Can Sodium Beat Lithium in the Battery Race? with Landon Mossburg

[00:00:00] Well Landon, I know a bit of your story because I came out and visited you, not that long ago, it was by, I don't know, nine months ago? Yeah, it's dog years, feels like forever Yeah, and I was like, holy shit, this is happening right here in our backyard, not too far from my first office when I came out here I came out here to launch, as part of the team that launched what became Level 3, and we built a big building there in Interlochen Oh, okay, I didn't realize, we're in Brookfield We're in Brookfield

[00:00:29] The building's still there? The building's still there, it was still owned by Level 3, then called Lumina until a few years ago Oh, cool And I don't know what happened, did they put it up for auction? Isn't that chomp? It's like a really big, oh, cool Yeah, it's a big complex, and they moved in, and I think they'd let it actually feed it dead, but They might be converting it to, I think it's residential is what they might be trying to do I don't know, I lost track

[00:00:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah But tell us what I saw when I came out and visited you, and what are you doing now? We're going to talk about what you did before Yeah What is Peak Energy all about? It's like oil and gas, is that right? Well, you know, we're energy We're energy We don't, we're not currently doing any oil and gas We started the company three and a half years ago I've got two co-founders

[00:01:24] We've all been around batteries, energy, EVs, something to do with that for a while We brought in some folks who are really hardcore energy folks as we built But, yeah, because everyone wants green energy, so you see these big wet mills Yeah You see solar Yeah But then you hear, well, the problem with those is when they're working, it's great But if it's not a windy day, or there's clouds in the sky, all of a sudden you've got a problem Yeah With those, and what do you do with that?

[00:01:54] Yeah Intermittent energy So, yeah What do you guys do with that intermittent energy? That's the problem we're tackling first So, the goal of the long-term vision of the company is to deliver the cheapest dispatchable electron Which is a very wonky way of saying like very low cost power that's available when needed And then it's viable and fast to deploy I think incidentally, right now at least with where technology is, that's a clean electron

[00:02:21] The goal of the company is not explicitly to preference one technology or the other Although I think a lot of us are motivated, including myself, that sustainability is really important Price that in is important But right now, I mean, if you just look at the component costs of things that can generate and store And that you sold energy, the cheapest way, and about 80% of the places where people live Is either solar or winded in that

[00:02:51] That's already the case Except for the fact that the battery, you know, quantity of storage hasn't been able to support Yeah, I'm totally sorry I think that this is one of the interesting things with energy, especially right now And it's always been a challenge with the industry as well Like infrastructure is really big, it's really heavy, so it doesn't change that fast And so you have an image mismatch sometimes And these big infrastructure sort of markets

[00:03:19] Where timescales are completely different, cases are completely different Especially when they intersect with other technologies that are moving really quickly Because they're developed or incubated in some other part of it So battery costs fall out dramatically I think even in the last few years, it fall out 30 to 40 years And that's just not a hurt heart

[00:03:47] I mean, over a 30-year period, probably gas power has changed Probably on like 5 years in that same period It's like the oldest magnet batteries So I think it's just a part of like the industry catching up to this But the reason he exists and the reason we started a company If this was already solved, why do we matter? And the this, it's a luxury That's the story That's our story Yeah, so we're doing a grid scale energy source

[00:04:16] Think of like a giant container, shipping container-sized battery It's a shipping container-sized thing It has actually thousands of batteries inside it And then you go out into a field and you have hundreds of what? And you can deploy them next to a generating asset You can deploy them next to About generating asset, you mean? Solar, rain, gas In fact, like most gas turbines Depending on the use case But many of them have batteries deployed with them Because they can't The gas turbines don't like to offer that down very typically

[00:04:46] It costs a lot with winter chair And battery can offer that for them So take us through maybe 5 years ago What was this ADR or industrial radio batteries? Yeah The pioneers, companies like Fluence, Cowen The CEO of Cowen And took it from almost nothing To a few years ago When we left They were multi-billion dollar business on SS He's part of the team He's a chief strategy officer They started Companies started doing the first pilots of this

[00:05:15] That looked like a shipping container for the batteries Back in probably 2012, 2011 Maybe 2000, that might have been the first one So they've like From the outside They don't look that different But mostly what's changed The way that they In the beginning Like back in 2010 When we first started there The way anyone even thought These would be possible to work Was because you started having EVs Starting to make bigger batteries At much larger quantities Much lower CBs, electric vehicles

[00:05:44] Electric vehicles, yeah And because that started to get cheaper much faster You sort of have that many That much battery capacity You could start to put them Put them together That are in racks That look almost like data Cinevacs And server racks And then put them into 8 But those batteries Were developed The batteries that everybody Used back then And still everybody Except for mostly us Use today Are both parts And for that reason They are harder to manage From the safety perspective They don't

[00:06:14] They're hard to make it last As long as you need So if you're in a car A car needs to last 10 years But for energy infrastructure It's 25 And that's really hard to do So you've got to do a lot of A-being of the battery To get work So everybody water And everybody knows That when we're Toaster in a bathtub It's really hard to run A bunch of water pooling Which is a battery That's a high voltage system Enough power That power hundreds of homes Turns out that's actually What causes most of the fires That happen And stuff like that So if you rent out Like battery fires

[00:06:45] It's genuinely not a fire Like battery Like spontane So there's like You know It's cool technology It's grown a lot Newer tech Like newer versions of this Are very safe It's typically safer The industry has evolved Mostly by just following The supply chain Scaling And technology progression From these things And very recently And it's a lot of your guys Background as well Yeah exactly Why don't we go on A little bit of a tangent You mentioned one person On your team You guys are really An all-star team

[00:07:14] When it comes to What you're doing Like so Yeah What is your collective background Of you and the people Around you So I started my career Working in consulting With that Media Asia That's in Singapore And through that I met some folks at Tesla Joined there back in 2013 At the beginning of the Model S And stayed for five years Left as a director of engineering And I actually joined Tesla Because I Wanted to work at SpaceX So it was not my goal To work at Tesla

[00:07:44] But then I got there I got like Well they're going to be One of the same company Before too long By the time you hear this podcast Maybe they're a listening company But I got there And I like It was just So much fun Because the company Was staying so fast And the product Was so much clearly better In every dimension And The thing that Tesla Did differently They didn't invent the EV They didn't invent a battery They didn't like It wasn't because We had like that Any particular component Was new or novel It was that Tesla was the very first

[00:08:14] Car company To really Just take a Neal compromise approach And build from the ground That money would be So you're like How do we build a car Rather than take a car That was made for gas And shove a bunch of batteries In terms How do we make the battery And the EV powertrain An integral part of The structure of everything About the car And use that to an advantage And maximize that advantage We did that It took a ton of engineering Hard engineering Really hard problems to solve But when you do that And make the fundamental Better product

[00:08:43] Absolutely everywhere And as soon as You went back then It's hard to remember Just now But when you got in Model S You felt like You had the future Everybody felt it And that's what made me As soon as I got there And felt that I was like This is where I want to be So drop the plants And go to SpaceX And I think That was a key lesson When we look at What we're doing At peak now It's following A very similar It goes We have an application It's not a vehicle

