CHANGE ANXIETY?! Robert & Dan discuss 'adapting' to new realities, & necessary sacrifices...

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1:01Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. This one is quite unusual and quite special. This features a discussion about the past, the present and the future with the CEO of the Fully Charged Show Limited, the production company that make the Everything Electric show YouTube videos and the live events, the CEO, Dan Caesar. So Dan and I have a pretty big catch up. He's just been on holiday. So we're sort of having a catch up and a little chit chat about what's going on on the Fully Charged Show and the Everything Electric Show, as we all know it now. What's happened in the past and what we hope, and it's very likely to be happening in the future.

1:44So if you haven't ever watched the show before, this might be a little bit of a mysterious episode because we're talking about a lot of things you don't know about. If you've been a longtime viewer of the show, I think it'll be interesting. and I think it's worth watching and listening to. And if you've ever not subscribed to Everything Electric Tech and Everything Electric Cars, can I humbly suggest you do it. It doesn't cost you any money and it really helps us. And tell your friends about it. And that's all. Here, please welcome to the Everything Electric podcast, Dan Caesar. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed, test-drive-tastic events in the UK and Australia.

2:27Next up, Everything Electric Greater London, and then Sydney. All events include a B2B EV day and commercial vehicles too. So, Dan, this is good. We can have a proper catch-up, because there's so many bits of what's going on in the world that I do know about. I can even sometimes remember them, but there's quite a lot that goes in there, but it comes out there even faster. You know, sort of all this, because there's a lot, I think it's fair to say there's a lot going on in the clean tech electric vehicle space. I think when they write books about how great you were, Robert,

3:08information recall will probably not be... It's not going to be the big chapter. The big chapter. And I think that's why we worked so well together over the last sort of decade, because actually I'm quite good at that. For now, at least, I appreciate my ability to remember things might diminish, but there's a lot coming at us now in the world, right? Whether it's in the EV and clean energy industry or more widely, and of course, everything we talk about has become highly politicized. So it is quite hard to keep on track of things. Just recently, we did a podcast, for example, on data centers, which is probably slightly outside of our wheelhouse and the excellent Helen Chersky hosted that.

3:50But it's actually a gentleman that many people will know well, Toddington Harper, founder of GridServe, who's taking on data centers and cleaning up that market. But you cannot say that AI and data is not going to have a big impact on transport and energy. It's going to have a huge, huge impact. So, I mean, the reality is it's incredibly difficult to keep up now with what's going on. And unless you're a complete EV nerd who understands all the sales statistics, what's going on in each country with regards to legislation, et cetera, et cetera, it's impossible to keep on top of it. And there are some that would slow this transition down.

4:30I think we might have mentioned that about a million times over the last few years. And they rely on the fact that people are ignorant about what's going on. So, for example, Denmark in the last month, 97 % of new car sales were pure electric. Yeah. Denmark, not Norway. No, I know. It's spreading. It's almost like these cars are really, really good. But, you know, a lot of people rely, people who are trying to say that EVs aren't the future, no one wants EVs, etc., they rely on ignorance. Yeah. and spreading further ignorance and confusion to kind of downplay just how good this technology is and where it's going.

5:09So, yes, it'd be great to have a catch up and just to see what you know. Yes. See what I can remember. I can remember the Honda Super N. I'm very pleased to remember that. Yes, well, there are two statistics I've heard recently, which I thought were just intriguing. One was, I think it's 1.83 million cars sold in a month, electric cars, pure electric cars. And I've now got to find that again, just to make sure I've got the right. Yeah, 1.85 million electric cars sold in July globally, which is, you know, if you think even when I started, let's not even bother about that in 2010. But in 2015, 2016, I would think the monthly EV sales might be 100 ,000 globally, maybe 200 ,000.

6:02You know, it would be in that level, wouldn't it? It wouldn't have been – and they would mostly have been Teslas. You know, that jump is massive. Well, we would bemoan the fact that it hasn't happened quickly enough. I think the bit that, and we'll probably talk about how we're running the business and how we're adapting the business as part of this podcast. But honestly, I think we underestimated how much the misinformation and how much the fight back would slow down adoption. Which is not said adoption is not going well. But it is to say we might have reasonably expected in the UK, whereas one in four cars sold now is a battery electric vehicle.

