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0:00 Transform your startup journey with the energy tech nexus. Connect with fellow founders, access critical resources, and be part of a community shaping the future of energy and carbon tech. Your

0:10 path to building a Thunderlissard starts here. Learn more at energytechnexascom. Welcome back to

0:16 the podcast. Today, I'm really excited not only to have a really special guest, but also to have a guest host with me. Many of you may know him if you've been around in Houston, Jan Odegar, who

0:32 many of us know him as the former managing director of the ION, really a pioneer with building the innovation ecosystem here in Houston, has been a professor at Rice for many, many years of

0:45 computer science. So welcome, Jan. Thank you. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I'm looking forward to a great conversation this morning. And yes, this is my first time here on the podcast

0:56 and maybe not the last one. We'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes. I mean, they may keep me on here. So yeah, as Nada said, I did, I spent most of my career in academia, sort of on the

1:09 other side of the fence. And when the ion investment by Rice University came along, I said that that is something I want to sink my teeth into because I really saw the gap between sort of the, you

1:20 know, what we were doing great things on campuses around Texas and where did that go and not go in most cases. So that was really the investment And also was the retention of talent was an important

1:31 part for me, seeing that how we educate people in Houston and keep the talent here. And I think we'll probably get into some talent conversations today, we'll get into some technology, the roles

1:41 of universities, the role of ecosystems. So really looking forward to the conversation. And I'm hoping also we get to channel a little bit about the capital and the capital market, so. Yeah,

1:51 awesome. So let me welcome Mush Khan, who is the CEO of Alchemy Industrial. He came on not too long ago on this, podcast. And so I would encourage our listeners to go back and listen to that one

2:03 too, about six months ago. But we really wanted to bring you on again today, because the context of like what we're operating in and what you're doing has really changed. And we thought it would

2:12 be great to get your thoughts on what's going on kind of geopolitically, and how it's impacting startups, how it's impacting industrial manufacturing, and just generally the mental health of people.

2:28 But

2:31 let's start off with just a brief intro, Mush, on what are you doing, what is outcome industrial, and a little bit of your background, how you got into what you're doing today. Great. Well,

2:41 Nadia, Jan, thanks for having me here. It's always fun to be with the podcast and always great to have good conversations. On one lead-off note, it's so great to me that Houston is having these

2:56 conversations, I think that ideas are the bedrock of everything. And so one of the wonderful things about Houston is that I think all the best ideas are happening here. With respect to other parts

3:07 of the country and the world, this is the place to be. So just one quick advert for Houston.

3:14 So my very brief background, I'm an engineer by degree so I spent my whole career in the energy industry. Everything from manufacturing to industrial distribution, even software development

3:27 Different kinds of products, safety products, hardcore industrial products, et cetera. So this is literally the only thing I know. If you also need it to sell women's shoes, that would be a

3:39 massive failure. But when it comes to industrial stuff, this is my life and I love it. I truly do love it and another reason to be here in Houston. So alchemy industrial, we formed alchemy a few

3:52 years ago with sort of this concept about reshoring and it was actually pre-COVID

3:57 we launched that alchemy. And some of this was informed by some prior jobs that I had, one in particular, as the CEO of a PE back company that had its supply chain in China. So I spent a little

4:10 bit of time in China. Incredible experience, incredible people. I don't think you can find

4:17 harder working people than them there with the possible exception of Houston, but it's a great community to build things But it also showed some really important trends that were happening. One of

4:28 the things that I noticed right away, and this goes into the leading of what caused alchemy to be born, that I began to see the labor rates increasing every time I was there. Manufacturing direct

4:42 labor rates in particular,

4:44 which is good, I think that's very good for China. But you could see this unfolding of China no longer being the low labor rate country. in the early days. And so this is back in 20, oh my

5:00 goodness, 2014, 2015, something like that. And so, and now fast forward to today, China's direct manufacturing labor rate is actually higher than China. I'm sorry, higher than Mexico. Excuse

5:13 me, China is higher than Mexico, which is kind of a, it begins to set global dynamics and much higher than India, which I think we're seeing unfold. So, so this idea of reshoring, it wasn't

5:25 like a bolt of lightning inspiration. It was more a gradual unfolding of an idea. So, so me and my co-founder, John Meinsrull, decided to form out to me industrial, sort of driven with this idea

5:38 in mind. So, as we went deeper, we began to think about, okay, what's gonna be most important to build here in the United States? A lot of different things that we looked at, that we did also.

5:47 But finally, we settled on things related to power So our view was that. If America was going to reassure and re-industrialize, if we were going to electrify, which we are, every modern economy

6:00 tends to electrify more and more over time, just based on physics alone. That's what tends to happen. We thought, OK, we don't have enough power infrastructure in the United States to meet this

6:11 kind of demand nowhere near it. And this was before data centers. I didn't know idea about data centers before then. And so we thought, OK, we need to be in the power game And then we thought

6:24 about what's the thing that was sort of most important from a first principle standpoint. So we settled on battery energy storage, which I think is a fundamental

6:36 physical and economic device that has to exist in the marketplace. Battery solved a tremendous number of problems. Put aside IRA, put aside sustainability. Put aside all that stuff. But just on

6:48 pure economics, you go to store energy in a network just like a cash stores. data in a computer network.

6:57 Storage is vital to everything that we do. I bought this, and this was delivered in a package. This is a form of inventory. Without storage, things don't work. We're very focused on battery

7:10 energy storage and all the control systems that come with it.

7:14 We're still early. I feel like it will be early for the next 10 years, but early stage is a company. We do have now customers at a producing revenue. We built stuff and they said this money in

7:26 exchange, which is great.

7:29 We have opportunities that are scalable. Then

7:33 this whole situation with Terrace has really accelerated what we're doing, which I know we'll get into, but it's an amazing time for alchemy. It's not easy. I was joking with someone the other day

7:44 that alchemy is about four years old. I said, It's kind of like a four-year-old human. You can You can never take your eyes off it, occasionally it embarrasses you and runs into the street.

7:55 You know, so that's the life of, I think, an early stage company, and that's what we are. But, you know, I couldn't dream of building anything else or dream of anywhere else that I would build

8:05 this kind of a company than in Houston. This is the place to be, in my view, interesting. Yeah, no, that's fascinating. And I think especially like listening to you talk about like how you had

8:17 this vision of reshoring pre-COVID, 'cause people start thinking around about it during COVID when the supply chain was massively interrupted and you're like, we can't be dependent on trade because

8:29 something like this could happen, a pandemic, a war, some other catastrophe, and suddenly the supply chain is cut off. And some of the very essential things we need to have them manufactured in

8:42 America.

