Creating Smarter, More Sustainable Buildings with Jon Bolen from Entouch

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Jon Bolen 0:00
People think about getting their technology out at scale. The key is making sure your customer can achieve the promise of the original ROI. And that’s an implementation. Nobody cares how good your technology is, if they can’t use it.

Alexander Ferguson 0:20
Welcome to UpTech Report. This is our applied tech series UpTech Report is sponsored by TeraLeap. Learn how to leverage the power of video at teraleap.io. Today, I’m joined by my guest, Jon Bolen, who is based in the Dallas area of Texas. He’s the CEO at Entouch Control. Welcome, Jon, good to have you on. Alex, thanks so much. It’s great to be here today. Now Entouch Controls, provides smart building technology solutions. The topic for our discussion today is really around energy management solutions for really the mid market and enterprise organizations out there, whether those those business have small buildings or large buildings, it’s being able to provide better management of all the energy usage. I get that right.

Jon Bolen 1:05
Yes, I mean, at the at the end of the day, we’re trying to make buildings much more efficient than they are today.

Alexander Ferguson 1:10
So yeah, being green has come and gone. And I think a lot of people, some people care about it. And other people say, Well, everyone cares about it. So probably I should care about it. But from really like the, I guess it’s the the person you speak to is the building manager or the the building, what’s the title or role usually in the

Jon Bolen 1:32
typically we’re engaging with facilities managers, I mean, we are the leader in energy management solutions for multi site operations. And typically, you’ve got a really harried leader of facilities for hundreds, if not 1000s, of locations. And that’s the person who our message resonates with most, of course, they’re always trying to satisfy the CFO or the CEO,

Alexander Ferguson 1:54
but there’s always love you, they gotta make happy. But they’re the ones that are having to worry about all the buildings that they’re managing. What is what’s the real pain, though? Like, well, what are they What are they facing day to day that you’re seeing constantly and hearing over and over again?

Jon Bolen 2:10
Well, it’s, it’s, it’s really twofold, right? They’ve come to be under a lot of pressure, to reduce their energy spend and have an impact on whatever their organizational organization sustainability goals are, but they also have to drive profitability. So ultimately, what exactly right, so you know, we reduce energy consumption, and we increase operational efficiency, so we can increase site profitability, and then we like to say, so that we can save the planet one building at a time

Alexander Ferguson 2:41
saving the planet 1 billion at night, the, this concept of of being able to cut costs, I mean, that’s, that is either the business makes more money, or, or you reduce costs, and they both need to be happy. Um, and for someone, I’m trying to put myself in a building facility managers role, and their whole focus is in reduce costs, reduce costs, reduce costs, I mean, there’s only so far you can go. So it’s like, what is it? Like, I reduced cost as much as I can? And that’s it?

Jon Bolen 3:14
Well, you know, it’s a, it’s a really great question, because the folks who lead this part of the of our customers businesses are faced with, you have to do this less expensively, you know, day over day, week, over week, year over year, but oh, by the way, do not interfere with our customer experience. So

Alexander Ferguson 3:34
keep everything fantastic and amazing. Just make it cheaper, maybe. Exactly,

Jon Bolen 3:39
exactly. And so historically, what you see, especially with HPC infrastructure, is this sort of misguided approach where we just run it to failure. As long as it’s kind of cool and kind of comfortable, we really don’t want to spend too much money. So we’ll just wait till it really breaks. And what we’re really doing is wasting energy, because it’s inefficient before it breaks. And then when it breaks, the customer experience is horrific, right? Imagine in Dallas in the middle of August, if your favorite shop or restaurant loses the ability to keep it cool. That customer experience is very memorable for all the wrong reasons. And so if you’re using data to one, limit your energy consumption while you’re using that equipment, but also monitor the equipment for performance, you can actually get in front of that. And it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe when it fails.

