Thank you all very much for coming. As you know, the occasion for us gathering is Kate Galbraith, one of the authors of The Great Texas Windrush. This book is going to talk a bit about wind energy and Texas and wind energy in Texas. This event has been organized by Future Tense, which is a collaboration between the New America Foundation, where we all are now Slate Magazine and Arizona State University. The book is a fantastic and enjoyable read. I really liked it. Kate wrote it together with Asher Price. They're both reporters in Texas for competing publications, but teamed up to write this book. And Kate's going to speak briefly, and then she and I will have a brief conversation and then open it up to questions from you, the audience. And then afterwards, we have copies of the book for sale next door, and Kate can stick around and autograph your copy, write a haiku of dedication, if you're a very nice tour, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, without further ado, I'll let Kate come up and talk to us a bit about what's in the book. I should add that I am Constantine Cacaius. I'm a fellow here at the New America Foundation. And it's very fun to do this with Constantine, because he and I worked together, what, ten years ago at the Economist magazine in London. There are actually a few American infiltrates into the Economist, a little known but fun fact. Yeah, so it's great to be here. Texas is a very fun state to report in. I worked for the Texas Tribune in Austin for three years. It's a non-profit, non-partisan sort of policy and politics publication in Texas covers the whole state. I covered energy and environment. And what you really should know about Texas is it's just such a great state to report in. I sometimes think of it as God's gift to journalists. I mean, we are the state of Ted Cruz, and you're welcome for that. And you know, state of Rick Perry and Oops and the filibuster and the pink running shoes and so on. So it's a very fun state to be a journalist in Texas. I wrote this book with Asher Price, who reports for the Austin American statesman on energy environment. And, you know, I kind of stumbled into this idea because in 2005 I landed in Austin from London. I had been with the economist in London. I was covering insurance. I said, please, can I go home, i.e. at least in my country, and cover something? So they sent me to Austin. I'd never been to Texas before. And I was a regional correspondent for the economist. And I really just stumbled into the wind power story. In 2006, a couple months after I got there, Texas was passing, just at that time, passing California to become the nation's number one wind power state. And I was kind of like, oh my gosh, like, where am I? Am I in Texas? I thought this was oil and gas country. And it was a very, very fun story. And it's really just grown from there, essentially. Texas remains number one in wind power by far. I mean, it's 12,000 megawatts, I don't expect that to mean a lot to folks, to everyone. But it's about 9% of the power on the Texas electric grid last year came from wind. And the next closest state, which is indeed California, has less than half of the amount of wind power that Texas has. The third closest state is Iowa, for some reason. But on some windy, particularly windy days or particularly windy moments, the amount of wind power on the Texas grid climbs above 20%. So it's really a pretty dramatic transformation of the electric grid and the electric grid capabilities in Texas in the oil and gas state. And that's what drew me to report on it. It's just, you know, and the more I dug, the more sort of contradictions emerged about the existence of wind. And I'm sure we'll talk about that with Constantine a little bit later. Just I wanted to just kind of get you in the mood of Texas wind and show you just a three minute video that was made by a fellow called Brian Merzer in Texas for Texas Monthly Asher, my co-author. And I did a piece for On Texas Wind for Texas Monthly several years ago. And Brian put together this wonderful film. So we'll just watch three minutes. The setting is some guys up in North Texas who were kind of tinkering around during the energy crisis of the 1970s. They're a father-son team, and could we play the video? The Carter family represents three generations of Texas wind power engineers, and like the early oil pioneers a century ago, theirs is a story of successes and failures. It took Jay Carter Sr. and Jay Carter Jr. three years of tinkering on turbines in the late 1970s before they settled on a design that worked. My dad was in the oil business, and I was an oil field brat, you might say, and we kind of followed around the oil fields around the country. That kind of got me started in engineering, which I'd sort of been doing ever since I was a kid, you might say, building model airplanes and flying them. Jay Carter Sr., now 88 years old, was a mastermind at the manufacture of lightweight composite material that would prove crucial to the Carter turbine design. I recognized, of course, that wind was free, essentially. And if you could harness it at a low cost, why it would be one way of generating electricity and generating electricity had always been something that I'd been interested in since I was really a kid. We've had some units that have been through winds over 120 miles an hour and continue to generate electricity and winds over 100 miles an hour. Jay Jr. has seen all aspects of the wind industry, riding the full length of the learning curve. The Carter's were determined to slim down wind turbines, using some of the lessons in the helicopter industry. The lighter the turbine, the lower the capital costs. So prior to getting into the wind, I was working in the aircraft industry. But there was the oil embargo in 1974. And boy, we could just see the prices of electricity going up. And so we were really aware of the problems that it was bringing to the farmers and their agriculture and the high electric bills to pump water. And so initially, that was the market that we were going after, was the agricultural markets to provide them with low-cost electricity. Among their first sales were to Michael Osborne, a space cowboy in Pampa, who had recently quit as a promoter for the famed Armadillo World Headquarters music venue in Austin. Well, before the Carter's, we were looking for the equipment. We were looking for the turbine. And other folks were trying to either rebuild like old Jacobs turbines or old wind chargers. But there really wasn't a good turbine. So the Carter's had a unique design. They had a two-blade downwind design. It was also a tilt-up tower. So it was a guide tower. And it had a lot of features that could have been the wind farm standard. It happened to be that their two-blade downwind design did not win the technology race and the three-blade upwind design that came from Europe became the dominant turbine that you see everywhere today. We got out of the business there for a while because it just Great.  We don't really need to see that right now. I really like the video because, you know, among other things, it brings in a couple of themes of Texas wind that run through our book, the connections between wind power and oil, which we can talk a little more about later. J. Carter Sr. family grew up in the oil business, moved into wind, not uncommon. Texas now thinks of itself as the energy state. We've also got a hint of a much stranger connection between Texas wind and Texas music that does exist is strong. I can't fully explain it. So, the J. Carter Sr. and Jr. operated out of a little town called Burke Burnett, which is a couple hours northwest of Dallas, and they were tinkering around. It was called Boomtown USA, close to a century ago because it was one of many towns where oil was booming, and so they really got started tinkering around, moving from helicopters and aircraft into wind power during the 1970s energy crisis. Energy prices spiked. A lot of folks started moving into wind that way. I will say Texas, and this is just, I'm going to give you a real quick potted history of Texas wind, and then we'll have a conversation here, but Texas wind definitely predates the 1970s energy crisis. The roots of some of the modern movements lie in the energy crisis, but even, you know, 150 years ago, wind power was going strong on the great plains in the sense of the water windmills. Those old kind of whirligig windmills really helped settle the west. They helped pull water out from the aquifers so that this very dry land, these plains where there was no water in sight, wasn't enough water that you could pull up with a windmill to grow a large crop, but you could water cattle and you could get water for your family. And in fact, close to 100 years ago, Midland, Texas, of all places, now, of course, oil and gas country, fracking central, it was known as windmill town because really everybody had one. So you had these water windmills, then things evolve into using wind to produce electric power that really gets going after World War I. A lot of folks come back from the war. They've flown these new things called airplanes, and they see some of the potential similarities and design between the wind power or the airplane wings and wind power blades. And so they kind of work on that. And by then, you've got the potential for a lot of rural ranches to have what's called a wind charger to, you know, light a few flickering lights in the ranch house. These isolated ranches did not have centralized power.  And then in the 1970s, you have people like Jay Carter, senior and junior, all over the country, a resurgence of interest in wind. And it wasn't just the carters were making these turbines, experimental turbines. They had a lot of problems.  