Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 You know, so back when I was rich and a couple of planes and the guys that love to fly, I mean, they just love to fly. That's all they want to do. Yeah. Yeah. So I totally, I totally get it.

0:36 Yeah, he loves it. He loves it. You know, he's, uh, it's his passion. So, you know, it's well, more than a passion at this point. So he's totally invested in it. And, you know, he told

0:46 me, because we were talking about work and stuff. And so I was like, look, I'm willing to be poor until I get my 1500 hours in. So I said, go for a dude. If you want to live at home, you know,

0:59 your room is here. So, you know, rent free. Yeah, that's, that's so awesome. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you felt the same way, but just as a father, you want them to find their passion.

1:11 Yeah, 100. Yeah. So Charlie, Charlie will DJ and she'll be upstairs. and be there for 36 hours and come down and say, Dad, listen to this beat, and you're like, Oh, okay. But you can tell

1:25 she's passionate about it, so all right. Yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Where is Charlie at home now? So Charlie is in DC working for an AI think tank. Oh. lobbying group. And yeah, as

1:39 weird, she had been DJing in New York, and then she moved to Great Barrington with a classmate of hers that they had a band together called Drab Ab, and they were gonna write their Sergeant

1:56 Pepper's Lonely Art Club Band or Dark Side of the Moon or whatever epic album you physical graffiti, they were gonna write that and they figured out they just made each other lazy. So they worked at

2:09 the sandwich shop for about nine months and didn't write a look at music. Oh my gosh Charlotte.

2:17 Bam, they went to London and then Charlie just ran across this job and said, Dad, I think this would be really cool. So yeah, she's amazing. Yeah, that's good for her. Yeah, I mean, I think

2:28 it's, you know, I think that like with my oldest, I think he's gonna, he'll end up doing some work here and there. He could teach and get paid, but it's not, I mean, it's surprisingly low pay

2:42 to be a flight instructor, you know So like 25 or 30 bucks an hour. So, you know, it's not like you're working 40 hours a week. It's, you know, you may be getting, maybe getting 20 hours of

2:55 flight time in. Well, my next door neighbor, a small world runs the flight school at the Sugar Land airport. So is it an intro to the game? Is it, is it Anson? Yeah. Yeah. That's what his

3:08 acted as training. Okay. Dana, data hack and some of the names and he and his wife are the nicest people on the planet.

3:17 And Sarah talked, my middle child talked about wanting to be a pilot, so Daniel gave her a lesson. Oh, nice. And he said, This isn't out of the generousnessof my heart, if I get you hooked, I

3:29 make a lot of money off of you. Yeah, fair enough, Daniel. Yeah, no, we've invested a fair amount, but I think it's worth it, it's a great skill. And he loves it, so it's all good. How's

3:41 life outside of the podcast world? So it's cool, the kind of catching up around here. I don't know how much you know about this, but we've literally more from podcast rows where our hats back or

3:55 maybe say enough bomb periodically in a podcast to, we're a legit AI software company. I've seen a lot of about Collide online recently. Is that what you're talking about? Well, so we've got our

4:08 knowledge share app, Collide, on there the Collide GPT that we built. we're using that rag model to build applications for energy. Oh, interesting. Customers, and you sit there and go, okay,

4:24 how did you idiots become AI software folks? And it's really, we just figured out we had all this unique content in the energy business. So we started training a language model on and when you have

4:39 specific training, you get better answers in a subject matter, as well as, you know, we compete with big boys all day and you go, well, how can you actually do that? It's like, well, do you

4:50 want us tuning your language model or do you want some woke folks from Silicon Valley doing it? Sure, yeah. And the industry's been pretty receptive and so we've done some cool stuff. We've got

5:03 one application in and I don't know if I can talk about on the air, but it's in, it's worked in basically an offshore driller We, in effect, scanned in all of their. safety documents, safety

5:18 drawings. And that was a pretty labor intensive process of, oh, we're gonna replace this part. What do we do? And we've in effect automated all that. Very cool. And yeah, no, they seem really

5:31 pleased. We've got about another 10 proof of concepts out there. So if we can, let's find my running joke. If we can find one of these that we can sell again and again, two or three of these,

5:43 then maybe I can get my plane back Yeah, well, we're implementing some AI and I can talk about it during the recording, but by the way, I totally agree with you that it's gonna be more subject

5:55 matter specific, otherwise it's way too general. So like if I go on chat, GPT or complexity and I ask about, tell me about battery management systems, you know, okay, you'll get sort of some

6:08 generic stuff, it won't be bad, it won't be great. What we're doing is much like what you're doing and we're using Microsoft Co-Pilot for us, we're taking all of our data, whether it's stuff that

6:21 we learn from customers, we're loading up things like our internal phone calls that are recorded and transcribed. That's going in there. So now, and it's still very thin data, 'cause we've only

6:33 added it for like two months, but

6:36 now if you query that, then it's much more specific. And it's pulling up specific technical data and things like that. So yeah, but we're - It's not my time, so I'll volunteer. Why don't you let

6:50 Collide, GPT

6:53 build that in parallel and see if we work - Yeah, I'd love to - Totally open, totally open that up. See if the energy specific knowledge actually helps in that. It'll be good, 'cause we're trying

7:04 to develop something maybe proprietary, not the platform, but we want the knowledge to be proprietary

7:15 the inference part of it is what's really important to us. And we know we're going to do the training and we need a platform to do it, but we don't need to own the platform. You know, you want to

