Dick Zhang w/ Bluelight (Autonomous) Machines — DT 392

Summary

Podcast Summary: Dick Zhang w/ Bluelight (Autonomous) Machines — Dirt Talk, DT 392

Podcast: Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Host: Aaron Witt
Guest: Dick Zhang, CEO of Bluelight Machines
Date: November 20, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between host Aaron Witt and Dick Zhang, CEO of Bluelight Machines—an autonomous equipment startup in the civil construction industry. Dick candidly shares his journey from a college dropout obsessed with drones to building and selling a drone-based quantity surveying company, and now, pushing the edge of autonomy with machines like rollers and articulated trucks. Throughout, both discuss leadership lessons, autonomy technology, industry challenges, and the vision—and obstacles—of “infecting” the Dirt World with useful, affordable automation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dick’s Unconventional Path into Construction Tech

• Dick left an Ivy League mechanical engineering program after falling in love with drones in 2012.
  “I lucked into playing around with some drones at the drone research lab. I fell in love with drones. I started failing out of school... I quit and moved to Pittsburgh to do the startup. I quit, by the way, an Ivy League education.” — Dick [01:18]
• His parents' reaction to dropping out was classic:
  "Oh my God, it's like the end of the world...My mom comes to me still and says, you could be a doctor." — Dick [02:10]

2. Building (and Surviving) a Drone Startup – Identified Technologies

• Dick’s first company provided drone imagery and topo for oil, gas, and construction clients, which evolved into quantity surveying.
• Early drone work meant hiking up mountains with custom drones, learning through tough jobs and hardware failures.
• Core business lessons arrived painfully—with runaway hiring sprees, cash flow crises, and learning what genuine business “pain” feels like:
  “You have not been in business until you have experienced extraordinary pain. That’s like a very essential part of the experience.” — Dick [13:11]
• Both Aaron and Dick recount near-bankruptcy moments, living on credit cards, and the emotional agony of layoffs.
• Key mistake: confusing upfront revenue from big sales with sustainable recurring business, leading to scaling too quickly.
  “We went from 12 people to 60 some people in less than a year...and then a year, year and a half goes, we start churning a majority of our business...all these massive checks dry up.” — Dick [15:52]
• Despite everything, he built a viable business and sold it, ensuring continuity for customers and his core team.

3. Construction Tech Must Meet Operators Where They Are

• Dick’s experience: most construction technology is designed by technologists, not people who understand the nuance and realities of changing crews, pressures of production, job site chaos, and real-world machine operation.
  “If you’re trying to do something good for the industry…you just have to visit 500 job sites.” — Dick [43:22]
• No patience for expensive, hard-to-use, or slow-to-deploy products.
• Blue Light’s thesis: autonomy kits must be installer-friendly, affordable ($20k–$40k, with ambitions to go cheaper), require almost no training, work with rotating operators, and be up and running in minutes—not weeks.

4. Building & Deploying Bluelight’s Autonomy

• Bluelight Machines focuses on automating rollers and articulated trucks, using vision-based AI, not lidar—cheaper, more robust, and less sensitive to dust.
  “The real work, the hard work is just get vision working really well.” — Dick [54:44]
• Early deployments often started with “dumb” autonomy and spotters, intentionally doing less to test core features, learn fast, and iterate—rather than feature overload.
• AI models themselves are basic; the real value is in curated, jobsite-specific training data—getting vision algorithms to reliably recognize real construction equipment and people.
• Operator buy-in is achieved by showing the tech helps upskill, not replace, “rare” and valuable labor at a time when operator interest is declining. “Roller is a great one to go after. I haven’t met many people that are just fired up for 12 hours in the roller.” — Aaron [79:11]

5. Realities at the OEM and Industry Level

• The big OEMs, Dick says, aren't interested in collaboration—so Bluelight is now working with other brands.
  “It became very clear in the last month or two that this particular OEM is not interested in working together. And in fact, they would like to compete also. Fine.” — Dick [61:43]
• Both lament the slow pace, risk aversion, and self-preservation of large institutions—OEMs, contractors, unions—which impedes broader industry progress. “I will not forget it… everyone that is in the way of progress so they can make more money right now… it is making me so fucking upset.” — Aaron [67:54]

6. Autonomy, Safety, and Human Factors

• The hardest problem isn’t technology, but the “human element”: convincing jobsite superintendents, accommodating different jobsite SOPs, building user trust, and ensuring safe, confident operations after the Bluelight team leaves.
• Safety is handled through relentless iteration—each incident leads to concrete changes (e.g., color-coded override swipes, increased feedback loops).
• Dick’s stance: safety must be approached practically, with real-world feedback, not just burdensome rules from the office.

7. The Larger Vision & American Dynamism

• Both express disappointment at the U.S.’s declining performance in construction and infrastructure—and a motivation to help nudge the industry back toward greatness.
• Dick and Aaron see their work as “help” above all—a mission to enable more with less, improve operator roles, and make construction jobs more attractive and productive. “We are here to serve. We’re here to make them look good. We know our place.” — Aaron [72:53]
• Dick’s explicit goal is to “virally infect the global fleet of equipment with autonomy”—through openness, transparency, and visible progress rather than stealth or secrecy.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The cultural leap of quitting college:
  "I quit, by the way, an Ivy League education." — Dick [01:18]

• On the pain of leadership:
  “I could puke right now...That’s like so deep in my gut...you go from, call it 60 to 6 and oh my God.” — Dick [17:09]

• On why start autonomy for construction:
  “If you want to really help the industry…get out of the sky, get on the ground, get muddy and move some dirt.” — Dick [35:58]

• On product design principles:
  “You can’t even require 15 minutes of training to use your stuff…operators cycle in and out every three hours.” — Dick [44:58]

• On why construction tech must be practical:
  “Production is like, you gotta keep moving, don’t ever stop moving. And until you appreciate, you know, laser beams being stared down at you because your stuff broke... you did not appreciate the pressures of production.” — Dick [49:42]

• On AI vs. Lidar:
  “Installing lidar is just a crutch and a cheap way to get something looking ok, but the real work is just get vision working really well.” — Dick [54:44]

• On operator fears about autonomy:
  “I have had many a dozer operator come up right up to my face...and just motherfucker me...taking my job. But...how many of your buddies will retire in the next five years? ‘25.’ How many decent folks gonna fill those seats? …Maybe two. One in ten right seats we’re gonna fill.” — Dick [75:41–77:46]

• On what’s most valuable:
  “If you can just help somebody or help a group of people...that is the ultimate fulfillment of life.” — Dick [25:52]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Dick’s education & drone discovery: [00:52–02:39]
• First encounters with drones/early jobs: [06:40–08:53]
• Drone company business/losses/pain: [13:01–18:03]
• Ownership struggles and hiring sprees: [15:52–17:58]
• Selling the company, closure: [35:03–41:09]
• Transition to Bluelight/a new autonomy thesis: [44:07–46:46]
• On why autonomy must be simple, affordable: [44:58–46:46]
• Real-world pressures/‘technology people’ misunderstanding construction: [46:54–51:25]
• How Bluelight’s AI actually works: [52:59–58:47]
• Operator buy-in, upskilling argument: [75:41–80:56]
• On the OEM/OEM culture & barriers to progress: [61:43–67:44]
• Bluelight’s human challenges and safety approach: [100:03–109:36]
• The burden of laws/rules and innovation malaise: [112:17–115:04]
• The mission—helping operators, ‘infection’ by autonomy: [120:09–121:10]
• Both founders’ leadership/personal struggles: [124:24–128:41]

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Conclusion & How to Learn More

Dick and the Bluelight team are committed to practical, open, operator-first automation—believing that only this approach will truly transform construction for the better. They’re scaling quickly, openly sharing their process, and laser-focused on actual jobsite improvement.

To follow and connect:

• Website: bluelightmachines.com
• LinkedIn: Dick Zhang

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“We’re not here to replace operators, we’re here to upskill them—to help do more with less.”
— Dick Zhang

“We are here to serve. We’re here to make them look good. We know our place.”
— Aaron Witt [72:53]

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For anyone interested in construction’s future, the realities of autonomy, and candid startup stories—this is an essential episode.

Transcript

[A]

This episode is with Dick Tsang of Blue Light Machines. Dick is CEO of Blue Light Machines, an autonomous civil construction machine startup that's already working with leading civil companies nationwide to automate rollers and articulated trucks. He's using many lessons learned from building a previous technology company serving the civil construction and mining industries to help contractors build. Better than ever. This was a great time. Dick is a character. You don't have to wonder what he's thinking, which I love. That makes conversations a lot more fun, so I hope you enjoy this conversation. Dick Zhang, Blue Light Machines. So what is. Did you go school?

[B]

I did one year of my mechanical engineering undergraduate degree.

[A]

Wow, so you're one year into a mechanical degree, huh? So you've done some calculus and I.

[B]

Basically did the ones.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then started that second year and it was the. All the 201 classes, thermo, you know, all the fancier classes. Oh, my God. I was a decent student my whole life. And then that second year of college, I just started failing everything.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And then at the same time, I got. I lucked into playing around with some drones at the drone research lab. And so, like, I fell in love with drones. I started failing out of school. I met that, this, this lady in Pittsburgh who was running this small business incubator, and all of it came together and I said I quit and moved to Pittsburgh to do the startup. I quit, by the way, an Ivy League education.

[A]

So what school was this?

[B]

Penny?

[A]

Oh, wow. You.

[B]

Know, I don't know what you know about the stereotypical Chinese upbringing, but I went home and said, I'm quitting college. It was like the end of the world.

[A]

So your, your parents are Chinese? Yeah, from China.

[B]

China. Yeah. I moved here 40 years ago.

[A]

40?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so you were born in the States?

[B]

Yeah, I was born Salt Lake City and then grew up in New Jersey.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. So what's Chinese parents reaction to.

[B]

Oh my God, it's like the end of the world. It's like heart attacks. I mean, to this day, my mom comes to me still and says, you could be a doctor. You could go back to school. You could be a doctor, you could be a lawyer. Come on.

[A]

It's hilarious. What do they do?

[B]

Very technical. Mom was very technical biologist for pharmaceutical and dad is very technical chemistry.

[A]

Okay, so they're very much in the traditional, like highly trained path.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, they actually, their story is China. They used to do this test. It was one test. Every high school student takes it at the end of the year and they literally rank every single graduating High school student, you know, one to the end and then the top, like 30 or something in Chinese. In math, they. They would send to the US for math PhDs. The top in chemistry they sent to the US for their chemistry PhDs. The idea was like, let's go get our top folks educated. Anyways, they came here to get educated, did their PhDs, very technical, very academic, very book smart, and then they never left. I was born here and the whole life is in the US now.

[A]

So when you found drones, what year was this?

[B]

2012.

[A]

So the whole commercial drone thing was still pretty early on at that point.

[B]

It was very early. Yeah.

[A]

Military drones were getting there.

[B]

Yeah, they were really there. This was like the early days of, like there was, you know, every. Every few months you'd read about some startup that raised another like $100 million to do drones.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Some operating system of drones, whatever. Of drones. And it was very early into the hype. Hype cycle for drones.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So it was good timing because it was. Well, you tell me, was it good timing?

[B]

I was very good timing for me personally. It was enough, you know, excitement for me to leave school and send me down this path that I went down, which I'm very grateful for. But like, in terms of building a drone business, it was awful timing.

[A]

Well, you're not in the drone business anymore, so.

[B]

Well, that was a happy. That's a happy story and I'm happy.

[A]

To tell the story, but.

[B]

Yeah, but the awful timing, way too early. Lot of, A lot of hype rushing into something and it's very unclear what are we doing for this industry and. Yeah, okay, that's 2011. 2012. Yeah.

[A]

Because the first time I used a drone was 2015, I think maybe 2016. You had a good. Yeah.

[B]

Was it a DJI?

[A]

It was a DJI.

[B]

Really good.

[A]

Yes. Yeah, it was like right when. It was right when the Phantom 4 came out.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Phantom 3 was still kind of janky.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Then they refined it with the four.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And a friend of mine who has, you know, a bunch money because it wasn't like anybody had them. That's still like a novelty. Pretty expensive. Yeah. A few grand and novelty. He had one and it just knocked my socks off the first time I.

[B]

Used it in a positive way.

[A]

Unbelievable. It was incredible. Fell in love. Yes. I mean that if. If people know me for taking pictures with my camera, if it weren't for my drone, I would have never gotten into taking pictures of machines because I had to do without permission. Oh, yes, you would Just snoop a drone. I would. Yes. Interesting. Yeah. I bet. I couldn't get on job sites. So I. And it's a legal gray area. Like, I don't do it now. I've been by the book for a long time now, but. But you know, when you're a kid. I was. Yeah. My early 20s.

[B]

No, it was not illegal.

[A]

It wasn't illegal. And I would just post up outside the fence, fly my drone over construction operations. They don't. It's not their airspace.

[B]

And it's been happening for 50 years with helicopters.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, they'll snoop on each other's jobs via. Via choppers.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Planes.

[B]

You're not doing anything that's not been done before. No.

[A]

And I wasn't there to snoop. I was there to take cool pictures and put them on the Internet. But that's how I did it. The whole. All the early days was with a drone because it was the. When the Mavic came out, then I was like, oh, my gosh, this is off the chart. You can. You can put it in a backpack. Like you. You're kidding. And then that. That was. I bought that. And since then, it's just been. I've been through a lot of them at this point.

[B]

Huh. That's really. It's really poetic that the drone is what got us both going into this. I have two very distinct memories about the early drone company. And like, the drone company days. It's called Identified. The one was I was £300.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah. One of our. And I'm happy to talk about that too, but one of our customers was oil and gas, West Virginia, and they wanted us to topo right away. Up and down a landslide, like on a mountain. I'm like, you know, I'm 20 or 21 at the time. And so I literally. It was like one of those drones that you could assemble by yourself. It had the metal tube, you know, legs. This was before dji.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so I'd strap it to my backpack and then climbed up the mountain puking. I'm like, get to the top. I'm way out of shape. Right at puking, like, about to just pass out. And launched a drone again. Pre. DJI launched a drone. It just flew away. And anyways, that was a very traumatic day. Gotta go back down, get the backup drone, come back up.

[A]

You had a backup. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

It wasn't the first. That's why.

[A]

And.

[B]

Second moment in the drone business. Our first contractor. This is what got me going down the Construction, you know, the whole journey, the last 15 years. It was this contractor I met through, I think, our social circle. Mascaro. It's this local superintendent. He's building an office building. He says, dick, like, we pay a lot of money for these planes to come take pictures of our building. Could you do it with your drone? Sure. So he, you know, it was like 500 bucks a month or whatever. And, John, if you're listening to this, thank you for sending me down this chapter or this whole journey. But, yeah, he paid me a few hundred bucks to come out and just take some pictures. And a couple months in, I sent it going around the backside with the waypoints. They had moved the crane, drone clips. The crane falls down. You can hear all these steel workers mother motherfucking up a storm.

