YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Steyer

lines on the record: 89
first: 2023-03-06
most recent: 2023-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Parts of people and the lack of those positive parts is a huge problem. Counting too much the traditional measures of intelligence and success and isn't there something much broader than that that includes a lot of Counted in those tests and those measures that actually reflect much more your contribution as a person.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that I've learned is the way that we used to define intelligence is somewhat relevant but way too narrow. It's a cliche to say that there are a lot of different kinds of intelligence, and I think that's true, but I think more than that, intelligence itself is overrated, that the ability to put yourself and other people's places, that doesn't show up on your SAT. The ability to look into the future realistically doesn't show up on your S18. An internal sense of decency that doesn't show up on your SAT. And I think that the way that American society and including me looked at your measurable scores was disproportionate. As I said, I think it matters, but I also am much more aware of the value of different positive.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm 100% against the debt bon. I'm like, mom, they get 17 appeals. It gets mitigated and litigated. She goes, that's a bunch of baloney, a bunch of the evidence in there is baloney. And they get railroaded and there are a bunch of people on death row, who I'm pretty sure innocent. I'm thinking, oh man, what a soft-headed, chuckle-headed lady my mom is dead right. No one was saying. And she did that over and over where she just cut through all the jargon and all of the cant and all of the fake sanctimonious stuff to what's the truth. And I just really appreciate that.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my parents were ridiculous sticklers for honesty and were very judgmental about it so that if you were dishonest with my parents, it was like a life sentence that was unforgivable fact. But the other thing that I find in thinking about my parents, especially my mom, she saw something through society's baloney. I said to my mom in 1989, my mother's very religious. So I said, mom, do you believe in the death penalty? And I knew what she was going to say. She was going to say, don't believe in the death penalty because I believe in the sanctity of life and the redemption of the human soul. And that's not an appropriate way for someone who loves God to think. She goes, not only with that, I said, why not? She goes, because I don't think they're guilty. I think that a bunch of those people on death row are innocent. And once you've killed them, then there's no coming back. You've committed murder yourself as a society.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got out of there in 15 minutes. And I moved to the West Coast two weeks later. I was unable to see how they would see me. To me, I had a job. I'd done a good job for them. I was going to do something different. I wasn't rejecting them. I thought, in fact, we were going to end up being Claude Allis, which, by the way, we ended up being close allies. But it took five years before they accepted me back in the fold. And then over time, I was Goldman's biggest clearing customer. And we were back to being what I originally thought they'd do on day one.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaving Because I had thought that it was going to be very, very friendly and that they would think he's going to be a future client. He's done a good job for us. We're personal friends. This is a natural thing to have happen, but we'll continue to work together and we'll be close allies. That's honest to gosh, what I thought. So when I went in to say I was going to leave, I said, look, I understand that I'm responsible for half the positions in this department. And I don't want to screw you in any way. So if you want me to stay for six months and work out my positions, happy to do it, whatever's going to make it okay for you guys, I'm going to do. And the guy goes, do you think you could be out of here in 15 minutes? 15 minutes? Let me ask you a question. Do I get to say goodbye to my friends? He goes, no, I want you out of here in 15 minutes. That gives you time to go back to your desk, get your stuff, and get out of here.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me say this in terms of people who are professional counterparts or partners for me, the three people who were in senior positions and really impacted me were Bob Rubin, Warren Hellman, and David Swenson, who was the head of the Yale Investment Office. In terms of the people who really shape the way I think about work and what you're trying to accomplish through your work life, it's really my father and my maternal grandfather, both of whom were incredibly serious about their careers, incredibly serious about integrity, and incredibly determined to have an impact broadly within their chosen field. When I think about what I've been trying to do, I've been trying to be half as good as they were.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who assume the status quo is forever. I remember in 2012 talking to a guy who ran a Fortune 25 company and had run another Fortune 25 company. And he asked me how I thought that the electricity pie chart would change over the next 20 years, so by 2030. And I gave him, I thought, a stock response was basically a lot more renewables, a lot less coal, natural gas probably stays the same. And he looked at me and said, I don't think that any of the pie slices will change by a percent. And I said, you could be right. But if that's true, that's the end of the world. So I'm assuming you're wrong. Just assume the status quo is forever, and that was his basis. Come on, man. That's a 0% probability”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the investment that I like the most is the one where you look at it and say that makes absolute, complete, convincing sense. And no one else believes. That is my idea of real conviction at odds with accepted wisdom. That's my idea of a great investment.