EP 85: Aarya Borele from Evardi Energy

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1:07Welcome. You want to start with any kind of current event things if you got AWS, ducty-b-latte or ducklabs? I know. Prefect pot daxter. I didn't have that in my bingo card, but I didn't have a lot of it. Even I don't even think we've talked about the Grog cursor stuff either. Oh, yeah. And a while. And just like how big brain ends up looking. He's like, okay, we'll just control the whole fucking chain. We'll go from hardware all the way up to actual software. So people actually run. Yeah. Well, like I installed downloaded Grog about today. Just because it's a bucket. Let's see what this is about. But it's of course only running locally. And so. But I think that's like there's such a everyone I talked to in like at the office is like, yeah, if we could figure out how to easily put this in a VM. And so I could run my cloud remotely. So I can always be running my cloud instead of having to remote control from my laptop.

2:08And then when I'm sure like it's annoying at this point, I've got a hotspot that I use for clients. And I'll turn it on in my car and let my laptop keep working. Yeah, you'll come you home because I'm in the middle of running something. Right. This is stupid. You can just do this in a VM. It is wild now. I mean, with just the idea I realized with cloud code that I get running. And it's like you can log into your cloud app now and like see everything is happening. And I'm running code extra on my phone. Easy. No, I'll have one laptop benchmarking local sort local models on it. And that's my Nvidia gaming laptop. And while it's doing that, I can remotely control it from my cloud desktop app on my MacBook while I'm also got four T mooks or CMux windows. Yeah. Running and codex also running. So it's just crazy, man. But that's where everything I feel like is going like Airmeas added the bots right after buzz came out. Yeah.

3:08The whole agent working together thing. That's exactly what Grock bought is, but they just give you a VM because they have all the fucking hardware in the world. So it's it's fascinating. There's lots of stories there. I don't know which which ones we want to. I mean, I feel like Jacob, which one's most interesting to you. To me, it's the running VMs consistently while also doing other work because I remember we did that for training our transformer models because it takes so freaking long. Yeah, that you have to. Well, that's like I was talking to our ML expert and I was I sent her some stuff. I think it's called hoodie HODY and it's essentially a genetic driven cloud infrastructure. So like the agents can spin shit up on their own. Yeah, without any. But then I was like, man. And so then I got her thinking of like, hey, we could actually use this to run parallel training instances or split up the training across like topics and have them running in parallel all at the same time instead of having to crash everything on the one.

4:14Anyway, it's a yeah, the whole agent thing. I think that's probably. I think we're doing it right now. Just probably use the last five minutes we can. We'll pause and do the intro and you can tack it on the front of this Jacob. Okay, everybody, we are back in the studio for all together again. Yeah. For the first time in a minute, John Calvian here with with Bobby Neelan. What's going on guys? Thanks for making the track, especially with the tropical whatever brewing off the off the coast of Louisiana. No, it's funny because I. I guess say a potential client. You know, I'm going to Oklahoma City after this and I was easy in Oklahoma City. That's right. And I was like, I was going to coffee's like, actually, I'm going to be in Houston on next week is like, well, I'm going to miss you. But you know, trip to Houston wouldn't be complete without a tropical storm of some type. Yeah, absolutely.

5:14Well, it is dry currently and not raining here in Houston. So hopefully we'll be all right. Yeah, we do need the rain. My sprinkler system would appreciate that. So you're a little bit. But actually, you know, when we get into it with Arya, actually a lot of things that are very pertinent to what may or may not come down with with a tropical storm hitting. Absolutely. So perfect to you. Yeah. So we're here today with Arya, Berelli. Yes. Lovely to be here. Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Thanks for thanks for joining us. Of course. And you're a founder or a Vardy energy. Yes, founder and CTO. Oh, very cool. Well, let's just rip the bandaid. What what is a Vardy and what do you do for? Of course. So my co-founder and I started a Vardy. And what we do is we work with utilities like PG&E, Kaisa, a court. And a lot of the co-ops and munis in this industry. And what we help them do is automate a lot of the engineering that happens in the back end with regards to things like maintenance, things like outage management, planned outage approvers and all of those things.

6:22So that operators can spend more time in the field dealing with all the new notes, searches that are coming up so much is changing in the industry. And so we want to help save them time and increase efficiency doing that. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think after, especially even after barrel, I mean, people were just pissed at everyone in Texas. We've had enough things happen like why are we not prepared for this? Like how can we not get things back online faster or so? Exactly, exactly. No, I think that truly raised a very, or put a big magnifying glass on the whole utility infrastructure and the lack of investment in it over the decades and stuff like that. I'm glad to see because those are, it's like, it's such a hard thing because I feel like ultimately there's very little, there's, there's hard, it's hard to incentivize a utility to do to spend. It's hard to incentivize any business to spend money on things that they don't have.

7:23Right. Right. On potential outcomes instead of defined outcomes. Exactly. Why would we have winterized everything in Texas until, yeah. Yeah, truly like, I mean, we were fracking wells with unwinterized equipment up in Arkansas when I was in the field. And guess what? It sucked when it snowed the four times a year that it snows in Arkansas because we'd everything would freeze up. Oh, and then it's like you can't redo anything. Right. It's so interesting and operate. I was speaking to mention that all of the maintenance is failure driven because they just don't have that time. And it's such a hard problem, you know, even on the operator side as you're working with ancient infrastructure, you are dealing with so much new. Low generation and demand, uh, Erkort itself, I think the demand went up this year by 93 91 gigawatts and it's predicted to go up to 365 by. It's insane. And then you have the low generation cues because of these data centers and they're on 400 gigawatts separately. Right. So they're behind the meter. Exactly. It's a hard problem to solve on the operators and as well.

8:25And so that's why I think there's so many smaller things that can be done in this industry and we're here to tackle those. Yeah. No, I agree with you. Our industry historically, the energy industry is very retroactive. And so, I mean, they're, they've gotten more proactive with the basic things like maintenance and but like. I don't feel like that's until the last, I don't know, 20 or so years. Where did I run and got their generics and. Well, but like it's, I mean, just across the board though, right? Whether it's a utility or an upstream operator, you know, they're not incentivized to spend money unless they have to. They're on preventative things like that. And but ultimately, you know, over time with all the other industries out there. Yeah. Well, but like you also have these, you know, like the manufacturing industry where it's like uptime is the metric. You do not want downtime. And it's like, okay, well, the oil field is exactly the same way utilities are the exact same way, right? It's all about utilization.

9:26And so if you want the little competition, that's right. So what? Exactly. And so, yeah, it's such this weird balance. That's all your brokers, right? That is what drives me nuts about. It's all come from the same. Open market. And it's like there's three companies. It's not true. It's a true man. Yeah. Like who can I choose? I literally can't choose any other center point. Right. No, there's various view areas where you have that overlap. Like you can choose the future 100% green electrons. They're coming through the same conduit. You know, my neighbor, he was eating all the green electrons. Oh, right. And it's crazy because it's marketed a lot as a deregulated market, especially in Texas, the Texas area. It's really, really not. Yeah. No, it's not at all. If it was deregulated, my energy prices wouldn't have doubled their last years. Yeah. Natural gas stays flat. Yeah. That's such a joke. Well, now I mean, obviously we're going to get into it, but like just the AI data center is going to add a whole another beast to this.

