Podcasts about eor

Episode SummaryAlex Feldman is the founder of Tiger and Bear, an M&A advisory focused on tech and services businesses. Before that, he was Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel at Amaysim, where he ran three acquisitions simultaneously during full lockdown in 2020 and 2021 to build a dominant player that was ultimately sold.In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack how to buy and sell businesses when the world is doing crazy stuff around you. Alex breaks down why today's volatility isn't actually that different from the GFC or COVID, why timing is the single most important variable in any deal, and what the SaaSpocalypse means for tech companies thinking about selling when their natural buyers are struggling.You'll also hear why more than half of Tiger and Bear's recent deals involved European and Asian capital rather than American, why profitable venture-backed businesses are suddenly more attractive to strategics, and what happens when the IPO market disappears as an exit path. For founders who can't raise their next round, he offers blunt advice: never waste a crisis, cut costs to buy yourself runway, and remember that raising and selling are the same activity, you're just selling different amounts of shares.Alex closes with his Big Cojones moment: putting every spare $500 into the stock market during the GFC with no idea where the bottom was, buying Macquarie Bank shares at $30 and riding them back up.Time Stamps00:00 - Intro02:25 – Alex's first investment: going all in on the BHP Rio Tinto merger that never happened06:19 – How to do M&A in volatile markets and why this cycle isn't that different11:50 – Timing for buyers vs sellers: why uncertainty kills deals, not direction13:08 – The SaaSpocalypse: what happens when your natural buyer is struggling18:10 – Why European and Asian capital is replacing American buyers in Australia21:08 – What M&A looks like in the Australian tech ecosystem right now24:01 – When is a company big enough to buy and too small to be acquired28:30 – Mergers of equals: why similar-sized companies come together in downturns38:39 – How to become a disciplined buyer: capital, internal muscle, and integration43:08 – Why the hardest part of any deal is admitting the other side does it better47:54 – What to do when you can't raise: never waste a crisis55:01 – Big Cojones moment: investing every spare dollar during the GFCSponsors:First Cheque is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone___Pear Tree: Pear Tree helps Australian and New Zealand founders build high-performing offshore teams without the agency middleman.As local hiring becomes more expensive and harder to fill, many operators are turning to offshore talent across engineering, development, marketing, accounting and operations at a fraction of local salary costs.The offshore horror stories you hear usually aren't a talent problem. They're the result of outsourcing agencies that overcharge clients while underpaying staff. Pear Tree takes a different approach through a direct, transparent model where your team is paid fairly, fully compliant, and focused entirely on your business.As part of the Day One community, you'll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire. Learn more at http://dayone.fm/peartreeFirst Cheque is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows.Mentioned in this episode:Deel x PX_Script 1Deel x PX_Script 2Pear TreeIf you're a founder or operator trying to scale, here's the reality — Australian hiring is getting harder, salaries are at record highs, and the talent you need is increasingly out of reach. The best operators are quietly building offshore teams of engineers, marketers, accountants and analysts at a fraction of the cost. Pear Tree does it differently. We headhunt highly skilled talent from the Philippines and South Africa with full transparency on where every dollar goes, so your team is paid fairly and fully focused on your business. As a Day One listener, you'll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpSpotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Is your career site delivering the conversion you need? Dalia's plug-and-play tech turns any employer career site into a high-performance candidate conversion engine — no replatforming required, live in days.Visit dalia.co to learn more. Alright rec techies…..here's what's happening this week. CORK, Ireland — Workvivo by Zoom today unveiled Workvivo HQ, an AI-native digital headquarters that unites communication, knowledge, and action in one intelligent platform. Designed for every employee, from frontline workers to corporate teams, Workvivo HQ gives every organization one place where work gets done. https://hrtechfeed.com/workvivo-launches-workvivo-hq-the-ai-native-digital-headquarters-for-every-employee/ AUSTIN, Texas—-Indeed, the world's #1 job site1 and a leading hiring platform, today introduced Sourcing Assistant, an AI-powered feature that finds, engages, and delivers quality applicants faster for stronger hiring outcomes.  https://hrtechfeed.com/indeed-launches-ai-powered-sourcing-assistant/ NEW YORK — June 16, 2026 — HeyMilo AI, an emerging New York-based agentic recruiting platform, has announced it has crossed a major funding milestone, bringing its total capital raised to $6 million. https://hrtechfeed.com/heymilo-raises-6-million-to-scale-agentic-recruiting-for-high-volume-hiring/ Deel, the leading global payroll and HR platform, announced the launch of Deel Field Services (DFS), a purpose-built solution for organizations operating in medium-to-high complexity, on-site environments. Built on the infrastructure and expertise of Employ Africa Group (acquired April 2025), Deel Field Services extends Deel's existing workforce platform into a new category: operationally intensive, location-based deployment for industries including oil & gas, mining, construction, and heavy logistics where standard EOR models were never designed to go. https://hrtechfeed.com/deel-launches-hr-infrastructure-for-rigs-mines-construction-and-more/ Hirevue, the global leader in skills-based hiring, today announced the launch of Hirevue AI Interviewer, a voice-based solution to help enterprises identify qualified candidates through dynamic, skills-focused interviews. Built on more than two decades of hiring science and validation studies, AI Interviewer helps recruiters prioritize their most qualified candidates based on predictive insight. https://hrtechfeed.com/hr-techbytes-hirevue-adds-ai-voice-interviewer/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brent Baxter, Sam Delestienne, Steve Hoffman, John Strenger, and Matt Melsen Winning a banker-run auction at 5% under the highest bid. Closing a deal when co-sellers have not spoken in months. Getting through 22 countries of employment complexity with a client who refused to work with EOR providers. Acquiring a Netherlands-based public company and discovering the due diligence documents were in Dutch. These are the problems that no playbook prepares you for. Four corp dev professionals share how they handled them, and what it cost when they got it wrong. What You'll Learn  How to win a competitive auction when you're not the highest bidder What seller conflict at the closing table looks like (and how to get a deal back on track) When an employer of record works in a cross-border carve-out and when it creates permanent establishment risk Why management trust in the buyer can outweigh the highest bid number What a first European acquisition actually costs in compliance, legal, and cultural surprises If you're running deals where the numbers are right but the relationship isn't, or you're in a market you haven't operated in before, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, connects you with advisors who have closed deals in exactly that situation. ____________________ This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom. DealRoom just launched the only MCP server built for Buyer-Led M&A™ — so your AI and your deal data finally work together. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot directly to DealRoom and let your AI read your pipeline, analyze due diligence documents, and automatically write findings back.  See for yourself: dealroom.net/mcp ____________________ Episode Chapters [00:00] Intro [03:12] Partners who came to blows over valuation [03:37] The closing table walkout [05:47] Every deal craters on Friday [07:54] Why managing emotions is the hardest job after LOI [13:30] A door blows off an Alaska Airlines jet mid-process [16:00] Winning at $15M under the highest bid [18:23] Trust and reputation as deal currency [23:09] The "baby ugly" lesson [25:06] Preempting banker processes [32:14] What EOR is and when it works [33:52] Permanent establishment risk with C-level hires [34:48] CBA compliance across 22 countries [40:38] First European cross-border acquisition [42:38] Dutch documents and data residency surprises [46:20] Why in-person matters more in Europe [50:38] The $100M tax exposure that was not real [55:57] Outro

Vi gästas av Den Urbana Bondeklassen – även känd som ”Daniel”. Han berättar om sitt deltagande i ett kommunalt beredskapsprojekt där han lär sig mer om att odla i sin egen trädgård. Men också om en rapport han läst som heter ”Räcker maten?” som kommenterar på Sveriges självförsörjning när det kommer till livsmedelsproduktion och hur […]

Calle och Anna reder ut vad det egentligen innebär att regeringen vill halvera priset på kollektivtrafiken och följer en pågående debatt om att Stockholms stad bedriver ett gerillakrig mot tidöregeringen. För mer information om Allt åt alla Stockholm och vad vi gör så kan du prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev här. Följ oss också på Facebook, […]

Episode SummaryAlexey Mitko is a partner at Co-Ventures, the architect behind Eucalyptus' ESOP plan, and widely known in the Australian ecosystem as "ESOP Guy." He was around employee number twenty at Canva and one of the early employees at Koala, giving him a front-row seat to three of Australia's biggest consumer tech outcomes.In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack how Alexey designed the ESOP plan that led to roughly $300 million distributed back to Eucalyptus employees, the largest ESOP payout in Australian history. He walks through the three questions every founder faces but rarely verbalises: who gets equity, how much, and why you have an ESOP plan in the first place.You'll also hear how he modelled allocation across multiple rounds and hundreds of hires to avoid giving too much away early, why he personally walked the first two hundred employees through their equity, and why Australia's lack of a secondary market keeps ESOP feeling like monopoly money. Alexey closes with his Big Cojones moment: proposing to his wife, the most nervous he's ever been despite having climbed Europe's highest mountain.Time Stamps00:00 – Intro03:01 – The three ESOP questions every founder needs to answer05:58 – How to model equity allocation across rounds and hundreds of hires09:10 – Using ESOP as your most powerful recruitment and retention tool12:02 – How walking 200 employees through their equity built culture and trust15:02 – Open financials, shrinking cash balances, and what went wrong along the way17:55 – Why Australia's ESOP ecosystem is still behind Silicon Valley26:48 – Teaching employees to understand equity: the Google Sheet that started at zero29:20 – High salary vs heavy equity: giving employees a real choice32:16 – Common ESOP mistakes founders make and how to avoid them35:03 – Why Australians treat startup equity like monopoly money39:11 – The secondary market problem: why liquidity changes everything for ESOP43:25 – Why your startup career is a portfolio of equity bets46:36 – What angel investors can do to help portfolio companies build better ESOP plansSponsors:First Cheque is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone___Pear Tree: Pear Tree helps Australian and New Zealand founders build high-performing offshore teams without the agency middleman.As local hiring becomes more expensive and harder to fill, many operators are turning to offshore talent across engineering, development, marketing, accounting and operations at a fraction of local salary costs.The offshore horror stories you hear usually aren't a talent problem. They're the result of outsourcing agencies that overcharge clients while underpaying staff. Pear Tree takes a different approach through a direct, transparent model where your team is paid fairly, fully compliant, and focused entirely on your business.As part of the Day One community, you'll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire. Learn more at http://dayone.fm/peartreeFirst Cheque is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows.Mentioned in this episode:Deel x PX_Script 1Deel x PX_Script 2Pear TreeIf you're a founder or operator trying to scale, here's the reality — Australian hiring is getting harder, salaries are at record highs, and the talent you need is increasingly out of reach. The best operators are quietly building offshore teams of engineers, marketers, accountants and analysts at a fraction of the cost. Pear Tree does it differently. We headhunt highly skilled talent from the Philippines and South Africa with full transparency on where every dollar goes, so your team is paid fairly and fully focused on your business. As a Day One listener, you'll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpSpotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Det här avsnittet är en liveinspelning av ett panelsamtal som genomfördes i samarbete med Krakel. Malmö stad köper varje år varor och tjänster för omkring 9–10 miljarder kronor. Men vilka företag får egentligen ta del av våra skattepengar? I dag går offentliga medel till företag som kopplats till folkrättsbrott på Västbanken, militär- och övervakningsteknologi samt […]

High Yield Pediatric Viral Exanthem / Illness Review: Roseola infantum, Varicella-zoster virus infection (Chickenpox), Measles, Hand, foot, and mouth disease, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), Erythema infectiosum, Mumps, Rubellafor your PANCE, PANRE, Eor's, Physician Assistant exams, USMLE, NCLEX, nursing exams.►Support the channel by joining and becoming a member! (Thank you so much!)►Paypal Donation Link: https://bit.ly/3dxmTql (Thank you!)►INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cramthepance/►YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZCILePJ-E17txF-ObXlFKwIncluded in review: Slapped cheek rash, Koplik spots, Forchheimer spots, Posterior auricular lymphadenopathy, Circumoral pallor, Dew drops on a rose petal, Maculopapular rash, Vesicular rash, Parotitis, Orchitis, Oral hairy leukoplakia.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/cram-the-pance--5520744/support.

Live from the exhibit floor of the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in beautiful Bismarck, North Dakota, this episode kicks off a massive three-day broadcast celebrating 75 years of the historic Bakken play. Host Scott Hennen balances his jet lag from a recent trip to Norway with full-throttle interviews featuring the absolute heaviest hitters in global energy, aerospace technology, and state legislation.   First, Bernie Bourgeois from Chevron details the multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Hess and breaks down how cutting-edge "chemical EOR" literally washes subterranean rock to maximize American energy prosperity. Then, legendary local public servant Lynn Helms uses a pizza analogy to explain why the U.S. is barely on "first base" when it comes to oil recovery. State Representative Mike Nathy takes us inside the legislative trenches to expose the real economic data surrounding data centers and look ahead to a critical upcoming Republican primary. Finally, we talk to UND aviation graduate Grayson Miller about real-world life-and-death drone warfare, tracking how elite Ukrainian "Spider Web" drone swarms managed to set the Russian military back by multiple decades.   Standout Moments & Timestamps [43:00] Squeezing the Shale: Bernie Bourgeois from Chevron explains the global integrated brand's massive production footprint, moving four million barrels of oil a day around the world.   [43:42] Washing the Subterranean Stone: Bourgeois delivers a fascinating technical breakdown of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), detailing how specialized solvents act just like hand soap to alter rock characteristics and make oil more "slippery".   [44:11] Unconventional Permeability: A masterclass in geology as Bernie describes tight rock unconventional formations, explaining that the microscopic pore spaces in shale are less permeable than a kitchen granite countertop.   [44:31] The Emerging Argentine Frontier: Chevron's shale general manager maps out the world's top shale assets, crowning West Texas's Permian Basin a behemoth while identifying Argentina as the next massive global resource destination.   [45:34] Seven Slices of Pizza: Former Director of Mineral Resources Lynn Helms stuns the hosts by revealing that current technology has only extracted a meager 15% of the oil trapped in the Bakken and Three Forks formations—declaring that nobody would buy a pizza, eat one slice, and throw the rest away.   [45:54] Geological Records vs. Extinction Climate: Helms cuts through standard political rhetoric to discuss real geological history, noting that the Earth's climate has constantly shifted across millennia and tracking how special interest groups managed to weaponize the education…

Episode 225 with Ernestine Van Rappard, CCO  at Workpay, a Kenyan founded, Y Combinator backed payroll, HR, and Employer of Record platform helping companies hire, pay, and manage employees across Africa without setting up local entities. Ernestine joins us to unpack one of the biggest hidden barriers to doing business in Africa: compliant hiring, payroll, and workforce management across multiple African countries.In this episode, we explore how global companies are expanding into Africa faster by using Employer of Record (EOR) solutions to hire employees legally and compliantly without establishing subsidiaries. Ernestine explains why setting up entities across Africa can take months, the complexity of navigating labour laws and payroll regulations across different jurisdictions, and why payroll infrastructure is becoming a critical part of Africa's digital economy.We also discuss the rise of remote work and distributed teams across Africa, the growing global demand for African talent, and why international businesses are increasingly looking towards African markets for both expansion and recruitment. Ernestine shares how Workpay evolved from a HR software platform into one of Africa's leading payroll and EOR providers, now supporting companies hiring across multiple African markets.What We Discuss With ErnestineWhy hiring and payroll compliance remain major barriers to business expansion across Africa.How Employer of Record (EOR) services allow companies to hire in Africa without setting up local entities.The realities of managing payroll, tax, and labour law compliance across multiple African countries.Why global companies are increasingly hiring African talent and building distributed teams across the continent.How Workpay is helping businesses scale faster across Africa through payroll technology, HR management, and compliant workforce solutions.Did you miss my previous episode where I discus The Future of Ecommerce in Africa and Why Speed and Reliability Is Everything? Make sure to check it out!Connect with Terser:LinkedIn - Terser AdamuInstagram - unlockingafricaTwitter (X) - @TerserAdamuConnect with ErnestineLinkedIn - Ernestine Catz - van Rappard and WorkpayMany of the businesses unlocking opportunities in Africa don't do it alone. If you'd like strategic support on entering or expanding across African markets, reach out to our partners ETK Group:www.etkgroup.co.ukinfo@etkgroup.co.uk

Episode SummaryIn this 101 episode, Cheryl and Maxine go deep on the fundamentals of pre-seed investing, from how the stage came to exist to why the perceived risk gap between pre-seed and seed is much smaller than most investors think.They break down the history of how venture stages evolved from single rounds to alphabetized series, how seed investors eventually got pushed up the stack, and why pre-seed emerged around 2017 to 2019 as a distinct category. They unpack why PitchBook's definition of pre-seed as "whatever the investor calls it" muddies the water, how seed preempts from larger funds are inflating average valuations, and why thinking in risk stages rather than round labels is a better framework for evaluating early companies.You'll also hear why graduation rates from pre-seed to seed don't support the idea that pre-seed is two to three times riskier, why the Australian ecosystem is sitting on a talent surplus with a capital gap at pre-seed, and why this stage is particularly well suited for angels building diversified portfolios of 20 to 40 companies. Cheryl shares her framework for evaluating pre-seed opportunities through the lens of problem pain, frequency, and market size, and Maxine walks through how to think about return profiles, dilution, and valuation at a stage where there are no outputs to measure.Time Stamps00:00 Intro01:56 – A brief history of venture stages: how pre-seed became a thing07:14 – Why round labels are broken and risk stages are a better framework09:23 – Seed preempts: how big funds are blurring the line between pre-seed and seed11:48 – Is pre-seed actually riskier than seed? The case that it's not16:41 – Graduation rates: what the data says about pre-seed to seed conversion22:59 – Valuation dynamics: what pre-seed rounds look like in Australia vs the US28:36 – Why Australian founders are leaving for the US at pre-seed and what that means31:29 – How to evaluate pre-seed companies: inputs over outputs35:05 – Cheryl's pain framework: frequency, intensity, and willingness to pay38:28 – Why pre-seed is the best stage for diversifying who gets funded43:44 – The AI revenue problem: why getting in early matters more than everSponsors:First Cheque is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit https://www.deel.com/dayoneFirst Cheque is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpSpotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Vi har läst… eller tja, Martin har läst USAs nya strategidokument för kontraterrorism. Det är ett… intressant dokument. Myran kom bara till första sidan innan några konstiga versaler ledde honom ner i ett kaninhål. På slutet blir det också lite uppdatering av finanskrisspekulationerna från förra avsnittet. Går börsen bara bra för att robotarna utsatt sig […]

Månadens avsnitt inleds med kamrater-på-gatan-intervjuer från första maj. Efter det går vi igenom partiernas vallöften på kommunal och regional nivå, med fokus på SL-priserna. Sist men inte minst snackar vi om allt drama kring att Arkitekturupproret ställer upp i kommunalvalet. För mer information om Allt åt alla Stockholm och vad vi gör så kan du […]

I detta avsnitt gör vi en djupdykning, ända ner till persiska vikens botten, eftersom Martin har läst på om vilka minor som eventuellt kan dölja sig där. Myrar funderar kring varför det inte blir finanskris egentligen, borde det inte vara dags nu? För kontakt och uppdateringar med Eld och rörelse kan ni följa oss på […]

I detta avsnitt pratar Johanna, Jacob och Oskar om Liberalerna, stormen Dave och lekplatser i centrum och massa annat skoj. Hur låter en bäver?

Diane Prince walked into staffing with zero recruiting experience and one specific intention: build a business she could scale and sell. Six years later, she sold her staffing agency for $28 million.

