Redwood Materials Has Built A Recyling Empire

We're good. Okay, okay, here we go. All right, JB, we're off on an adventure.

You ready to go?

Yes. All right.

Here we go.

All right, man. So I think it was about when, 2020, that I was here and you guys have— I know you'd started the company a bit before, but it was the early days, I think, when we arrived of somebody getting to see what you were up to.

Yeah, I think 2020 was the year. It's been a while. Yeah, we've been busy and growing like crazy. This whole market has grown around us. It's It's an exciting time in Nevada.

Yeah, I can see you guys have been busy. For people who don't know the basics of Redwood Materials, how do you describe it?

Well, I would describe us as basically a battery ecosystem company. You know, I personally love batteries. I love EVs and I love electrification. And we've built this company to you know, solve problems in almost every aspect of that supply chain and in that value chain. So when we got started, we were focused on recycling and end-of-life management for lithium-ion batteries for EVs and computers, phones, really every lithium-ion battery out there. And we've expanded over the years and added in other pieces of business to that scope. So we added in a critical materials business, refining different components out of those batteries. And then more recently, we've added in a whole energy storage business, functional energy storage, you know, creating energy storage projects and assets out of largely remanufactured or second-life batteries, which, you know, we've started seeing coming to us in huge numbers, tens of thousands. So in each step of that journey, we're really creating value out of waste. Minimizing waste and adding, you know, more efficiency into that entire supply chain ecosystem for batteries and energy storage.

And this was born out, obviously, you're working at Tesla for many years building this giant company and you're just realizing that there wasn't a good system in place to start recycling the batteries that were coming back.

Absolutely. And I felt it every single day. It seemed like, you know, that was a common question from from customers, you know, buying an EV, you know, what happens at the end of life? You know, how is this going to work? Or is it a problem? And, you know, not only is it not a problem, but it's a big opportunity because batteries are so unusual in that they're almost 100% recyclable. All of those critical materials that we, you know, read a lot about and are concerned about, you can reuse 99% of them. And you can do it again and again. It's not just once. So I kind of had a front row seat to witnessing that evolution and seeing some of those problems evolve at Tesla. And it kind of guided me into this opportunity to help the whole industry, really all OEMs.

I know we're going to see some of the battery storage stuff later, which is this new chapter, but I wanted to give people a feel because the first time I came to visit you, I don't think I fully wrapped my head around what you guys were doing until I saw it myself. But we're in right now pulling into where people are going to send in their old cell phones, their toothbrushes, their battery packs, all this stuff. And you guys are going to— Uh-oh, you're in trouble.

That works well. I'm offloading this truck right now.

You're in trouble, boss.

Now I'm in the wrong spot. Start with that one. We'll back it up.

Okay. Does he know you're the boss?

Frankly, I'm thrilled if he's telling us we're in the way of going faster and getting stuff done.

Yeah.

It is a very active site, as you can obviously tell.

Yeah, they're doing work.

We're in the middle of, you know, unloading trucks. We see 15 to 20 shipments a day coming in and out of here full of batteries.

Yeah.

You know, these are coming from automotive dealers, from OEMs, from other companies aggregating the small stuff you just mentioned, like toothbrushes.

So they help gather those and then ship them to you in bulk.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. And then so for people to understand, it is nuts. I mean, you're taking these batteries and there's all these minerals inside, what, lithium, cobalt, nickel?

That's right.

And then you guys are actually going to extract it out. And that's the part I didn't fully get, like on the elemental level.

That's right. And, you know, figuring out how to extract and separate all of those things has been part of the trick, part of the engineering challenge here. You know, how could we take a full battery pack that had everything mixed together? It was a complicated assembly and, you know, build the machines to automate that, to get the copper out of it, to get the lithium, to get the nickel. And then to purify it also.

Did you know you would be able to do that? Because I see what you guys are doing now and it's advanced so far.

Well, we had the sort of the capability in mind, I guess. You know, some things seem easy from first principles and I tend to kind of sometimes underestimate problems. But, you know, we knew it was possible. We didn't know how hard it would be and how long the journey would be. And we're still on it. Quite frankly.

Yeah.

But we've gotten to a point now where this is profitable and we're able to keep bootstrapping this and growing it on its own. So even doing that and competing favorably with mining was, a lot of people doubted that was even possible and still many do.

And that's part of it is obviously you want to recycle to make use of what we've already mined and things like that. But In so many ways, people have spent all this energy, money, time extracting the stuff from all over the world. Now you can reuse it and it's already— now it's right here in the United States, just sitting here waiting to go into something else.

Absolutely. And, you know, all that work that went into digging it up, to mining it, to refining it, to building it into, you know, the supply chain, even getting it to the US is work that we can value and take advantage of so that we don't have to do it again as a society, as a country.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's maybe counterintuitive, but one of our biggest strategic assets for these materials are the products that we've already imported and bought. Yeah. Even today, you know, Redwood is the largest cobalt producer in the United States, and that's all from what we call secondary feeds or products that, you know, came into the United States, you know, as a product. And, you know, now we're disassembling, you know, refining material from those products.

Yeah. Okay. Should we take a peek?

Yeah, let's take a look. So yeah, this is one of our yards where we're receiving material. We're obviously taking it out of trucks, we're unpacking it. And one of the things, the first things we'll look at is where we actually do diagnostics and testing on EV batteries that come into us. And start to understand, you know, can we reuse them? What will it take to reuse them for some of our energy storage projects? And we have to make that decision. You know, does it need to go to recycling? Should it— can it be reused or can it be repaired?

So you said— but you said most of the batteries in the United States come here.

Today, you know, we estimate maybe around 70% or more of the lithium-ion batteries end up you know, here or in one of our other yards, but coming to Redwood in one place or another. But this is our biggest consumer battery yard. Sorry, watch your step. It's a little bit messy here.

Okay. So, and this is where you like test how much capacity is in a battery?

Yeah, exactly. And this setup right here is doing some of that testing.

Okay.

You know, this is a, I believe it's a Chevy Bolt battery pack, you know, and right here is sort of a little test jig that we use with some of these different packs. We'll plug it in and we'll, you know, talk to the battery pack, you know, electronically and then actually pull a load and try and charge and discharge it and understand how is it performing, what health does it have?

So like what do you want to see to decide whether you're going to put it in an energy storage versus recycle it?

