Bonus episode: Why Is Lady Liberty Holding a Power Cable?

Hi, I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications consultant, and this is Energy Empire. And today I'm coming to you with my first ever solo episode, and I'm interviewing Rosie Jewell, who is a graphic designer and visual artist who actually designed our brand for Energy Empire. So our very cool logo featuring the Statue of Liberty. And she is Jigger and my former colleague from the U.S. Department of Energy Loan Programs office, which is how we first met her. And so today we're going to talk about kind of Rosie's approach to design, how she got into it, what the design process looked like for Energy Empire and what our collaborative process was, what we were going for. And you're going to see some really cool behind the scenes footage of her design process. And then we're also going to discuss clean energy communications and branding and some of the issues kind of facing our sector in those areas and what she and I think might make a difference and set us in a better direction. So I hope you enjoy it. And thanks for being here. Hi, Rosie. Welcome to Energy Empire. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I've been so excited about this. Well, also thank you for being my first guest for my first solo episode. I'm really excited. It's just me and you. Okay, so we have to start with this. Our listeners have feelings about our logo, specifically the fact that our power plug only has two prongs. Like we did not know that we were going to offend so many people. We've been getting called out on LinkedIn and some people are telling us it's not safe. So this tiny detail got a really outsized reaction, which tells me branding matters more than people and energy sometimes admit. So what was the story there with the two prongs? I don't know if there have been more comments since I last caught up with the controversy, but I mean, the honest answer is just that it looks better. I tried it both ways and I'm sorry, like call it artistic license or whatever, but especially because this needs to function at such a small size. It's just clearer if it's two prongs. To go even further into this controversy, what we really should be asking is what is attached to the end of the power cable? Because the Statue of Liberty is like a lightning rod, right? She's made of copper or she's coated in copper. She gets hit by lightning something like 600 times a year and it just courses like right over her body and then goes straight to the ground, which is what keeps her safe. But if she's standing out there in the rain with like a janky appliance attached to this power cable, that's not going to be so good. So I did a little drawing to show you what the outcome of that might be. And yeah, let's just say, I don't see how that could possibly be controversial. Sure. I mean, to me, it's the toaster or something, right? It's like just meant to like represent a regular electrical appliance. I think people were like, well, for PV and all of these like random references for us about electrical safety, of course, like the grounding prong and the importance of it, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure all of that is very important. But most importantly, should we be worried about the electrical safety of our brand? Are we at risk? I think we're fine. I also like I come from the UK where we have, I think they're considered the safest plugs in the world. So I just want to state for the record that I do care very deeply about electrical safety. But yeah, we don't need to be quite so literal with the Statue of Liberty holding a plug. Sure. It's all for fun and it's art. It's meant to be fun and light. So I love it. I love it so much. I'm so excited to dig into how it all came to be. But for people who don't know you, how did you end up designing the logo for an energy podcast? Give us the short version. Yeah. So, well, you and I know each other because we both worked at the Department of Energy in the loan programs office. I was there from 2023 to early 2025. And we both worked kind of almost directly under Jigga in the front office in the external affairs team. And you were the media PR guru, obviously. And I was one of the people who made stuff look pretty, I guess. Let's dig into that a little bit more history and your background. You're a designer from Dartmoor. Am I saying that right? Dartmoor, so much more elegant when you say with your English accent, we'll let you do that from now on. And you ended up at the US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, which I do not think is an obvious career path. So kind of how did that happen? I don't want to give you like the extremely long version of the story, but I grew up on Dartmoor, which is if you can kind of picture a little bit like Scotland or a little bit like the landscape in Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, like these gorgeous rolling hills. It's very bleak and barren in a way, and just very dramatic and beautiful. I had a really, really strong attachment to that landscape as a child. It was in the middle of nowhere and I was like literally roaming the moors on foot, on horseback. I grew up painting and Dartmoor was like an endless inspiration to me. So just that is like some context as to how I ended up here. But it was definitely a circuitous route. So I studied French and Spanish literature and came out of university thinking that I would do something in kind of human rights. And I was really interested in women's rights. I met my husband at university and we decided to move to LA together because he was interested in becoming a filmmaker. And I'm going to say as well, I'm a pretty risk averse person, which is going to sound kind of weird because this was one of the like big risks that I took in my life where we just decided to move to LA sight unseen, trek across the country from his parents' place in New York. But when we got here, the first job that I had out of college was actually with a non-profit urban design firm. It's a really cool organization called KDI. And I was the development and