Jon Powers: Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. I’m the co-founder of Clean Capital and serve as President Obama’s Chief Sustainability Officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation and finance. You can get more episodes@cleancapital.com. Jon Powers: Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. We’ve had an exciting few weeks here at Clean Capital. We recently announced a growth in our investment from Manulife, an additional $500 million that we can put to work into solar assets, storage assets, partnerships with developers, and we’re really looking for folks to work with. So please reach out through clean capital.com as we look to expand our footprint within the renewable industry. Part of the things that I get really excited about is where the future of this industry is going. In today’s conversation is all about that. It’s something that most of us don’t think about every day, which is insurance. Not just insurance on our assets, but how we’re sort of inuring the broader risk of climate. So we have a conversation today with Barney Schauble, who is the chairman of, and the Phil of Climate, who is the chairman of the board at series, an amazing organization, and has been working in this space, both on the risk side and the capital market side for his entire career. And will really explore not only how did he came to climate through that lens, but the importance of thinking about risk and how we can better do it across the market and the work that needs to be done to ensure that we can address these issues overall in the climate crisis. So I hope you enjoy the conversation, and as always, you can get more episodes@cleancapital.com. Barney, thanks so much for joining me at Experts Only. Barney Schauble: Thanks very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Jon Powers: You know, we’re gonna dive into some topics today that, you know, I think folks in the industry may know about but not really understand in terms of insurance and risk and some of the amazing, uh, work you’ve been doing over the last decade plus in this space. But before doing that, I’m gonna go back to you. You grew up, uh, south of Boston. You know, you went to school. Um, where, where along the way did you first, first get interested in insurance? Uh, and what, what, and as, as a son of a former Allstate agent and a brother who works, uh, in the insurance industry, it’s a space that I only pretend to understand. So, you know, what stoked your interest there? Barney Schauble: Sure. Uh, well, you, I would say it wasn’t a necessarily a childhood aspiration. My dad was an English teacher, but it was, it was two things. I mean, one was I was always interested in risk. So we were a big game playing family, you know, risk and monopoly and card game. Right. Um, really everything. And also, uh, some coincidence, uh, some chance itself. So I was actually giving a tour when I was at college, and somebody came up to me at the end of the tour and said, you are a good storyteller. I work in the insurance industry. You should come and work for me. Uh, I had no idea what he did. I didn’t really think about it. But because I’d grown up in Boston, I was going to school in Boston, it occurred to me late, uh, right before my senior year. It might be good to go and get some work experience somewhere other than where I grew up and what I knew. Right. And I wound up being purely by chance for Marsh McLennan, obviously one of the world’s largest insurance brokers. And that’s really where it began. It was just a chance encounter of somebody who met me and thought, this is an industry I should try. And I, it was a job that I could get and go live in New York City and, and try some time on my own before I graduate in college. And that chance encounter led to, uh, really the next 30 years. Jon Powers: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And so when along the, so you’re at Marsh and you’re, you know, working sort of in, in this space, you know, but later on you end up at Goldman Sachs, right. And really end up on the finance side. So how did you make that transition, sort of what led you in that direction? ’cause it’s, I think it’s very few folks will have made a leap like that in their career. Barney Schauble: It was, so I was at Marsh in 1993. Uh, rather than going back to my senior year of college, I took that fall semester and, and worked in New York. That happened to be a time where there was a lot of press about the derivative markets. And this is like behavior that Bankers Trust and Chase and all the others who were advertising all kinds of risk transfer instruments. And then I was walking every day from my shared department in Hell’s Kitchen over to, uh, Marsh’s headquarters in dealing with risk in insurance. And I was quite curious as somebody who didn’t know anything about either market, why are these things, you know, the derivative market and these things, the insurance market, it seems that functionally they work in exactly the same way. You pay somebody some premium and if something goes wrong, however you define it, you get paid some compensation. But like, who defines the line as to what’s on the insurance side and what’s on the finance side, and why don’t these people ever talk to one another or compare notes? And as it happened, there were a few people at the time exploring options on the Chicago Board of Trade that were linked to the cost of natural disasters. And so I went back