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May 1, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:15:14
American Energy Dominance, Exclusive Triggered Debate w/ Alex Epstein & James Showalter | Triggered Ep238
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Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
And today is going to be a fun one.
We're going to do another deep dive into all things energy policy.
But we're going to do it in a little bit of a different way.
We're going to have two guests.
Alex Epstein, the author of Fossil Future, along with first-time guest named James Showalter, who actually runs a solar and battery company.
And despite coming from very different perspectives, And different sides of the energy spectrum, they both support the Trump energy policy.
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Guys, joining me now, the author of Fossil Future and Energy Talking Points, Alex Epstein, along with the founder of Energy Access Innovations, James Showalter.
Guys, thank you so much for both being here.
Thanks, Don.
Happy to be here.
So I thought we would do a little something different with this episode, and we have more of a discussion or perhaps even a debate on energy policy.
You both have expressed quite a bit of support for the Trump energy policy that's been coming out, but you both also come at it from very different angles.
Alex, you've been on the show before to discuss the case for fossil fuels, while James is actually in the solar and battery space, which we often think of as...
Perhaps being at odds with fossil fuels.
So I guess to start, James, can you just introduce yourself a little bit to the audience and talk about your unique perspective?
Absolutely.
So my name is James Showalter.
I started Energy Access Innovations, which controls Signature Solar Electronics, which is the number one B2C consumer platform for solar parts in the United States, and also EG4 Electronics.
Which is our own battery and storage brand.
And we reached number two in volume in the residential battery space last year.
Over 350 million dollars in revenue.
Over 400.
Jobs that we've created in my hometown of Sulphur Springs, where I grew up.
Sulphur Springs is a coal community.
We have a coal mine that got shut down.
And I started the company when I was 24. Previous to that, I was a solar installer between 19 to 24, and I kind of saw some of the problems of the battery-less net metering dependency solar.
And previous to being a solar installer, I was a barbed wire fence builder working on dairies, and I ran a hardware store before then.
I graduated high school early as a homeschool gig.
My parents took advantage of whatever unfunded school choice there was.
So I was able to leave high school by the time I was 15 and just have been running ever since.
I love entrepreneurship and I love independent energy.
And we've been a big part in trying to move the industry towards just return on investment and independence.
And we see an exciting future for the technology and an exciting future for an America with dropping energy prices and more energy abundance overall without government intervention.
So that's kind of a based background for a solar guy.
I kind of like it.
It's also sort of funny that, Alex, you're based as the fossil fuels guy in Southern California.
So getting the message out about fossil fuels.
While James is actually based in Texas.
And by the way, Alex, if I look at the hair, I'm going to say you're going to be more the solar guy.
So it's a little bit of an interesting dichotomy there.
But one area where there seems to be a lot of common ground is subsidy culture.
Both of you have published pieces talking about how destructive this is.
Alex, can you give us the lay of the land and then James perhaps respond?
Yeah, for sure.
With fossil fuels, I don't just have a fetish for fossil fuels.
I didn't come from a family background of fossil fuels.
I didn't come from industry or anything like that.
I like fossil fuels because fossil fuels are, in most cases, the most cost-effective form of energy on a free market, which means they're affordable, they're reliable, they're versatile, they can power everything, including airplanes and container ships.
Nothing is as versatile as oil in particular these days.
And then they're scalable.
They're available to billions of people in thousands of places.
So politically, I don't stand for fossil fuels at all.
And in fact, I'm very at odds at the moment with the fossil fuel industry on subsidies, which we'll talk about in a second, because they want certain subsidies that I don't think are right.
Or some of them do.
Some of the trade groups do.
What I'm really for is energy freedom.
So the freedom of all different industries to produce and compete, and then the freedom of consumers to choose.
And there are many, many impediments to energy freedom, and the current administration is doing a good job.
At fighting many of them, I'd say particularly on the control and regulatory side.
The battle that we have coming up that I've been advocating on this show and others needs to go in a certain way is with regard to what the president calls the Green News scam.
Or the IRA subsidies.
And they're called tax credits.
They call them tax credits to make it seem like, oh, we're just letting people keep a little bit more of their money.
But these are, in fact, overwhelmingly a mechanism to just give money to otherwise unprofitable businesses.
So if you were to take the things that the fossil fuel people support, sometimes like hydrogen, carbon capture, for the most part, these cannot.
They cannot be funded in a free market.
They can in a very limited way, but not in the way they are.
And so they're demanding, you know, upwards of hundreds of billions in subsidies.
If you look at the biggest single subsidies that are a problem, it's what are called the clean electricity ones, which historically and currently are focused overwhelmingly on solar and wind.
Depending on the estimates, you're looking at between about $300 billion and $900 billion.
So over the next 10 years.
So think about that amount of money.
But it's not just that.
It's not just the amount of money for the budget.
The main issue is these have dramatically distorted electricity markets.
Because what they do is they pay utilities a huge amount of money.
I mean, the mechanisms are complex, but they pay them a huge amount of money to use solar and wind whenever they happen to be available, even though they're not reliable on their own without massive storage.
And that defunds the natural gas and coal.
Because if the natural gas and coal don't get paid when solar and wind happen to be available, they get defunded, they have less money.
That plus the regulation has given us a dramatic, dramatic shortage of reliable electricity supply.
So what I am for is getting rid of all these subsidies, getting rid of all favoritism, and setting up market rules where any form of energy, including solar and wind...
Can succeed if it can actually contribute to reliable energy at the lowest cost.
That's what I'm for, and that's why I think we should get rid of all the IRA subsidies, or as President Trump has put it, terminate the Green News scam.
So James, how would you respond to that?
Because again, obviously there are subsidies across the energy sector.
Oil and gas certainly gets it as well, but you certainly hear it.
I hear about it more in wind.
Solar's definitely made some advancements over the last few years, but I sort of, you know, someone I know who's a banker in New York once sort of said, you know, solar's been the next big thing for the last 30 years.
Never quite matriculated.
How do you respond?
Yeah, gosh, there's so much to unpack about what's in those subsidies.
Normally I'm on podcasts discussing like products technically line by line.
So I'm going to just, if you'll entertain it, let me discuss the IRA like it's a product and kind of go line by line on those credits.
Just to check the theme here for a second, this is, I think, one of the reasons why me and a few other people in the solar industry are realizing that, you know, our future is not in the green lobby.
And we aren't fighting for what they're fighting for.
We are fighting for at EAI and many other companies that I think will come out of the woodwork and support this movement, which could really change the landscape of the green movement.
We don't want into that.
