In today’s episode, I was honored to be joined in studio by Ed VanDyne, one of the most fascinating guests we’ve had on the show. When you look up serial entrepreneur in the dictionary, you’ll find Ed’s smiling face, and the ideas that have sprouted his various companies are consolidated from ideas and learnings from previous chapters, including a lengthy season managing the MIT Racing Team, and spinning a technology company out of Woodward, VanDyne SuperTurbo! The innovative sails for Tetrahedron Racing boats, for example, are the same shape as the molecules of ammonia created through Plastic 2 Green’s innovative processes!
Plastic 2 Green is the star of this show, however. Ed has developed an innovative process to turn waste plastics into market-competitive carbon rods, carbon black, and ammonia - plus more - using plasma to break down plastic molecules, and science to send the resulting molecules to the appropriate containers. Future cargo ships will burn an ammonia / diesel blend, and in Ed’s opinion, ammonia is the best and most-stable way to move toward a hydrogen-powered economy.
The smoke in the studio during this podcast wasn’t from herb, it was my little brain overheating trying to listen and think and process and ask good questions! I think I did a pretty good job of it, for a country kid, so please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Ed VanDyne.
The LoCo Experience Podcast is sponsored by: Logistics Co-op | https://logisticscoop.com/
Follow us to see what we're up to:
Facebook
Music By: A Brother's Fountain
In today’s episode, I was honored to be joined in studio by Ed VanDyne, one of the most fascinating guests we’ve had on the show. When you look up serial entrepreneur in the dictionary, you’ll find Ed’s smiling face, and the ideas that have sprouted his various companies are consolidated from ideas and learnings from previous chapters, including a lengthy season managing the MIT Racing Team, and spinning a technology company out of Woodward, VanDyne SuperTurbo! The innovative sails for Tetrahedron Racing boats, for example, are the same shape as the molecules of ammonia created through Plastic 2 Green’s innovative processes!
Plastic 2 Green is the star of this show, however. Ed has developed an innovative process to turn waste plastics into market-competitive carbon rods, carbon black, and ammonia - plus more - using plasma to break down plastic molecules, and science to send the resulting molecules to the appropriate containers. Future cargo ships will burn an ammonia / diesel blend, and in Ed’s opinion, ammonia is the best and most-stable way to move toward a hydrogen-powered economy.
The smoke in the studio during this podcast wasn’t from herb, it was my little brain overheating trying to listen and think and process and ask good questions! I think I did a pretty good job of it, for a country kid, so please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Ed VanDyne.
The LoCo Experience Podcast is sponsored by: Logistics Co-op | https://logisticscoop.com/
Follow us to see what we're up to:
Facebook
Music By: A Brother's Fountain
In today's episode, I was honored to be joined in studio by Ed Van Dyne, one of the most fascinating guests we've had on the show. When you look up serial entrepreneur in the dictionary, you'll find Ed's smiling face, and the ideas that have sprouted his various companies are consolidated from ideas and learnings from previous chapters, including a lengthy season managing the MIT racing team, and spinning a technology company out of Woodward, Van Dyne Super Turbo. The innovative sails for Tetrahedron racing boats, for example, are the same shape as the molecules of ammonia created through Plastic to Green's innovative processes. Plastic to Green is the star of this show. However, Ed has developed an innovative process to turn waste plastics into market competitive carbon rods, carbon black, and ammonia, plus more, using plasma to break down plastic molecules and science to send the resulting molecules to the appropriate containers. Future cargo ships will burn an ammonia diesel blend. And in Ed's opinion, ammonia is the best and most stable way to move toward a hydrogen powered economy. The smoke in the studio during this podcast wasn't from Herb, it was my little brain overheating trying to listen and think and process and ask good questions. I think I did a pretty good job of it for a country kid, so please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Ed Van Dyne back to the Loco Experience Podcast. My guest today is Ed Van Dyne. And Ed is the founder, president, and CEO of Plastic to Green, his latest venture, as well as founder, president, team manager of Tetrahedron Racing. So, um, Can we start with the racing team? Sure. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thanks for being on. The racing team is an attempt to break the world speed record in sailing. Okay. The key to the idea is using a tetrahedron shape, which is the strongest structure known to man. Okay. And so we have a prototype boat already. That's made of steel and it's, uh, fairly big, 15 feet wide, 25 feet long and about 25 feet tall and it only weighs 400 pounds. A typical sailboat of that size, 25 footer would be three tons. And so the ability to make a lightweight. Sailboat is, you know, the, the initial idea behind it, but there's probably a dozen more patents that we are working on, um, for how to go fast with that sailboat. And so it will foil, unlike America's cup boat, it'll foil on three foils so that it's much more stable. And the other key is the current record holder is a boat that only goes one way. And so they put it into the water, and they go down the beach. Uh, and then they pull it. Right, as long as the wind is at your back, then you're good, but you have no way home. Yeah, you pretty much have to pull over, put it back on the beach, tow it, you know, carry it back to the other end of the beach, and put it back in the water. So it takes about four hours to do an individual run. So hopefully the wind is still there four hours later. Right. And so, uh, this, the idea behind this project, Boat is really to be able to go in both directions, sort of like a conventional, more traditional sailing vessel sail bot. Does it have a sail in the same way? It actually has three sails. Okay. So it has a main sail that's further back in two jibs, one to each side. So it utilizes the tetrahedron, uh, shape to the maximum effect by having the. You know where the right or the, the windward, uh, jib hold the boat down and you know when that's the side that wants to tip up. Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm. And then the, the, the leeward sail. Jib sail pulls the boat up out of the water to help. Oh. Prevent from burying the, the leeward, you know, uh, side of the boat, which is normally tipping and uses that wind force, uh, I guess almost like a Judo style against itself to keep the boat flat, more flat. Correct. Um, I'm embarrassed to say, but I don't know what the shape of a tetrahedron is. It's a pyramid of triangles. So it has a triangular base and then has a pyramid up from that. So three, three beams instead of four. Okay. Looks like a pyramid minus one corner. And that's that whole, um, that's the whole structure is that the thing that resembles that then? Correct. Okay, interesting. And so a very strange thing along the way when I was working on the sailboat is I came up with the idea for the lowest cost way to make ammonia. Which, uh, out of waste plastic, which is what plastic to Green founding idea came from. And about eight months later, I decided I was gonna join the Ammonia, uh, power Association, ammonia, ammonia Energy Association, I guess. Okay. Okay. And their logo was the exact same logo as my sailboat logo. No. And I said, the heck is going on here. And I realized that the ammonia molecule is actually a tetrahedron. Oh. And I was like, You know, blown away and laughing and falling on the floor, you know, with the sort of like, well, that's pretty Oh, God's got a sense of humor, somehow. Somehow. There's definitely some reason I So did you just stumble into the ammonia thing out of plastic? I mean, that wasn't related to the racing venture, necessarily, or One aspect was related in that I was studying the sailing and boating industry, and we had actually looked at, um, making some of our tetrahedron sails for large shipping vessels. And so making those large shipping vessels with sails is something that Michelin and some other big companies were working on. And we, I just took literally a prototype of the sailboat, um, you know, the top half, the sailing top half of my sailboat and dropped it onto a picture of a giant shipping vessel and basically made a picture of how you could use transcripts. tetrahedron cells on top of an existing boat without needing to add to the structure of the existing boat because the tetrahedron structure would take care of itself. Oh, that's so cool. And so, um, but in. more about the shipping industry, I learned that the future fuel of the shipping industry was going to be ammonia. And so they had already tried hydrogen, they had already tried other fuels, and they had concluded that their future carbon free fuel was going to be ammonia. And so when I, another thing You're like, well, that would be a big, big deal. Potential customer, right? And so, uh, a friend of mine asked me to look into how to make green hydrogen. And I've been annoyed with plastic waste. I'm a diver. And I, you know, I read an article 15 years ago or so that said, you know, when you put plastic in the trash, it goes to the dump, but it doesn't stay there. It gets up and floats away and it floats down the stream. Cause. Plastic floats, right? And so it floats out of the dump down the stream into the rivers into the ocean and being a diver I'm like, okay and and so for the past 15 years Every time I you know Take a wrapper off the top of a brand new ketchup bottle and I put it in the trash I apologize to Mother Nature for the fact that I'm not disposing of this properly. Yeah. Yeah and putting it in the dump I hope it stays in the dump right and doesn't end up When you say it floats, does plastic kind of work its way out of dirt? Yes. Kind of? It floats. Right. And so the dirt settles. It's lighter than the soil, and so over time, over 10, 000 years or whatever, 50 years, it'll work its way out of the dump and Sometime one day, you know, it depends on how buried the plastic is. Right. But it gets up out of the dirt and floats away and goes down to the stream and ends up in the ocean anyway. Right. Well, and if you recycle it, lately at least, it probably just ends up in the dump. Anyhow, at least in most of America. Correct, because only, um, about 9 percent of plastic gets sent to the recycling center, which is pretty low. Right. But only about 70, or only about 30 percent of what gets to the recycle center stays, or goes off to be recycled. Right. because, uh, a Coke bottle has the red ring around the top. So even if the cap is gone, the red ring is a different type of plastic. And if that red ring is still on the Coke bottle, it does not go to the recycler, it goes back to the dump. Oh, is that right? Yes. Because it's, they can't handle it. It's too labor intensive. Too labor intensive to cut red rings off of Coke bottles in order to recycle them. So the, the, the recycling guys only take the pure plastic that's properly prepared for them. That's very little. So every time you Mr. or Mrs. customer out there leaves a little red ring on the Coke bottle, you're basically throwing away, even if you recycle it. Correct. Try to. Yes. And lots of other problems. And lots of other problems. So tell me about, is burning ammonia already something that people do? Um, not quite yet. I mean, there are lots of startups and even Toyota. Toyota's developing an ammonia powered engine. Okay. That they'll be releasing in 2026. Oh, know which country it's going to be released in. Huh. But America's a good place to release it because ammonia is only about 70 cents a gallon. You do need two gallons for every one gallon of gasoline because it has a lower heating value. Right. But, you know, that makes it a dollar 40 a gallon compared to gasoline. Well, and as I, what I'm familiar with ammonia because of, uh, farming. Yes. My dad's a farmer in North Dakota, and I know that, like, natural gas is, you know, not too far chemically even from ammonia, right? Like, that's a big input source, at least, for that molecule. 99 percent of ammonia today is made from natural gas. Okay. Because, being CH4, it has four hydrogens, one carbon. And ammonia has three hydrogens, one nitrogen. Okay. And so it's very similar and so that's why they use steam methane reforming to be able to make the ammonia. Um, and third, because also they get 30 percent of their hydrogen from the water. Not just the, uh, the methane. And so the, uh, that's the primary way it's produced today. And when we take plastics apart and pull the molecules apart from the plastic, we only get about 10 to 14 percent hydrogen. So it's a fairly low ratio. But then when you add the nitrogen molecule to it from the air, you actually get more. mass you're shipping out than you cut in. And there's lots of nitrogen that's freely available by comparison. Correct. And so the nitrogen comes from the air. Now, most people think of fertilizer as nitrogen, right? And so that's the part that you want on the farm. Right. Well, you need something to fix it too. Right. You need something to hold it in place. And so that becomes the hydrogen. Now, and. Without ammonia, we would only be able to feed about 3 billion people on this planet. So thanks to ammonia, we can feed 7, 8, going on 9 billion people, right? And so, um, ammonia is never And more if we got our shit together, and a little more carbon in the atmosphere. We can't not make ammonia. We need it. to feed as many people as we have. Yeah. And, um, so that's a very important molecule. But if we're now gonna, you know, run on a non carbon based fuel in the future, we're gonna need a lot, lot more of it. And so, fortunately, the oil industry, and together with the plastics industry, make an awful lot of plastics that don't get recycled. Right. And our process can take all of those, including the food waste, the paper waste, the aluminum, think of a yogurt container. It's got some yogurt left in it and it's got the aluminum lid and that aluminum lid makes that piece of plastic unrecycled, right? Not to mention the paper label that wraps around the, the, you know, the plastic, that combination, that mixture of stuff, you know, we can take it all. Uh, because we're using what's called a medical waste destruction process as our front end. So this is a process that takes medical waste and basically breaks down the, the liquid that's still in there. The blood molecules basically cooks it all to inert molecules and it takes the, the gaseous part of the, you know, the plastics after they're gasified. They get destroyed by an even higher temperature plasma, and then that gas has enough energy in it that they run that gas into an engine, and that engine can run the process. Oh. So when I, when I saw the fact, and being a combustion engineer from my past automotive experience, Sure. We haven't covered yet. Um, the, uh, my, the combustion, you know, on that engine is only about 30 percent efficient. And so the fact that they could get, you know, essentially enough energy that a, an engine at 30 percent efficient could run the entire plasma. destruction process of the medical waste, I basically did it, you know, back of the envelope calculation that I was going to get more energy out than the energy the plasma took. Right. Right. It doesn't hurt that I'm a plasma engineer and invented a high energy plasma ignition at MIT in my youth. And that high energy plasma ignition I also knew was very highly efficient in how much energy I could deliver versus how much energy. It took from the battery. So yeah, from a car. So I think what I hear you saying is that this, this plasma engine kind of breaks this max of mess