Well, we'd want to make sure that it's in physical tact, you know, intact. It doesn't have a hole in it. It's not, you know, burned or something. And then we test, can it communicate? And then finally, we'd be testing, you know, what is the chemical health of the battery itself?

Okay.

Because a battery pack like this is a kind of a complicated machine. It has the little cells, but it also has a lot of computers and electronics and contactors and harnesses inside of there. So we kind of go from the outside in checking, you know, how much function does it have? How is it working?

And the part like the energy storage part of all this, you set out to do the recycling and then what, you were just seeing that packs were coming back with way more life left in them than you thought?

Yes. And over the last just couple of years, you know, we've seen the mix of material that we get shifting toward EVs and toward big packs like this very quickly. So today it's more than half of our material. It looks like this. And that's this kind of tidal wave that we expected to come, but it actually has happened even a little sooner than we expected. And from those old EV packs or other very large battery packs, you know, there is a lot of life left. You know, they may not be sufficient to run the car for whatever reason. Perhaps there was a, you know, a lower capacity or lower ability to fast charge. Maybe they couldn't accelerate the same way, but we can tolerate a lot wider specification.

Yeah.

So something that would have not been very desirable in the car, we can still accept and get a lot of use out of in secondary application if we treat it more gently.

Okay.

Maybe it'll discharge and charge much more slowly, for example.

Okay.

Or use a smaller range of its total state of charge.

Yeah, like when we look out here, I mean, we talked about it a bit. So there's batteries coming in from everywhere and then you've got a site like this here and then I think another one in Southern Nevada.

We do.

And it's even bigger?

A little bit larger acreage. And that one we use more for functional inventory. So this site we have kind of leaned more towards stuff that's going to be recycled. But behind us here, these are EV packs. So that site in Southern Nevada has more of this type of material, fully V-Packs.

Okay. And then the, you know, they're all in these bags. I mean, I guess it's junk for other people, I guess. But I mean, the, it's, and it's, I was trying to wrap my head around it. I mean, it seems like hard to keep track of. It seems hard to, you just need a big field and then to sort through all this stuff.

Well, part of why we don't have this in a big warehouse, it's not just to save money on the warehouse, but it's also for fire risk. 'cause some of this material does have a fire risk to it. You know, batteries in general have a fire risk and especially if they're not packaged properly or if they were damaged or defective coming into us. And this is kind of the last stop, you know, for batteries. So we see, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly.

Yeah.

And, you know, we just want to be prepared in case there are, you know, thermal events or possible fires. Being outside and having everything spaced out a bit more lets us manage that much more safely. And, you know, we're able to immediately see, respond quickly, and prevent any kind of propagation.

I hadn't thought through that. And then they were telling me earlier there's infrared devices looking for heat. So if something starts to get unusually hot, then you guys just come out with some fire retardants and—

Automated alerting and watching 24/7. And we're also staffed here 24/7. And yeah, and can respond very, very quickly.

There's those drones now that do that for putting out fires, the forest fires.

I've seen them.

Yeah, you guys knew that would be very sci-fi if you had the—

That would be cool. I have to look into that. I've seen that company. There's a few startups doing that. Yeah.

Yeah. And so this will always like the— feels like some of this is a manual process because you guys have to deal with these objects. And so how like automated does all this get in the future? Or is this— this is working fine? It's constantly automated.

And everything we see is just in this high state of change, which makes it tricky to automate sometimes. You know, we want to sort of get a problem a little bit stable before we invest in automating it. But there's a lot of times where we're seeing, you know, the first pack we've ever seen of that type, or maybe there's the first 10 we've ever seen. And, you know, we want to start to learn from it, you know, figure out how to interface to it before we automate too much.

When you guys say you're getting like 70% of the battery, how do we give people some idea of how many batteries that is?

I mean, this is, you know, just if I looked last year, I mean, we received tens of gigawatt hours equivalent of batteries. So it's, I mean, the same as hundreds of thousands of cars equivalent.

Okay.

And not every one was a car, but, you know, maybe it would be the, you know, 1,000 laptops equals 1 car. So this is a lot of material. I mean, it's tens of thousands of tons per year is another way to think about it.

And these are just coming to you guys in truckloads?

—Yeah, you saw some of the semi-trucks being unloaded. You know, we're receiving, you know, less than full truckload shipments if it's coming from small locations. Sometimes it's full truckloads. Yeah, it's a lot of logistics and planning, packaging, freight lanes, logistics. I didn't appreciate when we started this, you know, how much of a packaging and logistics company we would become, you know, on the journey to solving recycling. Yeah, but it's a big deal.

Yeah, I think the first time I came to visit you was I remember huge tins like that full of cell phone batteries, but there weren't— it was early, early days. We weren't doing car packs yet, I don't think.

Yeah, maybe just ones and twos. Yeah. But yeah, it has really changed. The mix has shifted dramatically and it's just accelerating, you know, because if we look in the market, the majority of the lithium batteries deployed are in cars. So that is our future and we're really focused on making that as efficient as we possibly can. Okay. But, you know, still maintaining and solving the consumer and e-bike and all the other, you know, intermediate sizes.

And I think, okay, then our next stop is kind of where we do some processing.

Exactly. The first step on the actual recycling processing journey. So here we're doing the diagnostics, receiving, kind of deciding what goes next. But we're going to go up and look at our— we call it RC1, our calcination machine where, you know, we actually start to discharge and disassemble things. Okay, okay, should we do it? Let's go up there. All right.

This is crazy, man. I remember it was just this one warehouse.

I know, it's changed a ton.

You're like, you're already a hardcore industrialist at Tesla, but now when I look at the size of this campus and everything you guys are doing—

I mean, you look down the row and it's like, whoa, that's a lot of batteries. Insane. Yeah. I do really like batteries. It's kind of funny sometimes how you sort of like lean into things you like and at some point you're like, whoa, there's a lot of that.

Well, ever since I've known you, that part I've known. You're into this. Yeah. This has got to blow your mind though. I know this was the goal to come this far, but—

But I mean, even this, I don't know, it still feels kind of small to me, honestly. We have so much growth to go. Yeah. We're only really tackling right now a few percent of all the batteries that have been deployed. So we've gotta grow 50 times at least just to sort of match the actual sales volume of new batteries.

Like what do you mean when you say that? Because when I hear, oh, you're getting 70%, it sounds like everything is kind of flowing, almost everything's flowing.

