#250 - Neel Vasavada

0:01 Thanks for coming today to episode #250 with Neil Vasavista and you're in for a treat. It was a great episode, a lot of fun to record. He is an incredibly smart guy. I really didn't expect, I didn't know what to expect, to be honest. But to get a guy with a background like Neil has coming into the live events business, to bring that background with him, just an incredible guy, smart guy. And what he's doing with the sustainable power system and being able to power up these festivals completely using battery technology, He's just, he's that far ahead of everybody else out there.

0:44 So I think you'll really enjoy it. I hope you do. I enjoyed recording it. And so enjoy and learn a lot about battery power systems as you go through it. So have fun. Hi, and thanks for joining today on Geese of Gear episode #250. This podcast is brought to you by Ultimate Support Systems, a part of ACT Entertainment, the BCM 300, which I'm using right here. This boom is a deluxe broadcast mic stand from Ultimate Support, bringing fluid functionality and quality of life features together in a single sleek design, offering a fully extended 37 inch length cable management channel and clips and an extended drop to better serve popular mic solutions including the sure SM 7B the and of course the Rode pod mic, which I'm using right here.

1:39 The BCM 300 is both the most fully featured and most attractive broadcast mic boom in its price range. Get a mic stand that supports your investment and looks as good as you sound on podcasts, live streams and conference calls. You can learn more about the BCM range of stands at www.ultimatesupport.com and this podcast is also brought to you by Gear Source. Founded in 2002 with an ambitious cition to support live events, businesses buy and sell gear globally. Since that time, the company has transacted in more than 100 countries, selling 1/4 billion dollars in sound, lighting, staging and video gear. Gearsource continues to evolve the platform for massive global growth, enabling localized currencies, payments held in escrow to protect buyers and sellers. Yeah, I powered logistics behind a new global logistics brand and more.

2:33 And by the way, we have updates this week with some of the bulk listings management features. Throughout 2024 and beyond, the company will continue to grow its toolbox for the benefit of users worldwide. So why not take full control over your gear with a visit gearsource.com.

3:21 It's funny, I still bought my head during that intro song. I love Godo, I love the song. And by the way, Godo's up to some fun things. Right now. He's remastering I think his entire catalog with Kramer, Eddie Kramer, which should be incredible. He's doing these sort of up close and uncomfortable shows where he's doing very intimate shows where it's a combination of storytelling, comedy and playing music. And he's really doing well with those and selling out every venue. They're all small venues, little theaters, little, you know, not coffee houses, but, you know, couple 100 people kind of thing. And sometimes it includes dinner and stuff. But Greg Gotovitz, one of my favorite people, love the guy to death.

4:08 One of my best friends and just a super guy, talented musician and a Beatles formationalist extraordinaire, historian. You know, he knows more about The Beatles and really rock history, just music history. That guy is a walking encyclopedia and I'm actually going to have him on again soon. He just doesn't really know how to work a computer very well. So we have to wait until his lovely woman is available to set him up to record on a computer. And so that should happen anytime soon here. I know Sarah's been working with him and his team, AKA his woman. And so, yeah, I'm looking forward to getting that done because I love the guy and and he's just fun to talk to. So of course, I'm up in Canada.

4:50 I'm at my house in Canada. You can tell from the background. It's different from my background in Florida, which is actually quite boring. And actually, that Beatles picture right behind me there came to me from Greg Godevitz. He gave it to me as a gift when he came to visit one time. But I had my 60th birthday up here, which has been really weird. You know, I know we all turned 60 at some point, if we're lucky enough. And my father passed away at 52, a long, long time ago. So don't say oh, I'm sorry because it really was a long, long time ago. But you know, so I consider myself lucky. I've already outlived him by 8 years. And I'm pretty healthy right now. I think the healthiest I've been probably since I was 15.

5:33 And you know, pretty clean living, lots of exercise, relatively good diet, I wouldn't say perfect, but pretty good diet. So I'm taking care of myself. However, at my 60th birthday party, I got sick. And so, you know, I was in bed by 9:30 at night and didn't wake up for two days or get up for two days and I'm still sick. So like, I don't know, going on two weeks, It'll be two weeks in a couple of days that I've had this thing. And I don't know if it was COVID or the flu or a cold, but I think probably COVID just based on the fact that it kind of started as a real heavy fever and massive headache and just body aches and everything else, like a flu. And then it kind of went down into my chest where massive coughs and sore throat and all that stuff to now where it's just this long nagging cough and stuffy head.

6:24 You know, like at night I can't breathe through my nose. And during the day I'm coughing and right on cue. And, you know, just this raspy voice and stuff, which some people would say is incredibly sexy. Not me So. But anyways, turning 60 has been interesting, you know, a lot of reflecting, a lot of thinking about where I'm at in my life, where I wish I was at, where I want to be at, where I might have thought I'd be at by now, what I thought I might be doing. And guess what? Throw that stuff all out the window and just keep enjoying life. So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm living everyday like it's a gift and trying to do my best, trying to be good to other people, trying to be grateful. And I reach out to a lot more people. You know, the Craig thing was definitely another, it should be unnecessary wake up call for a guy who just turned 60, who's most of my friends are either in their 60s or coming up on 60 now too.

7:18 And a lot of them are less healthy than me too. So, you know, I'm talking to people as much as I can now and, and trying to make sure I reach out to people. I don't want to miss that opportunity. And I, I don't think I ever told this story again back to Craig. So the night before the F1 race, which was my last day with Craig, he called me and I was kind of like humming and Hahn. I was kind of, you know, I've been at race tracks for the last 13 or 14 years with my son. I love being there, but I'd rather watch it on television. When it comes down to actually watching a car race. And, and the problem is with car races, you know, it's about a minute and 32nd lap. Each time they go around, the car goes by, you don't see it again for a minute and 1/2. And even at the F1 race that I went to with Craig, we ended up watching most of it on the televisions in our beautifully air conditioned suite that we were in. And so, you know, I was kind of like, I don't really feel like dealing with traffic and all the people and being at the track and it's such a shit show.

8:19 And but I really wanted to see Craig. There was something nagging at me saying do it. You gotta go to this. And so I pushed myself and said, yeah. And I know everybody's rolling their eyes right now going, what a douche. You know, you couldn't decide if you wanted to go to the Miami Grand Prix, the F1 race of all F1 races and all this stuff. And, you know, again, I'm not saying I'm special, but I'm hardened, jaded, whatever you want to call it. I've been around race tracks an awful lot for the last 1314 years. And another day at a racetrack just to see a race that I could watch on television in two hours. It's just not worth it to me. So it was all about seeing Craig, hanging out with Craig.

9:00 And also my son wanted to go, Jeremy wanted to go to the race. So I am so happy. Like, I almost made a decision that literally would have haunted me for the rest of my life. And so I'm so happy I made that decision. So anyways, what else? Here in Canada, weird weather. So a couple of days ago, which would have been June 17th, we had fairly massive snowfall snow. So I looked out the window at, I don't know, 8:00 at night or something, 9:00 at night. And sure enough, huge snowflakes were coming down like crazy. And the next morning there was snow on the trees, snow on the ground. And we were just like, wow, this is weird. You know, June 17th, 18th and, and there's snow coming down and it's been pretty cold like this morning. What's the date today, June 19th? 35° when?

9:53 When I got up and and went upstairs. And so it's not not really summer weather quite yet, but I don't mind it. I love it. I love being able to wear some of my jackets and stuff. It's fun. And of course, in other news, the Panthers are currently playing the Edmonton Oilers and I'm in enemy territory, which is really weird because it used to be where anything South of Edmonton in Alberta hated the Oilers. And in Edmonton they love their Oilers, of course. And but right now it's not just all of Alberta, it's all of Canada going for the Oilers. So I'm the enemy. I'm a Panthers fan. I'm I've got my Panthers hoodie and Panthers shirts and stuff. And so I'm not super popular right now.

10:35 And unfortunately the Panthers are kind of making a mess of it. They went up three games to none. It was a foregone conclusion that they were going to finish probably in Edmonton in the fourth game. And lo and behold, Edmonton blows us out in game four-game 5, Edmonton looked like they were going to blow us out again. And then the Panthers came back but lost it. So now we're still up 3:00 to 2:00, but we go back to Edmonton. And I'm just hoping it doesn't go seven games. Like certainly the television networks and the league and everybody hopes it goes seven games and then God forbid, the Panthers win at home. But I don't know. My, my little ticker can't take it. You know, I, I want him to just get it over with so I can get on with my life now the market, the, the sound lighting, video live events market is still so crazy busy. You know, it's like a lot of our top sellers and new sellers and stuff, they're all like, hey, I really want to sell this stuff, but everything I have is out right now. So can we figure out a way to maybe sell it and deliver it in September or sell it starting in August and deliver it in September or whatever?

11:43 And honestly, that's the smart way to do things. Like a lot of companies are sitting back saying, hey, we're too busy right now to sell any gear. And, you know, that's like saying, you know, I'm too busy to exercise or I'm too busy to make a salad for lunch. I'm just going to have a burger and French fries from the fast food joint down the street instead. You know, just because it serves the purpose and gets you past that short term problem doesn't mean that it's good for you. And the same goes with your inventory. You should be managing your inventory all the time. And I know some of you listening are probably going, this doesn't involve me. I don't manage inventory. Sorry. I'm not going to take long. But I do really stress on the good habits of always turning over inventory. And one of my favorite people in the industry, Mike Cannon and Bob Cannon, who who started this process and taught Mike, they sell gear while it's still new.

12:37 Basically, they sell gear while it's young. They don't wait until it's on its last legs or or gone out of fashion or whatever. They're selling the latest version and people are like, why are they selling that? It's the hottest thing going right now because they're going to replace it with either the same thing or maybe the new version of it or whatever. But that's a healthy business, you know, continually upgrading, replacing, renewing your inventory, refreshing your inventory. It's also good for your financials. And I won't get into that right now, but it is turning over your assets is very good for your financials. And so, you know, even though you're really busy right now and everything's out, let's have a conversation, you know, connect with my team, We'll have a conversation about how we can start planning to sell off some of your inventory in August or September. Even though you're using it full time right now, it's 100% utilized.

