Tom Fanning 00:00

We need everybody pulling together with a national energystrategy. It is a national security imperative to build this stuff. We can'tafford as a nation not to supply the power necessary to get to where we need tobe. This is not like I need another refrigerator. This matters to the sanctityof our nation. I If

Nico Johnson  00:23

you want to understand where we are in the current moment,the power industry, who better to speak to than someone with four plus decadesrunning one of the most influential power companies in the US, perhaps in theworld. Tom Fanning recently retired from his 43 year journey at SouthernCompany, 13 of which, as the CEO, arguably making some of the most critical,important decisions in energy infrastructure, not to mention clean energyinfrastructure, depending on where you sit with nuclear energy today. On thiscollaboration episode between SunCast and Energy Empire, Jigger and I are goingto sit down with Tom Fanning, and ask him some questions about hisperspective on how we achieve affordability and what he learned over fourdecades of the power sector's evolution. Jigger, toss it over to you, Tom.

Tom Fanning 01:13

Hey,

Jigar Shah 01:13

so good to see you guys. See you. I think you were my veryfirst meeting in my job as the head of the loan programs office, because wewere fully remote, and

Tom Fanning 01:24

I've always enjoyed working with you. You're one of thesmartest guys I've ever met in Washington. And what was so great about thatmeeting was we started firing off ideas about, hey, we could do this and dothis, and hey, let's call a car a storage facility. I can remember how that'sright.

Jigar Shah 01:40

That's right.

Tom Fanning 01:40

We had a great time and always appreciated your work.

Jigar Shah 01:43

Well, thank you. I want to start on your journey. I mean,you had 15 different jobs,

Tom Fanning 01:50

yeah,

Jigar Shah 01:51

at Southern while you were there,

Tom Fanning 01:54

before I became, before

Jigar Shah 01:55

you became chair. Talk to me about your journey, and youknow, like, so what is what is it like going through the entire HR chain atSouthern? Yeah,

Tom Fanning 02:06

it was so weird, even my time before Southern. I was aNational Merit Scholar coming out of high school, it was Yale, Georgetown,Virginia, mean and West Point. Dad convinced me to try and play football atWest Point. I get hurt five days far. I'm supposed to report for BeastBarracks. Georgia Tech turned me on, and I took doubled up in Russian, and thenI got reappointed West Point. Got hurt again, stayed at Tech, graduated with myfour years now of Russian. I go work in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Wow, thatgets canceled. Son of a gun. I go back to Georgia Tech graduate school. I leavegraduate school, gonna go work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a company called abar in Zany. Live in Jeddah, car, apartment, food paid for. And son of a gun,the Iran hostage crisis hits. Oh my goodness. And so I just say, okay, I'm out,and the world is telling me something. Well, here's the thing: life isn'tlinear. No, yeah. And even when you tell the story, when I tell a story of mycareer at Southern, oh God, was there 43 you know? No, it wasn't linear at all.And in fact, my 15 different jobs, you know, so I changed jobs, and you know,round numbers, 15 top mean, and I moved, I forget what it is, I think I movedeight times and had six different business units, lived in Australia, New York,blah blah blah, was all over the place. The whole point in having that kind ofdiversity of career, even though it would appear at the outside to be kind oflinear,

Jigar Shah 03:43

yeah, is

Tom Fanning 03:44

that you get all these different experiences, yeah, likewhat brought me into what I'm doing now. This national security work was Ispent three years as the Chief Information Officer, CIO,