[A]

And then.

[B]

Oh, my God. That taught me about working with, like, working with operators and working with steel workers. But that's my second core memory with this business.

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. We could sit here for hours and talk drone stories down.

[B]

Drones.

[A]

Oh, boy. I had this one time, it was. I was at Granite Rock. It was at their quarry and flew.

[B]

The Granite rock is the same as granite, like, contracting or.

[A]

Different, different, different. But they're right. Right down the street from one another.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, it's very confusing.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But yeah, they were, like, kind of intermingled, but way back, like, Granite Rock, I think has Contractor License 22 in the state of California. So they've been around. They've been around quite a while. But I clipped the high wall. Oh, yikes. And so barreled my drone into an area of the quarry that you couldn't walk. It wasn't accessible. So they. They spent. I mean, it was long enough for me to be, like, pretty nervous about it. Just the cost involved.

[B]

Yes, they.

[A]

Long enough with a D11. Oh, God.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Pioneering a road. Oh, my God. I'm sitting there, I'm like, guys, at this point, like, I'll just chalk it up fuel alone.

[B]

I'll buy a new one.

[A]

But to their credit, we got it back. Oh, my God. It was fine.

[B]

You a road with an 11.

[A]

Yeah. But, yeah, we've been through. I mean, I just. Because the DJI Mavic 4 is not sold in the States, I bought. I ordered one, Sent it to a friend in Australia when I picked it up. That's right. And illegal importing. Well, and then I. I destroy it. Destroyed a week into the trip.

[B]

Oh, super.

[A]

And I can't get it fixed.

[B]

Super.

[A]

Because it. I bought it in different country, of course. So what did I do?

[B]

Of course.

[A]

Bought another one in Australia.

[B]

Of course.

[A]

Yeah, I have it in a box.

[B]

So fun.

[A]

Yeah, it was really cool. What, what about. What about drones got you going? Like what. You can do a lot with them. So what. What about it was exciting to you? I mean, I mean everything. Flying cameras.

[B]

It was not so literal. Imagine I was 19 at the time, you know, and you just see this little whiz bang thing take, you know, you can drop.

[A]

Zooming around.

[B]

Yeah. You can put a couple of dots on the screen on your laptop and they hit go.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And then the thing just goes. You just, you know, in a half a second, you know, like, this is. This is it and I love it. Or it doesn't do anything. It's honestly, it's kind of like the autonomous rollers. In half a second you see it and it's like it's the sparks are going or it's just not it for you. Sure.

[A]

Yeah. So it was it for you. You move out to Pittsburgh to try to make a company out of it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was the original? It was like mapping or. What were you doing with drones?

[B]

I had no idea.

[A]

Okay. Something.

[B]

All I knew was something I'm going to make, make a dollar with drones. And you know, we had some like in the military detecting IEDs. We had some concepts there. I talked to oil and gas, I talked to agriculture, any indus insurance, any industry that would listen to me. You know, I was just hammering the phones and then, yeah, it was this, this superintendent from mascara took me under his wing, taught me about the business and I see. And then I was like, oh, maybe I'll call somebody else in town, see if I can do two of these and then three of these. And then. So at first it was just pictures. And then same guy said, you know, they, they take these photos from the planes and they'll stitch it and they can make 3D like contours. And we. It's important for quantities and topo. And anyways, that started the whole. That whole drone company was about a 10 year chapter or story. And that's what sent me down the journey of quantities for dirt jobs and quarries.

[A]

Wow. And that became the business that was the business was quantities.

[B]

It took me like two or three years to like even get going in that direction. Okay, three years get going in that direction. Three years building the business, making some outstanding mistakes, very painful mistakes. And then three years was fine. We were coasting. It was, you know, it was a nice business. And then, you know, there was a wind down And I sold it and stayed with the new parent company for a year. That kind of thing.

[A]

Interesting. I think that's one of the things I've had to really accept is in business is that everything takes longer than you think it will.

[B]

Sadly. Yeah, it. Way longer.

[A]

It takes. It just takes time. What terrible mistakes.

[B]

Oh my God. What terrible mistakes.

[A]

Well, yeah. Pick, pick, pick. Pick one. Let's start there. Let's start unraveling this terrible sweater.

[B]

Probably the most terrible. So it's very. It's like it's screaming to me the story I want to tell. I'm just thinking about how do I even.

[A]

How are the story pieces together.

[B]

Yeah. So I guess probably your travels. The following sentiment will resonate with you. It is very obvious when you work with a contractor that has experienced pain, like 08 pain, they make decisions differently, they plan for growth differently, versus, like a contractor that has never experienced pain. And I would argue, like, you have not been in business until you have experienced extraordinary pain. That's like a very essential part of the experience.

[A]

No, it's like. But it's like a. It's. It's like emotional abuse.

[B]

It is.

[A]

Yeah. It's like they've been. It's like they've been abused. Yeah, yeah, it's.

[B]

It's this.

[A]

It's this deep, deep like they are a different individual.

[B]

It's cut in your heart. Like it's just such a deep, you know, have experienced that pain. And so.

[A]

Yeah. And they talk about it with like a sadness and it's just. Yeah. Yep. I know the people. You can tell them pretty quick.

[B]

Yep. And so anyways, to loop this back to your question, like, you know, for me, that pain. I'll try and paint you a picture. Right. So we're in this second three year chapter. We sort of got our bearings on what we want to do. I did the founder thing, the techie, techie, founder thing. Raised a few million bucks. We had our first dozen or something, two dozen customers. And then. So you got cash in the bank is one thing. You know, there's all these like stories, articles you hear on TechCrunch and all these tech places about, you know, all this hiring. For some reason, everybody thinks hiring, you know, is the. Is like such a wonderful metric. I'm the opposite. We'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, so, yeah, and so. And then to get technical for a second, we would do these subscriptions for the drone software, maybe a $25,000 subscription. I hired this awesome sales guy and he would go get these deals where they would pay the whole thing up front, 25,000 today, and we got to earn the revenue over the next year, okay? Or even he was so good he would book these three year deals, 100, 150 grand, you know, today, okay? So cash is coming in today, which is spectacular. And so there's all this money on hand, okay, and all his money coming in, but on like on a proper accrual basis, like, you know, it's not as rosy as the bank account shows, okay? And then, and so then we just went on this fucking hot. Part of my language.

[A]

You go, go for it.

[B]

We went on this hiring spree, okay? We went from 12 people to 60 some people in less than a year, half a year. And then, you know, the problem with these year long deals is, you know, if you don't have that right product market fit, you're not doing a good job for your customer, you don't get them next year, okay? And so this sales guy, he brings in all these enormous deals, all these enormous cash payments today. And then a year, year and a half goes, we start churning a majority of our business, okay? Not like 10%, like over half, three quarters of our business, okay? And so then all these massive checks dry up. And as they're drying up, our overhead cost, spending everything, infrastructure, we're just like, just spending outrageous sums of money, okay? So we get to this point, there's a very distinct like turning point in the story. Obviously the checks are not coming in and, and so, you know, you got dozens of people on staff and first time founder, first time running a business. I'm trying to think of any way out that's not the hard way out. Yeah, I'm trying to think of any other way to do this.

[A]

Just letting people go.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And so then over the course of less than six months, you know, we basically whittled it down to an essential team of six.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

That was, you know, to have to fire somebody for, for poor performance, that's hard. That's a hard thing to do. But then to have to let go of so many people because of my mistakes, operating and decision making, that's like a, like I could puke right now. Telling, sure. It's like so deep in my gut, you know, this pain. And so you go from, call it 60 to 6 and oh my God. And then, you know, I was loading up credit card, loading up payroll on my own personal credit cards. We would start the 15 day pay cycle with like five grand in the bank and I need A couple hundred grand, like, at the end of this pay cycle. And so I would show up to these contractors with a demo, demo drone looking for an order today. Oh, I'm already here. You know, let me just walk down to accounting. Let me just go pick up the check. You know, like dozens of times. I would have.

[A]

I would have to do that and.

[B]

Pick, you know, and anyways. Extraordinarily painful.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Mismanaging a business.

[A]

It's interesting because I've been there, done that too.

[B]

And I roughly gathered.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah, I remember. So I. The first time, I just. We were cash flowing the business for the first few years, which is. It's great. But if you're growing and cash flowing, I didn't have an outside capital. No, no. Like, because when you're in your 20s, no bank is going to give you money or anything like that.

[B]

So you have no credibility.

[A]

None. You have no assets. Nothing.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah. So. So it was, you know, whatever the business was generating was. Was what we were using.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there was a time I've told the story, but ran the company out of money. I. We had about five grand at the time.

[B]

How long is the buildwith story?

[A]

Company started in 20.

[B]

18. 18. So seven years. Okay. So three years in. Halfway in, it sounds like.

[A]

Yeah. This was like, in the first two years. It was still pretty early on. It was just the marketing company.

[B]

Okay. Okay.

[A]

But I. I was putting more and more on our American Express. And then I figured you could just kick the can down the road. Like, I won't pay this month. I'll pay it next month. But that's not how American Express works. I didn't know that at the time. So I turn off the payments to American Express. I get to the airport, they say, hey, your car didn't work. I was picking up a rental car Sunday night. It's like midnight.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In Indianapolis.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm tired. I'm in a different city. Yes. I have to go to work tomorrow.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Just give me my damn car. Your car doesn't work. So I. They do it a few times. I call American Express. They're like, well, if you pay us $25,000 right now. Oh, my God, you'll. We'll turn your card back on. No problem, sir. And it's like, yikes. So I had a backup. I had a personal credit card in my bag that I forgot about. Use that to get the card. And then didn't sleep that night because I was thinking, you know, not only did I need the 50 plus thousand. But I needed like 60 or 70 grand by the end of the week. So it was, it was Sunday night. By Friday, I need about 60, 70 grand.

[B]

Was.

[A]

Which was a shitload of money at the time. Yeah, and still is, but. Yeah, it still is. But like that was, that was a lot of money.

[B]

Yeah. Early 20s. That's a lot of money. Oh.

[A]

And so I call, I call Dylan Stevens, who is an early customer at Rosso, and I, because I didn't know what to do, so I called Dylan. I'm like, dylan, here's, here's what happens. Like, well, what if we paid you up front for a year's worth of service? Oh, man. For, you know, a small, a small discount, you know, 5% or whatever. And for us, lovely offer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow. So. So he ends up writing us. It was like about a hundred thousand dollar check. Yeah. I couldn't believe it was the most money we ever, we'd ever had by, by a mile.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that was our first, like, taste of that. But the, like you said, the problem is you're getting the money and now you're using it and then you still have to service the contract.

[B]

There's a year of life on this contract.

[A]

Yeah. So. So we started to get tight and that's when we needed to borrow a little bit to keep growing. That's when we went to Randy. He loaned us some money. But that's when things really went off the rails because we. I tell people, I mean, I, I walked into a shitload of money. Way more money than I ever, ever should have walked into. I wasn't like really looking for it, but I was. And it found me. I don't know why, I don't know why I had to learn this lesson. But you go, well, yeah, you go get a shitload of money. What do you do? You go hire a bunch of people. You got to go spend it.

[B]

I need yes people. I need yes. Somebody to run the office. We need a nice office. I need the Friday, you know, breakfast for the team.

[A]

Yes. Team meeting. Yes.

[B]

Off sites, all this nonsense.

[A]

Spend it, spend it. And yeah, we have about 90, 95 people right now. We're at about 45. So it's been this slow and there's been some up and down in between then. But it's been like a three year period of just pain, trying to figure out what our business really is. And we're like getting to the. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Thank God. But it's just been a miserable experience.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A miserable experience.

[B]

You know, the hard part. And I think we're telling the same story. When. When you're. There's nothing wrong with being in this chapter of, like, searching for, what is this business? What's our essence? You know, what's our product? How do we bill, how do customer? What's our ideal? All that. Right. What is this business?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That is actually the joy of entrepreneurship. It's like, you know, being in this. These states of unknowns and finding your way. Okay. What's hard is when you have 50 people whose families depend on them to make payroll, and you got this big machine and you got this big team, and you're trying to move around at light speed as you navigate this and answer these questions. I found that extremely, extremely difficult.

[A]

Yeah. Well. And you're in. You know, like, I was. I was just talking about this. People are, you know, like, criticism. It's like dumb criticism, but, like, you don't know you're doing. It's like, yes, I don't know what I'm doing. First company I've ever run. First company I've started. I'm in my 20s. I still don't know how to tie my shoes. Like, I. And so that's the crazy thing about this experience, too, is you've got. You walk into millions of dollars. You're in your 20s. You don't know. You don't know anything from your ass. Nothing. And yeah, it's the. Because I. I know the shame of that. Of that story. Well, because you just. You feel like such an asshole. You're like. Because of my stupidity, my ignorance.

[B]

Consequences of your decisions.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. Well. And they are your decisions. You have to own it. But it's like, I was. I wasn't. Like, I was just dumb.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, I wasn't. I wasn't intentionally making wrong decisions here. I was just. I was just an idiot.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, yeah, it. That by far, has been the worst part of business is, like, all these people. Yep. I've let all these people down.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because of my.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

Ignorance.

[B]

I could tear up. Like, this conversation is so painful.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's. It's. And it's. This just. It's such a weird dynamic. Yeah.

[B]

You're.

[A]

You're a male in your 20s trying to figure out who you are, but then all this is happening over here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that's interesting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now the happy bit, you figured it out and you made a viable business. That's what you sold it.

[B]

That. Yeah. That's that chapter.

[A]

Three of three, huh?

[B]

And I can skip over a lot of the details, but, you know, you're a few people. You're looking at a whiteboard, and we got to make payroll in 12 days. And so it's just scrambling, and it's just, you know, it's a. It's a core team. It's an essential team. I've never said it said this, but, like, I have real love for that team. Like, you're down in the trenches and, you know, just life. You're, like, gasping for life together.

[A]

Well, and you. You know, who's with you and who's not at that point, you know, actually.

[B]

So, yes, in a word, yes. But also, if. If I was on the other side of this whole dynamic, I would have left a long time ago.

[A]

I.

[B]

It was not logical to stay.

[A]

I agree. It.

[B]

Not logical to stay. None of this looked good, and there was no outlook for it to look good. You know, over the next 24 months, the logical thing, actually, to protect yourself would have been to leave.

[A]

I. Well, and. And that's how I say that. Yeah. I don't. I don't. I just told our team this the other day. I'm like, some of you have been here a long time. I don't know why. Like, I really don't. I appreciate it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, thank God you're here. But I don't know why. I can't explain it, because you know what?