13:28 You're going to jump the queue. You're basically come September, everybody's going to have warehouses full of stuff that they're looking to dump. And if you can jump in in July or August instead, you're going to do really well. And then lastly, Please remember to like and subscribe to our podcast. It helps a lot. Sarah's working really hard to get it to gain a following on, on YouTube, on Meta, on even Tiktok. She's got all kinds of stuff going on on Tiktok, but liking and subscribing really, really helps us. I would appreciate it if you did it. And yeah, so that's all about that. Now on to today's guest. Today's guest is Neil.

14:09 Oh, God, I'm going to screw this up. Neil. I'm so sorry. Neil Vasavada, who is the founder and president of OverDrive Energy Solutions. Neil is the driving force in the movement to bring green technology to the events industry. His engineering background and experience with both sustainable energy and live entertainment development has led him to found OverDrive Energy Solutions. Along with his Co founder John Boxer Hardison OverDrive has become a leader in sustainable energy for live events. In 2023, a partnership with Sustainability Non Profit reverb.org resulted in the two largest solar powered stages in U.S. history. The first was Willie Nelson's Luck Reunion, which we've spoken about on here with Richard Cadena, which reduced fossil fuel use for stage power by 95%.

15:06 In August, OverDrive made history with the largest temporary solar field ever for AUS Festival, powering parts of Billy Eilish's headlining set at Lollapalooza Chicago. OverDrive has also provided power at notable events and venues such as Coachella, Google's IO Developer Conference and Dodger Stadium with over 2.5 million, sorry, 2.5 MW hours of energy deployed. Moving forward, Neil is committed to developing cost efficient, liable and clean energy systems for live events and beyond. So please join me in welcoming Neil to the podcast, ladies and gentlemen, Neil Vasavada. And I think I might have almost gotten that right in the in the intro.

15:55 But how you doing, Neil? You did and I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah, good. Well, I appreciate you doing this. This this has sort of been in the works ever since Richard Kadena's most recent recording on this podcast where, I mean, he probably spent 30 minutes talking about the Willie Nelson thing and how well it went and how he even had some fears and things, you know, where we better have a lot of diesel generators in the background just in case this implodes on us. And so I guess we'll talk a little bit about that today. But so you know, Neil, as I said in the intro, and I kind of read your bio, so you're the founder and president of OverDrive Energy Solutions.

16:39 Co founder. OK. And so energy, what would you say is sort of the elevator pitch of of what OverDrive energy Solutions is or does? We're dedicated to reducing and eventually eliminating the use of diesel and gasoline and other internal combustion engines in live events. That's a that's a huge statement And, and I know, yeah, yeah. Well, and I know that that live events has wanted this for a while, not because they hate, you know, using generators or whatever. I think in some cases that is the case. But I, I think everyone and, you know, led by people like Billy Eilish, who I know was, was a a a huge advocate of, of this.

17:25 You know, they, they want more sustainable tours and shows out there, festivals, etcetera. Correct. Yeah, And Marissa, it's not just about sustainability. You know, let me start off by saying that diesel generators are a terrible way to make power. Why is that? Well, they're not reliable. They're only reliable in the sense that we've had them for 100 years. But how often do we deploy twin packs? How often do we have cold backups? In our world? You would think that after a century they could figure out a way to make this power source absolutely bulletproof. They're they're not particularly efficient.

18:07 They're not good at turning diesel fuel into electricity. The bleeding edge of technology might have 40% of the energy that's in that fuel actually becomes electricity. They're polluting. The fumes aren't pleasant. They, you know, they, there's, there's not a whole lot going for them except the fact that we've had them for so long that people know how to use them. They understand them very well. And I don't want to take that away from them. Familiarity is a big thing. But let's see here, let's compare diesel technology to what we generally call electrification, right, which is storing energy in some way and then deploying it. The battery generator systems.

18:49 All right. So the systems that that that we specifically are using to get rid of diesel are what are we're, we're calling battery power stations or just sometimes power stations. And they, they have two fundamental components that are in every system. One is energy storage and the other is an inverter. And you can think of them like a car. You have an engine, that's your inverter, that's how much power you can make. That's what makes the power. And then you have your gas tank, which is your battery. That is first where you store that energy to make the power and what you have to refuel in pretty much every metric, every measurement that we use in the live events world, whether it's actually, you know, a qualitative number based or just subjective, how we feel about it.

19:39 The battery power station is a better way to power our concerts. It is fundamentally more reliable. I think we conflate familiarity and reliability a little bit here, but the simple fact is that that battery systems and and inverter systems, they have very few moving parts. They operate at much lower temperatures and they're also 100 years old. They they've been around and they've been in heavy, heavy, heavy use. Just not in our world. The application is new, yeah, not not the. Technology, you know, they're they're silent with, with modern that the kinds of batteries that we use, they can be placed very close to the loads. So you don't need to be further away. You know, in a lot of places you need to be at least 20 feet away from the load with the generator, some places quite a bit more.

20:30 You don't have to do that with the battery system and they're actually cost effective. In fact, I believe that they should be cheaper than diesel generators. So there's there's a notion of sustainable energy or sustainability in general is a cost adder that it's more expensive. That's another thing that, you know, we're really trying to grasp the conversation around that. So we have this technology that is actually cleaning. It's more sustainable, obviously it's safer, it's more reliable, it's actually cost effective too. And we'll get into that in a little bit. So what's the downside? The downside is how long it takes to fill the gas tank. Yeah, that is it. Well, just being devil's advocate for a second, you know, the couple of things that I've heard brought up. One is, is, you know, the source of the components for the batteries, you know, the fact that little kids are shoeless and, and, you know, digging in, in these mines in, in Africa and stuff.

21:30 And secondly, the footprint that, you know, although it's more sustainable and it's, it's very efficient and all of those things, it's large, you know, you need a lot of space, not just for the batteries, but maybe for if you're using a solar farm to recharge the batteries or whatever. So what about those things? Well, it's interesting, Marcel, see you, you just highlighted two things. The 1st is misinformation. There's a lot of misinformation and dated information about technology out there. So let's misinformation is what's behind a lot of the the the conversation on the safety of batteries. And isn't it funny that none of that started until Elon Musk? But but Twitter and pissed everybody off and and then they started turning him into Satan. Well, no, because it was true and it is true. It is true that certain batteries are made of toxic chemicals that are rare in mind in in in questionable practices. So the most common electric car battery, and this is also similar to I think batteries that are in a lot of consumer goods and stuff are called lithium NMC, which is NMC stands for nickel, manganese and cobalt. These chemicals are the ones that are, you know, that that have a lot of controversy around them. They are crucial in some automotive batteries to allow you to discharge and charge at very high rates. So, you know, they're still pretty common in the electric car world.

22:59 But the misinformation part, first of all, the quantities of these chemicals in the electric car world and things like that have dropped considerably over the years to their they're a fraction of what they were ten years ago. But actually none of that matters because Marcel, the batteries that we use, the batteries that are ubiquitous, the stationary energy storage these days, which also happen to do the batteries that are in the standard range Teslas, I think the Ford Mustang Mach E uses, these kind of batteries are called lithium iron phosphates. Lithium iron phosphate batteries have none of those chemicals. They're 100% recyclable. In fact, they rewrite the book on what you and other people might be used to on batteries. One of the first things is they are, they have a very, very long life span in our application.

23:53 They last 10 to 20 years and and it's not even accurate to say they last 10 to 20 years. The manufacturers rate them as the end of their service life when they are at 80% of their new capacity. And as you know, batteries degrade with time. So, so really at the end of that life cycle, they still have use, you just have to add 20% more. So you might want to use them in an application, but they're not moving from place to place. They are also 100% recyclable. They also don't have thermal runaway issues. So there's a very specific test, UL9540A that is conducted to see how a battery pack handles fire. And we've all heard concerns about electric vehicle fires. And you know, once one of these things get burning, the electric vehicle, the NMC style packs, it's really hard to put them out.

24:52 That said, I think I, I don't quote me on this 'cause I haven't seen the latest statistics and I believe there's some new things out, but last I saw, electric vehicles are like they're, they're, they're 110th or one 100th. That's why you don't want, I don't want, I'm not sure which one it is. And that's a pretty big range. I understand less likely to catch fire in the 1st place, you know, So there's good there. It's bad. But again, that doesn't apply to what we're talking about here. Lithium when when you with the batteries that we use, when you try to light one of these batteries on fire, they don't the fire does not spread inside of the battery.

25:33 So they are actually they don't do that thermal runaway thing. That's what they call it when a battery catches fire and it spreads throughout the pack and you can't put it out, thermal runaway. So thermal runaway. So again, the answer to your first question is non issue on all fronts and hasn't been an issue in this world for about 5 years. That's good. But but we, you know, I get, I get asked that question a lot. And then the second thing, I'm not sure where that's coming from because the systems that we use are significantly, well, I shouldn't say significantly. They're usually either equal in size or smaller than the equivalent diesel generators that we're using. Including refuelling, Including solar. Farms.

26:16 Well, no, now see the solar farm is just a way to refuel the batteries, right? It's just a way to recharge them, OK. I guarantee you that if you built an oil refinery on site, it would be a lot bigger than the solar farm. So I don't think that that's really a fair assessment either because you, you know, that's, that's a benefit. And it's not that, you know, one of the things about energy storage these days about batteries is that we've come a long ways in terms of how much we can store. Really, I think the bigger problem is charging times. But if you think about it, all you have to do is match what a diesel generator does in terms of, in terms of runtime. And then there's all sorts of ways, there's a whole menu of ways to mitigate the, the, the fact that you can't recharge a generator as fast as you can recharge a battery power station as fast as you can refuel a diesel generator. If you try really, really hard, you're going to find use cases where a diesel generator is better. In fact, you don't have to try that hard. There's there's definitely use cases where a diesel generator makes sense.

