Foreign. Welcome everyone to the Park Innovation Flow podcast. It's good to have everyone in the audience today. I'm here with our special guest of this episode is Tim Braun from Blue Terra. Thanks for being here, Tim.

Pleasure.

And we also have Peter Van Rye, director of South Platte renew and creator of park, with us today. Thanks for being here, Peter.

Always great to join you.

Yeah. So we got Tim here. Tim flew all the way in from Michigan to be here on this episode. We appreciate that. And he's got a split for a date night after the show, so he's flying right back. So, yeah, thanks for coming out and visiting us, Tim.

You bet.

Maybe to start things off, you could introduce yourself, maybe give a little bit of your background, where you're from, how you got to where you are.

Sure. No, thanks. So I think a lot of people don't know. I actually got my start in financial services, spent 11 years doing that, doing socially responsible investing, which got me excited about clean tech, which got me into the water space in 2007. So spent the last almost 20 years now, you know, doing water tech. Started with emerging hydropower, did a little stint in venture capital, found partners at mnet, Luis Montestrucke and joined them. And that was a wild ride. We grew that company significantly over the next five years. Got acquired by Xylem, spent some more time there, spent about six plus years at Xylem, and then started really working with Xylem Innovation Labs and a bunch of the tech companies that they were bringing through and vetting. I was like, man, this is my favorite thing to do is to work with these early stage companies and help them find their footing. Kind of like what you did with mnet. So like, I got to do this again. And so that's where you know, basically came up with the idea for Blue Terra. It's like, how do we help these emerging technologies find their footing in the clean water sector, make sense out of what they're doing. Look at, you know, larger, more holistic frameworks that are appealing to people like Peter and the C Suite and less just about buying widgets, Right?

Yeah.

So that's what we do.

Cool. What are the. Is there differences between finance people and water people? What are the. They're the same. They're the same. All right.

You know what's funny though, is my client development experience in financial planning. I started like most people back in the 90s, hawking mutual funds and selling life insurance. But by the end of that career phase, I was working with high net worth clients and doing you know, 401k plans with corporations. And it's the same kind of client development, building rapport, building trust, thinking about big picture approaches, like, what's the long game here? How do we put all of this into a holistic framework where we can generate real value for the client? Right. And so it never occurred to me that that phase of my career would be useful and what I'm doing today until I was like, oh my God. That was like the best possible training for the sector.

Cool. Yeah. All right. How about you, Peter? Do you, I think you've been on the show before, but maybe give the listeners a little background what you've been up to, who you are.

Yeah. Peter Van Rye, I'm the director of South Platte Renew, also the director of Englewood Water Utilities and been with South Platte for almost coming up on eight years. And in that time I've really just been able to spend a lot of our time and focus and energy moving towards leading innovation. And I think that this is the encapsulation of it all, is this podcast is one of the innovations that has come out of this whole desire to try and figure out how to innovate in the wastewater public sector space differently. And so PARC's mission is, is to figure out how to innovate differently and more effectively. And being on this podcast is always a great opportunity to check back in on it and see where we're headed and what we can maybe change and incorporate and do better next time.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, the whole financial aspect that Tim brought up. You know, he came from financial services. You have an executive mba, I'm an environmental guy, science guy. So it's always interesting to hear MBA kind of business concepts infused into ways where we're going to treat it like a portfolio or, you know, just some of the concepts. It's always interesting to me to see how that translates or how you translate it into the, the wastewater world.

Yeah, I think it, I think it helps to, helps to take some of the more complex technical aspects of what we do and translate it into what a lot of people understand, which is value and monetary effect and, you know, just, you know, what, what things cost and how translating between those two and being able to really help simplify it so that people step back and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. I never thought of it that way.

Yeah, cool. All right, well, now we're at the icebreaker question. So I gave this before, so hopefully you thought about it a little bit. But if you go back, give your 22 year old self, if you can remember back that far. Give your 22 year old self a piece of advice. But you only had 10 seconds to do it. What would that piece of advice be, Tim? What would you tell yourself?