70% of what's reaching end of life. Okay. So we have, I would call that market share. Yeah. And just watch out for nails here. But if you look at how many are being put into the market, how many lithium batteries are sold in a given year, you know, that's way in excess of what's reaching end of life because all this is so new.

So you guys are preparing for what's going to reach end of life.

I feel the sense of like mild panic on how much growth has to happen.

For you to be able to process all that.

Yes. Okay. Okay. And we're feeling it. I mean, every year it's more and more and more.

Still rolling. Good. Okay. This is fun. Are you doing okay? I'm good. Okay.

I don't know exactly when to go in and out of our discussion.

No, no, we'll make it all magic at the end. Yeah.

So we'll head up to RC1 now.

Okay.

Battery recycling line.

And same thing when I— when it was 2020, I remember the thing that jumps out in my mind was a couple dudes in these intense flame heat suits or flame retardant suits. They look like spacemen. And that was when it really hit me what you guys were trying to do, which is you're melting. You got to melt these things down to this to this level where you can extract the elements out of it. I can't even wrap my head around how that process would even begin.

And the process we're doing today is actually a lot less thermally intensive than that was, what you remember. So, you know, we in the early days started, we didn't know what to do. You know, we were trying to learn and create this. That was like version 1 you saw half a decade ago. Yeah. And We found ways to reduce the temperature to the point where we don't melt anything today. It takes too much energy to melt everything. And that has a lot of other complications to it. You mix the materials together. So right now, we have a much lower temperature discharging process and it's all dry. So we don't add any water at the stage we're going to see. No heat suits needed. And it's also very automated. So it's a much bigger scale machine and highly automated.

How does it work that you take a battery? I went through earlier before you got here, and in my head I thought you would have to break these, the packs way open and already start getting down to this, this really fundamental level. But you're almost, you're like baking the, you're baking these. I don't know if cell or pack is the right terminology, but you kind of bake the outside of it off and carbonize it, right? Well, we—

one thing we need to do is discharge everything. So by heating it just a little bit, you know, the internals of the battery kind of break down and, you know, any residual electricity it has just turns into heat. Okay. And that's a really safe way to discharge things, even if they're embedded in another device or if they're mixed together. You know, you can't just manually go and discharge them because a lot of these things are tiny little cells. Mixed together in a big, you know, box full of material.

Yeah.

So that's one of the functions that heating does for us. And again, we don't want to do too much heating, so it's kind of like a just enough. Yeah. If you do too much, well, then you start to burn things, and we don't want to burn anything.

Is it secret what that ideal temperature is?

Well, in our process, in our case, it's, you know, several hundred degrees Celsius. So it's kind of like your kitchen oven, but kind of at the high end, maximum level. You know, but again, we really, we don't want to melt any metals, even aluminum. We don't want to melt it because you start to just kind of create a mass of material, and we want to aim for, you know, higher efficiency separation, and we want to do that separation mechanically. But we have to wait until we can kind of get the battery de-energized and also The other core function is to separate electrolyte and some of the sort of adhesives and binders. These packs and modules have a lot of tapes and glues and foams and all that kind of material, which causes havoc if you've just put it straight into mechanical separation. So where does that stuff go? Well, we— that literally gets carbonized off. We basically pyrolyze it, is kind of the term. You know, heating it in an inert atmosphere. So we intentionally take away oxygen so we don't, you know, cause the burning. And then if you apply a little bit of heat with no oxygen, that's where you can kind of get the organic materials to separate. Okay, okay.

And then when I was, like, when I was at GM and I got to go through their battery facility, I assume that not all lithium-ion batteries are made the same way, but, you know, they were doing these layers, these thin layers.

Laminates, they call them. Yeah. What is it? Call it a pouch cell, a pouch, like a little aluminized.

Yeah, I got to take one apart where it was, it was like filo dough or something. You were, you were peeling off this layer and there was kind of the lithium was like liquidy in between, if I remember right.

Maybe, maybe I don't, but yeah, well, there's a, there's an electrolyte that's kind of liquidy. It probably smelled terrible if it was.

I was, I had the gloves. I was, I couldn't smell. I was, I was working in a glove box.

Yeah, so it would have smelled terrible. You weren't in the glove box. Yeah, phyllo dough is a good example.

So like on something like that, how are you getting, how are you getting the elements out from this sandwich?

Well, it would go through this machine that we're headed to. So it would be, you know, heated, baked a little bit. Then we go into mechanical separation. So we do this kind of multi-step, you know, shredding, grinding, impacting of all the materials. To kind of separate what are called the active powders from the metals, the foils, and some of the remaining, you know, chunks of metal. If it's just a cell, you know, there isn't much bulk metal, but if it's a full modular pack, there's a lot of other big pieces of metal— mounting structures, enclosures, cases, wire harnesses— and we recycle all of that. There's no— there's almost no waste coming out of there. So it's a combination of, you know, a little bit of thermal treatment in order, again, to get rid of electrolytes and adhesives and binders and the state of charge, and then mechanical treatment in order to separate both ferrous, like the magnetic materials basically, from non-ferrous and powders from sort of more large-scale bulk material.

And when you say mechanical treatment, what exactly does that mean?

Well, when I say mechanical, it just means that we're not using chemistry yet. So sort of mechanical means like, you know, you're using the physical properties of the stuff in order to separate it. Okay. Okay. You know, whether it's magnetic or not, you know, whether it's, you know, big or small. Yeah. Whether it's, yeah, things like that. You know, when we do chemical separation and we do that as a next step, that's where you start really utilizing the chemical behaviors of the elements or the compounds.

And when you do, if you get a battery pack from a car and it has X amount of lithium in it, how much is reusable at the end of this process?

A huge percent. You know, it varies a little bit based on what element we're talking about. And we kind of keep track of that entire periodic table almost that's in these batteries. It's copper, it's high 90s percent is reusable and recovered. Nickel, the same. Cobalt is the same. Aluminum, maybe we're, again, 95 or greater. Lithium is probably one of the toughest ones, frankly, to go after because there's actually not that much lithium in a lithium-ion battery. As a percent of the weight, it's only a single-digit few percent. Less than 10%. So you have to be, you know, really quite efficient and careful to get a very high recovery of that.

