00:02
Peder Hansen
I chose the picture by P.S. Krøyer, called Iron Foundry, Burmeister & Wain.

00:09
Peder Hansen
It is a darker picture. Back when this picture was painted, it was a big industry in Denmark to build ships and everything for them. And there was an enormous amount of innovation.

00:24
Peder Hansen
You can feel what it really took to make these very large vessels back in the day. The kind of teamwork, the kind of buildings where everything had to be done by hand, the ingenuity to make these large propellers or shafts or engine blocks.

00:42
Peder Hansen
You could have a job back then as an apprentice. You could then become a master. You could get your own apprentices. You had a job for life. But not just your life. It was everybody that worked with you and under you in that setting.

00:58
Peder Hansen
Coming from a blacksmith family, I can appreciate working with the metals in the foundries. You have, in the middle, the molten metal that flows out, and you're creating something that we feel is so rigid, but once it's being created, it's so fluid. I think you can take that with you throughout life.

01:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Peder Hansen, a Danish wind turbine engineer. Welcome, Peter.

01:50
Peder Hansen
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

01:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You're very welcome. To begin with, Peder, you live in Omaha, Nebraska. I have to admit that I've never been to Nebraska. So I would like to ask you, what is this state in the Midwest like? And how did you end up in Nebraska of all places? And why Omaha?

02:10
Peder Hansen
Well, first of all, Nebraska is a wonderful state and Omaha is a wonderful little town. It's not so little, surrounding areas along with Omaha is almost a million people. That's like the inner city of Copenhagen, or even more. It is in the middle of the Midwest. We have an inland climate here, right? We have 40 degrees Celsius in the summer times, and we have minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter time. So it's true inland climate.

02:37
Peder Hansen
What brought me here was the wind industry. I've been in the wind industry for 35 years and about 30 some years ago, almost, I was invited to California to help an American company develop and design wind turbines. I don't know if they've gotten sick of buying them from Denmark or importing them, or if it's just one of those things where now we Americans want to do this ourselves.

03:01
Peder Hansen
20 years ago, I was invited to come out to a company in Omaha, called Valmont, and I had myself never been out here. I was invited out to take a look and it's just gorgeous out here. I immediately said yes to the job. I was only supposed to have been here for a couple of years, and I've been out here ever since, and I love it.

03:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I heard a little about your family history. Your family had a company named Vestas, and they started making wind turbines in Lem, close to Ringkøping in the 1970s. It was your mother, actually, who was the visionary and saw that this could be a good idea, is that right?

03:42
Peder Hansen
It's kind of a funny story, right? I was named after my granddad, Peder Hansen. His dad was actually the founder of Vestas. It was a family company. Vestas was at the time a farming equipment company. We built everything that John Deere builds today, except the tractors, but also cranes and those sorts of things. And so it was an industrial company.

04:08
Peder Hansen
The oil crisis in Europe in the '70s was a wakeup call for a lot of European countries that didn't pull their own oil out of the ground. Mærsk did not have these oil rigs at the time as they do today. The Danish government basically said, if you can come up with ideas to make electricity for us, therefore we can be self-sufficient, we have some great incentives for you.

04:35
Peder Hansen
Well, the funny thing is, that a guy showed up at Vestas one day. I'll just say he looked a little bit like a hippie and he knocked on the door and said, I'd like to talk to the CEO. My dad had taken over from his dad, and went down and talked with him. And my mom came with, because she was the national sales manager at the time, and let him in, and heard a little bit about what he was doing. And a group of guys had developed a windmill.

05:09
Peder Hansen
Very shortly thereafter, we started calling them wind turbines. Three wings, three blades, generator gearbox sitting up on top of a tower. And it was a fairly well-baked product. Except they couldn't build it because they had nowhere to build, and they wanted Vestas to do it.

05:23
Peder Hansen
And my dad basically said, no, I'm not interested, this is some hippie dippy stuff and we're a well-respected company. Well, that night at home, my mom basically told my dad, this is the future, and I think you're dumb not to do it. It was a longer conversation than that.

05:40
Peder Hansen
And lo and behold, the managers at Vestas said, okay, if you put all of these curtains up down the back of the factory, you can do it down there, but don't tell anybody what we're doing because it's a little bit embarrassing, and these windmills may never work. Fast forward, it was the right decision that my mom made my dad do.

05:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And those visitors were from the United States, right?

06:03
Peder Hansen
No, that visitor was a guy by the name of Henrik Stiesdal. He was Danish, and that guy ended up becoming the CTO of what today is Siemens Gamesa.

06:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ah, okay.

06:15
Peder Hansen
So, he has his own company now, where I believe he specializes in floating platforms for offshore wind turbines, so that engineering streak continued with him, yes.

06:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And so your mom convinced your dad to go ahead and do this and you were just a little boy at the time. How did you personally end up making wind turbines? Was it always in the cards that you would follow in your father's footsteps? And how did you educate yourself to make sure that you could do it?

06:47
Peder Hansen
It's a specialty product, obviously. Back when I started, there was no such thing as a wind engineer. There were engineers that did wind turbines, there were people that did sailboats that could do blades, and there were gearbox engineers. And of course there were structural engineers that could do the towers. But all of a sudden you're talking about a dynamic beast out there that's sitting out in the wind.

07:09
Peder Hansen
I knew that I wanted to be in wind, because it was fascinating, right? It was brand new in the '80s and early '90s, and brings with it that entrepreneurial spirit that I have from a long line of entrepreneurs that come before me. And the United States is the right place to do that, by the way. But of course this was in Denmark.

07:30
Peder Hansen
So, I had, actually, before I started my engineering degree, joined the Danish army. I became a sergeant, had my own platoon. But ended up busting both of my knees, had knee surgery. I had wanted to have made that a career, and then had to sort of reevaluate after the fact.

07:48
Peder Hansen
I think the military makes you grow up a little bit as well. And Denmark is very different in the way we approach military service. You don't have to sign up for four years. You can get to try it first for nine months or so, and then decide whether you want to be a professional soldier. So I had chosen to be a professional soldier, had surgeries, and had to rethink.

08:08
Peder Hansen
And that's when I thought, let me do this the old-fashioned way. I became a machinist first. Now my grandfather on my mom's side was a blacksmith. He had taught me a lot of things. I know how to work a hammer and an anvil. I know how to shoe a horse, those types of things.

08:27
Peder Hansen
And my grandfather on my dad's side, the owner of Vestas, was also a machinist. And so between the two of them, I had all the opportunities in the world to be a hands-on guy. So I went in and got myself a machinist education, initially working with blades and mills and so forth, and then worked my way into becoming an engineer.

08:49
Peder Hansen
At that point, with the focus on wanting to be in the wind industry, it was structural engineering, mechanical engineering, et cetera. I have a master's in mechanical engineering, and that's really only the springboard to getting into the wind industry. I was then so lucky that, in the early '90s, my dad had been offered a job in the United States with a company called Zond Energy Systems to develop wind turbines over here.

09:16
Peder Hansen
And I then had an opportunity to come over here, mostly as an apprentice first, repairing old turbines out in the field, installing some of the prototypes and then slowly working my way into an engineering job, which lo and behold, I loved it.

09:33
Peder Hansen
But because I'm a little bit of an outgoing person, I very quickly got pulled into what we called sales engineering, where I was out with customers listening to what they wanted out of wind turbines, and then could go back to our engineers and say in an engineering fashion, do that translation, because it's a different language, I guarantee you.

09:52
Peder Hansen
I like the technical aspect. I like the engineering. Whether I sell wind turbines or spare parts for wind turbines or repair parts for wind turbines, the human interaction I enjoy a lot. The engineers said I transferred over to the dark side, but that's a different story.

10:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you have other dreams for the future? You worked at the famous Ruth's Hotel in Skagen, where you lived for a long time. That's a legendary place and in a beautiful spot of Denmark in the northern part of Jutland.

10:28
Peder Hansen
Yes, so Skagen is, of course, a wonderful place to be, and anybody who's listening to this podcast needs to get on an airplane and fly over there and visit Skagen. What a gorgeous place to visit. I was fortunate enough that my parents had moved up there. And I needed a job. So first I started out at a Shell gas station.

10:48
Peder Hansen
And that is also a service job, especially in a place like Skagen, where it's the first stop for tourists to come in, and you show them around, you pull out a map, and you say, go here, go there. Back then we had to actually pull out physical maps, we didn't have GPS in our phones, that's how old I am.

11:05
Peder Hansen
People will come in and ask for directions and it was always fun to just learn a little bit about them. A lot of them were somewhat wealthy German, Norwegian, Swedish tourists, and many of them having daughters my age. So the goal was, a lot of times, well, could we see if we could show them around, because we're of course the local guys. And so that was the name of the game a little bit as well.

11:36
Peder Hansen
Then my mom actually got a job as the manager at Ruth's Hotel. When it was a smaller hotel, it had a cook, Birgit was her name, and not a chef, but a cook, made good Danish food. They had renovated the restaurant. But part of it for us kids was help Mom out, go out and make the beds in the mornings, clean up the rooms.

12:06
Peder Hansen
I was fortunate enough that when I was not working at the gas station, I also got to man the bar, which was a ton of fun. Now, since we moved away from Skagen, Ruth's Hotel has become pretty darn famous. But this was actually before those days.

12:25
Peder Hansen
We had one particular lady, she would come for the summer, she would spend six weeks there, and she was an older lady. And it's those kinds of customers that you become friends with as well. She bought me a book by Inge Correll and taught me a lot of manners and a lot of pli. I don't know what that is in English, but basically you're having good manners.

12:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes.

12:52
Peder Hansen
— which is sort of interesting. And sometimes during the afternoon I could sit and talk with her for a couple of hours. Have you seen the series in Denmark, Badehotellet?

13:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I've seen a few episodes. It's a Danish TV series about a hotel.

13:06
Peder Hansen
It's Seaside Hotel, in English. And it was that kind of hotel where people would show up in the summer and spend the summers there. They'd go down to the beach and it was super hyggeligt. It was super cozy. It has now been turned into also a very cozy hotel, but with a, I would say, a very famous chef and very good food, and it's not cheap to stay there anymore. But it was a good learning experience.

13:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Fantastic. You climb wind turbines. Are you a bit of an adventurer and thrill seeker?

13:42
Peder Hansen
Yes.

13:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And talk about climbing windmills. That sounds a little extravagant.

13:47
Peder Hansen
It was a job. I'm a little older. I have gray hair and a little chubby now, but I certainly was not in my twenties because I climbed several wind turbines every day. And for those who don't understand what a wind turbine is, it is a tubular tower. It's 15 foot in diameter at the bottom. It's 300 to 350 foot tall. And it's a ladder that goes straight up.

14:11
Peder Hansen
And you have to be able to climb up with a climbing harness on. It's a harness that you put on that is cinched to you, with these D rings on them that you connect to a cable that runs up and down, so that if you fall, it closes shut and you only fall a couple of feet. You may bang your head around a little bit and some knees and some elbows.

14:33
Peder Hansen
But that in and of itself is actually kind of boring to climb. People that have a fear of heights even can do it because it's a fairly narrow tower that's 15 foot, and you can see the wall in front of you. The fun part comes when you get into the top of it, because they are big.

14:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I mean, I know they're different sizes, but how tall are they?

14:56
Peder Hansen
The tower itself is about 300 feet tall. So about 100 meter tall towers. The rotor diameter, from tip to tip, is also about 100 meters, all depending on the type of turbine we're talking about. And the generators up top will produce power for 1000+ homes today.

15:18
Peder Hansen
So that of course requires quite a bit of space. So you pop up inside of this wind turbine and then you can take your harness off, because you close the lid and you don't really go outside. Now it wiggles a little bit. It moves around in the wind. It moves a couple of feet in each direction.

15:38
Peder Hansen
So if you're prone to seasickness and car sickness and those sorts of things, you might feel it a little bit. When I get back on the ground, you have that feeling of having been on the boat and then going onto the ground again. They are big pieces of engineering. They're big machines. They're being driven by the wind.

15:54
Peder Hansen
It's the kinetic energy from the wind that drives the rotor, which then drives the main shaft, which speeds that speed up in a gearbox to make the generator produce power on the other end. Yes, so many other things do that, a diesel generator does that. It's just we use clean energy in the wind to make the power.

16:14
Peder Hansen
Now, you put your harness back on again and you open the lid on the top of it and you walk out on the top surface of one of these wind turbines. That's when the fun begins because that's what it's really all about, right? You are doing something that not very many people do. You get to climb around on the wind turbine.

16:31
Peder Hansen
If you forget something down at the bottom, you have to climb down and get it. So you have to really think about, what am I going up there to fix? And you don't want to carry too many tools up, but you don't want to miss anything either. It's an interesting job.

16:46
Peder Hansen
I've always loved it. I think those who are in the business have a passion for it. I don't think you become a wind turbine technician and stay in it if you don't like it. You come on your job the first day and you either love it or you quit.

17:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. The listeners cannot see my facial expressions and I think they indicate that I would … I would not be climbing a wind turbine. I think it's rather impressive that you talk about it so as if it's just another day at work.

17:18
Peder Hansen
You look a little scared.

17:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Just visualizing it makes me nervous. Did you never have an incident where you thought, oh my goodness, what am I doing? Or almost fall?

17:28
Peder Hansen
I've never almost fallen. You slip sometimes on the ladder. You just learn to grip a little harder next time. We are very safety conscious in the wind industry. Everything is safety, safety, safety. Just the electrical part of it, we do what's called lockout-tagout. And it means you open the boxes where the high power is, you shut everything down, you put a label on it, you lock it out, you hang a label on it.

17:57
Peder Hansen
And people know, do not touch it cause there's people up there working. You have the harnesses where you're always clipped into one or two places at any given time. You're not allowed to unclip one of your harness pieces until you've reclipped in the next one.

18:13
Peder Hansen
There are very, very few accidents and almost no fatalities in this business. Now we've learned a lot over the years. There have been incidents where people have been complacent, where the safety standards may have not been imprinted into the brain of those who are working on the turbines.

18:34
Peder Hansen
Then you, of course, have some young daredevils sometimes that just want to try this and that. And they're either not with us or not in the business anymore. And I feel that, especially now that the wind industry has grown so much, we are a lot more mature.

18:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Denmark is a big wind turbine country now. We have quite many wind turbines all over the country and they are a normal part of the landscape in Denmark. Denmark also exports a lot of them. This started in the '70s when you also started in the business. So I assume that your family was a big part of making Denmark a wind turbine nation, isn't that the case?

19:17
Peder Hansen
Yes, it is the case. Yeah, I'm very, very proud of the work my mom and dad did, for the wind industry, with the wind industry, and in the wind industry. If you want to hear a little bit of a funny story about how we sold some of the very first turbines to a US developer, I'll tell you that one.

19:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, please do.

19:35
Peder Hansen
So I may butcher it a little bit. I don't know all the details. I was myself 13 at the time. So it's limited, you know, you hear the stories. But it just was announced in California that large incentives were being given to California developers of wind power. So some of the to-be developers were out looking on the European market for wind turbines and where else to go than Holland?

20:05
Peder Hansen
Holland, of course, was known for their windmills and Holland at that time had also gotten a couple of wind turbines developed by companies down there. And lo and behold, one of the sales guys at Vestas had found out that the owner of one of these large developers in California, Zond Energy Systems, was coming to Holland to talk to one of Vestas's competitors.

20:30
Peder Hansen
We, of course, didn't like that. And we thought we had a better turbine, which we did, cause that company is no longer existing, just to put it out there! — and called the people that were coming over, and said, you guys, you need to come up to Denmark and visit with us instead. We'd really like to show you what our wind turbines can do and why we're different.

20:50
Peder Hansen
And they said, no, we don't have time. We have a flight to catch home. We will visit with these Dutch people and thank you very much. Your little company is not interesting to us. Because that's all it was, right? It was a little company, this little company that made farm equipment and so forth. Yes, we put up quite a few wind turbines in Denmark and Germany and so on, but we were not a wind turbine company. We were another company that made wind turbines.

21:18
Peder Hansen
My dad has always flown airplanes and so he jumped in an airplane and said, well, could you spare us a couple of hours at least before you fly back and I'll drop you right at your airport to fly home, and they said yeah, we can do that. They are both actually pilots, we found out later. So they were enthusiastic about getting into my dad's plane.

21:38
Peder Hansen
My dad flew down, got them, flew them up to Denmark. We rolled out the red carpet for them. And my mom is a marketing genius. And so she took care of them and just made it effortless to see the factory. And right then and there, they bought the first two turbines on a handshake.

21:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's great.

21:58
Peder Hansen
Yes. And that then turned into several thousand wind turbines over the years.

22:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you have done business, as you mentioned, with the US from very early on, and you eventually decided to move here. What are the challenges of doing that in terms of making the move and learning how to do business in the US? It's not just a walk in the park.

