Turner Caldwell

And so when you have a highly variable feedstock, because the earth is heterogeneous, you need to constantly be tuning the temperatures, the flow rates, the chemical addition rates, the resonance times of a highly complex refining circuit.

And we don't have that labor pool here that has that embedded know-how that can walk up to a refinery and quickly get it operating on spec and then also manage that variability.

And the

mining at those mine sites, we're making thousands of decisions a day.

And when you don't have that labor pool of folks that are able to make the right decisions, the right thousand decisions, that can cascade into low productivity, low availability of equipment and low utilization of equipment.

And but the software angle is really not enough.

And we kind of talked about how we're vertically integrated.

The gate to software penetration, really not the gate, what sets the rate of software penetration and technology penetration into these plants and into these mines ultimately is the operating teams.

It's like, what is the tech stack that they're comfortable with?

And for the most part, it is pen and paper and maybe 150 spreadsheets that are kind of scattered around an operation.

And what you need to do in order to actually accelerate software uptake in the space is you have to go down into that operating layer, understand the core problems that they're facing, but then also really control the culture and make sure that the software tools themselves are designed for the folks that are going to have to be interfacing with them.

And that's why we think that sitting the software engineers right next to the operating teams, but not in like a forward deploy engineer type way where everyone has the same incentives is what's going to yield the best results when it comes to trying to optimize these assets.

Yeah, I'd say there are three big ones, and they might overlap a little bit with Drew's.

But I think that the general techno-optimism and what technology can do in these sectors is much, much higher at Tesla.

The belief that you can innovate on systems that are old and archaic is at the core of the company.

The other is a general appetite for risk, which enables super-fast decision-making and enables the teams to move really quickly without being burdened with fear of making the wrong decision.

And the last is a clear...

you know, firm commitment to not giving up on projects that have the outcome.

Like, if the outcome is worth it, like, Tesla will, like, fight through the challenges of getting to that outcome.

And I think what we see, at least in the minerals industry, is, like, folks will give it a shot for a year.