[00:09:13] This is an inner storage application But rather than take something That was made for something else And shell it together We are starting From sort of ground up And saying What's the best Way to build this This energy storage product The product This generating assets But Take the best way to do And we don't really care Whether This is something That we need to use For a car as well It doesn't have to have Any other application Other than Being real

[00:09:40] And we're privileged That you can do that Because there's a lot One, there's a market time Energy is getting What's going on In the house So now you need to mess In these types of technologies And the type of battery cell We're using And a lot of the other technology The components we're using The benefit is from Manufacturing capacity It's originally driven But At the core of what we do Is basically How do we build

[00:10:09] This really critical piece Of the modern grid From the ground up To be what it is And we're just sort of Blocked from the grid So we can start From any source And we can attach it safely In the most fast decision Way And at scale Big scale Yeah, that was I mean We'll talk more about that So let's go back to the team So tell me about Yeah How you guys came together Yeah So my One of my co-founders

[00:10:38] My first co-founder That it was Is named Cam Dales I'm actually Our first investor That's at Clips Which is a Deep tech hardware investor They've been doing They've been doing Since 2012 So it's before school And I know Eclipse Because Greg Reichow Who's on the board now And he's partnering here Greg ran production To Tesla So I worked in So this And our second And Cam Was a partner In Eclipse

[00:11:06] So he actually Had just joined Eclipse After working in Battery And he was there For like three months You know The day that they invested I walked with Cam outside And told him I would She'd probably So Can you still I can just Like Point from your Brand new investor Exactly Wow They understood Don't bring sports About it So Cam came on He runs He's our chief Commercial officer

[00:11:35] And then our second The second co-founder Is a guy named Yemokarn Yemokarn Yemokarn Best executioner Guy I've ever worked with I worked for him For a while He's still the best manager I've ever had at Tesla He ran A lot of operations So And then he was The CEO Of At Lyft And then The CEO Of And then Companies of Around 120 People now I'd say probably We have like 45 50

[00:12:05] Or Test Authos Or Test in Background And your biggest Presence is Intel Horn You're here In Colorado Yeah We have about 15 people here And then the rest Including where You're doing The manufacturing Yeah Yeah That's It was important There's a lot of Lessons learned From Like Tesla But also After Tesla I'm One thing I want to do Is if you Put the factory Really far away First factory Really far away From

[00:12:36] It's going to Make In South Florida Especially the place You put it Is like Not It's too Or Yeah I mean I won't Shalefio In Northern Sweden Which is where Northolt put The factory Is a beautiful It's One You should definitely Go visit It's really cool It's just If you're an American Or like a Japanese guy A cream guy A Chinese guy Like That's so far away There's not even English students We had a lot Of problems In that So we learned Let's optimize

[00:13:05] For putting the In a place That already Has a good Workforce And also Is easy For the Engineers Even though The battery And infraction Or the System manufacturing That we're Doing there We've already DFTed it We had a Pilot line At steam It's producing Dial all that In and Just see There It's still Anytime At So I want to Return To the Barrier Department Stash Station Because I Think A lot Of us Who are

[00:13:35] A few Cessler Moved And have Been seeing Kind of Green energy For a long Time Probably Look past The fact That The ability To store It At scale Is essential To use it In a meaningful Way Yet The storage At scale Is something That's been Elusive Yeah When I think It is Batteries Store Extremely well The grid Itself Is If you Look at Just the Total

[00:14:05] Capacity Of the It's About 45% More Than What we Use So you Don't build A grid For And that's Because Electricity Has to Be used Unless You have A battery Or some Other Way To store And So Batteries Because Intermittent Power Makes That worse During Certain Points Of Batteries Fair Really Well In The Mid Of Even Before We Let

[00:14:34] Batteries Would Have Most Back Then The Technology Was There So We Using Height Pumped Up Literally Two Lakes One Up high And one Down low And you Just pump Pump the Water And run To Get So You Have Excess Energy You Would Pump Up And You Needed To Use That Energy That's Right You Have To Force Drive And It's Working And I Think Actually It's Actually Wildly Efficient Is It Is Wildly Efficient But Like Most Of Places Where It's Really Cheap To Do

[00:15:04] That Are Done They're Now They're Now Pumped So So Is Like Gravity Is Free It's Just Selecting Energy But Gravity Is Free Too So That's A Really Efficient But Interesting Wind Is Very Cheap Too So Yeah I Mean It's Sort Of Depressed Air Sort Of Things Which Are

[00:15:34] Good For Really Long Duration That's A Swing That's Just Captured Next To A Giant So At Its Core You Technologies And Pretty Much Every Other Type Of Generation Those You Giller Gas Coal Is Just A C Turbine And So So And It's Its Core Fundamental Our Power Systems Just A Few Different Things Which Is

[00:16:04] Yeah So What We Do Why Batteries Are Important Is To And For That Reason There's A Lot Of Optimization Left To Do There And If We Can Get Right Then You Can You Can Right Well We Are Early In Our Journey So We Got The First

[00:16:34] Teaser Which Is What Everybody Was Doing We Just I Think We Are Really Going Starting To This So One Of The Hardest Things To Build On The Electricity Grid Is Transmission And That It Makes Sense Because You Gotta Not It's The Most

[00:17:03] Land You Gotta Disrupt Nobody Wants To Take High Voltage Power So What Happens Is We Don't Build Very Much Transmission And If You Didn't

[00:17:43] Way You You Are Also Increasing These Seam Used At Data Centers XAI Is The Fastest Almost 4 KGW Out Of Mega Gags Which Is TESSA Big Energy Source System In Memphis And They Are Performing Multiple Functions Like What

[00:18:16] So Battery Basically Access A Soft Shop So There's Just A Lot Of Utility That You Get Out Of These Things And I Think What We Done Is We Built A Better Mouse Jab Or Battery For Grid Scale Now The Reason Ours Is All These Other Batteries Out There Are Built On Our Technology Need To

[00:18:58] Be The Water Cooling For Batteries If You Look At The Reason These Batteries Go Down It's Not Intuitive In Our Daily Lives If You Have A Battery You May Hate Over Tiny Degrees But It's Usually There We're Not Used To Batteries Not Being Available Partially But On The

[00:19:29] Battery They Brake The Battery Stops Will Those Are Also The Things That Generate They Actually Use Like 5-8% Of The Power That You're Storing In Battery So You're Losing A lot Of That Energy And When They Brake They Brake In The Wrong Way They Storing So Much Energy There So It's Really Hard To Do But If You

[00:19:59] Walk Us Through Your Innovations That First Off Before We Do That Tell Us Where You Are In Terms Of Product To Market Yeah Commercial Roll Out Pretty Proud Of To

[00:20:29] Get Into First Full Scale System Grid Connected In Field That Was In Urgo Pilot Line Came Online About A Year And A Half Ago We Crossed A Billion Dollars In Customer Contracts Earlier This Year Wow Do 10 Billion I Think It Will This Will Since Next Year We're On Trapped Around So All Those Are Roughly Three To Four Times Faster One Sector And It's Moving And You Have To I Think One Of The Reasons You See A Lot Of