communications person there. So I did mostly a lot of grant writing and a lot of bid writing. And they are based in Los Angeles and in Nairobi. Basically, their model is working with underserved communities to co-design public infrastructure that layers environmental, economic and social benefits. And so because of the projects that we were doing in Nairobi in particular, flood risk is something that comes up a lot that people have to deal with. Like the poorest communities live in these informal settlements alongside rivers, and they have to deal with, I mean, as we've just seen in the news with Nairobi, I think several people have just died from the flooding there. So KDI builds these public spaces with the community that like layer flood protections and green infrastructure, along with social and economic programming. And so that was like my first kind of exposure to the world of climate change and climate resilience. And coming out of that job, I really realized this is the overarching problem. And like the big challenge of our time is to deal with this, this threat and this risk. So 2020 is when I left KDI. I mentioned that I grew up painting and have been a sort of artist on the side all my life. But it was something that I had very much been oppressing in my professional life and thinking like, from a very young age, I decided, you know, this is not a sensible pathway to take. I should be academic. I should pursue more stable vocations. But I realized in 2020 that I really needed to scratch that itch. So I had this opportunity come up where a person that I had volunteered for suggested that I could come and work with him just as a contractor on kind of communications consulting. And that gave me the opportunity to transition out of KDI and start building up a design portfolio on the side. So I did that for a few years and built up this design portfolio from scratch. I taught myself design on LinkedIn and YouTube with all of the arrogance of somebody who just like doesn't know what they don't know. I was like, I can do this. I'm an artistic person, right? And most of my clients in design were in the climate advocacy space. And so towards the end of, I think, 2022, I was talking with a really good friend of mine and saying, I feel like I've spent so long looking at the problem with climate. And obviously, it's really important, this role of advocacy. But, you know, where are the solutions? How can I find out about what we're actually doing to mitigate this issue? And this person was Lucy. She was also at the Loan Programs Office. And she said, well, we're looking for a designer. So why don't I put you in touch and see where that goes? And yeah, that's how it happened. Rest is history. I found myself on the team with you and yeah. Yeah, I think I interviewed you for that job. You did, yes. A lot of us spoke with you and you were so clearly a good fit with the really strong culture we had at LPO and Jigger very much so, of course, believes in external affairs and the importance of communications and marketing and invested a lot into growing our team so that we had all the tools that we needed, which I think we'll talk more about the importance of that type of work a little bit later. But one thing from your story that really resonates with me is kind of the influence of like the place that someone grows up, because I have a very similar story. I grew up in the Eastern shore of Maryland and in this region, actually, I currently live in the DC area and grew up on the Chesapeake Bay. And my dad was a boat mechanic and electrician. and he always worked in a boatyard. And so we always owned one to three boats. So we were out on the water a lot. And so, yeah, just all my most vivid childhood memories involved the Chesapeake Bay and kind of like the influence of natural spaces on the values of a young person, I think are really important and kind of also led me to pursuing this as a career. So it was fun to hear that about your background. When people think of DOE, I do think that what comes to mind for them is scientists or like policy specialists, but they may not think about designers and visual artists like yourself. And people like you play a really important role in DOE's work. So what was it like being a creative there? It was great, honestly. I think, yeah, that might be like a strange thing to hear and goes against what most people would assume. But one of the things that I loved, like you said, Jigga was really overseeing the office at a time of expansion. And the phrase that we all kept saying to the point where I'm almost tired of hearing it now is that we were building the plane as we fly it and we were putting all the things together. So there was this amazing kind of startup mentality almost. And I'm definitely a generalist. So I love working in a small team with other like smart generalists. And I get a real kick out of working with people who are like total nerds about their particular area of interest. So I got to interface with people, you know, who were explaining like how loans are structured to me and what is credit subsidy and got to like understand about the, some of the technical aspects of the projects that we're working with. So I just found it a really dynamic and inspiring environment. I definitely learned something every day. Everyone really valued what I did and what we had our other designer, Lee Farrell, who big shout out to Lee. I should say here, I have an anecdote here. So I went to a wedding a couple of years ago and I mentioned that I was a designer at LPO to an energy journalist and his eyes widened and he went, did you do the posters? Like people love those posters. And I had to tell him, no, that was the other designer. That was Lee. So he was incredible. But I think people really did value what Lee and I were doing and the importance of design and visual communication overall. The most fun thing is when someone comes to you with this, a really important point that they're trying to make, but it's complicated and it's like, there's layers to it, layers of context and complexity, and you help them kind of strip it down