51 - Laurent Segalen's Twelve Rules (Co-Host of Redefining Energy)

That's the power of the narrative. I got bring value to the intangible. And the intangible is fed by the narrative. I will give you the Golden Rule of who I am.

Everything he does is high risk. That is his personality.

But it's not high risk, it's beyond. It's quantumized. Because you know, you decide to do the stuff you'd never allow.

I hope it's not the case. I want to change that. I hope it's not the case by the time I do my 12 rules on some podcast somewhere in 10 years time.

But what can happen in a great scenario is exceptional.

Hello, listeners. This week we sat down with Laurent Segalen. And what a guy, what a conversation. You probably know Laurent from his stuff on LinkedIn and Twitter or his podcast, Redefining Energy with Gerard Reid, his co-founder.

And Laurent has got some great insight. He's also really not afraid to speak his mind. And he's the first guest on this podcast who came armed with his top 12 rules for life. So he pretty much interviewed himself.

My job is very, very easy.

I hope you like it. We love having Laurent in the studio. And do let us know what you think in the comments. See you soon.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So I was thinking about the interview style for this interview. And I was thinking I probably want to be somewhere between Paxman and, I don't know, a therapist.

Because when you sent it through, your bullet points, it's a bit like This Is Your Life. We've got so much to cover today. But, I mean, there's going to be some funny stories here. Are you sure you want to do this live on-air?

Yeah.

Because, as you know, I've got my own podcast where basically I'm getting information and sharing conversations from someone else. And when I'm with Gerard, we're just bantering. And here, I don't have a lot of opportunities to reflect. And I know it's extremely preposterous, but yeah, why not now at this moment of my career?

Well, let it all out. This is a safe space. You can lie down on the couch. We'll have like a big picture of Freud on the wall. Let's do it all right. So Laurent, thanks very much for taking the time to come visit us today.

I guess we've got a whole structure to this conversation, which is going to be a lot of fun. But before we do that, let's figure out who you are. So who is Laurent and how did he get here?

Well I got there by mostly accidents more than destiny. So if I go back more than 25 years ago, I was working at PwC on various environmental and compliance stuff. And the whole Kyoto Protocol arrived on my desk because nobody else wanted to--

you know, they, what is it? And that's how I started looking into carbon.

And the whole stuff grew extremely rapidly, basically designing the European carbon market for the European Commission.

When's this?

2000, 2001.

OK, cool.

And that was the moment where they were also liberalizing the electricity market. So I organized the biggest simulation of trading of power and carbon. And literally every big guys, the WE, the idea of the shell are trading on the mock simulation for months.

And that's funny, because that was a funny story.

At the time, everybody was calling me say, look, there is this company in the US. And we are--

so I mean, we want to do the same it's Enron. So how can we be?

How do we become Enron?

Yeah. We can become the Enron of Europe. Everybody wanted to become the Enron of Europe. And so and I'm on--

the stuff I was doing at PwC, it just grew extremely fast. I co-wrote the GHG protocol. And if people don't know that, it's where we coined the term Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. So I'm a bit of a--

if you are struggling with what is Scope 3, we need another podcast to explain.

[LAUGHS]

Scope 1 is the easy bit. Scope 3 is the impossible bit, right?

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah and Scope 2 is a weird story, but I don't think we have time now. So anyway, so I was really getting on the top of the action. And then at some point of bank, which was one of my clients, said OK, that's great you talk about carbon and so on. But you know, why don't you come and raise a fund and trade it? Because apparently you know what it's all about. And so I jumped from consultant to banker.

So I became an accidental banker of a manager. And for the next three years, which was like the mid-2000, my fund returned 26% per annum. So people didn't really know what I was doing, but you know, 26%, that's fine.

Dangerous place to be.

Yeah, exactly. And it was a very--

look, I traveled a lot. I went 30 times to China, 15 times to India. That was really tough.

And I was also going to all those COPs. So I went to COP 7, and now there's COP 27 and Scope 7, Marrakesh. And we finished and said, yeah, we signed those. We signed the agreement.

And it really was like that. And the planet is saved. And I felt great. Now I see 20 years later a lot of the same guys, by the way, are still working on.

You were COP before the bandwagon. Before it was cool.

No, it was cooler. It was a lot of fun.

A lot of fun at the time. I think I went to 3 COPs and said, OK, next for the younger people.

OK.

So anyway, so I was at the [? Swan ?]

bank, French bank and Natixis.

And the deals were just coming and coming and coming. And the fund was too small, so I had to spread the deals.

Because a lot--

the only place where they could absorb some paper was in the city. So I was just spending half of my time here in London.

And lo and behold, each of the guys around the table were making 20 million there, 30 million there, and so on. So basically a lot of people made a lot of many thanks to my trade. So at some point I was hired by an investment bank to, because I was not making a lot of money in France and they proposed me like something like 10 times more--

not 10%, like 10 times. So I said, OK, fine.

And I learned that unfortunately it was the wrong investment bank. It was Lehman Brothers.

Oh no.

Oh yeah.

So were you in Lehman Brothers in the--

LAURENT SEGALEN: Ah yeah, the day. Yeah, yeah.

You were there on the day.

Accident, accident. Always accident.

Did they give you a cardboard box that you had to take out with all your things in it? All your Post-it Notes and--

No, no, but I.

--your Microsoft mouse.

When you see the pictures of the guy, a lot of--

but that was the floor number 4. It was the equity guys. I was floor number 3, fixed income.

Oh.

But it was, the year and a half I spent there was absolutely fascinating, because we were like 500 on the floor. And you had not just what I was doing was electricity and clean, but then after you had the oil guys and you had the metals guys. And so that really allowed me to trade liquid. Because I was trading with illiquid or invest--

it's like on the cusp of investment and trading illiquid.

Where here, I get the flow guys, the option guys. And I really learned a lot of what is trading. And of course, then you had the guys that were doing the swaps on the interest rates and the currencies and pretty much everything you can imagine. So there was like this.

A buzz. I'd imagine there was a real buzz.

Oh my God. And the great thing.

Until there wasn't a buzz.

Yeah. No, but look, the thing is until the Friday, we thought we would, I don't know, be bought by Bank of America or something. And it never happened.

Yeah.

But to give you the excitement, there was this big bell. And every time somebody was doing 100,000 trade, you would raise. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And everyone would shout, yeah! Very testosterone, from the old world compared to what's now everything.

Very Wolf of Wall Street.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Very.

And then what happened? So Lehman Brothers, of course that was 2008, 2009.

Yeah, so we were bought by Nomura. But that was the moment where all the carbon stuff I was doing was not really--

I mean, after the financial crisis and all the stuff went down, now I had started to have some contact in renewables.

I remember that lunch with seven investors and they were all telling me that they were doing solar in Spain.

And I'd say, wow, when you have eight guys who tell you exactly the same stuff, like [SNIFFS]

smell like a bubble. And of course, it exploded because they were just milking subsidies. And the only interesting thing I did at Nomura was, OK, I'm not going to tell about my trip in Ukraine where I met the mafia and so on. Which, by the way, are very nice guys.

A lot of fun, but it really was rough.