down and then outflowing from that is, is at least in part, is that this ammonia already? Or in that case, it's more of just like a, a fuel oil. No, it's not. Not even that. It's, it's a combination, um, done right. It's a combination of mostly hydrogen and carbon. Okay. But because of the food waste and the paper waste, There's small amounts of oxygen, but we're doing our best to keep the oxygen away from the hydrogen. So it doesn't convert the hydrogen and oxygen back into water, but it will combine itself with the carbon. Um, and so we'll still get some carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the ammonia that comes from that. paper and food waste. And can you capture that too? We'll capture it later. Okay. And we'll turn all the carbon monoxide into carbon nanotubes, which are extremely valuable at about between, you know, 15 and 50, 000 a pound. Okay. And there, they go to the That's for building, uh, those satellites and stuff. Well, for building chips. Oh, I see. Nowadays, that, uh, microchips are three dimensional. They're using, uh, carbon nanotubes in place of gold wires to connect the chip itself, the silicon, to the outside world. Hmm. Because, um, Carbon nanotubes are nearly superconductors, and so they conduct as well or better than gold and they're even at 50, 000 a pound. They're so lightweight that they're actually cheaper than gold, right? And so it is a it is a cost decrease substitute gold substitute in in a microchip Okay, so that's why they're so expensive. So when they convert In the existing process when you convert natural gas into ammonia, there's extra carbon, right? Where does that carbon go to? Typically, um, whenever they're using it for heating the water, to make the water steam, it all goes to the atmosphere. There's other opportunities to capture it, um, but for the most part, it is, you know, gone. It goes lost to the wilderness. Yeah. So it is one of the, um, something like number four in the world for how much carbon emissions are created by the ammonia industry. Oh, is that right? It's the fourth highest emitter in the world, I think. Interesting. Something like that. After farting cows somewhere. After cows in the oil industry. Right. Or at least the transportation industry fueled by the oil industry. So it seems like the trick here is, is really, I mean the technology for the plasma exists, the, um, Kind of the case has been made, but then getting all these molecules to separate themselves into tight little groups and go to their homes, uh, is part of the trick of the chemistry, or the physics, I guess, both? Most of that physics, at least on the, the side of, uh, like, separating gases. is pretty straightforward, right? But the carbon mostly comes out as a solid. And so what we need to do is keep that solid carbon from plugging up the filter, right? Because we need to stop the carbon from going any further down the stream and be able to then get the gases by themselves so that we can separate them. And, um, our intellectual property is really around taking the hydrogen out while it's still hot because you need high heat to make ammonia. And so the ammonia catalyst requires between 500 and 800 degrees Celsius, but we're going to destroy the plastics. with 5, 000 degrees Celsius, right? So it's cooling down at that temperature. It's cooling down to the temperature. It needs to be for making ammonia, but we need to not cool it too far as then we save a lot of energy because a lot of the energy of making ammonia is how much heat it takes. excuse me, to be able to make the ammonia in the ammonia catalyst. It takes high pressure and high heat. We're trying to conserve heat in order to conserve energy, in order to make that ammonia for less money than the current way of making steam methane reforming ammonia, which we're very confident at this point in time, we will be able to do. Well, and not only, Ammonia as a fuel for these ships and apparently Toyota's engine and stuff. And I do want to get into the physics of burning ammonia next, but, but even just as fertilizer too, that's one of the things that the, the climate fear thing, I'm like, well, that's great, you know, but we got to feed people, you know, and right now the fertilizer is being made by oil too. Correct. Natural gas and oil. Right. Well, obviously natural gas ultimately, but. And coal. Right. There is a coal way of making ammonia too. So. But it's not very highly utilized, um, again, because natural gas, at least in this country, is very, very inexpensive. Right. Whereas in Europe, now because of the war in Ukraine, natural gas is very expensive and about 150 plants that make ammonia have been shut down because they can't make ammonia in Europe that's competitive with ammonia made in the U. S. and shipped to Europe. Right. Right. Because we have low Right. You know, sort of what they call stranded natural gas, right? And we don't have enough ways of shipping them up. We'd like to use more of it, right? It's better than oil in a lot of ways because even if you know given it's just CH4 It only has one carbon molecule as a transition fuel. It's still better than, you know, other transition fuels, obviously ammonia being zero carbon will eventually win out, but it'll take time to build up the giant amount of production of it. Right. I mean, the market for ammonia today for fertilizer in total is about 78 billion in 2022. Okay. So it's. something more than that now, but it's expected to be 130 billion by 2030. And that's just for fertilizer and the current uses, right? Not even using it as a fuel. And how much is the market for diesel fuel in the market? That measure diesel fuels in the trillion, right? And, and you need two gallons of ammonia for every gallon of gasoline. So the amount of ammonia we have to increase in production, right? is just staggering also, but the plastic problem is staggering and solving that and solving that while making the future of hydrogen fuel is why we're doing plastic to green. You're in an interesting place in that if, you know, the world is successful at getting rid of all plastics and all oil based products, well, then you won't have any plastic stock, but you're not banking on that likelihood. There'll be a reduction in plastics, but think about The usefulness of where we were as kids, and we had glass bottles for milk, and you drop the glass bottle and crash it breaks on the floor. Today, you drop a milk jug and you pick it up and put it back and put it in the fridge, right? It doesn't. break, typically. And so there's uses for plastic that are never going to go away. Um, I was just looking at something, you know, maybe it doesn't, it has more than one use, but the plastic printer from Hewlett Packard on my, on my desk, the day that needs to, you know, go in the trash today, that would go in the trash and go to the landfill. But we can take that kind of a, even though it has 13 different plastics inside of it between the rollers and the, and the guides and the plastic shell on the outside, even the electronics, we can take that too. I was going to say the metals in there, because there's like rods holding the rollers on and stuff. They come out in the earlier stages of our process and eventually we'll get better and better about taking the metals and being able to separate them and based on their melting point and be able to get all the aluminums out one direction and all the steel out another direction and, you know, you know, the gold and, you know, the things in the electronics, the copper, you know, will come out and eventually it'll either be, you know, go to somebody who's going to try and extract that. Gold and copper out of the steel or whatever. Um, but, you know, for the most part, we'll get a, an ingot that can go to a metal recycler who can then metallurgically, you know, take it apart. And that's pretty standard in the metal. metallurgical industry. It's pretty well understood how to separate different kinds of metals. We won't be doing that, but we will be taking all the metals and ingots you can selling all the ingots we can and selling all the carbon. We can, our, our biggest volume output will be train cars full of carbon. You know, that will go to tire industry and other places. Um, Michelin and Bridgestone have asked for only. Uh, recycled carbon black, and so we'll have a unique recycled carbon black, and, you know, we're hoping to make some of our carbon much higher quality than the, than the tire industry requires, but, you know, we'll, The majority still needs to go to somebody who is a high volume user. And therefore, you know, Michelin and Bridgestone are on our list of companies we need to talk to, because ideally they're asking for carbon black coming from recycled tires. But tire recycling is a whole nother animal. And we are hoping to be able to take 10 percent tires overall, but there's still so much plastic. That's so much easier for us to break down than trying to break down tires. And tire recycling is, is sort of a different. That's a different puzzle. We'll do that with the next startup. Again, it'll be part of our company, but not 100 percent of our volume. Hopefully, we'll just design it to handle 10%. Partly because we have to handle certain levels of scrubbing. Whenever, if we're going to have a chemical plant with no smokestack, whatever is coming in, we have to be able to capture and, and hold onto and figure out where we're doing that kind of heat and melting all these things down with no smokestack, no smokestack. It's not a combustion process. It's a non combustion process. So We're essentially using my past combustion engineering in reverse to make sure that we absolutely never combust because, you know, that usually goes boom. Problems would happen at the pace that you're talking about moving material through here. And so we're going to use my old technology from MIT in reverse to make sure that we don't combust and we don't burn anything. Everything will be, uh, you know, essentially disassociated in a nitrogen environment. Um, cause we need that nitrogen hot also for the ammonia process anyway. And, uh, then we. Keep things from burning. And then we collect all the chemistry coming out and do something with it. Something useful, something circular, something like I said, to get the chlorine from PVC back to the people making PVC. So that chlorine they're using in their process to make their plastic comes from the plastic in the first place. And, you know, getting all of it is obviously a challenge, but getting, getting enough of it. For them to make a significant dent in where they get their chlorine today, which technically can come from seawater because there's chlorine and salt. And so salt is HCL. So therefore, you know, giving them back their chlorine that came out of their plastic and keeping that plastic out of the landfill and that, you know, chemistry from, you know, infecting our oceans and affecting our food. Yeah. You know, then the more challenging chemical is the PFOS chemicals, which basically is your Teflon cutting board that you have at home that everybody says, Oh, that's the cutting board to use when you're cutting your, your meat, because it, it holds onto less bacteria. Well, that's not really true, but, um, it is, you know, I'm a wood guy. I'm old school. I'm a wood guy too. And so anyway, but plastic cutting boards are made of Teflon, and Teflon is a forever chemical. So in the, in the environment, you could lay a Teflon cutting board in the sun, and it would sit there for 3, 000 years, not without breaking down. It would take 3, 000 years. Right. for even the sun in the sun to break it down in a landfill of three million. Yeah, exactly. And so being able to take that and then do something with the fluorine, we're going to obviously have to take it. Fortunately, it has a much higher melting point. So we will put it in what we call our third oven. And when we go to even higher temperature to break. So it's like Anything that's left after these first two phases, we'll just hit that with the superheater. Hit that with the superheater. And then the only thing we'll have left in that of high temperature stuff is silicon and, and the, uh, fluorinated plastics, which there happened to be a lot of, um, uh, 3m just lost 10 billion in a lawsuit for, for a, for a PFAS chemical in a, some product that they made that was poisoning people. So even though it's a forever chemical, it still is a poison in some respect. And so we have to be able to take that as well because it's a plastic. And so again, then we have to be able to take that fluorine out. Are we going to sell it back to the people making fluorinated plastics? No, we actually have to figure out how to. bury that in cement, and we're actually probably going to bury that in the silicon and, and, and sell that sand back to cement makers. So that fluorinated those fluorine molecules, which came out of rock. Originally, and get put back into rock to hopefully hold on to them for another million years. And then they're trapped in there, and they're good, it won't hurt anybody using the concrete, whatever. I'm pretty sure it won't, but I, again We'll do some research. We'll do research to make sure that it gets safely It's not like radioactive or anything, right? No. So as long as it's It's just physically separated from the environment, right? And then we'll still get the hydrogen and carbon out of the rest of those Fluorinated plastic you talked about this blank carbon that we had our block carbon. Did you call it black carbon carbon black carbon black? So that's different than the monotubes that you talked about before That's like the super high quality stuff is the little monotubes and then the rest is Right. Carbon black is what's in everything black. That black cup right there. That black cup right here. My phone case, you know. Literally everything black today is carbon black, as the ink. Your ink cartridge in your printer is printing out carbon black onto your paper. Um, so, it's everywhere. Um, you know, just think, look at something black, whether it's Black anything. Our earphone thingies. Yep. It's all made using carbon black, whether it's, you know, as the ink or it's buried in the actual substrate of the plastic to make it black. So is your, uh, is your racing team feeling neglected now that you've got this new plastic to green thing you're probably taking a lot of time spending on? Well, fortunately I didn't have a very big team, and so my one, one other partner in that company is. Yeah. off doing some other startup work and, and we'll, we'll get back to him when, when plastic to green can sponsor the sailboat, building our cash cow here real quick, real quick as relative 10 years would be a big success, I'm sure we have a chance to be a big success in 10 years. Yeah, no. That seems like the, my detector of good ideas was ringing pretty loud when we were talking at the. Verboten brewing there the other day. Um, tell me about the process when you do burn ammonia. Okay. You said that's, what is the chemical compound of that? NH3, nitrogen. So, um. I don't know if it burns or if it does something else. It's fancier still. If you chemically modify it, it burns extremely well. Okay. Because it's the precursor to TNT. Oh. Okay. Dynamite. is made from ammonia that goes into ammonium nitrate that goes into something else that makes TNT. I don't, I don't know the whole process and I don't need to know that whole process. So it's funny because we've been approached by two different manufacturers of, of dynamite that are like, yeah, we'd really like to make green dynamite. I scratched my head and go, Okay, we can help you do it, but again, the real reason they want to do it is because we can make ammonia cheaper than they can now. And it's the cheaper ammonia that they really They want cheap dynamite, not green dynamite. Exactly. If they can be green and cheap, then that's why they're going to do it. And so it's really funny. But, um, uh, back to how do you combust it? Ammonia, the reason I like it as a combustion engineer is because it does not ignite in, at room temperature and pressure. So