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THE FRONTIER LINE
Hosts Wayne Aston and David Murray explore the critical global pillars of infrastructure development and energy production, from traditional methods to future-forward advancements. The Frontier Line covers the latest industry news, energy innovations, and sustainability trends that are shaping the future. Through expert interviews with industry leaders in renewable energy, utility-scale battery storage, and waste-to-energy technologies, the podcast provides insights into the evolving landscape of energy efficiency and sustainable infrastructure. By focusing on the intersection of innovation and the politics of energy, The Frontier Line highlights transformative ideas and technologies poised to deliver cost-efficient, resilient, and sustainable solutions for global industries.
THE FRONTIER LINE
Los Angeles Burns, DEI Policies Impacting National Security and How Energy Security is Connected
Welcome back. Welcome, hello, wayne. Happy New Year.
Speaker 2:Welcome to 2025. Here we are, here we are.
Speaker 1:Coming with fire today. How have you been? It was what it was, what it needed to be, which was just, you know, time to disconnect and enjoy, uh, the closest to my life. How about you?
Speaker 2:Oh same same, Uh. However I I having enjoyed that downtime, now I feel an extra measure of pent up energy and excitement to be in the saddle and rolling again today.
Speaker 1:So you and I are a lot alike in that regard. Okay, I had that now. Now, now, let's, let's get, let's get back to that.
Speaker 2:That was enough. Let's get back to work.
Speaker 1:Let's get, let's, let's get some things done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent, which is bad to be back here. Well, yeah, well, and part of the reason I wanted to be up on the rooftop today and get this view which probably is, you know, filming us in shadow here but because we got beautiful blue skies. It's sunny, it's an amazing day, it is. It feels like the beginning of january and a fresh new year.
Speaker 1:It does finally, it didn't feel like christmas, at least yet it's been.
Speaker 2:It's been murky, it's been, it's been really really cloudy and snowy and right hazy, and although we're kind of spoiled.
Speaker 1:Here in Utah, right, we have the. You know I'm used to at least hoping for always a white Christmas, and if you're used to that it doesn't feel like Christmas when it's not, when we don't have snow on the ground and we really didn't have snow on the ground and it came after that and so you know, but now it kind of now it finally feels like winter Plus I was golfing. I golfed in mid-December, which never happens in Utah. I thought it was all Lake City and it was nice and my golfing partner wore shorts. That's really crazy, but nonetheless, that's kind of how it was in Utah. I think I know that short-wearing golfing partner you might know him.
Speaker 2:You might know him, okay, guys. Well, we are kicking things off with fire. Yes, okay, I am ready to spit some fire. We're going to kick this off with an article from Forbes, and this article is dated November 5th 2019. And I'm going to sew a thread here. Let me lay the foundation on this, dave, yeah, and hopefully buckle up listeners, because this is going to be a fun one. So here's the headline why everything they say about California fires, including that climate matters most, is wrong.
Speaker 2:This is a headline that couldn't be more relevant to what's happening as we sit here we've been watching the news riveted for the last 48 hours, or written more horrific pictures coming out of something Looking like the Palisades fire, one of five or six isolated fires in Southern California, put amount to be the largest fire event in the history of the United States. We've got over 100,000 people evacuated already. And we're not talking about mountainous region. We are talking about million-dollar mansions on the coast of Malibu, burned to the foundation. We are talking about neighborhoods ravaged, totally gone. But I want to bring it back to 2018 and I'm just going to read the first little clip of of the article.
Speaker 2:In 2018, a fire ripped through the town of paradise, california, killing 85 people. It was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state's history. That's not long ago. That's only what. Six years ago, yep liabilities from wildfires started by its power lines, bankrupted pacific gas and electric. Here's one of the connections I'm going to be making with this, this, this narrative, which cut off power to nearly a million homes and businesses last month to prevent wind from triggering and fanning fires.
Speaker 2:Many blame climate change. The reason for these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change, says Leonardo DiCaprio. This is what climate change looks like, says Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Okay, and then the end of this article leaves off with a quibble here between Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump. Now this is 2018, so Trump was still in service at the time and they were going back and forth in 2018 about Gavin Newsom mismanaging fires, addressing this Paradise fire. Fast forward six years. We have a fire that is making paradise look like a warmup, and they're back at it Now.
Speaker 2:What's really been crazy for me, dave, is to start connecting all of these dots, because there's so much to say about the DEI policies and the political environment of California that point to a serious, gross negligence, a serious failure of leadership. All of this could be preventable. What I'm reading is you know, fire hydrants with no water in them, fire departments who have fired or terminated qualified firemen because they wouldn't take COVID vaccines. We have a list, a laundry list of DEI policy here. I can see you jonesing. I'm stirring the hornet's nest hard right now. Okay, keep going, keep going.