8:44 And then serendipitously, like COVID happened. And now we have a new administration really has this as a strong focus. and suddenly everyone is talking about re-shorting.

8:58 So talk to us a little bit about, let's get into it a little bit. What is the right way to bring manufacturing back to you? Oh my gosh, first of all, I think it's a very difficult thing to do.

9:08 And there's a number of reasons why it's difficult. I think, well, let's go back to this bottle of water, seemingly simple, but in reality, it's a very complex supply chain that has delivered

9:19 this to us. There's different kinds of plastic, there's paper on it, there's water in it, a truck had to bring it to us, someone had to figure out how to invoice it, commercialize it, all that

9:30 stuff. If it's complicated, this simple bottle of water. So imagine having to rebuild these complex supply chains around very complicated products, like batteries, semiconductors, power

9:42 equipment, medicine. This is not an easy thing to do. I think it is an absolutely necessary thing to do, that being said, I think our expectations of the country we should be thinking like in a

9:53 decade type of a timeframe. You know, would it be great if we could wave a magic wand and all of a sudden we have supply chains for all the critical things here overnight? Absolutely, I don't own

10:05 that magic wand. If I did, you know, we'd all be on an island somewhere, you know, sipping umbrella drinks. But I think we've got to be patient and work this. I think we also have to recognize

10:18 that, I mean, who cares what hoodies are made? But I care what transformers are made. Who cares where shoes are made? But I care where medicines are made. And so I think as a community, as a

10:30 country, we've got to say there's like probably half a dozen categories of products that we just have to figure out how to do. Because as you pointed out, not with COVID, it showed us how fragile

10:45 supply chains are. And this is not an anti-China position, We shouldn't allow, as a country like the United States, we shouldn't allow ourselves to be this exposed on absolutely critical things.

10:59 And frankly, we don't need to be. We have so many resources here to leverage. If we have the patience and the hard work capital, it's gonna take a lot of capital, like in T's type of capital,

11:10 trillions. I think it's a20 to30 trillion investment over the next two decades to re-industrialize America. It's not clear to me where that capital's gonna come from Yet,

11:22 but I think it'll be fun building it. Anyone who wants to rebuild this part of America, I think the next 23 years is gonna be really hard, really frustrating and really fun. So that's interesting.

11:36 So where do you see kind of the, and there's also an order of thing and a sequence of thing that needs to happen for that reshoring to happen. And there is the workforce and the talent and the

11:48 skills. I mean, we claim to have a lot, and as you said, we have a lot of really good manufacturing people here, but are we ready to take on the additional cost? Nevertheless, that it is here

11:58 compared to it is in Asia, to manufacture, you know, what are the minerals, you know? And so, take that bottle, you know, do we have all the skills of the entire supply chain to control that,

12:09 where we're not held hostage by, let's say the minerals, the raw materials that we need? No, we're not, we're not ready at all And I don't think it's possible to do it in an orderly way. I think

12:22 it's gonna be very chaotic for the next three, four, five years. And in my experience, and even building a company is this way, and you guys have built businesses and been around businesses that

12:32 have built. Businesses are not really built intentionally, they emerge really. You know, there's this like, this kind of primordial soup of bullshit that all of a sudden, miraculously,

12:33 something comes out of it that is organized.

12:48 think that's the same thing that's going to happen. It's going to take, you know, hundreds thousands of entrepreneurs that are doing their thing. Would it be great if they could coordinate? Yeah,

12:59 absolutely. But heck, you know, me and my two kids can't even decide where to go to dinner, the same restaurant. You know, coordination is very difficult. But I do think it's, this sort of

13:09 goes back to how we started off the importance of having conversations and ideas Hopefully someone is listening. And they're like, Oh, wait, I'm doing this thing, and Mush is doing this thing.

13:21 Altami's doing this thing. Maybe we should get together. So I think it's going to be uncoordinated, chaotic, and incredible. It reminds me of, you know, Tim Cook said this code that's been

13:32 going around, that, you know, we don't go to China, because that's what we see. Apple iPhones are made in China. If we don't go to China because it's the cheapest, if we had to go somewhere

13:42 cheaper, we would go to Vietnam or somewhere else. But we go there because of the skill. like because they have like trained armies and armies of people to build these things, you know, and have

13:54 that kind of skill. And back to what you said earlier about, you know, you said, you know, we need to think more long term. And I think the way China thinks it's not even decades, they think 50

14:03 years ahead, right? And we don't have that thinking. We think five years. And then there's an administration change. And then we change our policies and laws again. And then it's five more years.

14:13 Yeah, that's problematic And I don't know what the solution to that is. Besides enough leaders all over the place to have a through line through that political turnover, which is obviously

14:27 inevitable. And in reality, really an administration has two years to try to get things done because then it goes into midterm cycles and reelection for the presidency and all that other stuff. I

14:41 think that's the sort of the beautiful mess America is. I will say there is and I would sort of think about the through-line this way, that, and this is still very true of America in my view. And

14:55 I'm not from the US, I'm a happy citizen now, naturalized and have been for a number of years. But I can say this as sort of an observer of America in addition to being an American is that, I

15:09 think that America has this really interesting characteristic

15:15 and sorry for swearing, but I will It's a, there's something unique about America that allows us, compels us to say fuck off to authority. And authority changes, okay? But I think authority

15:29 really is the old way of doing things. And we have enough people in the country who are willing to say fuck off to authority that drives this forward outside of political wins, outside of trends,

15:42 outside of whatever. You know, I mean, let's look at the three of us. We've challenged the status quo in different areas. That's very uniquely American. And I've worked in 20 plus countries

15:53 around the world. I haven't found that characteristic anywhere else. I think that's a very good point kind of, and you know, you being a professor, like thought leadership and challenging the

16:04 status quo. Talk to us about how you seem. Yeah, but so that's an interesting point. And I agree with you, but the question is, do we have the patience? Because it requires, you know, just a

16:14 project that, you know, I mean, you can't build an innovation sort of ecosystem, you know, overnight. It is a long play and are we willing to be patient, to drive in that direction? And what

16:26 do you see there? Because, you know, it's gonna take time to get the talent, it's gonna take time to get the minerals, it's gonna time to get it right. And there will be some mistakes along the

16:34 way. And that's part of the business. How do you, talk to me about sort of the, do we have the patience to actually do this? I don't know. I mean, I certainly hope we do. I hope we do. I know

16:44 it's required. It's a bit of a paradox. I think we not only have to have patience, but we also have a sense of urgency. I think the question is, okay, sense of urgency to do what? So it's

16:59 okay to say it's a 10-year journey as long as we have some idea of the destination in mind, some strategic intent that emerges from the sort of this national conversation. So we probably don't have

17:13 the patience and in a way I'm glad we don't because that forces us to act. But I think also Americans also intuitively understand that big things, great things take time to build. Now I would also

17:27 say that we've been also locked down in a regulatory framework that is unnecessary, not in terms of like zero regulations, but there are things that take too long. So if I wanted to build a new

17:41 power plant today, it takes way too long. You know, we think about this all the time

17:47 inside the company. And we're using AI actively inside our business. But I'll give you one example of what I'm trying to communicate. For us to deliver a proposal, realistically takes about half

18:00 an hour of actual human minutes of work. But how long does it take from a time

18:08 scale? It might take a week or two or three. Now, AI is disrupting all of that But in reality, I think we have to think as a country,

18:18 before we even think about things that we don't want to do, we can think

18:24 about, OK, why are we waiting? What's the latency in the system? If something is sitting on someone's desk for a week, is it adding value by sitting on someone's desk? So to me, that's sort of

18:36 the counter to - well, not the counter, but the complement to being patient. We should be patient but we shouldn't, also we shouldn't waste time. at the same time. No, I mean, I think it's

18:44 critically important that the hustle needs to continue. Yes. That needs to go there, but as a larger society, individuals need to be in a hurry. I think as a society to reshoring that capability

18:58 is gonna take time and there's gonna be missteps and there's gonna be successes. And maybe this, many of the successes will be not in what you started out doing. It is gonna be the pivot along the

19:07 road, you know? And so that is a key thing And I'm glad you brought up sort of the building sort of an energy. I mean, nuclear is increasingly an increase, you know? And we're very hesitant of

19:19 going there and the permitting and all of that and not in my backyard kind of thing. And so we need to get also the larger population on board with many of the important moves we need to make. Yeah,

19:30 so how do you see that? Yeah, and I see also like, you know, you said things take long and it's the permitting and that's from really the government side, right? Like, why does EPA and like the

19:40 national. nuclear foundation, you know, whoever's approving the permits, why are they taking three years to approve it? Like, I know there are studies that need to be done, but can it not be

19:51 done in one year? I think, yeah, that's the right question to ask, absolutely. I think it's the only way to sort out the necessary wait time versus the unnecessary wait time. Exactly. That's

20:05 what it is, right? I think we do have to have a national conversation about these kinds of things I mean, it requires tremendous leadership.

20:13 Everywhere from within a town to nationally, we've got to have incredible leadership. You know, China, and I'm not advocating, we should be like China. I don't think we should be. China is sort

20:27 of national champion philosophy of picking industries that they want to win, and it is very effective However, it may be wrong, and then they've committed trillions of dollars to an investment that

20:42 should have pivoted. So that's sort of the negative of this national champion, you know, we must win in this thing. It may end up being more right than wrong, but that story is yet to be told.

20:53 But I think we've, America's approach has to be strong leadership through all corners and all quarters. And I actually think, you know, it's from a human capital standpoint, the one of the best

21:10 ways to differentiate oneself today is by exhibiting those leadership capabilities. It doesn't, you don't have to go build a power plant, you could do whatever. It can be a smaller project, but

21:20 the opportunity to lead is wide open, I think. So, one thing you just kind of, I wonder if you've thought about this, because the onset of the World War II, the US. was staying out and then

21:32 they got involved and they really built a machine or manufacturing. How was that easier and how did it do than other parallels we could draw? Yeah, it's an interesting question, you know, war is

21:44 also obviously a big disastrous horrible catalytic advance and, you know, Bretton Woods was the outcome of World War II, post World War II, that sort of shaped a world economic order that's lasted

21:58 for three quarters of a century. I think there are parallels now and this is what led to my thinking about reshoring pre-COVID and pre, you know, tariffs and pre-all this other stuff I felt like

22:11 there was almost a strain in that world order. Just didn't feel like it made a lot of sense to me. Honestly, I didn't have a lot of data. It was more an intuition, you know, that didn't make

22:24 sense. The math I did was, oh my God, this is an incredible country. The US, all these resources, natural resources, we're blessed with tremendous geography. I was talking to my business

22:34 partner the other day about the inland waterways in the United States, a natural artifacts. but allow us to ship things really inexpensively. Well, we didn't build that, but it's here. We've got

22:46 agriculture, we've got natural resources. My view was we really should be doing more stuff here. So I think it is a time now. I would say things like the current discussions about tariffs, other

23:01 geopolitical events, I believe that, and I don't know how else to put this on, but it's sort of a natural next step from an order that kept the world fairly stable for 25, oh, sorry, 75 years.

23:17 So I think it's happening. Thank goodness no world war. God forbid, that would be disaster. But I do think that

23:27 the chips are being moved around. And so I view this as not the calm before the storm I think we're in the storm now, but it's a slow motion Yeah. And I mean, some kind of rupture kind of leads to

23:44 happen, right? But I think, I mean, I was thinking back to like what you were saying, you know, yes, things are manufactured in China, but they're designed here. And what you said about we're

23:54 an innovative country, we're a country of entrepreneurs, like in the since World War two, like nowhere else, you know, the innovations have mostly been driven by the US and then everyone has

24:07 followed and kind of built built on top of that. And, and you know, reminds me of like there was a survey of students all over the world globally and looking at like, you know, like in in Asia,

24:20 in China, people were very good in science and math. And then they said, Americans, what they rate very highly on is confidence, right? That's true. They're confidence. Sometimes I'm found it.

24:30 Yeah. But that confidence gives us the ability to take risks, right? And then you take risks. you're innovative and you're like, no, that's my point of authority. And

24:41 that's important. But going back to talking about like tariffs, because you know, there's a way of like bringing back manufacturing in terms of, you know, the Biden administration wanted to do

24:50 the same. And they were working, we had the infrastructure bill and the IRA. That's a lot of money going into building local infrastructure and creating those jobs

25:04 You know, and I hope in some fashion that will be continued. And then there's like, there's tariffs. So I was listening on the radio this morning, they were saying, well, you know, tariffs

25:13 should help local wine from California to be sold more. But then they were interviewing this small business owner who produces this wine. And he's like, yeah, but my quirks come from Spain and

25:25 Portugal. And my barrels where I stored this wine come from France because that oak wood is like the best wood for that wine and like. I'm like so depend, even though my wine is made here, but

25:36 it's a complicated process. And everything I do to make that wine is dependent on trade. Yeah, I think you have, and you're right, the interestingly, I think we've had two administrations, well,

25:49 three, so let's say Trump won by Trump too, all three administrations. And I would even argue the Obama administration began to become not isolationist, but withdrawing a little bit from the world.