We don't stand for the green movement.
We stand for distributed generation.
We stand for homeowners and end users having a right to generate their own power.
And we think that a lot of the future of a competitive, innovative, energy abundant landscape is going to come from energy that is generated sometimes at the end of the line and not the beginning of it.
But at the same time, we're not the ones that want to see Any other fuel source get penalized.
I want this administration under the leadership of your father to jump in and make natural gas as cheap as it can be without subsidizing it.
We don't want to see a seesaw where, okay, when one party's in power, the fossil lobby gets free money.
And when the other party's in power, the renewable lobby gets free money.
I believe in innovation and the free market.
Why do I believe in that?
Because that's everything I've done every year as a battery company is release a better product.
It's about 15% to 20% less cost.
You'd be surprised a lot of the public companies in the battery space have not.
And the reason is because they invest their money in D.C. to get subsidies.
So if I reframe the conversation on the green versus non-green, I think I've, you know...
Alex, I read your book.
I think about just the climate models and the way that that affects that.
I'm a battery guy.
I get paid to make a better battery.
I don't get paid to tell people how to change their world.
There's a lot of people that are buying from us or that work with us that are like, hey, I'm counting carbon as I do it.
Great.
Wonderful.
I'm going to make a better battery.
And if you're not counting carbon, I'm going to make a better battery and I'm going to sell you on energy ROI and energy of independence.
And I'd like to do it in a way that does not use public money and does not use subsidies.
So how do we frame an even playing field?
The even playing field I'm interested in is businesses and homeowners becoming a part of the energy generation marketplace.
I want millions of competitors to the central mistake that has occurred as these public monopolies in the power of business have had 100 years to vegetate and go from seeking the public interest to, frankly, I think they're like insurance companies where they make money.
Every time that we have a justification to raise the price, I think the green situation has been a boondoggle for some of the biggest operators because it's just like, you know, if you can raise the cost of medical care, then, you know, there's more overall profit for the insurance companies.
Yeah, well, it's no different than education.
There was no cost to raising the price, so they raised the price, even if the value derivative of that education is demonstrably less each and every year.
So, frankly, you know, I've got to, you know, take a step back and just kind of make sure that we're going on the scope here.
I think, you know, the American people came out and supported policies of saying, look, you're not right unless you cut my power bill.
And I think there's so many grid disaster tales around the United States where people's energy, energy poverty is one of the biggest problems we're facing in our time.
Energy prices should be going down.
And instead, people like me, I'm 28, we grew up expecting this thing's going to outpace inflation.
That's wrong.
So we have no dog in the fight.
The distributed generation group has no dog in the fight for whether or not America has more wind farms, solar farms.
We don't care.
And we think all, like for us, it's the power companies and the homeowners and businesses.
And what we want is a truly abundant market where millions of players are involved in there.
So I think if we want to see super competition with all technologies, and by the way, we're open to, I build battery systems that work with solar panels.
Show me another fuel source that I can deploy at the end of the line, and I'll integrate that too.
I'm open to squid oil and methane and all kinds of other things.
So for me then, okay, framing, how do we get to a free market?
And where does the IRA intersect with distributed generation?
I think that the IRA fell victim very quickly to regulatory capture, as they call it.
Where basically people who were involved in lobbying for the bill then wrote the regulations afterwards and they created massive loopholes.
You've got to pass the bill to find out what's in it?
Well, they passed the bill and then it went to executive branch administrative groups that frankly surprisingly did things that were vastly in favor of public companies.
So in the distributed sector...
We don't benefit from the PTC, the power tax credit where we pay wind turbines four cents a kilowatt hour to make power no one wants so they can call up the grid and say we'll sell to you for negative one cent, right?
So we can get power four from the Fed.
We have no interest in that.
There's zero interest whatsoever.
We want to be part of a revolution that is creating independence and ROI for our customers and driving down the cost of power for all of our neighbors that aren't yet doing that.
The one tax credit that's in the IRA that I believe is a free market equivalency, is I believe my logical basis is that homeowners and businesses should have the exact same competitive environment to make power as a power company.
That's the reality of distributed technology, which currently is batteries and solar panels.
But frankly, in some cases, it'll be battery, solar, and natural gas.
I think flare gas and batteries will be amazing for AI.
In areas where we aren't able to utilize natural gas.
We can use distributed technology to use all kinds of energy, and I'm just for energy independence.
And so when you look at a homeowner, the tax credit for homeowners is supposed to be 30% of the cost of the system.
Now, a homeowner has to use after-tax dollars to buy their generation system.
The power company which they buy from...
Writes off that generation asset, writes off the lines, writes off all the labor.
So I do think that there's one group where if we're going to serve the American people, we want to put homeowners in the market of having all the choices they can have.
We need to facilitate something like an equivalency, and it's about 30%.
Now, I would say that the residence tax credit is also a perfect example of what got ruined in regulatory capture afterwards.
Yeah.
Because, well, what's that 30% based on?
Well, it should have been based on actual costs.
I think it actually should be worse than that.
It should be based on a competitive target so that we actually drive the cost of the technology down.
I think when you have an unlimited cap, you create, in the U.S., currently, home solar with batteries in the United States is a minimum of $3 a lot.
But some of my installer guys are down to $2.60.
We drive the competitive end of the market.
The Australian market is at $1.20 for solar and storage.
Germany is at $1.20.
American solar, when everyone's lobbying for American solar, what they're really lobbying for in most cases is an uncompetitive and lousy business model.
So in Germany and Australia, that low price per kilowatt hour is not a derivative of extra subsidies?
It's actually just...
No, no.
I think one of the biggest jokes I had with Daniel Turner was that China got rid of subsidies in 2018.
They're not dumb enough to do it.
I think Daniel Turner got in trouble for calling renewables green-painted communism.
I'm like, no, no, you're wrong.
It's even worse than that.
The communists don't want it.
That's the whole problem in this space.
And what I see in battery technology is a guy who works on creating...
I'm working on a new generation battery solution made with a battery cell that's coming out of Michigan.
That we're going to roll out at the end of this year in a big partnership with a major company operating over there.
What I see is Wright's wall.
I see the next personal computer revolution.
Distributed computing.
Now, yeah.
What did that do?
It put the mainframe companies in check in the computer revolution.
Now, my...
James, James, like, okay.
Yeah, I was going to ask Alex, can you lay out the problems that you see with solar and can there ever be a...
I think it would be helpful just to get from James, like, a straightforward...
Absolutely, yeah.
Straightforward.
I think homeowners need a tax credit for a generation investment or some way to correct the fact they have to invest in generation assets with post-tax money.