27:26 But you know, we don't deploy solar farms for a lot of the shows that we do because we size all of our gear to have at least a full day of runtime, right? So if you're going to be running around and the vet and refuelling generators, it's really no different to deal with the batteries. Now, are you going to recharge the batteries? Well, in some places you can. Some places you have the ability through a variety of means to charge them overnight. So the fact that it might take you 5 hours to charge instead of 5 minutes isn't a significant issue. But that's only, again, that's one tool in your shed. And this is going to be a point that I'm going to bring up again and again and again. We have so much more flexibility when using batteries that even though there are things that batteries and battery powers stations might not do as well as diesel, which again really is how much energy, how much power you can put out and how quickly you can refuel it.

28:27 So do you have, do you have some kind of like planning software or something that creates an algorithm that says based on your show, here's the best solution? So it's to use a, a battery four times as big as what we need because it's going to allow us to go the whole weekend or to use more batteries or to have backups or to charge overnight. Like do you have something that helps make that decision? Or we have a we have a whole slate of tools to do that, including some software. Like I said, what I was going to say is that we so in order to recharge, refuel, we have several options. We have first of all, of course there's recharging, right? Second of all, there's battery swapping, right? So we can just swap out batteries, OK. And then of course, the third thing is to just simply have enough batteries to to make your runtime. So those are the reason why I don't think space is is is a big concern.

29:22 Right. And so what's the most common? Is it swapping or it's completely? Now, this is I will say one thing, because of all of the options and all the different ways we can do things, OK, using renewable energy requires a very different skill set. And to people who are very familiar with generators and how generators work and are really invested in how that works, it can seem complicated and it's very, it can be counterintuitive. Oh, really what we do when we look an event is we reimagine the whole power grid and we ask ourselves what are the loads? What are the things we're trying to run? Where are they are the energy demands? How long do they have to run?

30:11 What are the available charging sources that are already here? What charging sources can we set up and build? And then we apply that solution to every load on the show. So I'm going to cut to an example from 2 weeks ago. No values festival in Pomona at the Pomona Fairplex here in Southern California, the 1st roughly 250,000 square feet from the entry gates forward all the way to front of house at the first stage that you hit were completely diesel free done by OverDrive energy solutions that includes the box office 6 box office trailers merchandise. There was out of show merchandise, insure merchandise fulfillment, guest services, charging lockers. There was a, there's security scan and gates and, and, and, and then there was also a several office offices for different departments in that area. We went from, you know, I figure looking at the plot, they would have split that up into probably 4 diesel generators and destroyed out to everything.

31:21 We ran, we think 30 units there, 30 individual units. Closer to the to the power is needed. Well, well, well, hear me out. There's 30 individual units, 5 cable ramps, all of them were back a house. We're talking merch, security, everything. 5 cable reps was all there was OK Everything was set up so there was no refuelling or no recharging needed. We ran 18 in that area Phone. There were 12 offices with 18 different air conditioning units in them and we ran them for three days, 90 plus degree weather with no issues. Now someone might say, well you had 30 generators instead of four, 3030 smaller units instead of four generators. You know, my response is when you look at how much distro wasn't there, it was actually a simpler and easier installation. Now, if you've spent your entire career working with generators and all you know are generators, it looks more complicated. Just like if you've spent your entire life riding bicycles and you look at a car, the car is going to look more complicated, you know?

32:32 But that's the thing. It's a different thing, Yeah. That makes so much sense. Like that you can get the power to where it's needed, as opposed to, you know, put a big lump sum of power and then distribution to get it out to where it's needed. You know, Marcel, we've done, I think we've, we've just, we've passed 50 events in the last give or take three years. We have had this year we have had zero failures, 100% up time across all the events we've done last year we're at over 99%. We had one system go down in March of 2023 and that's that went down for about 30 minutes and that was the first and last time we had anything like that happen. We've been working with what failed, what failed. I failed.

33:19 I had the backup battery set up wrong. And it was one of our first shows, you know, that was, that was human error back then. But my point is that the systems are that reliable. They're so reliable that on customers that we regularly work with, we often get the call when a generator fails. You got a diesel? Because they know that I can get out there, deploy the battery and get them up and running faster than they're going to pull the generator out and bring a new generator in. We, we do Burning Man every year. We've done it for years. And it's really interesting watching all the generators fail in the heat and dust while the battery systems go. So they're more reliable. And we're not dealing with, you know, this isn't amateur hour.

33:59 Our last, you know, the shows that we've been doing this year we did South by Southwest, you know about Luck Reunion. That's not a huge show, but it's very boutique, high touch. We've done all of AEG, Golden Voices festivals, I think all of them down here in Southern California so far this year, including Coachella, Stagecoach and you know, we like I said, we just finished All Values and Pomona. We did stuff at the Rose Bowl. We did Google IO, which is their largest developer conference. It's at Shoreline Theatre, Menlo Park. These aren't small potatoes, 50 events, major users. We've deployed 400 amp services reliably, you know, so it hasn't been, you know, there's not a limitation in terms of power. And the question is, what's this all about? Everything that we do is backed by data. So it's, it's it, it's really hard to, to say that what the claims that we're making are are, are in some way distorted or invalid because again, we're very transparent. You'll find that we promote what we do a lot, not just because we want people to see what we do and come and earn their business, but we're trying to show people how reliable this stuff is.

35:06 So you wrap that all up, everything I just said, why have we had the success? Why are we have this? Why are we having this? Why are, you know, a bunch of roadies from Socal able to do this? And, and this is a space where the large traditional power suppliers have been struggling. They are learning and they're, they're starting to deploy stuff. And I think that's great. But what is it? And and and the The thing is that the use sustainable energy does take a different mindset and a different approach. And it just so happens that me and my Co founders are a very happy accident that has that background. Yeah, so a bunch of questions. One is when you, like you said, you're doing all these big shows, Google IO and Coachella and all this stuff, are you getting the call for battery systems or for sustainable power solutions, or are you getting the call for for generators and convincing them to switch to battery solutions? No, we're a battery solutions company, so we get the call for sustainability a lot of the time. However, OverDrive is very much focused on providing cost effective production friendly systems. By that I mean this stuff is sustainable or it enables sustainability.

36:26 It's much cleaner. It has all of those benefits, but that's not why you should be using it. Well, I shouldn't say that that's not the only reason you should be using it, Marcel. You should be using it because it's a better way to power the show, I can tell you. Is it more stable as far as the power? Like there's not the the spikes and stuff that you sometimes get off generator power. Yes, and more so First off, it's more stable and that's not just me talking. We have data logs for every single event that we have. We have at this point, we have gigabytes of data. And you know, one of the neat things is looking at at, at something that's been running for, for, for for for 16 or 20 hours with very with highly variable loads on it.

37:07 And, and seeing that across 3 phases, you know, you're only seeing a 1 Volt deviation over that entire time frequency. Like you're at 60 Hertz and you're at 60 Hertz and you're at 60 Hertz period. You know, so first of all, because we're not dealing with a rotating mass that has to accelerate and decelerate and all that stuff to generate our, our, our power, it's fundamentally much cleaner. But there's more. So inverter systems, the engines that we're talking about are by design, they typically can handle up to 100% overload for short bursts. And this is sort of a linear relationship between rated load and and overload. So you can actually run on the systems we run, we have you can run 30% overrated for 1/2 hour.

37:56 What does this mean? In the world that we live in live entertainment, we have a lot of very dynamic loads and lighting and audio, you know, very dynamic loads. And these systems are actually better suited to run those loads than a generator. You don't have to worry about about about balancing your loads across phases. You know, we've done some pretty hilariously unbalanced loads and it just doesn't matter. So again, I can keep going, I can go on and on and on. But this is a better way to power our events. It's it's definitely sustainable, but it is a better way. Are you guys manufacturing the components or are you using something from another industry that you're repurposing?

38:38 Well, we're, we're manufacturing the the gear any electronic or any, any assembly these days is made of components that are made other places. So, you know, our gear is custom manufactured for live entertainment. You use, again, we use UL certified batteries and inverters. We use, you know, we use gear that was originally designed and is often used in, in harsh environment applications. So the inverters we use, they're very common in, in, in like in yachts and, and ocean going vessels and things like that. They're they're designed to be working in those harsh environments.

39:24 And the batteries that we use, for example, you know, they're, I think the roots are really in telecom, but these are very, very commonly used for industrial commercial backup systems. We incorporate them into a shock mounted enclosure and things like that to protect them. But then there's things that, you know, that are, are completely our own design, the input output stuff, although, you know, we use standard Cam locks, you know, and other sort of connectors to accomplish it. The way that we laid them out, the way we mount them, the way we access them. And you know, it's all our own design. And the reason it is, is because one of the things that we lean on that makes. These activations work is the modularity and scalability of of these components, and there's so many different ways we can go into that conversation.

40:10 Yeah, I mean, I so I'm guessing there's not IP in the actual technology, but your IP really is more in the application and the experience and the knowledge of of not only using these, but in, you know, just what can and, and how, what the break conditions would be, what the optimal conditions are and all of those. Like somebody can come to you with a Coachella and you know exactly what to do, whereas someone else would be experimenting. How about this? I don't know what to do and what's what. And, and by design, we've designed our system so that you don't need to know as much. And that's that production friendly approach to it.

40:53 So, you know, there's, I think that again, you could just they're, they're, they're fundamentally so different. It really requires a, a different mindset. But you know, like, like I, let me, let me talk about briefly. I, I'd like to talk about where we came from in the 1st place so people understand why I make these claims. You know why usually. Usually where I start from the beginning, this time I started from like 2/3 of the way through but. Some days I wake up and I think I'm the luckiest guy on earth. Some days I wake up and I figured out and and I think I figured out how to ruin everything I love. I get it and trust me. And, and there's a couple, you know, and me and, and, and one of my business partners, Sean, we both had a very similar path.

41:39 My background is in hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicle technology going all the way back. I think the first electric vehicle I started working on was in 1994 and I worked in that space. Eventually I went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated with an engineering degree from there. While I was there, did project student projects with the US Department of Energy and the big three automakers. And then a couple years after I graduated, I worked in professional Motorsports for a little while. Then I started a company called Apex P Technology which was all about control systems and data acquisition. Systems, which is a whole other conversation we need to have because I've been around racing for 1415 years with my kid.