Alexander Ferguson 4:28
It’s kind of the looking forward approach of it will be cost us last if we can plan for that. But it’s in the moment. But as a facility manager, you just said earlier, you’re having to report to your CFO, etc. So when you’re looking at capital costs, I can imagine it’s how do you show that the value is there is is it very straightforward or is that part of the pain and problem it’s like it’s hard to calculate that capital costs and making efficiency choice Today,

Jon Bolen 5:01
typically, so a couple of things, right? So one, especially when you think of sustainability solutions, we all always tend to think that this means I’m sacrificing and I, in order to be more green, I must be sacrificing something, I have to give something up, I have to take one for the team, I have to use my moral compass to improve, prove the planet, the reality is on energy savings alone, typically, the implementation of our solution will pay for itself in less than two years, on average, across our portfolio, our solution pays for itself in 18 months, we have some customers that are paying for the implementation of the solution in seven months. And that’s that’s just on energy reduction alone, it doesn’t include the operational savings that follow from the implementation of our our solution, the CFO tends to want to look though, at an energy bill for year one, and compare it to year two, and say, Yep, I can see the reduction in energy, and therefore it’s paying for itself.

Alexander Ferguson 5:58
For you, guys, your approach to this, not let’s not get into the whole how just yet, or all the writers the bells and whistles, but how are you addressing this problem.

Jon Bolen 6:10
We address this problem by putting you know what I would consider the most impactful and feature rich control solution in a building in the space. But more importantly, the way we perceive it, is by doing that we’re converting converting the building to a data generating object, right, we are allowing that infrastructure to talk to us share with us how it’s performing, so that we can help you make better decisions about how you manage the building from a comfort perspective, and how you manage the infrastructure of the building from an operational and maintenance perspective,

Alexander Ferguson 6:45
I’m just gonna take a moment here is turning the building into a data, data generating objects data generating object, and we’ve heard about buzzwords like IoT, and big data and all this forever. It’s boring. But I like this, this visual of Alright, we just need to turn this infrastructure, this this item, this asset that we have, and it just needs to tell us more information, we need to understand what it’s feeling what it’s thinking. And that’s really what I guess this future is of smart buildings or being able to be efficient and make things more green, you have to have the data to work with. So that’s basically how you’re trying to address the problem.

Jon Bolen 7:21
Absolutely. Absolutely. And we see, that is the critical first mile, right? The if you want to really deliver on the promise of IoT, then somebody has to put in the first mile to get the data you have, you actually have to connect to it, right? It’s not, it’s not a then a miracle occurs, you actually have to put building controls, and in order to understand what the building needs you to do. What’s the adoption, though?

Alexander Ferguson 7:48
Like, I am curious of statistics, when you look out there, like, I’m not a building management facilitator, but I’m trying to see are all my peers already, they already have adopt this? And now I’m just trying to choose which one or is it is it, it’s still in the early phases.

Jon Bolen 8:01
You know, it depends on who you speak to. And, but, but building technology is really in sort of a to our three Oh, phase, right. So in the early days, you know, a number of people put in some semblance of controls that allowed them, I’ll say sophisticated, localized control. And then there is a wave of controls that allowed you sort of, you know, I’ll just call it over the wire kind of control. But But if we, you know, for those of us who are old like me, what that meant was pulling a building, right? You know, and, and so the younger folks in your audience probably don’t remember things like modem pools and servers, and communication servers that just did outbound calls and pull data back. And somebody relatively manually had to make sure that that that took place, that generations of controls actually created some real skeptics, right? Because the vision was the same. We’re gonna make this seamless. It’s that we didn’t use words like the cloud, right? But we were we were certainly on the front side of the internet. And it’s going to be so easy, because all of this is going to be managed centrally. And the reality was, the promise of those solutions was never fully realized. Right? So I would tell you, we see two audiences, right. So we see a group of people who believe they’ve adopted this, but they have a relatively negative experience, because they adopted maybe call it 10 to 20 years ago, so we’re talking a couple of decades, then there is still a huge Greenfield because of that, right? So you have a group of folks that I think I’ve already done this, and it really didn’t play out the way I thought it would. And then you have a second group of people who are looking at those skeptics saying, I don’t want to get burned like them. And I need I need a solution that will pay for itself. I you know, they all remember the toughest story, if you will, and they think I don’t really want to have that conversation internally with my leadership. I don’t want to be the one who has a failed implementation. And it’s really important for us to realize that only just now are these managers being asked to manage the cost of energy. And energy consumption on their p&l. Prior to, I would say the last 12 to 24 months where it’s really become in vogue. To drive this, we were asking people to take responsibility to reduce an expense that they weren’t being held accountable for. So the risk to them of not reducing, it was high. Right? energy was a fixed expense. Nobody, nobody took me to task. If I was spending too much, it was just assumed that’s how much it cost.