22:20
Peder Hansen
It isn't. It isn't. And I would say that if I had put a little more effort into the thought process, I probably wouldn't have done it. I also got into it young enough, over here, that I feel that it may have been a little less effort because you're a little more malleable and you're going to go a little bit more with the flow when you're younger than I would today.

22:43
Peder Hansen
This was also in the '90s. There was a big push to have bigger and better relationships between Europe and the United States. And I felt I knew, I wouldn't say the United States, I felt I knew California quite well when I moved over because there's a big difference between California and a lot of the other states.

23:08
Peder Hansen
California is also very familiar with the wind turbine. So I feel that the transition in moving over here for me probably was not as stark as it would have been. And sometimes you just sort of have to take those quinky dinks, those coincidences, with you. Because I was not supposed to have been in the United States for the rest of my life.

23:30
Peder Hansen
Initially, I was just supposed to have been six months on vacation with my parents because they moved here. I then couldn't sit still and helped out with various different things and so forth and got myself a job and a girlfriend and so on. It wasn't like I came over, got a job and had to get into the culture.

23:49
Peder Hansen
I was eased into it, and there were so many Danes at the time, because all the big manufacturers had representatives over here and technicians and repair people and so forth.

23:58
Peder Hansen
I mean, you would go down to our little spot where we would go and have breakfast sometimes. I mean there were always three or four or five Danes sitting around talking about their wind turbines or their problems or whatever was going on. So it was a relatively easy transition for me. I think it's a lot harder today.

24:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And as a maker of wind turbines, do you consider yourself an environmentalist? And what does this mean to you also on a more personal level?

24:31
Peder Hansen
That is a very good question. Environmentalist per se, I would call myself a good guardian of nature, and let's not mess it up more than we absolutely have to, because we do have to live, right? I do run the air conditioning. I bought myself an electric car and that's a difference. And environmentalist, yes, I think the wind industry solves a lot of problems.

24:59
Peder Hansen
They put a lot of people to work. That's number one, right? We make the power from a resource that we all kind of cuss out every now and then anyway, what the hell with the wind, right? We use the kinetic energy for that to turn into electricity that then powers what we use. Denmark is a good example of that. 50–60% of a baseload in Denmark is wind today.

25:22
Peder Hansen
And Denmark is sometimes looking at rates of electricity that are negative. You're being paid to use electricity because we make so much of it, because it's a pure market-driven system. What does it mean to me? I love the business, but it's also because it's unique, there's not very many in it. So it's fun to educate people.

25:44
Peder Hansen
It's fun to say, oh, look at that big windmill and say, by the way, I actually know something about that. Do you have questions? And then have a dialogue. I just recently had a dialogue with an older couple whom I got in touch with because they are upset that a development company wants to put up wind turbines in their backyard.

26:06
Peder Hansen
And I can understand that. Do you necessarily want to sit and be neighbors to a wind turbine so close? No, but try to understand where they're coming from. And then, of course, also figure out a way so that they can understand where you're coming from and that this is an environmentally friendly way of making power.

26:26
Peder Hansen
Am I an environmentalist per se, a tree hugging whale-saving hippie? No, I don't feel like I am. I lean to the side of protecting the environment and one of the ways to do it is driving an electric car, living in a smaller place, and assisting the wind industry.

26:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And taking care of nature is much more than being a hippie, right?

26:47
Peder Hansen
Well, you know what I mean.

26:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I do know what you mean. Do you feel a little bit lonely with your view of nature in the United States? Or do you have a lot of like minded people around you?

27:01
Peder Hansen
Also a very good question. I don't necessarily feel lonely about it. I feel sometimes I'm the one that comes into the room with the unique perspective. I then feel that it is my absolute obligation to listen to people's concerns and educating them on why I do what I do and what we're doing for the world matters.

27:26
Peder Hansen
And hopefully I can change people's minds that are against it, or at least I learn to understand why they're against it. And hopefully they will have a resource in me knowing that if they ever have a question, I'll try to answer and be as neutral about it as I can. However, I do have a passion for the business.

27:43
Peder Hansen
It's such a novel business and such a novel product for people. The blades themselves, just a single blade is 50, 60, 70 meters long, each one of them. And that's 200 feet for a single blade. And you put three of those on a hub and you stick it up in the wind and it's a gigantic sail. So that I think is unique and that people want to learn about wind turbine technology, I think it's fascinating.

28:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Can you tell us about your connection to the Museum of Danish America in Iowa and why you're still so involved with your connection to Denmark?

28:23
Peder Hansen
Oh my goodness. How are you not connected to Denmark when you are a Dane? When I moved to Nebraska, I did not know that there was such a large Danish community out here. I mean, when I moved out here in 2003, we still had phone books, and it was funny when we moved into the first house and looked in the phone book and looked at all the Nielsens and Jensens and Hansens and Christensens and Christiansens that were here.

28:49
Peder Hansen
There are thousands of people with SENs in their last name, and we all know that when you spell your last name with an SEN at the end that you're of Danish descent. So that, of course, was super interesting. The CEO of the company that I started with, he's Danish, and he has been connected with a lot of the Danish people here in this area.

29:14
Peder Hansen
Just north of us is a little town called Blair. And in Blair they had a large Danish Lutheran college called Dana College. And the president, John Mark Nielsen, and I got to know each other because my boss at Valmont lived in Blair. And he then became the director at the museum.

29:38
Peder Hansen
And when he did that, he introduced me to the museum and to Dana College and asked me to do some classes on wind and renewable energy and so on. That process got me connected with a little Danish museum out in Elkhorn, Iowa. Elkhorn, up until the mid-'70s, you could walk there and hear nothing but Danish. It's that Danish.

30:14
Peder Hansen
And this museum has now become a fully accredited museum, and it preserves Danish heritage. And they don't just preserve old things, they tell the story behind them. But what I also find fascinating is that they want to continue to be in touch with modern immigrants, such as myself and a lot of others that come over here. Especially in the wind industry, because we export a lot of Danes to the United States in the wind industry, and telling their stories.

30:36
Peder Hansen
I mean, I've donated all of my passports, I've developed good friendships, and I sat on the board out there for six years. I would say there are people of Danish descent over in Iowa and other places in the United States that are more patriotic than Danes in Denmark, and they've never been to Denmark.

30:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what do you think it is that you brought along from Denmark — personal qualities, professional qualities — that made you a success in the United States?

31:06
Peder Hansen
Because my education was in Denmark, and I did a lot of my apprenticeships in the United States, working my way up, I understand Danish culture and American culture very, very well. And I have an ability to take those two and sort of meld them and mold them in explaining why do the Danes do this and why do the Americans do this.

31:33
Peder Hansen
And I feel I understand the American customer. And I understand the sales proposition that the Danes have for their products and how to make those two come together. It is interesting because the sales process in the United States is still what the Europeans would call old-fashioned. There's human interaction still. It's a conversation about what the customer wants.

31:58
Peder Hansen
Understanding and catering to that, it's building a community, and staying within that community. And if you play by those rules, I feel you have success. It's not me that has the success. It's people that do that, that have success.

32:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question for you. It's still too early to think about it, but when you look ahead, where would you like to retire and live the rest of your life and maybe even be buried when you're no longer here in the human shape, at least?

32:30
Peder Hansen
I'll answer the first one first. Cremate me and put me in a crock pot or in an urn. And then let the children or the grandchildren figure out what they want to do with me. Or, I don't know, mix me with some resin and put me in a wind turbine blade. It doesn't matter to me at that time. Where would I want to retire? I want to retire where my grandkids are.

32:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have a lot of them.

32:56
Peder Hansen
I have two.

32:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I don't know why I thought you had nine.

32:59
Peder Hansen
Not that I know of. Well, I could have. There could be some out there. But the grandchildren that I know of, I have two. I have little Olivia, who's six, and little Lucy, who's nine.

33:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's probably where the nine came from.

33:13
Peder Hansen
It changes your life when you have grandkids. It's changed my outlook on life. So really, if they want their old papa in their life somewhere, I would love to be where they are.

33:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ah, that's nice. Well, Peder, thank you so much for your time at Danish Originals. We really appreciate it.

33:31
Peder Hansen
It was really a lot of fun and not as scary as I thought.

33:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you think it would be scary?

33:37
Peder Hansen
Well, you're always nervous. You're invited in to talk about yourself. What do I say? I don't have a lot to offer.

33:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You did have a lot to offer.

33:45
Peder Hansen
This was such a pleasure.

33:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For us too. Thank you.

33:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Peder Hansen chose P.S. Krøyer's Fra Burmeister & Wains jernstørberi, or The Iron Foundry, Burmeister & Wain from 1855 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.