Jigar Shah 03:56

right,

Tom Fanning 03:57

Jigger. Most days I thought CIO stood for career is over,yeah. It was a disaster, but here's the thing. Turned out to be one of the mostenjoyable, interesting learning opportunities. What we find is that everythingyou do in life is a learning opportunity, and I think as you go through yourcareer, you, you want to have what we call in Southern a major. My major wasfinance, you know. I was CFO of the international company, CFO of GeorgiaPower, CFO Mississippi Power, CFO of Southern, but I was also all these otherthings, strategy, CIO, blah blah blah. You really get a chance to test yourselfin unfamiliar waters, and I think every bit of stress, if you will, whetherit's personal stress, experiential stress, et cetera, not knowing, not beingthe expert, very often when you live in a linear organization, you grow becauseyou know more. One of the things I give Southern. A lot of credit is they movepeople up not based on what they know but what they can know and how they canbuild personal networks and really expand their horizon, so so I think that'sreally important. And let me give you one other thing, when you live in anenvironment that continually challenges you, you learn to recognize people likeyou, and that is Southern Company, clean, safe, reliable, affordable stockprice that looks like this over 50 years, highest customer satisfaction, UnitedStates, boom, boom, boom, highest reliability. We are terrific, but thegreatest harbinger of future failure is past success, and what you always have todo, in my view, and this is you, is celebrate the revolutionaries. Look atpeople that will always ask why and why not. When you're in an organizationthat is a high performing organization, and you have such great results, peoplewould try to kill the revolutionaries. They try to say, wait a minute, what?What are you trying to change? Look, how good we

Nico Johnson  06:07

are. You see how we're doing.

Tom Fanning 06:07

You always have to attack your conventional wisdom. Mywords: creative destruction. Yeah, you always want to test the boundaries, andyou always want to ask why and why not. So, I think those are things, and infact, it was funny in my career. The most important thing that happened to meduring my career was not some great, brilliant strategy or whatever. It was amoment where I had an ethical dilemma that was enormous. I was effectively theCFO of our international company, and a president we had hired from AES,Applied Energy Services, Jeff Hamburg, in my opinion, but there's lots of caselaw here, tried to pay a bribe and to receive a favorable treatment on a dealin Portugal, and I was the only guy that stood up to him, and of course westopped it. We didn't pay the bribe, and ultimately Jeff Hamburg left thecompany. At that time, I was newly married, I had a two and a half year old, asix month old, and I even one day resigned from the company because of this,you and they taught me to come back, but that was the most important thing Idid, and I can remember after it was all over, they invited me in. I was just ayoung kid, I forget what I was, probably 26 nah, nah, I was 30, but I was 30,and they bring me into the board meeting, and it caused a lot of turmoil insidethe company, as you can imagine. Board gave me a standing ovation, that to mesaid a lot. So, and I know I'm going off with this simple question.

Jigar Shah 07:52

No, it's really interesting,

Tom Fanning 07:53

Jigger. The issue is, as you think about your career, thereare the whats,

Jigar Shah 07:59

I agree,

Tom Fanning 08:00

but there are the hows,

Jigar Shah 08:01

yeah,

Tom Fanning 08:02

and in my opinion, long term, the hows are way moreimportant than the whats you do, and if you can demonstrate, you know, thisidea of cultivating talent, this idea of ethical behavior during the worst oftimes, I think that really shows a lot.

Jigar Shah 08:18

Well said.

Nico Johnson  08:19

A lot of folks have had an opportunity to experience sort ofwho you are through your leadership, you're very well spoken and have beencovered a lot extensively through your career. What do you think would surprisefolks about you who kind of only know you through that lens of CEO of SouthernCompany?

Tom Fanning 08:38

I am a classic dumb guy. No, I mean my guy in the best sensepossible. Yeah, I always make a joke. I say, what is it? Women start outsmarter than men, and men catch up. Men never catch up.

Nico Johnson  08:51

Yeah, I

Tom Fanning 08:52

tell my wife that. My wife, Sarah, is the youngest chiefcounsel in the history of United States Senate, and she was the senior vicepresident of the Washington Officer Travelers, and all this other stuff, she'sjust brilliant. She's like, she has a law degree, a photographic memory, she'slike every man's nightmare. Yeah, but I am, you know what, and I've made a lotof money over my years. What is it? The theory in economics about the permanentincome hypothesis. I act like any guy that just graduated college. I, I worryabout my personal budget. I, I love sports. I just do dumb guy stuff. I lovebeing a parent, I love hanging out with my wife. I am not some guy that puts onairs. I'm just as normal and blue collar as they come. My parents, my mom wasreally smart, full scholarship to Smith. My dad never. Went to college andenlisted in World War Two in the Marine Corps. He was a really tough hombre,and I think he instilled in me this idea of being completely blue collar, andmaybe you're smart, maybe you're not, but by God, you're not going to getoutworked. So the idea of personal sacrifice, having a calling that's biggerthan than tactics, it's funny. I, I tried to turn that into a funny story in mylife, and it's like thinking about companies, but it's also people.