42:21 He's still a he, he's doing all kinds of different formula stuff. He's he's big on open wheels. So I mean he came through 10 years or eight years of karting and and then the last three or four years have been open wheel mostly in Europe. I haven't discussed this on any podcast at all, but I was an engineer in IndyCar. I was an engineer in the in IRL Formula Atlantics. I. Haven't done any. Do you know John Batos? I don't know. I haven't done any of that stuff since the early 2000s. He's an old timer. He's an old timer. I mean, he's probably sort of the mentor that brought my kid up in, in car racing. But Beto's Formula Atlantic, you, you would have bumped into him at some point because most of the cars and the components of the cars came through him.

43:05 He, him and his brother owned a company called Primus Racing. Oh, I think I heard of them. Yeah, I worked with Hassle Grin back in the day and I think I I worked with Dorcot and Hilton and and Brooks Racing and all these things. This is going back 20 plus years. But you know, something interesting happened at that time because I had this background in electric vehicle technology. We ended up working with early stage Tesla. I think it was even back before Model S was released, providing them with data acquisition systems, 0 electric motorcycles, I think we did some work with them with wiring and harnesses and stuff like that. We worked with the US Department of Energy. We helped do data acquisition stuff for the what, for the Automotive X Prize, the Progressive Automotive X Prize, you know, all of this stuff. So I, I, I had a foot in that door. And then around the the 2008 recession, that business really, really slowed down.

43:59 And I ended up helping a a buddy of mine and one thing led to another and I ended up working in the live music business, specifically working with infrastructure stuff, barricade flooring, things like that on large stadium tours and music festivals. And I actually helped. What a strange. Path though, you know, engineering school to racing and rock. And roll. Let me. Like I said, rock'n'roll. Yeah. Crazy. My childhood dreams are my daily nightmares. Yeah. You know, I don't know which. Is which? Yeah, exactly right. So, you know, I had this thing where I had this, this deep engineering technical background in batteries, electrical systems, you know, all that stuff. And then I, you know, I, I've spent 12 years now working on some of the largest, most complicated productions in our world.

44:53 Now, now, now, Sean, he he graduated with a, a master's in electrical engineering with a focus in solar to a job market that didn't have a lot going. I I think you might have to correct me on this, but I think like his campus job was flying an inflatable mascot in their school's arena. Oh my God, that's hilarious. And that so when he couldn't find a job, a good competitive job in the solar industry, he ended up being Roger Waters pig pilot. Sean Jacobs is the pig pilot. He's still the pig pilot.

45:35 He's been flying the pig for Roger Waters since something like 2008 or something like that. He's also gone, he's gone on to be head carp for for Roger. He's been a carp on Green Day. Coldplay. We're currently OverDrive is currently touring with with a Green Day in Europe right now. Sean's with them. We're not doing energy. We just put out our first teaser about it. And I can if you put a put a put a pin in this, we'll talk about what we're doing with Green Day maybe at the end of the podcast. But the point is that we're both these, you know, we're, we're, we're the the third kind of leg in the stool is boxer. He runs bigger hammer production services, long time tour manager, production manager.

46:19 Now he has a crewing company, a well known crewing company. And he's a conservationist. He has had solar on his warehouse at his home. He's been driving electric cars for many, many years. So he's a production guy who has practical experience. We're production people who have engineering experience. And the pandemic happened and we had no touring to do. So when the pandemic happened, I actually ended up talking to some of my colleagues at the US Department of Energy who's still there. And I was really, I was really surprised and by by what they were telling me about how far that technology has come. And so we started started messing around with it on our own. Literally did the start up thing, built the shed in my backyard back there.

47:08 We called it OverDrive Labs and 10 by 10 shed and started playing with stuff there. We did our first event which was a movie night on the beach for a fitness group here in Santa Monica, CA. I think it was in April or May of 2023 and it was 16 no 15 months later we did Billy Eilish's headlining set at. Lollapalooza. That's that's some serious movement growth. That's wild. And and that's with the reliability and everything we're talking about.

47:49 And I think the reason why we've progressed this quickly and we've had the reliability and we've been able to deliver is because we're looking at it from a completely different lens. You know, it's just the the questions that you started off with, right? Toxic batteries. And what was the second one? Again, it was toxic batteries and they take up a lot of space. Well, that's the surface stuff. Just wait till you start digging and you have, you know, we have all day. This, by the way, is why Richard is so awesome. I'm in awe of that guy. He's a dear friend. And I really look up to him because Rick, because we've had a lot of skepticism, you know, a lot of people say you can't do that, you know, and you know, they say you, I, I always like to try to come up with a good analogy for, you know, they say you can't do that because there is a, you know, there's a post in the middle of that path.

48:44 You can't go, you can't go that way. But there's nothing securing the path that anyone check and see. We can just, or post, we can pick it up, move it and then go past it. You know, no one's doing that. And so you know that that's what this whole journey has been about is building a company. And now you asked about IP. Actually now we're getting into sort of the the development timeline, the path that OverDrive is taking. So there's very much technical IP in what we do really. Yes, absolutely. The way that we, the way our connection systems work, the way that things work together, everything is modular right then and there is, is, is, is IP.

49:25 And I've actually, you know, we, we're, we're, we're working on a raise right now, we're working on scaling. And so these are things that we've been, we've been speaking with legal. Professionals, my concern, my concern is always that, you know, a bunch of yahoos can get together and save up some cash or get a small investment and and go buy a bunch of battery packs off of, you know, Alibaba something and and end up in a in a pickle. You know, Yahoo do a lot of harm not only to our our industry, but but to your brand. You know what I mean? Like so. Marcel, we're not seeing this as yahoos. We're seeing the largest diesel generator rental companies on earth buying batteries and having issues. It's really is the happy accident that's brought us to where we are.

50:10 It's not the fact that we are the best. Yeah, I, I actually joke that, you know, we're such terrible engineers that they kicked us out and made us go work in Rock'n'roll instead. All right? We're not, we're not the smartest engineers yet. I work with our vendors and our suppliers. It's always interesting when you have when you're, you know you're, you're in a meeting with somebody who's obviously way smarter than you, but because of an experience or perspective, you can open their mind to something. Well, and here's herein lies the, the opportunity like a, you know, you seem to downplay a little bit the package that you bring. And there's not very many people in our industry who, A, went all the way through school B, you know, have engineering degrees and stuff and end up going to work for car companies, you know, helping to produce electric cars and, and the technology behind it and then find their way into live events that doesn't.

51:06 Happen very often. It doesn't happen, but then there's not a lot of several engineers who are losing fingernails and slamming into things at 3:00 in the morning. If I was smarter I might have a nice 401K and a cushy desk in Detroit. But you're having a lot of fun and. All seriousness, I just wanted to address what you said about that. Combination of, of skill set and, and knowledge doesn't exist. And, and you know, that's why Someone Like You can come into a, a very old industry that's done things not very old. I shouldn't say that, you know, 100, not even 100 years old, 60 year old industry, whatever it is that's done things a very particular way. And our industry is definitely stuck in our ways quite often where it's like, well, that's how we've always done it.

51:50 You know, like you said, there's a pole in the way. Well. Let's move the pole. But you know, I think a guy with your sort of package of of skills and knowledge is very rare in our industry. And then even. Kadina. Kadina is very rare in our industry, yeah. And I got to say we're having a lot of fun and you know, so we're bouncing around a lot of places right now. But what what I was talking about with and what, what, what what comes up is down playing. And I know I listen. I almost feel like I have to because we can do it the other way if you want. We've done 50 shows plus shows. We've had no failures. I've already talked about that. The clients, the people working in those spaces love it.

52:30 The artists love it. The production people love it. The controllers love it. You know, we're hitting it on a ballpark. Yeah, but no one wants to hear that because then you sound like it's actually less believable if I just lay it out like that. And those every, everyone thinks those things are true. So what I think you hear from me is I'm trying to bring a sense of balance to this. I'm trying to explain to people, listen, when, when, when, when we talk about these benefits, they are real. OK. And lest someone thinks that, you know, we are, we are. And, and whenever you have a lot of skepticism, people think that you're you're inflating things. You know what happens? And it's human nature. So I try to when I speak, I try to be very, very clear and transparent about where it came from.

53:13 I mean. Yeah. We're not the stupidest people in the world, right? So, yeah, I'll give you that. Like, you know, I've worked hard to gain this knowledge and we've we've, we've broken a lot of stuff to get here. But the point is that that the the reason we're successful is because of the time energy spent that getting here. This is not, you know, I'm I'm what is it like? You're like, I'm sure there's a meme out there somewhere about what you're paying for when you hire a professional with, you know, here. We've got this is 35 years of messing around with this stuff is where we got to where we're at.

53:53 And it's also, you're right. That is part of our IP is simply the fact that it's hard for other people who are invested in that world to get their head around it and to look at things a different way. And you really do have to look at everything from the software perspective, from the hardware perspective, from the labour perspective differently in order to get, you know, a good result. Wow. I mean, it seems really clear to me that you guys would be a massive acquisition target for some of the, you know, the cat and, and you know, the big Sunbelt scenic or sunbelt, what are they called? You know what I mean? Like those companies will look at you and go, Oh my God, like that. We're never going to acquire as much talent and, and experience as these guys have.

54:36 Let's just acquire them. I, I was hoping that would, that would be the case when we first started and, you know, maybe we, we still could be an acquisition target, but you know, we're learning how different it is from a lot of their business models. You know, first of all, the battery systems, they, they, they require a lot less distro and the same companies that you're talking about. Let's look at their revenue model for a second, OK, They have these generators which have a service life. Every time you use them, they're worth less than the last time you use them, right? You're wearing them out, OK, They need maintenance. They, they need, they need repairs. So there's an ongoing overhead cost to them. OK.

55:18 Then you have distro and most of it is very simple. It's copper. And what's crazy is if you look at the price, prices of copper, a lot of the distro that's owned by these companies, it's not just that it's been paid off ages ago. It's worth more now as scrap than it was new in 1998 when they got it or whatever, right? So they're going to look at optimizing a grid. All right, First thing they have to face is that all of their operations, OK, you're going to have to retrain everybody. Sure, we can talk about it at the sea level. Our publicly traded generator company wants to be sustainable.