to college, didn’t I, I went, spoke to one of my mentors at Marsh about this, and he said, that’s an interesting question. You’re the one going back to school. I already have a job. Maybe you should look into this. Right, <laugh>. So I found some academic literature where people are starting to think about, could you take insurance risk and move it into capital markets? Could you actually cross that, that boundary, if you will? And that’s what I wrote my undergraduate thesis on. There were a number of people think about this idea, but they didn’t have any data. How would you have done? So I was able to go back to a part of Marsh, get the data, put it by hand into a database, and figure out is it true that if you invested in insurance risk, a, you could make some money, particularly property catastrophe risk, but b, that it’s not correlated to financial markets. So whatever the market does every day isn’t gonna drive hurricanes or earthquakes or rainfall patterns, and therefore that could be a valuable asset in your portfolio. Right. And as it happens, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs were also exploring this area. So because I was young and cheap and had some expertise in this esoteric area, they hired me into the group at Goldman that was starting to explore this. And that meant that I got to work on literally the first catastrophe bond and a number of the ones after that, some of the early weather derivatives. And so I happened to be in the right place at the right time and have some intellectual curiosity around this particular topic of risk and risk markets and aligning between capital markets and insurance markets. And, and that’s really all I’ve done since then. Jon Powers: And where along that path did you first get interested in the climate piece? Was it driven by risk? Was it driven by environmental passion? Like what was the, the Barney Schauble: Healthcare, it was driven, it was really driven by risk in, in that if you spend your time thinking about how to construct these instruments and talk to people about the risk return of these instruments being natural question that they have is how are you estimating the probability of a hurricane of over a certain strength or of a, a hydroelectric plant getting sufficient water running through its turbines for the year. And so obviously we employed ex internally and externally at Goldman, and then at Nephila, lots of people who understood the underlying science built these kinds of catastrophe and weather models. But then once you start looking at those models, you start looking at, it’s well-known since James Hanssen is testifying in front of Congress in the eighties. Right. You know, I was in high school, that maybe those distributions are changing in their shape, and some are and some aren’t, and how rapidly are they changing? What does that mean? How much more do you need to get paid? And so that led to us thinking much more about that as a family as well from a philanthropic or policy standpoint. Okay. How can you support understanding more of what’s going on in terms of research and climate and capital markets? And one conversation that we would often have with prospective investors is, you are asking me, because I’m coming to you about this catastrophe fund, about the impact of climate change, which is totally natural. We’re 1% of your portfolio at this endowment or at this pension fund. What are you doing to evaluate the impact of climate change on the other 99% of your portfolio, which is not going to be unimpacted by these changes? And often the answer was nothing. You know, they just assumed that it would impact this very small component of their asset allocation, but not really thinking more broadly. And that led my wife and I to think a little bit about who else is in this space, particularly from a nonprofit standpoint. Who else could you support to increase knowledge and education and action in capital markets, which led us to places like environmental defense, which, you know, I know you are involved in with series, which we wound up becoming involved in. And sir frankly called me and said, thanks for the donation. We see that you’re in the insurance business in some variant. We frankly are mystified by the insurance business’ approach to climate change or lack of public discussion around this. Yeah. Could you come and talk to us? Which I did. And that led to more substantive discussions. They asked me to join the board and ultimately asked me to become board chair. So I’ve spent a lot of my time <laugh>, uh, Jon Powers: The call Barney Schauble: For that reason. So, so it was a logical evolution from a professional interest. How do you think about climate risk and think about probability to what are the larger real world implications? And one of the things that I like most about edfs approach and series approach is they’re saying, this is just information that you should use as a company, as an investor, as a government to make better decisions. And it seems very hard to argue that you should ignore that information or not want to use that to make good decisions. Jon Powers: I’m, I’m gonna come back to that, uh, piece for a second, but for folks that aren’t familiar, you know, just for a second, just could just paint the picture of series, series mission of the organization. Barney Schauble: Sure. So Siri started in 1989 after the Exxon Valez Oil spill, really as a coalition of people thinking that environmental