Jigar Shah 10:34

Yeah,

Tom Fanning 10:35

there's three kinds of companies in the world: there's birdsof prey, moving prey and road kill,

Nico Johnson  10:43

yeah,

Tom Fanning 10:44

fundamental to your persona. It's kind of your ethics andyour just fundamental beliefs, that's roadkill. If you can't abide by somethingthat other people can rally around, in terms of values, the hows, not the what,then you're roadkill and wrong. Okay. And then the fun thing is, what'sdifferent between a bird of prey and moving prey, and I think it's how youdefine success. I always, both personally and as CEO of a company, define sexin the long term, so I always aim at that North Star, and I can massage, youknow, near term what we need to do, but yeah, I never lose sight of that. Toomany companies in America define success by hitting next quarter's earnings,

Nico Johnson  11:34

yeah,

Tom Fanning 11:34

or by hitting some short-term light post. My view is, ifyour long-term strategy is resilient and correct, and you can change it everynow and then. It doesn't mean you're stuck with it, but you can move around inthe near term in order to stay faithful, but get there. I think people that setshort-term objectives as their north star imperil their long term and reallyhurt their shareholder base or their long-term personal outcomes.

Jigar Shah 12:05

Well, and that's a great segue into Vogel.

Tom Fanning 12:09

Somebody shoot me.

Jigar Shah 12:14

So I remember all of the Pew Charitable Trust meetings, sortof in that 2007 2008 timeframe, around the first nuclear renaissance.

Tom Fanning 12:22

Yeah, sure.

Jigar Shah 12:23

And you know, I think when you think about all of thedifferent.. I mean, there were over $100 billion if not, you know, $200 billionwith the projects proposed back then. And you know, yours was the one whoreally got started, right? I think there was the single largest training ofworkforce in the country, right? I mean, there's probably over 10,000 peoplewent through that training program, and they got their peak at 9000 people on

Tom Fanning 12:48

site

Jigar Shah 12:49

that were on site at Vogel

Tom Fanning 12:50

with Covid.

Jigar Shah 12:51

You had to go through the Covid process too, bankruptcies,etc. But you know, I think part of, you know, when you think about what we'redoing right now with the nuclear renaissance, when I was there, we were doing alot of that work, right, as you know, with the restart of Palestinian nuclearplant, et cetera, but the Trump administration is doing a lot of stuff too, andreassuring the fuel supply is

Tom Fanning 13:11

a dominant solution in America. How do you get there?

Jigar Shah 13:14

But what is it that you learned through that entireexperience around what it's going to take for America to do big things again.

Tom Fanning 13:26

Two words: vision and courage. No one would build a nuclearplant on the basis of a short-term perspective.

Nico Johnson  13:37

No,

Tom Fanning 13:38

you've got to have a real vision as to what you want to be,and I see we can get.. I'll let you guide me how far you want to go on this,but there's really two kinds of energy markets in the United States. There'sthe integrated regulated markets that are generally seen in the southeast andin the west, right? Southern Company is one of them. Then there are theso-called - they're not organized markets - PJM, New England, MISO, Texas,California, that I think are kind of a disaster. Nobody's going to build long-termassets in those markets without changes. So, let's kind of start there. So,when we think about new nuclear, we think about a commitment. You've got tohave a long term view. If the market doesn't avail you a business imperativethat provides a long term view, in other words, if the markets are always shortterm, energy driven, blah blah blah, lots of volatility, you ain't gonna builda long-term asset there. It won't happen, right? Capital won't flow to thoseplaces. So, we're gonna start with half the country, and if you have the rightmarket, then you have to go to that. I think are a lot of the challenges. Infact, I was on Squawk Box now about two months ago when. And the bigannouncement came out, was it Chat GPT or somebody wanted to build 10 gigawattsof nuclear to support their