7:25 be able to make decisions quicker, respond to customers quicker, like all that stuff. That's important. Yeah, we've noticed that in terms of how we're building our applications as clients want to

7:38 house their own data. Yeah. And so we're just pinging their databases to get answers. And the other thing we've figured out too is people want an answer, but they really probably are more

7:52 interested in the source. So kind of like perplexity, when we build our applications, it says here's the answer and oh, by the way, we got it at page 57 off your safety manual. And oh, by the

8:07 way, if you're thinking about that, you need to go down these rabbit holes. Yeah, I think there's a lot of value to that I discovered perplexity. maybe, maybe a month ago, I was actually

8:17 listening to

8:19 the podcast. I don't remember who's, but they mentioned it and I began trying it out. And I really like the fact that you can, you know, it sites the sources. Cause then you've got a little bit,

8:31 a little bit of defense against the hallucination problem, you know, and we've, we've tried to tune all hallucinations out Which is good. Collide GP is supposed to tell you and we're going to,

8:43 we're rebranding it. Collide AI and we'll, we'll name it something else two months from now. But

8:50 we, we, if it doesn't know, the answer is supposed to say, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good. Yeah. I think so. What are you guys doing? Yeah. So you pained me and said, Hey,

8:59 I want to come on. Yeah. Yeah. So we're focused on our core business is to build energy storage systems We're building them right here in Houston and we're using as much US content as we can even

9:10 down to the cell when the cells are available. Um, and a whole view is that, um, uh, sort of the, the top level thesis is that we're reshoring manufacturing and we, that was sort of the whole

9:23 idea behind alchemy a couple of years ago, we launched it and then we've really focused in on energy storage systems and sort of the related electronics, et cetera. And so, you know, the real

9:34 value proposition is, um, certainly, certainly we qualify for the various benefits in the Inflation Reduction Act, but more than that, um, our view is that over time, there's an increasing

9:47 premium on, on, um, supply chain security, there's an increasing premium on cybersecurity, uh, and, um, and that there's also going to be an increasing premium on knowing that you've got a

9:58 development partner in the United States. So with our bigger customers, we'll work with them to design systems together So, we're building battery systems for, primarily for commercial entities.

10:10 and industrial applications. So dummy that down for me is somebody that's never really dealt with batteries. Sure. And backup, although I did, I did invest in a company called ActivePower in the

10:22 late '90s, the flywheel battery company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know where it went, but it went public and I sold all my stock for five. So money my times I was pretty pleased by that.

10:32 That was a win. That's all I've done in backup power supply. So give me an example. Yeah, so the way to think about it is, let's look at the markets first. So there's sort of three general

10:42 markets as residential, commercial, and industrial, and grid scale or utility scale. So in each one of those markets, the energy has to be stored for different reasons. And in this case, it's

10:54 in particular it's energy then that gets converted back to electricity. And for us, the energy storage device we're using is a battery. So a battery that you may have on your phone anywhere else

11:07 except a lot bigger. So, um, so the general, uh, when you think about a battery, there's several reasons why you want to store energy one could be just want some resiliency or backup power to if

11:19 you lose your power, you want to be able to power stuff that's important to you. Uh, in other cases, it could be that, uh, there may be, um, a peak charge that's happening, um, uh, that

11:32 happens on most grids and you want to avoid that peak. So while electricity from the grid is super expensive, you run off your, your battery Um, and then in other cases, you might be selling

11:43 power back to the grid. So you're charging your batteries at night when typically powers less expensive. And then you sell it back, you know, when power is more expensive or electricity is more

11:52 expensive. And then there's a few other, I think, use cases that go beyond that, but that's the fundamental thing. Store electricity and use it in different ways for backup or selling power back

12:04 or power back. So back in the late 90s, when I was a power technology banker, that's code for oil was like an8 a barrel, I got to make it living. Yeah, I got to be living the Internet's hot.

12:16 Can I figure out hydrocarbons and internet and power technology bankers sounded pretty good. Yeah. You know, one of the things we talked about was the grid had three nines of reliability,

12:31 999. And in the digital age, you got to have, you know, five nines or whatever it is. And it's the whole concept of even if you're good, 999 of the time, that's still eight hours of downtime a

12:43 year. And those down times happened in like five and 10 second bursts and destroys the world from microchip. Is that kind of what we're talking about backup? Are we talking about winter storm Yuri

12:56 hits and I'm running off backup for five days. It's a great question. I think when I look at the recent history of the American grid versus today and what's happening. So I think the sort of up

13:10 till maybe five, six years ago, 10 years ago, perhaps

13:17 the demand side and the supply side were both relatively stable. And losing power for eight hours every year, perhaps not a big deal, unless it was for certain high demand applications like

13:33 semiconductors.

13:35 But now what's happening is that sort of from a macro standpoint,

13:41 the growth in demand is really accelerating. So the way we look at it is there's two or three reasons why it's happening. One reason is sort of the general electrification of the economy, which is

13:55 a long term historical trend. And whether you think EVs are a thing or not. Generally speaking, economies tend to electrify. as a sort of a primary energy source. The second reason is

14:12 that there's no doubt now that America's manufacturing base is beginning to re-shore and all the data is showing that. And some of that was sort of a, was catalyzed by COVID when we realized that,

14:25 we have all this stuff that we really need that is made somewhere else. It used to be a free trader, and then I couldn't get toilet paper. Right. And that was - True to soul, yeah. Yeah, maybe

14:35 some protection is exactly - Exactly, yeah. And so, not everyone is our friend, you know? And so, or sometimes they are temporarily not our friends, and when you really need something, that's

14:46 a really bad situation. So America, I think, is reshoring and re-industrializing. My personal view on that is that, that as labor rates in China are increasing, and they have increased. Like,

14:60 if you look at direct manufacturing labor rates have increased a lot. In fact, most data shows that direct labor rates in China are more expensive than Mexico, which is producing manufacturing

15:11 revival in Mexico. So that these factors and a few other things are pushing manufacturing back to domestic economies like the United States. So that's reason number two that we need a lot more power.

