A podcast and some consumer content
I'm on Planet Money! Go listen!
If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time with earphones (Air Pods) in listening to podcasts. So go right now and download the latest episode of Planet Money, which features yours truly talking about solar. You can also listen on your computer/phone by following this link:
If you’re here because you heard the story and want to find my original solar series, links below:
Rooftop Solar Power Has a Dark Side
The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be On the Verge of Collapse
There is something that’s really fun about radio/podcasting, and I think it’s that the medium is so different from writing. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, so sitting down to write something is second nature; when I worked at newspapers, editors liked to joke that longtime reporters could write news stories in their sleep. But radio is not at all natural to me. I could not do it in my sleep. You have to speak conversationally and clearly while actually reading a script. When you’re interviewing people, you can’t really interrupt them because it might ruin the tape (reforming interrupter here.) And radio—or at least Planet Money—does A LOT of edits.
Still, it was really fun doing this episode precisely because it was so different. Keith, the host, and I interviewed Nat Kreamer, who founded SunRun, which is one of the largest solar companies in the country. We interviewed a self-described solar sales bro. And we interviewed an analyst who used the fun phrase “residential solar death spiral.” I hope to do more podcast/radio down the road, but the industry is a bit saturated right now (TIME just lost its person in charge of podcasting) so we’ll see.
Other CONTENT you may have missed: I look into some bananas fraud cases, including one in which a scammer takes out $40,000 loans on people’s behalf without their knowledge and a company takes a lien out on their house; two separate couples who had their checks stolen in the mail and rewritten for tens of thousands of dollars and who could not get the banks to give them their money back (!), and a few pieces on what happens when the largest solar installer in the nation abruptly closes, which it just did.
But first! Go listen to Planet Money. Rooftop solar’s dark side.
BFAT, Books to Fall Asleep To
I get most of my audiobooks from the public library, and I recently did a search for the word “Hudson” because I wanted to find some history books about the Hudson Valley, where I live. Instead, (after the many romance novels about a handsome man named Hudson), I stumbled across a bunch of books with titles like Get a Good Night’s Sleep and Confidence and Switch Off and Relieve Anxiety by a woman named Lynda Hudson. I looked her up and she is a hypnotherapist who reads these books that are meant to kind of hypnotize you into sleep / relaxation. If you are someone who has trouble sleeping, give them a try, I find her voice very soothing and for some reason, I like the idea of being hypnotized. (Don’t @ me with your gold watches.)