26:05 And so, we had come out of the Iraq war, et cetera, so I think the country was like, well, what are we doing? And so, I think with starting with Obama and maybe even the 2008 financial crisis,

26:19 I would say that was the beginning point of Americans being able to rethink what this economic system needs to look like So Trump won, obviously, you know, I would say, very big on rhetoric, not

26:34 as much action, but the rhetoric definitely was make shit here.

26:40 Then Biden came in and as you correctly pointed out, he was very much more incentive based. So inflation reduction act, infrastructure bill, chips act, et cetera. So more carrot oriented. And

26:54 then Trump is here, heavy stick oriented. I don't know what the right approach is, but the through line is make shit here That makes you here. Yeah, now tariffs, the way that we're doing it now

27:04 is extremely chaotic and very hard for businesses to accommodate the changes. Frankly, 'cause we don't really know where it's headed. I think, you know, and maybe that's part of the plan, I

27:18 don't know. Yes, uncertainty, that's more dangerous, yeah. So it's very hard to plan

27:24 what's gonna happen, but again, I think we as entrepreneurs and business leaders should be looking at that through line, make shit here. And so I think, you know, taking that wine person,

27:36 probably not an easy solution for that person, you know, and so even for businesses who are building things here, like just those tariffs impact them. 100 Yeah, there's no doubt, just to follow

27:48 on to that wine story, because, you know, there's been a few stories about the other thing that the American wine producers said, well, we're going to hurt us because the distribution network

27:57 will be gone, because it won't be big enough for just us. So the cost of distributing our wines will skyrocket even for the distribution. Yeah, yeah. So as an intro, there's sort of cascading

28:09 things that we're not looking at. Yeah. And so, so it is one interesting challenge, is I want to sort of pivot a little bit here. And, and I wonder, so, you know, you depend on talent. We're

28:22 hollowing out our educational system, it seems like, and we're sort of, again, shocking that one. So what's your thoughts about sort of the pipeline of talent that you have access to and, at the

28:31 end of that maybe talk to us about how do you find it to find talent here in Houston for your business? Well, that's a great question, Leon. I think this is why I think it's a 10 to 20 year

28:40 journey where you have to rebuild a talent pipeline from the beginning. I wish there was an easy solution to this one. There isn't. If there was, I'd be in that business doing that still might in

28:52 some ways. But so I think, again, it's going to take time. I think also we've got to really think about, think about sort of the compensation strategies for this, the people that work in

29:05 manufacturing. So back in the day,

29:09 it was a very stable sort of a job. You could count on it, even if you worked hourly, certain number of hours or above, you had a pension, etc. Okay. So we've moved very far away from that. So

29:21 almost every manufacturing employee in the US now is a contract employee by another name. In other words, you know, they're good until the end of the next pay period. That's it. So in your mind,

29:35 as a person, if you have a family, and that creates tremendous stress. So I think one thing we have to think about is, how do we,

29:43 as private employers, how do we rethink this idea of what employment should be? And maybe you can't do this with everybody bit. Could you take, let's say 60 to 70 of your team and say, I'm

29:55 investing a ton of money in them and training And I'm going to rethink my commitment to those employees. So I think we've got to think about that. I also think in terms of young people,

30:10 we 50 years ago, let's say, maybe longer, we had people that were working in agriculture. So they came off mom and dad's farm, fixing a tractor. So they were mechanical skills ready. Well, not

30:23 true today at all. Now, there are other skills that are important, obviously but we've got to think about how do we - see skills development in a different way and then I think if you look at the

30:36 employment statistics, there's millions of employees that have given up on working. Probably a number of really good reasons, most of which is probably really shitty work out there. There's maybe

30:50 7 or 8 million employees and not all of them are going

30:55 to go into manufacturing, but how do we get to them? How do we think about things like in manufacturing is heavily male oriented? How do we make the jobs attractive to a female employees too? I

31:04 don't want to pick follow-up on because you brought up something interesting that maybe think about, we have been so focused that sort of success in the US. is all about getting to college and

31:15 getting a bachelor's and then maybe going postgraduate. Germany and a lot of Europe has this technical program, which actually is much more professional oriented towards the kind of skills we need.

31:26 Is that something we need to, I mean, there has been sort of dabbles at the edges of wanting to do that. We don't have a robust program that here. Is that something that you think could be an

31:34 interesting thing? I think that's fundamental. I mean, I think Germany's program. I mean, if we could cut and paste that here, first of all, I think a lot of Americans would really love it.

31:43 And it is professional. You're not considered sort of a second-class employee. You're a professional employee. Who cares what your department of labor job classification is. Yeah, I think those

31:55 kinds of things are important. But I also think that.

32:00 And by the way, this whole area of talent, there's like 100 businesses that we could build to solve these problems and become very wealthy doing it.

32:09 But one of them, I think, is this idea of what is a credential. So as an employer today, we've said, because you went to school at ABC School. So I'm a mechanical engineering graduate from LSU

32:23 and so somebody saw that on my resume. and said, Oh, I've outsourced my decision-making because LSU said that this guy, you know. It's good, yeah. It's good, okay. Or, you know, in my case.

32:36 It's trained. Average.

32:39 But I think that's this idea of credentialing around, how can we, so let's say you got a machinist or a truck driver or whatever, how do we validate that person and how can we make that credential

32:52 owned by that individual? That credential has to be carried by that person. And I think this is where things like AI and other technologies can be really, really interesting to say, look, my

33:03 resume, it's right here. And it's verified, it's based on data and who cares where I went to school. I've done this for 15 years. So let's say I went to school and I graduated with a history

33:18 major, but then I've done financial analysis for 15 years Well, who cares where you want to go to school. if you can show that you're legit and that so - Is that part of your next sort of

33:31 compensation package where investing in your employee won through training and certifications and credentials and to bring back some version of a pension? Because where you sort of couple them where

33:44 you get some stickiness because now three years, that's a long time to stay with a company. Well, you have to. Exactly. You have to. I don't think you're gonna get people without rethinking this

33:54 kind of stuff So I would say in the sort of the hierarchy of needs as an employee, we've all been employees, we all are employees in different ways, but one of the hierarchies of needs is that,

34:06 are you working for a company that you believe in and whatever that means to you,

34:14 which I think is largely dependent on your direct, the person you're directly reporting to. If that experience is bad, company is bad, experience is good,

34:25 But then also are you paid fairly? I think when people think about fair pay, they think my buddy doing a similar job in another company is making about as much as I am. I think that equals fair.

34:35 If you haven't crossed that, none of the other juicy stuff will land on an employee. And then you're opened up to all kinds of things like training and development and other kinds of benefits. Are

34:47 you ready to lead the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth, offering unique resources and expertise for energy and carbon tech founders. Join us at

34:58 energytechnexescom and

35:00 start building your Thunderlisset. I think that's super interesting. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of how it's a system, right? And we can't fix one thing 'cause everything's gonna have an impact.

35:14 So if you look at, okay, why do we live in a society where a four-year degree is valued more than a two-year degree, you could be like a technical degree, right? and a lot of it is because. the

35:23 universities really want everyone to go there. It's like a business, right? It's a business model, yeah. It's more like a business. You want everyone to get, and that's how we've kind of

35:33 promoted our culture. It's like get that four year degree, pay a lot of money to get that four year degree, and then go into debt, you know, and like you have to change the whole system. And

35:44 then I was thinking, you know, based on what you were saying is like, I mean, our world is changing, right? What we haven't touched yet that we, you know, I want us to go into like AI, and

35:53 automation, you know, since World War II, or like since the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which was kind of the peak of the industrial era here in the US. We've lost maybe 10 million jobs to reshoring,

36:07 but I would think majority of them is also because of automation. So if you - Yeah, that's probably true, yeah. If you go to a Tesla factory, today it's all automated. It's more robots than

36:17 people. And the people working there are basically managing the robots, right? Like they're computer engineers. And scientists, because the topic is also about jobs. How do you make these people

36:30 who are unhappy right now? I mean, why we have the administration that we have today is because people, because I think generally, I think in my mind, it's a lot because of inequality. Because

36:41 in the

36:43 1960s, if you were a mechanic or if you were working in an auto industry, you were making not so far away from what the doctor or the lawyer was making. Very true. I mean, it was a real, you

36:57 could raise a family. Yeah, the income gap wasn't that bad. But what's happened is now doctors are becoming richer and richer. Businesses are getting more and more money. Like you're seeing, you

37:07 know, the likes of Musk, like people, you know, flying jets and like just a lot more billionaires. But then there's, there are others who are still, you know, white collar workers, blue

37:17 collar workers, still stuck at.

37:22 You know, 50K, 60K, so there's like this big gap. That's so true, yeah, it is. I think there is this

37:29 very big and important problem to solve, which is one of the reasons why I love manufacturing because, you know, you can make decent money, even at sort of in your early days in manufacturing,

37:42 you know? And like, how do we push for that, where we are compensating people fairly, we are taking care of pensions, because I feel like in some way that drive has kind of gone away. And now,

37:54 you know, we're not thinking about, we have become more efficient. Because we have AI, because we have technology, like the eight hours I put in today are probably three hours that I used to -

38:06 Yeah, true, yeah. Or like, yeah, I have to put in three hours now

38:11 to do the eight hour work that I used to do 20 years ago. But I'm not being compensated for that. And I'm not being told that, Okay, now I can work less and have a better quality of life. Instead,

38:22 I'm like, No, you got to work more. So how do we think, you know, the way that we work, because we still, still that thinking 50 hundred years ago, that we should work in the same way. But if

38:33 we want to make sure more people have jobs, more people have good quality of lives, let's also innovate in the way that we think a work day should be for everybody. And we have to, I think, in

38:43 order to win this. And you're so right. You're so right I think that work should be meaningful, on balance, not every day is meaningful. But, you know, some days, like somebody has to buy the

38:55 toilet paper. That's not meaningful work for anybody. But, you know, but for the most part, most of our days should be meaningful work, which is not true today, unfortunately, for many, many

39:05 of us. And I kind of have a snide comment that I use sometimes, the spreadsheet guild And the spreadsheet guild are people that, you know, look at things through. you know, some Excel

39:17 spreadsheet where they say, oh, you know, we should be less expensive than that. Okay, and some of that, that's part of it, but there's a bigger opportunity to say, how can we be more

39:28 innovative? How can we create things? One of the interesting thought exercises to do that, I'm doing right now, and I'm gonna write something on this once I've coalesced is, if you take out money,

39:40 what is the truth, what is the wealth of a country? What are the things that create wealth? Well, what really is wealth? We've conflated money with wealth, but as you pointed out, there's a lot

39:50 more to wealth than other things than just money. And there's five things, I won't go into detail, but one of them is the natural health of a country, the ecosystem, trees, lakes, oceans, et

40:03 cetera, how clean are they, et cetera, the air. Number two is the physical and mental and emotional health of a person that's citizens

40:14 Number three is the, the. sense of community, society, how healthy is that? Do you feel like you belong somewhere? Number four is

40:24 the robustness of the knowledge ecosystem, how easily do ideas move, how ideas get, how easily are they propagated, are they rewarded, et cetera? And then finally, sort of the physical systems,

40:36 roads and bridges and houses and things like that. In my mind, we've got to think about wealth in a different way, because imagine a place, this mythical place, where everything was clean, like

40:52 clean as we wanted to find it, where people were generally healthy and they could get healthy if they weren't healthy and they felt good about the world they lived in and they felt connected to their

41:03 communities, however they define it, if they could be creative in their own ways and those ideas were rewarded. And then finally, they lived in good homes and the roads weren't shit and everything

41:13 else Wouldn't we want to live in a society that?

41:17 It's not mythical actually. Yeah, no, and yeah, and it's from Norway. And he'll tell you. Well, it's interesting, I love what you're saying. I love the five points, and I think that what we

41:28 need to figure out is how can people live in comfort and take advantage of those benefits? Yes, right. And I think that the erosion of the middle class is what allows people to figure out, I can't

41:34 even participate if that was an opportunity. I think that's so true And that is sort of the concentration of wealth on one end of the scale to the cost of the rest of it really makes it hard to even

41:34 appreciate that. Yeah,

41:55 I think, and I'm a, politically I'm a libertarian, but also I think there's also certain sort of societal realities that we have to deal with. One of the important ones is that if there's a big

42:07 enough portion of our society that doesn't feel like he can participate in the game, flip the board game over. Yeah. This is not my idea, this is history, you know, and so, and I would argue

42:18 that this is the French Revolution. Yeah, and I would argue like in the US, we were having versions of that happening, so I think we should pay attention to those signals. I think the, you know,

42:29 again, why I'm so passionate about manufacturing is that it is a middle class type of an employment and, you know, let's say a machinist, I used to own a machine shop and our most junior machinist,

42:41 the person who couldn't even spell or say machinist, was making 16 or 17 bucks an hour. So you're an 18 year old kid making 16 or 17 bucks an hour. Okay, that's not great, but pretty good, not

42:54 bad. And then if you keep on learning, and eventually at the high end, you're programming a machine or you're leading a bunch of machinists, you're making 30, 35 bucks an hour with overtime. Now

43:05 you're at 100 grand a year, maybe. Not bad. I mean, not bad that you can, you can raise a family. You can. afford a home, you can maybe have some vacations that are decent or whatever. And so

43:18 we've got to repopulate that portion of us. And so I'm sort of on this tirade against the spreadsheet guild because of that. And that's what got me thinking about, well, what is wealth? National

43:28 conversation should be, can we build or rebuild a society like that and still be trained to kill a capitalist? I don't think we have to choose But

43:41 we can't have a massive swath of our population that doesn't feel like they can participate in the economic game. Otherwise they will flip the game board. Oh, I like the analogy of flipping the

43:53 game board because it's so true and we see it happen. And that really is what put the current administration into place. A lot of people that said, no, I'm tired of this. I don't want to be.

44:03 They may not have understood all the consequences and sort of maybe the chaos that we're having, feel like they were part of our society, that the one we feel part of. They exercise this, this

44:15 American trait of saying fuck off to authority. That's what they did. And they will do it again. If the current version is not rebuilding American in the way that's healthy in my five ways. And

44:30 look, I think I'm pulling for any administration to be successful. Everybody should. Yeah, of course. We should be hoping for success, whatever that success is, in my tiny world, it's, can we

44:43 create an environment to build these amazing companies and make amazing products for people?

44:49 It's good, honorable work. It can be worked on by anyone, even went to high school or a two-year degree or whatever the case might be. It's, I like to think about it as a positive opportunity.

45:00 It's a generational opportunity. I wanna be able to look back when I'm, Hopefully 90 years old and say, OK, did I was. caught of rebuilding this wealth of

45:14 America. And I know there's tens of thousands of people like me. They're doing much bigger things than I am. And so this is our opportunity. And going back to Houston, Houston has a shot at

45:27 becoming sort of the epicenter of global manufacturing. Again, we have been. And I would say that no one in the world knows how to make complex stuff, put it on a flatbed and ship it all over the

45:42 planet, like Houstonians. No one. We've done it. And so we have all this latent talent and capital, et cetera. Like, for example,

45:54 the battery stuff that we're making, the skill set to make battery systems is very similar to someone who's making control panels for the oil and gas industry. So I can go to someone who's made that

46:05 And with some - fairly easy instructions, they can do this, you know, it's wiring, it's bending steel, it's testing, it's electrical connectivity, et cetera. So, Houston has this golden

46:18 opportunity. I mean, I could go crazy about how Houston can win here, but we have to win. Well, you know, because one of the things that Houston, we often hold out that we're an energy capital,

46:29 we're a health capital, we're a space, I said, you know, manufacturing is really the cross cutting part of the ecosystem. And, you know, and people tend to forget that a lot of our chemical

46:40 plants are manufacturing. Yeah, that's right. They are manufacturing manufacturing is It.. And that's an important part. If you think about what we want to do in in in health care and farm and

46:48 whatnot, we have real talent in that space that could could be put at work to that one. Yeah, and it's a great point. So my very first job was as a baby engineer and a chemical plant, and

46:60 allegedly the fixed things that were broken, although I probably broke more things than I fixed in reality. a few spectacular cases of doing that. But

47:09 it is, it's very interesting because a chemical partner refinery is a huge automated manufacturing machine

47:15 that is managed and run by humans. But they're not actually doing any, like no human is moving this gallon of chemical from point A to point B, but they're managing the machines that are doing it,

47:27 monitoring them, fixing them, operating them, et cetera And these are

47:33 extremely advanced manufacturing operations. And we have tens of thousands of people who've grown up. Yeah, and we have also the talent that actually designs and build these things. My wife worked

47:44 for Technip Energies. They actually designed those ethylene plants and the refinery and whatnot. So we have the full stack of talent from operators in the plant to people that actually designed

47:56 these globally. So it's kind of interesting. Preaching to the quiet I mean, yeah, this is the place. Now I do think that we have to You still need sort of this knowledge thing or training thing

48:09 to port them over to like the stuff that we do. It's mostly intuitive for them, but not completely. And so, and this is where, you know, we should talk about AI as it relates to manufacturing.

48:20 This is where things like AI can really be helpful. We're deploying it natively in our company. It is literally part of my everyday work

48:31 It's like I have now a, what I would call a two-year engineer, assistant or 30 bucks a month, you know, 'cause I use Grog, it's, I've tried perplexity, chat GBT and Grog is my, great for me

48:44 and what I'm doing. And so, so I think these tools are now available to really do special things. Yeah, before we dive into AI, I want to make a footnote, comment. I was, you know, back in

48:56 2020, I had opportunity to visit one of our community colleges.

49:01 It's the first time I went into our conference room and on the whiteboard was we admit people that make this much an hour. And in six months, you're ready for jobs that make more than two ex-that an

49:14 hour. And when the conversation in the education system is about that, how you truly can transform somebody's income and family, then that's the conversation we're missing to some degree in our

49:25 education. I know you're right, we don't have it enough. Yeah, yeah. So we need more of that Yeah, some of it, we have a marketing problem in manufacturing also, you know, we do. And it's

49:36 honestly, it's part of the culture, part of the culture of like legit manufacturing people or just get your done, you know, don't beat your chest, et cetera, no. And I'm not saying we should

49:48 beat our chest, but we should tell more stories about what we're doing because I think otherwise it's a bit of a mystery, you know, it's not like you're gonna easily understand it. We don't have

49:59 any like Netflix TV shows about manufacturing. Well, maybe we should. Maybe we should, yeah, maybe we should. Well, that was one of my pet peeves when I was running iron was the fact that we

50:09 didn't tell enough stories about the successes we have and people that are working hard to create something new here in Houston. What goes on here, you know, because we're such a corporate sort of

50:19 inside the corporate walls kind of place. That's true, yeah. And we need to get out there and tell the stories, so. Yeah, I mean, you look, you can, I'm on LinkedIn and there's a lot, and

50:27 you are too, not that. The big, big companies are very timid on telling their stories in a social way. Very, still very kind of corporatey and blah, blah, blah. I mean, you're right. And I

50:42 also think this is kind of a Houston culture too. We're more of a. Get it done. Get it done quietly, don't brag. I was telling a friend of mine who lives in another city, they're in California