You know, chill out, take time, be a look for, you know, find somebody who is doing something amazing and go invest in that relationship. Like you want to grow old together because, you know, mentorship and, you know, sitting at the feet of a master learning skills and career path is so great. And I came out of college just wanted to prove myself to the world. I didn't need anybody's help. That was the worst idea ever, Right? Should have been the opposite.

Yeah.

Should have come with more questions and less bravado.

Yeah, it's too bad we don't know this stuff at 22.

My son's 19.

Okay, well, you've been trying to talk him into this.

Are you kidding me? He's like, no way, dad.

Yeah, I got a 19 year old too. I know how it is. How about you, Peter? What's your 22 year old son? What are you gonna tell him?

Buy vinyl

for the expense and the inconvenience?

Well, I mean, well, and so there's, there's actually, it's actually true by vinyl. But also what's embedded in that is similar to what you were talking about, Tim, is, is pay attention to the long game, is, you know, don't try and immediately go for instantaneous reward and response. Look at your career, look at what you're doing, look at the investment in your relationships, investment in the things around you as a long game as opposed to a short sighted, just set of independent actions. And so if you think about vinyl, if you'd bought vinyl 30 years ago, that would have been a great long game.

Yeah.

So it could, you know, who knew vinyl was gonna come back? The way I know it's exploding and

I'm sitting at home with a bag of cassettes and a whole rack full of CDs and they're all worthless to me. And if they were on vinyl, I could actually listen to them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I bought a, I bought a case so I could put my cassettes in a case. I did that just recently.

Oh yeah, I finally just threw a big bag of them the other day because I was like, I don't even have a cassette player.

You threw away cassette tape?

Yeah.

I hear they're coming back.

Are they? They are coming back. I was, I. My first car had a eight track in it. Oh, I had to have A cassette converter that you plugged into the eight track so I could listen to cassettes. That's. I'm dating myself now. All right, let's get to the. Let's get to the questions at hand here, Tim. You're. I know your mission with Blue Terra is. And you can talk more about this, but building sustainable restorative communities, as you say. So how does treatment, wastewater treatment, fall into that? How does it go from just a disposal, a disposal service of here's how we get rid of this to a sustainable community. What am I looking for? Restorative community.

Restorative community. Yeah. No, I love it. Listen, back in the early 2000s, my whole thesis for jumping out of one career and getting into this one was specifically looking at waste streams and looking for value in waste streams and trying to turn those waste streams into new materials, raw materials, right. Trying to do this kind of circular economy approach to just better resource utilization and better sustainability and helping, you know, understanding where you are and becoming native to that place and working kind of just within your own footprint. And I realized that cities are kind of the perfect scale to do that. Right? An individual company or a state is too big or the state's too big. Individual companies are too small. But a city is kind of like the perfect ecosystem for waste streams. And of course, clean water agencies do the ultimate job of cleaning up after absolutely everyone else in the community. And just every year there's more challenges. Like, hey, we figured out this PFAS stuff is really nasty. Like, you guys got to figure out how to get rid of it or else, right? Oh, this copper and lead. That's your job now, right? So it's your. Like, our sector is constantly cleaning up after you. Look at. I mean, you guys are making biogas here out of wastewater. Solid. Yeah, that's perfect. Case in point, profitably.

Too profitably.

Making. Well, we're going to talk about that more in a sec.

Well, we actually don't generate profit, but it's revenue positive.

It funds park. Right?

It does.

I love it. So there are cities. We did a lot of work with Grand Rapids, Michigan, and they've been measuring the water quality in the grand river upstream and downstream of the city for, like, decades. And when they started doing this, there was. There was still a big CSO community, and they had lots of overflows. And you imagine the grand river was probably pretty gross by the time CSOs being CSOs combined sewer overflow system. And so they regularly overflowed. In fact, there used to be a bumper sticker that said, shit happens when it rains in Grand Rapids. But they've completely eliminated their overflow. They have zero overflows. People still would come up to me like, thank God you're here. We've got this terrible overflow problem in Grand Rapids. Like, actually, you don't. Like, you guys are one of the most innovative, cleanest utilities certainly in the Midwest, if not in the entire country. But what's fascinating about that upstream and downstream water quality monitoring in the last 10 years, the water in the grand river downstream of Grand Rapids is cleaner than the water upstream of the city, which is amazing.

Yeah, right?

That's amazing. It's almost like the city is like a filtering mechanism for the Grand River. In some respects, that's probably not quite true. And there are. I mean, it's. The city's called Grand Rapids. Right. Like, the river drops like 18ft from one end of the city to the other. So I'm sure there's some dissolved oxygen benefit, that kind of thing that's happening just with the river itself. But like, it's still pretty. It's still pretty awesome.

Yeah.

So that's kind of restorative. Like if our community. If, like. I think you guys have a similar situation going on with South Platte. Rania, you don't, you don't overflow to the river, do you?

I'm sorry, we discharge.

We don't discharge. Right.

Like, yeah, we don't overflow to that.

I would be willing to make you a bet.

No.

That the water you're discharging is cleaner than the river.

I would, I would agree with that.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Right.

Our samples indicate that that's restorative.

That's restorative. Right. To the river. You're making the river cleaner just by being here, which is pretty cool. And the last thing I was going to say, Peter, is to challenge you guys to not just, you know, take your own biosolids and turn them into biogas, but you got all this excess capacity. What about take. What about South Platte Renew becoming like a co digestion organization that takes all kinds of organic waste from the community. Yeah. And now you're helping the entire community of Englewood and Littleton and your other communities become a net energy or more energy positive, less carbon intensive community across your 10 cities. Right.

Yeah. And I think, I think you've, you know, we've talked it at length about. That's the whole idea with parc is to see what's possible. It's not to just look around at what's available, but start to think about what's possible that we're not doing. And something like that is actually a thing that we have looked at in the past, and we will continue to look at it. It's one of these things that we have to. We always have to balance the fact that our core purpose is to treat wastewater for our communities and discharge clean water to the river and. And recover our gas and apply our biosolids, and so we can't mess up that process. That's right. And so everything that we do that we look at, that's an innovation or some kind of an expansion of what our core business function is, needs to ensure that we protect that first and foremost. And then if we can layer onto it in a way that doesn't impact that and if it enhances it, great. That's always the thing that we're looking at when we, you know, when we think about ideas like that, to expand and potentially move beyond just what our core business function is.

Yeah, there's some crazy things out there. I remember. You probably remember a while back, we were looking at this algae treatment. Used algae to treat the wastewater, the nutrients in the wastewater. And then, you know, if you scaled it up, you take that algae, use it to make products, use it to make, I think they were saying shoes or something. Make a pair of crocs out of algae. You know, like just things you don't think of or people don't realize, you know, that there's resources in that water because it's just sewage. You know, it's sewage to most people. Cool. All right, well, let's talk about Blue Terrorist tagline. I love this Clean Water 2.0, which is like, what are we on Windows 12.0 or something? But, yeah, usually it means, you know, the next generation that something different, something improved. So what does 2.0 mean to you, Tim?

Yeah, no, thanks. The whole 2.0 idea is really rethinking this legacy infrastructure, Right. Not always buying new or not always going out and trying to build the next new thing, but actually looking at how do we understand the infrastructure we already have in place and what can we do to compel it? What technology or frameworks can we apply to this legacy infrastructure to compel it to do something way beyond what it was ever designed to do?

Yeah.

You know, a lot of utilities have been investing, so technology investments tend to happen in silos, much like a lot of utilities. I don't think this is necessarily true at spr, in my experience, but a lot of utilities are heavily siloed. And the tech sector has responded to that by selling technology, software, applications, et cetera, silo by silo, instead of, you know, on a larger perspective. And so really sitting back, understanding our entire utility framework, our value chain, with that holistic perspective, we can start to find big opportunities. So I was starting to say earlier, you've made a lot of these investments. You've invested in models, you've invested in scada, you've invested in all this data collection from sensors and whatnot. So all that investment's already been made. And you've got, of course, the gray infrastructure of the facility and your communities have the pipes and the sewer systems and the pump stations and all that stuff. 90% of the investment that needs to be made to have an outsized outcome is already there. So just by bringing the right tech, the right framework to understand all that in context, like the ROI is off the charts. Typically you can get easily. We were joking about 10x returns. That's a modest number. We're often seeing many more times that ROI from taking that kind of Clean Water 2.0 approach.

So maybe it's partly just a new way of thinking about things. New models, new different look at things than people have been doing for the last hundred years.

I think part of that you, you've hit on is that innovation doesn't always have to be something new that's never been done before. It can be taking what is established in place and figuring out a better way to use it. I remember when I first got here eight years ago, we're fortunate that we have an excess of hydraulic capacity, which gives us a lot of ability to try different things. And when we were first talking about innovation, it was the leading edge technologies that would, you know, that would be fancy and cool and are the technology of the moment and the more boring way to do innovation. And what I would say is let's innovate the existing concrete and steel we have here. So we have all this concrete, we have all this steel that's already been put in place. Let's figure out how to innovate that which is a little less sexy, but it's really, actually can be as rewarding and actually result in much better outcomes than trying to just, you know, raise everything on the site and try something new and also a whole lot more affordable.

And something we've talked with you guys about too is, you know, rethinking the treatment plant as just treating raw sewage and starting to understand it as a carbon management system. System, right Understanding it as well. If we degrade all the carbon out of the wastewater, we got nothing left for nutrient removal, right? So now we got to add carbon back. If we take all the carbon out, we're not going to have anything. We're not going to have as much left for our biogas program. So really understand what is the. I like. I like the Goldilocks phrase, right? What's the Goldilocks approach to each of our processes? So it's just right, and it delivers just the right amount of carbon to the next phase of treatment to optimize. So we want, as you mentioned, Peter, we want the cleanest water coming out of the discharge pipe as possible. We want the most biogas production, we want the most nutrient removal. And just understanding how we get the best of everything out of the plant as a larger concept is totally available to us today, especially with the amount of tech and compute. And I know you guys don't manage your own sewer system at spr. I know. Englewood. You do, Peter. But starting to understand our sewer systems not just as conveyance assets, but what if we started thinking about our sewers as pre treatment networks or linear treatment assets? We would treat them very differently. Yeah, we would. They would show up differently on our balance sheet. Right. Coming back to the business proposition, we would invest more in them. I made it, you know, kind of a joke last week when I was presenting at a conference, and I said, you know, everybody in this room knows how smart or how important sewers are. They're more important to public health and modern medicine. We all know that smart sewers are sexy, but the Romans had us beat. The Romans had a goddess of the sewer system, right? And they worshiped the goddess of their sewer system because they knew how important their sewers were. Imagine if we treated our sewers with the same respect and regard. We protect our treatment plans with our life, but we just throw anything in our sewer system and hope for the best. And there's biological chemical process happening in every linear foot of that sewer system. What if we turn on the lights? What if we understood what was going on there? What if we used the sewer system to actually make the sewer system run better? With just a few biological interventions or chemical interventions strategically distributed throughout our sewers could become amazing, amazingly productive assets to our treatment works, Helping us deliver consistent, predictable load and flow to the headworks at the plant. That then allows us to do the Goldilocks principles, not just from the headworks to the effluent pipe, but your entire collection system network as well, interesting.

Do you know the, the name of the goddess of sewers?

Clochina.

Clochina. I'm gonna write that down.

That's really hard to spell. C, L, O, A, C, I, N,

A. I'm not gonna write it down. It's too many vowels in there. I'm already confused. Well, let's talk about, we kind of hit on this and I want to get both of your takes because you know, Peter, you're on the utility side, you're on kind of the tech development, tech sector side. But how do you, you know, this industry and you mentioned is slow moving, it's risk averse, it's very important to whole communities, public health and well being. So how do you innovate or how do you drive innovation? Which, you know, in that atmosphere, I guess is my question.

I think one of the most important things with any type of innovation is you have to remember the customer in all of it. And so our customers are the citizens of the district, the service area that rely on us to take care of a, of an issue for them. And so if we make sure that we don't forget them in the entire process of innovation, then you can start to drive a culture and a support for innovation. I think oftentimes what happens with innovation is we think we know better and so we move forward without helping to translate to the customer why this is a good idea. I think what, you know, we've talked about with park and with, whenever we're talking about parc, we always tie it back to driving value for our customers. So all the innovations that we're exploring and bringing in and looking at are ultimately fundamentally rooted in, we're trying to drive value for our customers. And I think if we can, if you hold those two things together, that you can be leading edge and you can be trying this new technology and experimenting and failing at times, but ultimately realizing that your goal is to drive a better value long term for the customers. And that doesn't always mean, you know, that doesn't always mean monetary value that could be, you know, environmental value and societal value and all those kinds of things is how are we driving that value through innovation? And when you can, when you can bridge those two, especially for your community, as you're talking about why this leading edge, untested experimental technology is important to look at is because the upside could be so much greater if it does work. And then you bound it in a way so that the downside doesn't create so much of a drag on the value proposition that you can Learn from it and then move on.