They explode. You know, I mean, they tested it out. And then this is an image of the first wind farm in the country. There was a fellow in the video, Michael Osburn. His tagline was Wind Ranch Operator. They didn't really know to call them wind farms back then. They didn't quite know what they had. But he built the first ever wind farm in Texas, second in the country, first was in New Hampshire. He built this in 1981 in Pampa, which just to go back real quick, Pampa is up in the Texas Panhandle, which is the remotest region in Texas. It's also the windiest area of Texas. And I've actually really enjoyed getting a lot of reporting trips to the Panhandle, believe it or not. There's just something about the flatness and the wind. And it's somehow very compelling. So he puts this up, 525 kilowatt turbines in Pampa, 1981. These are about 100th of the capacity of the enormous wind turbines today that you see just four of them out in West Texas. Another fellow follows soon after. His name is Father Joe James. He's a priest in Lubbock, Texas, which is a couple hours south of Pampa. And he basically thinks that saving energy, he sees the energy crisis, thinks that saving energy is essentially next to godliness. And he buys some Carter turbines and puts five of them up beside his church, not only beside his church, but specifically beside his church football field. Because in Texas, churches, of course, have football fields. Fun fact. So he and others sort of get going. The 1980s, they have some government, federal government incentives, the state government's considerable federal government incentives at that time. Those really die off in the 1980s when oil prices crash. People lose interest in alternatives. And in fact, there was one day in 1986 where gas was so cheap that a guy near Austin who had a gas station, he started giving away gas for free as sort of a gimmick just one afternoon. But you can't compete with basically free energy. And so the interest in alternatives and getting off of foreign oil and natural gas as well, there were huge concerns that natural gas was running out at that time. And we can talk a little bit about that later. Texas oil and gas production actually peaked in 1972, has never actually returned to those levels since then. So 1970s, great time for wind innovation. As the 1980s come on, interest in wind in Texas dies out. California, under the first coming of Jerry Brown, is still decides to dive into wind power. Jerry Brown at that point, not fond of nuclear power.  And by about 1990, I think California has about 90% of the world's capacity in wind power. I mean, it's just unbelievable. They didn't do it all right. They had some investment tax incentives that meant that the turbines were sort of shelters for rich people's money, tax shelters, and they didn't have to work. And they had some issues with birds as well in the Ultamont Pass area and so on that kind of freaked California out. Just to give you a sense of the contrast, when I was reporting my very first Texas wind power story in 2006, one of the folks I talked to was the Texas land commissioner, Jerry Patterson. He's now running for lieutenant government. But journalists in Texas just love Jerry Patterson because he's a very colorful guy. He flies his own plane, carries a gun in his boot, all that stuff. And so at that time, he was very excited about the ability of the general land office, which oversees state land in Texas to lease out offshore land that the state owned to wind farms just as we could lease it out to offshore oil rigs. And so I said, well, commissioner Patterson, environmentalists are very concerned that these offshore, these potential offshore farms are right in the path of migratory birds coming out from Mexico. He says, well, sure, we'll pop a few birds, but at the end of the day, we'll have smarter birds. Yeah, that's Jerry Patterson. That's why being a journalist in Texas is particularly dreamy. 1990s, George H.W. Bush is president. He signs off on the production tax credit, which is still an important force for wind. He also goes to the Rio de Janeiro Climate Conference. I don't think you'd see a Republican president going to that sort of thing today. It's also when Ann Richards is in power and her administration kind of breathes new life into Texas wind. There are also a bunch of California companies that see momentum tailing off in California, move to Texas, look around, and they think there's a public power utility in Austin that decides to kind of take a risk and buy a small amount of wind power. And they team up with the California company, Kenatec. And there is the first large wind farm in Texas. It's not super large by today's standards, still a fraction of the amount, but they put it, they basically looked, this was put up in 1995, and they essentially looked for the windiest site they could find in Texas. And that was in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. National Park Service said no. So they said, okay, what's the next windiest spot we can find? This remote ridge on the Delaware Mountains, it's like literally middle of nowhere. I could drive six or seven hours from Austin and I have to get here. It's 100 miles east of El Paso. They put up this wind farm in 1995, and a couple months later, big storm comes along, gusts of up to 160 miles per hour, it part of it blows down. And it's amazing, instead of being discouraged, they're like, okay, I guess it's windy here, wind power, good. So on it goes. In 1999, governor at the time, George W. Bush, signs a just massive law that is a combination of electric power deregulation, horrible, nerdy stuff that we can get into if you want, but you probably don't. And also it's a renewable portfolio standard, a renewable energy mandate, essentially, mandating 2,000 megawatts of renewable energy, essentially means wind power, wind is cheapest, be built in Texas by 2009. Texas is so far past that. It's amazing. We now have 12,000 megawatts of wind power and growing very strongly. Governor Rick Perry extended that mandate with the approval of state legislature in 2005. Texas has also supported wind by building out just an incredible sum, sort of almost $7 billion of transmission lines to connect the wind farms, which that's kind of what a modern turbine looks like here. The $7 billion of money that Texas has signed off on connects wind farms, which really came up in West Texas and now are starting to be built up in the Panhandle, so remote, I can't even quite reach it, to the cities which are largely in central and east Texas that need the power. So that's an incredible investment. I actually think that's some of the untold story of Texas wind. I mean, that's $300 for every single Texan. It's about to appear on Texas power bills, three bucks a month for years. I'm looking forward to everyone starting to discover that fee on their bill and ask a few questions. So that'll be interesting. I'll stop there, but we'll have a conversation now and then open it up for questions. Great, well thanks very much, Kate. Hopefully you won't, yeah, John's taking the screen up. Everything works like clockwork here. One of the very intriguing things to me in the book, and we saw in the video the Carter family there, is how far back the history of wind goes in Texas. And one of the sort of transition points in the book is when you go from talking about these tinkers who were initially building small, sort of almost homemade windmills to the emergence of sort of modern, large turbines. I was wondering if you could sort of walk us through that transition a little bit, which you did a little bit now, but at what point did people from Scandinavia start coming into Texas and building larger turbines? Yeah, it is a funny transition. I mean, then the early 80s, you have these just teeny tiny wind farms they wouldn't even register by modern standards. And then by the late 90s, by the early 2000s, you have modern scale wind farms. And now of course, Texas always likes to be building the biggest wind farm in the country or thinking it will be building it. And I've seen announcements, biggest wind farm in the country. And these are all different wind farms, sort of in successive years. And so I think one of the things that really got wind to scale up was in the mid 90s, there were this public power utility, Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin was committed to an experiment to sort of buy wind power. It was a bit of a reach, it wasn't economic for them at the time, but they're a public power agency and they thought we're interested in getting off of fossil fuels. There was a study out at the time that said that Texas, the energy state, the oil and gas state had become a net importer of energy because Texas also obviously, in addition to all the oil and gas, has just a tremendous amount of industry. And so these factors combined and there was this first wind farm and this remote Delaware mountains, they rebuilt it quickly after it blew down and decided not to be intimidated by it. And then in 1996, for reasons that I still do not know, George Bush, Governor Bush calls his top public utility regulator into his office and they're talking about stuff, utility regulator Pat Wood is about to leave the office and he's going out the door, he hears, hey Pat, and what? We like wind, and Pat Wood is like, we what? And Bush says, according to Pat Wood, go get smart on wind, that's all he said. According to Pat Wood, he's got his cowboy boots up on the desk and just go get smart on wind and Wood is thinking wind power, like that's a sort of hippie-dippy California thing and so Bush wouldn't talk to us for the book, he doesn't seem to talk to anyone these days. So why he said that, I honestly don't know. He had a couple of friends, including Kenneth Lay of Enron, Sam Wiley who were Green Mountain Power, who were at that time getting interested in alternative energy in wind, interested in climate change and pollution issues. Maybe it's that, maybe it's that Bush grew up in Midland which again has a lot of oil but used to be called windmill town, it's got a lot of wind. So why Bush said that, I don't know but what that led to is this really interesting process in Texas that they did something called deliberative polling on renewable energy which is rather than call people up and say, hey, are you for wind or against wind? They would go to different cities, bring together a group of people probably about this size and say, come to us for a weekend, we'll babysit your kids, we're gonna educate you on power sources and they had people from all sides and this was carefully, is very carefully done, it's called deliberative polling and so people would come in for the weekend, listen to presentations about the pros and cons of wind and coal and natural gas and by the end, they did this in city after city, big city after big city in Texas and everyone was for wind power and so I think that probably kind of laid the foundations for the state to go ahead, it gave Bush some confidence to be able to go ahead and sign this renewable energy mandate in 1999. I don't think you'd see, Rick Perry extended the mandate in 2000, I don't think you'd see another Texas governor mandating renewable energy and we can talk about that, there's been a very interesting. Yeah, I did wanna ask you about that, as you mentioned in the book, there's not been a steady march of progress of increasing wind power, increasing renewables and you touch on in the end of the book the political changes in Texas and in the country in the last sort of half decade that we were talking earlier that