Jigar Shah 15:07

Meta,

Tom Fanning 15:08

okay, in

Jigar Shah 15:09

Ohio,

Tom Fanning 15:10

and and the guys at Squawk, who I've developed a friendshipwith over the years, called me and said, "Would you please come on andtalk about what it's going to take to build new nukes,

Jigar Shah 15:21

somebody a lot more serious than Meta.

Tom Fanning 15:23

Well,

Jigar Shah 15:23

I mean, I think AAP could do it, but I don't think Metacould do it.

Tom Fanning 15:29

Nobody is going to build 10 gigawatts by themselves. Well,even Southern won't,

Jigar Shah 15:34

certainly not Terra Power and Oklow,

Tom Fanning 15:35

no, hell no. So, so here's, here's what you got to do, in myopinion, is you got to set a standard in which somebody will be able to executeon a long-term vision, right? So, I think we need revenue assurance, we needprotection during construction.

Jigar Shah 15:55

Yeah, but let me interrupt you for a second. Like, I hearyou, but what I'm saying is that, like, is it when you think about the factthat you've got, I don't know, 30 different reactor design companies now,right?

Tom Fanning 16:06

Right,

Jigar Shah 16:07

you and I both know that all 30 of them are not going toscale up and be successful.

Tom Fanning 16:11

That's right,

Jigar Shah 16:11

right? Someone's got to pick some winners, right? So, you'vegot the large reactor format, right, the AP 1000 then you've got the smallmodular reactor, right? So, you got X Energy and Terra Power and Geatachy BDX300 and you got the viable bit

Tom Fanning 16:26

of niche,

Jigar Shah 16:27

totally. And then you've got the micro reactors, right? Yougot Hollow and you know Radiant, and all those folks, right. My point is thatthe government plays a big role and did play a big role with Vogel in havingthis public-private partnership, I think you're right that the integratedutilities have more of a permission structure by which to think long term, butyou also need to do big things in our country, right, whether it's on nuclearor whether it's building out all these data centers or whatever it is thatwe're doing, there has to be a rational use of 10,000 scientists, experts, andengineers at the national labs use of super. There's a partnership here, right?That's all I'm saying.

Tom Fanning 17:10

Partnership is a little scary word to me, because at the endof the day, somebody holds the bill, unless for sure what I said on Squawk wasthat we need everybody in the boat,

Jigar Shah 17:21

yeah, the

Tom Fanning 17:22

federal government, the private sector, maybe even somefunding sources we haven't thought about, sovereign wealth funds and a varietyof other things, and then the states,

Jigar Shah 17:30

yeah,

Tom Fanning 17:30

and maybe the states should think about not only their statebut a region,

Jigar Shah 17:34

right

Tom Fanning 17:34

now, Southern, we have this dogma, and it is religious, andit's, it is, and but what we believe is, you keep every problem inside onestate jurisdiction. Vogel was a Georgia problem, it was never a system problem.Oh,

Jigar Shah 17:49

there, I think there's an entire like office of academics atthe University of Georgia that do nothing but publish papers on how you shouldthink about things in a Georgia only context.

Tom Fanning 18:00

Wouldn't it be cool, and I started thinking about this, andthis is heresy to probably most people in the United States, great friends withErnie Moniz. Yeah, when he was Energy Secretary, brilliant guy, and in fact hejoined my board. Yeah, fabulous. Wouldn't it be great if we had a nationalenergy plan, and wouldn't it be great if we said, you know, what we got tobuild as a matter of national security this kind of portfolio of generationacross America. We tried to reflect that, interestingly, on one of the Obamainitiatives, where he was going to control the emission of, you know, NOC, SOC,particulate matter, co sustained

Jigar Shah 18:41

power plant,

Tom Fanning 18:42

yeah. So, so, and every responded with something calledPrism,

Jigar Shah 18:48

yeah.