responsibility ultimately is related to fiscal responsibility. You know, these are financial matters. And they, their strength then and their strength remains really being a convening force for networks of companies or of investors or of policymakers to say, if you agree that you should be thinking about the impact of climate risk on your operations, then if you work with other like-minded companies or investors, you can actually start to impact people’s behavior. And so, to give you a local example here in California, there are lots of companies in California that are being more mindful about their water usage, partly because they’re concerned about the availability of water over time, given the drought cycles in California. But also partly because if you can use less water to make genes or beer or whatever it might be, your costs go down, you’re more efficient, it’s good for your shareholders. And so when legislation is then being considered in California around water usage, you can take companies that care or investors that care, and they can go speak to legislators and say, this is an important issue for us, uh, as employers, as investors in your district. Here’s the input that we have. So really taking that signal and translating it into capital markets saying, if you’re looking at investing in water utility debt, or if you’re looking at investing in shares or private equity or venture capital, whatever it might be, incorporating climate into your set of decision making factors feels like a logical and prudent thing to do as a fiduciary. Absolutely. Jon Powers: And for folks that that don’t know, series played a really critical role, um, when the Trump administration decided to back outta Paris, it was series, uh, really their leadership that brought together a coalition of folks that to, uh, to really grow their commitment. I think that was a transformational moment for the climate fight because it took away the responsibility of the government and said, we are as private sector are gonna step up regardless, uh, and really drove some significant change, which is, you know, uh, was a really monumental moment for those of us who cared about these issues. Barney Schauble: Absolutely. We have a copy of that in our office here. They sort of, we are still in Yeah. Poster put together where companies said, we can’t control what any individual administration does, but we as global companies believe that this is something that we are going to continue to care about. And, you know, that’s inspirational. Jon Powers: Absolutely. So I’m gonna go back just to insurance for a second. And then I think most folks that listen to this, you know, I think about, I think my dad, who was an Allstate agent, right? Who was doing, uh, uh, home and auto and uh, that whole spiel. Uh, but most folks in the industry think about insurance around their panels, right? Or ensuring their facilities. What you guys are doing is a much bigger play, right? Is like looking at, uh, larger trends and making financial play betts on either reinsuring those trends, uh, or, you know, um, I imagine some betts around those trends. Like how do you guys, could you just talk about what that market looks like in terms of, would, would you categorize it as reinsurance or just categorize it as sort of capital markets insurance? Like how would you sort of categorize that bucket? Barney Schauble: That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of, uh, focus on specific terminology. Is this insurance? Is it reinsurance? Is it hedging? Is it an option? Is it a swap? But if you sort of step back and say, ultimately you’re talking about risk transfer, you’re talking about right, how do you think about what risks you can control yourself and what risks you cannot. The rest of it is almost packaging or sort of formatting. You can create a security, you can buy an insurance contract. But the way that our business evolved at Nephila, which you know now part of Markel really had three phases to it. And each of those phases started with an unmet demand for capacity. So the earliest phase, the best example is U S A a a well-known large mutual in, in the United States covering retired military officers or military officers. I’m, I’m when they retire. Yeah, there you go. When they retire, they largely go to two places to Texas or to Florida. Right? Uh, good weather and, and you know, other attractions to them. You don’t want to not cover a client who’s been a client for a long time just because they decided to move to Texas or to Florida or to North Carolina. But at some point you’re stacking up hurricane risk, you know, one policy holder on top of another. So in the end, reinsurance exists simply because some insurance companies can’t diversify away from a concentration of risk in their portfolio. You have lots of policy holders here in California, lots of policy holders on the coast of Texas. At some point, you as an insurer need to buy protection against an event where all of your policy holders or a large number, it could be impacted at the same time it’s just insurance for insurance companies. Yeah. And what was happening in the 1990s was a realization with the advent of computer modeling and some large events that impacted the US and the UK that maybe the industry was unable to digest the full amount of catastrophe risk in certain places like Texas, Florida, Japan, California. And so they were looking for a way to augment that capacity. ’cause even