Innovation Junkies Podcast

4.4 Jesse Edmondson on the EV and Mineral Supply Chains

The Jeffs are joined by Jesse Edmondson, CEO of US Critical Minerals and Director of Government Relations for Standard Lithium. Dive into the technical innovations driving lithium extraction, the environmental advantages of direct extraction, and the vision for Arkansas as a key player in the electric vehicle supply chain. You can learn more about Jesse and his work at uscriticalminerals.com and standardlithium.com.

Jeff Standridge:

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. Great to have you here. My name is Jeff Standridge.

Jeff Amerine:

Hey, it’s Jeff Amerine. Good morning, everybody.

Jeff Standridge: 

Jeff Amerine, how are you today?

Jeff Amerine: 

Yeah, fantastic. I understand we’re going to talk about some potentially world changing topics today and on how Arkansas is going to play a big role in electrification in the future.

Jeff Standridge:

That’s right. You know, uh, you and I had the opportunity to attend the, uh, Arkansas lithium innovation summit, uh, a few weeks ago had about 600 plus people there really exploring how, uh, the smack over found, uh, formation and the lithium play down there in the Southern part of our state. We had, uh, folks from the big three or four, uh, lithium, uh, organizations that were there. One of them, we have a guest with us today. Uh, Jesse Edmondson, Jesse is the CEO and co-founder of US Critical Minerals and also the Director of Government Relations for Standard Lithium. Jesse, good to have you with us today and we’re excited to unpack this concept called lithium.

Jesse Edmondson:

Good morning, gentlemen. Happy to be here.

Jeff Standridge:

Very good, very good. So tell us a little bit about you, Jesse, how you got into this world and a little bit about what you do on a daily basis now.

Jesse Edmondson:

Sure, so Jesse Edmondson, born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, went to Northside High School and then found my way at the University of Arkansas studying the geosciences. So actually I got introduced to the geosciences and to that department in the University of Arkansas by actually studying tree rings. So studying old trees and looking at the rings and how those rings are related to climate. And so that’s how I landed in the Geoscience Department. The Geoscience Department historically is very much oil and gas focused. And that was something that geologically, you know, intellectually, at least at that time, was not something that was extremely interesting to me. And so I focused on that kind of interaction between humans and the earth and studying old trees to do that. And so I’m kind of a weird geologist, but I got a bachelor’s and a master’s there at the University of Arkansas and my degrees were in geology. And so I got out of school and kind of felt like I needed some street credit as a geologist since I had the two degrees and wanted to kind of put them to use. And so I actually got started as a geologist looking at gold and silver out in Nevada. This is the summer of 2011, which at the time was a record high gold price. It was an exciting thing. And I really got kind of hooked on the idea of making discoveries and doing mineral exploration and going out and looking for stuff and finding stuff and bringing value to that and being able to tell stories around that. And that’s really one of the things that I learned most at the university and particularly in the triggering lab under Dave Staley was, you know, one of the things he taught us is, you know, if you can always go into nature, bring that data from nature and then tell a story with that, you’re always going to have a seat at the table. And so that’s something that I’ve carried with me into the mineral exploration world and now into the critical mineral world. So, yeah, fast forward, the investors that were behind the gold and silver project I was on wanted a graphite project. This is in 2012, really early on in the battery materials kind of race, which we’re now a decade into, where Elon Musk kind of made his first announcement around building out these gigafactories to support the proliferation of electric vehicles. And he wanted to have North American supply chains. And so when that happened, you had really overnight dozens of battery materials companies looking for new deposits of lithium, of graphite, of nickel, of cobalt, trying to find domestic solutions where we could have kind of secure and sustainable supply chains because we were reliant in many cases on the Chinese or other of our adversaries for a lot of these important raw materials for these kind of modern day supply chains. And so I got first started on graphite in 2012, which is also a critical mineral, also a battery material similar to lithium and I got kind of hooked on critical minerals at that point. Just all the moving parts around it, the geology was important and was interesting, but there was also this really important geopolitical component. It was a mineral that we were all carrying around in our pocket every day via cell phone and laptop computer. And so that was something that really interested me. Coming from the environmental background, I was normally on the side of, of where we need to be really limiting mining. We need to be as sustainable as possible. And so it was really interesting to be at that interface where I felt like having come from the side that was literally trying to save old trees around the planet to being in mining, I realized how important it was to have people within mining at this important moment where we were really gonna have to do an order of magnitude more mining, in this century for supposed clean energy minerals compared to traditional fossil fuels. And so I realized that there needed to be people within the industry that were thinking about how to do things sustainably that realized that mining really had to kind of reinvent itself as it got the social license to operate. And so I started carrying on different roles within this industry, not only just doing geology, but doing business development work. So who are the battery companies buying these materials or who are the cathode and the anode makers? How do you present yourself as a new supplier? What does that process look like for getting a new material evaluated or qualified? And it’s got a lot of really good experience doing that. And then also started doing government relations work because critical metals is so much a geopolitical issue. So whether it was state-level interactions or county-level interactions in rural Alabama related to the graphite project I was working on at the time, or at the federal level speaking with our senators and our congressmen and working with groups like the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that were really doing a lot of work around critical minerals and