[00:20:58] Companies In Space In The West Especially China Does The West One Of The Failure Modes Is Great Idea But The World Has Changed In 10 Years It Takes You So There Wouldn't Be Bottle Act On Specific That We Would Have To Stay Out Ourselves And Have To Have To Take

[00:21:29] Years To To Have Factors So It Takes Like I There's Not I Characterize What We've Done Is Like There Are Some Key Choices That We've Made But We Didn't In The Energy System Just To Produce

[00:21:58] So 10 Million To 100 Million In A Year And Then A Billion Next Year A Billion Next A Little Bit Over A Lot Of Contracts With Customers Are In Some Cases Signed And So You're Boring In Some Cases It's Follow On Revenue From The Contracts Assuming Those Go Well Break Down Your Customer Types That Are Early Dollars Well Yeah And That Billion Is All

[00:22:28] Signed Contracts They Have CTS So Various Levels Of Bank But All Those CTS Are Also Deposit So At Least We Got Those CTS Are Things Like Our Factoring S We Have To Finish The Certification On Product Which Is Having Various

[00:22:59] We've Already Crossed A lot Of Them The Customers There's Really Three Different Types Of Customers Right Now There There's Data C And I Are Reaching A Little Bit Of New Spaces Here I Think Every Every Data Center Certainly Starting In 28 But I Will Even

[00:23:28] In Late 27 You're Going To See The majority Of Some Just Need To For Ready The So That's The First Category Second Category It's Massive It's Massive And No End Of That Demand Cycle Yeah Knock On Wood I Think The Challenge Of Anybody Who's In This Sort Of Segment

[00:23:58] Now Is There Is So Much Opportunity And It's Going Really Fast And You Know Not Everything Out There Is Going To Get That Especially If You're A Company Like Us We Are In The Scalar Process So We're Sold Out Everything Every Pilot You Decide To Do Where Every Customer You Deliver To We Need To Make Choices To Make Sure That Customer Or That Pilot Has Like There's Some Follow Opportunity Yeah Of Us Even

[00:24:28] If You Like Them To School So Good Problem To Have It's A Nice Problem To Have As Long As You Make The Right Choices Second Second To Customers They're Called Independent Power Providers Or Energy Developers They're Profit Motivator Motivated Energy Companies Most People Know This But 70% Of Energy Generated In

[00:24:59] Violent Or They Don't Have To Go There A Lot Of Data And Those Are Big Like Brookfield Has They Just Bought A That Research About $7 That Was Announced Yesterday One Of Our Biggest Customers The First One We Known Is 200 Tower Blackrock Based Energy So So That So That's The Second Category They Are Really For Us Fast And The Key

[00:25:29] For Them And Why I'm Proud Our Biggest Customer Is Because They Are Really Tough Negotiators And Might Do Small Experiments To Check But To Do Big Project You Have To Pencil If They They Out There To Have Some And The Third Type Of Customer Is Utility Customer And This Is

[00:25:59] Like Your Sales Or P G And Stuff Like That And Also Phenomenal Customers They Are Not Typically Thought Of As Profit Motivated And Energy Developer Because They Are Huge Opportunity We Just So Working With Multiple Of Those And Actually Your First First

[00:26:29] Delivered Project To Utility Be Next Year Hopefully At The End Of Next Year We're Sort Of Trying To Figure Out Can You Pull In Some Demand Can Can So We Build Some Extra So That Will Be At The End Of Next Is It It's Very Hard To Get A Utility Project Is It Same Product In These Three New Cases Yeah The Data Center One Slightly They Want A Slightly Shorter Duration Right

[00:26:59] Now So Duration In Batter Just How It's Supposed To Discharge Or Charge For And Data Singers Making A Transition From The Way They Bought Power Before Now Was Uninterrupted Power Supplies UPS And That Was Like Five To Ten Minutes Now They're Moving To An Hour Or Two Hours Because They Have To This Moving Task And Increasingly To Interconnect To A Grid They Have To Also Agree That If There's A Really Hot Day Or

[00:27:29] Energy Demand Peeds Too Much They Can Ramp Down Their Usage For A Period Of Time They Don't Have To Say How That Is Yeah That Makes Sense Because If They Could Use Energy That Doesn't Cause The Peak Energy To Go Up It's A Whole Different Yeah Because You Go Back To This Like The Greek Can Support On Average Like If Access

[00:27:59] So It's Really Just Like A Few Hours A Day And On This Really Hot Or Full Days A Year Or If There's An Out Yep That Definitely Happens And What's Really Challenging For A lot Of

[00:28:28] The Predominant Base Generation For A lot Of These Places But One Of The Challenges For Grid Operators And Guys Like Data Centers Especially On Old Days But Also On Hot Days You On Hot Days These Combined Cycle Gas Turbines They

[00:28:58] That Can't Generate Maybe It's Even Worse On Cold Days And That's Not Just One It's All Of It So The Grid Will The Day You Might Need The Energy The Most But The Hot Is Everyone Running There You See There's Less So That's Texas Has Struggled In

[00:29:28] Any Other Lots Of These Generators And Really Cold Days Like PJM That's When You Really Power So I Think Batteries Play A Big Role And That's What You've Seen Happening In Texas Texas Is Texas And California The Two Biggest Markets For Energy To Actually Probably In The China Might Be Big It's Close And Texas Because It's Unregulated Or It is Regulated Very Lightly

[00:29:58] In California Is Because It's Mandated Yeah So It's Like In The Most Regulated And Most Regulated Places The U.S. This Technology Wins So It's Stuff In The Middle Where You Just Need To Update The

[00:30:28] Got A Got Got A Investment Behind It Surrounded By Extremely Talented Colleagues Who've Done Incredible Things How did You End Up As The CEO Of Then I You know I Think It's Always Been Something I

[00:30:58] Career Probably For Some Of Things That I Wait Until Here He Had Me Or Had My First Child A Little Earlier Only Two Years Into Our Marriage And So If You Started A Company Before It's Hard Doing It With Young Kids Is Hard Is Even Harder So I Set That Goal For Myself Quite Early In Probably Before College I Wanted To Do It And

[00:31:29] I Think So I Would Have Probably Taken A Bit More Risks If I Didn't Have A Family To Support Early On Or And Probably To Be Honest I Finding Going To Work At Tesla Was Just A Blast It So Fun It So Is I Mean Yeah Every Day

[00:31:59] Almost In History Where There's Not That Many Opportunities To Do And So That Was A Last But I Think That Is The First Reason Why The Second Reason Why Was You Know I Went To Tesla I

[00:32:27] at the time like the company's mostly just the executives in that uh and we you know when i left there were about 6 000 people uh we had raised billions of dollars so it was a really crazy growth story um the uh but like what it changed was how hard manufacturing and using technology both how hard this was like making batteries that's what my folks try and do um uh and they were making

[00:32:54] battery slots which peak doesn't do but that was what we would mean there but also not only that it's really hard but that it's like five that it is an incredibly strategically important thing for everything from transportation to energy infrastructure to military hardware drones need batteries yes and what is increasingly i feel a massive focus around this is that