Tom Fanning 18:48

And then Prism 2.0 was the idea that there are regionalsolutions to a national energy portfolio. Yeah, that's not a dumb idea. And so,what if the United States said we need to add 20 gigawatts of nuclear, we needto get it built by 2040 Now, let's work with the states, let's work with theprivate sector to figure out what are the things that we need in place. Whatare the.. I'll tell you, two of the big inhibitors right now, but we neednational solutions. It's going to work. There, we were the only game in townafter Scanne went bankrupt.

Jigar Shah 19:26

I know,

Tom Fanning 19:26

and 9000 people, we couldn't find enough electricians. Onlygame in town. Now they're all working on data

Jigar Shah 19:34

centers,

Nico Johnson  19:35

yeah,

Jigar Shah 19:36

instead of nuclear plants,

Tom Fanning 19:37

pipe fitters, welders.

Jigar Shah 19:39

Right,

Tom Fanning 19:40

we need to reinvigorate the development of skilled labor inAmerica, that should be a national imperative that both parties can get into,and we need to align ourselves not only with independent workers but with thelabor unions. I can tell you a great partner in the work that we did at Vogelwas Sean. McGarve, US building trader, that's right, guy is fabulous, 100%

Tom Fanning 20:03

And so this idea of somehow union labor is terrible, andthat is the dumbest thing I've ever heard on the planet. We need everybody inthe boat, next everybody in the boat. This again is going to be, I think,bipartisan. We've lost our production industrial production capability in theUnited States when we were getting large metal forgings, we had to go toMangiarati in Italy and IHI in Japan, big equipment from Du Sun, and blah. Itdoesn't exist here anymore, right? Well, we need to develop that, and so nowhere's your idea. Big, beautiful bill. Hey, let's start strategically investingin industrial production capability in the United States, and growing thatagain, and now when you think about the coming buggy whip impact to labor thatAI will give, we have an avenue for people to leave and go into some growtharea. All this makes sense, but that's where we need everybody together,thinking and agreeing to pursue, but if industry wants to give the governmentthe Heisman, if the states don't want to work with the federal government,we'll never get anywhere.

Jigar Shah 21:12

Well, now they're forced to, right? I mean, and so justlike, I mean, I know we could talk to you all day, but I know we all gotlimited time here, but like, but now we get into the place that we're at now,which is that you know we've got record amounts of data center load growth,right, and then you've got all the load growth we had before from newmanufacturing facilities and EVs and all sorts of other stuff, right. You'vegot a situation where it seems like the playbook that most of the utilities aregoing down are old entire playbooks, some of them are new, like Georgia Power.Did you know, like Line Vision, across the entire state, they're doing, whichis grid-enhancing technologies. They're doing a ton of battery storagedeployment, right, to get more out of the grid that we've already paid for.Yeah, but I think there's a lot of other utility companies who are a littlescared, and you know they're they're just going back to old playbooks andyou're seeing double digit rate increases every year, right? I mean, so wait a

Tom Fanning 22:08

minute, the organized market, Georgia Power just agreed, Ithink, and I don't want to speak for Georgia or South, oh, no, I

Jigar Shah 22:13

wasn't suggesting, yeah,

Tom Fanning 22:14

but they just agreed to a three year rate freeze,

Nico Johnson  22:16

right, PJM, the

Tom Fanning 22:17

organized markets are saying they did,

Jigar Shah 22:20

but, but I think when you go broader, well, went through theentire United States, EEIS official position is not that, and one of thechallenges that we have right now is you've got a bunch of governors who do nothave a PhD in how electricity works, right, but there it's become a politicalissue. Well, but,

Tom Fanning 22:37

but in these organized markets, I think I'm in PJM now. I'vemoved to DC to help birth my national security business. I think we're seeingrate increases in the 25 to 35% range, so it's happening. Yeah, right. So, whatdo we do about that?

