On the Edge with Erin Petrey (D) 6th District KY Congressional candidate

Welcome to On the Edge, hosted and produced by Whitney McKnight in Berea, Kentucky.

On this episode, Whitney speaks with Kentucky 6th Congressional District candidate, Erin Petrey, a progressive Democrat, originally from Lawrenceburg, now living in Lexington. 

Petrey has worked as a sustainability specialist inside of Amazon Web Services, the operations manager for the Libyan Embassy in Washington, and as a program manager on several capital projects large firm that turns biomass into energy.

All these experiences working within systems informs how Petrey analyzes her view of Congress's current performance. In her opinion, there are multiple system failures in Washington, and she believes her experiences can help her fix them. 

In this episode of the podcast, Petrey and I discuss the impact of billionaires on US policies, including artificial intelligence, the affordability crisis, and how she plans to represent Kentucky's 6th should she be elected. 

Reporting from The Edge of Appalachia in Berea, Kentucky.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome, Erin Petrie, to being on the edge. I'm the host and producer Whitney McKnight, and I'm just so pleased that you are able to join me and my audience. So let's start with what you're doing. You are running for the Congressional 6th District of Kentucky. You want to represent us in Washington? Why would you want to do that?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Yeah, no, listen, I know some people say, Aaron, why would you, why would you do that? Washington is a mess. And, you know, really what I say is that it doesn't have to be this way. I know that, you know, sometimes we also think, by the way, that this is the worst it's ever been. But, you know, back before the, well, I don't want to necessarily put this as the um the tee up here, but back in the 1800s, especially before the Civil War, I mean, people were beating each other up on the floor of the Senate.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Which one was it? It was the start of Calhoun. Yes, it was Calhoun. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, listen, we it feels, it feels, it feels intractable. It feels so terrible right now. But here's the thing is that this I see as an incredible opportunity to write the ship and get us back, not just on the right path and moving in the right direction, but to rebuild our country into something that we didn't necessarily know that we could be before. So I am running first off to make sure that we can get money out of politics, corporate money out of politics, restore the value of an individual vote by having someone who doesn't take corporate money, who is focused on things like campaign finance reform, and someone who has a strong history of tackling big problems, building big things, and getting things done. And that's exactly who I am. I got tired. I just got so exhausted of the lack of real progress happening in Washington. And so I didn't think that there were people who represented the kind of policies and direction that I know that we need. And I know that people across this country and right here in this district know that we need in Washington and for this country. And that's exactly what I want to do. I want to make my home the place I grew up, the place that made me who I am, a place that belongs to the people again, and not have them as political pawns like they have been in the past 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

I think it's more than 20 years, but okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Well, I say 20 years because we did, I know that listen, well, if we do go back to Hal Rogers and Mitch McConnell, right? 1983 and 1985, respectively. Um, so literally my whole life. Um, but especially, you know, I feel like the last 20 years is really when we've had sort of this rise of sort of the new post-9-11 order, too, um, and sort of this move towards protectionism conservatism. Um, I know we had Obama in there in the beginning, but then we have this sort of backlash, right? Being like, oh no. Um, but yeah, it's been too long.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

I think, okay, I'm gonna back up a little bit because you've said so many things that we can unpack, but let's pin that because I don't want to forget talking about Obama, because many of my listeners voted for Obama as well as for Trump. So, you know, any portrayal of people being 100% on only one side is inaccurate. But let me back up. Okay, so I want to just underscore something that you alluded to, but we didn't really flesh out, and that is you are not taking any campaign donations from corporations or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

That is correct, yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Okay, so it's kind of like the Bernie Sanders type of style, just send in your$25 and you're okay, that's great. And I agree with you that there's too much filthy, dirty, dirty, dirty money in there.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Yeah, I mean, listen, it, you know, the legal limit, my my campaign team would would would would, you know, yell at me if I didn't say the campaign limit is$3,500. So if you could do up to$3,500, send that check in too. But those$25 checks, they really do make a huge difference. And you know, listen, my my job before I joined uh this race, I worked at Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Yeah, well, we were gonna get to that.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yeah, no, but I'm saying that I I know how the biggest companies go. You know, I know how this works. I lived in Washington, you lived in Washington, we know how this works.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