55:59 Tell that to the guy behind the desk in Stuart, FL Tell him or her to stop using diesel generators and go to this totally different technology, right? So there's that. It's a huge cultural shift too. Huge, huge cultural shift facilities, right? They have to, you know, you have to, you have to, we've all heard, or some of us have heard how Hertz really struggled to, to, to add electric cars to their fleet and they've had to backtrack now and things like that. So you have that every time they deploy these things, if they're deploying them correctly, they're cannibalizing the best revenue they have the the most profitable stuff. And, and I don't know what your experience is, but I've been on shows where the distro bill was almost as much as the generator.

56:44 Actually, I think I've been on the show where the distro bill was higher than the cost of the generator. And then when you put the labor to put in distro, how much does an 8 hour call of union electricians cost in Chicago, right? And they have to do that. They have to do that distro. So what do we see? What we see in the market predominantly right now is people replacing large generators with large batteries. I think that's where some of the perceptions that we've talked about come from, OK. The thing about electrification components is that they're almost perfectly scalable. I can take a MW battery generator system. OK, I can take a huge battery generator system and charge a cell phone with it, and it's actually still pretty much just as reliable or or as as efficient as as if it was running 750 kilowatts at 3/4 of its maximum loan.

57:37 But you can take that one MW system and if it's designed properly, the components within it allow this. You can split it up into 1000 kilowatt systems. Yeah. Right. It's it's not very easy to do that with generators. So our systems, very specifically the ones that we've built, you can go all the way 10 kilowatts to 150 kilowatts with the same components. You can add battery capacity, you know in what's called 5 kilowatt always. That means it would run a 5000 Watt load for an hour all the way to 640 just by connecting them.

58:18 You can hot swap them. You can actually add batteries while you're running. You can take batteries away and take them to charge while you're running. This is where it gets fun. We can parallel inverters in different ways. We have a a unit we call the Pro 60. At it's core, it's a 6000 Watt generator system inverter. OK. You can run two of them together and there's a way with software and communications cables to connect them and now you have a 240 Volt split split phase system. You can 66 kilowatts, so 50 amps per phase. Take three of them. Now you got a three phase system. Now all of a sudden we've got an 18K3 phase generator, but there's more.

59:01 You can also stack them in the other direction. You want 18 KA 120 volts single phase. You can run three of them like that all the way up to 36 kilowatt three phase. That's wild. This so I have all I all I need is this. I have nine boxes that one person can roll around easily in my trailer. You know these are I I forget the exact dimension, but they're like the three quarter truck pack or one way they're three wide. The other way they're four wide and a truck that one component can be used in so many different applications. You can Lego it together the way you want. The same thing with our Pro 600, which is 10 times the size. It's it's it's nominally 60 kilowatt can go all the way up to 180 kilowatts three phase. So we have the ability to go around and tailor our loads to what we need.

59:50 The separation distance for the big systems is five feet. A lot of our systems are exempt. They're they small enough for the exempt from from some of these codes. So you can put them, you know, right. We we have we have a problem. That some of my my guys have real concerns about which they should have real concerns about and that is people putting their drinks on our gear. Personally, I'm not encouraging it, but I love it because I know that the chances of someone not going to drink over and it getting into that enclosure the way it's designed are very, very low. Even if it got into the enclosure. These things have seen some stuff like I've I've had units in green fields where we didn't know there was sprinklers, you know, like I'm not encouraging this. Like think about this for a second. In what world would it be a problem that people keep putting their drinks on a diesel generator? In what world is your is, is your power supply for the entire bar at the back of house, right, you know, or, or at the back of the bar or in the bar or under the bar, you know, so there's so much flexibility that can that can happen. I'm going to tell you another thing too, that that's going to blow your mind.

1:01:02 So one thing I'm going after is supplemental generators. I mean, there's one thing about making festivals green, but as an engineer, the first principal sort of engineering me, I'll never be comfortable with seeing diesel generators at venues in urban areas. Did, we did Dead and Company last year and we had I think they were MW twin packs, 2500 kilowatt units at Fenway, at Wrigley Field, quite a few other destinations. But you know, we, we're in a business where we bring generators to places with power because there's not enough power, it's not reliable. So all of our units can do the following. Not only can they power things, but they can actually boost things. Let's and and we do this all the time now. So we did this in South by Southwest. They had 100 amp service in the park that we were working in the stage needed, you know, two 200 amp services or something like that.

1:02:00 We had our unit, the pro 60, which is capable of boosting, I'm sorry, Pro 600 capable of boosting those things by 100 amps. What we could do was we could take in 100 amps and add 100 amps to it. And really, and this is where it gets really fun, is when the load was drawing more than 100 amps, it would take the remainder of the power from our system, our batteries, our inverter. But when it was less, it was charging our system. So we're working like a big sponge. Interesting. So we did that South by, we did it at 2 Coachella events. We did it at a Interscope Records Capital Records party. They had a mansion for their what did they call it?

1:02:44 They call it party in the desert every year Coachella weekend one, you know, celebrities and executives and music industry and all that stuff. They had a catering operation that they would typically bring a supplemental generator out for. Well, all we had to do was plug our unit into a 20AMP or even actually it was a 15 amp Edison and we could output 50 amps, you know, and, and actually we could have, I'll put 50 amps continuously on that system for about four hours. But obviously no one's pulling 50 amps continuously. And actually in all these applications, the state of charge of the battery when we picked it up was 100% because whatever they drain, they're always putting it back. Right now it gets even more.

1:03:32 So we did another thing where we had a large video wall running again off of a 15 amp regular plug in a house. We had everything sized for 30 amps for that video wall. So we could boost that. But there's more. All these systems can work as UPS's as well. So let's say that we had grid power and we had one of our systems. If the grid were to go down, if you have a power failure, if we size our system properly, it can continue to power the load until our Baker batteries is dead, which you know, when these grid tensions, we try to go several hours. So that actually happened at the Capitol reckless party. They, they, they lost power in the house. The, they had a power failure in the house. The catering operation stayed up and running. There were no issues, you know, and so if we ever have a great failure or something like that, we have several hours to fix the problem.

1:04:20 And these are all things that they aren't, you know, obviously they're not features of generators, they're not intuitive to people. But once you, once you learn these details and then you go out there and you apply them. And that's the other thing that you know, that's the other IP that you mentioned. It's going to take time for people to really understand how these how you do these combinations. And that's another reason why you mentioned software. One of the things I had to call out yesterday is developing software to help manage and implement this. Now we already have every unit we have has data, log unit and wireless streaming. They all stream to a web-based server.

1:05:00 I can go and look at everything that's running on a dashboard at any time. And we do. I mean, we're at our festivals mostly. What we're doing is watching to make sure nothing's going wrong. We can even control things off the web. So OverDrive has gone to the next level. Now we deploy our own networks. So even when there's production Wi-Fi, we have a Starlink. We have these 900 megahertz long range wireless nodes. We can also use production Wi-Fi and have ours is redundant and then we can actually turn off and on things Luck Reunion that show that you know, we've done a couple times with Willie Nelson, we shut off stage power at like 2:00 in the morning and well, I understood the call to be 9, but actually the call from the mainstage was at 8.

1:05:45 I got a phone call and I picked up my phone and I hit a button and I powered up the stage from our Airbnb. Interesting. So you know, Richard was here for that. That was fine. And the last thing I asked you a couple. Questions, Neil. Go on, go. On I just want to say one thing real quickly about Richard. One important thing about that is he is somebody who is absolutely steeped in generators and traditional electrical systems. And if Richard has been able to change his way of thinking, understand this stuff and move forward within the short amount of time we we've had. And Richard's been in the industry forever and he likes to make jokes about, you know, setting things up on stone tablets and stuff like that. If he can make, if he can figure this out, if he can make the change, anyone can.

1:06:30 Yeah. Well, and and I mean, he's a huge advocate, obviously. So a few questions and some of these are going to be really dumb. But first is your bigger challenge the the size of the load or the the length? Neither. Those aren't challenges. Well, or I should say like what are you optimizing for? Culture, probably culture the the entire the biggest problem by far is people's unfamiliarity and. Skepticism. And let me, let me, I'll, I'll, I'll take that to the next level. OK, First of all, I don't know if if you're aware, but another thing that we've come across is how we how over respect our current generators are so when we did the building. Failure based though, isn't it?

1:07:21 Like isn't that based on? Well, I remember I had a problem 12 years ago at that one show that we did. So we always overspeck them now. Except Marcel, they're making them less reliable. So what we're finding, what we're finding, and it's not just us, there's people from other organizations have done this, is that the generators that we use in live events typically operate at, you know, we were thinking that it was really bad. It was 25%. What we're finding is a lot of stuff is under 10%. And what you're, what you're getting at those low loads is something called wet stacking in diesels where they have the, the particular emissions don't burn off properly. The emissions control system they add don't work right and the generators actually fail. The generators are less reliable because the loads that we're running them at are, are very low. That's another thing is, is we've, we've come to find that this, you know, the supplemental power thing is a rule of thumb. Sean did this on Roger Waters.

1:08:16 He simply measured stuff and they figured out that they could drop supplemental generators AT2 venues that they've been getting them forever. No one ever questioned it. They just get get the stuff. So first of all, loads are not really an issue because a, they're lower than you would think, B, we have that scalability. You know what? You know what happens if I'm wrong? I can actually plug in a second unit in real time. That's a double mic. The cool part like you know you could put in a an X size package and have a miscalculation or gear added to a show. God forbid it does happen and you could just add like a module right? You don't have to respect the whole system, you can just plug in another module.

1:09:00 It's, it's one of my favorite party tricks. We, we, we fill the trailer everywhere we go because they'll use everything we bring. No matter what we spec always, you know, our clients always find uses because there's always something that is either a pain in the ass or we're not doing because it's a pain in the ass. I'll give you the simplest example. At the Rose Bowl, they had the, they had cords running against an emergency exit that went back of house that went backstage at the mainstage. And so they said, and there was a security tent right next to it to move it to the other side. So there were no cords would make it really crowded, right. So someone said, Hey, why don't they just put a battery over there? And then we've, we've, we've opened up that space.

1:09:42 We made the emergency exit, you know, much cleaner and more compliant and, and safer, right, right. So that we did that last weekend with the with a security gate. We did that with an inflatable. We did that with the merch fulfillment tents. That was just last weekend. Yeah, the last gig we did so. And there's no danger to to proximity or anything of these batteries, like whether it's heat or radiation or whatever. Like these are dumb questions for sure. No, they don't. They don't, they don't have. So that's, that's actually an interesting question though too. So electromagnetic, you know, radiation is fundamentally caused by changing and moving currents. We don't have a rotating mass like a generator. We actually have less electromagnetic output and things like that than interesting than the typical generator.

1:10:34 These units, they don't run hot. Like the hottest temperatures that we see in the desert like at Coachella might be 120 F in the units. They run fine at 120 F and, you know, an equivalent generator. What's that running at, you know? Yeah. 22250 if you're looking at oil, yeah, those. Desert shows are brutal environments, you know that and and the Burning Man and stuff. Brutal environments for gear. Yeah, so I mean, I, this is, again, this is like I said, why I, why I tend to try to inject a little bit of, of, of humble into what I, I talk about because when you say things like, you know, and, and, and it's, I'm sure it's a little frustrating as an interviewer when I say things like, that's not a problem, neither of those problems. It's just a culture.

1:11:23 It sounds nuts, but then take half a step back. I realize that we can scale the battery storage, we can scale the power output those. Assets are real time. You can scale it real time, which is the cool part, yeah. They're easy to move. I mean, all right, weight is an issue. Right. Things weigh a lot, but you know what a lot of stuff that we deal with in live events weighs a lot and we use just just here we use 480 Volt generators that are some distance away from load with a step down transformer to go to two O 8, right And have you I mean step down Transformers, A-75 kilowatt step down transformer weighs how much 2000?

1:12:07 Pounds. Yeah, they're not. Yeah, they're. Not so. It's not like, yeah, batteries are heavy, but again, when you take that whole system, the generator, the Transformers, all that addition and everything like that, it's heavy too. So when I say things like that, I know it sounds nuts, but but really it all goes back to helping someone understand that, OK, they're scalable and the things that make them scalable are easy to move around and get around. I would much rather push a rack of batteries. One of our our, our typically size large battery stacks is about the size of a refrigerator. A lot easier to push that into place and plug it in and take the old batteries out. Then they get a fuel truck that's fuel, a generator in the same.

1:12:47 Spot. Yeah, that makes sense. Two more questions. Well, no, I mean not for the whole interview, but just two, two things that are on my mind that I'll forget if I don't ask you. Cost per delivered what as compared to to diesel generators, is it less, is it more if you include refueling and all of the all of the components? The longer the show, the more cost competitive it is. But it doesn't even have to be very long shows because, you know, again, the live entertainment industry has given us a gift here. So what standard practices for a generator? Let's say that you're doing a show. Marcel, apologies, I don't know your background. Let's let's let's talk a stadium show that I know a thing or two about those your steel team loads in typically what, three days before production shows up?

1:13:42 Four days before production shows up. So when that generator comes with the steal team and it gets started, when does it get turned off? I don't know. Load out day of course doesn't get shut off at all in between. So when that state generator is started, it will run 24/7 for days and days and days, right? Another little characteristic of diesel generators is that they typically. And the fuel, sorry to interrupt, but so yours is basically power on demand versus? On demand. Running, running all the time. Yeah, not only that, but never even thought of that. That makes a huge amount of sense. People don't realize this.

1:14:24 Diesel generators also, they typically burn the same amount of fuel at idle all the way up to 2025% lower because the efficiency of the generator starts tanking as you get toward idle. OK, so it turns out it takes almost the same amount of fuel to make 25 kilowatts out of 100 kilowatt generator than it does to have it sitting there overnight just running to keep the councils on at the stage. So that's crazy. I'm, I'm, I'm going to, pardon me to the rude guy looking at his computer, but I want to quote real numbers to you for a second. OK, Because we just finished another sustainability report.

1:15:06 All the data is the property of my customers. It's up to them to share. So I don't share names, but I will tell you that in one single three day event, we saved an estimated 2000 gallons of fuel recently. And that's fairly typical of like a three day festival. 2000 gallons of fuel. What are they paying for fuel service around here? You know, is it 6-8 bucks a gallon? Yeah, yeah, you're in California. But also the distro well and that that's delivered fuel and all that stuff, right? Also look at the cost of that distro again, even if you own all the distro, even if you have an all in deal from your generator supplier where they don't charge, OK, you still have to provide the labor to lay that all out.

1:15:52 And as you know that that can take a while. So when you look at the cost savings from that stuff, these systems should be cost competitive and a lot of times they are. In fact our entry at the Coachella was really about being production friendly and saving cost where they had small hard to service generators around their site than it was sustainability so. Currently the focus is is single events like festivals and and single shows or whatever, but is there a plan to to work towards a touring application for this? Focus isn't live events. Those are the ones who have let us in. Those are the ones who have let us in so far. Really, it is a big cultural change.

1:16:33 I understand. I get it that it is, you know, one of the things in our industry is that is, is, is, you know, first thing first that artist has got to go on those curtains have to come up and you know, they've got to start performing at the time that they're supposed to be performing. And that has to happen, you know, every day, 2-3 days for six weeks a year, right? So our entire system in production management, I think, is designed to be very, very conservative. And if you have what works, you stick with what works. We think that there are huge applications in Turing, and So what we're doing with Green Day right now, I can talk about that for a quick second. Yeah, that'd be good.

1:17:15 So when we were looking at all different sustainability solutions and, you know, Sean is a pig pilot, one of the things that came up was why can't we reuse helium? Because helium is a it is a non renewable resource and the prices for helium have come up dramatically over the last several years. So one of the things that that that Sean actually designed and built is a helium recapture system. All right. And that is it's it's been used with Roger Waters, it's been used with Coldplay. It's a slam dunk. It allows them to take the helium out of the inflatables instead of venting it, store it, use it at the next event.

1:17:57 Works really well for tours and it gets us out there in the touring world. So you know, one of the reasons that that that that we're pursuing that is to get that foothold in there to get the opportunity. It's really easy to show festivals what we can do because I can throw in the back of my vehicle and we can go Touring applications takes a lot more commitment from the tour itself and from us. We have to provide the people and everything. I I have to say, if there's one thing I'm disappointed in, Marcel, it's that we haven't been able to get on a major tour yet this year. And a lot of it has nothing to do with the industry or the tours. I think that there are definitely tours out there who are very receptive to what we're doing. It's simply that things have happened so quickly that we haven't had time to sit back and engage those tours. But I think that.

1:18:43 Yeah. I mean, to me, the obvious thing is you need to get in into a lot more of these top production managers because I can think of a handful of them right now like Faye McMahon, who I've already mentioned being one of them. But I, there's, I can think of five or six whose names I won't mention right now, but who are very, very interested in sustainable solutions and would be Guinea pigs for something like this. As long as they have this conversation with you. Like honestly, having just spoken to you for an hour, I trust you. You know what I mean? Like I trust that my shit will work, you know, with you at the helm, because you guys have designed a, a proper system. You know what you're doing.

1:19:28 It's so much easier when you think of scale. It's so much easier to build this sort of technology than it is something that's getting implemented into 10s of thousands or millions of cars that are going to be driven by a soccer mom who doesn't need to or want to understand technology. She just wants to hit go and the thing goes right. And it needs to be safe. And so, yeah, I mean, to me, it's just a matter of time. And, and for me really it's that there I, I need to start reaching out to those production managers and talking to them. You know, what's really cool about what we do? And I really do appreciate that. It's very, very, very cool that, you know, we're earning people's trust and your trust and things like that. But don't take it from me.

1:20:12 One of my favorite things to say these days is call anyone at all who's worked in Golden Voice production. Who's. Work with Luck reunions production. You can go ahead and talk to the auditorium staff at Luck reunion. I mean at South by Southwest, you can talk to Sparks now owned by Freeman company. They're the production company that did Google IO, you know, and I don't even have to give you a name people who who try this stuff. Well, here's a little statistic for you. Of all of the gigs that we did last year, our first year, you know, our first saw a year in business, every single client not you know, we're, we're, we're up to, you know, we're, we're halfway through the year now and every single person that we worked with last year that's still doing an event this year has come back bigger. Without exception.

1:21:03 Nobody has worked with OverDrive and then said, you know what, we're going back to diesel. Yeah. You know what's interesting, Neil? Like, so I was a very early player in, in commercial LED, you know, commercial LED, similar to battery technology was like a bug light for engineers. You know, it, people were just like, oh, I love this, You know, it's, it's green and it's, it's got all of these wonderful, you know, benefits and. And I go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. Do I remember what I was gonna say? Do you remember when stages were hot? Yeah. Yeah, no one even thinks about that anymore. Yeah, no, it's true. No change the makeup game. But I'm talking about commercial LED, like warehouses and hotels and whatever, like just general lighting, right? And so I started a, a company in, in 2004, I think. And it was in that business.

1:21:59 And so the whole world was going this direction of, you know, green and sustainability. And it's, it's better for the environment and all of this stuff. And I looked at that and said, nobody gives a shit. Like people who are writing a check at the end of the day aren't writing a check because it's saving the planet. They're writing a check because it's saving them money. So let's focus on the, the financial details and the financial because then that way, like the cultural shift, forcing people to want to care about the environment if they don't, for example, is a really tough thing.

1:22:39 You know, it's a really like, I'll tell you the only reason I was interested in the Tesla and I don't have one, but the only reason I was interested in one because I'm a Motörhead, I'm a racing guy, right? And so when you look at the Plaid, the Model S Plaid, The thing is a freaking rocket ship. It's the fastest production car, I believe, I don't know, maybe it's not, but zero to 60 and what is it, 1.9 seconds or something? It's insane. And so that to me is Elon Musk saying, hey, this thing isn't just green, it's pretty fun. It's. Fast and it's really fun. Absolutely right. Go on that example. We bought a Tesla Model YA year ago, 13 months ago. We've put 30,000 miles on it.

1:23:24 It's gone the shows in Texas, it's gone the shows in Chicago. And we tow a trailer with it. We tow a 5000 trip # trailer with it. By the way, the trucks rated 4000 lbs or the Model Y is. So we drive all over LA, we tow a trailer to the Bay Area. And people say you're not supposed to be able to do this stuff with electric vehicles, right? We've we've done the we've done the work. The maintenance costs have been, well, it's had it needed about $1000 in repairs because I keep on driving it with the 21 inch sport wheels that it has over nails and stuff, you know, and I've, I've, I've gone through 2 tires. So the next tire I'm actually going to downgrade to the 19 inch wheels so I can get some meteor rubber on it. That's been the only problem.

1:24:07 It's and you know, once again, Oh yeah, I did a calculation get we're spending the same amount of money as a vehicle that would that got 85 miles a gallon right now of gas. By the way, we supercharge it most of the time because where I live, I can't get the Tesla into my back alley to get to my backyard to charge, you know, so there's an example there of like, you know, of something that, that, that when in the use case, it actually turns out it's not sustainability that and, and we bought it when, you know, they had a big price drop. I think it was 42 grand. You're not going to get anything that gas, diesel, hamster powered.

1:24:48 I don't care. You're it's very hard to envision spending that kind of money on something that has delivered that much value. And that's the same thing that we're saying about this stuff. And that's, that's when I go back to saying the culture part is really about us going out there, doing these jobs, speaking with people like you, sharing the data, sharing what we do and, and continue to try to move this forward because. Yeah. You're not just buying it because you're going to save the planet. You're you're buying it because it's the next obvious evolution of powering these shows. And there's all of these benefits. And, you know, for me, when I was pitching a half million dollar relighting project for a warehouse or something, it was like at #10 was it saves the planet.

1:25:34 You know, the other nine were direct benefits to your business. They were going to help your business. It was safer, better lighting. It was saving you money on your electric bills and paying for itself inside a year was doing all of these other things. And Oh, yeah, by the way, you can say that you're more green, you know, but that wasn't my sales pitch because that wasn't, you know, what was going to sell the most projects at the end of the day, you got to tell them what they want to hear, as long as it's truthful. And you got to, you got to sort of come to where they're at, not force them. To I completely agree and you know, but here this is kind of cool too, because sustainability there, there are tangibles in there, right? Like it is really striking when you point out when you realize that you, Marcel, have never been on a festival site without the drone of generators in the background. Not once until we did luck reunion this year and we managed to make it the, you know, a 100% diesel free festival. Never been on the site.

1:26:38 You've never been some you. Go to any major. Show and you smell diesel everywhere you go. OK, so there are tangible benefits that are tied to sustainability, but you're absolutely right. Like I, I started this podcast by saying something that sounds controversial, but it's true. Diesel generators aren't particularly good way to make electricity. It's just, it's the best thing that we had until relatively recently. And getting back to what we're saying, these applications like Turing, I actually think the applications in, in Turing are even even stronger. And then outside, you know, there are, there are so many things in construction, municipalities, government, and you're asking about IP, You know, OverDrive is, is we're as much of a product development company.

1:27:22 So we're looking at a lot of cutting edge technologies, we're looking at high voltage stuff, we're looking at direct DC stuff, we're looking at new ways to do safety. We're even looking at, you know, a video I had yesterday was about AI enabled tools to help design and build these things. So now let's take the dashboard that we have that allows us to monitor stuff, turn things on and off, and change a few simple things like input current limits and things like that. And can we expand that out to where you put a CAD drawing of your site into our software package and you put where the loads are and it will determine your different operating regimens and things like that. You know, so there are so many.

1:28:03 And I, I would say that if, if anything, that's right now, the challenge that we're having is that there's, you know, it's, it's, it's a, a sewer hose to drink from. That's, you know, it's, it's a fire hose. I'm sorry, that's, that's the word, the fire hose that we're drinking from and. Well, and it's too technical of a sale still, probably like when you can dumb down that sale process and get it to where a production manager could just go boom, here's my information, or a show, whoever, whatever person that is, the person who's making that decision can just stick some information into it that the system requires and it spits out, here's what we think you would need, here's what it would cost, here's what it would cost if you were using diesel generators, presumably. And what if that same system had forecasting? What if it has?

1:28:53 You know, I'm also on the board of directors to the Event Safety Alliance. And we do a lot with weather. So the big weather suppliers, DTN, AccuWeather, people like that. They have solar radiance forecasting their API. What if our system actually was looking at what the sunshine was going to be like tomorrow, What temperature is going to be like? What do we think air conditioning demands are? Do we want to leave that unit alone or do we want to swap a new set of batteries before doors open because the solar production isn't going to be good enough? We can automate these things. There's so much potential, so much potential beyond what you can do with diesel. And one of the things right now is, you know, we're just trying to really build awareness and show people that this stuff works so that we can continue to grow. You know, we're fundraising right now. I, I see us as a major player and I really do believe that we, we can build a company that is that that's it's toe to toe with the major power suppliers right now. And let's be clear.

1:29:51 You'll never get there because you're going to be acquired by one of them. You know, I still think like if I was sitting on the board at, at cat or, or, you know, whatever one of these other large players, I'd be looking at your company right now and saying, let's buy them before they get too big. But the other problem is going to be scaling, you know, and, and so the fact that you're raising money is, is obviously wise and necessary because there will come a moment obviously fairly quickly where it's like, hey, we need to 10X our inventory and be able to execute much more quickly or on more jobs or whatever. We need to widen our footprint. We might need a building with inventory in the Eastern United States or in Nashville.

1:30:35 All of that is happening as we speak. We're working on that scaling. We have had some some great results with some of the fundraising we did. Now we're trying to take it to the next level. And you know right now what we want to do is continue to do highly impactful, very visible, important jobs. We're actually not looking to do everything right now. We want to keep moving the needle and that's what we're doing. So with tours again and things like that, we want to keep moving the needle. One, Neil, obviously you know better than anyone, the last thing you want to do is grow too quickly and screw up a couple jobs because that little bit of bad news, like every time a Tesla catches fire or every time a Tesla bumped into something or anything bad, there's so many people who need and want Tesla to fail. There are some very big companies who probably need and want you to fail right now, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, the last thing you want to do is screw up a job.

1:31:33 Marcel, that's one of my struggles right now actually, is that, you know, I, I think that the more people get into sustainable energy at this point in time, the better it is for all of us. I mean, you know, more successful sustainable energy activations from anyone will only help us do more business, gain more business, do more things. But there is a problem and that is that, you know, everything I've been talking about right here, right now, what's happening in other spots with sustainable energy is people are deploying these really large battery systems. They're replacing a generator with a big battery or they're doing what's called hybridizing, which they're pairing them. But they're not resizing things, they're not getting rid of distro.

1:32:13 They're making things much more complicated. They're making things much more expensive and they're failure prone. And it's just as it's. It's a simple. I have the exact same problem, Neil, in, in LED, you know what, what, what, what was happening is as the market started growing, you had all of these companies just bringing stuff straight from China, price being as low as it possibly could. And they were either flickering or they were a really bad color, or they made clothing look terrible or your skin look terrible or whatever. It was just really a bad experience for customers who then, and I mean, I'm talking like chains of car dealerships or you know, hotel chains, we're saying we're going back to standard lighting. We're getting rid of all of this LED stuff, and I knew better, but it's a really tough road to go along at that point and say to them, hey, I'm sorry, but you just bought bad shit, you know? And if we were to replace it with good shit, you'd be very happy.

1:33:11 And I'd love the opportunity to show you the difference. And they're like, no, get out. Well, now think about this for a second. We've got, you know, put yourself in the shoes of those big tour managers, production managers, put yourself in the in the shoes of big production managers. That generator person from the $150 million generator company that they've trusted for 25 years is, you know, that's who they have the relationship with. They try something with that person and it doesn't work or it fails. And this is this is, this has happened. This has happened at multiple events this year and last year. Are you going to really believe Neil, this guy you don't know, saying no, no, no. The guy you trust and that big company that has all these resources, they're doing it wrong. They don't know what they're doing.

1:33:52 It's us deadbeat old race car guys from Long Beach who got this figured out. You know it's not. It doesn't sound possible too, which is why our focus again I would. Believe you over them. I really want I could tell within 45 seconds of talking to you that you know what you're talking about. I. Don't want to talk about this, I'm a talker. You figured that out, right? You know what? I'd like to shut up and do a show. That's the best way to move this forward. Every time we deploy these things, there's, there's this, you know, there's nothing better than sitting back. You know that last the the last song the show's done. You know, they leave the stage, the house lights come on and it's like another one.

1:34:34 You know, that is rewarding and it's, it's doing things for our planet. I mean, let's not forget that we are doing, we're doing good for, for, for those around us. And one more. Question related to the batteries and stuff. So if you were to do a tour and, and let's say it's not a stadium tour, let's just, yeah, maybe it's a stadium tour or whatever, but you're let's say it's AUS tour. How are they recharging batteries in between shows? Again, there there are, there are many different ways and the same tour can have a different approach. So let me give you a couple, right. So what we did for Billy Eilish was we took advantage of the build schedule.

1:35:15 They wanted the power of the show on 100% renewable energy. So we brought in battery banks and we built a solar field. Another thing that we, we, we specialize in is quick deploying solar fields. We put out a 10,000 square foot solar field came out of 1/4 truck. Four people took 4 hours to put it down. Oh wow, that's incredible. 100 by 100 and that went down on like a Monday. I think the first show day was where the doors open on Friday, maybe it was Thursday and we just soaked up the sun for four days, charged batteries and then we could use those batteries to run the show. Let's say that there's a we're now incorporated to the stadium tour and we're working with the steel crew, OK, We can go out there and we can deploy solar in the parking lot of that stadium outside the venue, charge up batteries.