Alexander Ferguson 10:27
But now we’re gonna empty offices and things and people are like, Alright, what’s going on here? Why are you not trying to cut the cost?

Jon Bolen 10:32
Correct. And we’re seeing increasingly in the investment community, this real drive towards what we call ESG investing, right? So which is environmental, social and governance issues, and huge investment firms like BlackRock are telling their portfolio companies, if they don’t materially move the needle on those topics, then they’re going to withhold investment funds, and they’re gonna start putting people on boards who are making decisions to

Alexander Ferguson 10:59
those coming from top down now. It’s like, Alright, what’s show me the data? How are we being more green?

Jon Bolen 11:04
Exactly. And, and the benefit to solutions like ours, as I said before, is because the payback so significant, you get to achieve those goals without having to pay what people call and Bill Gates in his latest book called A green premium, right? The I’m gonna pay more, in order to demonstrate that I’m saving the planet. That’s asking a lot of a business whose primary responsibility is fiduciary, to their investors, you know, we have a solution that when implemented, has a very impressive payback, and achieves your sustainability goals, you do not have to choose one over the other. This is a smart business decision. That also, if you will check the box on your sustainability checklist.

Alexander Ferguson 11:50
Let’s let’s take a change gears a little bit, I want to know a bit more about the story here of the beginnings of in touch controls. And when when you joined on as CEO, what was the year and in touch control started Exactly.

Jon Bolen 12:03
And touch was founded in 2008 by a handful of telecommunications and power management engineers, folks that came out of like Lucent and some other organizations that that we may all remember, sort of in the early aughts were to sort of these high flying organizations. And and the, the the founders had this vision that they were going to be able to create, I’ll just call it a widget that was going to control and I’ll just say very dumbed down, if I can, terms, the thermal capacity, which doesn’t sound very dumbed down and does it or thermal envelope of a building. Because they thought residential solar was going to be a big thing. And on their journey, what they actually built, was an incredibly robust commercial hv AC control. And so they built this widget, and with one of their other founders realized, okay, that word salad we just said about what we were trying to do doesn’t seem like the right direction. We’ve actually created in simplest terms, nest for business, the Nest thermostat for business. And they they embarked on this journey of convincing people to buy the widget. I was asked to join in 2013. I joke now Alex, that I was I was asked to join us the adult in the room, right. So a group of founders, they needed, someone who had who had scaled businesses before and in particular, scaled a managed service before. So I joined I was asked to join in 2013 to help scale the managed services side of the business, because apparently, commercial entities didn’t just want the widget, I had no idea what to do with the commercial thermostat. But this is a programmable thing I can go I can just order something from one of these big, big companies that I’m aware of, you know, maybe it’s Honeywell or Johnson project, put that on the wall, I just tell someone to program a schedule. What does this really do. And what we needed was want to educate people on the cloud suite of applications that we use to manage all of the data, but to to do it for them. Because the reality is this DIY mentality in the commercial space, where I’m just going to go buy a bucket full of stuff, and I’m going to put it in and things are going to work out okay. It while while many organizations, especially multi site organizations have the technical capacity to do that one time, they don’t really have the operational capacity to manage that 1000 times. So if you if you’re operating 1600 locations, right, and you need the solution across all 1600 locations, you need the ability to identify the right solution, deploy the solution and manage the solution. We’ve built a vertical solution that does all of that. So part of my journey was building that out. And so when I joined our customers at the time were folks like Chucky cheese and JC Penney’s and Pizza Hut. You know, over the years, we added some very interesting brands, whether it’s you know, Lowe’s Canada, FedEx Office, and Other relatively large organizations. And as we scaled the business, I was fortunate enough that our shareholders came to me and and at night and 2019, and asked me to take over running the business. And so, you know, over the last couple of years, while it’s been an interesting journey, we’ve seen really exceptional growth and profitability and revenue. And excited to say that right now we’re the best at it in space.