[B]

It is one opinion. Like, money is important. Right. And building a business, all that is important. I have never felt so strongly about this, you know, but it's been very clear to me in the last year, like, money aside, if you can just help somebody or help a group of people in this world, that is, like, the ultimate fulfillment of life. And, you know, so, like, I see, you know, just in my travels, I see. I see build with, you know, helping the industry. And so, if I had to guess, like, your team just feels this fulfillment that, you know, we're out here trying to. Trying to help. That's it. That's all you can do in life. Nothing else matters. Money, you die. Like, you don't get them. You don't get to take the money with you.

[A]

Right? No. And, like, you do. You have to fulfill the basic need of money.

[B]

Yeah, it's.

[A]

I think money is a basic need. I would say that's how people pay their mortgage, send their kids to school, whatever it is, feed their family. But there's not a lot of businesses that offer people, like, an opportunity to make the World better.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And, and, and it. It's not that simple, but it is kind of that simple.

[B]

I mean, to put it, you know, make it. Make it better or to help, like to put it in three words. That's it. That's. That's the ultimate fulfillment of what you can do with your, with your life.

[A]

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And just create value like that. That's why I love the construction industry, is because it's. It's built on creating. That's all it is, is, is creating. Well, it's all it should be. There's a lot of nonsense now involved and a lot of sadly, people with their sticky hands in the pot. That is infrastructure dollars that don't actually build anything. Yeah, that's. I won't get on that.

[B]

So we'll get there.

[A]

Yeah, but, but, but, yeah, I think you're right. Like, it goes back to our mission. Like, I. Like a lot of criticism is completely fair about us going all over the damn place. But like, the one thing I cannot be criticized for is that we've been. And we can't. Is that like we've been fixated on this since the beginning.

[B]

That's right. Like, that's just make it better. Yeah.

[A]

That's the one thing. We're here to serve an industry. We're here to make it better.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Period.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we haven't quite figured it out yet, but we've tried a bunch of stuff. We have made an impact.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That's the only game in town.

[B]

Yeah. People will criticize anybody that criticizes. Here, come take my job.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I will happily let you drive the ship tomorrow. Right. Like step up the line. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's easy to criticize.

[A]

Well, yeah, the criticism, it doesn't. It very rarely bothers me. I think it's kind of funny most of the time.

[B]

So worked up.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I, Yeah, I. I always tell people, like, if you're going to criticize, at least be clever about.

[B]

Yeah, seriously, just sound dumb.

[A]

Be creative. Don't just say I don't know what I'm doing. It's like, yeah, I've said that a hundred times. Like, you got me exposed. Eric doesn't know what he's doing. Like, yeah, no, I'm nuts. I don't know what I'm.

[B]

Of course. Yeah.

[A]

So you, you, you scratch, you claw, you build a viable business.

[B]

Yes. Okay, so this chapter three of three is scratch, claw, build a viable business. Honestly, like, by the end of my chapter with the business we were doing like 20% of that income. Like a lovely business by all measurable, you know, measurable metrics. And, and the essence of the business was we had our own software that we made in house. And it was for, you know, you take your drone photos, you would create topo, you'd create quantities. And you could do all kinds of clever things, shrink, swell and all that stuff with quantities. Right. A lot of big dirt jobs, a lot of quarries. And then we also had a few pilots as part of the team and we had some customers that didn't want to fly the drones themselves. And we had one, you know, one Vulcan was an outstanding customer, I think they still are to this day, but was an outstanding customer. And like they had dozens, maybe 50 cores that they wanted flown in the last three days of every quarter or every month. And, you know, they needed tonnage, reporting and stuff. Anyways, we found our essence. We found our essence. We sort of found like the product and we found the market fit and, you know, how do you price and how do you deliver? We did it in a way that there was a few pennies left at the, at the end of the whole thing for every dollar that came in. And then this would have been.

[A]

Can you, before you go.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To kind of wrap up the chapter, just, just explain how it works for somebody that doesn't know how do you get quantities with a drone in the air? But, but simple terms don't get too.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so let's just say 100 acres of dirt. Doesn't matter what you're building. Okay. They got the fancy software now. And so the drone basically knows it's this square area. If you're looking down at the, the top, you know, four corners. And then it's basically fancy enough now that like, you don't really need to touch anything else. And so yeah, it, you hit go and it takes off and then it starts at the first corner and then it does this like lawnmower pattern and it goes back and forth and it's very particular, like how far are these lines? It's very particular, like how you know how many seconds in between each photo. Oh, very important part. So as it's flying this lawnmower pattern, it's taking photos about it probably every two seconds. And so like this hundred acre site, subdivision, whatever, it'll probably take, you know, depending on your system, somewhere between 200 and 500 photos and high quality photos. Right. These DJI's are amazing now. And every photo has a 3D, like location attached to it and you know, some play with rtk, GPS and the whole trimble world and bases, things like that. But anyways, important, important points are 100 acres square area. To oversimplify, a few hundred photos, each one has 3D position. And so then you can feed this into a number of softwares. Ours was one of them. And you basically like imagine it's actually how your eyes work. Okay, so imagine you're looking at two images and we see the same red car or the same manhole in the two images. Turns out like if you have at minimum three of these images and you know what pixel this manhole is in all three images, you can triangulate the coordinates of this manhole on the ground. And so it's kind of like if you were to take a rover, you know, the output of this whole processing is like if you stuck your rover on the ground like every two inches and they call it a point cloud. And so it's very like computationally intensive. But you do this a bazillion times, you know, compare all these points across all these images and then poof, after a few hours you got this like point cloud of what this site looks like. And you know, every inch you've got an X, Y, Z in color and it looks like this beautiful like 3D rendering of the site. And so then what's, you know, so that alone is useful because the whole industry of like basis and rovers, right, is to get elevations of stuff on the site. But then what was really cool is if we came back next week and flew the same thing and you circled this area, call it the cut, you could actually like compare last week to this week and you could quantify how much material left this area.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so in the cut you could quantify how much left the area. You could do the same thing in the fill, you could quantify how much came into this area and you basically like we had contractors doing billings off of this. It's like, you know, I moved this many yards and it's just, you know, at this priced, at this rate. And so here's my invoice for the month.

[A]

Well, it's, it's arguably the most accurate way to track quantities.

[B]

Yeah. If done correctly.

[A]

Yeah, if done correctly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If done, if done in a disciplined way, yes, it's remarkably accurate. I mean compared to like some guy in a truck with a little counter on their vest.

[B]

Oh my God, you're lucky if you have a counter so many times. It's like tickets, post it notes yeah. Oh, my God. It's just. Anyways. Yeah. It's to understand, like, how much work was actually done. This. This was. Became the way to measure it and.

[A]

But it was in. Once you got there, it was good timing because that's. This started to become pretty big a few years ago in the industry.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But. But even when I was still in construction in 2018, 2017, it was still. I was doing this a little bit with drone deployment and my. My personal drone.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it would just knock people's socks off.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They were just like, what did you do? Yeah, yeah. Just. Just mind bending. Yeah. It wasn't that long.

[B]

Years and six years into the identified chapter and you think about people were still. Mind blown.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I think they still are still over.

[B]

Yeah. Yes. Day. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I still. I mean, it's not uncommon now, but it's not standard practice.

[B]

Not everywhere. Far from it.

[A]

No, no, no. But yeah, it's. It. The technology is incredible.

[B]

It's so cool. I mean, again, you see a drone fly after a second, it like, pulls on your heart or it doesn't interest you. And this idea that we could, like, take these photos and then let the computer crunch for a couple hours, and then you got this, like, amazing 3D rendering. It would just pull it on my heart. Like, this is so freaking cool.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so. Yeah, that's. That's why the whole business was built around that.

[A]

So. Yes, that's the business. Were you planning to get out of it or did the opportunity present itself? That was just like.

[B]

Well, this is. It did not present itself. It was hard work to, like, there was a distinct point where I said, okay, it's time to.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Find a home for the business.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. So you went looking.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I see.

[B]

Was hard work.

[A]

Why get out of it?

[B]

There were two or three big forces that came together. The first. Okay. I'd spent a decade looking at construction sites from 400ft in the air. It occurred to me after 10 years, drones are important. Don't get me wrong. Quantity is important, but you want to really help. Going back to that theme of help, you want to really help the industry. You want to really move the needle, get out of the sky, get on the ground, get muddy and move some dirt.

[A]

Yeah. Help build the job.

[B]

Nothing else matters.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so that was like my big core realization about the industry. And so I want to help move some dirt. That was like a big driver. Another big driver is. It was like, you know, leading 2018, 2020. It was like the rise of early Rise of self driving cars. And so I just nerded out about self driving cars. That's another one of those. You see a drone fly, tugs on your heart. Yeah, I see a car drive around, Nobody in the cab, nobody in the driver's seat. That tugs on my heart.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And so that was second big force is like nerding out about self driving cars. And then I think third major force is 2020. You get this pandemic and you just like operators, you know, people stopped applying and it just like fell off a cliff for these contractors. And so I had contractors begging me to help with autonomy.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So, yeah, those were probably. The three big forces came together.

[A]

So you got out of the drone thing because you saw another opportunity.

[B]

Yeah, it's actually. So this is super interesting. I booted up an old iPad literally this week, and I opened up PowerPoint on it. And here from like 2019 was my pitch deck. I wanted to raise capital to do autonomy under the original drone brand of identified. Yeah. And you know, I went out to market, three or four conversations. Everybody said, like, these are two very different things. Yeah, you got way too much capital on the cap table already. Like, this is just messy. Like, you know, I've been there.

[A]

Yeah, I've been there too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

So, yes, all those sort of happened. And then that was that distinct point. Let's. Let's find home for the business.

[A]

Yeah, we. That was honestly why we sold the marketing company. The original company was. Yeah, that exact. Everybody saying, this doesn't really make sense. Yeah. But we spent a lot of time fooling ourselves in. No, no, it makes perfect sense. And then we realized it doesn't make sense. What we ask ourselves, does it make sense?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

No, it doesn't make sense. And then the decision was made right then and there.

[B]

Yep. We'll come back to it as we talk more about blue light. But a very important theme of the last few years is if you really are intellectually honest, the correct answer. Pretty obvious. Yes. And then you spend a lot of time because you don't like the answer. It's very emotional. You're very passionate. You spend a lot of time trying to find any other answer.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In business, whatever the right answer is, do it as quickly as possible. No matter how uncomfortable, do it as quickly as possible.

[A]

I've probably reflected on that point more than anything else this year. Like, reality is reality. It does not fucking matter what you think about it, how you feel about it, where you are, it just is what it is. And the sooner you Work with it. The better off you'll be. But, boy, have we spent a lot of time. And this is speaking very frankly. We have been overly optimistic about the construction industry.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

In a lot of ways.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I'm still optimistic. But the speed in which the industry can get somewhere, we have to be realistic about.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or else you don't have a business. Like you've. You need the business.

[B]

You've got to survive.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. And so it's like. Fuck. Like we. Okay. We do have to really meet the industry where they are today. Yeah. Regardless of where we can go tomorrow. Yeah.

[B]

It doesn't matter.

[A]

Doesn't matter.

[B]

Right. We got solve problems today.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Which sounds, again, sounds obvious.

[B]

We're going to talk a lot about this when we get into Blue light.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Talking points.

[A]

Duh. Yeah. Okay. So you sell. You sell the company. And that in itself is a lot of work.

[B]

Yeah, that was a lot of work.

[A]

Yeah. It's not just. You don't just put a for sale sign out front.

[B]

That's great. I mean, you can. Nobody's looking.

[A]

Yeah. Were you happy with how that wound down?

[B]

It was lovely. Yeah. We, I mean, I didn't fly here on my Gulf stream, but it was enough to, you know, we made some. Basically we're able to return capital to like, make some dollars for our early investors. Right. And then to me, like, in my heart, more importantly is I had a number two, Zach. And you know, as part of this whole transaction, you know, I knew I was stepping away. So he became, you know, basically the operating president and, you know, new buyer, was basically a financial silent buyer. And so as far as, like, customers could tell, nothing changed except Zach was now running the ship. And. Yeah. And so it just, it makes my heart very happy that even to this day, like, I'll talk to him every. Every few months, even to this day. I mean, it's not easy. Right. There's always problems. But they are still doing wonderful things that, you know, that they've been doing for the last five years. Wonderful things for customers.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And yeah, he's taken some. Some of the accounts that, you know, were small and made them medium large and taken some of the large accounts and made them really large.

[A]

And what's the company name?

[B]

It's called Identified. Identified Technologies.

[A]

Yeah, it's still under Identified Technology. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, you just Google identified in drones. He should come up on Google.

[A]

But you were, you were completely out.

[B]

Yeah, well, there was a year where like, Zach was basically doing all the work and I was. I was still on his payroll, dragging him. Dragging him down. And I didn't really do much, but. Yeah, that was 2022, I think. And then I was it.

[A]

How. How do you go figure out how to make something autonomous?

[B]

Holy.

[A]

Like, where do you even. Where do you even. Where do you even start? Because I. Holy. I. It's. So is your background's interesting because. So we've alluded to it a little bit. I don't think the solutions for construction. And this may be. There may be some arrogance here. I don't know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or I might be naive. I don't know. I don't think solutions to the construction industry can come from technology people.

[B]

Agreed.

[A]

I think they have to come from within the industry.

[B]

Agreed.

[A]

In that can come in various forms.

[B]

Agreed.

[A]

But you have to really understand the industry.

[B]

Agreed.

[A]

And not just understand the mechanics of earth moving.

[B]

Agree.

[A]

You have to understand people. Yeah. And how people talk. Like the new. The nuance. I think you have to understand the nuance. Yep. And there's a lot of nuance.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

A lot. Because it's in the real world. And I think that's what a lot of people don't appreciate as well. Some of the outside people is that there's so much nuance in this world because it's in the real world. You're dealing with different people, different places.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Different soil conditions, weather. Like, it's. It's. It's simple. It's moving dirt back and forth. Really not simple, but it's very complex.

[B]

It's very complex.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. And so your background, I think, is essential to figuring this out. You just. You need a certain level of experience, just a certain number of conversations, I think a certain amount of time on job sites, a certain number of sites. Like, you have to see enough. You have to have a big enough data set that you can't get. You can't get it faster.

[B]

You cannot.

[A]

It just takes years.

[B]

You just have to visit 500 job sites.

[A]

You just have to visit 500 job sites. Exactly. And I didn't realize that until I'd visited 500 job sites. And then I'm like, holy shit.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. This is crazy. I. How doesn't anybody else see this? And it's like, oh, they haven't. They. They don't get to see all this stuff.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

So I think that's really important. So you have. That. You have technology software. That's great. But you go look at an autonomous car. It's kind of complicated. There's a lot there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So how do you start to even figure that out? Do you just go get autonomous Autonomy for Dummies at the library?