15:23 And then reason number three was something that I didn't really understand until maybe well, less than a year ago was things like, it was generative AI and the sheer processing power that that

15:36 requires and then the sheer electricity that you need to run those data centers. So those three things, general electrification, America, re-industrializing

15:49 and data centers are pushing the power demand curve in a very different way. And not only, and it's not like the power demand increasing

16:01 a lot. everywhere. It's the nature of power demand is increasing. So if you put a data center here, where we're sitting, a massive data center, the local grid infrastructure might not be able to

16:14 support it. And so just the, or if you put a big manufacturing facility, same thing, some of you have not only kind of a macro increase in demand, but you have different load intensities

16:26 happening So when you put a lot into a bucket and you combine that with sort of a generally aging centralized power and transmission infrastructure, it creates a lot of problems and a lot of

16:38 opportunities.

16:40 So long on to your question, which is different now, it's a good one because oil and gas guys have a tendency to gripe about, oh my gosh, the government interfering with our business makes it so

16:54 hard. Let's cut to the chase in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, even New Mexico. if you want to drill a while, you can drill a while. Sure. And if you want to move oil, you can send a truck to it.

17:05 Right. Maybe a little more expensive. Yeah. But a grid actually has to balance. Yes. It has moving pieces that have to be in synchronicity. Yeah, they do. Yeah. And if not, so it's a lot

17:18 harder to do. It's a lot harder, yeah. And I think that, you know, you've got the presence of renewables like solar, you know, batteries don't generate power, they store power, but they help

17:31 to make the economics of solar in some cases. So it's a very complex equation. I can tell you that I don't understand all the subtleties related to the

17:46 grid. Maybe there are people out there that do - I haven't met anyone yet. But because I think it's such a

17:55 moving target of what's happening in our current power system, electrical system. Among all of that, we believe that there's a reason to store electricity, and that there are economic reasons to

18:10 then sell that electricity back in different ways, whether it's as resiliency or backup power or some of these other things that I talked about, and that the markets are very dynamic right now, and

18:24 so I think there's a long-term opportunity to build batteries and put them in different applications. As I mentioned earlier, our focus is on the commercial and industrial world, less on utility or

18:36 residential, but I think there's opportunities everywhere. So where are y'all today? Do you have installations up and running, or are you still pre-installations, maybe the word? Yeah, so we've

18:49 built a few things internally. We've now won some of our first real commercial customers, people pay us to do stuff, so we're designing and building those systems now they'll begin to get installed.

19:01 as a year wraps up, and

19:05 then assuming that goes well, and I think it will go well 'cause we've got small people working on it, then we'll begin to expand on those customers and also pick up other customers. So, I would

19:16 say that

19:18 we're still early in many ways, but we're now building real things for real customers that expect us to deliver based on their requirements And so, where I think as

19:34 2025 approaches and as we move into 2025, then we're more in the beginnings of scaling up the business. And

19:43 so in your systems, how much of it are things you're taking from other manufacturers

19:59 and copying them together, if you will, versus proprietary build type stuff? And maybe just walk me through an example. Sure. Of like what pieces are there and stuff. Yeah, so our journey is

20:07 beginning as an integrator, for sure, because it's hard to make everything on your own. So we're taking somebody's cells, somebody's battery management systems and power control systems and energy

20:18 management systems and we're integrating together to make sure that they work, which is not a trivial task on its own But that's by far the easiest thing to do to begin. Our roadmap though is to

20:33 build our own equipment along that value chain. And we've got sort of a certain order that we wanna do things in because I think there's a lot of value in delivering a product that is integrated by

20:46 design.

20:49 And you've been around the industry long enough to know that people can, people say the stuff is integrated and I've got a great API to make sure that things connect with each other. never really

20:59 works that way. It's hard to actually deliver something that's integrated by design. And so that's our roadmap. So a specific example of something that we're working on right now, we've got a

21:10 customer that is a, they're in the medical industry, they're deploying clinics throughout the United States into rural America. So they want more resiliency for each one of those clinics. So our

21:22 system will be a battery system with all the electronics, it's going to be approximately the size of a refrigerator, let's say, and that wherever these clinics go, we'll also install our system.

21:37 So that way, if they have power supply issues, then we'll make sure that they stay open. So that's a critical resiliency need that that particular customer has. And also because they're going into

21:53 parts of rural America, the grid supplies.

21:58 even more unreliable in those parts of the country. And so that's a good example. What kind of spec do you build that to meaning? Like how many hours do they feel like they need of power? Yeah,

22:09 and it's really, I think one of the things about batteries that has been oversold in terms of its value is that you can be on battery supply for days at a time. You could, but that's a very

22:25 expensive implementation So the way we think about batteries is that it's a handful of hours at a time that you have this backup supply.

22:35 So in this particular example that I shared, we know that they're operating hours from this point to this point, and they probably need three, four, five hours or so, maybe a little bit longer of

22:48 backup supply, so we can provide that supply to them. It's also, it's not a heavy industrial use,

22:59 there's complex industrial equipment that's being operated there. It's a small building in a way. So that's a somewhat easier use case for us to manage. So it's a few hours typically that you would

23:13 provide that backup. If you wanted to go longer, if you wanted to go days of backup, the reality is today you probably need a traditional generator to provide that kind of resiliency. But normally

23:30 that's not what we see in terms of the requirements. It's usually a few hours at a time. I don't know if I told you this story, but my dad is early adopter of technology. I mean, the Yates family

23:42 may have in the first VCR of America, but then he never upgrades. That's just who he is. We're probably still using that VCR today. So dad calls me, this was probably, I don't know, five or six

23:56 years ago. It was pre COVID. He's like, Hey, I'm getting solar panels put on the vacant lot. Nice. I go, all right, dad. Yeah. I'm just curious how much is this costing dad goes125,

24:11 000. But I don't ever have to buy electricity ever again. And I go, well, just do any math on that. And he goes, yeah, it's a 123 year payback. Yeah. And I was like, dude, you're 80. I

24:24 hope you're, I hope you're here for payback. But you know, yeah, I'm just saying, well, winter storm, Yuri hits and my house is right in between the police department, the fire department and

24:36 the hospital. So I don't think my, my electricity's ever gone out. Boom. Of course it goes out.

24:46 Yeah. So I show up over at my parents house. I got my cat and a carrier bag on her arm. I walk into the den and my dads are eating the paper He ain't even moved the paper, but I hear him under his

24:51 voice. 123 year payback doesn't sound so bad, right? I know, yeah. Well, that's just it. I mean, I think like we talked about even earlier, you know, the eight hours of

25:05 interruption in that four nines example. Well, the problem is, is like which eight hours when you need power, you need power. And it's one thing if you are, you know, you lose power for 10 or

25:18 15 minutes and it's not a big deal But like just about everyone in Houston, when, when barrel came through, value of power was really, really high, you know, and, and I didn't have any special

25:32 requirements at home. It was just a massive inconvenience for me not to have power and it was uncomfortable. But you can imagine other people that really need it and where that, the case for

25:42 resiliency is way beyond whatever dollars and cents you can, you can put, put behind it So, you know, it's really, when you need it, you need it. I was joking around with my kids a few weeks

25:55 ago that if you think about everything in our modern-day economy, if you remove electricity, how quickly we revert back to how life was more than 100 years ago. It's so fundamental. It's so

26:11 fundamental to everything that we do. If you lose it and we lose it from time to time in Houston, you realize how important it is And that's more than what the balance sheet or the PL says. It's a

26:24 way of life. Yeah, and I mean, just the volatility today of power prices is stunning. I mean, you can sit around and it's 25 or 30 bucks and then boom, 1500, literally because it didn't rain

26:40 and it was supposed to or whatever the case may be. And

26:45 so there's physically just having having the power, and then there's economically, you know. Yeah, it's a dynamic time.

26:52 It's not like it was about a decade ago, you know? And so it's a, and as I mentioned earlier, it's within all of that, there's great opportunities. You can figure out how to create value within

27:04 this dynamic of we're not making enough power versus how much we need. So if you look at it, I'm gonna make these numbers up, but they'll generally be right

27:19 1950 to 2000 power usage was up almost 15x. I mean, it was refrigerators, air conditioning, the computer, all this. And then let's go 2000 to call it 2001, 22, maybe even 23. It's just flat.

27:37 Even though we had 10x, the cloud computing added, et cetera And I think that lulled us into a false sense of security

27:50 I was listening to an interview with the head of me so the other day, and he was saying, Yeah, we used to have 15 excess generating capacity. Now we've got like two or three. Yeah. Yeah. So do

28:01 you have a view on the world of how we deliver this going forward? I mean. Yeah. I think. Well, I do. I don't know if it's right or not, but. It's going to be more right than mine. I would

28:13 say. Yeah. We'll triangulate. You know, it's so interesting I was actually looking up some of this data earlier today because I was curious about the rate of growth of

28:27 demand over time. And you're right. You know, with the majority of the lost century, it was a pretty big increase in flat of the lost several years. I

28:37 think it's sort of a multi-variable thing So

28:43 many modern economies really start thinking about efficiency measures as they modernize.

28:51 I think that even though we've had an increase of demand in the United States, we've also had a lot of efficiency measures that have come in that have probably blunted the growth of demand. But then

29:04 you have the introduction of things like regenerative AI or electrification and reindustrialization. That's kicked off another

29:14 sort of demand cycle, but the supply cycle has not really responded. And so I think that efficiency alone is not going to be enough to really handle this. I think, as everybody knows, it's

29:28 expensive to build a brand new power plant of any kind. It's expensive to build new transmission lines. All the infrastructure at the end of the supply chain is expensive to build And so,

29:43 I think the speed of that build out is not going to match the speed of.

29:49 of the demand for electricity. So my view on it is that we, in many ways, have to rethink the whole idea of generation and how it's delivered and where it's delivered. And I joked around, I've

30:03 joked around with this before, it's probably a total sort of bullshit viewpoint, but I'll share it, is that the ultimate distributed power system was when we each had a fireplace. There was no

30:16 transmission lines, there was no centralized, there wasn't like a central fire somewhere, never one carried the burning torch and then provided you with power, that would never work, totally

30:30 insane to do that. And so I think there's something sort of, if I can use the word natural and more distributed forms of generation and systems of power It's more, I

30:46 think, liberating. humans to know that it's like, this is my thing. And, you know, like your dad, that's the ultimate distributed generating asset. And he's sitting there with his newspaper

30:58 woman, cozy during the, during the, during Yuri. But I think that's where we're going back to more and more distributed generation, more and more sort of localized, um, power-related systems

31:12 And perhaps that's not, you know, a solar panel on every roof. Maybe the economics don't work out. But I can see more localized neighborhood, neighborhood level generation, community level

31:24 generation, um, you know, larger buildings having their own generation, certainly data centers having their own generation, maybe even nuclear for the, for the, you know, the hyperscale guys

31:37 So I think it's going back to sort of the way things were philosophically more of that. I've got my own fireplace, um, type of a system. So that's my view on it. I think that's where it's going

31:49 to go. Yeah. I think you're right because if you think about, let's go build big expensive power lines everywhere. If there's a snail darter right there, we can't build it. We've got to build

32:05 around it. We've got to spend three years in court fighting about it. I know Joe Manchin is trying before he leaves to get his permitting bill through to help with that. But even that feels like he

32:18 would best case be a band-aid on a big gaping wound. You

32:26 just have too many entities involved now to try to replicate building the grid. I don't think we can do it again if we tried. It would be very hard to do. A great thought exercise is that if we had

32:40 no grid as a stand they are no sort of centralized idea of power generation, but you knew with some sense of certainty that these are the requirements. You know, we're gonna have data centers,

32:51 we're gonna have electrification, we're gonna have reindustrialization. Would you rebuild the grid exactly the same way? Or not even the grid, would you rebuild the system exactly the same way as

33:03 you build it now? Probably not. You probably wouldn't do

33:19 that. I think you'd rethink it. I think you'd definitely be more distributed in your thinking And maybe it's not an or, maybe it's an end. Maybe we still need some kind of a grid that looks like

33:21 what we have now, but probably not enough to serve the requirements that we have. I don't think this is an easy problem. I think the risk is that it limits growth for us, for the United States. I

33:36 hope it doesn't.

33:39 And one of the real concerns I have is especially as it relates to AI that -

33:46 unless we do this kind of processing within the United States, or pick your country, whatever your domestic country is, with AI, that work has to be done, I think, within your borders, just for

34:04 sort of cybersecurity reasons. And so how do we power that? Just take that alone. How do we power that? Well, how do we power domestic manufacturing? For example, another security issue. We

34:20 have to figure out a solution to these kinds of problems. And so that's what excites me about being in

34:27 this business. It's not easy, but we're trying to conquer our own little tiny corner of the universe and be really good at making batteries that can help people So I have another theory. I was

34:41 asked to keynote an operators meeting for a new. natural gas storage facility that's coming online in Texas, given that I think there's only one and it's Trinity. I'll go and just name them. And

34:57 you know, a lot of times being the podcaster, getting up there, give a speech. I just try to say something controversial. So, you know, cause a buzz or whatever. But I actually, I actually

35:07 believe this. And what I did was I walked through kind of the high side case and the low side case for every one of the things leading to electrification, electric vehicles, AI, data centers,

35:20 tick on down the list. And then I kind of came up with the summary. And my summary was if you're coming home from the bar and you stop at Taco Bell, And because you're connected to AI, your toilet

35:36 is heated when you get home. You are gonna pay whatever you can for AI. You know, 'cause that is the question. I mean, AI is cool, but how much are we gonna pay for it? Right? We don't know

35:46 that yet. I mean, that's almost like early days of the internet. You know, we just don't know yet, but I think you don't wanna search for music. You want when your girlfriend ran off with your

35:58 best friend who you want I used to lover by guns and guns to play, you know what I mean? We want these decisions made for us and helped out. So I think we're gonna use a ton of AI, and we're gonna

36:10 need a lot of electricity for it. Yeah. And so I lay all that and everybody's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I go, Okay, when's the last time any of y'all tried to sell something to Google?

36:23 Not a hand went up, Microsoft. When did y'all try to do it? And I go, You guys have gotta stop thinking We're in the natural gas business. We're just gonna supply all this natural gas 'cause

36:34 that's where the power's gonna come from. No. No. No. Those technology companies are gonna make their decisions and they're gonna go choose nukes. They will. Yeah. And they're all working on it.

36:44 And of course the audience goes, Oh, well, there's gonna be all this regulation. And they can't do it. I go, Not ever seen it? I watched the you, I was watching, I re-watched that show,

36:49 Silicon Valley. Have funny. DC goes, Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah I think you're right. It's want into DC and they tell 'em, Here's what we think we first walk for tech companies. Tech companies

37:08 couple of years and I heard I'm supposed to go back and watch the rest of it. You should watch the rest of it. I've heard this. It's a tiny anniversary, so it's replaying. I think it's on Max or

37:15 something, but Max Prime plus whatever. Right. And so it was so funny re-watching. I kind of binge-watched it over the last month or so And what I love about it is it's speaks to what you just

37:31 said, which is that I think one of the things that I admire most about sort of that part of our economy is they ignore boundaries. To them, it's like, Oh, this is an artificial bullshit boundary.

37:46 Let's figure out a way around it. Let's change it. Let's ignore it. Whatever the case might be. And I think that,

37:54 and this is, I think, a good part in a way about being raised in the energy economy, which I was. My very first job was in the chemical plant as a reliability engineer, and there were 17 rules to

38:07 prevent an idiot baby engineer from, like me, from doing something that would blow up the facility. That's probably good, but that also creates this, Let me follow the rules mindset that is good,

38:22 but that can also prevent you from really thinking about how to redo things differently. you know, even though it's a comedy and in the show, it really shows you how interesting it is and how the

38:35 people that are from that part of the economy just think they tend to think differently. And I think we need to embrace some of that type of thinking too. That's why I like this kind of, if you

38:47 could begin from, saw from the beginning, what blank sheet of paper, is this how you would design it? Versus making incremental changes Because incremental changes, if you're in a stable

38:58 environment, fine. You have 3 back out of the three years. Okay, maybe that's okay in some ways, but that's not the environment that we're living in now. Yeah, and I think the other element

39:10 that Silicon Valley does a lot better than us in energy land is we have a tendency to think in, I don't even describe this, maybe in units. we want to sell this many gallons of oil or whatever.

39:28 And Silicon Valley sells solutions. Yeah, right. I mean, I get an iPhone and it allows me to search my music. You know, I don't sit there and go, well, you know, is it this part or this? And

39:42 I think energy companies are gonna have to start thinking in terms of selling solutions, as opposed to just adding incremental parts to the infrastructure Yeah, I agree. And I think those, you

39:55 know, I think it's, you know, where we tend to be a bit more fixed on our business model thinking, you know, and all the economics that come with it versus like you said, selling solutions. And

40:07 that's why it's obviously valuable to think about what is important to the customer and then working backwards from there. And as much as you can, liberating yourselves from the whatever rules that

40:20 are, know within you and and it's hard look. It's really hard. I'm in my late 50s now, and an entrepreneur again started a company with a good friend of mine.

40:36 It's tough. I was having a drink with a buddy mine last night, and he was asking me how it's going. I said, This is kind of weird, but every morning I ask myself, why am I wrong? Let me take

40:47 the opposite side of my thinking here. Can I defeat my own thinking in some ways? Because I'm trying to break my own thinking to make sure, like, okay, all right, this seems to be right. Or,

41:03 wait a minute, it's kind of a weak position because I can argue against myself because I got this fact and this fact. And so, changing our way of thinking, I think, is so important right now.

41:15 But it, like I said, it's hard. It's hard to do that. And coming from the energy industry, you know, we're all trained to sort of think. can be trained to think a certain way, but we've got to

41:27 break some of that thinking now. Yeah, it's funny. I hate to admit this on the air, but he doesn't watch my podcast so long. I argue with Colin all the time. And 90 of the time, I think he's

41:38 right. But I just take the other side just does. And if I can break him, then we need to go think about this again, because I'm a degenerate alcoholic, but usually hung over. And if me with my C

41:53 minus Well, those are your most endearing qualities, I would

41:57 say. If I never come your thought process here, Colin, we've got to do something about this. So yeah, yeah. So tell me this. If we're doing this, and you got a standing invite to come back on

42:11 anytime, if we're doing this in five years, tell me stuff. We're talking about in five years that we're not talking about today. Tell me maybe things that happened over those five years that would

42:27 be surprising to us right now. Give us some outside the box stuff. That's a great question. I would say one thing that we shouldn't be talking about in five years from now, in five years, is

42:42 none of us should be talking about, remember that time a few weeks ago we were lost power. Okay. We should not be having those conversations. And maybe it's seven or eight, but if we're still

42:52 having those conversations in five or six years time, something's gone wrong. We haven't achieved the most basic standard of success, which is reliable electricity. So that's one thing that we

43:06 should be the absence of bitching about losing power. You know, you shouldn't be having those conversations. I think in many ways, the sign of great technology is that it disappears from our

43:19 consciousness.

43:21 All the best technology becomes kind of, it's barely noticeable in our lives. One of my favorite examples of this, probably a stupid example, but I share it, is that we use certain technology

43:34 every day that we barely notice, but has been iterated over many generations, and is a fundamental part of our lives now, which are shoes. We don't think about them, that's technology, and it's

43:47 allowed us to become more human and less human, but it's not part of our consciousness. So I think that should be another sort of signpost of success is that is the world of power and how it's used,

43:60 is it sort of becoming invisible? But it's there, it's doing its thing. I think that's an important, that would be an important milestone that we shouldn't be

44:12 talking about, is the fact that power is unreliable.

44:18 It should be that we're also liberated to do things that we couldn't do before because it's also less expensive. And maybe that's not five years from now. Maybe it's closer to 10. But the sign of

44:31 good technology is that it should be going down in cost. It has to.

44:37 And it should be ubiquitous. There should be the availability of electricity across the planet because it's such a liberating part of the human existence. And I bet there's the cure for cancer in

44:55 some eight-year-old in the middle of Africa right now. It's in her brain. But if she's not able to live a basic life, then that idea is never going to get liberated and never going to get shared

45:09 with the rest of humanity. So we should be talking about that kind of stuff that humans are now liberated to do things across the world couldn't do before. Those should be the kinds of conversations

45:21 I think we should be having in five to 10 years from now. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this and I'll regret saying this 'cause it's on video. Yeah. Do their forever. Add it to the list. I

45:35 actually think that we in the energy business over the next five years will do a better job of telling our story, educating the world where we can actually be having constructive conversations and

45:50 five years where today we can't. Today we say something, oh, you're oil and gas, you're destroying the planet. Yep. I think five years from now, we're starting to embrace it. We're late to the

46:02 game, but I think we're gonna be where we can say, hey, once you start burning hydrocarbons, guess what? Your life expectancy doubles 'cause you're no longer burning dung and wood in your house

46:16 and the pollutants. That's a good thing. Okay, let's now deal with the stuff that's the downside to that, right? I think we're gonna be able to be more constructive. But maybe I'll be in

46:25 Pollyanna. I don't think you all, but I mean, and I want you to be right. It's weird because my experience with our industry is that we don't do a good job of telling our story. We haven't. And

46:37 in some ways, we're almost afraid to tell our story. And maybe it's because of the, you know, while you're from the oil and gas industry, which is my, my career. But I'm proud of the things

46:50 I've done. I'm proud of the things that people that I've worked with over the years have done. And the fact of the matter is we still have, to your point, hundreds of millions of people that still

47:01 burn biomass for heating and cooking. You know, those are problems we have to solve first. And the fact of the matter is that there's still tried and true sources of energy that can be

47:15 inexpensively deployed. across the planet and those should be the very foot, whatever they are, those should be the first solutions to those problems. And we, to the 2 billion people we're gonna

47:30 add by 2050 or whatever the number is, you're gonna be added in Africa and Southeast Asia. We cannot tell those people, no, you don't get energy. We got ours. No, no way. 'Cause the wars start

47:44 over stuff like that And we did, let them eat cake is not an appropriate thing to say. No, and I think let's say you're in Africa and you've got a hospital and you need a diesel generator to run.

47:56 I mean, then for God's sake, that's what they should be using. And

48:04 maybe, or if there's a better technology that's less expensive and more accessible than great, they should use that. But every human should first be able to choose least expensive, the most

48:16 accessible. energy source that they have, just to start, you know, living a life that's different than the one that they're living now. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. So walk me through

48:28 this. There are people out there listening, who do you want a phone call from? Meaning what is your ideal customer look like? I'd say that, I'd add to the customers, I think one group of people

48:42 that we're trying to attract is people that wanna build this stuff with us So really bright engineers that wanna build

48:52 incredible equipment, like batteries and all the systems that go along with them. And so that's sort of one audience that we wanna attract. In terms of customers. I'm gonna cut you off, you know,

49:05 on collide on our knowledge share app now. We now have 20, 000 job listings. Oh, you do. We've basically gone and we've scraped it. And it's simple stuff. It's literally just posting. But we

49:17 want to disrupt jobs, kind of like we have with other things. And I think we do that with content. So can we come out and shoot content about why it's cool, what you're doing? 100, absolutely.

49:29 And let's go find you some engineers. 'Cause I know they exist in the digital wildcatters community. Yeah, and I would say this. We just need to tell that story. It's kind of like, I think what

49:39 engineers used to be. And so even before my time, and I, I'm 150 years old and began my career in 1990, but even in 1990, the era of specialization had already begun. So you were just, I'm a

49:54 mechanical engineer. So you were doing mechanical stuff or electrical or whatever the case might be. But back in the day, the best engineers were engineers that had integrated knowledge. And so I

50:06 think that's where we're going now. We need engineers that can, that can integrate things together, that they may be graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, but they know enough about

50:15 other disciplines. plans to build a completed system. And so it's a very old school engineer. We need engineers that love to build stuff because there might be literally building stuff in

50:26 the beginning. So if you

50:30 don't know the right side or the right end of a screwdriver to use, you're probably not the right engineer for us. And unfortunately,

50:39 because of over the specialization and other reasons,

50:44 young people are not entering the workforce with great mechanical skills, or mechanical skills at all. And you use the term mechanical skills to mean, like, can you build something? And so

50:58 those are

51:08 the kind of people that we need. We need, I think, a very unique type of a person. And they're out there. We've got a few of them already. Thank goodness. But those are kinds of people that we

51:09 really need So I'm happy to - Yeah, we'll show it for the camera crew and film something like that.

51:19 There's probably serious content to do where we focus on the job at hand, then there's probably fun stuff to do where maybe we eat hot wings or we shoot basketball. You know, why would I want to

51:34 work here? We'll figure that out. So tell me what a customer might look like For us, like every new business, we're getting as narrow as we can with customers. And so even though we have

51:45 ambitions to do a lot of stuff. So in the beginning,

51:50 we're looking for customers that we would classify as commercial and industrial types of customers. So it could be, you know, it could be like this medical clinic or it could be a small

51:59 manufacturing facility or even an apartment building or an office building, et cetera And it's someone who's dealing with power reliability issues or perhaps with the cost of being higher than they

52:13 can afford it. And they're looking for a different way to supply power. And so something that's more reliable, less expensive over time. And in that sort of commercial - And what's the size range

52:27 for that? Is that a - Well, so - They need a megawatt of power? Yeah, something like that. So we look at in terms of size of battery. So that for us is megawatt hours So our typical target

52:42 customer, ideal customer profile is definitely less than 10 megawatt hours, but probably less than two or three megawatt hours in terms of battery size. So that's sort of where we live. Utility

52:55 scale batteries are like 10 plus megawatt hours, and way beyond. So that's sort of the size of battery.

53:04 So the smallest system might be a few hundred kilowatt hours into a battery standpoint. So the building size could be - You know, let's say, let's put it in building size terms. It could be five

53:16 or 600 square feet or it could be a few thousand square feet. If you're just looking at a building or perhaps let's say a small manufacturing facility or something along those lines, restaurants,

53:28 gas stations, those are all specific cases where we think we can add value. The, yeah, I know there's, I've got a lot of friends that are restaurant tours and power going out if they had few

53:43 hours so that they could actually evacuate their freezers. That's full of food. Yeah, we were the restaurant tour a couple of weeks ago,

53:53 you probably know him. And that's exactly what he said. That without, if you lose power without notice, you've got food, you've got wine, perhaps

54:07 And these are high-value things for them, and it's hard to replace it, obviously. if he had a little bit more time. In his case, he had sort of the central kitchen that he could have moved stuff

54:18 to and that central kitchen had power, but he didn't have optionality, you know? And so you're exactly right. It's just usually a few hours is enough to kind of work through problems. 'Cause the

54:32 local Mexican restaurant down in Richmond, Dux is where I live. Eddie and I've been friends forever 'cause I've eaten there my whole life. Yeah. Eddie, I think, and I don't think he'd mind if I

54:42 say this, I think it costs him2, 500, 3, 000. Yeah. Just in food spoilage, you know,

54:52 and he's had to do it, what, twice because of the tornado or whatever. Yeah, and that's a couple events who year is probably enough to justify having some kind of a system, some basic system in

54:58 place. And you know, unlike your buddy Eddie,

55:11 not only is he losing food, but he's not serving his customers and customers are hard to earn. And so once you interrupt that pattern, then you've got to sort of earn them back. And I'm sure you

55:23 would, you're going to go back almost no matter what, but there's certainly a group of customers that you might risk losing if you don't have power when you need it. So it's those kinds of

55:34 customers that are attractive to us at this stage, and that's where our opportunities seem to be coming in. Nice. Yeah, very excited. Well, dude, you were cool to come on. Well, thank you. I

55:39 was about saying, when did we have launched? A couple of years ago? A couple of years ago, the first time. Yeah, I think we saw each other again, maybe a year ago. Well, didn't you record

55:40 with Colin and Jake, and we saw Joe when you came in for that? Yeah. This was a much better experience. 10 times away. I can say this more eyeballs and more ears will be on this. I love it.

56:10 Yeah, I think I recorded with Colin maybe, it's got to be two years ago, maybe even more than that, it was a while ago. So, but you know, I love doing this. I love talking about making shit

56:22 here. That's my mission. You know, when I turned 50, I'm 57 now. When I turned 50, I had sort of a career transition moment where I had the opportunity to sort of step back and really think

56:36 about what I wanted to do So I was very, very lucky to have that opportunity. And I was actually at this conference that Peter D. Amandez holds every year in California and Los Angeles. And it's

56:54 called Abundance 360. It brings entrepreneurs together. But one of the exercises he does is this idea of what's your massively transformative purpose. The other thing that he couples with that

57:05 think in terms of 25 years as a goal timeframe. And I'd never heard about this 25-year concept. The idea of purpose, et cetera, I had, but so those two, three days really got me thinking about,

57:20 okay, I'm 50, what do I want to do for the next 25 years? So, you know, hopefully I'm around for that long and I've got to be healthy to do it. But after like a lot of note-taking into the night,

57:35 you know, I really thought about what's deeply important to me And my mother, my dad passed away about a year ago, but my mother was a seamstress and my dad was a pipe hitter. And throughout my

57:49 career, 80 to 90 of the people that have worked for me and teams that I've led and companies that I've led are truck drivers, pipefitters, millwrights, welders, you know, people like that. And

58:02 so it all coalesced for me in those moments with Peter, and so. For me, I created this 25-year objective around my own purpose to improve the lives of a billion industrial workers. And I say it,

58:23 I have no idea, honestly, on most days, how I'm gonna do it. But what I do know is that energy is a fundamental part of improving people's lives. And that a business, the most amazing thing

58:37 about a business is the leverage it can give you to affect outcomes. And yes, you're gonna do it right and you're gonna get money back to your investors. All those things are 100 true and important.

58:49 But also,

58:52 my hope is that through Al-Kamie and whatever else I do down the road, that I can affect people in that positive way, where people like my mother and people like my dad have been affected positively.

59:11 And that's why I'm doing it. Yeah, I got to make payroll and go to make customers happy. All that stuff, table stakes. But this is deeply important to me. And that's why I'm doing it. Well,

59:21 and you said it really well earlier, we ought to be proud of what we've done. 'Cause we really have taken a world that I believe in 1950, 90

59:31 of the world lived in poverty. Today it's less than 10. Yeah, it's a remarkable thing. And it's all been energy driven Yeah, because in effect, productivity is basically somebody else doing

59:42 something for you, right? And that's all powered by energy. It is, yeah, we should be proud of that. And yeah, we have to find ways to improve. There's no doubt about

59:53 that, but it's fundamentally good. I'm proud to be in the energy industry. How do people get in touch with you? So I'm active on LinkedIn, so Mushcon, M-U-S-H-K-H-A-N on LinkedIn.

1:00:08 So if you message me on LinkedIn, I'm pretty responsive there. That's probably the best way. I'm not an ex guy, so I've never really done the Twitter thing.

1:00:18 But LinkedIn is sort of my go-to social media platform. That's the best way to reach me. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you. I love that. It's good seeing you again. Likewise. Yeah, we'll

1:00:27 do this again. And happy to have you guys out. Nah, that would be great. Yeah, awesome, thank you.