 How many have read the book already? So a handful. Everyone will be taking that as a homework assignment as a follow-up. So let's start with the plot, right? Lay out the plot of the book for people. There are some really interesting actors. And then there are a lot of subplots going on. So we'll parse this out a little bit, like the layer of the onion. So let's lay the story as if it were a Hollywood movie. What's the plot and the key players and the drama that's there, the tension that's there? All right. I'll do the main without giving up everything, right? Good. OK. So it's meant to be a thriller. I wrote it this way. Yes, it is. Yeah. So I don't take the story from a 50,000-foot view. I wanted to tell the story somehow through people and since this had become a race, then I wanted to be with America's team. And so I looked around, who was America's team in the global race? And I found the closest thing to it was at Argonne. Argonne National Lab, which is a federally funded, one of the 17 national labs just outside Chicago. And I found it by chance online. There are a dozen or two dozen recognized battery geniuses around the world. Two of them are there. And their stuff was not this abstract research invention. It was in the Chevy Bolt. So it had already been commercialized. So I took a trip out there. I previewed the material with an article I did for Foreign Policy Magazine. And it really worked. And the reason it worked was it coincided by chance with a visit to the lab by Wang Gong, the Minister of Science and Technology in China. So I knew about Wang Gong. And so Obama had made a goal, we're going to put 1 million electric cars on the road, America's roads by 2015. And Wang Gong had said the same thing. We are going to put a million cars on China's roads by 2015. And then I get this phone call. Wang Gong is going to be at the Kennedy Center tonight. Don't tell anyone I told you. I put you on the list. So I showed up early. And there he was. I mean, no one was there yet, but he was there on the terrace. And so I was able to go up and talk to him for a while. And then I flew out to Oregon. I had just been there the previous week for this story. I flew out to watch him going through the lab. And it was this very nervous thing where basically the main character in the book, Jeff Chamberlain, who's running the battery lab, is very nervous because there's his bait noir right there in the lab. And they know that the United States is way behind in the race. Japan commercialized lithium ion batteries, 1991. Sony. Toyota pioneered hybrid electric cars, the Prius, in 1996. Japan was way ahead on the factory floor. South Korea right behind them. And everybody fears China because China being China. And there's China right there in the lab. So that's where I open the book. So what you do is you follow this team, Jeff Chamberlain's team, as it attempts to create the super battery. And he, every week, gets in front of his guys. And they are almost all guys. There's one woman who's on the staff. I know you've already told me we're going to zero in on that, which is good. And he fires them up. He's this evangelistic motivator of his troops painting the stakes in very large colors, very, very broad. And understanding we're going to beat the Chinese explicitly, where we are going to invent this. And I call it, so their invention, the stuff that's in the vault, it's called NMC. I call the next stage of NMC for shorthand, so people can understand it, NMC 2.0. They're going to invent NMC 2.0. We're going to beat the Chinese. That's the plot. Partway through, they understand that everything they're doing is wrong. Basically, the pathways that they are taking and that everyone is taking, who they know, is working on the battery, on making the super battery, are going about it wrong, which is quite a self-admission, and that they need to start over. That's the, I'll go that far for now. Let's start with that end and work our way back. So if you think about the point in the book where they make the realization that everything is wrong, how they're focusing on it, the framework, they need to take a blank slate to focus on transformational goals as opposed to incremental improvement in the technology, but also to rethink the silos, the compensation structures, how they work together, drill into that, because you're really talking about not just inventing a new technology. You are talking about reinventing the system through which that technology and potentially other technologies for the future could emerge. So one of the main plots is that in their ecosystem there, so in these labs, in the Department of Energy are sprinkled former Bell Labs people. So the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chiu Bell Labs, his chief scientist at Bell Labs, Argon, the director former Bell Labs, one of his assistant directors, Bell Labs, and he has succeeded him, the head of the Berkeley Lab, Bell Labs, and along with this realization that they were doing everything wrong and they didn't have the system in place that would produce the desired outcome and answer presented itself. And that was let's create a system that resembles the Bell Labs system. Bell Labs having created the transistor and a bunch of other really cool stuff using its managerial system. And so Stephen Chiu proposed the creation of what he called Bell Lablets around the country seeking stretch goals, putting a five-year, $120 million behind each one of them and one of them was batteries. And they called this for short the hub, the battery hub. And there's a competition. Argon goes into the competition and the idea is that you throw everything out of the window that you're doing, you start from scratch, you try to get beyond lithium ion, you realize that you gotta think way out of the box and so you gotta bring people in to the system who aren't of that, some of them will be of that world but a lot of people who are not and understanding that the answer is not going to be intuitive. I wanna pause there really quickly. I do want your questions