the things that Rick Perry said eight years ago, Rick Perry today might not say. So I guess the way to make this a question is to say, what exactly is the effect of the rise of the Tea Party been on renewable energy in Texas? It's been so interesting to watch, I mean, I've dug through Governor Perry's press releases on his website in the news archive and you see him 10 years ago, he's going out to a wind farm in West Texas, he's cutting the ribbon and the press release right there will say how many carbon dioxide emissions the wind farm will save. I mean, it's incredible contrast that to the rhetoric today where Governor Perry has said he's not gonna run for reelection, the Attorney General Greg Abbott is eager to step up and his sort of mantra is, I wake up, I go to the office, I sue the federal government, EPA, and then I go home. I mean, Texas is suing the EPA over greenhouse gas emissions and I don't think you'd see any mention of carbon dioxide savings now. So it is an incredible change. I think the rise of the Tea Party had a lot to do with it. I don't think you'd see, you know, mandates are very out of fashion these days. The solar industry in Texas, Texas is a big sunny state of course and the solar industry would love to get a, quote, non-wind carve out, you know, please let wind do its thing and let us have some non-wind solar but they've been trying for years, haven't gotten it, they've been trying for a little fee on power bills, haven't gotten that. It's a very tough political climate so I think the Tea Party has a lot to do with it and also Texas kind of, you know, wind is continuing to be built but Texas honestly feels like has sort of forgotten about wind because everyone is just wrapped up with fracking. You know, I think politicians would probably much more love to be seen and photographed at a drilling rig rather than a wind turbine these days. One of the things you mentioned in the book is the sort of intrinsic sort of network nature of providing energy to the grid that it's not, the economics of it aren't just how much it costs to build a wind turbine but also how much does it cost to interconnect that turbine to the grid. You saw that in Texas, unlike elsewhere, you already had a very distributed infrastructure because of the history of oil exploration in Texas. And I was interested, as you're mentioning now, there can be a relationship where wind and petrochemicals are competing but there's also been a sense in which the historical development of wind in Texas, the way was paved by the oil and gas industry. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that sort of relationship. Yeah, well one of the favorite comments that I stumbled across in the book was there was some people gathered in West Texas admiring a solitary wind turbine and someone apparently remarked, this is the late 90s, ah, now we can drill above the ground as well as below. And that just kind of gives you a sense of where Texas is at in thinking about these things. There are tremendous synergies between oil and gas and wind power in Texas that I think really did help Texas emerge from among other states that are also windy to be more aggressive on wind power. And you know, it's people like Jay Carter Sr. who we saw in the film, people who were experienced in oil, used to working with their hands. Landowners were very used to folks knocking at their door and saying, I'd like to drill, here's the royalty check, I can give you. In the late 90s, early 2000s, when oil and gas production was declining in West Texas towns, that's now reversed, they were open to the idea of wind power because as the guy said, you just sort of rent the wind, it's free, you can't use too much of it. So why not just use this free resource and go with that? And so I think there was, in a lot of ways, oil paved the way for wind. It also resulted, as you said, in some infrastructure in West Texas, power line infrastructure for natural gas plants and the mere existence of these towns, a lot of these West Texas towns that are at the center of the wind boom now were originally founded by the oil wildcatters and then the windcatters discover them in the 1990s. So a lot of synergies, there's a really interesting battle right now or just interesting dynamic, I should say, between wind power and natural gas. We could go very nerdy on this and I think we could have a whole panel on the interplay between natural gas and wind power in Texas. But fundamentally, I mean, T. Boone Pickens is a great example. He, in 2008, he was out promoting what he called his Pickens plan. T. Boone Pickens, I imagine most people in the room probably know who he is, but if you could quickly, in case anybody doesn't. Yes, Texas's favorite oil and gas billionaire who has gone around in 2008, he was trying to kind of create a platform for himself and promoting this thing called the Pickens plan, which again would bring Texas, would bring the country off of foreign oil, off of imported oil, with the help of wind and natural gas. There were always problems with this, but he also grandly declared that he was going to himself build the largest wind farm in the country in the Pampa area where he's got a ranch, not on his own ranch to be sure. But he, and then he gets caught out like just about everyone else with the fracking boom. It's kind of amazing that people didn't foresee this, but the combination of hydraulic fracturing, busting up rock with water, sand, chemicals to bring up oil or gas plus horizontal drilling, being able to access new reserves, those things came in and Pickens was caught out. He retracted his plans to build the biggest wind farm in the country and just a quick, funny story. I was working at the New York Times at that time and they said, could you please write, this new Pickens plan is out, could you please write a piece on it? So I call up Boone Pickens and this guy and I said, I'd like to talk to Mr. Pickens. I'm doing a story from the New York Times. Said, ah, you know, it's very busy, but we're flying from Dallas to Washington in two days. Are you coming? And like, okay, private plane, let me just check that with the New York Times ethics people. So I checked it with them, it was all cool. And so it was me and eight oilmen on Boone Pickens' Gulfstream.  It was fun. So I wanted to ask you one last question and then open it up to the audience for some questions. You mentioned that about 9% of the energy in Texas, I guess in recent years or over the last year, came from wind power. What I'm curious about is how obviously no one thinks that wind will be the unique source of power for electricity. How saturated is that in terms of if public policy were to go in a way that is as conducive as possible for wind, what's the ceiling? How much room for growth is there for wind power in Texas and nationally for that matter? That's a great question. So right, Texas last year, 9% of the energy on the Texas grid from wind, that's the contrast is to the nation where about 3.5% last year was from wind power. So Texas is ahead, it's building more wind power and honestly in conversation in Texas, I don't hear a tremendous amount of sort of grid integration pushback from the grid folks on the wind issue. Clearly there's an interest in being able to store energy. The problem with wind of course is that it doesn't blow all the time and in West Texas where they built a lot of the wind power, it blows most strongly at night and in the spring and the fall, which is not as useful as it could be at night. Everyone's asleep and in the spring and the fall people don't have their air conditioners on. So solar in some ways makes a lot more sense for the grid because the sun's beating down right when you need electricity the most, need your air conditioning on. And so it's a great question. The Texas grid is kind of a great laboratory because fun fact there are three power grids in the lower 48, Eastern grid, Western grid and Texas grid. Texans love, this feeds Texas national pride. I've heard bus loads of Texans just cheering when they hear they have their own grid. But it does mean that Texas is this kind of unique laboratory and I mean the built out of wind in the next couple of years could reach sort of, this is a complete guess but maybe sort of 9% now, 12%, 13% and at what point does energy store and all of that come into play, it's a great question. So we'll ask some more great questions from the audience. Please do wait for Ariel to bring you the microphone as this is being broadcast on the web which I should have mentioned at the beginning and state your name. Yes, my name is Edward Hoyt with Nexon. Just following on this question of integration, in Europe you have some countries that on a particular day can achieve 50%. Denmark and Spain I think have reached that level. Obviously over the course of a year it's a lot less so there's still considerably a lot of room to go in terms of consumption. I wanna come back to the question of natural gas. There's a study that has come out just recently in the last few days, gotten a lot of press that Stanford did making the case that cheap natural gas is going to displace coal which is one of the reasons why there's this quote unquote war on coal going on and then, but then they also say it's gonna be detrimental to renewables and I'm not sure that I fully agree with that. Number one, gas is not gonna stay as cheap as it is for in the first year of the future but there is the integration benefit of having natural gas to facilitate more generation using wind. And so I'm wondering if you could just sort of elaborate. It may be a little more nerdy as you say in looking at grid management but I think it's an important point to show how natural gas can help facilitate further integration of wind. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean the interplay isn't just between wind and natural gas, it's also wind, natural gas and coal and again, Texas is, having its own grid is a terrific laboratory. We've got wind, 9% and gas and coal I think are about sort of roughly close to 40% each. Texas has a little more gas than elsewhere in the country and so you do see this complementarity between wind and gas such that you can turn natural gas plants on and on, on and off quickly so that when the wind dies down I say hey, natural gas plant, can you turn up please?  