The Key to Accommodate Demands of AI-Driven Computing? Innovative Cooling Solutions and Higher Power Densities

This is straight straight straight out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of straight out of Crumpton. I'm Gabby Bar, and I am joined by Mr. Greg crumpton. Greg, how are you? Gabby doing great today. It's been a fun morning. Had a lot of fun stuff going on, some work, some personal, dogs barking, you know, just kind of a normal crazy crumpton household, but things are well. I'm looking out the window this morning. The absolutely beautiful Carolina Blue Sky. So it's gonna be a great day. We've got a gentleman joining us today that I have been this is kinda crazy, but I was thinking about it. Yesterday afternoon, actually, I was driving and thinking about this morning. We have a story that, that I'm gonna tell. Or day one will about a traumatic instant that occurred to our country, and we were together when this happened. So we go back at least to two thousand, and I know a one. But probably two thousand. But we're gonna talk about that moment in my life that I'll never forget. And, some other fun stuff where we don't get too heavy with fun day. Looking forward to it. I am excited to introduce David Kid. He is a data center professional and he works with security and compliance is what you might call an expert in those fields. David, how are you doing today? I am wonderfully well. I hope you are too great to be with you. Great to have you. We go back a long ways as I kinda eluded to. I'll never forget the the day that I'm talking about, which was nine eleven. And where we where you and I were that morning. Hard to believe that it's been so long ago, but it seemed like just yesterday that that occurred You were hosting a local seven by twenty four chapter meeting in the vacant, what turned into Charlie two data center for P ten way back when. Does my name start me well? We had just gotten started. I mean, that was our first year in operation. In the Charlotte Data Center. And that second floor data center suite there was, was still unoccupied. That's how early in the stage of the business we were. We thought, well, we've got this huge open space. Seven by twenty four exchange Caroline is looking for a a place to hold an event. Just get it going. We had a panel discussion going on up front. Good turnout. Good crowd of folks. Came in there. I was sitting on the panel for the panel discussion, and I can guarantee that no one in attendance that day remembers a word. Any other said on that panel discussion because very quickly the day completely transformed from where I was sitting, I just saw everyone's pagers going off that tells you a little bit about the era that we're in that you were wearing pagers. Gabbi, a pager is a device people wore on their belt. That alerted them when we got a message. I know what a beeper is. It was an upgrade from the stone tablets and abacus that we used in the day to day. Very quickly, all of the banking folks that were getting the alerts, particularly, that were in attendance, you know, Charlotte being a big hub. You know, everyone has their stories that day and that's where Greg and I were and very quickly finding out where I had family in downtown DC. I had right next to the FBI building actually, and I had a family in the World Trade Center that day and and so many others have have connections to that day. Being in the mission critical space, all of us there, you know, it very quickly turned into lessons in not only high availability and mission critical systems and all, but more importantly, it was a human story because that is the most important part of everything that we do is how we take care of each other. It was an extraordinary day, and when we shared it's one of those deals, and and I felt this way, and I may have said this before in the podcast, but it's kinda like the day that I lost my parents. I was fortunate to be with both of my parents when they passed holding their hands and talking to them. And it's one of those things I never wanna do again but there's no way I would ever want to have missed it either, you know, because it was so impactful. And Mark Hurley, who's still a friend of mine to this day, I remember Mark being on the panel with you. And I remember I was looking at him because I was not on the stage with you guys or or upfront. And I was just sitting there in the audience. I remember hurley looking at his pager. And then he I think he leaned over to you and and said something, and then you got up and addressed the crowd. There were a lot of banking people there. A lot of financial people that had fiduciary duties to their company, but more so, I remember the human feeling. And I remember, I called Connie from your parking lot, I believe. This is probably now going on ten o'clock. The second plane had hit. And I remember talking to her on the phone, and I'm like, I don't know what to do other than just come home. I don't know what else to do. There there's we may need to be really mobile and really flexible to help some people. Our business was data center infrastructure support. I didn't know what was gonna happen. So we needed to kinda be all hands on deck for that. But then on the human side, man, that's like the biggest gut punch you'll you'll ever wanna feel that just got delivered. Kind of a weird day, but when I think about it, and we had Dave Jones on this podcast, like, number three in our series, and now we're a hundred and ten or whatever. But he was first, and we talked about it a little bit that day too of how Pete ten was a fresh company as airtight was, and you not only have all the human stuff going on that you got a new company and you're still trying to find your c legs as a