[B]

This is a. Let me just start rambling. You guide me. If you.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I did a certain lane. That was a horrible question.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it deserves a ramble.

[B]

It's a great question. I just gonna ramble about some, like, very core principles that, you know, at the core essence of blue light. I like how you put it five minutes ago, you got to meet the customer. Where they're at today. It does not matter what you think about tomorrow or next week or next year. And so I think, you know, when we were thinking about blue light, some of the very important things were this cannot cost $150,000, can't cost $500,000. A lot of these autonomy solutions that have been out there are like a million plus per. Per kit, no machine included, per autonomy kit. Right. It's impossible.

[A]

It's impossible.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's got to be 20, 30, 40 grand to play. And my dream, by the way, is to cut that by five over. Over the next five years. It's got to be. And I didn't really appreciate this even until starting blue light and really being out there with operators, you cannot be like, you can't even require 15 minutes of training to use your stuff, okay. Because operators cycle in and out like every three hours. You know, somebody was running this roller, might be doing something else this afternoon, and then might be back by 4pm or you send operators to different jobs. Some operators, you know, start. Start work at a new contracting firm, you know, on Monday, and they don't freaking come back from their lunch break. You know, it's just like, it's such a unique. And you're alluding to it like until you have been on 500 jobs, you don't even realize the constraints of what you have to build inside of if you're trying to do something good for the industry. And so, yeah, the constraints we sort of arrived at are like, this has got to be very affordable. We cannot require that. You got to ship this thing to some shop to get it installed. Right. Nobody has patience. We can't take machines down. You know, yes, the roller is the cheapest machine on the job, but if you take the roller down, you can't make compaction on this lift. Means you can't start putting the next lift. Means your whole lineup of equipment is sitting there doing nothing because you're installing on the roller. Right. So it's got to be like one or two hours to install and it's got to be literally 30 seconds pick up. You know, most many, not everybody. Okay, that was another interesting thing we learned. Not everybody has a smartphone, but many people have smartphone. You gotta be able to pick it up and in like 15, 30 seconds get going by yourself. It's just like such a really radical.

[A]

Tell that to some other pretty big technology companies within the industry. I don't know if they've used their products. Yeah, I'm just.

[B]

Oh my. So you talk about these other big technology companies.

[A]

I mean, I don't mean to derail.

[B]

You, but you got me started so I know what I look like. Okay, but these techie techie guys that show up to these job sites. Okay, These techie techy guys, you know, and it's, it's just, it's so classic. Oh, construction is so dumb. Construction's so ignorant. They're not good adopters of technology. No.

[A]

We need to show these cavemen fire. Yeah, they, they don't even know about fire.

[B]

It is, it is, it is exactly backwards. You techie techie or you person did not appreciate the pressures of production. And there's one story I go back to when we start talking about this. The pressures of production. Imagine we're building a data center in Richmond, Virginia. It's early days of our autonomous articulated truck, the 745. Okay, so we're running basically beta stuff. Okay, we're in the hall. It's like six or seven articulated trucks. It's a 1250 up on the bench loading us. Chuki is his name, the operator. So Chuki's loading. They got some oversized bucket, as Lisveld always does. They got some oversized frickin bucket on this shore. Boom. 1250.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

It's like two and a half scoops.

[A]

Oh, it's a fun machine. I've seen pictures of it. Okay, seen the machine.

[B]

It's like two and a half scoops and this, this bed is full and right as you like swipe to go, the thing bugs out and it stops working. And then you're sitting there for like 14. I'm sitting there in the auto truck because I'm helping test and the thing bugs out.

[A]

So you're sitting in the truck?

[B]

Yeah, as it's driving.

[A]

Yeah, as it's driving. But you're not driving.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. This is part of early days testing. And so I'm sitting in the truck, you know, I'm freaking out. You know, I'm on the phone where AirPods Everybody's on a group call. Nothing's working. And it's only been, like, 12 seconds. Okay. Scrambling. Nothing makes sense. So then I gotta reboot the truck. After you reboot the truck in the app, you gotta hit connect. This whole ordeal takes, like, probably less than 60 seconds. But as I'm rebooting the truck and waiting for this thing to connect, I can look back at Chuki, and he is just staring laser beams at me, this fucking guy. And then in the 60 seconds that it took my truck to reboot, the six trucks that weren't there a minute ago are now all waiting behind.

[A]

Yeah. And now they're all up his ass. Yeah. And now it's there.

[B]

Now it's. It's our truck. And Blue Light is holding up the entire job for making a lick of production.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. And so I tell this story because. And, like, we preach it inside you with our engineers, everybody inside team Blue Light. It's like production is like, you got to keep moving. Don't ever stop moving. And, like, until you appreciate, you know, laser beams being stared down at you because your stuff broke, because it took 60 seconds to reboot your truck. It's like you did not appreciate the pressures of production.

[A]

Well, I think the technology people, they think they're the ones that are important.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And they think they're the ones that are changing the world.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

But I, again, I'm around too many people that actually build the world to think that I'm the one that does anything.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I don't do shit, man. Don't do nothing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No. I am in service of these people that actually build our world. Correct. That actually put pipe in the ground.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Pave roads, move dirt, pour concrete. Like, that is still. We're human beings. We have physical needs. Food, water, shelter.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

These are the people meeting those physical needs.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Nothing in humanity happens without those physical needs.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I think they forget that. They think they're the ones that are important in the grand scheme of things.

[B]

Like, it's not just technology people, by the way.

[A]

Oh, it's not?

[B]

No. It's not. Some of these contractors that have come up real quick, you know, in the last few years, you know, you get these back office folks and you get management.

[A]

You get plenty of that.

[B]

You get leadership, you know, think that they drive the business. No, don't get it wrong. It's the folks making production on the job that is, you know, you either make production or you support somebody who makes production. There is nothing else that matters.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so yeah, I think it's very common for these technology people like you were too ignorant to realize like the pressures of production. You didn't, you didn't yourself understand it. So then of course, like when you try and make us a technology solution, it was dead on arrival, like you had no chance. And even with we believe like a product, you know, that we've built that is sort of kind of fits inside what the industry needs, it's still not obvious that we're going to succeed because the pressures of production are just so high.

[A]

I distracted you a little bit.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you're sitting. What is a 745 or 745? But how do you get a 745 to drive itself?

[B]

Ah, okay.

[A]

How do you figure that out?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great question.

[A]

Yeah, you can't just go on YouTube and you know, and then go to Home Depot.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's a great question. So the dirty little secret. And some of our competitors will trash to have trash talk to us, to our customers. The dirty little secret is actually to make a robot drive around in a circle. Not a very hard thing. You could literally go to ChatGPT today and say, hey, I want to buy a little RC car. And then I want to send me a list of what chips do I need to buy. Write me the code so that I can control it from my phone or I want to use this open source software, just tell me what to do. And so luckily there are some like open source, widely available methodologies, widely available tools, widely available tech stacks and chips and all that. Right. And so to say it literally it is the exact same chip and the exact same kind of firmware that makes a drone fly. This is what we put in the roller.

[A]

I see. Yeah, interesting.

[B]

So we did not take, we did not take a self driving car and cram it into a roller. Yeah, we took, we took basically a little drone and, and made the roller a big, a big drone.

[A]

How does it see is it, it's not lidar. I don't think yours is. No, I haven't seen that.

[B]

And I will, I will.

[A]

Because light on.

[B]

I won't die on this hill. Yeah, it's expensive.

[A]

And it breaks.

[B]

Yeah, and it breaks. You get two sensors. When two sensors disagree, what do you do? You had to listen to one anyway. So why even have the other sensor if you were going to listen to one when the other one is disagreeing? And then you get this expensive sensor that costs Money. But then you get the complexity of more data, so then you need more compute power. And then this sensor is fragile, so you need more electronics and robustness testing. Everything exponentially gets more involved if you just double the number of sensors you have from camera to camera, plus lidar.

[A]

So the.

[B]

Hold on, let me. Let me finish my ramble. Another very important point about appreciating a job site, lidar, the moment it sees dust, is rendered useless.

[A]

Explain lidar.

[B]

Yeah, that's a great question.

[A]

Yeah, explain lidar.

[B]

LIDAR is literally like a laser pointer. And then when the laser pointer beam hits something, the sensor can basically sense it that this literal laser beam hits something. Okay. So then these lidar sensors, there's some nuance about how they work, but just imagine it shooting out of bazillion thousands.

[A]

Yes. Spinning really fast.

[B]

Some of them shooting these lasers, some of them spin. But even the fancy ones nowadays, nothing spinning. We're just sending out a bunch of laser beams. Okay. But the problem with laser beams is they hit dust and ping back. And now you got this big cloud of, like, massive in front of you. And so then if you have lidar onboard your system, you either do two things. One, stop the machine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

From a lick of dust. Sure. Okay.

[A]

Or two, you ignore the lidar and.

[B]

You just keep going.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Which is the cat mindstar system is they've used lidar, but then they have. They have the other form of sensors.

[B]

There's a few. Yeah.

[A]

As well. On the. On the truck. Yeah. So that's how they get around. That is there's multiple systems. There's like the redundancy factor.

[B]

It's actually. If I can piss a lot of engineers off by saying this, installing lidar is just a crutch and a cheap way to get something looking. Okay. But the real work, the hard work is just get vision working really well.

[A]

Okay. Yeah.

[B]

Vision is the superior way to get it done.

[A]

Well, because I honestly, I thought lidar was the only way. And then I saw the Komatsu system, which is their autonomous haulage system for mining. And they don't use lidar. So it's like, oh, wait, you don't actually need this. These trucks are moving just fine too.

[B]

Do just fine.

[A]

And one team says, no, we're team lidar. The other team says, no, lidar. Stupid. And the Google cars, they're all lidar. Yeah. Waymo. Waymo. Waymo. They're all lidar. You'll see them. Phoenix and Iowa. Quite a few different Phoenix.

[B]

Probably a dozen, two dozen cities.

[A]

Yeah, but they are like rolling deep in Phoenix right now. They've gone all lidar. But then Tesla is not lidar.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

They're camera based. So you went camera based. You're just using vision, straight vision, to understand what's in front of the machine.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And around the machine.

[B]

Yeah. You want another dirty little secret about blue light? The quote unquote AI that we use, you know, to see what's around us.

[A]

Is it just a bunch of people in a call center like Amazon stores?

[B]

Early days. Early days. It was, it was me and my co founder Justin, basically doing that. But the dirty little secret, the AI model, you know, AI that we use. The model is an off the shelf, like if you did a 101, you know, camera vision course in college, you would use this model. And so the model is actually nothing fancy. I'm skipping steps here a lot.

[A]

But in the world, in the world.

[B]

Of AI, like, the model is not the fancy part. What matters is they call it training data. And so real images from real job sites of real dozers is what you need to train an AI. Yes. And just the way like this technology is evolving, if you have 10 pictures of 10 different dozers and train your AI with it, and then you install that on one of our rollers, it's going to do a pretty awful job of stopping for a dozer. You only had ten pictures. But if you have ten thousand, hundred thousand, a million pictures, eight 71s, yellow, gray, on stone, on dirt, Ripper. No ripper. Doing all these things. Yeah, Dirty, clean, whatever. Sunrise, sunset, midday. If you have 10,000 pictures and you train your AI with it, and then you ship that to our roller, it is amazing how good it is at seeing dozers.

[A]

You get the images to begin with by running it manned to create that.

[B]

That's how we did it like in our first few months.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you need to get the initial data set to begin with.

[B]

We actually, we had the AI installed, but it only could see people and cars because that's all the stuff we had access to.

[A]

Sure, yeah, yeah. Because the data there is as robust as it.

[B]

Walk down the street. Yeah. Take your own pictures of cars.

[A]

Well, yeah, but. But I mean, just the autonomous, the miles and how much time they've put into this now is insane. So. So you're using multiple cameras to be looking all the time, and then you're training an algorithm to then recognize that's a guy. And then if that's a guy and it's in my way, I stop.

[B]

That'S a guy and it's within the distance that I care about.

[A]

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, if it's in my path. Yeah, I stopped.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah. You know, and honestly, all we sort of went down this. It's a, it's a super curious set of topics, this AI thing. But yeah, our first customer landmark is this guy, Mike Marshall. He was one of the guys, like, we got this huge job coming up, endless rolling. Give me some auto rollers. I said, mike, it's going to take some time to like make a roller that can have the AI to stop for things. He said, dick, I don't need that. Just make the roller go by itself and I will staff somebody to sit at the corner of the four pads and hit stop if any of the rollers are about to do something dangerous.

[A]

I see.

[B]

Okay, so I'm jumping to another concept here, moving away from the AI for a second. It's a very common thing in technology startups to think I got to do all of these things. We need all of these features. It's got to be very feature rich. We need dozens of engineers to pull it off.

[A]

Yeah, been there.

[B]

Yeah. Actually, that's cheap thinking. The hard thinking is to be very intentional. I say internally, like when we talk about it, it's like, let's reduce the scope, let's do less. We don't want to do a dozen features, we only want one or two features. Let's think hard. What's the one bet that we're going to make? Let's build it super quick and then we can see where we write on the bet or not. And if not, that's fine because we're doing this development like in a matter of hours or a couple of days, not on the matter of six months or two years. And so if the bet was wrong, that's fine. Tomorrow we're going to pivot and try another bet and then another bet, you know. And so, so this concept of reducing scope was really hammer hard hammered into me when Mike said, I don't even need the things to have eyes on them. Just, just make them roll.

[A]

Interesting. So that was the first iteration was you made a little roller pen with a guy and a knee stop.

[B]

Yeah. Yes. In a word, yes. Yeah.

[A]

But it was over something literally days.

[B]

Days later though. Days later, my co founder, Justin, from that world, so basically my co founder jd, he got the thing rolling, the electronics of it, the robotic side of it. And then Justin comes from a background in this kind of Vision AI World. It was like, literally two days later, and he got it stopping for people walking in front of it.

[A]

Okay, okay, okay, okay. So pretty quick. Yeah. And these were cab rollers?

[B]

Cat or cabbed cat? They were cat rollers.

[A]

Did you. Did you talk to Cat about this, or did you just kind of go do it?

[B]

Yeah, we don't ask for permission. Sure. We have a customer that needs help.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then to loop it back to that same concept. They need help today, so we do it.

[A]

So you have customers, you have dealers. I'm starting to go off on different tension here. Have the OEMs even acknowledged you?