And when I was going to GM, I mean, they were making a big deal about switching to these LMR batteries, lithium manganese, and it was to raise the level of manganese in the battery. It's a bit cheaper than, I think it was maybe cobalt. Exactly. And, and so as, as, and I know they don't change overnight and things like that, but as the battery chemistries change and we're competing with China or the automakers are competing against each each other. You guys are already pretty dialed in to handle whatever somebody comes up with, or that means you have to then invent all these new—

We have to keep evolving. Yeah, you know, it's part of what keeps us on our toes, you know, and whether it's again LMR, iron phosphate, or even solid state, you know, every time the technology shifts, you know, we have to, you know, understand, you know, can we process it in the same way, or what does it take to adjust our processing. I mean, to me, that's part of the fun, but it also is some of the challenge. You can't just kind of rest back on what we did a few years ago and expect it to not change. Okay.

They're leading us around here, but we want to go in there, right?

Well, I think we're probably going to drive around this whole machine and just look at it maybe from the outside.

Oh yeah, tell me what's going on.

So this is the sort of business or backside of the RC1 machine. You know, you'll see this kind of rotating cylinder up there. It almost looks like, you know, almost how you make cement. But inside of there is where we sort of process the batteries through. You know, that's where we do that heating directly is happening in here. Then everything off to the right is where we're, you know, processing the sort of gas part of what comes off. But all the solids stay behind and, you know, including about 95% of the carbon atoms. Is, you know, CO2 is something we're really working hard to avoid here. You know, part of the sustainability is to not emit more CO2 in this process. So we've worked very hard to make a specific flow sheet here that separates the carbon into the solid form so that we keep that in the product. And then the gases that come off are the mainly hydrogen-rich, you know, organics. Okay. Coming out of the battery. As it heats up. Okay.

And so what— when that piece is rotating, what— why is it rotating? Is that to help some kind of separation or—

Well, the battery, it's actually at a slight angle. It's a bit hard to tell, but it's like 5 or 10 degrees angle. And as it's rotating, that's helping move the batteries through it. So they'll kind of sit in there and tumble around and sort of make their way from one end to the other over the course of maybe an hour or so. Okay. And that provides what's called residency time, so that they stay in there long enough to heat up and to sort of, you know, have the heat, you know, fully kind of soak into the battery. So you guys have—

like, nobody had really done this before?

No, this was all kind of trial and error, and this is probably generation 5 or 6 of this technology. We even build most of the equipment in-house because there are no vendors that we could go to to purchase these things. So we engineered it, we've also fabricated and built a lot of it. And everything off to the right you see here is again where we're sort of cleaning up any of the gas that comes off of it to make sure that what's emitted is essentially water vapor. And then all of the solids stay in a solid form and they go back into this building. Okay. And that's where we start doing the separation. Okay. Inside the building. Inside the building. Okay. So you were starting to ask, you know, did we separate the nickel and the lithium from this, and we don't do separation here yet. This outside machine is just getting ready to separate. It's getting the material into a form that we can, you know, much more easily go after it mechanically. Shredding, screening, impacting, and that's where we start to separate and take away aluminum, ferrous materials that we can, like screws and nuts and bolts. And even then, we kind of still remain with a a core batch of material that needs chemical separation. Is it? Well, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, that's okay. Some things like the lithium, you won't find a chunk of lithium in a battery. It's actually kind of atomically embedded into the powders. Okay. So we have to do a lot of steps in order to get the lithium actually separated individually.

And I know I asked you this before, but it's just when I see all this. So you start this company, you have this idea that this is possible, you're working off first principles that this should all be possible. It's just when you see the scope of this and what you guys had to figure out, I mean, I guess it's like you wanted to find out if you could do this and then you just got to figure it out as you go.

Well, somebody had to do it. I mean, we knew that batteries were coming at end of life. There was really no question there and sort of how to do this. You know, we needed to just dive into it, start experimenting, and we've gotten better and better as we go.

So like when other people hear about, oh, like before you guys came along, you could dump off your battery for recycling. But then I look at what you guys have figured out, what, like people did know how to recycle a battery, just not that well, or?

Maybe at much smaller scales and then sometimes at higher cost. You know, the key here has been to do this without sort of subsidies or without, you know, cities having to fund and pay for things. And what we're doing today doesn't have any federal subsidies. Okay. You know, this is competing, you know, outright with mining and doing it profitably without subsidies. And you guys will—

you'll sell the raw elements back to somebody who's trying to make a battery again or make—

Or other devices and materials. So once we recover and refine the material, it can be used for anything that needs that same element. Yeah. So for instance, you know, when we recover cobalt, you know, that has a lot of other valuable uses, some actually that are higher value than batteries. So cobalt is used in high-temperature alloys and aerospace alloys and defense applications. A lot of those right now are actually higher priority and higher value to be supplied in the US.

Okay. Can we park in there somewhere?

Yeah, we can park, I think, next to this— no parking sign. Okay.

Remind me of the name of this.

This is— So this whole facility is what we call our RC1 facility. It's kind of the first step on our recycling and separation for the live batteries. So yeah, and this facility is where we'll load in live lithium-ion batteries, small and large, to be heated and then mechanically separated. And how long has this been here? This is pretty new. It's only about a year and a half, maybe 2 years is when we started this particular line. And we've been learning steadily. It's running pretty well now, but still we're learning new things and having to adapt to new feedstock. Okay. So we'll walk down here and we can look at where— Hey, morning. Morning. Look at some of the loading and where we actually are loading in the small batteries.

Like this is stuff that would've come from where we started. Here's an example.

So tons of different types and formats. These are, you know, largely laptop batteries, small consumer electronics stuff. So there's no liquids in these drums. They're just kind of a fireproof container. But this is like where we started.

That was step one. And then, and then now that's been sorted and transported here. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Like, as these, these are cell phones, laptops. These are like just consumer batteries.

It's a, yeah, a big mix of different consumer batteries and stuff here. You know, here I'm not even sure what these are, probably also consumer but a little bit larger. Sometimes these are like some medical device or, you know, heartware or some kind of monitor or something. This one's even more messy. You know, there you see the inside of some of those like Philo Dough things you saw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, we have to deal with this mess. I mean, people don't always just send us a really clean, nice battery. I wish they did. Yeah. But a lot of times it's mixed with garbage and we have to deal with separating a lot of that out.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, same thing.