as well throughout the conversation. So if you've got a question you wanna sprinkle in here I'll take some pauses and throw in. Let's build from there. So there were some collaborations, some unique and unprecedented collaborations that came to bear in the proposal for the battery hub, right? Past competitors, people who literally had histories of not, not only not collaborating, but competing. So one of the first things that happened, so Berkeley and Argon, what word am I going to use? Very, at the weakest, very strong competitors and the stronger, they hate each other and their rivals, but what happens at the very, very beginning when the announcement is made, there's gonna be a hub competition, a guy at Berkeley, a very senior scientist, a renowned scientist at Berkeley calls one of the battery geniuses, Mike Thackery, at Argon and suggests that they collaborate on a proposal and they travel, well, the one from Berkeley travels, John Newman is his name, travels with Jeff Chamberlain to Washington to sit down with one of the senior battery, managers in the Department of Energy to just sort of socialize the idea that they're gonna be working together. This was such a shocking idea that Berkeley and Argon would be working together, that the conversation almost did not get past that. So you're working together? Yes, we're working together. So you're sitting together here today in these same seats, yes? Next to each other, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting though when you have a state of crisis really rethinking not just the technology, but the relational structure, who you collaborate with, the need to collaborate and even to the degree of the compensation structures and how people were individually incentivized had to change under the hub program. There was literally a rethinking of everything around how they would collaborate. So the main breakthrough that the Argon group made and it was very skillful and that was, so they got their application for the hub, for this Bell Lablet, included five companies, five labs, five national labs and five universities. This 555 combination recurs in the narrative as a sort of a mantra. And the first thing they did was begin to negotiate among themselves. This is a key hindrance in establishing big, in getting big invention. Who's gonna share the fruits? How are they going to be distributed? And they very early on figured out a formula for how to do that. And there's competition, the scientists, the inventors themselves have a feeling of ownership. This being the United States. And would like to earn something if they make a big invention, if it gets commercialized, one of the incentives for them is they too could maybe pay down their house, buy a new car. And so there needs to be some percentage in there. But what you heard when you were listening to the deliberations of how they were going to set up the system was almost a hostility from the legal side, from the company side about, honestly, I didn't quite understand why they were hostile, but didn't feel that the scientists themselves should have a voice in how the profits were distributed, which inventions got the green signal to go. They finally did reach a very good modus operandi and other people who have examined what they came up with have been very impressed with it. But the takeaway for me, again, was how, you see this all over the place in so many places in life, how people get greedy, sort of wanting to slice up the pie for themselves before there's any pie, anyway. I see that a lot in the startup world, the venture capital of back gamers. I have a bad voice of a moderate. I'm about 2010, I was talking to a Nissan employee who was very upset. They didn't bring the people doing the electric car tech to Tennessee when they relocated from California because they thought electric cars would not work. Then what happened was when the stimulus came up, they took the money, 1.4 billion dollar DLA loan, collateral not backed by Nissan, it was a taxpayer backed IDB bond. Instead of using the treachery's people, they used a Paul Weiss law firm and a bundler. And I believe in green tech, I'm a moderate. And what happened with the technology is that they knew it was from the California Air Resource Board days and we actually had an autopsy done on the battery and Nissan lied to Congress. And then a NASA scientist complained because what you were talking about about these Bell South lab type places is they formed, they got money to do something in Mountain View and Nissan owns AutoVance, which is Putin's car company. And it turns out that EV tech is used in weapon systems and self-driving tech too. So then I had to talk to Google, I'm working on the story for like five years, talked to other people and people were bullied into not telling the story. So what's fascinating is that you actually care about the technology. I go to Republican events, they wanna spend no money, but I think that energy independence is important. And I think that the message got lost in both political parties. And I would really like a solution to this problem because Congress has already told me, I've been there, they're not gonna give another damn dime to the electric car after seeing what happened with the 2010 stimulus. So I would like to help you to help fix that problem. Thank you. I think there was a question somewhere in there. I was trying to figure out what the question was. Technology is serious about really doing it. The Department of Energy, they got a complaint from people from Nissan and they ignored it and the money was still given to Nissan before they got the money. And they built capacity for 500,000 cars globally. They already had capacity for 50,000 and they paid on. And they never needed to take that money. We need to cut to the- The question is, is there a plan in place because there was no plan with the charges? There were three different local charges. Are you gonna have a rational plan if the Republicans might wanna do it? Because I think it's important. All right, I'll try this