you can have a leak and you can bring out a lighter and try and light it. It will not explode. It will not burn at atmospheric temperature and pressure. My, is it, because it's Burn your eyes and stuff, right? Well, that's a different thing. I mean, we've stayed cautious around the, uh, anhydrous ammonia, or maybe that's a little different material. No, that's exactly what it is. Same stuff. What's anhydrous mean? Anhydrous just means without water. Oh, okay. So what you have as ammonia under your sink is 95 percent water and 5 percent ammonia, and it's still stinky, right? Right, right. But when it's anhydrous or water free, now it's, uh, you know, very stinky and it'll make your eyes water. more from an acidic reaction. Okay. It'll, uh, it also, it doesn't really, I mean, I think it hurts your lungs, but I don't, you know, it's not that you, it's the stingingness of the poison is more of a, it's more like it stops your reaction is to stop breathing and it's like, yeah, it's like getting a wind knocked out of you almost if you do catch a whiff. Exactly. And so you don't want to breathe it and that's why you stop breathing. That's what can kill you. Run away from an ammonia leak. Unfortunately, a very standard, little bit special than what you would buy at a hardware store, but a fairly standard respirator. Make sure I say that correctly. Uh, you can walk into an ammonia leak with no problem and breathe normally. Oh, cause it's a big molecule that that respirator can screen out pretty easy. Screen it out. Huh. And so, it's really good that, you know, you, you can for fairly, you know, you want to have the respirator that covers your eyes also, cause your eyes will be stinging and you'd close them and not be able to see. So if you just put a respirator mask over your whole face, you can walk right in and go solve the leak. Huh. The other thing you can do is, because, uh, ammonia loves water, you can literally just spray the area with water. Oh, right. It'll just grab onto those molecules. It'll just grab onto those molecules and wash it down as fertilizer going down the drain. Right. And so, it's a very, you know, it's very, comparably safe. Comparably, less volatile than gasoline everywhere and whatever. Less volatile than gasoline, less volatile than, than. like a lithium ion battery exploding, which can even explode or at least catch fire even underwater where lithium burns underwater. So the fact that an ammonia leak can be stopped by a standard fire department is pretty good. Right. Right. I'm sure there's a lot of fire departments that are kind of cool. Watching some of those videos you see online and going like the look of that, right? Exactly fun. So, um, And it's actually PFAS chemicals that you need to put out a lithium fire. So here you are spraying down a lithium, right? With PFAS chemicals that are poisoning the environment, you know after with whatever right forever after that Right forever after that interesting forever. Literally. I mean, that's why they're also called forever Chemicals. Well, when you say PFOS, is it phosphorus or what are you talking about? No. The F is the fluorine. Oh, okay. And, and I don't know what all the other symbols stand for, but there's two different ways of making the acronym with a P F O S and a P F A S, but all of those. They're all yucky. They're all. They're all yucky. You know, going to be here forever and, and the challenge is, um, water treatment plants don't know what to do with them. So they basically get them in their solids and then they spread their solids that they get out of the, out of the water treatment plant on a field and that just dries up and blows away. And so the reason we have so many PFAS chemicals in our environment is because of the fact that it's. It's blowing. Is that those microplastics you hear about sometimes? Most of microplastics are PFAS because they don't break down. They're going to be here for 3000 years. It's little tiny particles and we're just spreading them on field like butter. Right. And then of course it doesn't stay there when that storm blows up and blows them away. That's one storm we just had last weekend taking it a long ways. Exactly. And so I didn't, I wasn't really aware. That's really the. bulk of the environmental, or a significant amount of the environmental contamination is we've already pulled it out of the sewage plants and stuff, but then we don't know what to do with it from there. Right. And that's why we're going to be able to take that. And obviously we'll take a little more money to take that, but it's going to be regulated here pretty soon, but it has to be disposed of, needs to be disposed of properly. Whether or not we can. take the dirt part out before we put it through our plant or not is still to be determined. So hopefully there's a way to get the PFAS chemicals to either float or sink or do something different than the dirt. Right. So we don't have to put so much dirt through our plant, but we will if we have to in order to keep those PFAS chemicals out of the environment. Interesting. And you say a plant, uh, what are you, I guess. What are you imagining needing? Are you raising capital right now for this venture? We're raising capital, uh, for early stage. We, but we have some significant capital available to us from the department of energy because they have a, what's called a title 17 loan program, and they're loaning money only to innovative ways of making hydrogen. And so they are trying to help stand up the hydrogen economy, With 72 billion for hydrogen, but they'll loan us the money, but they're only loan us the money when we show that we're at a technology readiness level eight. And right now we're at technology readiness level five. Okay. Because we're using all off the shelf equipment, so the medical waste destruction front end and then the gas separators and then the ammonia back end, that's all off the shelf equipment. So we're fairly far along for a startup that's only a year old. Yeah. Yeah. Invalidating that with this supplier, this supplier and this supplier, we're at technology readiness level five. But originally they said you only needed to be at technology readiness level six in order to get the billion dollar loan. And, and so we said, okay, here's how we're going to get to technology ready now. This level six by doing testing at this supplier, this supplier and this supplier and not actually building our own prototype. Well between when the loan program started in December, six months later, they basically came back and said, well, we've changed our minds. We really, to give you a prototype to be a billion dollar loan. We really need to be at a higher technology readiness level than just six. And so that's put about a three year timeline into our original timeline. But that's okay. Now we're building a concept lab. We're building it in a trailer in order to make sure that that is mobile. Um, in order to be able to take it to our different, uh, potential strategic partners that are gonna give us their plastic. And so we want to be able to test, you're just gonna like, throw it into this bucket and or the cistern thing and the plastic goes through and Yeah. And out comes the carbon and the, and ammonia. Um, that first, uh, you know, mobile lab will just do ammonia and, and carbon black. Yeah. And then. Then we'll build a fancier, uh, pilot plant somewhere here in Colorado to validate the whole process and get the 2, 000 hours of runtime necessary, that's three months of 24 7 operation that we need to be able to demonstrate the technology to the Department of Energy so that from there we can get the, a year or so later, get the billion dollar loan done. So we can stand up where now our target is to put up three, uh, 500 ton per day plants in the United States. Now those plants will be on the Mississippi river, on the Hudson river, you know, in places where there are very large sources of plastic that we can bring down the river, you know, or, you know, in the San Francisco Bay area, some places like that, where we can bring in enough plastic by barge and be able to take out. ammonia and carbon black by barge or by train. And so it's a very challenging to find these places, but technically over time, just to keep up with the plastic problem just in the U S alone, we'll eventually need 40 or 50 plants in the United States just to keep up with the plastic problem. Wow. What, uh, Um, so this qualifies for the hydrin, hydrogen funding because it's the NH, right? That's Right. So Ammonia is considered a hydrogen fuel. Okay. That's when one of the challenges I've had, uh, when I hear people talking about moving from oil to hydrogen or, you know, whatever, hydrogen is going to be power of our future. I'm like, well, we should do more nuclear because hydrogen seems really scary and dangerous, but Correct. Frankly, even just talking about ammonia. Ammonia. Makes it seem a lot less scary. Yes. I never finished answering your other question. Oh, yes. Um, which is, how does it burn when it doesn't burn? Um, well, there's two ways to burn it. One way is to mix it with another fuel. So a lot of the, uh, big ships that run on giant diesel engines will still use the diesel fuel as the pilot in ignition. So about three to five percent diesel fuel. You know, just to start the flame. Yeah, yeah. And when that ignites just from compression, Right. That will then ignite the ammonia and get the ammonia broken apart. Once it breaks apart into hydrogen and nitrogen, it basically burns fairly easily. You know, actually fairly quickly when it's in the form of hydrogen. So hydrogen burns faster and ammonia burns extremely slowly when it's actually burning by itself. You can get it going, but it usually takes a pilot fuel. So the other approach is actually using a. cracking catalyst to take some of the ammonia apart. So you break some of the ammonia apart into hydrogen and nitrogen, and then you mix it because ammonia is a gas at room temperature and pressure. And so you put the gas into the engine, direct injection, or port injection, doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But you then, with 30 percent hydrogen and 70 percent ammonia, your fast burning hydrogen mixed with your slow burning ammonia gives you a burning rate of almost identical to gasoline. And so that's how you can burn it without needing a pilot fuel. You use some of its, of itself broken apart. Is that like a mechanical cracker? No, it's catalytic and it's high temperature or it's ultraviolet light. Oh. You know, can, you know, cause that's actually how. ammonia breaks down in the environment, it breaks down from sunlight, and when ammonia breaks down from sunlight in the field, you know, the nitrogen is available to the, because you want the nitrogen for the plants, you want it to be left behind. Oh, okay. I'm starting to understand more. Because, you know, nitrogen is the key component that they need for the fertilizer for the plants. Right. I have to say, uh, conducting an interview with you is different than many of my guests because I have to, like, not just listen, because that's always part of it, but I have to think as well if I'm going to, uh, keep up. Keep up, Buttercup. Um, so you're an MIT guy. You've had a lot of experience, um, in that field. Extra smart people then, but you've kind of hung around Colorado your whole career. Only, I ran a company, uh, Adrenaline Research as a spin out from MIT in the suburbs of Boston. Okay. And so that was my MIT spin out company. And, um, I ran that for 14 years and then sold it to Woodward and Woodward brought me to Colorado. So I've been here in Colorado for 20 years now, five years working for Woodward and then spun out with a Van Dyne Super Turbo. Yeah. And then, uh, Um, moved on to, uh, wave solar technology, which was a, a sun, yeah, um, a thermal solar technology that, you know, one didn't work quite as we thought it might, but it was also based on solar thermal technology. Power. And, um, at that time, the, um, the every other solar PV company in the country was going bankrupt because the Chinese were used of dumping solar panels on the United States. Right, right. Oh, my God. But You know, I couldn't get any funding for a very different solar technology, you know, at a time when it was blacklisted because of every other solar company bankruptcy. So I gave up on that and, uh, started, you know, went off to California and, and moved to California, lived there for two years and, okay. And then came back to start the solar, to start the sailboat company. And so it's been a whirlwind tour with COVID in the middle. And I had a job at a winery during COVID. And that's when I started building my sailboat and they had a scrap yard of stainless steel in the back of the, the winery shop. And I asked the boss if I could have some of that, stainless steel tubing in the backyard and I built my first tetrahedron in the welding shop. Now was this just like an idea or a dream that came to you this tetrahedron shape and applying that to a sailboat or? I had actually applied for a patent and I decided I'd apply for the patent myself. I'd written so many patents before, uh, back in The year I moved here, so, um, probably 2004. Okay. And that was a tetrahedron, a patent for a tetrahedron sailboat. Oh. But, I, you know, being naive or being new to writing my own patents, I checked the wrong box. I checked the design patent box, not the utility. And so when I got feedback from the patent office that they were, you know, you know, You know, you know, every patent comes back, they're going to deny the patent for some reason. Right, right. And I went and checked with a lawyer and he said, well, what's the point of pursuing this patent? You don't want this design patent anyway. Because, no, a design patent is very, like a patent that here's, If you're doing something like a drawing or a, I'm trying to think of the right terminology, like a piece of artwork can be a design patent, but a piece of technology has to be a utility patent because someone just changes one thing. on the drawing and they violate, they don't violate your patent because they changed one tiny little thing, whereas a utility patent is about the idea and you're in you. And so I basically filed, checked the wrong box. Had I checked the right box or checked with somebody before I checked that box, I would have done better. So I actually have a patent filed on this sailboat from 20 years ago. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Interesting. from 2004. It's been simmering for a while. It's been simmering for a while, and I'm like, here I am in a, in a, with a pile of tubing. I'm gonna go build my tetrahedron sailboat. And so I've, I came up with some other patentable ideas, and I do have one patent filed for the, uh, For that company, but the overarching idea of the tetrahedron sailboat by itself using a tetrahedron to make a sailboat out of is not, you know, something I'll be able to patent because one, I filed it already to somebody else had something similar from years before anyway, so it's really, you just have to set the world speed record and then people will notice exactly by your sale accessories or different things. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I wanna, we usually, uh, jump in the time machine and go all the way back, and I'd like to spend a little more time on Van Dyne's Super Turbo in particular, but also here are some of these other chapters, but Um, can we go back to, to Little Ed, uh, as a seven year old or something like that? Where were you at? Seven year old Little Ed, um, was having trouble reading. Oh. And so my, uh, I would try and read the book Dick and Jane when I was about six and my younger brother was about three and he could guess the words faster than I could read them because I was dyslexic. Basically the, you know, cat looked like T, you know, C, A or something. Right, right. I don't know what that word is, you know, because I couldn't see it. You know, I just, everything was mixed up, numbers, letters. And so, um, it was very annoying to me that, you know, my mom just stopped trying to teach me to read. And, and so I, again, little Ed felt, you know, abandoned by his teacher mother who wasn't willing to teach him anymore. And so I managed to sort of get through school by being a very good listener. Right. And, you know, and I couldn't take notes. The auditory. And so I had to just listen and then, you know, I would, you know, read the first chapter, the last chapter, and the title of every chapter in between, and I'd write a book report. And you know, and all I cared about was getting a C, you know, because as long as I pass with a C, Is that right? You know, it didn't matter. You never got diagnosed as dyslexic? Oh, I got diagnosed, eventually. But they just didn't know what to do about it. They didn't. They didn't know what. Yeah, they didn't they like, you know, a doctor would say he'll outgrow it, right, you know, and things like that. And so where were you at? Like in the country or I was in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Okay. My parents moved there when I was 10 years old. All right. And you know, the classes were challenging and the school was somewhat challenging. And so they assumed I was going to go to, you know, You know, the industrial, you know, tech high school. But I went to the visit there, actually took a class there in eighth grade. Um, and it basically felt like jail, you know? And so I'm like, man, this is a weird place. You know, it's going to be hard for mom and dad to send me here willingly. Well, and so fortunately I took a welding class in eighth grade and, and, and. Did pretty well, but I, I had enough of a sense that going to the technical high school was going to be a problem, you know, is going to be jail time. And so, um, fortunately our regular high school and that in Sudbury, uh, Lincoln Sudbury high school was extremely well equipped with shop classes. Okay. And so they had a metal shop, a wood shop, a auto shop, a high, a wood shop. A fiberglass shop for making boats. Oh, cool. Um, they had a really good architecture program. Um, trying to think of, there's gotta be at least two or three more. An electronic shop, a computer lab. We were in the town next to the headquarters of digital equipment corporation. So we had a VAX PDP 11, which at the time was. Better computer than when I went to college that they had at the college because it was, you know, the, the kids of the deck, you know, executives had the best, you're right at the hub almost of, uh, the technology. And so, um, You know, I basically took every, I never had a free period. I took every shop class. I even passed, you know, automotive, advanced automotive shop class as a freshman and caused two seniors not to graduate because I screwed up the curve on the test for AutoShop, and that, and the two seniors, and two seniors failed. Yeah, I got my car keyed a few times. Fortunately, I was painting my own cars at the time. So, I said, well, I guess I gotta repaint this one. So, anyway, you know, so my, my life as a, you know, as a kid was basically repairing cars in my parents garage. driveway and my dad, uh, bought me my first 25 car when I was 12. And so I fixed that up and sold it and, um, you know, got onto the next car and the next car. And so, um, when I was 15, um, I went to the registry one day. Of course, I'm driving to the registry by myself. Yes. We couldn't get one until you were 16. And, um, I got to the registry and, um, and the lady says, You can't title another car this year without a license. I said, A license for what? And she says, A license to be a used car dealer. I said, Okay, how much does that cost? She said,$435. I said, what do I get for my$435? Right? She said, A repair plate, a discount on insurance. Um, the list went on and on and on. I said, okay, can you look up one more thing in the rule book? And she says, what? I said, do you have to have a driver's license right, to get a used car dealer license as she looks and looks? She says, nope. I said, sign me up. So that was quite amusing when I came home. Did you keep slinging cars after that for a long time? Yeah, until I retired at age 18 to go to college. Interesting. So you, like, kind of bought and sold and fixed. stuff and took all these different classes so you could fix the electrical, you could fix the paint. Yep, so when I was a junior in high school, about a year after I got my used car dealer license, um, my guidance counselor came to me and says, you can graduate this spring. I'm looking at him going, why? You know, and he says, because You have so many credits from all your shop classes that you, all you have to do is sign up for one summer English class to get to, you know, three and a half years of English and you can graduate. And so I'm like, I'll think about that. And so I literally went home. It felt like that afternoon, but it was probably. That week sometime, but I walk into the kitchen behind my mother, the teacher, right? And she is talking to my aunt without noticing that I'm standing behind her on the other side of the counter. And she says, Oh, Ed, he's not going to college. He's going to be a mechanic for the rest of his life. You know, because, you know, he's making more money in the driveway. Then I make as a teacher and she knew that because my dad was my banker. And so she's, you know, she had the correct knowledge. I didn't quite know what she made for a living, super flattering. Well, I felt completely devastated. My, my reaction to that comment was, Oh, shit. My mom's giving up on me again, you know, here I am, you know, working hard to prove to her that I can, you know, succeed and be smart enough to make it through school. And yeah, I didn't care to get better than a C in English class, but I was getting straight A's in math and, you know, And so I had already taken, uh, physics one in, as a junior. And so I basically decided at that moment that I was going to college just to prove her wrong. Was it just you and your little brother or was there more siblings? I have an older sister and she, It was already about to go off to college. I see. She was only a year older than I was. And so, I, you know, said to myself, Okay, I have to sign up for advanced physics, calculus, you know, all these other things. So your senior year was a little different than you might have thought it was going to be. Yeah, it was a lot tougher, you know, the year than, than, you know, high school had been up until that point. Yeah. And I still got to take shop classes, but not quite as many. And, um, and I just knew I was going to college. And, and so even that summer, after she said that I got on a Greyhound bus and took myself on college tours. They, they took my brother, took my sister, you know, but not Ed. Ed had to take himself all the way to Purdue, Indiana from Boston. And to get to, to tour Purdue, to tour, I came back on the way back, went to University of Michigan, went to, um, I didn't know you were leaving though. Did they not be like, Hey, maybe we can go to this next one? My mom put me on a bus and said, let me know when you come back and you need a ride home. Okay. And so, yeah. And so, it's a very interesting black sheep kind of feeling there with, uh, especially that they were doing those things with your siblings. Yep, and so I went to GM Institute as that's where I really wanted to go because they were basically a subset of General Motors. They're now called, not Rensselaer, they're called, um, Kettering Institute is what they're called today. And, um, I went to Cornell and Rensselaer on the way back on the, on the Greyhound bus. Okay. So I literally slept on Greyhound buses every night for, for a week and toured. You know, five, six different colleges, you know, all by myself at 17 and got back home and there's no internet. There's no cell phones, nothing like that. You're looking, you're going to the phone booth, looking for a map of the city so you can figure out where 22nd and 54th street intersection is with all my own money earned from making, you know, selling, fixing and selling cars. And, um, And so, you know, taking taxi rides from the Greyhound station to get to the schools and things like that. It was, you know, challenging and looking at maps to figure out which overnight bus was going to take me the farthest. Right. So I could actually get a little bit of sleep that night. Overshoot your mark and come back the next morning quick. I don't remember showering for that whole week. But anyway. You're probably right by the time you got there, but that's okay. I did have changes of clothes, you know. So where did you land? I don't know. And so I ended up, uh, um, fortunately because of my dyslexia, being able to take the, um, the SATs untimed back in my day, the SATs were a major scoreboard getting into college. And so it took me about eight hours to do the. The English portion of the SATs and about three, three and a half hours to do the math portion. Yeah. Only because of the word problems. Right. Right. I could do the math. Okay. It was the word problems and being able to understand them enough to try to guess that what the word problem is trying to get to, but probably not very smart to do that. And so I got high enough scores in math. Then I got into North, I got into every one of those colleges except for. General Motors Institute, which is where I would have gone if I had gotten in. But I didn't even know at the time, because of the lack of internet, that, uh, GM Institute or at that time was free. So because it was free, everybody who came from a poor household, but had straight A's, you know, applied to that school to get into General Motors because, you know, it was free. Well, and circle me a little bit, is this like the, or I don't know what. Like late 60s or something? 80s? I don't even know how old you are. Um, I, I went to college in 1980. 1980, okay. Um, so 1980, so yeah, so the, it was still like the GM and Dodge and, and whatever had done some consolidation, the 70s weren't. Good to them necessarily, but the 1979 oil crisis, right? You're compounding their problems of having only big cars, right? Right after the 1973 oil crisis, you know, they came out with the Pinto and the Vega and I think some crappy cars, but You know, then they were hit again in 79. Right. And then you got the Reliant and the Aries and different things like that. Mostly you got four cylinder. The Toyotas and Hondas are really kicking their ass, both in size and fuel economy and reliability, all of a sudden things changed. And so. Yeah, it was a very in flux industry at the time. And so I, um, I graduated from Northeastern and went to an interview at Ford and, and I got the job at Ford and I asked them, okay, what am I going to do at this job? Cause I, there was actually the interview and then going back and, you know, um, and what did you get a degree in? What were you pursuing? Engineering and mechanical engineering. Sure. And so, um, when I went back to Ford for the pre job interview, the guy told me I was gonna basically be in charge of the little wire that looks like an S hook that's between the button of the door lock and the lock. Oh. And that was going to be my job. I said, I made those in high school out of coat hangers. Right. So I said, what am I going to do at week two? And the guy says, no, that's your job for a year. You're like, I quit. I can't do it. I said, I don't know if I could handle this. So I went back and I, and I was a co op student at a company called Draper Laboratories, which was part of MIT or a spin out of MIT, but I didn't quite uh, the whole affiliation with MIT at the time. So, um, I, but I had already joined the MIT racing team, which was racing cars, formula V racing cars, in sports car club of America races, and so I had already joined them the year before because I was from Michigan. walking right past the racing club as I went back and forth to work as a co op student. That's the main reason I picked Northeastern because I could have job experience. And where is Northeastern? It's right downtown Boston. Okay. Yep. Um, right near Symphony Hall. Okay. That's really a nice part of Boston. About two blocks from, uh, the Prudential Center. Yes. Yeah, you see the Big buildings, the Prudential's, one of the two big buildings. Gotcha. Uh, at least in Old Boston. Now there's a few more tall ones too, but back in those days there were only two skyscrapers. Gotcha. And the Prudential building and the, and the John Hancock building. And so I lived downtown and I was going back and forth to MIT Right. Through MIT's campus on the way to work as my co-op job. Yep. And so I just, I, you know, decided that if I stayed with Draper Laboratory. Cause they were offering me a job upon graduation. Um, they said, you know, uh, you know, come to work for us. And it was more interesting than the little wire between the door lock. I was doing robots. I was developing robots, which we way much higher tech than the door lock wire, not the door lock. Just the wire between the door lock and the door, and then lock. And so I, um, I decided to stay there because then I could work on that race car. And, and, you know, still get my automotive passion there. And still do some really cool robotics work. And, uh, when I sat down with the head of, um, uh, personnel, on my first day as an engineer at Draper Laboratories, he said, Oh, by the way, you can take classes at MIT. Oh. And I said, you've got to be kidding me, right? And he says, no, they're free, and, but they don't have any night classes. So you have to leave work and go to, go to class. How many could I take? You can only take one a semester. Okay. Because you're leaving work to go to class. But that's how supportive Draper Laboratories was for education. And, and so, Basically, I, you know, I went to work at Draper Laboratories and, you know, immediately took over the racing team from the PhD student who had been running it and wasn't putting enough time in and had, had to, you know, focus on his, getting his PhD. And so I took over running the racing team. So I was doing that job full time. Did you have a background in racing? Had you been racing some of these cars you were buying and selling and slicking? Not legally. Right, right. Right. Right. What was your favorite, by the way, we'll do a quick flashback, but your favorite fast car that you bought when you were a high school guy, uh, I had two. The fastest drag racing car was my, uh, Dodge Charger with a 383 Magnum and a four speed, a pistol grip shifter. And, but the shifting was like an entire arm length, you know, it's this giant lever. Hit the dash almost with it in the front. He went from the seat all the way to the dash to shift gears. Um, and that was a hilarious car because it never drove straight line. You'd just drag race it and it would just be sideways the whole way down the quarter mile. Sometimes it was sideways left, sometimes it was sideways right. Right, but it was never straight. You know, and you had to put the suicide knob on it because you couldn't keep up with how fast it was 30 turns locked in. It was just ridiculous. So if you couldn't turn that wheel fast enough, you lost it. And so that was my favorite drag car. And then I, I set up a Camaro as a road racer. And because Sudbury's roads were a very, well, Windy, and they were basically cow pasture. Nice. Right. So the, so the, the roads were created by the cows, not by the cars. Yep, yep. And, and then just paved over after a time. There's some roads out in Southwest Wisconsin that are kind of like that too, where it's just like crooked. And so I had been road racing, uh, and, and, Literally. Again, not legal road racing. Exactly. Very not legal. And, and, and I had a reputation in town that don't, don't race me on any road in Sudbury. Right. Because there was two kids that never made it home, you know. They lived, but they ran into something trying to keep up with Ed. Exactly. So, I sort of taught myself how to road race, and then once I got to MIT, I started road racing, you know, for real, with a real race car, and that was a lot of fun. Well, and that was kind of your first entrepreneurial venture, too, it sounds like. Well. But, do