But yeah, there's a study from three or four months ago done by the Brattle Group for a kind of clean power coalition in Texas that does contend that the combination of wind power and cheap natural gas could help to, could add to coal's problems, be, you know, coal's problems currently including federal regulations coming down the pipeline. Although those federal regulations haven't always been as tight as some wanted or expected. So it's, this is a very, this is a very complex subject and you know, maybe New America Foundation could have a whole panel of experts on this very subject. It's, you know, I, my best answer is not a very satisfactory one. It's just kind of we'll, we'll see. I mean coal, coal seems to be falling out. Natural gas, wind in Texas cut into natural gas by it looks like several or more percentage points. You know, natural gas may be sort of swinging back up and coal swinging back down. But you know, in Texas you have some of these old power plants, old coal-filed power plants from the, from the 70s that they've said they're gonna shut down for most of the year except in the summer when Texas desperately needs most of the power. So it's, it's a very complicated interplay. I urge you to read the, this Brattle report. And yes, good discussion would be great. Yeah. Hi, Michael Nix. Renewable portfolio standard and energy storage. You mentioned the number about wind generation peaking, like one to two in the morning. And I'm with you, I'm much more of a solar advocate than a, than a wind advocate. Has there been any talk about storage concepts being promoted in Texas so they can store the power and then use it when they need it? Yeah, definitely. You know, energy storage is sometimes referred to as the quote holy grail of renewable energy because, you know, if you had the ability to store electricity rather than how it currently is, which is it's generated, you've got to use it immediately. You can't, you can't really hold onto it. If we could hold onto that energy, then we could, you know, then wind power would be working even when the wind died down. So that would be fantastic. There are a couple projects in Texas. Duke Energy put up a battery in, I think it started operating in January or so, 25 or 35 megawatts, I can't quite remember, out in West Texas, paired with a wind farm. That's a very interesting experiment to watch. Texas also has the largest or one of the largest batteries in the country out in this very remote town that I have visited called Presidio. That's less related to wind. It's because they've got some, you know, one old, old, old power line that's supported with wooden poles going to this super remote town. So if lightning hits, you know, they'll still have a little electricity for a while. But Texas is, you know, very much thinking about storage, partly because they've got all this wind on the grid and are interested in solar. And so there's, you know, there's been talk of a compressed air storage facility up in the panhandle. You know, we'll see.  Will they create, will the Texas grid create more rules to encourage storage and so on? Yeah. If you can just wait for the mic. GE has these new, what they call the brilliant turbines where they paired them to a little bit of battery. Do you want to comment a little bit about that or what do you think of those? That's a technology I don't know about, but I'll go Google it. Hi, Emily Williams, American Wind Energy Association. So coming at this from a pro-wind perspective, three of those turbines are under construction right now in Texas. I think those are the first ones. So just a quick, quickly to dispel the myth that Texas wind only blows at night. There's a lot of growth on Gulf projects that kind of match peak load in the early afternoon. So there is, you know, wind is not just blowing at night. But I found very interesting from what you talked about was that Texas has forgotten about wind. So last, and they've kind of moved on to fracking. So last year, I think Texas installed almost 2,000 megawatts of wind, more than anywhere else in the country, it's like a $4 billion investment. And particularly as the Cres lines are being completed and we're seeing wind kind of expand to new areas of the state that it hasn't been before. My question for you is whether or not you think the industry should be more proactive in voicing the impact they're making or are they better off kind of sitting back and letting fracking take the focus? That's an interesting question. And thank you for bringing up the coastal wind farms, right? Texas has built, you know, 10 years ago, pretty much all Texas wind was being built in the West Texas area that I showed you, but now the last three or four or five years, there's been growing interest in wind farms along the Gulf Coast, onshore, not offshore, a lot of them near Corpus Christi. And those winds are much better matched the grid because they actually blow hardest during the day and sometimes in the afternoon, related to the way that the wind comes off the Gulf. And so that's, as I said, that is much better matched the grid, but there's less land along the coast. That's a constraint. People like to live on the coast, so where do you put the turbines and so on? West Texas is a little bit emptier, but yeah, I mean, it's, one interesting thing I've seen in Texas, back to your political question, is there's a growing effort to emphasize the lack of water use of wind turbines, you know, coal plants, gas plants, all of these thermal plants use, you know, a considerable amount of water, some of which goes, gets heated up and goes back into the river, but nonetheless, Texas is in a very big drought right now and water is, water is the subject of a $2 billion vote in a couple weeks on election day. So water is a big topic in Texas and I do see the wind folks starting to emphasize that, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting that wind continues to grow, sort of despite this political dynamic that's really just changed in Texas. They've got to fight to prevent the, last session they fought to prevent the repeal of the renewable energy mandate of Governor Bush, Governor Perry, arguably it's moot, Texas is way past mandates, but there's complicated things with renewable energy credits that this would apparently affect and it's also symbolic, you know, symbolic of how the kind of tea party views wind and Texas politicians as you all know, have many of them have jumped on that fine tea party bandwagon. I think we have time for one final question. We'll try and cram it in. If you want to very briefly, if all three of you will give you time, but just very quickly and then Kate can answer all of them. My question is about water because fracking uses so much and aside from pollution, isn't the main water supply in that central part from Canada all the way down through Texas, the Ogallala aquifer, which is being depleted and running low and needed so much for agriculture? Is there enough water to frack? Question one, two, and three. Yeah, I'm from Houston, so in regards to the Keystone XL pipeline, do you, that's the talk of the town right now, so do you think that's gonna have an effect on talk of increasing the wind farms and what kind of effect is this having in West Texas because I'm not familiar with what's happening there? And third. Rorick McCorsen from the Heiners-Bolt Foundation. Back to the political point, so the question briefly would be who are the political advocates these days in Texas for renewables, I'd say in general, especially among conservatives? You know, not necessarily naming names, but as it's members of the state legislature, is it more local officials, some mix of the two? So I think that's informative to the debates we see in Washington where you can't really get anything through. Yeah, great. So let's start with water. I'll keep you to. Yeah, water, let's talk afterwards. I could give a whole nother talk on water fracking and water. Texas Tribune did a series of articles last year, this year on fracking and water use, so we can talk afterward. Keystone and- But for the people who won't be around afterwards, it's a large problem, it's not a large problem. Fracking water use, about 1% of these states overall water use, according to studies that have been funded by oil and gas, there is, to my knowledge, no real independent study in Texas, I'd love to see one. In rural areas, it's where there's a lot of fracking and not a lot of people, or that there's considerably more, it reaches the double digits. Agriculture, always the biggest water in Texas, about 60%, so it is a big issue, big discussion in Texas. Keystone, yeah. Keystone and wind, I have not really heard a lot of discussion linking the two. Keystone is oil related, whereas wind power is electricity, oil doesn't directly generate a lot of electricity now, so I really haven't seen a lot of discussions on the two. We can talk afterwards if you'd like, and your question was on the- Who is pushing, yeah. Who is pushing? Well, it's really interesting to see Texas politicians somewhat caught in the political change that has happened in the last 10 years in Texas. Again, five or 10 years ago, Governor Perry, all the state politicians on board with wind power, signing off on an extension of a wind power mandate, signing off on $7 billion of wind power transmission lines. Now you see that conversation happening much less, and when it comes to extending the federal tax credit that helps wind power, that's when people kind of have to take a stand. You see Governor Perry not signing a letter to President Obama requesting an extension of the tax credit, whereas the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallon, did sign that letter. So you see kind of a divergence there, and you see a lot of congressmen from rural areas. I called up a bunch of them like a year ago, I think, when the discussion on the extension of this credit, which was expiring at the end of the last year, was happening, and some of them just didn't want to give me a position, honestly. They're kind of caught between a rural constituency, which likes wind and a tea party constituency. So it's very interesting to watch this political shift. Which Kate will continue to watch. Thank you all very much for coming. I should mention that the book is for sale outside. Kate will sign it. Asher, her co-author, will not. That was his voice that we heard narrating the video. So they were both here. We talked about a lot of policy issues. The book talks about those. It also tells a lot of individual stories in a way that I found it to be really just fun to read. And I mean this as a compliment, it doesn't read like it was written by two people. They really managed to sort of have a voice and a narrative thread that goes through. So I very much encourage you to read it and get it half signed, and then you can go around the country, go to Texas, go visit Asher, and get the other half signed there. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to Kate.