And okay, yeah, let me do let me stop you then. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I don't want to get so far afield that we forget to talk about who you actually are, where you come from, what your experiences is, because when you our experiences are, because when you talk about Amazon, I think what you have already shared with some folks publicly here in Berea is that you know, you were a data center person essentially. You were the one involved in putting those together and citing those. So we met we definitely need to talk about that. But let's just say, you know, Aaron Petrie grew up. Where'd you grow up?

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Uh, so I was born in Lexington. I grew up um in the middle of the woods in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Um, I was actually in Anderson County at their Chamber of Commerce dinner on Saturday, and I was talking to Mayor Troy, and I said, Yeah, you know, I grew up in Lawrenceburg off Bonds Mill Road, and he looks at me and goes, Oh, wow, you were way out in the country. And I'm like, Yes, our closest neighbor was a mile away. So, you know, I know what it's like to have to stockpile food in a freezer. Um, our we lived in a valley, right? So if we had an ice storm like is happening right now, I mean, I remember we we would have to staple blankets to the doors around our kitchen because we had a wood-burning stove in our kitchen and we all had to sleep on the floor in the kitchen when the ice storms would come through. Yeah. And we'd have to use the propane burner out on the patio to cook our food. Because, and I remember Whitney getting city water. We had cistern water when I was a kid. So I remember them digging up all of the pipes to put in that infrastructure for city water. So I know what it's like to live in a rural place. So I grew up there, but my dad's from Hazard, my mom's from Maysville. Um, you know, we've always been people who are, you know, entrepreneurial-minded, small business folks. Um, and I went to uh school here in Fayette County. Um, I did public schools in Fayette County. And then um I always wanted to see the world beyond Kentucky, right? And my parents were wonderful in letting me do that, you know. So we they took us around the world, around the country. And that's why I wanted to be a diplomat. I wanted to tell people around the world. I wanted to be a public servant to the people of the United States by making us safer here at home, by increasing our soft power and improving those massively important cross-cultural and uh multilateral relationships overseas. So that's really what guided me as a kid. And did you do it? Did you do those things? Well, I did my undergrad at in DC at the George Washington University. I got my master's in, I'm sorry, my undergrad in international relations and anthropology because it's very important to understand the politics, but it's even more important to understand the people. And then I did my master's. I came back here to Lexington and did my master's at the Patterson School of Diplomacy. And then the recession happened. And so the government wasn't hiring for the Foreign Service. And so I went to South Korea for a year and I taught English in a public school in Southeast Korea in a city called Daegu. I never, I don't think I'd even eaten kimchi at that point, to be honest with you. Like I didn't know what was going on. I learned the Korean alphabet in a week, um, so I could actually read signs. Um, because half the things are just in English, but are in Hangul in the in the Korean alphabet. And then when I got back from Korea, um, I tried to find a job here in Kentucky, doing um export uh promotion, things like that, you know, trying to be an ambassador of Kentucky around the world, but there just weren't jobs here. So I moved to DC. And um, that's when I got a job managing a foreign embassy. I was the special assistant to the ambassador of Libya to the United States, and I helped a country that had just come out of revolution, had just overthrown a dictator, re-establish their relationships with the United States of America. Um, so I coordinated with, you know, the Department of Energy, Defense, State, the White House, Congress, the business community, the Libyan diaspora, and helped them get back on their feet and re-establish themselves as an independent nation with diplomatic relations here in the US. That was my first job.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

I mean, you must have been young, what, 21 or 24? 24? I was 24. I mean, okay, so I'm gonna just kind of unpack that to explain at least. I mean, I think maybe people kind of have already picked up on it, but that is so much supply chain. So much, I mean, just like it's it's so operational. This is coming from this place, this has to happen for this thing to happen at the next stage and so forth. So you are you have described handling something at a very complex level. Um, do you speak Arabic at this point?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

No, um a beshwaya sway. I speak very little Arabic. I know, and I know just enough to be dangerous. I'm the kind of person who so I speak almost fluent Spanish. Um, and here's the interesting thing with um Spanish and Arabic, they're very linked because um the Moors uh owned Spain, they they ran Spain from 7-Eleven to 1492. And so there are so many words in Spanish that come from Arabic. So I can listen to someone speaking Arabic and kind of get the gist of what's happening. So yeah, yeah, mashallah, yeah, yeah. Well, bucra inshallah, like, you know, that's always the rule. Bukra inshallah means like tomorrow, God willing. Um, but you know, so after that though, um, that's really what that job led me into really what I made my career about. So I'd always been a conservationist and an environmentalist at heart as a kid, you know, picking up trash off the side of the road at the farm and having my own little environmental club, which was me and my little friends. I was the face of the single stream recycling program when we moved from uh multi-stream to single stream recycling here in Lexington. So there's a commercial, I have to still uh digitize it, but I was the on the commercials for the LFUCG Lexington Fayette Urban County government saying this is how you recycle.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Um but I dude, you do seem to get yourself into a lot of different unusual places. I mean, just looking through your looking through anything about you online, all of your different bios, I'm like, what? How does that like people ask me? They're like, How old are you? I really had that same reaction when the first time I spoke with you. I was like, wait a second, how is she possibly fit so many things into her young life? You've really done big things your whole life, including recycling.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Exactly. Well, and you know, and and those big things didn't just stop at the embassy of Libya. I used that as a launch pad to help me into really that next longer phase of my career, which focused on building big things that matter, critical infrastructure like hospitals and ports and manufacturing facilities and renewable energy infrastructure and um EV charging and yeah, you know, data centers. And I'll talk about the data center piece later. But, you know, I did the data centers because I wanted to make them more sustainable, less of a stress on the environment. But, you know, I've I've built big things and managed billions and billions of dollars in contracts. And I'm the person that companies ask to come in and unstick things or build the foundation for either the company in general. I've I've built startups from the ground up, and then I've also built large-scale capital project programs that, you know, employed hundreds of people, created jobs in dozens of states, exported hundreds of millions of dollars overseas. And I was the one at the nexus of all of that, coordinating, making sure that everything happened on time, on budget, done, done uh with with appropriate quality measurements and also done safely. So, because especially when you're dealing on a construction site, you need that. So I was not just in the boardroom, I was on construction sites in my steel toes and high viz vest and hard hat too.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Interesting. Okay, so I was gonna ask you, what exactly do you mean when you say you built all of these things? But I also want to make sure that we have a hard example of you unsticking things because I think that'll be relevant to you going to Congress. So, what do you mean you built these things? What was your actual job? Where did you do it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Start there. Yeah, so I'm gonna give you the example. So um I worked at a company, actually, the one that you mentioned to me before we hopped on here. Um it was in Bethesda, Maryland, but they have um plants and ports all throughout the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic United States. So NVIVA Biomass is the world's largest producer of industrial biomass. I was hired there to be the chief of staff to their chief financial officer. And he had a huge portfolio and just could not keep track of it. He managed HR, IT, all of the finance, of course. So accounting, investor relations, treasury, accounts payable, um, but then also construction, procurement. Was this because it was a startup? Why the heck did he have so many? This was a 1500-person publicly traded company with a market cap of a billion dollars. But as from the executive level, you know, there was the CEO and the CFO, and then there was the head of operations. And really those three people, uh, plus the general counsel really had all of those different things under them. But that's why they hired a chief of staff, someone to come in and really take on. And so they gave me the construction program essentially. And they said, listen, Aaron, this is we're not good at constructing things. And you've just come from being a program manager, building medical cities, you know, working with an export-import bank, exporting things for um, you know, small, medium uh women, disabled, veteran-owned businesses. And I lost that job because of Donald Trump. We can talk about that one later, but yeah, we will. Yeah, no, I know. And so what happened there was they were about to launch into deploying their entire market cap of a billion dollars into brand new green field and brown field infrastructure projects. So expanding their current plants and ports as well as building new ones. And frankly, they had been very, they weren't very talented at it. Let me just say that. And they needed someone to come in and fix that. But here's the thing is that I was the one who saw this all happening. I said, guys, you don't have a program manager, you don't have someone over this to create the systems, to keep everyone accountable, to keep everyone marching to the same beat. And I went in, I wrote a job description, I went to the CEO, I gave it to him, and I said, You need this, otherwise, you will fail. He read it, said, This is your job now, didn't make a change, and that's what happened. And so, so I took one of the plants in North Carolina, uh, the Hamlet facility. I helped them get that back on track. Um, so uh pulling it together, making sure that we could actually get it um built in time. But then what I did is I built all of the physical and digital infrastructure around the capital deployment of three greenfield plants, uh, a port in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and multiple brownfield projects. What that included was um sourcing, like I first off, I had to just identify what the problems were. And one of the biggest problems was accountability. Does that sound familiar when it comes to Congress? Um, it was accountability. We didn't have a good system together for scheduling. We didn't have a good system for managing documents and version control, and that leads to change orders. And if anyone on here listening knows anything about construction, the word change order should make you shiver because that just means money, money and delays. And then we also needed to staff this thing up. So I helped create the systems, create the policies. I I personally provisioned a lot of those IT systems to actually make them work. And then I trained people and then they got deployed out to sites. So now there is a port in Pascagola, Mississippi that is operating. The Loosdale plant is one of the uh largest uh biomass plants in the southeast United States. And I helped set the groundwork and make those things actually happen.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Wow. Okay. So what I hear in there is somebody who's really good at seeing the big picture, systemizing it, systematizing it, and then and then teaching people how to then make it work. And you know, the operations then become routinized. That's incredible. Okay. Thank you for explaining that.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Let me say one other thing. Another critical role of mine at Inviva was being the go-between between corporate and the field. Because people at corporate, they are they they're accountable to the board of directors, the share shareholders, because it was a publicly traded company, and to the joint venture partners. One of the these projects was a joint venture. And then the people on the ground are the people actually there every single day, climbing to the top of rail loadout, making sure that the welds are correct, making sure that people are getting their jobs done safely. And a lot of times what was missing was that conduit because I would be the one every single week, I would fly down to Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and I would be on those sites from seven to seven every single day, talking with them, asking them what their problems were. And then I'd go back to headquarters and say, guys, I understand this is what you need and this is what you expect them to do, but let me tell you about the realities and what they actually need, and let's come to a middle ground. And that is what I want to do in Congress, right? Be that conduit between the leadership in Washington that can so often feel disconnected from our daily lives, and the people on the ground who can't feed their families, who can't find good health care, who can't find affordable housing. I have done that job before and I want to do it again for the people of Kentucky.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Well, I I appreciate your enthusiasm. I truly do. And as you alluded to, we were both in Washington. We think we overlapped. Don't necessarily I didn't know you in Washington. But um one of the reasons why I was ready to leave Washington as much as I absolutely love it, is because I I got spooked. I got spooked because after interviewing multiple people, uh two different, you know, I covered both Obama administrations and I covered Trump one. I was a healthcare and health economics and policy reporter. Yeah. I quit thinking that I was talking to anybody who actually had any power to do anything. And and I really did feel like I didn't know who was actually in charge. And I just felt really I was a little freaked out by that because it didn't seem to me that the person in the White House really was the one in charge. And it always seemed to me that the people I was talking to from either the you know, the Rayburn building or the, you know, whether it were in the House or the Senate, they were pandering and I couldn't figure out who they were pandering to. And the only non-conspiratorial type of conclusion I can come to is that everybody's just answering to billionaires at this point. Bingo. Yeah. So how do you change that? How do you bring, you know, we we haven't really explained the experiences you had while working at AWS, but you've got a lot of experience from a lot of different sectors, and you have a key set of skills, which is organizing things so that they work. But all of that, notwithstanding, you're dealing with an entrenched system of corruption behind the scenes. So what do you do with that?

SPEAKER_01 19:44

Yeah, so I like to describe myself sometimes as a professional pain in the butt.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

That's what I say. That's what I tell everybody I am. I'm an investor.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Yeah, equal opportunity pain in the rear end. Because here's the thing is that I don't like taking no for an answer. Because I don't want to say, can I get this done? I ask how I can get this done. Because that is the question that has always led me to getting things done. You think that the government of Libya and the people who were working as foreign service officers under Gaddafi wanted to change how things were being run, especially from some 24-year-old white girl from Kentucky. But I was like, guys, I'm the person who's actually going to get this done for you. And we are at such a critical time, Whitney, in our country where every single person is hurting who is not a billionaire. We are in this K-shaped economy, right? Which means those with the most keep going up and those with the least keep going down. And people are tired. The word affordability isn't just a buzzword, it's reality for us all. I was making the most money I've ever made in my life at my last job at Amazon, and I was struggling. Okay. If that's the reality, then please. I mean, the people who are making minimum wage or our teachers starting out with the 48th lowest starting teacher pay, please. Like, how are they getting by? And so the way that you do it, first off, I think that number one, I think the tides are turning. We see that with what's happening in Texas. And so I do think there will be a critical number of people.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Um saying what's happening in Texas, it could be any number of things that's happening in Texas.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

There are two elections that just recently happened that were 30 point swings, right? One was for a replacement for a House candidate. I believe it was what, the Texas 18. And then the other one was the Texas State Senate just flipped. That's huge. The Miami mayor, that's huge. There is a lot of sides turning in this direction.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Sorry to step on you. I was just uh reflecting on a report that I wrote maybe two weeks ago. Um, it was based on KY policy reporting. Basically, Kentuckians are accustomed to voting against their stated, not just like their best interest and they don't know it. They have gone out and said, this is what I want, this is what I need, this is how I have to have the government help me in order to get by. And then they vote for the people who will not do those things. What do you think is the reason why Kentuckians, based on these studies, why Kentuckians vote against themselves?

SPEAKER_01 22:22

So I don't like to phrase it that way, right? Because I think that's putting people down. Um, and I know that we can say, you know, as Democrats, like, oh yeah, well, you know, why are you doing this? Because we're the ones who are actually trying to get you those programs, but that's not going to win us anything. People don't want to be told that they're moral failures or that they've failed themselves and their families by casting their vote in a certain direction. And, you know, we can go back and dissect, you know, every single election that's happened since uh 2000 or 1990 or whatever, but I really just want to talk about this time right now. And the reason why people overwhelmingly voted for Trump is I think it's pretty clear, right? The Democrats were not the party that we needed to be. We were a failure. People, people say you're too cerebral, you're you want to argue points more. But people vote with their wallets and they vote with their hearts and their guts.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Which is why I don't find it unusual to think that people voted both for Obama and Trump. These were candidates that came along at the time where people said, this doesn't work. We need something new. What I think happened for what it's worth is that the system doesn't really change depending on who's in the White House because the system isn't run by our government so much. It's run by people with more money.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

And that has really been acute since Citizens United as well. I know it hasn't always been that way. I mean, it's always been a challenge, right? I mean, look up the robber barons of the early 1900s, right? I mean, your Rockefellers, your Vanderbilts. The reason that they built libraries was so that they wouldn't get bad press and they wouldn't get the tax man coming after them, right? People say, oh, those billionaires were building hospitals and doing all these nice things. I'm like, no, it wasn't. It was to get the law off their backs.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

I think that the antitrust enforcement is actually one of the ways that the billionaires have, you know, kind of insinuated themselves so thoroughly across all the different sectors of our economy because we didn't stop them.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Yeah. So, but uh, but what up? So going back though, is that I do think that we can continue to build critical momentum towards November of 2026 if we elect the right people who are going to not be beholden to corporations because they're not taking their money and actually following through on those promises because that is something that is incredibly popular right now among voters.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

What's the the non-corporate-backed candidates in particular?

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Well, no, in particular, going against billionaires and getting corporate money out of politics. So it's become more and more acute, right? And so people are struggling more and they're seeing billionaires make more money. They're seeing Elon Musk dump$10 million into the Kentucky Senate race. Now it's personal.

unknown 25:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Now it it's it's it's not that it just didn't, it wasn't here before, right? You know, sure you can say, yeah, but Mitch McConnell has been, you know, been been bought by all the big corporations. Andy Barr, who is who is the current congressman in my district right now, in the sixth, right? He has been the top three from mining companies. We don't even have coal mines in this district of mining company recipient money, right? And it's be that's the only reason Andy Barr keeps talking about coal, is because he kiz paid for it. And it is all I'm saying is that listen, we can be fatalistic about it or we can keep pushing. And I think that putting billionaires to task, taxing them, putting real limits on them is something that is continuing to grow in popularity. And that is something that Congress can do, and we can continue to push that. And that is what I am committed to doing. Would you say that has what has to go hand in hand with that might be term limit? I agree with the concept of term limits. No one has ever given me good data behind it, though. They're like, oh, well, this is what passed almost in 1990. I'm like, well, that was too long ago. And they're like, well, people want term limits. And I'm like, what people want is politicians who are actually accountable to the voters. You have to get to the core issues. Of course, term limits will poll well, but what you have to look at the rationale and the emotion and the pull behind it. And it's that people do not feel as if their representatives are representing them. But as the saying goes, follow the money. Well, money does everything.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

And that's actually, I'll put this question to you. I also put it to Zach Dembo when he was on the podcast. Is it that people who tend to be corruptible go to Washington? Or is it that when people, regardless of whether or not they're corruptible, they go to Washington and they are corrupted because the system is corrupt? You know, I don't, I don't really know. I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm putting it to you as, you know, how do you see your way through that?

unknown 27:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

I think that's a very fair question, right? I am running for Congress, not to be a lifelong congressional member. I am running for Congress to make real change. If I get, if I get if I am lucky enough for the people of Kentucky to trust me enough to be elected in May and then again in November, it is not my goal to continue to be re-elected. Of course, I will work hard to do what I am put there to do. But if for whatever reason companies want to come after me and spend money because I do not want to, I want to put limits on them. I want to put campaign finance spending limits, I want to tax billionaires. If people want to spend money against me and they are successful in doing that, then so be it. I will fight against them in another way. I think that people go to Washington and they are corrupted because they want to hold on to power. That is it.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Yeah. What happened when you were at AWS? Because, you know, we're talking about power-hungry people, we're talking about billionaires, we're talking about what I uh would characterize as a very narrow portion of the economy, taking up many, many, many of our resources. And so it's kind of like a it's almost like a fetish economy. Only a few people can really benefit from it. So, you know, how do you how do you come through all of those things? And and you're you have experience. A lot of people don't have the experience. So talk to me about that.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

You know, here's something really interesting. So I saw something um, you know, on on it was a meme the other day that was very good. I was like gonna try to find it. But long story short, it that it said that so we have all of these billionaires building AI so that they can sell us ads to make more money. Well, and maybe even to replace us. Yeah, well, I know, right? And so I'm gonna tell you exactly why I got a job at AWS. I applied to that job cold, by the way. I got in there fully on my own merits. And my job was to lead external reporting for sustainability for Amazon Web Services, their data center arm. And my job was to try to make my personal mission was to try to make them more transparent and more accountable because that's also what the Amazon customers want. And I'm talking big customers, Netflix, uh, Apple, Pinterest, Adobe, Salesforce. Those are the big governments on the public. I wasn't so so there's government cloud and then there's private cloud. So those are two different ones. So I wasn't the one really working with the government. And let's be real, the United States government doesn't have sustainability requirements. These private companies do. So the private companies were pressuring us to do more on sustainability. The US government couldn't give two cents, you know? And so, especially under Trump, right? And so now in the European government, I did work with a lot with European government, right, on the mandatory side, right? Um, and as my team did too. And so we definitely pushed for those things too. But most of that was from um European, from the EU, uh, more emerging from Southeast Asia, Australia, uh, and to a lesser extent, like places like um Brazil um and Japan. Now, moving back though, the reason I got that job at AWS, the reason I wanted to get that job is because I wanted to work directly in sustainability to make the biggest impact. Data centers take a disproportionate amount of resources, and I wanted to see, I wanted to go to the belly of the beast and try to make a big difference. And I did in many ways. There are things on Amazon's website, data and metrics that had never been published before, that I got pushed through leadership because I said, our customers want it, this is good for business, and this is why we need to do it. And I was successful, things like water use efficient or water use effectiveness, um, regional power use effectiveness, which are measures of efficiency. And the number one thing I tell people is that listen, yes, I do think that we need to have um uh legislation policies uh to control data centers and how they do interact with things like our grid. Um, but one of the best ways to do that is to make them give us data. It's all about transparency. We can't say if they're doing well or not unless they are required to do that. Now, the SEC was going to be putting through environmental requirements for reporting, but Trump killed that. And so I was listening at the end of the day, sustainability has everything to do with efficiency, which is doing more with less. And data centers, I feel I feel torn about data centers, right? Because on one hand, the concept of a data center is that companies will be using compute power, right? Everything that we're doing, this Zoom meeting is on the cloud. If you have on-premises servers, right? So these are servers and computers you manage on your own, okay? That is much more resource intensive, energy, water, everything, uh, critical raw materials than having a hyperscaler. A hyperscaler is your AWS, your co-location providers, your Google, your Meta, et cetera, right? Uh Microsoft Azure, Oracle. It is more efficient environmentally and from a cost perspective to move from on-premises to data centers. If optimized using AWS silicone chips, companies can actually reduce their carbon emissions by up to 99%. And that's huge. How easy? Yeah, it's huge, right? So moving from on-premises over to data centers is inherently the right move. Where the challenge is, is we are being sold a panacea, a cure-all, frankly, a snake oil in the in the guise of generative AI and AI. People are saying AI is going to fix your life. AI is going to solve all these problems. AI, I remind people, is a tool, but it is not the solution. It's a tool.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

I don't even yeah, I see it more as a bunch of billionaires. I think there's really at the end of the day, there's less than 10 that are really.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Like, ooh, we got to get AI, AI, everything. Look at Grok.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

Yeah, but I well, yeah, let's talk about Grok because that's actually a good example of where I was going with it, where it's it just also seems um it's a cool toy only us can play with because we're the only ones with enough money, but they also want to have the bigger toy than the other guy. So we are essentially letting them take over an enormous amount of resources to play a game where they're gonna just try and outdo each other. And I think Grok is a great example because he actually did break the laws to do the one in Memphis to build his Grok uh data center in in Memphis. Yes, he just completely went around the law. He he was told you cannot do, I think it was about emissions, but I actually don't remember. So I'm speaking uh with without a lot of information here, so I'm gonna stop. But but yeah, that is how I see it. I see it as I see it as irrelevant to the rest of our lives, frankly. And really what I'm what I'm upset about are hyperscale ones.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Well, no, so hyperscale data centers are everything owned by AWS Google. Hyperscale means large scale, right? Now, there are ones that are tailored to generative AI and AI, and then there are the ones that are for compute, right? Compute is your standard, right? Um, where we really need a lot of focus is we need a lot of focus on pulling in generative AI and AI. We have to pull it in. It's it's running rampant. It's caught. I mean, the fact that I listen every morning to my NPR podcast and they're talking about lawsuits because children committed suicide because of talking with a chatbot.