Vineyard Wind sues GE Renewables to block a walkout over $300M in withheld payments and defective blades. Plus Ørsted posts a $262M quarterly loss and shakes up its board. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Uptime316 Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes who are in Australia. Before we get too far into this episode, I would like to mention that the UK US relationship has been very tense recently, as you have seen in the, in the news articles and on television. But there was one good news piece that just happened, which is the band Oasis just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So that is trying to mend those relationships, bring the UK and US back together. In at least a musical sense. So I know Rosemary was watching that closely as the votes were counted. But, [00:01:00] uh, everybody in the UK is super thrilled about it as they should be. And all us Oasis fans can’t wait for the induction ceremony. In fact, we’re planning to go to Cleveland. They’ll go watch it if we can. We shall see now onto more important information this week. Vineyard, wind and GE are not getting along. And if you have been paying attention for the last two years, you would’ve noticed that there’s been a couple of tense moments. Well, uh, that wind project is a little bit up in the air because vineyard wind has filed suit against GE renewables to stop the turbine maker from walking away after GE sent a termination notice. Over a $300 million ish, uh, disagreement in unpaid bills. At the center of this dispute are defective blades, of course, that, uh, broke off in 2024 and caused a number of problems, uh, for GE and vineyard Wind is particularly a delay in the [00:02:00] project and ge having to fix pull blades off of turbines that were already installed and I think they ended up sending those back to France. Reading the lawsuit, it seems like GE did not repair those blades. They replaced those blades because, uh, they may not have been able to repair them or maybe is the amount of time it’s gonna take to repair them. You can repair almost anything made out of. Composite. Uh, but this is a big problem because, uh, if GE does walk away and they’re talking about walking away from this project at the end of April, vineyard, wind believes that the turbines are not ready to be operated, and they don’t have a way to operate those turbines. They don’t have the knowledge or the people because the people belong to GE that need to make some of these turbines operate. Even there’s even some question about if all the turbines are operating at the required [00:03:00]handover requirements. This is unique because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wind turbine manufacturer leave before a wind site is finished. It must have happened before, but. It does put both sides in quite a pinch. Right.  Rosemary Barnes: Can I just jump, jump back to, to something that you said, um, that you can repair almost anything when it comes to composites? I would say that that doesn’t necessarily apply if your design was insufficient in the first place. And I mean the design for manufacturing in this case, I think that the, like computer model design worked fine, but obviously it was not as easy to manufacture or as possible to manufacture. With the correct quality as what they expected. It can’t have been so simple to just, just repair. That’s, um, that’s what I want to say. Like it, it’s obvious to me that if it was possible to repair, that would’ve been much easier than what they’ve ended up with, which I think is pretty foreseeable. Or most [00:04:00] engineers would probably have foreseen that if you, you know, put blades out there that, um, don’t meet your. Standard, um, quality control acceptance criteria that, you know, the consequence of that would be that it would be more likely to fail. So yeah, I think you can repair nearly anything on a standard blade that is possible to make correctly. But if you’ve got big quality problems, then it’s not, it’s, it’s not easy and it’s possibly not possible to, you know, just get, um, just get onto that in repair.  Matthew Stead: I, I think you’re both right. Because it all comes down to economics. So I think Alan’s statement, you know, things can be repaired. It just comes back to economics, doesn’t it?  Rosemary Barnes: U usually, yes. And like for your average, like if you’ve got a wind farm and you’ve got a blade with a big, a big repair, or you know, like a big defect right on the main laminate, that’s gonna require, you know, like a huge repair, taking the blade down and keeping it down for, you know, like three months while you rebuild like 20 meters [00:05:00] of laminate. Yes, that would be technically possible, but you wouldn’t because it would be so expensive. So us usually, like in 99% of cases, that would be it. That it’s not actually impossible to repair. It’s just very hard. But, you know, in these really huge blades and, you know, um, bearing in mind that I don’t, I don’t know the specific quality problems that they face, but, you know, just from my knowledge of composites, you can say what the challenging areas would be, but you know, a really big blade is gonna have a really thick laminate and, um, composites don’t like to have really thick laminates. When they cure, it’s usually an, an exothermic reaction, puts off heat, you know, like the temperature is changing and um, it works fine for thin laminates, but when it’s really thick you can get hot spots and cold spots and maybe it’s hard to get the resin to go all the way through evenly. But you know, imagine if you’ve got a really thick laminate and there’s a chunk of it that just didn’t get any resin in it. How are you gonna repair that? Like, I wouldn’t say impossible. I’m sure if the fate of the human race depended on it, then you would, you would make it work. But it’s [00:06:00] certainly very close to impossible.  Matthew Stead: Economically, it does not make sense.  Rosemary Barnes: You would probably have to make a few inventions. Along the way to be able to make it work as well. I think,  Allen Hall: I think I should read part of, and I don’t like reading these lawsuits, but this is informative in a sense that it provides some relative background as to what Vineyard Wind is thinking in some of the contract details that are involved here. So in June 4th, 2021, this is directly from the lawsuit, uh, vineyard Wind entered into A TSA with GE renewables in which. GE Renewables agreed to design, manufacture supply, install commission, and test the wind turbine generators for the vineyard wind project at a contract price of more than $1.3 billion. There you go. On the same day as an integral part of the commercial agreement, the parties entered into an SMA, uh, by which GE renewables agreed to maintain and service that wind turbine [00:07:00]generators for the first five years. Of operations of the project and guarantee that all wind turbine generators will operate at a 97% of production availability. Uh, this guarantee is central, is a central component of the commercial viability of the Vineyard Wind Project. So I would say so, right. Uh, at present, all of the wind turbine generators on the project have been installed. However, the wind turbine generators are not yet fully operational and are. Able to reduce power at only levels well below those intended under the contracts fundamental to the project’s commitment to Massachusetts to achieve full commercial operation. The project requires repair, commissioning, and maintenance of GE renewables, 62 proprietary wind turbine generators, and their component parts work that only GE renewables knows how to perform. So it sounds like Vineyard Wind has a five-year contract that GE ISS gonna operate these [00:08:00] turbines, and if they leave in a couple of weeks, vineyard wind really doesn’t have a backup plan. They may have. Were planning on a plan five years down the road where they could operate ’em, but to operate those turbines immediately when they haven’t, at least as. Indicated here may not be fully commissioned to providing the right amount of availability. That’s a huge problem for Vineyard. Huge.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting to me that they’ve decided to withhold some money that I think everyone agrees that they owe that money to ge. But then there’s a dispute because Vineyard when says that GE owes them money for some other stuff That sounds like GE disputes. Um, it’s like if you have a problem. With your landlord, they always tell you, don’t, don’t withhold rent, because then they can, you know, that’s, that’s their out of the contract. Right? So it seems weird, like it’s a relatively small amount compared to what vineyard wind is risking. So. It seems to me like, are they, is this a mistake from them? Are they giving ge an out from this contract that’s gonna be [00:09:00] really hard for them to meet? It might be that GE knows what it would cost to entirely fix the wind farm and have it producing the way that it should. But, you know, let’s say in a worst case scenario, that means remaking every single blade in the um, in the wind farm. At the, at the French factory, you know, like that could be your, your worst case scenario. GE knows that that’s gonna cost more than what they’re ever gonna pay over the five years of, um, you know, the, uh, of missing the availability guarantee. So then it is worth, for them, the cost effective thing to do is to just walk away and they’re kind of, the amount that they’ll have to pay is limited. If I’m thinking fairness, it’s so unfair that vineyard wind would be stuck with this wind farm that they can’t really get to do anything. But if I think about how I see these disputes work out in the smaller versions of them that I’ve seen, it seems like vineyard wind actually probably is the one more likely to come out with a bad outcome from the way that they’re [00:10:00] choosing to play this right. Uh, because they, they risk not being able to operate at all. And they have potentially, like, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t, I don’t know about, you know, how likely it is that the 300 million, that their withholding will be enough for GE to walk away with without having to pay anything for, um, you know, not operating, uh, correctly over the next five years. But, um, you know, it just seems like it’s not so much money compared to the billions that are at stake. To risk that they will be left unable to operate the wind farm at all. You know, it’s just, uh, I don’t know. It seems risky.  Allen Hall: Let’s start with the kickoff of what happened and what vineyard wind is alleging happened from these, their perspective on it. It does provide some insight into all the things we talked about on the podcast for the last two years. We, we saw bits and pieces of it. According to vineyard wind, uh, GE Renewable [00:11:00] claims that it is owed quote amounts due unquote for milestone payments is, is contrary in in language to the TSA, so the turbine supply agreement put simply vineyard wind owes nothing to GE renewables because the TSA turbine supply agreement allows vineyard wind to withhold amounts. The project engineer determines that GE Renewable owes vineyard wind from milestone payments otherwise due under the contract. So what they’re saying is GE owes is a bunch of money. Yes, we do owe GE renewables money, but it’s in Vineyard Wind’s favor. So why would they send GE money? Um, those set off amounts are substantial because GE renewables caused catastrophic injury to vineyard wind by installing 68 defective blades on 24. Wind turbine generators resulting in two years of delay and over a billion dollars of damages. In July, 2024, one of the GE renewable offshore blades collapsed and fell into the waters off Nantucket resuscitating a massive environmental cleanup and requiring a six month [00:12:00] construction hiatus during which GE Renewable performed a root cause analysis, concluding that 68 of the 72 GE renewable. Blades installed at the project, nearly all manufactured by GE Renewable in Gaspay Canada, and they say nearly all, not all, nearly all were also defected because they were inadequately bonded together, the original blades were so poorly made that they were beyond repair. Indeed, the federal government required GE renewable to remove all the blades and to replace all gas bay blades with others manufactured at a different facility in Sherbrook, France. So that’s really the kickoff to all of this disagreement was the quality issues from Gas Bay. Uh, vineyard Wind goes on to say that GE Renewables and, and their CEO, Scott Straza, basically admitted to, uh, a, a serious, um. Overlook or quality issue? Quality escape, something of the [00:13:00] sort, uh, in some of the statements, which I, I remember him talking about  Rosemary Barnes: allegedly, in your opinion. Allen Hall: Well, and Scott Streek did say it. In fact, here’s, here’s what Scott Streek did say. Streek, uh, acknowledged that the blade failure and said, quote, we have identified a material deviation or a manufacturing deviation. In one of our factories that through the inspection or quality assurance process we should have identified. Because of that, we’re going to use our existing data and reinspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind and for context in this factory in Gus Bay, Canada, where the material deviation existed. That’s a quote. What happens now,  Rosemary Barnes: obviously I’ve never worked on anything that’s, this is the biggest example of, um, a, you know, a blade quality problem, a serial issue probably that’s ever happened in the wind industry. I’ve never worked on something this big, but I have worked on probably half a dozen small, small versions that are quite similar. Um. To this, but just on a, you know, a much, much smaller scale. And I will say that it never [00:14:00] feels fair what the owner of the wind farm, like, what the outcome is, never feels fair to the owner of the wind farm. Like when you’ve got a serial defect in, um, in play it like, and everyone suffers. It costs, it’s gonna cost the, um, you know, the manufacturer a lot of money. But I think that proportionally it is. Affects the owners more in nearly every case. It’s just there are some contractual things that you don’t end up with outcomes that feel, feel fair to anybody that, um, you know, would take a casual look at it. So I don’t think that an outcome that feels fair is probably likely for, for vineyard wind. Um, and I guess it all just comes down to whether or not GE agree that they owe that 800 million or whatever the figure is. Um, or if a court finds that they owe it. Because surely the contract doesn’t say that Vineyard wins engineer at any time can just, or project manager can at any time decide [00:15:00] that, um, GE owes the money and so they don’t have to pay. That obviously wouldn’t be a very, um, nice contract for GE to sign. So there’s gotta be some more nuance to it other than. That our project manager says, you owe us money so we’re not paying. And then, you know, you have to continue. Like, I, it’s probably impossible for us to, without, um, you know, having access to all of, all of the documents and the legal degree to understand it. Probably, probably hard for us to Yeah. Come up with a, a reasonable conclusion.  Allen Hall: It does make you think, usually the progression is dispute. Whatever contractually is obligated in the beginning happens. And so if there’s someone who decides what pot of money goes where, that, that’s usually the first step. Second step is usually arbitration in the us. I’d be surprised if they haven’t gone through at least an attempt at arbitration. And then once arbitration breaks down, then you go into the courts, which is clearly where they’re at now you’re, you’re at the highest level that you can be in terms of legal proceedings to try to sort this matter out. And I’m sure both sides. Do not want to be in front of a [00:16:00] courtroom if they can avoid it. So there’s a much more to come about this. I, I think the other operators, uh, GEs this is, is this GEs only? Yeah. This is GEs only wind farm offshore in the us So this is it. But I would imagine that the other, uh, operators in offshore wind in the US or. Being very careful word through contracts and how this is proceeding.  Rosemary Barnes: That’s something else I think about this case is that it’s going to be like the GE are the ones who have more at stake in terms of reputational harm. I would’ve thought then. Um, so. Yeah, that’s obviously a consideration that they’ve, they’ve gotta have, it isn’t, regardless of where the facts are, it’s not a good look. Right. Um, to be seen, to be walking away from a wind farm. And it probably would make other people considering big expensive GE wind farms to be like, oh, you know, are we actually gonna get across the line with this? Or is there a risk that they just, you know, throw a tantrum towards the end and threaten to walk away and we have to renegotiate [00:17:00] everything. So, um, I guess that there’s a, yeah, there’s always just the perception. Is as important in a lot of ways to what the actual facts are.  Matthew Stead: The thing I find is, um, I mean this is largely a legal thing, isn’t it? You know, we, we’ve agreed that it’s, with the lawyers, it’s a largely a legal thing. The, the sort of topic that I’m interested in is, um, like the example of you buy a car, you know, you buy a Toyota, um, you expect to be able to maintain it. You expect to be able to run it and get a serviced by a Toyota, you don’t expect in the first year to take your Toyota to Ford and get them to fix it in the first year. The bigger issue is the turbine supplier agreement does not actually allow the turbine to be operated without the OEM, so no one knows. No one knows how to run it. So for me, it’s a massive industry challenge, access of data, access of how to run a turbine. If the OEM is no longer there, so I think hopefully [00:18:00] this can have rama bigger ramifications for the industry that operators and owners can actually run the assets they own.  Rosemary Barnes: Well, there are companies that will come in and pull out your control system of your, you know, your turbine. If it, you know, if you, um, if you don’t wanna work with them anymore or if the company went bankrupt, then there are companies that will rip it out and put a new one in. It’s not, not saying that that’s like an easy, cost effective thing to do and probably not gonna get the same, um, performance as, as you originally did. But that’s what happens if you are, um, you know, your turbine manufacturer goes bankrupt and they just don’t exist to support anymore. Sometimes people have to resort to literally pulling out the whole control system and starting again. Not easy. When it’s something as big and new as this one obviously  Matthew Stead: isn’t the better answer that when you buy something, you actually buy the information to actually run it. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t fully agree [00:19:00] though, because. It’s like, um, o often what you say, oh, you know, like this would be good. Like the one common thing is people say, oh, you know, like it’s planned obsolescence. People, engineers plan design things to fail so that you’ll need to replace them. And I think that that does, that does happen again in like consumer, consumer products. Like, um, yeah, like your, your battery isn’t really designed to last for 10 years in your, your phone the same way that it is in an electric car. Um, more than 10 years in the case of an electric car. Um. But it’s not. It’s not what happens in industrial scale equipment. You are mostly worried about getting the price point right. And if you want something to last longer, if you want something that anybody can come in and fix it easily, it costs more to engineer like that and usually like a a lot more. So it’s not just people like evil engineers or evil. Um. Evil management at these, at these companies.  Allen Hall: I already get to evil engineers. Rosemary Barnes: No, people think it is. People think it’s evil. Engineers like purposely designing bad products to [00:20:00] um, make money, which I actually do think that they do with consumer products. Some of the time. Um, but when it comes to like industrial equipment, I, I don’t think that that’s the main, the main thing that planned obsolescence is not, is not a major factor here. It’s about trying to get the price point competitive to make sales. And if you want to get better engineering, you, you will, you will pay for it.  Matthew Stead: I got a call with someone today that, which is on this topic. So, you know, we, we are a sensor company and, um, we pro we provide results, okay? So if we actually provided the raw data that we measure, it actually allows people, other people to reverse engineer our products. So we don’t generally provide the raw data, so we provide the end outcome. Because it means that people can’t copy what we do. It means we can actually charge a lower price. So actually there’s a lot of logic to, you know, having, you know, [00:21:00] all these ways of engineering a product to, you know, give a better outcome to the end customer. Allen Hall: I know Rosie doesn’t like Elon Musk, but this one of the things that Elon Musk did with Tesla at least, I don’t know about the other companies that he runs, but with Tesla, they went off and. Made patents, right? So they applied for a bunch of patents and received them and then just made them open use. And the reason they did that was so somebody couldn’t jump the patent line, create a patent about some car related electric thing, and prohibit Tesla from doing. And so Tesla has always had the need to create patents that cost them, I’m sure, a, a pretty penny, just so they can avoid. Patent conflicts and lawsuits going forward. And it’s sort of the same thing, right? That the evil engineer bit, that’s the evil engineer bit I, that I don’t like is that when you get these crazy patent things happening out there that are just there to collect money and not do any of the work,  Rosemary Barnes: and some of the patents are. Absolutely crazy. Like when you do a patent search and it’s like you’re [00:22:00] reading the language and like it sounds like they’ve just patented the concept of a wheel, you know? And then you’ve gotta try and figure out like what’s actually going on. Yeah. In  Matthew Stead: our world, someone has a patent around the Doppler shift. Allen Hall: How can you have a patent on Doppler shift? That’s crazy.  Matthew Stead: It’s fundamental physical. You know, there’s a shift in frequency of a sound, um,  Allen Hall: based on speed  Matthew Stead: and yes, sound comes from a blade and there’s a doppler shift.  Allen Hall: That’s real. I, I, I guess, uh, see, that’s, that’s, that’s the craziness of that. See, you should have thought about. The idiots that were gonna do that and then write a patent about Doppler shift.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s really annoying because it’s like, you know that it’s not gonna be, I mean, a lot of them you are like 99% sure it’s not gonna be possible for them to defend that if it gets challenged. But it’s like, to what extent do we trust that, you know? Um, so you still usually end up steering around it anyway, but it, it really gets in the way of elegant engineering solutions. All these. Bizaro patents that are out there like clogging up [00:23:00] the design landscape.  Allen Hall: That happened recently. Right? Rosa? You had and I were talking about a particular patent. I thought had it existed and it did at one point exist and I. Rosie said, I don’t, I don’t see it anymore. So I did some search on it. Yeah, it got pulled off. Uh, the list of valid patents. It was a lightning related thing.  Rosemary Barnes: And you were complaining that it was so obvious that they should never have been able to patent it, but yeah, and somebody obviously said, said something at some. I don’t think patents are not the best way to protect an idea anyway. Right? Like nobody, if you, if you’ve got a new technology idea and you’re relying on a patent to protect other people from copying it, it’s not the best idea. I do work with a lot of small inventors who are like, oh, I’ve got a patent application, and they think it means something, that it doesn’t. They think, oh, you know, patent was approved. That means it works. It means it’s a good idea. It doesn’t mean any of those things for like small, outside of big companies. I, I think it’s super rare that you would get more. You would get a positive return [00:24:00] on. On filing and maintaining a patent in all the countries that, um, are relevant  Allen Hall: as wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. Sted posted a net loss of 1.7 billion Danish groner, roughly $262 million for the third quarter, as the cost of battling us anti win policies continues to mount the CEO. Rasmus abo, uh, says the company is about. One year into a turnaround plan, uh, that’s set to [00:25:00] run through beginning of 2028, and that the medicine is starting to work. Uh, one major strategic change. Ted will enter partnerships on new projects far earlier, and so it will never again, uh, be forced into damaging late stage divestments The company maintained its full year EBITDA and, uh, guidance of, of, of. 24 to 27 billion Danish kroner. That’s a good bit of money. And the sale of a 50% stake in the horn, C3 to Apollo Global Management for a billion dollars is already under. Well, at least in progress, but there’s a lot more behind the scenes here. Sted had an basically an investor meeting and a shareholder meeting, and, uh, they have three new board members. They let go of, if I remember correctly, three board members that were [00:26:00] employees that they just, uh, had reductions in forces that happen to affect board members, which is very odd. Very, very odd in my. Humble opinion, having watched number of boards for a long time, usually don’t remove board members in that fashion, but there does seem to be a, a, a more emphasis on the board to help, uh, the CEO of stead get through some of these tumultuous times and maybe a little bit of concern about the, the, the way the board was constructed to get or sit back into profitability sooner rather than later. This is a big deal up in Denmark. Of course, stead is the power company for Denmark. This has implications worldwide, though, uh, what stead does everybody else follows. And the one thing that, uh, that was sort of in dispute before the shareholder meeting was EOR at one point, was. At least contemplating a board seat. And then right [00:27:00] before the meeting they backed off and said, no, it’s fine. We don’t want a board seat. Maybe they had some sense of what the changes were gonna be made to the board, so they felt better about it. But orsa is not out of the rough seas at the moment. There’s a couple more years of, of growing pains and learning some lessons that they wish they didn’t have to learn. I guess that’s the way I would look at it. What implications does this have on the greater offshore wind community? Is stead taking basically a step back and, and trying to focus. Herding offshore wind, or is it just other, another companies are gonna step into that, that space that Sted may have previously occupied? Matthew Stead: I think what you’re talking about, um, Alan, is, is all logical. I mean, you know, you can’t have everything. So, um, as in you can’t, you know, getting late to a project and expect it to go well, um, spreading risk is a good thing, you know, so the whole, you know, [00:28:00] doing it fast. Doing it cheap and doing it well. Um, you, you, you can’t have all of those things at once. So actually what they’re talking about, I think is entirely logical. Um, so yeah, I think if they can lead the way that way and, and you know, I’ve come from, um, some other industries like construction and they, they spread the risk across multiple. Organizations that know what they’re doing. So the idea of joint ventures where you get the best of both worlds makes complete sense to me. Allen Hall: Do they start making different decisions on projects based upon their financial stake at the moment? A And more importantly, when they start looking for offshore wind projects, are they likely to hook up with Vestas? Because I, I think that’s where this is all going.  Matthew Stead: Pick a horse.  Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re gonna pick a horse. I, I mean, that’s the best, best way to think about it. They’re gonna pick a horse and gonna stick with them. Instead of having, uh, a lot of options and playing one against the other, I could see alignment happening, uh, versus being the [00:29:00] one offshore, of course. And or instead being a big player. There is, is that the combo that’s gonna push the industry forward? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think it’s more similar to what Chinese manufacturers are doing, a lot more vertical integration. You can, um, yeah, save, save a lot of money by doing that. It is. Uh, you know, not always ideal from other points of view. And it might be nice to have a, you know, a thriving technology ecosystem of, you know, different manufacturers competing with each other and, you know, making better products. So, um, yeah, I don’t know, uh, have sit on the fence on this one for what’s good. I do feel really bad for osted though, like in terms of the, the. Shocks that they’ve had over the last couple of years. I, I don’t think most people would’ve foreseen that it would be so risky to try and expand into the US like everybody. A few years ago, everybody thought that that was the next big profitable frontier in offshore wind. And [00:30:00] I don’t think that many people would’ve foreseen things going the way that they did.  Allen Hall: Is it the result of large industrial projects take time and that in that timeframe, five, 10 years, that the world changes so much? You can’t. Accurately predict what the outcome will be and or it just got caught up in it.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that’s actually one of the themes you guys have read, um, how big things get Done Right by Ben. Um, that’s one of the things that he mentions that the quicker that you can do the execution phase of your project, like spend plenty of time planning it, but when you’re actually committed, work super fast because the longer that you’re working, the more your chance of a, a black swan. Um, a Black Swan event be, you know, a government that turns out to, you know, want to, you know, tear up contracts and you know, do all these other unprecedented stuff. You know, if you’ve got projects that take 10 or more years to build, then there’s just like a lot more risk of something like that happening. And I think that, um, you know, like in some ways that’s just one of the inherent weaknesses of [00:31:00] wind energy in general, but offshore wind especially is that it does actually take a long time to get through all of the things that you need to do to. Um, to complete a project. And so it’s just, yeah, a lot more chance for, you know, the government will change two or three times probably in, um, you know, during a project. How many wars can start, how many, you know, pandemics. Can there be you? Like, the longer that you’re going, you might think none of those things could be predicted and that can’t, but you can predict that those sorts of big things happen. And the longer that you, um, are exposed and the more of them that you’re probably gonna face. And I think that, yeah, like something like a solar farm is much quicker to roll out. Um, battery projects are much quicker to roll out. So it’s just like that, those are benefits of those technologies compared to wind. You just have to kind of accept that that’s one of the weaknesses of this, this industry that we’re in. Allen Hall: Is it a benefit to have solar because it can deploy very quickly, or, or is it just [00:32:00] smarter to have. More wind turbines of smaller megawatt outputs because you can manufacture ’em at scale quicker, and so the economies of scale don’t really matter so much. This is an argument we’ve been making for months now, that when you start selecting a single turbine, which doesn’t have any history, and it’s a big one, and it takes a long time to produce, you are really setting up yourself to fall into that window where something can go wrong. Versus just stamping out two or three megawatt turbines and going like crazy. It just seems so much less risky.  Rosemary Barnes: I think that I definitely agree with you for onshore and then for offshore. Probably also, like I don’t think it’s necessarily go for a smaller turbine. It’s just don’t go for the brand new one. Like that’s why I don’t understand how many people are like so obsessed with this, you know, small, small amount of improvement that they get from the very biggest. Turbine, but I don’t think that they realize the amount of technical risk. And I think that it gets, it’s getting [00:33:00] more and more like the, um, technology increment is getting more and more the bigger that we go. It’s not that like, oh, we’re learning how to do this, this, well, it’s, it’s the opposite that, you know, like every, um, increment up in size as an exponentially more like larger number of problems, technical problems that have to be solved. And, um, I think that, yeah, that’s. That’s something people don’t factor in. Allen Hall: Is it the gold rush problem where the miners were trying to hit that pocket of gold and spending all their time trying to find this gold, find this gold. In the meantime, a lot of them obviously broke, and the people that made money in the gold rush or the stores that sold the pickaxes, if you, you making a pickaxes, you have a customer page, you can just sell those things in. Levi’s, be the other one, right? So they’re selling genes of pickaxes to the miners. Guess who won in that battle, right? Levi’s.  Rosemary Barnes: But what’s the analogy with win two of the pickax manufacturers,  Allen Hall: the people that make the two megawatt machines? In my opinion, that’s gonna be who the pickaxes are because you don’t have to think about it. If [00:34:00] you can talk to operators of the United States today and you say, what turbine would you like to buy over again? And they will almost all tell you, GE one point fives. Almost all of them. And you go, yeah. Oh, okay. I understand it because it’s a machine. It’s pretty simple. But it does work. And it is, it is a true warhorse turbine. And some of the vested ones are the same. Simpson Siemens turbines are very similar, right? Uh, but in today’s world, when we’re talking about 15, 20 megawatt turbines, I just think, man, you gotta be careful doing that just because of the time it takes to develop it and produce it, and. Work at all the kinks? Uh, Rosemary, I think you’re right about that.  Rosemary Barnes: I think the issue is that, um, when you’re deciding whether to develop a project or not, it really depends a lot on what the spreadsheet tells you your return is going to be. And, um, you know, a bigger turbine with, uh, you know, like larger output over its lifetime, longer lifetime. Those are all gonna give you really good. Spreadsheet numbers, but what’s not in the spreadsheet [00:35:00] is, oh, you know, you’ve actually increased your risk of having to wait two years while they replace every single blade in this, um, in this wind farm. Oh, by the way, yeah, you’re gonna be dealing with, um, you know, twice as many repairs and your, um, downtime is not gonna be 2%, it’s gonna be 3.5% or, or something. You know, those, those sorts of things, I don’t think, uh, adequately captured in the, the spreadsheets whe say when you, whether you should or shouldn’t develop a new project.  Matthew Stead: So, so the evil engineering should be making decisions, not the evil lawyers.  Allen Hall: The financial people always make the decisions, right? The insurance companies make the decisions.  Rosemary Barnes: Don’t think there’s a lot of engineering into, um, input in the, the very first stages. But I also think that if you put in the reality, like most engineers, I think are a little bit pessimistic because our job is to see what problems exist at, you know, and then solve them ideally. Um, but at least part of it, like our brains are wired to look for problems, right? That’s, um, that’s a necessary part of the job, in my opinion. But if you were, you know, like pessimistic in your assumptions in the [00:36:00] spreadsheet, you would probably the majority of the time say, don’t make this project. The return is not very good. Allen Hall: Well, that would be a smart move, right? Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I don’t actually think you probably should have too many engineers in in involved.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. But what is the CEO incentivized by is the, yeah, so it, it comes back to, you know, what, what, what drives the project And it’s not just engineering.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps. For Rosie and Matthew, I am Allen Hall and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.