Jigar Shah 22:53

Well, that I mean, what, what kind of leadership should weexpect today from the investor-owned utilities broadly in this moment of, Ithink, crisis, right? I mean, people, I think, believe that. I mean, even thePresident talked about it in the State of the Union.

Tom Fanning 23:08

Yeah, listen, I think we need, you know, it was funny when Istarted talking about this, it was all the arrows in the quiver, and that gotObama took that over as all the above. I should have trademarked it. We needeverybody pulling together with a national energy strategy. It is a nationalsecurity imperative to build this stuff. Look, this work I'm doing right now,when you think about, and I hate to talk about it, but weapon systems andnational security systems that are going to be driven by AI and quantumcomputing and all that's behind that, we can't afford as a nation not to supplythe power necessary to get to where we need to be. I mean, this is not, this isnot like I need another refrigerator. This is matters to the sanctity of ournation.

Jigar Shah 23:59

Wilson Rickerson wrote a report called Powering the Fight,and he talked about how, you know, like in wartime, like that's when we createdsort of SPP and the Northwest Power Pool to try to get a lot of that strandedcapacity into be able to build wartime mobilization.

Tom Fanning 24:18

Yeah, listen, there are lots of ways to get this done, andthat's what I kept telling everybody on Squawk, was to say, look, this is ahard problem. Smart people, if they're working together, can figure it out, andif we get everybody in the boat, it was my kind of metaphor. Then I think wecan get through this. We can do it, but it's going to take check your ego atthe door, vision and courage, some of this idea about courage isn't some, youknow, I'm Superman, it's more courage based off the fact that one of my littlevalue equations in life and in business is value is a function of risk andreturn, if I can think through preserve. Returns, but reducing risk, I createenormous value, and I think acting in a way now. When you reduce risk in acompany, or in an industry, or in a country, it isn't like you put a skin onthe wall and say, look what I just did. It's a lot of hard work behind thescenes, changing the way we think this idea of having courage to change awinning strategy here to four or creating something new. This is where we'regoing to get the job done, and I think we got to get the CEO infrastructure inthe utility sector. We got to partner with the people that are going to be thehuge consumers of energy, and we got to partner with federal and stategovernments. I'm speaking at a conference tomorrow, mostly state and localpeople. They have a huge role to play, and we've got to have a human strategyand industrial production strategy. We can get this stuff done, but in fact,I'll bet you, you and I could sit down this afternoon and come up with a plan.

Jigar Shah 26:08

I got time,

Tom Fanning 26:08

but it isn't our plan. It's got to be their plan. No, it'sgot to be their plan. And we need to get them on board. So, this is this ispolitics in the best sort of vein.

Nico Johnson  26:20

Yeah,

Tom Fanning 26:21

this is getting people together to accomplish something big.It's a moon shot, and that's what we need to do in America today. That's the

Nico Johnson  26:28

Tom. I hear you saying that, and the question is in the backof my mind is, where does the leadership come from? Who's going to marshal allof the stakeholders? How do we get them all in the boat. It

Tom Fanning 26:41

comes at all levels, more stuff, leadership at all, at everylevel. So, what we need are smart people talking and listening. The problemwith this divisiveness we have in America is the fact that people stoplistening. People are more inclined to raise their voice when they feel likethey're not being heard, and so one of the talents of leadership in Americatoday is stop talking and listen, and then let's figure out where we agree andstart working on those points of infrastructure intersection to build somethingvaluable. We can do that.