Yeah. Okay. And, you know, this is an example of sort of the packaging. You know, we recover and separate all the packaging and then we can reuse it. So this is what's called vermiculite. It's a fireproof, just instead of like foam peanuts, this is kind of a fireproof equivalent. This is what people put around the batteries or when they ship it, you know, this kind of gets added, mixed in to kind of cushion them from each other and to prevent shorting and to prevent, ideally prevent fire. Okay. But we'll recover it. So we don't, we don't want to send the packaging into the material, into the processing. Yeah. And we can reuse it because it doesn't degrade it. You can reuse it 100 times. Okay. Now these are probably larger batteries. And yeah, you see here we're in the middle of loading some larger batteries right now.

Hey, so these, like, this is what I wanted to get across. This whole thing will go in the oven. It will. That's wild to me. Yeah.

Well, it's, yeah, not exactly an oven, I guess.

I would say it's— We'll go into the process.

Yeah, because I mean, I don't want to call it an oven just because it's— there's no air. Okay. So it's a weird design and it was kind of tricky to kind of get through into a space that has no air. So we even have an airlock. It's almost like a space station. We're going into the space station to heat because again, we don't want to burn anything. That's really the key because then you end up with, you know, more emissions and more carbon.

Are we going to watch it go through?

Well, this is just a conveyor, but yeah, you can load one in if you want.

I get excited by conveyors, man.

You want to push one in? You can kind of see, you know, if you look inside of there, we've got loading coming in from a few of these different chambers too. That's where we're loading in smaller stuff. And the speed of the conveyor is all computer controlled. So that's what adjusts how fast we can load. So we have our own control software, you know, constantly watching temperatures, gases, material performance to know how fast we should load.

And walk me through one more time. I just think this will blow people's minds. I mean, what— so this is plastic really on top and that is going to get that first layer of heat is going to hit that, right? And then to help you get to, well, ultimately what's inside.

Well, ultimately we want to heat this whole thing up kind of slowly. Over maybe a couple, you know, an hour or two, you know, and then cool it back down. But we do it in that inert atmosphere. So it goes up this conveyor, goes through an airlock, and then it goes into this, you know, inert environment where we heat it up and then cool it back down. And while it's getting hot, you know, the adhesives and the organics, the electrolyte kind of comes out of it, but it'll look kind of the same. Okay. Like when it, if I could I can't, but if I could reach in there and grab it at the other end of it, you'd kind of see the same thing. It would just look like it kind of got heated up and the metal would all still be there exactly the same. Yeah. Okay. Does that sort of make sense? Yeah, that does. And on the other end of this is when we go into our mechanical separation and processing.

And so how long from when I— when we watch this go off, would a metal, an element come out on the other end?

All the way through mechanical separation, it's not very long. It's maybe 2-3 hours at most. And yeah, I mean, if you look at the other end, you'd see, you know, full-size super sacks, we call them, big bags of different metal concentrates and different fractions, whether it was copper, aluminum, iron, or the active powders.

And they're even putting like the boxes in? Yeah, in some cases.

Yeah. And we don't really like to do it, but it's kind of Some of these, it's not safe to unpack the whole thing because you may not know exactly what's in it. And, you know, it doesn't create any extra sort of problem. Yeah, but you wouldn't want to send, you know, any kind of— I mean, we don't want to send certain types of batteries in here that contaminate the output. So as long as you're not mixing in like lead or nickel-cadmium batteries, that we very much want to avoid. Okay.. But if it's just paper or small bits of plastic, that we can handle very, very seamlessly.

Okay. Should we keep going or? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Let's go look at the larger format EV module loading.

Okay. This is cool, man. Last time you were in a— Very small. It's a little hut.

I think we can get through here and we'll kind of look in there. And our biggest, you know, challenge in this whole thing is actually packaging. You know, everything inside the battery, you know, turns into, you know, something we're selling, right? One way, shape, or form. But the packaging is hard to manage. So this is a sort of larger scale module loading. It's where we're loading, you know, really full-size EV modules, you know, much bigger format objects. And we do it in a more automated way.

Okay, so there's a pack right there.

Yep, exactly. And these are too heavy for one person to lift anyway. So, you know, we wouldn't— you couldn't just grab onto it and chuck it on the conveyor belt.

So this is similar to what we just saw, but it's just a bigger pack.

It's just a much bigger pack. You know, that could be 20 kilowatt hours that just got loaded in one fell chunk.

Yeah.

And, you know, we're able to process that whole thing one at a time. What is that counting down? I believe that is the cycle time of the conveyor. So it's sort of how long until the conveyor advances again. And again, that's all computer controlled. So these guys are not actually physically controlling the conveyor. We need to be watching the the conditions inside the machine. Okay. Because it's a big chemical processing plant essentially that's running in there.

And to give people an idea, because they might have got turned around, all the stuff we saw on the outside of this building, that was all kind of like over there, the machinery. And so this is going to get sucked up into the—

Up into that conveyor. Machinery of all that process you were describing. Exactly. All these feed into that rotating cylinder. So yeah, now he's happy. I guess that's really funny. I haven't actually seen that happy jumping battery before.

Are they going to put a second one on?

Well, I think maybe they're waiting on the conveyor. Oh, that means the conveyor is going to go. Okay. See there, it moves ahead. So they're loading the conveyor as it creates an empty space.

Basically. Oh yeah, man, those are massive. There's just one battery pack after another. Yeah.

Yeah. And all different kinds. So you see it's like high variety. You know, we've got to deal with, you know, a lot of different variety of modules and types of loading, some bigger, some smaller, some with different packaging. But we've kind of gone through time optimization, tried to figure out also what the materials are inside of these. So we kind of mix and match in a thoughtful way to create the given output. Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Should we keep on moving?

Yeah. This is wild to me. Oh, I— watch the curtains. I always, when you started doing this, I always pictured somebody having to take that pack apart manually and then you're like, I could never picture how you actually got to the good stuff.

It, I mean, it doesn't scale if you have to do it manually, unfortunately. All the mechanical separation is kind of inside of a machine, so you, it's hard to watch it. You can't really see it happening.

Are we allowed to look at the control room to kind of give people a, is there somewhere we can give people a picture of what's happening with the, the, the end of this?

We can take a peek in there, but I just wouldn't want to show any of the values on the screens. It's too close. Okay. Is there a way to just zoom it out enough?

Yeah, well, I don't want to do anything that's— I was trying to get people— and you can't really see through that window back there very well, can you?

We could look. Did you look before?

I did peek before. Let's have a quick peek.