reinsurers need to diversify their exposure, right? So even the large Berkshire Hathaway, Swiss Re, Munich Re at some point they say, I’m full in Florida, I’m full in Texas. And so is there a role to find another home for that risk? And that’s really what we worked on with the original catastrophe bonds was saying, could you create a security where you take that risk in Texas and you take it to a pension fund in Japan, or a pension fund in Australia, or a pension fund in England and say, you don’t have any of this risk, you’ll be well paid for it. It’s not correlated to your market. And we’re just augmenting the capacity in the existing reinsurance market. Now, whether that’s in the form of reinsurance or the form of a bond or the form of a swap, ultimately what matters is if something very bad happens, you need capital to flow to U S A A so it can pay, right? Its. And one of the things that our investors always liked about that proposition was it’s a rare non-zero sum game in financial markets. And if you buy Apple and I sell Apple stock, one of us will be right. One of us will be wrong. Right? Whereas here, you know, U S A doesn’t want there to be a massive hurricane in Texas. Either they’re not happy to hit this in the same way that you’re not happy if you hit your auto insurance policy or your home insurance policy, but you do need at that time some injection of capital to help to, you know, provide some more resilience, right? So that was the first piece was catastrophe risk. The second piece is we started looking at other marketplaces where there weren’t great answers for risk protection. If you are a hydroelectric plant, if you’re a solar facility, as, as you all know very well at clean capital, if you are a city that spends a lot of money, if you have several 100 degree days in a row, uh, if you are a farmer in India and you’re concerned about the rain and the monsoon season, those are all similarly quantifiable natural hazard risks. And often there isn’t protection right now, whether that’s an insurance contract or a derivative contract available to you. And if you run a ski resort, if you run any other business where the, it’s not necessarily physical damage, but it’s fluctuation of your costs or fluctuation of your revenue, depending upon weather, is that a contract that you can structure and again, offer some resilience. And so that was the second phase of a lot of what I was doing within Nephila was trying to develop a, a market in weather risk, which would stand next to that market in catastrophe risk. And then lastly, and I know you’ve had K w H and others on, on the podcast in the past, as we thought, as we think about decarbonization, there are a lot of other risks that come with the creation of new facilities, biofuel plants, solar facilities, batteries, where in the end you want to borrow money to create new infrastructure. That bank that’s providing that money is concerned about the variability of cash flows coming out of that infrastructure, right? Whether again, that’s a hedging product or whether that’s an insurance product or reinsurance product, they don’t necessarily care so much about the packaging, but they care about how do I re get that volatility and get somebody else to take that volatility in a way that I then can be more comfortable making the loan. As we think about the scale of what needs to be built and the volatility of cash flows around those assets, there’s a real opportunity there for what we think of as sort of green insurance or reinsurance there as well. So in each one of those cases, it really was just looking at the market and saying, there is an unmet demand for some kind of risk transfer capacity, and perhaps our investors can be paid to provide that answer. Jon Powers: So when you know this, you know, the recent announcements in California, right? With State Farm pulling out with the wildfire, uh, wildfire insurance in the area, and I think we’ll begin to see much more of these announcements in the near future. Two questions. One, is it that’s driven because they’re not getting the reinsurance backing anymore to be able to, to, to double down on that. And then two, do you guys actually see an opportunity there to come in and, and, um, provide some type of product to those firms? Like talk me through sort of the thought process there. Barney Schauble: Yeah, it’s a complicated question and certainly a sensitive Jon Powers: One. I only ask complicated questions, Barney, Barney Schauble: <laugh>, <laugh> Jon Powers: We’re dealing with as a Barney Schauble: Reget of Northern California. It’s, uh, it’s a topic that, uh, we spent a lot of time thinking about. So when we think about, uh, the basic risk model, there’s two engines, if you will, to any risk model for insurance, uh, in the property space. One is the events themselves, are those events or what could ha what has happened historically? What could conceivably happen? How is that changing? And there’s no doubt that with wildfire that has changed, right? It’s a fundamentally different risk as we’re seeing again, uh, this year based on the fires in Canada than it was five or 10 or 25 years ago. Just the moisture in the air, the dryness, the amount of accumulated tin that’s, it’s just physically different than it was 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. So that’s one piece of the equation that State Farm and others are considering. But the second is also the assets that could be impacted by those