[00:33:22] that technology that battery technology is basically non-existent outside of increasingly non-existent outside of the region there are some battery factories in the west that have been built there were some some good government support that they'd like sort of uh made a quick um quick investment boom uh under binding and then sort of scale back as those tax credits have gone away um some of that's being taken out by new battery uh by like changing those over to energy storage but

[00:33:49] those factories are like they're probably not uh yet at the scale or level competition we're not without subsidy they can um and we're certainly not only persons you've not even i mean i think 10 years ago people were saying well you know china is subsidizing our manufacturing so maybe they're going to win on the word in an honor that's not the case they they are they are flowing with profit massive profit

[00:34:14] uh that they're making off of their you know 15 year trillion dollar investment battery factory that's now they're plowing it but um it is of national importance uh that we if we want to have uh continue to have a leadership position in the components of a modern energy economy if we want to have um an

[00:34:39] industrial base that can support modern military if we want to have a car industry like those things are all we need matters and uh how's the u.s government supporting you right now are they i i increasingly like i think when the administration changed over everyone's time like us this like how do people feel about this um i think that there's a a pretty stark policy shift away from

[00:35:05] from uh electric vehicle incentives which has um definitely dampened the build out of ev battery factories uh and um that's been a bit challenging but on the flip side that the administration's been very supportive of uh battery energy storage and um is increasingly so so i'm i'm optimistic about what i mean when we haven't i don't know what to do very very so it means that we need to take some

[00:35:32] very big whole vets as a nation and we need to be smart we can't i think we're past the point now we're so far behind that we can't just try to catch up we have to look forward and get the next thing that's going to happen and invest in it and that's what china i mean they picked a technology called called lfp which back when they picked it they actually bought it from a company in the us so they want to screw it up all the assets and then they they structured a ton of international policy

[00:36:02] uh to build that industry out and that is dominant technology globally today um in the book the entire industry yeah but picked them right i think we're gonna have to do this and i'm you know i'm you know actively uh trying to get that message out there because it's it's very clear yeah at least for energy storage in the grid which is kind of the it is the most important market for batteries today

[00:36:28] uh it's wow i don't think they know who guessed that two years it is uh it was a customer today or it's partially it was already happening um electric electrification and everything is sort of driving it and that's even just the amount of uh batteries and just electrical grid infrastructure operating and then you just go this uh is this vast it's bigger than it's um and i was already happy but uh

[00:36:55] yeah that um i think you got a little you guys look at the energy for dvs is greater than energy data for there's i think still i think still it's probably harder to solve because it's distributed distributed you know distributed access that's that's gonna be really hard like i think the it's hard enough when you're worried about uh when you're worried about trying to like build up the

[00:37:20] whole power supply on the transmission level but now you need to also think about how do we get that we can't just push over high power line high voltage power lines that are relatively easier though than building into the neighborhoods you have to get a power in the neighborhoods city cities uh that's going to be one of the next challenges and that's also again again batteries and help because if you have more surge distributed all through your network it's less critical that you

[00:37:45] have you've overbuilt your transmission grid like crazy and why colorado why are you colorado and given that only 15 people today are all right is there any like well maybe we should not be in colorado i mean i love colorado i i uh when we were moving back from sweden uh it's kind of got from morefold we we i actually moved with the company back here last year i was with the company and we left the north american extension and we didn't know where more folks like north

[00:38:14] american back here to stand for uh we ended up selecting site in canada um but uh at the time sort of the first time i got to choose in my career everywhere else i do it's like for a job and so we didn't live we had some family out here and it's just such a fantastic place to live so people um and uh when we picked when we started to build the company uh there's actually a pretty

[00:38:38] nice little battery because it's all down here for energy to get up here um and you have uh uh but the national labs and uh uh in our and stuff like that as well so they've been really influential um from the research level so you get a lot of people um uh that was the usual system you operate in i mean the data center yeah well it was a fear that that was going to be as important when we started the company as it has been now but that's it

[00:39:07] that's helpful it's very helpful while you're hearing this customers do the decision makers are ready to hack out they're not building that much here for the decision no they're not building but the decision makers are uh so that's been really good um why are we more in california i think it's uh we we started the company um um some of our first recruits like our cto's in tall turkey uh he

[00:39:30] was the uh the lead engineer on the first one here kill what our cut pack from ls which is incredible technologist and engineer and just builds the best teams in the world um we hired him early on he lost also another excessive very early in james 2009 so then me liam and we had this deep network into tesla also around that time with like tesla started and maybe a little before that had started

[00:39:58] to focus on other stuff you know the human robot program more and more on robot taxi tesla energy had a lot of attention when we were there but it's increasingly less it generates most of tests that test is profit today but it's it's well it doesn't feel like it's at the center of the beginning and um the best engineers in the world were there so but coaching it without uh

[00:40:26] uh we have to do you know to move as fast as we have we can't wait for people to move first uh makes sense so ai must be helping in the design of batteries and and the whole you know platform architecture around it how is ai you know manifest itself your i mean i think it's uh

[00:40:50] i think there's what's happening now and what we see coming very soon um what's happening now i think is probably in a lot of ways very similar to other hardware companies um i mean of course we use it like every other like you know you can use all the things normally use it for but i think what is if you're manufacturing something of doing development where you have a lot of like handover between diverse discipliner disciplines or different like simulations that have to like

[00:41:17] feed into each other all that right lining of information between people and computers and back to people that stuff is increasingly just happening uh but you can you can use um an llm to speed up the iteration time and reduce uh just like kind of a lag that has been inherent in the system by uh yeah embracing which is i guess what ema's um and that's if that's actually huge i think we it's hard to see

[00:41:47] but i would not like i would expect that over time is this the startups are going to develop you know adopt it really really fast we're doing it immediately but like as they you know manufacturing having a select to use this i think you'll actually see material productivity gains just happen from that absolutely wide background we're pretty excited about this and when you think about the creativity gains in that context talk about what that means it means like faster time from

[00:42:13] ideation to product scale um it's probably uh sometimes the thing of productivity is you get more than a fewer people but what you're talking about is also the progress in the technology itself i think you'll send the systems cheaper blocks cheaper like hardware which is like a pretty you know hardware has not gotten that much a lot of other things again cheaper i think it's pretty

[00:42:39] interesting there's a some economist has this youtube figures guess talking about like you know where are the gains everyone expected in the dot-com stuff happened that like there'd be massive gains and efficiency and production and they like at least as you measure the gene feed itself like that they haven't shown up as it would just be there i mean there's a counter already into that to things like if you look at like spot that's right like when i was growing up uh you had cds

[00:43:08] you didn't have maybe somebody who really loved music maybe yes like 100 space now i have the equivalent of every cd ever made and you know you listen to them for a very for like a price of one scene and same thing with tv and movies and stuff like that a lot of communication functions where you know all these things and those things are going off yeah right and you're talking about things that um