Rwm safon, dydych chi'n ddigon, am y cwylio'r un hearing buswll. Dwy'n meddwl, rynodd eich hunau i Mathematicio Ni, a rynodd eich hunau? Rwy'n meddwl, rwy'n meddwl... ..on yr hunau? Bydd hi'n growl! Rwy'n meddwl, rydw i'n mynd i. Dwy yma llawer? Rwy'n meddwl. Rwy'n meddwl! Ond llawer ac... ... newid ychydig a'i wneud hyn. Rwy'n meddwl, rydw i'n meddwl. Great, brilliant. Thank you. I knew if I didn't do both, someone would call me up in it. Right, okay. So Park Run. Park Run is a weekly event that happens all over the UK, simultaneously, probably, at 9am. Every Saturday morning, Friday today, so if you really want to, you can go tomorrow 9am to Ledbrie, I believe this is closest. It's on the EMF site somewhere. To quote Park Run directly, Park Runs are free, weekly community events all around the world. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to run the alphabet and it's exactly what it sounds like. I want to go, oh God, not yet. I'm not making that joke yet. I want to go to 26 Park Runs. Each of them start with a different letter of the alphabet. I'm doing very well at the moment. I've been to three. So I'm very dyslexic. I don't really do letters. So if there is any sort of mistakes in here, blame me because it was me. I'm a mathematician. I really like collecting things. So this follows up. So I want to collect all of my least favourite things. I'm a masochist. So I mentioned in the brief of this talk that I had realised something miraculous. As I was running around Heartlands Park Run, I got into the second lap and I was just going round the corner. I had a thought. Aren't all Park Runs the same? Surely they are. You're just going round in loops. And if they were, how can we explain this? So to the modern mathematician, they all are the same. You go round how many times you get to the end. You feel tired. Your legs give in and you need a drink. So how many Park Runs are possible? So another quick question for you. Who thinks there's only one Park Run? None of you. Great. Good. How many think two? How many think there are lots and lots that I can't really name on a slide and I couldn't really go through in the whole of this presentation? Great. All of you are wrong. So here's a mathematical idea. We're going to name it Homotopy. If there's any computer scientist in the audience, yes, this is like Homotopy type theory, but not the same. Okay. Here's a squiggle. They're going to squish it. Give it a squish and it turns into a line. That's the whole idea. We're going to take curves, closed curves, give them a squish, turn them into nicer things. Okay. So a Homotopy to the mathematicians is a continuous map between two spaces. Spaces are just kind of shapes and that's how we have to think about them. So on the right, we want for a squiggle to a line. They're both spaces. We call them topological spaces. Okay. So to the real mathematicians in the audience, a Homotopy is a continuous function between... We don't really care about this. So we now ask under what metric are two things similar? So if I want to say park runs are the same, how am I going to do this? So we're going to call them the same if they have the same fundamental group. Okay. So let's take some closed paths. So imagine I'm going for a run. Go down, down, down, down. And what I've done now is a closed loop because I started in the same place and I ended in the same place. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to start in the same place, go for a run, come back to the same place. That is a closed loop. And the fundamental group is all of those things you can do in your space. All of the runs that you can start at the same place and end at the same place and potentially maybe go somewhere. So this is what we call the fundamental group. And it's considered up to Homotopy. So squish them if I go all the way round. I'm not going to do it. But if I go all the way round outside, off the stage, back to here, that's the same as me going all the way down to the end here and back. They're the same because I can squish them in on each other. And the fundamental group has what we call a group structure. So what's a group structure? Well, to mathematicians, we need an addition. So we need to consider how we can add two things together. And as you see in my little animation over there, what we do is we take one end and we take the other and move them together and bang, we have one path. So we go from two to one by just going together. Right. So a group to a mathematician has the following structure, closure. So as we've seen, if we take any two paths, add them together, we get another path. That's pretty simple, right? So inverse, so we need to undo a path.  So the inverse is running in the opposite direction. Great. So if I'm going to do an identity, identity mathematics means that if you add it to something else, you get the same thing you started with. So adding zero, think, or multiplying by one, something like that. So the identity loop or the identity run is doing nothing. It's like adding zero. Great. So this is the complicated bit. Associativity, very, very complicated word. So this means basically if you add three things together, it doesn't matter if you add the first two first to the third or if you add the last two to the first. It doesn't matter. So I have gotten a screen. Ew, I know a sum takes right to school. But it doesn't matter. It's like that. OK. Good. So here we have a circle. Right. Circle, can we go over here? Right. Can we come with me? Over here. Right. It's going all the way round. So if we start up here and we go on a run all the way round, that is a loop. And we can do that twice, three times, four times. I'm starting to name numbers here. And you may start to realize something. And the inverse is going in the opposite direction, negative one, negative two, negative three, and so on. And we've got zero.  OK. So as I said, you've got past on a circle. We can go plus one, which is forward, negative one, which is backwards, or zero, which is do nothing. And this forms our coveted group. And this group is kind of the integer. So all the whole numbers you know from school, I know school, we all hate school. But it is the integers. Now I've used some funny notation. There are pi one. That means the fundamental group because p is like th. And s one, which is just a sphere, is z, which is the integers. All the positive and negative whole numbers. Right. Great. So oh, God, it's a fancy name again. So what we're going to do now is to see Fert van Kampen theorem. That is a fancy name to mean that we can just cut things in essence. So we're going to consider wedge sum. And then we're going to do this see Fert van Kampen. Right. OK. So the wedge sum is we're going to take two circles, right? And I'm going to do what I've done here. I've taken one point and I'm going to move them together. Imagine their Play-Doh. And what happens is they just join together. And we use this fancy notation, which looks a bit like a V. And it is a V, really. OK. So we're going to take two circles, add them together at a point, and notate it using this fancy little V. So the see Fert van Kampen theorem says that if we take this fancy little V and we consider the fundamental groups or the different paths you can do on it, that's kind of the same as doing all the paths on one part of the circle times. Well, some sort of product, the other one. OK. Great. So if we consider the figure eight, which really is just the wedge sum of two circles, S1's a circle, we're going to add them together, join them together, and we get a figure of eight. See Fert van Kampen tells us that the fundamental group is just Z star Z. I'm being very careful not to use times here because it's not exactly the same as times. OK. So great. So here's another one. We can go around all the way around. There we are. That's a full loop. And then we see a blue one. That's a half loop. Carry on. It's a bit slow. Come on. Bit quicker. Thank you. OK. Great. So we have the full one, which we can call eight. And then we have A, which is the half bit, and B is the other half bit. And again, we can do the same thing. If we're going to run round A, we can run round in the opposite direction.  Doing A is forward, and going A inverse is backward, much like our one and negative one. So OK. What is this fundamental group of this one then? Well, what we have is what we call the free group. That's free, isn't it? I don't quite know the understanding of this, and I've changed the notation because I don't really like the notation. But the point is, when you go running round this park run route, what happens is you run round A, or in some way maybe forward or backwards, and you run round B. So we have this kind of this bit here. OK. I'm going to get to examples in a minute. I'm sorry. It's very, very kind of notation heavy. OK, great. So what is a path? Well, as I've just mentioned, we can run round A, we can run round B. So this one's running round A, then running round B, which is the whole space. We run round A, then we go round B in the reverse direction, then back round A. Remember, it's a figure of eight. So when we do A or B or A inverse or B inverse, we always end in the middle. So this one isn't complicated. I don't really know why I did this, but part of me decided that was fun to write out. And I mean here that when I've got A, B inverse A, you can't just multiply through to get like A squared B inverse. This is a non commutative algebra. And that's another funny word. And what it means is that, as I said, A times B is not equal to B times A. So remember when we were in school? I'm sorry again. This is not the best analogy. But we learned that one times two is two times one. And so we see here, again, I've given another example, that A, B, A inverse is not equal to B. Because if you think about it, running round A, and then going round B, and then going round A in the opposite direction while running, it's not the same thing as just running round B. That makes sense, right? Good. Oops, I've been through that bit. Okay, so that's a figure of eight. What about, we call it two rows, because rows are pretty. So if we consider rows with more petals, which part runs usually are, we'll see in a minute, what we're going to have is something like this. So we have all these wedge sums, fancy notation, use C for van Kampen several times, and then we get all these kind of integers multiplied together. And this is like the free grip on two letters, which we saw a minute ago for the figure of eight, but for N letters, where N is just a number. It doesn't really matter what it is. We'll use it in a minute. Great. Okay. How are we doing on time? So we're doing very well on time. So aside covering spaces, this is where I bring out my friend. I got a story to say about my friend. I went looking for him the other day. I went through, I live in Swansea at the moment, and I went into town. And kids don't play with slinkies anymore, apparently. I know I don't look old, but apparently the toys of my childhood aren't the toys of nowadays childhood. It is what it is. Okay. Great. So you may be asking me, okay, does it really matter if I'm going to go running round my park, run kind of loop, some sort of, go the whole loop twice? Does that really change the fundamental group? Well, no, not really, because if we think about going round circles several times and then we turn it into a slinky, we do this, well, what we're really interested in is kind of