I was the luckiest trader of uranium. I managed to convince the committee that uranium was like a green electricity and so on. And that was before Fukushima, of course.

And because I'm French also--

well now I'm Brit, but I was French at the time.

I convinced the French nuclear Areva to open a physical account for them all. And it took me like--

they were antiquated, like send faxes and everything. And before I was in French on the phone. And one day, I was the first banker who ever opened a physical--

For uranium.

--no, look the warehouse was like super-protected by the military.

How do you take delivery of uranium?

So how--

so I was dealing with the mines in Namibia and also in Canada, Cameco. And I was trying to do Kazakhstan, but I was stopped before. No, no, so look, you have special transportation and it's like, I mean it's not just any container. You know, your certain boats can do that and they are GPS tracked and so on.

But you ship what they call the yellowcake, which is like in barrels and it's like 0.5% or something.

The chalky stuff.

And then it goes into those warehouses. And then it's processed by all the HFs--

I forgot. I mean, there was a lot of. I was just doing the upper part.

Clipboards everywhere, I imagine.

So the interesting thing is, of course, I knew nothing. I knew nothing.

That might be a theme here at the moment as we run through your 12 rules of life.

Yeah.

So I knew nothing, but I'm going to try to make it short. The day my people knew I had a physical warehouse, the phone started ringing.

And I learned along the way that when people say, "Bonjour, Laurent," they are in deep trouble. [LAUGHS]

So anyway, everybody start calling me. And I just focused on line, so I started buying uranium and so on and so forth. And then there was also, there was always the guy from Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. He'd say, how did you get your stuff? And the great trade was the guy from Goldman Sachs was much more intelligent than me and the guy from Deutsche Bank was much more stupider than me. So the trade was selling from Goldman to Deutsche.

Anyway, well at the end, I feel, then nobody calls me. And then everybody calls me back three months later. I say, can I get my uranium back? And of course, I managed to make $50 million on the whole stuff and I didn't know why.

And I learned three months later that the [INAUDIBLE]

in Australia had been flooded and nobody had talked about it. So the uranium guy at the market was long, that's why they just dumped it on me. And then the market was short, everybody took back. And I made a lot of money without.

Just storage. Just uranium storage.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Exactly, exactly.

And a phone.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, exactly.

And a fax machine. Very cool. And then where from then?

And then they closed the commodities department. I tried to create a hedge fund, which never went anywhere. And I would say 10 years ago I was a bit in dark place, because what I used to do was kind of nowhere--

very difficult to raise money. So what I did, I started brokering wind pharma sort of box. Following the bubble, so at some point it was in the UK. There was Australia.

Spain, it disappeared and reappeared.

Operational plants or?

No, it was--

I mean, the trade is RTB, ready to build.

Ready to build.

So basically you have a guy with a terrain, a connection, a permit.

And then sell it.

It's a bit of an originator or generally they are kind of small teams, a few guys. And then they give it to developers who are going to do the [INAUDIBLE]

and so on. And then might reflip them afterwards once they are constructed.

And it was a very--

I mean, looking back, relatively easy because there was--

the permitting was much faster. Connection was much faster. And everybody was making money because just the price of [INAUDIBLE]

were going down. So even if you overpaid for your terrain--

The cost curve.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody solved the cost curve. Like ooh.

All right, cool.

LAURENT SEGALEN: OK, so that's it. So that brings us to I would say five years ago. And then the whole world went. The whole horizon--

like first it was carbon, then it was solar and a bit of wind, and then EV started arriving and batteries. And I mean, it's amazing the expansion the Precambrian expansion of the energy transition is like from all over the place.

And right now, so what am I doing right now is the question.

[LAUGHS]

Yeah, yeah. That's the question I was going to ask.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Look.

What are you doing right now, Laurent?

OK, so look, I have the privilege of working for my pleasure. I don't need to work to--

I mean, I could stop working tomorrow. So that's a privilege I have.

Which means I have the choice to choose whatever I want to do and give it the time it requires.

Because there's a lot of people, they need to make it on a monthly basis or quarterly basis. But that's not my case.

So for instance, last year, four years ago, I had invested in a startup called Zeigo. We were doing some power purchase agreement with a guy I like a lot, JP Cerda.

I've never met JP. I've heard a lot about him, but.

He's great.

Sold to Schneider, right?

Yeah, yeah. We should--

and again, it's accident. Because I was against--

I was against selling to [? Schneider, ?]

which at the end was the good thing to do.

Also, I helped raise money for interconnector between Ireland and the UK. We just obtained the sign-off by Ofgem.

Cool. Congratulations. That's massive.

When--

congratulate the team, because I've done [INAUDIBLE]

last year. So but I said, they will obtain the Ofgem sign off, which they did. It's a great team.

And this last year, I invested with Gerard. And it's funny, because I was talking to someone and I was always saying Gerard, Gerard, Gerard. And after a half an hour, they'll say, but who is Gerard?

[LAUGHS]

He's your other wife.

Yes, yes, yes. Exactly what my wife says.

So we haven't talked about the podcast yet.

LAURENT SEGALEN: OK.

Obviously doing the podcast.

You've listen to this and you haven't watched, I guess listened to a Redefining Energy or Minutes, which comes out every Sunday, then you're missing a trick. You guys have done a great public service, I think, of getting fantastic people on talking about energy transition issues and doing it in a--

you're willing to take risks in your conversations I think a lot of corporate podcasts can't do.

And I really respect that, what you're providing to the industry. So thank you for that.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Thank you.

We're going to come to the podcast later. But we've got to get onto the 12 rules, otherwise we're never going to finish this thing, right? Let's do it. And these 12 rules are incredible.

LAURENT SEGALEN: OK, good.

So if you're listening or watching this, Laurent sent me an email last night.

Yeah.

And said, I want to talk about this, please.

Yeah.

And so lots of people do that for this podcast, but usually we say no. It's our podcast, we'll do it our way.

But yours is very unusual. And we're going to follow this whole thing so.

This is Laurent's 12 rules. Is this is for life or for careers or for the energy transition?

It's my 12 rules for investing, trading in the energy transition. Certainly not for life, I'm not Freud or a philosopher or anything. So that's, yeah.

12 rules. And you came up with this--

I assume it wasn't last night you came up with this. Thinking about this for a while.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just piled up. And at some point, I said, OK, Moses came down from Mount Sinai with 10.

Then Robert McNamara, the 11 Lessons. So I said 12.

Well, I mean, 12, I don't know, seems like a good number.

Probably one or two are a bit weak, but yeah. That's it.

We could chop it if you want.

No, no, no, no. Some might be weaker than others.

Let's do it.

Or maybe I do I say something and then the opposite, which is not unusual.

HOST: [LAUGHS]

Well, let's do this.

Number one.

Number one, go.

Hold on. Before we get started, does number one mean the most important? Is it 1 to 12 in importance or is it?

OK, so I think the more importants are probably at the beginning and the end.

OK. [LAUGHS]

OK, if you're listening to this, just switch off for half an hour and come back after number--

for number 12. All right, let's do it. Number one--

very, very important, what is it, Laurent?

Well, I have coined the power of common knowledge.

Ooh.

