Welcome back to the podcast, Bribes, Windle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. Today we're discussing

a lively new book about what the author calls Clean Tech con artists. My guest is Jim Rossi, the author.

He's a widely published writer, including for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

And for our purposes today, he's the author of Clean Tech Con Artists, A True Vegas Caper. Jim,

thank you for joining me.

It's great to be here, Alexandra. Thanks.

You have an exhaustively research story here. Can you just take a few minutes to walk our listeners through the story?

Let me just preface it by saying that I don't think clean energy is a scam, but what I found in

my book were there were a bunch of people who purported to work in clean energy who were

running a scam. Let me take it from the top.

When this story begins, I was in graduate school at UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

And previous to that, I had worked as an investigative journalist for Los Angeles Times and many others.

I won an award.

And what happened was all my editors started getting laid off.

This was around 2009, 2010. Fast forward to 2013,

I'm in graduate school at UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I'm studying history and solar energy.

And I didn't have to go into debt because I had a graduate assistantship. I was working for the vice president of economic development.

And my job was to arrange events on campus and off campus.

We had a lot going on with renewable energy at that time.

Senator Harry Reid, the Recovery Act, $11 billion for renewable energy in and around the Mojave.

So as part of my graduate assistant duties at UNLV, I helped to put on events on campus and off campus. We work with Senator Harry

Reed. There was the Recovery Act with $11 billion in renewable energy coming in and around

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