[B]

We're primarily on Caterpillar rollers and articulated trucks. We used to be on John Deere Articulate. That was actually our first development machine. And then it was a pretty sour sort of unfolding between us, the contractor Lisfeld, and John Deere. And so we said, this is too messy. Let's just go to cat trucks. We had exceptional support from early CAT dealers. So it was like all the forces came together. We just did it for the cat trucks. And then for, like, the last year, you know, I was very open to this idea of, I'm happy to work with any OEM that wants to work. Like, we're an open book. I have no secrets. You want to know our. You know, our roadmap for development? I'm happy to tell you. And so. But it became very clear in the last month or two that this particular OEM is not interested in working together.

[A]

Yeah, fine.

[B]

And in fact, they would like to compete also. Fine. Sure.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so we said, look, you know, for a year, I've been getting customers asking me to do it on every other brand of roller, but I have not. I've actively said no, because I'm loyal to, you know, our early customers who are cat heavy, and I'm loyal to our dealers who are cat heavy. But if you would like to compete, then we need to do what protects our life, and we're gonna do every other OEM on the planet.

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

And, yeah, so we just announced with Dynapack. It was a super successful launch in Atlanta, like, two weeks ago. And it was, like, within the week, we had a call with headquarters in Sweden and all the North American folks, and very positive, very good. I don't know where it unfolds and, you know, where it eventually goes, but, yeah, very positive. Very eager to work together.

[A]

They just. These big companies, it's not just the big OEMs, but they want it to be Their idea.

[B]

I get it.

[A]

And it's like even real, even, even, even recently there was one. I don't want to get into like what exactly it was, but there was this guy that says, I'm gonna do this for you and it's gonna be amazing. It was, it was incredible. It was really something. You know, I'll say it. So, so. John Moyna, MTS Mobile Track Solutions. CJ Moyna Earthmover Legacy Center. Amazing organization.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And like that is a guy that is just built to move dirt like his. He is, that is his purpose. God made him existence. To move the earth.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Period. This guy. No doubt about it. No one has ever refuted that. It's just so obvious. He's, he's. And he just, he loves the industry. He loves Caterpillar. He loves old machines. Their, their collection is unbelievable. Incredible.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I. World class. Yeah, world class. And it's, it's private. Like he sources it all. They have full time people working on these machines. The restoration, it's just old museum that's available, open to the public.

[B]

Did you just post some pictures about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I haven't posted Visualize. Yeah. But yes. Unbelievable. So they said we're gonna have a hundred year Caterpillar birthday. Oh. And we're gonna have it. We're gonna put up, you know, spend our money to do this. Yeah.

[B]

To celebrate the brand.

[A]

Celebrate the brand. Celebrate. Like you know, this only happens everyone once every hundred years. Oh yeah. Do you kind of see where I'm going here? Oh my God. So I know that it was like you, you would, you would think Caterpillar be like let's do this together. Like this is incredible. We would love to do something like this. Not only do they have. Their dealers were very helpful in it. I can't say enough good things about the cat dealer network. The dealers participated. Caterpillar. No, we're not going to participate. And then they did their own the same weekend.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

The same weekend.

[B]

We're going to last weekend. Two weekends ago.

[A]

Two weekends ago. We're going to have our own birthday party. Wasn't planned.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But we're gonna have our own. And maybe they say well it's a coincidence. And I'm like okay, whatever. But it's just like why?

[B]

Why?

[A]

Like why? Yeah, like why?

[B]

It's.

[A]

It's so frustrating. Like, like it's so disappointing. It's disappointing like for, for somebody like me. I have. I still love the brand. I love the machines. I love the People that work there. I love the dealership. I was a Caterpillar shareholder for a very long time. Like in college. I mean it was like I lived and died this damn brain. But then it's stuff like that that's like, why? Why? Yeah. Can't. Come on, like throw me up, throw me a bone here, for goodness sake. And so that goes to. Then it's like, watch, you're gonna go to Conexpo and have you, have you been to Con Expo?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You're going to go to Conexpo. I'm going to go to Con Expo. All the OEMs are going to be talking about how their tech, their technology is world class. Our technology is incredible. We're a technology. We're not actually an equipment manufacturer. We're a technology company.

[B]

It's good for shareholders, it's good for the branding, the marketing.

[A]

And I just don't. That's not the winning formula.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's just not. Somebody like you can do it so much better, so much faster.

[B]

Cheaper.

[A]

Cheaper. Like better for the customer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Why not just work together? And then the OEM thing drives me nuts too, because it's like they all. They won't say each other's names.

[B]

That's right. It's like they're all talking about each other.

[A]

They all talk. It's very passive aggressive. And it's like, go to a job site.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Go to a job site. Like who runs one? And even a customer that's a die hard cat fan, I guarantee you. They have other stuff there. From United Rentals.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Or something like that. They're renting from like all over the place now.

[B]

Yeah. It's just so silly, like, you know, it's. I have had to be very intentional about this the last year, you know, because of this. I believe it working with dealers thing has really only been the last like 10 or 10 months maybe. I catch myself and I have to catch myself and I have to be relentless about. Doesn't really matter, you know. If OEMs want to work together, great. If OEMs don't want to work together, great. Like we have a plan both ways. Yeah. And we are going to keep marching and like our North Star is do good for operators on the job sites actually, you know, moving material and putting in fill and as long as we take care of that, you know, that person on that, on, on the job site, everything else will fall into place the way it needs to fall into place. Sure. The dust will settle the way it's supposed to.

[A]

Yeah. I Like what, what, what? What Is starting to really piss me off. And I will not forget it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When I'm in a. When I'm in a position to do something about this kind of stuff, I will not. I will not fucking and forget it. Yes. And it's not OEMs, it's everybody.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

That is in the way of progress.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

So that they can make more money right now. It is like I. I can feel like, the anger within me right now as I'm saying this. It is making me so fucking upset.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And it's just how.

[B]

They're all leeches.

[A]

But. But some of it is. But. But a lot of it's just like, how much more money do you need? How much more? Like, how much?

[B]

Is there an example of, like, somebody getting in the way that, like, really, like, gets you fired up? It's. It's.

[A]

It's a lot of the industry. I think it's like the establishment within the construction industry. Yeah. Gcs, I think. Are there big engineering firms? Are there law firms? Any materials companies? Very guilty. Like, any. And it's not. It's not their fault. Fault like their. It's just so I'm. Big picture. I'm looking at America and I want America to be better.

[B]

Yeah. We have to win.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I travel and America is not better, sadly. And is so sad.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we still believe our hubris that we're the best. And it's like, go anywhere else.

[B]

Anywhere.

[A]

Anywhere else. Not London. London sucks. But like, anywhere else. Yes. And. And, and, and, and, and, and like, really reflect. Like, like, like take inventory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because we're not where we think we are. And it's just like everybody's been out for themselves for so long. That's it. They're all protecting their own interests for generations. Yes. And it. And it'. Me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's. But it's like, well, what about the next generation? Correct. And the generation after that.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And the generation after that. And it's like, good for you. You're making a shitload of money. Congratulations. What do you go do with that money? Well, you don't know what to do with it, so you go give it to J.P. morgan. Is J.P. morgan or. I don't even want to. You know, I don't even want to bag on JP Morgan. Any of the banks, any of the institutions, whatever. Are they taking that money and are they, like, making the world better?

[B]

Nope.

[A]

Probably not. Probably not. And. And then. Okay. You're gonna give it to your kids. I've Seen that play out a lot of times.

[B]

It ruins them.

[A]

I almost always. Does it destroy them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I grew up. I grew up around all these people. Like, thank God. My. I. We had just enough money growing up where we had a brilliant life.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then it just. The door slammed shut.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And it was like, dude, you just saw it was possible.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You go after it.

[B]

Yep. It's on you now.

[A]

It's on you. And thank God, because if I had, I wouldn't be doing any of this right now. If I had.

[B]

That's good parenting.

[A]

Well, yeah. Yes. Like, I. I 100. I give my parents so much credit for that. I don't know. It's just really upsets me.

[B]

So let me ask you this. So I agree with all those sentiments. You know, we started talking about big company, and then that's talking about leeches and everybody out to protect.

[A]

I will say, yeah, if I were in their position, I'd be doing this.

[B]

You do the same.

[A]

I'm not. It's not because I'm too good. This and that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're out here to make a buck.

[A]

Yeah. I'm not there to criticize them.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I would be doing the same shit. I just want to.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Continue.

[B]

But, like, it is very upsetting. You know, you go to these. These other continents, these other countries, and in many ways it is better. Lots of. Lots of conversations that have I've had with people like, oh, we should have free health care. It's like, okay, go to any of the countries with free health care. Why don't you move there?

[A]

Sure. Yes.

[B]

Yes. And then you end up waiting seven months for, like, you know, a checkup. They all come here for health.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then you end up coming here. Exactly. For your health. Health fair. So anyways, it's like, it's easy. I had a cycle probably about two years ago. I got very depressed about this society. I got very depressed about these leeches and everything. But then it's like, okay, let's do something about it. You got one life again, tying it back to helping. What can you do with your life and your time and try and help? You may not flip the whole picture for the positive, but you can at least help a small part the of.

[A]

Of the picture.

[B]

And. Yeah. So, like, you know, I resonate with you. Packaged it basically. And bill is your. Is your attempt to help the industry. And then we've packaged into blue light as our attempt to help the industry. But at the end of the Day, it's the same thing. It's like, we gotta help these operators. That's basically what it boils down to.

[A]

That's it. Yeah. It's serve the people in the field. Like one of our values. We're the stagehands, not the stars.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

We are here to serve.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

We're here to make them look good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We know our place. And if the day we forget it.

[B]

It'S just too depressing. If you don't. If you don't, like, you know, figure out how you're going to make your mark and how you're going to help, and all you do is thinking about it. It's just, like, such a sad existence.

[A]

But that. But that's. That's the opportunity. Like, that's what gets me excited.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But. But it's. It's been very demoralizing at the same time. Like, people just can't get out of their way. But. But China's a good example. Like, just the hubris that is everybody criticizing China.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Go there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Tell me it sucks. Like, I don't. I've been there.

[B]

Yeah. It's pretty dang nice.

[A]

Pretty incredible. Like, pretty incredible.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've left the country more this. This time, this year than any other year. And I've found myself, as I come back, I'm, like, sadder and sadder. Yeah. And it's been so uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. It's been upsetting, like, to go from Japan to Chicago o'. Hare.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

And it's just.

[B]

You pick the worst airport to come in through.

[A]

But it's just so sad. Like, it bums me. All right. Just. I was in Australia, and I come back to the States.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And even just the quality of food there versus here, it's like, man, like, I. I would rather live here than anywhere else. But, like, we should be so much better.

[B]

We can be.

[A]

And we can be. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I'm either gonna help make that happen or die trying.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

That's it.

[B]

It's a. It's a story of, like, American dynamism. And I never thought I'd be. I'd be like. If you asked me five years ago if I'd feel so passionately about this. I feel very passionately about this.

[A]

Something's changed.

[B]

Yeah. Dynamism.

[A]

Past five years, like, it's. It's opened this world.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

That I'm looking, I'm seeing everywhere now. I'm like, yes.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

This is wild. Like, we can do great Things again.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And we haven't done great in a long time. We have to.

[B]

We have to. Yeah. Make it here.

[A]

All right, let's, let's. I'll put a pin in my anger for a moment. I'll calm back down and actually do my job again. You're saying you're serving operators? If I'm Mr. Operator, you're taking my job.

[B]

Correct. So actually, you mentioned, you mentioned this earlier. Well, why don't you ask your question?

[A]

No, explain yourself.

[B]

Yeah, it's a great talking point. You made the point earlier that you just got to be on the 500 job sites to even have a chance to do something useful for this industry. And it occurred to me pretty early on in blue light, the most impactful thing I can do for this business is go March across the 500 job sites and then the thousand, and then 5,000. And. Like, I wear the boots everywhere.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Been wearing the boots for two years, haven't taken them off. I wear them to boardrooms, I wear them to meetings, like that's it. I wear them to airports and everything. So I have had many, like we install a roller, you know, doing a demo or whatever. A customer just bought the auto roller. I have had many a dozer operator come up right up to my face, 65 year old dozer operator and just motherfucker me to my face, mother Chinese guy. You took in my. Taking my job.

[A]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I bet you've heard.

[B]

Okay. Yeah. So I got, I got two things working against me. Okay? Like it looked like an Asian techie, techie dude.

[A]

You do kind of look from. Okay, yeah, okay.

[B]

And then, and then layer on top of that, I just, we just hit go on this tablet. This roller is, you know, going back and forth with nobody in the seat.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It's a very powerful moment. And. So it's basically the same question or same series of questions every time. It's like, yes, for 50 years you made your career on getting in the seat of that thing and running it and operating. And it's an amazing career doing an amazing thing for this country.

[A]

Right?

[B]

But let's ask the question, you, Mr. Dozer operator, in my face of you and your buddies, how many will retire in the next five years? He says 25. And I said, okay, of you and your buddies are retiring the 25 of you, how many halfway decent, not even excellent halfway decent folks do you think are going to fill the seats? And then they sit there for a second and it's like, well, shit, like maybe two. One in Ten right. Seats we're gonna fill. And so, you know, we were talking about this before starting this podcast. It's like you have the appreciation because you're on all these jobs. Now that I've been on all these jobs, I'm starting to see it where this is, this implosion that we're heading for. Owners, customers, they only ever demand more out of contractors. We want more, we want faster, we want it cheaper. The expectations only ever go up, but then our capacity to work and make production is only ever falling. And so at some point these two crisscross and it's implosion on the industry. And I don't know what it looks like, but I seriously only think we're like five ways to five years away from this implosion.

[A]

And I would argue it's already crisscrossed because it like, it's not like the implosion. It's dramatic, but it's not dramatic to begin with.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Like, I feel like, yeah, yeah, it's happening, it's happening. It's a slow death at first.

[B]

Yes, yes. And so, and so, you know, then we. Okay, so we have this realization like, okay, a lot of us are actually on the older side and very close to retirement. And you know, after we retire, it does not look like there's lots of job applicants, you know, filling the pipeline. And so that's where like Buildwick comes in and training, right. And taking somebody and making them a great operator. And so the theme of words I'll use is we're trying to upskill operators here where it used to take two or three guys to run grade on a pad with a dozer. Thanks to technology in the form of machine control, we can now make production with one operator. Right. And so that was a big mold multiplying effect on making grade on a pad. In similar fashion, making compaction on lifts as you're building a site used to be a two man job. Used to need a guy in a dozer. You used to need a guy in the roller. Okay. And all we're trying to do is upscale these dozer operators so that they can run the fill and make more production by themselves. Because it's not like there's this line of endless operators who are applying to run this roller. Okay.

