The Power of Data and Building Better EV Infrastructures with Stable Auto

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I am thrilled to have you here on the Talkers and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listening to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I am thrilled to have Jamie Schiel co founder and CTO of Stable Auto. Hey Jamie, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me on. Stoked to be here.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's good to have you here. Good to connect with you. A fellow north county coastal tech builder here. So welcome. Do you want to give us a quick one minute overview of what Stable Auto is?

Yeah, I can do that. One minute short. When you say high level then. Okay. So Stable Auto is a San Francisco based machine learning software company. We do have people all around the country. So as you said, I'm in North County. What we do is we help businesses make really successful investments in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Because as it turns out, it's really, really hard. Make positive investments in EV charging. But if we're going to replace the entire world's transportation infrastructure with renewable, clean alternatives. That can't be the case. It needs to be a really accessible, really positive investment for a lot of folks. So we're trying to change that equation a little bit.

Awesome. I'm stoked to dive into that. But first, want to dive into your background a little bit. Where'd you grow up? How did you find your way into tech?

Yeah, so I grew up in New Zealand. Christchurch, New Zealand. Haven't been back there in a while because of everything going on. But it's still my roots. So I've been in the energy space for a long time. My first job actually was with a company called Unison Networks. They're a big energy distributor down the southern hemisphere. And I was working for a big research agency that was doing, trying to connect a lot of academic research with the industrial environment. So I was sponsored by Unison Networks and we were trying to do a lot of different things with remotely monitoring transmission lines. So these are not the lines that you see along your street. These are the big cross country lines that run across, you know, states and counties. And, and so in New Zealand, a lot of that infrastructure is really, really remote. It's in, you know, high terrain, difficult terrain. And so the state of the art in New Zealand and much of the southern hemisphere is just basically sending out helicopters and they're flying in really challenging terrain. It's really unsafe. So we were trying to automate a lot of that stuff using drones, basically. So my actually early start was doing drones, designing energy management systems, compute systems, and particularly a lot of instrumentation to try to sense faults from the air. So that, that was kind of how I got the start and kind of the whole sort of instrumentation and energy sector and then ended up getting recruited to MIT over in Boston. So I was there for a couple years doing pretty much the same kind of stuff with instrumentation, but in a more kind of generalized research environment. So I was in a group there called Camera Culture. Obviously it got its start doing camera design and kind of grew out to all kinds of instrumentation. And actually met my co founder there, Rohan Puri, he's the CEO of Stable. And we were kind of, you know, both in this kind of instrumentation world and both really liked this energy space. And so much activity was happening around that time in the automotive world, particularly autonomous vehicles, like rewinding back like say like 2015 around then. And that was like the gold rush for autonomous vehicles, right? Like everyone was raising ungodly amounts of money. It was like, no one's going to have a driver's license forever. You know, these cars are going to be on the road en masse in a couple of years. And when you make that kind of logical leap, you know, we were kind of seeing this incredible paradigm shift. Like the first time transportation has really changed at a fundamental 100 years. And we're like, man, the world is not ready for all these autonomous vehicles. Like, there's no infrastructure for it. And so that was kind of the space that we were operating in, kind of mentally just really excited about the space. I guess. One thing leads to another, and here we are basically. I mean, the story from there to stable is a little bit longer, but maybe. I'll pause for a second.

Yeah, no, I love that trajectory in that regard. We were talking offline before about just the power of data and instrumentation and wiring things up. And, you know, data is powerful. And even consumer data obviously was not tapped into and thinking that everyone's going to be driving or everyone's not going to be driving in autonomous cars and not ready for the regulation and all that. Because, yeah, the crews and waymos and all those, yeah, they were hot. They're coming back around. I think autonomous trucking is actually going to hit first. And we have an interesting company in San Diego, Tusimple, that's got autonomous trucks going across the country now. So it still might. Might come out. But obviously everyone jumped in on anti lidar and all those other spaces as well, too. So, yeah, smart move to kind of move into where the next big trend is, which is electric vehicles. Obviously, in general, it's just so hot. Tell us a little bit about, like, how you found your way to that. And I don't know, just the data you were seeing that said this is something we want to start a company in.