and figure out like, what is the point that we want to make here? What is the story that we're telling? And like, how do we, you know, if it's a chart, for example, and a liftoff report, can we make the heading of the chart tell you what the chart is explaining to you so that you You don't have to do the work. What were some of your favorite and most impactful design projects that you worked on over the years at DOE? It was definitely deploy So I had a hand in various other bits and pieces and was kind of a general graphic designer And you know people would come to me to do a one pager or a deck but deploy was the definitely the thing. So it started with Kyle, our boss in the external affairs team saying, we're going to be putting on this conference this year. Maybe you want to put together a couple of logo options to send and, you know, we'll see, see what you come up with. I sent like 10 different ideas and started getting feedback from this mysterious person called Susan Kish. And then it just snowballed from there into developing the entire brand identity for the conference, doing all of the environmental graphics. I got to start working with Jason Ramos, who is also still a colleague. He's the chief architect at Constructive, which we'll talk about later. Yeah, doing the environmental design, doing all the promotional design, doing the decks, doing the social media graphics. And I think by the second year with Deploy24, where we went like much bigger and much better, and we had the exchange, and I think we had three times the number of attendees that year, which was just so exciting. And I really, by that point, was kind of co-creative directing it with Jason, which was just such an incredible opportunity and such a blast. And I mean, we got such great feedback for Deploy24, especially people told us that they got so much work done. They had like 60 meetings that it really was like the front porch of the Department of Energy. And this moment where people could see the full continuum of how like all these different offices fitted together to support projects from R&D stage all the way to deployment. And they could meet all the people on the way that would help them get there. and of course the programming was amazing there were like I think 130 hours of programming over the two days lots of like really pragmatic conversations and yeah it was just really special to help create the environment for that I think the the plenary stage in particular like I had such a thrill watching people filter into that dark room I mean you saw Jennifer Granholm presumably giving the closing speech and you know not a dry eye in the room it was just so powerful and to get to see that on a stage that I had co-designed with Jason was unbelievable. It was awesome. It was a very specific moment in time. And anybody who was there for those two years that we put on that conference will know that it was something special. And I love that, I mean, real deal-making was happening in those groups too. Like projects got built because of the connections that DOE helped to foster, not just with our offices, but also among private sector partners. So yeah, it was really special. It was such an incredible team to be a part of. And I think one thing that is evident of just how special it was is that we have all continued to try to work together as much as possible. I have a client that is a former colleague. I have many, many colleagues that I work with across my accounts as a consultant who are former colleagues. And I, you know, we all, I think, seek any opportunity to work together because we built such tremendous trust amongst ourselves during those years. And the culture was so special and the teamwork was so special. And everyone that came into the organization was so talented. Yeah. And I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. 100%. I actually remember you saying at one of our all hands meetings that among the external affairs team that there was this like really high level of emotional safety amongst us. And I remember that was like the exact phrase that you used. It's something that we don't talk about enough with teamwork, right? And how we collaborate, like it has to start from this basis of comfort with each other and a sense of safety and that like we can share honestly with each other. And And that I think is like one of the reasons why we are, as you say, forever colleagues. We really are. So when it came time to build the brand for Energy Empire, of course, you were the first person who came to mind. You and I reconnected. So when I first came to you with the idea, first of all, the podcast had a different name. It was not at first Energy Empire. We had a different name, but it was too common. So we switched over to this is our brand. When I first approached you about it, what did you think I was trying to make this feel like with the understanding that you didn't immediately love it? I knew that you meant energy empire in the sense of like a business empire. And it was about something like a confident narrative, a narrative that is optimistic that we're putting out, you know, something that works against the doom and gloom. And it's like, we're going to build an energy empire that's based on clean energy, that's going to change the world and change the course of humanity. I got all that. but you have to understand that. So I'm British American and I have like two wolves inside of me. There's an American wolf and that was the one that understood what you meant and it's like, woo, let's go. And then there's the British wolf that was like, should we be doing that? Like empire is kind of a loaded word. And then Venezuela happened and then I felt like I had to say something. But you know, you guys know what you're doing, you know, your brand and yeah, you were right. So like we can calm that British wolf down, the American wins for today. And it's memorable, you know, the alliteration works. And I yeah, I think like everybody knows knows the phrase energy empire now. It's so hats off to you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I know you briefly