one. I think that the, so in the stimulus, Obama's stimulus, that's $787 billion that was allocated in 2009 of that, there was 2.4 billion in there for electric cars and batteries to establish a battery edifice. We were starting from scratch in this race and some of it for electric cars. Elon Musk got a big chunk of money, for example. Some of the money went up in smoke and some of it didn't. Elon Musk's didn't. LG's money didn't. It's producing the batteries for the GM Volt. It will produce the batteries for the pure electric GM Volt in 2018. So, but I think this happens. I think that the government, the federal government is behind right now and we don't know what will happen in the next administration. But it has had through Republicans and Democratic administrations consistent support for this. Well, let's drill into that because part of where I wanna take the conversation is when you look at the sum of the sub-narratives, right? You've got Argonne, you've got the labs, you've got a government funded set of solutions and then you have the startup world. Let's turn a little bit to the startup world and introduce those characters into the plot and then let's contrast the two worlds and how they were really approaching this battle, right? So, key players in the startup world. All right, so, well, the first one is A123, a Massachusetts startup, a MIT scientist, Yetmen Chang, made a big breakthrough with a lithium ion, chemistry that was invented by the biggest battery genius of all, John Goodnuff, who today is a 92 year old battery scientist still working at the University of Texas. In any case, A123 in the year 2009 was the biggest IPO in that year in the country. So, it's in the game. And they raised what, collectively over a billion dollars between their financings and their IPO. It is huge, huge, huge, huge. And that was reflective of that environment that I'm describing where so much hope and buzz and really a fever had come to center on the battery. And so, but who is the startup who we're focusing on here? We're focusing on Envia Systems, which is a Silicon Valley startup. That was the first licensee, even before GM, before LG of the argon material that ended up in the vault. And it's two Indian immigrants who run it, one of the recurring themes in the book is that even though we're talking about this frenzied competition between the United States and all these countries, is that America's team is almost all foreign foreigners or foreign born. And many of them from the countries that are the rivals of the United States, which speaks, it speaks to the nature of our country, but it was still surprising for me. So Envia sets out to optimize the material to create NMC 2.0 and gets embraced by the Department of Energy, by ARPA-E, and raises $3.2 billion from VCs. And they have in mind the dream of every startup in Silicon Valley, and this is a big subtext to the companies in Silicon Valley. We're gonna go IPO. We have a billion dollar IPO. I'm not giving away the rest of it. I can see you're staring. I'm not gonna do it. I think it's really important to drill into. Well, so I wanna come back to the IPO as the driver, because a lot of decisions that were made were to some degree made around that objective as the primary driver. So to contrast, you had people at Argonne who literally were looking at the technology for the technology's sake and wanting to win the technology race. And you had startups in the venture-backed world who were looking at, I want an IPO at the billion dollar level, and this is my tool to do it. So very different lenses into the race, but interesting motivations in advancing the science. It's still working that through. I think I do think that on the science side, so you have the business side in the startups, you have the science side. The scientists, they aren't coming every day. Of course, they realize what they're doing could end up being very big. And they could, all of them could be able to buy their own home, from the bottom to the top, and the top guys could do much better than that. But they are also, they're passionate about what they're doing. But how do you go about it? And if you go into the startup world, it's true. That billion dollar IPO is options. How many options am I awarded for joining your company? That's a motivator. So they raise the money, the race is on, they're trying to pursue General Motors hard. GM has a relationship there. Let's drill a little bit into that. Okay. But you can't draw me all the way to the end. We've got to get there. I'm gonna give away the whole book. We've got to get there at some point soon. All right. So right, so you have parallel narratives. So you have Argon driving to do two things. One, creating NMC 2.0 and trying to resolve this big technological obstacle voltage fade. And trying to win the hub. And then the other narrative is the startup. The startup trying to do exactly the same thing and trying to get its stuff. If it can do it, trying to get its stuff into GM. Trying to get GM to license it. And you have cameo appearances. Not only Wong-Gong shows up at Argon, but Obama shows up at Argon and shakes hands with the battery scientists and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton show up in the narrative too. So they're driving, they're driving toward this end. And it's not quite a collision course, but they're driving down the same lanes and you're headed into two climaxes. Double climaxes. I'm not going there. Gotta buy the book. Questions for the audience. Constantine, I'm a fellow here. Constantine, don't ask me about the climax. He's not gonna give it. We're gonna move on to the anti-climax. You mentioned sort of at the very beginning of the talk, this sort of geopolitical question of electric energy versus petrochemicals and gasoline and diesel powered cars. As this sort of race for a better battery is going on, the internal combustion engine is also a moving target, which you talk about in the book as well. And I was sort of hoping you could maybe talk a little bit more about that side of