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We're proud to release this ahead of Ryan's keynote at AIE Europe. Hit the bell, get notified when it is live! Attendees: come prepped for Ryan's AMA with Vibhu after.Move over, context engineering. Now it's time for Harness engineering and the age of the token billionaires.Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI is leading that charge, recently publishing a lengthy essay on Harness Eng that has become the talk of the town:In it, Ryan peeled back the curtains on how the recently announced OpenAI Frontier team have become OpenAI's top Codex users, running a >1m LOC codebase with 0 human written code and, crucially for the Dark Factory fans, no human REVIEWED code before merge. Ryan is admirably evangelical about this, calling it borderline “negligent” if you aren't using >1B tokens a day (roughly $2-3k/day in token spend based on market rates and caching assumptions):Over the past five months, they ran an extreme experiment: building and shipping an internal beta product with zero manually written code. Through the experiment, they adopted a different model of engineering work: when the agent failed, instead of prompting it better or to “try harder,” the team would look at “what capability, context, or structure is missing?”The result was Symphony, “a ghost library” and reference Elixir implementation (by Alex Kotliarskyi) that sets up a massive system of Codex agents all extensively prompted with the specificity of a proper PRD spec, but without full implementation:The future starts taking shape as one where coding agents stop being copilots and start becoming real teammates anyone can use and Codex is doubling down on that mission with their Superbowl messaging of “you can just build things”.Across Codex, internal observability stacks, and the multi-agent orchestration system his team calls Symphony, Ryan has been pushing what happens when you optimize an entire codebase, workflow, and organization around agent legibility instead of human habit.We sat down with Ryan to dig into how OpenAI's internal teams actually use Codex, why the real bottleneck in AI-native software development is now human attention rather than tokens, how fast build loops, observability, specs, and skills let agents operate autonomously, why software increasingly needs to be written for the model as much as for the engineer, and how Frontier points toward a future where agents can safely do economically valuable work across the enterprise.We discuss:* Ryan's background from Snowflake, Brex, Stripe, and Citadel to OpenAI Frontier Product Exploration, where he works on new product development for deploying agents safely at enterprise scale* The origin of “harness engineering” and the constraint that kicked off the whole experiment: Ryan deliberately refused to write code himself so the agent had to do the job end to end* Building an internal product over five months with zero lines of human-written code, more than a million lines in the repo, and thousands of PRs across multiple Codex model generations* Why early Codex was painfully slow at first, and how the team learned to decompose tasks, build better primitives, and gradually turn the agent into a much faster engineer than any individual human* The obsession with fast build times: why one minute became the upper bound for the inner loop, and how the team repeatedly retooled the build system to keep agents productive* Why humans became the bottleneck, and how Ryan's team shifted from reviewing code directly to building systems, observability, and context that let agents review, fix, and merge work autonomously* Skills, docs, tests, markdown trackers, and quality scores as ways of encoding engineering taste and non-functional requirements directly into context the agent can use* The shift from predefined scaffolds to reasoning-model-led workflows, where the harness becomes the box and the model chooses how to proceed* Symphony, OpenAI's internal Elixir-based orchestration layer for spinning up, supervising, reworking, and coordinating large numbers of coding agents across tickets and repos* Why code is increasingly disposable, why worktrees and merge conflicts matter less when agents can resolve them, and what it really means to fully delegate the PR lifecycle* “Ghost libraries”, spec-driven software, and the idea that a coding agent can reproduce complex systems from a high-fidelity specification rather than shared source code* The broader future of Frontier: safely deploying observable, governable agents into enterprises, and building the collaboration, security, and control layers needed for real-world agentic workRyan Lopopolo* X: https://x.com/_lopopolo* Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlopopolo/* Website: https://hyperbo.la/contact/Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction: Harness Engineering and OpenAI Frontier00:02:20 Ryan's background and the “no human-written code” experiment00:08:48 Humans as the bottleneck: systems thinking, observability, and agent workflows00:12:24 Skills, scaffolds, and encoding engineering taste into context00:17:17 What humans still do, what agents already own, and why software must be agent-legible00:24:27 Delegating the PR lifecycle: worktrees, merge conflicts, and non-functional requirements00:31:57 Spec-driven software, “ghost libraries,” and the path to Symphony00:35:20 Symphony: orchestrating large numbers of coding agents00:43:42 Skill distillation, self-improving workflows, and team-wide learning00:50:04 CLI design, policy layers, and building token-efficient tools for agents00:59:43 What current models still struggle with: zero-to-one products and gnarly refactors01:02:05 Frontier's vision for enterprise AI deployment01:08:15 Culture, humor, and teaching agents how the company works01:12:29 Harness vs. training, Codex model progress, and “you can just do things”01:15:09 Bellevue, hiring, and OpenAI's expansion beyond San FranciscoTranscriptRyan Lopopolo: I do think that there is an interesting space to explore here with Codex, the harness, as part of building AI products, right? There's a ton of momentum around getting the models to be good at coding. We've seen big leaps in like the task complexity with each incremental model release where if you can figure out how to collapse a product that you're trying to.Build a user journey that you're trying to solve into code. It's pretty natural to use the Codex Harness to solve that problem for you. It's done all the wiring and lets you just communicate in prompts. To let the model cook, you have to step back, right? Like you need to take a systems thinking mindset to things and constantly be asking, where is the Asian making mistakes?Where am I spending my time? How can I not spend that time going forward? And then build confidence in the automation that I'm putting in place. So I have solved this part of the SDLC.swyx: [00:01:00] All right.[00:01:03] Meet Ryan swyx: We're in the studio with Ryan from OpenAI. Welcome.Ryan Lopopolo: Hi,swyx: Thanks for visiting San Francisco and thanks for spending some time with us.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah, thank you. I'm super excited to be here.swyx: You wrote a blockbuster article on harness engineering. It's probably going to be the defining piece of this emerging discipline, huh?Ryan Lopopolo: Thank you. It is it's been fun to feel like we've defined the discourse in some sense.swyx: Let's contextualize a little bit, this first podcast you've ever done. Yes. And thank you for spending with us. What is, where is this coming from? What team are you in all that jazz?Ryan Lopopolo: Sure, sure.Ryan Lopopolo: I work on Frontier Product Exploration, new product development in the space of OpenAI Frontier, which is our enterprise platform for deploying agents safely at scale, with good governance in any business. And. The role of VMI team has been to figure out novel ways to deploy our models into package and products that we can sell as solutions to enterprises.swyx: And you have a background, I'll just squeeze it in there. Snowflake, brick, [00:02:00] stripe, citadel.Ryan Lopopolo: Yes. Yes. Same. Any kind of customerswyx: entire life. Yes. The exact kind of customer that you want to,Vibhu: so I'll say, I was actually, I didn't expect the background when I looked at your Twitter, I'm seeing the opposite.Stuff like this. So you've got the mindset of like full send AI, coding stuff about slop, like buckling in your laptop on your Waymo's. Yes. And then I look at your profile, I'm like, oh, you're just like, you're in the other end too. Oh, perfect. Makes perfect.Ryan Lopopolo: I it's quite fun to be AI maximalist if you're gonna live that persona.Open eye is the place to do it. And it'sswyx: token is what you say.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. Certainly helps that we have no rate limits internally. And I can go, like you said, full send at this stay.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. So the Frontier, and you're a special team within O Frontier.Ryan Lopopolo: We had been given some space to cook, which has been super, super exciting.[00:02:47] Zero Code ExperimentRyan Lopopolo: And this is why I started with kind of a out there constraint to not write any of the code myself. I was figuring if we're trying to make agents that can be deployed into end to enterprises, they should be [00:03:00] able to do all the things that I do. And having worked with these coding models, these coding harnesses over 6, 7, 8 months, I do feel like the models are there enough, the harnesses are there enough where they're isomorphic to me in capability and the ability to do the job.So starting with this constraint of I can't write the code meant that the only way I could do my job was to get the agent to do my job.Vibhu: And like a, just a bit of background before that. This is basically the article. So what you guys did is five months of working on an internal tool, zero lines of code over a mi, a million lines of code in the total code base.You say it was cenex, more like it was cenex faster than you would've. If you had done it by end. SoRyan Lopopolo: yeah, thatVibhu: was the mindset going into this, right?Ryan Lopopolo: That's right.[00:03:46] Model Upgrades LessonsRyan Lopopolo: Started with some of the very first versions of Codex CLI, with the Codex Mini model, which was obviously much less capable than the ones we have today.Which was also a very good constraint, right? Quite a visceral feeling to ask the [00:04:00] model to build you a product feature. And it just not being able to assemble the pieces together.Which kind of defined one of the mindsets we had for going into this, which is whenever the model just cannot, you always pop open at the task, double click into it, and build smaller building blocks that then you can reassemble into the broader objective.And it was quite painful to do this. Honestly, the first month and a half was. 10 times slower than I would be. But because we paid that cost, we ended up getting to something much more productive than any one engineer could be because we built the tools, the assembly station for the agent to do the whole thing.[00:04:43] Model Generations, Build Systems & Background ShellsRyan Lopopolo: But yeah, so onward to G BT 5, 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 3, 5 4. To go through all these model generations and see their kind of corks and different working styles also meant we had to adapt the code base to change things up when the model was revved. [00:05:00] One interesting thing here is five two, the Codex harness at the time did not have background shells in it, which means we were able to rely on blocking scripts to perform long horizon work.But with five, three and background shells, it became less patient, less willing to block. So we had to retool the entire build system to complete in under a minute and. This is not a thing I would expect to be able to do in a code base where people have opinions. But because the only goal was to make the Asian productive over the course of a week, we went from a bespoke make file build to Basil, to turbo to nx and just left it there because builds were fast at that point.swyx: Interesting. Talk more about Turbo TenX. That's interesting ‘cause that's the other direction that other people have been doing.Ryan Lopopolo: Ultimately I have. Not a lot of experience with actual frontend repo architecture.swyx: You're talking that Jessica built the sky. So I'm like, I know the NX team. I know Turbo from Jared [00:06:00] Palmer.And I'm like, yeah, that's an interesting comparison.[00:06:02] One Minute Build LoopRyan Lopopolo: The hill we were climbing right, was make it fast.swyx: Is there a micro front end involved? Is it how how complex reactRyan Lopopolo: electron base single app sort of thingswyx: And must be under a minute. That's an interesting limitation. I'm actually not super familiar with the background shelf stuff.Probably was talked about in the fight three release.Ryan Lopopolo: BA basically means that codex is able to spawn commands in the background and then go continue to work while it waits for them to finish. So it can spawn an expensive build and then continue reviewing the code, for example.swyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: And this helps it be more time efficient for the user invoking the harness.swyx: And I guess and just to really nail this, like what does one minute matter? Like why not five, okay, good. We want no. WeRyan Lopopolo: want the inner loop to be as fast as possible. Okay. One minute was just a nice round number and we were able to hit it.swyx: And if it doesn't complete, it kills it or some something,Ryan Lopopolo: No.We just take that as a signal that we need to stop what we're doing, double click, decompose a build graph a bit to get us to high back under so that we [00:07:00] can able the agent continue to operate.swyx: It's almost like you're, it's like a ratchet. It's like you're forcing build time discipline, because if you don't, it'll just grow and grow.That's right. And you mentioned that my current, like the software I work on currently is at 12 minutes. It sucks.Ryan Lopopolo: This has been my experience with platform teams in the past, where you have an envelope of acceptable build times and you let it go up to breach and then you spend two, three weeks to bring it back down to the lower end of the average low bed stop.But because tokens are so cheap Yeah. And we're so insanely parallel with the model, we can just constantly be gardening this thing to make sure that we maintain these in variants, which means. There's way less dispersion in the code and the SDLC, which means we can simplify in a way and rely on a lot more in variance as we write the software.[00:07:45] Observability, Traces & Local Dev StackVibhu: Lovely.[00:07:46] Humans Are BottleneckVibhu: You mentioned in your article, like humans became the bottleneck, right? You kicked off as a team of three people. You're putting out a million line of code, like 1500 prs, basically. What's the mindset there? So as much as code is disposable, you're doing a lot of review. A lot [00:08:00] of the article talks about how you wanna rephrase everything is prompting everything, is what the agent can't see.It's kind of garbage, right? You shouldn't have it in there. So what's like the high level of how you went about building it, and then how you address okay, humans are just PR review. Like how is human in the loop for this?Ryan Lopopolo: We've moved beyond even the humans reviewing the code as well.[00:08:19] Human Review, PR Automation & Agent Code ReviewRyan Lopopolo: Most of the human review is post merge at this point.But post, post merge, that's not even reviewed. That's justswyx: Oh, let's just make ourselves happy by YouRyan Lopopolo: haven't used fundamentally. The model is trivially paralyzable, right? As many GPUs and tokens as I am willing to spend, I can have capacity to work with my hood base.The only fundamentally scarce thing is the synchronous human attention of my team. There's only so many hours in the day we have to eat lunch. I would like to sleep, although it's quite difficult to, stop poking the machine because it makes me want to feed it. You have to step back, right?Like you need to take a systems thinking mindset to things and [00:09:00] constantly be asking where is the agent making mistakes? Where am I spending my time? How can I not spend that time going forward? And then build confidence in the automation that I'm putting in place. So I have solved this part of the SDLC, and usually what that has looked like is like we started needing to pay very close attention to the code because the agent did not have the right building blocks to produce.Modular software that decomposed appropriately that was reliable and observable and actually accrued a working front end in these things, right?[00:09:35] Observability First SetupRyan Lopopolo: So in order to not spend all of our time sitting in front of a terminal at most, doing one or two things at a time, invested in giving the model that observability, which is that that graph in the post here.swyx: Yeah. Let's walk through this traces and which existed firstRyan Lopopolo: we started with just the app and the whole rest of it. From vector through to all these login metrics, APIs was, I dunno, half an [00:10:00] afternoon of my time. We have intentionally chosen very high level fast developer tools. There's a ton of great stuff out there now.We use me a bunch, which makes it trivial to pull down all these go written Victoria Stack binaries in our local development. Tiny little bit of python glue to spin all these up. And off you go. One neat thing here is we have tried to invert things as much as possible, which is instead of setting up an environment to spawn the coding agent into, instead we spawn the coding agent, like that's the entry point.It's just Codex. And then we give Codex via skills and scripts the ability to boot the stack if it chooses to, and then tell it how to set some end variables. So the app and local Devrel points at this stack that it has chosen to spin up. And this I think is like the fundamental difference between reasoning models and the four ones and four ohs of the past, where these models could not think so you had to put them in [00:11:00] boxes with a predefined set of state transitions.Whereas here we have the model, the harness be the whole box. And give it a bunch of options for how to proceed with enough context for it to make intelligent choices. SoVibhu: sales, so like a lot of that is around scaffolding, right? Yes. Previous agents, you would define a scaffold. It would operate in that.Lube, try again. That's pivoted off from when we've had reasoning models. They're seeming to perform better when you don't have a scaffold, right? That's right.[00:11:28] Docs Skills GuardrailsVibhu: And you go into like niches here too, like your SPEC MD and like having a very short agent MG Agent md.swyx: Yes. Yes.Vibhu: Yeah. So you even lay out what it is here, but I likeswyx: the table contents.Vibhu: Yeah.swyx: Like stuff like this, it really helps guide people because everyone's trying to do this.Ryan Lopopolo: This structure also makes it super cheap to put new content into the repository to steer both the humans and the agents.swyx: You, you reinvented skills, right?Vibhu: One big agents andswyx: skills from first princip holdsRyan Lopopolo: all skills did not exist when we started doing this.Vibhu: You have a short [00:12:00] one 100 line overall table of contents and then you have little skills, right? Core beliefs, MD tech tracker. Yeah. Yeah. The scale is overRyan Lopopolo: The tech jet tracker and the quality score are pretty interesting because this is basically a tiny little scaffold, like a markdown table, which is a hook for Codex to review all the business logic that we have defined in the app, assess how it matches all these documented guardrails and propose follow up work for itself.Before beads and all these ticketing systems, we were just tracking follow up work as notes in a markdown file, which, we could spa an agent on Aron to burn down. There's this really neat thing that like the models fundamentally crave text. So a lot of what we have done here is figure out ways to inject textswyx: intoRyan Lopopolo: the system right when we get a page, because we're missing a timeout, for example.I can just add Codex in Slack on that page and say, I'm gonna fix this by adding a timeout. Please update our reliability documentation. To require that all network calls have [00:13:00] timeouts. So I have not only made a point in time fix, but also like durably encoded this process knowledge around what good looks like.swyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: And we give that to the root coding agent as it goes and does the thing. But you can also use that to distill tests out of, or a code review agent, which is pointed at the same things to narrow the acceptable universe of the code that's produced.swyx: I think one of the concerns I have with that kind of stuff is you think you're making the right call by making, it's persisted for all time across everything.Yes. But then you didn't think about the exceptions that you need to make, right? And that you have to roll it back.Vibhu: Part of it isswyx: also sometimes it can follow your s instructions too.Vibhu: It's somewhat a skill, right? So it determines when it uses the tools, right? Like it's not like it'll run outta every call.It'll determine when it wants to check quality score, right?Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. And we do in the prompts we give these agents, allow them to push back,[00:13:51] Agent Code Review RulesRyan Lopopolo: When we first started adding code review agents to the pr, it would be Codex, CLI. Locally writes the change, pushes up a PR on [00:14:00] those PR synchronizations of review agent fires.It posts a comment. We instruct Codex that it has to at least acknowledge and respond to that feedback. And initially the Codex driving the code author was willing to be bullied by the PR reviewer, which meant you could end up in a situation where things were not converging. So yeah, we had to,swyx: he's just a thrash.Ryan Lopopolo: We had to add more optionality to the prompts on both of these things, right? The reviewer agents were instructed to bias toward merging the thing to not surface anything greater than a P two in priority. We didn't really define P two, but we gave it, youswyx: did define P two.Ryan Lopopolo: We gave it a framework within which to score its outputswyx: and then greater than P zero is worse, right?Yes. P two is very good.Ryan Lopopolo: P zero is you will mute the code place ifswyx: you merch thisRyan Lopopolo: thing, right?swyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: But also on the code authoring agent side, we also gave it the flexibility to either defer or push back against review feedback, right? This happens all the time, right? Like I happen to notice something and leave a code review, [00:15:00] which.Could blow up the scope by a factor of two. I usually don't mean for that to be addressed Exactly. In the moment. It's more of an FYI file it to the backlog, pick it up in the next fix it week sort of thing. And without the context that this is permissible, the coding agents are gonna bias toward what they do, which is following instructions.swyx: Yeah.[00:15:19] Autonomous Merging Flowswyx: I do wanted to check in on a couple things, right? Sure. All the coding review agent, it can merge autonomously. I think that's something that a lot of people aren't comfortable with. And you have a list here of how much agents do they do Product code and tests, CI configuration and release tooling, internal Devrel tools, documentation eval, harness review, comments, scripts that manage the repository itself, production dashboard definition files, like everything.Yes. And so they're just all churning at the same time, is there like a record that, that any human on the team pulls to stop everythingRyan Lopopolo: Because we are building a native application here. We're not doing continuous deploy. So there's still a human in the loop for cutting the release branch.I see. We require a blessed [00:16:00] human approved smoke test of the app before we promote it to distribution, these sort of things.swyx: So you're working on the app, you're not building like infrastructure where you have like nines of reliability, that kinda stuff?Ryan Lopopolo: That's correct. That's correct. Okay. And also like full recognition here that all of this activity took in a completely greenfield repository.There's. Should be no script that this applies generally toswyx: this is a production thing, you're gonna shipRyan Lopopolo: toswyx: customers. Of course. Yeah, of course. So this is realVibhu: And like one of the things there is, you mentioned you started this as a repo from scratch. The onboarding first month or so was pretty, it was like working backwards, right?Yeah. And then you had to work with the system and now you're at that point where you know, you're very autonomous. I'm curious like, okay, so what, how human in the loop is it? So what are the bottlenecks that you wish you could still automate? And part of that is also like, where do you see the model trajectory improving and offloading more human in the loop?We just got 5.4. It's a really good,Ryan Lopopolo: fantastic model, by the way.Vibhu: Yeah. Yeah. It's the first one that's merged. Top tier coding. So it's codex level coding and reasoning. So general reasoning both in one model. SoRyan Lopopolo: andVibhu: computer [00:17:00] use vision.Ryan Lopopolo: Now we now with five four, I can just have Codex write the blog post, whereas for this one I had to balance between chat.swyx: Oh, I need to, I might be out of a job. Oh my God.Ryan Lopopolo: Oh,swyx: I know. You just gave me an idea for a completely AI newsletter that five four could do. Yeah, I get it Now.Ryan Lopopolo: This sort of thing is just one example of closing the loop, right? Like the dashboard thing you mentioned. We have Codex authoring the Js ON, for the Grafana dashboards and publishing them and also responding to the pages, which means when it gets the page, it knows exactly which dashboards are defined and what alerts.What alert was triggered by which exact log in the code base. ‘cause all of this stuff is collated together.swyx: It has to own everything.Yes. Yeah. Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: And it means that if we have an outage that did not result in a page. It has the existing set of dashboards available to it. It has the existing set of metrics and logs and can figure out where the gaps in the dashboard are or [00:18:00] in the underlying metrics and fix them in one go.In the same way, you would have a full stack engineer be able to drive a feature from the backend all the way to the front end.Vibhu: So it, it seems like a lot of the work you guys had to do was you as a small team are fully working for a way that the model wants the software to be written. It's like less human legible for better. Code legibility, agent legibility. How do you think that affects broader teams? So one at OpenAI, do liaison, like this is how software should be written. Like I can imagine, say you join a new team with this methodology, this mindset there's ways that, teams do code review, teams write code, like teams are structured and a lot of it is for human legibility.So should we all swap? Like how does this play back one broader into OpenAI and then like broader into the software engineering, right? Is it like teams that pick this up will it's pretty drastic, right? You have to make a pretty big switch. Should they just full send Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: The mindset is very much that I'm removed from the process, right? I can't really have deep code level opinions about [00:19:00] things. It's as if I'm. Group tech leading a 500 person organization.Vibhu: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Like it's not appropriate for me to be in the weeds on every pr. This is why that post merge code review thing is like a good analog here, right?Like I have some representative sample of the code as it is written, and I have to use that to infer what the teams are struggling with, where they could use help, where they're already moving quickly and I can pivot my focus elsewhere.Vibhu: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: So I don't really have too many opinions around the code as it is written.I do, however, have a command based class, which is used to have repeatable chunks of business logic that comes with tracing and metrics and observability for free. And the thing to focus on is not how that business logic is structured, but that it uses this primitive ‘cause I know that's gonna give leverage by default.Vibhu: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah, back to that sort of systems stinking,Vibhu: and you have part of that in your blog post, enforcing architecture and ta taste how you set boundaries for what's used. There's also a section on redefining [00:20:00] engineering and stuff, but yeah, it's just, it's interesting to hear,Ryan Lopopolo: and as the models have gotten better, they have gotten better at proposing these abstractions to unblock themselves, which again, lets me move higher and higher up the stack to look deeper into the future on what ultimately blocked the team from shipping.swyx: Yeah. You mentioned so you, this is primarily a, it is like a 1 million line of code base electron app. But it manages its own services as well, so it's like a backend for front end type thing.Ryan Lopopolo: We do have a backend in there, but that's hosted in the cloud.Yeah. This sort of structure is actually within the separate main and render processesWithin theswyx: electric.That's just how electronic works.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah, of course. So have also treated like. MVC style decomposition with the same level of rigor, which has been very fun.swyx: I have a fun pun. This is a tangent, NVC is model view controller. Any sort of full stack web Devrel knows that.But my AI native version of this is Model view Claw, the clause the harness.Ryan Lopopolo: That's right. That's right. I do think that there is an interesting space to [00:21:00] explore here with Codex, the harness as part of building AI products, right? There's a ton of momentum around getting the models to be good at coding.We've seen big leaps in like the task complexity with each incremental model release where if you can figure out how to collapse a product that you're trying to build, a user journey that you're trying to solve into code, it's pretty natural to use the Codex Harness to solve that problem for you. It's done all the wiring and lets you just communicate and prompts to let the model cook.Yeah. It's been very fun. And there's also a very engineering legible way of increasing capabil. It's fantastic, right? Yeah. Just give you, just give the model scripts, the same scripts you would already build for yourself.swyx: Yeah.Yeah. So for listeners, this is Ryan saying that software engineering or coding against will eat knowledge work like the non-coding parts that you would normally think.Oh, you have to build a separate agent for it. No, start a coding agent and go out from there. Which open Claw has like it's pie Underhood.Ryan Lopopolo: [00:22:00] Yes.Vibhu: Basically define your task in code. Everything is a codingswyx: agent by the way. Since I brought it up, it's probably the only place we bring it up. Is any open claw usage from you?Any?Ryan Lopopolo: No. No. Not for me. I don't have any spare Mac Minis rattling around my house.swyx: You can afford it? No. I just, I'm curious if it's changed anything in opening eye yet, but it's probably early days. And then the other, the other thing I, I wanna pull on here is like you mentioned ticketing systems and you mentioned prs and I'm wondering if both those things have to go away or be reinvented for this kind of coding.So the git itself and is like very hostile to multi-agent.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. We make very heavy use of work trees.swyx: But like even then, like I just did a, dropped a podcast yesterday with Cursors saying, and they said they're getting rid of work trees ‘cause it still has too many merge conflicts.It's still un too un unintuitive. But go ahead.Ryan Lopopolo: The models are really great at resolving merge conflicts. Yeah. And to get to a state where I'm not synchronously in the loop in my terminal, I almost don't care that there are mergeswyx: with disposable.