SPEAKER_00 35:49

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

We have to be accountable to people and our environment, and we are not doing that. So the long and the short is in its essence, data centers are more efficient than on-premises, right? It is the right sort of, it's the scalability, right? Like you want to you do more with less. But where the big challenge is is that AI and generative AI are this, it's this bubble. The entire S P 500 is buoyed by seven, like seven to ten different AI-focused organizations. Anything that happens to AI is going to have a huge impact on people's portfolios, on the value of the dollar. And that is we the fact that we have allowed ourselves to get into this situation in a relatively short period of time tells you everything that you need to know. These tech billionaires have zero qualms about making money over everything else.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

Well, and what if there's a bubble? They will end up as you were referring to, they're gonna take it'll take the market down. But it almost seems to me the bubble is inevitable. And I don't think it's inevitable. I agree, they don't care, but they're really the ones that I encountered when I was in Washington without realizing that's who I was encountering. Yes, per face. But you just you felt the influence.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

So, all right, we we kind of we've established that's an issue. You go to Washington, you're great with your systems, and you know how to connect people. I get that sense from talking to you, you know who needs to do what for whom and so forth. How do you do this? How do you get the money out? How do you stop the corruption? That seems to your own question. How do I do it? Not can I do it? So how?

SPEAKER_01 37:33

Yeah, so I told people that, you know, if elected, the first thing I would do would be to knock on every person's door in Congress and make sure that they know my face and my voice and my phone number, um, regardless of what party. That is what I've done in every single job I've ever done. I have been friends with people from the janitor to the CEO. And I'm the person who says, Aaron, I can't figure out how to get this done. And then the not the second thing I would do would be to sponsor legislation for sweeping campaign finance reform. Because until we control the money, we can't do anything else. And at the same time, I know for a fact that there is going to be significant support around reforming the tax code and especially putting a significant tax on those at the tippy top. And then number three is if we want to talk about data centers, and this isn't necessarily like my order of operations, like for policy generally, but if you want to talk it from a data center perspective, it's trying to push through more of that transparency reporting. These companies have to be transparent and they will fight against it. Your Amazons, your Google's, your Microsoft, they will lobby against it. So we need to make sure that they are accountable to actually reporting their emissions, reporting their energy usage, reporting their water usage. You benchmark that. We already have that benchmarked. There are analyst firms out there that do this. Um, like IDC, for example, uh, they do these benchmarks on the data center industry. Um, but where it comes to is that we have to make sure that there are actual legal requirements. Otherwise, everyone's gonna not do them, right? Mandatory people talk about sustainability reporting as mandatory versus voluntary. So it's what you're required to do by law and what's nice to have, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Um, no one has done any of what you're talking about, even though it is necessary and people have already brought it up and said, why are we not regulating more of this? And I'm gonna tell you, I think it's because Chuck Schumer's corrupt. I just don't think the Democrats have set themselves up in a way where they have the ability or even the willpower to do the things you're you're the things you're talking about. So either there's gonna have to be a real change with the next election and a lot of fresh people with fresh blood and fresh ideas and not a lot of the kind of corrupt back deals that they have come into Washington, or or what you're talking about is just gonna stay pie in the sky.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Yeah. Well, Whitney, that's one of the reasons I'm running as well, right? Because um, like I said at the beginning of the uh of our conversation, the only thing that's polling worse than Donald Trump right now is Democratic leadership and the Democratic Party. I want to come in and revitalize and reinvigorate the Democratic Party because we need to look in the mirror. I'm also the only candidate who is running in this race for Kentucky Six who is not taking direct instructions from the DNC. I'm not using DNC talking points. I'm openly critical of party leadership. I do not wait for permission to discuss an issue. I look, I lead with what I know is the right answer. And I do not look for permission from Chuck Schumer or the uh or Hakeem Jeffries or anyone else. People in Congress are here to represent the people. It's people over corporations, it's people over the billionaires and their assets and their bank accounts. And that's what we need to return to, and that's what I value. And I'm also the only candidate in this rapes who has actually successfully managed billions of dollars in money to make real things happen.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Well, thank you, Erin. It's been really stimulating to talk with you because you need new energy.