looking down at it. We're interested at the actual shape, not kind of how many times we go round. And I give the analogy is if we're going to cut downwards on this slinky, which I'm not going to do because this cost me six quid, what happens is we got a load of circles and that they all have the same fundamental group and I don't really care about that. All I care about is the shape. Great. Okay. So here are the examples. Here's what you were waiting for. So we were waiting to find out how many park runs are there. I've left it as a surprise until the end and we've got N. N's just a number again. I'm a mathematician. We like putting variables everywhere. So we're going to consider some different park run courses up to Homotopy. I have run most of these. So let's see some of the park run courses. Well, firstly, here is Penrose Estate. This is one down in Cornwall where I'm usually based and we can see it's a nice line. It goes, don't go out and back, just out, right? So what happens here is we have an animation. Here's the root and it just obliterates itself under Homotopy and it goes to a point. This is no homotopic because it has fundamental group of zero because we can't really run around the point, can we? The only thing we can do when we're at a point is stay the same. So that is one type of park run. So at one, people who said one, you are wrong. That was none of you. So well done. So an overlapping loop. So just like this stuff. This is Gundersbury in London. I expect there are some people from London in New Orleans and may have even been to this park run. So this is Gundersbury. I ran this just before lockdown. I think this is my last park run before lockdown. I ran this one. Absolute nightmare. It was very rocky. I didn't like this one. I've done ones done in Cornwall. Okay, here's to park run. What's it going to do? Oh, it squishes into a circle. So this has fundamental group of the integers. So if we take any kind of squiggly park run that doesn't overlap, then we have a circle. And we have the integers because it's quite nice. You can run my once twice, three times, four times, five times. And so on. And you go in the opposite direction. Okay, great. So here's one crossing loop to any pedants in the audience. That was my Strava buggy act in that area up there. There's only actually one crossing loop. So this is Heartland. This is my home park run when I'm based down in Cornwall. That kind of hopefully doesn't dox me. The area is big enough. Okay, so, oh, I don't have an animation. Fine. What we can see here is we've got one crossing. So what's going to happen is it's going to turn into a figure of eight. So this, this out here expands, this expands and you have a figure of eight and we've seen that is the free group on two letters. So that's different. I said, I don't really care what the group is. All I care is it's different. Okay, two crossing. I've got two examples here because I quite like them. Here's Durstan. I haven't ran this one, but it looked quite fun. So it's got kind of all the way out. You do a loop. You come back. All right. So look what I'm saying. That one. Yeah, I don't like I've really got to learn blender, but I must note that this is continuous. So the animation shows it discontinuous, but it really is continuous. So what happens is we get a three rows. And how many letters is this free group on way three? Someone's learned something. Okay, great. What about this one? Forrest of Dean. Again, a bit out of my range, but let's have a look at this one. This one's quite fun because you go all around the place. I quite like this one. This one used to be one of my edge cases, but I realized that it wasn't an edge case because it does this, which is a circle. We've got three circles. And what you do is you take these two intersections, move them together and you get a three rows. And as our friend out in the audience told us, this has three letters. So it's different. Okay. This is where you come in. I couldn't find anymore. I spent two hours looking through the parkrun site. Have you ever tried to go and look at all of the parkruns in the UK on the parkrun site?  And nobody would really do it apart from a masochist. So I couldn't find something with three overlaps. So if there is anybody in the audience that has a home parkrun, you can prove me wrong and show me it's n equals four. But if not, it's n equals three. There are only three parkruns. You've heard it here first. Great conclusion. I should go to newspapers with that one, shouldn't I? I'm sure that one of them would buy it. So conclusion. Great. So we've quickly learned about algebraic topology. One of my favorite areas of maths. I'm an applied mathematician. Don't tell my university. We have seen the fundamental group and we've briefly seen the product and the free group. So here are a few conclusions that you should take away once you exit that door. Math is fun. That's my job. I'm paid to tell you this. So maths is fun. It's not just sums. The fundamental group is wacky and fun and it does several interesting things. James doesn't really like crunching data. I gave up after two hours. And I really, really need to learn blender. Did you see the state of those animations? I did those in PowerPoint and I am proud, I will tell you. But that is the end. And if you have any questions or you want to just come chat about topology, I am going to be based in the maths tense. So here we are in stage B. Go all the way round. You're going to go that way and you're going to go all the way round until you find workshop B where I will be standing outside smiling sweetly to come and get you to answer me questions. Thank you very much.


I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech. I'm the co-host here and Tim Epicella is the other co-host. And don't forget our other co-host. Yeah. Oh yeah.  Anyway, so this is Trump week and my goodness gracious, I'm getting depressed about it. I'm getting news fatigue, aren't you? We have so much of this every day. I don't know, it's only been three years Jay, 911 days of this administration, I don't know why you're even beginning to be fatigued. Well, we got a long way to go, it's true. But you know, I think the country is fatigued too. A lot of people are sort of turning their backs on it, including people who might, you know, might question him then, turning their back, can't stay watching it. Even the networks repeat themselves on and on, have the same guests on and on. And they hours every day, may I say, droning on about what he's done or not done. And in the meantime, he seems to be getting traction, his numbers are up. And his base is arguably bigger. And this is very scary, because he's perpetuating a campaign, he's actively campaigning on hate, on misogyny. He's acting, he doubles down on the worst things. When you call him on something, he says, yes, and I really mean it. And that's how his campaign is going. The other thing that he does is he lies. I mean, there's a complete lack of moral fiber here, and a lack of ethics. He lies, and he's proud of lying with the alternative truths and all that. We talked before Tim, he's gaslighting us, all of us, we are in a quandary as to what is the truth, get definitional problems. And this isn't just you and me and, you know, the people we know, it's the press too. Well, and you talk about that term gaslighting is the ultimate effect is the person who's being lied to starts to question their own reality. To say, maybe I just don't know what I'm thinking, or maybe I just misperceived what he said. But no, what he says is crystal clear. And certainly, we saw that at the North Carolina rally, if you will. And he's talking about the other Republican candidate, or not candidate, but the representative in Congress, Omar, last name Omar, and he's saying horrible things. And then the crowd chimes in and send her back, send her back. So if you watch that 13 seconds for them to do that, and that's the optimal point, because the next day he said, Oh, I didn't agree with it. And so I tried to speak very quickly. What did he say? He says, I think I started speaking very quickly. Well, 13 seconds in my world is not very quickly. And he stood there at the podium and just kind of took it all in bathing in it, bathing in it. So here's a kid, here's a point where he says he spoke very quickly. We saw the video, you can time it if you want is 13 seconds. So he's gaslighting us. He's gaslighting the nation. And he expects us to swallow it. Yeah, some people do swallow it.  And he doubles down. So, you know, you begin questioning, how can he do that? And then he continues to do it. And then you know that the base, the base is enjoying that the base wants that the base believes it when he says things, they enjoy it. Now, where's a pattern? I mean, this pattern has been going on for 911 days, actually before then, because as a candidate, he was doing the same thing. Remember the VFW Hall, about a year and a half ago, and he's, you know, he's talking about stories about him. And he said, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. And he just basically denied the factual stories that were being portrayed against him. And he just said, who are you going to believe me or your own eyes? Basically, that's what he was saying. We're moving into the reality show. We're moving into the reality show, which is complete fiction, but it's entertaining. And it gets your attention. And it distracts you. It displaces truth. And I think that's what's happening. And people are going for that because there is a blurred line between fact and fiction in our entertainment. And so I think he's playing on that he's creating a sort of fictional world for us and people buy it. I mean, there's got to be all kinds of sociological psychological explanations for this. And I think people buy it because they like to be into fiction. And that's what he's selling fiction. Well, if it's fiction, it's pretty close to reality. I mean, that's what he's trying to make it into reality.  And remember, June 15 2015, as he's going down the escalator, what's the first thing he brought up? If I may read a quick, quick code on this is when Mexico says it's people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have a lot of problems. And they're sending problems with us. They belong, they belong to those problems. They're bringing in drugs. They bring in crime. They're rapists, comma, and I assume some are good people. So some is the operative word, meaning most of the Mexicans are really fomenting hatred and fear. But that was really all about racism.  And it's not just Hispanics, it's not just the Mexicans, it's, it's everyone, you know, make America great again is make America white again, that's what it is. That's what Nancy Pelosi said. Well, I agree with her about that.  