company and then, you know, this thing happens. But a day to remember and a day to honor for sure. Glad to be with you that day if I had to be somewhere. Well, thank you. It was quite a day for all of us. But like you said, the the key to all of it in the end, especially with the advantage of of having some distance and time is you realize the human story is the most important part of it. The things we do in business are important. They they pale in comparison. I mean, here we are twenty three years later, still talking about one moment in time, you know. So I think that's an adjustment to to friendship and the bonds that are created. And I don't know that that was our bonding moment, but that certainly strengthened it if anything. So It was one of the anchors in the story to be sure. I'm a throw a little levity into the situation, but I I just could not address that because it's a big day in my life. With you. You said this a while ago before we started recording. We have done a lot of fun stuff together. We've created. We've torn up. We've torn down. We've figured out stuff at three AM. I mean, we've done all kinds of crazy stuff. I love that through it all. You know, we've been able to be customer vendor, customer partner, but more so friends because friends take care of each other in the right way. And that means I do right by you in business. You do right by me in business, and we still maintain our very clean friendship, meaning there's nothing weird. I don't owe you anything. You don't owe me anything other than the mutual respect that we have for each other. There's no quid pro quo involved on anything. We worked, you paid straight up, you know, which is how I wish all life was, but I'm unfortunately, it's not that clean. I would be a bigger simpleton than I am if I believe that to be true, but it's just been so fun to go through all these iterations. I still have a picture, and I I look at this picture. It's a physical picture, you know, like printed on paper. Of me taking a picture of my watch, and it was this orange timex watch that I really liked. It was twelve o five AM, and we had just voted up a twenty ton portable cooling unit onto a record to take from Charlotte facility to Raleigh facility because there was a failure. Those were great machines until it rolled off the loading dock somewhere. I forgot where that term. But with moments like that, I think solidify relationships both in a business sense and and a personal sense because you for me, excuse me, I'm able to tie that back to doing the right thing, being honorable, doing what you say you're gonna do. All those traits that I think make up good human character and that I work hard to I fall short some days, but I work to be that guy, you know, to deliver. And those little moments, man, they just mean the world to me, you know, I felt like I was doing the right thing for the right reason for the right people. Through a series of those things, you build twenty plus year relationships and You recently, I called you or or emailed you or touched it. I forget what and said, hey, I've got a group of college students that I would love to get exposed. I'm I'm working with this group called the nomad Futures. And we're trying to showcase the structure and the jobs and infrastructure and the life and career that people can have in the data center environment. I called you and said, hey, I've got this group of kids that we would like to bring through a facility and kinda showcase. What is a data center? Really? People hear about it and It's like, okay. I've got this magical device in my hand, and I've pressed this magical button and magic habits. You know, for people that are in the trenches, it's not magic. It's a lot of stuff. It's networks. It's power. It's cooling. It's latency and lack of and all of the things that make up that. And you were so kind to to let us bring a a group through there and you actually did the tour. Forgot where I was, but I wasn't able to go. Just that kind of building the relationship where you could look at somebody and say I'm trying to build something for the future. Will you help me? And you immediately jumped on that. That's a preface to what do you see our world evolving into from a human side of being able to understand function in a data center infrastructure environment. How do we tie more people to it and bring in the conversation of what do you do for a living other than press a magical button. How's that for a ramble? First of all. That's a wide open door. So now that you wound me up, Gabby's gonna be your job to say, okay, Ray it back in. We started in the data center business, and I remember a good friend of mine that I've known over thirty years now. He gave me a call, and he said, I'm getting involved with something I think you you ought to check it out. It's something that Dave Jones is is working on and getting started up as well. What kind of business is it? I can't really explain it to you yet because I'm still figuring it out, but I think it's something you wanna be a part of. Now you guys were still working in telco then. Right? I was in the telco world, and I knew Dave Jones from telco. When I was with a a company down in in South Carolina, building up competitive local exchange carrier operation and long distance business. I I handled all of the operational systems and brand technology work for the company. The consultant that we brought in was State Jones helping, you know, put the the plan together for a big part of the business. I've gotten to know him there. And everyone in Telco, and especially in the Carolinas, knows knows Dave Jones. So that's how I first became acquainted with him and he was a the co founder of Pete ten. That was one of the reasons I knew that