Yeah. All right, how about from your perspective, Tim?

I'm gonna kind of build on what Peter was saying and something you said earlier too. But I love this idea. It's like starting with the customer. You're here to serve the customer. You're here to serve public health and safety and then next kind of environmental safety and protection and so on up the chain. And so I think you have to start anytime you want to bring in an innovative technology. It's really a, it's kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of priorities and goals within which you can innovate. Right. So it's like number one, like we can't try this tech if we can't make certain that we have public health and safety with or without this tech. If we bring this in. So you need guardrails. Okay, great. Then we're going to. Is this going to upset our plan? Is this going to cause other issues that, you know, unintended consequences? What are those guard. And then you just move up the line and then you can start to figure out, you know, so it's kind of a multi parameter optimization problem to do innovation, to do it well. But I think if, like you said, Peter, if you keep those things in mind, if you really understand the business you're fundamentally in before you start taking those steps, then you've got the right framework to move forward.

Well, then the business we're fundamentally in is customer service. That's what we are. We provide service to a set of customers. And I think that's sometimes lost or forgotten when we think about governmental entities and public sector entities, is that it really is there to serve the citizenry and the customer base. And if we start to think of it that way, then all of a sudden you put more of a business minded approach to how we execute. And that's how our citizens and customers operate their day to day lives. It's their own, you know, world of their life as a business to be able to survive and thrive in whatever they're looking to do. And so I think if we can translate to, to the complexity of what we do and oftentimes the hidden nature of what we do because it's all underground and it's, you know, nobody even realizes we're here to something that they can say, oh, that's why I, that's where I get value. Then all of a sudden you gain a whole bunch of traction and support for, well, let's do leading edge things, let's make it better, let's figure out how to do it better.

Yeah, I like that. And those approaches, there's a lot of similarities in what you both said. Like, you know, don't forget why we're innovating in the first place. It's for a customer, it's for someone. Because I've seen that. It seems like sometimes, you know, people just start innovating and then they get down the road and they're like, what am I doing this for? You know, what's the point of all this?

Yeah, yeah. You have to remember what the purpose is. It's not to innovate. So you can, you know, spend millions of dollars testing out something because it's cool and you want to, you know, write a paper on it.

I thought that's what we.

Oh, shoot.

Maybe I missed it. Did I miss it?

You know what? I do want to say one more thing. Yeah, go ahead, Blair. If I can. Is that I will say, I mean, clean water agencies are the reason population density can exist. You're solving the most fundamental problem of, of urban density, and that is water and sanitation services. Right. And so what you have here and what you've done is amazing. I think park's incredible, you know that? But what you've done is said, guys, you know, how can we solve these problems more effectively? How can we be a venue for other problem solvers to come and figure this out and then how do we share this freely with the rest of the community or with the rest of the sector? But I think I would, I would love to see in our lifetime clean water utilities, first of all recognized for the value they deliver to their cities. I think it's, it's never recognized.

It's.

I'll go on record, it is never fully recognized to the extent it should be. And then say, you guys are so amazing. Thank you for doing this. Here's a bunch more money. What else could you do?

Now I like what for the community

because you've got this amazing group of people who are here because they're passionate, they're underpaid, they're over risked, but they're here because they, because they love it. They're here because they want to solve the problems of their community. And I think it's just amazing. And I think we need to just like flip the script on what a, you know, already is calling it a clean water utility or a water reclamation facility is already a big push in the right direction. But as you know, Peter, I mean, the entire sector is trying to figure out how do we tell Our story. We suck at telling our story. We need help telling our story. We need help. And by the way, communities want to be proud of where they from. They want to believe in their city government or their regional government is doing amazing things. That they're winning. Right. That you as an organization, you as a community are leading in lots of ways.