Not a whole lot has happened. I mean, the people are saying that kids are in cages, that it's immoral, that it's the most, you know, immoral, obnoxious things we can remember in our, in our lives here in the United States. However, there's not a lot of news about it, because it's all moved on to other things through another apprentice show, if you will. This time it's about hatred. And so we have another episode. It's another episode. And the border episode, we'll pick that up some other time. If you caught what he said when these accusations about the horrendous treatment of these children were brought to his attention, and he had to address it. And what he said is, they're leaving an area that, you know, those conditions are far, far worse than what they experience here in these detention centers. He almost made it sound like they're lucky to be here. And we're taking much better care of them than they were in Mexico, or in Guatemala or Honduras. I mean, what kind of rationale, what kind of rationale is that? It's racism. We're, you know, they don't have facilities for to clean up. They're overcrowded when they sleep. They have them, you know, the minimal provisions. And he's saying, they've got it, they've got it made. Yeah, just a lie. You remember what Cynthia said last week in her informal poll in the state of Alabama? These people deserve what they get because they should have come here in the first place. Yeah, it's truly remarkable. And I think I think that's going to continue. I think the worst thing that I can think of, and you and I spotted it early, was the fact that here in the United States, with all its economy and its technology, the Board of Patrol did not keep a record of what child, what went with what parent. And they don't know, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of children out there that will actually never be reunited with their parents. They separated them physically. They separated them in terms of country. They deported the parents, the children, or God knows where. And there's no record of who belongs to who. What a festering blemish this will be on the history of the United States. Yeah. And it will never ever go away. It's not lost on you and me, but it's not lost on a lot of people overseas too. Yeah. Anyway, so we're in the middle of a campaign. That's what he's doing. He's campaigning and he's attacking the other side. And he's attacking him on a very low tax. This is going to continue. This is the party of Trump, not the Republican Party. Let me take you down memory lane on the last candidate, Republican candidate, that actually had some morals and integrity and ethics. You might remember him. His name was John McCain. And I saw that clip. He was at a rally. And if you remember back in 2008, when he was just, he was the candidate and he was at a rally. And one lady stood up and said, no, no, I don't trust him. I don't trust him. He's an Arab. That's what she said. He's an Arab. He's an Arab. And McCain said, no, that's not true. He took the microphone. Exactly. He took the microphone. He goes, no, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happened to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's all what the campaign's all about. I saw that. That was the last great candidate of the GOP that I recall seeing. That's the old GOP. The new GOP is different. It's Mitch McConnell GOP different. And that takes us to the question of Congress. We're always trying to connect the dots.  And the wall is the wall between the house and the Senate. And piling up all this legislation in the house that the house feels and Nancy Pelosi feels is worthy, but it ends at the wall. It doesn't get into the Senate because McConnell's not doing anything. And the result is no action. Congress is dysfunctional, nonfunctional, and it's not going to be functional until the Senate changes. Somehow, I hope, it's just as important as diselecting Trump to diselect those guys. And it's not because they're going to change their minds in the next senatorial terms. It's because they should go. They should be ushered out of government. They have breached their duty to the public. They should be of no consequence to us. This will be another four years of gridlock, just like the Obama administration, where the house was the gridlock, with John Boehner as the speaker of the house. So how many decades do we have gridlock where nothing gets done in this country? And we flounder as a nation. We do in every way.  And getting paid for it. They haven't addressed the issues. They haven't resolved anything. Hearings are nice. But how about some legislation? How about some congressional analysis and legislation? But one thing that strikes me, and we don't talk about it enough, is that we have a huge deficit, thanks to Trump and the Tax Reform Act of, what was it, 2017, where he fooled everyone into thinking they were going to get a big reduction in their taxes while the corporations got it and permanently, but the middle class didn't got it temporarily and it wasn't much. And the result is we have a much bigger deficit than we had before. And you think that Republicans are going to be, traditionally, they have been restrained about the budget. Not this time. They are thrown it away, and including on the military, I might add. And so what's going on is we have this multi-trillion dollar deficit. We don't have the tax revenues to pay it or pay it down. We're in worse fiscal condition, way worse than we were when he started. And here we are up against in September. It's like, what, a month, six weeks away? We're up against the debt ceiling again. Congress is going to get into another crisis over that. It's coming soon, and there'll be a shutdown. God knows what will happen. Why is this a prize to anyone of the GOP? Remember, Donald Trump loves debt. He proclaims debt is a great thing to have. That on the basis of fraudulent representations. You wouldn't admit to that, but he loves debt. So why would a trillion dollar deficit really get under his skin at all? It's not at all. And to bolster his belief that debt is good, the stock market is at $27,000. And the Dow is doing completely what's opposite of what should have happened with a trillion dollar deficit. And it's not happening. Well, they say the economy and the stock market are both a function of public confidence. And somehow, here's an excellent confidence man who makes us believe things that aren't necessarily true. And that perpetuates the economy as such as it is. There are real flaws in it, frankly. And it perpetuates the stock market such as it is. But when we find out that it's all a matter, it's a confidence game, when we find out that the statements he's making, the assurances he's providing, and which people believe aren't true, then I suggest it's not going to be a slow decline. It's going to be a rapid, sharp decline. It's going to be the biggest decline the country has ever seen because it's built on smoke. And we're going to find out the reality. Collectively, the markets will find out the reality. And I don't know when that's going to be, but I think that's what's coming. It's been going up for 10 years. Yeah. I mean, all things, all parties come to an end sooner later. And just by natural time of a decade of prosperity, not prosperity, but we've climbed out of the worst recession in the history of this country. And we climbed out of it in 2008. And here it is 2019.  Oh, yeah. So, but you're right. The confidence is still extremely high. And I guess that's good from one standpoint. But when you have obvious things that are, you know, that a trillion dollars a debt, when you have other things that are very, you have an inverted yield curve on our interest rates, these are obvious things. But I go back to Donald Trump's, you know, his quote, are you what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. Well, these things are happening. And so somehow he's got a hold over, you know, investors on this. Let's talk about Iran. Because Iran's been in the news lately over drone number two. Episode number two, having to deal with drones, right? So now we shot down shot down. I know that's not exactly accurate. Even if it were, even if it did happen, we're not sure it did happen. An Iranian drone that was approaching a US warship. And you told me this morning, well, no, it's actually we didn't shoot it down. We we intercepted its radio signal and that brought it down. But do we have it? We have pieces of it? Do we approve of it? Because the Iranians deny it. They say all the drones are accounted for. So I don't know what to believe. Who knows what to believe? That's that's a really big point. We don't know what to believe anymore. But you can believe that the Iranians confiscated a British, a mini tanker oil tanker, a very small one. That's been confiscated. And now they're going to float it through the Straits of Hormuz. And that's a fact. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I believe them when they say that they're going back to making bombs. I believe they're doing that. And I think is one NPR commentator said this morning, every month, you know, there's an incident that brings us closer to war. And if you listen to the rhetoric, you get you get stronger rhetoric. Every time something like this happens, and people are threatening war on both sides. Let me ask you this. Is it far better for a president to be a wartime president when it comes to reelection? Oh, yeah. Yeah, not only that coincidence. Yeah. Well, exactly. It works in his favor. It does not work in the benefit of the country or the benefit of any other country, frankly. But it works in the favor of the guy who's running for office and who is the president. So I mean, and I and I and I wondered if the war gets really heated as we go forward to the election day in 2020. He could claim a national emergency. He could delay the elections. He could he could call he could call the elections rigged and all that very troublesome. And PS, you know, there's this thing about to get the name of the product. There's something about face, face photo. And it's an app on your phone. And people have been using it, that it changes the way you look. But more importantly, it keeps a copy of your face. And it's getting pictures of everybody's face voluntarily, because it's fun to make Tim or younger or whatever it does. Come to find that the headquarters for this app, this face app, is in Russia. It's in it's a Russian company. Not the only one. There are others to like that that are on the market, you know, as legitimate apps and applications for your computer, whatnot. And they they emanate from and are operated in Russia and in Russia, you have to assume there's a connection with with the bad guys. So if you're worried about facial recognition, if you're worried about a loss of privacy, you can include that in your concern. I get to see Donald Trump using it to mock his fellow opposing candidates, making their face look all sorts of goofy poses and looks, and have fun with that just trying to mock them, rather than call them Pocahontas. I'll make them look like Pocahontas facial recognition is a problem. There's more cameras going up except in San Francisco. And, you know, I mean, I feel that we have we have a, you know, a serious problem in China over the loss of privacy. And I think it's going to happen here, too. And the attorney general, your attorney general, not mine. What's his name bar? Yes, is really he's out of the bag now. You know, this week, the that case where the fellow was choked by New York City policeman, the Department of Justice, just as the statute of limitations was expiring Department of Justice said, no, we're not going to prosecute that, not the district of New York, which is controlled in such decisions by the Department of Justice bar in Washington. And there have been so many other decisions that bar has made, you know, for and in the name of the Department of Justice, that, you know, the Department of Justice is going south on us is being controlled by a guy who's being controlled by Trump. So our legal system, you know, we have Trump who is not into rule of law or the or the Constitution in any way. We have bar who does what Trump says and he's not he's just going to do what Trump says. It's really horrible. And we have the courts which are being stalked, even as we speak, while we look at the headlines and all this about Iran and about hatred and about the border. He's stalking the courts with right wing conservative judges. So our legal system is being deteriorated as we speak them. It's been eroded. However, many decisions have been against Trump and his efforts to subvert the law and the Constitution. So I still see checks and balances. They take a long time to get to court. Unfortunately, that's what was recently mentioned about the Mueller testimony that's going to take place here on the 24th of July. But also other subpoenas. I mean, it just takes time to grind through the system. And it's designed to be that way, I suppose. Well, but it's having it's having a very negative effect. Everything is so slow.  