6:46we might have reasonably expected by now we'd be more like 40 percent 50 percent yeah um and it's different in every every country of course so it is it is interesting to see it but i definitely think that the market has grown extraordinarily quickly but at the same time nowhere near fast enough for people who are like like us who think well you know battery evs are a bit of a no-brainer But where we are now, particularly post-Iran conflict, is that battery EV sales are flying because it's highlighted the economic advantages of those vehicles, the fact that you're less reliant on overseas fossil fuels.

7:29And in Australia, for example, EV sales have doubled in that timeframe. And it varies from country to country. So I'm looking at an article on electric at the moment, which talks about July battery EV sales as well. And it's really interesting. If you look at it, China's a bit down, actually. Battery EV sales are up. But the reality is the Chinese market is starting to slow down a little bit. We've heard about this quite a lot. It means more pressure on the new energy vehicle companies to manufacture and export EVs to other parts of the world. So that's a known quantity. What's probably less well known is that Europe is actually up by about 28 % year to date, month on month since last year.

8:14So Europe is actually going quite well. We tend to think, don't we, lazily sometimes about France and Germany being the kind of the beating heart. But obviously, Europe is made up of a number of different nation states. It's much bigger than that. It's not just about France and Germany. North America, meanwhile, has sort of checked out and sort of left reality, as far as EVs are concerned, for the time being, is down 18 % year on year. But the bit in the statistics and the chart I'm looking at that stands out is the rest of the world 96 % up year to date. Right. And I think we are absolutely, in the West, very guilty of looking at it through, well, what's America doing?

8:57what's germany doing what's uk doing what's france doing um and the reality is that um it's all the other countries i mean if you look at the uptake in places like thailand yeah uh of evs and vietnam and latin america increasingly so uptake of evs in these places but don't necessarily have their own car industries protecting lobbying etc has been incredibly quick and that's all that the new entrants need isn't it they need to sell the cars they don't necessarily need to sell them to german consumers for example uh you know uh consumers from guatemala or ghana or wherever will do equally equally well so um it is an extraordinary change and also you can see very clearly through the sales numbers that plug in hybrid and even e-rev sales are not faring anything like as well so the consumer has a gut instinct that actually battery evs now now they do 300 miles on average and and you know they last a long time a lot of the myths have been kind of busted a lot of the anxieties have kind of dissipated you can see that people are gravitating more and more towards battery ev so i'm not saying it's done i'm not saying the mission is done but what i would say is that we're entering a new era.

10:17We're entering a new phase. And I would say it's definitely now not whether battery EVs will win. It's which companies will win. Yes. And which countries will win. That's the phase we're in now. And I think we have to take a moment to reflect on that. I mean, it certainly made us think in the business, what are we doing? How do we serve the market as it's kind of adapting and evolving? How are we still relevant in another 10 years' time? Yeah. I mean, that's, I think, the huge challenge for us is because it's not only the actual automotive industry is changing, but the media landscape, I think, is the way it would.

10:57But even using those terms makes me sound like I'm on Newsnight in 1997. You know, it's so dated. That term is so dated. But I mean, my two abiding memories of the last year are going to the launch of the BYD Dolphin Seal in London and going to Goodwood. And both of those events were so, you know, you didn't have to be a subtle observer of human behavior. They were completely and utterly dominated by paid influencers. and that you know and this is not a criticism of paid influences although it might sound like it from an old git but it's just different so there so byd have worked out oh well if we have a thousand or two thousand young people talking into their cameras with our cat with our car in the background that will be viewed by 250 million people and if we get robert to come along and do a really good review that's very successful that might be 250 000 and out of those 250 000 a massively higher proportion of potential buyers of that car than the 200 million but the 200 million is still 200 million you know overnight in one in an hour after they do it you know so i mean i'm not sure i've got any of those figures right i'm pulling them out of backside but that was very noticeable and made me rethink how we do things you know it's a well i mean accepting entirely that that tesla really were the prime mover and they made all this possible the big name now you could argue is byd so on consistently now in australia five or six out of the top telling top selling battery evs are byd i mean they're doing that well they're doing pretty well here in the uk um they're going into lots of other markets they're super ambitious they've spent a lot of money but their approach is you know to invest big um to boil the ocean really you know um other companies are having to be a little bit more targeted they've got less money um but i've seen events where there are influencers and you could take a kind of old-fashioned view which is hang on we know a lot about this what does you know a fitness influencer know about this sort of stuff yeah but that assumes that every person who buys a car is a middle-aged man who wants to listen to another middle-aged man talk about how a car drives and unfortunately well fortunately i should say that's not the way the world works most people buy cars for they just want to something to get them from a to b or something to be comfortable i mean yeah i like a car that handles well i'm pretty sure you you do too but most people don't really care it's about cost and comfort and status and and all these different things so i think really we we have entered a total totally different media landscape um and it's never going to go back in the bottle and you would say change is only going to accelerate uh from here you can see with things like you know when you go onto google now and you search for something gemini gives you a search suggestion and that's killed a lot of you know traffic on on the internet going to to to website so and yeah things are going to only accelerate further and faster so really we have to accept that we're in a different world and as i say battery evs are going to be the the dominant powertrain but i say now it seems consequential i i am i know i've been banging this drum for a long long time but we can see very visibly the stress within some of the companies now oh and you can also see some countries eyes lighting up i I mean, China's the obvious one, right?