events. And if a big event happens and it hits a swamp, nobody caress. If it hits glass houses lining Biscayne Bay, then it really does matter and glass doesn’t perform particularly well, right? Right. So again, what you’re seeing is the building a very high value assets in these riskier places, and the value of those assets is also changing relatively rapidly with inflation and replacement cost. Unfortunately, insurance at a state level, at a homeowner level is not really a free market. The prices aren’t allowed to fluctuate to reflect the real level of risk. And that means two things happen in most states where you have property catastrophe risk. One is that prices are effectively capped as to how much they can change every year. So even if your house is worth twice as much as it was before and is twice as risky, the homeowner’s insurance company can’t typically show up and say, oh, by the way, I’ve redone the math and you have to pay four times as much as you did last year. Right? It’s regulated. Yeah, yeah. At 7% increase, and therefore that’s a problem for you at a local property level. So it means that the riskiest properties are effectively underpriced. And what that also means then is all of the lowest risk properties are naturally overpriced because insurance companies have to say, I can’t charge enough for this glass tower in Galveston, so I’m gonna charge much more than I need to for a brick fortress in San Antonio so that I can in the state of Texas, actually make up the premium volume that I need for the aggregate risk portfolio. And so when you look at the decisions that have been made by local companies, it is partly a function of the changing event risk, what is happening climatologically, but it’s also partly a function of the changing asset exposure, or often that data has been outdated or poor, or doesn’t reflect the actual physical characteristics of that asset. So part of the withdrawal is the fact that if you can’t take that risk and you can’t reinsure that risk, the only real option that you have is to try to shrink your footprint. We’ve looked at that risk wildfire in California in particular. There also is the possibility that the real price for that risk may be high enough that that company or that business isn’t going to pay that risk. Right? So, you know, we often would say over the course of the history of nephila that there isn’t necessarily a bad risk, there’s only a bad price. But if you went to a new hotel in Napa that was worth $10 million and said, you’re probably gonna have a fire every 10 years, therefore we’re gonna charge you more than 10% of the value of your hotel every year, right? They pay that. They probably can’t pay that, by the way, they didn’t plan on paying that when they built the hotel. Right. And once to two problems, one of which is there’s no term structure in insurance. There is no 1, 2, 5, 10 year price as there is in so many other markets, which means that people make decisions based on poor information. Right. But, you know, secondly, you have an issue of that winds up falling on taxpayers. The state itself, whether it’s the California Fair Plan for wildfire, whether it’s citizens in Florida, whether it’s the North Carolina or Massachusetts or Texas or Louisiana State Wind Pool winds up taking this risk because they wanna provide some protection to homeowners. And ultimately those are not sophisticated risk taking institutions. And that just means that if you live in that state, you’re ultimately subsidizing bad risk decisions because the state itself has gotten into the insurance business. And that is often where we are, right? The share of where risk actually goes. It’s often winding up now on state balance sheets. Jon Powers: Hmm. So I’m gonna go back. You, you, you talked about your, your firm a few times and just gimme a little background. So when you were, you know, what led you to first Bermuda and then nla and folks that aren’t familiar with a little history of like why, what, where the company name came from. Barney Schauble: Sure. So, uh, so I moved from Marsh to Goldman in 1996, and we executed the first catastrophe one at the end of 1996. And in 19 97, 2 childhood friends, one worked at an investment bank, one worked at an insurance broker, had the idea this catastrophe bond market seems interesting. They actually had previously invested in some of the options that I mentioned on the Chicago Board of Trade. Maybe investors aren’t going to want to make their own decision about catastrophe bonds. Maybe they’re gonna wanna hire a manager who actually understands insurance, which sounds very logical today. But at the time there were three bonds, so it was a little early <laugh> to set up an asset manager, but they, uh, created a company and went out to raise money from investors and said, we think this is an asset class that is going to grow, and we are going to be the first professional manager in that asset class. So they started in 1997, they started investing in 1998. We got to know them. We were the first people at Goldman selling these instruments. They were the first people buying these instruments. So we were each delighted to meet one another in this marketplace. Right? A few years went by and their thesis started to become true, which is more of these securities came into the market. I left Goldman, went to work, uh, in the weather space, which was interesting to me at another company. And they called me and said, we are leaving