[00:23:00] Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: We invoke a dollar land skill and that coaches codex to push the PR Wait for human and agent reviewers Wait for CI to be green.Fix the flakes if there are any merged upstream. If the PR comes into conflict, wait for everything to pass. Put it in the merge queue. Deal with flakes until it's in Maine. End. This is what it means to delegate fully, right? This is in a, very large model re probably a significant tax on humans to get PRS merged, but the agent is more than capable of doing this and I really don't have to think about it other than keep my laptop open.swyx: Yeah. I used to be much more of a control freak, but now I'm like, yeah, actually you could do a better job of this than me. Yeah. With the right context. Yes.[00:23:47] Encoding Requirementsswyx: Anything else in harness in general? Just this piece, I just wanna make sure we,Ryan Lopopolo: I think one thing that I maybe didn't make super clear in the article that I heard on Twitter as an interesting, that's respond [00:24:00]swyx: to them.What's the chatter and then what's your response?Ryan Lopopolo: Ultimately, all the things that we have encoded in docs and tests and review agents and all these things are ways to put all the non-functional requirements of building high scale, high quality, reliable software into a space that prompt injects the agent.We either write it down as docs, we add links where the error messages tell how to do the right thing. So the whole meta of the thing is to basically tease out of the heads of all the engineers on my team, what they think good looks like, what they would do by default, or what they would coach a new hire on the team to do to get things to merch.And that's why we pay attention to all the mistakes, mistakes that the agent makes, right? This is code being written that is misaligned with some as yet not written down, non-functional requirement.swyx: Sorry, what? Did the online people misunderstand orRyan Lopopolo: No,swyx: whatyouRyan Lopopolo: responded to? Somebody just literally said that.I was like, oh yeah,swyx: okay,Ryan Lopopolo: This is the [00:25:00] thing. This is what I've been doing. Oh, youswyx: agree? Yeah. I see. Interesting.Ryan Lopopolo: One other neat thing, which I did totally did not expect is folks were just. Taking the link to the article and giving it to pi or Codex and say, make my repo this,Vibhu: you achi a whole recursion.Ryan Lopopolo: And it was wildly effective. Really? It was wildly effective. NoVibhu: way. It just actually is something I tried with five, four yesterday. I didn't have time. Last time I was like out speaking of something, and this is one of my things, I was like, okay, I have this article. Can we just scaffold out what it would be like to run this?And I, I did it first as that and then I was like, okay, let me take another little side repo and say okay, if I was to fully automate this like this because I haven't written a line of code, it'sRyan Lopopolo: like over full, setVibhu: it right. The side thing I'm doing of voice. TTS I'm just like, slobbing out, whatever.It's nothing production. I'm like, how would I make this like this? And it's actually like a really good way. It's like a good way to learn what could be changed, what could be like, it's just a good analyzing, right? You give it all the codes, you give it all the context, you give it the article and it walks you through it very well.That's right. That's right.[00:25:57] Inlining Dependencies[00:25:57] Dependencies Going Away & Brett Taylor's Responseswyx: I guess one more thing before we go to Symphony is I wanted to cover [00:26:00] Brett Taylor's response. We had him on the show. He is your chairman, which is wild. Yeah. That he's reading your articles as well and like getting engaged in it. He says software dependencies are going away.Basically they can just be like vendored. Yes. Response.Ryan Lopopolo: Aswyx: hundred percent. A hundred percent agree. You still pro qr, you still pay Datadog. You still pay Temporal. Thank you.Ryan Lopopolo: Yep. The level of complexity of the dependencies that we can internalize is, I would say low, medium right now. Just based on model capability.What does the,swyx: what is medium?Ryan Lopopolo: I would say like a. A couple thousand line dependency is a thing that we could in-house No problem. Call in an afternoon of time. One neat thing about it is like probably most of that code you don't even need. Like by in-house and abstraction, you can strip away all the generic parts of it and only focus on what you need to enable the specific thing.Yes. You're building,swyx: I've been calling this the end of b******t plugins.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah.swyx: Because there's so much when I published an open source thing, I want to accept everything, be liberal. I want to accept, this is post's law, but that means there's so much bloat. Yes. There's so much overhead.Ryan Lopopolo: One other neat thing about [00:27:00] this too is when we deploy Codex Security on the repo, it is able to deeply review and change. The internalized dependencies in a much lower friction way than it would be to like, push patches upstream, wait for them to be released, pull them down, make sure that's compatible with all the transitive I have in my repo and things like that.So it's also much lower friction to internalize some of these things if code is free. ‘cause the tokens are cheap sort of thing.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. I think like the only argument I have against this is basically scale testing, which obviously the larger pieces of software like Linux, MySQL, he calls up even the Datadog and Temporals and then maybe security testing where Yes.Classically, I think, is it linis tos, it said security open source is the best disinfectant.Ryan Lopopolo: Many eyes.swyx: Many eyes. And if inline your dependencies and code them up, you're gonna have to relearn mistakes from other people that Yep.Ryan Lopopolo: Yep. And to internalize that dependency, you're back to zero and you have to start.Reassembling all those bits and pieces to Yeah. Have [00:28:00] high confidence in the code as it is written. Yeah.Vibhu: Even part of the first intro of this, you basically mentioned like everything was written by codex, including internal tooling, right? So internal tooling, like when you're visualizing what's going on it's writing it for itself.swyx: Yeah. I'm built internal tools way I now, and like I just show them off and they're like, how long did you spend? And I didn't spend any time. I just prompted it,Ryan Lopopolo: very funny story here.swyx: Yeah, go ahead.Ryan Lopopolo: We had deployed our app to the first dozen users internally had some performance issues, so we asked them to export a trace for us get a tar ball, gave it to our on-call engineer, and he did a fantastic job of working with Codex to build this beautiful local Devrel tool, next JS app, the drag and drop the tar ball in, and it visualizes the entire trace.It's fantastic. Took an afternoon, but none of this was necessary. Because you could just spin up codex and give it the tar ball and ask the same thing and get the response immediately. So in a way, optimizing for human [00:29:00] legibility of that debugging process was wrong. It kept him in the loop unnecessarily when instead he could have just like Codex cooked for five minutes and gotten this same.swyx: Yeah, you verify your instincts here of this is how we used to do it. Or this is how I would have used to solve it.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. In this local observability stack. Like sure, you can de deploy Yeager to visualize the traces, but I wouldn't expect to be looking at the traces in the first place because I'm not gonna write the code to fix them.swyx: Yeah. So basically there needs to be like this kind of house stack and owning the whole loop. I think that is very well established. And it sounds like you might be like sharing more about that in the future, right?Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. I think we're excited to do[00:29:36] Ghost Libraries Specs[00:29:36] Ghost Libraries & Distributing Software as SpecsRyan Lopopolo: We're gonna talk about Symphony in a little bit, but like the way we distribute it as a spec, which I think folks are calling Ghost Libraries on Twitter.This is like a such a cool name. It does mean it becomes much cheaper to share software with the world, right? You define a spec, how you could build your own specifying as much as is required for a coding agent to reassemble it [00:30:00] locally. The flow here is very cool. Like we have taken. All the scaffolding that has existed in our proprietary repo spun up a new one.Ask Codex with our repo as a reference. Write the spec. We tell it. Spin up a team ox spawn a disconnected codex to implement the spec. Wait for it to be done. Spawn another codex and another team ox to review the spec com or review the implementation compared to upstream and update the spec so it diverges less.And then you just loop over and over Ralph style until you get a spec that is with high fidelity able to reproduce the system as it is. It's fantastic.Vibhu: And you're basically, you're not really adding any of your human bias in there, right? That's correct. A lot of times people write a spec and be like, okay, I think it should be done this way, and you'll riff on something.And it's no, the agent could have just handled it like you're still scaffolding in a sense, right? I want it done this way. It can determine its spec better.swyx: That's right. That's right. Part of me it, I'm, I've been working a lot on evals recently, and part of me is wondering if [00:31:00] an agent can produce a spec that it cannot solve.Is it always capable of things that he can imagine or can you imagine things that it is impossible to do?Ryan Lopopolo: I think with Symphony, we, there's like this there's this axis where you have things that are easier, hard, or established or new, right? And I think things that are hard and new is still something that the models need humans.Yeah. Drive.swyx: Yeah. Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: But I think those other quadrants are largely salt. Given the right scaffold and the right thing that's gonna drive the agent to completion,swyx: it's crazy that it solved,Ryan Lopopolo: but it means that the humans, the ones with limited time and attention get to work on the hardest stuff, like the problems where it's pure white space out in front. Or like the deepest refactorings where you don't know what the proper shape of the interfaces are. And this is where I wanna spend my time. ‘cause it lets me set up for the next level of scale.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Let's introduce Symphony.I think we've been mentioning it every now and then. Elixir. Interesting option.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah.swyx: Yeah. I'm not,Ryan Lopopolo: again, like the [00:32:00] elixir manifestation here is just a derivative. Is it a modelswyx: chosen? Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. Yeah. And it chose that because the process supervision and the gen servers are super amenable to the type of process orchestration that we're doing here.You are essentially spinning up little Damons for every task that is in execution and driving it to completion, which. Means the mall gets a ton of stuff for free by using Elixir and the Beam.swyx: I had to go do a crash course in Beam and Elixir, and I think most people are not operating at that scale of concurrency where you need that.But it is a good mental model for Resum ability and all those things. And these are things I care about. But tell me the story, the origin story of Symphony. What do you use it for? Is this, how did it form maybe any abandoned paths that you didn't take?[00:32:46] Terminal Free Orchestration[00:32:46] Symphony: Removing Humans from the LoopRyan Lopopolo: At the end of December we were at about three and a half PRS per engineer per day.This was before five two came out in the beginning of January. Everyone gets back from holiday with five two and no other work [00:33:00] on the repository. We were up in the five to 10 PRS per day per engineer. And I don't know about y'all, but like it's very taxing to constantly be switching like that. Like I was pretty tapped out at the end of the day, again, where are the humans spending their time? They're spending their time context switching between all these active tmox pains to drive the agent forward.swyx: Yeah. No way. Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: So let's again, build something to remove ourselves from the loop. And this is what frantic sprinted adapt here to find a way to remove the need for the human to sit in front of their terminal.So a lot of experimentation with Devrel boxes and, automatically spinning up agents, like it seems like a fantastic end state here, where my life is beach. I open live twice a day and say yes no to these things. Yeah. And this is again, a super, super interesting framing for how the work is done.Because I become more latency and sensitive. I have [00:34:00] way less attachment to the code as it is written. Like I've had close to zero investment in the actual authorship experience. So if it's garbage. I can just throw it away and not care too much about it. In Symphony, there's this like rework state where once the PR is proposed and it's escalated to the human for review, it should be a cheap review.It is either mergeable or it is not. And if it's not, you move it to rework. The elixir service will completely trash the entire work tree NPR and start it again from scratch. Okay. And this is that opportunity again to say, why was it trash right? What did the agent do that wasswyx: bad. Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Fix that before moving the ticket toswyx: endRyan Lopopolo: of progress again.swyx: Yeah. Why is this not in codex app? I guess this, you guys are ahead of Codex app,Ryan Lopopolo: yeah, so the way the team has been working is basically to be as AI pilled as possible and spread ahead. And a lot of the things we have worked on have fallen out [00:35:00] into a lot of the products that we have.Like we were in deep consultation with the Codex team to. Have the Codex app be a thing that exists, right? To have skills be a thing that Codex is able to use. So we didn't have to roll our own to put automations into the product. So all of our automatic refactoring agents didn't have to be these hand rolled control loops.It has been really fantastic to be, in a way, un anchored to the product development of Frontier and Codex and just very quickly try to figure out what works and then later find the scalable thing that can be deployed widely. It's been a very fun way to operate. It's certainly chaotic. I have lost track very often of what the actual state of the code looks like.‘cause I'm not in the loop. There was. One point where we had wired playwright directly up to the Electron app. With MCPM CCPs, I'm pretty bearish on because the harness forcibly injects all those tokens in the [00:36:00] context, and I don't really get a say over it. They mess with auto compaction. The agent can forget how to use the tool.There's probably only what three calls in playwright that I actually ever want to use. So I pay the cost for a ton of things. Somebody vibed a local Damon that boots playwright and exposes a tiny little shim CLI to drive it. And I had zero idea that this had occurred because to me, I run Codex and it's able to, it's oh, it's better.Yeah. Like no knowledge of this at all. Uhhuh.[00:36:30] Multi Human ChaosRyan Lopopolo: So we have had like in human space to spend a lot of time doing synchronous knowledge sharing. We have a daily standup that's 45 minutes long because we almost have to. Fan out the understanding of the current state.swyx: Yeah, I was gonna say this is good for a single human multi-agent, but multi human, multi-agent is a whole like po like explosion of stuff.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. And that this is fundamentally why we have such a rigid, like 10,000 [00:37:00] engineer level architecture in the app because we have to find ways to carve up the space so people are not trampling on each other.swyx: Sorry, I don't get the 10,000 thing. Did I miss that?Ryan Lopopolo: The structure of the repository is like 500 NPM packages.It's like architecture to the excess for what you would consider, I think normal for a seven person team. But if every person is actually like 10 to 50. Then the like numbers on being super, super deep into decomposition and sharding and like proper interface boundaries make a lot more sense.swyx: Yeah. To me, that's why I talked about Microfund ends and I, an anex is from that world, but Cool. It is just coming back to, to, to this I dunno if you have other, thoughts on. Orchestrating so much work coin going through this. Is this enough? Is this like any aha moments?Vibhu: It'll be interesting to see like where, okay, so right now you pick linear as your issue tracker, right?swyx: Or it's like a is it actually linear? This is actually linear.[00:37:55] Linear vs Slack WorkflowVibhu: Oh, that's linear. It's linear.swyx: Oh I never looked atVibhu: video. The demo video I had to download to [00:38:00] run.swyx: So I, because I'm a Slack maxie, but Yeah, linear. Linear is also really good. Yes,Ryan Lopopolo: we do make a good use of Slack. We we fire off codex to do all these lotion, elasticity, fix ups, the things that like sync that knowledge into the repository.It's super cheap. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Just do it in Codex.swyx: My biggest plug is OpenAI needs to build Slack. You need to own Slack. Build yours. Turn this into Slack.Ryan Lopopolo: I did read about it. Youswyx: did?Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah.[00:38:25] Collaboration Tools for AgentsRyan Lopopolo: I would say that if we think that we want these agents to do economically valuable work, which is like this is the mission, right?We want AI to be deployed widely, to do economically valuable work, then we need to find ways for them to naturally collaborate with humans, which means collaboration tooling, I think, is an interesting space to explore.swyx: Yeah, totally. Yeah. GitHub, slack, linear.Vibhu: Yeah, that was my thing. Okay, where do we see right now Codex has started Codex Model, then CLI, now there's an app, app can let me shoot off multiple Codex is in parallel, but there's no great team collaboration for Codex.And it [00:39:00] seems like your team had some say into what comes out, right? So you talked to ‘em, codex kind of was a thing. From there, if you guys are on the bound, what stuff that like, you might not focus on, but what do you expect other people to be building, right? So people that are like five x 50 Xing.Should you build stuff that's like very niche for your workflow, for your team? Should it be more general so other people can adopt? Is there a niche there? ‘Cause part of it is just okay, is everything just internal tooling? Do we have everything our own way? Like the way our team operates has our own ways that we like to communicate or is there a broader way to do it?Is it something like a issue tracker? Just thoughts if you wanna riff on that.[00:39:35] Standardizing Skills and CodeRyan Lopopolo: I think TBD we have not figured this out in a general way. I do think that there is leverage to be had in making the code and the processes as much the same as possible. If you think that code is context, code is prompts, it's better from the agent behavior perspective to be able to look in a package in directory X, Y, Z, and it not to have to page so [00:40:00] deeply into directory if you C, because they have the same structure, use the same language, they have the same patterns internally.And that same like leverage comes from aligning on a single set of skills that you're pouring every engineer's taste into to make sure that the agent is effective. So like in our code base, we have, I think, six skills. That's it. And if some part of the software development loop is not being covered, our first attempt is to encode it in one of the existing setup skills, which means that we can change the agent behavior.Yeah. More cheaply than changing the human driver behavior.swyx: Yeah.[00:40:39] Self Improvement via Logsswyx: Have you ever, have you experimented with agents changing their own behavior?Ryan Lopopolo: We do.swyx: Yeah. Or parent agent changing a subagents, behavior or something like that.Ryan Lopopolo: We have some bits for skill distillation. So for example, there's one neat thing you can do with Codex, which is just point it at its own session logs to ask it to tell you how you can use [00:41:00] the tool pedal better.swyx: It's like introspectionRyan Lopopolo: or ask it to do things. I useVibhu: this session better. What skills should Iswyx: high? I like the modification of, you can do, just do things to you can just ask agent to do things.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. You can just codex things. This is like a, this is like a silly emoji that we have, right? You can just codex things, you can just prompt things.It's really glorious future we live in, but okay, you can do that one-on-one. But we're actually slurping these up for the entire team into blob storage and. Running agent loops over them every day to figure out where as a team can we do better and how do we reflect that back into the repositories?Yes, though everybody benefits from everybody else's behavior for free. Same for like PR comments, right? These are all feedback. That means the code as written, deviated from what was good, a PR comment, a failed build. These are all signals that mean at some point the agent was missing context. We gotta figure out how toswyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Slurp it up and put it back in the reboot.swyx: By the way, I do this exactly right. I used to, when I use cloud code for [00:42:00] knowledge work, cloud cowork is like a nice product, right? Yes. In I think you would agree. I always have it tell me what do I do better next time? And that's the meta programming reflection thing.So I almost think like you have six reflection extraction levels in symphony and almost like the zero of layer. So the six levels are PO policy, configuration, coordination, execution, integration, observability. We've talked about a couple of these, but the zero layer is like the, okay, are we working well?Can we improve how we work? Yes. Can I modify my own workflow without MD or something? I don't know.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course you can. Like this thing is also able to cut its own tickets ‘cause we give it full access.Yeah. Make it a ticket to have it cut. Tickets you can.Put in the ticket that you expect it to file as on follow up work,swyx: like Yeah. Self-modifying. Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah.[00:42:44] Tool Access and CLI FirstRyan Lopopolo: Put, don't put the agent in a box. Give the agent full accessibility over it. Domain.swyx: I had a mental reaction when you said don't put the agent in a box. So I think you should put it in a box. Like it's just that you're giving the box everything it needs.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. Context and tools.swyx: But we're like, as developers, we're used to calling [00:43:00] out to different systems, but here you use the open source things like the Prometheus, whatever, and you run it locally so that you can have the full loop. I assume.Ryan Lopopolo: Yep.Vibhu: I think likeRyan Lopopolo: another, you wanna minimize cloud, cloud dependencies.Vibhu: You also want to make sure that you think about what the agent has access to. What does it see? Does it go back into the loop, like from the most basic sense of you let it see its own like calls, traces it can determine where it went wrong. But are you feeding that back in? So you know, just the most basic level of you wanna see exactly what's input output, like does the agent have access to.What is being outputted, right? It can self-improve a lot of these things. It's allRyan Lopopolo: text, right? My job is to figure out ways to funnel text from one agent to the other.swyx: It's so strange like way back at the start of this whole AI wave Andre was like, English is the hottest day programming language.It's here, it's just Yeah. The feature as well.Vibhu: A lot of, okay. Like a lot of software, a lot of stuff. There's a gui, it's made for the human. We're seeing the evolution of CLI for everything, right? All tools have CLIs. Your agents can use [00:44:00] them well, do we get good vision? Do we get good little sandboxes?Like right now? It's a really effective way, right? Models love to use tools. They love the best. They love to read through text. So slap a CLI let it go loose. That works for everything.Ryan Lopopolo: It does. Yeah. Yeah.[00:44:14] UI Perception and RasterizingRyan Lopopolo: We've also been adapting nont, textual things to that shape in order to improve model behavior in some ways, right?We want the agent to be able to see the UI agents do not perceive visually in the same way that we do. They don't see a red box, they see red box button, right? They see these things in latent space. So if we want, Hey, yeah, I do. We haveswyx: a ding if that goes off every time. Alien spaceRyan Lopopolo: ding.Anyway if we wanna actually make it see the layout, it's almost easier to rasterize that image to ask EOR and feed it in to the agent. Ha. And there's no reason you can't do both, right? To like further refine how the model perceives the object it's [00:45:00] manipulating.swyx: Cool. Could we, you wanna talk about a couple more of these layers that might bear more introspection or that you have personal passion for?[00:45:07] Coordination Layer with ElixirRyan Lopopolo: I will say that the coordination layer here was a really tricky piece to get right.swyx: Let's do it. Yep. I'm all about that. And this is Temporal core.Ryan Lopopolo: This is where when we turn the spec into Elixir, where like the model takes a shortcut, right? Like it's oh, I have all these primitives that I can make use of in this lovely runtime that has native process supervision.Which is I think, a neat way to have taken the spec and made it more choices achievable by making choices that naturally mapswyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: To the domain, right? In the same way that like you would prefer to have a TypeScript model repo if you are doing full stack web development, right? Because the ability to share types across the front end and backend reduces a lot of complexity.And becauseswyx: that's what graph kill used to be.Ryan Lopopolo: That's right. Andswyx: I don't know if it's still alive, butRyan Lopopolo: [00:46:00] no humans in the loop here. So like my own personal ability to write or not write elixir. Doesn't really have to bias us away from using the right tool for the job. It is just wild.swyx: Love it. I love it.Yeah. I wonder if any languages struggle more than others because of this? I feel like everyone has their own abstractions. That would make sense. But maybe it might be slower, it might be more faulty where like you'd have to just kick the server every now and then. I, I don't know. I think observability layer is really well understood.Integration layer, CP is dead. I think all these just like a really interesting hierarchy to travel up and down. It's common language for people working on the system to understandRyan Lopopolo: The policy stuff is really cool, right? Yeah. You don't really have to build a bunch of code to make sure the system wait for the, to passswyx: it's institutional knowledge.Ryan Lopopolo: Yeah. You just give it the G-H-C-L-I with some text that say CI has to pass. It makes the maintenance of these systems a lot easier.[00:46:57] Agent Friendly CLI Outputswyx: Do you think that CLI maintainers need to be [00:47:00] do anything special for agents or just as is? It's good because like I don't think when people made the G GitHub, CLI, they anticipated this happening.Ryan Lopopolo: That's correct. The GH CLI is fantastic. It's great super industry.swyx: Everyone go try GH repo create GH pull and then pull request number, right? GH HPR, like 1 53, whatever. And then it like pullsRyan Lopopolo: basically my only interaction with the GitHub web UI at this point is GH PR view dash web.Exactly. Glanceswyx: at the diffRyan Lopopolo: and be like Sure thing. Send it. Yeah. But the CLI are nice ‘cause they're super token efficient and they can be made more token efficient really easily. Like I'm sure you all have seen like I go to build Kite or Jenkins and I could just get this massive wall of build output.And in order to unblock the humans, your developer productivity team is almost certainly gonna write some code that parses the actual exception out of the build logs and sticks it in a sticky note at the top of the page. And you basically [00:48:00] want CLI to be structured in a similar way, right? You're gonna want to patch dash silent to prettier because the agent doesn't care that every file was already formatted.Just wants to know it's either formatted or not. So it can then go run a right command. Similarly, like in our PNPM distributed script runner, when we had one, when you do dash recursive, like it produces a absolute mountain of text. But all of that is for passing. Test suites. So we ended up wrapping all of this in another scriptswyx: to suppress the,Ryan Lopopolo: which you can vibe the channel only output the failing parts of the tests.swyx: You make a pipe errors versus the standard, standard out. I don't know. Okay. Whatever. Too much thinking have to do that. The CII used to maintain SCLI for my company and yeah, this is like core, very core to my heart. But you're vibing my job.Ryan Lopopolo: That's right.swyx: Cool. Any other things?This is a long spec. [00:49:00] I appreciate that. It's got a lot of strong opinions in here. Any other things that we should highlight? I think obviously you can spend the whole day going through some of these, but I do think that some of these have a lot of care or some of this you might wanna tell people, Hey, take this, but, make it your own.[00:49:15] Blueprint Spec and GuardrailsRyan Lopopolo: Fundamentally, software is made more flexible when it's able to adapt to the environment in which it is deployed, which means that things like linear or GitHub even are specified within the spec, but not required pieces of it. There's like a more platonic ideal of the thing that you could swap in like Jira or Bitbucket, for example.But being able to tightly specify things like the ID formats or how the Ralph Loop works for the individual agents. Basically means you can get up and running with a fully specified system quickly that you then evolve later on. I think we never intended for this to be a static spec that you can [00:50:00] never change.It's more like a blueprint to get something worth a starting point up and running.swyx: Yeah.Ryan Lopopolo: For you then to vibe later to your heart's content,swyx: you have like code and scripts in here where it's oh, I think this is a really good prompt. It's just a very long prompt.Ryan Lopopolo: Fundamentally, the agents are good at following instructions, so give them instructions.And it will, improve the reliability of the result. We, much like the way we use Symphony, we don't want folks to have to monitor the agent as it is vibing the system into existence. So being very opinionatedVery strict around what these success criteria are means that our deployment success rate goes up. Yeah. It means we don't have to get tickets on this thing.Vibhu: Think it all goes back to that like code to disposable, right? Like early on when you had CLI or you'd kick off a Codex run, it would take two hours. You would wanna monitor okay, I'm in the workflow of just using one.I don't want it to go down the wrong path. I'll cut it off and, just shoot off four, like that was my favorite thing of the Codex app, right? Yeah. Just Forex it like, [00:51:00] it's okay. One of them will probably be right, one of them might be better. Stop overthinking it. Like my first example was probably like deep research.When you put out deep research and I'd ask it something like, I asked it something about LLM, it thought it was legal something and spent an hour, came back with a report completely off the rails. And I was like, okay, I gotta monitor this thing a bit. No don't monitor it. Just you want to build it so it's that it, it goes the right way.And you don't wanna, you don't wanna sit there and babysit, right? You don't want to babysit your agentsRyan Lopopolo: with that deep research query that you made. Looking at the bad result, you probably figured out you needed to tweak your prompt Yeah. A bit, right? That's that guardrail that you fed back into the code base for the task, your prompt to further align the agent's execution.Same sort of concept supply there too.swyx: When you talk, how are the customers feelingRyan Lopopolo: for Symphony? I think we have none, right? This is a thing we have put out into theswyx: world. Symphony's internal, right? As long as you are happy, you are the customer. That'