14:38They're thinking there's a huge opportunity here. In fact, they're not thinking that. They thought that 25 years ago. Now they're just fulfilling a plan that they started and published publicly for many years. But there are others going, there's a huge opportunity here. Australia being a market we know well, which is going, actually, this could be good for Australia. All this move towards EVs and then move to all the ancillary technologies, whether it's solar, batteries, vehicle to grid, et cetera, et cetera. there is an opportunity for certain countries and certain companies to to accelerate things that's why i'm a bit sad in the uk at the moment that the market isn't there aren't more evs being sold but more than that that the zero emission vehicle mandate is being lobbied against that that to me seems in the light of the fact that there are you know there are wildfires in the in in the uk uh and all of the world of course there are you know there's you know extraordinary heat in this country.

15:32The new technology is just better technology. That seems to me like crazy, you know, ostriching, putting your head in the sand and really not accepting the fact that not only is this changing, but it needs to change as well. So that's really hard to see that happening in the UK. And I think the UK will lose out economically as a result of that. If you were an overseas investor or an overseas car company, why would you set up shop in a country that's going to maybe turn its back on progress yeah well i mean although i mean there's a lot of reasons behind that but i mean all the you know more or less every chinese car company that we've interacted with and and driven their cars and gone to see launches and all that sort of thing they're all opening factories but none of them are in the uk they're in put they're in portugal you know there's a very recent well portugal you know you could say well they're in old eastern european countries many of them are hungary romania you know there's a lot of car factories in those countries but portugal and spain are very similar to us but they're they're in the eu and their power is cheaper because they don't tie their renewable generation to the price of gas thank you very much end of statement you know it's just like what other what other reasons you know you can say come and build a car factory in devon on the m5 and they go how much is your electricity yeah yeah no it's i mean it's you know it's it's almost impossible to make a case but those companies will still set up research um houses here we'll still do maybe some amazing engineers marketing you know other other things obviously selling through existing and new retail channels as well so um but no you're right i mean in a post-brexit world where energy in this country is extremely expensive in the uk i'm talking about obviously it's it's gonna it's gonna be quickly chalked off a list of potential places you could put a factory but what is interesting of course is now many of the german companies companies like ford etc basically joining hands with yeah we've got partners to say actually you know we've got additional capacity do you want to make things here in in in europe yeah um and we think we all know where that's headed right yeah we all know what that means in the long term

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18:24I mean, the review that Elliot did of the Ford Bronco, the electric Ford Bronco, I mean, in terms of views, that doesn't know very well because it's not going to ever be a popular vehicle in the UK. But that's a fascinating, you know, because that is such an iconic, macho redneck american brand you know the ford bronco you know you can't that's it that's what started a lot of that sort of ridiculous pickup truck suv butch big tires nonsense and they're making it in china and it's not for sale in america and it's electric it's kind of sums up for me a lot it's very symbolic car even if no one ever buys one well you spoke to michael dunn recently didn't you on the podcast as well and he you know he says this thing that there will be brands without factories ultimately yes you know and a lot of the companies will end up manufacturing their cars are the cheapest place to manufacture their cars and we all know where that is and that those are consequences of decades of offshoring now coming home to to roost but it's too big to change that really it's about how to adapt to that one thing that's less talked about is dark factories, i.e.

