Introducing The World Changing Podcast

Show Notes

Welcome to... The World Changing Podcast! Who are we? Why do we care about changing the world? Meet your host Greg Robinson and producer Flo Lumsden. In the first half of the episode, we introduce each other and discuss why we are making this world changing podcast. In the second half of the episode, Greg and I discuss how his first sustainable energy start-up, Drift, has led him to his newest venture, Aston Labs. We also go into more depth about various topics we are interested in addressing with the podcast. We hope you enjoy it and, who knows, maybe together we will change the world!

Creators & Guests

Host

Greg Robinson

Husband. Dad. Working to make basic needs not so basic..

Producer

Flo Lumsden

Audio and Video producer. Owner of #chorusstudios

What is The World Changing Podcast?

Join us as we talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. Hosted by Greg Robinson and Flo Lumsden, an Aston podcast produced by Chorus Studios.

Greg: [00:00:00] Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it, we'll keep it anyway. Uh, how about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, Then we can take that out. Welcome to the World Changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon-free future.
We'll talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co-founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company, and on the other side of the camera here, we. Flo Lumps in our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
Are you recording? I am recording. Oh, all right then. But don't
Flo: worry about it.[00:01:00]
Greg: , I'm gonna start first by introducing the producer, of this fine world changing podcast, Flo Lumsden.
Oh, thank you. Flo Lumsden over there. What I think is super interesting is, uh, I have this identity crisis of being like an artist and a musician in my life. And, but I basically have spent my entire life from like first grade until now thinking about electricity in some way or another, which we'll get into.
And I think in some ways, Flo is similar in the sense that her training and her interests, kind of center around like global environmental politics. Like how can you change, uh, the systems to make the world more environmentally equitable for people, uh, at the political level. But there's this through line in her life that kind of centers . Around art and, mainly around like emotional [00:02:00] storytelling.
And really just communication and connecting with people like at the just most fundamental level. So this sort of makes this a really cool match for us to bring these ideas that most of the time people don't really wanna listen to at, in my everyday, uh, gatherings with friends. But Flo is nice enough to join here and, uh, thank you.
And put this together. So Flo Lumps. Everyone .
Flo: Yay. Thank you for the introduction, Greg. I appreciate it. And uh, now it's my turn because you are really the host of this podcast, and I will be, Helping to produce it and ask questions here and there, but you are our guide. And so I need, we need to introduce you, we need to give you a formal introduction and really list all of your credentials, which I know you would probably not do for yourself.
So Greg [00:03:00] Robinson is a founder and CEO of Aston Labs. Mr. Robinson earned his BS in physics at the University of Washington in 2009. He began his professional career in 2009 in Seattle in product design, development, and distribution with Questar Energy Systems after being issued a patent on behalf of.
Questar describing an improved electric electricity distribution network. Greg and Ed Mackenzie. His his bestie, no , his work partner, a formal Google and Microsoft software engineer, decided to develop the vision which underlay the patent, resulting in the formation of drift energy in 20. Greg and his partners created an easy to use system for purchasing continuous renewable energy, the first of its kind, and built a team to operate and market it.
Greg spent seven years serving as chairman and CEO of Drift along the way, raising 13.5 million of venture capital from some well [00:04:00] known and prolific early stage venture capital firms. And Angel, I. Both Fortune 500 and small companies relied on the Drift team, to assist their sustainability leaders even with
the most aggressive environmental social governance goals or e s g goals in late 2021. Greg, ed Mackenzie. Drift, CTO O and Kang, is that correct? Kang, Kang and Kang drift General Counsel with help and encouragement from noted successful investment professionals started as and labs to ensure that no other company working to serve the basic needs of our modern technology driven economy would be held back by an infrastructure network that fails to keep up with innovation.
that is the formal bio . But Greg, what does all this mean? Who are you? I mean, I, I read this and I. , you've, you've raised legitimate capital from impressive firms, [00:05:00] so people believe in you and what you're doing. You have a background in physics. You have worked with some of the best software engineers to, to create new and improved distribution, uh, of energy or electricity systems.
And now you're onto your next thing, ASIN Labs, which we will connect the dots, which I think is a really interesting story. But before we do that, can you tell us a little bit about who you actually are? ?
Greg: Uh, yes. Yeah. I think with all the things that you just said, the whole bio, I mean, I'm just basically getting started.