10:29Such a big thing. And then there's all the best systems that people are trying to throw up that, you know, are being marketed as more reliable energy for the local, you know, businesses and it's all American energy. And it's like, yeah, all the energy on our grid is American energy. You know, I don't understand that selling point. But it's, yeah, it's, I mean, it's the Wild West is far. That's the, I think the worry some part of it is, you know, I'm all for making more uses of the electrons so that the grid itself can be more reliable and incentivizing things. But at the same time, the way that like, Erkhard is currently set up, especially with the on demand stuff, they're not set up to make the grid more reliable. They're set up to just capture the arbitrage opportunity when it goes from 50 kilowatt or $50 a kilowatt hour to 5,000. And that's where the money is. It's not to help the local community get it.

11:31That's not how it works. Exactly. And that's why it's also something we've noticed is harder for utilities themselves because you actually won't believe this a lot of times with ISOs. They reject outage approvals and requests the day before. And someone we were talking to in Austin actually was mentioning on the generation side, they struggle so much because they have a couple of maintenance requests for these really niche parts and they're in wind. So it's more very generation heavy if something breaks down. It is a really big cost as well on infrastructure. And all of their maintenance requests have noticed a lot of times will get changed or declined a day before or a week before, which means you've paid now a really heavy amount and organized and scheduled 50 people to come in for maintenance. And all of that needs to be reorganized. Oh my goodness. That sounds like a well filled problem. We did that all the time. Great. It's really interesting actually because oil and sort of utilities and a lot of energy I've noticed have really similar parallel.

12:33If you look at it in terms of solid data and industrial. Yeah, exactly. Right. And you know, most of the time it's in the most remote. Yeah, because I was unfriendly places to you know, that's the energy dilemma. Right is the most abundant sources of energy in the world are typically the furthest away from the people that meet the energy. They are there. They don't want to. They're told you anything. There's. Yeah, right. They want it close enough but not directly there. Right. Which has been interesting. I've moved to Katie. Nine years ago. And we live in like around an old gas field. And so there's gas pipelines and there's actually a gas well not far from our house. And stuff. And so it's interesting to see that but that also gave me a lot of confidence when I got my generator. I was like, yeah, let's go ahead and install the hard natural gas line so that we can make make advantage use of this if the electricity ever goes out again. Yeah. But I think a good starting point with this would be kind of can you just give high level for people who aren't familiar with you know, the wholesale.

13:37The back end of the right. They're just they're a consumer. They don't they pay their monthly thing and they don't ever really comprehend or think about anything from beyond their electric plug. How does you know, let's use our cot just because that's where we are. But how does the utility. How does that whole system kind of work in a nutshell? Of course, great question. And actually it's really interesting because if you look at our court and Kyso noticed that quite similar. But if you look at Alabama and more of this southern power, for example, doesn't really have a separate ISO. It's all part of the same regulatory body. Right. And so it's very different. Yeah. And so it's very different for them as well to do regulations. Something the way it works right now in a deregulated market like Texas is the regulated market like Texas is you'll have all of these utilities, which again are. Dealing with a lot of issues already reaching out to a bigger regulatory body like a court and having them approve or just approve a lot of the.

14:40Daily things that they're doing with regards to load management because a cost responsibility is being like OK, hey, all of this is the amount of demand we have. This is what the consumer consumers want now. How do we make sure that that is reached and for them a lot of times it means managing utilities and saying, hey, you can't do an audit right now. We need you because there is going to be really hot today and people are going to have their AC's on or there's going to be a storm and we can't risk having a generation source of. A cost job is to keep the lights on to make sure there's no blackout and on the utilities, the distribution operators are the ones that are in charge of actually making sure in the field that nothing bad happens. So there's a lot of communication going on constantly between the two of them as we know it's like a real time system. I don't think people realized that the prices are updated as frequently as they are and like it's so dynamic. It's way more dynamic. I feel like than the oil field is which is fascinating because we complain about all of our problems. It's going to to like when oil field, you know, in peas, others can like capitalize on it with like their natural gas.

15:43Right. Because I mean they can get yeah, outsized returns on their, you know, on their natural gas like at certain times when they need it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean that was the whole pitch for the big win minors. Right. Yes. Okay. Here's a take a cost cost center and make a revenue center. Right. And actually it is getting so much more complex as we talk about it because of a lot of new regulation. This is what we've been spending a lot of our time doing work on is FERC 881 which essentially is a new regulation that has come and has gone to these ISOs and said, Hey, you need to move from standard line ratings or seasonal line ratings to hourly line ratings. And just to break that down right now what Kaiser does and what Erkord does is they have two line ratings a year, which are seasonal. One is for summer, one is for winter that they compare every single outage request or maintenance requests that they get and they say, Okay, well, you can do it or you can't do it. Now it's going to turn directly hourly by 2027 is when it's predicted for some of these ISOs.

16:45So it's a really big change and it's a big change in terms of utility because from an operator, I'm dealing with all of this stuff about data centers. I have thousands of people moving, immigrating, having to get them on board and making sure that the wires of all of my sort of infrastructure is old. And now I have to deal with an ISO potentially disapproving or changing my outage request much more often than they were already. And so it's a lot, a lot of changing. Yeah, I didn't know all that was going on behind the scenes. Well, that's the thing. It's a, I mean, it might as well be a trading desk like to a certain extent because it's a commodity that's being traded. But you're not just moving around like dollars and cents. I mean, like you've literally got like physical infrastructure that will not be done. And like you said, are you just sitting on it? And like with them, we just said this, some of these are very remote operations. It's like, you can't just get this there. Oh, they approved it. Now I have to get there and bring it out. Yeah.

17:45And it takes everything takes so long because even if you look at getting new transformers, substations, it takes three years to get one procured and built. So not even built just procured and then you build it out and foreboding it out. You need to do again and outage to do this. Right. Now that's what all the best systems are going after the locations they're targeting are as close to the substation as they can be so they don't have to build any new infrastructure. Exactly. Which can be a good thing. But when it's next to a elementary school and a creek and in a flood zone, probably not an ideal situation. Not that that is from a direct thing that I experienced. But so where do you guys come in? It sounds again, it sounds very similar to even actually worse in some aspects because of the speed of the operations. Generally speaking, it sounds very similar to what we're accustomed to on the upstream side where you've got a bunch of different data coming in at a bunch of different frequencies and a bunch of different stakeholders.

18:49There's all this logistics and communication that should be happening and needs to be happening. But I'm sure it's not happening. No, efficiently or as real time as they would like it to be. Absolutely. Well, there's two main things that we focus on. Number one is reducing as much time as possible spent on a lot of the admin of it of getting out of the proofs, getting maintenance requests, requests approved and things like that. We actually have trained a lot of models and a lot of agents on doing these contingency checks from the perspective of an ISO. And so we're able to give you with a really high accuracy. How likely it is that your request will be approved or rejected based on what the load is predicted to be. And we do this on an hourly basis. And so we've been doing research on this for a long, long time. That's one of the things we offer. And that's something we've been set is we've been told as a really interesting approach. Another thing we really look for in the distribution side of things is how we can make things much easier for these operators themselves.

19:54So we have a lot of agent take services we offer for things like maintenance requests and things like data history on a transformer level and a substation level. And the biggest sort of incentive for us is we want to reduce the interconnection queue. We want to reduce the end consumer price that is being given right now. And the way for us to do it is to spend more time and more money and resources on actually building out more generation and investing in heart tech. Because if you look at the grid right now, it's really unstable to the point where you add a new best storage, you know, setup or you add a new generation source. It might break. Yeah. If it does, it's a really hard thing to sort of overcome and you lose so much money behind it. And so our focus is the redirecting resources to all of these really important things by doing a really good job of solving this problem. Yeah. Yeah. So you're not submitting a request waiting until the week of to get the rejection and then resubmitting it.

21:01And yeah, now that makes a ton of sense. There's so much. There is so much on the regulatory side that is just so prime for automation. Absolutely. And the rules are defined. That's the thing, right? Like, I mean, any new regulatory workload that we add in our system. Yeah. I have found that the easiest starting point for it is to let Claude go and scrape that website or that web page and pull the definitions and, you know, the procedure and exactly how you do it. And it absolutely has all the context you need. It's great. Yeah. I mean, when a fable can just one shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the regulatory stuff, there's so many people that their primary job or function is not regulatory, but they have to do regulatory stuff.

22:13Exactly. And it's like you're paying people way too much money to spend a majority of their time dealing with regulatory stuff that they don't want to do. They don't like to do, but they have to do. Right. And instead of spending time doing engineering or whatever, designing the next thing. Exactly. And so, yeah, I think that's a huge so much opportunity there. So I know you grew up and said, I'm going to do this when I grew up, right? Of course, growing up, this was my dream. Yeah. Turning data and national wall insights. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. During context engineering, actually. So growing up, I grew up in India. Okay. And I came to the US when I was 17 for uni for my undergrad. And growing up, I always knew energy was something I wanted to work in. We have so many blackouts in India. My co-founder is from Kenya. And so she's very much experienced the same problem. It's what we started off wanting to solve as well. Yeah. Is all we want to fix blackouts, which as the sophomore and college is okay. That's a really big.

23:13Yeah, the big goal. That's a big area. Asia score or be hungry. Exactly. But I ended up doing chemical engineering because again, growing up for me, energy was one of the things that I wanted to do. I mean, energy was one of those things that you can all of sort of the equity problems and societal problems that I saw growing up had sort of come back to lack of access to reliable energy in terms of having access to the internet having access to learning more about these things when you can't have a light on you can't really think about anything else. Yeah, so the whole Maslow hierarchy of needs, like if I'm worried about survival or just like being comfortable, I can't tackle like higher level. Right. Not worried about regulatory agents. Exactly. I don't really need that. But you're not the first person I've heard this from. There was an intern we interviewed when I was at University Lands that he was at A&M, but he was doing petroleum engineering. And that's why he chose petroleum engineering because he's like, I grew up and we didn't have access to reliable energy. And like this is a wave like we, you know, we could provide reliable energy and like, you know, I mean hospitals didn't have to have black up rolling black as a hospital so that you can't provide for people that.

24:21Absolutely. Well, it's so funny because it's like coming here. It's the complete opposite. We've got it so at least to the average person. It's so robust that it is so out of sight out of mind that like now it's the devil, right? Like energy is bad. All the stuff. It's like you realize your entire life runs off of electrons. Like it runs on energy that was generally, I don't care how it was generated. It was, but it's energy. And I think there's such a big taboo around it now because people don't want to talk about it enough. And all they talk about is data centers with very important topic to talk about not taking away from that. But I think it's important. More important in the sense that like this is going to take from or make energy more expensive for the average consumer. Absolutely. And then you go to the water side of it. Like there are basic needs that people expect and want to be able to have affordably that. Yeah. This is going to, that's what's going to strain on it in that way. Yeah. And it's actually really interesting. You say that because almost all of the utilities I've talked to, they're two biggest priorities are number one.

25:23Making sure that there's reliable energy acts provided. And number two is making sure that it's affordable. Yeah. Like that's such a big priority for these utilities as well. And they're trying hard to achieve it. And so that was an interesting thing for me to learn as well going into it. I mean, as a company, they want to, but they also realize that you can't. Exactly. Like it's, it's the work that they have to do is really complex. And so our goal again, going into that, going into it with the idea of, okay, we want to solve blackouts. Yeah. We started off doing a lot of research into this. We've been researching for two and a half, three years. And then we saw a lot of sort of space to grow in this industry. We heard from a lot of people we were doing research, read that we would, they would like us to develop something for them and actually see. A lot of demand in that, in that field. And so we ended up going full time. Very recently. It's been two to three months now. And we signed our first two contracts. So we're live in two international utilities, which is very exciting.

26:24Thank you. And we just signed our first US design partnership. So we're really looking forward to going in this space. That's super exciting. Thank you. Thank you. So I just thought about it. Yeah. So during Yuri, right after I actually wrote a blog and I'm curious on your thoughts on it. Or because I'm assuming you've gotten fairly deep on the cloud computing side and stuff too. So it was like basically that designing a grid is similar to how you design a cloud of restructure. Because like you've got your base, like whether it's nuclear coal. And that's like your reserve instances. And like see your EC2 instances would be like natural gas that you can like spin up when on demand when you need it. But then on top of it, a wind and solar are more like your spot instances. Like if they're available, it's great. And you can get them cheap and whatever. Exactly. But you can't rely on it. Like they're not always going to be there. And they can go away as soon as they can show up. And absolutely. And actually a lot of the research work we did a while ago. So we were working with this community in Sub-Saharan Africa. That was, it was essentially a lot of data on and sort of in migrant cramp and refugee camp.

27:30And it was looking at how these mingrids are able to support it. And so much of it is downtime, not because of any other reason. But that's how solar is. And I think it's such an advantage to have on the grid. But it has to be thought about really smartly and built around. Like you can't just find your own way. Exactly. And then even just getting back to like say oil and gas. Like you're not just replacing the energy it creates. There's the whole downstream petrochemical side of it. Right. That's so much. That will never, you know, people would never realize how much that's it would impact until it's gone. Right. Yeah. I think the big thing with the alternative or renewable energy that a lot of the traditional energy people have a problem with is that they look at just the power gen costs of the individual asset and not the entire system. Right. So like solar, great. And it's super cheap. However, to actually leverage that energy, I need a battery storage system as well. That adds tremendous amounts of money to the total cost of the project and all of the other fun stuff.

28:33And so it's, I think that's where, you know, the new energy and the traditional energy groups end up butting heads the most because everyone wants to publish their super low number on, on, you know, which one is the best and stuff. And the reality is there is no silver bullet in that, you know, the world needs to use the energy that they have available to them wherever they may be in whatever capacity is available. Right. And so I think that's the bigger thing. But I think, again, when you think of the renewable side, you have to include battery systems now. Like that's not. And if you want it to be remotely reliable or functional, you need the storage. I think that technology is improved tremendously. Like more so than I thought it would. Yeah. And in a handful of years. Even like the, just like the Tesla battery studies that are coming out, right? Like once they hit 80% you know, 10 years later, that's basically the bottom of those batteries. And so it's like, oh, well, that's going to last a hell of a lot longer.

29:36Yeah. So who knows what I'm sure there will be a startup that is recycling Tesla batteries into battery energy storage systems if there isn't already one. Yeah. There we go. But even now, say what the grid is not fit. Oh, if you said it or if I saw it somewhere like, is it in California, where certain areas have decided, like said, it's actually cheaper for them to. They are just like basically giving homes like batteries. Oh, yeah. Like there are places that are trying to do a full distributed energy system. Yeah. Like I think there's a co-op or two in Texas that's looking at something or trying to insinuate it. I'm not sure what the, because I know someone that's been insinuated. Like I feel like I heard of one. I was like like the, um, yeah, the, the major like electrical company was like giving batteries to like, you know, it's selling them for. Yeah, do. Yeah. For consumers just because like they're like, we now we don't think it can take us to train off of the grid. Right. Right. What is that base power is kind of trying to do that here a little bit, but that's the thing. Like if you gave me, you know, an extra five bucks a month on my utility bill to, and then you came and set up the battery.

30:42That's why would I not why would I not do that? I would do that all day long so that I at least had a day of backup power to her, you know, when inevitably another hurricane comes and shut the shit down again. Or even just like built like home builders. I think I think that's the problem. People like the way that it's currently set up is it's a most of the time the battery storage is it's an add on after the house exists. Right. If I had that when the house was built and I could just roll it into my mortgage for $20. Oh, yeah. Five years a month. Yeah. Whatever that would have been. It would have been great because now I have already had my generator. Right. You can plug it in. I can use that to, you know, store to the battery. Um, there was that gritty company. Do you ever see pretty? I don't think I have. So they were, uh, they were trying to leverage the wholesale market in Texas. And so those are ones that failed during your, your big time. It was great though. It wasn't right. Well, so their whole pitch was if you do it on average, right? You know, you might, you're, they had a basically a smart contract set up that every 15 minutes it would buy wholesale from the grid based off your consumption and demand or expected demand.

31:49And so, you know, 80% of the day, you're getting basically free power. Right. And then Yuri happened and all the wholesale spot prices exploded. Yeah. All their customers were really pissed for their 500 to $1,000 electric bills a month. And so they ended up shutting down. But they're one of their like premises was if what we have, we have the code and everything already set up. So that if you had battery storage at your house, you could set it up so that at a certain time by electricity, you know, from 11 p.m. To the 6 a.m. Or whatever times and it drops below a certain price. Yeah. You can have all this configuration. You buy it, it's stored to your battery. Then the next day you could just pull off the battery and said that. Oh, that makes so much. It's the most like efficient way to utilize. That's what I think the average person also doesn't get is that the energy goes to the grid, whether it's needed or not.

32:50Oh, no, a lot of the times. And so like at night, it's cheaper for them to just give it away than it is to shut down for two hours and then immediately spin back up when the demand starts back. And so there's there is like there's this optimization. There's an opportunity for efficiency and optimization in that market that I think someone is ultimately going to tease out. And this also sort of brings back to my take on the debate between renewables and traditional energy sources is also the market will belong to someone who's more innovative right now because it is the time to try out these things and try out giving consumers access to batteries and stuff like that. And I do think the grid is being very innovative and flexible with that right now. I don't think I've ever seen something like this. And so I think it's a great thing to see, but it's also funny. You mentioned Yuri because I know of a company in California that assigned a PPA with CalPine and when Yuri did happen, the company in California made so much money off of that because it's a PPA.

33:52So they have like they have to and they sort of what be able to sell it back into the grid itself. So it was just like the I don't remember the numbers, but the magnitude of the profit they made on it was insane. Yeah, I bet no, I've heard from the Bitcoin miners the same thing right like the demand response piece really incentivize them. They'll make more money in a year off of one or two demand response incidents than they will mining Bitcoin the whole year. And so it's like on one hand, that's good. You want people to be incentivized to have on demand power that we can revert from from you know intermediate operations to full time critical operations. But you don't want it just like that's what that's my problem with the best systems is that they're not there for for the consumer. They're there to make money in the garbage trash. Like that's all they're there for right. And so anyway, I don't know how you solve that problem, but let's let's get into into the tech stack a little bit.

35:00So what kind of what's in your stack? Yeah, of course, right now we use a lot. We use a lot. But the biggest things that we are you on or are you operating going on? So we build on cloud we're on AWS and we in the utility space. I'm sure as an oil and gas and a lot of other energy. There's so much compliance that needs to be fulfilled. You have so to is the standard one, but then you have ISO certifications. You need to do there's no standards. You need to fulfill. And so, especially I think building in critical infrastructure. It's really important that you are in tune with a lot of that. So that's a lot of what we've been working on. We're on AWS right now for some of our international clients. That's where they prefer actually one of them. They want an on-site deployment in Benin. So that's something that we're working on right now. Yeah, absolutely. So thanks to that end, like where did you build it like AWS native like initially and then that you have to like turn it into more containerized type of

36:01requirements. Exactly. Exactly. And so we built it out cloud native and then we had to make it a bit more siloed. Which is a bit excessive. It's not traditionally what is done in the US. US cloud is great because there's a lot of strict requirements that you can fulfill based on it. But we're very happy to take the extra step for our clients. Yeah. And maybe easier knock on wood and maybe easier now than ever with. Yeah, absolutely. You were actually building out and shipping it. So much easier. Like desktop AWS in for a emulators now. Okay. Like this is crazy. But yeah, it's a compliance is a big thing. A lot of other stuff that we tie in with were very big on our integrations were very diagnostic because there's so much going on the utility space. I don't want an operator to have to deal with another separate tab after having all of these other software that they already have to use that are ADMS that are 25 years old. That you can't really change now because it's been so long it's going to take a year to switch it.

37:02And you don't have the time to so we tie into a lot of this kind of data historian data we tie into all mess systems, which is our management systems we tie into were in the process of getting on board it with were no less ADMS and a lot of the other platforms on that level. And then we also tie into a lot more of the AI models as we were talking about your a and I'm sure you guys know about what happened in Nepal recently. And so the events are happening so often and grid reliability one of the biggest defenses against it is using AI to predict when and how these climate events are going to be taking place. And so a lot of the work we do as well is evaluating and setting up sort of standards because it's funny enough but in this industry apart from research does not actually industry standards for what weather model. Yeah, industry is awful any kind of standard generally speaking absolutely and so that's actually an exciting project we're working on.

38:02Yeah, so you have like a whole meteorological side of it as well. Exactly. Exactly. It's not a focus but you have to yeah exactly for all of our risk as well and actually we were talking about them being deterministic earlier on and I can't emphasize more on how much of a design decision that's been because it's also really hard to be a lot of the people in the industry to be like yeah don't worry and AI is going to do it and you can trust it completely. We talk about it all the time I mean we deal with say petroleum engineers all the time they're not going to be okay with Hey my black box said this and then watch for the other history they don't care if it works you can show them that it works. It doesn't matter if you can't show them how absolutely and I think that's such a good thing to have in industry as well because that's the job like that is. That's what you need to have that as much as we talk shit about. I'm glad they're doing it. Yeah and it's really funny I was talking to an investor something earlier and they were like oh is your accuracy like 95% and I was like if it was 95% we would be like we wouldn't be alive.

39:02Yeah we wouldn't be able to survive because in a critical infrastructure space that's really really bad. It needs to be a lot more yeah and so I think we've personally been really lucky because we've been doing a lot of research we've been able to do a lot of iteration on our product which I've noticed a lot of the other startups in this field fail just because to get that first pilot it takes six months of going to compliance and doing all of this where you're not getting any feedback on your product and then when you do get the pilot of course you're going to fail because it's the first time you're testing out your product yeah. And so on that end we're quite lucky to have feedback that we're getting consistently from operators so we're able to build our accuracy out really heavily. Yeah and so one of our design decisions has been to make decision fatigue sort of disappear. We do a lot of the backend calculations contingencies very deterministically with a very very high accuracy so that an operator doesn't need to spend their time doing a lot of this map doing a lot of these calculations and doing like power solving.

40:05Yeah models and simulations they get information that they can trust very accurately and then they are the ones making the decision at the end of the day and then we compare it and we're also building a database on the side because another thing that we've noticed really heavily in this industry and in a lot of energy is the people coming in are not as much as the people leaving. Okay and so it's also sort of bridging that gap that we're focusing on a bit now that's a huge piece of this right is just how do we capture the domain knowledge in a way that's not sitting down and just interviewing someone. Exactly. Exactly. Right. No, I think that's a huge benefit of these systems that people don't recognize off the bat that it's like hey. Yes, it's just a chat but what you're chatting about and how you correct it and all your feedback and all of that stuff is very valuable context that can be used to train and build and make things better. So that was one of the first things I was going to bring up is that not enough people recognize that these are iterative tools and things right that like everyone testing these things should assume it's going to suck the first probably two or three.

41:21Yeah, iterations it should get better each iteration but it's still not going to be perfect and it won't be because that's how it works. And so well, I want to set the stage because it's a it's a problem that if you're not dealing with it, you don't really understand but it's like I'm building this text of sequel. Set up for a client right and it's like okay, I've got it's got billions of rows in it multiple tables some ambiguous relationships across those. And so it's like okay, I can have an agent sit there and generate you know questions based off the structure and stuff but that's not how you're going to ask for the data from this database you're not going to say filter out filter star table you're not going to do the sequel. And so it this like even on the testing side you first start with like the rawest point and then you try to get it more semantically closer to a human instead of actually using the database names and the table names and stuff but ultimately you have to have real world examples from the user of how they ask those questions and then what the expected the expected answer and what the basically the translation to sequel is from that question and the average person doesn't understand like why when you deploy it.

42:40It just doesn't work the way that they use it. It should just always work it's like no you call this yeah, I have no idea. It's right. It doesn't it knows how to navigate the database all day long but until you under like until it learns how you call this one field this acronym or jargon that it's not directly mapped to it's not going to understand it but they're. They were like my spotifier yeah, they get better than they get better when I tell it good job or bad. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot easier to build them accurately if you have those questions ahead of time instead of yeah, hoping that the tool when deployed automatically knows how to answer all your specific questions 100% and it's also always different in different companies and different geographies. I mean across people across people right and actually that's one of the biggest roadblocks we ran into when we first fully began working on this and the way we went around it is we did a lot of approval checking so one of the other features we offer is switching and how we can automate something like switching which essentially is if you are doing an outage and you are sending in a crew to do it you have to make sure that there's a switching line that is already decided.

44:00On before you go and have a crew sort of do all the maintenance things or do a switch or whatever and writing that itself is long and the process of checking that is even longer and so what we did was we with a lot of international clients worked on having more for comparison thing where we would have our models and agents sort of check what they're done and eventually we've started having them drafted and then compare it to what an operator was doing. An operator would actually write and now in the next month or so we're looking to deploy it to the point where it actually writes it and then we have an operator sort of check it and so a lot of it we've been noting noticing is we first want to start with automating a lot of the checking that's being done because that again is a lot of work and time on an operator side and so it's easy enough to give to an AI where you're not completely trusting it but at the same time it's improving our model significantly. I don't think about this but you do international mean are you have to do this in multiple languages as well like the very lucky that not just yet okay that being said don't sleep on how good the models are translating oh I have no doubt but I mean like it's almost like you know what the say the bible has been translated you know different thing and it's a different telephone like so that they actually have this in a certain way that they're just dialect and like all of a sudden like one of the changes just enough to you know where you're like in 95% and

45:27that's right yeah that's very valid yeah we actually have so we are working with Kenya's national utility Kenya power right now and there is some so he Lee so what we also been looking at right now is maintenance locks that they submit and what data we can get from it because it's not really arranged in a really nice pretty SQL with sort of all of the different filters that you can just put on it is very messy which makes sense for any operator in the world right now and so a lot of our work is also translating that and having it converted but I know we came across this very shortly for one of our problems and so for that we were really adamant on getting someone to translate it for us and for us we're very lucky my co-founder is doing it so she was able to do it but yeah I can't over emphasize how important it is at least in the beginning early stages to have someone go in personally and translate all of that for you because I so much context that I'm scared of missing with any other translator when people think like jargon is

46:27across an industry but like jargon can be within a department of a company exactly there is no absolutely 1000% they are talking about the exact same field in the database but they're using a different name across three different assets so it's like those are the areas where you really have to it's important to capture all that's a 100% what so what what what models are y'all playing with what get give some people give me the rundown on what you're kind of geeking out over these days what's exciting yeah of course if you're using any open source stuff is it all cloud code we are using a lot of open source stuff a lot of it is again on the weather models and the especially if you look at for example comparing Alabama to Seattle to California and Alabama storm risk is such a big thing Seattle in California you have wildfires coming in such a big thing and no two open source models are going to be really great at predicting both of them at the same time and so a lot of what we do is we use open source models for topology data which is something that really helps you map out the grid we use a lot of open source models for our weather and things like that and a lot of actually developing our own one one of the research papers we have is coming out in a couple of months which is exciting as well

47:48and a big sort of reasoning for us to do that is again contacts engineering and being able to have our risk assessment sort of cater to every single utility that we're working with so a lot of it is that a lot of our agentic work is completely on cloud code just primarily because we don't want to share it with or we don't want it to rely on an external API that might anytime go down so it's something that we want to be self-reliant and so actually what we've also done is we're in the process of network modeling a lot of grids for different utilities right now and so it's like 3500 substations we model it out and we test it before approaching you just to show you sort of the impact that our platform can have on your grid and then saving you time and money right and so one of our member we did a recent sort of model for one of the companies in the south and we noticed that we'd be able to save them almost 18,000 engineer hours just by modeling and simulating what their current work looks like on a model of that grid and so it's the I think it's really really interesting research to geek out about in the industry.

48:57Well, that's the thing I think people are worried that AI is going to take their jobs but it's like the first thing it's going to do is make it easier right like instead of you having to go run all those manual calculations it's just there. You have more information faster to make a better decision at the exactly and then you have more time to go in and talk to your consumers go in and do more research into the data centers and what that would look like for you to adopt like there's so much backlog in the industry that AI is the way of catching up is how I like to think of it. Yeah, now it's the scale. That's how you scale for sure. Absolutely. What have you been have you messed with like Airmeas or Grapat or any of the harnesses or anything fun like that? Absolutely. I actually this is crazy. You mentioned Ermeas because I just started using it yesterday when I landed because my friend from Mexico recommended it heavily. I was using open claw a lot before and for me it didn't really work out. I realized there's a lot of security loopholes with it and I'm not very comfortable with having it legal information.

50:04And so have been messing up met messing around with things a lot having been been messing around with the YAMS a whole lot especially because for us we have to train a lot of transform long running processes. And so it's if you look at some of the data sets that we're working with right now it's tens of thousands of days it's basically data every 15 minutes for the last five years. Oh well high frequency series data right exactly time series data and then if you're really heavily training a transformer model and then comparing it to existing models that Nvidia has and a lot of these other giants have. And then creating our own models based on the transformer model and it's reaction to so a lot of training work to do so that also is a very exciting place to talk about that. I mean obviously we've talked a lot about like where LLM's are not good at you know you actually using data their language models right but like how is this all how does that work all in the back and like where you're actually it's helping.

51:04Yeah you really like multiple ML models on the time series stuff as well as LLM's on the text based side or is that LLM. Understand the time series data in some kind of way absolutely so what I love talking about this but what we've noticed a lot and I had a research has been doing so much work on this as well is we don't use LLM's on the time series data primarily because we want to run it through a hard model and see what the actual output looks like. One of the biggest things we've been struggling with is bad data because the data training it's great. Big industries have bad data. Yeah especially because like it's kind of immutable it's like well we can't go back and like see what it read at the time and just it's a bad value. Yeah right and it's a really good way of doing actually my had research just message me about an update with it yesterday but something that he said that I found really funny was that it's shocking how good a transformer. Good a transformer model is at predicting bad data if you run enough of it through the model and so a lot of what we've noticed is playing around with models to us personally is really exciting to see what kind of configurations work best for the data we've seen some extremely promising results for even very basic models.

52:22And so it's very exciting for us to look at the frontier models in the industry and see how they could help predict and simulate things that haven't been considered before and a lot of the research we've been doing right now actually is with a company in sub-Saharan Africa that runs a lot of these mini grids and so for us we look at it primarily through two sectors one of them is the harder engineering side which is where we look at what does the load generation sort of actually look like. At what time are we doing load shedding at what time are we going to store these batteries and a lot of the reliance there is on diesel generators which again not the best for the environment so it's optimizing all of that and then on the ML it's such an interesting view of how does every single signal correlate to a consumer on a household level. Sure which again gives so many inputs that we haven't even been able to consider yet so a lot of research going on that.

53:23Yeah because I would like I think I had X-Abenus in here for the power of the one time but like they were doing stuff on the drilling side where the time series data but you have the ML doing time series but it recognizes a pattern and is that tied to an action and then the LLM can actually say this pattern goes like now here's the procedures to handle you can use action. I mean that's again the LLM's are the great aggregator in my like perspective right you've got all this data you've got machine data you've got this machine messy time series data that's just coming in all the time and God knows how good or bad it is and it's definitely going to have random spikes and just noise and shit that on on the basis looks like a signal but it's just junk. And then at the same time you also have all the paper documentation that goes along with what is happening on those assets and that time series timeline. Across that and so being able to aggregate the data from both of those places and put them in one where it's like okay this spike is correlated to this person doing this thing on this job versus this spike is just junk because it's noise and the sensor freaked out for a second and we don't need to worry about it right and so that's that's.

54:31I still don't think enough people truly recognize the power of what these things can do when you start you know you're running ML models on this time series data it's looking for all these trends and patterns it's also running predictive maintenance and all this other stuff and then meanwhile your data bit you know your unstructured data is being. Crawled through by agents it's then correlating back to the timeline that you've built with your time series data and now all the data is normalized essentially and contextualize on both sides right it not just that has always been the problem is like if i'm looking at raw data i don't have the context and if i'm looking at the context i don't have the raw data yeah well I'm. What I'm like even now with lm's like. I get lm's are not good at the time series data necessarily but you obviously m l is and but we don't have to be a data scientist like i'm ever doing like course air shit and it's like oh use the player and arm like what was cool yeah i was a great but like but now it's like but if you know the question to ask like.

55:31You can give it the persona of a data scientist machine and it knows to go create a test and training split and yeah you know running on random force actually boost but like you know and i'll compare the results of these like you know 10 15 to my health whatever it is and return what the best ones are which was our most explainable yeah and yeah that's the most fun part of on the testing and like R&D side you get done with the run you're like okay how do we make this better. That we increase that is what are what have we done. Yeah absolutely and i'm so glad you mentioned the important of being the importance of being able to decide what is noise and what isn't because that's such an important thing and i think we don't emphasize that enough even in research. Um normally that what happens is it's always a look back right it's always pro it's after the fact right right and so like that makes it so much harder to know any context because god knows how long ago it was exactly and so having it ahead of time.

56:31Makes it a lot more fun yeah. Um early we wrote up substations and made me think of something fairly totally off but maybe you could get a contract with the 49ers but are you guys aware of like the uh. conspiracy theory with the 49ers. No we know like so it was right around like the playoffs last year. Yeah I think George Kittle or one of them like towards Achilles or ever but this guy had a has a sub stack and like I had like a like a three piece like conspiracy theory but saying how like so there's a substation right next to the practice facility so that's where their locker rooms are they spend a lot of time there. The training field. And apparently like the uh you know according to some research he was citing or ever like based like the waves can like like reduce the integrity of the soft issue. In your basically subs because it's right there it's emitting like and they have a correlation or causation but they have also had the most soft issue. Yeah it's like the data five years or something. Oh. The way the data supports that that could be a problem right but neither the 49ers or anyone else isn't there

57:33again they're not incentivized to do that because they would. Of course. I was. We have to get a tour of but yeah. Um but uh see I was like maybe you can you know create a model for them like how many soft tissue injuries they'll have. Um like how do you really. Or you get the level of soft tissue. Or you get some of that to draw things or oh yeah polymarket. Yeah. Yeah. Calche or yeah. I mean shit. That would be worth now you know. Yeah. That's pretty easy though. I've never heard of that. Yeah. That's good to know. I'd be in the lookout for you. No yeah. So I'll just look at that series and then you look at the data and you're like well. Not wrong. Yeah. Definitely correlates. Um get into some you know come with quick little speed round. Yeah. Okay what is your favorite open source model today? Open source model. Um open material best for climate in any location. What about uh just general or coding? Just general coding. Um I really like deep sea.

58:35I've used it a lot. I don't know that counts as open source. Yeah. Yeah deep sea because one I think it's also um cloud code and codex and all are really great. But they're not I think it's very well I'm playing around with right now is being able to host a model on um a virtual machine or a separate server and actually investing in that kind of infrastructure and having it hosted locally in a sort of a closed model. Yeah. Um just do sort of protect against when the prices do go high for a lot of these. Yeah no yeah. Everyone has a hedge against that side of it right now. Yeah. No I'm token cost and um and again we're at the point of like these some of these models just like if they never got better are extremely good and can do it depending on the work you want. So like if you can lock that in and be like I know that I'm not going to pay any more for this. Yeah. Right. No I mean that's a big thing. Olamma just came out finally rolled out their like teams enterprise cloud offering. Yeah. And so now when you start Olamma you can you can run just open cloud code running Olamma models and I told Sam or one of our IT guys are devs this and uh because we're you know work he's

59:43been talking about like okay what are our what are escape hatches should there be issues with the cloud or if you know the outages keep getting worse or you know they keep cutting back on all the token limits and all of this other stuff and so I was like oh well they're taking direct game at that by just having it as the very first thing at the top of the page. Right. You open the thing. Yeah but it's true. Uh and like deep seek flash is so it's so fast. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think people people underestimate the value of speed with these things because so much of it is like you end up getting to your destination but through multiple iterations. Uh huh. Faster you can go through those iterations. The faster you can get there and the better it ends up being and so uh you know while yeah like fable is really good and really smart it's super expensive and it takes a long time and you know you run out of tokens damn near instantly if you're trying to do anything wrongly big. Yeah then what do you like exactly.

1:00:43And so uh but I also think people don't like you are talking about uh I just did a benchmark yesterday on some classification workflows using 401 mini 54 and 56 Luna and 401 mini has the least amount of drift. It is the most consistent and it's the cheapest. Yeah. And it's like okay well guess what we're going to use that for that. For that case and yeah there is a reason it doesn't ever have to be better than that. No it doesn't. And so yeah and that's the other thing the newer models you know they're pulling more of the controls out of them so I can't like for Luna I can't set the temperature to anything because it doesn't have a temperature setting. Yeah. And so when I run it back through the same process doing a classification job it switches the shit that it classifies for no apparent reason and there's no way to control it. And so I know audit history. Right. Like there's there's yeah it's uh so anyway that it's a it's a fascinating area to be in. And so yeah I think so many more people not just from a privacy and cost perspective

1:01:47but also just from a utilization perspective right. Like I was telling one of you earlier it's like I will turn the hotspot on in my car and let my laptop keep running while I'm driving home and traffic so that it doesn't disconnect from the job that it's running. I'll be like Starbucks and like yeah this is working. I got my hotspot on I got a click because I'm like walking to the car with my laptop. Yeah. So my laptop's sitting open on my console and my truck and uh but yeah moving just having a VM in the cloud that can run those same things allows you to work all the time. Great. Yeah. No I've started talking to quad like what can I build you know like build my own like yeah yeah. I'm actually never built a computer I'll be fun to do anyway. That's really yeah. No yeah it is fun. But then just have to kick ass machine just seeing that running like just by a spark. Yeah. Well that like mean that's thing now. Or can you name the raisins stuff or ever like yeah the new AMD stuff looks interesting. I saw speaking of our our stories that we should have started with uh I think they bought some company that's running just insane uh like 400 tokens this second type processing.

1:02:53So like that of the average person it's about 40 tokens per second is what 40 to 60 something like that on a normal foundational model. And this is 400 and it like you literally hit enter and it's it's done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. That's a I love how competitive this is getting across all this stuff. Yeah. So this is your first time in Houston or not? It is my third time in Houston but my first time alone. Okay. Which is exciting. Yeah. Um alright so my kind of two piece questions because I've never been to the Bay area. So you're coming here what's the restaurant that you're going to that you've been wanting to try in Houston and then if I go to the Bay area what do I need to check out? That's a great question. Um I actually have no idea so any recommendation you'd have for using that would be any any particular cuisine you're wanting to I've heard that the seafood here is good. I don't know if that's true. All of the food. This is another really one of the best things that I see. It because the beauty of it is there is not a type of food that you want that you cannot

1:03:56find here. Um like um Armenian which is a very small country that has not have a lot of there's an Armenian church here. There's multiple like Armenia. Uh huh. Places here that I can get genuine good Armenian food. Right. I mean I'm trying. I mean there's a lot of great seafood places. I'm probably going to kick myself in the ass. Um well I mean there's lots of Tex mechs seafood. Yeah but she has to see food. I'm thinking like I mean like is still there that little oysters like it's like it's in town. I had a really great meal there before but like but even like if you want some more like Cajun style like seafood I mean like I mean landry's and poppatos are hard to beat. I mean there's um there's lots of the root poor I mean I it's a baby sex or lanes um but and then I mean I'm so many probably get plenty of yeah Indian food but there's a place uh Aga's it's like in Stafford actually but it's like socially one of the best uh Indo-Pac restaurants in North America is I'm like people fly here for it. No every walk crazy. Yeah yeah. Okay I'll definitely check this out.

1:04:57Yeah. Yeah. But if you want if you like barbecue or if you've never had a good barbecue I mean what do you have lots of good truth or uh I'm a finger-tunced finger-tunced myself but I mean there's so many truth. I have high standards for barbecue I will say after when we went to Albama very recently and they let's go to my experience. It's going to be different too. Like this is Texas totally different. Okay I'm excited to try it. So you're that's all all pork it's all like sweet generally um here it's going to be all brisket it's all beef um that's how you measure the quality of that or beef rib or some of that. And so it'll be brisket they'll ask you if you want it dry or fatty um what are you seeing closer to downtown or are you seeing? Um yeah next should the Galeria. Okay. Okay. There's a lot of good food over there. There's good food everywhere. Yeah. That's part of the project. But yeah if you were coming to Houston I would say you'd probably definitely have to get Tex-Mex and uh Tex-Mex barbecue. It's a lot of barbecue. Okay. Tex-Mex. It's not that good. Yeah. But yeah it's like do you want Latin afro fusion because there's a restaurant I can tell you about downtown to go get that out.

1:05:58It's like literally everything. Um honestly the the thing I've missed the most that I don't feel like we have here it now that you're talking about Alabama is at least I haven't found it's like a legitimate soul food like like a proper uh like a proper. Uh huh I see like blue plate type type thing but I I'm sure that that exists. I just have yeah I haven't looked over it. Yeah. Um we'll do one more. But what are you most excited about from a technology perspective um then that can be about you know you guys specifically about the you know the space in general but what uh what are you most interested in there? I love that question so much and I think what I'm most excited about not just yes and our space 100% but also in general is how physical AI is going to start becoming a lot more decentralized in the sense of how it's going to be more commodified because even right

1:07:02now I don't think physical AI is to the point where you have access to models like Chargipiti or Claude you can just reach out and you can sort of everyone has a Claude Chargipiti account right now um and I really heavily see at the rate in which physical AI is developing that in the near future everyone's going to have access to that kind of technology for themselves where it's not going to be that hard to build a robot. Listen we just uh I don't know how I got down this rabbit hole in you two with my daughter the other two but uh the new hugging phase robot duck popped up and she her eyes lit up and I was like we started watching the demo video and I was like they I'm am I going to get this for you for yeah is this what you're doing this year because I kind of want one and I'd love to teach you how to perk in it but then it like I started you know a hour later or whatever I was thinking about it and I was like man this is going to be crazy right like it is 399 and it you know it's cute and sure it could probably pick up socks

1:08:02or pack off the floor or whatever it's just got a little mouth yeah but you know throw away your own snack wrap yeah like yes like hey that's the first thing we're going to do is we're going to teach it to pick up things off the floor that shouldn't be there and then it's like think about actually having access to build your own robots or build your own like computer or having something that builds it for you and your home assistant is actually a fine tune model on all the conversations that you've had and you can control it and it's not just Alexa or whatever spying on you all the time for ads right like that was the first I didn't even realize that but that was the first like open source hugging face robot thing that they put out is this cute little wally like robot with little antennas that move around but it's just a voice that to text basically box that sits on your like oh that would be really cool though like to tie into my Gmail and my calendars and all the family crap and like doing laundry putting up dishes yeah just yeah just hug anyway so I'm very good at putting laundry in the washer after that

1:09:06being right not like that may not be oh it'll be good on his that scale the dryer is not getting fooled at least it'll make it to the dryer eventually getting it from the dryer to the drawer is a whole another conversation but yeah things like that right like it's going to be wild to see that keep we're not too far from the Jetsons I know why I was telling Collins that the other day I was like when we were talking about the robot I was like when we were growing up and stuff in our period that can be all right that we would be having flying cars and robots yeah assistance and all of this stuff like it's start your life is going to be so much different on this or something of that size I mean like exactly and even like taking it further away from home systems is eventually in the future kind of like what it was like to get the AI influx if okay now I can outsource an entire coding project to my cloud or a different model eventually in the future I'll be able to have a drone get all of my own meteorological data for me instead of having to rely on open

1:10:11material or any API available and that's where personally I'm really excited to see how to change how we do research how we innovate in the industry like especially in deep tech as well I used to be a big biofuel fiend before this I worked at a biofuel club I joined a biofuel startup I yeah I started my own make your own biofuel we make our own biofuels and we connected to collect it from the dining halls and we built up a lot from scratch all chemical engineers but even things like that like school projects and building out really complex deep tech ventures how easy is that going to be if you don't need to spend so much time going to a separate EPC firm to get a titanium lead you know whatever built out for you even the on demand like there's all these companies that are spinning out that are doing 3d printed things on the man 3d printed parts 3d printed metal and so it's like yeah you need to cut some part you literally can

1:11:12drop the file online and order it and it shows up two days later yeah it's crazy yeah that's a real thing yeah so yeah that is very very exciting to me yeah I'm just very about the atrophy like the mental atrophy that we all may or may not have well but like I've absolutely thinking about that as well but like you know over time you still have people that work on horses you just don't have as many but technology has advanced and yeah you know we still have horses right yeah still barriers yeah it's not as my dad used to be one yeah it's not as uh you know common in my age now I'm old like when he turned my ages like it's not hurt too much dude I couldn't imagine but if I hunched over a horse for they I'd be like I'd be done well but he when he did he's in heat to like you're like front to your day that's whoa but your dad was jacked yeah that's just yeah he has all this crazy yeah yeah yeah yeah and because he would do um the black

1:12:15smithing too like you know because like I mean some horses you know just like I say it was like a very large like a Clive's L type he would actually make them but even like the shoes he would get he would have to shape in my he'd be sitting on his trailer that so I want to talk to him that he's like he's up in yeah yeah that's brutal yeah no we're just gonna all get softer but we'll keep building shit yeah I would say it's good it does have a really significant impact because something I've noticed with things like granola um which is the note taker that everyone's using now people have stopped paying attention in conversations because they're like oh my granola will record it yeah yeah I'll go through it later exactly like it's it's fine it's it's happening and so they like turn off their brains in the middle of conversations and I think well but was that already happening and now we just have something to capture it so that we do remember because that is right like absolutely it's I'm very with you on that we we've been using granola for a long time because it's fantastic stand by it especially for a dev if you're doing any kind of

1:13:19custom dev that's a wonderful workflow um but yeah it is it's like I find my I don't know if I'm tuning out more if or I'm just more conscious of the fact that hey this is reporting and therefore I'm now not paying as much attention as I should be right I think it's also where like say the soft skills and anything authentic is going to have any even more value absolutely I completely agree with that I'm actually something that we've been working a lot on is um and something we've noticed a lot is having discourse about this this podcast even and coming in person and talking about these topics makes such a big difference and now we've started hosting dinners for operators we're having our own newsletter come out and highly recommend that make such a big difference absolutely like in-person presence and discourse over anything it should be crazy that that is like you know unique now really exactly exactly like that's how it works maybe they were talking about this one with the

1:14:21printing press like yeah I couldn't really like you know about this is going to be a problem like it's all going to be on paper we're not to talk about it right that's true actually that's funny but yeah I think definitely I like the view of looking at everything that's coming in with an opportunity mindset of well whatever you can't really stop the tech that's coming in so how can we take it and there was out of the box like I mean like I'll put it in but not like I mean you could do it in America they're gonna keep it in China and Russia and then you'd be way behind in screwed right yeah like we have to moving ahead with technology is not even a question yeah um but I think that's it's a delicate balance and I'm excited to see how that goes as well for sure that's awesome amazing well again thanks for reaching out to us I mean like yeah putting putting yourselves on our radar I mean you know sometimes people reach out and you can tell us like they want to kind of salesy with what they're doing but it's like this was like a genuinely interesting topic and just have someone from out of town come in and uh yeah yeah what can we what can we help you with what are you looking for from from clients or from from people out there do you have any kind of

1:15:23absolutely the biggest ask would be getting in the room having one conversation because what we've noticed is even starting to talk about integrating AI into your system starting to see what kind of opportunities are available out there and giving us a chance to show what we've built and the kind of history we've had and the experience we've had built out in this field is more valuable to me than anything else and so anyone who's interested in this field and wants to reach out we'd love to talk and thank you guys so much I came across one of your podcasts I believe with um someone in the industry and I was hooked and I was like oh I have to reach out to them because I'm going to use it anyway it's such a shame if I don't know what he did that's such a cool like full circle thing for me and Bobby right we just do this for fun we're not trying to make money or become you know celebrity or anything off of this we just do it's about fun yeah that's the whole point and I think that's why the podcast will just use so authentic and genuine it's because it is kind of nerding out about the cool stuff happening in the industry yeah that's one of the

1:16:27reasons I'm totally cool with not having sponsors because they don't get to tell us what to do exactly well that's awesome and then they can find you on LinkedIn or where else or yes you can find me on LinkedIn I have a twitter and it was the best place to reach me and what's the company website it's evardy.ai okay you spell that real fast evard.ai.ai perfect and so raise and my email is also aria at evardy.ai so very easy to reach out you know we're fine guys that's perfect yes absolutely. uh aria thank you so much for for coming on Bobby yeah to see me my class how to be here thank you so much for having us yeah thank you jealous you're going to be getting out of town for this yeah tropical whatever that but like last week I started looking as you were hosting that happy hour tomorrow and I was like oh maybe be cooler in Oklahoma City so I log into weather.com the day I logged in it was 108 last week in Oakland City it was felt like 108 here but it was legitimately 108 there and like think tomorrow afternoon because like there's a social this place social capital I want to do it yeah but then they can rent out the rooftop it's

1:17:31gonna be 103 degrees at 5 p.m. oh it's great but yes better than that warm local home abris yeah but it's a dry heat yeah yeah great awesome guys all right thank you guys yep while sun may see them as the crazy ones we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do goodbye