I dagens avsnitt pratar vi om Iran återigen och att amerikanerna verkar kört in i en återvändsgränd. Har den nån plan? Ingen vet. För kontakt och uppdateringar med Eld och rörelse kan ni följa oss på Facebook, Instragram eller på Bluesky där vi heter @martinhansson.bsky.social och @myran.bsky.social Vill ni köpa Eld och rörelse-tröjan hittar ni den i Allt åt […]

I dagens avsnitt pratar vi om Iran igen, från olika vinklar, högt och lågt med Kalle som är vår producent (och som faktiskt får arvode för klippning!), tillika nybliven far. Unga byggares poddcast som vi tipsar om i början kan ni lyssna på här. För kontakt och uppdateringar med Eld och rörelse kan ni följa […]

Vi pratar om kriget mot Iran tillsammans med oss Ali Esbati som gäst i avsnittet. Ni kan annars höra Ali i podden Viljans Optimism. För kontakt och uppdateringar med Eld och rörelse kan ni följa oss på Facebook, Instragram eller på Bluesky där vi heter @martinhansson.bsky.social och @myran.bsky.social Vill ni köpa Eld och rörelse-tröjan hittar ni den i Allt […]

HOW TO HIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA IN 2026   Friends, I am back in South Africa, in one of my favourite cities for one of my favourite conferences, Recruiters Unite!   As has become tradition, we're going to do a Brainfood Live on the day the event, to speak to local South African recruiters and discuss the main challenges in hiring in South Africa in 2026. We hope to share knowledge between local recruiters and increase awareness for outsiders on how things roll here in the Rainbow Nation!   A few things we'll cover: Macro hiring outlook for 2026 Understanding South Africa's labour law framework Employment Equity & B-BBEE in practice Permanent vs contract vs EOR models Compensation benchmarks & pay transparency trends Scarce skills and critical talent pipelines Remote and hybrid hiring dynamics Managing unionised environments Immigration and cross-border hiring Retention in a high-mobility market All this and more, as we dive into the nuance of hiring in one of the most dynamic and complicated countries in Africa.   We're on Tuesday 3rd March, 12pm GMT / 2pm SAST Register by clicking on the green button (save my spot) and follow the channel here (recommended)     Ep364 is sponsored by Recruiters Unite   It's the event of the year for recruiters in South Africa. Get together with 400 local recruiters and a handful of brilliant experts from overseas and share knowledge as to how recruitment is working today and how it will work tomorrow.   Tickets here

This week, Jason is joined by one of the most influential voices in American economics — Austan Goolsbee, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago!In a rare and time-sensitive episode, Jason goes straight to the source on what's happening in the economy right now — so timely, in fact, the Fed required the episode to be released before their next meeting. Austan breaks down what the Federal Reserve actually does (and what it doesn't), why Chicago has its own Fed, and how monetary policy decisions get made behind the scenes — from interest rates and inflation to employment and consumer spending.Austan also opens up about his path from University of Chicago professor to the White House, including how a personal connection with Barack Obama turned into a front-row seat during one of the most intense economic moments in modern history. He shares what surprised him most about policymaking in Washington, the pressure of making massive decisions with limited information, and why having diverse perspectives — your own “personal board of directors” — matters more than people realize.They get into why consumers still feel crushed by prices even when inflation cools, what's driving the strength of the economy, and why housing affordability may be the biggest long-term issue facing younger generations. Austan even reveals what he considers the ultimate trading secret — and why, despite everything that can go wrong in the world, long-term investing has historically rewarded patience and belief in human innovation.Austan reveals all this and more in another episode you can't afford to miss!Host: Jason TartickCo-Host: David ArduinAudio: John GurneyGuest: Corporate Bro Ross PomerantzStay connected with the Trading Secrets Podcast! Instagram: @tradingsecretspodcast Youtube: Trading SecretsFacebook: Join the GroupPebl hipebl.ai Pebl's AI-powered EOR platform simplifies building and managing teams in 185+ countries, enabling fast, seamless growth across bordersWayfair https://www.wayfair.com/ Wayfair is a leading online home goods and furniture retailer offering millions of products across décor, furniture, and housewares from thousands of global suppliers. It's built a technology-focused e-commerce platform that makes it easy for customers to find and buy items for every space in their home.Square square.com/go/[tradingsecretsSquare is a financial technology platform that provides businesses with point-of-sale systems, payment processing, and tools to manage operations, payroll, and online sales. Originally known for its easy-to-use card readers, Square now offers a full suite of software and services to help businesses run and grow.Rula https://www.rula.com/tradingsecrets Rula is an online mental health care platform that connects people with licensed therapists and psychiatric providers who accept insurance, often with low average copays. It offers flexible online therapy and support tailored to individual, couples, family, and teen needs

On this episode, Pete and Julie share their POV's and insights on recent global payroll and EOR marketplace updates and activity making headlines to kick off 2026!   Pete and Julie share their thoughts on recent events, including Dayforce SKO, Strada Global SKO, Papaya Global's 2030 Workforce Summit, and ADP ReThink in Prague.  Additionally, they discuss several product updates and acquisitions and what it means for buyers and providers of global EOR and global payroll.  Vendors mentioned in the episode include ADP, Boundless, Dayforce, Deel, EOS, G-P, Hitekers Omnipresent, Papaya Global, Payoneer, Remote, SKAUD, and Strada Global.  Links mentioned on the show: Pete's Post from the AI workshop in Prague: https://tinyurl.com/ypzupj62 Pete's Post on Global EORs acting like teenagers: https://tinyurl.com/5n6xb2sz  Pete's Payroll Influences Blog on ADP ReThink:  https://www.payrollinfluences.com/post/adp-rethink-event-recap-adp-turns-75  Pete's series on the future of EOR: https://www.globalization-partners.com/blog/evolution-global-eor-as-strategic-growth-engine/  Papaya Global's 2030 Workforce Summit: https://papayaglobal.com/go/event/2030-workforce-summit-recap/ Connect with the show: LinkedIn:  http://linkedin.com/company/hr-payroll-2-0 X: @HRPayroll2_0  X: @PeteTiliakos  X: @JulieFer_HR BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/hrpayroll2o.bsky.social  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HRPAYROLL2_0    WRKDefined Podcast Network: https://wrkdefined.com/podcast/hr-payroll-20 Thank you to our marquee sponsors for powering the HR & Payroll 2.0 podcast forward!  G-P ‘Globalization Partners': https://www.globalization-partners.com/ OneSource Virtual: https://hubs.ly/Q03YFNR90 Zoho: https://www.zoho.com/press.html Thank you to our ‘wizard behind the curtain' and show producer Ryan Kielma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-kielma/

Coming out of the pandemic almost every company started hiring globally, giving rise to the EOR (Employer of Record) market. An EOR enables companies of any size to easily hire, manage, pay, and reward employees in any country, and today more than 40% of all global employers use an EOR. One of the leaders in this market is Oyster, a fast-growing company founded as a B-Corp, dedicated with a mission to make global employment a single, seamless marketplace. The founder of Oyster, Tony Jamous, is a fascinating entrepreneur who has a unique way of describing global employment. In this podcast I interviewed Tony so he can explain some of the strategic issues in building a global company of any size. I think you'll find Oyster a high value solution provider that combines world-class technology with a strong culture of global advice, support, and regulatory compliance to help companies grow. (FYI we are partners with Oyster in Galileo: Oyster's extensive global employment practices database is embedded in Galileo to assist you with many strategic HR policies around the world.) Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube. Additional Information 2026 Imperatives for Enterprise AI: The Road Ahead The Definitive Guide to Corporate Learning Oyster Announces Intelligent Global Employment – Redefining EOR Market Get Galileo, The AI Agent for Everything HR Chapters (00:00:00) - Interview with Tony Jamis(00:00:25) - Oyster's mission to reduce wealth inequality(00:05:52) - Will Our Platform Become a Strategic Workforce Partner?(00:10:15) - The Human Capital Challenge(00:13:24) - Have We Thrived as a Global Company?(00:16:09) - WSJD Live: Should HR Companies Integrate With HCM Prov(00:17:23) - What's the role of AI in the Workforce?(00:19:05) - Oyster HR: Going global with technology(00:20:51) - EOR Provider Takeaways

High Yield Bacterial Disease Review:Cholera (Vibrio cholerae) Chlamydia (Chlamydia trachomatis) Gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae) Bartonella henselae (Cat scratch disease) Botulism (Clostridium botulinum) Campylobacter (Campylobacter jejuni) Diphtheria (Corynebacterium diphtheriae) Acute Rheumatic fever (Group A Streptococcus) Rocky Mountain spotted fever (Rickettsia rickettsia) Tetanus (Clostridium tetani)Review for your PANCE, PANRE, Eor's, Physician Assistant exams, USMLE, NCLEX, nursing exams.►Support the channel by joining and becoming a member! (Thank you so much!)►Paypal Donation Link: https://bit.ly/3dxmTql (Thank you!)►INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cramthepance/►YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZCILePJ-E17txF-ObXlFKwIncluded in review: Cholera (Vibrio cholerae), Chlamydia trachomatis, Gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae), Bartonella henselae (Cat scratch disease), Botulism (Clostridium botulinum), Campylobacter (Campylobacter jejuni) Diphtheria (Corynebacterium diphtheriae), Acute Rheumatic fever (Group A Streptococcus), Rocky Mountain spotted fever (Rickettsia rickettsia), Tetanus (Clostridium tetani), Major and Minor Jones criteria, Doxycycline, Azithromycin.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/cram-the-pance--5520744/support.

Det blir ett nyhetssvep, vi börjar i Burkina Faso, går vidare till Epstein och till Iran. Sist pratar vi om pengarna som regeringen ger till HTS i Syrien, och Martin har en lång genomgång av relationerna mellan al Qaida och HTS – vad är egentligen skillnaden? Varför delade de på sig? Sista delen är därför […]

Valåret 2026 är här och vi inleder vår bevakning av valrörelsen med att diskutera Stockholms handelskammares rapport ”Slaget om Stockholm” som handlar om varför väljare i Stockholm har potentialen att avgöra vem som vinner valet i höst. Vi pratar även om de tragiska bussolyckor som ägt rum i Stockholm senaste månaderna och de bakomliggande arbetsmiljöproblem […]

En ny statlig utredning föreslår att en särskild lag om plattformsarbete införs i Sverige. Ella, Filippa och Pontus pratar om vad detta kommer innebära för svenska gigarbetare.

Det blir något av ett nyhetssvep med fördjupning – vi pratar om 3 ämnen: Vad är EUs handelsbazooka (och framförallt vad är över huvud taget en bazooka), upproret i Iran och repressionen det möts av, och slutligen den attack Rojava utsätts för av den syriska regimen. För kontakt och uppdateringar med Eld och rörelse kan […]