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sports, I get more than an hour of aerobic exercise virtually every day, more than 365 times a year. And a lot of it's tennis. Occasionally it's mountain climbing, which I've gotten much slower at to my distress. Some of it's water skiing, but I feel like that's the thing that I just get a huge kick out of.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could influence other ranches in a way so that animals were raised shame would be net much healthier, would restore the souls. There's a whole bunch of positives through a gender vague.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ted, I'm shocked to hear you think I'm competitive. Look, we don't want to do anything that doesn't have impact, but we believe that in order for it to scale, it has to be successful economically. My competitive feelings about returns haven't changed in IOM, not in Iona. There's the substantive change that we can make in specific companies and specific outcomes and specific impacts. Okay. And then there's the point we're making. This is how it has to go, and you're going to get paid for doing it. So even if you don't care one bit, if you don't do it, you're an idiot. Our family has a regenerative cattle range. We wanted to prove you could raise cattle in a way that net sequesters carbon. And it's part of a much broader regenerative agriculture movement in the US and around the world. Our goal in that always was to develop techniques that other people would want to adopt and do better at. We couldn't change the world from our ranch, but hopefully.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world you lived in Farallon to some extent, particularly in the public market side, is always thought of as a zero sum game. And as you're espousing the importance and necessity of making these investments, it has a degree of a positive sum element to it. I'd love to hear how you think about the nature of competition, how your competitive drive, if it all has shifted in your day-to-day investing.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investments in the transition to make it happen faster and to ride the wave of demand that is that transition. But obviously there are people who don't believe that. I spoke to one big pension manager who said my best investments this year were in oil and gas. And I was trying to be polite so I didn't mention that his worst investments for the past 10 years, including that year, were oiling gas.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think now it gets a spectrum, Ted. I'll give you the example. In the United States, if you talk to the huge asset gatherers, the Black Rocks, the Goldmans, if they get a new investment client so they come in and they're going to have an investment visor and they're going to allocate their portfolio, 10% of them want a so-called ESG overlay. In Europe, in Germany, the same number is 90%. So it depends how much from a societal standpoint people have bought into this is a must-have. And so we see it in various ways. It's all shades of bay that the people who are like, I absolutely insist on. And I say now, one of the things I say is having a fossil free portfolio, the divestment movement. I say, this is not the time for divest. This is the time for invest. The answer here is making profitable.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to go to Wall Street conferences in 2012, 13, 14, 15, and say you need to take climate into account. This is going to change the world. It's going to change the investment world. I was like the two-headed man at the circus. People wanted to hear what I had to say because he's just so weird. We had previously thought that he was remotely intelligent, but I think we can prove to our own satisfaction that that is definitely not true if it ever was.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's an abulient market, everything's gone great. People are fat and happy. It's hard to invest money. People are always going to complain about something.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of people, young people want to work in a climate response. First of all, I think this is going to affect every single person on this planet. So it's not like I'm saying, oh, this is going to affect my grandchildren. No, this is going to affect me. This is affecting me today. But I think young people have worried about this and thought about it for longer. And it's more in their bones that they cannot escape this. So responding to it is part of having a meaningful life and not including this way of thinking for the last 200 years has got us where we are. I think the next generation understands that participating in the solution to this is an absolutely meaningful thing to do with your professional life. And they want their professional and personal life. So that's one thing that is a huge advantage for us. Any investment business when you're starting, if it's a really terrible market, so people are depressed, outcomes are bad, people have lost money. It's hard to raise money.