I think that there's 25 states in the United States to charge sales tax.
On generation equipment for homeowners and businesses and the labor on such.
And I think that there are sales tax exemptions for power generation.
I actually worked with a Republican house rep in my district.
Trump supported it.
So is this a new subsidy or you want to modify the consumer one or you want to modify the investment tax credit?
The investment tax credit for homeowners needs to be idiot-proofed and it needs to be kept because we need to create an even playing field.
But you want to get rid of it for industrial solar?
Yeah, absolutely.
There is no mandate from an American ratepayer that wants to pay extra for solar power unless they want to pay extra for solar power, and those governments shouldn't subsidize that.
Okay, so I think you're talking about then getting rid of the ITC, so investment tax credit.
You're talking about getting rid of the vast majority of that, because what you're talking about is a tiny portion of the market compared to what industrial.
Solar is getting.
So with this, there are two aspects to this.
So one is this issue of, like, should you be able to sort of, if you're a homeowner producing electricity for the grid, should you get some sort of, like, the same kind of tax deductibility that a business should?
And then there's this whole issue of, like, is it really good to think about these homeowners as in any way equivalent to what?
I think the best way would just be to say, hey...
Homeowners can business expense certain kinds of things if they want to sell electricity to the grid.
It can just be like a little home business.
You don't need tax credits to do that.
You can just have deduction.
So you can get rid of the whole IRA and do what you're talking about.
I do want to say, though, this distributed generation thing, like right now, solar is preferred not just with subsidies, but is preferred with a form of market access that is totally insane.
And so the way to think of it is...
Solar gets to sell to the grid, so the grid will take solar or wind at any time in any quantity, regardless of the reliability that it's contributing to the system.
And then they'll say, well, solar is cheaper than fossil fuels.
This is like, you know, I have a 10-month-old.
This is like somebody saying, hey, I'm a babysitter.
I'll only charge you $15 an hour, but I only come a third of the time and you don't know when.
And I'm way cheaper than that babysitter that comes all the time when you want them.
That's not the same thing.
So what I'm advocating is that we need grid rules that require everybody to meet the same standards of dispatchability or reliability in one way or another.
So if homeowners want to do this, it can't be like the past where they can sell electricity randomly and we have to take it.
And with net metering and subsidies where they get a huge bonus, it needs to be you provide...
So if a homeowner can provide electricity using their solar panels and batteries with the same reliability as a natural gas plant, more power to them.
But the current state of affairs is just screwing up the grid further with this so-called distributed generation.
So do either of you think you could actually ever have a truly fair marketplace with all of these things competing on equal ground?
Yes.
Yes.
It's hard.
Yeah, it's hard, but there are three fundamental ways to do it.
So one is...
One is this is the most radical would be like you have total property rights in the country and you make it easy to build things and you literally can have competing grids.
Like that's one way to do it.
The second way to do it is what I indicated, which is having the kinds of markets we have right now, but having tech neutral, what are called dispatchability or reliability standards where all the different players have to meet.
You have to make electricity available on demand in certain quantities.
You can't just make it available randomly.
And then the third thing, which is what the old utility system used to do sort of with laws, is what's called long-term system cost analysis, where you figure out a given entity serving the consumers and accountable to them.
Decides what is the right mix of things.
So it might decide, hey, solar is good for 7% because it's cheap on the margin, but it's not very reliable.
Maybe a little batteries, maybe this much natural gas, this much coal, this much hydro.
And you work it all out as a system.
So you can either have the market that's fair, or you can try to do this system thing, or you can return to a society with full property rights, which is obviously a long way away.
Those are the three ways.
Alex, I think you're glossing over something, and I just want to make sure we're clear on the solar we're talking about here.
I actually spoke at SolarCon earlier on last week, and what I told the industry was two things, one of which you'd probably very much agree with, and that was that net metering and any kind of grid subsidy is incredibly unfair to people's neighbors, and it needs to end.
And the other one is that within two years, I think all solar will have 100% battery attachment.
Okay?
What does that mean, James, for those who are less energy inclined?
Absolutely.
I'm sorry?
What does that mean for those who are less energy inclined?
Yeah, 100% battery attachment means that the solar that has been going into the market, and this is why I started EG4 five years ago, the solar that's been going into the market is a bad product.
It is just solar panels converted directly to AC, and then basically there's no way to store it.
So some of that power runs your house and a majority, 60% of that, actually just goes out to the grid.
It's just like dumped onto the grid.
And the grid company pays for that export.
And then depending on the green inclination of the grid company, they've been subsidizing that export.
So the California PUC, because they finally woken up and realized that their electricity prices are insane, did a measurement of the cost of buying that power.
The way that they do it, you know, because they want to give a premium return on that power.
It's $8 billion on a $24 billion residential market.
So what it means is the 15% of people with solar in California that do that, they don't have backup on their homes.
And they're raising the rate of power 50% for all of their neighbors so they can get this payback on an overpriced solar system.
And what I also noticed when I build this company in technology is that the solar tech companies Price their products to the subsidies.
The moment the subsidies step back, the innovation steps forward.
And America, again, has three times priced solar.
So the insanity of what we've done in the market with subsidies in terms of grid regulations, there should not be any net metering in the United States.
Okay, so we agree on that.
I'm curious what the thing we disagree on.
Yeah, I think the only thing that we disagree on...
When we talk about the reliability requirements, that's fine, but most of my customers, all of my customers are battery-attached, Alex.
And most of them will only export 0% to 5% of their power they ever generate.
All of their energy savings happen behind the meter.
Unless the grid company invites them to participate with their battery bank, which is a dispatchability, to your point, a dispatchability structure, I've got power companies calling me up.
As a guy with a fleet with tens of thousands of battery systems deployed in the United States with the volume that we've got, saying, hey, can we work with you and build a control system so your customers can give us power during peak time?
My own house, I don't even have solar on it.
It's in the shade.
I've got two batteries, and I've been able to cut my energy prices by 75%.
Is that because you're charging those batteries during off-peak times, James?
Yes, and utilizing good old fossil fuel at the off-peak time or nuclear or whatever, because some of these things, you know, the best dispatchability technology in the world right now is a battery, followed by your natural gas peakers and then the nuclear solutions, which are great for base power.
But the reality that I want to see us head to is that the thing that is called batteryless solar is recognized as a scam, and frankly, free market forces move away from it.
So we need to, the energy abundance leadership.
That is so clear behind the people that supported the president and behind his administration.
We need to make sure these power companies cease to create these kind of market distorting and punishing subsidies that hurt everyone's neighbors.
The sales reps will stop selling the bad product the moment that the grid doesn't want it.
And the grid's almost an accomplice in this.
I've seen this in the Texas market.
What happened was we actually had...
Retail energy providers buy into this whole structure on the buyback because they're like, well, once I got a homeowner with a batteryless solar system, they have to export.
Like they've invested in an overpriced batteryless solar system, $60,000 or something.
It should have been $20,000.
And then what happens is they stop buying back in general on the grid.
They raise their cost of electricity for the stuff delivered at night.
And so the homeowner feels like the cost of energy went up 50 percent.
We definitely agree on this.
But I would say what you've said so far is totally consistent with tech-neutral dispatchability standards.
There's no subsidy required unless you want to make it a business and have a tax deduction for it.
But I would say I would be very cautious about...
Two things.
One is this idea of, I forget how you put it, it's battery attached.
But battery attached does not mean it's anywhere near fully dispatchable.
Like, batteries are relatively expensive.
And if you're talking about a pure backup where you can have a self-sufficient system not connected to the grid, like you can have a self-sufficient, like Elon, for example, you know, in Memphis is building self-sufficient things.
Guess what he's doing it with?
It's not solar.
It's natural gas.
So natural gas can be self-sufficient behind the meter if you want to run data centers or whatever.
Same thing with nuclear.
With solar and storage, nobody is doing this at large scale because it's just too expensive.
So when you're using solar and storage, you're not using storage that's sufficient to truly make the solar fully backed up.
You're making it less unreliable, less non-dispatchable.
So my view is like...
We ought to be clear about that.
It's not at all the same.
Solar plus storage is not at all the same dispatchability as natural gas or anything like that.
And all we need is rules that just say, hey, if you can actually, if you have a big battery bank, if you can provide power by the same standards of natural gas, you should be allowed to.
That's it.
We just need to allow the same standard being met by homeowners.
But so far, as you've agreed to, homeowners have been able to scam other people with these ridiculous net metering.
Well, you know, I think the only thing I push back on that, Alex, is your grip on the technology versus, you know, our focus in the business.
Our customers are putting over a 12-hour reserve on their homes, which is typically two hours of solar production because you make a point about the solar capacity factor being about 20%.
You can achieve this with the right size battery bank.
Our focus has been reducing the cost of battery banks.
We're the best cost efficient.
Battery Bank of the United States.
Great.
I want you to be able to compete, but I have no lack of grip on the technology in terms of, like, nobody is actually making purely dispatchable things on a large scale with solar and storage that can be grid independent.
So they're depending on the grid, but then they're claiming to be, you know, distributed and independent.
I mean, I got 100,000 customers, Alex.
Your homeowners are off-grid?
My homeowner is off-grid.
The grid is a backup generator providing maybe 2-3% of their power unless they live off-grid entirely and they get that backup generator from a gasoline source or something else like that.
Right.
Well, obviously, that's totally fine insofar as they can do that.
I mean, off-grid has been around for a while and it's getting better.
And that's a good thing.
What I'm saying is just...
You seem to be concerned about these homeowners not being allowed to sell electricity to the grid that's at high quality.
I'm saying, let's let them sell to the grid that's at high quality.
Get rid of the whole IRA and make sure everyone is allowed to sell to the grid at the same quality.
And I'm trying to say that my homeowners don't need to sell to the grid.
They're dropping out like school choice parents.
Great.
Even better.
We're running out of electricity, so good for them.
That's great.
I want energy freedom, so I totally support your customers.
Doing that, what I don't support is this idea that everyone is saying, like, we need our particular subsidies for the IRA.
This is what every group is saying, right?
The battery people are saying or the homeowners are saying we need ours.
The oil people are saying we need the carbon capture and the hydrogen.
The solar people are saying we need investment tax credit.
The wind people are saying we need production tax credit.
The biofuel people are saying we need clean fuels or whatever.
Net-zero airlines are saying sustainable aviation fuel.
What's going to happen if we don't put a stop to this is everyone's going to demand their own little thing, and we're going to have $1 to $2 trillion of IRA kept around, and we're going to still screw the grid.
And all of this administration's goals are not going to be possible on the grid as long as we have the solar and wind subsidies.
And for everyone watching, again, who's not an energy expert, the IRA is the Inflation Reduction Act, and anyone who's been watching...
Understands that anytime Congress names a bill, it usually does the opposite.
It's the Inflation Act.
It's the Inflation Act.
There's no reduction in the Inflation Act whatsoever.
Yeah, and I think that the key thing here is that it's not radical to say that homeowners should have access to a free market generating power.
And the tax implications of investing in generation.
For a homeowner should be the same as their power companies or better.
Homeowners are voters.
They drive the economy.
And if you want the power companies living in a no-subsidy environment to actually do their job and innovate and use any source necessary...
The only way to really make that happen, or one of the best ways to make that happen when you do the right thing for homeowners and give them an even playing field, is put the power companies up against tens of millions of Americans that are saying, you know what, if you don't do a good enough job, the battery-attached solution is,
I'm just going to leave.
And that all of a sudden wakes up things in our society that are institutional monopolies, like the school system.
When all of a sudden you can leave...
You drive innovation and competition in those institutional monopolies.
What I don't see is why we have to drag homeowners into the green agenda with solar farms and wind turbines making power nobody wants whenever they want to do it.
The bottom line is, and this is where we fought for And we actually filed a bill in the state of Texas with a Republican sponsor on a sales tax exemption for all distributed generation.
Why?
Because there's no reason why the state should prefer centralized generation versus distributed generation.
And also because of, frankly, the weight that these technologies carry.
If someone does a system that saves a $300 a month power bill, even if power stops inflating, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 of output on $20,000 of hardware.
Who's an economic driver that's going to put cash in the pockets of middle-class American homeowners who've been squeezed out of this economy?
You know, the bottom line...
Just make a free market.
Yeah.
Yeah, just make a free market.
Again, if it's like right now, just quote-unquote distributed generations getting a lot of special preferences, including access to the grid to sell non-dispatchable electricity.
So what I'm in favor of is hold them to the same standards and give them the same...
Tax deductions.
It's not the same as a tax credit that's transferable where you can just sell it to somebody and make a ton of money on it.
So we can get rid of the whole IRA.
And if there's some issue with business tax deductions for homeowners for their own selling electricity to the grid, let's fix that separately.
But we don't need to keep the IRA at all.
And none of those IRA credits are focused on what you're talking about.
Converting the homeowner tax credit to a tax deduction is a very anti-middle class move because most of the middle class takes the standard deduction.
Most of the middle class.
But this is part of this tax credit scam is you're talking about giving a tax credit to people who aren't really paying taxes.
So it functions as a subsidy.
No, they do.
They're not paying enough taxes to be able to benefit from the tax credit.
So just make it a deduction.
Just make it a deduction.
That's the same thing the power companies have.
Now you're saying, well, middle class needs separate treatment because they take this deduction.
Let's just make it simple.
Free market, dispatchability standards.
Everyone gets the same business tax deductibility.
Get rid of the IRA.
Get rid of the green news scam.
America wins.
So I've done these walkthroughs of homeowners, Alex.
And what happens is most homeowners have about $10,000, $5,000 in withholdings across the year.
They put in a system.
They get a 30% equivalent, so it's maybe $7,000 to $9,000 if you're not manipulating the value, which is a big problem I want to talk about, which is the real big cheese.
That's 80-plus percent of where all the money's going is the manipulation.
Okay, so what happens is that they get their withholdings refunded when they get a tax credit.
It's not a refund.
You're mistaken on it being a refundable tax credit for people who don't pay taxes.
We're outright explaining to Grandma.
That if she is on Social Security and doesn't pay any net taxes, she can't get the tax credit that exists right now, Alex.
That's fine.
And we'll evolve past the 30%.
We want a fair playing field for taxpaying, homeowner, middle-class Americans.
And I think that the majority of them are going to want an access to participation of that.
And so they don't file their taxes.
The individual taxes with itemized deductions, Alex, they take the standard deduction.
So it's very much why so many people donate to churches, like myself, go to church every week, I donate.
I don't go and grab all that.
I take the standard deduction.
So the way that individual taxes work, if you really dive into the issue, you'll see the efficacy of...
The residential tax credit, and I think what we need to do is go after the 80% of the resident, even within the residential tax credit category, I think 80% of the cash is going to a scam focused on lease ownership and multiplying the value of those systems.
We're putting $30,000 systems, when they wrote the regs for the tax credit, they set it where you take a $30,000 system and put it in at $110,000 based on a third-party appraiser of cash.
I think this is getting very...
Technical.
I think the key is, if we look big picture, if there is some legitimacy here and it can't properly be done by the business tax deduction, as I suspect it can be, Then what's going to happen is if you try to preserve just this little part of the IRA or just this sub-portion of the IRA,
then you allow all the lobbyists to preserve their portions.
Everyone is arguing for their particular portion.
So versus if there is some legitimacy here, if homeowners are in fact being screwed, whereas right now they're being actually benefited through access to...
To sell unreliable electricity that is not fair to everyone else.
But if they're in fact being screwed in some way, then through reconciliation we can set up a new thing that addresses that fairly.
But we still need to get rid of the entire IRA.
And if we don't get rid of the entire IRA, and if people who are generally free market like you argue for your own little slice of it...
Then we're going to lose the whole thing.
And here's the macro, just so Don at least has my perspective.
Like, right now, I'm holding an energy conference with a lot of the, you know, today and tomorrow, some of the, like, leading electricity energy people.
I mean, like, Lee Zeldin is there.
Lots of people are there.
And every person who knows about electricity is like...
If the IRA tax credits for solar and wind do not go, we cannot fix the grid.
I've pre-interviewed everybody.
It's always the same.
In Florida, anywhere.
This is ruining the grid.
You cannot subsidize unreliable power and defund reliable power and handle a grid that needs to expand to accommodate AI, let alone EVs if we have more EVs.
It's so urgent to get rid of the IRA and to get everyone on board with getting rid of the IRA.
So we need that.
And if there are any other changes to tax code that are fair, then we can do those separately.
Alex, you guys mentioned the word sort of, you know, the very technical nature of this.
You know, having been around politics for quite some time right now, how many people in Washington, D.C. How do we get to a solution that is actually fair and just in something that the vast majority of the 535 people in Congress likely will never understand
in term of that big picture?
I think they do.
Understand.
So I've spoken to pretty large groups.
I spoke to the Republican Study Committee, which is the largest group of Republicans in the House about this.
A lot of them get it.
What's happening, though, is so everyone knows fundamentally, like most Republicans at least know, like you want a free market if you're subsidizing things that's making things more expensive and or lower quality.
That's that's how it works.
You don't want to subsidize things.
And the IRA, and I'm putting out something on this probably before this comes out, like every single one of the IRA subsidies is in some way making things less efficient.
What people are mostly, they're mostly confused.
They're being pressured by special interests.
So what we need is as many people as possible, you know, at the White House, the House and Senate to say we have to rise above this.
We have to just be against subsidies.
We have to be against the IRA.
We have to be for energy freedom.
And everyone gets that.
It's just that what's happening is, you know, the oil lobby is coming into your office.
And the solar lobby is coming into your office.
And the wind lobby is coming into your office.
And they're each claiming that their particular subsidy is crucial for the country.
And if we don't do it, it's going to be bad.
But they're also kind of reminding you, hey, we contributed a lot to your campaign.
I don't contribute to anybody's campaign.
I don't support any political party.
I don't support any politician.
I support good policies.
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.
I actually have lobbyists now.
I set up the Energy Freedom Fund.
I get no money for it.
And they only get paid to fight for energy freedom.
They have no accountability to anybody.
So I'm trying to fix the system myself, but we don't give money to politicians.
We just give the truth.
And so that's why I'm eager to be on this show and for people with influence to listen.
It's very simple.
This is anti-freedom.
It's terrible for the budget.
It makes energy more expensive.
It makes energy less reliable.
It's bad.
It's just there's all these special interests confusing it.
And that's what we need to try to get above.
Given the natural sort of demands that we need as a country and where we're going, you mentioned EVs, electric vehicles, what will be the data centers that are going to be required around AI.
We don't currently produce...
Enough energy to be competitive with China, who's firing up a new coal-fired power plant every other day.
It does feel like we probably need all of these methodologies to be able to work together to actually be able to generate the electricity that we need to be able to actually fund that innovation.
And if you fall too far behind in the AI race, all of this is over anyway.
Well, you need everything.
I mean, that's like saying, well, we need all the computing we can, so let's give subsidies to uncompetitive computing.
No, let's have a free market, and let's make sure we get rid of all the barriers.
So one thing this administration is doing that's very good is trying to figure out for every industry, hey, what are the barriers?
Like, at my conference, you know, we have, like, what are the barriers holding back nuclear?
What are the permitting barriers?
What are the barriers holding back electricity as such?
What are the barriers holding back oil and gas?
Rid of all of those barriers.
That's the key.
And by the way, just so people know, I know this is controversial, but right now we're making some big decisions as a country about trade.
And I would say I'm definitely on the side of let's make sure we have really good trade relationships with our allies because Canada and countries like that, they can be really, really big allies.
And that's going to be part of...
Dealing with the China situation, which is a real problem, is making sure that we have maximum freedom here and that we have sort of interaction with free allies as well.
I think like we need to scale that up.
So get rid of all the barriers as quickly as possible.
That's the urgency supporting, like giving money and tax, you know, these special favors to people.
That doesn't accelerate anything on any scale.
Bigger picture, guys.
How does, since you brought it up, sort of how does tariff and trade policy impact?
I mean, I think we all agree that energy security is national security.
I've been saying that for years, ever since they cut off Keystone Pipeline and all of these other things.
I'd love for you to both to lay out what it means to you.
Maybe we'll start with James and then go to Alex.
Yeah, energy security and just really the future of the America First policies.
You know, as a job creator, You know, the the industry has been taking subsidies from D.C. and then basically borrowing homework from China.
Right.
And that's been basically the way that things have gone.
So actually, earlier on last year, you know, we were in an 80 percent Trump district.
We were watching the polls and it was very clear that your father was going to win.
And like in March.
We acquired a manufacturing facility.
We started renovating it, stood it up.
It was a facility in a town next to us that has 10,000 people.
It lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs 10 years ago, really hasn't recovered.
And we set forth a plan to move all of our manufacturing from overseas back to that facility over the next few years, I think.
American manufacturing of energy technology takes vertical integration, so you have to go back up the chain.
We've let capacitors and heat sinks and all the passives that actually it takes to make energy control equipment, we've let that all go overseas.
So we have to move that back.
What about the batteries, James?
You're obviously so dependent on rare earth minerals.
China's been making that play forever.
How do we break that dependency on China and their policies?
Rightly or wrongly, but certainly intelligently, seem to have cornered a lot of the market on those minerals required to make batteries, whether, and again, whether that's for what you're doing, whether that's for EVs, etc.
Yeah, I think I also want to point out that China has a dependency on imported lithium, right?
The batteries that I've sold were manufactured in China from lithium from Chile.
So, like, basically, they are two rides across the Pacific because they're not completely self-sustaining.
On the international stage.
I think, you know, as somebody who's moved from, you know, a product development and OEM to manufacturing, I mean, the shocking level of just not having a focus in the past 25 years on critical rare earth minerals.
And that, I mean, I think that, you know, if we want to see energy security, we're going to have to go after that.
But I would say lithium batteries and solar cells.
We can make those in the United States within 10 to 20 percent of what China makes them for in a robotic factory.
But frankly, Chinese factory owners want to see made in a country where they can keep their money, which is a big problem in the Chinese economy right now.
So we can actually be we can be the next generation.
Of energy hardware.
I think in the security dimension, there's a couple other ones we try to address.
We were the first battery company to make an EMP hardened, like military tested battery system for a house that would continue to operate in the case of a grid emergency like that.
And as a standard issue, some of our competitors are like charging extra for it.
And we also are working on, you know, I think what we really need is a signal from the DOE or the DHS as to a cybersecurity standard that they'll get behind the best.
You know, cybersecurity people in the world work for the American government.
And we either need a platform or a signal.
I think the whole grid does as to where are we going to go the next stage with cybersecurity.
But we can match and bolt that on with anything we're doing.
So energy security.
The third one is the economic security of energy.
And I do a lot of humanitarian work in East Africa, and I see what happens to communities that are energy scarce.
We need a competitive energy market that's dropping in cost.
That also is more reliable in the case of a backup situation.
And I think my technology is a huge part of doing that.
I think my competitors, as long as they aren't driven by distorting forces, we're going to do the same thing and going to really contribute to an abundant future.
Alex, what about you as it relates to tariffs and trade policy right now to be able to secure that production for the future?
I'm putting out something on this soon.
I have, I think, a considerably different position than I've heard.
I think part of what's happened is there is a really legitimate concern about certain structural issues with the United States economy, including dependence on China.
And in particular, we definitely have...
Unnecessarily diminished industrial capacity.
And you see this especially in, like you mentioned, critical minerals, rare earth dependence on China.
These are really serious kinds of things.
Worries about, hey, in a wartime situation, are we going to be able to ramp up manufacturing in the way that we would like to be?
So these are very legitimate concerns.
And I think there's a temptation for tariffs because it's something fast.
It's a fast action you can do.
I think the actual solution is entirely, I mean, it's basically two things, but the main thing is much more industrial freedom.
The reason for the problems that we have is just a dramatic decline in industrial freedom over the last 50 plus years.
And, you know, I mean, we could go through this chapter and verse, but the whole National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA just making it impossible to build things.
But just to give you one example, I've studied the early oil industry, the first ever pipeline, long distance pipeline.
Guess how long it took to build?
In 1870s.
Three months.
It was completed within six months of the company being started.
So think about this.
In the 1870s, we know the Empire State Building was built in slightly over a year with technology of a century ago.
So it's all that we are hamstringing ourselves.
If you have a country with property rights and clear laws against endangering others, but not like...
Quote-unquote, protecting everything in the world from any impact by us.
If you have that, if you have innocent until proven guilty for businesses, if you have clear laws...
Written by usually Congress and enforced clearly, like that system, there is no comparison to that.
There's no comparison to that whatsoever.
But unfortunately, we created this kind of green fascist system, which in many ways this administration is trying to undo, but it needs Congress's help a lot because you can only do so much to the executive.
But this lack of industrial freedom is the reason for our diminished industrial capacity.
Part of this industrial freedom, part of what makes it better is actually trade, particularly with allies who also have industrial freedom and are aligned with us.
Because that way we get to take advantage of the resources of other places.
Canada has three times our oil reserves.
They have three times our oil reserves.
We could have an amazing relationship with Canada.
They, like us, have limitless natural gas.
The two of us together could just be even more dominant on the world stage.
We have a lot of...
In common with Australia, there's all sorts of other things.
So it's going to be totally crucial to have these relationships to deal with China.
Now, with China, I think the main problem has been that we have not been clear about how we designate them.
Are they an ally?
Are they an enemy?
Are they a beloved trading partner?
You need to decide what China is, and they make policies accordingly.
But ultimately, you're going to need industrial freedom and trade to outcompete.
To out-compete China, or hopefully China becomes more civilized and less communist.
That would be the ideal.
And one final thing is, there is a legitimate thing of, hey, we need some things domestically for wartime, but I believe the way to deal with that is not to subsidize industries and not to pass general import taxes, which is what tariffs are essentially.
It's to say, hey, the government needs to set aside certain critical minerals deposits.
It needs to set aside even certain manufacturing facilities as part of its military strategy.
So we can make some of that stuff a military expenditure, but I don't think that we want to pass taxes.
And screw up our relationships with our allies and create uncertainty in the markets.
Because unfortunately, what you're seeing right now, and this is why we need really good trade deals soon, is we have a lot of uncertainty in the markets.
Oil prices are getting depressed.
And that's really hurting the oil industry.
And they're not going to do anything until they have more certainty, plus their steel costs are going up.
So I think if we can, you know, there are different forces and different advisors.
And I'm not an official advisor, but my advice is go in the direction of...
Double, triple down on the industrial freedom, double down on the trade with allies having even better relationships, and then do some specific stuff with regard to security in China.
That's my idea.
James, do you support increasing oil and gas production in America?
Do you agree with the notion of the importance of ramping that up?
There's obviously been a lot of debate, but there does seem to be some common ground in pushing back against the left sort of climate hysteria.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think actually to utilize all of America's oil and gas resources, I think there's going to be some incredible opportunities to leverage battery technology in areas that, you know, I've talked to oil.
I know the number one natural gas rights owner in Texas.
We have coffee together.
I mean, I know oil and gas grows here too.
And, you know, when we talk about this stuff, he's getting paid a dollar in MCU, Don.
For the stuff he's sending out in some of the far reaches of the lines, by the time he nets the pipe fees.
He could get $7 in MCU making electricity for an AI center if he could use a bank of small-scale turbines recharging a battery bank.
That then could tie into potentially a 20% capacity effect with some solar that is unsubsidized and caught in super cheap.
So why aren't they doing that now?
That seems like a no-brainer then.
Because battery technology is the innovation of our time.
It has moved so fast in the last three years.
I've built a company off of that innovative push because my homeowners don't get to manipulate the subsidies.
They get the 30% equivalent.
That's it.
So what I have to do every year is make a 15% compounded better.
So yeah, we're talking to those people.
I have people that are, I'm so busy with the manufacturing side, but we have people in the oil and gas field that are discussing, hey, how do we take the AI centers?
To the hard-to-tap resources.
Because who cares who your center is?
As long as I get internet out there, it's much easier than getting power.
So you're going to see some incredible opportunities to...
Batteries are not necessarily a renewable technology.
It's like on my own house.
I'm using fossil sources from the grid, and I am buying it off-peak hours, and I've cut my power bill 75%.
So batteries are a bonus technology that the U.S. needs to be able to make.
And, you know, I just say, you know, I see the pushback on, you know, your father's policies, and I think it's just not fair.
I think that the majority of Americans sent your father to the White House as our negotiator.
The cookie's in the kitchen.
The meal's not served.
And we're in this with your father on finding the right spot, and we know he's going to get a good deal.
So if you're the administration, what are the next steps that you're trying to do to figure these things out?
You know, our focus entirely is hiring more manufacturing workers, training them up, because job training and education for high school-level people in rural America is not where it needs to be.
So if you're a manufacturer here, you've got to invest in your people.
We've done it at Signature Solar and EG4.
Now we're doing it at Solar 76, our factory company.
So we have to put people up to production levels where they are meeting or exceeding Chinese productivity, because the Chinese are about a third of our labor costs, although labor is only a 15% driving factor on a product.
My goal is to make rural Texas competitive with China, which means I've got to get people who first meet the productivity level of China.
We're very close on an everyday worker already, like a few months into full production.
And I think what Americans will do is sit around the break room and actually innovate on manufacturing, and they're going to adopt AI better than the rest of the world because of the culture that we have of freedom and of individual contribution.
So my goal is to make this new generation technology a completely American thing.
And if we wanna import components
We're going to support the government by changing our supply chains to match the foreign policy that our lead negotiator came out with.
And that's what it is to be an American right now.
Can I just say one quick thing about China?
I want to avoid any wrong implication.
So I think China, like, there are a number of diplomatic tools that we can use against China in different kinds of things, and there are all sorts of issues with them, like stealing our technology, stealing IP.
There's a laundry list, which I'll write about soon.
But I don't think tariffs right now are the effective way of dealing with them.
Like, if you look at the nuclear industry, like, they're really getting harmed by that fusion in particular, which is an important area of innovation.
Like, they have...
I think you need to...
industrial freedom your way out of that have specific targeted punishments toward China that are not tariffs that punish us, but that actually punish China.
So there's more to say about that, but I just want to be clear, like, I don't think the tariffs are the right mechanism right now.
I think that we need to do other things to solve the problems that are rightly being recognized.
Now, Alex, you know,
I don't even disagree with you as it relates to some of the sort of instability in the markets right now, but isn't there also a sort of a cost?
To rushing into a bad trade deal?
Don't we need to perhaps reorient maybe the whole system?
And some of that takes time.
I think maybe that's the problem with being in a trade war or any kind of war with China.
We are so accustomed to sort of this instant gratification society.
We live in a two-year political cycle and people make bad decisions for the long run to be elected in two weeks, as opposed to 50 years.
That, to me, seems to take some time.
How do we avoid those pitfalls so you don't end up basically being in the same place?
Well, I mean, I think this is another controversial view, but I think ultimately, like, you want...
Yeah, I think ultimately the long-term deals, like, you need to be made by Congress, and it's just because, like, the stability is very key to all of these deals.
And so Congress, like, gave the executive a certain amount of power, and I can understand the temptation to use it, but, like, I think it needs to be a congressional thing, because you're seeing right now the instability and unpredictability of depending on any particular person is a real issue that the markets will always have.
So that's one thing.
I think, I mean, like, you know, I'm not...
So, you know, we're in a certain position right now.
I would say that, like, in general, the deals are going to be lowering the tariffs.
Like, I think the negotiations that should happen are fairly straightforward in terms of fundamentally, you want to get other countries to lower barriers and have us lower barriers.
So that's primarily lowering tariffs, but then also lowering if they have some particular, like, refusal to import our stuff.
I'm not saying that justifies a tariff by us, but, like, that's the kind of thing you want to negotiate.
But I think fundamentally, Overall, the deals are not that complex, especially with your allies.
I think Elon was right.
You want...
A tariff-free zone, where with your allies with Europe, with Canada, with Australia, we need a lot more industrial freedom at home, and then we need freedom to trade with them.
So that's what I'd focus on first.
Also our allies in Asia, you know, Vietnam, Japan.
Like, that's what we want, is this entire block of free nations, or relatively free nations, that have incredible free trade, that are all doubling down on industrial freedom, to counterweight China.
You know, just being in Africa, I've been there.
But for my honeymoon, even, like, go to the different places.
I mean, China's just trying to take over there.
James mentioned Chile.
Like, China's very strategic about all these relationships.
People say China has used tariffs.
China's dramatically lowered tariffs over the past five decades as part of their strategy.
But you still can't buy a Ford in China.
It goes beyond tariffs, in a little way.
I mean, there's other obstacles.
That's why I said other kinds of...
Other kinds of things.
Yeah, so you want to minimize as many of those as possible.
So that's, again, and I can mainly speak to energy and industry because those are the things I know most directly.
Like, right now, that's what I'm saying.
It's just what I think, but it's also...
What I'm hearing from other people, if they had stability, if we had what Elon is advocating and others are advocating on the free trade side with more industrial freedom, that would be a really exciting level of stability, and it would be more economic growth, which for oil and gas is what they depend on.
If you're in the Permian Basin, there's no amount of deregulation we're going to do there that's going to materially affect their finances and their ability to drill baby drill.
If they have an innovation 10 years from now, yes.
But the main thing is they need prices to be at a certain level.
It doesn't need to be too high.
But if the prices crash due to economic instability, that is going to dramatically reduce energy dominance, at least with oil and gas.
James, how do you see tariffs?
Does it create an opportunity onshore American jobs or not?
Yeah.
I think my mind's a little poisoned.
I'm a CEO that's built a company from zero to 400 employees.
In a few years.
And I'm just looking at the calendar.
It's April 22nd.
If I had my team try to lead the company by committee and question everything I did in a few-week pattern when something complex was underway, I've gone through it a lot in just five years as just a small little company that's grown in scale.
And again, I just kind of, like, on the current situation, the big picture is...
Especially if you're something critical to the American economy, you're going to be better off making it in the United States.
And the future of manufacturing is automated.
It's great middle-class jobs for people who run those automated lines.
So as an American company, your only safe bet is to invest in America.
I feel like it's been that way since last year.
So for me, we have confidence in technology.
And our supply chain can go to allies.
It can also go straight to the U.S. I'm sitting on a smack over region, which is some of the highest quality lithium in the world.
It's going to be refined 20 miles down the road with a lithium refining position, with a lithium refining joint.
As long as it's clear, especially on energy, that we want to follow an American First policy.
We're businesses that work in this economy.
I think everyone knew the power the executive had on tariffs from the 2018 timeframe, and they sent Donald Trump to the White House.
And the bottom line is, you know, I don't want my employees losing confidence in their CEO in a few weeks.
And so, you know, we haven't lost confidence that all of a sudden the Trump campaign doesn't listen to people.
You guys got elected listening to people.
So I hope everybody's keeping track of the effect on the economy and the effect on small businesses.
I'm sure you guys are.
But I also know how hard it is to get a good deal.
I've negotiated with China before for years.
I've done hundreds of millions of business there.
Gosh, I have in-laws that are Chinese.
I go there all the time.
Shoot, I was there last week.
And what I would say is that there's a lot of anti-China rhetoric, but I think we need to be careful here because we're going to avoid learning the right lessons.
This country is moving away from subsidies on green stuff.
When they're doing well, we assume that they're cheating.
We have to say, no, actually, maybe we're doing poorly because Washington is so bloated because of the kind of subsidies that Alex and I are ready to fight against.
Yeah, well, they're more than happy to still sell us sort of overpriced subsidized windmills that they're making and manufacturing because that's a benefit to them.
They may just not use them themselves.
No, they're just laughing that we're subsidizing because they're not stupid enough to subsidize windmills anymore.
But I would highlight, like, so there's the subsidies, which, you know, I'm totally against, and we should totally get rid of those.
But the main thing they have on us is they actually have much more industrial freedom than we do.
Because they don't have as much industrial freedom as we used to when we had real property rights.
But you can actually build stuff quickly in China.
And so that's what we need to do with Congress and the executive, but especially Congress.
We need to really radically make it easier to develop things in the United States.
That is the number one case.
So that...
Like, liberating American industry and then trading with our allies as freely as possible, and then having targeted stuff against China.
I don't believe it's tariffs, but it's other things.
I think that is what is going to be the key to security and abundance.
I've got to insert something there.
If you want industrial freedom, come to a place like Sulphur Springs, Texas, working on a 5,000-acre industrial park.
You can meet with a city manager.
We get new factories permitted in 10 days over here.
The bottom line is...
Well, by the way, there's going to be a big difference for all of that between the red states and the blue states, and I think that's going to create some of its own internal strife.
But yeah, that's a no-brainer.
I wouldn't be trying to do this in a blue state because on any given day, the whims could change the regulations because it sounds like we're actually talking far more about regulation right now than we are about innovation or control or anything like that.
The regulatory component of that is going to be big, and so it does seem like the red states have created the freedom for you to do what you need to do, that you're not going to get in a blue state.
The federal government interferes with that so much, so it's true.
If you look at, say, oil and gas in the Permian, things where the federal government is staying relatively out of, yes, in Texas in particular, it's very industry-friendly, much more so than California where I live.
But there's a lot of federal stuff like NEPA that can just interfere anywhere.
And when you have the wrong administration, it can do stuff.
And that's part of why you need congressional action.
And this is one role the president can play, is encouraging Congress to take serious action in reconciliation and then beyond with bipartisan.
Permitting reform.
Because if you don't have that, you don't have the stability.
So as good as the president is, it's on industrial freedom stuff.
That only lasts so long.
That only can last one presidency.
You know, another person, you know, you'll have another president.
The next term could be a Democrat.
Like, you want Congress to change the laws.
And that's a hard thing.
But that's where we want to use.
That's where I would advise using political capital.
Well, I agree with all of that.
And you're right.
I mean, getting it done legislatively so it can't just be sort of erased with the stroke of the pen.
I think we'll also create a lot of the stability that we're all talking about and we want in the market.
So, Alex, James, thank you both for a great discussion.
I look forward to seeing sort of how all of this plays out and, you know, definitely want to see advancements in all of these technologies so that we can continue to have American hegemony and dominance in the energy space and in so many other places.
Absolutely.
Thanks for your time, Don, Alex.
Thanks a lot, Don.
Good to meet you, James.
Bye.
Thanks a lot, guys.
Be well.
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