our current home a big insurance broker. We’re going to become independent. We want you to move to Bermuda and join us as a third partner. And so ultimately in 2004, that’s what I did. Yeah. It was still, you know, a single digit number of people and less than a billion dollars in assets. But I moved to Bermuda and we grew the firm over the course of the next six years. And then I moved here to California in 2010, uh, for a variety of reasons. But the Nephila name comes from the fact that when they set up the company in Bermuda, when it became independent, they needed something. Most hedge fund names are either like a color and a, and a standard geo geological or natural formation that seemed very generic. Yeah. <laugh> name named after the founders themselves. They aren’t those kinds of people and or something else, which is related to the story. And so one of their wives was actually looking at Bermuda and hurricane risk. There are two stories in Bermuda folklore, if you will, around how you can predict when hurricanes are coming on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Right. One of which is there’s a spider locally that usually builds its web high up, but when hurricanes are coming builds its web closer to the ground. And that spider is called Nilla ez. That’s its Latin name, Nilla, weirdly. It’s still available as a name, uh, for investment funds at that time. Yeah. <laugh>. Jon Powers: And they went, Barney Schauble: The other story, or the other technique that’s used locally is you actually have a tube of shark oil, and if the shark oil gets cloudy, then hurricanes are coming. And if it’s clear, you’re fine. But shark oil capital didn’t seem like a great idea. Jon Powers: No, yeah. That would echo. Well, I think <laugh>, well, Barney, look, I could talk to you all day, uh, about this stuff. I’m fascinated by it. But I, I do wanna sort of step, one of the things we do, uh, I like to think about is where is, where are things going and what’s the world gonna look like in 2030? Um, if all goes right, right. And we are, you know, policy, technology, finance, these are all aligning in a way that we’re moving towards being able to at least address the climate crisis. I don’t know, use term solving it. ’cause I’m not sure we’re ever gonna solve it, but we can address it, you know, in, in specifically in the space that you work in. Like what does the world need to look, what needs to get done for us to be in 2030 looking back and saying, you know, these last seven years were, uh, an acceleration of the stuff, the answers that we care about, and now we understand climate risk, we’re putting this across our portfolios. You know, there are, um, you know, we’re, we’re properly risking the, the, the, the, the businesses we’re building in, in Southern California. Uh, and we’re doing it, you know, in the outer banks, right? Like what, what needs to happen, sort of it to help accelerate, uh, that adoption. Barney Schauble: Sure. So I think the key is ultimately, as you say, how do you think about risk and how do you price for risk? And that if you follow that simple proposition that leads you to a couple of different places. So if you think about that from an insurance market context, you want people to have real information about risk and be able to charge a price that reflects that to aid in better decision making. If you’re gonna build a building and you’re going to put it at the top of a hill, and I’m going to build the same building and put it at the bottom of the hill where we know that water will ultimately be in the next five or 10 years, that forecast should be considered in the pricing of that building or that mortgage or the insurance to protect that building. I should be discouraged from building it next to the river. And you should be encouraged to build it up the top of the hill. And right now, it’s not clear that in the mortgage market or the insurance market, they’re looking ahead that two or three or five or 10 or 30 years in a way where the tools do exist to do that. Right? They may not be, but at least they’re directionally accurate. So I think that’s one is that a basic level of decision making, it has to be based on better information that leads them to a question of who caress about this? Who makes this happen? And to the extent that you have large pension funds in America, and certainly around the world who are saying, when I deploy my capital, I want to start thinking about is the climate risk being reflected? That matters a lot because if they send that signal to their managers or to the companies that they engage with, ultimately that’s going to move capital in the right direction. And then that leads to policy, which is, if you look at, for example, the policy that’s being proposed by the s e C around disclosure is saying, these are questions that you need to answer as a company. Investors and perhaps stakeholders or or others are going to want to know, how do you think about this question? And your answer may be, we don’t think about it, we don’t care. It’s irrelevant to us, we’ve already solved it. Or the answer may be, here’s some detailed metrics, or here’s what we’re doing within our operation. There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer, but not considering the question, it doesn’t really feel like that’s a useful step in terms of where we need to go. So pricing is important, policy is important, but then also enabling new technology is important. A