Alexander Ferguson 15:24
This this journey from taking a widget for originally meant for solar home solar to then like your analogy of a nest for business to then realizing Well, we don’t know you know, what to do with this. Alright, let’s create a full service solution. You make it sound so pretty. Okay, great. touchpoint A, then then to point B, and then milestone seven. What were some of the the hardest milestones or things you had to overcome that, that you can can look back and say, Wow, we were able to, to get over that?

Jon Bolen 16:00
That’s a great point, I’d say. two things. One is credibility. Right. So you know, at some point, and, and every sort of early stage growth companies journey, you’re just two guys in a garage, right? Or 10 guys in a warehouse, right, whatever, but but you are communicating $2 billion organizations, and they, and they need to make a bet on you. And so, in the in the very in my very early days, it was convincing these organizations like Chuckie cheese and JC Penney’s that we could deliver for them. It’s very challenging, because, you know, they have a tendency to say, this is really neat, but we’re going to put you out of business, aren’t we like, you’re not going to be able to do this, we’re going to be so demanding. And so you have to get to a point where you create credibility. And what that means is, in some cases, with an early stage company, its student body, right. And we have to make this happen for this customer, because they have to be referenceable. So the first, the first hurdle is organizational credibility that you can actually deliver for these larger organizations. Now, we did that with the second hurdle, which is the the ability to implement your technology at high velocity and high quality. So when I joined, I come from a background where I deployed technology today, technology enabled business services in the multisite space for unfortunately, for me, because I’m an old guy, decades, and and so what I knew was, it doesn’t matter if your technology works really doesn’t, everybody’s technology kind of does what they say it does. It’s a few, if you rewind to the late 90s, when everybody was implementing RPS from from SAP and Oracle, you could find for every article, if somebody’s adopting SAP, you can find an article about SAP implementations failing. And that’s not because SAP didn’t work. It’s because it was implemented incorrectly. But and, and the reality is, most everybody’s technology works if you implement it the way they envision you to. It’s the job of the technology provider, though, in my space to make sure you do. So when I first joined in touch. My first week, one of our founders is actually on the roof of the building, implementing our technology. And I said, this feels not scalable. Like if, if, if one of the founders is doing the install, this is not scalable. And so we embarked at that time, on building out technology that supported the implementation, not just all of the neat stuff, I talked about making the building smarter, but a mobile application that walks a third party installer through the installation of our app, a centralized commissioning tool that allows an employee to integrate with that application, see the data coming off the site in real time, and photographs of the install in real time, so that they can approve the install before someone ever clears the site.

Alexander Ferguson 18:56
So it’s like creating technology for the actual implementation of your technology was needed technology and process.

Jon Bolen 19:01
Absolutely. Because to get over the credibility hurdle, we had to prove we could deploy at scale. So you know, by the time we get to, you know, a 1600 site implementation in 2018, we deployed the entire thing, and 20 weeks, and we did it with virtually no go backs, using our own technology and using a half a dozen subcontractors in order to manage the nationwide footprint for which we had to implement. That, to me was the most critical component as people think about getting their technology out at scale. The key is making sure your customer can achieve the promise of the original ROI. And that’s implementation. Nobody cares how good your technology is, if they can’t use it.

Alexander Ferguson 19:49
It has to work for them to them care that how great how great it is and for that is a powerful testament part of it then is is that that growth of the People can they actually use their technology, but then it’s the team, as it sounds like to be able to execute, going from 1010 guys in garage or warehouse, right? How big is your team? Today? We’re about 40 people today. That’s great. So when you think of both the lessons learned here and in previous roles, what would you say is, okay, we always look at your What was your best circumstance of your best hire. But I also like to ask, like, what was the worst, worst hire that you learned a good lesson from?

Jon Bolen 20:29
Wow, that’s, that’s tough, right? So because the best ones are super easy. I think the the two things I would say, and I took the single out of worst tire, because we all make mistakes. One on the best hire, the key to hiring anybody is setting your ego aside. And recognizing that your job is to always add people to the organization that make you smarter, that solve problems better than you can, the moment you fall into the trap of I know better, I just need bandwidth you’ve already lost. You’ve already lost. And so I would say the the corollary to that, and I’ll say the worst hire at times, as we have scaled, and this is gonna sound somewhat tongue in cheek, but a little, the worst hire can be me, right? Because as we’ve scaled, I’ve had to give things up. And I can tell you that I’ve got folks in my organization right now that at times are like, Look, we get it, we get you used to do this, but you got to let us do it. And so at times, the worst hire is yourself. Because you have to figure out how to get comfortable with giving somebody else responsibility for something you’ve done before. So as you scale, you have to give up certain tasks, but they won’t. Go ahead. What

Alexander Ferguson 21:49
do you say to yourself? To get yourself out of that mode of well, I could but but I think I do it better? Don’t I? Like what do you say to you? How do you how do you create that transition yourself?

Jon Bolen 22:00
I think the again, twofold. One, if you want to achieve the goals, you have to the business, you can’t do this anymore. It doesn’t matter. If they don’t do it like you, you can’t do this. Because you often and I in the beginning, as I took over the entire organization as CEO, I had to get past the idea that somehow that I thought I did it better. The reality is I did it differently. And doing it differently doesn’t make it better. And so so we really have what I continue to tell myself is, is it just different? Or did I do it better. And and what I’ve learned to do, and I you know, as we’ve grown, we’ve brought in really great leaders, I’ve got a fantastic CFO that that I’ve been able to bring in over the last couple years and leader of our sales and marketing organization. And what you have to realize is if you’re going to convince someone who has the capability to lead, and achieves that make us smarter and make us more intelligent, you have to also realize that you’re giving up a piece of your own control, that they’re not joining you just to show you fealty, they’re joining you because they want to be part of the team that’s on the journey with you. And, and nobody wants to carry your bag. And, and so, for me, what I’ve had to learn is let them carry their stuff, you carry yours and recognize that, yes, you used to be the person with the GPS and the map. Right? And, and sometimes you have to hand the GPS to somebody else. And that and just just like when you’re you know, you’re driving home and you hit home on the GPS in the car, and it starts to route and it gives you three choices. And they’re all they all say 27 minutes, but no one is better than the other. Right? Let them pay. And so that I think therein lies you know, the worst hire sometimes can be you if you don’t know you’re the problem.