Speaker 2:Now the governor Newsom he's up to his same. He's up to his same blame. He's blaming Trump for forest fires in California. Ok, the mayor of Los Angeles City, karen Bass, a known Marxist, actually a member of Karen Bass, a member of Venceramos Brigade, which is a Marxist organization out of Cuba, and so she is a black female mayor. Nothing against that. We shift gears to the fire chief, the fire chief of Los Angeles County, white female, gay, lesbian woman, and both the training chief and the vice chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, both all three lesbian women, one of those Blacks.
Speaker 2:And the problem, as I'm researching this and I'm unraveling this huge ball of yarn as I'm researching this and I'm unraveling this huge ball of yarn is that because of policies focused on DEI inclusivity and bringing these people unqualified, incompetent people in, we're way beyond talking ideology. We're talking about people dying. We're talking about billions of dollars of damage. We're talking about things that could have been prevented if we had competent people in the right positions. So this really underscores this ridiculousness of the DEI policies we've been drug through the mud with for the last many years, and so part of the dots I'm connecting are moving fast forward into today's fire.
Speaker 2:What are the implications of that kind of damage on the grid, on energy transformers and substations and all of that energy infrastructure?
Speaker 2:And a parallel on predicting we already had our end-of-the-year predictions. I'm making a start-of-the-year prediction on this and that is that if we think that these rampant wildfires are a big deal, just wait until later this year when we see three or four major transformers go out by man-made actions and we really start understanding the frailty of our grid and how vulnerable we are, because reports are stating that these fires are likely started by arsons. I mean, we have five separate fires starting all almost around the same time. This is not natural disaster. Something is afoot, but. But wildfires are one thing, and that's debatable energy and infrastructure. When we start having these we predicted this last year when we start seeing 50 million people with no power for three weeks, four weeks and it starts becoming crisis in the headlines, it will eclipse this California fire situation by a long shot, and so it's never been more important for us to start looking at facts and start focusing on solutions. Right, there's so many implications to this. Go ahead and weigh in on that. That for a spitting fire opening here, wow.
Speaker 1:How do I follow that up?
Speaker 2:My hair is on fire.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, let's see. I would say this In my experience and going way back into my time in the news business and covering fires, especially big ones, whether it was along the Wasatch Front, somewhere here in Utah, even up in Yellowstone what I learned very quickly is that it's hard to jump to conclusions on causation and then also in second guessing firefighting tactics. I don't know and I haven't seen any conclusive evidence yet that hiring policies are impacting this right now. They may be you know what. They may be just absolutely qualified. They may be just absolutely qualified. It may be part of it. It may not be part of it.
Speaker 1:I think what that becomes? It becomes a political football and I think that's my concern If I'm looking at this whole thing. My concern of this whole thing right now is to not get caught up in maybe the politics of it on both sides instead of like how, what is really at the root cause of these things and how do we fix that and why isn't that being addressed, which is where I think some criticism can absolutely be leveled at where we are in some areas of California. I think there are certain policies put in place after the last fire in Paradise that PG&E would say has hampered their ability to upgrade infrastructure.
Speaker 1:That leads to problems. I think they're. You know, while well-intended environmental policies in California, probably to protect air and things, they are probably not doing the prescribed burns that every science, every fire expert would say in order to deal with urban sprawl and all of these things. We have to have these plans in place, these mitigation strategies in place. We have to mitigate the climate or anything else is doing, because it doesn't take a lot for a fire in a, in a when, when you, when you have lots of uh fuel that hasn't been dealt with, yep to run fast, yep you. You can add to it and say, well, the winds are greater maybe.
Speaker 1:So I've seen some pretty great winds over the last couple decades here, where they it, it, it fan, literally fans the flames, creates its own weather patterns and all the weather systems these are, you know. I go back to the Yellowstone fire. The Yellowstone fire, they changed their entire management policy back, way back when, because they were trying to contain fires. Back, you know, back when we, when I were on the eighties. Why? Because they thought that was good. What they realized after the fact is that not only did it help release seeds on some of these lodgepole pines, it brought back the landscape. Their position changed. That's the natural position of how you fight fires. You let them burn to a certain degree because it's one of nature's way of taking care of some of these issues. If you don't do that, if you fight every fire in your foothills because you don't want it to run into housing, well then you better have mitigation strategies in place and they better be actively being sought after. So, and then, when they come up to do these things, these prescribed burns, what's happening at least what I do know is happening. What I've read that has really happened is they, every time they go to do these prescribed burns, they're running up against all kinds of problems in California. But we can't do this.