No, what was the other one? No. Well, no collusion, no obstruction. There's three questions that should be asked at the Mueller testimony. Did you did your report say there was collusion? Now it wasn't conspiracy, but was there collusion? Did your report say that there was obstruction?  Those are the only three questions I would want to ask, because I know what the answer is going to be. And it needs to be heard to the American public rather than a 448 page report. And he's going to try to stick to stick to his script, you know. Well, that's fine. He's not he's not going to be candid very easily. And I don't have my hopes. I'm sorry, we'll see what happens. Everybody be listening. And I hope the hope the House drafts good questions and presses for answers, you know, sometimes these guys just grant stand. You think they know how to be good cross examiners. Sometimes they don't. According to Jerry Nather, they've been huddled together to work on the questions in unison. Not not every representative or is is constructing their own separate questions. It looks like they're actually figuring it out as a group. Yeah, I think I don't have that much time. Well, speaking of time, I don't think that the Trump is going to just stand by and watch the television on Mueller. He's going to think of another distraction. Well, he has to because it was a minimized Mueller. Because this was what happened to Richard Nixon. It was the actual public testimony that actually really remember a public started to get the full picture of what was really going on. They weren't getting it from the newspapers and they weren't getting it from TV reports. They really they watched they watched those public hearings. And then they go, ah, and as soon as those public hearings are going on, the the the public polls for impeachment went way up. But before it wasn't. Yeah, well, number of people in the house who won impeachment is increasing for sure 95 95. Every time you look, it's more. And I guess it affects somebody, not the base, maybe, but it affects somebody in the house. The problem is they can't do anything. And that's why this election is so important. They can't do anything yet because Representative Al Green's impeachment proposal was based simply on the racist statements that Donald Trump made. OK, that's a very finite, finite band of bandwidth of reasons for impeachment. But what if you say payments to Stormy Daniels and the illegal campaign financing of that? What do you say about obstruction of justice? What do you say about the racist comments? What do you say about all these things you can add on to the list of reasons of high crimes and Mr. Meener? Well, maybe then you'll get more than 95 votes. Yeah, but you know what, it's like, you know, the word Diana, it would have been enough. Diana means it would have been enough.  And the problem is that politically, that impeachment is a political process. And none of them were. And even collectively, they aren't, because it's a political process. How many, how many representatives, GOP representatives in the House, in the House voted with the resolution that this racism that Trump conducted against the four representatives? How many went over to and said this is intolerable? I think it was three or four, Max. Yeah, but I think they voting on party lines, most of them. And they're going to continue to do that for every bill. Well, then things we've talked about many times is let the House stand up for what it believes about the rule of law and the preservation of the Constitution. They're not going to win on the impeachment, but let that be a statement to the American public that we stand for something. We didn't win, but we stand for something. Yeah, we're not completely immobilized. So anyway, you know, I look at my notes. Yeah, the press, the press. So we spoke before about the television media repeating themselves, having the same guests on. It's sort of poking at Trump every day for hours, repeating themselves from one hour to another hour to another hour. And although I have trouble watching Fox News, I'm sure they're doing the same thing. And so, you know, what you have is the press is excuse the expression droning on about this, and people are getting fatigued about it. But what's interesting is they're always looking for something new just to their credit, they're supposed to be looking for something new. And and some of the news articles really don't talk about the primary offense, like, you know, they're send them home sort of send them back. That's the primary offense. They rather look for angles on that. The Times had an article about this. What do the Republicans think about this send them back? So I mean, what we have is we're buried in this news about Trump and the administration. We're buried in this news about how the government isn't working. And we're really, really tired of it. I don't know how the press could, you know, do better. I think sometimes more analysis would be helpful. Connecting the dots would be helpful. The country is changing, you know, and it's not just in government, it's changing because of what's happening in government. Because of the rule changes that he's making. Because of the social, the social evolution, the social dynamic that is being created, country is changing. And I think we will see that in the near term. We will see those things happen. I agree the country is changing, but also the more things change, the more they say the same. Okay. Because what I believe is this Epstein episode in the press. Boy, did that get attention because it was something different than the usual droning on, if you will. And this was salacious. This was really something that the press could get their teeth on. This is no different than when John Edwards was running as president and is, you know, well kept mistress and child was discovered.  Very hard. Very hard. That's the one I was trying to remember. Thank you. He was out of business immediately. That was it. That was the end of it. But, you know, Trump has been through a lot of these things and he's not out of business. In fact, some people like it, they think it's a sign of will and power and strengths.  They keep bubbling up and judge just unsealed the documents or the Michael Cohen payments to Stormy Daniels. Well, those documents have been unsealed. And again, it shows very, very distinctly that Donald Trump now was the master of these directing these payments. And this happened the day after the Access Hollywood video. And what else happened the day after the Hollywood video? The Podesta break in of his emails. That happened the day after. So Donald Trump is kind of the Marriott master up and master on this stuff. But remember that William Barr decided not to pursue the prosecution of those of that payment. While he's in office. No, no, statute of limitations. Statute of limitations on that, I think is 2022. It's about to run. It depends what crime you're talking about. I don't know. There's so many. It's true. I mean, we live in a world of crime that fascinates us, but it doesn't help the country. It doesn't really help the economy. It doesn't have our relations with, you know, all these other countries. And we sink deeper into this sort of world of slimy episodes of a reality show. And the saying that everything he touches dies. I mean, hope picks out of this unsealed documents. She's going to be called back into Congress to see what she was lying before the house. Waits for a distraction on that one, too. So, okay, here we are. We've looked at it today, maybe looking back. What do you see looking forward on this? I mean, in terms of the events next week that we can expect. I think you can expect more outrageous statements from Donald Trump as pertaining to his candidacy, and the fact that people are behind him no matter how outrageous he is. People are supporting him, and he'll drone on about that. And he'll make more outrageous statements about the squad. And he's getting traction on this. He sees it in his poll numbers. So this is a good for him. He likes this. You know, in two weeks' time, there's another democratic debate. Right. It's going to be really interesting to see how that works. And I hope they can, they meaning the people involved can get their act together so they don't look like they're shooting each other. And they can provide some leadership for us. I think they learned a lesson. We'll see. But we'll see if Kamala Harris has learned not to do that because, you know, she's got a long way to go in this race. In some ways it helps her in other ways. If she pushes herself way out in the corner, it's not going to help her. Yeah, we need a leader now. Okay, thank you, Tim. Thank you, Jay. Next week. Next week. Next week. Trump week. Trump week. Every week. Trump week. Okay, we'll do it.


We've seen some good reports coming out of the labor market. The unemployment rate as measured by U3 has fallen from 6.7% to 6.3% in April, and 6.3% is near normal levels. However, if we look at the U6 measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time and discouraged workers, we see the unemployment rate at almost 12%. If we go back in time and look at the labor market from 2007 before the economic crisis to today, what we find is the people that are not considered in the labor force have increased from 77 million to 92 million, or nearly 15 million people are no longer considered to be in the workforce over that time. And within that group of not in the workforce in 2007, 4.8% wish they had a job. And today, it's 6.2%. In 2007 before the crisis, 4.8 million say they wish they had a job. Today, that number is up to 6.2 million, or a 25% increase. So a lot of people have been moved out of the workforce by government statisticians. In fact, John Williams at ShadowStats.com, using the old methodology, projects U6 unemployment rate to be almost 23%. And again, if we look at inside the labor market statistics, what we find is the number of part-time jobs is continuing to increase. The number of jobs in healthcare, education, and social services continues to increase. But the number of breadwinner jobs and jobs in manufacturing, construction, industry, information, and trade, those jobs have not even reached the level of the 2001 recession. So that's a very bad sign. And so despite the fact that the headline unemployment rate is looking better, if we look beneath the surface, what we see is a labor market that clearly has yet to recover. And that's the Mises view.