it was something to check out. You know, first of all, Frank Mabley who spoke to me about it was someone that that I knew for a very long time and and trusted and and was very close to personally and professionally. But, on top of that, knowing that it was something that Day Jones was building means it's something that, that I'd wanna be a part of because I knew his character and the culture of a business that he was gonna build. That certainly turned out to be true, the character of the organization and the people that that came together to to build which ultimately turned into really the next wave of technology beyond telecommunications was the commercialization of the internet had taken place. You know, people don't realize that the internet itself dates way back from academia and military and government, but really the commercialization of the internet was still in its infancy. Alright. So you're saying Al Gore was not involved in this? You know what, Al Gore might have had something to do with it when he was in the senate, but it might have been a vote or two. I don't know that he personally turned a screwdriver to make it happen. Alright. Well, we won't contradict the house today. So it was brand new. We were still figuring out what problems we could help people solve. Eventually, as it, you know, started, it was a time when I knew all of our customers. And by that, I mean, I knew every individual, not just every customer as a company. That was, you know, really the the ground up where we started. And, of course, the company evolved to be a nationwide entity with with, you know, over forty data centers and thousands of customers in every industry you can, you can possibly imagine. And we started that with the focus being on highly available, highly secure mission critical data center space. Getting that where it's scalable and affordable for businesses. So they're not having to build their own data centers, which is very expensive, or do something that is less reliable and, you know, runs the risk of damaging their business. That was where we started. Over time as we grew and technology changed. The cloud became the next thing, and that's where talk about the magic. You know, what is the cloud? People just go, it's this thing out there. Well, a piece of the cloud, you know, lives in the data centers that we we built and that is just very sophisticated, shareable compute infrastructure and storage infrastructure and connectivity. So that we can take those computing resources and share it among many different customers. That they have that flexibility of, of growing and expanding and scaling their business without having to go out and write a check to buy a bunch of new servers and build that out. They can, you know, turn the virtual dial and and all of us in in the infrastructure business will will make it happen for them. There's so many pieces to it. You know, it's like this big jigsaw puzzle that you see laying on the table that's put together, you know, and that's the magic button press. But if you take one piece out of that puzzle, you don't have the magic. And, you know, being able to to couple all those different topologies together and to make a worldwide cloud, so to speak. Yes. It's it's still baffling to me. I talked to people on other continents in seemingly real time over Zoom or teens or whatever. Yep. And the latency from you saying the word yes to me hearing the word yes is so small that looking at it on the camera, you can't distinguish that latency see because this is real time. And we're traveling undersea cable through switches, converting light to back to, you know, copper to come to my house on back to glass on fiber. I mean, it's just it's absolutely mind blowing. When you look at all of the pieces that are involved in putting together what we now know as the modern internet functionality. And it's just routine in day to day. You and I are both old enough to remember when the local TV stations got the capability to do satellite live broadcast, and they were, you know, boasting about their new live shot one or whatever they would call it to roll that out. And they were very excited to go out and actually be able to do a live broadcast from the courthouse or the scene of an accident or something. That had not been possible previously, and it was revolutionary technology. And the live shot transformed news and arguably that technology led to the twenty four seven news cable channels and news cycle we live in now. Really, when you think about it, that technology was so revolutionary then. Every teenager has a live portable broadcast studio in their pocket. That has potentially global reach that is very powerful technology that come down, and it all comes from things that people have built out. I came to really appreciate skilled trades as I gotten into the data center and mission critical infrastructure business. I came at it from the IT world. When I met you and and your team, I had an awful lot to learn about everything that goes into making those critical systems stay up and right. There's a thing of a good friend of mine data centers, drink electricity and they belt cheap. And at the simplest level, that's what they do. So you've got to keep the power coming in and you've gotta get away to reject that heat because converting all those zeros and ones into something useful takes a lot of power, it generates a lot of heat, and you've got to come up with ways to make sure that it stays on forever. Twenty four by forever is like we we live. I learned a lot about not just how those systems in the mechanical world work and how sophisticated things needed to be from a power standpoint. How everything interacts and becomes almost a single machine in and of