Speaker 1:Um, I would argue across the country whether it's hurricanes, it's going to be fires, it's. It's the fact that we are living, you know, we have a lot of, we have a lot of urbanization and we haven't effectively dealt with maybe some of these things and and it's sort of the trade-off we do for growth, yeah, it's sort of like, if we're gonna, if we want to live on the coastlines and we want to, like, develop mangroves and you know these, these places that like, say, in the case of hurricanes, buffer hurricanes, well then they're going to be more intense when they come on shore, irrespective of whether they're more intense in general. I think I and so, going back to kind of where you started, and you are starting with Fire and Brimstone, and I love it, which is it is a very, very political issue, charged issue right now. Mostly, I hope we can get through this in that all of you know that California gets the resources that they need in order to do this, and then some, you know, sober, serious discussions happen post fire, after people are safe. Yeah, how do you, how do we do, how do we fix this? So, this, so next year, during the, during the, you know, during the, you know, this time of year, we're not then reporting on another story where okay, now you know it was Malibu Well then it's going to be Del Mar, and then it's going to be here, and it's going to be there and, oh, we're going to go all the way down to San Diego and it's going to be Poway and all these areas. Because that's what's going to happen if we don't effectively deal with this.
Speaker 1:And this is this is leadership taking a very serious stance and saying, well, okay, californians, in order to do this, we've got to have a lot more prescribed burns, and so I don't want to. You know, yes, that does that mean it's going to, it's going to take our particular matter? Yes, but would you rather have that, or would you rather have the heart of LA completely eviscerated? Thousands of structures already lost oh yeah. Life loss, oh yeah. Billions and billions and billions of dollars already lost oh yeah. Would you rather have that? Or would you rather have an increased particulate matter? A couple of days, a couple three, four, five, 10, 12 days out of the year? I would go after the latter. Yeah, I think it's the smarter thing to do, and it's it's, it's a give and take. It's like look, we have. How many millions of people do we have living down here? Well, this is if we don't do this, we don't address aging infrastructure and the sprawl, and then we can talk about underfunded emergency services. This is expensive, so where's that money going to come from you?
Speaker 2:know what I'm saying. I mean, it's getting to that. I want to touch on one point that you touched on, and that is that I don't want the listeners to perceive my vitriol on the matter to be insensitive, inhumane and compassionate. I have two daughters that live in Southern California. Luckily one's on vacation, but her school's already been evacuated.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you said that because I know you and I know that's not where it was coming from. I know it's no, I know exactly where it's coming from. But this is frustration with the politics, yes, frustration with what you and I see in our own side of things, and especially the energy space is just intractable, just lots of wasted time and people not doing anything and standing in the way of smart progress.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. And so I have children in harm's path because of these idiots making decisions. And I can point to a couple financial decisions $2.7 billion air quotes spent by Los Angeles City and Counties on building reservoirs and water mitigation. And guess what? None of those reservoirs have been completed, none of that distribution infrastructure. How do these spend $2.7 billion and not have any of this ready? That's one failure. Well, you and I know the answer. I know the answer and I won't conjecture on it, but I know what the damn answer is. And the other one is this woke leftist lesbian fire chief cut not funding by 17 million last year, or new hires and training and all the relevant matters that would have been helpful. Today it's gone. But what have they done?
Speaker 2:Well, we're focused on rooting out bigotry within the fire department. Listen, I'd rather have a bald guy with a fucking mustache and tattoos and talking nasty. Who, who's competent, who can take a hose up a ladder and put a fire out and know what the hell he's doing. With some experience, then I wouldn't have any of these lesbian black women who talk good talk and have no experience or no acumen for this. So this is where my frustration's at, and it bleeds way through the fire department. This is, this is military People in harm's way because of of these policies. Okay, you, you send people into combat and you have you have a commander and a commander who, who's part of this, this leftist woke tribe. Okay, and people die. So I'm not okay with casualties, human life casualties, let alone. You know the billions that you mentioned of a property loss. Yeah, but we're talking military, we're talking police departments, we're talking fire departments, and it all has a connection to energy and infrastructure, which is what we're all about.
Speaker 1:Do you think and let me ask this do you think because we hear a lot about and it's bandied about on, I think, both sides of the political aisle about we need to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut? Is that always the best strategy? Because in the case as you bring up in Southern California, cutting, cutting, maybe not was not the best thing. So sometimes we, we applaud the cutting when it's done under the auspices, but when some, when we look backward and say, oh, probably would have been wise to maybe spend an extra 25 million dollars, yeah, and would that have made a tangible difference?
