Clean Energy Investing: What is the Investor Perspective?
This week on the podcast Peter and Jackie discuss the results of a recent survey they conducted with a group of investors to understand their perspectives on investing in clean energy. Do investors see an opportunity to generate strong returns in clean energy? Are they actively investing in clean energy? What do investors view as the most significant risks or uncertainties?
Next, Peter and Jackie discuss why policy risk was one of the top concern areas for investors. Why does policy risk rate high on the list of concerns? What are the factors of policy risk that should be evaluated?
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Episode 201 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian, welcome back. Well, spring is definitely in the air. And with spring in Alberta comes an election.
Jackie Forrest:
This year for sure. And of course, there’s a lot of debate around important topics like healthcare, education, and even the importance of a hockey arena.
Peter Tertzakian:
Absolutely. And you can’t escape also energy issues, and we’re going to talk about all of the above with a special guest next week.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, so don’t worry. We are thinking about the election, and we’ll talk more about it next week. But for this week, we’re going to talk about a couple of issues. We want to talk a little bit about Tesla’s strategy, which is pretty interesting, but also important, a topic we think about a lot is investment and investing in energy transition and how investors are thinking about it.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. We’ve been remiss about talking on the podcast the last few weeks about the Tesla car price cuts. The price of a Model Y, I believe Jackie correct me if I’m wrong because you have one, has been cut to below the US average car price.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I mean they made a couple of big cuts. By the way, Canada’s not the same. They haven’t done it for every market. But in the US, in January it was down 20%, and then another drop in April.
Peter Tertzakian:
And we’ve been remiss about talking about this because we’re sort of digesting it and thinking, okay, this is interesting because Tesla at the expense of profitability is seeking to grow its market share. And the perception largely is it’s trying to increase the adoption to take market share away from combustion engine vehicles, which is true. But I think the bigger story, which is not talked about as much is the very shrewd business strategy that companies undertake when they have economies of scale is to flush out the other competitors within the electric vehicle space here.
Jackie Forrest:
Oh, I think so all. The competition is coming. GM, Volkswagen, you name it. They are on the-
Peter Tertzakian:
The Korean makers and others. And then there’s a whole bunch of marginal players that do not have the scale to be able to reduce their costs. I mean, if you think about what Elon Musk and Tesla have done over the last just short 10 years, they’ve gone from a Roadster, which was handmade, to 2450 Roadsters approximately were made. To now just this multi-billion-dollar global supply chain that’s a juggernaut really in terms of building vehicles. And when you achieve that kind of economy of scale, you can afford to lower your prices to flush out the competitors who have a much higher cost structure.
Jackie Forrest:
It’s interesting because you say juggernaut, they have it on the infrastructure as well. A lot of these new cars that are going to come out that use the other type of plug, don’t have that great a charging infrastructure. So, he’s got that advantage too, which maybe a lot of new buyers don’t appreciate. But he has a much better product today. And think about that dropping your price in this world. I mean, the price of everything is going up and he’s talking about the Tesla Y dropping like 20% the price. But it’s a bit like the OPEC strategy isn’t it?
Peter Tertzakian:
I was going to say, this is very much what the Saudis have done on a few occasions. The last time they did it was a few years ago where, what was it like in 2014-15 when they saw the newcomer coming in, the American shell players and they said, enough of this, we don’t want any new players taking away our market share. So, with the scale and the low-cost production that they have, they just drop the price by flooding the market and it takes away the high-cost producers.