Ooh, that's--

and really it's--

in our industry, it's the fight for the common knowledge. They call that the Overton windows and so on. It's the power of narrative. And the extraordinary thing is with the media, the social media and everything, I mean, it's literally everywhere.

I was raised and did my studies before the age of internet where you had two newspapers and that was pretty much the end of it. And now it's, people are bathing and confused. And also they can be in a silo and really listen to what they want to hear.

And the thing is, I force myself to listen or read even stuff which are like painful, like out of Houston, Texas where you're going to go soon, that is like very oily. So the importance of the narrative and.

Is that what that means, common knowledge?

Common knowledge is what everybody--

OK, the common knowledge is now OK, climate change is real and we need to do the energy transition, which was not the case 10 years ago.

OK.

10 years ago is some scientists said that there might be a risk, but alternative energy X would be costly. That was the common knowledge. And now that's--

so it's important because the common knowledge moves every--

drags everybody with it.

And it's this sort of references where people don't really argue with those things because they're--

but it's different to common sense, right? Although that is still important.

No, no, it's different. I think common sense must be another rules a bit down.

OK, so what's very interesting is the value of companies--

it used to be 90% hard assets, 10% intangibles. And if you look at the value of the companies, it's the opposite.

It's what I was going to ask you about. You mentioned.

LAURENT SEGALEN: So yeah, so that's the power of the narrative. Because people are going to bring value to the intangible. And the intangible is fed by the narrative.

So OK, so I've got a few. I've got a few examples here. So if you take the car industry--

so you have this company called Stellantis, which is the amalgamation of Peugeot and Fiat and Chrysler and so on, and you've get Tesla.

Last year, Stellantis did $16 billion of net result.

Their market cap is 53.

So it's like three times the results. And Tesla did 12 billion and market cap $650 billion.

[LAUGHS]

So you see.

The power of Elon.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's amazing.

But you're right. It's the power of the narrative, right?

Yeah. So yeah. So that's.

Common knowledge. Everyone knows whatever Elon does, he's going to smash it. All that is common. You don't even challenge that now.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know who's in charge of Boeing, Chrysler, Fiat.

Yeah, I know. I know.

I don't know.

It's Tavares.

Look, without Elon, he would be the most celebrated guy. Unfortunately, you don't exist.

But you know what he does for his pleasure is every Sunday go and unscrew a diesel engine and screw them back again. That's his passion.

[LAUGHS]

Wow. There's a lot to unpack there.

So, OK, so common knowledge. And it's important that we win the narrative. Because look, you like it or not, the fossil fuel industry incumbents have 20 times more money lobbying than we do. But that's why I do the podcast, you do the podcast, we communicate, is to continue to push and win the narrative.

Very good. So we've got a lot of work to do. And there's a good quote in here we've almost brushed over. We do the quote?

The quote, I don't know. I think it's Paul Martin, my friend.

It's Tom, what you have to understand is that some people jobs relied on them not understanding what you're telling them. [LAUGHS]

So that's part of the--

yeah.

Part of it. Let's do number two.

Two, the very dear to my heart. A trade is worth 100 reports.

So just doing something is worth 100 times talking about it.

Exactly.

HOST: Exactly.

Exactly. And so I've got the three A's.

And again, I don't want to disparage any people. But the activists, the academics, and the--

forgot the third one. Activist, academics, and accountants. [CHUCKLES]

They, a lot own the narrative.

So going back to number one, they don't have time for that. And at some point, talk to people who do stuff rather than talk about it. So I was talking to this great woman called Adela Ara, she's head of operation at Lightsource BP. And she said, people were talking about hydrogen or something.

And she said, it's teenage sex, you know? The teenager, they talk about sex all the time but they never do it. [LAUGHS]

Sorry, Adela.

But of course, that's the good, the bad, and the ugly. That's the famous quote in the cemetery after the gunfight. And the bad is dead and the ugly is now discussing with Clint Eastwood.

And Clint Eastwood say, you see my friend? There are two categories of people in this world, those with a loaded gun and those who's digging.

You're digging. So, OK.

And digging is hard. Digging is hard. Like talking about doing stuff is--

I mean, just getting stuff done is just 100 times more painful than it looks every single time.

Yeah.

Every single time. A trade is worth 100 reports. I think you can make that a trade is worth 10,000 reports.

Yeah.

Number three, let's do number three. And I've got--

you can see this from the Space Center, the International Space . Station. "PRICES," in capitals.

Oh yeah, prices.

Prices, prices, prices.

Price, price, price.

Is that a rule? Can prices be a rule?

Yeah. Because look, there's a lot of investments which are proposed or talk about or new technologies. And they're all based on the fact that, oh, in 20 years' time, the price of power will be super-high--

and we need to invest in that--

or super-low, so there's going to be too much renewables. And hence, "hence," hence the price of oil. You know, hence we've got to do clean hydrogen or green hydrogen for zero.

Oh, the old hence problem.

Yeah, the old hence. Yeah. So just people making shit up in 20 years' time. And I will say, look, I mean, and that's somebody was traded at books. I had to mark my books every evening. And you look at the forward curves. And after three years, they're not very liquid anymore.

So I believe in forward curves. Don't tell me in 10 years the price of this is going to be this or the price is going to be that, because nobody knows. Nobody knows.

And I can understand academics are making some big rules. But look, even just in 10 years, everything that has happened--

the technological changes, the geopolitical changes. You cannot predict the future, but at least you can rely on forward curves. So that's it.

That's--

and more generally speaking, you know, I believe in the law of supply and demand.

High prices are the best cure for high prices.

Low prices are the best cure for low prices. So that's what I learned trading commodities. And we're seeing that in gas.

That's all very well. But the whole, it feels like there is--

and this is a bit of a deep conversation, but why don't we go there? But there is so much government intervention in power and energy markets--

in particular right now--

to support the right thing, which is that we need to get to net zero and the whole.

We talked about Rule 1, the narrative. The narrative is baked in. And now governments are stepping into markets to manipulate the outcome hopefully happening faster than it would have normally.

What do you think--

from your perspective as someone who's been involved in markets for so long, what do you think about government intervention in markets in general? And then maybe a couple of examples. I'll put you on the spot.

But I think that's already my Rule 7 or my Rule 8. But that's OK.

Look, energy is not shampoo. You need to--

there's no way governments are not going to intervene.

Now some governments are, in their DNA, super interventionist, like in France or in Spain. And some governments--

more in the North of Europe or it could be Texas--

much more freewheeling. But anyway, governments need to make sure that energy is relatively affordable and there.

And I remember when I was really young in the late 70s and you had the traumas of people pushing their cars and those queues of after the oil shocks.

HOST: Oil prices, yeah.

My God. That when governments step in.

Yeah.

And when the market is so prolonged, generally they retreat and they let the market sort themselves. So the government interventions are more of a reaction to crisis. And that's where they need to step in. But we end up like last year, where Germany threw 5% of its GDP, 5% of its GDP--

5% of the GDP.

--to subsidize fossil fuels, 5%.

They did 4%, you give me 1% of the GDP, I can save the planet. [CHUCKLES]

I can tell you. So that's--

but because it's every people's daily life, just the way they move, the way they heat themselves and so.