sort of the improvement of gasoline as well. So it's not to have a sort of simplistic picture that electric cars are coming and getting everything else out of the way. Right, so this is a very good question, thank you. So a principle approach in the book is not to be a hagiography about technology, about invention, about how it happens and how it can happen. And so the Apollo narrative is debunked. The whole idea that a president names a stretch goal and throws the resources behind it and the deadline and scientists scurry and accomplish that. We understand that that is a, it was an aberration. The Manhattan Project was an aberration too. And we understand that the electric car and the super battery are not fate complies. Just because we want them and the stakes are so high, it doesn't mean that they will happen. The battery was invented in 1799. To be fair, only recently was it understood that we wanted the super battery. The different circumstances through history arose and now we want this. One of the narratives in this story is Don Hillibrand who at Argonne is in charge of the combustion side of the lab. And he lays out a very compelling argument that gasoline combustion has only begun to become efficient and is going to become a lot more efficient and in fact it's enshrined in law, the CAFE standards. Right now cars get an average of 25.1 miles per gallon by law cars and small trucks have to average 54 miles, 54.5 miles per gallon in the year 2025. That's huge, that's huge. And so this raises the bar for electric cars and he argues that because of this, combustion is going to be with us for a very, very long time. The battery guys will get there but it's going to be hard and it's going to take a while. Is that as far as you wanted to go? Or you want? I don't want to go there, I don't want to get to the client. Okay. We're trying very hard not to give away every minute secret sauce here. No one asked about that, okay. Your microphone is on, yeah. I'm Steve Gibb with Chemical and Engineering News and I was just curious about the disciplines of traditional battery experts and what kinds of new disciplines they brought in when they expanded the teams. I think the first they, so the usual as you know are physicists, chemical chemists and engineers. And they spoke, I should say they spoke notionally of bringing in people from the side and the short answer is I don't know the out of the box. There's one person who they brought in from the side is sitting right here, this man, may not mark of it, sort of a theoretical chemist. But the idea is that they wanted to get down to the very, very basic science. What they discovered is that even though they've been working on batteries for so, so long, they didn't understand the atomic level science and that was one of the roadmaps that they needed. They needed to peer into the very center of the battery, understand the science at the atomic level and from that and incidentally this was one of the Bell Labs. Maybe that was the out of the box thing, is using the Bell Labs approach. Peter Littlewood who's become the director of the lab over the last year, former Bell Labs guy said if Bell had not been making the telephone but had been making batteries, it would have taken apart and understood the battery at its very, very minute level, created a roadmap and then understood all the pathways that it needed to go in order to create the better battery. This isn't known yet, the scientists, researchers don't understand the battery yet. Which is so fascinating to me. I thought that was just such a fascinating sort of revelation in the book, the point where everybody has that giant aha moment that we're tinkering but we don't understand what we're tinkering with and why what we're doing is working. Right, so they understand the basics, right? That the lithium starts in one electrode and moves to the other one and then comes back and they know the compositions. They're putting the compositions in there. It's at the nano scale. They don't know, for example, this great obstacle, voltage fade, which when high voltage, 4.7 volts, is applied to the cathode, chaos happens. They know that the cathode kind of goes crazy and starts moving around and everything moves into a different place creating a completely different material from what, from where they started. But they don't know what has gone where, where everything lies and why. And the objective is to get the atoms to stay in the same place. So they really do need to figure that out. Yeah, other questions before I, yeah. Hi, Anne Clausen with Alcoa. And I was at the ARPA-E summit yesterday and there were a variety of different batteries on display. There's a zinc air battery, an aluminum air battery, in addition to the lithium ion approach and some other different approaches. So I was wondering if you could talk about, in addition to combustion lithium ion batteries, other outside the box approaches and how those play in with the battle you're covering in the book. So in the hub, they are attempting to, they are trying a bunch of different, not lithium ion approaches. And they're trying sodium, they're trying magnesium. There are batteries called air batteries, sulfur air. The trouble with zinc is it's great as a single charge battery. They're in hearing aids, but they haven't figured out how to make them rechargeable. One battery that has a lot of hope around it, sulfur, air battery, at a grid scale using in your power company. There's a lot of hope, again, in a high temperature battery twinning sodium and sulfur, but a very, very hot 300 degrees centigrade, but GE is working on that. No one knows what's going to work, but they really are trying everything. No one can say that for certain one of these paths is going to succeed, but what I come back to is you have one of the things that I do in the book is trot out a forecast by ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil produces every few years a forecast. So it has a 20, 40 forecast. In the year 2040, according to ExxonMobil, electric cars, fuel