itself. The data center is one big machine that you can walk inside. Working from the business from them really the ground up, I touched so many pieces That's how I ended up moving into governance risk and compliance side because I had had touched so many different aspects of the business, you know, the mission critical infrastructure being a part of it when data center commissioning matured, and you got to the point where you actually took a look at every single component compared its performance against submittals and design requirements from the designing engineer and ran every component at its one hundred percent design capability verified performance that everything was back a little like it should be, whether it's power, whether it's cooling, whether it's communications, whether security. And then once all of that is done, you do your integrated acceptance testing where you run it as a single system, and we would put a data center through every conceivable mode of operation, emergency mode, failure mode, recovery mode, all to see what it would experience over ten years of its lifetime, run it up to its full load, what it's eventually going to experience years from now, before we ever put the first customer in. And all of that comes together because of you, people in your team, the critical power systems guys, who figure out everything from the flows of cooling fluid when valves need to be tweaked just so much the control systems that go in to drive all of that, the electrical systems, then integrating that into life safety systems so that the people are safe when you're coming and going from the data center if something unexpected happens. That is an enormous production that takes so many talented people that you just have to pull together, and it's absolutely amazing to watch. When we're, you know, designing and building, operating these these critical systems and keeping people up and running. It's it's really great. You you know what? I find remarkable about it whether we're building a data center or a high rise building or an airport. You know, we've got all this sophisticated machinery and infrastructure and millions of dollars worth of hardware. And it comes down to a handful of people getting around the table. There's this beautiful sequence of things that have to happen. And no matter how sophisticated we get as a entity or as a community, It really comes down to Kim, the engineer sitting there, and it gets down to Greg, the power guy sitting there, and it gets down to Greg, the cooling guy sitting there. Being able to formulate and take all this big stuff, these big ideas, and then make it happen. That's the cool part to me that you know, people are worried about AI and robots taking their life and everything. I'm not worried about that because I've been in enough poop on the fan moments to where a robot is not gonna take that job away from me because You can't. At least not yet, I'll say. Having the human component and the passion to make stuff happen is so integral to me to what we do, skilled trades, and human to human relationship. You just can't do that without that human compassion piece to me. Our passion and mochi or mojo or whatever word you wanna put on, what you have, what Chris Cummings ties up in Raleigh. You know, when the poop is in the fan, do you get your boots on or do you run? If you're not getting your boots on, when it's in the fan, gonna be in a world of mess. Literally. AI is the the big exciting thing right now, and it it's funny to me because I did a research project on artificial intelligence back when I was in college and then we called them expert systems. That, I was working on deciding. At Wofford is our memory serves me. It was at Wofford. Yes. At Wofford College down to Spartanburg with that project, I learned about AI, and I had a joke back when I was working in computer science when I was in in college, that the career I want is the to be the first computer psychologist because at some point, the machines are gonna get so sophisticated they're gonna make decisions that the original programmer say, how did you come up with that? Which is why in the medical expert system that I was designing it, we we came up with a y function. How did you make the decision you made? And I think that's gonna be a a big part of what happens with AI. Yeah. Right now, it's been a long road with AI and we're this hockey stick moment where a very transformative things are are happening very quickly. At the end of the day, it's a lot like the steam engine was the frightening threat, back in the early days of the industrial revolution that, oh, you won't need the logger or the, and the guy with the ax, you know, chopping down trees, the the truth is you still need the people. They'll do some they may be doing something a little bit different than they used to do as industries are created and things change. Things aren't gonna go away. Ai is gonna be one new tool that we create things with. And one of the things we're gonna have to do is create very different data centers with very different, you know, immersive cooling and different power densities and different designs that are are gonna fundamentally transform the neck big thing. I think, you know, as we looked at the internet and cloud computing AI is gonna be really the one of those watershed moments that that transforms the industry. But I agree with you. People are not going away. They're not going to take all our jobs and and make us go away. Just as in the eighties, we were afraid that in the automotive industry as they saw robotics coming in. There's this fear that people were going away. And it didn't happen then. I don't think it's gonna happen now. I look at it as tools and enhancements, but