Alexander Ferguson 24:02
I love the the complete circle there that you’ve made this concept of being able to have a good team be able to let them grow. Also comes to with technology of being able to implement it sometimes you actually bring on people that know more than you or vice versa. Actually, as a vendor, you may have to rely on someone else. technology adoption, just kind of changing the our gears a little bit. Do you see there’s kind of a push back from the building management or whatever of adopting new technology. Yeah, let’s let’s do it. Is it all forward? Or is there kind of a reserve because you know,

Jon Bolen 24:40
it? It’s funny, I honestly, I think it falls on generational lines, right? It sounds bad, but the longer someone has been in position and you know a little bit and I know I just described but I’m kind of this way my own company, right. There’s a little bit of the Get off my lawn mentality, right, which is Yeah, we do this We do that. The, I’d say, the folks that come at facilities management with a, I’ll just say, a fresh perspective, a data driven perspective, and are comfortable with technology, they tend to be at the other end of the spectrum, which is why are we using data to do this? Why would we possibly do this as manually as we used to? Why would we rely on the store managers to try to figure out what’s wrong with their equipment,

Alexander Ferguson 25:28
with the data that really makes their job so much easier, because it acts like you can’t, you can’t deny, versus we just really need this because there’s there’s problems or there’s issues, but like, here’s exactly,

Jon Bolen 25:40
and Crossing the Chasm from get off my lawn, to using the data is sometimes hard. If your organization isn’t with you, or you don’t have an advocate to help you cross the chasm within your organization, right? You might have all the religion in the world, but you need someone to you need someone to help you kind of make that happen internally.

Alexander Ferguson 26:00
So it’s talking about kind of the little bit more of the technology, but also the future of the space. Because technology continues to advance. I mean, it started with the set for you guys creating this nest for for commercial use. But it’s really, how do we create buildings to provide more data off of it so we can create smart choices? What do you see both while you’re excited about maybe something that you guys are working on right now or have just recently released. And then also, I want to talk about the future, overall, the industry, but specifically for you guys, what we are excited about?

Jon Bolen 26:33
What we’re most excited about is, you know, I’ll say, predictive analytics, leveraging machine learning in a in a really precise and surgical way. Right, I think that’s, to some extent in the Holy Grail with the data that we use in the built environment, being able to really predict failure relatively precisely, so I can invest in advance of the catastrophic failure. So how do I how do I and today I’m pretty good at telling you, I think that particular piece of equipment is bad. What I want to be able to tell you what we’re working on now, and we are in the process, I’ll say, of releasing, just let’s just say later this year, is, is not only do I know that that unit is underperforming, but I believe this component on that unit is going to fail within the timeframe. And, and that is the holy grail in the space, we are in the first iteration of training, a model that will allow us on a particular set of components to predict it, we have nine business cases, if you will, nine models lined up behind this, that we are then going to train. And so that we we can tell you today, when we tell you we think it’s going to break too often you say well see if it breaks, what I want to be able to say is that not only is it going to break, but this piece is going to break and it’s going to break in this timeframe,

Alexander Ferguson 27:57
you painted a fascinating future where you’ll just have your budget planning for the next year say alright, we already know what’s gonna break this is the costs are gonna come up versus a retroactive. Alright, this is what happened last year. So I guess we’ll probably need to have X next year, you’re already know what’s going to be happening. That’s it. That’s the vision. That’s the vision. And hopefully not not too not too far away.

Jon Bolen 28:21
No, no weird. But like I said, we’re training the first model now.

Alexander Ferguson 28:24
So just kind of just just for fun looking ahead. If you could wave a magic wand and have any kind of futuristic technology in existence in this space for you,

Unknown Speaker 28:35
what would you like, I just have X, you know, Well, certainly, it’s