cell cars, natural gas and plug-in hybrids, all of them together comprise less than 5% of the market. And it's 25 years from now. And this, it seems to me such, oh, and by the way, the gasoline has taken an even larger part of the market. This seems to me such a foolhardy and risky approach to planning your next 25 years. We live in an age of utter disruption, nobody forecast eight months ago that the price of oil was going to be cut in half. No one was thinking about shale oil. I don't have to tell you, Daniel Juergen, his book, The Prize, published in 2012 does not mention shale oil as a factor and barely mentions shale gas. These are brand new. Just on a political side, no one forecast the Arab Spring or that Putin was going to invade Ukraine. When we have this kind of chaos around us, our presumptions, a lot of, I think, false confidence on the part of oil companies and incidentally, car companies, this is a consensus forecast that the world we're living in now is going to be transported almost exactly as it is 25 years from now. Yeah, okay, one in the back and then up to the front. Great for the mic, please. Hi, Michael Nix, energy consultant here in town. On that exact point you just brought up there. As a matter of fact, electric drive, transportation associations having, they're having a bunch of big meetings this week to bring in congressional staff, or members of Congress, this kind of thing. Would, as an electricity guy, I'd love to see what you're talking about move forward. Speaking of shale gas and we're using a lot of that now for lower electricity prices and lower emissions than coal. Talking about these lower gasoline prices now, I'm seeing it around here in DC, like $2.50 a gallon. Does that hurt us temporarily in terms of people are saying, well, why do we need to spend money on these new technologies when, man, it's $2.50 for me to fill up my car, $2.50 a gallon for me to fill up my car? And why do I need to look at these new technologies when everything seems to be just about fine right now? Electricity prices are decent with shale gas being transferred over to a lot of the northeastern and middle Atlantic electricity generation markets can you help me out on that? Yeah, I could talk a little bit about that. So first I wanted to tell you that the book is not a policy book. It doesn't propose policies and it ends as a story without getting into the politics. Apart from to the degree that the politics are part of the plot. That said, I have an opinion on that, all right. And it's that I hear this about oil prices, about gasoline prices. I think this is a, it's an easy narrative and it's a false narrative. So I don't think that people who buy electric cars today to date, they're not buying them generally speaking for reasons of saving. It's not an economic decision. It's a lifestyle decision. People want to be green. They want to be cool. They want to be different. If you're a billionaire, you want to drive around in Elon Musk's car and you want to be the first one to buy it. In 2018, so we've got right now, GM has announced that at the end of 2017, it's going to put on the market the Bolt. It's going to rename this car, by the way, because it sounds too much like the Bolt. Also the movie with the dog. Yeah, I mean they're taking a lot of grief for that name. Anyway, 200 miles on a single charge, $35,000. And Elon Musk has announced, similarly, that he's going to have a car on the market. One second, you want to add something, I know. He's going to have a 200 mile car on the market in 2018 for around that, $35,000. The average price that Americans paid for their cars last year was $32,995. It's right there in the sweet spot. The BMW 3 Series, the low end luxury, costs the base, costs $33,000. It's right there in the sweet spot. So these cars, these two cars, I view them as the inflection point, where electric cars, where we enter the electric age. Here is where you're buying a car that are in the sweet spot of what people are paying. You know that Musk, I can't speak for the bolt. They unveiled it. I have no idea what's in the interior, but you know that Musk will produce a very stylish car that will challenge the BMW. And no one knows what will mentally flick that switch that will reduce or eliminate range anxiety. But 200 miles is pretty far. And so I do think that's an inflection point. It's completely separate from low oil, low high oil prices. Those cars will sell based on what they should sell an agnostic decision about taste. Do you want the electric Model 3 or do you want the BMW 3 Series? Just to comment and support that, there's a Tesla, I guess we call it a dealership, down at like 11th and Jean or the West here. Those cars are cool. And I'm six to 200 pounds. I can sit in that car in the back seat. It's comfortable. You can get three of me in the back seat. They're beautiful cars. And it's $70,000. There's a lot of people in this room that are gonna pay $70,000 for a mid-level BMW or Mercedes or Lexus. So yeah, I think, you know, and when you'd say he's going down to 30,000, he's definitely price competitive there. Yeah, if there's some doubt that he will be able to do that, but this is what he's saying, 35, yeah. And it's under a dollar, a gallon equivalent to fuel the vehicle. So he's got a lot of stuff in his way. Thank you. Okay, thank you. We had a question up front. Wait for the mic, please. You guys are asking all my questions. So I'm just gonna sit here and listen. No, no, you guys are great. Sorry, I'm Chris, I'm a fellow here. But since you talked about this disruption and unpredictability, I'd like you to make a prediction about the future. So I think one of the things you really bring home in the book are the immense physical obstacles to inventing the super battery. I mean, if we could have invented it, we would have done it. So having spent years looking at this without giving away the end of the book, what's your kind of overall assessment? I mean, is this even a viable technology that we should be pursuing in a great race, especially considering