Yeah, for sure. So we had both moved out, myself and my co founder, Rohan, we had moved out to San Francisco together. That was the place to be at the time for, you know, this kind of research. And, you know, initially we were really just kind of engineers for hire. Transitioning from the research space to startup environment is challenging for anyone. Right? It's. It's just a totally different mental space to be in. You're trying to solve different problems for different people. So we were just kind of in that area in San Francisco trying to do as much as we can to kind of embed ourselves in the space. So we were working for some of the names you mentioned. We actually worked for a couple of venture capital firms vetting startup ideas for them and actually started to get a lot of pull from some of the different autonomous vehicle companies that were making very large promises around vehicle deployments in the coming months to years. And we're having this kind of oh crap moment about the infrastructure side and realizing that, you know, promising that all this, this technology was going to make sense both from a safety standpoint but also from an economic standpoint. And when you learn some of the numbers, if you've got, you know, all these vehicles driving around without people quote unquote, but then you've got all the back end infrastructure, the cleaning, the recharging, all this kind of stuff, all that requires so many people, the economic starts to break down. And so they had these very, very explicit cost per mile targets for their fleets. And infrastructure was a large piece of that. And so we were working for them basically as hired guns, trying to sort of navigate that sort of technology piece, like what that's going to look like. And actually ended up forming some partnerships. If you look back in the archives of Stable, we actually had a partnership with Electrify America to deploy some physical infrastructure in San Francisco. Kind of trial by fire. San Francisco is one of the toughest places to deploy EV charging. And that was really kind of the genesis of what Stable ended up becoming as a company versus just me, my co founder and a couple of people, you know, engineers for hire, is going through this kind of, this process of trying to deploy physical infrastructure in San Francisco and realizing that like, forget autonomy, forget all this other stuff, like it's just really, really difficult to deploy EV chargers. So obviously that was, you know, at a time when people were realizing that autonomous vehicles were a lot harder than they thought. And it was kind of a reality check. And so it was, it was good timing for us that we had, you know, this kind of other trajectory we're going on which is just like helping people get charges in the ground. And there's a, there's a whole bunch of things that make that really, really challenging. But maybe I'll highlight what I see is like the three biggest one, the first one is in. There's a big difference coming from New Zealand to here. But there's this weird thing in the US that none of the grid here is connected. So you basically have these like local energy markets all around the country, local grids, they can be either regulated or unregulated. Most of them are regulated. So they're basically vertically integrated monopolies, regulated monopolies. And so each one of them has their own kind of way of structuring how you can buy energy from them. What we call a rate schedule. And so it's different across the entire country. And they also have their own regulatory bodies that govern what they can and can't do with these rates. And so that cost of energy is changing across the entire country. It's also changing just about every hour of the day. You know, I'm sure everyone is familiar with their energy bill at home. If you run the dishwasher at the wrong time today at peak load or super peak load, it can cost 5, 10, 15 times the amount if you do it at an off peak time. And so for industrial contracts, this kind of stuff gets even more complicated with various kinds of ratcheting. And so even to be able to go to some sort of funding body and say, like, hey, I'm going to install this infrastructure and it's going to cost me $10 million. And here's what my return is. You're trying to do some really complicated mathematics about the cost of energy just varying crazily throughout the time of day. And so for that you need to understand what the load is on your charger. But then you've got all these vehicles. If you look at like a combustion engine, regular vehicle, right? Like you drive up to a gas station and you put the pump in, and whether you're in Michigan or Pennsylvania or California, the fuel goes in at the same rate. You know, for an electric vehicle, it doesn't go in the same rate. You have different battery technologies, you have different charging technologies. The temperature, the ambient temperature outside will affect the rate that you can charge a vehicle. So you don't even know how much energy your charging station is going to draw. And then you don't know how to convert that to cost. And you have this other weird thing that, you know in gasoline vehicles, so you're driving down the road, you see your little, you know, fuel light come on and you think, oh, I'm, I'm running out of gas, I better go to a gas station. So it's very reactionary and it's a destination freeview charging. It's completely different. You look at a lot of the data and it's not reactionary, it's opportunistic. So I'm, I'm at a grocery store, I'm already here. There's an EV charger I might as well plug in. So it's, it's preemptive and it's, and it's opportunistic. And that means trying to predict when people are going to show up to charging stations, how much energy they're going to draw and then converting that into a cost. It's a phenomenally difficult problem and you need to be able to do that to say like this is how much revenue I'm going to make from my charger. Therefore here's, you know, the return on the investment. I can go out and raise some capital, I can get this thing installed, I can talk to all the different regulatory bodies and get the, you know, the ticks and I's dotted and T's crossed and all that kind of stuff. And it's just enormously difficult. And you can see that in the industry right now that there's, I mean open any news publication, you take publication and just read about how much stuff is being said about lack of EV infrastructure and range anxiety and all this kind of stuff.

Yeah, there's a lot to it. Especially like you mentioned the individual energy companies who are driving variability on price throughout the day. Peak load, peak price is changing. And I think anyone with solar on their roof is realizing that the payback isn't really making sense these days because peak now is at like midnight and peak price has changed and all these things. So yeah, there's a lot of variables in that. So that's super interesting. So you, you're built. So tell us more about the platform itself. What is the platform doing to kind of take all those variables and balance it all out?

Yeah, so that's, that's where the machine learning comes into play. That was kind of the, the insight that we had and it was a tool that we had initially built for ourselves as we were trying to deploy these stations. We were a very, very small company at that time. We're still small now, but it was even smaller back then trying to justify building this. It was like five charger facility and there was like a 15 charger facility. These are, and these are big stations, like 150 kilowatt, not the thing you're going to, you know, put in your garage. These are the, the huge, you know, five foot tall boxes you'll see at a grocery store or Whole Foods maybe. And so we were a small company trying to justify how we were going to, you know, successfully install this, all these big energy assets and make a good return, all that stuff. And what evidence do we have, like what collateral do we have? And you think about all these different variables to balance and justifying that. It's kind of unrealistic to think that a single person is going to make a perfect decision every time. And you can see that even with the national operators about 20% of their charges account for 80% of use. Obviously that's a very generalized statistic, but across the whole industry that's about what it is, an 80, 20. It's not very good.

No, you're talking like a charge point, one of those. As a national, you mean?

Yeah, I don't want to name names because everyone kind of, you know, some people are better than others, shall we say. Like there's probably some listeners who are being like, that's not what my infrastructure is. And other people are like, wait, 20%, ours is like 5%, you know. Yeah, but that's, that's where machine learning comes in. Right? Like machine learning is very, very good at taking large multivariate data sets and figuring out the patterns. So what we've done is we've taken charging Data from over 30,000 charging stations across the entire country and we input data from whether it's up to date, EV sales down at the county, the local traffic at every road in the us, every time of day, median household income. There's, I mean there are, I think there's only over 72 variables that we use at this point and try to correlate why certain stations were used more than others. And so when we started out it wasn't at all apparent that you could even predict BV station usage. No one had ever done it before. And we, to our knowledge, being the first to demonstrate that, yes, you can in fact predict how a station is going to be used. And so we, we do all of that, we convert that into an energy load and we also convert that into a cost. So you as a business operator, even if you have no understanding of EV charging, you have no understanding of machine learning. You can log into our software, it's a cloud based software, you can input all of your variables about your business, what you're hoping to achieve with your EV charging, and you can see how it will perform over 1 year, 5 year, 10 year, and change your assumptions to see how that plays out.

Oh, super cool. Interesting timeframe. With the pandemic for all this, obviously driving habits changed immensely. Gotta imagine what kind of data and trends did you see over the last two years and how do you manage that as a company?

Yeah, this has been probably the top topic of discussion for the last two years for us, it's been super challenging. I mean, so the industry as a whole, when the lockdowns first started happening, was the first thing people did was stop driving. Right. So you didn't need all of our data to see that, like you look outside and see it. And the effect it had on us customers were. Were pretty decimating. We had a couple customers that lost over 90% of their business in California, which at that point, you might as well round up to 100. You know, like, it wasn't good. The good news is it did bounce back very quickly. It changed a lot of things in terms of just how our company was structured. A lot of people were looking more inward than outward, you know, focusing on their existing investments. It takes so long to permit these sites and get them operational that a lot of these companies had sites already in their pipeline and just focused on kind of pushing that through versus new sites. But where we are today, we've kept very, very close eye on the trends of the pandemic and trying to figure out how we model that because it's this really challenging thing that, like, no one expects us, right? So no one expects us to model Covid. Like, no, they don't expect us to predict that Omicron was going to happen, right. But at the same time, they. They expect us to get the EV charging rate. And so how do you. How do you reconcile that? It turns out. I feel kind of weird saying this, but if you look at the traffic data, the evidence is that most people don't really care about COVID anymore. We've hit a baseline in traffic that doesn't really change. And my interpretation of that is that people are just a little bit kind of wary about COVID now, but everyone's kind of reached their stress level. So the changes that they're making in their life when like Omicron comes in effect again, isn't affecting their driving patterns. You know, maybe they're seeing family less, maybe, maybe they're flying less, but driving is about the same. Now. If you look pre Covid to where we are now, it is very different. The baseline has shifted. But as, like, all these different resurgences keep happening every winter, whatever it is, really the traffic isn't changing that much anymore.

So there's a whole new baseline, which is kind of interesting.

Whole new baseline, yeah.

Covid's also become political, obviously. So has, I think, ev. Ev, you know, and even just green tech and climate change. Be interesting to know if you can tell that as well from the data like, of who is driving EV chargers related to, I don't know, people who are doing Covid versus not believing it in that regard. We don't have to go down that rabbit hole, but there's probably some relation to EV chargers versus non EV drivers versus non EV drivers and how seriously they're taking Covid as well. But you don't need to comment on that. That's okay. But curious around who are some of the businesses, like what are the ideal kind of companies that are using your guys data and product.

Yeah, so we have really all manner of people using it. So we kind of classify things as kind of small CPOs versus large or national CPO. So CPO is a ChargePoint operator, not to be confused with ChargePoint the company, just anyone with a ChargePoint. So that's kind of the first bucket that we deal with. So a small CPO might be someone that deals with single state, two or three states, but they kind of, they know their sector and international obviously is someone who's doing, you know, the majority of states, not necessarily all of them, but like over 20, something like that. So on the smaller CPO side, like they really don't have the resources to do something themselves. A lot of them are trying to use spreadsheets to model a lot of this stuff and it's just not, you know, quite have the capabilities there. The national CPOs, they run into that other problem I was telling you about where you know, there's just so much variability across the entire country in terms of the energy markets even as what you're saying before about, you know, whether there are patterns you can observe and Covid versus charging station use and whether there's some political aspects of that. And there, there are, I mean certain states behave very differently from other states. I'm not going to name names, we can all guess which ones. And so they have a real hard time like keeping track of all this, just different variability. We also have a lot of interest from various utilities companies. We have an announcement we're going to be making very soon about. But utility companies have a very important role to play in EV charging because you know, they're publicly regulated so they're often the vehicle that is being used to deploy physical assets. And in particular there's a lot of discussion right now around what is the role of EV charging and what is the role of you know, credits and incentives, state sponsors, credits and incentives. Because in the one sense you can see in kind of phase one of the EV charging industry, we're really kind of in the first inning right now and phase one didn't go super well. So there's really, really uneven access to EV charging. You see a lot of people and disadvantaged communities that just simply don't have access to it. And you also see this other problem where a Lot of EV charging is just not profitable. Like I saying before, you're about to 20% accounts for 80% of the use. That's not a great statistic. And so, you know, public funding in one sense needs to be used to increase access to, you know, disadvantaged communities, some of those other states we spoke about. But in the same sense it's, it's not a sustainable platform if none of those charges are also profitable. So there's a lot of discussion right now is can you find a middle ground that increases EV adoption, maybe is unprofitable in the short term but profitable in the long term? Or do you just say no, we're going to have some charges that are completely unprofitable, but we have other charges that are very profitable and they're going to offset each other. But it's the utilities that are, that are leading that discussion and being able to play off some of these variables and see how they compare to each other is super valuable to them. So that's a big area of interest for us.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the regulation like you mentioned is a big piece. Subsidies, which there's still like 100 year old subsidies in the gas world even, which is crazy. So I can understand why the conversation is like do we need the credits and subsidies? But I think seeing some of the leadership from state pushing a mandate of EVs are the only vehicle that are being sold by a certain date. And then after that you see car companies say the same thing too. We're only going to sell electric. That's where the wave starts to happen. But take us through a little bit of the federal discussion of this infrastructure bills that they've been pushing out. Is that changing? Is that from the top down seeing an industry change in terms of people getting grant funding, so now they are installing and that kind of stuff or what are you seeing from that regard?