that's just my view. But I just have this weird image Dave a view wearing a white lab coat telling the robot to lay down on the work bench that you needed No couch involvement just to work, but I love that analogy. I hadn't thought about it, but you're right, you know, when you You know, it's kinda like controls programming. If and then, if this occurs, then do this. If this occurs, then do that. But it's somewhere in that thought chain, you have to say, okay. Why did you do that? And then let's get better from that analysis. So that makes total sense when you when you lay it out that way. You almost need to anthropomorphize with the AI when you put it in the role of making decisions or creating a design or a concept, treat it in a lot of the the same ways you would treat an intern or an entry level technician. Okay. Explain it to me. How did you get there? Okay. Great. You've come up with this. Do we know it's gonna do what we intended to? Yeah. We talked yesterday. I think, Gabby, when we recorded yesterday because of a scheduled deal we had, but think we were talking about apprenticeship roles yesterday, and it's almost like an apprenticeship role. You bring somebody in and you show them how to do it. And then the next step is y'all are doing it together. And then the next step is they're taking the lead. And then the last step is, okay, tell me what you did. And then that's where that analysis comes in. Okay. Now that you did that, let's do an autopsy on that process and tell me why you did And then that way you can learn as you, you know, develop. Uh-uh, that's a great way of thinking about it, though, you you laid it out there. And in the same way you eventually get to the point where you trust a an employee or partner or friend to do something because they've shown you they consistently can deliver on on what day they they can do. You just look to the system or tool. You've trained it. You've had experience with it. You know that you can trust and do what you expect. And maybe that even leads to a tiered type question. If you've got a a large language model with all this data at a and maybe there's parts of it that you have access to that like this is a subject matter expert answer. This is an intermediate answer, and this is Gabby and Greg sitting around the card table having a beer guessing answer. So you could have multi answers from AI based on the relevancy or the value of the material they're working from. I don't know. I'm just something that popped in my head. It context matters. Actually, one of the things that's impressed me about some of the large language models in particular is you can ask it to explain a topic at a particular level. For example, just to experiment with things and try things out. I asked chat GPT. Probably was three at the time. Explain quantum physics at an eighth grade level. Saw what it put out. Okay. That's interesting. Then I said, explain quantum physics at an undergraduate physics student level. Came up with very different answers. But the ability to do that is something that was previously unique to a human being. Computers have always been able to you know, regurgitate information, but to take concepts or large volumes of data and then contextualize it, deliver it to a specific audience or in other cases, be able to deliver it to a specific purpose. That's going to be really interesting so that you could say, hey, design, you know, a shiller for this purpose versus that purpose. Yeah. I guarantee you an apartment complex The needs are subtly different from a mission critical data center. Well, if you're designing things on the fly and everything's custom because you have ais doing it. It can take those those contacts into account. I guess I knew that, but I had not heard it explained that well. So that's good info. So everything is all about AI right now. Everything you read, you know, articles or freaking people at my Sunday school class, you you're gonna talk about AI if you have a conversation much beyond surface stuff. For me, I love it because not because of how cool it is, but because of the heat that it generates, because I find that piece fascinating. And you mentioned it a while ago, we turned ones and zeros into to sensible heat that is ejected from the computer. So what do we do with that heat? How do we get it to a neutral location? We have submersive where you're dumping the whole server in either mineral oil or dialect fluid or direct to chip, which I think is the long term solution to cooling. But it it's really interesting, man. When you start thinking about what you and I used to build racks that were, you know, three k w rack was heavy. Back in the day. This is part of what I was thinking through last night. When we started going through the world started going through virtualization of servers. We started having migratory heat in Iraq or in an aisle. That really was fun because you were chasing the unknown and I remember us building hot dog containment down at Charlotte One. I think a lot of it it was a combination of authorization and higher densities growing at the same time, but you never knew where that load was going to land exactly. But watching that evolution And now, you know, we start hearing about, you know, I've got a good friend who works at Dell. And the wattage per chip that they're talking about wanting to roll out and waiting for the world to catch up to figure out what we're gonna do with all that heat is phenomenal compared to what, you know, we started with. You know, how does AI play into that? I think about because you talked about design. So how do we heat our buildings with waste heat from data centers and, you know, building this really used to be co generation plants that we would build on