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's become clear that that's actually an unusual combination. You don't need to be a magician. You need to be a dedicated high integrity professional. I'm a real believer. I do think you have to have the intelligence and judgment, but basically the old saying, the harder I work, the luckier I get. You are going to have to do the work so that when the real opportunity arrives, you know it's the real opportunity. Whereas if you haven't done the work, it's just another opportunity and you don't understand what creates real opportunity. To me, it's, can you find, organize, ally yourself with, partner with, team up with those kind of people in a coherent way who can execute a strategy and then have a strategy that makes sense? That hasn't changed.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, Ted, I don't see it as materially different. When I was under the age of 25, I felt that there were an infinite number of people who are very hardworking, very smart, very honest, and very dedicated to the task at hand. As I've gotten older, starting with, say, 26 in one day.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World, there are going to be times when it just stinks and you're going to have to get through that. And that's just the way it goes.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are leaving the companies overwhelmingly important. You guys used to do that at Yale. I mean, you had to figure out who are these people? What are they going to do in 1987? What are they going to do in a crisis? Because for sure there's going to be a crisis. And early stage companies, you know it's not going to follow to their plan. Of course, it's not going to follow to their plan because the world's going to change. The opportunities change your capabilities change. The demands change, the risks change. And so when you think about early stage companies, that's the environment they're in. You think there are these immutable things that you will never do. But the truth is, it's really about leadership and being able to adapt to a changing environment and take advantage of that looks bad to you, but actually that's really good for you. So when you think about young companies, the question is, are you going to have a team of people with leadership that can basically change, adapt to the changing?”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is still a mathematical formula in thinking about probabilities and success. And it's still about foreseeing the future. The way the returns happen in an early stage company where there's much higher chance that the company won't work, but if it does work, the returns are completely different as well. To me, this has always been about making judgments about what is likely to happen. And a lot of times understanding the”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love to think about the world in terms of alpha and beta. The beta is what you're talking about. How does the impact of all the different macro environmental influences change the returns? And how much is determined just by the success or lack of success of the specific company? Beta's always going to move around and we know that. There's going to be slower growth out of China, faster growth out of China. There's going to be higher interest rates. There's going to be lower interest rates. There's going to be budget deficits. There's going to be hopefully smaller budgets deficits. I think that's a law of economics, but I guess we're going to find out if that still holds. But this is about alpha. I was talking about plastics. That has to get solved. Sorry. If you look at the impact of two degrees Celsius, what that even means, these are problems that we cannot allow to fester.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First class. You can't do it. And so in all of this, there's a question of how much can we do at any one time. We haven't decided not to do infrastructure. We've decided we can't do infrastructure right now because we don't have the tame and the strategy where we go, okay, that's a strategy that makes sense and we can execute the heck out of it. So there's a lot of investment business questions here that I find incredibly interesting and I find measuring the impact in a discernible way, knowing that it's going to be imperfect and it's going to change but that you can do is also critical. There's a task that will take more of until this Friday to complete.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say that, Ted. I'd say if you think about it, put on your Yale investment office hat for one second. We probably did 20 financial services startups within the context of Farallon. We did a whole bunch of new markets. As I said, we'd moved to new markets, new ideas, new verticals. Ted and Tom can't go. Okay, now we're in the infrastructure business in Honduras. Excuse me. Do you speak Spanish? Because last I checked, your Spanish is very, very bad. And by the way. Do you know anything about infrastructure? Because last I checked your idea of infrastructure as your garden hose. You can only do an investment activity if you have a great investment team. So you and I may really want to invest in something, but unless we have a team that can be leading, not okay, but outstanding, fantastic.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those is going to be a huge determinant of what the result of this is. This is global warming. The United States has 330 million people out of 8 billion. You can do the math.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in open air market in Lagos, Nigeria, they have their own diesel generators. In each stall. And it turns out that a diesel generator, which of course was fossil fuel, and it also emits a lot of, not particularly healthful emissions from burning the diesel, but also is obviously a big emitter of CO2. Cost 10 times as much per kilowatt hour as solar. It's not just the transition for us. We're thinking, oh, yeah, the transition from my internal combustion engine to a NeV. But the transition around the world may be very different than the one for people in the United States of America because we have multiples of the GDP per capita of a lot of countries. And a lot of those countries are going to be developing in many ways the kinds of lifestyle that we already have. And so how that goes.