Yeah.

And this is, this is one of the ways that you guys are doing that. Yeah.

And I think you, I mean, so, so we met because of nawqa, which is national association of Clean Water Agencies. And I think that's one of NAWQA's main. It's great. It's one of the main focuses of NAWQA right now is to tell the story of clean water agencies far better than we have for the last 50 plus years. Because you're right. So much of what we need to do in this sector is funding based. And it's hard to fund things that you don't even know about. And it's hard for the community to want to fund it. It's hard for the local, the state governments, the federal governments to fund it if they don't know about it. If they understood it and knew about it, then all of a sudden our ability to say, hey, here's a reason why we should invest in this. Here's a reason we should be proud of this sector because our community exists because of it. That's a narrative shift that I know our sector has been working on for 20 years. And we're still just, you know, we still need help getting it out as to why it's, it's so critical to what we do.

Yeah, yeah, agreed.

All right, well, let me ask you one final question then we'll get to the end of show quiz here, but what changes do you two see on the horizon or what needs do you see coming down that we're going to need to address? You know, to position utilities for the future.

You want to go first?

Well, I think, yeah, you probably know better than. I'll tee it up. Well, and I think you'll tag right onto this is AI is obviously something that we're focusing on. So you got the aspect of AI. So AI is going to solve all these things, solve all of our problems and it's going to fix everything that's been broken in our systems forever. And one of the challenges for from a public sector entity perspective is we don't necessarily respond quickly to things. And with the speed at which AI is advancing, we could issue an rfp, go through a selection process, select A technology move forward, go through a three to six month process and then all of a sudden the technology is three versions out of date because moving stuff. And so I think what we need to do on our side and where I think this part as a philosophy plays into it, is figure out how to disrupt what's always occurred and find better, faster ways to do it. And I think AI is one of the most significant pressures to really force us to have to do that because we can't just go at the same pace and because we'll be left behind, you know, ten, tenfold.

Yeah.

All right, how about you, Tim? What's your, what's your take on that question?

Yeah, I'd start by saying no good deed goes unpunished. Right? I mean, look, the, the, the better the sector becomes at doing its job, the more it's being, the, the more is asked of it. And you know, as so many of the communities I work with across the country are finishing up their long term control plan or are getting, you know, achieving compliance, you know, the regulators are coming in and like, that's great. But the Clean Water act says zero overflows. Right. The Clean Water act says perfection. So you got to keep going, like, here's your new, you know, here's the new challenge ahead of you. So I think that's always like, I don't think there's the bad news is I don't think our sector will ever have an opportunity to rest on our laurels and be like, hey, we're done here. We can just relax now and just like watch all the processes happen. I think to Peter's point, technology is advancing in all the other verticals out there so quickly that if water and wastewater or clean water, doesn't it, you know, really start to take hold of this, not only will they be left behind, but there'll just be increasing pressures. Like, why aren't you guys doing this? Like, we've solved this across the electrical grid, we've solved this in transportation, we've solved this and whatever all these other ways, public health. Why is, why is the clean water sector still, you know, hanging out in the 90s and the early 2000s? Yeah, and so look, I think the

fast 90s, I say 80s, 80s, 70s,

60s, but I mean, I think the point is, look, the more our sector embraces the rapid change of technology and the innovations and the availability of compute power and all those things, the faster we take control of our own destiny. And we get to decide where those investments are made. We get to decide what Innovations will happen and how the sector will move forward rather than being told what to do and how to do it. Yeah, right. Like that's what, that's kind of what I think woke the sector up back, back in the 90s with the CSO policy and subsequent policy revisions from, from EPA and from Congress and so on. Like, if we, if we just, if we don't advance our own ball, it will be, you know, we'll be held accountable.

Yeah.

And we won't get to choose which

I think it gets to the, you know, so you look at, you know, what's in front of us and it could be all doom and gloom and how terrible the future might be. And in reality, it's what's exciting and why innovation is so critical to this sector. It's what makes this industry. Probably the most exciting period to be in this industry is the opportunity to, to respond to the biggest challenges that we have facing our sector across the board. And who wouldn't want to get into this line of work and just, and just dedicate your career to it? Because there's so many cool things and fun things that you can do and rewarding things that you can do in this space. And I find it to be one of the most exciting points in my career is right now.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Peter. I think, to me, I think the promise of AI and of course, I was thinking about this this morning. I mean, what does that even mean? AI 10 years ago meant something very different than it means today. And it's going to be something very different ten years from now than it does today. But the promise of AI is like, look, think about South Platte Renew's entire service area and think about the complexity. The surfaces in the soils, in the substrate and the buried infrastructure and how all this stuff flows and makes its way to the headworks here at the plant. Right. Bananas complex. Right. And trying to understand all of that using the original tools that it was designed and built with back in the early part of the 20th century, when the word computer was a job title for smart people doing hard math problems when they had slide rules and like, super broad stroke assumptions about how stormwater wastewater behaved in this environment. The promise of AI is all, you know, is going to empower all the crazy Wang ideas I was sharing earlier. Right. Of being able to really understand everything inside of your systems footprint, being able to understand the microbiological processes that are happening in each phase of your plan and be able to tame the complexity of all of that and put Decision intelligence in front of operators and say, this is what's happening in your system.

Yeah.

What do you want to do about it? I recommend you remember the Terminator that dates us to right when he was like, he had these options, had all these options, like, you know, and then he selected an option. It's like that, right? It's like, hey, this is what's happening. Here's all the dis, you know, here's all the, the real time intelligence that you need to understand to make the right decision. And here are the decisions before you. And the operator's like, that's amazing. I want to do this.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. I also like the. I think it does change you mentioned, Peter. Like when you start seeing things as, you know, because this could be a problem, this could be, you know, an issue. But when you start saying, no, this is an opportunity, this is a challenge to overcome. It makes. Does change your mindset on how to, how to look at some of these things. But. Well, good. Thank you for. Thank you for your insights. Thanks for being here and sharing your insights with us today.

Thank you.

Now, are you ready for the end of show quiz?

100%.

Okay. You guys can approach this as a team. Yeah. How about we do that?

I like.

I'm going to give you.

I do too.

I'm going to give you a three choices here in the categories. You can either pick Mr. What are they known for? Or superstores. What would you guys like?

I think. What are they?

What do they know?

What are they known for? Okay, what are they known for? There's four questions. Let's see if you can, between you two, get them all. Okay, what are they known for?

Off the bug spray.

Insect repellent. That is correct. Shout.

I agree with Peter.

Okay.

Shout the deter.

The stain remover.

Shout it out.

Stain remover is correct. You guys are nailing these sos.

That's the scrubber pad.

Yeah.

Remember the steel wool, the soap and impregnated steel wool?

Yeah. The ones that leave a big rust stain on your sink when you leave it sitting there. Put it back in the cardboard now. It's all scrub daddies now. SOS isn't cool, but you are correct. Steel wool soap pads. These are so easy. All right, last one. Goldens.

Goldens.

G, U, L, D, E, N, apostrophe.

That's mustard.

Mustard is correct.

Nice job.

You guys nailed those. We don't usually get a four question sweep, so.

Yeah, well, he got us the. He got us to sweep because of the mustard. Because I did not know that.

I did not know that either. I don't think I've heard of Golden's Mustard, or I wouldn't have put it together. All right, well, congratulations, gentlemen.

What do we win?

Well, you win this. This South Platte renew water cup there and. Yeah, have a safe trip home. Thanks a lot for coming out for the episode. We appreciate talking to you whenever you're in town. And thanks again.

Yeah.

Tim, thank. Thank you very much for coming to South Platte to do this. We really appreciate your presence and your insights.

You're so welcome. Such a pleasure to be here. You guys are. You're doing amazing things. You're advancing the sector. So thank you.

And thank you, Peter.

Thank you, Blair.

You're welcome.

Another fine job hosting a stellar episode of the podcast.

Yeah.

This was fun to our audience. Thanks. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, give us a thumbs up. Give us a like on whatever podcast player you're watching on. If you've got any ideas for episodes or topics you'd like to hear, shoot us an email and we can think about those. And thanks for listening. Thanks for being here on the Innovation Flow podcast.