campuses that could heat, cool, water, air, people, heat exchangers out the wazoo to do all kinds of cool stuff. That's really what the data center's becoming to me as a coach implant. We've got a lot of heat. That we can do some really cool stuff with. So I love watching that evolution just because I'm a nerd in that you know, deep sense of data center. But watching the, you know, I still go back to the people that are involved in these facilities and how quickly the operators are having to become savvy, different ways of thinking through things. And you know, rather than having sixteen sixteen cylinder cat generators lined up in the back of the parking lot, Maybe we got some batteries. We're doing all kinds of different stuff. So it's just a really good time for the industry, I think. But watching the people adjust to this and learning new stuff and figuring out how to utilize their skills and being vulnerable enough nowadays to say, Hey, I don't know squat. About solar or storage or or network storage on the data side or, I mean, all these different components. You're starting to see to me, a whole lot less bravado and more collaboration as people begin to realize they don't have to be the all knowing swami They just have to be able to know a bunch of swamis and come together to solve a problem. I think that's the change in because you and I, we we shared at suffering through one particular VP one time who wouldn't give you a lot of runway to make decisions or to make your fingerprint on your organization because he had a certain way and that's the way we're gonna do it. I think that we're seeing that evaporate that mindset is leaving our facilities, and we're bringing in a much more collaborative. I wanna work with Dave because Dave's good at this. I'm good at this. I don't have to know everything because I know Dave and Dave knows a guy. He knows a lady and she knows three other ladies that can help solve this problem. I think we're seeing more and more of that. Are are you dropping me on a dream? I think I've seen some of what you're talking about in a lot of different technology space and and certainly this is one of them. And that's because things have become so complex that you can't be an expert in everything. You have to have other people that you can trust and that you can work with to come together to solve problems. And that's always been where the best solutions come from. I see that that is becoming more and more essential as things have gotten to the point where they change more rapidly than even the best expert can keep up with in every area even every area within their industry. Right. You get alone beyond that. So it's something that is going to be a a net positive I think for the community and, and for people. I agree. I still think about this one data center that had these really cool economizer coils and that we could utilize free cooling, but we never got the opportunity because the mindset was, you don't need to do that. We had built that capability into the model That kind of stuff drives me nuts to this day. The lack of hugging people and as opposed to crossing your arms in front of Well, let's say this is the way we do it because this is the way we've always done it. Changing that mindset can be transformative. Not just to the business, but when especially younger technical people see that. They see an opportunity for their ideas to be accepted. And all of a sudden, you're gonna have creative ideas coming at you that you never would have gotten before. If you just took the the rigid approach of, this is the way we do it. That's the way we'll always do it. No other opinions matter. So if you have those conversations, you break down the silos. And like you said, get everybody in the room to share their expertise, but also recognize no one of us knows everything. You can really come up with some amazing stuff. Now, Dave, I'm reading the book right now. I'm almost through with it. It's called the Culture Code. It's not a new book, but it's it's been out since eighteen or so. But What part of the book talks about how PIPSAR, in particular, does their, a betterment of their films when they produce a film And they have these sessions to where regular old workers come in and critique the film while it's being developed. And the writers, and the producers, and the directors have given I don't know what the right word is, but they have they have embraced having everybody chopped their work up and you can't, as a reviewer, you can't offer suggestions. You can only critique what you see. And I think that's so cool because you're not taking the creativity away from the process because these people who are writing and making the film or the the animation, whatever you wanna call that, they're still vividly creating, but you're also It is kinda like build quality in as you go like doctor Dimming did on the Justin type delivery as opposed to waiting to the end to fix it. You're building quality in and every step. And I've just been really fascinated by that book, because I'm a I'm a culture geek. I love it. I love it more than than yogurt. I'm all about culture. You know, it's an overused word for sure, culture, but you you know it and you feel it and you see it when you go similar and I love my company right now, service logic because when I get to go visit our companies, especially the new ones, I'm going this week down to Fort Myers. And I love walking into one of our new acquisitions, and I don't go right away. I go three or four months after, you know, after the dust has settled with it. But to get a sense for these companies is so cool because you don't have anything already, like, biased in your view. You're just walking in cold and you're able to absorb and you