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the ongoing federal halt on US offshore wind projects and mounting lawsuits from Equinor, Ørsted, and Dominion Energy. Plus Japan’s Goto floating wind farm begins commercial operation with eight Hitachi turbines on hybrid SPAR-type foundations, and Finnish investigators seize a vessel suspected of severing Baltic Sea cables. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the  Allen Hall: Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Rosie Barnes, Joel Saxum, and Yolanda Padron. Many things on the docket this week. The, the big one is the five US offshore wind projects that are facing cancellation after the federal halt. And on December 22nd, as we all know, the US Department of Interior ordered construction halted on every offshore wind project in American waters. Uh, the recent given and still given is national security. Uh, developers see it way differently and they’ve been going to court to try to. Get this issue resolved. Ecuador, Ted and Dominion Energy have all filed lawsuits at this point. EOR says [00:01:00] a 90 day pause, which is what this is right now, will likely mean cancellation of their empire. Project Dominion is losing more than about $5 million a day, and everybody is watching to see what happens. Orton’s also talking about taking some action here. Uh, there’s a, a lot of moving pieces. Essentially, as it stands right now, a lot of lawsuits, nothing happening in the water, and now talks mostly Ecuador of just completely canceling the project. That will have big implications to US. Electricity along the east coast,  Joel Saxum: right Joel? Yeah. We need it. Right? So I, I hate to beat a dead horse here because we’ve been talking about this for so long. Um, but. We’ve got energy demand growth, right? We’re sitting at three to 5% year on year demand growth in the United States, uh, which is unprecedented. Since, since, and this is a crazy thing. Since air [00:02:00] conditioning was invented for residential homes, we have not had this much demand for electricity growth. We’ve been pretty flat for the last 20 years. Uh, so we need it, right? We wanna be the AI data center superpower. We wanna do all this stuff. So we need electrons. Uh, these electrons are literally the quickest thing gonna be on the grid. Uh, up and down that whole eastern seaboard, which is a massive population center, a massive industrial and commercial center of the United States, and now we’re cutting the cord on ’em. Uh, so it is going to drive prices up for all consumers. That is a reality, right? Um, so we, we hear campaign promises up and down the things about making life more affordable for the. Joe Schmo on the street. Um, this is gonna hurt that big time. We’re already seeing. I think it was, um, we, Alan, you and I talked with some people from PGM not too long ago, and they were saying 20 to 30% increases already early this year. Allen Hall: Yeah. The, the increases in electricity rates are not being driven by [00:03:00] offshore wind. You see that in the press constantly or in commentary. The reason electricity rates are going up along the east coast is because they’re paying for. The early shutdown of cold fire generation, older generation, uh, petroleum based, uh, dirty, what I’ll call dirty electricity generation, they’re paying to shut those sites down early. So that’s why your rates are going up. Putting offshore wind into the equation will help lower some of those costs, and onshore wind and solar will help lower those costs. But. The East Coast, especially the Northeast, doesn’t have a lot of that to speak of at the minute. So, uh, Joel, my question is right now, what do you think the likelihood is of the lawsuits that are being filed moving within the next 90 days? Joel Saxum: I mean, it takes a long time to put anything through any kind of, um, judicial process in the United States, however. There’s enough money, power [00:04:00] in play here that what I see this as is just like the last time we saw an injunction happen like this is, it’s more of a posturing move. I have the power to do this, or we have the power to do this. It’s, it’s, uh, the, it’s to get power. Over some kind of decision making process. So once, once people come to the table and start talking, I think these things will be let, let back loose. Uh, I don’t, I don’t think it will go all the way to, we need to have lawsuits and stuff. It’ll just be the threat of lawsuits. There’ll be a little bit of arbitration. They’ll go back to work. Um, the problem that I see. One of the problems, I guess, is if we get to the point where people, companies start saying like, you know what, we can’t do this anymore. Like, we can’t keep having these breaks, these pauses, these, this, you know, if it’s 90 days at $5 million a day, I mean that’s 450 million bucks. That’s crazy. But that nobody, nobody could absorb that.  Allen Hall: Will they leave the mono piles and transition pieces and some [00:05:00] towers just sitting in the water. That’s what  Joel Saxum: I was gonna say next is. What happens to all of the assets, all of the steel that’s in the water, all the, all the, if there’s cable, it lays if there’s been rock dumps or the companies liable to go pick them up. I don’t know what the contracts look like, right? I don’t know what the Boem leases say. I don’t know about those kind of things, but most of that stuff is because they go back to the oil field side of things, right? You have a 20 year lease at the end of your 20 year lease. You gotta clean it up. So if you put the things in the water, do they have 20 years to leave ’em out there before they plan on how they’re gonna pull ’em out or they gotta pull ’em out now? I don’t know.  Allen Hall: Would just bankrupt the LLCs that they formed to create these, uh, wind  Joel Saxum: farms. That’s how the oil field does it bankrupt. The LC move on. You’ve, you’ve more than likely paid a bond when you, you signed that lease and that, but that bond in like in a lot of. Things is not enough. Right. A bond to pull mono piles out would have to be, [00:06:00] I mean, you’re already at billions of dollars there, right? So, and, and if you look again to the oil and gas world, which is our nearest mirror to what happens here, when you go and decommission an old oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, you don’t pull the mono piles out. You go down to as close to the sea floor as you can get, and you just cut ’em off with a diamond saw. So it’s just like a big clamp that goes around. It’s like a big band saw. And you cut the foundations off and then pull the steel back to shore, so that can be done. Um, it’s not cheap.  Allen Hall: You know what I would, what I would do is the model piles are in, the towers are up, and depending on what’s on top of them, whether it’s in the cell or whatever, I would sure as hell put the red flashing lights on top and I would turn those things on and let ’em run just so everybody along the East coast would know that there could be power coming out of these things. But there’s not. So if you’re gonna look at their red flashy lights, you might as well get some, uh, megawatts out of them. That’s what I would do.  Joel Saxum: You’d have to wonder if the contracts, what, what, what it says in the contracts about. [00:07:00] Uh, utilization of this stuff, right? So if there’s something out there, does the FAA say, if you got a tower out there, it’s gotta have a light on it anyways. Allen Hall: It has to or a certain height. So where’s the power coming from? I don’t know. Solar panel. Solar panel. That’s what it have to be, right? Yeah. This is ridiculous. But this is the world we live in today.  Speaker 4: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals. Because this industry needs solutions, not speeches, [00:08:00] Allen Hall: the dominoes keep falling. In American offshore wind, last year it was construction halts this year, contract delays. Massachusetts has pushed back the signing of two offshore wind agreements that were supposed to be done. Months ago, ocean Winds and Berroa won their bids in September of 2024. The paperwork is still unsigned more than a year later, a year and a half later. State officials blame Federal uncertainty. Uh, the new target is June and offshore wind for these delays are really becoming a huge problem, especially if you don’t have an offtake agreements signed, Joel.  Joel Saxum: I don’t see how the, I mean, again, I’m not sitting in those rooms. I’m not a fly on the wall there, but I don’t see how you can have something sitting out there for, it’s just say September 24. Yeah. Yeah. You’re at 18 months now, right? 17, 18 months without an agreement signed. Why is, why is Massachusetts doing this? What’s, what’s the, what’s the thing there? I mean, you’re an, [00:09:00] you are, uh, an ex Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Ian, is that what it’s called?  Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I think they would like to be able to change the pricing for the offtake is most likely what is happening as, uh, the Trump administration changes the agreements or trying to change the agreements, uh, the price can go up or down. So maybe the thing to do is to not sign it and wait this out to see what the courts say. Maybe something will happen in your favor. That’s a real shame. Right. Uh, there’s thousands of employees that have been sidelined. Uh, the last number I saw was around 4,000. That seems on the low end.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think about, um, the, the vessels too. Like you’re the, like the Eco Edison that was just built last year. I think it’s upwards of 500 million bucks or something to build that thing down in Louisiana, being sent up there. And you have all these other specialized, uh, vessels coming over from Europe to do all this construction. Um, you know. Of course if they’re coming over from Europe, those are being hot bunked and being paid standby rates, which [00:10:00] is crazy ’cause the standby rates are insane. Uh, ’cause you still gotta run fuel, you still gotta keep the thing running. You still gotta cook food. You still have all those things that have to happen on that offshore vessel. Uh, but they’re just gonna be sitting out there on DP doing nothing.  Yolanda Padron: You have the vessels, you have people’s jobs. You have. Regular people who are unrelated to energy at all suffering because of their prices going up for energy and just their cost of living overall going up. All because they don’t look pretty.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The entire, that entire supply chain is suffering. I mean, Yolanda, you’re, you, you used to work with a company involved in offshore wind. How many people have, um, you know, have we seen across LinkedIn losing their jobs? Hey, we’re pivoting away from this. I gotta go find something else. And with that. In the United States, if you’re not from the States, you don’t know this, but there’s not that much wind, onshore wind on the East coast. So many of those families had to relocate out there, uproot your family, go out to Massachusetts, New Jersey, [00:11:00] Virginia, wherever, put roots back down and now you’re what? What happens? You gotta move back.  Yolanda Padron: Good luck to you. Especially, I mean, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of projects, right? So it’s not like you can just move on to the next wind farm. It’s a really unfortunate situation.  Allen Hall: Well, for years the promise of floating wind turbines has dangled just out of reach and the technology works, and the engineers have been saying for quite a while. We just needed someone to prove it at scale. Well, Japan just did the go-to floating wind farm began commercial operation this past week. Eight turbines on hybrid spar foundations anchored in water is too deep for anything fixed. Bottom, uh, it’s the first. Wind farm of his kind in Japan and signals to the rest of Asia that floating wind is possible. Now, uh, Rosemary, their turbines that are being used are Hitachi turbines, 2.1 megawatt machines. I don’t know a lot about this hybrid spark [00:12:00] type floater technology, which looks to be relatively new in terms of application. Is this gonna open up a large part of the Japanese shoreline to offshore wind? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, at the first glance it’s like two megawatt turbine turbines. That’s micro, even for onshore these days, that’s a really small turbine. Um, and for offshore, you know, usually when you hear about offshore announcements, it’s like 20 megawatt, 40 megawatt monstrosities. However, I, I think that if you just look at the size of it, then it really underestimates the significance of it, especially for Japan. Because they, one, don’t have a lot of great space to put turbines on shore or solar power on shore. Um, and two, they don’t have any, any good, um, locations for fixed bottom offshore. So this is not like this floating offshore wind farm. It’s not competing against many onshore um, options at all. For Japan, it’s competing against energy imports. I’m really happy to see [00:13:00] a proper wind farm. Um, in Japan and they’ll learn a lot from this. And I hope that it goes smoothly and that, you know, the next one can be bigger and better. And then it’s also, you know, Japan traditionally has been a really great manufacturing country and not so much with wind energy, but this could be their chance. If they’re the country that’s really on scale developing the floating offshore industry, they will necessarily, you know, like just naturally as a byproduct of that, they’re gonna develop manufacturing, at least supporting manufacturing and probably. Some major components and then bring down the cost. You know, the more that, um, these early projects might start out expensive, but get cheaper, fast. That’s how we hope it’ll go. And then they’ll push out into other areas that could benefit from offshore wind, but um, not at the cost. Somewhere like California, you know, they have the ability to have onshore wind. They’d really like some offshore wind, some floating offshore wind. But it is a hard sell there at the moment because it is so much more expensive. But if it gets cheaper because, you know, projects like [00:14:00] this help push the price down, then I think it will open things up a lot. So yeah, I am, I’m quite excited to see this project.  Allen Hall: Will it get cheaper at the two to six megawatt range instead of the 15 to 20 megawatt range?  Joel Saxum: That’s what I was gonna comment on. Like there’s, there’s a, there’s a key here that the general public misses. For a floating offshore wind farm. So if you’re gonna do this cost effectively, that’s why they did it with the 2.1 megawatts ones because with a, with the spar product that they’re using basically. And, and I was sourcing this off at my desk, so here you go,  Rosemary Barnes: Joel. We need a closed caption version for those listening on the podcast and not watching on YouTube. Joel’s holding like a foam, a foam model of a wind turbine. Looks like it’s got a stubby, stubby holder on the bottom.  Joel Saxum: This is. Turbine. Steel. Steel to a transition piece and then concrete, right? So this is basically a concrete tube like, um, with, with, uh, structural members on the inside of it. And you can float this thing or you can drag these, you can float ’em key side and then drag ’em out, and [00:15:00] then it just fill ’em halfway or three quarters away with ballast sea seawater. So you just open a valve, fill the thing up to three quarters of the way with seawater, and it sinks it down into the water a little bit. Water level sits about. Right at the transition piece and then it’s stable. And that’s a hybrid. Spar product is very simple. So to make this a easy demonstrate project, keyside facility is the key, is the big thing. So your Keyside facility, and you need a deep water keyside facility to make this easy. So if you go up to Alan, like you said, a two to six, to eight to 10 to 15 megawatt machine. You may have to go and take, you may have to barge the spars out and then dump ’em off the spar and then bring the turbines out and put ’em on. That’s not ideal. Right? But if you can do this all keyside, if you can have a crane on shore and you can float the spars and then put the, build the whole turbine, and then drag that out as it sits, that’s a huge cost reduction in the installation operations. So it, it’s all about how big is the subsea portion of the spar? How? How deep is your [00:16:00] deep water keyside port? To make it efficient to build. Right. So they’re looking at 10 gigawatts of floating offshore wind by 2030. Now it’s 2026. That’s only four years away, so 10 gigawatts. You’re gonna have to scale up the size of the turbines. It’ll be interesting how they do it, right? Because to me, flipping spars off of a barge is not that hard. That’s how jackets and spars have been installed in the past. Um, for, um, many industries, construction industries, whether it’s oil and gas or just maritime, construction can be done. Not a problem. Um, it’s just not as efficient. So we’ll see what, we’ll see what they do.  Allen Hall: You would need 5,000 turbines at two megawatts to get to 10 gigawatts, 5,000 turbines. They make 5,000 cars in a day. The, the Japanese manufacturing is really efficient. I wouldn’t put anything by the Japanese capabilities there.  Joel Saxum: The problem with that is the cost of the, the inter array cables and [00:17:00] export cables for 5,000 turbines is extreme. Allen Hall: We also know that. Some of the best technology has come out of Japan for the last 50 years, and then maybe there’s a solution to it. I, I’m really curious to see where this goes, because it’s a Hitachi turbine. It’s a 2.1 megawatt turbine, as Rosemary’s pointed out. That’s really old technology, but it is inexpensive to manufacture and easy to move around. Has benefits.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It also means like they, they’re not gonna be surprised with like, you know, all of. When you make a 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine, you’re not only in the offshore environment, you’re also dealing with, you know, all your blade issues from a blade that long and 2.1 megawatt turbine has blades of the size that, you know, just so mature, reliable, robust. They can at least rule those headaches out of their, um, you know, out of their. Development phase and focus on the, the new stuff.  Joel Saxum: Does anybody know who [00:18:00] makes blades for Hitachi?  Allen Hall: Rosie? Was it lm? I, I, I know we have on a number of Hitachi turbines over time, but I don’t know who makes the blades.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I don’t know. But I mean, also it’s like, um, it doesn’t mean that they’re locked into 2.1 megawatts for forever, right? So, um, if the economics suggest that it is be beneficial to scale up. Presumably there will be a lot that they have learned from the smaller scale that will be de-risking the, the bigger ones as well. So, you know, um, it’s, there’s advantages to doing it both ways. It’s probably a slower, more steady progress from starting small and incrementally increasing compared to the, you know, like big, um, fail fast kind of, um, approach where you just do a big, big, huge turbine and just find out everything wrong with it all at once. Um, but. You know, pros and cons to both.  Allen Hall: Hitachi buys TPI. They got the money. They got the money, and they got the brain power. [00:19:00] Delamination and bottom line. Failures and blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. The Baltic Sea has become a chessboard under sea. Cables carry data. Pipelines carry energy as we’ve all seen and someone keeps cutting them. Finnish investigators are now saying a cargo ship dragged its anchor [00:20:00] across the seabed for tens of kilometers before severing a telecommunications cable. On New Year’s Eve, special forces seize the vessel. Four crew members are detained, but the questions still remain. Who or what is trying to cut cables and pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.  Joel Saxum: It’s not accidents like it happened on New Year’s Eve and it was, and you drug an anchor for tens of kilometers. That’s on purpose. There’s, there’s no way that this is someone, oh, we forgot to pull the anchor up. You know how much more throttle you have to put on one of these? Have you seen an anchor for an offshore vessel? They’re the size of a fricking house,  Allen Hall: so they’re investigating it right now. And four, the 14 crew members are under detention. Travel restrictions, we’ll see how long that lasts. Crew includes nationals from of all places, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. So there is a, a Russian element to this. [00:21:00] I don’t know if you were all watching, I don’t know, a week or two ago when there’s a YouTube video from and oral, which makes undersea. Equipment and defense, uh, related, uh, products. And Palmer Lucky who runs that company basically said, there are microphones all over the bottom of the ocean, all around the world. Everything is monitored. There’s no way you can drag an anchor for a kilometer without somebody knowing. So I’m a little surprised this took so long to grab hold of, but. Maybe the New Year’s Eve, uh, was a good time to pick because everybody is kind of relaxed and not thinking about a ship, dragging an anchor and breaking telecommunication cables, wind turbines have to be really careful about this. There, there have to be some sort of monitoring, installation sensors that are going on around the, all the wind power that exists up in that region and all [00:22:00] the way down in, in the North Sea. To prevent this from happening, the sabotage is ridiculous. At this point,  Joel Saxum: yeah. I mean, even, even with mattresses over the export cables, or the inter array cables or, or rock bags or rock dumps or, or burials, these anchors are big enough to, to cut those, to drag and cut ’em like it, it’s just a, it’s a reality. It’s a risk. But someone needs to be monitoring these things closer if they’re not yet. ’cause you are a hundred percent correct. There’s, so, there’s, there’s private, there’s public sides of the acoustic monitoring, right? So like the United States military monitors, there’s, there’s acoustic monitoring all up and down. I can’t actually never, I looked into it quite a while ago. There’s a name for the whole system. It’s called the blah, blah, blah, and it monitors our coastline. Like ev, there’s a sensor. Every man, it’s a couple miles. Like all, all around the EEZ of the United States. And that exists everywhere. So like you think like in international waters, guarantee that the United States has got microphones out listening to, [00:23:00] right. So, but if you’re in the Baltic Sea, it’s a little bit different of an, of a confined space. But you have Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, all along the southern and eastern coast and the, and Russia. And then you have the Fins, Swedes, Norwegian, Denmark, Germany. Everybody is Poland. Everybody’s monitoring that for sure. It’s just like a postmortem investigation is, is doable.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, how are they gonna stop this? Should they board the ships, pull the people off and sink them? What is it gonna take for this to end?  Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. In the meantime, I think Joel has a movie going on in his head about how exactly he’s gonna portray this. Um, yeah, it’s. I mean, I’d say better monitoring, but I, I’m not sure. I guess keep a closer eye on it next time. I mean, I really hope it’s, there’s not a next time, but there seems to be a pattern developing. Right.  Allen Hall: I forgot how many of those happened.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The maritime, this is a, this is a tough reality about the maritime world. [00:24:00] ’cause I, I’ve done some work done in Africa and down there it’s specifically the same thing. There’s say there’s a vessel. Okay, so a vessel is flagged from. S Cy Malta, a lot of vessels are flagged Malta or Cyprus, right? Because of the laws. The local laws there that Cyprus flagged vessel may be owned by a company based in, um, Bermuda that’s owned by a company based in Russia that’s owned by a company based in India. All of these things are this way. There’s shell companies and hidden that you don’t know who owns vessels unless they’re even, even the specific ones. Like if you go to a Maersk vessel. And you’re like, oh, that’s Maersk, they’re Danish. Nope. That thing will be, that thing will be flagged somewhere else, hidden somewhere else. And it’s all about what port you go to and how much taxes you can hide from, and you’ll never be able to chase down the actual parties that own these vessels and that are responsible you, you, it, it’s so [00:25:00] difficult. You’re literally just going to have to deal with the people on board, and you can try to chase the channels to who owns that boat, but you’ll never find them. That’s the, that’s the trouble with it.  Allen Hall: It does seem like a Jean Claude Van Dam situation will need to happen pretty soon. Maybe as Steven Segal, something has to happen. It can’t continue to go on it over the next couple of months with as much attention as being paid to international waters and. Everything that’s happening around the world, you’d think that, uh, ships Defense Department ships from Denmark, Finland, Germany. We will all be watching this really closely UK be watching this and trying to stop these things before they really even happened. Interesting times. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcasts. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas. We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. [00:26:00] And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show for Rosie, Yolanda and Joel. I’m Alan Hall and we’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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Allen, Joel, and Rosemary break down the Trump administration’s sudden halt of five major offshore wind projects, including Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and parts of Vineyard Wind, over national security claims the hosts find questionable. They also cover the FCC’s ban on new DJI drone imports and what operators should do now, plus Fraunhofer’s latest wind research featured in PES Wind Magazine. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon, and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and I’m here with. Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel Saxon is down in Austin, Texas. Yolanda Padron is on holiday, and well, there’s been a lot happening in the past 24 hours as we’re recording this today. If you thought the battle over offshore wind was over based on some recent court cases, well think again. The Trump administration just dropped the hammer on five major offshore wind projects. Exciting. National security concerns. The Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergham announced. The immediate pause affecting projects from Ted Eor, CIP and Dominion Energy. So Coastal [00:01:00] Virginia, offshore wind down in Virginia, right? Which is the one we thought was never gonna be touched. Uh, the Department of War claims classified reports show these giant turbines create radar interference that could blind America’s defenses. Half of vineyard winds, turbines are already up and running, producing power, by the way. Uh, and. I guess they, it sounds like from what I can see in more recent news articles that they turn the power off. They just shut the turbines off even though those turbines are fully functioning and delivering power to shore. Uh, so now the question is what happens? Where does this go? And I know Osted is royally upset about it, and Eor obviously along with them, why not? But the whole Denmark us, uh, relationship is going nuclear right now. Joel Saxum: I think here’s a, here’s a technical thing that a lot of people might not know. If you’re in the wind industry in the United States, you may know this. There’s a a few sites in the northern corner of Colorado that are right next to Nebraska, [00:02:00] and that is where there is a strategic military installations of subsurface, basically rocket launches and. And in that entire area, there is heavy radar presence to be able to make sure that we’re watching over these things and there are turbines hundreds of meters away from these launch sites at like, I’ve driven past them. Right? So that is a te to me, the, the radar argument is a technical mute point. Um, Alan, you and I have been kind of back and forth in Slack. Uh, you and I and the team here, Rosemary’s been in it too, like just kind of talking through. Of course none of us were happy. Right. But talking through some of the points of, of some of these things and it’s just like basically you can debunk almost every one of them and you get down to the level where it is a, what is the real reasoning here? It’s a tit for tat. Like someone doesn’t like offshore wind turbines. Is it a political, uh, move towards being able to strengthen other interests and energy or what? I don’t know. ’cause I can’t, I’m not sitting in the Oval Office, but. [00:03:00] At the end of the day, we need these electrons. And what you’re doing is, is, is you’re hindering national security or because national security is energy security is national security, my opinion, and a lot of people’s opinions, you’re hindering that going forward. Allen Hall: Well, let’s look at the defense argument at the minute, which is it’s, it’s somehow deterring, reducing the effectiveness of ground radars, protecting the shoreline. That is a bogus argument. There’s all kinds of objects out on the water right now. There’s a ton of ships out there. They’re constantly moving around. To know where a fixed object is out in the water is easy, easy, and it has been talked about for more than 15 years. If you go back and pull the information that exists on the internet today from the Department of Defense at the time, plus Department of Interior and everybody else, they’ve been looking at this forever. The only way these turbines get placed where they are is with approval from the Department of Defense. So it isn’t like it didn’t go through a review. It totally did. They’ve known about this for a long, long time. So now to bring up this [00:04:00] specious argument, like, well, all of a sudden the radar is a problem. No, no. It’s not anybody’s telling you it’s a classified. Piece of information that is also gonna be a bogus argument because what is going along with that are these arguments as well, the Defense Department or Department of War says it’s gonna cause interference or, or some degradation of some sort of national defense. Then the words used after it have nothing to do with that. It is, the turbines are ugly, the turbines are too tall. It may interfere, interfere with the whales, it may interfere with fishing, and I don’t like it. Or a, a gas pipeline could produce more power than the turbines can. That that has nothing to do with the core argument. If the core argument is, is some sort of defense related. Security issue, then say it because it, it can’t be that complicated. Now, if you, if you knew anything about the defense department and how it operates, and also the defenses around the United States, of which I know a little bit about, [00:05:00] having been in aerospace for 30 freaking years, I can tell you that there are all kinds of ways to detect all kinds of threats that are approaching our shoreline. Putting a wind turbine out there is not Joel Saxum: gonna stop it. So the, at the end of the day, there is a bunch, there’s like, there’s single, I call them metric and intrinsic, right? Metric being like, I can put data to this. There’s a point here, there’s numbers, whatever it may be. And intrinsic being, I don’t like them, they don’t look that good. A pipeline can supply more energy. Those things are not necessarily set in stone. They’re not black and white. They’re, they’re getting this gray emotional area instead of practical. Right. So, okay. What, what’s the outcome here? You do this, you say that we have radar issues. Do we do, does, does the offshore substation have a radar station on it for the military or, or what does that, what does that look like? Allen Hall: Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but if the threat is what I think it is, none of this matters. None of this matters. It’s already been discussed a hundred times with the defense [00:06:00] department and everybody else is knowledgeable in this, in this space. There is no way that they started planted turbines and approve them two, three years ago. If it was a national security risk, there is no chance that that happened. So it really is frustrating when you, when you know some of the things that go on behind the scenes and you know what, the technical rationales could be about a problem. And that’s not what’s being talked about right now that I don’t like being lied to. Like, if you want to have a, a political argument, have a political argument, and the, if the political argument is America wants Greenland from Denmark, then just freaking say it. Just say it. Don’t tie Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, new J, all, all these states up until this nonsense, Virginia, what are we doing? What are we doing? Because all those states approved all those projects knowing full well what the costs were, knowing how tall the turbines were, knowing how long it was gonna take to get it done, and they all approved them. This [00:07:00] is not done in a vacuum. These states approve these projects and these states are going to buy that power. Let them, you wanna put in a a, a big gas pipeline. Great. How many years is that gonna take, Doug? How many years is that gonna take? Doug Bergham? Does anybody know? He, he doesn’t know anything about that. Joel Saxum: You’re not getting a gas pipeline into the east coast anytime soon whatsoever. Because the, the east, the east coast is a home of Nimbyism. Allen Hall: Sure, sir. Like Massachusetts. It’s pretty much prohibited new gas pipelines for a long time. Okay. That’s their choice. That is their choice. They made that choice. Let them live with it. Why are you then trying to, to double dip? I don’t get it. I don’t get it. And, but I do think, Joel, I think the reason. This is getting to the level it is. It has to do something to do with Greenland. It has something to do with the Danish, um, uh, ambassador or whoever it was running to talk to, to California and Newsom about offshore tournaments. Like that was not a smart move, my opinion, but [00:08:00] I don’t run international relations with for Denmark. But stop poking one another and somebody’s gotta cut this off. The, the thing I think that the Trump administration is at risk at is that. Or instead, Ecuador has plenty of cash. They’re gonna go to court, and they are most likely going to win, and they’re going to really handcuff the Trump administration to do anything because when you throw bull crap in front of a judge and they smell it, the the pushback gets really strong. Well, they’re gonna force all the discussion about anything to do with offshore to go through a judge, and they’re gonna decide, and I don’t think that’s what the Trump administration wants, but that’s where they’re headed. I’m not sure why Joel Saxum: you’d wanna do that. Like at the end of the day, that may be the solution that has to come, but I don’t think that that’s not the right path either. Right? Because a judge is not an SME. A judge doesn’t know all of the, does the, you know, like a, a judge is a judge based on laws. They don’t, they’re, they’re not an offshore wind energy expert, so they sh that’s hard for them to [00:09:00] decide on. However, that’s where it will go. But I think you’re correct. Like this, this is more, this is a larger play and, and this mor so this morning when this rolled out, my WhatsApp, uh, and text messages just blew up from all of my. Danish friends, what is going on over there? I’m like, I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not in the hopeful office. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I’m not having coffee in DC right now. I said, you know, but going back to it, like you can see the frustration, like, what, why, why is this the thing? And I think you’re right though, Alan, it is a large, there’s a larger political play in, in movement here of this Greenland, Denmark, these kind of things. And it’s a, it’s. It’s sad to see it ’cause it just gets caught. We’re getting caught in the crossfire as a wind industry. Yeah. It’s Allen Hall: not helping anybody. And when you set precedents like this, the other side takes note, right? So Democrats, when they eventually get back into the White House again, which will happen at some point, are gonna swing the pendulum just as hard and harder. So what are you [00:10:00] doing? None of, none of this matters in, in my opinion, especially if you, if you read Twitter today, you’re like, what the hell? All the things that are happening right now. RFK Jr had a post a few hours ago talking about, oh, this is great. We’re gonna shut off this off shore wind thing because it kills the whales. Sorry, it doesn’t. Sorry. It doesn’t, if you want, if you wanna make an argument about it, you have to do better than that. A Twitter post doesn’t make it fact, and everybody who’s listened to this and paying attention, I don’t want you to do your own research, but just know that you got a couple of engineers here, that that’s what we do for a living. We source through information, making sure that it makes sense. Does it align? Is it right? Is it wrong? Is, is there something to back it up with? And the information that we have here says. It is. It’s not hurting anything out there. You may not like them, but you know what? You don’t want a coal factor in your backyard either. Delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to detect [00:11:00] early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. Joel Saxum: When it comes down to sorting through data, I think that’s a big problem. Right? And that’s what’s happening with a lot of the, I mean, generalizing, a lot of the things that are happening in the United States in the last 10 years give it. Um, but people just go, oh, this person said this. They must be an authority. Like, no, it’s not true. We’ve been following [00:12:00] a lot of these things with offshore wind. I mean, probably closer than most. Uh, besides the companies that are developing those wind farms, simply because it’s a part of our day job, it’s what we do. We’re, we’re, we’re looking at these things, right? So. Understanding the risks, uh, rewards, the political side of things. The commercial side. The technical side. That’s what we’re here to kind of feed, feed the information back to the masses. And a lot of this, or the majority of all of this is bs. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t, it doesn’t play. Um, and then you go a little bit deeper into things and. Like the, was it the new Bedford Light, Alan, that said like, now they’re seeing that the turbines have actually been turned off, not just to stop work for construction. They’ve turned the turbines off up in Massachusetts or up off of in the northeast area? No, that they have. Allen Hall: And why? I mean, the error on the side of caution, I think if you’re an attorney for any of the wind operations, they’re gonna tell you to shut it off for a couple of days and see what we can figure out. But the, the timing of the [00:13:00] shutdown I think is a little unique in that the US is pretty much closed at this point. You’re not gonna see anything start back up for another couple of weeks, although they were doing work on the water. So you can impose a couple hundred million. Do, well, not a hundred million dollars, but maybe a couple million dollars of, of overhead costs in some of these projects because you can’t respond quick enough. You gotta find a judge willing to put a stay in to hold things the same and, and hold off this, uh, this, uh, b order, but. To me, you know, it’s one of those things when you deal with the federal government, you think the federal government is erratic in just this one area? No, it’s erratic in a lot of areas. And the frustration comes with do you want America to be stronger or do you want nonsense to go on? You know? And if I thought, if that thought wind turbines were killing whales, I’d be the first one up to screaming. If I thought offshore wind was not gonna work out in term, in some long-term model, I would be the first one screaming about it. That’s not Joel Saxum: reality. [00:14:00] Caveat that though you said, you’re saying if I thought, I think the, the real word should be if I did the research, the math and understood that this is the way it was gonna be. Right? Because that’s, that’s what you need to do. And that’s what we’ve been doing, is looking at it and the, the, all the data points to we’re good here. If someone wanted to do harm Allen Hall: to the United States, and God forbid if that was ever the case. That wouldn’t be the way to do it. Okay. And we, and we’ve seen that through history, right. So it, it’s, it doesn’t even make any sense. The problem is, is that they can shield a judge from looking at it somewhat. If they classify well, the judge isn’t able to see what this classified information is. In today’s world, AI and everything on the internet, you don’t think somebody knows something about this? I do. And to think that you couldn’t make any sort of software patch to. Fix whatever 1965 radar system they have sitting on the shorelines of Massachusetts. They could, in today’s world, you can do that. So this whole thing, it [00:15:00] just sounds like a smoke screen and when you start poking around it, no one has an answer. That is the frustrating bit. If you’re gonna be seeing stuff, you better have backup data. But the Joel Saxum: crazy thing here, like look at the, the, the non wind side of this argument, like you’re hurting job growth. Everybody that goes into a, uh. Into office. One of the biggest things they run on all the time, it doesn’t matter, matter where you are in the world, is I’m gonna bring jobs and prosperity to the people. Okay. How many jobs have just been stopped? How many people have just been sent home? How much money’s being lost here? And who’s one of the biggest companies installing these turbines in the states? Fricking ge like so. You’re, you’re hurting your own local people. And not only is this, you stand there and say, we’re doing all this stuff. We’re getting all this wind energy. We’re gonna do all these things and we’re gonna win the AI race. To the point where you’ve passed legislation or you’ve written, uh, uh, executive order that says, Hey, individual states, if you pass legislation [00:16:00] that slows or halts AI development in your state, the federal government can sue you. But you’re doing the same thing. You’re halting and slowing down the ability for AI and data centers to power themselves at unprecedented growth. We’re at here, 2, 3, 4, 5% depending on what, what iso you ask of, of electron need, and we’re the fastest way you could put electrons to the grid. Right now in the United States, it’s. Either one of those offshore wind farms is being built today, or one of the other offs, onshore wind farms or onshore solar facilities that are being built right now today. Those are the fastest ways to help the United States win the AI race, which is something that Trump has loud, left and right and center, but you’re actively like just hitting people in the shins with a baseball bat to to slow down. Energy growth. I, I just, it, it doesn’t make any logical sense. Allen Hall: And Rosemary just chime in here. We’ve had enough from the Americans complaining about it. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard for me to comment in too much detail about all of the [00:17:00] American security stuff. I mean, defense isn’t, isn’t one of my special interests and especially not American defense, but. When I talk about this issue with other Australians, it’s just sovereign risk is the, the issue. I mean, it was, it’s similar with the tariffs. It’s just like how, and it’s not just for like foreign companies that might want to invest in America. American companies are affected just, uh, as equally, but like you might be anti wind and fine. Um, but I don’t know how any. Company of any technology can have confidence to embark on a multi-year, um, project. Now, because you don’t know, like this government hates wind energy, but the next one could hate ai or the next one could hate solar panels, electric cars, or you know, just, just anything. And so like you just can’t. You just can’t trust, um, that your plans are gonna be able to be fulfilled even if you’ve got contracts, even if you’ve got [00:18:00] approvals, even if you are most of the way through building something, it’s not enough to feel safe anymore. And it’s just absolutely wild. That’s, and yeah, I was actually discussing with someone yesterday. How, and bearing in mind I don’t really understand American politics that deeply, but I’m gonna assume that Republicans are generally associated with being business friendly. So there must be so many long-term Republican donors who have businesses that have been harmed by all of these kinds of changes. And I just don’t understand how everyone is still behind this type of behavior. That’s what, that’s what I struggle to understand. Joel Saxum: This is the problem at the higher levels in. In DC their businesses are, are oil and gas based though. That’s the thing, the high, the high power conservative party side of things in the United States politics. The, the lobby money and the real money and the like, like think like the Dick Cheney era. Right. That was all Weatherford, right? It’s all oil and gas. Rosemary Barnes: So it’s not like anybody [00:19:00] cares about the, you know, I don’t know, like there’d be steel fabricators who have been massively affected by this. Right? Like that’s a good, a good traditional American business. Right. But are you saying it’s not big enough business that anyone would care that, that they’ve been screwed over? Joel Saxum: Not anymore Allen Hall: because all that’s being outsourced. The, the other argument, which Rosemary you touched upon is, is the one I’m seeing more recently on all kinds of social medias. It’s a bunch of foreign companies putting in these wind turbines. Well, who the hell Joel Saxum: is drilling your oil baby? This is something that I’ve always said. When you go go to Houston, Texas, the energy capital of the world, every one of those big companies, none of ’em are run by a Texan. They are all run by someone from overseas. Every one of ’em. Allen Hall: You, you think that, uh, you know, the Saudis are all, you know, great moral people. What the hell are you talking about? Are you starting to compare countries now? Because you really don’t wanna do that. If you wanna do that into the traditional energy marketplace, you’re, you’re gonna have [00:20:00] a lot of problems sleeping at night. You will, I would much rather trust a dane to put in a wind turbine or a German to put in a wind turbine than some of the people that are in, involved in oil and gas. Straight up. Straight up. Right. And we’ve known that for years. And we, we, we just play along, look. The fact of the matter is if you want to have electrons delivered quickly to the United States, you’re gonna have to do something, and that will be wind and solar because it is the fastest, cheapest way to get this stuff done. If you wanna try to plant some sort of gas pipeline from Louisiana up to Massachusetts or whatever the hell you wanna do, good luck. You know how many years you’re talking about here. In the meantime, all those people you, you think you care about are gonna be sitting there. With really high electricity rates and gas, gas, uh, rates, it’s just not gonna end well. Speaker 5: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and [00:21:00] 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions. Not speeches if Allen Hall: you don’t have enough on your plate already. Uh, the FCC has panned the import and sale of all new drone models from Chinese manufacturers, including the most popular of all in America, DJI, uh, and they clo. They currently hold about 70% of the global marketplace, the ban as DGI and Autel Robotics to the quote unquote covered list of entities deemed [00:22:00] a national security risk. Now here’s the catch. Existing models that are already approved for sale can still be purchased. So you can walk down to your local, uh, drone store and buy A DJI drone. And the ones you already own are totally fine, but the next generation. Not happening. They’re not gonna let ’em into the United States. So the wind industry heavily relies on drones. And, and Joel, you and I have seen a number of DJI, sort of handheld drones that are used on sites as sort of a quick check of the health of a, or status of a blade. Uh, you, you, I guess you will still be able to do that if you have an older dj. I. But if you try to buy a new one, good luck. Not gonna happen. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think the most popular drone right now in the field, of course two of ’em, I would, I would say this, it’s like the Mavic type, you know, the little tiny one that like a site supervisor or a technician may have, they have their part 1 0 7 license. They can fly up and look at stuff. Uh, and then the [00:23:00] other one is gonna be the more industrial side. That’s gonna be the DJ IM 300. And that’s the one where a lot of these platforms, the perceptual robotics and some of the others have. That’s their base because the M 300 has, if you’re not in the, the development world, it has what’s called a pretty accessible SDK, which software development kit. So they’re designed to be able to add your sensors, put your software, and they’re fly ’em the way you want to. So they’re kind of like purpose built to be industrial drones. So if you have an M 300 or you’re using them now, what this I understand is you’re gonna still be able to do that, but when it comes time for next gen stuff, you’re not gonna be able to go buy the M 400. And import that. Like once it’s you’re here, you’re done. So I guess the way I would look at it is if I was an operator and that was part of our mo, or I was using a drone inspection provider, that that’s what comes on site. I would give people a plan. I would say basic to hedge your risk. I would say [00:24:00]basically like, Hey, if you’re my drone operator and I’m giving you a year to find a new solution. Um, that integrates into your workflows to get this thing outta here simply because I can’t be at risk that one day you show up, this thing crashes and I can’t get another one. A lot of companies are already like, they’re set and ready to go. Like all the new Skys specs, the Skys specs, foresight, drone, it’s all compliant, right? It’s USA made USA approved. Good to go. I think the new Arons drone is USA compliant. Good to go. Like, no, no issues there. So. Um, I think that some of the major players in the inspection world have already made their moves, um, to be able to be good USA compliant. Um, so just make sure you ask. I guess that’s, that. Our advice to operators here. Make sure you ask, make sure you’re on top of this one so you just don’t get caught with your pants down. Allen Hall: Yeah, I know there’s a lot of little drones in the back of pickup trucks around wind farms and you probably ought to check, talk to the guys about what’s going on to make sure that they’re all compliant. [00:25:00] In this quarter’s, PES Win magazine, which you can download for free@pswin.com. There is an article by Fran Hoffer, and they’re in Germany. If you don’t know who Fran Hoffer is, they’re sort of a research institution that is heavily involved in wind and fixing some of the problems, tackling some of the more complex, uh, issues that exist in blade repair. Turbine Repair Turbine Lifetime. And the article has a number of the highlights that they’ve been working on for the last several years, and you should really check this out, but looking at the accomplishments, Joel, it’s like, wow, fraud offer has been doing a lot behind the scenes and some of these technologies are, are really gonna be helpful in the near future. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Think of Frown Hoffer of your our US com compadres listening. Think of frown Hoffer as and NRE L, but. Not as connected to the federal government. Right. So, but, but more connected to [00:26:00] industry, I would say. So they’re solving industry problems directly. Right. Some of the people that they get funding research from is the OEMs, it’s other trade organizations within the group. They’re also going, they’re getting some support from the German federal government and the state governments. But also competitive research grants, so some EU DPR type stuff, um, and then some funding from private foundations and donors. But when you look at Frow, offerer, it’s a different project every time you talk to ’em. But, and what I like to see is the fact that these projects that they’re doing. Are actually solving real world problems. I, I, I, Alan and I talk about this regularly on the podcast is we have an issue with government funding or supportive funding or even grant funding or competitive funding going to in universities, institutions, well, whoever it may be, to develop stuff that’s either like already developed, doesn’t really have a commercial use, like, doesn’t forward the industry. But Frow Hoffer’s projects are right. So like one of the, they, they have [00:27:00] like the large bearing laboratory, so they’re test, they’ve tested over 500 pitch bearings over in Hamburg. They’re developing a handheld cure monitoring device that can basically tell you when resin has cured it, send you an email like you said, Alan, in case you’re like taking a nap on the ropes or something. Um, but you know, and they’re working on problems that are plaguing the industry, like, uh, up working on up towel repairs for carbon fiber, spar caps. Huge issue in the industry. Wildly expensive issue. Normally RA blade’s being taken down to the ground to fix these now. So they’re working on some UPT tile repairs for that. So they’re doing stuff that really is forwarding the industry and I love to see that. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s one of the resources that. We in the United States don’t really take advantage of all the time. And yeah, and there’s a lot of the issues that we see around the world that if you were able to call f Hoffer, you should think about calling them, uh, and get their opinion on it. They probably have a solution or have heard of the problem before and can direct you to, uh, uh, a reasonable outcome. [00:28:00] That’s what these organizations are for. There’s a couple of ’em around the world. DTU being another one, frow Hoffer, obviously, uh, being another powerhouse there. That’s how the industry moves forward. It, it doesn’t move forward when all of us are struggling to get through these things. We need to have a couple of focal points in the industry that can spend some research time on problems that matter. And, and Joel, I, I think that’s really the key here. Like you mentioned it, just focusing on problems that we are having today and get through them so we can make the industry. Just a little bit better. So you should check out PES WIN Magazine. You can read this article and a number of other great articles. Go to ps win.com and download your articles today. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate all the feedback and support we receive from the wind industry. If today’s discussion sparked any question or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you [00:29:00] never miss an episode For Joel, Rosemary and Yolanda, I’m a hall. We’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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Vi utser årets arbetskritiker, snackar om vad vi tror Framtidens vänsters chanser i stockholmspolitiken. Anna tar också uppe en kommunpolitisk skandal som inte fått tillräckligt stor uppmärksamhet. Avslutningsvis peppar vi inför biljettstrejken som Allt åt alla Stockholms kollektivtrafikgrupp drar igång i januari och som man kan läsa mer om på biljettstrejk.se. För mer information om […]