referenced the LPO posters. And of course, the LPO kind of the visual language of those posters was an early reference point for us. So what was it about that work that we wanted to carry into this? And maybe for our listeners who aren't familiar with that poster series, can you just kind of explain it a little bit? Yeah, so I think there was an original series of posters in maybe like 2009. Hopefully Lee isn't gonna message me after this and say, actually it was 2011. The LPO did this series of posters of different technologies that the office was funding projects in. And then they were kind of resuscitated, I guess, when Jigar arrived at the LPO and we did this kind of second series. So there was like a poster showing geothermal energy. There was an EV one. There was like a supply chains one, nuclear one. And they were in the style of the like WPA screen printed, kind of like the National Parks posters. So like flat colors, very epic landscapes. And you can see like energy workers often in the imagery. they thread this needle between being really down to earth and like really connecting with regular people, but also being incredibly optimistic. And they capture that forward looking, you know, very American mindset that we all recognize and love from those vintage posters. So one of the ideas that we had was to kind of do something similar, like a scene of some kind, where you could see energy workers or construction workers, you know, building some kind of industrial plan or doing some kind of clean energy project or maybe climbing a transition pole. But we ended up deciding that obviously, because as I said earlier, this is an artwork that needs to work at small scales and it needs to be iconic and memorable that doing a scene probably wasn't quite the right direction. But we did keep the visual style of that like screen printed solid colors and a kind of vintage feel. Yes, as well as kind of the color palette. We really, yes, which was really important. And I love how bright and kind of unexpected and anti B2B clean energy startup kind of feel that it has. I love those posters so much. They're so meaningful to me. People still talk about them. And I know you were, you told your poster anecdote and I have to tell mine, which is I happened to be in Ashland, Virginia one day for a random unrelated reason, but I popped into Dominion Energy's co-working startup incubator space that they have there in Ashland, just seeking a desk for the day. And I walked in, and I guess this isn't something that people do. They have startups that are residents there, and I didn't realize that. I thought it was just a co-working space. But I walked in and kind of explained who I was. And I was like, can I just crouch here for the day and use your Wi-Fi? And they were very gracious and they set me up with an office. I walk into the office and it's just wrapped with the LPO posters. Oh my God. Yes. And this was a couple of months after we had left after the end of the Biden administration. And so many of us had departed, including myself, had left LPO at the end of the administration. We had this very cohesive team and we all felt very close. And there was very much so a feeling that we were breaking up the band and we weren't ready to go. Like it was a very sad moment when we left the building, the forestall building. And so I was still very emotionally attached. I still am emotionally attached to LPO, but I was very emotionally attached to the work that we did. So it just was very powerful for me being completely out of context in the most random place and just walking into this office and like seeing the posters. I was delighted. I texted a few people. I don't know if I texted you, but I definitely took photos and sent them to multiple people from our team. And that has happened in other places too, that I have hopped on a Zoom call with someone I've never met before. And one of our posters is framed behind them on the wall. Happens all the time. Yeah, they're really cool. I'm going to send this to Lee because I really, I hope he hears this. Yes. Shout out to Lee Farrell, who I believe is still doing some work for that office. And we fully support him and the folks that are still there. So as we were designing the logo, one tension we kept coming back to was that I wanted something that was symbolic and resonant, but not too literal or too on the nose. We also spent time trying to make this feel American and powerful without tipping into it being cheesy, cliche, or weird empire slash Rome energy, which is actually a direction that we went in at one point. So what kind of felt hardest to solve there? It's a great question. It kind of goes back to your first question of what did I think about the name like I think the word empire was the sticking point and it's both the like the success of the name but also it was the thing that we had to work hardest to get right visually the reason why we mentioned Rome and like started throwing that around as an idea was because I think it was Simon our producer your producer sorry who said you know maybe we could do something with Roman architecture because there's all this neoclassical architecture in DC and it speaks to kind of the connection between government and energy. And yeah, we threw a couple of ideas around. There was like a plinth with the sun on top of it that didn't have legs and I knew it didn't have legs. But one of my first questions when we talked about the name was how comfortable are you with imagery that is American? And I threw out the idea, what if we did just spitballing like a flag with lightning bolts instead of stars, which again was a terrible idea. I don't know why I even threw it out there because I'm very anti-lightning bolt. Are you very anti-lightning? I am. I didn't know that. I did the branding for Deploy Action and I had this whole thing with Arnab where I was like, please don't make me put a lightning bolt in it. There are lightning bolts everywhere. It's time to put down the lightning bolt. We can get into that later as well, the imagery generally in clean energy. I had a sleepless night where I