 Welcome to the Boundary Spanners, a podcast on residential decarbonization with me, Nate, the blue collar CEO of HVAC 2.0. And I'm Abhi, a white collar policy researcher based in Canada. In this podcast, we're taking tacit unspoken and hands-on knowledge from the white and blue collar worlds and turning it into explicit and actionable out loud insights for residential decarbonization. The views expressed in this show are entirely personal. You can follow the Boundary Spanners podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your favorite podcast from. Thank you for listening. So this is my, and I'm a policy guy and a researcher. And that's my day job, although, you know, we both have to say that we're here on a personal capacity. And for the last, I'll say four or five years, I have made a conscious effort to spend more time in HVAC communities. You and I, Nate, we did an episode earlier about the white collar and blue collar culture. And we talked about how the pathway towards residential electrification, decarbonization goes through HVAC contractors, goes through blue collar work, and the ability of all these, the best laid plans of policy makers and policy shapers have to rely on the backs of what we broadly call blue collar workforce, the men and women who go into people's homes and fix systems and replace HVAC systems and do plumbing, electrical and all of these things. So for me, and you and I, we talked about this and we were lamenting the fact that blue collar worlds and white collar worlds, again, broadly speaking, seem to be drifting further, further apart. It's not only that, that the implicit and explicit and tacit knowledge domains of these worlds are different, but also culturally were different. We may be watching different TV shows, we may be shopping in different places, we may even be drinking different beers. And so, if knowledge, if we form knowledge about our world, the impressions that we have of our world are constructed socially, by which I mean, if we form an opinion of the world through our interactions that we have with the world socially. What does it mean when white collar and blue collar communities inhabit different social realms. Does that also mean that are the way that we think about problems, the way we conceptualize solutions, and the way that we approach these interactable problems like residence electrification. Does that mean that we will be drifting further apart and how we define these problems and try to come up with solutions. I really do think it does. So, I want to tell a story of my own prejudice where I hated myself for it. So, back when I was I think I was just out of high school, I hadn't gone to college yet, but so I was like it was that summer I was working for my dad. And part of what we do is we'd stock the fridge with pop or soda depending where you live, and we'd sell to the guys it costs like 35 cents a can, something like that. And so I was up there and I had bought just a ton of stuff it was like 1000 bucks of stuff and it was really heavy on a cart. And it was heavy enough I was nervous about taking it to the truck. Because the parking lot was bumpy, and it wasn't super hilly but it wasn't dead flat so it, as I walked out the door, this kid comes up to me, and he says hey I'll wash it for you while you go get it. He didn't have a name tag on or anything like that. And he was African American, and I ran to the truck, nervous that he was going to steal my stuff. And I got back and everything was fine. He was there. And I thought, Wow, I'm an asshole. So we talked a little bit and here he was also going to be a freshman the next year at teal college which was 15 miles from Grove City where I was going, and he was playing football. And I'm just like, if he had white skin, I wouldn't have been nervous. And like I didn't realize that I had that prejudice in me, and I hated myself for it. So we all have these internal prejudices that we don't even realize or acknowledge. And in my view, the last acceptable prejudice in society is white collar versus blue. Oh, you shouldn't go do that. Like, go to college, you don't have to do that job. Like that's a common prejudice now. And having spent my whole life back and forth like so one I'm guilty. Like I catch my own thought processes doing that like well no I don't need to pay attention to that opinion because he's just a worker. That is a horrible way to live your life. You're invalidating someone I mean, so many problems on earth come from invalidating people that are different from you. Right. So to go to your example where you talked about meeting a young gentleman and realizing it and coming to face with like your own. You call them prejudices surface right and you were able to see them for what they are. And this is part of what like forums like, you know, we talk about social construction of knowledge. It's not like you read an explicit book that said, people who look a certain way or talk a certain way are not to be trusted but that idea is formed through your cultural background experiences and how you navigate, you know and through repeated like through, like through osmosis we absorb things that we read and we see and they reform these tacit ideas in our head. And, especially where we are today 2021 culturally I think you know we a lot of us are are looking like you did at trying to second guess our knee jerk reactions that are often formed through like, you know, a tacit implicit in knowledge and ideas that we have an examining that and trying to think of and trying to transcend that and trying to act in ways that we expect of ourselves. And then what you're saying then is an extension of a similar set of this is the last acceptable the more and most enduring a prejudice seems to be discrimination against people who may be less credential than you. Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to even say it as educated than you because you know my someone very close to me used to always say, don't let school get in the way of your education. So if you think about education as a lifelong project, then what we're talking about here and at the day is credentials and what do you have a credentialed and you know, there's different ways to which we established knowledge right so if you have a PhD have some credentials. If you don't if you're, if you're a blue collar worker then you have some credential you have said different ways of expertise, and the way in which we afford the way in which people with different levels of expertise, get to set and define expectations are set to define rules and set to define programs and projects and priorities for goals that we commonly share is uneven. We've talked about this before. When you look at I know I live in Canada and municipalities here over the past four or five years are all developing like local energy plants, you know, with bold and ambitious targets to get to 2050 energy goals climate goals and so on. Then when you read who was a part of like the advisory committee that's helping them put these programs together. Not often as someone who without a college degree reflected on there. It's not often like the blue color men and women who will have to end up doing a bunch of this work. Yeah, I don't know that they're that their priorities are their value systems or their knowledge domains are represented. There are so many problems with that there's so many problems with that. I mean it's I think of like Colonel Klinger from Hogan's heroes, you will do it and you will like it. And you can't do that to people like I don't want to be treated that way you don't want to be treated that way. Yet we design programs that treat the people that actually do the work that way. And I'm like why are they pushing back. And the other piece I mean I'd like to take a step back like we had mentioned culture war last time like be very careful just using the phrase climate change because it tends to trigger people just as using the word capitalism triggers some people where I just view it as a thing I don't view it as good or evil to tool. So, I mean I firmly believe that the main reason that Trump rose to power, a whole lot of the conflicts that we're seeing and this is across the world I mean France had the yellow was a yellow coat yellow vest thank you yellow vest uprising, which was heavily blue collar workers. So, we're creating the schism, and then either ignoring it or being like that tamp down shut up let the meat cake. And we're, this is not good. So, yes we're talking about just residential electrification here is the narrow view of what we're looking at. But the broader view is, this is affecting our lives. It's affecting our mental health. I mean, Trump was a hard president to have not that I want to get political but you couldn't get away because there was always a tweet. I live in Canada. I live in Canada and I couldn't get away. And I'm not even American right and you know just so it affected our mental health but we did that that is the reaction there that's the end result of the schism that I largely think relates back to white color versus white color. It's not entirely but that's, that's pretty close. So there's a couple of things you said there that I think is worth unpacking. So the first thing is that Wildest podcast is about residential electrification. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. I didn't know when I was in physics, you know, we talk about frictionless spherical cows in a vacuum. That's the ideal, you know, like ideal conditions. Yeah, you know, you can model that but once you start adding friction, you get, you know, the second or the third other place. It's the same thing like our residential electrification doesn't exist in a vacuum. You cannot just look at that without situating it in the broader political and cultural conflicts in the world that we're in today. Correct. And the second thing you were talking about is sometimes, you know, it seems like policymakers talk the big talk about including communities and listening to frontline workers and just transitions and incorporating workers. The, the experiences workers and prioritizing them and transitions and stuff like that. This is my personal reflection on this is that I feel like policymakers still do not understand the priorities and there's a lot of passive knowledge about the residential electrification space that escapes the scrutiny of policymakers. And I, as someone who's, you know, involved in, in research and in policy, I wanted to do the work, so to speak, and spend time in, in quote unquote blue collar communities. So I joined online communities of practice. I'm taking classes at a community college to get like my gas certifications so I can, you know, moonlight as a, as an aspect installer when I, if and when I get the time. But the purpose of my foray into blue collar workplace and work spaces is so that I can better understand and have a very tap and to tap into that task in the hopes of, so, of the blue of blue collar policy shapers and makers and policy writers and analysts like me have to rely on if we are to get to our ambitious energy and clinicals, and it might be worth explaining what we mean by explicit and passive knowledge. Yeah, you know, so the way I understand it is explicit knowledge is like the most basic form of knowledge it's things that you can write down and pass on to someone rules of thumb. If you're giving someone an address and say, well, you go there and turn right, take a couple of rights at the next intersection and get to the space that's explicit knowledge. Those are things you can write down you can convey to someone else by writing things. That's the most basic form of knowledge right implicit knowledge is practical application of explicit knowledge. So what this means is if you are using the same, you know, giving directions on a map analogy implicit knowledge is you know because you've been driving in Ontario. That you can take a right at an intersection, even if the right is the light is right. And you know it because you spend time on turn you live there and of course yesterday's explicit knowledge up out there in front of you with that. There's only you'll only see a sign. If that says do not turn right, but not every intersection doesn't have a sign that says you can turn right. Some of it is just implicit knowledge. If you're driving in Ontario you'll notice people doing it. If this is your first time, you may not have even read Ontario Road May user manual. You just know by observing that's implicit knowledge. Tasset knowledge is even more ethereal and a more subtle than that a more ingrained that that tacit