19:34factories that are basically run by robotics. Because in the UK at the moment, there's lots of talk about, well, you know, if what's going to happen to our car industry. Yeah. But I can tell you for a fact that the car companies will ultimately automate the vast majority of manufacturing over the next decade anyway. Yeah. um and so that is going to change change things very very significantly so the idea that the car market as it was five years ago ten years ago is relevant to what's coming another five ten years ago for me is for the birds it's going to be completely different and if you're not saying actually this is going to happen we need to adjust our business our our business models our country to the change that's about to take place, then you're doing the industry a huge disservice.

20:35And you can see the tensions in America where they're kind of trying to keep everything out at the moment. In the UK where they're trying to slow things down, Europe similarly is trying to slow things down. But it doesn't change what's going on in the outside world. That growth of EV sales in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, Australasia, et cetera, that is not going to be slowed down. So it really is, it's always a shame when you see, you know, policymakers or lobbyists actually be quite successful in slowing progress down. And at the moment, the zero emission vehicle mandate is under huge pressure, under huge fire in the UK.

21:17That effort is being led by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the SMMT. and I feel that they have painted themselves into something of a corner. And you can feel their communications becoming increasingly, what's the right word, diplomatically? I think increasingly they don't really hold water. So the two main contention points at the moment in the pushback against the zero emission vehicle mandate is coming from a small handful of car makers. It's not coming from everyone. And the SMMT are obviously the organization that represents the old industry, if you like, in the UK. And they've got a very, very tough job to do, by the way.

22:09It's a very, very tough job. I imagine when they're very pro-EV, I can imagine members shout at them. I can imagine when they're very pro-ICE, the members shout at them. It's a really, really difficult situation. So I understand that. But I think they are somewhat out of step with what is actually taking place. And the two main points of contention really is that the zero emission vehicle mandate, the targets are too high. The demand isn't there. And actually, we're not meeting those targets. And therefore, you need to lower the targets, take the targets away. And the reality is that there are some technical aspects to this.

22:45But the companies that are doing well are making the targets. Yeah. Some of them are making them and going past them. Others are almost making them and they won't get penalized. They won't get fines. And there's just a few that are not making it. And often, if you take the Renault example, Renault 5 is a brilliant car, right? In every category, there's a star, right? So Tesla Model Y is a star, right? Incredible. Sells incredibly well. Renault 5 has sold incredibly well. You know, the Kia PV5 van has sold incredibly well. If you create the right product, there will be market for it. And some of the others that have not got such good product are now leaning on the fact that actually this is all going too fast when actually it probably is their product that's the issue.

23:30It's not as competitive as it should be. So the reality is that the whole reason there is a set of targets is to push industry to go a little bit further than it would do on its own. It's a bit like your teacher, isn't it, saying, Johnny you need to try a little bit bit harder if you want to get an A plus you know that's the way of the world we need to have targets and actually the zero emission vehicle mandate has made the UK a bigger market at points for battery EV sales than Germany so it has been successful so to see it attacked on the basis that we're not making the targets well we're pretty close like if we were miles off but on average it's very very close so I think the reality is that's that's unfortunate and the other kind of line of attack has been um uh discounting you know we're discounting evs in order to to sell them and the reality is that the car industry has used discounting for all power trains always over many many years and continues to do so and there's definitely some studies that show that discounting for ice vehicles is more at the moment than discounting for ev so there is a slightly disingenuous debate going on within within the industry the reality is i think i am concerned about the industry surviving my view was never to be critical of companies on the basis that we didn't like them but you know be a constructive friend say actually you need to get your skates on here because if you if you don't then you will be um under under threat so So it is tricky in the UK market at the moment to see that kind of playing out.

25:05And I'm pretty sure it's a done deal. I know we've got a new prime minister. I'm sure another one will be along shortly as well. But I think it's pretty much a done deal that the ZEV mandate will be watered down. But I think the consequences will mean that UK and its citizens lose out, really, in short. But it's also that thing of, you know, that sort of increasingly ridiculous argument, it was always fairly ridiculous. There's no point us doing anything about climate change, because all the other countries aren't doing anything. And that what is happening now, and we can really see it now, is that what other countries are doing is bypassing, effectively, the industrial revolution that we experienced.

25:45And they're going to the electron, the electron revolution. So Ethiopia, you know, I never would have thought that we would talk about Ethiopia, Ethiopia's adoption of electric vehicles. Again, it's one of those countries that just, what happened there? It's like Pakistan with solar panels, you know, and their electricity, there was another element of that when I spoke to Professor Ray Wills recently, was that they didn't want to, they had to ship their solar panels around the other side through Russia because they don't get on with the Indians. So they could easily have got them through India.