Jon Bolen 28:42
the models that I’m describing now. But in addition to that, the constant optimization of the building using both machine learning models, and then just say AI, that’s also looking at, say weather patterns, and recommissioning buildings almost on a 24 hour cycle based on outside weather, and adjusting how those buildings are going to perform to maximize comfort and minimize energy consumption for those buildings. And, and then, you know, in a perfect world, right, if you if you start to go out farther and farther, sort of in concentric circles, you know, we’re we’re relatively focused on individual via the built environment and, and HVC lighting and other infrastructure control. You know, in the coming years, what we’re going to see is the, the energy grid, it’s going to look different, right? We’re gonna have, you know, micro grids, I buildings are gonna have generation capacity and storage capacity. So we’re already seeing that where large footprint buildings can afford to put local generation and local storage. And, and really, you start to decentralize the power grid, if you will, different than we currently think about. And so, you know, we’ve got to also have the ability to manage that consumption and understand Are there opportunities for us to put energy back on the grid? Are there opportunities for us to manage this building slightly differently? As you look at all of those micro grids in a, in a more macro level? Have they put energy back out into the communities? And when do they need to draw energy. And I mean, it starts to get really much more complex. And ICN touches being a key part of that ecosystem as it evolves.

Alexander Ferguson 30:26
I’m fascinated with with energy creation, and that’s probably the future of that combination of micro grids and being able to more sustainably what you think that every building could eventually just be self sustaining? Could we ever get to that point? Or is it is it going to be still always an ecosystem of just large power plants, and then just providing efficiency?

Jon Bolen 30:48
I think, um, you know, it’s funny, one of my favorite Hemingway novels ends with the quote, it’s pretty good think so. And so it’s, it’s interesting to think that we could get there, I think there are so many constraints, political and infrastructure wise, that would actually allow us to get there, it’s going to be hard. I do think we will get to a time though, when all new builds are trying to drive towards a zero carbon standard, which were kind of already there for at least zero carbon. But to be self generating, and self sustaining, I do think that that starts to become very real, right, the idea that you can do that today. And that is not far fetched. But very, relatively large facilities and campuses can be self sustaining and create a micro grid environment today, that is not science fiction, whether every building could be completely self sustaining, I think is is a little bit more science fiction than we want it to be. But I do see a time I mean, when you think about the cost of generating a kilowatt hour of electricity with solar and wind right now is below fossil fuels. And so you know, we’re at a point where you could see every new build, you know, maybe it’s a decade from now, right, where, where every new home goes up with solar shingles, and a wind generator. And it has the ability to offset call it 70 or 80% of their energy, the challenge we have with renewables today, is that because wind and solar are reliant on weather patterns, that you also have to have a local storage solution or some other alternate energy solution to offset the loss. Now, the reality is we were closer to that, but storage capacity on municipal scale is still an issue. I also think and you know, for another podcast, in order for us to really achieve that type of zero GHG, kind of net zero goal, we’re going to have to see a lot of investment at both the I’ll say, political level, and the private sector and new forms of nuclear energy, right? If we really want to see and achieve net zero carbon, then we’re going to have to explore something other than wind and solar, wind and solar are fantastic. And I think we’ve seen huge inroads, and they are a tremendous part of the equation. But but there’s, I think, because of the weather, exactly, I do think over the next several decades, what we’ll see is quantum leaps and, and how we use and manage nuclear energy, and that that will change the game too. Now, I’m not I’m not suggesting in any way shape, or form that somehow we’re going to, we’re gonna have localized nuclear power plants. But I do believe we’re gonna see some something akin to what you described, which is buildings that are that are individually sustainable, I think, different forms of renewables and nuclear energy could could create opportunities for communities and regions also to be locally sustainable.

Alexander Ferguson 34:06
You paint a fascinating future. And also, you mentioned that the roadblocks that are in the way, but right, what was your Hemingway quote, wouldn’t it? It would, it’s pretty, it’s pretty to think so. It’s pretty to think so. Love it. Thank you so much, Jon for both sharing the story for Entouch Controls of what you guys are doing and the future when it comes to new energy consumption. And for those that want to learn more, you can go to entouch controls at Entouchcontrol.com. And thanks again for your time, john could have gone Oh, thanks so much. I really appreciate it really enjoyed it. We’ll see you all on the next episode of UpTech Report. Have you seen a company using AI and machine learning or other technology to transform the way we live, work and do business? Go to UpTech report.com. And let us know