[A]

Roller is a great, great one to go after though, because I don't. I haven't met many people that are just fired.

[B]

No.

[A]

Up for 12 hours in the roller. Like, like they're just getting work. Like, yeah, fuck yeah. I get to run a roller for 12 more hours. I couldn't. I couldn't.

[B]

Doesn't exist. Who would want to do that?

[A]

I've met those people.

[B]

Yeah, that's. And so. And so whatever operator that was in the roller, if you were fortunate to have a great operator in the roller, Take them and do literally anything else on the job that is more impactful to production than literally sitting there just doing this back and forth. Let technology help with this. Very menial, very repetitive. Like, it's the waste of a great operator to sit there and do that. Right. So take that operator. You know, so often I show up to these jobs. You got 10 pieces, 12 pieces of equipment. A dozer, an excavator. Right. And then you got a few trucks and a couple rollers, water truck. So often I show up, you got 12 pieces on the job, and two trucks are sitting there doing nothing today. And so take them out of the roller and go make more production in the truck. And so, you know, when I come across these operators that have this very emotional reaction, I mean, all I can do is I'll stay for two or three days and I will help run the roller, you know, paired with them. And so it's fun. It's like, you know, as you're. As you're pushing the lift across the roller is making compaction with you. And then as you move forward to the next row, Piles of roller moving forward to the, you know, follow you along the. Along the fill. And then after three days, you come back without fail. And like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened in the industry. And I don't ever want a roller man on my roller again.

[A]

Just because it does what you want.

[B]

Yeah, just bring the blue light roller with me. Yeah, it does what you want. Exactly. And. Yeah. And so it's like, it is not this mass firing of roller operators. It's like put them in the truck that was doing nothing or put them in the water truck or put them in anything else that was doing nothing.

[A]

And that's the. That's the thing like it. The numbers just aren't there. Like supply, demand.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You're not. You're not putting people out of work through this. And I think the only challenge then is the roller. So for. I'll go back to gps, like.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You used to make grade. You'd have to go out with a grade checker and some. Maybe some other poor, poor guy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

With a sledge.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And pound hubs.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And you would learn a lot about making grade pounding hubs Yep. And that made you a better blade hand by doing that work.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I think being in a roller gives you essential. An essential understanding of compaction and how a fill works.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And how earth moving works. Yep. That said, that's not the only way to do it. But contractors do have to supplement that education.

[B]

Okay. Super question. And you know how it happens. You normally take a roller operator, if they're halfway decent, let them do the role for some number of months or a couple years. Right? Yeah. And then they graduate into the articulated trucks.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And being in that roller is a great way, like you say, to learn how the materials flowing, learn how the dozer's flowing, learn how trucks are flowing. You know what's better than. Than sitting in a roller to learn how to drive an articulated truck. Go sit in the jump seat of the articulated truck. And so even if you don't have the extra piece of equipment and the roller's running by itself because of blue light, Take that extra blue light, the roller operator, and let them jump seat ride with your seasoned articulated truck drivers. Sure. And that is the way more effective way to learn how to run a truck.

[A]

Which is. But that, that's. And that's commonplace in mining.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You like all the time you'll see somebody in the jump seat. But in construction, it's very rare because they can't afford it. They can't have somebody in the jump seat. They just need someone in the other truck.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But yeah. If you don't have another truck, this is what you do. If you have another truck, you say to the new operator, just go follow the first truck.

[A]

But that discipline does need to be there.

[B]

Yeah. I have to help these contractors open their eyes to like the. This, this slightly different way of thinking. How do you. How do you train your workforce?

[A]

Yeah. Because that's again like even. Yeah. Making grade for.

[B]

For pipe.

[A]

Like.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The best place to learn is in the trench.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's right before you're in the hoe. And so there. But. But it's not the only way. It's just that knowledge needs to be transferred in a different way. Which is why we do. We do partially.

[B]

Sorry to be. It's in the details for another second. Another way to sit there and learn how the fill works. If the roller is running by itself, Feel free to sit in the roller running by itself.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And still watch how the fill is working around you. And so just because the thing runs by itself doesn't mean the learning opportunity is Gone get a buggy and go sit at the corner of the fill and watch how everything's working. Get to see it from a bird's eye view. It's almost a more impactful way to learn, you know, learn how this fill is working. Right.

[A]

Yeah. I'm not, I'm not surprised that operators like it. I've been. People are very negative about this, especially online. Yeah.

[B]

Like I've wanted to so badly, Aaron. You know, every time, every once in a while you post a video or one of our guys posts a video and there's always the guy behind the keyboard saying, oh, you're taking operators jobs.

[A]

Yeah, taking jobs.

[B]

I would love to copy and paste like a job posting at hoopla rating for a roller operator and paste it in that comment and say, feel free to apply. I will make sure you get the interview.

[A]

Have at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but even, I mean these guys will say they're my favorites when it's a remote machine.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And so it's a guy running the machine and they're saying you're taking somebody's job.

[B]

It's like he's still running the machine.

[A]

It's one to one. Like you can't even, can you see? Like I'm, I'm a little.

[B]

There wasn't even leverage on, on operating this machine.

[A]

Yeah, I'm, Yeah, but, but I'm not surprised because like I said, I've seen it a lot in mining. Yeah, I think so. It's not one to one. I think civil construction can learn a lot from mining and I wish more civil contractors went to mine sites to see how materials really moved because it's way more efficient. Not always.

[B]

I disagree with, in general.

[A]

You've seen quarries. Have you seen large. Yeah, large mines in like Chile or.

[B]

Like not international, but like big gold mines in Nevada.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. Us, we do it okay. Oh, we do it okay. I mean like you need to go to like properly, like Western Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, and, and again, it's not fair because that's their whole business.

[B]

That's right. Yeah.

[A]

And they do it in one place, you know, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's all you do. You can get really good. Yeah, but, but when I go to these mines, I've always asked, what do you think about this? I love asking operators what they think about the autonomous stuff at an autonomous site. I've never heard anything negative. I mean I've asked a lot of people. Well, and sometimes it doesn't Always work perfectly.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But usually when it doesn't work it's human error.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Ironically can confirm. Yes, it's human error that screws with it. But the sites it's really working well at. Everybody likes it. Especially like the excavator operators because they spot the truck and the truck does it exactly where they want it to go every time within a quarter inch. Yeah. And. And then it. What's not to love? And, and driving a truck like it's a grind. It's a huge area of exposure. Especially running at night, you know, 12 hours at night.

[B]

Yep. You're.

[A]

You, you're just on days now you're on nights. Like that's, that is a tough role. It's putting those people into blade positions, dozer positions, getting them into excavators, getting them operator positions that they would have had to wait five plus years for. And there's the skilling. Yeah. It's the weird dynamic that is like. Well I had to do my five to 10 years.

[B]

So you have to do your five season operators.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to do your time buster. And it's like, like you know, maybe like I like that's a. It's a romantic thought. Like and, and I, I see the logic but that's just again that's not reality.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's not how the world works anymore. And I don't know what to tell you about that. And, and that's like. That's like everything. Like your dad could say that about you. Everything a hundred different ways.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Like wow. You get all your packages ordered? Yeah, I had to go to the store. Go to the store. That's right. Yeah, yeah. You idiot. And so it's just a. But, but human nature is such a big part of this. Like you can't just approach it from. And that goes back to the whole techie thing. If you just put your techie spin on it. Well you guys just don't get it. This is actually easy. It's. That's not how it works either. It's more like you're dealing more with culture and human element. The human element more than you are the machines.

[B]

You know it's really interesting. You know you talk about the human element. So our, on our teams, his name is Rob. He helps with all the like the you know, customer success and dealer success and you know he comes from a career at cat actually and at a, at a cat dealer, you know running sales and rental and you know all these so he comes from this world, right? And we get to meeting and he's in a career transition and he gets so excited about the blue light stuff and I'm trying to understand why. And he was like, it's just like, you know, selling the thing is so exciting. And I told him, I said, this role, our existence, like marketing autonomy, pretty easy. Selling the thing pretty easy. Installing the thing, pretty easy. Training the thing, pretty easy. The hard, really hard work and where our effort is, you know, him and I, our effort goes, is success on the job site with the tool after we leave. And it's entirely the human element. And people ask me all the time, what's the hardest part about blue light? It ain't the tech. The rollers go like, that's a pretty straightforward thing. The hardest part is a human element. Every human comes from different experiences. They come from a different background, they got different constraints. Every job site, the way you move material is different. The pressures of your owner is different. The pressures of your superintendent is different. It's just like the human element is the hardest part and it is shaping up to be like a whole industry effort to even nudge it a little bit towards this autonomy thing. It's going to be a 10 year effort of the whole industry. If we're going to have any chance of success, of helping operators make a little bit more production.

[A]

Well, I was going to say, and that's optimistic too because GPS is still, they're still figuring it out.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Like 20 years later, 20 years later, 24. Still like, man, this GPS stuff's actually pretty good. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, it is, it is pretty good. But I do think that that horizon is condensed because of workforce. Like, I think it's accelerated, I think. Yeah, I don't, I don't. Again, I think this is forced. And that's at least, that's what I'm betting on. And that's what I see.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's where that's our business opportunity too, is like, listen, you guys, you're gonna have to do this at some point. And in our category where we're playing, it's like we're gonna be the game in town. So I get it, you think it's on your terms right now, but it will be correct. It's just a matter of time. It will be on our terms. And the sooner you get on board, the better off you'll be. Like, everybody wins. Like, we win here together. Yeah. And you're, you're playing again. It's A similar game.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But completely different game.

[B]

It all goes back to upskilling the labor force and helping people, Operators produce more. And you're doing it sounds like through training and you know, bringing in people into the pipeline and upskilling them through.

[A]

Teach people how to communicate.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so all we've done is the exact same thing. We're just doing it with a little bit of technology and that's it.

[A]

Yeah. I, in, in, in talking with a lot of operators. I know the ones that are good are not worried.

[B]

Yeah, correct.

[A]

Because again that, that's like one of the most valuable skill sets. Correct. In the industry.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Now. And it only gets more valuable from here. Correct. The interesting thing too is when I was talking with, I hadn't thought about this. Ah, what's the company in San Francisco Tech or. Yeah, they're built. Built Robotics.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

This was years ago. I had a conversation with them. They're like, well, you know, assuming this works, it raises wages for operators.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

And it's like, oh yeah, it does. And that is something that has to happen.

[B]

It's production per capita.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Whole economy is GDP output per capita.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I, But I think wages growing for the people performing the work. That has to happen. That's right. Because they're pretty bad right now.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like really bad.

[B]

Yeah. Actually I go around the country with these new customers. I'm talking to owners, I'm talking to like VP of operations. And I'll tell them right to their face, like, my objective actually is over the next few years, blue light operators should make more money than non blue light operators. Kind of like, like a GPS opera, A GPS dozer operator can make more production in the fill than you know, without the tool.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So they're worth a few dollars extra. Correct. You know, to you. Because they're making more production. So same way if one guy's running three machines at the same time, they are worth a few more dollars to you. Yeah. And so it's so all like we're trying to enable these operators to make more production at the same time. So then they become more valuable. So then they're wasted. Wages can go up. Well, it's just positive cycle.

[A]

It's the same, it's, it's the most valuable operators right now in like a market like California.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

By far the most valuable operator is a GPS blade hand.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That's really good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And a lot of them are, are some of the older guys.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They've been doing it a long time.

[B]

Adopted it, learned it.

[A]

They adopted it.

[B]

The tool to work.

[A]

And they can put it to work with their principles.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And boy, can they finish.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And the more you finish, the more money's made, more you're paid, like the more valuable you are.

[B]

Yeah, it's emotion, you know, it goes back to the human thing. You see a machine rolling around with nobody in the seat. It's a very emotional thing. And I can, it is a little weird. Yeah, I can relate to that. And I too would be angry if I was an operator. But yeah, it's, it's very rare after three days. Like if you give me three days with an operator, it's pretty rare that they feel the same way. At the end of the three days.

[A]

We were in, in the oil sands in Canada and they have a mine that's part of its manned, part of its unmanned.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

It's really cool. And they dump into the same, into the same. This was interesting because I've been to other mines. I was just at one not too long ago. They run autonomous and manned within the same pit, which is also very interesting. But this one, it's segregated, so they dump into the same crusher but from different sides. And it's completely split off. But we were. I remember it's like middle of winter. So it's cold, it's, you know, everything's white, frozen. That's when they get their best production is because there's no underfoot conditions. It's oily sand. Oh, so you can't build roads.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so when everything freezes, it's solid. Let's haul ass and you can get out. Yeah. So like January, like you're probably putting up your best monster numbers.

[B]

So interesting.

[A]

It's. Yeah, it's the opposite.

[B]

So interesting.

[A]

It's incredible. Yeah. So we go to this operation. We're in this like little school bus, this little short bus, and he's kind of showing us how the autonomous operation works. And these are, I mean maybe three 40 ton, if not 400 ultra class trucks, like big trucks proper. They're hauling 400 tons of sand plus the truck itself. Yeah, and I remember he, he took the school bus and you, he kind of like used it to draw a line. You know, we were driving along. It's left hand drive because it's, it's a mine. I was just in Australia, so I have to like backwards. So it's, it's, it's. Yeah, you're on the left side of the road. So we kind of like peeled to the right and built like a little kind of like bubble in the hall road. And then we backed into the bubble.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And he basically told the computer, hey, this is off limits, this little area here. But you're looking through the back window with the bus. Yeah, but you're. You're looking through the back window and it's like kind of dirty because it's winter, you know, you know how that is. And the, you know, the truck's just getting closer to us. Closer to us, closer. And yeah, I mean, it's. It's an ultra class truck. And then just, you know, it almost gets right up to us and then just slowly just goes right around us. And as it's going around us, I'm looking, you can see the cab. There's no one in it. Like, like, holy. And then it just goes right around us. Gets right back in the line and keeps going. I'm like, wow, that is something else, man.

[B]

Huh.

[A]

But you forget. And we were again at a mine in Australia that was autonomous not too long a few weeks ago. And, and every truck, you're looking at them, you're like, oh my gosh, there's no one in that thing. It's crazy profound. But you wouldn't know if you were just standing, watching the operation. No one. Yep. You wouldn't know.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Have no idea.

[B]

It's pretty incredible. I. Last week I was at a job, they had two auto trucks running around and a link belt loading them. And you know, I tend to travel, see these jobs, and I take meetings and emails and stuff from the rental car. And so I'll like, look out at the hall every, you know, every few minutes. It's just like an everyday job. Sure. Two autonomous 745s running around. Oh, no. 1731 7. 745 running around. And it just looks like an everyday job. It's like, it's just like so profound to just watch nobody in the cab, empty cab, and it just rolls by, heads off to the dome.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you. Are you afraid that you're building the robot army that will take over the world?