I'm just extremely cautious about it. I just think that every time, it's like Whac-A-mole. Kind of government turns up and hits a thing, hits a mole in the market. And it just turns up somewhere else and no one knows where it's coming up somewhere else.

And governments like to do things for really long periods of time.

And so you end up with Whac-A-Mole with long, long sort of time tail ends of all these models coming.

But I get we need to do it. I'm just--

I probably err on the free market side more than anything. But there's lots of ways to cut this one.

Also it depends how, right? It completely depends how. There there's lots of different policy mechanisms that you can use, some of which are heavy-handed and blunt and some of which are very targeted and light. And there's a whole distribution between them. So it's a very difficult question for me to ask you, because it's a how answer.

It's very difficult. Look, you can have super-good government intervention like subsidizing heat pumps.

That is great.

That's government intervention, but you get your gas boilers out. Because heat pumps are a bit more expensive than gas boilers. And weirdly, electricity is much more taxed than gas.

Because they apply carbon tax on electricity, but not on gas. Guess what, that's good lobbying from the fossil fuel industry.

So look, you don't have the choice between zero government intervention or maximum intervention. There's always government intervention. There's more when there's a crisis, when the market is managed to supply a clean, cheap, and secure energy. I mean, government has other fish to fry.

Let's get back to it. Number 4 of 12.

That's critical.

I've got the word scaling here. What do you mean by scaling?

So there's this book which just came out called How To Build Things or How Big Things Get Done and it's absolutely fascinating. Which is something I kind of understood intuitively, but now it's kind of the guys prove it. And in our desire to do the energy transition, you've got the old school who say, OK, let's build cathedrals. You know, nuclear plants.

Hinkley Point Z.

Hinkley Point Z or carbon capture and storage. So you take a cathedral which is refineries and you're going to hook cathedral on the top, which is a carbon capture and storage plant that is like big projects outside one of--

and I had this discussion with the CEO of Urenco nuclear fuel. And he said, the problem is these big nuclear plants is it's like you're building an airport every time.

And of course they want to do the smaller reactors, which would be airplanes. I don't know which great consultant says, guys, oh, you go from airports to airplanes and say, that's it. Problem solved, thank you very much.

Yeah so--

and if you look at every innovation which is working now, whether it's wind, solar, batteries, EVs, or just manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing, you know, quantities, quantities, quantities, Stalin used to say--

I mean, I hate Stalin, what a butcher. But he had good quotes.

Yes, he was a horrible person, but he had some humor. And he said, quantity has a quality all its own.

Yeah.

I mean, people learn with quantity. They just adapt. They make mistake, the price go down.

So that's what you've see seen with solar, battery, EVs, everything. Whereas you don't have that phenomenon for those big one-time nuclear or CCS or gigantic hydrogen thing. So they're never going to learn.

The learning of those kind of projects, it's almost like intergenerational, right? I mean, the feedback loop is so--

it's just so big and cumbersome. You're--

I don't know. It's hard to see how in Hinkley Point C we're going to make fast enough step changes along the cost reduction curve in doing that lots of times to get the cost down.

Oh, I can tell you in France in the 80s, they were putting out one nuclear plant every three months.

HOST: Incredible.

Yeah. But you had young people in the 70s, the most prestigious place to do to the engineer was the nuclear.

They had the best students. They were young and they were just churning new nuclear plants like never. So really, I don't know if the price went down, but at least they managed to get the price stable. And that's why we still have.

The program delivering on time.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah.

What's the--

there's the guy who wrote Skin in the Game. You know that guy.

I'll put it in the show notes.

But he has this theory that with megaprojects, big projects, the longer the period--

so as soon as the project is late, you think the longer after it's late, it's closer to being finished. And he says no.

The longer delay there is, the further away you are actually from being finished, which is the opposite way that your mind thinks, right? You think we're already this late, we're going to be really close now. And actually, the bigger the project, the more that actually isn't true. It's true with bridges, tunnels, nuclear plants, loads of stuff. We're not here to bash Hinkley Point C.

No, no, no, but.

That's a very tricky project, by the way. I mean, like who's winning in that Hinkley Point C?

The first Hinkley Point, I thought the British taxpayer--

because I'm French and British. So the British taxpayer, the wrong side of the trade because they had to buy. And of course, people say it's 129 pounds a megawatt hour, but it's from--

It was 95.

--plus inflation.

Yeah, 95-96.

Yeah but now if you look, we're going to go to 200--

Yeah.

--with inflation.

At the time, that looked expensive.

Yeah, already at the time. Yeah. But now, even with that wonderful gift, they're going to explode the budget. So now it's the French taxpayers on the hook. So after Brexit, you know, like we're in it together. We both lose on Hinkley Point.

There will be a meeting at some point where the big heads get together and say, OK, we'll split that one 50/50. We'll split that one 50/50. Let's see. Let's see.

LAURENT SEGALEN: OK, let's see.

Let's come back to your rules. Rules of life, rules of living your best self, with Laurent. All right, number 5.

Just one thing about scaling. Because the scaling thing is not just for the industrial part, it's also the financial part. It's there is this saying in trading which is, liquidity begets liquidity. The moment you create a liquidity pool, it just attracts more liquidity.

And OK, so I'm going to give you an example. I was in the French bank and I was in the elevator. And I was super cocky, because I just had to raise 140 million Euro, which is probably like, what double now? It was like the biggest raise at nine months. And I was happy. So I was like, hey man, you know.

So I was in the elevator and come this young guy. I mean, he looks like his mother's milk still wet on his face.

He came from one of the trading room.

And I tell him, look, man, it took me nine months, but I raised 150 million. And the guy say, I raised 4 billion this afternoon. I was like, oh.

Plus he was trading bonds, government bonds. But that's liquidity.

And somehow, how can we, if you want to save the planet, de-risk the investment in green so that we press a button and we get--

and Elon Musk, he did it at some point. He raised 5 billion for Tesla in 24 hours. And I said, guy, wonderful.

5 billion in 24 hours?

Yeah, yeah.

I bet it wasn't even that many phone calls. I bet it was 10 phone calls or less.

I don't know. But that, when you manage that, we win. We all win.

Because we are de-risked. We are back to scale.

HOST: Back to scale.

Of course. And then after, you get all the horror stories of the [? sparks ?]

and so on where people raised much too much for projects which were like not suited.

But that's capitalism unfortunately. OK. Different times. Rule Number 5.

Rule Number 5, again, in capital letters, "TECH."

LAURENT SEGALEN: Tech, yeah.

Tech. What are we talking about here?

Tech. Look, there was this movie about 10 years ago with Matt Damon called The Martian. You remember?

Yeah, yeah. I remember that, where he's got the little mirrors and he's communicating in slow time.

Yeah, a great movie about a stranded astronaut on Mars. And it was written by a guy who really went to see the NASA. So everything was kind of realistic. And he said--

great, great, line, we're going to science the shit out of this.

And I believe it's tech who's going to save us from the energy transition. And again, it's OK to sue the oil companies and so on, but they have a thick skin.

And you can ESG everything you want. You realize that a lot of the dirtiest assets have simply left the stock market and they are in hedge funds or owned by the state of India or whatever.

So, and again, nothing against the whole ESG movement, but you really want to get out. It's thick and probably goes to the thing at the bottom, emotions. You like this?

[CHUCKLES]

I love it. I love it.

OK, say it.

[LAUGHS]

It's your phrase. I can't say it.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Oh, come on. You can read it.

I can read it. I can do it in a French accent if you want.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Please.

No, I'll leave that to you. Emotions lead to ambitions. Ambitions don't reduce CO2.

Strong, strong start.

Returns drive investments. Investments reduced CO2.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah. So tech. Tech, tech, tech. And look, I hear Tony Seba, the futurologist, was kind of said five, six years ago, everything's going to be electric and so on.

And so he got it wrong, but in the details. But I like the vision. I like the vision that it's tech. And maybe I'm a tech optimist. What I've seen during my own life is that tech and new investment and new people and more digital, that is what's bringing progress.

Yeah. Sorry.

You've come to this podcast pretty teched up. You've got two phones, identical phones. I assume a burner phone and a.

No, no. No. One doesn't have a chip, it just works on the WiFi. And the iPhone 10, so it's kind of old.

All right, Number 6. Innovations do not come out of nowhere.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Oh yeah.

What does that mean?

Every day, I receive 10 guys who have found the cure for the new batteries or the new this or the new that. And of course, they say I'm the first one.

And what we've seen, if I look back 30 years, there's been just one big innovation per decade. So I would say in the 90s, that's when they managed to coin the wind. And then the whole decade after that, that was the development of wind.

The 2010s, so the decade of the 2000, that was solar. And then starting in 2010, you have the development of solar.

I mean the big ones.

And during the 2010s, it was the batteries probably even more because of batteries and heat pumps, which were like being debugged and so on. And guess what. Then our decade is batteries and heat pump with acoustic curves.

So there's not a lot of innovation and scaling.

And you kind of see them from far away. And everybody arrive, oh, I reach the tipping point in three years. No you won't. Because all those innovations have been 20 years in the making.

So that's what I'm trying to say here.

The innovations don't come out of nowhere. And if you are talking about public money, generally there's also some public money which is mixed around. And that's where government intervention are good.

Well let's do that one. Number 7 is about public money, right? It's public research and development is good for innovation, but it's up to the market to scale. This is one of--

this is Rule Number 7.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah.

So what does that mean?

Well there's a quote from Jigar Shah, which I, of course, have a lot of respect. And it's very interesting what he's doing at the DOE.

The department is, I don't know, he has like 400 billion or 700 billion. And his job is to finance the first plant. Because once the first plant exists, you have--

it becomes bankable and the rest can come in. And it's absolutely fascinating, because.

What sort of plant?

Oh, right now he's investing into hardwood materials--

the first recycling plant of batteries or the first carbon black or the first big hydrogen. I mean, he's never going to finance gigafactories because they are--

thanks God, Elon Musk has done it for us.

I don't like to say government have a role to play, but I would say there are moments in the scaling that governments can really do great things. Really, really do. And sometimes.

But governments are pretty bad allocators of capital in R&D spend, right?

Yeah, but sometimes you have good surprises.

Yes. Exactly, yes. I'm not saying we should pull the plug on R&D spend by any means. I just think there's so much work to be done in where that money goes.

Look, in the US, you see some VCs who are investing in stuff which are like, wow. Or ooh. You know, like nuclear fusion or--

I mean, wow.

Oh yeah. I've seen it's like $5 billion last year was raised VCs for nuclear.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Fusion, yeah. Then you realize they don't even have the fuel because.

How much cash are these guys willing to blow? How much are you willing to fund something?

Well the question is, is it the headlines? You put $5 billion in a bank account or they say, OK, I'm going to give you 5 billion in installments that you need to report every quarter and we can pull the plug whenever we want.

You need a lot of runway for fusion to make that work.

Yeah. But look, it's great. Now at the same time, you have this stupid stuff called ITER in France, which is the first tokamak or something. They want to do it.

We've got one too, right? We've got one down in Oxfordshire somewhere.

Yeah, but it's a small one. In France, they decided to build a big one.

Have you been? Have you been? No, it's bloody massive.

You mean the one in Oxfordshire?

Yeah, yeah. Actually cool to talk about there. Yeah, where they put the plasma and it spins like a donut and it lasts for like a microsecond.

Yeah. It's a nice story. How much? $20 billion. Oops.

Right. It's going be very by 2040, actually, if you ask the experts at the tokamak.

I'm backing it. I love it. Floating plasma, big magnets, it's all the good stuff.

And you know what? If we reach 10 seconds, it's going to be a massive breakthrough.

It is, yeah.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Unless you'd like to. I mean, no wonder the fossil fuel guys are supporting that.

Mm, because it's.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, we support.

Yeah. So look, yeah, it's difficult. And at the end of the day, that's why it's also--

I go back to common knowledge all the time. We need to make sure that the people who are allocating that money--

I'm not saying be smart, but be half smart. That would be great.

I think one of the--

I don't know whether it happens in other countries, but the problem here is the game of getting government--

so we haven't done, we've not gone down the route of getting government grants and all that stuff. We looked at it and it seems like it's a game of how well can you write a paper that's asking for the money rather than how much do you really need the money to work on R&D.

And that whole chain has got to be broken somehow, because the amount of writing a 10,000-word application we can get a consultant in--

is pretty much like no-win, no-fee. And getting the money from the government is just not cool. It's not a good way to do this, I don't think.

Yeah. Look, what can I say?

I mean, you should make it one of your rules. We should change this.

No, no. Make your 12 rules.

LAURENT SEGALEN: OK, so.

All right, Number 8. The wave is more important than the surf.

That's a super important one. That's a super important one. And that leads back to my story about uranium.

I was a very lousy trader, but I got--

I caught a beautiful wave.

And there are other times in my career where I was on the top of my game, but the market was like, nah--

no volatility, no nothing, just sliding.

The [INAUDIBLE]

the power market, which is going down just like this. And no matter how good I was, no way I could make money.

But there is a skill in finding the waves, right?

Yeah, I mean it's called diversification.

HOST: Yeah. Well, yeah. [LAUGHS]

But look you. I mean, Modo, you're on an amazing wave.

You are the master of time and data on a market growing by 30% and you don't have any competition. So yeah, you are. Are you a great surfer? I don't know. But you're certainly in a great wave.

I grew up in--

I'm from Birmingham, right, so we've got canals. But there ain't that many waves unfortunately. So yeah, complete luck.

And also, it means it's very tough to be contrarian.

Because a contrarian goes against the wave and say it's a bubble and it's not going to work and so on. And that's why a lot of people try to be contrarian. But it's a very special mindset.

Generally whenever you enter a market, you are bullish. You want to develop this, build stuff, buy stuff. And the short is like, man, no.

Now it works if you look at--

sometimes it works. You look at the story of Adani. And of course, in hindsight, everything is, of course it was clear.

But then you look at, what's his name, the New Yorker with Herbalife, right? Have you seen that, that documentary? And he just became more and more underwater. I think Herbalife never even--

Herbalife survived, right? It's a business still. I should probably put a disclaimer on this. If you're listing from Herbalife, there's something you need to read.

OK, so let me give you--

when we reached the peak of oil, I had bought a lot of paper, carbon paper, at I don't know, 5 to 8 Euro per ton.

What's carbon paper?

CR.

What's that?

It was a carbon emission reduction that I bought from China or India based on what investment that made or methane capture.

Like a certificate.

Yeah, exactly. So I bought a lot at 5 to 8. And I hedged myself on the market that's 15.

So beautiful trade, beautiful trade. The problem is the market was following oil, which went $240 per barrel. So my hedge at 15 becomes 16, 17, 18. And the thing is I'm bleeding on my hedge.

But because I've got a physical position, I cannot mark to market it.

So I was just--

my hedge was killing me. And at some point, I was just saying, no, no, no.

The bubble is going to pop. The bubble is going to pop. You know, every day. And every day, you had a guy say, OK, you lost another 2 million today. 2 million today.

At some point, I capitulated. I had to buy back because of my.

And then what happened? The next day.

And then, of course, pfft.

But it just, that's--

so again, the wave, it's also called the trend is my friend. It's OK. Rule number--

Rule Number 9 now. This is going fast. And I want to--

so it says folks never to do business with. And it's all about trust, this one, isn't it? What do you mean there?

Never do business with a desperate man.

What happens then, you do business with a desperate person?

It's just--

look, there's a lot of emotion.

Is it charity or are you just a scavenger? It's always messy.

So some business grows, some businesses die. And generally, the disappearance of business is a personal drama. And it's very difficult to intervene as an outsider in those moments.

And of course, emotionally, at some point you want to do it or not. But from a financial perspective, it's just like, just don't do it. I mean, just, that's it.

But you've got also in here who you know versus what you know and the value of trust. What do you mean?

What you know evolves all the time, because things change--

price changes, tech changes, circumstance changes. But who you know stays. And the quality of the relationship and trust you built over the years--

over the years, because right now I'm working with people.

People propose me deal all the time, but you don't understand. I'm working with people I've known for at least 10 years--

10 years in the making and assessing each other and building the trust.

And I'm going to invest in JP Cerda's new venture.

And he pitched me. You know, what's up? I said, OK, I get it.

I'm in.

Don't send me a 30-page deck. I trust you.

Trust is like virginity, you can use it only once.

So trust. So I have trust.

Basically nice about this. But there's also--

it's very exclusive.

LAURENT SEGALEN: It is.

Right? And--

That's an old man talking.

--I like to think--

That's an old man talking.

--I like to think the best product wins or the best idea wins, but that may be because I'm just a naive whippersnapper.

Look, it's a mix. But if you look at Facebook, they bought the products. They never made any products. If you look at Microsoft, they bought the first operating system. They bought Android. So who won here, the guy who designed Android who sold it for 50 million or Microsoft who made it a multibillion dollar business?

And now they're buying OpenAI.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, yeah.

But that's a not-for-profit, so we can't. [CHUCKLES]

Not yet for profit.

So look, I tell you as I see it. And you're right. But that's probably with--

I should have said with age.

HOST: Yeah, yeah.

With age.

I hope it's not the case. I want to change that. I hope it's not the case by the time I do my 12 rules on some podcast somewhere in 20 years' time.

Number 10, know how to value time and optionality.

Oh yeah.

How do you value time and optionality then?

OK, so optionality is, whenever you do a long-term trade or a long-term investment, the whole idea is that something called askewness. So what can happen in a bad scenario is low, low impact. But what can happen in a great scenario is exceptional.

HOST: Yes.

And so it's very important, every time you deal with uncertainty, that the downside is significantly lower than the potential upside. And when I was trading--

and I was not very good at the math and the Greeks and the gamma, but I was good at spotting.

Long-term trade, OK, if they never pan out, my premium investment was very low. But if they hit a trigger point, I would have outsized return.

And so I've done one or two like this in my life which were like, well, other people made the money. I had a pat on the back saying, you've been lucky, although it was really designed and everything.

Commemorative tie.

HOST: Yeah.

Asymmetric bets then. Asymmetric bets.

Yeah yeah, really. Yeah, it means--

and of course, time is very important because if you want to make an asymmetric bet but it's in six months' time, people aren't going to price the asymmetry. So you're not going to make any money. Whereas beyond a certain horizon, people don't know how to price asymmetry.

We go back to prices, prices, prices. [INAUDIBLE]

So the way you need to organize your--

and time is going to become even more important now that we have inflation, because you used to have zero inflation. So in a certain way, you put your cash in, you see if your cash is zero. But here, you're down 5% per annum, which in five years you're down 25%.

So you need to do something with it. So time becomes expensive. So just saying, whenever you trade, think about time.

You know it's nuts, right?

LAURENT SEGALEN: Sorry?

So I'm 32 years old. I was born in 1990. And ever since I was an adult, so available to get credit, credit has been 0% until the last couple of years. Obviously there's various ways of which it doesn't really look like that. But my whole cohort of friends and peers have only lived an adult life in a world of 0 or close to 0%, which is a mindset which is very difficult to get out of.

And I think we've got--

I think we've actually got a generational issue here of thinking we may never go back to 0, 1, 2% interest rates. In fact, if you think about--

we've gone down a rabbit hole here, but the distribution of wealth and opportunities and outcomes and all that kind of stuff, actually that's probably not a good thing because it expedites pretty bad distribution of those things.

So just a comment really, which is we've got a whole age group of people of a decade who only know this thing. And watch out how they behave in their lives, in the market, in their careers based on that.

Almost--

how to describe it--

reference point.

The risk-free rate really is 0 for us, for a decade of us. And that ain't true. [LAUGHS]

There's nothing about that that's true.

No, no.

HOST: Nothing about that is true.

But the thing is that there are two generations of bankers who started in the early 80s with like interest rates at 16% per annum and then they went down non-stop for 30 years.

The opposite problem, yeah.

So, but see, they made money. Because as the price of interest rate goes down, price of bond goes up. So there are people who made their whole career on declining interest rates. So it's not just the young generations. Generation before, we learned what's a bit more expensive. So that's.

And now we're getting to the gold, right?

Ah, the golden rule!

The golden rules.

The golden rule.

HOST: 11 and 12, they're kind of connected, aren't they? Let's do this. 11, you've written the final golden rule.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah, final.

Obviously it's not if we've got 12 to come.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah.

What's happening?

Well, I do the trick.

I do the trick sometimes in seminars or conferences where I feel I've got an audience which is hard to move. And so I did the trick twice. I think I did the trick for wind or for solar. I'll say--

so there was like, I don't know, the panel was like something about O&M or like very--

[LAUGHS]

Exciting stuff.

LAURENT SEGALEN: --very exciting stuff. And I say, I will give you the golden rule of [? O&M, ?]

but at the end of our talk. So we'll have the discussion and then I see people starting to move. Say, what's the golden rule? What's the golden rule?

I'll say the one with the gold ruled.

You can do the same trick for wind or battery or anything. And it's some time.

I'll make sure to reference you if I do.

No, no, it's not from me. I don't know where I got it, but it's like, we people who are in a certain way trading or investing with other people's money, as long as we deliver, it's fine. But at the end of the day, never forget that the one with the gold rules--

that's your board or investor.