26:17You know, they could have imported them through India, but they don't want to. But the fact that it's gone from almost naught to sort of 70 % of their electricity is now solar without any government intervention whatsoever. It's nothing to do with the government. There was no mandates. There were no, nothing. It just happened because it's more reliable and it's cheaper, simple as that. And that stuff is happening around the world. And if we don't participate in that, instead of us being a bastion of freedom to burn fossil fuel, we'll just be an old industrial outlier that's kind of slightly broken down.

26:53I mean, we should be at the forefront of this, not at the rear guard. Well, at points, we have been at the forefront. Yes. And we're not at the back. No, no, that's true. I definitely see that the political tension that the likes of Farage and Trump have created around wind turbines and, you know, net zero, which I still think is a crap phrase, but, you know. Terrible phrase. Which has been weaponized. but that has changed the Overton window. It's moved the discussion to such an extent that Keir Starmer was very kind of lily-livered on this subject, didn't fully commit, had a huge mandate. We remain to see what Andy Burnham will do after recess.

27:37Will he keep that mandate as it is or will he basically cave to laggardly lobbying? But the reality is we have been a leader at points, at several points, and we are in serious danger of not only slipping to the middle of the pack but but but going backwards and yeah ultimately in australia at the moment we've just filmed an episode with um eon uh and uh amber and we're going to film again with amber in australia soon in australia now i know they've got a lot more sunshine although actually in the uk there's a lot of sunshine the last couple of summers um but the reality is people are getting paid to generate electricity they're actually having they're actually getting they're not not paying bills they are getting paid they have an income you might not have the ability to participate in that and all these things are interlinked so from from my standpoint it's really really sad to see how america's sort of stepped back from that kind of global leadership on clean tech um but the uk is kind of vacillating in a way that i i don't think is going to help any of its citizens on the plus side we're going to australia soon and um and that market's absolutely booming uh i think around the same time there's a show on in addis ababa in ethiopia someone mentioned to me and i was like oh if i wasn't yeah i probably want to go to to that you know but you know people are leapfrogging as you say straight to soda yes in that sense it's similar that you know there are analogies with the the phone network you know that we had a copper wire phone network which we had for hundreds of years and then people tried to do that in africa and it never worked and then once cell phones arrived they just jumped they never bothered with the but they didn't waste time with copper you know they went straight to well they went straight to fiber and and cell phones and i mean that transformed their economies transformed the way they operate they do everything with their phones you know when the brief experience i've heard of that is in india where i was in what we would call a shanty town you know a sort of set massive area of thousands millions of people living there i don't even know all the kids have any kid over about 10 had a smartphone and everyone had a smartphone and they were using them all the time it's how they pay for things it's how they know where everyone is how they communicate you know that and you go my goodness not even in at that time because this is a few years ago this the equivalent kids in the uk wouldn't have had them You know, they were actually in advance of us in that sense.

30:10So, you know, that stuff, I really now see that starting to happen. I know it's Nigeria, all these countries in Africa that are adopting electric vehicles, and they're all from China. And as the technology, you know, the economies of scale improve. You get things like balcony solar and little, you know, fold-out solar and little portable battery banks and things like that. They've suddenly become viable. And obviously, I don't know if you were in subcontinent, for example, why wouldn't you just buy that technology, use that technology? For me, it's very clear what's happening. And the UK and Europe and America is not immune to that.

30:53It is still a global economy. I know there's been a lot of anti-globalization voices, but the economy has been built over decades to be a global economy. And you are not immune from that. So it is really interesting to see it play out. But from our standpoint, I guess, as the fully charged show, limited as everything electric, we have to look around the corner and see what's coming and predict how we kind of evolve our kind of business model to deal with the new reality. So you mentioned the media landscape. That's changed significantly. AI is going to have more of an impact on that, of course.

31:28ev sales where they aren't the market it isn't done but we moved to a new phase of the market in in my opinion and then the home energy stuff which we i think i think was always part of your plan to have that as part of the channel but obviously we've really ramped up our home energy sort of content in the last um six or seven years i mean that is really coming to the fore now and yeah we're going to be in london soon for an exhibition that we're running uh at twickenham stadium in september which is going to be our biggest show in the uk this year and then i don't want to make people in the uk feel bad but the sydney show is going to be crazy good i think the market is moving at such a such speed and then we're looking forward to well how do we adapt our business model um into 2027 2028 and what it's a bit inside baseball and for those who are bored by it i just keep it very short but basically what we what we've done in the uk is we've taken the exhibitions outside this year.