lot of the discussion around the insurance industry in particular is around existing risk. How do you think about pricing and repricing? There hasn’t been as much discussion around the opportunity associated with the massive solar build out that clean capital is part of right. Mission change in manufacturing practices to be more closed loop based. You know, there are many other changes that are already happening at a private sector level where equity has gone into those markets, public or private or venture equity debt has gone into those markets, infrastructure lending or green bonds. But there hasn’t yet evolved a complete risk market, whether that’s insurance policies or others forms of hedging to allow people to create as much of this new infrastructure, as much of this new movement as possible. And that’s a real opportunity for an industry that’s been thoughtful about helping people take risk, is to say, how do you enable the huge moves that we need to make globally in the interest of decarbonization? So there is a real opportunity there. It’s not just about the changing nature of risk, it’s also about the changing nature of people’s risk capacity needs. Jon Powers: Interesting. Jon Powers: So I’m gonna take you back to, um, Boston. You’ve come back from your summer in New York or your, your semester in New York, and you’re wrapping up about to head off to, um, you know, probably back to New York, right? To to your future career. You’ve finished your thesis, uh, which it’d be fascinating to go back and reread now that you’re, uh, down the road and you, you could sit down and have a beer with yourself. What piece of advice would you give yourself? Barney Schauble: Well, other than, you know, please don’t unveil your Boston accent unless you really, really need to <laugh>. Uh, nobody has ever asked to hear more of that, that I still have access to it, but it rarely comes up <laugh>. Jon Powers: That’s hysterical. Barney Schauble: Looking back, is making decisions that reflect over longer arcs of time. You know, there’s a famous Bill Gates quote about people all overestimating what they can do in the next year and underestimating what will be achievable in the next five or 10 years. And I think that’s definitely true. As I look back on the past few decades of my career, it not necessarily just being patient, which is obviously a, an important quality to, to aspire to, but just recognizing that change is difficult and change takes time. And that if you make decisions based on, well, what will I have wanted to do three years from now, or five years from now, or 10 years from now, that may lead you to better decisions or decisions that are at least grounded in better context than if you are just responding to what’s in front of you at that point in time. Right. My partners, you know, were a good example of this in starting the fill up. You know, they believed over a long enough time period, if you follow the logic, there should be an asset manager in this space. It took a long time, and if you looked up a year after, two years after and said, well, maybe this isn’t working and you moved on to something else, you know, a lot of bad, a lot of good ideas die in early death in that way if you’re unwilling to persevere. So that’s the advice that I would give myself over, uh, Sam Adams at that point in time. <laugh>, Jon Powers: That’s great advice. Barney Schauble: Thinking about these things that you think about and look at series A d f and how they’ve changed, or you look at the policy framework in the United States and how that’s changed, but just think about longer arcs of time rather than, you know, our tendency, which is this season or this year, or this earnings forecast. Jon Powers: Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, when we started Clean Capital, right at the time, you know, we were, we, it was hard to look out past any of your nose, right? Because you were trying to make sure you could function as a company. But we believed in the broader trend that, in the direction the country is heading. And now, you know, as of, you know, as of last week we just announced we put a billion dollars out the door into assets in 26 states. If you’d have told me that in 2015 when we were starting the company, I’m not sure I would’ve believed you, but, you know, and I feel like we’re just getting going. ’cause the, the alignment of where the industry’s going, where the market’s going, where finance is going, um, it’s, it’s an exciting time for the stuff that we care about. So Barney, thank you so much for joining me. Barney Schauble: Absolutely. Thanks very much. No, I, I think that’s a great example. There are many of them out there. Uh, but I do think that persevering is, is worthwhile. So thanks very much for having me on. Always a pleasure to catch up. Jon Powers: Absolutely. And you can always get more episodes@cleancapital.com. Thank you to Colleen Young, our producer, for helping to as always put this together. Uh, we’ve had an exciting, uh, win here at Clean Capital as we’ve announced a new investment from Manulife, speaking of insurance, uh, as we’re, we’re continuing to, to grow as a company and we’re always looking for partners and opportunities and, uh, to, uh, be on the ground putting assets, uh, into, uh, in, into the, into the market in terms of solar storage and hopefully more assets to come. So thank you for being a part of Experts only, and look forward to continuing the conversation.