Jackie Forrest:
The theory is in theory, you could maybe make as much money as you did before. You have to sell many more cars and make less profit per car, but if you sell way more cars, you’re kind of back to the same place.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, it sells way more cars. I mean, this is a classic textbook business strategy where you flush out the competitors by dropping your cost, and then when you have the market share that you want on greater volumes, you can raise your price. Again. I wouldn’t be surprised if oh, give it a year or two, the price of the cars goes up again.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well and market share I think matters in these early days of new products. People look at the Tesla stock price and they look at the valuation multiple and they say, oh, that’s crazy. And it does look crazy. But at the same time, if 10 years from now, 80% of the cars around the world are Tesla, maybe not so crazy, and a strategy, can enable you to get that market share, which enables you to get the scale and then nobody else can compete with you because they can’t get the kind of unit costs that you can buy.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, you can’t. I mean, this is pointing toward a world five years from now where there will only be a handful of electric vehicle makers that survive the cut. And it could be that even some of the larger companies that we are accustomed to won’t cut because they will have invested billions of dollars, but the scale they would have achieved at that time would not be enough to be able to compete because Tesla’s not only going from market share, it’s flushing out its competitors and it’s seeking to expand its advantage of their global economies at scale. I think it’s brilliant.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and they’re also building up the supply chain themselves, so they’re going to get control on more and more of the supply chain of the components that are needed like the batteries and things like that, right?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. So it’s going to be very interesting to watch. As I said, it’s a brilliant strategy and we shall now move on to, well, let’s transition. There’s the transition from combustion vehicles to electric vehicles, but let’s talk about this word transition: energy transition.
Jackie Forrest:
So, our next topic is how investors think about energy transition and investing in space. What are some of their concerns? Are they excited by it? But the first topic is they can’t even figure out what the definition of the word ‘transition’ is. I find that kind of interesting. There’s this whole discussion around green taxonomy and all these different groups are here in Canada. There’s been an initiative going on for several years, but what you’re finding is that there is not a lot of consensus there, so banks and different institutional investors are all publishing what they consider green. And these are some of the big contentious questions. Is natural gas green? Is CCS and carbon capture storage green? If we’re not going to be using oil and gas in 2050, should we be putting money into cleaning it up? Now, that’s one of the topics some groups are saying it isn’t an energy transition if it’s decarbonizing something that won’t be around in 2050. There are definitions like that. What about nuclear? Some people are saying that’s not green. So everyone’s coming up with their definitions.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I think legitimately people are asking, well, are even electric vehicles green? I mean, we’ve got significant mineral resources, critical minerals that go into batteries that come from places in the world that have operations that are not green by any stretch of the imagination, significant emissions from a full-cycle Scope 1 to 3. So yeah, I think the definition of green is 50 shades of green.
Jackie Forrest:
And you and I struggled with this. We tried to do a document not too long ago and define energy transition. So, what we’re going to talk about for this podcast is cleaner green is that kind of near zero type technology. And decarbonization or any transformation are the ones where we’re reducing the emissions from the existing fossil fuel systems.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, I mean, put another way in business, and I like to think about it as the business of energy. There are always innovation challengers who come up with completely new ways of producing a good, in this case, the good is energy. And so the challenger comes in and there’s a whole suite of incumbents that are established, in this case the fossil fuel companies and the conversion makers, engine makers, turbine makers, et cetera, et cetera, that are in that game. And then the incumbents typically innovate to try and keep the challengers out and they can drop their prices, they can improve their products, and in this case, improving the product means making the joules of energy that come from incumbent systems go from what we’ll call, let’s just call them black joules to more green joules by reducing to net zero the emissions that are produced upstream, midstream, downstream.
Jackie Forrest:
And as we know the incumbents, don’t stand still. And over the last few years, many of them have recognized that the world is changing and how can they change their businesses to be part of that future? So that’s the interesting part. The spreadsheets don’t tell you that there’s always a competitive response.
Now, once we got by the definition, we wanted to understand how investors were thinking about clean energy. And so at the end of last year, we surveyed a group of investors and corporations to understand how they were feeling about energy transition investing. We got some really good insights from that. I think one of the biggest insights is that a lot of them, something like 60%, are no longer investing in oil and gas. I mean, we’ve seen that divestment movement, only a minority have moved towards clean energy investing. A lot of them are sort of sitting there trying to understand it all and don’t know what the risks are, don’t know really where it fits in their portfolio, aren’t that comfortable with the technologies and all these new evolving nascent areas. When they used to do energy, it was oil and gas. They had analysts that had studied that for years. They understood that, well, this is all very new. And that’s, I think holding up money sort of flowing into this area.