stand there at a service meeting or a a technical safety meeting like I'm going to. And you get to see who's making this company what it is. You get to watch them, you get to hear them interacting with each other. And I just I love the human side of our business and and watching it develop and you know, we're seventy five hundred people now, and we have seventy five hundred brains out there doing what we do. It's just so cool to see that culture of that local company. And but I just think back to a company that saw as a Pixar, you know, they're just opening their self up to say help us get better as we go. Don't wait till the end and poof poo it. I think that's great. Like you said, you you build it into the process you're not elevating the experts because I guarantee you the the animators. They're experts at what they do. They're probably some of the best out there. And when you have other people who are outside of that, making the critique, if you can get past that initial reaction to defend yourself. Which is ego. That's human nature. Yep. But you can get past that you know, you can you can really create some amazing stuff. I think it's amazing that you've got a culture that you've been able to build across seventy five hundred people and and preserve that across the country. That's an amazing thing, and it it comes from exactly what you were talking about with Pixar where people are willing to listen, talk to each other, even if you are the expert, learn something from each other. And share ideas. Well, our company is seventy five hundred strong. There's fifty three or so operating brands, and every one of them are unique. And what's really cool to me is, like, when we do our annual meeting, we have a president that all everybody from these different companies come and everybody gets a little window to speak about their company of what they did last year and and more so looking ahead to the current year or upcoming year. And always leave there knowing that there's fifty three proper ways to do it because we have good companies that make money. They take care of people. They're long, long minded, you know, in game people, but they're all unique. You know, what we do in San Diego is not what we do in Seattle and it's not what we do and you name it. It's different. But it's the the core values are there. And that's people centric and listening and, you know, this group I'm gonna be with this week. I'm so excited because I've never met I've only met, like, three or four of people at the company. You get to go and just absorb what this company's all about, and it's so cool. I I look forward to it. So So I know we could talk for, like, two more hours, but my and yours and probably Gabby's schedule won't allow for that. But I know we could talk because I love talking to you about a variety of topics because you always make my brain light up with different thought process and different different stuff to dig into. So thank you for the the gift of your time and making me now have to go to this book. And right now, a bunch of stuff again before I forget it. Likewise, I always love talking with you and learned a lot from you over the years. And I I greatly appreciate that, and our French Well, it's definitely mutual. It's been fun. I can't wait to see what what the future holds for both of us. You know, it it's just a great time to be alive. Every day is better than yesterday if you don't wake up with dirt in your mouth. So that's always a good So, gabby, here we are. We've had another beautiful hour. I feel so energized. Get out. I'm so looking forward to going to Florida to meet with this group. We have so many cool people. It's just good to get the go immerse and listen and watch and go, wow. How cool is this? So, I'm pumped. I may actually run to Florida. I'm so energized. I may do I'll do a What what was the movie? The box of Chocolate guy? Run. Forest gum. I I may do a Forrest gum run down to to, Fort Myers. I better get my boots tuned up to do that. But now, super excited. Love David. So appreciate his time and willingness to come and reminisce with us a bit and, and more so look into the future. You know, there's a lot to be had and We've got a lot to do, Gabby, to make sure that your current peer group is in good hands before we pull our final final library card out. So we got more to do. Yeah. As as it happens. Yeah. David, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like every time we talk about AI with someone, I'm always, like, mind blown. There's definitely I don't know. Just always new technology and all forever changing and growing and so it's really cool to hear about it from, you know, your perspective and what that looks like for you, especially with, you know, you being directly involved with those data centers and and those processes. So thank you so much for for sharing those thoughts with us for kind of coming on and telling a little bit of your story. And we hope you'll come back and and talk some more later. I'm sure in the very near future, there will be much more AI new updates too. Come on and discuss. That's for sure. And next month, we'll have to get an update. Yeah. Right. Because everything will complete complete. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us in our privilege, and hopefully we can do it again soon. Absolutely. Well, thank you again and ask for all of our listeners Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of straight out of Crumpton. For more episodes like this, don't forget to subscribe through Apple Orthonify Podcasts and don't forget to check out greg crumpton dot com for all of your Greg Crumpton content. This is it is straight straight straight out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton.