Phil Layton: A Glimpse Of The Mountains And Hope For A Better Tomorrow Inspired This Scientist To Develop Affordable Renewable Energy Solutions

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. I can't wait for you guys to hear from today's guest. He's a physicist, an attorney, and a founder of a company who's doing the ultimate do the thing by bringing renewable energy innovations to life. During this interview, we really dive into how having a significant purpose can really drive you to do really remarkable things. It was really incredible getting to hear from someone who is operating on such a high level with the work he is doing and also is able to use the same skill sets any of us can use for doing the thing. We talk about how sometimes expanding your perspective when you're faced with difficult challenges can really help you overcome anything. For over 25 years, he's helped startup and mid sized companies with technical development, management and research. He started PI Energy to enable solar power to the entire global market. And his impactful journey has only just begun. His story is inspirational and motivating. Welcome Phil Layton to the show. Hey everyone. I am so excited. I have Phil Layton here today. Hey, Phil.

Hi. Thank you for having me on the show.

Yeah, I'm so glad you were able to make it. I'm super excited to be able to talk to you more about what you're doing and your story.

Thank you.

Yeah, I would love you to start off and just tell the listeners more about you.

Well, thanks. I am a physicist and an attorney. My focus has always been on clean energy. So my whole career has been moving forward in some way with trying to get the planet towards a more environmentally friendly source of energy. And that came about from growing up in Southern California. And I'm using this as kind of a point in time where I really realized this was an issue is I lived in Irvine and I was looking out one day after a rainstorm and realized there was mountains that I'd never seen before. And I had lived there for like three or four years and it just was all the smog had built up and how much More pleasant the environment was when you can see mountains and can actually see farther than a few miles. So the rest of my career I started off working in what's called pulse power plasma physics, which is controlled fusion, which is the holy grail of renewable energy. It's just we've always been working on it for the past 50 years. We're almost there. But that's been the case for many years now. So it's a very tough problem. And I end up moving into actually satellite systems. And I worked on the Mars rover, the James Webb telescope, Cassini and some other satellites and other missions as a radiation effects physicist. But it was something that is really fun. But I still was missing my end purpose in life. And I think from a philosophical point of view, it's always for me better to have a purpose that all your hard work has some goal that is good. During this time I also was in the Navy Reserve. I went one time we had. There was a big downturn in the, in here in San Diego and I ended up going to law school too. But the purpose for that was to help to understand how to do a startup actually and some of the ancillary things you need for a startup, including understanding IP protection contracts, corporate formation. So meanwhile I've been looking at different types of ideas for moving renewable energy. I looked at fuel cells, different crazy concepts for solar pv, integrating all these things. But I finally came up with an idea that I thought at first was a little crackpot. But I talked to some of my colleague friends at two professors that one was at UCSD and one at USD and they go, wow, I can't tell you it'll work, but it really has a possibility. But really if this does work, it change solar pv, so you got to try it. So I was able to get some funding and build a prototype and it actually produced a little power, which was amazing because there was no semiconductors. Most solar PV uses semiconductors. This was something you can just stamp on Mylar. So it had some very interesting properties. We were able to raise funds. I was able to start the company on this, which is pie energy. And away we went, we had funding. It was just a little challenge with that particular design. We never can make it small enough. So as with all startups, you have to kind of scratch your head and think maybe this we can't manufacture it, we're going to have to modify our design. And so that's the beginning of how we started the company and kind of how I got there. But over the course of the last 10 years, we've iterated our design to become more manufacturable and less of a technical risk. And we are now on starting to produce large area samples that are producing power. And we have a method for manufacturing these at high scale. And the exciting part is, could really take solar new levels. You can start putting solar on places that you couldn't use before. Right now solar is sitting on roofs, solar farms, some carports, but that's really all that they're economically viable. But if you want to expand renewable energy, you need to look at all these other unused surfaces. One of them is really exciting for me is on electric vehicles. You put on a bus, electric bus. It's got a large surface area. If you can wrap it around there, then you can extend the miles. In San Diego, on average about 30 to 40 miles, which is almost most of say a typical school buses range. And then now you have, coupled with the electric battery on that bus, you could have an emergency power supply that would just drive up and you, you know, during one of these fires or an earthquake or a hurricane is this portable device that can power locally some place when the grid's down, but at the same time it's useful as a school bus during the school year. So that's kind of, I put in more than probably you asked. So that was a little intro and, and a little bit about kind of our philosophy.

But yeah, no, I love, I love that there's so much in there that I am just like, oh my gosh, so excited about to talk about. Because I know when we were talking right before we started recording, I was sort of saying what doing the thing was, you know, and I just feel like what you just said is the ultimate in doing the thing right. Like you're literally impacting the world, you know, with, with what you're working on.

Ah, thanks. You know, there's always difficult times as we've all gone through and when you have that purpose and I have kids too, you go, I need to leave this as better place. It makes it easier. I think life is very difficult when you're working day to day and you go, if I wasn't here, would it matter? If you feel like you really are doing something that would make people's lives better, then it just makes it easier when you have those difficult times. Yeah.

And I'm just wondering so how it's like, gosh, there's so much in there that's like so, so amazing where number one, I mean the physicist and the attorney kind of like Combination I think is fascinating. How did that come about? How did you decide to do both?

And yeah, so my original plan, when I was in high school, I had all these ideas on the basic physics itself, how matter interacted and it's difficult to explain without. It's really based on this thing called the standard model, which is field based analysis of physics. Anyway, my original goal was to dive in that deep and had some ideas on that. But through going through the PhD program, I realized it's very difficult, you have to find funding. And I kind of stumbled into the pulse power plasma because that's the. My advisor, I mean, there was an advisor that had some funding and could sponsor me. And so you really took whatever position was available. So I kind of realized that was I wasn't going to, you know, that there was a deviation from that. And the other interesting thing is, so after grad school I went in and I started working essentially for a Department of Defense was my first post grad school job. And with the end of the Cold War and then kind of like I go, it wasn't my intention to do that type of work. So it was kind of starting to go a deviation from my underlying purpose. I go, what's my purpose in life? Why am I doing this? I'm working in this facility and it's isolated. And then all of a sudden the Cold War ended, which was great, and they laid everybody off in San Diego, so nobody had jobs. So Anna Lark beforehand, I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I just applied to law schools, just not really intending to go, but then kind of thinking it'd be kind of fun to start a company. So it was kind of in that you come out of school and you're trying to find your way and it's not always the same way you expect when you come out. I was going to be a physics professor and do research and that didn't happen. So I ended up going to law school. I had a good time because law school, nothing's black and white and there's a lot of back and forth. It was a much more diverse population too than physics. Tended to be very male, in fact, entirely male dominated. And it had a very different perspective. But it was. Law school was much more broad, it was more diverse, people had different ideas. It was a lot easier than physics. So it was kind of fun. I enjoyed it. So I think it's good because you get a little diversity in your perspective of how you look at a problem.

Yeah, I love that it completely rounded out your experience to give that 360 degree view of what you needed to be where you're at now.

Yeah. And then also kind of at that time, a guy in the Navy asked me to join in the Navy Reserves for my technical background. And so I got a chance to see what it was like as a Navy officer too. So that was an interesting experience. I very much enjoyed it. I had the opportunity to serve. It also was a little terrifying when all of a sudden there was a war and I possibly could go. It was kind of like, wow, I didn't even think about that. I always thought that we'd been peacetime for so long. But it also kind of provided another perspective on life and also a way to learn how to manage people. So a lot of that was project management for engineering projects. Yeah.

And can you walk us through a little bit more on that night or the day in Irvine when the rainstorm happened? How old were you? What was going on for you at that moment?

I was I somewhere in. I don't know the exact moment, it was probably sometime in winter, but I was about 16 and I was already by that time wanted to be a physicist. I had ideas for the way the basic mechanisms of matter. And so I'd always was by that time focused on science, but it really was. I think I've done a lot of backpacking and hiking and I really feel better being out in nature. And the more plants, the more I can experience the mountains. I feel better. And you know, you don't quite realize that it takes a little circumspection to realize, oh, what? What is. Where do I want to be? I want to be like, if you go on vacation. I really like being out in nature. And it took a while to realize that, but you're. I was stumbling through all this, the challenges you have in high school in band and stuff, but then just realizing, wow, I really feel better when I can see the mountains. I feel better when the air is clean. Besides, you're not coughing or have some allergic reaction. So it was enough of an impact on me that I always remember that just looking out and going, oh my God, that's fantastic. It's kind of like you see this view just out there. And the LA Basin, which includes Orange county, is rather large. And your perspective, if there's smog, is inward. But if you start seeing for a long distance, it changes your perspective too. You start looking out and going, wow, I can see for a while I can see myself, how I am in this large cosmopolitan area, but also that interface with nature out there. And that's what I really like. I want more trees, I want more of that. So that's kind of, I don't know, that moment in time. Yeah.

And I think what's really great about that too is you have an actual like true visual of that purpose. And you can see it, you know, because I'm sure you're, you're. Whether it's consciously or unconsciously you're referencing back to that. So through all the. I can imagine all the stuff that happens as you're trying to build this, you know, everything that you're doing now, that's gotta be in the back of your mind of what the future that you see, you know, for.

Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's. And you, you feel better. You just feel better when you, you have clear air and you feel better when you know, whatever impact you're having on the environment, you go, okay, I'm not really. If I bike into work, I feel good about myself, but I also feel good that I'm not making the planet worse. So there's nothing like having multiple benefits from something. So you're cleaning the air visibly, but you're also, from an environmental standpoint, helping the planet. And if you're looking at renewable energy, after you pay the upfront infrastructure cost, it's free. So that's nice too.

So I'm so curious because there's so many people that have an idea for something and you have the most magnificent. Right thought and you mentioned it to your friend and he was like, oh, that's actually not a bad idea. And then what gets you to actually. Then to move forward with it? Like what. How did that work?

Yeah, so I actually had another idea 10 years before that. So I've done this before. And in that case it was collaboration and that was this virtual keyboard where you use your. This is before they had smartphones, but there's a way to make your camera on your phone see where your fingers are. And then you could type and have a full size keyboard. Where back then you had those. Just the numerical keypad. That was a simpler and less risky because it was really just electronics and some software and some optics. But that we actually formed it. I went out, talked to lots of companies, Logitech, Microsoft, Nintendo. And I learned a bit from that. And we actually built a prototype and I used all the stuff I learned in law school about negotiation and IP and licensing. And I learned about one of the things is a lot of its timing. So we got very close. We had the deals started to be struck and then the dot com bust and everybody just panicked and stopped investing. So that gave me a little bit of an idea of how difficult the process is. So when I. And back then I was still trying to do renewable energy, I was hoping that would help fund my renewable energy concepts. But during that time I've been reading papers, trying stuff, they're all theoretical on it until you actually build something. So a lot of it was, I think about something, I go, wow, this is a great idea. Then you sleep on it and go, oh, there's a problem. Then you read some papers and you find out somebody else already tried that. That happens a lot. You think you have a really clever idea, but somebody else has tried it and you go, oh, that was their problem. Maybe I can improve it. And then. And so it's kind of this iterative process. Rarely have I found that there's just a single aha moment. And to get to, hey, I need to go out for funding. I wanted to have other people's opinion, people that were technically knowledgeable before I commit to a family and my time and everything. That's why it was important to get some of my colleagues. And usually with anything new, nobody can tell you it's going to work because nobody's tried it. And that's an important thing to note is a lot of times investors say, well, how do I know it's going to work? You don't, because nobody else has tried that method. And it may be slightly different from what somebody else is doing, but until somebody actually tries it, there's so many variables that you can't know without actually trying it and building something that it's very difficult for somebody, even in a technical field to really say whether it's going to work. So there is a bit of just saying, okay, it seems like it's going to work. But anyway, you have to really, there's a commitment there. And then raising funds is a whole nother process because you have to convince other people that this will work and you have a plan and it can be commercialized. So it was good to have that previous experience. And I had also worked at a startup when I was in the space industry. We had started from a very small group and then successfully got purchased. So I had some idea of what the challenges are from a startup perspective. Yeah.

And I love how it just shows that, you know, for the listeners that maybe haven't done the thing or that are doing multiple things, it's really just being okay with something not working because what you're learning from that thing is going to be what's going to help you do whatever the thing is, that is your thing, you know, so.

And then a lot of it's iterative. You, things don't work out the first time, and you just can't say, okay, that's it, packing up. Sometimes you go, oh, let me think about that a little bit. And you go, ah, I think I know how we can fix that. We'll try this. And a lot of you see these large projects, there's always something that goes wrong. And in that moment, it looks like that's game over. And a lot of times this is the same thing. I think when you're, you're doing, I know in grad school we'd have these hard physics problems. I have no idea. And you feel like in that moment it's not solvable, you can't move forward. But a lot of times just letting something sit, sleep on it. And I used to do this in grad school. I would read all the really hard problems, try them out on Friday night, and then I go to the beach, play volleyball. And by Sunday it was like I was very clear and I was able to solve those. But having that time and that distance and the ability to maybe exercise allows you to look at everything from different perspectives and to relax your brain and come back to a hard problem. A lot of times by seeing it in a new way, you can look at it and solve what seemed to be insurmountable at that time.

Yeah. And I actually, I think you just helped kind of add another formula that I haven't had specifically before, which is looking at things from different perspectives. And I think that concept of just even where you got the, you know, where you did law and then the physicist and those, the combination of the two really gave you this rounded out version of yourself to be able to kind of tackle the things you're tackling now and then with what you're saying in terms of the, you know, trying out the virtual keyboard and then being in the space industry, it's like all of these things gave you all this, this different variety of views, you know, that are now helping impact what you're doing now.

Yeah. The other thing is, I'm also a musician, but I'm not saying that to say, oh, wow. But it's also helpful because it's another way your brain can get so focused on something that it sees only one path. For me, what's helpful is stepping back, maybe playing some music when you have something Difficult because it's another way to kind of change your perspective by listening to music. It helps, you know, motivate you, but it also is a perspective. So the more of those different thought methods for thinking about anything, I think helps.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I'm glad you brought that up because that does kind of, kind of keep into that line of being able to distance yourself and then also almost like work different parts of your brain in order to, to separate yourself a little bit more from what it is. So then you can solve whatever it is that is still out there.

Yeah. And there's so many times I think everybody has this something seems insurmountable, you're in a problem that's very difficult. And I think it's both. Could be technical, it could be personal interactions, having some perspective where you look at it from the outside, from the top down, or a higher level where you step back from something and then you might see, oh, it's not as bad as I thought. And just having that, because your brain sometimes can get so focused that 4 o' clock in the morning you go, oh my God, it's not solvable, or I have this horrible problem going on and it's so insurmountable. And then you wake up, you go for a run, you do something different, you go, that's not as bad as I thought.

Yeah, it's funny, I've had that 10,000 foot view in business before, but I never actually looked at it in personal. And I think it can be applied to so many things now that I'm thinking about it. But yeah, I love, and I love the word insurmountable because as I'm thinking of the things that you're managing and how high level your brain actually operates on to be able to do the stuff that you're doing. I just think that's really great, great advice.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. It's funny because, you know, having kids, they're all struggling through all. They start from this knowing nothing, and then they go and they're trying to read and they go, oh my God, it's so hard. And, and they think it's. They're going through all those same struggles that, you know, we started off with when we're younger. But then you realize you have that perspective, you go, oh, you'll be able to read. You know, I know I was able to accomplish this. Or, you know, they're having a difficult math problem and you'll eventually get it, it's okay, you don't have to solve it now. And if you get a bad grade, it's okay. You just have to make it through. But it's interesting seeing that as being a parent where to them they haven't had that chance to see everything, you know, all the struggle and the successes and stuff like that. So it's very difficult for them to see the possibility of success. And knowing that you have that possibility and the more you have those go, okay, I know it's tough now, but I know I've done this before and success is there, it's possible. And sometimes that's what it is. It's imagining the possibility of success. And you may not have the path up the mountain, all the steps, but you know, you can get this part and you know where you want to go, and that helps you get there. And that's one of those struggles. And for kids, it's the same thing. If they can see that, it makes it easier for them to try.

Yeah, I really love that. That is so good. So through all of this, what is kind you're really curious on how does your risk assessment work, like for you internally, when you're doing something new and you're taking something this big on?

Yeah. So there's from personal. It was. You really can't completely assess all your risks up front. But now, as running a company, I'm responsible for the risk of all my shareholders and all my team, my employees. When we make a decision to move forward, they need to be convinced that we're on the right path. So most of our technical moving forward, if we feel like the path we're on is not the best path. But there is other paths. We explore them. You take a look at what other paper, you do some research. Then I present that to my technical group. If I can't convince them or if it's their idea, they can't convince the rest of the team, then it may not be the right path to move forward. But we keep looking at some of these. So I think it's an iterative step. So from a technical standpoint, the first thing is I need to be able from the team needs to feel like that's the best path forward. And we've had that happen a couple times when we feel we've run into a challenge and we deviate, we modify the design, we look at something go, okay, somebody has a really great idea, but you need to really look into it because there's always some gotcha. You go, oh, yeah, that'd be great. But we can't manufacture that or how are we Going to move to the next step and you don't have to have all the answers, but you need to be able to have a path. So I see from some stuff you have to convince your team that it's the right path. So it's kind of a group collective. The other part from a business perspective is we have a board and they need to be able to understand that path forward. So from a risk assessment, you have a lot of team members that help you decide that they each have a different skill set. If you can bring your team and say, yeah, I think that's a good path, then I feel like you have a lot less risky. Not that the risk is gone, but using all the resources and sometimes it's looking outside of your group. You don't want to have a vacuum. Make a decision based on. Everybody in the team has been thinking about this in this way. We also have technical advisors and a lot of times it's very helpful to talk to somebody that's not in the day to day operations. And we also have business advisors. You kind of bounce it off. The challenge is they aren't also they don't have all the details. It's very difficult to bring somebody up to speed with all the details. But at least if they can go, I think that's a good idea. I think that's the right path. So that's kind of the way I look at moving forward on something that's new and how to minimize the risks associated with the decision.

Yeah, yeah. I love that. You're basically getting this collaborative view, but then also being able to bring in extra people as you kind of feel is necessary based on whatever it is.

Yeah.

So what do you think's been the hardest thing for you? Just in regards to doing the thing? I'm just thinking of everything you've done like, and you're playing at such a high level too. What's been the hardest thing about it?

Huh? That's a good question. There's always, I think there's two parts to that is one is when you have a difficult. A Roadblock. The Roadblock could be technical, robot could be funding. The Roadblock could be anything like that. Your first gut reaction is, oh my God, we can't get past that. Overcoming that initial the shock of how am I going to move forward? This is really tough. Can we do this? And not making a gut reaction out of that and a gut decision. I think I've learned that a lot of times sitting on one of those hard problems. This happened early days in Physics grad school, they give you these really hard problems that would take pages to solve. But just starting off some of them, you go, I have no idea how to start this. And it's just that emotional. I don't know how to move forward and this can't be done. So those I think are the hardest thing. It's that inertia of moving forward on something that doesn't seem solvable or. And I think you can. People have had this, you have that. The personal, you can have it business, you can have technical. But overcoming that and just saying, okay, it'll be okay, I'm going to sit on this for a while. And this, you know, nobody's going to die if I don't solve this right now. So I think that's probably the hardest thing is emotionally getting over that and letting something sit. I'm more driven, so I want to solve stuff immediately. So it's just letting it sit, giving it a day, sleep on it, go run, go do something, go bike. Just to let something sit, have some time to look at it from a different perspective.

That is so good.

So good.

So if you had one piece of advice to give the listeners on doing the thing, what would it be?

I think a lot of it is persistence. If. Oh, actually there's a couple things. One, find something that you enjoy doing and find a purpose. If you have a purpose, you're going to have times when things aren't going so well. If you're doing something that really has no purpose, be it a job and you can't find that purpose, it's very hard to motivate you during those difficult times. But if you feel like what you're doing is good, and I think when I'm saying good, if, if you feel like you're giving a gift or it. You always feel better when you're giving a gift than actually receiving. So it's the same thing is if you're doing something beneficial that will make people's lives better. If you're a doctor or a nurse and you help somebody feel better, you feel better yourself. It also makes it easier in those times when it's really challenging to move forward and keep moving forward. I have kids that it's the same thing. They have those difficult times. My elder son was saying that when he was doing just problems, he's actually just graduated from material science, he's working a job. But having something real gave you a purpose. It made it easier to do those difficult things. Things. So if you're going to do the do the thing. You should have a purpose behind it. Why are you doing that?

Yeah, yeah, that is so good. And then can you speak a little bit more to persistence? Is that just really connected to the purpose?

I think that helps with it. The purpose helps it. It's understand persistence is important because most things that are hard, especially some like what we're doing. Hard tech is hard because, you know, the hard problem, meaning it comes from the word hardware, but it's actually also relevant. The hard part is when you're building something or doing something very difficult, you're going to run into a lot of problems. Nothing in life, especially when you're building something or you're trying to do and that pertains to anything that's difficult, requires persistence, because if it was really easy, somebody else would have done it. And I think the things that are sometimes worth doing are very hard. With persistence, it's more than just pushing forward. It's understanding your own, how you deal with problems, but also our fallibilities. What keeps you from moving forward? When you run into a difficult problem, how can you best keep moving forward? By taking care of yourself. A lot of it is taking care of yourself, understanding your emotional states when you run into a hard problem. And then how can you motivate yourself? Everybody has challenges and there's always somebody that's had a worse challenge than you have. For me, that's getting out. I bike to work a lot. I go out and exercise. Doing that, looking forward to that, looking for why I really appreciate this opportunity I have to do something good. Those type of things help you emotionally say, okay, I can do this, I'm going to keep moving forward. Having a good family support helps a lot too. But having all these things that help support you when you're having those roadblocks in front of you to keep reminding that there is something good that's there. This is possible, you can do this, you know all that. It's building that support to keep that perseverance moving forward when things are more challenging.

Yeah, that is so. That is so good. I'm picturing like, would you do it on a. On a, like a. I'm getting technical now, sorry. But just like on a sheet that says like, this is what I'm doing when I do this, or is it just something more of like a knowing, do you think?

Yeah, I think it's more known. So when there's a technical difficulty, usually you go down and say, did anybody else run into this beforehand? And that takes the discipline of reading lots of papers. And sometimes we actually found. One time where we're looking, we didn't find anything. And nobody has run into this problem. And we found that it was one word. Everybody was calling this problem a hillock. And then papers just flowed out of nowhere. And it was like, this is fantastic. But up to that point, it just felt like we just tried things and tried things, but we just had to keep persevering. But a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about, how do you keep your perseverance? Is just a habit you build. At least for me. Doing exercise is good because you sit down. I notice I sit on front of a computer and I feel like I can't think as well. I can't think outside the box. I'm just stuck. I can read a paper and get other people how they addressed it, but then I have to get up and move. So it's just kind of stuff, high level stuff that is kind of philosophical saying, okay, I'm stuck, get up and move, I'm stuck. I need to. You just feel too tired or whatever, just put it away. It's okay. It's 4 o'. Clock. Yeah. Normal days ends at 5, 30 or 6. But I'm not making any progress and it's better just to get some rest. So the kind of philosophical approaches to something like that, when you run into a roadblock, but when we as a team move forward, each individual will look at how to address it. And then we get together and do some brainstorming. Then you have to write it down, because if you have an idea, it won't be as clear the next day. And you write it down, you look at it, you put down, where did you get your resources or your backup material? The papers. And it's a very iterative process in that case. But you really need to document it because solving problems, at least technically, a lot of times it's over multiple days and multiple people. And you have to have the ability to share that information and also remember what you have. I've also noticed that we'd work on something and six months later go, didn't we work on that one thing? It was obvious back then that we thought we'd remember it, but you wouldn't remember where you got it because you're working on so many things. So writing is an important part or documenting some of your concepts.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. So I know we talked about PI energy a little bit in the beginning. I just thought we could kind of go there again. And what if you're if you're able to talk about like what you're your where you're at now with it and what the. What people can look forward to.

Yeah. So we're still in development but we have made a lot of exciting progress actually in the last couple of months. The goal is to have a solar PV that can go more places and use solar. The way not to compete with the current solar PV but although we could eventually but is to use solar where we're not and we should be like on electric vehicles, buildings that can't put it on because they can't support the weight or these fire code offsets but just expand solar. There's a market out there and we've actually gotten a lot of interest from outside organizations and companies that have specifically told us hey if you could build that we would love it. On this application I didn't even know about but right now what we've been building is we have a manufacturing plant that actually is at a university that allows us to build our prototypes. We actually have a couple different places we build on. It's not just that place, but this allows the majority of the manufacturing. But we're starting to build on 5 inch wafers. We've been improving our. Everybody wants to know the efficiency now but it's very dynamic. Last week is different from today really. The end goal is sometimes we build material and there'll be a material improvement that doesn't correlate directly to efficiency. But we've been making some very good improvements on each one of these layers. And we're right now able to produce these 5 inch ones which is about the size of the cell level solar PV that most people see in modules. Modules being the big panels you see out there. They're compilation. You add all these individual cells, you tie them together and then you get a panel. We have a path for making those, but what we're right now doing is we need to integrate all those. The new technology which is an ultra thin film crystalline silicon, the same material you see on the modules. So they're non toxic. We use less materials, less energy to manufacture it and it can go more places. So that's kind of a short version of what our end goal is and what the material capabilities are. But we have a path with this place to actually make pilot which is to make a lot of these and demonstrate it on say a electric school bus. So we're in that that part where we're improving our efficiency. So we can then get to the pilot demonstration. So we're not at Pilot where we can send this out and show people it working, but that's our next goal. Biggest challenge is fundraising. So we're, you know, that's the, to bring in the resources to move this forward. Is what we're doing half of or a large part of what I need, I'm doing along with some of our team members and keeping the development moving forward.

Yes. So with that, if people are interested, if they're hearing this and like wow, I want to be involved in that. Is there, do you have an investment page that they can go to or.

Is that so we have just completed a crowd equity funding. We will move forward with more private funding later. And so at the moment you can learn more about the company and at least understand it on our webpage which is pie energy.com, p I e n e r g y.com and when we move forward with our next round of funding then those people, you know, people can learn more about us, ask questions, they can send us some questions and if that seemed right for them, they want to participate, we will, you know, they, they'll have the best ways to contact us. And until we actually have that open, we won't have equity funding open at this time. But in, in the future we will.

Yeah. I like the idea of them just being able to go to your website and then sign up on that interest less to at least be involved in what's going on, whether they want to be an investor or a user.

We've had a lot of people saying hey I'd love to. The other part is there's some companies we've had people that are doing RVs, mobile homes, emergency power supply for island nations have been contacting us actually internationally. We've gotten locations that have a lot of oil money and they want to go renewable because a, it provides more jobs in those locations. But it also they understand the impact of what their oil and they know the oil is going to run out. So we've had a lot of people that contact us that way through our website that I'd never, that have applications that I'd never known about. So it's actually very interesting to hear some of the ideas that people have by just looking at, hey, if you had this ability, if you can do a flexible non toxic something that's cheap enough to wrap around a lot of surfaces, what could we do?

Yeah, that is so cool. It's cool when it kind of takes over its own legs, you know where you're.

Yeah, it's not one person It's a collective. There's a lot of smart people out there and it's really exciting to hear their ideas about where it can go. And those collaborations where people reach out to us have been. One of the fun things about the crowd equity is I've had more people reach out to me than I was had in the past and there's a lot of great ideas and concepts. So it's actually been kind of fun to hear it.

So cool. Well, it sounds like really. And I like that you're really open minded where you do take people's ideas in and you're flexible and open to that, which I really think is great. I think it's great. Well, it was so wonderful having you on, Phil. Thank you so much for taking the time and doing this with me. I'm excited to. It's funny, sometimes when I do these interviews I get even more excited to listen to it back because you just shared so many good nuggets that I can't wait to get into even more.

Oh, fantastic. It was a lot of fun. I enjoy talking with you.

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