Peter Tertzakian:
Another way to think about it is that there is over a century of understanding the risk and return paradigm of investing in oil and gas and oil and gas systems. And so there’s just this gut feeling the knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation of analysts of say, what is the risk of investing in an oil field in Alberta versus investing in an oil field in Texas versus offshore North Sea or offshore in Africa for that matter.
And so then you knew how to put it through a spreadsheet and understand the risks and the returns and make a judgment call of where to put your money. Because only until about half a dozen years ago, if you walked into an investor’s office and say, hi, I’m here to talk about energy. Well, de facto, the implication was that I’m here to talk about oil and gas because oil and gas, it’s the dominant sources of primary energy in the world. And now, of course, you walk into somebody’s office and say, hi, I’m here to talk about energy. And the implication is that you’re here to talk about green energy, but with no real clear understanding of what green means.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, and there are so many varieties. Hey, I would say coal too.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, coal’s there too and we don’t follow coal that much. But in terms of instability and public market options investing, oil and gas has way more options to invest in the capital markets than coal.
Jackie Forrest:
For sure. So, there are a lot more opportunities, whether it be public or private. Okay, so that’s a great background that came through in our survey is that majority of respondents aren’t doing oil and gas anymore. However, a bit of kind of paralysis about getting into clean energy because of some of the uncertainties and knowledge that they have today, which isn’t where it would be with oil and gas, and therefore they see it as a higher risk.
Peter Tertzakian:
I think we should back up though. Why is it that 60% are saying, okay, we are not allocating any more funds to oil and gas? And so number one is because movements like the divestment movement and other factors, including the fact that for well over a decade, pretty much oil and gas was not delivering returns. In the meantime, tech, real estate, all these things, this is of course a pre-Ukraine pre-inflation period, were delivering tremendous returns. A host of factors had soured the investment appetite for investing in oil and gas. And then ESG and the directives that have come down from the top of these financial institutions said, okay, we are no longer investing in it. But it’s important to note that many of these institutions were not necessarily funding more oil and gas companies, but they equally were not divesting.
Jackie Forrest:
True, yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
They wanted to hold onto their portfolios to have exposure to the energy economy, which is a significant portion of our global GDP.
Jackie Forrest:
Exactly. And I think we have the numbers here. On average, it’s about six and a half percent of GDP energy as a total and that includes clean energy but we know that’s dominated by fossil fuels today.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, it was 95 plus percent on a dollar basis.
Jackie Forrest:
And then currently, because commodity prices have come up so much over 10% of GDP, so that’s part of why they wanted exposure to that in the past. But I would agree, many are not divesting of the existing holdings, although some are, but not adding new. Now, an interesting thing about clean energy that came back from the survey, I found this quite surprising is that only 8% were skeptical that good returns could be made in green and clean energy. S,o if you wind the clock back to the 2006-to-2011 era, clean tech 1.0, I think you would’ve had the exact opposite: 90% of people say you can’t make money in clean energy. And investors, because of that period, lost a lot of money. They stayed clear of the area. So I found that interesting. They’re not actively investing, but they believe that there is an opportunity to make money here with only 8% saying that they didn’t think that. Right. That means 92%, right, think that there’s the possibility of making good returns here. So that is a major change in mindset, which is positive for green energy and its potential growth.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s a major change in mindset because they’re saying, yes, I think I can make money in clean and green, whatever that means. I need to put a better definition around that because it’s very easy to draw a boundary and a definition around investing in oil and gas, but how do you create a boundary of understanding of investing in a biofuel plant, a battery plant, a solar farm, geothermal, hydrogen. It’s just a universe of investing that is completely different and almost boundless. Yeah. I think there’s money to be made in these areas. I’m not sure which one, and I don’t understand it. So while I think there’s money to be made, I’m not investing.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, true. We’re seeing that in terms of the answers, in terms of who’s actively investing, but I still think that’s positive. It’s like, “Well if I could learn enough and I could understand it better and I think that there’s an opportunity there.” Well, which is the first step, you have to believe that before you invest the time and effort to understand these areas better.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. Well, it’s an opportunity, and I think the sentiment also comes because of the whole simple phrase: follow the money. And there’s so much money from the public purse going towards clean and green, whether it’s the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States or the federal government policies here in Canada. The money is coming in. Investor money to a certain degree has come in. So yeah, follow the money, there’s money to be made.
But again, I don’t understand how to handicap the risk of investing in a biofuel plant versus a battery plant versus a hydrogen facility. So ,if I don’t understand that, the default is to go invest somewhere else out of energy, and that is what’s happening. I’m not saying that investing in energy is completely void. No, some people understand it, but it’s like there’s a lot of investors just on the sidelines watching this, and this is one of the major points of resistance to accelerating the transition. If we don’t get private capital to follow through with public capital, then it’s going to be much more difficult to execute the infrastructural changes that are required to achieve net zero.
Jackie Forrest:
For sure. Yeah, we need that capital, we need a lot of institutional capital to come into the space. Now that’s a good lead into the other question that I wanted to talk about we asked investors to talk about what areas they saw as higher risk in terms of investing in clean energy. So what are some of the top investment risks? And the top two that came back, one was economic viability, and the other was the policy. How much strength and endurance will the policy have?
And then a second set of issues that rated sort of the tear down from that were things like the price volatility of the inputs and outputs as we’ve seen that already this year, the adoption rate and how competitive technologies could lead your investment to not do as well as you thought. I think policy rated higher than all of them, and I found that kind of interesting because policy exists in any area you invest. It’s a huge influence on returns and how companies ultimately do. Why do you think policy is such a concern though when people are thinking about clean energy investing relative to those other areas?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, let’s think about the mechanisms of energy transition. I mean, historically, transitions did not require a lot of policy. Let’s take for example, wind your mind back to the 1800 when electrification first started with the likes of Thomas Edison and others, where there was no policy to encourage people to get off the gas, lighting, kerosene, lighting, et cetera. There was no carbon tax, there were no bans on gas lighting. Thomas Edison and others invented light bulbs and installed the grid. There were many, many challenges, and many incumbent responses to try and keep them out. But at the end of the day, it was just driven by technology and innovation, and many of the world’s energy transitions historically have been driven by technology and innovation. So today to try and get people off of the established incumbents, if we’re trying to force that as a society under the broad umbrella of climate policy, we’re trying to force a very fast transition by historical standards. I mean even by Edison standards, it took 50 years before the light bulb was perfected from 1880 to about 1930.
Today, it’s just driven so much by policy. Because the reality is that in the absence of the carbon issue, oil and gas is a very difficult commodity beat. Going back to the beginning of this podcast, it has massive economies of scale. The cost of producing the joules is very low, it’s very energy dense, and has a lot of the qualities that society wants in terms of reliability and deliverability. And if it were not for the environmental dimension, we wouldn’t even be talking about energy transition because it would be so hard to beat.
So therefore, actually there is an inordinate amount of policy coming into the fray to try and divert to detour people off the established supply chain roots. And because there’s so much policy coming so quickly, now, getting to the punchline here, financial analysts are having a lot of difficulty trying to figure out what does this policy mean? How does it handicap the risk-return mindset that I’ve had for a century? I don’t understand all these different places. And then you layer on top of the policy, which is difficult to interpret. And guess what? It’s the default is: I don’t understand this. I don’t understand whether the policy’s even going to end endure past the next election, so go I’ll invest in, I don’t know, real estate or retail or something else.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I think that in clean energy too, you could argue in almost any industry the policies could change things for you, but in many cases, the policy is needed to make economic returns. If you took it away there, you might even shut in some of these facilities without the policy. Some of them just can’t compete with hydrocarbons. And so you need that policy more than maybe some other areas. I think the second thing is, although there’s been such a rush of new policies like the IRA or the, we just talked about the Canadian new incentives that came out with the 2023 budget, but those are all so new, and because they’re new, they haven’t been around long, people haven’t got comfortable with them. There are lots of unknown details and details do matter in this kind of stuff, so it makes them harder to assess.
Peter Tertzakian:
They don’t have a good gut feel yet, which is why we get sort of back to the discussion of why isn’t the money being invested. That’s why the money isn’t being invested.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, that survey result didn’t surprise me. Every time we go talk to investors about clean energy, we get questions about policy right away. But it got us thinking a little bit about how can we start to, objectively understand policy risk. And one thing is looking, well, how much does this investment rely on policy? Of all the costs, how much needs to be covered by the policy? That’s one metric. We’ve been spending a lot of time looking at different types of investments and thinking about the policy piece and how it contributes to the economy.
But also within each of these policies, we can break it down into some general areas that you need to consider to be objectively comparing one to the other or how they might compare to something you are comfortable with, to give you some sense of how it sits relative to things that you already know. And I think there are three areas that we’ve talked about. One is influence. So first of all, it’s that first thing: how material is it to your economics, and is it mandatory? The more influence it has, it can determine the longevity of it.
Peter Tertzakian:
Sure. I mean, so simplistically, let’s just take the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States where you get production credits. It’s hugely material for say, producing solar panels.
Jackie Forrest:
Exactly.
Peter Tertzakian:
It’s very material. So of course I’m going to take advantage of this and I will build another solar power manufacturing plant and away we go. So this notion of materiality is super important. And we have said on previous podcasts that the clarity of such policy is super important so that the potential manufacturers that want to set up a new plant can take advantage of these without having to grind the spreadsheets too hard and trying to figure out how all the cells should be filled in basically.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. And I mean, you’re talking about the incentive type ones, but it’s also really important, the influence for the penalty type ones. We have a lot of those in Canada. If you don’t follow this, the Canadian Clean Fuel Standard, if you don’t follow it, there are some serious issues for your company. So companies will do everything to meet those requirements for cleaning up their fuels.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. I think as a broad statement, I would say right now, the work that we’re doing would demonstrate that the materiality of some of these policies is very large. In other words, the incentives are there to do things. But the flip side to that is that the policy dependency is very large. So if anything happens that challenges the policy, say governmental change, which takes us to the next subject which is the resilience of a policy. So, there’s uncertainty about whether policies are going to last, and how do you capture that in a spreadsheet?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, exactly. The endurance of them. If a policy’s been around for a few election cycles, if it’s supported by both major parties in a political system, if it’s got support from other stakeholders like industry, if it’s shown that it’s financially sustainable, that, and I think by the way, the IRA, that is a question mark, is it going to be financially sustainable? Then people are more comfortable with it.
If it’s new, there’s a lot of uncertainty. For example, the EPA recently released their new rules on tailpipe emissions, which their estimate that would require 67% of new light-duty cars to be electric by 2032. When the US government tried to bring this out before, there was a lot of pushback from the automakers. If you don’t have buy-in and if it isn’t doable, then there’s more uncertainty if the policy’s going to go forward and whether should you invest based on that policy. Right.
Peter Tertzakian:
So endurance resilience is a huge factor, and it’s the ability to put that into a spreadsheet to figure out the returns and the uncertainties because, at the end of the day, investors’ business is understanding risk and return. That’s the entire job of an investment analyst. What is the risk and how much money I’m going to make handicapped for that risk?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Now, the third important thing that we have to consider when we’re sort of objectively looking across a set of policies is its predictability. So, there are a couple of ways that are, I think quite topical, that predictability is being measured. One is, does it have price volatility? So for example, the 45Q that supports carbon capture storage projects in the US gives a firm price of $85 per ton for restoring carbon for 12 years.
Canada uses a carbon price, it may go to $170 by 2030, but it may not. Now the government with the budget is talking about the Canadian Growth Fund, which maybe will create some certainty to our carbon price through a contract-for-differences mechanism. But if you don’t have that, then you have to say, well, I’m not sure what the price will be, and therefore your investment, you downgrade that price because it’s not certain, and therefore you can’t guarantee that you have that, and it makes it harder to go forward with your project. California’s a great example. The California Low-carbon Fuel Standard went from $170 to about $70 now. Yeah. So imagine if you were trying to figure out what your return on investment was. Yeah, if you used $170, you’d be kind of disappointed when the carbon price is sitting right now.
Peter Tertzakian:
So again, if you’re an analyst trying to assess the risk and quantify that risk, we have carbon prices that are uncertain and we have carbon prices that are dependent upon government and policy. If there’s a new government that’s elected, whether it’s in the United States or Canada, are they going to shred these policies? And so now you look at it through the lens of those analyzing an investment, 2030 is only seven years away. For most of these infrastructure projects, the spreadsheets run 30 years plus.
Jackie Forrest:
For sure. Yeah, like most million-dollar projects.
Peter Tertzakian:
So what do you do for the balance of the 23 years in terms of thinking about how long this policy is going to go on? What’s the vulnerability of those policies? What is the volatility of the carbon price? What carbon price should I assume, given that it’s been all over the map and up and down? We’ve had guests on our program that talk about the uncertainty of the quality of things like carbon credits. Are they worth what they’re worth?
And so, you take all these factors in, and we haven’t even talked about technological risk, and allocator of a few billion dollars of capital is sort of looking at these projects and saying, “Okay, I don’t understand how to handicap this.” And so the default often is to not invest.
Now, I know what some of our listeners are thinking, “Oh but look, Peter, there are billions of dollars going into building all these sorts of things like wind farms and solar farms.” Okay, wind and solar are completely different categories because it’s one of the few areas that’s proven to be able to produce and compete, and we’re getting there with lithium-ion batteries and vehicles. But there are many other areas of the energy landscape and geography, I’ll call it, where the roots are completely dependent upon heavy amounts of policy. They are fraught with opacity and misunderstandings about the impacts of policies on risks, technology, and so on. And so the default is basically to stay away from this stuff.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, I would say, I think you’re right, that’s what we’re seeing in the data. But some people are dipping their toe in and I think there’s a trillion-dollar-
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, people are dipping their toe, and I would say the public is dipping their toe into it because so much of it if you look at it, is funded by the public.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, with these new incentives for sure. I mean, that is one advantage actually of our Canadian system for all its faults is that in the carbon markets, it’s the heavy emitters that are paying the clean companies, not the taxpayer. When it comes to these pure subsidies, it’s coming from the taxpayers.
Peter Tertzakian:
What a lot of investors see is at what point is that investment economically viable, and if it isn’t, and it becomes what’s called a stranded asset, it doesn’t pay for itself. So all that money that went into it becomes, and there’s this perception that green projects are all going to go and they’re all going to come down the cost curve. And when the policies come off or are reduced in terms of their subsidies, then we’re on our way. But I’m going to argue that there’s going to be a lot of green on-green competition in the 2030s and that many of these green projects are not going to survive, they’re going to be stranded assets.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well, is that a reason not to invest?
Peter Tertzakian:
No.
Jackie Forrest:
Or is it a reason to think about very thoughtfully what risks you’re taking and mitigate those risks?
Peter Tertzakian:
No, I think the game is to try and figure out how to clarify the risks so that investors are more inclined to have a better understanding of that risk-return paradigm to be able to justify with greater clarity of the investment and more intelligently place their investments rather than this kind of shotgun approach all over the map. Or worse, let’s follow the herd into certain areas of green energy.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. I mean, I think there’s a huge opportunity. I mean, this is a trillion-dollar, multi-decade opportunity. It’s going to become a big part of our economy. Alright, I’m going to finish this podcast, I don’t do this very often, with a quote. British banker and financier Nathan Rothschild noted that, “Great fortunes are made when cannonballs fall in the harbor, not when violence plays in the ballroom. Rothchild understood that the more unpredictable the environment, the greater the opportunity.” I believe there’s going to be great fortunes made in this energy transition. You do need to have a way to understand a bit better where the risks are, and I think that’s where investors are looking.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, okay, I’m not going to debate that great fortunes are going to be made given all the money that’s going into this space. I think though that the game is not to have a whole bunch of pooled fortunes accumulate at the expense of not optimizing the benefits to society.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, with that, I think we’re out of time. We could keep debating this, right? I think we could, and maybe we’ll talk about it. But thank you so much to our listeners for following the podcast. If you liked this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
Announcer:
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