32:27What we found is with rising energy costs in a, you know, post Brexit, post COVID world exhibition venues became very, very, very, very expensive for us and for everyone who exhibits. So we've taken our shows outside this year and that's worked, worked really, really well in Australia. Our show is still a big indoor show, but it shows that our events can work really well outside. And we've sort of pivoted and changed our model and that's enabled us as a business to be more profitable. but also this year we had to defer our australia show in sydney from march to september turned out to be amazing how that's changed isn't it because it was not looking exciting in march i will say we did a melbourne show in november we did a melbourne show in november and the australian market was just sort of teetering a little bit so we did a sydney show march 2025 which was incredible yeah then the market didn't really pick up it was still at that I use EV penetration as a benchmark, but I'm talking about all the technologies.

33:26But EV penetration was about 6%, 7%, 8 % every month. It didn't really pick up. So the market was sort of getting into the doldrums. It was lacking confidence. We did the Melbourne show. The Melbourne show was pretty good. But then over our winter, Australia summer, it became, you know, people were very concerned about the market. Is it going to grow? What's going to happen? and at that point we we felt we had no choice but to defer our sydney show and ironically we couldn't have traveled across uh the middle east to sydney that weekend to run the show anyway because there was something else going on at that time that kind of interfered with the airspace so we took a very very difficult decision to move the show um but actually it's turned out very very well for us and actually that show is going to be i think the biggest one we've ever had because the market's transformed.

34:14EV sales have doubled in Australia. Cost of living is on people's minds in Australia. And they're using things like battery and solar to offset that sort of financial position. So that was really interesting. But from a business point of view, and this is the inside baseball bit, as a small business, that gave us a hell of a cash flow problem. So I think from our perspective, what we do is we kind of update our investors sort of every year, and we'll do that in October. But that has made this year a little bit more challenging, I would say. So we're very, very keen to rework the business model in order that we can actually be more profitable in 2027.

34:56We can keep doing all the great things that we've been doing. So we're making some quite big changes internally to do that. But we're very, very positive about 2027, what that's going to look like on the channels. with the events. But yeah, we're going through. I think it's been a year where we've thought, okay, we really need to be match fit for what's coming because I don't think the economies of the world are going to become any less volatile anytime soon. No, no. Possibly. It's not going to be settled. Possibly. We're really trying to make sure that we're sort of fit for the future. So I'm working diligently in the background.

35:34Well, you've been swanning around to see the Ferrari Luce and things like that. My whole life is just one long of luxury events. I've been kind of working very, very hard in the background, trying to kind of sort of, I guess, rewire the business, re-engineer the business. So, you know, we're confident going into 2027. So there are changes going on. And I don't want to be accused of being cryptic. But obviously, when you're doing that, you know, I can't talk about too much of it too publicly. other than to say the plan for 2027 is a good one and we're really looking forward to getting through. But it is going to necessitate some changes.

36:12Yeah. I mean, it's the one advantage I think I do have at my advanced age is that I've never had a job. And I don't mean by that I've worked all my life. But what not having a job entails is constant, challenging, difficult changes. that it's a regular feature through my life i mean there was a i was looking up a thing the other day uh and i and i was in an old diary and i just all i do is i keep notes of jobs and what i'm working on and what's happening and and i looked through this list of things of projects i was working on none of them ever came to fruition it was quite a long list but they were all like these are going going to be really positive and itv have said they're interested in doing this no none of them were ever ever you know so the i've dealt with that all the time so actually the changes that we've got come out and they are challenging and really difficult and i don't have an answer to all the problems that we're facing by any means but there's a side of it that's actually really exciting and invigorating because we've got to do something or or or stop you know that's the choice yeah i mean i i i would say that you know from my perspective you know it's it's made us ask some quite fundamental questions internally about how we how we operate and how we how we do things but we have enjoyed particularly last five years five years of real stability yeah and so um i have to say that we've had a really really good period i think i think trump coming back in about a year and a half ago was challenging for us because he changed, he basically ripped up all Biden's, the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which included a whole suite of energy, clean energy and EV-related supporting measures.