I think that all of those things are required. Uh, in order to even begin having the conversation about what has to be done. I mean, it's so deep. Especially if we just focus in the electricity sector, like this started so long ago, the people who designed the network are no longer around to inform how it might need to change.
So I think there's this [00:06:00] general, I don't know if there's this fear, but there's this general fear that if we change the electricity system, we're gonna lose. the way our modern lives work. So there's always this, this sort of like tempered, uh, approach. And so how that connects to who I am is that, uh, as I said in my intro, uh, you know this, I've been interested in electricity.
From the, my earliest days, my, actually, my science fair project in first grade, which we'll try to dig up this picture and put it somewhere, , uh, uh, was an, an electric fuse. It was like, you know, battery and steel wall and things like that to show that if you put too much, uh, electricity across a piece of metal that can't take it, then it'll burn out and it'll stop the circuit from electrocuting anyone.
it's, uh, that was in first grade that I was interested in that. Wow. Just so unfortunate.
Flo: You were like, I need to know how electricity works from a fundamental level when I'm six years old. , I'm gonna build a, [00:07:00] was it, would you call it a battery? No. Well,
Greg: no, it was just like, it was a, it was like a nine volt battery and it was connected to like steel wall and then that connected to like a bra or some other kind of metal to connect the circuit between the battery and then, The circuit turned on.
So basically once the metal touched, you know, and completed the circuit, then there was too much electricity for the tiny strand of steel walls, so the steel wall would basically burn. Wow. And it would show you how, I mean, it's just, that's how a fuse worked. I mean, I wasn't invent, there was no, no invention in first grade, but of course did a light up on fire.
Oh, it just, it would just burn if, that is how I imagine everyone should, you know, go home and try this. Of course. Uh, because, cause I
Flo: think, what I think is so interesting about you is you understand electricity in a way that I haven't been able to grasp even when I've been in physics class and heard over and over again how electrons move and how they flow and.
I mean, this is, it's just magic. It's invisible. And to be . Able to [00:08:00] really grasp that concept is kind of amazing to me
Greg: personally. Yeah. Yeah. I only recognize that when I talk to people about it, but I, I mean, I'll tell you kind of how. How it went from, first grade. I don't know if I was really focused on it when I was a kid.
I wasn't doing many other things\ with electricity. But I do think once I got into the physics program, at University of Washington, Like some things started to coalesce where it was like I was pretty interested in meteor meteorology, so I had this option to replace my nuclear physics.
I didn't really do much in nuclear physics. I replaced a lot of those classes with meteorology and climatology, and it was a math-based science, and so you could kind of swap that into your curriculum. And so there was that going on. And then I was also taking like electricity and magnetism and I really.
The electricity and magnetism courses. I always felt like I was behind. Like I sort of was learning all these new things in the new, in the math about it, and I always [00:09:00] felt like I was behind. But I always did well in those classes, like way better than any other of the physics classes. So clearly there was something where, whether it was my interest level or just like some, like natural understanding, uh, of how it should.
You know, whereas I, I think that that's not really an intuitive thing to understand how electricity should work. Um, but just whatever I exposure I had prior to college, like it sort of coalesced for me to be able to, in some ways do better than I thought despite feeling like maybe I wasn't fully, you know, present during classes or I wasn't studying enough, or I wasn't keeping up.
Um, yeah. And so that the, you know, the swirling. so swirling together of, uh, of meteorology and electricity, there was sort of a logical path for me to now go into. At the time, the only, field where you could be focused on both of the [00:10:00] weather and the power, the power grid. Electricity was renewable energy.
And I can tell you. . In college, we were learning about like tuning electrical circuits. Like you have to tune like the, basically like all of the quality of the electrical circuit and like the way the electricity works has to be sort of tuned in some way. By the way, you design the circuit, if you don't design the circuit right, then the circuit won't work.
And now it was like, oh, and now we're going to use the weather and we're gonna inject, we're gonna make the electric, we're gonna make the electrons. with the weather. Like that was just the, that was a mind blowing concept when I was in college. It's one thing to do that on your house, it's another thing to do that in a little neighborhood or a little thing on the side, but to actually have plans to run the power grid mm-hmm.
on a variable source of power using sunshine and wind and water and all of this stuff [00:11:00] was, it. Mind blowing enough to hold my attention. Yeah. And so it's held my attention now for about 13 years. Yeah. . And so that really, I think that kind of summarizes like who I am because I, I think that curiosity, if the curiosity is quenched, I'm out
You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, yeah. But this is one of those problems. It's like, it's so intractable and to think about how the system design could. Not just like at a high level and theoretically like not a research paper, but like how can you bring that all the way back to this moment and say, well, if you just started this way, then you could create, you could sort of somehow create some kind of flywheel or some way to accelerate us towards this future that we're all sort of, that we, that we want.