was thinking about all these different American symbols because you were keen. You were like, yeah, let's make it patriotic. We don't want this symbolism and this imagery to be completely co-opted. And, you know, it belongs to us too, right? Like we're Americans and clean energy, like these technologies come from America. And so we wanted to signal that. So I had this one sleepless night where I was like making a list of all these different symbols that we could draw on, like the American eagle, cowboy hats, flags, stars and stripes. And each one I was just like, nope, nope, that one's not going to work. process of elimination And then the Statue of Liberty just popped into my head and it felt perfect Like it the perfect symbol of America because it hasn been co by left or right It still something that speaks to all of us universally And it's something that speaks to the, like the highest ideals of America, right? Like it's enlightenment. Um, she's holding this torch as like a beacon of progress and light. It was the first thing that people saw, you know, when they arrived at Ellis Island that welcomed them into America. It just, yeah, that felt like the best angle to go down was a no brainer. And also not to get super philosophical, but she's holding this torch, right. That's like light and heat. It's a form of energy and energy is the story of progress. And that's something that's all like very intimately wrapped up with the story of America. So it just felt like the perfect kind of continuation of that. But the first idea was to have her holding a lightning bolt. Nothing if not completely inconsistent with my views because that was like kind of a, just an evolution of the torch, right? Like she's just holding the symbol of energy more generally. But I raised that with you guys. We had our first feedback call and we felt like we hadn't really found anything to, any threads to pull on and we needed to kind of go back to the drawing board. And I was like, well, what about this one with the Statue of Liberty? And you guys were like, yeah, we like it, but it's a bit earnest. It's a bit too serious. So then I was like, okay, what if she's holding up a power cable? And Simon immediately went, I like it. It's cheeky. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, what I liked about it, I do think that even from the first round, and I know that we're going to cut into this video, like some of your early design options. I think early on, I really loved how you had to look at it for a second to realize that it was Lady Liberty because you just see like the very top of her crown and her hand. But then it was so clearly brilliant once we figured out like, oh, this is what we're looking at here. And I think we maybe inched her up a little bit. So you got a little bit more crown. So it was like slightly more clear what you were looking at. It's the perfect combination of very Americana, very patriotic. We weren't shy about the empire piece of our name. Each word in that name is working very hard. And I know we felt comfortable leaning into it because one of the things that led Jigar and I through our journey as we were frankly working on this podcast for all of last year trying to figure out what it would be is that the clean energy industry continues to act like it is this small sector without a lot of power and that we want to see clean energy step into its power. And that when we think about what we're building, it truly is an empire. And we really are transitioning in changing the planet for the better. I mean, combating the biggest global challenge that is facing our generation and climate change, and also building tremendous wealth on, you know, doing something good that we need to do in order to protect the future of this planet. So I think it's a powerful idea. And we wanted to lead with a powerful symbol, visual symbol. So for people who aren't designers, kind of give us like a brief overview of what your process looks like. Yeah, well, you mentioned that you had come to me originally with a different name earlier last year. So I'd already had an opportunity to like take on some of the background and the context with the thinking and let that bake on the back burner. And then I think we had our first call about energy empire right before the Christmas holiday. So again, it's like the more I work as a designer, the more I realized that it's very much about like the overall process. If you look at it, it's like you're digging a flower bed and you, you know, like you're adding stuffed to the soil and you're getting it all ready and then you have to like walk away and then when you come back a seed will have magically appeared in the flower bed and it will start growing but you you have to like have the process of walking away and letting it just bake and develop like a stew in the back of your head because if you try and force it and like push it forwards you just you start going around in circles and you get frustrated with it so I came back to it like very fresh in January and as a first step I with this kind of like illustrative work I like to come to you with just pencil drawings like keep it really sketchy you have to kind of give a client like one problem at a time to think about so instead of showing you something in full color that I've spent a ton of time on that might not have legs it's showing you something kind of quick and dirty that encourages you to like bring your imagination to it as well And I want you to focus on just like the idea to start with and maybe the composition to some extent as well, but not talking about color and not talking about fonts, just which is the idea that we want to develop here. And then it's just iterations from then on out, right? So we'll show you some of the behind the scenes pictures, which I never thought would get public viewing. So they're not great to look at, but that's not the point, right? It's about the idea developing. so I started to introduce a bit of color and just show you some like low res versions of what it could look like and we played around with different compositions we tried showing