Speaker 2:I don't know well, you say cut and I I would, I would uh I don't know what was in there, what they were cutting instead of cut, I would say replace. That's a more accurate term because the money went somewhere. These 17 million dollar cuts on the fire department went elsewhere. This whole climate change?
Speaker 1:well, that'd be the question where do they go? And then was it? And was it a city council driven measure? Yes, right, was the city council saying. Because this is is you know, in many cases city councils and I'm here to learn they're going to come in and say you've got to reduce your department by 10%. And you might have a fire chief who's saying, like, look, we need an engine, we need a new engine in place, we need this, we need this, we need this capital infrastructure. And they say, well, this is what you've got to do. We've got to cut 10%. Yeah, so I think that is where I would like to see.
Speaker 1:If this turns out to be exactly that case. Well then it comes back on the decision makers control the purse strings ultimately. Yep, if you don't see the big picture and you are asking your departments to cut budgets and the departments in their departments to cut budgets, and the departments, in their best way, are saying, well, we need extra for whatever and you're going to leave us responsible, you then can't come back to us and say, well, you didn't do it. And you say, well, I told you you needed the thing and you didn't do the thing. It'll be equivalent to like well, we would you know. Let's just say we have to pay for security at electrical, at you know, at at power technology.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, right, and, and, and. If you came and said, well, you got to cut it, you know, and I'm like, well, we, we got to cut it and we take it down from, like you know, 24 hour security to, well, we had to cut budgets. It's like the people who were in the know usually in my experience with the fire departments, especially when I worked with them here in Utah no-transcript they really do understand. They play the political game Like anybody. They know they've got to ask for a lot in order to get, but they also know what it takes in order to actually get the resources. Absolutely Right, and they know what line it is Like. This is my line, I'm not crossing it, I'm not giving up budget cuts and I would rather resign. Then then deal. Then you, then you, you know, and you gut this department because you're making it dangerous, you're putting liability on me as the fire chief for loss of life.
Speaker 1:Right that's what this equation is, and that's where I would like to. And so to your point. The question is are the people who are in positions of power now down there, are they the people that can draw those right lines and, irrespective of color or sex preference or whatever, do they have the aptitude to be able to say this is what we have to do? Do they have the backing of the right kinds of people? Those are harder things to answer and that's where I just don't know.
Speaker 1:But it all comes back to. Are we listening to the people who are the experts in this? I mean, I'm the firefighter, the people with the wildland, fire manager people and what is their and what is their? You know what have they been saying, and I I've read a little bit about that. What the fire agencies have been saying oh, they've had the whole full on plans of like and, to your point, like, we need water mitigation, we need this, we need this, we need need this. Why aren't those things built? Yeah, and those are absolutely 1000 fair questions to ask why isn't this built? And I wait, and you and I both know the answer that which is welcome to red tape, welcome to getting stuff done in california.
Speaker 1:Yes, you know, and I I'm not to pick on california's, you know, I'm gonna keep picking on california for a second there's more, there's go ahead you know, was going to say I know all kinds of stories, as do you, about how people tried to build basic ADUs in their backyard or build a shed and have been in permitting for two years. Yeah, well, that's a fundamental problem of getting stuff done, and so you have so much red tape that you cannot get things done. And so when you try to build what you know damn well the community needs and you, it takes you a long time and it takes you way more. You know more expensive, many more years where you're not getting the things online that you need to get on, and that, to me, comes back to that's a failure of leadership. Yeah, because you know, as a leader, you frankly good leaders sometimes they don't make anybody happy. In fact, they piss off both sides, sure, or all the sides. They go.
Speaker 1:Give me the experts, give me this I'm making the decisions best for the people, even though they might not understand the big picture. I think I do and I'm putting my job on the line as it, but I'm going to do it because, damn it, we got to go this direction and I just don't. I see a lack of courage and leadership that way to say I'm, I'm okay, pissing off my base, I'm I'm okay Pissing off the other side because you've put me in power. This is what we need to do. This is where we're going, and if you really, if you want us to like, grow, be safe, do all these things, and this is how we're going to have to do it, and I don't see that often enough, and so, when it happens, when we have that genuine leadership, it's a breath of fresh air, yep absolutely.
Speaker 2:And look the genuine leadership, the guy who's not afraid to piss everyone off for the good of the community or the good of the project, is the guy you need. But unfortunately, and all too often and almost always, when we talk about these left-wokest DEI policies, it goes against that grain because it's not politically correct. We could violate someone's rights, we could offend someone. Heaven forbid we do that. I'm going to drag Janice Quinonez.
