Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. Now it is time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And staying consistent with our focus on a practical energy solution, we are going to roll back to February 2008 when we had Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of New York based Venture Capital firm, Lux Capital on the show. Josh is young and known as one of the leaders in nanotechnology. However, this part of his interview that we are going to focus on has his real cool contrarian and refreshing perspective on energy. Lets check it out.

Josh: I do have some contrarian opinions, so I'm probably going to offend some folks here. My thesis on this is the following. Most people say we need to end dependence on foreign oil, and that's probably a good thing to do. There's good geo, political, and economic reasons to do it. Other people say we need to stop emitting carbon, because man is causing global warming, and global warming might be a bad thing. Now, there's controversy on the later point more so than the prior, but I think that there's two simple solutions to this. Okay, and I'm going to offend some people here-electrification of cars-that means electric cars-and nuclear power.

Russ: Okay.

Josh: If you think about how we make our electricity today, it isn't with oil. We basically burn coal. We burn natural gas, or we burn atoms three Uranium in nuclear reactions. Today that's about 20% of the electricity that we produce. Now in France, it's about 85%. Now it's going to take a lot of political will, and it's going to take a lot of fear residing to go into nuclear, but I think it's the right way. There's usually two quips that people have about nuclear power, and they're both rational. One is the fear. We've had Chernobyl in Russia. Well, the truth is, I wouldn't buy anything from Russian era engineers, let alone a toaster oven.

Russ: Right.

Josh: So I think the technology has improved a lot. Now, the second thing is what do we do with all the waste that we're producing, and that's a damn good question. The answer there is technology and entrepreneurs. Some people are going to try some things that are going to fail and some have, and I'm looking and I've learned from those lessons. We're in the midst of putting together a company right now that's actually licensing in a whole slew of chemistry and material science technologies to go after that very problem, treat the back end of the nuclear waste cycle.

Russ: Cool. I like your solution, but let me ask you this, even more controversial. How much do you think our species is contributing to the global warming?

Josh: Well-you know-there's two ways to look at this. The first is sort of like Pascal's wager. He was a philosopher, and the consequences of not believing in global warming are probably pretty high, so let's assume that global warming is real. Now, on the one hand I look and I say, people don't retire to Minnesota. They go to southern California or Texas, so maybe things getting warmer isn't so bad, okay? The other thing is I think that there's a lot of hype, and a lot of hyperbole, and a lot of excitement created by Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth, and it's very hard when you have all these people that are galvanized. It's almost like a religious mission. Until some of this hype dies down, the rational scientists and the empirical business people-their voice right now is totally lost in the noise. There's a guy, Bjorn Lomborg, and he wrote some books, and I think they're all worth reading, but he came with a very Ben Franklin, rational approach. He said let's stack rank the world's biggest problems, and let's probability weight them, and let's figure out if we put x amount of dollars in, what would be the y consequence. And he says, look, global warming, let's assume it's real. Let's assume that man causes it. It's still a 100 year problem that could be solved in 50 years, and you and I know what's going to solve it. It's going to be business, and free markets, and technology.

Russ: Absolutely.

Josh: Now, there are other problems-cancer, AIDS, heart disease, that hit home a lot harder, that we all lose family and friends over.

Russ: Absolutely.

Josh: Those are 20-year problems and they need to be solved in 5 or 10 years, so I think that we're doing a great injustice by diverting the attention of people, smart, young entrepreneurs, young businessmen, and maybe most importantly capital, into all kinds of foolhardy things. If you take something like biofuels, ethanol, and biodiesel, and all these things, I call them biofools. Okay? There's a vast amount of money that I think is just going to be burned up just with all the other carbon. We went from an agrarian economy where we used carbohydrates to fuel horses, to a hydrocarbon economy where we powered cars, and from a hydrocarbon economy to a uranium economy and nuclear. The idea of going backwards in time to relying on crops again, just to me makes no sense, and I think people are going to lose a bundle. If I had one advice for your listeners, it's one of those things, I applaud the endeavor of all the entrepreneurs, but I prefer to sit out the ride, and I advise that they do the same when it comes to biofuels.

Russ: Okay and that concludes our discussion with Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital. And that wraps up this mornings Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And now it is time for another Business Survival Tip, so lets welcome Carl Kleimann.

Carl: Hello business owners this is Carl Kleimann with another Business Survival Tip from Odyssey OneSource. Would it surprise you to know that the minimum wage in Illinois is higher than the minimum wage in Texas? And that the minimum wage in San Francisco is higher than the minimum wage in Los Angeles? Complying with minimum wage rules is not as easy as it once was.

For starters, the U.S. Department of Labor has increased the minimum wage three times since 2007. On July 24th, 2009, the federal minimum wage increased to its current $7.25 per hour. This is where the simple part ends.

More than a dozen states, including California, Illinois, and Connecticut for example, have adopted minimum wage rates that exceed the federal requirement. Furthermore, a number of U.S. cities including San Francisco and Santa Fe have adopted minimum wage rates that exceed both the federal and state requirement.

To add more complexity, there are a host of exemptions to the federal minimum wage requirements. For example, businesses that generate less than $500,000 in annual gross revenue and do not engage in interstate commerce, are generally exempt from federal minimum wage requirements altogether; however, may be subject to state requirements. There is also a youth minimum wage that allows employers to pay $4.25 per hour to employees under 20 years of age. This wage may only be paid during the first 90 calendar days of employment regardless of the number of days worked.

And finally, you are not allowed to reduce an employee's pay below the applicable minimum wage level by deducting for non-voluntary items such as cash and/or merchandise shortages, company required uniforms, or tools of the trade. This is one of the more frequent violations of the minimum wage requirements.

I am Carl Kleimann and this has been another Business Survival Tip by Odyssey One Source, ranked as the number one Professional Employer Organization two years running by the Black Book of Outsourcing. For more information on this and other issues affecting employers, please visit www.odysseyonesource.com.

Russ: Okay stay tuned in for our featured guest segment still keenly focused on practical energy solutions, as our guest will be John Hofmeister, energy expert, former gust on the BusinessMakers Show back in episode 145, former president of Shell Oil Company, and now founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.