I've seen CEO removed overnight because the people who have the gold rule. So it's just.

Wow, that's harrowing, isn't it? They want to think of that right now?

LAURENT SEGALEN: No, keep that in mind. No, keep that in mind.

We are not owner. The owners are the owners.

Yes. We work for them.

We're just the manager. Yeah.

I mean, if you are a shareholder, you have both roles. But there are a lot of cases where the manager thinks he's the owner. And always have the humility to remember that you've got owners behind you. And as long as you deliver, you'll be fine.

But you can't you won't be able to get away with everything.

Let's not talk about the past. Let's talk about the future.

That works once, you know? [LAUGHS]

Yeah, just one more quarter. One more quarter, please. All right, so.

LAURENT SEGALEN: So I put AIDA. I put AIDA, because that's on YouTube. It's the eight minutes marketing speech by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. You never seen that?

HOST: No, no.

Oh my God. It's like AIDA, do I--

A, attention, do I have your attention? I, are you interested? D, have you made your decision? And A, action.

And it's an extraordinary--

it's a debt of play and it's an extraordinary marketing course. It's the ultimate marketing course. It's hilarious, of course. And of course now Alec Baldwin is a bit of a problem and so on.

So I even wonder if there's not the other guy like, I forgot his name, Kevin Spacey. But OK, that's enough.

We've done Stalin. We've done Stalin. We're now doing Baldwin and Spacey.

I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you. OK, they're disgraced, but at the time they were big.

OK, all right.

You didn't know. Sorry. 12.

12.

The most important.

And this is just--

what is this quote? Is this just?

I know. This one is a quote that happened to me. You know, I was raising--

I was trying to raise a fund 12 years ago, 10 years ago. And I had one of those brilliant mathematical structure and wonderful trades would produce so much. And I knew so much and so on.

And I was in front of [INAUDIBLE]

individual, you look at me doing all the seven veils dance. And they look at me and say, if you're so intelligent, why are you so poor? It's like, it hit me like a bus.

So what do they mean by that?

Well it means, like, OK you're a big brain, but you forgot.

In a certain way, you probably took too much time working your expertise for other people.

So you're down to a very simple rule, which I believe is the most powerful sentence in business. It's, what's in it for me? And what's in it for me?

Because I receive--

every day I receive proposals. And I see what's in it for the other guy, that's for sure. Basically he wants to take my money against a nice fairy tale. You know, am I going to believe or not?

And it's the first question I ask is, sorry, I understand whatever you say. But what's in it for me?

What's in it for you, that I can see. But I don't see what's in it for me.

And so I'm not--

OK, maybe it's a bit egotistical or so on. But I would say it's somehow, in everybody's head, never forget to ask yourself the question always.

When something's being proposed to you, always, OK, what's in it for me? And that's going to help you a lot. It's a good filter. It's a good filter.

And we've got we've got a couple of things that didn't make it in. I want to touch on them. We've got Ronald in there.

We're doing all the big names. What's this quote you've got in there?

Which one? From Ronald Reagan?

HOST: Yeah.

Oh, it's great. If you're explaining, you're losing.

What does that mean?

It means there are a lot of things which achievements you do kind of speaks for themselves. So you need to let your achievements speak for themselves. You know, you've done this or you've done that. But basically, model speaks for itself.

If you start having to go into 15 minutes explanation, you already lost the people. So that's what it meant in a certain way.

I wonder what he--

what that was in reference to when he quoted that.

I don't know.

Because he had a lot of explaining to do as well.

The thing is, it's fascinating. Because I remember, of course, the 80s very well. And he was loathed by a number of people, but he was worshipped--

very, very, very divisive. Now, I mean, you've seen that stuff. It's US politics. You've seen that stuff with Donald Trump.

But I don't think there was anything to salvage in Donald Trump. I think the guy was really awful.

But Ronald Reagan, I remember when--

I was 16 when he was elected and America was really in deep shit. They'd lost Vietnam.

They had two oil shocks. I mean, four guys are going to die, but it was a bit of a disaster. The Iranian revolution, the Soviet investment, invasion of Afghanistan, I mean, the US was nowhere.

Really, I mean, I, at the time, went to see not the Berlin Wall, but the border between East Germany. They asked us to stop. We went out of the bus. They asked us to stop because the guys on the

[? mirador, ?]

they were shooting the guys. And you would see the same road on the other side of the fences. And you'd see a village and people living in jail. That was communism.

And when I was young, people tell me, communism--

everybody communists. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

And he, Reagan, said no.

Not going to happen.

And of course 10 years after, the Cold War is won, the Berlin Wall falls. I remember that. I cried all night long when we saw the Berlin Wall falling.

But again, it's imagination. And people take that for granted. I can tell you six months before, if you tell me, oh the writing's on the wall, the Berlin Wall is going to pfft.

Nobody had a clue. We thought that the dumb stuff--

That's fascinating.

LAURENT SEGALEN: --would be there for the next 20 years.

Yeah. The way that you look back in history as if the end was--

the end was in by the late 80s. You saw some West Russian or West bloc--

Eastern Bloc, but West of Russia and states starting to fall and revolutions. It seemed--

in hindsight, it looked obvious.

Pfft.

[LAUGHS]

Not at all, no, no, no. A lot of stuff happened.

You're like shell-shocked. And September 11, the great financial crisis. Yeah, yeah, you look back and say, yeah, of course, of course. But you know, you're in the thick of it, it's like boom.

Your mind plays tricks on you, doesn't it? And we've got what? We've got one more. Oh no.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Got one more.

You've got an Elon quote. We started with Elon. We'll come back to Elon.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah.

What's this one?

Well look, and again, I don't want to judge whatever he says. I'm just concentrated on whatever he does.

And what he has achieved the past 15 years is nothing short of a miracle.

Because the guy is in 30s, he has 150 million, and he could just go in the Bahamas, drink Daiquiris and have a good life. And he decided to put half of it in Tesla, half of it in SpaceX. And guess what, 15 years later he's the only space company. The guy is not.

Jeff Bezos has got his little--

Come on.

--little thing.

Come on. He makes one rocket flight per week right now. It's like the bus.

It's even boring.

And he started, and there is this extraordinary space magazine and you see the guys working on the Falcon 1. Like three guys in a warehouse. And they say, is it a threat for Boeing and Lockheed? And yes it was.

HOST: Yeah.

And so he managed. Because not only he's crazy, but he has a tolerance to risk which is absurd.

And any company would say, oh, new technology, OK, I'm going to allocate 5%. No, 4%. No, 3% of our Capex. And the guy says, I'm going to allocate 100%.

Yeah.

So that's extraordinary. So just space, that would be great. But he does Tesla.

And Tesla is, of course, the cars. But look, even we are in the battery storage.

What he did, I mean, people forget. But the Hornsdale battery, you remember the Hornsdale?

Hornsdale, yeah, of course.

The whole story of the Hornsdale, we tweet, tweet.

100 days, right?

100 days or you don't pay me. And he delivers in 92 days.

And that broke the ceiling, because all the experts 100% say not possible. Never going to happen. Build a new gas turbine.