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, if you look at India, they're going to have five times as much electricity in 2050 as they have now. The infrastructure that is built to deliver that electricity to the world's most populous country, what gets built happens to matter quite a bit. I think the DRC has about 100 million people, the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10% of those people have access to electricity. So that means there's probably going to be a lot of electricity generation that's developed in the DRC over the next 30 years. And what the source of that is.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The shareholders meeting and cast him into a fiery furnace? Or is there a way to do this into a way so you have real impact? Because in the public market, if you own a thousand shares of IBM or I own a thousand shares of IBM, that doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference. How do we make a difference in that context to push public markets where the people generally have very diffuse shareholders? Is there a mechanism, an investment mechanism, where you make more money and influence the pace of the transition, which is both critical? There's so many different places here, and I haven't even talked about infrastructure in India and the DRC. How does that really work from an investment standpoint? How is that an investment? Why do 90% of those people not have electricity? Because people didn't think it was going to get an investment return to build it. We're not doing infrastructure, but building infrastructure around the world.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic pieces you have to win in the marketplace. How do you win in the marketplace when you do it retrofit? But Ted Cites, that dirty little bum, refuses to do retrofits. For it to really happen, you have to be able to prove that you're going to be richer if you do the retrofit than if you don't do the retrofit. And how are you going to make that happen? You can see the different stages of capitalism. I've talked about deployment near-in, improvement of tech, creation of new tech. There's also a question of how are we going to influence our public market management to try and make this part of their successful toolbox so that they're doing what I'm saying, which is acknowledging that every decision has a climate impact. And that has to be taken into account, and it's part of their responsibility. Do I have to go, say, if Ted SITES doesn't do this, we're going to vote him out?”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to do, a lot of companies don't succeed in that for new ideas that really answer or solve a real world problem, way that the world needs it to be solved. I always say it's a must-have business. If I go into your office, it's something you must have, not something that'd be great if we had it. No, that never works. Must have. So that's something we're also very interested in. Beyond that, one of the big questions is, what are we going to do with our existing buildings and infrastructure? What are we going to do? They emit a lot of CO2. Why is anyone ever going to fix that up? Because it costs money to fix us. So why are you going to do it? Are we going to have to pass laws that say that you can't do X, you can't do X.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first stage is when it's an idea with an entrepreneur seed stage, most often pre-revenue. That is an area that we've done some working in and some investing in for the last over a year and a half. And that's something that I'm really interested for. Where the future is looking, where the ideas are coming. And if you want to understand the trajectory of the business climate response, understanding the new ideas that are coming up from the smartest people is really helpful. It also can be, as in all investment areas, if you're doing it with really great people, you can get very good returns. But that's very early. The next stage is when you have a company that has revenue, it has a product market fit, but the question is, can you take it from very modest beginnings and really scale it so that it has real impact? Okay, we're very interested in that too. That's something where it's very.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something which people have worked on for decades and they feel as if there have been a lot of strides there, probably 12 companies in America working on this. They've raised a bunch of money. I invested in one in 2006, just to put it in context. And I think people feel as if they can break through on the engineering in the next 10 years, then that would have real impact because then you have to cite, build plants that takes a really long time. I'm sure there'll be a lot of pressure to do it faster. takes a long time. It would have real impact starting in 2040. Look, if we aren't well on the way to solving this problem by 2040, we're going to be in a very tough spot, to say the least. There's different stages of deployment, improvement, creation.