how cheap gas has become and might be for years to come? Mentioning the great race, the author of that book is sitting in this room. I've just given you a plug, man. Okay. Short answer is yes. We don't know what the outcome is going to be. However, the stakes are so high in achieving this stretch goal and the dividends so great that it's worth putting federal support, a lot of federal support behind it. And putting together a kind of a format that brings everyone in, sort of jettisoning our allergy to violating free market ethos and coming up with a formula of intellectual property sharing but that involves industry and the inventors into really juicing this process and seeing if we can get there. I think there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot of upside in doing that. And this starts from just to end this part. It starts on a very crass level. You get there, a lot of people will become rich. So you got that. And then all the way on the other side, you clean up the air. One of the things we focused on, you've been talking about this as a very sort of clinical economic decision. I will buy car A versus car B at some intersection of price point. And we talk about the environmental impact. One thing we haven't talked about is the overlay of what's going on in the Middle East and the social narrative, right? We've got a country full of people that are hearing about ISIS and war is in the Middle East. I'm wondering how much that narrative motivates people to just want to become oil independent irrespective of the other conditions. So energy independence, it's a narrative. It's one that Jeff Chamberlain uses in his motivational talks to his battery scientists to get them fired up. But it's a slogan. It's not real. It's not something we should be doing. Or it's something that goes, this idea goes back to 1973 to the Arab oil embargoes where we lost confidence in our, we lost control of our own narrative as a country. And another part of the world, the Middle East took control of a large part of the global economy became in a distorted way, very influential in geopolitics and in the global economy and in our economy according to the course of oil prices. And so I don't have to tell you, from Nixon on, this mantra has been we're gonna get off oil and then as the subtext, we're gonna get off Saudi Arabian oil and a lot of jingoism involved in that. But we shouldn't get off oil. And in fact, a healthy economic energy edifice is a diversified fuel system. It's a diversified energy system in which we produce some oil and gas and batteries and nuclear and so on and we import what we can too. So just to close this out, we become energy independent, we're producing all of our oil for about how many years, and then we deplete it and then we're back where we started, we're importing this stuff. There are a bunch of questions in the back. You have Larry Mehmet, Department of State. Hi, Larry. I know Steve that- Former Uzbek guy. Yeah, exactly. I know that you are always concerned about the implications for these issues on geopolitics. And one of those has to do with what you were just talking about with energy independence, but I think there are a lot more. And I wonder if you would comment about what implications all of this has for geopolitical issues. Thank you. So, I think a lot of, pardon me, a lot of people are thinking about this and we don't know, you use the word all, implications, but we know what some of them are because we're looking in front of us of the implications, we've seen the impact that shale oil has had. So, one of the forecasts, a very interesting forecast was put out about a month or so ago by Citibank, Ed Morse, looking at, I'm sorry, it wasn't by Ed, he distributed it. It was by their grid storage team. And almost across the board, investment banks and energy, sort of renewable energy research houses are the new fever is grid storage. And the belief that lithium ion batteries for power companies are already there, that the technology is already there, that the cost just needs to come down and that between now and 10 years from now, the utility industry is going to undergo utter upheaval and that their existence is threatened and why are they threatened? That homes are going to install, like we're already seeing in some states, like California, install large-ish batteries in their homes, in neighborhoods, in malls, factories, businesses that allow those places to store solar, wind, to balance the peaks and the excess demand in gas and in coal and you substantially reduce the consumption of these fuels but at the same time, you substantially reduce the income going to these utilities. They're going to have to figure out a new business model. But on the geopolitical side, countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan that burn a lot of oil to produce their electricity, the scenario that's depicted and I think it's totally realistic, those countries install batteries, large batteries in their power systems and they don't burn oil. They start using natural gas or solar or nuclear, whatever and they burn a lot less oil and the number that's put on that of how much demand is reduced because those countries burn less oil as four million barrels a day which is exactly the volume of oil, the increase in US production because of shale oil over the last three years. So you have seen the impact, the geopolitical impact, cratering the Russian economy, putting all of the OPEC producers critically underwater. They're in a brinksmanship game right now with shale and we're going to knock all you shale guys out of the market so we can be kings of the hill. How long can they do that? Saudi Arabia can do it, Qatar and Kuwait, how long can the other states do it? So you're seeing the tectonic result of shale oil, four million barrels a day, the same exact thing with, so just to close this out, I think that so there's a scenario that at the end of this year, going into 2016, that oil prices peak again, well peak at some level. They go up again to 90, whether they go