Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. My name is Pete Bigelow. I'm your

host and reporter at the Automotive News. You may have caught the news a few weeks back

when Tesla slashed the prices of its electric vehicles across the board and then

Ford followed suit by cutting the price of the Mach-E by thousands of dollars.

It got me thinking about the affordability of electric vehicles.

That upfront costs, even with those reductions,

is still a barrier to a lot of potential customers.

And we've talked about the bits and pieces of that before on the podcast, but we've not yet covered the financing of vehicles themselves.

To be honest, I've never really considered the question of whether EV should be financed in a fundamentally different way than their conventional counterparts.

But Alex Legal, who's my guest today on the podcast, say they absolutely should be considered different. He's the founder and

CEO of Tenet, a startup at the crossroads of finance and climate tech and it's providing a new

roadmap for lending based on the premise that EVs better retain

your value over time. Alex is going to tell us about that and more today. So let's get right to it.

I'm pleased to bring you this conversation with tenant founder and CEO Alex Legal.

Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Hey, I want to kick this off by asking you about a tweet that you put forth the other day, which I thought was really interesting and kind of contrarian to what many of us might think. But you wrote that the most important goal for civilization

is to enable increasing energy consumption, which is really interesting, you know,

compared to like I said, my first thought would be, oh, we should be reducing gasoline consumption. But, but just kick this off by explaining that. What did you mean by that?

Well, so I think in general, socioeconomic wealth correlates one-to-one with how much energy can you consume. And if you trace anthropologically,

civilization, then just... And by the way, one of my favorite authors, for example,

...