Which is, this is really cool. It's like when I got into this, I think solar panels were a hundred times [00:12:00] more expensive than they are today. Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah. It's 99% off when I got in , you know, 99% off, uh, a solar panel. And I just think that we're like, we're sort of at this, at this cusp where.
Everybody needs to like, change the way they think, including me. Like constantly. Like we need to change the way we think about, about how this works. So, uh, and that's how I spend my days.
Flo: I love it. I know, and it, it makes sense. I mean, I, I, I think a lot of people, including myself, would feel overwhelmed by the problem of trying to use the weather to create the electricity, but you are inspired by it.
So like, kudos to you, . Um, . It's like, so we're,
Greg: I think I'm inspired by overwhelming things. I think that's what I've, that's the theme. .
Flo: so. With that in mind, what are some of the goals for the, or hopes for the podcast? Yeah,
Greg: I think if we could sum it up, I think the hopes would be that we want to,[00:13:00] highlight some of the new technologies that aren't being discussed as much.
I think we wanna explore the new ideas that could help the world be more environmentally healthy and make this planet a more equitable place for people. And we. Uh, this one's kind of personal for me, is like, I really wanna make sure that we have a place for ideas and concepts, uh, to be as complicated as they need to be.
Sometimes when you're solving a problem that still is in the future, it's hard to fully articulate it exactly as it should be articulated. And I think getting into the weeds on those problems. and, and leaving the nuance there. Uh, we want to, we wanna make sure that this is a place to do that. Uh, also challenging, as you just said, challenging assumptions about what's good and bad.
Um, I think [00:14:00] sometimes like certain energy, obviously nuclear is always brought up as this debate of whether this is good or this is bad. It's like, well, can we dig that out a little bit and be like, are there different types of. This is different way of making it that could be interesting. A different size of plant that could make it interesting, et cetera.
Mm-hmm. , uh, and then this one's big too, is just like electricity is fundamental to every single industry now. Yeah. Like, uh, the crypto industry's always talking about like, oh, we need to get help. The unbanked, the 1.9 people billion, 1.9 billion people who are unbanked, it's like, , the unbank problem in a fundamental way is an electricity problem.
Um, not only, but if you get down to the long tail of the other people, it's like, well, if there's a billion people who are unbanked mm-hmm. who also don't have electricity, it's gonna be really hard for you to hand them like [00:15:00] a, like a digital token and have them go pay for it at their. Right. Like there's no internet, right?
There's no, and there are ways around this, and it's important for us to know this is not an impossible problem. This is something that could be fixed. Uh, but I think making sure that we highlight and encourage that cross pollination, between all of the industries that are needed or that could, that could actually help move this conversation of sustainability and, and kind of infrastructure system design forward.
Flo: Love it. I'm so excited. Me too.
So, wait, so let's, let's, let's, uh, I'd like to hear a little bit, and I guess we can go into this in more depth in future episodes, but a little bit about the evolution from Drift to Aston.
Greg: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Any other sort of founders of companies out there who.
Know that experience of not of, you know, you [00:16:00] set out to do something and you have a vision for what you think it should be. And with Drift it was, if we could figure out a way to write, a standardized contract with , a corporate off tape or some kind of buyer of renewable energy.
we could use math to arrange the power sources on the other side. So we could sort of like, they could say the P, the buyer could say, these are my goals. Mm-hmm. as lofty as they are, and we could say, okay, here's the price to meet those goals. And then we can build a network like a physical, renewable energy infrastructure.
Mm-hmm. . To then build that into this contract and like, and meet the, meet their demands over time. So it wasn't just saying, it wasn't some corporate customer saying, I wanna be a hundred percent renewable today. Yeah. Because I need to. [00:17:00] Yeah. It's like, well, that's not possible. So, and by the way, it's important for me to note a hundred percent renewable to me does not mean that I've, I've offset somewhere else.
It's that when I purchase electricity, I pay for it in a power bill. I look at a, you know, I look at how much did I buy mm-hmm. versus how much did I use like, continuously throughout the year. I'm not saying like on average throughout the year. Um, it's important to note. So that was the idea of Drift could we make it where you could subscribe to this network of renewable energy assets and you could hit your goals, right?
And you didn't have to do anything else besides that as a corporate. because, let's be honest, like the head of sustainability at a reasonably sized like sustainable brand mm-hmm. has to figure out how to make sure that they have like recycled paper, recycled cups, uh, and also renewable energy, right?
It's like, how could you, how could this one person be responsible for doing all of these things? [00:18:00] So it really was a service to make that pretty simple. And I think we started that company like 10 years too early, honestly. Like I'm starting to now hear of companies that. , uh, we're kind of thinking of like a little bit of that now.
Like maybe we'll just help people see how much renewable energy they should buy and there's people like selling people these services to say, here's how much you should buy. And we were sort of 10 years early saying like, Hey, we'll go buy it for you. Right? We weren't sort of suggesting somebody should and, and so what The trouble we, the trouble we.
With Drift was like the thing that was missing in the market when we started it was, uh, there wasn't really like a modern infrastructure company that we could go to and say, Hey, we're running this business to serve this customer, set these corporate cus customers. Um,[00:19:00]
and, and we would kind of wanna run that business model on your infras. . Mm-hmm. , this exists in all, in many other industries, right? Like if you, um, if you wanna start Spotify for instance, you can go to these record companies or publishing companies and you can say, well, you have all of this stuff. Mm-hmm.
and I would like to take all of that stuff that you have. And I'd like to move that into a, a package into a product. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. That people can now, interact with and it's gonna be better for you cuz you're gonna get more plays. It's gonna be better for the customer, it's better user experience and it's good for Spotify because we're also gonna make some of that money too.
Um, you transform it from this big randomized network of supply. Mm-hmm. . into something that like each person can now have. Um, the difference there is that to plug into those big aggregators for Spotify [00:20:00] is like this sort of, I'm sure this was complicated, but it was like it existed. There was these big buckets of existing supply they could go to.
And in the energy business it was like that really didn't exist. Like we couldn't go to, you know, a big infrastructure company and say, oh, I've got this contract with. . These 20 companies, they're 25 companies that I can't really tell you about because they don't want you to know what they use for electricity and I need you to just like plug into our network and then we'll make sure that the people get what they want.
Like that was impossible cuz it was just like the mindset of an infrastructure builder is still that of when Thomas Edison was building infrastructure with JP Morgan, it was. , I'm gonna put in this power station and I'm gonna find somebody to buy something from this power station. And, and that's it. One to one.
Yeah. Like, as long as I have a buyer, I can build this new infrastructure. And our thesis was like, at Drift was like, [00:21:00] well, you don't have to do it. It's almost like you can take the, what the people want and what the companies. and you could build behind that, right? Not like what that company wants, but like what the network of companies want.
So that was just, we were kind of too early to that. Mm-hmm. conversation. Mm-hmm. , I think both for the buyers and the sellers, but we had better, we had kind of a better time with the buyers. Like it was easier to kind of get them to be like, yeah, like I would rather buy renewable electricity from people who make it rather than buy it.
Uh, by some offset from a broker or something like that. Right. You know, it felt more direct connected. It felt like they could make more of an impact if, if we could build behind that, that agreement we had with them. And so, um, and so that piece that was missing this like modern infrastructure company to serve.
this modern user experience that's happening in, in, in sustainability and, and sort of climate [00:22:00] impact, um, that was missing. Mm-hmm. . And so as much as we tried to fight it mentally, um, I think Ed and, and KA and I, and then other people we started to talk to about it, different investors who had back drift, even some of the investors who had back drift.
Um, , you know, we had learned so much from that, from that experience of like, okay, well, like a modern infrastructure company is missing, how would you build it? Mm-hmm. . And now it's gonna look way different than anyone's gonna think. When I say modern infrastructure company here, how that looks, it's gonna look completely different than what even a lot of people will have in their minds.
Even when I talk to people, they're like, . Well, infrastructure companies are hard. You're not gonna, you know, you don't wanna start that, but it's like, I feel like at this point that has, that narrative has to start happening. Mm-hmm. , like, we have to start getting where we're, you know, we're fixing supply chains for certain types of fuels or [00:23:00] technologies.
Mm-hmm. , uh, we have to start changing the supply chains for certain fuels and technologies. Whereas previously, you know, all of the supply chains are really like kind of well supported in like oil and gas for instance. If you wanna get oil and gas like it, you can get that all this infrastructure's been built around those industries.
And in some ways, even though solar and. and, you know, various carbon free powered, you know, technologies like nuclear, green, hydrogen. It's just like those infras, the infrastructure for those industries is not built. And so it's like you're not just gonna have these, these infrastructure companies that make 95% of the revenue from oil and gas aren't magically going to shut all that down and then go start a new one.
Right. And these infrastructure companies have been selling. , you know, commodities contracts, or they've been selling, they've been doing paper, [00:24:00] paper contract arrangements every five to 10 years. They're not magically going to turn into like a software company that, that Right. Interacts with, you know, the next version of Drift or whoever comes out here in the next decade.
So we kind of saw that gap in the market and said, um, you know, there's, there's an opportunity to build that modern infrastructure. .
Flo: So I guess that's As is asin. That's ASIN Labs. Okay. And I feel like, or I know there are some components you guys can't really talk about yet. Mm-hmm. , so we won't be able to flesh out the full concept of what Astin Labs is,
Greg: right?
Yeah. At this moment. Yeah. We'll unpack that. But it's a modern infrastructure company that's gonna allow for more carbon free. electricity infrastructure, but carbon free utility networks to grow right faster. Um, we're gonna use kind of the power of, of software and um, [00:25:00] whatever people's opinion is about crypto, I don't really care.
We're gonna use blockchain technology and crypto to sort of. To accelerate the development of that network. And we're gonna lean on the principles of like online marketplaces and online marketplace networks rather than leaning on the constructs of, you know, traditional infrastructure companies, which really is having a public company and buying a bunch of stuff.
financing a bunch of stuff. Like, it'll look different than that, but yeah. Yeah, there's some things we can't talk about yet, but
Flo: it's exciting. we're going to shift into why are we making this podcast and, um, it's sponsored by Aston Labs, So we're gonna be covering, covering topics that would be related to the areas of , infrastructure energy.
electricity and also financing and future of, of, [00:26:00] um, contracts and finance. Mm-hmm. , decentralized finance. We're we covering those types of topics but not just those that pertain specifically to what Aston Labs is doing? Cause we're gonna have, we're gonna have all kinds of conversations about those
Greg: topics.
Right? Yeah. I think, I mean, the thing, the thing that will, will always be there is that pretty much anything we talk about, Whether directly or indirectly comes back to electricity. Like if we talk about agriculture or food supply chains in some way, they're all gonna come back to, you know, how does the infrastructure network, what's the infrastructure that supports that network?
Mm-hmm. , uh, that's a, that's always gonna be, We're always gonna be coming back to what's the physical stuff that has to be in the world to support these initiatives. I think sometimes that gets missed, you know, um, I [00:27:00] hear so many cool soft software companies that are out there. like, oh, we're doing, We're working in, in, uh, regenerative agriculture, or we're working in.
Climate impact for corporations and we're working in, uh, optimizing battery storage for the power grid, and we're working in all these different categories. It's like, okay, well what is the infrastructure that needs to be there for you to scale faster? Right? Can this not be a 10 year journey? Can this be a six month journey , you know, um, and what and what kind of infrastructure? network has to exist. And if you had a, a partner or if you had a network that you could go to that saw the world the way you do mm-hmm.
it didn't have like 95% of the revenue coming from oil and your competitors . Right? Yeah. Uh, then maybe, you know, maybe it would act different. Maybe it could happen way faster than what you think it could. You know, and I mean,
Flo: brass tacks here, I'm a human being on planet Earth in 2022 and my power goes out.
[00:28:00] So, . Mm-hmm. . And it's not a good feeling?
Greg: Nope.
Flo: Because you're like, you know me. I mean, I don't have a generator yet. I'll probably get one. Mm-hmm. , I'd rather have a solar panel and a battery. But, um, you know, we're dependent on the grid. Do it, do that and. anyway. It's just, and it's like, it's not even a hurricane.
The power goes out, it's like a rain. It's like raining and the power goes out. It's like, what the heck is going on? So it's like, yeah, neither of us probably know, you know more than I do, but we may not know the real, actual, tangible reason for that. But it's a symptom of a bigger problem, which is we're putting everything on the grid.
All the cars are going electric. We'll have flying cars that are electric. We'll have, I don't know. I don't, everything will be electric. Mm-hmm. . , the power grid probably needs an update, even if we didn't care about sustainability and equitable and equitable [00:29:00] futures. Mm-hmm. for all people. Mm-hmm. , we're gonna have to change it anyway, so like, why don't we change it the best way possible?
Yeah. With like our values and ideal
Greg: future in mind. Yeah. It's a big, it's a big job. Basically. The thing that's kind of funny about this, about being in sustainability, as you already know, uh, in the, in. Field if that should even be called a field. Sort of like more of a survival, more of a value. Yeah. ,
Flo: I'd like to survive and live a healthy life, and I bet other people would like to as well.
Yeah.
Greg: And after I live, I'd like to continue living, I'd like my
Flo: children to live. Yeah. And not choke from pollution and die from heat and cold and stream
Greg: weather. Yeah. I think, um, it doesn't ever feel like you're competing with somebody who's. Who's also working on this? Like, that's what's sort of interesting, why I hesitate to call sustainability a field or climate impact like a field.[00:30:00]
Um, because in a field you usually have competitors and like it's sort of, even though yeah, you're competing in terms of like who's gonna get revenue and who's not gonna get revenue, it's like there's still always this sort of overarching feeling that, that you're on the same team even. Maybe you're, you're competing for deals.
But I think, um, the thing about power going out, I mean, I think the ch most challenging thing about answering that question is like, where are you in the world? Like in some cases where you are in the world, it's like you might only get, you might have no electricity. That's like still a real thing, right?
Which to a lot of people is mind boggling. We're, you know, talking about the electricity applica, talking about the electricity applications or the things that are gonna run on the power grid, um, in the United States, let's say, uh, versus some people don't like, have any electricity service at [00:31:00] all in their homes, still in parts of the world.
And that can be. for political reasons. I mean, there's like any number of reasons that that is happening. But at the, at the end of the day, it's that the amount of electricity that's on the grid doesn't equal the amount of electricity is trying to get pulled from the grid. So at a fundamental level, it's like if we.
Anybody who knows deeply about how the power grid works is gonna hate that I just said that. But at the end of the day, it's like supply and demand is not getting met and that's why your power is go going out. Mm-hmm. . And I think that is, uh, and even with like the, if the wind is blowing or whatever, there's something fundamentally wrong with like the system design.
You could have a bunt above ground wires, like modern neighborhoods are burying cable, burying wires, especially if there's chances of like, Or hurricanes. Um, there's that story that we saw about, um, that community in Florida. I think I actually know the name now. I think it's [00:32:00] called Babcock Ranch. Yes. Is it called Babcock Ranch?
Yes. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Cool. Uh, we didn't, I didn't know the name of it. Ding. We were talking about it before. Uh, but that community, you know, sort of like got through Hurricane Ian despite its proximity to places that completely went out for weeks. Uh, they were able to keep the lights on and I think it's just like a sy Yeah, it's like a system architecture that we now have the technology for, but you're always running up against like what's already there.
Yeah. Inertia. Inertia is a wicked, wicked competitor, so, and
Flo: our power companies are huge. They're giant and there's only two of them maybe in each market.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's very few. One or two won't options. We won't get too much in the, in the weeds on that, but yeah, like the people actually running the physical infrastructure system, they have, they call it natural monopolies, which is like, I don't want [00:33:00] 40 different companies wires running down the street.
It's better to just have one company's wires running down the street. And so, but yeah, that's a whole stack of like a hundred and something odd years worth of regulatory shifts and changes. Um, we gotta start somewhere. You gotta start somewhere. The other challenge I will say for utilities, and this is not really of any fault of their own, it's like they exist to serve the masses, these utility companies that are built, um, when you, the company are meant to serve the masses and you've spent your whole, the whole time in your career, like pushing supply.
to the buyers, the demand. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, now the demand's gonna make a little supply and put it back into your grid . And then you're like, oh, wait, wait, wait. We're not ready for that. Let's like, [00:34:00] sort of not do too much of that. Yeah. So now it's like we're gonna control how much that can happen.
And then, which I usually refer to this as like Power 1.0, power 2.0, power three point. Or you know, is like Power 1.0 was like just pushed, it was like, it was like the utility pushed power all good, and then renewable energy, a little bit of like deregulation or just like allowing people to sort of make their own power who were not the utilities.
Now it was like, that's Power 2.0. That's like, oh now a little bit of those. Buyers, those homeowners, those commercial buildings, those independent private companies are gonna start to push stuff onto the grid. Mm-hmm. and the utility didn't have control of that. They sort of had to allow it to happen.