Yeah, it's always challenging commenting on federal issues in the us especially coming from New Zealand. I'm like, oh, I don't want to talk about it. It is super, super interesting and something we follow very carefully because the reality for a lot of businesses we deal with, they do just follow the grant programs because historically they've been very, very good. You could essentially deploy charges for free. And like I was saying before, it had some positive effects in terms of EV adoption. And important part of it, just seeing EVs out, EV chargers out in the world makes you more likely to buy an EV if you're, you know, people often cite range anxiety for not buying an ev. But if you're, if you're driving the grocery store and you see an EV charger, you drive to work, you see an EV charger, you know, you can install one at home, it increases the chances of you buying an ev. So it's had some positive effects, but it's had some negative effects in that people are chasing free money and it has created a somewhat unsustainable industry. So there is a lot of discussion right now about the role of state sponsored programs to be both a carrot and a stick. Right. Because like we need a stick, the clock is ticking on climate change and we have the Paris Accord, we have all these different agreements that we need to stick to and it's important that we get a move on and get a stick. But I think there are plenty examples throughout history that shows that carrots in the end can be the, the better path here. So, you know, you, you bring up the fact that a lot of, you know, OEMs are now pivoting to electric vehicles and promising they're not going to even sell combustion engines after a certain date. I think that's one piece of it that's really interesting and I think that's probably something that people don't acknowledge enough is that there just isn't that many EVs on the market right now. Right. Like if you want to go out and buy an ev, like sure you can, there's Tesla. Right. If you're okay buying a quite expensive sedan, if you want to put yourself on a waitlist for a Rivian, you know, and get that in two years time, you can do that. But those things are going to change very, very quickly. I think, you know, this year and next year there's so many new EVs coming to the market. I think it is going to be a totally different ball. So honestly, I would, I would bet that it's going to be those effects that have the larger impact. But that being said, the state sponsored programs have been great for us. Right. Because they create so much awareness around the industry, so many new people trying to get into the space. It's something that we take very, very seriously. And you know, we make sure that we have all that factored into our financial projections and people can figure out how to take advantage of that money. Yeah, Time will tell, I think, how they decide to distribute that money. Yep.

You mentioned a interesting thing of a whole new ballgame as well as this idea that the range anxiety, like people are going to expect a gas station everywhere they go. Right. As well as at Home. So not a gas station, a charger station. But what kind of data are you seeing of people charging at home versus everywhere else? Like is home the place real charge or is it literally everywhere that people need to plug in?

Yeah, so it's mostly at home. It's what you'd expect. Mostly at home charging is what you see. You know, there aren't actually great studies around empirically what that is, but the, in the industry, what most people say is it's roughly follows that 80, 20, you know, 80% of charging is going to happen at home, which makes sense, right? Like you shouldn't plug it in overnight. And that, you know, raises the importance of some of the utility programs as well. You know, a lot of them are experimenting with new rate schedules for EV charging at home. And that's super important. But you're right, that 20% that's going to happen out in the world, that's often the thing that people are reciting as the most important to boosting EV adoption. And certainly if you, if you just chat to any of your friends or your family about why they're not buying an ev, they'll, they'll express those concerns like, oh, what if I get stranded here or there? And you know, so it's really important that just visibly there are EV charging stations. But also there's a lot of dialogue right now about what those EV charging stations should be. And the general consensus is that they should be those really fast stations they can refuel you on in under an hour. So 150 kilowatt up to 350 kilowatt, that kind of thing. Got it.

But if 80% is going to happen at home you mentioned earlier, like underserved communities, urban communities, multifamily focused as opposed to single home, they could be not, they could not have the access to this. So that's really interesting to think about as well too. Right? Like how could an entire apartment building, you know, they're not going to put in 100, 200 chargers for every resident and no one's going to move their cars while they're sleeping. Like these are all really interesting things that you guys apparently are pulling data on. So fascinating to help kind of a larger population.

And I think that's where a lot of the state sponsored programs can help. You know, those programs are great in areas where like you say, there isn't a great economic incentive for people to install charges for, you know, multi unit dwellings. But with a little bit of prodding from the state, maybe that can be where you know, there can be an outsized gain in EV adoption.