That's what you get, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, unless we wear a sort of full dust suit, you can't get in there. Yeah.

So, okay, so the little ones are here, the bigger packs are over there, and they're all getting—

they're all going through the— like a conveyor system. Yep. And okay, the airlock is outside, it's a bit harder to see.

Um, and then they, they're gonna end up in here.

Yes. So they, they go through that, that rotating machine, then they come back in the building into here. Again, it's kind of hard to see. Yeah. You know, this screen actually is showing it kind of better. Better in a way. That is the same thing.

Can you help walk me through a little what's happening?

Well, this is the output. So we put a bunch of different, we have a lot of different types of material coming out. They end up in these bags. So these are sort of screw conveyors and feeders. Filling a bunch of different bags. Behind it is part of— this is part of the mechanical separation. This is screening and shredding and grinding. So there's a lot of different steps of that. Maybe it'll come up higher and we can see it.

But like when we see those bags, I mean, I could see written on there, those were the elements' names. Yeah. On the end of the bags.

And sometimes Now this again won't separate lithium and it won't pull apart some of the cobalt and nickel from each other, but it will separate copper and aluminum and iron. So it does sort of the first heavy mechanical separation. It's way more efficient to do that mechanically than it is to do it chemically.

And then lithium, to get to that point, you would still do that here or that has to take place somewhere else?

That's another step. Okay. So this is really, you need to do all of this. Just to even get ready to start to separate lithium.

And we talked about it a little in the car, but the energy to do all of this, like, is if you look, step back, you're like, man, this is a lot of energy, a lot of steps, but it's still, it's still going to be better than digging in the ground.

Still profitable and cheaper than mining. And we've watched that at every step of the way. I mean, if it wasn't, we'd never be able to make money, right? You know, because the products we would make would just be too expensive. But we've been really careful about what our energy input is. And as I alluded outside, you know, all of the heating here is sort of auto-thermal. I mean, we're leveraging the waste heat and energy left over in the batteries to do the heating. Okay. We use electricity for blowers and fans and lights, but it's much less than if we used electricity to do the main heating. Okay. Okay, cool. We're back.

Thank you for doing all this. So cool.

Oh, my pleasure.

It's kind of fun.

I mean, every time I go on a tour, I get to see some new stuff too.

I actually see the green icon, the green whatever it was.

I had not seen that. I hadn't seen the little dancing battery happy face that is motivating them.

How is Nevada? I mean, this— well, I drove up here. It is insane to see all these buildings going up everywhere. Um, it's Google building some data center right next to you guys.

It is really busy out here. Uh, feels like a boomtown in a way with, you know, just enormous interest in data center growth and, uh, all the energy infrastructure associated with that.

Do you have a feel for having built Tesla in California for so long versus working in Nevada? It seems a bit easier to get things done here.

Well, especially large industrial things. It is very, very fast here. And, you know, partly for some obvious reasons. You know, we're not— there's more space. You know, there's a little bit more industrial kind of footprint around us. So I don't feel like we're cutting any environmental shortcuts or anything that, you know, would be needed anywhere else in the United States. But the general jurisdiction, the sort of, you know, county itself, you know, is all just very forward-leaning and really wants to, you know, enable business growth and development. Like, I'm shocked, man.

I mean, I come here, I don't come here. On a super regular basis. And so just driving out this morning, it was insane. There's construction everywhere. There's construction everywhere.

It's, you know, it's already created some of its own challenges though, in terms of just stressing the infrastructure here. For workers and— Well, labor and also traffic. Yeah. When we first came out here, there was no traffic. And today, you know, traffic is quite an issue. Now the state and the county are working to increase road sizes and So it's kind of interesting watching the whole cycle unfold, you know, from, hey, let's attract as much business as we can, to whoa, all the business came, you know, now we have to manage that growth and the people that came with it.

When you talk about recycling batteries, that should be something that California would love to do, I would think, in the spirit of they've been pushing electric vehicles so hard and they want to do environmentally forward things. Do you think you could have built this company in California?

I think it would've taken a lot longer. Yeah. And, you know, to be fair, we still definitely have, you know, some employees in California. I think California's amazing for, you know, certain disciplines and, you know, obviously a lot of people love to be there and want to remain there. But I think, you know, as we're scaling this size of industrial operation, there's not many places to do that in California. Yeah. Even just getting access to the power, the land, the logistics footprint, it's tougher to do there.

You guys already have a second site on the, is it the East Coast? In South Carolina. South Carolina. Okay. And that's— It's geographic to get batteries from different spots and—

It is. And it's a campus that's actually bigger than this one. It's less built out, less developed.. But we're already recycling there. We're already receiving materials. And yeah, again, it really helps us with logistics and, you know, being present, you know, on the other side of the country.

And you're saying obviously the math has to check out to make this cost effective. Is this a brutal, low margin business? But you're dealing with these things that the country wants and that the economy needs. Or can this be like a pretty high profit? The business?

Well, you know, we think it can be a pretty healthy margin business over time, but it's a lot of work. And, you know, it's only in the last 6 to 12 months that we've even made it a robustly positive margin business. Yeah. You know, this is—

What was the key to making that transition?

It's a combination of scale, you know, and having the right, you know, enough economy of scale, but also a lot of innovation on the process to get recoveries to be higher. To reduce impurities and to really mature, I'd say, the whole thing. So we had a stable product that we could be selling to the right buyers. Some of that's kind of just very obvious, but surprisingly hard to do.

And then I know you, I've known you for a long time. I mean, you're very hands-on. You used to build solar-powered cars. You were doing the earliest work with Tesla's battery packs, assembling them in your garage. I know you, I've been to your house where you were building your own Solar farms, are you, when you're talking about some of these innovations that you guys have done, is that, 'cause I'm sure you're very busy running the company, are you able to contribute on that level? Does it drive you nuts if you can't?

Oh, I will try and do as much of it as I possibly can. You know, as you say, I love being hands-on. I love being an engineer. It's kind of bittersweet that, you know, I have to divide my time sometimes between, you know, engineering leadership and all the other duties. But no, I still love being hands-on and especially with our energy work. So the site we're kind of coming into right now, this kind of stuff I'm very personally involved in and sort of helped kind of guide and architect exactly how we started this thing.

And so, and when I saw you last night at your house, you were building, I felt like a version of this at your house.