On this episode, Pete and Julie share their POV's and insights on long list of HR and payroll tech marketplace updates and activity making headlines to wrap up 2025!   Pete and Julie share their thoughts on recent events including UKG Aspire and Workday Rising EMEA.  Plus acquisitions, product announcements, and news from vendors across HCM, Payroll, Benefits, EOR, fintech, compliance, managed services, and more.   Vendors mentioned in the episode include ADP, Alight, Bitwage, Deel, DarwinBox, G-P, IBM, Paychex, Paystand, SD Worx, Strada Global, UKG, Vensure Employer Solutions, and Workday.    Connect with the show: LinkedIn:  http://linkedin.com/company/hr-payroll-2-0 X: @HRPayroll2_0  X: @PeteTiliakos  X: @JulieFer_HR BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/hrpayroll2o.bsky.social  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HRPAYROLL2_0    WRKDefined Podcast Network: https://wrkdefined.com/podcast/hr-payroll-20

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda recap the UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight in Edinburgh and Great British Energy’s £1 billion manufacturing push. Plus Ørsted’s European onshore wind sale, Xocean’s unmanned survey tech at Moray West, and why small suppliers must scale or risk being left behind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your host. Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Queen City. I have Yolanda Pone and Joel Saxon back in Austin, Texas. Rosemary Barnes is taking the week off. We just got back from Scotland, Joel and I did, and we had a really great experience at the UK offshore wind supply chain spotlight 2025 in Edinburgh, where we met with a number of wind energy suppliers and technology advocates. A Joel Saxum: lot going on there, Joel. Yeah. One of the really cool things I enjoyed about that, um, get together the innovation spotlight. [00:01:00] One, the way they had it set up kind of an exhibition space, but not really an exhibition. It was like just a place to gather and everybody kind of had their own stand, but it was more how can we facilitate this conversation And then in the same spot, kind of like we’ve seen in other conferences, the speaking slots. So you could be kind of one in ear, oh one in year here, listening to all the great things that they’re doing. But having those technical conversations. And I guess the second thing I wanted to share was. Thank you to all of the, the UK companies, right? So the, all the Scottish people that we met over there, all the people from, from England and, and around, uh, the whole island there, everybody was very, very open and wanting to have conversations and wanting to share their technology, their solutions. Um, how they’re helping the industry or, or what other people can do to collaborate with them to help the industry. That’s what a lot of this, uh, spotlight was about. So from our, our seat, um, that’s something that we, you know, of course with the podcast, we’re always trying to share collaboration, kind of breed success for everybody. So kudos to the ORE [00:02:00] Catapult for putting that event on. Allen Hall: Yeah, a big thing. So, or Catapult, it was a great event. I’ve met a lot of people that I’ve only known through LinkedIn, so it’s good to see them face to face and. Something that we’ve had on the podcast. So we did a number of podcast recordings while we’re there. They’ll be coming out over the next several weeks, so stay tuned for it. You know, one of the main topics at that event in Edinburg was the great British Energy announcement. This is huge, Joel. Uh, so, you know, you know, the United Kingdoms has been really pushing offshore wind ambitions for years, but they don’t have a lot of manufacturing in country. Well, that’s all about the change. Uh, great British energy. Which is a government backed energy company just unveiled a 1 billion pound program called Energy Engineered in the uk, and their mission is pretty straightforward. Build it in the uk, employ people in the uk, and keep the economic benefits of the clean energy transition on British soil. 300 million pounds of that is really [00:03:00] going to be focused on supply chain immediately. That can happen in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. It’s a big promotion for the UK on the wind energy side. I see good things coming out of this. What were your thoughts when you heard that Joel Saxum: announcement, Joel? The offshore wind play. Right. It’s like something like this doesn’t happen to economies very often. Right. It’s not very often that we have like this just new industry that pops outta nowhere. Right. We’re, we’re not making, you know, it’s like when, when. Automotive industry popped up in the, you know, the early 19 hundreds. Like that was this crazy new thing. It’s an industrial revolution. It’s all this new opportunity. So offshore wind in, in my idea, same kind of play, right? It’s this new thing or newer thing. Um, and as a government, um, coming together to say, Hey, this is happening. We have the resources here. We’re gonna be deploying these things here. Why would we not take advantage of building this here? I mean. Any politician that says I’m bringing jobs or I’m bringing in, you [00:04:00] know, um, bringing in funds to be able to prop up an industry or to, uh, you know, start a manufacturing facility here or support an engineering department here, um, to be able to take advantage of something like this. Absolutely right. Why offshore this stuff when you can do it Here, you’ve got the people, you have the engineering expertise. It’s your coastline. You’ve operated offshore. You know how to build them, operate ’em, all of these different things. Keep as much of that in-house as you can. I, I mean, we’ve, we’ve watched it in the US over the last few years. Kind of try to prop up a supply chain here as well. But, you know, with regulations and everything changing, it’s too risky to invest. What the, it looks like what the UK has seen over there is, well, we might as well invest here. We’ll throw the money at it. Let’s, let’s make it happen on our shores. The Allen Hall: comparison’s obvious to the IRA Bill Yolanda and the IRA bill came out, what, A little over two years ago, three years ago, roughly. We didn’t see a lot of activity [00:05:00] on the manufacturing side of building new factories to do wind. In fact, there was a lot of talk about it initially and then it. It really died down within probably a year or so. Uh, you know, obviously it’s not a universal statement. There were some industries model piles and some steelworks and that kind of thing that would would happen. But sometimes these exercises are a little treacherous and hard to walk down. What’s your thoughts on the UK government stepping in and really. Putting their money where the mouth is. Yolanda Padron: I think it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s great, right? It’s great for the industry. It’ll, it’ll be a great case, I think, for us to look at just moving forward and to, like you said, government’s putting their money where their mouth is and what exactly that means. You know, not something where it’s a short term promise and then things get stalled, or corporations start looking [00:06:00] elsewhere. If every player works the way that they’re, it’s looking like they’re going to play right now, then it, it could be a really good thing for the industry. Allen Hall: Well, the, the United States always did it in a complicated way through tax policy, which means it runs through the IRS. So any bill that passes Congress and gets signed by the president, they like to run through the IRS, and then they make the tax regulations, which takes six months to 12 months, and then when they come out, need a tax attorney to tell you what is actually written and what it means. Joel, when we went through the IRA bill, we went through it a couple of times actually, and we were looking for those great investments in new technology companies. I just remember seeing it. That isn’t part of the issue, the complexity, and maybe that’s where GB Energy is trying to do something different where there’s trying to simplify the process. Joel Saxum: Yeah. The complexity of the problem over here is like that. With any. Business type stuff, right? Even when you get to the stage of, um, oh, this is a write off, this is this [00:07:00] for small businesses and those things, so it’s like a delayed benefit. You gotta plan for this thing. Or there’s a tax credit here, there. Even when we had the, um, the electric vehicle tax credits for, uh, individuals, right? That wasn’t not something you got right away. It was something you had to apply for and that was like later on and like could be. 15 months from now before you see anything of it. And so it’s all kind of like a difficult muddy water thing in the i a bill. You’re a hundred percent correct. Right. Then we passed that thing. We didn’t have the, the rules locked down for like two years. Right. And I remember we had, we had a couple experts on the podcast talking about that, and it was like, oh, the 45 x and the 45 y and the, the C this and the be that, and it was like. You needed to have a degree in this thing to figure it out, whereas the, what it sounds like to me, right, and I’m not on the inside of this policy, I dunno exactly how it’s getting executed. What it sounds like to me is this is more grant based or, and or loan program based. So it’s kinda like, hey, apply and we’ll give you the money, or we’ll fund a loan that supports some money of with low interest, zero [00:08:00] interest, whatever that may be. Um, that seems like a more direct way, one to measure ROI. Right, and or to get things done. Just just to get things done. Right. If someone said, Hey, hey, weather guard, lightning Tech. We have a grant here. We’d like to give you a hundred grand to do this. Or it was like, yeah, if you put this much effort in and then next year tax season you might see this and this and this. It’s like, I don’t have time to deal with that. Yolanda Padron: Yeah. We might also just change the rules on you a little bit, and then maybe down the line we’ll see where we go. Yeah. It does seem like they’re, they’re setting up the dominoes to fall in place a bit better. This way. Yeah, absolutely. Joel Saxum: That’s a, that’s a great way to put it, Yolanda. Let’s setting up the dominoes to fall in place. So it’s kinda like, Hey. These are the things we want to get done. This is what we wanna do as an industry. Here’s a pool of money for it, and here’s how you get access to it. Allen Hall: A lot’s gonna change. I remember, was it a couple of months ago, maybe, maybe a year ago, time flies guys. Uh, we were just talking about. That on the way home from [00:09:00]Scotland, like how many people have had in the podcast? It’s a lot over 60 have been on the podcast as guests. Uh, one of the people we want to have on is, uh, Dan McGrail, who’s the CEO of Great British Energy because, uh, we had talked about with Rosemary the possibility of building turbines all in. The uk, they have blade factories. All this stuff is doable, right? They have technology. This is not complicated work. It just needs to be set up and run. And maybe this is the goal is to just run, it may maybe not be OEM focused. I I, that’s what I’m trying to sort through right now as, is it vestas focused? Is it GE focused? Is it Siemens Keesa focused? Is there a focus or will these turbines have GB energy? Stamped on the side of them. I would Joel Saxum: see love to see support for sub-component suppliers. Yeah, I would too. Yeah. The reason being is, is like that’s, that’s more near and dear to my heart. That’s what [00:10:00] I’ve done in my career, is been a part of a lot of different, smaller businesses that are really making a difference by putting in, you know, great engineering comes from small businesses. That’s one of my, my things that I’ve always seen. It seems to be easier to get things done. In a different way with a small business than it does to engineering by committee with 50 people on a team faster, sometimes better. Uh, that’s just my experience, right? So I would like to see these smaller businesses propped up, because again, we need the OEMs. Yes, absolutely. But also spread it around, right? Spread the wealth a little bit. Uh, you know, a, a factory here, a factory there, a engineering facility here. The, uh, you know, an execution plant here. Some things like that. I would love to see more of these kind of, uh, spread around like the, like GB energy’s money spreads around, like fairy dust. Just kind of plant a little here, plant a little in this city, make a little here, instead of just lumping it to one or lumping it into one big, um, OEM. And that doesn’t necessarily [00:11:00] have to be an OEM, right? It could be a blade manufacturer that I’m talking about, or. Or a big, big gearbox thing or something like that. We need those things, and I, I’m all for support for them, but I just don’t think that all of its support should go to them. Speaker 7: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind Energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by Wind Professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches. Allen Hall: If you haven’t booked your tickets to Wind Energy o and m Australia 2026, you need to be doing [00:12:00] that. Today, uh, the event is on February 17th and 18th in Melbourne, Australia. Uh, we’ll have experts from around the world talking everything o and m, and there’s so many good people are gonna be on the agenda, Joel, and a lot of big companies sponsoring this Joel Saxum: year. Allen Hall: You want to give us a highlight? Joel Saxum: Yeah, so like you said, Alan, we have a ton of sponsors going to be there and, and I’d like to say the sponsors. Thank you ahead of time. Of course. Right. We’re, we’re, we’re super excited for them to get involved because as we’ve put this event together. We’re trying to do this no sales pitches, right? So we wanna do this, not pay to play. We want people here that are going to actually share and learn from each other. And the sponsors have been kind enough to get on board with that message and follow through with it. So, like our lead industry sponsor Tilt, uh, Brandon, the team over there, fantastic. Um, they have, they’re, they’re the, their key sponsor here and they’re supporting a lot of this. So the money’s going to applying in experts from all over the [00:13:00] world, putting this thing together. Uh, so we have an, uh. A forum to be able to talk at, uh, C-I-C-N-D-T. From here in the States, uh, we’ve got Palisades, who’s another operator in the, uh, Australian market, uh, rig com. ISP over there doing blade work and it just keeps rolling down. We’ve got squadron on board, squadron’s gonna do one of the coffee carts. Um, so I know that we’ve got a limited bit of tickets left. I think we are 250 in the venue and that’s what the plan is. I think we’re sitting at about half of that leftover. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s getting close to running out. And I know in Australia everybody likes to purchase their tickets at the last minute. That’s great. And but you don’t wanna miss out because there is limited seating to this event. And you wanna go to WMA w om a 2020 six.com. Look at all the activities. Book some tickets. Plan to book your travel if you’re traveling from the United States or elsewhere. You need a couple of weeks [00:14:00]hopefully to do that ’cause that’s when the airline prices are lower. If you can book a a couple of weeks ahead of time. So now’s the time to go on Woma 2020 six.com. Check out the conference, get your tickets purchased, start buying your airline tickets, and get in your hotel arranged. Now’s the time to do that. Well, as you know, war has been selling off pieces of itself after setbacks in the America market. Uh, sounds like two heavyweight bidders are looking for one of those pieces. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and ENG G are allegedly competing for Seds European. Onshore Wind business, a portfolio valued at roughly 1 billion euros. Supposedly the bids are gonna be due this week, although nothing is certain in a billion dollar deals. This is a little bit odd. I understand why Stead is doing it, because they’re, they’re trying to fundraise, but if they do this. They will be essentially European offshore wind only [00:15:00] with some American onshore and a little bit American offshore. Not much. Uh, that will be their future. Are they gonna stay with America one onshore or, and American offshore? Is that a thing? Or they just could, could be all European offshore wind. Is that where Osted is headed? It’s a complicated mix because, you know, they’re, they’re, they’ve negotiated a couple of other deals. Most recently to raise cash. They’re supposedly selling, uh, another set of wind farms. I dunno how official that is, but it’s, it seems like there’s some news stories percolating up out there trying to raise more cash by selling large percentages of offshore wind farms. Where does Joel Saxum: this all end? I don’t know. The interesting thing is like if you looked at Ted, uh, man, two years ago, like if you Googled anything or used a jet, GPT or whatever it was like, gimme the. Three largest wind operators in the world. They were the top three all the time. Right. And, and most valuable. At one point in time, they were worth like, [00:16:00] uh, I don’t wanna say the wrong number, but I, I thought, I thought 25 billion or something like that. They were worth. ATS at one point in time. Market share. Allen Hall: Yeah, Joel Saxum: I think that seems right. So like they, they were huge and it just seems like, yeah, they’re trying to survive, but in survival mode, they’ve just kind, they’re just dwindling themselves down to being just o just a small offshore company. And, or not small, but a small, just a, just a siloed offshore company. A large offshore company. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, even just, there was, there’s another article, um. Today we’re, we’re talking here, CIP and Engie looking to buy their European onshore business. They’ve also are putting up like, uh, was it greater Ang of four in Taiwan for, for sale as well. So, I mean, like you said, where does it stop? I don’t know. Um, CIP is an interesting play. Uh, an Eng, CIP and Engie kind of battling this one out ’cause the CIP management team is a bunch of ex or said people, so they know that play very well. Um, ENGIE of course, being a big French [00:17:00] utility. So that one will sell, right? They’re, their European offshore or onshore assets will be gone shortly. Uh, they’ll be sitting with a bunch of offshore assets that they own and partially own around the world. Uh, and of course their, their, I think their US onshore fleet is about a gigawatt, maybe a and a half. Um, that could be the next domino to fall. You don’t, I, sorry, Yolanda, I used your, your, your, uh, euphemism from before, but, um. That they’re actively parting ways with some stuff. I don’t know when it stops. Allen Hall: It is odd, right? EOR has basically stopped a lot of renewables. Stat Craft has pulled back quite a bit. Another Norwegian company. A lot of the nor Northern European companies are slowing down in wind altogether, trying to stick to onshore for the most part. Offshore will still be developed, but just not at the pace that it needed to be developed. There is a lot of money moving around. Billions [00:18:00] and billions of, of euros and dollars moving. And I guess my, my thought is, I’m not sure from a market standpoint where Orid is headed, or even Ecuador for that matter, besides maybe moving back into oil and gas. They never really left it. The direction of the company is a little unknown because these, uh, news articles about sales. Are not really prefaced, right? It’s just like, all right, Taiwan, we’re selling more than 50% of the projects in Taiwan. We’re out, we’re selling European onshore pow, which there’d been some rumors about that, that I had heard, but nothing was really locked in, obviously, until you really start seeing some reliable news sources. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is an interesting play just because it kind of keeps it. Up in Denmark and not in France with Engie. That’s what I’m, in my [00:19:00] head. I’m thinking Sted is not likely to sell it to Engie just because they’re French. This is a national, uh, security issue for Denmark Sted. Is it, I I how Engie is involved in this maybe to help set a, a baseline of what the valuation is so that CIP can then purchase it. Do you see CIP losing this, Joel? Joel Saxum: No, I don’t think so. I think, yeah, I think CCIP has to land with this one and, and CI P’s been building a portfolio quietly, building a, not, I guess not quietly, they’ve been building a portfolio for the last few years. It’s pretty stout, uh, pretty fairly sizable. Right? And it, it’s an interesting play watching this for me because you, you see all these people kind of rotating out. And it, and it has to do with the, the, in my opinion, it has to do with the macroeconomics of things, right? Once, when you develop something and you get through, like in, into the teething pain cycle and all that kind of stuff. [00:20:00] The asset is not designed to have a 50, 70%, you know, margin, right? That’s not how wind works. Wind, wind operates of small margins and a lot of times in the early, a early stages of a project, you end up running into issues that eat those margins away. So when you’re talking about small margins, they’re six to 10% is what you kind of see. Um, and it’s pretty easy to eat away a 6% or a 10% margin. If you have some kind of serial defect you have to deal with, uh, or that, that the OEM’s fighting you on and, and you know, whether or not they take responsibility for it or you have to pay for it. A lot of times those processes can drag out for 12, 24, 36 months until you get made whole. So the early state, the first, you know, five years of a lot of these projects, five to eight years, are very expensive. And then once you get through kind of those things and the thing starts just chugging. Then you actually are starting to make money, and that’s where CIP P’S buying these assets is in that years after it’s gone through its teething pains and the company that developed it is like, man, [00:21:00] we need to get outta this thing. We’ve just been burning through cash. Then CI P’s kinda swooping in and grabbing ’em. And I think that this is another one of those plays. Allen Hall: So they’re gonna live with a smaller margin or they’re gonna operate the assets differently. Joel Saxum: The assets may be being operated better now than they were when they started, just in that, in, they exist, the starting company simply because the, some of the issues have been solved. They’ve been sorted through the things where you have early, early failures of bearings or some stuff like the early fairings of gearboxes. Those things have been sorted out, so then CIP swoops in and grabs them after the, the teething issues that have been gone. Allen Hall: Does evaluation change greatly because of the way horse did, manages their assets? Up or down? Joel Saxum: I would say generally it would go up. Yeah. I don’t necessarily think it’s dependent on o and m right now. I think it’s just a, it’s a time to buy cheap assets, right? Like you see, you see over here in the States, you see a lot of acquisitions going on. People divesting, they’re not divesting because they’re like, oh, we’re gonna make a ton of money off this. They may need the cash. They’re [00:22:00] divesting in, in, um, what’s the term, like under duress? A lot of them, it may not look like it from the outside in a big way, but that’s kind of what’s happening. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I think it’ll be really interesting to see, uh, you know, there were a lot of layoffs in Ted and Europe as well, so seeing if maybe some of the people who can make those assets perform better. Come back just with a different t-shirt on. Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today in this quarter’s, PES Wind Magazine, which you can download a copy at PES [00:23:00] wind.com. There’s an article by Xan and they were, uh, contracted by Ocean Winds to evaluate the sea floor from. The sea floor at Moray West, which is way, way, way up north on the northern end of Scotland. A pretty rough area, Joel. And, but what ex Ocean did was they used unmanned survey equipment to monitor the ocean floor where the mono piles were gonna replace for the Moey West Wind Farm. That is a really difficult area to operate any sort of boat, but. Uh, the reason we’re doing this remotely unmanned was that it, it gave them sort of a, a less costly way to get high resolution images of the sea bottom. This is interesting because ocean wind was developing more a West apparently hadn’t used anything like this before, but the results, at [00:24:00] least from what I can see in PS win, look Joel Saxum: great. Yeah. This is a technology that’s been, um. Man, it’s been under development by a lot of companies in the last six, eight years. And now it’s starting to get to the point where it is, I mean, we’re, we’re TRL nine plus, right? There’s a lot of these solutions out there that are commercially ready. Xans been a top of this list since, man, since I was playing in that oil and gas world, to be honest with you. Like 20 18, 20 17, uh, really cool looking boats. That’s besides the point. Uh, but when they show up at trade shows and stuff with ’em, you’re like, ah, oh, that thing’s neat looking. Um, but it, it, it, it solves all kinds of problems, right? So when you go offshore and you’re just gonna do, say you’re just gonna go out there and do multibeam, so you’re just gonna do echo sound where you’re just looking to see depths and what’s on the sea floor. The minimum kind of vessel you need for that is 10 to 15 meters long. You need probably two to six people on that vessel. And that’s just, if you’re going out doing shift work, if you’re staying out there [00:25:00] and working 24 7, that vessel grows to. 30 meters instantly, right? So now you’re burning thousands and thousands of dollars in fuel. You’ve got food on board. You got all, it’s just a pain to put this vessel out there. You take all of those people out of harm’s way. You take all the costs away and they, and you put two of them, or one or two of them on shore in a facility, and then you put this three meter vessel out there that’s fully autonomous. No people, but collects the same style of data. I mean, it’s a no brainer, right? So you’re getting the same style of data and if, and the thing’s working 24 7, there is no need to have someone sleep. There’s a not a technician issue. There’s not, none of this is, is a problem anymore. Nobody’s getting seasick, right? So you’re sitting, you’re, you’re sitting back on shore, uh, going to work, uh, with no PPE on, um, having a, having a coffee from Starbucks down the street. And you’re running this thing 24 7, you’re collecting all [00:26:00] that fantastic data. Uh, it is just, like I said, it’s a no brainer. Now, now they’re getting to the stage where they’re putting ’em out as swarms, so you can cover whole fields. You’re doing live cable inspections. It’s, it’s pretty fantastic. So Exo ocean’s really making the next generation of robotics o offshore. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that’s gonna drive down the cost of energy. These kind of developments make huge strides in lowering costs, and this is why you need to read PES Win Magazine. So there’s a. Great articles all throughout the magazine. This quarter’s issue is, is Heavy with articles. Get your free copy@pswin.com today. As you know, in the wind industry, survival has always belonged to those who can keep up, uh, and Sorn freeze. Nuon knows better than most with his decades of experience at LM Wind Power and Uzon. He now chairs two Danish subcontractors, Polytech and Jupiter. Bach. Uh, his message to smaller suppliers in, in a recent article is. Pretty blunt. It [00:27:00]says the manufacturers, big OEMs want fewer partners and larger partners who can take on more responsibility. And if you cannot invest and grow with those manufacturers, you’ll be left behind the winners. It says it will be those who stay close to the turbine makers and adapt as the industry evolves. Joel, this is a really interesting discussion that, uh, Soren put out there. Obviously he’s invested in Polytech and Jupiter, Bach, uh, to great suppliers obviously, but small businesses are where a lot of the key technologies have been driven over the last five, six years. In wind, or more broadly the last 20 years in wind, a lot of great technology has come out of places that you wouldn’t have thought of. The OEMs have not been the bastion of innovation. I would say it [00:28:00] is necessary. You have both, wouldn’t you think? You have to have the small business innovation to prove out ideas and to show that they work, but you also have to have the large manufacturers to implement those ideas more broadly without either one of them, nobody wins. Joel Saxum: I fully agree and I think that one of the things that’s a little bit, uh, more of a granular comment there is. I think sometimes you need the OEMs and the other suppliers within the supply chain to open their doors a little bit, right? So this is, this is me wearing my, my small business, small innovative business, uh, in the wind industry cap. And that is, man, sometimes it is hard to get a conversation with a large subsupplier or with an OEM when you have something that can help them. And they just don’t want to communicate, don’t want to help. It’s just our way or the highway kind of thing. And if you watch, like we, so the podcast gives us an kind of, or not [00:29:00] gives us, it forces us to have kind of an op, an opportunity to look at, you know, what are the, what are the financial statements of some of these OEMs? What are the financial statements of some of their large sub-suppliers? You know? ’cause if they’re located in countries where that stuff is public knowledge, you can see how and what they’re doing. And if you, if you look at business in a general way where you rely on one customer or two customers to, for your whole business, you’re gonna be hurting. Um, especially in the way we look at things or what we’re seeing in the wind industry right now is if you’re, if you are a large company to say you do a hundred million in revenue and your customers are ge Vestas. Depending on what happens regulatory wise, in some random country somewhere your a hundred million dollars could shrink to 50 real quick. Um, so I don’t think that that’s a great way to do business. I think, you know, having a bit of diversification probably helps you a little bit. The OEMs Allen Hall: have a particular job to do. They need to deliver turbines onsite on time and create power for their customer. That’s our main [00:30:00] focus. They are a generator. Driven company, they make generators on steel towers with a propeller system basically. Right. Just simplify it way, way down. There’s not a lot of technology in that itself. Obviously there’s control systems, obviously there’s electronics involved, but the concept from this basic fundamentals is not difficult to to grasp. The difficulty is in execution. Showing that that product can last for 20 years, and that product can last in different environments. Australia, United States, up in Scandinavia, Canada, way down south and Brazil. There’s some really rough environments there and the OEMs are relying upon in industry, uh, guidance from like the IECs and then the dvs, uh, uls Tube. Nord. Uh. Bvs where they’re trying to make these turbines comply to a [00:31:00] set of essentially regulations, which just simplify it. You can do that. But as we have seen historically in the wind industry, if you make a turbine that just meets those requirements, you do not necessarily have a successful product. You have a product that is marginal, and as Yolanda has pointed out to me numerous times, there’s a lot of real issues in wind turbines. That probably could have been solved five years ago by small mobile companies with outside of the box ideas that could have given the OEMs a huge advantage, especially in blades. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and I think a lot of these companies are, they’re looking at things from a different point of view, right? They’re smaller companies. You have people who could know the product, they know the real issue that’s going on on the ground. They know. Kind of what they need to do, what the next step is to move forward in their solution.[00:32:00] Right? But it’s not like it’s a, a company where you need 30 people to sign off before you can go onto the next stage, and then you need 30 more people to sign off before you can get funding to do something else. And so yes, the OEMs are doing a good job in their scope. If they’re meeting their scope, they are doing a good job. You know, if I, if I take like bread and cheese, then yes, I have a sandwich, right? Like, it might not be the best sandwich in the world, but I have a sandwich. So like, they’re making the sandwich and that’s great. But if you want something to, to actually work and to last and to, to give everybody else the, the idea that. You know, wind is profitable and we can all benefit from it. You have to get all those different layers in there, right? You have to make [00:33:00] sure that you know, if you have a big lightning issue, then you get the right people in the room to get that retrofit in there to solve your lightning issue. If you have a big leading edge erosion issue, then you get those right people in the room to solve everything, and it’s not always going to be a one size fits all. Right, but you do need those smaller companies to, to be in the room with you. Joel Saxum: I’m a hundred percent agreeing with you, Yolanda, and I think that this is the issue here is that at some level then an OEM, an OEM engineering head would have to admit that they’re not the end all be all, and that they may have got a couple of things wrong. And what, what I would love to see and who, and maybe maybe ask you this question, who of the major four Western OEMs. Do you think would be open to like an industry advisory board? Nordex, you think it’s Nordex? I think Yolanda Padron: that’s the closest one so far that we’ve seen. Right? Joel Saxum: Yeah. I, I, I agree with you, and I’m saying that because I don’t think any of the other ones would ever admit that they have an [00:34:00] issue, right? They have attorneys and they have problems, Allen Hall: so they really can’t, but I, I think internally they know that they haven’t optimized their production, they haven’t optimized their performance out in the field. They’re trying to improve availability, that’s for sure. Estes has spent a great deal of time over the last year or two improving availability so that the money is being spent. The question is, do they have all the right answers or the overspending to get to the availability that they want to deliver to their customers? That’s a great question because I do think that we we’re just in Scotland and there’s a number of technology companies in the UK that I think, wow, they should be implementing some of these. Ideas and these products that have been proven, especially the ones that have been out for a couple of years, they should be implemented tomorrow, but they’re not yet because they can’t get through the door of an OEM because the OEM doesn’t want to hear it. Joel Saxum: Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Right. Well, well, like I, the, the, the example that keeps popping into my mind is Pete Andrews and the team over [00:35:00] at Echo Bolt, simply because they have a solution that works. It’s simple. They’ve done the legwork to make sure that this thing can be optimized and utilized by technicians in the field around the world. But they, it just like, they haven’t gotten the buy-in from, from whoever, uh, that it seems to be, you know, there’s a hurdle here. Uh, and that hurdle may be the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t know. Uh, but I would love to see, I would love to see their, uh, solution for bolted connections, uh, and monitoring bolted connections kicked around the world because I think you could save. Uh, the wind industry a ton, a ton, a ton of money. And that is an example of a small business full of subject matter experts that made a solution that can solve a problem, whether you’re an OEM or you’re an operator or whatever. There’s there that’s there, utilize them, right? Those are the kind of things that we need in this industry. Yolanda Padron: And it’s also those smaller companies too that will look at your feedback and then they’ll say, oh. Okay, do I need to adjust here? [00:36:00] Did I not focus on this one parameter that your specific site has? Right. And you don’t see that from the OEMs ’cause they have so, uh, they have so many problems that they’re trying to tackle at once that it gets really difficult to, not just to hone in on one, but to, to tell everybody, oh, I, I have this perfect solution for everything. Here you go. Allen Hall: Right. I think there’s an internal conflict in the engineering departments and manufacturing departments of any OEM, regardless if it’s in wind or in any other industry, is that they have a system to make this product and they’re pretty confident in it, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. They don’t want to hear outside noise is I, I would describe it as noise. Like, uh, if you have a great solution that would help out their manufacturing process. But I work here, I know how, I know the ins and outs that that new idea by a small company won’t work here. Those [00:37:00] barriers have to be knocked down internally in the OEMs. The OEM management should be going through and saying, Hey, look, if I find me the manager of this operation, if I find a company that could help us and save us money, and you’re being a roadblock, guess what? See ya. Hit the road because there is no way you can let those opportunities pass you by. In today’s marketplace, you need to be grabbing hold of every opportunity to lower your cost, to improve your product availability, to improve your relationship with your customers. How do you do that? Quickly, you look at the companies that are providing solutions and you grab them, grab them, and hold on for your life and listen to what they have to say because they have probably done more research into your product than your people have. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you [00:38:00] found value in today’s discussion, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

What does it really take to grow a recruiting business to $300M, scale contract staffing revenue, and execute a profitable exit—while keeping your team together? In this high-impact episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, host Benjamin Mena sits down with industry veteran Jon Davis, who reveals the exact strategies that turned his firm into one of the most successful staffing organizations in the country. Whether you're running a solo desk or scaling an agency, this episode is your roadmap to recurring revenue, massive valuation, and building a business buyers fight to acquire.

Efter lite inledande snack om fars dag handlar avsnittet mest om kriget i Sudan, dess förhållande till Förenade Arabemiraten och andra internationella aktörer, och det indirekta stöd till folkmördar-gänget RSF Sveriges regering står för när Benjamin Dousa vill sluta nya frihandelsavtal med Förenade Arabemiraten, och även varför ingen verkar vilja att det ska bli fred. […]

The crew discusses Equinor's significant investment in Ørsted, while Ørsted denies plans to merge. They also cover Jupiter Bach's new plant in Colorado and the upcoming Wind Operation and Maintenance Australia 2026 event. Register for ORE Catapult's UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight!Learn more about Composite Inspection and Consulting! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here's your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. I have Rosemary Barnes in Australia who has, uh, been doing a little bit of travel. Joel is back in Austin, Texas. Man, I feel like everybody's been traveling a lot and so is Yolanda. The Yolanda has been on the road quite a bit and we have a really interesting week in wind energy. Particularly over in Denmark and Norway, and if you've been following the news there, uh, as we all know, Ecuador had a pretty big investment into Sted several months ago where they put in about two and a half [00:01:00] billion dollars to buy 10% of Sted to help write the ship a little bit, and then. A c basically last month, right Joel? It was about last month where they, they spent about a billion dollars for the right rights issue, uh, to keep that stock moving, right, and or, and need more cash. And that's how they raised it. That's a total investment, about three and a half billion dollars. That's a lot of money for anybody to be spending at this moment, and Ecuador is thinking this is a pretty good bet. That's great and they wanna work closer with Ted. And the talk is that Ecuador wants a boar seat with Ted Joel. Is there any chance that is going to happen?  Joel Saxum: Well, it was, it's interesting that they brought that up as well, right? Because the initial buy-in, you know, back I think six, nine months ago or whatever it was, they specifically said in their press release, we are not trying to get a board seat. We don't want to have [00:02:00] control over this, yada, yada, yada. But then when the rights issue came out, and I think it was the, the TED stock dropped like 30% or something that day. Um, they threw more cash in, they got a little bit more power. But it's like anything, right? Once, once you've got, uh, quite a bit of money invested and you have a, have pretty heavy percentage of us of whatever that investment may be, it can be. Half ownership in a car, I don't care. You want to have a little bit more say about what happens with your money and what the results can be based on strategic decisions. And if you've, you know, been watching Ted's decisions. Now they've been at the, the whim of government policies and stuff for the last few years, but they've also mistepped a little bit on a couple of them. Uh, so you can see EOR wanting to get in there to protect their investment a little bit. The, in the funny thing to me here, and, um, Rosie, you spent a ton of time up in Denmark, is the, the, the back and forth between the Norwegians and the Danes about, oh, you're, you're just our [00:03:00] little brother. You're our, oh, you're our distant cousin, da da da da. How they were kind of all at one point in time, a lot, you know, a lot closer. There was what was called the, um, the calmer Union, I think it was. And that was the Danes, Norwegians,

Legalese and logistics shouldn't stop you from living and working anywhere. In this episode, we unpack the confusing stuff: work-from-anywhere policies vs. hire-from-anywhere roles, W-2 vs. 1099, employer-of-record (EOR), visas, and taxes. So you know what job listings actually mean and how to navigate them. No promises, no legal advice, just clear explanations and what to consider next.Highlights:

Madeline Temple is a global brand and communications strategist who has spent many years flinging herself into the unknown. It seems to be a theme in her life. That, and good hair. Fingers crossed both continue.She is a firm believer in taking calculated risks, both personally and professionally. Sometimes they don't work out as planned, but the stories have always been worth it.Madeline's calculated risks have provided real-world, international experience you can't find in a style guide or the latest marketing best-seller. She's experienced in branding, strategy, design, corporate storytelling, advertising, cultural trends, PR, content, social media, and research — both on the agency and client side in the US and UK; in B2B and B2C companies; and at Fortune 500 corporations, PE firms, and startups. She's been quoted in the Chicago Tribune and Wired magazine and has appeared on BBC Radio 4's flagship program Today in London.Currently, Madeline is VP, global brand, communications & content at Safeguard Global, the company that started the global EOR category and industry. Prior to this, she was Hillrom's VP, corporate marketing. There, she wrote the brand story that turned a $3 billion medical device maker into a medtech company acquired by Baxter in 2021.

High Yield Antiarrhythmic Drugs Review:Class I (Sodium Channel Blockers)Class II (Beta Blockers)Class III (Potassium channel blockers)Class IV (Calcium Channel Blockers) for your PANCE, PANRE, Eor's and other Physician Assistant exams.Review for your PANCE, PANRE, Eor's, Physician Assistant exams, Medical, USMLE, Nursing Exams.►Paypal Donation Link: https://bit.ly/3dxmTql (Thank you!)Included in review: Pathophysiology of antiarrhythmics, cardiac action potential, phases 0–4, Phase 0 depolarization, Phase 1 initial repolarization, Phase 2 plateau, Phase 3 repolarization, resting membrane potential, cardiomyocytes, pacemaker cells, funny current (If), L-type calcium channels, T-type calcium channels, effective refractory period (ERP), conduction velocity, reentry, rate control, rhythm control, AV node, SA node, QT prolongation, torsades de pointes, post-MI arrhythmias, structural heart disease, supraventricular tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, ACLS, catecholamines, cAMP, PKA, beta-1 receptors, calcium influx, nodal blockade, non-dihydropyridine vs dihydropyridine, Disopyramide, Quinidine, Procainamide, Lidocaine, Mexiletine, Flecainide, Propafenone, Metoprolol, Atenolol, Bisoprolol, Betaxolol, Esmolol, Acebutolol, Propranolol, Carvedilol, Labetalol, Nadolol, Pindolol, Timolol, Sotalol, Amiodarone, Dronedarone, Ibutilide, Dofetilide, Verapamil, Diltiazem, Amlodipine, Nifedipine, Nicardipine, Amiodarone adverse effects, blue-gray skin discoloration, interstitial lung disease, thyroid dysfunction, corneal microdeposits, hepatotoxicity, beta-blocker contraindications, asthma caution, bradycardia, AV block, cardiogenic shock, diabetes caution, CCB adverse effects, constipation, AV block, bradycardia.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/cram-the-pance--5520744/support.

In this episode of our Cross-Border Catch-Up podcast series, Diana Nehro (shareholder, New York/Boston), who is the chair of the Cross-Border Practice Group, and Kate Thompson (associate, New York/Boston) discuss the nuances of global hiring, focusing on the differences between an employer of record (EOR) and an agent of record (AOR). The speakers evaluate the pros and cons of each model, highlight compliance risks, and provide practical tips for employers to effectively and compliantly build their international teams.

On this episode, Pete and Julie share their POV's and insights on a rush of HR tech marketplace updates and activity making headlines to wrap up the summer months of 2025!  Pete and Julie share their thoughts on recent acquisitions, product announcements, and news from vendors across HCM, EOR, recruiting, fintech, and more.  Vendors mentioned in the episode include Dayforce, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, DailyPay, Chime, Deel, Coupa, Flowise AI, Paradox, and SmartRecruiters. Links to stories mentioned: MIT Study: The GenAI Divide, State of AI in Business 2025:  https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf Story on Super Mom, Super Commuter Rachel Kaur: https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/indian-origin-racheal-kaur-flies-to-work-malaysia-supercommuting-13862272.html Connect with the show:    LinkedIn:  http://linkedin.com/company/hr-payroll-2-0  X: @HRPayroll2_0 @PeteTiliakos @JulieFer_HR BlueSky: @hrpayroll2o.bsky.social  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HRPAYROLL2_0

High Yield Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) ReviewReview for your PANCE, PANRE, Eor's, Physician Assistant exams, Medical, USMLE, Nursing Exams.Merchandise Link: https://cram-the-pance.creator-spring.com/►Paypal Donation Link: https://bit.ly/3dxmTql (Thank you!)Included in review: Pathophysiology, PCOS symptoms ,PCOS diagnosis, PCOS treatment, PCOS infertility, Rotterdam criteria, LH/FSH imbalance, Hyperandrogenism, Anovulation, Insulin resistance in PCOS, Letrozole, Clomiphene, PCOS vs NCCAH, PCOS ultrasound findings, 17-hydroxyprogesterone, PCOS and endometrial hyperplasia, Combined estrogen-progestin oral contraceptives, Medical mnemonics for examsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/cram-the-pance--5520744/support.