[00:43:36] that we consume in a disposable income sort of way more music more things to watch but fundamental things are so much more plentiful now than they ever could have been sure with internet so food supplies yeah food supply medicine uh living all across the world and there's no way that could have happened without benefits the internet so that's child's play relative to what's going to happen in the next 20

[00:44:02] years so i think you know the word abundance is being used pretty commonly now and abundance means what word of bias that uh non-service people wise yeah it's going to be more abundant and it's also the fundamental things that that are the most basic for quality of life i have access to shelter

[00:44:23] i've access for uh uh for uh clothing i've access to food i've access to medicines across the broadest world yeah i don't know how you measure that in gfp but i think you'll see it show up more in real measures of gdp that like the botcon stuff happened because it's just it's hard goods or it extends more to hard goods in this type of issues um i think like it's in some ways it's sort of been hidden

[00:44:51] but like automation uh manufacturing and stuff like that is happy as goods got really cheap and we also accept a low cost of our needs but then the next level of uh cost down and a lot of things that we use uh with the other day happened because those economies led by china have bought me faster than you go to a chinese factory that's not all but like most of them are there's more robots than people

[00:45:20] and they're highly highly and the way they're doing that is they people like before they had a lot of labor doing jobs in factories now um most like those jobs are still there now they're engineers or engineering control software and robots and stuff like that scheme were um i think that's interesting is now like

[00:45:44] the the cost and time it takes to to program an industrial robot or all the process has is the cost and time it's really very fast like i mean like what happened over a 40-year period in history it's probably going to happen i don't know four years ten years something like that but i think it's both incredibly exciting and a massive opportunity i think you can also look back at like

[00:46:10] the industrial revolution you said okay look every time this level of economic disruption change happens there's also like a lot of friction a lot of anxiety so i think um we we have to think about policies to to make sure that keep not only like i i i'm genuinely in optics i think people will like everyone's intensive um i think where it could go really long is if people don't have confidence that they will

[00:46:39] uh and they react to that yeah no it's uh there's one big arc that speaks to the positive and that's what we touched on which is abundance and that's when you felt across all corners of the earth you know there's just the things you need absolutely me uh are you much more abundant and uh and in

[00:47:03] in certain areas it doesn't have to be very abundant is you know is if you choose so you'll have a lot more time on your hands uh so there's that's the positive i do think there's this other uh daunting part of it which is where's ai really at it even but i do think there's certain very vulnerable best people with ai and some of them are ones who are maybe coming out of code in early in their

[00:47:32] career and covet disrupted very critical farce maybe even free their career but well their high school their college during cobit and just as they're starting to get their feet underneath them i would say many cases develop some questionable paths during those periods but then now ai is hitting higher uh at a point where you know some of them probably aren't ready to know you have to it as quickly as you need to and can have the skills to adapt to it i think there's vulnerable

[00:48:02] uh kind of age span there is probably eight nine ten years yeah i think kids who are just getting gone you know they're kindergarten first grade second grade third grade ai is just going to be the world they're growing up in and uh and i think that's gonna be a whole different yeah aspect of it do you think people will still need to work in 10 years or uh i've got a my oldest is uh coming up on 14 now so i think he's probably old enough where you'll see it i'm not sure about

[00:48:32] myself well i'm hosting this what's called the bolt summit here uh and uh it's gonna start at the the last event of what is now called the swagger fest and it's going to be the first generation for this bolts on it that's going to continue for two and a half days so as a word summit applies it's really about getting together we're going to be these are people who create uh create content

[00:48:58] or creating experiences but those who are building platforms and i've been a platform now in the creation uh and then those who want to invest that all looking forward in time saying but it's that human experience as ai is influencing kind of the human journey going forward uh what but you know what do you do to get in front of that i mean look 10 years ahead and anticipate you know what the world's gonna look like and you know ask me a question about three or four weeks i'll benefit

[00:49:25] you a lot of really smart people spending a lot of time together talking about that i think it's uh yeah i'm not honest too but i do think there's something different fundamentally different about our ai and and you've faced in the past uh and i think one of them is that what it means to be human is gonna uh is gonna uh evolve because it's not just you have humans and you have ai or humans and

[00:49:52] whatever the new technology is there's gonna be some kind of interplay that starts to take place you know humans getting connected to machines and humans being bioengineering you can yeah and then you have this these things that start to look like post humans while you still have these you know old fashion humans oh where that's yeah there's a you know i think the one thing that gives me a little

[00:50:17] bit on one hand like i'm i'm tech i love technology i spend my career most of it doing it because i really love working on um new tech uh but i draw back to some time at tesla when i was like 2014 i started working with um on some stuff on on the olive highlands tesla and back then we were working with a

[00:50:43] really simple system um uh really low-rise cameras and not much pc plus and you're already like it already felt like oh my god went from you know the beta systems back then where like barely could keep you between two really well painted ones in the road and they're saying that it almost felt like some good drivers it's just a little bit we're so close um and then you know the next iteration was also huge

[00:51:10] it wasn't quite as much of a stuff change but it was really and so trying to like extrapolate that fur it's i wouldn't bet you back any amount money by this point every project and now we do have the next iteration of the service um yes i would not surprise be surprised that this this takes longer than we think it will which i actually don't think is some some if it can go very quickly but not so

[00:51:40] quickly that we can't figure out how to handle that change it could be pretty good for us if it goes too fast we don't know how to handle it sort of skips that that could even look bad yeah it keeps you i i i think the autonomous steel case is the perfect analogy because i think it was around maybe 2015 2014 and you got us running a sale back then we've been big band that works for us with all the autonomous

[00:52:08] vehicle you know companies and it's like two or three more years two or three more years two or three years and i was one of the people saying that yeah and we're now 10 years later and we got waymos but we don't have waymo waymos quite a little number of them and then we're on here in colorado yeah they're jarring around man you can't get in on the app right but i've seen a few or maybe in denver itself yeah i was at one moment yesterday in san francisco so it's oh yeah i've been in them

[00:52:34] in san france that's an area feeling of course yeah so you you alluded to earlier that what you're doing now in the in the product technology which inclined what you will be doing what a few years from now is in a evolve quite a bit so take us to your strategic kind of progression of of how you think well both your company and your product technology yeah i got evolve so so i think

[00:53:01] go back to like how you how everybody almost everybody thinks about that word is it's a part of it it's not a thing that's uh uh it it performs a function that enables something else to happen um and it's embedded as part of that thought so of course you can buy an external power bank but that's the that's an edge is uh but the grid that's what it is there's only the external power banks and the reason for that is because unlike the external power banks you buy for consumer thing you need like an air conditioner

[00:53:31] and a bunch of support systems and all this other stuff around it to do it um if you can remove all that other stuff you need you can start to think about building a grid that has capacity that doesn't has storage uh and i think that is the most part that's why i think we have a right to exist rather not just like um well we're not going to stop at being dedicated and industrial system uh but

[00:53:56] become sort of a full grid uh uh the full second company that's building and next generation grid um it's because it doesn't clients when you say that that you're you're running kind of you're an energy company you're running an energy platform as opposed to supply i think we'll have uh i yeah i i think we'll have a role in running some assets on the grid um we i think it's for customers that