knowledge is is your instinct. I know I can almost complete your sentences sometimes because like you and I have had many years of association, and I have an instinct about how you act like you behave. If there's a movie that I watched, I would know, but within a reasonable degree of certainty whether you'd like it or not. It's not you haven't written down teams of movies that you like. It's just, I have an instinct about it and I can't even explain to myself. Why I know what I know about how you feel about certain things. Yep. See implicit knowledge I can explain to someone I can say, I know in Ontario you can turn right on a red, because I've seen other people do it, watch and observe. But as tacit knowledge is even more fundamental than that. It's deeply ingrained and you watch and observe and you don't even know how you know these things, but you can just have an instinct. And this is and when you move to a new experience, you don't have any tacit knowledge about anything. I've told this story before. When I first moved to Michigan, a buddy of mine invited me over to his home for Thanksgiving and we actually drove for more than 12 hours to go to his parents place. This was my first Thanksgiving and be like left to six in the morning, got there on supper time. And his mom asked us, are you guys ready to eat? Are you guys hungry? Do you want food? You must be tired after a long drive. And I immediately said no, because in India, when you go or someone's place they ask you, do you want food? You say no. They ask you again, you say no the second time. And then they ask you the third time and then you're like, well, I guess if you're going to twist my arm, then I will indulge only if you insist. But this is a social dance that I didn't even realize we did in India. No one told me in India you have to say yes the third time. It's just something deeply ingrained. I didn't even know that I knew that. And my instinct was as soon as someone said you want food, but I'm at my friend's place, I said no. That was the wrong answer. Yeah, I'm actually hungry. And they didn't ask me again because like the tacit knowledge in this domain here in America, back then in Michigan, was when someone says they don't want something, don't force them. And then I was too embarrassed to because as soon as I said no, they're like, okay, they left me alone and they're all having fun. And I was too embarrassed. Oh, so you just went hungry that night. You know what I did? Oh man, this is embarrassing to talk about. You can't see it because of my tan, but I'm blushing right now. I slumped across the road. I slipped out of the house and went across the road to a gas station and I ate a frozen burrito. Because I didn't have tacit knowledge of this domain. And so that's a key thing. So could I define it the way that I have it in my mind? Yes, sir. So explicit knowledge to me is written down, or it's somehow like it's, it has been formalized in some way. It's written down it's it's spoken, but I mean it's no longer in someone's head tacit knowledge to me lives entirely on someone's head. So what we're trying to do here is take tacit knowledge of you and I and, you know, others that are working in the electrification space and make it explicit. So that's hopefully we can keep policymakers from inadvertently nuking our chances of actually getting there. I mean, I told you for years my main reason for being on Twitter is to help reduce the odds of policy screwing us. Because basically anything that touches the kitchen table, which is pretty much every program ever. When it comes to efficiency programs, anything that touches the kitchen table creates friction and ends up hurting the adoption of whatever it is. Or if it helps, it helps temporarily but as soon as you take it away, the system is now worse than it was to begin with. Like I'll give one specific example. In gas, the rebate program that I worked with before it came into town, there weren't a ton of energy auditors in Cleveland but you know say there were eight something like that this was before I was an auditor I was just an installation contractor had no interest whatsoever in being the auditor like I just want to get the work done. But Dominion came in and paid auditors, and then they created this program where homeowners only had to pay $25 or $50 to get an energy audit it was it was a third. And it was like hey if you do this you can save $2,000 a year in gas well I only buy $1,500 a year in gas so can you make out the check you know to my name. So there's a lot of that going on like the programs were good but the problem was it killed the businesses of those auditors that were out there, I don't think there are any left in Cleveland right now. So that program came in and ironically ended up destroying a burgeoning industry or at least there was something there and now it's gone. And that is an unintended consequence of that. So I want to like that's now tacitly in my head but now it's explicit. So there's an interesting parallel here between your journey in mind that because you went to Twitter which I mean let's be honest, it's a white collar space. It's educated professionals, credential professionals who are trying to communicate with their peers and so you are I would argue probably the best one of the best known. It's a white collar so quote to quote predominantly blue collar frontline HVAC workers who was, you went on Twitter so that you can turn your past knowledge into explicit. So you can then communicate that explicit knowledge with people who occupy that space. Correct. So my journey was parallel in the other direction so like you and I. You know so I as a quote unquote white collar. I mean like you I you know I've worked in blue collar professions before but predominantly my career art is white collar. And I wanted to be better at my job as a white collar someone who helps understands researchers studies and develop policy I wanted to have a better understanding of the tacit knowledge in the blue collar space so I've intentionally been spending more time in the blue collar space that's the background of this conversation is that you and I are are in a way our project here broadly defined is to take the tacit knowledge in these spaces and turn it into explicit so that we are communicating across these different Yes, so this.