Speaker 1:It's important, but it's got to be weighed out. And again I'm going to say, because I read about and I just haven't seen it, I would love to see and I want to dig into this over the coming weeks because I'm really curious about where those policies have impacted it and if they've got you know there's some really good substantial evidence. If there is, we've got to look at the evidence and say like, yeah, we had bad policy. I would love you know we were doing these things and there's a better way to do it and we should consider it. But we'll see. We'll see what happens over time.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, we have to reserve that openness always. We have to be objective about everything we're presenting. We're not in the fire department, we don't have insider information into LA County and all of that. So this is all going to be brought to light. Most of it probably won't be. We may never know a lot of it. I'm going to drag another DEI situation in there because this is super relevant.
Speaker 2:Janice Canones, ceo of LA Department of Water and Power. She blames so much water being used for why the water ran out. It's the fault of the firefighters and the victims, but not hers. Now she makes $750,000 a year, twice the amount of her male counterpart, who she took over the position from a year ago. So double double. So double double. And we have a female Hispanic CEO, and I'm not racist and I'm not misogynistic, but why would we pay double to have someone who maybe is not doing as good a job? I don't know. To me that's a pure, pure failure. It's a price. Who we're selecting and how do you reallocate $17 million? We'll start paying the wrong people twice as much. Why does anyone deserve to get paid twice the salary the next year to do the same damn job?
Speaker 1:Well, we've seen that plenty, though. I mean we've seen that plenty. But I mean to be fair. You're like why is that person? I'm just throwing flames? No, but it's surprising, especially in that kind of space where you get sign-off to double a position salary Usually that's surprising to me.
Speaker 2:actually, just because you look at public policy, you look at this is an invisible department.
Speaker 1:Right, you look at me. This is the LA Department of Water and. Railwork. Usually they have a board, they have a board, they have a board, they have to pass that and usually there are adjustments. There's cost of living adjustments, all these things. That's surprising that it doubled from one person to the next. Yeah, yeah, it is surprising. It's crazy. So what did they say about? So what is? I've read a little bit about some of the water issues.
Speaker 2:What have you found that you saw on the water issues down there? Well, I think one of the biggest things and I'm going to go back we covered this when Trump did the interview with Joe Rogan. It really is timely now, because Trump spends nearly 10 minutes discussing with Joe Rogan on that three-hour interview how California, particularly Gavin Newsom and his cadre, have diverted billions of gallons of water from the north into the ocean. So we have snow melt and we have natural water resources flowing through California and they've refused to protecting fish or whatever, for whatever their reasoning is, for environmental reasons have not been able to leverage all of that water free-flowing. What I'm seeing is we have $2.7 billion of taxpayer local California taxpayer dollars that have supposedly been spent on reservoirs and water infrastructure and none of it's been completed. And so here California stands with its pants totally down. Money is spent, no answers for taxpayers. Those same taxpayers just lost their homes. This is a tragedy of epic proportion.
Speaker 2:I was seeing a video last night late last night, because I've been glued to this of one of the hospitals in the Palisades area evacuating people on foot and in gurneys. I mean, can you imagine if your mother is on life support or something and they're evacuating her in this apocalyptic fire. I mean it's crazy. It's crazy. And what's really disheartening is this morning to see all of the major media reporting this is 0% containment. We're like 48 hours in. That's 0% containment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not surprising for a fire this size. Honestly, I mean, from what I've you know, these big fires.
Speaker 2:It's disheartening when you're talking about subdivisions, it's not forests, no.
Speaker 1:I get it. I mean it's running and I mean you've got crews coming in from all the western that are already there around the western. Oh yeah, which I will say interesting because, you know, while this is all going on, there's a lot of, you know, there's the normal fair of disinformation that's out there. You know, I saw something one of my friends posted yesterday, you know, saying I, you know, she couldn't believe that crews weren't being sent from Utah or Oregon and California. So she was reading where she was reading and I don't know where she was getting source that the crews weren't coming, and it was appalling and I'm like, well, that's not, that's not the case. We've at least sent them two days ago, right?
Speaker 1:So again, there's that level of like how many, you know how you know what kind of crews, and then, and then just the scale, the sheer scale of this, you know, uh, and trying to trying to create natural, you know, just trying to deal with while I mean this is this is, this is, this is what happens. You, you, you evacuate a hundred thousand people. It's chaotic. Oh yeah, I mean, there there is, you can set there. There there's chaos, so you're trying to evacuate people. These are first responders, who are also tasked with making sure people are safe, also having to fight fire, absolutely. And so you've got a, you've got an overtaxed system, you've got which happens.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm not saying, I'm not giving an excuse, I'm saying, uh, dry hydrants happen and even well, and it just does. It's actually one of the problems of aging infrastructure. It truly is. You ask any firefighter, they'll say, oh yeah, we pull up all the time, even in urban cities with good water infrastructure, and we'll find a dry hydrant. Why, we test them a lot? Because we want to make sure they're working, because we might not see cracks, we might it? What it does is it highlights the aging infrastructure in LA. Yeah, and then back that up by water policy that we. You know water in general in Southern California has been a huge issue. It's been a huge issue out West because all that water is coming from. A lot of it's coming from the Colorado. Yeah, you know, utah is a part of that. I mean all of the West.