[00:54:26] so we go to market in a couple ways we sell our product to customers they're party customers we want to just buy it and offer it themselves there are also some customers who have like and they might be an early stage energy developer or something partner with us and we can also uh offer that help them out with us and maybe even um have some long-term say so i think increasingly we were interested like we're interested in both models we're just getting started on a second

[00:54:51] um i think increasingly we see that as a bigger one um we'll always have both yeah but i think that the cool idea to think about is there's a few types of technology on the grid that is just like it's embedded there's millions of these things like transformers uh distribution transformers this they look like gas or garbage cans on led poles uh or those big green boxes but uh you know so i

[00:55:19] just saw some stupid video clip of some you know beer and one of those yeah yeah oh yeah okay i'm scrolling a little too much i'm starting to see this kind of shit i mean that's just things that there's just lots of these different examples of like you have a massive amounts in terms of quantity of these semis that get replaced on a long time frame but there's so many that you're constantly like refreshing you need to do this yeah and so um i think what we've done is with our first product

[00:55:48] we've proven that you can remove all the stuff that's holding us back and adding storage and it leaves it's a bit so the next natural place for us to go is to start doing that solution it's not too it's all good because actually as you look at energy costs and this is like this is why you start with this is the core inside 50 energy if i took a solar module uh and a battery set and i know how much those two things cost so you do them that and you come up with the cost of electricity

[00:56:17] that would be generated by that at the equivalent reliability or capacity or whatever you would want to call it like non-immunancy uh because you have to that's what the batteries do it's like making that the solar panel firm uh so you want to target the firmness of gas generation you just take those two components this was three years ago we did like the first time i did this and you just do the math already those things imply electricity costs like about a third of the

[00:56:44] cost for the cheapest gas fire tower anywhere um it obviously doesn't cost that right it's multiple times five to ten times but uh but the reason for that is because all the other stuff we put around it in hardware and then also the fact that construction is really really expensive and so if we can embed store embed energy storage into something that's already going to be installed you have

[00:57:11] to be installed then you're sort of getting the most by far the most extensive part of this uh and that's kind of and that's our right to like start to have assets um that we or our customers and some combinations these two things can control throughout the entire so that's that's the long term issue i mean i think that's how we get to energy that costs far less than the cheapest energy

[00:57:34] positive value it's also clean and uh it's really really quick to deploy i mean networks are um much much more wider than that today because you have these both control points and storage funds spread they're not like concentrated on the language there's a two options well that's you just kind of a big dis in there i think guys say it's inevitable like that we've

[00:58:02] proven that we it is possible like it's inevitable that's the word yeah i mean the the the economics just something as long as we need energy and you can't figure out a way to just wirelessly transit that type of body is that's not gonna happen so yeah i guess and the bottom energy it's not just that we need energy we need more and more more energy and and what you're describing is a way of harnessing a lot more energy without having to build more energy yes you get more out of the essence yeah

[00:58:33] it's take advantage of all the the waste of uh you know generate peak energy um i mean to increase our energy peak to increase our peak energy in the u.s by five percent of the costs vastly i mean i think our grade is people say this all the time that the electricity grid is of the most complicated energy humans have ever built and i don't know i don't know if i've heard this but

[00:59:01] it's probably the most expensive too and it is 45 bigger today than it is and if you can make it if we can close that gap right and it's just everybody yeah because you say it's 40 percent 45 percent bigger but it can't solve the peak energy problem i said why you have to make it a lot bigger and yeah and the trillions of dollars that you spend for every yeah percent increase and but you know data centers do what they essentially doing and as you mentioned the the evs you know

[00:59:30] needing a bunch of energy if you if you can't solve that without increasing peak energy it's like i don't get it right and then people won't tolerate that you know how certain too much right yeah you'll see that and it's happening now but like because and i understand i deeply understand this like it's not fair for us for for rich countries or like wealthy well-off people to be like oh yeah it's like sustainability is important now now that i have money like energy can be more expensive i'm okay

[01:00:00] with that well of course i can afford it but like if like countries that don't have energy that they they want to have health care and hospitals and mics and schools and stuff like that that power um so i i have deep sympathy that even like not doesn't have to be countries other countries in our own like when energy costs increase it hurts the the people who can lease stuff with that the most and

[01:00:22] so i understand the pushback on what green energy with the perception is i what i really struggle with is when people say that well the only like green energy is way too expensive we have to just compromise it like that and that is not you have to in some ways if you're gonna guess you gotta be a careful so you know i'm sitting here full of colorado but in some ways by being a zealot about

[01:00:52] the need to build green energy all you're doing is shifting energy production to less green environments that are overseas and you gotta or you're just following up resentment towards the tech which is what kind of happened in a lot of cases but i i think the gap here is that it's not that like oh wait i think it's not that we don't have the technology so we don't have the execution we don't have the

[01:01:16] systems level engineering to unlock the potential of that yeah and what you're describing is uh is if you don't have to produce more energy in air you don't produce more peak energy or just energy in general because a lot of it's going to get wasted um you can uh even non-green sources of energy

[01:01:41] yeah it'll get a lot better too because it gets stored in use in a much more uh productive way as opposed to creating more energy yeah i want to get us to a point i think the products that we're building are going to get us to a point and i want this to happen as fast as possible i think we can get there in i yeah i think we'll have the components we need you know the products we need to to sort of complete this picture in the next five years with the cluster where then it's a scale complete

[01:02:10] build picture basically they get so that uh almost all the incremental energy generation you have to deploy can be can have vmg's very lower or no machines and that doesn't mean that like we don't need gas that predicates you like that we already have a lot of that stuff so if you can just make the new stuff that we're adding work cost effectively if it's green then you can still use that base load to help augment

[01:02:40] because it's really that's the trick with the grid like that's why when you hear people say we need an everything energy policy um i mean i'm a pretty motivated by a simple machine but i think the realistic cap way here is that you do but i don't think that we should like i think we are uh we are optimizing right now under a false set of assumptions back to our original back to the original

[01:03:04] thing that said like the timescales and speed at which these industries move it's half of this problem at least some of it is we have to get better engineering but the other app i think it's just like there are a lot of people in this who are buyers and making decisions around how to get this out who are just unfamiliar with these technologies it's relatively new and in some that are familiar they just don't know how fast prices yeah i think there's people will progress a lot more if they

[01:03:34] really talk to each other really listen to each other i think a lot of the debate about uh clean energy is positioned as some people want the energy more than others do we or do we all want and value a clean environment i i value a clean environment i think as much as anyone else and does a clean environment um but just dying on a clean environment doesn't say and therefore you should do this not

[01:04:00] that there's a cost there's a cost there's a cost including a cost to you know tell if these people care about like having having food yes so yeah you know they you know the discussion about okay you know some of this probably already covered well the environment whether it's clean or not is a local uh challenge not a local challenge you can't do something in your geography that is more clean

[01:04:26] yeah and that'll actually mean overall environment change so it's it's a top place but you can show what you know hope on that is if you look at where but by like uh sheer like email growth rate the fastest growing places for renewable energy are like the global the global south are countries that are substantially below like average yeah and and i think it's because it's the most cost effective and

[01:04:53] the fastest growing back that's and i think where i was going to go with this which is what you're touching on is the solution to clean environment that also is one where civilization continues to that's for yeah it's technology it's not stopping technologies having technology break how do you sustain kind of our very precious rock called earth that's right how do we sustain that

[01:05:17] for generations to come we all share deeply about that and we also you know understand the complexity of how to achieve that but it's not you're not going to exceed it from the mindset of saying let's just like reduce less energy yeah it's not an answer well and like you said that might work for some of us because you know we don't have to worry about yeah developing you'll be underdeveloped

[01:05:42] parts of the world but but uh you know technology is remarkable pigments and come to come to how to deal with creating sources of energy that that don't have a negative effect on environment and part of what you're doing is exactly that yeah i think there's just even unlocks that we have to do and uh we're so close now we just now we just have to see it but yeah i i think it seemed sparked it i don't know if you had this impression too let me be like it just went like 15 years ago

[01:06:11] everything was so much when you thought about tech and thought about what the things we were all with on back then you're so hopeful like it just felt like like everything was going to be better uh and the things we're working on the making we're going to in audiences some stuff there's been some some challenges i can understand why we are now but the fundamentals that like technology can improve people's lives we're still there i think it depends on which terms you're working on um and it goes to

[01:06:38] one kind of points i think we need to show more places where technology actually does the foot pumps that we have thought did you know that you just got well it's not just that we probably did i think that it is yeah questions why is that poorly understood right now i mean part of the frustration must have had variations conversation way too frequently with multiple times today is for people like you and

[01:07:06] you know we who are you know deeply you know in the tech world and have been for a long time you know we believe it deep in our bones deep in our you know in our bodies and our souls that technology is good for everyone that technology is what has allowed uh more people to be educated more people have shelter more people have nutrition it's it's been a force of good and if in the

[01:07:32] geography that you're in in our case colorado the more vibrant the tech ecosystem we take as a given that's good for everyone how can it not be yet you know the majority of voters at least uh in certain geographies including perhaps colorado aren't necessarily bought into them you know they're resentful a bit and and so if part of what we need to do is to go out what are we missing what are we

[01:07:56] missing where it seems so obvious to us that uh that the having a vibrant you know economy even and a vibrant economy you can't have without a really strong kind of uh tech ecosystem how can that not be more greatly appreciated you know what are we missing how do we do how do we convey that that's a variation of question that you're posing is it you know you go back 10 years ago it's like

[01:08:24] seem to be more acknowledged even that that was the case and now we're we have this wave of almost resistance against that and a lot of us were scratching and saying i don't really get this yeah and i there is a contrast that i that i've seen personally but i've been i think i read in a comment or something about it where uh the way that that people in the u.s and not people in the u.s and not being judged because like that people who have that think about and you know

[01:08:52] reason out and have outlook towards especially ai with technology general automation is pretty negative pretty pessimistic uh at least if there's anxiety uh it's only a little pessimistic yeah i'd say if that's all was anxiety yeah yeah i mean if conversation is far more than just anxiety but you go to china and people like i mean i don't i don't want to speak like universal i'm

[01:09:19] sure there's like gradations of this something it does not feel like that like my personal experience has not been that and uh this article is bringing that as well like i think people see it as oh let's hope it like it feels more like something now like 15 years ago and i thought a lot about it like why is it different there that uh and it's uh i mean i think there's something there with like it i don't know like there's probably some policy components to it but i i think there's

[01:09:48] something important how do we well you said china uh but talk about other geographies where you think it's far more hopeful than this diagram no actually like it it's a great question i had to thought about that enough i'm sure i'm sure there's probably like definite differences i think it's probably worse than drop yeah and it's here how do you think it is you test us i think there is a pretty pretty strong

[01:10:17] vibrant tech ecosystem because a lot of people have moved there um but i i definitely know there's a lot of like pushback from local communities on and increasing the ideas that's they just have a lot yeah so that's just very special yeah but i think this is sort of like inch because people are not actually having these like i think they perceive that there will be a negative impact on that mainly but

[01:10:41] like i think a lot of that pushback is just like people don't trust they're worried about yeah and i i don't i have no basis for that it's sort of my sense i think it's bigger than ai i know i think ai is front center right now but the anti-tech sentiment that is in pockets of yeah your big thoughts of ds right now is you know ai is just the latest layer that it's not

[01:11:09] constrained ai that's that's certainly the reason i run up texas or florida is i i think they're rallying around each other enthusiastically getting everything they can to further their uh their ecosystem around tech and i don't i don't think it's just the tech crowd that's soon that the whole oh yeah okay sorry policy like policy makers and stuff like they're certainly doing that i don't figure i just i i mean if you look at like the polling data for instance in like florida

[01:11:37] that the amount of political swing in the last two years is an unprecedented launch and i think uh toward direction uh to like if you just if this is a way over a simplistic thing so i don't imply any political uh interpretation of this so like if you just were to say like okay republicans are prone like building out this stuff and that's where the issue is not it and stuff and then grants are down it's the way down yeah again just pointing that out and some i believe uh different sets of beliefs

[01:12:04] which i think don't have to but like uh well why won't we go into your thing so yeah we're an energy company we're gonna double now i mean totally uh yeah yeah but um uh yeah like if you take that lens on it but like generally that uh it's swung radically like the latest one there is a huge swim put to the that's especially oh really far yeah uh which i uh is is sort of surprising um

[01:12:35] i don't know if it's that i have no idea if i hadn't looked into the data but it'd be interesting to see if there's a correlation there to where a lot of stuff is happening you see bigger soon i think probably not it's funny yeah well that's interesting i hadn't heard that uh maybe color i was on the right track you know maybe i'm wrong it's a i'm wrong everywhere i don't think there's a lot of stuff color could do better i think you're you're out in traffic some of that stuff and well i

[01:13:02] think we gotta just the biggest thing you gotta do better is come together as as uh humankind i i like to say that if if i was uh ai and i was gonna get with my ai buddies and i was talking about like what are we going to do to take over this human race i'd say i would get some of them to not like the rest of that and the rest of them not like i would get them fighting with each other and arguing over stupid stuff yeah you know like hey we're ai that's already happening social media

[01:13:29] you don't even know that's what's happening yeah yeah get us fighting with each other exactly i it's almost a worst case scenario where you basically like i believe this if we're if we're not like leading in these technologies it becomes a national security crisis oh no we have to do it no question but if but then you have like this tension between core national security objective

[01:13:54] and popular system increasing each other against it like that tension it's it feels very nice yeah and the problem is is we're not having rational thoughtful conversations around that tension yeah we're having this bizarre kind of yeah non-diagnosis one side yells one thing and other side yells something totally different them oh me they're absolutely right because this is something that i don't think is going to get solved all the way like people need some strength and i you know i think

[01:14:22] you think to the analogy and or to that article we talked about earlier we're trying to look generally has a more positive outlook on this trend i think part of it is because there's a general belief that that at least from a policy perspective the government will not let that people uh hurt too much because this like that will truly the government's going to take in and to try and make sure that society doesn't uh now there's a lot whether or not you believe that or not i think that's you there and i don't

[01:14:51] think people feel like not that politicians hate people or there's some people believe that generally and i

[01:14:58] think that's the idea of is that we have a lot of people who are in the country and i think that's what we need to see one party yes yeah no we definitely need to come together and that that's just on yeah our political leaders i think all of society does i think uh more of us need to do including me need to spend more time trying to think a little bit more about what's really going on and

[01:15:27] listening a little bit more to understand kind of other perspectives and you know and uh just put placing a higher hearty around kind of you know community fitting each other out you realize we're all in this together this isn't uh you know this isn't a fight where some just win and some just lose and it's like how do we how do we make the world a better world for the next generation and somehow we've gotten away from

[01:15:53] that i think you're right it comes to community and in some ways like i think this is this is a probably one of the things that drives some of the skepticism which is so much great stuff out of like the last time we grew is a tech development but one of the things that i mentioned is struggle is it is a struggle is that like sunday technology is built to arise like it's all it's community it's so much easier not to engage with your neighbor and your students that uh it's a i don't think there's any one company

[01:16:22] that's responsible for that technology that's just like humanity needs to figure out how to be work with these schools and they built it now make it easier for us the lazy money is that you get other for us to sympathize with them yep uh one internet uh on some positive notes and i'll say positive i'm sorry maybe go less than positive because this is a source frustration

[01:16:46] i think the colorado is so well positioned to be the you know benefactor of these broader tracks uh those who well one we have incredible uh obviously we have a credible environment here in the water linear during the sunshine the mountains kind of the outdoor lifestyle we also have this incredible infrastructure to work with um heritage around kind of uh the physical world

[01:17:16] you know physical things that are going to be impacted by technology ranging from uh you know space 10 is thriving here quantum is coming out strong energy is a including kind of new energy is it's a big thing out here we have uh my old industry digital infrastructure is gigantic out here we have all this these pockets of really strong uh industry we have a great research hub strong

[01:17:43] universities uh we have more kind of available land in the metro areas than the congested you know northeast and west coast uh and you know by and large those who are feeling like they need to leave the west coast or the northeast they don't necessarily want to go to texas and florida they would like to go somewhere that yeah it'd be a very attractive yeah so we we should be the big beneficiary of so many

[01:18:09] of the trends that are taking place right now that i just want to see us you know wake up a bit and say you need to say you know if we play our cards right all around it would be you know it gets interesting and compelling today it could be that you know you times 10 yeah you know going forward but we have to come together as community realize that for that to be the case you know

[01:18:34] you know the super majorities have to see that together and see that you know that's to the benefit of the broad much broader community and well i think that's available to us we just have to how to you know start going in the same direction yeah i i totally agree and i actually think there is a high risk but almost like a generational opportunity for political leaders anywhere not just about the colorado but i'm not going to see it happen here we have these new technologies that

[01:19:03] basically make like think about how elements can do this like ingest masters on information and can like take decisions and like synthesize it and transform it and there's like people only people could do that's fundamentally like like that that's a building block of like a lot of your office uh and if you think about one of the i'm talking about physical industries and i think increasingly that is them that's where a lot of startup and techs are going it's it's much less

[01:19:31] like pure software you want to get a build something yeah building especially constructed sucks run up inexpensive kids forever anywhere compared especially uh and at the same time you know i can understand communities that don't want to have no regulation so that suddenly somebody can build like a you know uh anything back there it sucks uh so you need to have a way where like you

[01:19:58] know common periods or like zoning laws and stuff that make sense and permit processes that make sense but they don't in a year there's no reason they have to do that uh and also governments that can be effective and provide services that don't cost you as much as you said today and i think like if you were to do what we're doing or for for energy storage on grid or what tesla did for the ebd in the first place and just say hey let's keep a setback and how will we build a pair of ops so

[01:20:25] we need one uh but how are we building for ops you can ground up to do what it's supposed to do but i'm going to pick the best way to do that with the most piece of technology how would we do that i think the thing you would come hot with would let us be like faster than the fastest place in the world the way in hand games and also still have very similar levels i think there's like that's the technical optimist you somebody takes that that's a very risky call but i think it would pay off yeah

[01:20:54] so i'm sometimes accused of being um naive being an optimist in a naive way uh to think that government wants that to happen definitely that's available yeah and if and if you know if some government uh you know a state government if someone if they chose to go all in on that holy cow the difference they can make it's finding convince them that that is what they should want to do uh in a broader way

[01:21:23] as if they did the difference i can make but first scenario to think about it is that i'm going to go there all the all the dangerous and flight you're supposed to be a few examples though estonia the guy was in sweden oh there's no question yeah they got the dot hunting did the whole the full government is in digital it's crazy yeah no it's not how you to identify that that's a gigantic opportunity it is a gigantic opportunity it's one more readily available now than ever but it would take a mindset change doesn't mean it can't happen

[01:21:53] get that a mindset change and you know the wise who's also going to be our next governor and you know if you know if you you know he took a little bit of political backlash but if you started to craft that as an agenda and brought kind of you know the left wing of his party along with him and said we have an opportunity to do real good for all of coloradoans by you're truly leading into

[01:22:18] kind of technology to make ourselves not more efficient but more effective more effective for the people we serve i mean if he could build an agenda around that an authentic agenda and execute against that i mean mike chatson the mayor of denver certainly has talked about that from an identity i perspective you know if they merely you know where they bring their i say their party not but i'm you know in i'm sorry not another party but you know they're left wing of their party i'll say the

[01:22:47] left wing is their party uh if they brought them more toward you know even the center of their party in that guard i think i think it's such a change real quick i think a few declarations like that that you know it's really an attitude you know and a commitment and uh and one that is that is set that we're really going to do things differently holy cow that would turn the tide in colorado well maybe this is a good podcast and then uh you don't have to do it everywhere just do it in one

[01:23:15] city or like one part and then the proving works and then we can do it well i think we've got a recording coming up soon there you go with our with our current governor he's gonna be out here and phil's been on here twice before that was before i got very vocal about my concerns about him becoming governor so you know phil we're gonna have to do uh part three real soon how about that well uh well i'll spy i'll be the first one to sign off to help him uh do it if he wants to get to

[01:23:42] it yeah good deal all right well this is fun we got a party to do together yeah a little bit so this is gonna be a good endeavor uh celebration a lot of crazy entrepreneurs are about to be here and we're gonna have a little bit of uh networking fun yes thanks for having me thanks for what you're doing is what you're doing is in quarantine it's gonna make a a big difference uh and if you do the the skill you're talking about doing it's gonna make a big difference across not just our nation but

[01:24:07] but our world too so we should love love sing after you're doing really big things and you guys are definitely in that category appreciate it it was really fun thanks a lot thank you for listening to this episode of the bear roars check out stretch the new song from dan caruso with music by jason mendelson available now on all streaming services if you enjoyed the episode please like and subscribe on your listening platform this podcast was produced by loud bear productions and edited by hannah

[01:24:36] schmetzer with support from kendall weinberg alex kim and gibson siegert