you mind if we take a quick break? Sure. And I want to come back to that. Okay. And we are back. Okay. And that was a really good bathroom break. So when we left off, you were managing the MIT racing team. Yep. And you're, and you're not even at MIT, right? Like you got one class. I got one class a semester. And so I'm taking classes and, and having a blast, uh, taking classes because I get to leave work. Right. You know, and then, you know. You know, come back to work and work on a robotics project. We managed to get that robotics project done. It had been delayed a year already, actually been delayed two years already. And we got an extra two more years and I got, I started managing the project cause the engineer that was on the project, um, you know, I, I sort of managed from. Like a junior position, but the engineer that was doing the software was technically the senior manager, but he was an introverted guy, you know, who loved clicking away at the keyboard and doing his software. So I took over as running the project and we took it from, you know, getting a two year extension to completing the whole project six months later. Oh, wow. And so nine months later, we were taking that robot. out to upstate New York to deliver it to another company that was going to take all of what we had researched and come up with for that and, and take it to the next level and commercialize it and build those robots for the sewing industry. It was actually a robot that could sew a pair of sweatpants every 17 seconds and with no hands. Literally, you take the, the, the cloth out of the, um, Die Cutter, and present it to the machine, it would unfold it, sew the seams, and open it up a long way, and fold it over, and align the other seam, and sew the other seam, and Oh, about as fast as you can watch it. Not quite, I mean, it's It, because it had six stations, each station had to work within 17 seconds. Oh, I see. So it wasn't quite blurry, but it was still fast as any robot had ever sewn any piece of clothing ever before. And so, um, the other guys on the, that group were working on a robot that would just sew a single suit sleeve and that's all it would do. And, and, and it had much. Much more expensive hardware, and it couldn't sew us just a suit sleeve in less than like two minutes. And so we definitely sort of, you know, kicked, uh, kicked butt on that project. Well, it starts to be like a good sewer could do the suit sleeve way faster than that. Oh, absolutely. But a good sewer probably couldn't do it in 17 seconds on the, or maybe about that, but. About that. We were going almost as fast as conventional sewing, but the key was they were having a hard time getting people. So, basically, the whole industry was leaving the U. S. to go to China. Right. And so the whole idea is that the cotton was all grown here, shipped to China, made into clothing, and shipped back. And so the whole idea was trying to, um, be able to keep the industry in this country because the cotton was here to begin with. And so automating it was the focus of that robotics group. Yeah. One would think almost that. Automation could have kept that here. Maybe it was just too far behind at the time. Cause we still do that, right? With, we raise a lot of cotton here and send it over there and they turn it into stuff and bring it back. Pretty much. Um, because again, it is still labor intensive and, and, but automating things like sewing is a very challenging concept. And so one of my, And there's all these different sizes and things, right? You know, one of my first patents was actually on a pneumatic robot that could align the cloth really quickly by doing it with air cylinders instead of with electronic robots. And so that was my first patent I filed on behalf of Draper Laboratories. Okay. as a pneumatic robot for basically, uh, doing very fast sewing, you know, alignment of the top to the bottom piece so that you could feed it to the sewing machine. That particular type of sewing machine trims about a 16th to an eighth of an inch off the edge of the material as it sews. So you'd have a looser, slight overlap where the air Could flow between or something is what you're trying to do. You can have an eighth of an inch error between the two pieces of cloth and still be accurate enough for the sewing machine to trim it and sew it at the same time. And so it was a really fun thing to do. And I had been doing it already as a co op student, but all of a sudden as a full time engineer, I took over the project. And I designed the whole last sixth stage of the, of the robot. Uh, And, and got it all the, you know, got the whole thing working and essentially supervising the supervisor as to what to do in software while I got everybody else to do all the mechanics of building the machine. Well, it seems like you've got some like Elon Musk esque kind of things like, I know what needs to be done. Just let me lead this team. And I'm going to make sure everybody gets their stuff done too. Right. Because it's not always easy. Like, especially for engineers, they tend to see the. Problem right in front of them. Not the bigger problem as easily. Correct. So your man on the streets helped you there. Yeah, while I was running the racing team, going to class, working full time, I was also designing my own racing car. Okay. So after four years of running the team, I Like on the side. Yeah, it was a secret skunk works project kind of. They knew you were working on stuff, but not quite what. No, it wasn't very secret. I actually got help from a CAD group and at MIT, where they designed, they gave me my own CAD program to be able to design the shape of the bodywork. And we, we went up to New Hampshire, we found the 3D printer in the United States. Okay. And we 3D printed race car bodies. Okay. Uh, from this CAD program. Program that I made the CAD students, the group that won, got the job of actually making an output from the shape of the design to the, the, what's called an STL file, which was brand new at the time to make a stereolithography model. And is this a plastic? Yeah, plastic. It was made with ultraviolet Lee cured plastic resin. And so I took that to the head of the, the, um, Wind tunnel laboratory, and I said here I want you to test these and he's like, what are these? I said they're race cars. He says no. What are these? I said, oh, they're 3d printouts. Right. And he had never seen one before. Because it was such new technology. And so I had learned about it at Draper Labs, and then I made my race car bodies out of it. Two different designs. And was that what the body, was that what your design was about, the aerodynamic stuff? Was it strapped on kind of a traditional chassis kind of element, or did that not matter? We had very strict rules in the class we were in, called Formula V, Formula V, and so those strict rules, you know, there were limitations of what we could and couldn't do. We couldn't use wings on the car, so I had to come up with ground effects and other ways of making downforce and things like that. And so, um, you know, I basically, you know, just studied Formula One. And everybody had the same power platform, basically, kind of thing? Exactly, the same Volkswagen power plant. Okay. And so, um, You know, so I took these two body designs to the wind tunnel and, um, and basically had the first 3D printed parts ever wind tunnel tested at MIT. Oh, interesting. And, and they just had a blast, you know, doing it for me. And so I had a lot of help. Yeah, yeah. You know, designing and, you know, building that race car because the whole team was like looking forward to this whole design of a new race car. So then, then did it compete? Yeah. Like, did you take this out on the circuit? I drove it for four years. Okay. In SCCA racing. And so. Okay. Had lots of fun. But I was also then, at that point, starting my own company at the very, at the same time. Okay. So I had, at that point, um, spun out of MIT with my plasma ignition technology. Oh, going way back to there. They're going back to the kind of the story we started with, right? Because I only worked for Draper Laboratories for three years. Okay. And then I started my own company on the idea that I had based on a PhD student that was there doing spark plug research. Okay. And whenever he got back with his movies developed, he would show the racing team because we were the only people in the building at nine o'clock at night. You know, and so he'd come back with these developed movies and go, you want to see some combustion movies? And so when I saw the combustion movie of this really special spark plug, I'm like, Oh, that's really cool. And, you know, and I basically kept asking him questions and, you know, he kept thinking I was bothering him. So he gave me the job, uh, cause he was German and he gave me the job of proofreading his, his PhD thesis, which was fantastic. 400 pages. Okay, so here's the dyslexic kid. Oh God. Being handed 400 pages to periphery, going, okay. Uh, you know, so of course I read it very, very slowly. Yeah. Corrected. Is that still true for you today? Yes. I'm still slow at reading. Yeah. Um, fortunately there's audible these days, so. Right. I get to consume books. My eyes don't work like they used to, but truth, I don't need to read that much anyway. Exactly. So thanks. It's so audible, I can read it three times my normal speed, because you just turn it up to 3x and listen, and that I'm good at is listening. So anyway, I proofread his PhD thesis and came back and said, we have to do this different. He said, what are you talking about? I said, the circuitry is wrong. Because my dad's an electrical engineer, so he's learned enough about electronics from fixing cars. And my dad, you know, showing me how to rewire houses. Because my dad did all of his own maintenance in the house. And so I said, the circuitry's wrong for this spark plug. Because it'll only work at low speed and low load. And that once you get to high speed and high load, the, um, The spark plug will disintegrate because the circuitry will get more and more powerful as the power of the engine goes up. And he's like, I don't care. I'm just trying to leave here. I'm trying to get back to Germany, you know, and just try to get done. It's like, and he kept saying, I don't care. And I'm like, no, we really have to do this right. And so, um, so anyway, I, uh, I went to the strobe light laboratory at MIT and they, Jacques Cousteau wouldn't have made underwater movies if it weren't for Doc Edgerton making him strobe lights. That would work underwater because they couldn't figure out how to make a projector waterproof. So the projector would run the film and the thing that would make the frames was the strobe light. The strobe light timing was timed. To the, to the rate of the feed of the film. And so that's what made underwater movies back in the day, but they also made triggers for certain things, you know, other military, uh, applications, strobe lights, and including like, Camera flashes that where you could take a picture of a city at night with a big enough flash Oh that they would literally poof, you know, do a giant picture of a city in the middle of the night Interesting from the YouTube bomber and things like that, right, you know spy plane or whatever it was Yeah, so anyway, I went to the laboratory at MIT Of course and asked them how they made a strobe light and what made it work And basically I figured out the relationship between what they had figured out, how a strobe light works, and how that spark plug worked so well. And so I related the two, and then the technician that had worked for Doc Egerton for 40 years said, Yeah, this is how we made strobe lights back in the day, but you wouldn't make it that way anymore. Today, you wouldn't use a diode because we have them today. It was back in 1940s, they didn't have any diodes storing that excess power that's being created at higher load? No. Well, it's just how the current was delivered. Okay. And so you had to make voltage to jump the gap, and then you had to make current to make the bright spark. Right. To make a bright arc, to make a strobe light work. Right, right. And so, I figured out that Okay, the guy just sat there and gave me the answer. Today, you would make a strobe light circuit different than you did back then. So I basically said, okay, well, if I combine a strobe light circuit as you would do it today, in 1990, at the time, with the same, uh, uh, You know, better than how it was made in 1940. Right, right. When the strobe light was first invented, and the, the capacitive discharge ignition was also invented in the 1940s. Yeah. And literally the combination of those two patents, but done with a modern component called a diode, became patentable in 1990. Even though all I did is combine two 1940s inventions. Well, there isn't that many new things in the world. Yeah. Mixing them differently is mostly what makes progress. Exactly. And so that, I, I went to the MIT technology licensing office and told them I had this invention. And they said, well, you should just go patent it yourself. You invented it without any research money from MIT, without any support from MIT. And I said, no, I really need you to own it because At the time, the big news at the time was the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, who basically had spent 30 years suing the automotive industry for inventing the intermittent windshield wiper. Right. I remember hearing about that story. And 20 years later. And he came out broke, right? Just about. He was broke for 20 plus years and then finally won his first case, you know, after 20 years of suing the industry. Right. Right. And unfortunately, his, his, and he, I don't know, it was a sad ending in the end. Cause when he finally got the money, you know, he was, I don't know how old at that point, he went crazy and he killed himself. Oh gosh. And so it's a sad story. So you, in the meantime, you're like, I want MIT's brand on the back of this. Not. Exactly. So what was even weirder is I go back to school, go back to work and running the racing team. So again, I have two full time jobs with the racing team and the, you know, and work and, and still taking a class a semester. And so I, um, I get a call about four months after filing the patent. And, and the guy from MIT's licensing office says, we have venture capital here in our office and they want to invest in your company. I said, I don't have a company. And, and he says something else. And I say, but I haven't graduated yet. And his answer to that was, do you want the money or not? I said, I'll be right over because, you know, the racing team and the technology licensing office were two blocks away from each other. So I'm like, I walked over there, met the venture capitalist, and then I started getting, you know, Negotiating to get spun out of MIT before even graduating because I would have needed another two, two and a half years to take enough classes to actually get my master's degree, because normally it's only a two year degree, but normally you're taking four classes a semester. I was only taking one class a semester, so I'm like, yeah, that's two and a half years away. I guess I'm, you know, so did you build a company out of that then? Yeah, I built a journal and research out of that. Okay. The name just came because we had, uh, a friend of mine and I had done one of the classes we took was an entrepreneurship class and you had to write a business plan. And so we wrote a business plan to make an America, American motorcycle company that was more like, you know, Suzuki. That kind of like the Buell thing. So I kind of like Buell, but not with a Harley engine. And, um, and, and we wrote that business plan for class and, and we got a pretty good grade. And, um, but we, we basically concluded we needed 30 million in venture capital. And here we were, I was 20 something and he was, You know, 20, 21 and I was 26 or something like that. And we're like, yeah, 30 million from venture capital. I'm not sure. Yeah. Well, I didn't, I didn't know at the time. Well, if I just. It was an MIT spinout that probably would have been doable, but I didn't think it was doable at the time because I didn't understand. Let's see if we could have a cool American motorcycle company if you got to that idea first. Well, if I had just had the, you know, stick to itiveness at that time to stick to it and then go ahead and, you know, and use the MIT connection to actually make an American motorcycle company. So this Adrenaline Research Project? Spins out. Spins out at MIT with the high energy ignition technology and with funding and we got to work and started, you know, trying to commercialize that technology. And that's like using the automotive industry to, to allow for like higher compression engines and stuff, correct? The way I kind of imagine it is the spark plug is actually pushing back against the pressure, too. So you have to, like, make it push through that pressure to get the boom. It's not a push as much as it's electrical. Right. But yes, it has to not It has to have a higher voltage so that it consistently can Right. separate that span. So the key was, what wasn't the spark plug idea that that had come from Bosch that had been run in the tests at MIT that I, you know, reviewed the PhD thesis for, basically validated that you could significantly improve low load combustion. So that mattered because this was the day and age when catalytic converters were very new. But the key was how do you get the catalytic converter working? Fired up, warmed up because, and so what our technology could do was cold start the car, uh, with a 70 percent reduction in cold start emissions. And so that's what the high energy was used for. But the key to the circuitry was that you turned off the circuitry. So that it did not do high energy at high speed and high load when you didn't need it because that would just disintegrate the spark plug. Right, right. And so that was the key to the invention as a circuit that could turn on and off. Took that innovation that your friend with the lazy PhD student had come up with. Yep. And uh, and really just bypass switched it for higher RPM. Right. And so it would work like normal and IRPM when normal spark is just fine. And it would work much, much better at cold start in idle when, you know, if you had one misfire, you could fail the entire emission test. Right. You know, just from a single misfire. Right. Right. And so that's what the technology was for. But I worked on that for 14 years and got very close to getting on the Bugatti. Right. And, uh, but we were 1, 000 more expensive, a car on a 2 million car. And they, even though we had knock detection, the other guys didn't, we had location of peak combustion. The other guys didn't all they had was misfire detection. And we showed them we could calibrate misfire detection in one day. The other system took. months. A normal misfire detection calibration took six months. The way it was done with what's called crankshaft speed fluctuation took six months to calibrate, you know, and we could calibrate in one day. And so basically, either the engineers were afraid of it or whatever, but They basically told us that 1, 000 more, a car and a Bugatti wasn't going to come. So you were for years on this with private equity funding and probably not as big of a salary as you wanted to. Mostly licensing funding. So I licensed the technology to companies that were going to produce it. Once I got off, you know, once I got the technology there, and then they, they were the funders. They were the funders and none of them got any revenues back out of it, basically. Because we couldn't get it across the line. I mean, we even had Motorola's automotive division. on our side at the end. And we then after sort of failing to get a low enough price for the Bugatti, right, which again, I didn't quite understand why price mattered, when the value like, you know, for the next two years, there was a story after story that they couldn't release the car, because it didn't have, well, no, 1001 horsepower. Oh. And that was the guarantee. And I'm like, I saw a thousand and one horsepower on the dyno when I was there because our system could do it. Right. Because our system had knock detection. Uh huh. But with that, when they used the other technology that didn't require, didn't have knock detection, they could not hit the thousand and one horsepower, which was what they had publicly proclaimed as their goal for the Bugatti. Interesting. Interesting. You know, because it was a W 16, which is a crazy compact engine. It's like two V 8s kind of straddling each other. Right. Yeah. Two W 8s, which was even weirder. Oh, right. They weren't, you know, they're, you know, they're just pistons everywhere. Oh, they're both W 8s? Two W 8s. Oh, I thought the 16 was Oh, gosh. Yeah. It was crazy. Anyway. Um, and again, we could have helped them cold started, you know, anyway, it didn't matter. So that was, how many years did you say? 14 years. 14 years. Wow. Developing that technology. And, and the thing that the straw that broke the camel's back, um, was the, the next year we got the opportunity to quote on the. Cause they had bought out Bentley and Rolls Royce. Um, and, and I'm trying to think what, there was a Volkswagen Phaeton that this engine was going to go on. So, um, we got to quote, uh, with Motorola's automotive division. We quoted on, uh, being on the Bentley and we had done another test since the Bugatti test to revalidate the 70 percent reduction in cold start emissions. And, and so we had done that and, you know, we had the misfire detection and we had the knock detection. I did the knock detection calibration in three days. And, and so here we are going in with a quote that's 40 more expensive. per Bentley for our technology versus the standard Bosch technology. Again, calibration takes three days. Bosch takes six months. The, uh, the, um, um, what else? Do you think it was emissions? Do you think it was just politics in some fashion that you didn't get it? As a Motorola didn't get it. Um, I, I have no idea. There, there was some, a little bit of rumor of politics that even allowed us to get the quote because. At that time, there was, it was the beginning of the war in Iraq, not Iraq, yeah, Iraq. And of course, everybody was being pressured to join George W. Right. The Coalition of the Willing, right? Right. And Germany wouldn't fall for it. And so they were pressuring saying, basically, if you don't meet our California emissions regulations to the letter, you won't be allowed to vote. to sell your ours in the United States. And so here they are going, Oh my God. So they're like scrambling. What can we use that's preferably American that, you know, can meet these emission standards that we can't actually meet because of these weird W engines. And, and, and basically we popped up and the research department said, we just did all these tests on the Bugatti, here's this technology and, you know, and so in the end. The war started without the German support, and so some of it could have been the 40 more expensive, but some of it could have been that we, they didn't actually have to join the war and they weren't actually going to be banned from selling cars in California. Cause basically 50 percent of all luxury cars at that time were sold in California. Oh really? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Like things like Bentleys and Rolls Royces. Right, right. The real luxury stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Super luxury. And so, but it's still, the fact that we got to demonstrate that we had way more value than 40 a car. Oh, for sure. Because they could have taken 40 out of the catalyst. They could have taken, the knock detection could have given them a higher horsepower number. Yeah, a smaller company party. Yeah. Once a year. Exactly. And so, it was, but that, you know, that really destroyed my sense that. I could ever, I could ever get across. I've got a stack deck here. Pretty much. I've got all the value proposition. Right. So was it just pack up the tent then or what became of the, I had fortunately done a deal four years earlier with Woodward who's here in Fort Collins. And, uh, and license them the technology and that deal, um, I've managed to negotiate a loophole in the contract. Got some kind of a revenue carry. Well, they were, they were funding us, but we were basically applying you with their funding and their license, not just revenue, but their license consulting contract. We were able to, you know, continue to develop the technology because when we licensed the Motorola. Yeah. It was our technology being licensed to Motorola. So, but we were able to utilize some Woodward resources as well as the Motorola resources to keep the advancing. Part of what they they're licensing you for is to make the technology better. So it'll be useful and apply for more patents for more IP protection. Right, right. So the loophole was that they had agreed to allow us to file patents and have the. The end date of the newest patent be the end date to the license. Oh, so they were looking at their, every, every year we, we applied for another patent was another year they were going to have to pay us royalties at the, at the 20 year mark, 20 year mark kept moving. Right. You're like, Oh, I'm getting close to my finish line. I better write another patent here. Right. And it was on their dollar. That I'm saying. Yeah. So. So, they saw the fact that they had not quite negotiated the licensing agreement very well. And, and so I went back to them and asked them to buy me out. Mm. And that would buy them out of this license agreement that was gonna go on forever. Right, right. If we kept working together. Right, right. And, and they agreed. And so, that's what got me here to Colorado. and got me sort of They got you. You got a little chunk of capital besides I got some capital. I got to be the head of the research department at Woodward, which didn't have a research department. Okay, cool. So that was a lot of fun because that's where I developed and invented and developed the super turbocharger. Right. And then, you know, so to me, it was like, You know, just doing fun projects and having what felt like an infinite budget compared to a startup. Right, well, they built like powertrains for ships and different things even, right? Fouls and controls and lots of different stuff. Might not be race cars, but it's pretty cool. And I was able to do that. to keep the license to Motorola and continue to support Motorola, trying to commercialize it in the automotive. And it would have been an extra payback to the stockholders of adrenaline, if that had actually happened. But. You know, very shortly after I sold out to Woodward Motorola sold their automotive division to a German company called Continental, which most people know of as a tire company, but they did do a lot more in Germany for electronics and other stuff. They had diversified a lot in Germany, but hadn't really moved to the U. S. And so they basically came to the U. S. and bought Motorola's automotive electronics division. And so once it became part of Continental, then became a whole nother political battle. Even though I was working for Woodward, trying to politically push Continental to continue with this technology. Right. Became an uphill battle. And is there other like work around patent technology that's in place now to do that better or just whoever was also competing with you at the time whatever it's just is what it is even to this day they don't have it would still be better if we use that it would still have better knock detection we also at the very end just before Motorola sold out to Um, uh, to Continental, we had figured out how to make it work within what's called inductive ignition instead of capacitive discharge ignition. So we basically brought another, like it basically would have eliminated that extra 40 that would have been the cost of it on the Bentley. It would have been literally for free and all the benefits. And so we had figured that out near the end and But then I couldn't get the managers at Continental to continue pushing the technology. Just a good story about how the best product doesn't always win. Yeah, definitely. Especially not in big industries where the consequences of losing a contractor so big, you know, could just been that supplier guy at whatever Bosch, Oh, by the way, Bosch, did you know that Bosch is the inventors of the world's first intermittent headlight switch? Headlight switches aren't supposed to be intermittent. Right. Anyway, that's an old, uh, BMW motorcycle joke right there. Um, I want to actually turn briefly to that super turbo. Okay. Uh, cause that's when I learned about you and I thought it was such a cool, uh, Can you, uh, sketch out the problem and the solution a little bit for, uh, non gearheads in the listening audience? Okay. That'll be hard to be a non gearhead answer. Anyway. I can translate a little bit, maybe. Okay. I'll rely on your translation. Uh, basically, it's a turbocharger attached to a transmission. And so a turbocharger normally just gets pushed by the exhaust. And the problem with a turbocharger is it has turbo lag. So everybody these days are trying to make them smaller and smaller to have less lag, but then you don't have the top end power. So you can't have both. And so you either need two turbochargers or as Volkswagen did at one point, they did one turbocharger and then they did the other. And a supercharger and the goal was downsizing the engine, right? Because a small engine is more efficient. And so having both a turbocharger and a supercharger allows the engine to be smaller, at least a gasoline engine primarily. And that small gasoline engine is more, much more efficient than a big gasoline engine, because it's using less fuel driving around town when you're at low speed, low load, right? Yeah. Like some of the, um, you still have to have the specs of the horsepower, right? Well, folks have, uh, that have driven like the Ford EcoBoost, right. You know, a 3. 5 liter pickup truck. That's fast as golly. Yes. Right. Because it has two tiny little turbos. Right. And so, yeah, they get rid of the lag. So basically the super turbo got rid of the lag, but it also allowed another. technology, which is called turbo compounding, which is taking waste heat out of the exhaust. So normally a turbocharger, once it gets up to the boost level, that's acceptable. Or, you know, then you just take everything else, you take everything else and throw it out for the heat in the exhaust away. Yeah. Well, Uh, and what the super turbo could do is do turbo compounding because it would hold the speed of the turbine to whatever speed you were looking for and that would give you the boost level you wanted and all the extra heat would continue to push on the turbine and that extra push would give you free energy back to the crankshaft, sometimes between six and 10 percent depending on the type of engine, like a, gasoline engine could as much as 10 percent extra power that would come just from exhaust heat pushing on that turbine because you're never opening a waste gate. You're just holding the speed to the right boost and, and holding on. And literally the turbine is pushing through the transmission, pushing the engine, giving it 10 percent extra power on a, on a gasoline engine, 6 percent extra energy on a diesel engine and hooking that turbo to the transmission allowed you to power it like a supercharger. It was a dedicated transmission below the turbo. Oh, I see. Okay. And that's why it was called a super turbo because it could supercharge, could turbocharge. And it could turbo compound. Okay. So like, I think of a supercharger, like an old school. Camaros and whatever is driven off the crank, which this was too, just not positionally quite in the same way. Right. It had a, a continuously variable transmission. Right, that way you can keep it in the sweet spot. Right. Ah, that's where you're talking about that. That heat assist kind of element. Right. Well, you would first, I mean, the, the reason it had turbo lag was because it didn't have enough heat yet, so you could spool it up without heat by taking crankshaft energy up to the turbine, get the compressor going very, very quickly. You Get that instant boost you get from a supercharger and you get that from the transmission. Yes, you're stealing some off the crankshaft, but that's for seconds, you know? So yes, you have worse fuel economy for a couple of seconds, but then you have six to 10 percent better fuel economy. Cruising down the highway. Right, right. So, you know, the, the loss at the beginning compared to the gain over the steady state was way Well, you don't notice that lagginess of like the old school turbos, especially. Right. It'd have no lag and better fuel economy. Now is your tech, is that technology in use today in some of the industry or has it Unfortunately, I don't think so, but um, I left that company because they were heading in the wrong technical direction. And I disagreed with the technical direction. I showed them an alternative direction and they said, no, thank you. So I said, okay, I'm not going to support it. I can't help you raise money or help, you know, run this company that's, you know, heading to their, you know, The issue came down to the fact that I was the only one left at the company at that time that had been at Woodward at the time we were developing the first super turbo. And so the first super turbo we made was for a heavy duty truck engine and it was gear driven. And then we switched to a traction drive when we went to do a. Volkswagen super turbo. And then when we went back to truck super turbos, we stayed with the traction drive, figuring that was better, but the traction drive ended up being much too lossy to be able to get 6 percent efficiency gain on a diesel engine. And so that lossiness, um, it just was not going to be easy. The slack in the belts basically ate up all the efficiency gains. You know, the drive, the high speed. You know, 100, 000 rpm drive took up, took up four kilowatts and when you only had six kilowatts available excess, that 6 percent efficiency gain theoretical became a 2 percent theoretical, which is not enough. And I knew from being in the automotive industry for 14 years, Close enough is never close enough. Yeah, and twice the price for 2 percent is not going to cut it. Yeah, yeah. You have to be Because there's a lot of complexity, right? Like, there's a lot of That transmission device sounds not simple. A lot of engineering hardware and software around that, probably. And boy, we got a whole bunch of grief just for having a different fluid. It wasn't running on engine oil. It was running on traction fluid. Oh my God. You're going to put another fluid on board a truck. Oh my God. That's terrible. You know, that's, that's difficult, you know, and, and, and the price tag, you know, 3, 000, the original one on the heavy truck that was engine oil lubricated. Or that was traction fluid. Yeah, right. The gear driven one is engine oil lubricated. Right, right. So it didn't need, it didn't need traction fluid. No special juice. I mean, that is a significant Obstacle. Believe me, it was an obstacle. And, uh, and so when I suggested we go back to gears and go back to engine oil, the answer was no. I said, okay, good luck. We're invested. Yeah. And so that's when it wandered out to California. And that's when I started the solar company. Yeah. Then when that failed to get any traction, Um, because everyone was going bankrupt in the solar industry. Right, right. Then, then I left for California. Oh, okay. Okay. After doing two stints at Burning Man. Cause it's so Ha ha ha ha. Well, maybe you do want to smoke this joint. I always have one ready for us here. Ha ha ha, okay. Um, we passed 420 without me mentioning it cause serious. But, uh, if you've been to Burning Man, you've smoked it before. Actually can't smoke. You're trying to get a gummies. They're okay. Oh yeah. I'll bring some lungs. Don't handle any smoke at all. Unfortunately. So, so you have kind of probably this, uh, Midlife ish crisis almost in separating from the van dyne super turbo. I'm Launched into the solar company, but it was probably a mid a bit of a crisis once that failed, right? And I wasn't even able to raise, you know capital for that after raising 40 million dollars for van dyne super turbo not being able to raise Right. Any money for, for wave solar just became so like, okay, what was the innovation around around wave solar was it was a steam engine that would run on solar thermal panels, but then the, all of the waste heat from the steam engine would get utilized for heating, heating, cooling. It had a heat pump. Uh, attachment, so it would heat and cool. And natural gas too, I think I read, right? Like as an emergency source. Yeah, as a backup. Right, well that's a big deal though. I mean, especially, you know, I'm from North Dakota, like I said, so. Yes, the heat pump sounds really good, but I better not die if it breaks. Exactly. Yes, it was solar thermal with natural gas backup. And it actually, that's when my first introduction to ammonia was we did an ammonia chiller, and we built our own at CSU's powerhouse. And, um, it was funny because the professor looking over our shoulder, um, had done a Uh, chiller technology for his PhD thesis, but he basically said, you'll never get it working because for five years, he built a chiller and never got it working. And with under six undergrads in nine months, we got a chiller working in the lab downstairs. And he was like, You know, like, not devastated, but what's the right word? He was, you know, like, you know, put under a little bit. Right, right. These six undergrads could build a chiller after he spent five years trying to build one for a PhD. Yeah. The fact that he still was a PhD, you know, was sort of like, Come on, guys, you know, be a bit more encouraging, be a bit more enthusiastic that we did something you failed to do in five years. Well, and, you know, sometimes it's just the right next set of eyes. You know, it isn't often just one person's brain that comes up with all the obstacle clearing. It's, you know, inviting. And that's one of the things I think I'm hearing in your story is that you've invited input and collaboration and connection and, and just done things kind of out in the wide, wide open comparably in each space to invite those other good ideas into the sauce. Absolutely. And we have 11 volunteers with a plastic degree. Oh, is that right? Yeah. And everybody's working for stock options. Right. Everybody's you know, working hard and helping us raise the money so that people can start to get paid. And, you know, but everybody is enthusiastic about the plastic cleanup. Everybody's enthusiastic because we do have the potential to make the lowest cost ammonia in the world and then make it from a waste product. And therefore it, you know, the whole, the, the economics are there, right? Uh, clean the earth, you know, right. Well, what I love about this, not to cut you off there, Ed, but like the, the whole kind of climate conversation spins around putting less carbon into the atmosphere, um, which is great unless you want to feed more people. Like there's a challenge there, you plants eat that stuff, but, but also more significantly to me is. Energy is, is money. Like you can't just print energy like you can just print money these days. So energy is more like money than money is like money. Right. Right, and that's the ability to do work. It's the ability to build buildings and get things done and to prosper. Right. You know, the thing, and so, if we can have good, stable energy with, uh, out carbon. I'm all for it. You know, that's the most exciting thing I've heard about this is, is that like, I want to have a clean earth and not starving people, right? I want both of those things are dead people. You know, exactly. Not dead people from hurricanes and well, yeah, hurricanes and freezing to death, sweltering to death, all those things that that energy allows us to protect people from the weather in a lot of respects. And, you know, there's definitely some Malthusianism in existing climate. Malthusia? Yeah. Right? Malthus. Yeah. Yeah. That says, ya know we could just get down to a billion people Like, it would be have a lot better Earth, right? That was an old climate scientist from the 60's, or something like that. Wow. That's definitely Right. Well, which takes seven billion people through one of the fix, right? Exactly. That sets up a worse situation. Kind of a conversation than we have now. Exactly. So anyway, why don't you just kind of deviate into the significance of this, I suppose. And with our technology, we can flip the switch and go back and forth between running on methane and running on plastic. Oh, really? So we're even better off so that, you know, because there's never gonna be not, not methane. Right. But we can still utilize that methane with zero carbon emission. Huh. You And so make those carbon nanotubes and our, our technology being so low energy, um, to make that green ammonia, we can make it with one quarter of the solar panels. So we need one quarter. The energy. You know, the amount of energy to make that green ammonia as you would take to make green ammonia from splitting water and then making ammonia out of splitting water. Right? Right. And so the fact that we have one quarter the other, like the solar field we need to run our plant right, is one quarter that of the competition making the their. version of Green Ammonia. I'm happy to sell it for their price. Right, right. Because now I can basically make 3X what it cost me to manufacture. So what do you need to get your billion? How much capital do you need to raise to get to the place where you could qualify for that billion dollar loan deal? We need 50 to 60 million. Okay. And then we'll qualify for the Billion and some of it's going to come in the form of loans because we can get a low interest loan here in Colorado for All of our solar panels for a pilot plant, right? And there's other building loans and other other aspects of Incentives. We're also going after grants from the government grants from private industry or big, you know Well, I would think, like, some of the existing oil producing companies would want a piece of this pie, but maybe they see it as a threat more than an opportunity. At the moment, they see it as a threat. We have approached one oil company, and so far, you know, crickets. Yeah, yeah. Right now we're going to have to prove it to them and we've approached two other companies and they want us to prove it to them. So maybe when we have our pilot plant running, we'll get their investment. But right now, you know, they don't believe us. Um, we've had one, um, Japanese company willing to invest in our next round, but they want to see proof that the carbon is of high enough quality to sell it. They basically said, yeah, we believe you on the ammonia, but we don't believe you can make the carbon black. You mean you can make quality enough carbon. to be able to sell it in the market. And we think that's a piece of cake, but you know, obviously it has to be proven. So we have to go build the mobile lab. We'll prove that in the next six months. So we'll be able to prove it, but it's kind of funny. The people that, you know, sort of believe one aspect of what we're doing, don't believe the other. But, you know, technically, we could throw all that carbon black and put it in the soil as fertilizer, because that's what's being depleted by all the nitrogen fertilizer. Is, uh, farms in this country are, the soil is now carbon depleted. Right. Yeah, the organic matter. The organic matter's gone, because the nitrogen helps the plants take up the Oh, the plants grow so amazingly that they just suck up all that organic matter. Yes. And so we could literally throw it on the fields and give it away for free and still be successful as a company because, you know, just for the first 10 years, the green hydrogen tax credit pays for a hundred percent of our costs, a hundred percent. And do you have somebody that does all this paperwork to do all the green energy tax credit things in the Colorado? I do now. I just, we just got our volunteer, uh, chief financial officer. So he's now working on all the different proof points financially that are gonna validate. Yeah, we can really do this and I've got a really good engineering team that have dug in and looked at all the research papers on, you know, how, how plasma, you know, chemically works to disintegrate molecules. Yeah. Excuse me. And it's, you know, they validate it. Yep. This paper here proves that that's going to work. This paper here is going to prove that's going to work. You're pretty confident, like you're pretty sure that this thing will work if we can spin it up and get it rocking. I mean, I just told an investor the other day, it's 110 percent chance we're going to get the whole system working. And it's a 200 percent chance we're going to get the ammonia piece working. I mean, the ammonia piece is. You know, literally off the shelf everything. Yeah, we just have to put the pieces together. So, okay, you know again having this Japanese company Tell me oh, you're not gonna make good enough quality carbon and I'm like, okay Oh, I guess I have to test that was the thing. I'm scared, you know Knowing what I know about plasma and how I you know, basically Back in the day could tune a Ferrari Formula one engine in two seconds Because they, they were sending engines to the racetrack and Michael Schumacher got the 800 horsepower engine. The other driver got the 750 horsepower engine, but the engineers at Ferrari couldn't figure out what the difference was. And I put my system on their engine and we did a dyno test. We went from 10, 000 to 18, 000 RPM in two seconds. I looked at the data and said, there's your bad cylinder. And they were like, Okay, how much is your system? I said 30, 000. They were like, yeah, that just saved us like 10 million. Interesting. They had been doing testing for years, not knowing what was wrong, what was the difference between the 750 horsepower engine and the 800 horsepower engine. And when you say a bad cylinder, you mean like a manufacturing flaw or something? No, it was just a bad cylinder. I use design. No, it was like a bad spark plug or a bad injector because even though they, they measured everything perfectly, you know, like every piece of that engine was within one 10, 000th of an inch of every other piston in the engine, every other Ring every, every, everything was mechanically within, you know, less than a 10, 000th of an inch difference between part to part. And yet they couldn't figure out what, where 50 horsepower went. And it was not the injector as like, as they could test an injector on a test bench and it would pulsate and it would put out the right amount of fuel. But once it got in the engine and the engine started shaking, the engine would cause the spring loading in that. Uh, in that injector to sort of like go into harmonic vibration and that literally bad spring within an injector would stop putting out the right amount of fuel and it would lean out or 5 percent less fuel than it should be for 10 percent more fuel and basically flood the cylinder and that would cause that cylinder to run weak and I could see that in the data through the spark plug. And, and, you know, so like they bought a system and so did McLaren and, you know, it was So you had a little revenues here and there. Yeah, but I mean, 14 years of research and development, you know, selling 30, 000 ignition systems to Formula One that didn't go very far. We eat that up every two weeks. It was the licensees like Woodward that really kept the company alive and, you know, Motorola's automotive division was really good to work with once we got the ball rolling until we sort of slammed into the wall of, you know, it's not German, so why should we buy it? Yeah. Interesting. Um, I want to move into our, is there other big, uh, elements of your journey that we've passed over? I mean, we've been all over the place. We're already over time, but it's cool. I, what, what would you like to cover? Uh, I think we're going to jump into our, uh, our closing segments, the Faith Family Politics. Okay. We always talk about Faith Family Politics. Faith Family Politics. And it's just as much or as little as you prefer. Um, I know, is it Diane? What's your wife's name? I don't have a wife. You don't have one anymore. Okay. I have a wonderful girlfriend named Tiffany. All right. And we You were married when I heard about the Van Dyne Super Turbo. Yes, I was. That's why I asked. And, um, I have a very, I won't tell the whole story, but I have the dubious distinction to be married twice and divorced three times. Oh. That's a story for another day. Fair enough. So you'll have to invite me back for that one. Anyway, um, uh, Uh, Tiffany's a wonderful lady and we've been going out for two and a half years. Okay. And so on the faith side. Do you have any kids or anything like that? I have two kids from my first marriage. Alright. Uh, my daughter's 32 and my son is 29. They're wonderful kids. We, uh, we do a one word description here of the children. One word. My son is, uh, just very, uh, one word, boy that's impossible. Sometimes I love hyphens. He's, uh, he's the detail guy. Yeah, he really loves getting into the details. He used to be an amazing actor in high school, and I thought he was going to be in Hollywood. Interesting. And he ended up, you know, going into biology, and now he's in data analytics. Wonderful, wonderful guy, but he's definitely not my type. Outgoing anymore for some strange reason is so what's the opposite of outgoing? That would be, I guess he's become shy, introverted. Yeah. I had to go from being introverted as a kid to becoming outgoing in order to do what I do, and he went the other direction. And so he's introverted now and I don't know why. Anyway, um, my daughter is just, um. I am a wonderful, creative person, but also very hardworking like I am. Yeah. So, hardworking, creative person. Fair enough. We can allow a hyphen right there. Okay. Uh, faith or politics next? Um, I probably should avoid politics. Oh, no. Come on. It's, uh, who are you excited about in politics? Um, I'm just against Trump. I love, I've been a Republican most of my life. All right. And I, and I stopped being a Republican. So you'll vote for Biden? Or will you vote for RFK or something? I'll vote for Biden in order to be a vote against Trump. Okay. Cause I'm a Republican at heart, but not with him. Really? Uh, he's just, um, you know. Just his personality? Is it a January 6th thing? Like, where, where does your I read, I thought I was in college when I read his book, and, you know, basically how he lied and cheated and, you know, went bankrupt on the banks in order to cheat them out of money and cheat his supplier out of money. He's like this guy's a scumbag. Yeah, this, you know, and, and I, it's, you know, I, I refuse to be a businessman. You know, with that kind of a moral code, you know, and so to have him as a president of our country with that low a moral code, you know, no, I don't appreciate that. Do you think, uh, without trying to offend our sitting president, like, do you think Biden's is actually running our country right now, though? Do you think he's got the mental capacity to do that? I think he's, um, you know, has enough. People around him to, to, to, to help, help do it right. What do you think is wrong with our system though? I, I still think he made a huge, you know, blunder just a few weeks ago on Easter, the day before Easter to say this. Oh my god. The, the Easter Trans visibility day. I mean, hello, that's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard, you know? And so, well, it wasn't him, like it was somebody in his office that posted on his Twitter, probably, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I just think it's sad. He's somebody should have stopped that one and not double down. Like they double down more and more as they get older. the weekend grew hotter. Unfortunately, I mean, the problem is I can't even think of a younger, you know, anybody in politics that I would get one over either one of those two. So it's sort of, we're at a weird void of politics that there isn't, you know, like RFK. What little I know about him. He's okay. Let's do a couple of podcasts. He's been on several two and three hour podcasts with Lex Friedman with, okay. Joel Rogan with others. I've seen, my dad watched his movie and was very positive about it. I never knew anything about him I'm very Republican until, until Trump came along. If you read the real Anthony Fauci uh, you'll also have some uh, uh, Okay. Uh, good lighthearted reading about our corruption of our medical industrial complex as well. Um, anything else in the political sphere that you're, uh, aside from like national elections, which don't matter much, like where are you at in the, you've, you've said you're kind of Republican by trait, but you've gotten a lot of like spinoff and, you know, government Loans and grants and things like that. That's, uh, that's good for government to do. Yeah. Absolutely. Those things. Yeah. Yeah. Because especially if you're gonna try and stand up hydrogen. Right. And hydrogen is difficult. Right. Like SpaceX wouldn't really exist without government subsidies at the beginning of that. When they go, well our space program sucks. Can anybody else do it? Do it. Do it. Right. Yep. And then Jeff Bezos has tried and really doesn't have rockets that compete with SpaceX yet. Right. Not at all. And so, you know, it's not, you know, I mean, I admire Right. And Jeff Bezos has been trying for ten years and he's not very good at it yet still. Right. Right. Enough to send Captain Kirk up into space for a moment. Exactly. Or something. So, yeah. I mean, Elon Musk is brilliant and, um, has his flaws, but so does every human being has flaws. So, you know, it's a matter of the extent of the flaws and where do you want to put those flaws, you know, in the White House or, or where, you know? What do you think about the, uh, The free speech debate going on right now, especially with regards to the Brazil, have you seen that news over the weekend? No, I didn't I tend to not watch news in order to stay focused on there's yeah, that's fair There's evidence. Maybe we'll say that Silva and his like Supreme Court guy that was kind of the guy that let Silva out to repeat the president again, um, that they're directly censoring a lot of accounts. Almost anybody that like, likes Bolsonaro has kind of been snooped on and this and that. And so there's a real, anyway, now are you concerned with that? Yeah. I'm absolutely, I'm concerned with China, you know, suppressing their, you know, weak wiki. I forget how to pronounce it. Whatever else. Wiki and all that. Their, their, you know. How about in our country though? How about Julian Assange? Yeah. Their Muslim population. Oh, right. Their Uyghurs. Uyghurs. Yeah, right. And so that, yeah, people need to be able to live free, you know, with their own beliefs. And so I believe everyone should have their own belief. Do I believe in God? Absolutely. But am I going to do it in a church? Probably not, you know, and so, well, not ever. I actually went to church here in Fort Collins at the Unity Church, which is open to Buddhism, all different religions. And so, you know, it's, it's okay. But, you know, to me, Uh, once the really good pastor left, I left the church because, you know, it was no longer an inspiring message every Sunday. And so when the message is, you know, inspiring and it's worth spending your time going there every Sunday, it's, it's wonderful. But if it's, if it's not, you know, really going to, motivate me or do something positive for your To be positive For my life. Yeah, life or mental, you know. So where do you exercise? You mentioned, I believe in God, but then like unity and so is Jesus. Different than Hindu or Zain or things like the Christian perspective. I have, uh, again on El Audible, listened to a gentleman named Dr. Murphy, um, who has basically, uh, read a couple of books about the power of the subconscious mind. Okay. And the way he describes, you know, how the Bible was written in code. Yeah. To, you know, prevent people, you know, like the Hitlers of the world from using it incorrectly. Um, That, that, you know, I believe what, you know, he says about God and, you know, and how the Bible, when you unbundle the code, is really a, um, a treatise about self help and how you can, you know, basically, Maximize your own capability to succeed, succeed at what you're doing in, you know, in love and life and, you know, being a good person in society and not cheating people, you know, that that's, Yeah, I think there's a very secular way to approach the Bible. Right. Uh, you know, I tend to fall in the line that Jesus was pretty special and that there's a lot of inspired words and even without any of that, It's like as good of a, like, do this and prosper kind of a guidebook as you're going to find. Right. And so I would recommend Dr. Murphy's interpretation of the Bible as a way, it's one interpretation. Right. He does, he is a theological scholar as well as a chemist as well as, as one other degree, I don't remember what. But he's, you know, his interpretation of the Bible, makes sense to me. And so I know that sense of God in that sense, his sense of, um, you know, how to utilize the lessons in the Bible to succeed in life is, is very positive. Multiple time entrepreneur, like having faith that we're going to get that 50 million we need to make this next step. Um, those are all very challenging. You know, that's what, that's why I say faith instead of religion is what does drive you forward? You know, what do you have faith in? Like, where do you think humanity's in a hundred years? You got faith in that? Again, you know, sometimes you have to make your own method of having faith, which is why I decided to put the sailboat on pause and do this plastic thing because the timing was right. The, you know, the, the opportunity was right. The opportunity is profitable. You know, you know, I could. You know, had yet to figure out how I was gonna make the sailboat company profitable Right. You know, it, I was gonna work on breaking the speed record, but, you know, uh Right. That's, I got something that really rich people already can do more. Right. Well that's why I figured I'll get rich and then go start sponsor my sailboat. Right, right. Um, and then people understand my crazy idea, but I do have crazy ideas that people don't understand until I. prove them to them. And so this is one that, you know, is a good for society, good for the world, good for energy, good for everything. So the win, win, win, win, win is strong for profits. And so I don't have to start a nonprofit charity to go clean up plastics, right? I can start a company that will actually pay its own bills and re repay loans. Yep. And ultimately return a lot to shareholders, return a lot to shareholders as well by a growth in value. Yeah. You know, we could be a 1. 5 billion company in seven years, obviously that's a target, you know, it may take us 10 years to get there, but we're going to go there because it's, it's not only a lot of money, it's a lot of profitability. Therefore, like you said, a return to shareholders and a return to mother earth and a way to keep this crap. Out of Mother Earth, because I've been apologizing to, you know, Mother Earth for 15 years every time I throw away a piece of plastic. Right. Well, uh, you know, shoot for the stars, you'll land on the moon. Uh, said somebody that wasn't very good at astrophysics, I imagine. Well, the very last card my mother gave me before she died was exactly the opposite. Shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll land among the stars. Oh, maybe that's the one I've been thinking about. Um, we always do the final segment. the loco experience, the craziest experience of your lifetime that you're willing to share with our curious listeners. Craziest experience. Well, did you crash a race car or anything like that? I did crash my race car. But I think the craziest experience, uh, for me was sort of like when I learned sort of like the power of my, the mental aspect of practice. And so I learned, you know, I, I was, I read a book called super learning and what they taught you in super learning was how to use like mental practice. So I know I've heard nowadays, you know, basketball players, you know, they'll visualize, visualize and practice dunking the shots, dunking the shots. And then they, in real life, they, you know, the subconscious mind takes over and they dunk the shots a lot more often because they've practiced in their mind. Yeah, well, I did that for race car driving. Oh, and so what was really bizarre was I practiced and practiced, you know, how to drive the race car on a specific racetrack. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. You're like kind of Memorizing this track virtually, like playing a video game in your head almost. Exactly. And so I did that for probably a month or so. And then I got to the racetrack for the first time after having done that mental practice. And I got in the race car and the entire race had nothing to do with the touching the race car. I literally could not remember ever touching the pedals. I could not remember shifting the shifter. And you have to, like on that racetrack, you had to shift the car from third to fourth five times a lap. I could not remember physically touching Anything in the race car, the whole race, once it got started was, Oh, that guy's an asshole. So when I swerve to the, to the right, he's going to cut me off. So when I, so if I swerve to the right and then immediately swerve back again, I can pass him on the outside. Oh, it worked. You know, because I'm doing it in real time. Right, and you don't have to think about the turns. I no longer had to think about driving the race car. It was all about strategy. Oh, fascinating. And I, and, and, and the weirdest part is I even not having met, These people other than in pit lane, you know, and met them once or twice, like barely knowing these people I could, I had a sense of their personality because I had raced against these cars. So I knew what that car looked like. And I, but all of a sudden I had all the mental power to spend my time strategizing how I was going to pass everybody. And I literally did pass everybody on the race and won the race. And it was sort of like, and I don't remember touching the race car. That's fascinating. It was sort of like, I mean, I sort of remember my hands and steering the wheel. But literally I had to shift, I had to do all had all that space for thinking that you, Yeah, because the practice had made all of that subconscious. And to me, that just changed my entire perspective on life because it's like, Oh, you can actually practice something and internalize it and basically take that out of, you know, take all that complexity out of your challenge, out of the challenge, so you didn't have to think and drive, you could just think. Yeah. And I'm like, I don't believe that. That was, that was like a miracle moment in my life that changed my life. I uh, I wonder if you've seen that recent movie, um, on the SimDriver. Yes. Did you? Yes. And that was a good movie, I thought. That, that, yeah, that was sort of like what I did in my head. Right, right. And he did it on, you know, in the, in the Right, and because he got so much practice in the, behind the video game screen. Like, but, but they showed that through, like how he could perceive Those personalities and stuff a little bit too. Right. And you could, you know, I drive this corner different. Right. Because I drove it in the simulation different than everybody says. Right. How it should be driven. And, and different was actually better. Sometimes can be better, yeah. Yeah. Huh, so cool. Um, well Ed, this has been a very enjoyable conversation. I've been using my mental skills as best I can to keep up. But, uh, I hope our listeners enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you very much for having me. Yep, Godspeed and good luck on the, on the 50 mil. Okay. Alright. Thank you.