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's deployed, then there's technologies where we can see here's the technology, it's got to come down in price, it's got to win in the marketplace, you need a lot of reps to get that to happen, but you can see a decline curve to cost and where it's going to cross over with the journey competitor and be cheaper, better, faster. So that if you're just a consumer and you don't know anything, it's cheaper, better, faster. Why would I not buy that? Oh, by the way, it's also cleaner. Great. That's even better, but that's not why I bought it. And then there are the technologies that don't exist. Example that I think is a highly relevant one and one that people think about a lot, honestly. Nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion, a clean, non-emitting technology safely done, can be done at a cost that is competitive with other sources of electricity, which would revolutionize a lot of things.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Floating outside the United States because it's very cheap. There's all kinds of problems with infinite use of plastics. It doesn't biodegrade. We don't recycle it. We stick it into landfills. We send it to other countries who then put it in the ocean. We pay them so we have clean hands, but the result is the same. There's so many answers to that question, but it's going to have to be answered. Now, I can tell you three or four different ways to address that problem, but there's no question that we have to address it.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What needs to be deployed now? So, for instance, as an example, let's say you and I own a big multifamily apartment building. Okay, one of the things we can do is change the glass in the windows so that it requires completely different amounts of electricity for heating and cooling. Okay. And the question is, what's the return on that glass? I was reading a story this morning saying that America's use of oil last year went up 0.6%, I think, or something very minor, but up the actual use of gasoline went down and will continue to go down as people transitioned to electric vehicles and non-internal combustion engines. So if that's true, then how is it possible that we're using more oil? And the answer is plastics. Even though we recycle only 6% of our plastics, the use of plastics is exploding.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have these things called batteries. So guess what? Over the next 10 years, we'll have storage systems that enables us to do long-term storage so that in effect, will it always be a management issue in terms of safety, in terms of storage, and in terms of cost? Yes, yes, it will. We'll have to actually manage it. But for everybody who says impossible, it'll never happen. We can never do it. That's just not true. And if you get deep into what's going on in terms of all the different technologies, there's a massive amount of amazingly great stuff. And are we going to have to be smart? Yeah, but that's why we're doing this. That's why I started galvanizing with my partner, Katie Halls, to say, no, yeah, we have to actually do it. But is it doable? Yes, it's doable. Stop.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're going to say it's unfair and it's misreading, and you're an idiot and you're not a big boy. And the big boys know we have to do this. And it's really like, I don't want to lose $5 billion. Who wants to lose $5 billion? So it's really important not to build those because all you're building is political problems for yourself. We have to make this transition. We have to do it as fast as possible. All of the people who own $5 billion pipelines are going to argue that we're stupid. that we don't understand business, that we can't do this. But if you actually look at the cost of electricity, the different kinds of electricity, the two cheapest kinds of electricity are wind and solar. They've moved from saying it's too expensive to do wind and solar to saying they're not dependent. It's like, okay, 10 years ago, you're saying they're too expensive. Now they're a fraction of what you cost, but now they're not dependent.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to get to net zero, not zero by 2050, and net zero implies that we'll continue to emit CO2 or CO2 equivalents, and that we will also suck carbon out of the air and stick it someplace in the ocean or in the ground, and that between what we suck out of the air and When we talk about fossil fuels in the transition, look, we don't have a choice about whether we make this transition. Obviously, we have to be smart in terms of understanding in a transition. You have to take care of people along the way. You have to make it possible for them to live. But you can't be building 40-year infrastructure because once you've built that infrastructure, once you spent $5 billion building a pipeline from point A to point B, when I say, okay, no more natural gas, you're going to have a fit.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a result, the people in Northern Europe specifically the Germans, who had made what turned out to be not a great decision to trust the natural gas from Russia have accelerated their moves away from that, accelerated the move away from fossil fuels, the price of gas that's down forty percent or something in Europe, the price of natural gas in the United States is less than half what it was three or four months ago. In fact, what we're seeing is that it is a transition, but we're going to have to get off fossil fuels. Do I think that that's something where we're going to go to zero?”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blackmail them with the fear of freezing to death. And so when you say that we're relying on fossil fuels, they made a choice to rely on a specific source of natural gas. And so for people who don't understand exactly how natural gas works, and I'm probably in that category, but I understand a little bit how natural gas works, it's not transportable the way that gasoline is to your local gas station. It has to be directly delivered in a pipeline from someplace. It's a gas. It's traditionally been a regional product. So the price of natural gas, the exact same substance in Japan could be literally 10 times the cost of natural gas in Texas easily. And in fact, in this case, when Putin basically was trying to blackmail the Europeans, the price was a lot more than 10x difference.