[B]

Nope. We.

[A]

Are you sure? Because they pretty sure.

[B]

The stuff, the tech. The tech in terms of AI, it's all pretty dumb.

[A]

I don't know. It's all I can assure you.

[B]

And, and I don't mean this in a. In a like, you know, like looking down on our blue light stuff. It's all pretty dumb stuff.

[A]

It's.

[B]

It's not like a self driving car.

[A]

You better be careful what you're saying about this stuff.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They might use these words, get upset at me. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. Michelle, you're very, you're very smart machine. That's right. Good machine. Good machine. Yeah.

[B]

No, the, you know, we've talked about all these job sites and how it's a living organism and it changes hour to hour. It changes halt to hall. Honestly, like if you sit one of.

[A]

These 745s, way to think about it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. If you sit one of these 745s, you know, at a. Whatever pad, you know, data center or something, subdivision where you loaded changes hall.

[A]

To hall a little bit.

[B]

Right where you dumped changes, hall to hall. Sure. How you got there, how you came back, you know, the sequencing of everything, it's all changing hall to hall. And so our design philosophy from day zero was again as part of reducing scope, we're not going to do anything fancy about deciding where to drive. All we're going to do is just copy the operator up there and we will help them run two or three trucks at the same time. All we're going to do is copy that dozer up there and help them make compaction on this lift, run this lift forward with just them. And so it's a very like follow the leader or follow me might be too literal in the dozer roller example. But like, you know, if the dozer has just knocked this lift down here and has moved on, all we're gonna do is just follow that and go roll that area. Articulated trucks, you literally. We had this experience yesterday. It was the machine rep, James. I won't call out anything else about him. He was awesome. All you literally do is boot up the second truck, hop out, boot up the first truck, open up the tablet. You just drive away. You drive away in that first truck and then the second truck just starts copying you and profound. And he said he had that experience kind of like you're in that short bus at that mine. He was sitting in the auto truck and you know, in the jump seat and like auto truck just starts going and steering wheel starts going and it's in gear, it's doing the thing. It just like it is jawed to the floor to experience it. But I think what really got him is it was literally like three minutes and we're rolling. And any job site you drop, you drop the any blue light machine anywhere in the country. Really anywhere in the world. But so far proven anywhere in the country. Drop off the machine. Three minutes, you're going like, it has to be that simple.

[A]

And it's just. You're using standard machines.

[B]

Yeah. Nothing fancy. Installs in two hours, at least on a roller.

[A]

That's crazy.

[B]

Yeah. Hour and a half.

[A]

That's really something. Yeah. What are the big challenges going forward?

[B]

It's the human element. It is. Nothing hurts my heart more. We do an install with a customer, and then we leave, and we have, like, a productivity app. And so I can see all the machines in the fleet, and I can see who's running it manually, who's running an auto or RC mode from the tablet. Nothing hurts my heart more than we just installed yesterday. And I wake up and I look at it a few hours today, you know, 11am and they've been in manual for four hours. That is the saddest, you know, for me. Saddest freaking thing. And so. But you can't just, you know, you cannot just call, you know, giving them a hard time and what's going on? Well, you know, you got. So we got to go. We got to go back to the site. I got to sit there, I got to talk to the super, I got to talk to the foreman. I got to talk to some of the operators in the morning, some of them at lunch, and I got to figure out what's the players, what's the dynamics, you know, what's preventing this. Sometimes it's really dumb. Sometimes it's. You know, we had a summer intern, and we had nothing to do with him, so I put him in the roller. Right. But other times, it's like, oh, I had this, you know, issue. You know, either blue light was bugging out or, you know, I didn't think it could do this. Turns out it could. And, you know, there was a training gap, whatever it is, but, like, it's that human element, and every job is different. And so the hard work that, like, not scares me, not keeps me up at night, but, like, the hard work is we gotta make it work for this contractor and this operator on this job in this fill. Yeah. And it is unique. Machine to machine. Yep. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Project to project, contractor to contract.

[B]

Same contractor, region to region, same contractor, two jobs. A mile away, you might be moving material completely differently.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, but because of a machine's down, the materials different. We're, you know, different sequencing of the job, whatever. And so it is. It is down to the machine. Like, down to the job. Human element. Sure.

[A]

Yeah. It's. I mean, that's what I would have Guessed. That's not, that's not surprising to hear. Yeah, it's, it's. Do you worry about, does it, does it keep you up at night with machines running around people 100%.

[B]

And I get asked about this a.

[A]

Lot.

[B]

You know, the safety thing. So my, my wife just birthed our first child four months ago.

[A]

Congratulations.

[B]

Thank you. And, you know, I got a lot of advice leading up to that.

[A]

Oh, yeah, but one of the more impactful. Yeah, everybody's got opinions when you're having a kid.

[B]

But one, one piece of advice I got that has stuck with me is you cannot not do the dangerous things with your child. You have to do the dangerous and important things very carefully and with intention. Okay? And so this is a very important thing, what we're doing, trying to help the operators, you know, like make more production. All the things we're talking about, dynamism, everything, right? So you cannot not do the important things in life. And to bring another analogy into this, it's like, you want to get a rocket ship to Mars, you cannot sit in your lab and talk about it and do whiteboarding and build a rocket and let it sit in the lab. You want to get to Mars, you got to launch rocket ships and blow up rocket ships on the way to Mars. But you do it very carefully. You do it with good planning. You do, you know, involve all the players. Like, I don't know if you've ever read one of the SpaceX, like, launch reports. They talk about, they talk about how they interacted with FAA and getting planes out of the way if something goes wrong. They talk about local environmentalists, organizations they work with for noise, for pollution, for, you know, sound, these things. They talk about it with environmentalists, like the debris cloud that ends up in the ocean. They show and literally can quantify all their efforts to pick up the debris out of the ocean. So we didn't hurt marine wildlife. All these things, right? You got to do, do the important things. You do it very carefully. You do it with intention, okay? And so when we show up to the, you know, to these sites with people, it's dangerous. It's like big machines, people rolling around. We cannot do it, but we got to do it very carefully. We got to do it with intention. You got to teach the important safety things. You got to build the important safety technology, fail safes. And, you know, regarding this topic of safety, if I can toot our horn for a second.

[A]

Toot away.

[B]

Yeah, tooting away blue light customers. Not us in some little field, you know, somewhere Blue light customers have rolled 600 million square foot of material autonomously. So it's not like some science experiment. Does this work or not work?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You know, 600 million square foot of material has been rolled across the fleet and it has been with zero injury, it has not been with zero incident. And actually you made the point earlier. Almost every case, there's only been a few like handful of incidents, but every single incident has been some form of human error. And it's the same with self driving cars, by the way, because they report on collisions. 99.9% of collisions is another human driver colliding with the self driving car. Yes, anyways, but what's been very powerful like the blue light approach is, remember I said do less, do it quickly, iterate quickly. And so roller simple, right? And so in every decision we make, do less, do it quickly, get the roller out there, get the 10th roller out there, get the 50th roller out there. And just by, just by getting rollers out there with actual jobs, actual fills, actual operators, we learn things about safety. And there's like two or three incidents that come to mind where, you know, some kind of operator error. But we don't go point fingers, we don't go giving them a hard time. We learn a very good lesson from it. Operator learns a very good lesson from it. Blue light learns a very good lesson from it. And in most cases there is some kind of something we can improve in the technology to reduce and mitigate that risk for the future. Right. And so let me give you a very in depth example. It's taking me a few minutes, but I think it's an important example. So we got the cameras, we talked about that. Roller rolls up against a person or a machine, it stops. And then once a person or machine gets out of the way, three seconds of clearance, roller says, okay, I'm clear to go. Okay. There is this feature functionality, call it. If the roller rolls up against something and it's stopped, it displays a picture of what it sees on the tablet, puts a red square around the thing that it stopped for. And the text says, hey, obstacle was detected. But if you want to, I'll let you override it and you can swipe to override. Okay. It's important because if you're rolling up against a parking lot or rolling up against the edge of pad, there's grade stakes, there's cars, all sorts of things parked along the edge, right. So you need to be able to override to get past these things. But it turns out that Swipe we had, it was the same gray color. It's the same swipe as every other swipe to get the thing to go. And so, you know, if you show up in the morning, get it to go. It's just a swipe. Everything's a swipe to get it going. So this operator, the roller had rolled up against the butt end of a scraper pan, and this operator made a mistake, maybe lost focus for a second, didn't realize what they were doing, and they swiped to override.

[A]

So the machine had. It was running autonomously. It came up onto the scraper pan.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they're just seeing this on their iPad.

[B]

Yeah, it's a picture of. It's literally the roller showing you. This is the pan that I stopped. 4. Here's a red square around the pan that I stopped for.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It's very, very clear what's going on. Yeah. And made a mistake, wasn't paying attention for a split second, did the override swipe. So sends the roller colliding with the butt end of the, you know, the counterweight thing or whatever of the, of the pan. Nobody hurt. Machine's not really even damaged. So luckily no injuries. Right. But we sit down with the contractor, we sit down with the operators. At first they were so squirrely, you know, and like, you know, trying to fat, you know, concoct a story and whatever. It's always the blue light. It's always the technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It wasn't us, which is fine.

[B]

And, and we take a very, you know, we take a very non emotional approach to this. And we're sitting there like team Blue light thinking, you know what? This swipe is the same as every other swipe. We're not doing any favors making this easier for our operators. What we could do is let's make this swipe bright freaking red. And then instead of the normal swipe, let's make the swipe go backwards. So if you're not paying attention, it didn't do anything. Right. You got to go backwards to intentionally override. And then if you do override and for like the five seconds where it's driving with the camera off, let's make the tablet scream at you. Cameras are off. Cameras are off. Cameras are off. Right. And so we can do these things, you know, and that way if you accidentally swiped and you didn't mean to, you can always hit stop. There's a big old stop button on the tablet. So we're sitting there and contractor, the autonomy lead, very positive about this. And we're Spitballing ideas together. So then to toot our horn about speed and iteration, our team implements this in maybe two days. And then the update is available for the whole fleet. After two days, updates shipped. It's ready for everybody. And so now everybody got better because of something we learned from this, from this one roller in the southeast. And then it was also like, you know, this cover your ass sort of thing. We have logs. We have logs that, you know, remote telemetry. We can see that it stopped for. And we see the picture that it stopped for. We saw the scraper that it stopped for. We have it in the logs that somebody swiped to override. And so. But it's all very matter of fact of fact. You know, there's a basic incident report. Here's what happened. And then more importantly, we improved the whole thing for your operators here, but for everybody. And it was done in two days.

[A]

This is. I think you can. It's a great example. I think you can. So we start to wade into safety.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I don't know how to talk safety yet in a constructive way, because I think a lot of safety is nonsense. Yep. It's like command and control. I'm gonna treat you like a child.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I'm just gonna let you do less things.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I came up. I could go fuck anything up. And I have all kinds of stories about it, but no, you can't do the same.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Like, it's done. It's done. Safety is done a lot of times by people in office.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Where it's driven by people in the office.

[B]

Never seen production. Never seen dirt.

[A]

Yeah. Which. Which are too clean. Yeah. It's not. It's not practical.

[B]

Like.

[A]

Like, it's not. It does require some. Some learning. Like, it does require some discovery.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But they don't. I don't know how to explain it. Like, that's. But that's. We can't allow that anymore. But we're like. And this is. This is like, where the industry is right now.

[B]

It's.

[A]

All of our training is on the job, which means we don't do training. I've been trained on the job a bunch. Yeah, it's trained.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Here's your address. And.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Billy's the foreman.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's about it.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That was my training.

[B]

Yep. Still is to this day.

[A]

Still up. Yeah, that's. That's exactly. That is the standard, I would say, on average painting with a broad brush, that is how everything's done. But mistakes are not tolerated.

[B]

So, yeah. You like stuck in between rock and a rock.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but the solution is then to create a manual. Yeah.

[B]

Big constraint. Heavy constraints.

[A]

Yeah. That overhead burden and add more to it. You never subtract.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You just add more.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And more.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And more.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And more. I was, I was out of mindsight recently. I think I've talked about this, but it was, they said, well, we're a mining operation. So, you know, everybody was wearing hard hats. But then we, we, we figured, well, what's going to fall in our head out here? It's a mining operation.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

There's no overhead hazard.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

We don't need hard hats. And now they don't enforce hard hats unless you're working around a machine or at the plant where there's an overhead hazard. It's like, yeah, that's so reasonable. But it's one of the only examples that I have in my memory, maybe the only one recently, of something being removed.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because of rational thought. It's a.

[B]

Not to talk politics, but to talk philosophically about a society. It has been proven many times over thousands of years. If you make laws that persist forever, you only ever have more laws.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And then you only ever have more constraint and then you only ever have less production as a society. And you choke yourself to death. Yeah. So.

[A]

But the lawyers make money.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Until they don't.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And, and so it's.

[A]

Until AI replaces them.

[B]

It's already happening. Oh.

[A]

I only have so much sympathy. I'm sorry. But, but, yes, but that, but that's, that's, I think oftentimes. What? Safety programs? Yeah, that's exactly what safety programs are. It's just, just, it's just more, more, more, more, more, more. Yeah. And I can't, like, I'm the new safety guy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've got to do more.

[B]

That's right. You're hired in to make more safety rules. Exactly. To be safer existence.

[A]

To be more safer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say, yeah, more safer as an idiot.

[B]

But.

[A]

It'S, it's a, but that, that's just a very practical approach that I think is the most productive. That's, that's why I always chuckle in a way of like when somebody's talking shit about SpaceX, when they blow up a rocket.

[B]

Rocket.

[A]

It's like, okay, I know my place in society. One, I'm not gonna talk shit about people making rocks.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Get like outer space here. That's, that's number one. Two, like, that's kind of how this process works. Like, do they want the rocket to blow up? No, but they also aren't surprised when it happens because they're, they're, they're pushing the boundaries of physics. Yes, that's what that, that's where, that's how you find the boundaries is you, you push and push and push until. Yes, there we are. Yes, but that's why, but this goes into. Then why most companies don't innovate.

[B]

Correct. You're constrained, choked.

[A]

Yes, but, but innovation, there's risk.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's hard.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's messy.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Everybody says they innovate.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Very few companies actually innovate.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I don't, I understand why.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because it's hard.

[B]

Hard.

[A]

It's really hard.

[B]

There's a, I think it's called innovators dilemma, but it's a very well known phenomenon. Yeah, you become, you know, make something great and then your company becomes big and then you stop. You like stop. Innovation just stops. And it's just because there's too much to lose. And like people give, people give the big OEMs and the big like Trimble, Topcon, the big technology companies a hard time for stopping innovation. Honestly, inside the constraints they're working with as a business. Like, it's just very challenging. I mean you see one tiny little screw up and there's this massive piggy bank to go chase.