I was, and basically what is happening here is we are using the second life or repurposed, remanufactured batteries. We're testing them, we're diagnosing them, and we're deploying them back into these big arrays of batteries, hundreds of them, so that they all can work together in a big single installation to store energy and power some kind of load. So in this case, you know, this battery array that we're looking at here, this Second Life battery array. This is nuts, by the way.

I hope people are watching this.

Yeah, there are a lot of them. Is actually powering these data centers, these modular data centers from Crusoe Energy that we've partnered with on this site and hopefully others. So these are full of, you know, Actually, I think these are NVIDIA GPUs inside that are running real actual customer AI workloads being powered by these batteries next to us. And the primary energy that actually, you know, feeds all of this in this case is solar, but it doesn't have to be solar. It could be a combination of solar and gas turbines. It could be reciprocating gas generators. But the storage gives you, helps you through the night.

It gives you this constant It does.

And it also, one other key function here is you won't see any diesel generators. This is very unusual. Almost every data center in the world, you know, has a big backup diesel generator parked next to it. And because we had so much storage, we can run these data centers for almost 2 to 3 days off this battery next to them. It's kind of like a gigantic UPS just sitting right next to them.

Can we walk in the middle of it?

We absolutely can. Let's go. Let's pull ahead a little bit and then we can hop out and check it out. Okay.

This is what it looks like.

In a way, it's very boring, though. There's no moving parts. There's not one moving part in this entire field out here. Yeah. Which I'm pretty proud of. Let's jump out and take a look.

Cool. It's like alien pods or something.

Well, each one of these is a battery pack. And it's a standalone battery pack. These used to be, you know, part of an electric vehicle battery system. But then that little finned kind of suitcase thing is— Oh yeah, let's come over here. That's our device. And that's basically what is converting and talking to the battery, but then, you know, independently controlling it. Okay. Because this architecture would not work if you just had all these batteries and you tried to connect them in parallel. They're all a little bit different. You can't, you know, control them well enough to do that. So this device is what kind of independently separates them from each other, and they all can operate independently with each one of these boxes.

And like, explain that more for somebody who just knows nothing about electricity. Like, what are you trying to— what has to happen to have all of these work as one?

Well, you basically need to be able to to independently set their power. And, you know, if one, you know, discharges more than another, or if one battery's weaker than another, we have to find a way to, you know, to reduce its discharge or to control it independently. Okay. So this little device is what electrically lets us do that. It's called a DC-to-DC converter, and it sort of buffers the battery from the array how we connect them all together.

And nobody else made something quite like that?

No, it's kind of an unusual application of what we're doing here. This is very unconventional. So this was really no good commercial off-the-shelf product. So we designed this ourselves and now we're even on the second generation of this. It also has a lot of software, so it's kind of a combination of power electronics that, you know, changes the voltage of the battery and isolates it. And also a lot of software to communicate with the battery and then also to communicate back with our site controller that aggregates everything and decides what to do with each battery.

And how would this be similar or different when we see Tesla building those giant storage systems in the early days in Australia and everything? You probably led that happening. And then there's other companies that are trying to make battery storage systems, how does what— there's one element that's obviously different, which is you guys are using recycled batteries that would have been sent out to pasture otherwise. But does it differ in other ways to their systems?

Well, functionally, I mean, we're storing electricity. So at the very top level, the function is kind of the same, you know, whether it's any of these different manufacturers. The implementation is very different. And, you know, we're able to— why bother do this is that we can deliver that energy storage function cheaper. So by extending the life of these batteries that would otherwise be headed for recycling, you know, we can have a very low cost structure. Now it's complicated. You know, we end up having to, you know, do some extra work and create a new kind of architecture. But it is very much worth it because we can deliver the energy storage cheaper than anything else. Yeah. So that's really the fundamental difference, I'd say. You know, there's also a sustainability aspect, which, you know, it's not really a sort of thing that gets valued directly, but, you know, this is maybe by our math, you know, 8 to 10 times, you know, less embedded energy if you can just reuse something and then recycle it versus having to build a brand new energy storage system.

Was this something you always had in the back of your head as a possibility or just as you started getting the packs in? And they had so much more juice than you would've thought that you saw this?

You know, we actually, I probably would've been almost a little dismissive of this, you know, 10 years ago. And I just didn't think we'd see enough material soon enough to make the engineering work, you know, worth it and really valuable. So it was something we knew was possible technically, but needed to see the economy of scale and this consolidation of the market to a point where we could, we could justify the engineering work to make this implementation happen. Okay.

And the coating, the wrapping that's on it, is that like insulation or just to protect it from the elements?

Well, the packs themselves are already very waterproof. They're sealed. This was actually just to provide a little bit of a sunshade and also insulation when things are really cold. Okay. So it's not a very fancy— it's like a bubble wrap, basically. Everything here is pretty scrappy. I mean, we were focused on cost. And then cost and make sure that we can deliver energy storage, you know, cheap, really cheaper than Chinese competition. Yeah. All right.

Well, people should be watching this particular podcast, but if you're not, if you're just listening, in front of JB and I, there's a massive solar cell field that they happen to be flat instead of on an incline, which maybe we can get into in a second. And then all around us are these batteries up on on platforms. I don't know, there's what, there's hundreds? I don't know.

I forget how many we exactly have out here, but it is several hundred, I believe.

And then just behind us, there's a data center in basically a shipping container, more or less, from Crusoe. And all of this is interconnected. Why do you guys keep the solar panels flat?

Well, this was sort of a somewhat new implementation of solar. We worked with another company that helped us kind of do that. The main benefit here was high density per acre. And we're in an industrial site here. You know, we're a little bit constrained even though we're in Nevada. So we wanted to jam as many solar panels into a small area as we could. And in this case, we were really trying to show the commercial viability of solar being stored in the low-cost storage, powering these data centers directly. Because, you know, solar is very, very cheap on its own, but unless you have cheap storage, it's hard to use it for any kind of loads that need dispatchable continuous power.

It is the idea to do the data center behind us. It's one of these small modular data centers which people are using and need. But is the goal of something like this to go even bigger and bigger and bigger? Like, but also behind us are massive Google building-size data centers.

We're surrounded by data centers and electricity here. It's such a cool place.

Would you ever be doing something like this for one of those?