Mm-hmm. , but they're still in control. They're just sort of letting it happen. And then Power 3.0 would be like, um, you know, where we are now, which is like now people wanna put as much [00:35:00] power onto the grid as they want to. They don't really want anybody to say, They don't want the utility to say, well, you can't do that because I have this coal plant over here that I have to pay off.
Like nobody's hearing that anymore. It's like, no, no, no. You don't understand. I want that coal plant outta here. Like, shut it down tomorrow. Right? And we'll make enough to make up for the rest. So a, as I'm saying this, you can tell that like almost none of this has to do with physical. , the physical infrastructure, it's all about the people involved and the stakeholders and Yeah, and the, I mean, it's your, it's your wheelhouse.
It's the, it's the politics, right? It's the politics and the regulatory that are, so I say all that to say that it is so much more complicated about why power stays on and why power goes out than any then we will probably ever be able to dig into. But we are gonna try our best to have certain guests on, to explore some of those topics where they,
where they're trying to solve the problem, or where they just really understand the problem. Like it's good for us to hear Yeah. Where there's just like intract [00:36:00] problems. We're
Flo: gonna, we're gonna keep learning. We're not gonna assume that we know everything ever. Right. Even if we're trying to build the next infrastructure company, which we are, or you are, we are going to keep the conversation going.
We're gonna be open to learning new things, challenging our assumptions. Mm-hmm. so.
Love it. I'm so excited. Me too. I'm also really honored to be on this journey with you. Me too. It's gonna be fun. I, uh, I, uh, you know, we have, we have, we all have our assumptions and our biases that are formed by our experiences, but I, you know, I like to try really hard to be open-minded and I'm, I think we both care a lot about progress.
Mm-hmm. and outcomes over optics.
Greg: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard in that moment when you're gonna say something that's like, you know, this is sort of the outcome we're looking for. And then, and then every, like you said, everybody has their [00:37:00] concrete ideas. I, like, I used to say, it's like, I guess they sort of tell my kids this.
every idea or every belief that someone has like, Every category sort of like this, this like container, let's say it's like a glass, this belief, and then like some people have filled that, that belief up with concrete and there's just no way of getting anything new.
into that belief, like it's just concrete, right? The best example is actually like, like titles and companies, they're sort of like these ideas, like, like the CEO is like this idea that most people sort of have like a concrete understanding of what that role is. And I could tell you as like having that, that title on a business card a couple times now in my life, the person actually living inside of that, Doesn't look at that very concretely at all.
right. You know, it's like, uh, it's sort of this [00:38:00] constantly, it's like an amorphous, you know, where it's sort of like this fluid that is just like constantly, constantly churning over. And I think all of this should be like, as we're trying to design, it's like everyone has theirs. Like nuclear is this idea that is, has like many people have already filled that idea up with.
It's like they have a concrete understanding of what it is. And if you want to change that, then it's like, sorry, too late. You're gonna have to chip that thing with a jackhammer for a long time. for a long time to get me to change my mind on that. And I think if this, if you know, going back to the hope of this podcast, if this Hope podcast has to be the jackhammer, that just chips away at people's concrete ideas of what, what exists in the.
What it's gonna take. And, and maybe, and
Flo: also I'm fine with bring,
Greg: brings in new boxes. Yeah. Yeah. Brings in things we haven't thought about before, things about things that
Flo: mm-hmm. bring in ideas and technologies that people don't even know are, are out there that could [00:39:00] be brought into the equation. Yep.
Sorry. Yeah, I, I cut you off. I didn't mean to cut you off. You said no. Or you were happy to be the
Greg: jackhammer . I was happy. I'm happy if we, we have to be the jackhammer. I'm also happy if we have to be the people that help to discover new, you know, just completely new containers. And we'll try to stay away from analogies, from metaphors as much as we possibly can.
Flo: No, analogies are so helpful though. It's just, You know, there's times when, there's lots of times when they're helpful and then there's some times where they're
Greg: destructive. Yeah. They, there's sometimes where they, where they sort of smooth over the nuances that are essential to actually have a conversation.
So we'll choose wisely. We'll,
Flo: we'll try to be careful with how many analogies we make. Um, and we can't promise perfection, but yeah,
Greg: we'll try. Yeah.
Flo: All right. Well, I think that's good for the introduction onwards. Anything else you wanna add? [00:40:00]
Greg: No. All right. Let's get started.
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