Jigar Shah 27:16

Last question, give us a give us a few minutes on whatyou're doing now,

Tom Fanning 27:21

so for nine years, just under a decade, I was the chair ofthe ESCC Electricity Sectors, Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council. Ican't remember this, and very quickly, as I was helping lead the electricityand energy sector, it became very clear to think about, well, every sector inour economy has a really pretty decent silo, like waters isn't very good,energy is really good, finance is really good, communication is pretty good,but what we don't have is somebody that can figure out the interconnectednessof industry today, and that's where I just became consumed. It's a laughableidea now, but back then I called it Dinners Across America. I tried to seek outleadership to, would say, "Hey, we've got to redefine, reimagine whatnational security is now, and because in a cyber sense, 85 plus percent of thecritical infrastructure in America is owned by the private sector. In the olddays, you know, we were protected by the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, andfriendly neighbors north and south, and we were safe, and the governmenthandled national security well. That ain't the case anymore. Southern Companygets attacked in a cyber sense during my time. I don't know what it is today. 3million times a day, JP Morgan way more than that. And so, what do we do? Howdo we work together? What are they after? We know with exercises with theintelligence community, with government broadly, with others. If there is anattack by a bad guy, they're going to hit us, not just in a silo, but thinkabout if we lose part of the grid, what are all the interconnectedness points,and what do we do about it? So this idea of knitting together created a groupcalled the Tri Sector Group, and it became electricity, I mean energy, finance,communications. And so we've been working as the Tri Sector Group, a coalitionof the willing asset owners and operators. It's not an association thatlobbies, it's people that try to understand problems and solve them verypractical. Recently this year, with the second Trump administration, with a lotof stuff he was trying to do, we, and they decided it would be great for us toformalize, and so now we have something called the Alliance for CriticalInfrastructure. And what we try to do is kind of four things, illuminate thebattlefield, so we collaborate is the magic word that came out of myparticipation as the only private sector guy on the Cyberspace SolariumCommission, we collaborate, it's not share, it's not cooperate, it'scollaborate, we have a joint accountability for illuminating the battlefield.What are the bad guys trying to do? What are we seeing on our servers? What'sthe government seeing? Intelligence community, everybody else. How do we worktogether to illuminate what's happening? And then it's almost like the old 60slava lamp, where you know the thing always moves around and it's always doingthat, the attack vectors change, the attack surface changes. How should weevaluate those changes and start to do systemic approaches to skating to wherethe puck will be? So let's take action now to lessen or eliminate the threatswe're seeing develop. That's thing two. Thing three, if there is an attack, seeColonial Pipelines. Yep, think about it. This isn't just a gasoline pipeline.There are so many interconnected issues that came out of that. How should werespond as a nation in a systemic way? We were chaos for a while around that,so we're trying to knit together industries that will understand the impacts,and then get America back faster, more effectively. Fourth thing, C O T E, everyadministration has an accountability to provide a plan in the event Americagets knocked to the canvas, and that's called continuity of the economy. So wework very closely if America does get knocked to the canvas, and let me justpull out what we call this a poly crisis. Let's just say a bad guy takes outGPS, say they take out part of the grid, say they hurt the Fed's ability tohelp digital commerce, say they infect our communication systems, maybe theyalready have. Say they impair our ability to move in a supply chain way, bigequipment, railroads, trucking, things like that.

Tom Fanning 32:10

Say they take out a port, Port of Long Beach. Say all thathappens at once. Who stands up first? Where do we stand up? The governmentdoesn't know how to run the 85% of critical infrastructure, so we flip thegovernment. No longer becomes a regulator, they become the enabler, and theprivate sector must lead the recovery of America in those kinds of times.That's the coat plan. Yeah, and that's something else we work continuity

Nico Johnson  32:39

of the economy.

Jigar Shah 32:40

I mean, truly breathtaking. It feels like your retirement isvery busy.

Tom Fanning 32:49

Moniece keeps grabbing me to help with nuclear, and I'mtrying to help people think about how to build new nukes and stuff, so there'sa lot to keep me busy. It's fun.

Nico Johnson  32:59

Yeah,

Tom Fanning 32:59

well, it was a real pleasure to have you on. Great to bewith you. Always good seeing you, my friend. Thank you. Take care, Tom. Thankyou, my friend.

Nico Johnson  33:06

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