It's possible. We're not ready to announce any of those things quite yet. So you could do it, man. Yeah. Nobody will know. But this architecture is very expandable. Yeah. We can deploy it at 100, 1,000, or 10,000, and the same architecture really works. We put a lot of thought into making it scalable. That said, I think the whole industry is trying to figure out what is the optimal size for data centers and deployment all the way from modular like this up to large-scale 100-megawatt like you see next door. Yeah. And we're actively involved in that. It's part of why I believe you saw companies like Google and NVIDIA both joining it as, you know, investors here at Redwood. And that's, it's really because of that energy innovation, energy infrastructure architecture work that we're doing.

Okay. Okay. Oh, I had one other question that I just forgot. Okay. So in this, this site is the first one like this that you've built?

Yeah, this is kind of like a first generation, I'd say. This is now, you know, over a year old and And it's been working fabulously, but we're actually several generations beyond this. And I mean, we could even go look at some of the prototypes we have of higher density, different architecture, second generation of these pack managers and power electronics. Okay.

And then like part of this, when you talk about we get 70% of the batteries, I mean, part of this is nice 'cause you're getting so much of the stuff, so you get to pick and choose what's gonna work. In a system like this? And I know you guys were very early to this business and figuring all this technology out. Like, does it get harder as people start to try to follow your lead and start to— I mean, it seems hard to hold on to 70% market share forever.

It is hard, but, you know, being able to capture more value is really key to that. And right now, you know, I You know, I'm sure people will emulate this if it works as well as we expect. But, you know, right now, you know, this is able to deliver a lot more value back to those same battery partners. So if anything, I actually think combining recycling with second life is going to let us potentially increase market share.

So this, and this is a little bit of the future of where this is heading?

Yeah, well, within the same system here, we're actually testing some of our next generation. So it's hopefully it's kind of interesting, I think, to see kind of the evolution. You know, if you're an engineer nerd, it's fun to see, you know, the old and the new. Yeah. You know, we've made these little pack managers, you know, more power dense. We've also increased the density of the field actually quite a lot by putting the batteries up upright, up vertical. So this little stand here is kind of an example of our next generation. Okay. For customers that want even higher density. So this is actually 2 EV packs standing up vertical. Yeah. You see one of the same ones we just tested, but now it's kind of sitting on this little frame that we make and standing up.

Okay, so like in the little rectangles, I mean, those are obviously not the full flat pack like this?

Well, there's all different kinds and shapes of battery packs. Right, right. So those are a different manufacturer, different type of battery. This one is again Chevy Bolt. Some are flat, some are square. You know, we kind of need to work with everything, but this is an implementation where we're kind of building a rack around these particular packs because we've partnered with GM. We see a lot of them. And then this is separate from the pack. Because this can work with any kind of pack.

Yeah. But the big, like, the step from there to here is just adding this easy infrastructure layer where you can just slap the pack in here and go?

Yeah, well, it's a few different things because this is totally different. So this looks totally different than the one over there. Yeah, yeah. So this is a whole new generation of pack manager. Yeah. That's, there's a lot of, changes that happened inside of this. And for this, it's also like 4 times the power. This is about 40 kilowatts, those are maybe 10-ish. Okay. Um, and this can also work with 2 packs potentially. So these are one big innovation. And then also just, you know, the way that we're kind of racking and standing up the packs is, you know, is quite different. Lets us fit a lot more in a certain area. Uh, so yeah, a couple different things going on.

Okay, okay. And where Do you say where you make these?

I mean, we assemble these, you know, here in Nevada. We do final assembly and test and software work. Yeah. The components come from all over the place. I think the casting has come from, maybe it's Wisconsin, boards from somewhere else and components and connectors from somewhere else still. But final assembly, you know, we want to do ourselves right now. And, you know, right now it's still evolving and being able to do that final test and software flashing is pretty helpful when you can keep close control on it.

But then going from the first generation of this to the second, I mean, would that be something that you would be doing personal engineering on or people are coming to you and they're—

Well, we've got a big team, you know, I don't want to take too much credit for these things. We have some brilliant power electronics engineers and, you know, I really enjoy being involved in sort of the architecture and migration. And sort of like how are we linking the technology to the market and sort of guiding what should this thing do and how should we sort of attack different functions with it, you know, going to the customer and the load. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the stuff I, you know, have a pretty personal hand in. I was just asking because I've seen you at work.

I know you can't keep your hands off these things.

Well, I mean, my whole house is running off, you know, Second Life batteries. It has been for years. So we're kind of in a living experiment on some of this. Not exactly this architecture, but, you know, it was a pilot in a way. Yeah, yeah.

That's cool. I'm glad I got to see it so long ago. And then I wouldn't have imagined something like this. Cool. Were there other ones you want to look at?

This was kind of the one I thought we could take a quick peek at. Yeah, that's great. I don't know if you guys want to look at solar at all, but it's solar. Solar is solar. This isn't the easiest place to get to, you know.

That was my job, man. I love it.

So that's kind of what you do is get to difficult places. Yeah.

I just can't believe you built a full-on empire out here. Yeah, you guys got big. Well, how many people are working for you now?

Gotta get a lot bigger. We have about 1,200 people now.

Wow. And do you guys do— you already do stuff in Europe too, right?

We do. We have a pretty large presence in Germany. So I believe we're the largest lithium battery recycler in Germany already. And are starting, you know, to work with EVs there as well. Yeah. And get into the whole All the same materials as here.

Yeah. And, and yeah, wow.

This problem is really global. I mean, it— yeah, there's opportunities anywhere you have batteries.

Well, it's cool that you were so dialed into this. It all makes sense knowing what I know about your background, but I'm glad somebody was thinking of all this ahead of time.

I, I love building things and solving problems fundamentally, so it's I think this is a worthy one that's, you know, an important mission, but it's also one where, you know, we've been able to build a sustainable business around it as well. Yeah. You can't scale these things unless you find a way to make a profitable business around it. And that's what's— it's taken a lot of work, but I'm pretty proud of the team that we're really there on the recycling piece and scaling that. Self-sufficiently now. All right, well, I know we'll probably just kind of put it in one of these handicapped spots. Let somebody else move it.

We'll move it. We'll move it. I know you got a meeting to get to. Thank you so much for spending the afternoon with us and showing us everything. It's my pleasure. It was great seeing you again.

Good to see you again. All right. Thanks, JB. Thanks, man. Yeah, I hope it's— let's, uh, we need to do it again, not in, not in 10 years.

Yeah.