to 100, the jury's out. I believe they won't. I think 70 is the new normal so let's say oil stays as it is, the same disruption that you're seeing now then continues till the end of the decade, maybe beyond there, these grid batteries come in, the impact is compounded on these same forces and I think it's a positive story with our relationship with China. A lot of the antagonism, the friction we have with China is because of China's concern about resources, its ability to have enough resources. Hi Steve, thanks for the shout out and for the great discussion on your book. I am looking forward to reading it, I have not yet. You've not read it? But I will, I promise, it's next on my list and on my Amazon purchase list as well. But anyway, I have read a fair amount of the pieces on your book and what I know from what I've read is that you and I ended up taking very different perspectives on innovation with our books. So your book looks a lot at technology push, we're both looking at the government's role but my book looks a lot at kind of regulatory pull and looks at the fact that California has created these mandates that basically force automakers to design, build and sell electric vehicles and they did the same thing with grid storage. They now have a band aid that says by 2020, 1.3 gigawatts of grid storage has to be deployed in California. So I was wondering if I could get your take on the importance of regulatory pull and which one of those, from your perspective, is driving these industries and why? Sure, so I wanna say two things in parallel. One is that some of the pushback, vigorous pushback and angry pushback is from Tesla owners. That Tesla almost does not appear in the book and how can you have a book on super batteries, batteries and electric cars that doesn't include the most successful electric car company that's validated the whole model and let me just say that the book, it's not intended to tell the whole story about batteries or about electric cars or what pushes and what pulls. It is meant to take a reader into the world of the battery scientists. It's intended to do the, I think the comparison is valid. 30 years ago, Tracey Kidder wrote Soul of the New Machine to bring the desktop computer to the average person. To bring, he picked one company irregardless of whether it was the most important company and has brought you in with one single team. What is it like to be sitting in that company and attempt to build a desktop computer and put it onto the market? This is the analogy. What is it like you're sitting in one lab trying to make the super battery and if you do it, you may change the world and this is what it's like and these are those forces. However, I do have an opinion on your question and that's that absolutely, not just California but California and that coalition of states that have mandated zero emissions comprise 30% of US new car demand and it just stands to reason when you possess that size of the market and you're insisting that a large percentage of the cars that are sold in your state are zero emissions. In other words, probably electric cars. You're gonna have a huge impact on the market and equally so California's mandates on the grid, I think will have, are having and will have a very large impact on the market. Just to build on what you just said, what was interesting, you read the book and the book is really about the people in the race more so than the race itself because absent from the book is the equivalent set of people in other countries and so if somebody were writing the same book from the narrative of being in China or being in South Korea, what that book would look like. It's really interesting that you've zeroed in on that. I'd love to hear your thoughts on if somebody was sitting in China writing that book, what would that narrative look like? Well, I can take a stab at that since I was not in a Chinese battery lab then I can only take a stab at it. I can tell you this, let me start here. There are, one of the main characters, one of the two battery geniuses is a Moroccan born scientist named Khalil Amin and he has on his staff a lot of Chinese, Chinese born and so I spoke to them and there is a big poll, speaking of polls from China to bring these people home and in fact, Wang Gong was a senior executive in Audi working on its electric car program and was recruited to come home to make China number one in the world in electric cars and so I asked one by one, I went through and not just the Chinese, I went through the sort of the foreign, why are you here? Why don't you do this at home? And one thing that was consistent in the Chinese scientists was they felt that they could make a bigger mark at Argonne in the United States than they possibly could in China that what they told me person by person is that if they were sitting in a Chinese lab, first there's no way of knowing whether the lab would even be trying to create the super battery, that much of what happens in these labs relies on who's leading the lab and that person's idea about what's best for him in terms of his career and so you create a great idea that you wanna pursue that you think will push the science along and whether or not you get a chance to do it and then having done it, if it gets patented, if it gets pushed up the chain is a big if and then lifestyle decisions. Lifestyle, these are scientists who got their PhDs here, they've married, they have children and there's this children question. Do I want to take my children home? They become American and can they compete with other Chinese at home on a language level? The upshot, the understanding that I got is that the US still has a much better chance of making the big breakthrough here than a Chinese lab does, that the same obstacles that we know about that seem stereotypical are in fact reality about just the differences of the incidents of big invention in one country or another. Good time for maybe one or two more if we've got. Peter Fagy back here. Hi, Peter Fagy, Department of Energy. Hi Steve, full disclosure, I