50:53 about this the other day, that we don't have like this concept of celebrity like we do, like we do in many other places. I mean, you could be at a restaurant with a billionaire and you've never

51:05 seen that person before in your life. You just, you don't know. And then also Houston is this, you know, three or four generations, we've become a globally prominent city, you know, but very

51:17 quietly, we've done it. And, but so maybe there could be more, maybe there could be storytelling in a different way. And again, great opportunity for someone out there, you know, to tell

51:28 stories about Houston, vibrant stories, everything from someone who's making handmade boots or clothes to, you know, the CEO of a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. There's like a billion stories

51:44 to tell, yeah. And, you know, often we don't think about Houston as an entrepreneurial city, but look at the amount of like manufacturing businesses that people have formed here, you know,

51:54 related to control systems, anything to do with IT and energy. They're all small businesses that

52:02 are entrepreneurs, but we don't think them in the traditional sense the way Bay Area is known for their innovations because they're disruptive while what we're doing is really disrupting quietly in

52:15 the energy industry to be able to drill oil at really deep and rough seas Yeah, I think you're right. I would also say that thanks to the work that people like you do and I understand, we are much

52:32 different versus five or six years ago. I would say that. But it's a slow build like anything else. And I wish, like I said, there were more storytellers around here. I think there are

52:45 storytellers. Maybe I'm overstating that, but I think there are. There should be more. There is absolutely not enough. But I think more than just storytelling, there's about going to

52:57 these areas like Ohio where you've had a loss of manufacturing jobs, right? Where you have all these people who are unhappy, like going there and creating these centers and training them and like

53:07 educating them about potential careers, right? 'Cause these people just don't have the guidance and you know, the government should, I mean, other than just the tariffs and the IRA and everything

53:19 is like, how much are you creating these centers and having grants to actually have these training centers? And let people know, like I mean, yesterday I was at my son's school, third grade, it

53:32 was career day and I was talking about my career and you know, there were people talking about being an internal auditor and engineer and like, and I'm like, I didn't have this when I was young.

53:41 Oh, can you imagine that career day presentation to become an internal auditor? Yeah, exactly, I know,

53:49 but like, she had a whole poster, she was way more prepared than I was, she had this like poster and I was, you know, just talking about, you know, the. Talking about my stuff, but you know,

53:58 it was it was really inspiring to see that that they're doing that and in these schools Because you know in third grade. I all I knew was like okay. Maybe you could be a doctor or like you could be

54:06 yes And yeah, that's that's interesting when I was in I think fifth grade I got to spend one week with my dad at his job. Yeah, I mean I grew up on a farm So I knew how to do farm and mechanical

54:17 but but he also was working in an industry So you know, so I spent a whole week, you know, just shadowing him and and you learn a lot about that And I mean, you may learn that that's not the job.

54:28 I want to have I'm gonna say in school Or you learn like, well, this is actually something I could do and I mean, it's easy when your parents have those jobs Right, but when your parents don't and

54:37 you're like that first generation or like they're you've skipped some generations of people having Real jobs

54:44 Well, then it gets hard then it then it gets hard and that's why then like, you know, schools are important in like giving that exposure Because you know everyone is supposed to be going to school.

54:52 Yeah, and start early start elementary. Yeah, you know Yeah, you're right. I mean, this circles back to your very good question, you're on about talent. I think it's a multi-faceted problem

55:05 and so it's gonna require, you know, different kinds of solutions along the way.

55:11 But I think we will. I do think we will. You know, we've got a massive shock to our system at this point in time, but, you know, and I think that there will be tremendous opportunities along the

55:23 way to solve this I can tell you, if I wasn't doing what I am doing now, I'd be 100 focused on this talent thing. I mean, when you start, I'll be there with you. Look, I will do it with

55:35 somebody. I just can't have another full-time job, but I think that if - Yeah, it's available. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, and let's do it together. I mean, I think there's ways to really tackle

55:44 this, that, you know, and I think there's enough people in the Houston community to know solutions. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that are working on this too Well, we've been sort of.

55:54 saying that we're going to get to the AI and how you think about AI. So let's dive into how you're using AI and what AI is going to be doing for your business and for manufacturing more broadly.

56:03 Yeah, for sure. So I think one sort of central point I'd like to make is for any company leader today, you should be personally involved in AI and putting it into your workflow. And it's okay if

56:15 you start with asking chat GPT for a chocolate chip cookie recipe. That's where you begin there, but for God's sake, begin The reason why I think that's important is that if you don't have AI

56:25 literacy as a leader, you're going to get beaten by somebody that does. And so it's a risk if you don't have it, you know, and so that want to make that kind of editorial point. So I began with

56:36 the chocolate chip risk cookie recipe also. And like any tool, the more you use it, the more you realize, oh my goodness, I could do this, I could do that. Oh, it doesn't work well with this.

56:46 And don't do that anymore or it's not ready So where it's evolved in and how it's evolving with alchemy is that. It's really looking at certain things that we do over and over again, that we can

56:57 accelerate and do much better. So for example, we were working with a potential customer, knock on wood, we'll get them next week, a PO, fingers crossed, toes crossed, whatever, but. So this

57:12 would be a scalable battery opportunity. So very valuable for us. And so

57:17 we went from doing an initial discovery call with the customer to delivering a proposal and like 25 minutes. Okay, now that was not the first time we tried a proposal. The first time we tried a

57:28 proposal was awful on it. But so we got some practice in. We fed Groc with a lot of data about costs and a bunch of other things, prior proposals. But then 25 minutes, we delivered that proposal.

57:43 Already formatted, ready to go. So I mean, how would you think that customer responded? Like, oh my goodness, how's it that you already delivered proposal to us. And it's like, it's just what

57:53 we wanted. And it is we were waiting for that. Yeah, exactly. And so, so I think that set us on a path with that customer to to to to what I think will be a win for us next week. So the initial

58:05 call with that customer was maybe a month ago. And so now we're talking about, you know, scaled opportunity for an industrial products, that's pretty quick. So things that I think I think you can

58:15 look for opportunities to do things quicker and more accurately, those of the areas.

58:22 The other thing that we're doing, and we're just building this now is that over time, we're building up a repository of information that's behind our firewall, of all the stuff that we're learning

58:32 about batteries, everything from UL standards to industry requirements to just stuff we've learned, even an article that I found or whatever, or a customer call that we've had. So now we've got

58:45 this building unstructured repository of data. that Grok now can learn from. And so now it's, you can see it evolving and this is sort of scary in a way.