more of Lady Liberty and there's one version in particular where you see like almost all of her body I think that was just getting way too serious and like detracting from the humor of the option that we finally went with so it's just testing different things but a lot of the time I know in the back of my head which is the best idea and which is the best direction and you're showing other options almost to just convince the client that the the right way is the right way if that makes sense and also to do the due diligence and like make sure you've turned all the stones over but half of the thing with being a designer is the actual skills and then half of it is the process and like refining your own process and making the right judgment on when to put out another option or when to put out your professional opinion that this is the way to go. So always learning. Awesome. So now it's out there and it's, it's, I mean, I'm really enjoying it. I love it. I am, my favorite color is yellow. So I'm very happy that my, yeah, I got my yellow font, my yellow name, but what's it like now seeing people engaged with the brands and having opinions about it, including about the number of prongs on the plug, which was one of the first criticisms we got. I know, like, calm down, guys. You know, it's great. I mean, it's always scary. Like, sharing ideas is scary and sharing finished work is scary. But it's just really exciting to see how much it does resonate. And I think it has achieved, you know, the brief that you just laid out about putting out this positive story and helping clean energy step into its power, but also it being a very human symbol and something that we can all relate to as Americans in our own way. So yeah, it's great. Well, one reason I wanted to have you on is making this brand made me think a lot about how stale a lot of the visual and editorial language of energy can be. A lot of the brands can feel visually interchangeable. So I was adamant that for our first meeting, I wanted this brand to clearly stand out, which I think we achieved. One thing I really cared about was making the show feel legible beyond energy insiders. So how does visual identity help with that? Yeah, this is a really great question. And I think the entire industry is doing a lot of soul searching around this. We're aware that there's a problem. And I also think that we are beating ourselves up maybe a little more than we need to, because to some extent, I feel like there is a question of just timing, right? The history of science is like full of examples of ideas that didn't take flight because it just wasn't the right time for them. And communications has a role to play in making it the right time. But there's also just to some extent, we're now, you know, in this crazy, like as we speak and record this video, an absolutely crazy geopolitical situation where as James was saying in your, I think, most recent episode, that clean energy has never looked so good. And to some extent, like we're just now in this situation where the costs are down, the security benefits are obvious, and it's like the moment that we've been waiting for. But I do think there are like sort of two buckets of like issues with communication that I see with clean energy, where it's like, on the one hand, it's an incredibly complicated sector. Like I feel like I've been in the sector now for about three years, and I feel like I'm still entering the learning what I don't know phase of energy and how it all works. And then we add to that mix, like all of these acronyms, like SMRs and VPPs and PPAs, and it just, you know, washes over most people and it's really hard to connect with. So I think we can work harder to just bring it back down to earth. And I wanted to shout out What's the Tea Here, which is this new series on LinkedIn by our ex-colleague Zanab Mirza, who was also at LPO. And they're like a really good example of how they'll talk about the like lofty, complicated energy policy or whatever it is, but then they tie it to what does it actually mean for everyday people? And they use like pop culture references to make that translation. So that's such a good example. And then the second bucket is like the moralism and the doom and gloom and like climate in general. It's been this like issue of if you don't realize that this is a problem and see it the way I see it, then you're a bad person. Like, how can you not want to fight climate change? And there's this, you know, if you've got a solar panel on your roof, it means you're a better person. And, you know, we call it a climate crisis. And I think to some extent, there's like an appropriate level of urgency there. But it's also any psychologist will tell you that operating from a place of fear and negativity is like not a good spot to be making decisions in, right? So moving away from that baggage, I guess, at this, especially at this moment, now that we're seeing that the moral and the environmental reasons for clean energy are obviously still important. Like it's a no brainer. Of course, we want sustainable energy because the alternative is whatever the alternative is. But the economic arguments now and the energy security arguments are so salient that I think that's what we really need to focus in on. This is kind of like a follow on to the same question. And I have an answer here as well, but I'm very curious to hear what you have to say. If you were advising the clean energy companies, what would you tell them to do or to stop doing immediately? Okay, I have two things. So one, we don't need to see any more like bland pictures of green woods and solar panels and wind farms and like, you know, beautiful, pristine landscapes that don't actually mean anything to the people looking at them, right? Like if you are a utility or a project developer, like you, if you're a place-based company, then use imagery of that place. I think that's so powerful. Like we were just talking about our own connection to the landscape that we grew up in. And this is something that I've been thinking about for a while. And I've talked with Zennib about as well. I read this book a few years ago called How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton, because I wanted to like engage with, you know, a really good argument for conservatism. And he has a whole chapter about environmentalism and this concept of oikophilia, which is the word oikophilia comes from oikos which is greek it's the root word of eco like in economy or in ecology and philia obviously is love of so it means like love of the home and the point he makes is like conservatives are oikophilists and he can't like understand why conservatives aren't the owners of environmentalism because they should be like there's a whole kind of nexus here of wanting to protect the landscape that you grew up in that's specific to you and your identity that I feel like clean energy could really be tapping into. It like placemaking and placekeeping and really drawing on the narratives that local people have about their communities and why their landscapes are worth protecting So moving away from generic imagery would be good And the other thing is just, and this might be a bit of a hot take, but I think net zero is not the most inspiring phrase and we all know it. And I would love to see clean energy just move away from the idea of net zero. This is my American wolf beating the British wolf in me and saying like net infinite. Clean energy is like the printing press. It's like the steam engine. Like this is a step change in how humans produce and power like everything in our lives. And it's putting us onto a trajectory where like there's this book Interstellar that says that clean energy is one of these technologies that's going to like get us to the next level where we become an interstellar civilization. And that's such an exciting narrative. And I feel like we could really lean into that and take a leaf out of Elon's book as well. And just, you know, he made electric cars look really sexy. So we should be doing that as well. Yeah, I love it. I mean, I'm with you in moving away from centering everything around climate change, and instead focusing on the fact that these are superior technologies in every way. Exactly. And so we do not need climate as our backstop in order to compete. And so I think that that's something that in general, our sector should move away from because it can turn people away. I mean, I think for me, advising clean energy companies, the number one issue that I see, and it's what you gave an artist's answer, and it was so beautiful, Rosie. And I am going to give like a consultant's answer and like an executive's answer, which is that I just think that companies dramatically underinvest in communications and marketing, dramatically underinvest. We are just not spending enough or doing enough. I can't even tell you how many companies I have engaged with that have one mid-level communicator with like eight years of experience doing 12 jobs. and there's no budget for visual anything related to visual identity. So when you're talking about having photography, like any type of visual assets associated with the places where their projects are actually built, it doesn't exist. And they have one person that's doing all their social media, their website, their branding, their media relations, and all of marketing, all of the marketing functions as well, all of their events, everything, and then wondering why no one has ever heard of them. It's wild. And I think that there's just a lack of understanding of the role of communications, which I believe should be an executive level function and a communications expert should be sitting in every boardroom and reporting directly to the CEO so that we can help to mitigate risk as well as help companies to embrace every opportunity in front of them. And so when we are relegated to a supportive function and dramatically under-invested in, we are not going to build power as a sector. And you know who's doing a great job with this? Oil and gas, oil and gas. I wish I had the numbers at the tip of my fingers. This is when I miss Jigar Shah, who his brain is an encyclopedia. And he would be like, the oil and gas industry spends 50 times more than the clean energy. It's something like that, y'all. I'll look it up and share it later in the show notes or something. But it's a chronic problem. And to give a couple of examples, I've been very lucky to be involved with some really powerful storytelling, particularly at the time that I was at LPO. And for the biggest moments that we had as a brand, so for example, Jigger appeared on the Ezra Klein show with Rob Meyer. We did one of Scott Galloway's podcasts. I pitched the Ezra Klein show for three years. Wow. I reached out. I was turned down. Ezra Klein turned me down on multiple occasions with multiple different ideas. He shut the door in my face. I got very close multiple times. But meanwhile, I had fostered a really strong relationship with Rob Meyer. So when he had the opportunity to guest host that podcast, he reached out to us. Scott Galloway, that took more than a year. It took repeated follow ups. Mind you, the producer did not acknowledge any of my outreach. It took multiple very, very well considered and thought through and deeply researched angles. I believe it was actually one of my colleagues, Molly Morrissey, who ended up actually like nagging that first response from somebody there after I was like, I've already tried three times. We need to try something new. Maybe you send the email. Who knows? Maybe they're sick of hearing from me. It takes a long time. And so you have to have the team that has the expertise that can invest the amount of time that it takes to do that work. And it takes a lot. And that was after hundreds and hundreds of media hits in the trade media and growing a media profile with four people working full time on media relations for years. And we had a $400 billion budget. So you would think that it would be easy to get in those rooms, but it wasn't. And that's what it takes. And so, you know, I think I have a lot of times when I talk to prospective clients, their expectations are just very unrealistic. Like, you know, I cannot come in for 20 hours a month to support you and land you something like that. Like it's so much work, so much, you know, thoughtful narrative building over such a long time. And, you know, it's the same thing with visual identity. It does take a lot of shoulder and a lot of commitment. So I would just really like to see companies take it more seriously and really, really invest and then see what comes from that. Yeah, 100%. And please stop using AI to generate images of janky wind turbines with two and a half blades. Every time you do that, an angel dies. Oh, my God. I'm dying to see that. If that is real. You haven't seen these? They're all over my LinkedIn. Oh, my God. Okay, so now you're doing this work at Constructive, which is specifically about building alignment across the energy and climate space through strategic convenings and network building. So does that experience kind of inform how you see this gap in comms and branding in our sector? Yeah, I mean, I see it all as it's all on a continuum. It's all like to the same end. So Constructive's mission is to build alignment and to basically create like infrastructure for collaboration to happen between the public and private sector or kind of between government, industry and finance. Like those are the big three and all the other enabling actors as well. Like I mentioned earlier, we were talking about psychological safety and, you know, what kind of mindset you need to be in to like work with somebody, especially across the aisle or whatever, you know, whether that's politically or because they are a buyer and you're a seller and they have like the opposite mindset to you. So to get there, you need people to be in a space of comfort and curiosity. And I think from my perspective, and I know you have more of a media relations perspective, and I'm more of a like branding perspective, but I see my job as kind of getting people onto that shared wavelength. There's like a tunnel between where you are and where you want the people to be and where they are currently. And you're not just like building the shortest tunnel that's the widest tunnel and they can see like straight where they're going so that they get to the same place that you are at. Like you want to build a tunnel that is appealing. Like if you're out walking on a trail and there's a fork in the trail, like what makes you choose one fork over another? It's not the one that's like the straightest and most straightforward. And like you can see right through to the end. It's the trail that like goes around a corner and there's like dappled light and it looks interesting and it looks like an adventure and you want to follow the trail and see where it goes. And so I really see my role at Constructive and our role as a very design forward nonprofit as creating that pathway, like architects literally, to get them to that spot where they can then collaborate constructively towards deploying clean energy. So we have a chief architect who's the four of us, we will work together on deploy. This is how it happens. So Susan Kish, Jonah Wagner, Jason Ramos and I kind of talked about spinning this off and making it an independent nonprofit after the change in administration, obviously. And Jason and I really worked together on creating these shared experiences. When we say like architects of collaboration, we don't mean, you know, puppet masters pulling marionettes and like telling people how they're going to work together. It's about getting them in a space and taking them on a journey, telling them a story. It's all like blended together to architect the experience. I hate using the word architect as a verb. I think it's beautiful that kind of the legacy of the Deploy conferences that we put together, that we discussed earlier, were just such a special moment, not just for our team, but also for attendees and folks in the industry. And you all have really carried the DNA of those conferences forward into constructive and in the events that you're helping to design now. So before we let you go, what are you working on now? What's constructive that coming up? We have Dervos States locked in. So we're collaborating with the DER task force again to co-produce Dervos this year, which, as everyone knows, is like the most exciting energy event on the calendar. Lots of hot takes about distributed energy. So that's going to be September 17th to the 19th in New York City again, right before Climate Week. So make sure you sign up for updates for that. And then we also have a couple of things coming up in London that we haven't announced yet, but we're going to be doing a summit in May with the WRI Polsky Energy Center on meeting energy demand with clean energy generation. And then we're also partnering with EMBA in June to do a summit on electrotech, which is super exciting. It's not just convenings and like big, large scale events. We're also developing dialogues that kind of like continue the legacy of the deploy dialogues and the liftoff reports to some extent. So more to come on that. But we have kind of upcoming programs that do deeper dives into specific technology areas like clean firm power and how to scale up deployment of those. that all sounds great um otherwise i know you're also a very prolific visual artist and i love it when i see your art pop up in my linkedin feed but where can people find you and follow your work um well i have a website you can check out rosie jewel.com definitely needs an update um i'm off of instagram because i just can't deal with the prospect of ai stealing all of my artwork and you can't turn it off in this country. There's like no way to just opt out. If I was in the UK, I'd be able to, but fun times. And then Constructive's website is constructive.org. So you can find us there and sign up for our newsletter to hear more about the events and convenings that we have coming up. Awesome. Thank you, Rosie, so much for joining me. It was so great to have you. And thank you for being here for my first solo episode. It was nice to have a friend on the other side. Such a pleasure. The pleasure was all mine, Jamie. Thank you for having me.