Yeah, fascinating. Well, super cool what you guys are building. Obviously very much needed. So thank you. But something else that we got to know is, you know, what brought you down to San Diego and how long ago?

Oh, so I've been in San Diego about a year. So I'm a recent reasonably new trans, but I've been coming down here for years to go surfing. I've been a lifelong surfer. I grew up surfing Taylor's Mistake and the Funga Matau bar in New Zealand. If we've got any Kiwi listeners, they'll know what that means. So I've been coming down here for a long time and have a few really good friends down here and actually a couple people contributed pretty heavily to stable and to my, My, my personal career from this area. So I've always loved it down here. And then, you know, so many things changed with the pandemic and a lot of the reasons that bring you to the Bay Area weren't really present there. And we started hiring more and more remotely and told the team, hey, if you want to leave San Francisco, you can do it. And I took my own advice and left San Francisco.

Awesome. And you ended up in Encinitas, right? Is that what you said?

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, yeah.

Very cool. NCS is quickly. The downtown area is quickly becoming a little bit of a tech hub between Flock Freight, who's completely taken over a bunch of buildings. I don't know if you've seen them, but they're kind of in the logistics tech space, Bluma, which is a banking software. Also they're over on second street got Equid, an E commerce platform that just got acquired for like 500 million. They're right behind Beer Garden and then a coworking space is housing a bunch of tech companies over at, I'll say that Cor Union right there. So yeah, kind of a. You're joining at an interesting time where downtown Encinitas is starting to grow up as a little bit of a tech hub.

Well, so I'm wondering, you as a venture capitalist, are you seeing those companies staying within the San Diego county to raise funding if they do want to? Are they still traveling outside of San Diego to do that?

Oh, they're still traveling for sure. There is not a lot of local capital in San Diego whatsoever, especially early stage. We haven't had the exits to have had the recyclable capital yet in San Diego. So no capital is absolutely coming outside. But at this point, well, one it's always been easy to fly anywhere from San Diego especially like to San Francisco. And now you don't need to fly anywhere to raise capital. Right. You just hop on a zoom. So I think that part isn't as important. That being said, we want to be fund, we want the capital to stay in San Diego when the exits happen. So if we can get more investments from San Diego to benefit San Diego companies, all the better. But you know, we've got some work to do from a capital community to prove ourselves that why you should take our money versus you know, name your other top tier vc. So early days. But I think it's just good to have a funnel and the funnel is filling with good companies who are, who are planting roots. They're doing similar as you. They're allowing remote. Right. And they're probably either reducing office or at least just like curbing it so that it's, you know, not expected. The entire company's here. But I think as you saw here, quality of life is good here. So why not plant roots here if you can and let people work wherever they want.

I couldn't agree more.

Similar mentality. Have you been able to check out our taco scene at all? Do you have a favorite taco spot?

I do. I mean, I don't know how deep I am in the scene. I could be offering an amateurist answer right now.

No, there's no wrong answer. That's the beauty of this question.

I mean there's some good stuff in north county, but I think my favorite is probably Oscars. Have you been down there?

Oh yeah, they're ceviche legendary.

That was the first. That was actually the first taco I had in San Diego like years ago. That was the only reason I moved here. No, there's other reasons. But you know, Just Peachy down in Leucadia.

Just peach? No, that's a new one for me.

It's a little farmer's market, but they sell Oscar's salsa and corn chips, which even their salsa is the best.

Okay, well, you missed. Oscar's had an Encinitas location, but they closed during. During COVID Unfortunately they were right next to the Trader Joe's.

Oh, no kidding. I didn't know that.

So hopefully we can get them back. But yes, I will. Just Peachy. Wait, just Peachy is. You said a farmer's market?

Yeah, there's just Peachy and then Peachy's Bar and Grill, which is completely different. Oh yeah, but just Peachy's the farmer's market. It's the best grocery store in San Diego. You quote me on that.

Yeah, it's adding it to our database for sure. Well, Jamie, thanks so much for sharing some knowledge, leading the charge here in changing the world and joining us here in San Diego. Welcome.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be a part of the community.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for being on the podcast. Cheers.

Yeah, cool.

Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow Fresh Brewed tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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