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you said, Ted, it's a transition. We can't just say tomorrow, no more oil and gas, no more coal. We can't because people freeze. If you're trying to avoid imaginable human suffering, the best way I can think of is not by starting by making people freeze to death. Having said which, I believe the lesson that people draw from Ukraine is not the one you said. So let's talk about Ukraine for a second, why that shows how this transition can and should go. So first of all, obviously, what had happened was a lot of Western Europe relied on Russia for the natural gas that they used to heat their houses specifically in the winter so that when it's cold in Germany or cold in Switzerland in January that they're reliant on natural gas flowing from Russia and that therefore that emboldened Vladimir Putin to think that he could in effect”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a lot of things that come up when people try to figure out how they want to participate in this. And the first is usually the use of fossil fuels after what happened this year in Ukraine. There's more of an understanding that we can't just shut off fossil fuels in the path to transition. How have you thought about fossil fuels as part of or an exclusion of investment strategy?”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, we're trying to set up investment vehicles that suit specific categories of investors and also have discernible, measurable, positive climate impacts. Unless that's true, we just won't do it. We want to have better than market returns, and we want to have measurable impact. We want to have both, and we believe that having measurable impact and riding this wave of climate awareness and climate transition will be very, very profitable.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies, the companies that are internet focused. But as a friend of mine who was a venture capitalist, said in 1996, Tom, every company in America is going to be an internet company. The internet is a tool for delivering information, goods, and services. You're not an electricity company because you lose electricity. You're not an internet company because you use the internet. Every company is going to use the internet in a huge way, and that's going to just be part of the fabric of American business, which it is. And the same is true of climate. Every company, Exxon is going to be a climate company. No question about it.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two basic points here. One is, of course, if we don't change the way we live, we will destroy the natural world, which will in turn come around and destroy us. That has to happen. I don't see that as a questionable thesis. But I also believe that that's a huge investment thesis, that in fact the urgency, the need means that we will have to rebuild our economy in a different way. And it will be pervasive. and it will be very lucrative. If it doesn't scale, if it isn't really lucrative, then we're not going to change the world because that's how capitalism works. You don't scale stuff that doesn't work, that gives a huge incentive for it to work and a huge demand driver. And so I believe what's like the IT revolution in 1996 people used to talk about the internet companies like eBay and AOL, the internet.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I feel as if we're at the execution phase of the climate crisis. We've talked about it. We've won the argument. Everybody knows what we have to do, but we actually have to do it. And so I felt like we're not prepared to do it. And I can be, as I felt I was in terms of winning the conversation, I can be on the right side of this argument. I can participate in this argument. I can be part of the solution. And that's a meaningful thing for me to do in my estimation and something I would say to people about what I'm doing now, which is investing in climate solutions. I say, if I weren't doing this, I would be eating my heart out because I wanted to do it.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent probably 10 months doing two things. One was running the economic recovery task force for California for Governor Newsom. And at the same time, I was also doing a lot in terms of climate outreach for the Biden campaign. And so I did a bunch on that as well. Between those two things, that was a more than full-time job for 10 months. And when that was over, then I was like, okay, now how can I impact the things I care the most about in a way that I can enjoy? Because if I don't enjoy it, then I probably won't do it that long and it probably won't be that mean.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I really didn't understand that I think I understand better is the context for what does it mean if we're having this conversation? Why does that matter? I think I learned a lot about how at least the Democratic parties political system works and how it's organized. Because, of course, another word for politics is just organization. And there's a lot of organizing behind what you see on TV or what you see at a rally and how that gets reflected at the ballot box. And that part, even though I thought I knew a reasonable bit about it, I definitely learned an awful lot.”
2023-03-06 · Capital Allocators · Tom Steyer – Investing to Save Humanity (Climate Solutions EP.1, Capital Allocators EP. 300) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source