haven't read the book yet. One thing that you haven't mentioned that kind of impinges on a lot of the topics that have been raised today is the role manufacturing is going to play. We're talking about the idea of a super battery, but the reality is it's got to be mass produced somewhere. Can you comment on that or send that? Yeah, let me just tell everyone here that Peter Fagy is a big shot in this world, that he is very, very important in this whole effort to make a super battery. He's one of the brains in the Department of Energy in this space. Just to answer that question, what I am told and what I believe to be the case is that the discovery science is one part, it's one piece of the puzzle that you, so the argons of this world are gone itself, but also the other labs that are working on this big question including the startups. They will get there on the discovery part, but that you need ingenious engineers to design and take that invention and engineer that into a product. And then another set of geniuses, manufacturing geniuses. And the analogy to this is a smartphone. So Steve Jobs did not invent a smartphone. What he did, he was a genius at design, he's a genius at manufacturing, and Blackberry already had a smartphone. He took it the rest of the way. So what the better battery needs, what the super battery needs is it needs those geniuses, those invention geniuses, but it also needs, this is what I'm talking about when I was answering this gentleman's question, is that it really needs a partnership where you do have those intuitive super star engineers and manufacturers, all of them doing it together to accelerate the process, make sure it's a success. So why don't we have time for people to have one-on-one time with you and also for the books out front. So one more question and then we'll wrap up. And I have one question that I want to close. Sorry to hog the mic, but I have another question that I'm really interested to get your take on. So when I was doing my PhD research on a kind of very similar topic, I remember people saying that the best science in terms of researching and developing new chemistries for batteries was in the United States, but the best commercialization capability was in Japan and Korea and then the best cost scenarios were in Chinese manufacturing. And I was wondering if you think that's still the case today or has something changed? Are there new players on the horizon? All right, just running those in order, I think it still is the case today. There may be other players, you know, you could pick your countries, Vietnam and Taiwan, certainly, Mexico, who are current and future, but this is one of the things that we need to, if the United States is going to win this race and in the book I call it a war, battery war, and that is something that the lead character, Jeff Chamberlain, coined that phrase. If the United States is going to win, it does need to, you know, we invented, Americans invented the lithium ion battery, Japanese commercialized it, and then North Korea, South Korea got better than, as good as or better than is stealing China's lead in manufacturing of all kinds of electrics, including lithium ion batteries. The U.S. needs to understand. So we could invent, again, right, we could invent the super battery and then someone else licenses it, someone else ends up manufacturing it. We need to be on top of all these areas in advance. We need to understand in advance what, you know, what's the plan and have a strategy. And even when you do that, even when you do that, you have a lead time, you have first mover status and you know that and that lead time, it used to be two years before someone else grabs your invention, your product, and then begins to produce it themselves at a lower cost, used to be two years. Some people think it's telescoped to six months. The U.S. needs to understand that, too, not only invent the super battery, but then invent the 2.0 and the 3.0 after that. So to close out. Don't ask me the ending. Two quick questions. You've been very clear you're not giving it away. Everyone will be reading the book as their homework. Two things back to back. What is something that was one of the biggest surprises for you in observing and being a part of this and seeing this unfold and telling the story? And then the flip of that, what is one thing you hope readers of the book will keep as a takeaway from that? Well, so the biggest surprise, there are a lot of surprises. I mean, I was surprised by how invention really works. I think that I had an impression that is the conventional wisdom in our country about how stretch goals are set and what happens in a lab and how the products are produced, how Silicon Valley produces its products. So that was a big surprise. But the biggest surprise of all is that it's how in technology as a whole how large a role bullshit plays. And just exaggeration, hype, and lies. And this is because the stakes are very high in inventing, in being successful. And in Silicon Valley, the whole game is raising money. How do you raise money before you've invented something? And then once you get that money, how do you keep going and get the next round? And how do you get your IPO? And then once you have your IPO, how do you satisfy the investors? You know, this is that game. And let me just say that there... So Edison famously said in the 1920s that batteries, especially rechargeable batteries, are a special province of liars. And there is a twist in the book at a certain point where we learned that law. And that was a very big shock for me and for a lot of people. And my takeaway? My takeaway is, I think it's... I think that it's healthier to understand and it'll be more productive to understand how invention really works. And that I have a lot of fondness and respect for the folks who I met while doing this book. And I think it's very worthwhile to keep trying to make the super battery. Wonderful. Well, we'll leave it there. I want to thank you for joining us for the conversation and the audience as well. Thank you.