Speaker 1:Nevada. I was going to say it's Arizona and it's like what are we doing? Nevada? I mean all of the United States, arizona and it's like what are we doing? How are we supplying? And then you know it's, you take all those things into account and you realize this is just a shit show.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, there's no easy way to explain it. Do you have people probably doing the best they can to save them while fighting fire? And I think you know you'll get these resources in, you'll get these hot shot crews in and they'll start to establish lines. But it's really hard to establish lines in urban areas when you've when you've got buildings going up, that and you've got spot fires. This is what the spot fires Exactly. This is what's happened. You've got spot fires at the start, you've got massive winds and you've got fires that are taking embers and they're pushing them miles away and they're spot fires. Yeah, that's hard, oh yeah, and that's why we saw Yellowstone and, granted, it's a forested area, but it's why we saw, you know, yellowstone back in the big fire. That was insane that they had spot fires two and three miles away. Um, there's the weather system created and so I I had an opportunity to talk to people who were there on the ground, yeah, and they said that they've never experienced anything like it, because the wind was hurricane force, wind created by the fire itself, wow, and so these fires would move two miles in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 1:Whoa, you know, a matter of minutes. That's incredible. There was no time to move Right, and there were people who were caught, like at the Yellowstone Lodge, where they had to hide in the pool and then the fire blew and they put on their blankets over them and the fire blew over the top of them while they're in the pool. Wow, and they blew through so fast. That was helpful because it didn't sit there and they were safe, but it sucks oxygen out and it creates storms. I mean, I've seen tornadoes actually on scene where these big clouds create these fire tornadoes. Wow, that's going on there right now. You have all. I mean, it's Armageddon. Yeah, it truly is Armageddon, and we're just seeing clips of it and we're seeing horrific pictures right now. And this gets to be a conversation of like okay, this isn't going to be the last time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So to be a conversation of like okay, this isn't going to be the last time, yeah, so really, what are you doing to fix it? Everyone's going to say, oh, we're going to fix, we're going to fix it. But to your point, and how come these reservoirs aren't full?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How come they're not done? That's right, because you knew damn well when these happened in the paradise that this is good. You had people saying it's going to happen again. Yeah're going to tax your infrastructure, you're going to need it, and it's not going to be there when you need it. That's right. So you don't have that. So why? Well, we got held. No, you got held up. You didn't find a way to push this thing forward. That's right. To do the big, to do the hard, yeah, and that's kind of my, I think that's what. Why are we not going faster to fix these problems?
Speaker 2:Listen, guys, and I, yes, absolutely. And I want to further. I want to further underscore for our listeners that I am not homophobic. I have a gay daughter who's married and her beautiful wife is amazing. I love them, I support them. This is not about the LGBTQ community at all, because I have zero issue with that. What I have issue with is incompetency at all levels. I think Joe Biden's incompetent. I think he's a fool. I think you know there's so many people we could pick on that don't fit necessarily the DEI profile but are purely incompetent people. Gavin Newsom one of the most incompetent politicians we've ever seen in the history of the country. He's not a DEI guy, but he's gotten most of it wrong, in my opinion it's a.
Speaker 1:I think you and I see it, and this, this goes to um, and I think this is sometimes with with you know with public, you know in with you know with public, you know in the public arena it's sometimes not the best and the brightest. Yeah, we've seen that time and time again. Sometimes it's, you know I mean, I heard this growing up, I'm sure you did too it's like okay, uh, why would somebody, you know man, woman, doesn't matter who can excel in some other you know form of life, whether it's entrepreneurship, running a business, running whatever it is making millions of dollars? Why would they, generally speaking, step away to to take on something else, unless they could maybe replace income because they are very well. Now, there are those among us and I think everybody who's ever been in the military kind of qualifies where you, they take, they sacrifice for the greater good. And I think and I applaud those people who say it's it, you know, it's money isn't as important. I'm going to you know, people in the military aren't getting wealthy. No, no, not not from being in the military. You know, usually experience afterward, absolutely it's what the military makes them into be, but they are sacrificing for a grand or good.
Speaker 1:We don't see a lot of that in the private sector. We see what the private sector is it's like. Look, I'm not going to go do a job for a couple hundred thousand dollars a year when I can make two million over here. So what? So? Who do we get? Yeah, do we get. Do we get the best of breed? Do we get the best of these people in these roles who are actually the best to do this? Maybe, so maybe not. Maybe we get lucky.
Speaker 1:I, my experience with it is we get, we get. Okay, we average with the you know, and there are a few exceptions when we get really good people, who are maybe those you know among us who are like. You know, I don't do this for the money. I do. I want to be able to sure, make sure I can take care of myself, my family, but I do this for the larger picture and that's why I do this. I applaud them. I just see a lot of these positions. It's not those people, yeah, and that's. And that you know it doesn't mean that, because it doesn't mean that, uh, you make too many dollars. It makes you the best, makes you do good at certain things, but it also makes you pretty effective, and there's just a lot of people that I've seen in the private sector that have given the opportunity to run in the public sector. Yeah, they do really well. Yeah, they do really well.
Speaker 2:Well, and and, and you know, I by by the power of contrast, I I also feel compelled to express gratitude for our Utah leadership, because I feel like we have a governor that's doing a pretty dang good job with some hard issues, but I feel like even maybe as importantly or more importantly, we've got senators and legislators that are seeing things for what they are. We're doing things about these fast-moving immigration policies that are pivoting. Right now. We see rapid change on the energy landscape for the state of Utah. Very grateful to be a citizen of Utah, a resident of Utah, and have the benefits of what feels like fairly sound and pragmatic thought and alignment amongst our state, state and local leadership.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad you said that and you know, I think we have an example in in the governor of the state of Utah, who's somebody who's pissed off both sides, Absolutely. I mean, he is not necessarily loved from his base, as we've seen. He's, you know, there are runs at him, uh, quite a few, quite a few, and they're going to continue to be because they don't feel that he's conservative enough. Yeah, um, from the other side of the aisle here in utah, you have no love loss, yeah, so here's a guy who I look at and going. I think he's kind of that guy who's kind of like he's trying to like lead, yeah, like, truly like I am, I'm doing the best for the state of Utah, yep, and yeah, I'm not going to make everybody happy In fact, actually, I might not make anybody happy, but I'm moving the state forward in a way that is reasonable. I kind of see him as that kind of that person. Yeah, oh, and he takes a lot of you know, I mean, he takes a lot of hits here in Utah most times.
Speaker 2:And I've chimed in and been vocal on LinkedIn because he's actively posting on LinkedIn. I've chimed in supporting Governor Cox and I've had idiots attack me, telling me to wake up and all kinds of things, because I'm so, so asleep, because I'm supporting governor cox's insanity. So to your point, yeah, definitely true, a true leader will never please everyone. Yeah, gonna do what's best for the community. Um, I will I'll.
Speaker 1:I'll share an anecdote that I might have shared on here before. But you know, back again back in news days a long time ago you know a lot of stuff, know a lot of stuff was kind of wrote, but we had the stories that were volatile, right, they, they touched a nerve and it was. There was a. It could be a left right, it could be a Mormon, non-mormon, it could be all kinds of stories and I always sort of it was interesting the reaction that came in. I felt always like we, we, we kind of we struck a good balance If I had, if we had groups on both sides saying you aren't really fair to us, you weren't really fair to us, and and on the same story, yeah, um, then I felt like okay, well, we're probably where we need to be, which is kind of in in a way of like this is there's, it's dispassionate and it's just you know it's going to let people they're going to take it and run with it however they want but it
Speaker 1:wasn't favoring, yeah, by its creation. It wasn't necessarily. It was favoring facts and information over passion, politics and prejudice, yeah, and I think leadership governors who maybe make decisions based upon those things, the best information at the time, a little bit, where we've hired them as the electorate to do a job. So you know, obviously they probably have some skills, that maybe they have a good gut for things, they have experience for things, they've proven a track record. Track record. We're putting them in there to take the, to look at the information, make a sober decision on what they're looking at and, and you know, let the politics play, how the politics is going to play. And, to your point, I think that's what we have in the state of Utah right now.
Speaker 2:I think the big takeaway because we're coming up on the hour already, we, we, we have absorbed. Yeah, we're over 40 minutes here. I want to on a final thought takeaway and feeling like I have hogged this and I appreciate your contributions to the conversation, Dave, and not vehemently opposing what I'm saying here we definitely, I think we agree, I know we agree, we welcome all the opinions. I really want to know more. I genuinely want to understand better, as running a fire department or a water company is is just imagine the implications when we apply it to the energy and infrastructure conversation. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, One of my biggest concerns that keeps me up at night is our national security as it relates to energy infrastructure, and that's what I'm trying to drive home for the listeners is it is such an urgent matter for us to be putting in grid hardening and enhancing mechanisms. I think about Taurus, I think about some of our other partners with some of these advanced semiconductors, advanced insulation, advanced cabling, advanced towers, towers there's so much technology available. It will require leaders and leadership to take hard stances and draw lines in the sand and make these decisions for the interest of our children and their children and whatever's happening in a hundred years from now.
Speaker 2:And now is that great transition that we find ourselves in in the energy and infrastructure landscape on the frontier line here, it's never been more urgent to be getting the right people with the right tech, the right teams, the right resources all together, and it has to be bipartisan. This is like we have to be united in order to make the monumental shift that's in front of us, because this is just one example of the potential that's coming. As I've stated before, Well, very well said.
Speaker 1:I think that's exactly where we find ourselves and I think this is, you know, the fires we can say are related in so many ways to this, to the energy need.
Speaker 1:The reason that you and I probably even started this podcast was because of our frustrations, as we were seeing them, of like, why are things not getting moved along faster? Why are, why are these? Why are there these big roadblocks? How do we remove them? Why are these? Why are there these big roadblocks? How do we remove them? Because not only were we trying to solve a problem, but we're looking at communities and trying to solve problems and growth and all these things, and seeing that there's these infrastructure, long-term infrastructure you know behemoths that that are just you need to work or you need to work around and figure out how to solve them, and I think we're. You know, as it relates to the fires, as it relates to energy infrastructure and water infrastructure and all these things we talk about and see the need on the energy infrastructure side, that's what we do a lot. We can talk about the lack, of say, water down in Southern California or that thing, or getting water, or even solving long-term water needs for just normal stuff, not fighting fires and it's moving some would say, at a snail's pace. Well, I would say we're looking at the energy infrastructure of America and going okay, guys, it's outdated, it's outmoded, you have utilities that are all that. They have all these little sandboxes. They don't want to necessarily play with one another in the ways that we would hope that they would play with one another. They're incentivized by the market. They do all these things and there needs to come to bear some new solutions because we're saying, okay, there's demand for power, there's demand for new kinds of power and there are all kinds of things in the way of that happening right, absolutely. And so, very similarly, we need good leadership that can see big picture stuff, strip away as much of the politics as possible and say, okay, yeah, you want that, you want that, yeah, but we got to go this direction Because, at the end of the day, we need power, we need these basic things in order for our country to have and see a prosperous future that we've just been enjoying now for the last little while, years ago, in creating these things and doing the right things and creating the necessary infrastructure, whereas maybe Volcomart wouldn't have gone for it and said no, no, no. Here's the vision. The vision is we need to do these things Now. We need an evolution of that where we talk about decentralized power. We have a grid Great.
Speaker 1:Now you need decentralized power that can be connective, can be a resilience partner, but that can actually power some of these projects. It takes the load off of the average consumer, it takes the load off of municipality and the tax, all those things, and it puts it on a private industry who does stand to benefit from it. But it was also willing to front some of the capital needed, if we can figure out how to do this. And then it's also about well, we've been ignoring nuclear for a long time, or hoping it doesn't go and hoping, I guess.
Speaker 1:I think I don't know what, I don't know what, but it's time to very seriously consider how we move forward in that because, for all intents and purposes, right now it is one of the best solutions moving forward. Everybody can say oh my, you know all this and that and the fear. That's where I'd say you don't know enough. You need to educate yourself, because the nuclear that is coming out right now and these new kinds of things are not the nuclear of Three Mile Island, are not the nuclear of Fukushima?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's still nuclear, but it's different. That's right. Are we still going to need to deal with spent fuels? Yes, not as much. We spent fuels yes, not as much. We still have some of those things, but then, if you look at the other side of it, what we get from it, it's huge. Would you rather have one site in Nevada that has to deal with this stuff, or in the desert, or would you rather have global or significant impact in all these other ways? Well, I would choose like let's deal with this irradiated material in an effective way so that we can all enjoy a little bit cleaner power. Absolutely, and that's good for everybody and that's going to affect. That's that, and I see this is. This is where we were at a point where we need leadership. We need significant leadership, both on a local level and on a federal level, and we'll I'm we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2:We'll see if that's going to come to bear, and we really shouldn't be having any emphasis on sexual orientation or skin color or race. These are not direct corollaries to what makes a good leader. If you happen to be any of those and you possess all of those qualities to be a competent leader, that's what we want and we accept that. So, thank you, and we opened up with a welcome to 2025. We're just getting started, guys. Stay tuned.
Speaker 1:We'll tell next time on the frontier line.