1:36:08 And then when production rolls in, we've got all that energy charge that we can then use to run the production camp outside the stadium. Don't have to bring in a diesel generator, don't have to do all that distro, all that cost and everything like that with the energy that we charge there. But if it's cloudy now, we can take this same unit and we can plug it into the grid power at the stadium and charge. Is it as sustainable? No. Does it cost a little more? Yes, but we can still do it. Let's say that. None of that, let's say, let's say that we don't have good grid power there. We haven't even touched on generator hybridization, But this sounds wacky to people. In fact, I, I got to tell you that one of the biggest production managers in our business said to me at a conference, he said, yeah, they're using diesel generators to to to charge these things.

1:36:55 I mean, it's just stupid. And you'll hear that, you know, that was my first that, that that was sort of like a, that was a lesson that we have so much to do when someone at this level who has worked with sustainability and tours is saying that because we all know what Priuses and Chevy Volts and other hybrids and you don't want to talk about that. Talk about, you know, the newest Ferrari hybrids and high performance and things like that. They pair an internal combustion engine with a energy storage system to get more efficiency and better performance. The same thing applies. We can actually reduce fuel consumption and increase reliability substantially right now, tomorrow by taking the diesel generators that are already out there and pairing them with battery systems.

1:37:43 Yeah, So what I'm saying, by the way, that's not the best way to do it. I would much rather not have the diesel generator at all. But even when you're using generators, batteries are a benefit. So your simple question, how are you going to charge them on a tour? How do you want to charge them? Are we going to hybridize the generator? Are we going to and, and you know, the best part is you don't have to make that decision until you get there. It's not like any of these things take a lot of. It's a complication though, that that has to be explained properly. Otherwise it's going to become an issue. Right. And you know, it's similar to when you buy a Tesla and then your first road trip you go, oh, this is a pain in the ass. I'll never have another electric car or whatever because, you know, you tried to treat it like a gas car and you tried to do things exactly like you would have with a gas car and it didn't work, right. And so, you know, you have to rethink. You got to change your, your, you know, you got to change your approach a little bit, right?

1:38:42 Yeah, You know, I think rethink is is an important way of putting it. We'll go back to that Tesla example real quick. So 30 + 1000 miles in a year in this thing, all these Rd. trips, you know what I learned? I have a three hour bladder, really a 2 1/2 hour bladder at highway speeds. You've got about 3 hours of driving time in a Tesla. I've also learned that I'm I, I don't when I, when I sit there browsing the shelves of the QuikTrip after I've waited in line to go to the bathroom and all that stuff, it takes about 25 minutes. And that's as long as it takes to charge a Tesla. So even though just like you said at the first, it seems like a pain in the ass, it is absolutely no impediment.

1:39:24 And just to put a point on it, we had, you know, I had, I had to fly somewhere and, and rented a gasoline car and took a road trip recently. And you know, I, I timed myself, I was definitely stopping less than three hours. I had about 9 hour drive, you know, and every time I stopped, if I wasn't thinking about hustling, I was stopped for 2530 minutes. So. So it wasn't that big of a change after all. So I want to go back to the, I want to go back to the Apex thing really quickly. So Apex speed technology, from what I understand, was it a data acquisition system that you developed or was it electronics? It was both.

1:40:04 We did control systems. Sorry you guys. My my other half just showed up here. Cleo. Hello Cleo. Say hi to everyone Cleo. Anyway, like I was saying, Apex Speed technology, we designed control systems and data acquisition systems, which I use. In fact, I've used components from the Motorsports world quite a bit in what we did. I also had a wiring harness shop, so we would build military spec wiring harnesses for race cars and things like that. So, you know, and a lot of the data stuff that we do here comes directly from that. So were you a driver or were you just a fan or whatever?

1:40:45 Like what? What brought you to racing? Stuff as a rule, I don't sit behind the wheel of a race car when there's clients around Yeah, I mean, I, I was, I was a driver. I, I, I, I love Motorsports, I love driving and I think there's a lot of lessons here too. I love the, I built this, I built a couple little project cars in my time. And right now I have this poor BMW that sits out there. It's what I call my Canyon Cruiser. It's done all sorts of engine work, suspension stuff. And when we go out there and play in the Malibu foothills or Angeles Crest or something like that, my little BMW, you know, it, it, it leads the 9/11 turbos and all these fast cars and stuff like that.

1:41:31 When we go to track days, it does all this great stuff. And I got to tell you, man, like really gets driven once a week because all my parking spots are taken and I have to move it to street cleaning once a week. So yesterday was that short throw shifter on that thing. I've got this crazy, I start throw shifter that, that that was very limited production. Oh my God, that feels so cool, you know, and, and it's got a, it's got a 5 LB flywheel. It Revs up so fast and like a Rev match downshift. Nothing feels better than that. Fun. Where do you go? Do you go to like Willow Creek or? Where Willow Springs, it's been there. It's been or Willow Springs Willow, it's been a lot of places. But you remember what I said before that how often do I drive it?

1:42:15 Once a week to move from one side street to the other? Because the simple fact is the EVs, we have two EVs. We have the Tesla Model Y and then my partner Veronica, she has a Fiat 500 E. They fit the use case of me, a business owner with a 13 year old in Southern California that lives in in Santa Monica and has a workspace in Long Beach and does gigs, you know, between San Francisco and Coachella and all that stuff. Those vehicles, the EVs fit the use case so much better that no matter how much I lose those cars and we also have this over landing rig. That's awesome. But you know what that rooftop tent doesn't do me any good on the four O 5 in traffic.

1:43:01 The technology that we're developing is is analogous. Are there things about diesel power generation, everything that's that that's really handy that's helpful. Maybe there's not a straight analogue with the way the shifter feels in that 318, but it's pretty damn cool that we can haul this thing out in the middle of freaking nowhere and have 12400 amp services. That's that's pretty cool, right? So the generator, but but let's save our diesel generators for those gigs where we don't have the technical expertise, we don't have the people we need to make a lot of power and we and we can get diesel. Yeah, let's save those generators for that. Are you doing any of the big EDM stuff yet?

1:43:44 Yeah, we, we actually, one of our early things was a little festival. It wasn't, it wasn't big. It was at Mammoth Mountain. It was called Fresh Tracks. And it was fun too, because yes, the batteries do work in 20° weather. You know, it's interesting you mentioned that I actually, we live here in Santa Monica. I am, I'm very lucky. There's this glorious thing called rent control, which is why I live five blocks from the beach. We use electronic music events locally as a, as a, as a testing ground. Have a couple of friends who are DJs. You know, I've been involved with Burning Man and there's a lot of electronic music there. So we bring our gear out to the beach in Santa Monica and throw parties all the time.

1:44:24 In fact, that's really cool. We're about, we're doing 1/4 of July actually, we're doing something on Sunday. I think it's, it's actually not electronic music related. It's a fitness thing. You know, we do stuff here in our local community a lot. And electronic music events are great are great testing grounds for this stuff. I have a few people I'm going to connect you to that I think could be very helpful and some really large and, and some maybe not as large. It's OK. We have dogs on the podcast all the time. But yeah, I, I love what you're doing. And and if I can ever help in any way, just, you know, ask anything. I really appreciate this opportunity and thanks to your producer, Jen.

1:45:05 Right, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Thanks to your producer, Sarah. Yeah. You know, for you and your audience, I would say, and I've been saying this for two years, give us a chance. You know, especially if, and this is a, this is not an easy ask. I'm asking people at the top of this industry. And the reason why I'm asking people at the top of this industry is because, you know, unfortunately, we know how this industry works. OverDrive could very well get a foothold in farmers markets and and whatever little shows, municipal events. We're in Hollywood, we can do parties all day long and it's not going to move the needle. It's not going to change that culture that I talk about.

1:45:47 So please, Marcel, what what, what, what we really want is the opportunity to work with what I say, highly visible, highly demanding, you know, applications. Let the trust that we're building with the jobs that we have done guide you. We have some partners out there who who help make these things happen. A big shout out to reverb.org, if you haven't heard of them, they're the largest sustainability nonprofit. You know what they've done for us. They paid for diesel generators. They paid to have diesel generators. Billy Eilish at Luck Reunion on standby so that if our stuff didn't work, they could switch the generators and go. And so we have people who are even helping us out in that respect, taking the risk out out of the out of the off of the productions hands.

1:46:41 Well, I think even Kadena said, I think Kadena said the first time they did the Willie Nelson thing, they had diesel backup and this time they didn't. What was even funnier too is that one of the diesel generators that they had as diesel backups didn't work. They had died. They, we, we, we decided to do a hybridization thing one day, fired up the generator. It wouldn't work. You know, it's gotten to the point there even where we will do that for people who really, really want it. But I don't do that anymore. I do not back up my shows with diesel generators. We still have backups. It's the entertainment business. People want backups. I back up my batteries with patterns. Yeah, we bring more back because it's more reliable than the diesel generator. Makes sense?

1:47:27 All right, Neil, thank you so much. I appreciate all your. Time. It's been fun I've. Learned way too much. I feel like I need a nap after this talk. You've, you've put too much knowledge into my small brain so but I'm definitely going to process it and I'll reach out to you soon and and I'll have some names for you. Can I make one more shout out because you've mentioned a lot of production managers. Do you know Bill Ramey? Yes, Bill is all into this. Bill and I hung out at no values come on a couple weeks ago. I think we're supposed to he's coming down for dinner next week and we're going to sit down and talk. But that's a production manager to watch. Bill is head over heels into this. He was visiting some of our vendors and suppliers last week. So I think you're going to see that spreading even at the top of the.

1:48:16 But there are guys out there who are really getting behind us very. Cool. I'm excited about it. I think it's awesome. I, I'm so happy that Richard put us together and, and convince you to come on here and I think we'll be talking more. Don't be a stranger, please watch our socials and things like that. If we're at an event where you're nearby, please look us up. If you're in Socal, feel free to give us a call. Look us up. Last thing I'll say is that if if you're doing anything that is for a not-for-profit or charitable thing that is aligned with what OverDrive does, you know it has to align with our values. It also and we have equipment available for it.

1:48:57 We'll provide the gear for free here in Southern California. That's beautiful. So if you have a charity really, really like that, give us a call, OK? That's really, really cool. Very cool of you. Thank you, Neil. Thank you.

1:49:41 None.