59:02 You can see it evolving from just a ridiculously advanced search feature to now reasoning And. so this is hyper geeky. So last night I couldn't sleep and 'cause

59:16 I was thinking about first principles on what a battery is, okay? Way too geeky to admit publicly, but I was doing it like at midnight, literally, I'm thinking about this. And so I turned on my

59:27 phone and I was having a conversation with Groc about what it, like let's talk about first, literally, let's talk about first principles on a battery. And so over half an hour I had this

59:40 conversation with Groc and we arrived at this description of a battery, which is a device that has potential energy. that's reversible, that when triggers does work. So Grock and I came to this

59:55 conclusion together. And so Grock was beginning to reason with me. And I loved it because I was interacting with it orally, not through the difficulty of typing or thumbing. So now I think it's,

1:00:10 I think those

1:00:13 are the areas, and then we're doing a few other things in the company that are allowing us to first gets more accurate and faster, but now emerging with reasoning capabilities. One other example

1:00:25 I'll give you is about a week ago, I was curious about this, and I said, Groc, design a battery energy storage system for me, but you can't use any readily availablecommercial components. How

1:00:38 would you do it? And it gave me an output. Probably 80 of it was complete bullshit, but 20 of it was, holy shit. This is really interesting. Like how did it come up with this idea, this concept?

1:00:55 You know, and so I think, and you can only do this, I think as the leaders have said, by actually using it, I think there's a lot of other hardcore business cases that you can use in there, but

1:01:05 I think the real value is a real integration with how you do work. And I think that's gonna be different for different people. I think there's a ton of great use cases in manufacturing at the shop

1:01:19 floor, especially when you integrate things like machine vision. So for example, let's say, you know, again, making this and the label on this bottle needs to be positioned, you know, three

1:01:29 and a half inches from the top. And so very simple machine vision use case, easy, easy to do. And so you can now disrupt quality assurance and you can do it quicker, more accurate. And then

1:01:41 let's say that I'm using machine vision I realized that 3 of my bottles is a little bit off and I can go back. to the manufacturing process and figure out what happened. So

1:01:52 those use cases are not things that I came up with. Those are ready to implement use cases. And this sort of circles back to, I think a couple of important things. One is when you look at a

1:02:05 product,

1:02:09 the labor input costs for that product are somewhere between 40 and 10 of the total cost. 40 for a hoodie or this t-shirt, very labor intensive, for a semiconductor, 10 or even less, 'cause it's

1:02:22 more automated. So AI can allow you to start driving out some of the labor input costs, which is a little counterintuitive when it relates to jobs, but only in the short run. What it really does,

1:02:36 it allows you also to think about different product opportunities. So I would argue, and I was having this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, like this kind of this great public

1:02:46 debate about. iPhones and can't make iPhones in America. Okay, maybe not. I don't know. But I've never made an iPhone and I just know how to use it.

1:02:56 But to me, the fundamental question is, what is the right product that should exist? And can you make that? And can you leverage these technology to make a better product than an iPhone? So in my

1:03:09 mind, reshoring the first use cases, stuff that was made here, make it here, exactly the same, okay? The broader use cases, what can we really make? What is possible? This is what got me to

1:03:25 thinking about wealth in these five ways is we should be building things within one of those five areas, in my view. And so AI, I think, enables that initial use case for the spreadsheet guild

1:03:39 loves, taking costs out, but the real enabler is just like that. We had a conversation I had at 12 30 at night. which is what's the first principles of battery. And the reason I was wondering

1:03:51 that, which

1:03:55 is, was what is really the right thing to build? Like what does a battery really do? That's what we should be thinking about. And, you know, so. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, what should we

1:04:04 actually be making? And I know, Jan, you have a lot more questions. Yeah, and so do I, but we run out of time. Yeah, I'm sorry for getting everything out of time. That's interesting because

1:04:12 it's like, you know, I mean, there's a couple of interesting things here. And I actually do want you to kind of respond very quickly. I mean, I love the way you talked about how you started

1:04:20 using it. It's a conversational tool. AI, you know, you start there because, you know, don't get discouraged by getting a bad sort of like, well, that's not right. No, keep probing the AI

1:04:30 tool and then you tear it, yeah. And then somebody told me the other day it's like, and then I asked them to build an app for me that simulated my physical system. So they got an app so they can

1:04:39 now use it there. But people are probably paranoid about, am I giving away my IP? Yeah, how do you think about that? And then I'm gonna stop asking questions. That's a very good question. And

1:04:50 so

1:04:51 this is why we're doing things behind our firewall. Yep.

1:04:56 So there's IP, but there's also I've signed non-disclosure agreements. So I'm gonna be very careful about how that leaks out of our organization in general. And so I think, and most large language

1:05:09 models allow you to have APIs now where your data set is not existing outside of your firewall So I do think there's some like good IT hygiene and housekeeping that people should be thinking about.

1:05:22 I'm actually working on a AI roadmap for manufacturers document now, which is really just to say, hey, this is what I've done. Maybe it's 70 right, but at least you get the 70 based on what I've

1:05:36 learned and you helped me fill in the rest of it. So I think that's sort of one of the issues on IP. And really quick, I don't know if you can give me like a one sentence on this, but like. You

1:05:47 know, over the past 10 years, we've been also a lot more before than now talking about additive manufacturing. But we don't talk about that so much anymore. It's not right now. It's still a thing.

1:05:58 It was a bit of a,

1:06:01 it was a bit of a metaverse thing for a while. More hype than reality, but there is reality. Interestingly enough, well, I think one of the limits of additive manufacturing is material science.

1:06:13 So I think the thing to pay attention to is the more material science advances. The more additive manufacturing use cases will come back. It's still it's still used actively, but I think it's the

1:06:25 boundaries on material science and it's maybe a longer frame time frame. I think so, because you also have the second sentence. You also have to rethink design thinking completely. You have to

1:06:37 design for additive. It's not replacement, you know, for whatever it is you're making. This was great. We're going to have to bring you on again in six months and see how things have changed and

1:06:47 where we are. Look, I'd love to have you guys out and show you what we're building and show and tell and let's do that. We're on the east end of that panel, like five minutes from the original

1:06:58 Memphis. We take our members out for a field trip every quarter. So we would love to host, you know, look, we're kind of a garage band out there, so it's not fancy, but we are building real

1:07:08 things And if anyone wants to see, like, what's actually inside one of these battery systems, we'll show it to you. Awesome. Yeah. Can't touch it, but we'll show it to you. OK. Yeah.

1:07:17 Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Both of you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. You know, my takeaway from this one is that, let's not work too hard on this re-wrenchoring. That's

1:07:25 re-wrenchoring the capability and build the next product here and scale from there. Yeah, that's the opportunity.