So he managed to smash and create the market we are thriving on. So that's saying.

And of course, if you want to say all the mistakes he's done and all the blustering and stupid stuff, even Twitter, you're right. But I look at the result.

I look at the results. The guy has created one $650 billion company, another one which is $200 billion, the SpaceX.

And Twitter, I don't know. I don't care.

Well you have to make huge, risky bets to make those things, to make those kind of outcomes.

Successive successes.

Exactly. So no wonder there are loads of things he says and does which fall flat or even worse, you know, wind people up or whatever. Because everything he does is high-risk. That's in his personality.

But it's not high-risk, it's beyond. It's quantum risk. Because he decides to do the stuff in Nevada.

But the stuff, his plant in Nevada, he doesn't have the money for it. So that's why he does the deal with Panasonic.

So you need to have a good--

to take money from Japanese, you need to be smart. And then, the guy said, but the plant you're going to build is bigger than the whole planet combined.

And you know, he's done the math that he needs to make it that big in order to get sufficient batteries. And then to decide--

and for me, that's the most important thing and nobody really talks about it--

but it's the move to China. Because the Tesla Shanghai, that's where it flips from lost profit to never lost money.

But the plant, from a football field to getting cars out of the door in 11 months.

Yeah, it's incredible.

In 11 months, he built the plant, he bring the machines in, he hired the people, get the supply chain, and he does all these things together. And then the cars are out in 11 months. If you ask Volkswagen or Stellantis or whoever, the people would tell you it's five years minimum.

And no. So here it's like whoa. And so I think it's easy to bash him. But people--

look, I read books on him. And you know, Tesla was--

Tesla is a great success despite Elon Musk. I said, come on, man.

And now I want to wrap and go to talk about your podcast at the end.

Because you've interviewed some awesome people on the podcast. A lot of us, I think most of us at Modo, are regular listeners to both.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Thank you.

And I wanted to ask you, because when you start doing a podcast--

for me, this has been a hell of a journey, right. We're on episode 50 or 60 or something now.

LAURENT SEGALEN: You're doing a good job though.

That's very kind. But you learn a lot about yourself in interviewing people. You learn a lot about the process.

You get a lot of feedback. Sometimes you can get kind of stuck in yourself thinking, oh, we're doing the right thing here? Was that right? Was this wrong?

How's the journey of doing a podcast been for you? And then could you talk to a couple of guests--

I am putting you on the spot here--

that you felt really changed your thinking or the podcast?

OK, good. I mean, first, the podcast exists because of Gerard Reid and the interaction we have. When we were in the pub five years ago and we were having a great discussion about things and so on.

And I said--

I don't know who said it--

one of the two said, our conversation is so amazing. We should record ourselves. Because people might benefit from our wisdom. So that's how it all started.

It's just two guys drinking in a pub and not saying we're going to create a podcast. It's we're going to record ourselves because we're so great.

This is great content.

This is great content.

Yeah.

And so that's how we started. And then of course, the next day you need to Google how to make a podcast, how to buy a mic, how to YouTube, how to upload, how to edit a podcast. And that's really how we started.

We started one episode a month. And after six months we said, we continue or not? But then we started having good feedbacks. And the first time we took a guest was after a year.

In fact, we did 12 episodes, just the two of us. Took our time. It was a bit of a part-time. I mean, didn't take too much time to do that.

And then the stuff started picking up. And then we'd get more serious. And of course, I think the big moment is when we decide to go two episode a month. So it means you create the logistics around. It's not like you're on the 28th of the month and say, OK, Gerard, let's talk for half an hour and then wrap it up and that's going to be it.

And what about all the other work? So this conversation--

as you know, the conversation is 10% of the work, right? There's all the scheduling and ideas and all the prepodcast calls and recording. And we've got the wonderful Izzy to do that and does a great job. Who does it for you guys?

It's me.

It's you.

It's me or it's Gerard.

Is it a lot to do that?

Yeah, but it's a bit of a mom and pop shop.

And so you learn over time. And kind of--

I have a list of 50 guys or themes--

it's more by theme that I want to. And then people meet. And you know, you're going to come on our pod. And at the end of the day, we're not making a Wikipedia page.

We want a good conversation.

And we know that when people listen to podcasts, their attention's lower.

So there's no point saying we went from 42.5 to 69.2 and throwing numbers or different jargons.

I learned that at the beginning. I had a person from, I don't know, Cummings. And she said, we went from the GPS BT to the Z, using those acronyms. I said, yeah, of course. We have no idea what you're talking about.

You log into analytics, you see all the drop off.

Yeah. So look, if you look at--

we had CEO coming, somewhere great, like a [INAUDIBLE]

Because you get the corporate guys and they're to read their talking points. And every time you wanted to ask something a bit more sharper, they'd say no, you can't really say.

That's a real problem, right? We have that too.

So the great things are episodes which we don't choose people because they are CEOs. We had great times with Paul Martin, for instance.

Paul Martin, the hydrogen guy.

LAURENT SEGALEN: Yeah.

Oh, love him.

We had such a great time with him and a lot of downloads. And we learned like so much. And then, of course, everybody started working around what he said.

And you know, my calibration, the ladder, which is excellent.

Well, it's just physics. Just same reason, same conclusion.

And yeah, we try to get some--

also young people, we are working on offshore wind farm, but that came through renewable. And so the podcast has become to have a life of its own.

It creates its own identity. So it's not like I want to do it, it just seems natural. The things have to fall in place.

But we want young people. We need to have more women on the show. Women--

men, they're like me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Women, I need to convince every one of them. And they prepare too much. And I need to reassure them.

But then after, the shows are fantastic. So I'm always working to get more women and a younger person who thinks differently or they're much more digital, much more agile.

And so yeah, that's it. And it's a bit of a big Caesar salad.

And the value is more the globality than each episode one by one.

And sometimes I've got great episodes which don't really download. And sometimes I've got episodes which are meh. And you know, guess what, they download like crazy and I don't know why. But I just want to create this common knowledge.

And we continue because people say we like it. And that's enough for me.

Well you've got a sponsor now, right?

I've got a sponsor as well.

Aquila, they're great. But the thing is, it costs. As you know, it costs to do. So at least it doesn't cost us to do because we've got some post-production and stuff like that. But it's really not about making money.

And of course, I have to say, we get a lot of recognition. So we get a lot of free influence.

When I contact some people, they know who I am. So that's helped me. So it goes both ways.

It's a two-way street, definitely.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah. And frankly, we're surprised. Now we're at, I don't know, 750,000? It's like, wow.

750,000 what?

Downloads since inception.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

That's a lot.

Yeah. But it's like--

That's a lot of people cooking their dinner or on a plane or walking the dog with you in their ears.

Look, we've been lucky. I don't know we are a great surfer, but the wave is--

HOST: The wave, the wave.

--the wave, it's all about the wave.

And I want to finish on your last quote, which I quite like. I don't know whether this is or whether this is anon.

Oh dear.

But it's got your name at the end of it, so I'm going to go with it. So I'll quote from Laurent and we'll finish here. Work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And with that, we're going to finish there. Thanks, Laurent, for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

My pleasure.

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