[A]

No, I, Right, so I am the asshat criticizing. But then I just read a book about Caterpillar not too long ago and it's like it did give me this enormous appreciation of like okay, well this guy, you know, the executive team is running a company that's in like 150 countries making tens of billions of dollars a year and dealing with different currencies.

[B]

More revenue than most countries, different politicians.

[A]

Okay, so there's a lot here. So again, like, yeah, again I'm not, I don't criticize thinking I'm better. Like if I were in that position would be doing the same shit. But, but yes. So I went to Bauma, the best trade show in the world for the construction industry.

[B]

It was fine.

[A]

Fine. Frankly, I don't think I'll go back. And I say I get to see a lot too. Like if I was somebody that had a family and wanted to go see machines, I couldn't say enough good things about it.

[B]

Perfect.

[A]

Unbelievable. Unbelievable opportunity. They do it better than anybody. They invite families, they have family Day. It's extraordinary. Schools, all sorts of stuff. I could not promote that show more yes. But there's no reason for me to go back in three years.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Because this show was the exact same one that was the last ago.

[B]

Yep, that's right.

[A]

And. And it's just like. But. But again, I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't blame them. I just hard. It's hard.

[B]

Hard to innovate, hard to actually do something.

[A]

And there's not incentive to. You're not rewarded to go fail. You just. Just make the next excavator. That's. If it's 4% better done. You're good to go, man. Yeah. Yeah. Which is. It's just. But I think you can extrapolate that that's where we've been as a country.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's where the construction industry's been. Like, there's an argument to be made that we're not very good at building things anymore.

[B]

No, we're not. Objectively.

[A]

We're not objectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can look at the numbers and actually point to we're not good at building things anymore as a country. And so even like, you know, the manufacturing stuff we want to bring back. Shipbuilding is one of the big things. I kind of chuckle. I'm like, so we're going to go up against China's shipbuilding industry. We can try to. But just look at the numbers. They're really good at building ships. Like every single ship in the entire world. Okay. So we're going to go build ships. 1. Who's going to build them? Where are we going to build? Oh, we're going to use American steel. Out of what plants? They're all dying, if not already dead.

[B]

Like, it's very expensive.

[A]

Yeah. We're just like, we're so far from that path. How do you get back?

[B]

You got to play your small part. Well, your small part. Yeah.

[A]

Or do things like. I heard. Speaking of like American.

[B]

Dynamism.

[A]

Dynamism.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A guy was talking about nuclear.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he was like, well, big nuclear doesn't work because we're not good at building big things anymore. And it's like, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So let's just do it on a much smaller scale.

[B]

Small nuclear. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like fit on a tractor trailer.

[A]

We'll just do it in a different way.

[B]

Correct, correct.

[A]

Which is. Correct. That's the kind of stuff that gets me fired up. It's like, oh, we can't do it that way anymore. But we don't have to. Correct. Because we can do it this way?

[B]

Correct.

[A]

That's. It's so cool. I don't know why people don't think like that. Because it's so much more fun. Like, life is so much. What's cooler when you're like, well, what can we do?

[B]

You know, I get. I really was like, developed an appreciation for this A few years ago. We were trying to sell the townhouse. Most people cannot visualize.

[A]

Most people can't.

[B]

Cannot visualize like a tomorrow. Cannot visualize something that's like not right in their face. And what really hit me was we're trying to sell this townhouse and it looks fine, you know, it's emptied out and stuff. And then my now wife comes in and, you know, does the. What I call it Staging.

[A]

Staging.

[B]

You know, it's Christmas time, so all the Christmas decorations and this, that and the third. Oh my God. Do you. The staging and then offers come in on the same day. Bunch of them overnight, way over asking. And it's because you need to help people visualize. And so, so actually, abstractly, that's our hardest challenge is people cannot visualize a world where like, you know, maybe a couple of ats and rollers are running around by themselves. Just came and visualize it. Don't even know to pursue it because they can't visualize it.

[A]

Yeah, it's really cool what you guys are doing. I'm excited. How I wouldn't know of you if weren't for LinkedIn. Well, I mean, I've heard of you from other now, but I think I first saw your shit with LinkedIn.

[B]

LinkedIn. Oh, interesting.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Why.

[A]

Why talk about what you're doing? Why. Why publish the plan, so to speak? The roadmap, I think, is.

[B]

That's a really interesting question.

[A]

Because there's other. There are others doing this.

[B]

Yeah. Why publish it?

[A]

They're openly, I would say they're shadowy. A lot of them.

[B]

Yeah. I think the important, the important, like principle behind all of this is you cannot build in the shadows. You cannot build in your. Your dark corner. You know, if you're going to move this whole industry. Like what we're observing is just a whole industry movement, you know, from operators to superintendents to management to ownership dealers, materials, you know, come everybody. Right? And yeah, so like, in a word, I think it's awareness and like, we're literally talking about staging this townhouse. It's like, you know, our goal. I don't think it's too soon to say this, but you tell me our goal is to virally Infect the global fleet of equipment with autonomy.

[A]

It's a little too soon to Covid to say you're viral.

[B]

I figured we're five years out, so I'm rolling with it. But you know, virally infect is like two very important words in the global fleet of equipment. Okay. And so the decisions we make, we don't make because we want to sell 100 of these things. The decisions we make is like we're on a path to 10,000. The attempt is 10,000 this decade. Okay. And so, you know, we're not going to pull it. We have to make, you know, we have to build great stuff. We got to, you know, visit the job sites, all that. But honestly we're coming up to a point and it's not too far away where actually awareness of all of this is going to become the limiting factor. And so for us building out in the open, you know, we think we're building better stuff that way. But then also it helps awareness and it's got, it's got owners, it's got superintendents, operators thinking about this and you know, hopefully, you know, all this little awareness stuff that we're doing will help them just visualize stage the townhouse so they can, they can kind of visualize a better world for themselves.

[A]

I, I mean, I think you're dead on with that. I think awareness is everything. So like.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I do beat myself up with how much money we've spent.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what we have from a business sense, however, we do have one of the more influential brands in the industry currently. And we do, do we do put a better numbers than like, than the OEMs. Just saying.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

With a much smaller budget.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

Like almost non existent budget rounding error. Yeah.

[B]

A rounding error of a rounding error for the OEMs.

[A]

But yeah, I'm just, I'm just an influencer. Yeah. But I just believe so strongly in awareness.

[B]

You have to. Yeah.

[A]

And brand and the ability to communicate and speak and write. Like I was saying, like those are the skills I've spent the most time developing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I, all of the changes in technology have only made me more resolute in all of those things, like to have a voice. But thank, but again, thank God it happened when it did because had I come up in the chat GPT world.

[B]

You would not have a voice.

[A]

I wouldn't have developed, I wouldn't have had to fight to go develop my voice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And now that I have it, I have it, I have to practice. It's A perishable skill, but I have it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And that's so rare. It's so. Especially not tell a story.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. But in business too, like.

[B]

Yeah, it's just, you know, all of our investors, I tell them, you know, I'm like, look, blue light. We can promise hard work and transparency, of course, like two fundamentals. Right. I cannot promise that there will be returns, you know, who the hell knows where all this goes? But I can promise it's going to be one hell of a ride, one hell of a story. And at least you got front row tickets to watch this story unfold well.

[A]

And you're going to do your best. And I've reflected upon that too, a lot is, you know, if you're doing your best or not.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And if you really are. That's it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You cannot control outcomes. You cannot control other people.

[B]

You can control inputs. And that's it.

[A]

Inputs with you. Yeah, that's it.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And just, just surrendering to the process.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

It's really hard.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But once you're there, you're like. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's quite freeing in, in a way.

[B]

You know, you use this word, surrendering to the, to the process and we're talking about inputs. My first business, I was like always a little bit of a heavier set guy. Only a little bit. And then that first business, you know, I want, I want excellent results and all these. We weren't even having problems, but like, I just riddled with an anxiety because I was so worried about, you know, controlling the outcomes. And my God, it was like I went from £200 to £310 and maybe a year and a half.

[A]

Really?

[B]

It was wild.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And.

[A]

And that doesn't help your anxiety? I mean.

[B]

No, it only cycles and makes it worse. Yes. Only makes it worse.

[A]

How do you lose? So what do you weigh now?

[B]

80, 85.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. 185. How do you go lose? 130 person.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Plus pounds.

[B]

Yeah, it's. We had an office manager one day he goes, dick, you look like shit. And he says, we lived in the office together, him and I, by the way.

[A]

Oh, good.

[B]

Actually, I forgot to tell this part of the story. We lived in the cinder block warehouse in grungy corner of Pittsburgh. Okay. And bought some plywood and two by fours and made ourselves a little corner of the office. Was the bedroom. That was my bedroom at first. And then I met him and he loved It. So he ended up living there, the office with me. And. Yeah. Anyways, he goes one day, he's like, you look terrible. And he says, why don't I cook? And then, and then you buy the groceries for us. I was like, okay. And just him cooking, I was eating Domino's. Like, he's our best customer. Yeah, the, you know, processed foods and takeout, all that stuff. And anyways, just eating cooked foods, like, lost 30 pounds. And then, and then I got into swimming. I was too. You know, we. This first company, we had like a little like fitness group and they would go run and work out together and stuff. In the back we had some weights and, you know, I ran like a half a mile with them and I was puking on the side of the road. And Cassie, I'll never forget, she's like, she was so wonderful to me. She's like, you okay? And anyways, so I picked up swimming, lost 20, 30 pounds. And then I, you know, know I'm coming in and out of the swimming pool at LA Fitness. There's cycling class going on upstairs. I tried that, lost 20 or 30 more pounds. And then the cycling coach up there, she taught me running, lost 20 or 30 pounds. And then, and then put it all together and so we're going to tie this all in with. With a picture I saw of yours a couple weeks ago. Tied all together. My cycling coach, she does triathlon.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So she convinced me to do this like little short sprint triathlon in town.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And yeah, it was 2018, 2019. And then. So I still have an eating issue. Let's just call it what it is. I still eat way too much, you know, way more than the average human should eat. But at least I'm exercising a lot now.

[A]

And so that's fine.

[B]

Yeah, it evolved into this hobby of doing half Ironmans. Has been my. Been my distance here for five or six years.

[A]

That's amazing.

[B]

Yeah. And then. So I still eat too much, but at least I'm exercising and have been for the most part. But, you know, been able to stabilize.

[A]

Yeah, I just, I couldn't. A lot of people are always like, how do you do? How do you keep up with the schedule and the travel? It's like, well, one, I'm. I'm healthy. Yeah, like that. That's number one, man. Like, I. If I wasn't like, I'm really healthy. Yeah, really fucking healthy. Because I've spent a lot of time and energy on dialing myself in.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

I can't afford not to be that's right. Like, I can't not.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I can't. I can't do this and not be this healthy. It doesn't matter.

[B]

I can confirm if you are way overweight. Your brain just thinks slower.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You are just less capable. And yeah, this time around, like, you know, like you're saying you're healthy, you're sharp, you're strong, you're fast. Again, we can't guarantee outcomes, but I can guarantee you I can work harder than anybody else that you put in front of me. And so at least, at least successes in the possible set of outcomes, you know, if you're not working the hardest, pretty unlikely, you know, that, that you win.

[A]

No, I can, that. That's exactly how I have it in my head. I'm like, listen, I'm not, I am not the smartest guy. I am, I am not the best positioned here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I, I. What I, I can do that most people can't is I can just out consistent. You.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I can just do the same thing every day, every week. And it covers months for years and years and years and that's it. Like, I can, I know I can do that. And, and I've been so. But that's hard to commit yourself to because you don't see the benefits of it. And I haven't really seen the benefits of it. Like, I'm still living above somebody's garage, and it just, just pisses me off more by the day. I'm very grateful for it, but I'm resentful of it in other ways, in a positive way. Not a deep, destructive resentment, but. I can dedicate myself to that path because that's just. I've been around enough successful people. It's like that's what they've done.

[B]

Yeah, it's a prerequisite.

[A]

Yeah. So I'm just gonna run that play. And I've seen that play. Like, I've seen them get that with this play. So. Okay, I don't, I don't have that yet.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I'm confident in this play because I know this. It's the prerequisite. It's like maybe I don't get there, but this is gonna give me the best chance.

[B]

Correct. Correct. It's at least success is at least in the set of possible outcomes.

[A]

Sure, sure.

[B]

If you have the prerequisites, yes.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. But if I don't. Yeah, no chance. Yeah, no.

[B]

Impossible.

[A]

Well, cool. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm really glad you came down Here. It's been great.

[B]

Yeah, this was fun with you. It's long form kind of talking. It's a lot of fun.

[A]

It's just the way to go. I struggle so bad when I'm on people's and maybe it works for them. It doesn't work for me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When it's just question, question, question. Okay, we're done.

[B]

Yeah, it's like. What was that? Yeah, yeah, I didn't say anything.

[A]

I was just getting going.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we're just warming up.

[A]

But this. Yeah. It's almost 3 o', clock, so we'll call it a day. How do people figure out what you guys are doing? Is it just blue light dot com.

[B]

Blue light machines dot com, Light machines dot com? Yeah, we do, for the most part we do links, LinkedIn and maybe a little bit of Instagram. I should do more. We will do more. But yeah. Bluelightmachines.com and then I'm. I'm Dick Zhang on, on LinkedIn and Instagram. And so.

[A]

And it's rollers.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Articulated trucks currently.

[B]

Correct. Yeah. The Holy Grail just to, you know, leave every. You and everyone with the visual, you know, you're. You're building up some site. 12 pieces again.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it used to take 12 operators and on any given day, one or two, you know, don't show up. But the Holy Grail is 12 pieces to build a cut to fill. Imagine six operators and one of them is like your autonomy foreman. And they got the one tablet sitting in the pickup and they got the two rollers and two or three articulated trucks. And so now six operators can run 12 pieces and then you could take the other half of that crew and then go spin up another crew somewhere else. Go chase another job. Right. And so that's the Holy Grail I've.

[A]

The mining equivalent of. That's like. It's like a guy running three to five dozers.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Which I really like.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's incredible.

[A]

It's incredible.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

They almost become like this autonomy foreman for the dozer.

[A]

And I've talked to the guys doing it again. They're like, yeah, this is. It's a pretty good gig. Yeah, like. Yeah, it looks like a pretty good gig. You've got a microwave right here.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Seriously, that's funny.

[A]

Cool. Well, thanks for coming and I guess we'll see you at the summit.

[B]

Yeah, thanks for having me. We're excited for November.

[A]

Right on.

[B]

Happy to talk dirty.