Department of Defense, Defense Logistics Agency, which manages our National Strategic Stockpile. And so anyways, I got some really good experiences kind of at the 30,000-foot overview, but of all these different parts, whether it was the federal side or the industry side being your customers or all the different companies that were trying to develop these projects and get them into fruition. And so through all those experiences and through really going, transitioning from a geologist to kind of a battery materials expert and critical mineral expert, where the last seven or eight years, I’ve pretty much gone to most battery conferences in North America where you had all the major players at. So trying to, again, build those networks, and understand those supply chains. And meeting around five years ago, I got the pleasure of meeting the CEO and president of Standard Lithium, Andy Robinson and Robert Mintak, and got to learn about their project. And it was really cool because at that time nobody was talking about lithium in Arkansas. And so being from Arkansas, being in the critical minerals industry to learn about standard lithium, to learn about the smack over lithium and that opportunity, that was not something we ever learned about in the department. There’s old literature about lithium and the Smackover Formation. The Smackover, certainly known as a prolific oil and gas, oil producer, and then, you know, what used to be a nuisance to oil producers was this brine that was associated with it, where in the 1950s, they realized there was bromine in it, and bromine had value to the chemical industry at that time. And so all of a sudden, it was realized that that brine in the Smackover had value and it wasn’t just a nuisance to oil production. And over time, we’ve learned that there’s other things like lithium in it that can also be profitably extracted. So it was really cool to learn about that story. The fact that, yeah, really a globally significant resource in the state of Arkansas had to be unlocked with a new kind of technology that was not being used anywhere around the world, at least at a commercial scale.

And so it was really an opportunity to revolutionize the production of lithium, make a really important contribution to our domestic supply chains and being able to do it in a way and in a place that you could get a project permitted, that there would be the social license to operate and that where you could build out an industry that would really include and uplift local populations and provide them a new opportunity and very much a local and regional energy transition story in that you’ve got this history of oil production. You’ve got a lot of muscle memory in that region of southern Arkansas. And we’ve hit peak oil in southern, at least in southern Arkansas. And so this offers an opportunity for generations of industry and of local participation in that industry through a kind of a vibrant workforces. So anyways, I’m just I’m just rambling, butt I’ll stop.

Jeff Amerine:

That was kind of fantastic background on you and the Smackover play and whatnot. But as a, as a follow-up, I think it’d be useful for our listeners to understand the cleanliness difference or the environmental impact difference between being able to extract it from brine versus the other ways that lithium is sourced. And I think there’s, that’s a real differentiator, but talk about that from a kind of a technical standpoint as to why it’s better.

Jeff Standridge: 

Yeah. And let me, let me throw a caveat in there, right? So in the South, in South Arkansas, we’re, we’re familiar with oil drilling and, and in North Central Arkansas, we’re obviously very familiar with fracking for natural gas, right? And now we have this lithium play. So to Jeff’s point, the cleaner, better, faster kind of concept around lithium that maybe our listeners would need to understand.

Jesse Edmondson:

Sure, absolutely. So I’ll start real quick with just where today our world’s lithium comes from, because it’s important to understand. So about half the world’s lithium comes from brine, not too dissimilar to southern Arkansas, except for this brine is found normally in high desert environments in South America. So you’re at high elevations, you’re in extremely arid conditions, and you’ve got a geologic situation where you basically have an old dry lake bed that is surrounded by sediments that are rich in lithium, usually some sort of volcanic origin. And basically you’ve got, you can think of like kind of a closed bowl system where everything over geologic time is washed into that bowl. But because of the arid environment, it’s slowly gotten the water that’s drained into there has slowly concentrated in minerals because it’s such an arid environment. And so, in that case, you’re drilling down in most of those deposits within the top thousand meters. So the top really thousand to 2000 feet is where most of those brine bodies are at. And so it’s quite shallow, but you get, depending upon where you’re at in Chile and Argentina, you get concentrations of lithium in the brine of over 500 parts per million, even over a thousand, pushing 2000 parts per million in certain environments. That environment being so arid, it allows you the perfect opportunity to pump the brine to the surface and let Mother Nature kind of help you process it. And so you use the power of the sun, you pump the brine into the shallow evaporation ponds that you make. And over time, the lithium concentrates in that brine because lithium really, really wants to be in solution. And so it’s one of the last things that will drop out and form a salt. And so you can use that to your advantage in processing where through the evaporation process, you can basically get most of the other stuff to fall out and then at some point the lithium becomes kind of super saturated in that fluid or almost super saturated. And then you can pull it out and further process it from there and create a lithium chloride. And then from there make a battery chemical with it. Usually lithium carbonate is what you use for brine source materials. And so that lithium chloride gets made into a concentrate through the evaporation palm process in Chile and Argentina and then most of that lithium chloride gets sent to China to be processed into battery-quality lithium carbonate. So that process, it does use Mother Nature to help you. However, you’re extremely dependent on Mother Nature in that if you get a once-in-a-decade or once-in-a-hundred-year rainfall, that completely messes with the chemistry of those ponds. And those ponds take anywhere from six months to over a year to several years, depending upon the operation, to actually fully mature the brine to where you can actually produce lithium from it. So it’s a very timely process. It’s one that if you do, especially in an Earth that has a changing climate, you’re very dependent on that climate and those weather systems for that consistency of the material. And so you’re vulnerable to it in that way, but you’re also, even though you’re pumping the brine to the surface because you’re pumping so much brine through that evaporation process, you’re not putting that water back into the formation. You’re changing, potentially changing the hydrogeology of those basins. And so because you’re so water-stressed in those environments, and you’ve got to use a massive surface land footprint to process those brines, because you need high surface area, you need large acreage evaporation ponds. Those operations have a really high environmental footprint in terms of that actual surface footprint, but you’re also potentially affecting the hydrogeology of some very sensitive, more shallow environments. And then you do need some fresh water to process the brine and to use an operation like that. And so again, because you’re in such drought-stressed environments, it’s really taxing in many cases to have a heavy water use footprint in those environments. You’re also very remote.

places too. So just the act of getting your product out of the ground into a sellable product and into the market, you know, has a footprint associated with it as well. So, but that’s where half the world’s lithium comes from. The other half comes from a mineral called spodumene, which is a hard rock mineral that’s formed essentially in large open pit mines. Most of that is mined in Australia. There’s other deposits in Brazil and Africa, and there’s some being looked at right now in Canada. But it’s very much a mining-intensive process, large surface footprint, energy intensive. And then you create a mineral concentrate of that spodumene and then you fur through a chemical and thermal process, you convert that spodumene into usually a battery chemical called lithium hydroxide. In the case of that supply chain today, again, most of it comes out of the ground in Australia and then gets processed into a battery chemical again in China. And so what direct lithium extraction does is it’s looking at these brine environments. It also allows you to go to places like Southern Arkansas where you could never do evaporation ponds because of the high rainfall. And so what you can, the easiest way for me to kind of describe it and think of it as basically a fancy water treatment plant where you’re pumping water through and it is selectively removing the lithium. And so you’re basically trying to pull out the lithium without getting anything else really attached to it. You can do a pretty good job of that. And then you’ve got to do a final kind of a polishing and cleanup stage of that lithium that you do pull out of the brine in order to further process it and then eventually upgrade it into a battery ready chemical. But what the direct lithium extraction process does is it’s a continuous process. The remaining materials in the brine that after it’s had the lithium removed from it is still essentially the same brine minus the lithium that came out of the ground. And so it’s safe for you to pump it right back into the ground, into the same formation. Again, you’re not having to expose it to the environment, so you’re not vulnerable to changes in weather and things like that. It all happens in a closed facility. But in southern Arkansas, because of the long history of the bromine industry, we know how that subsurface works and behaves. We’ve got really good hydrogeologic models of how to pull not only brine out of the formation, but how to pump it back into it. So it’s essentially what the bromine industry is doing today. Direct lithium extraction is a little bit different than bromine extraction, but it’s the same more or less concept. And so we’ve got a ton of data on how to do this. Because Standard Lithium has a strategic partnership with Lanxess, we know specifically a lot about how they’ve been doing it. We’ve got to inherit and learn a lot from them and their operation and a lot of their long history of the subsurface and their geologic understanding. We’ve been able to learn from all of that. 

Jeff Standridge: 

Let me interrupt you a moment and ask you a question, Jesse. Um, you talked about kind of a single purpose kind of water treatment facility, so to speak. And I’m using air quotes here for folks that are on the audio podcast. Um, are those going to be centralized facilities, or are they at the extraction site? And will you have to have pipelines? Tell me how that process works briefly, if you can.

Jesse Edmondson:

Yes, sir. So there’ll be a series of production wells that will feed via pipeline of our facility. And then it’ll be a central facility that will remove the lithium from the brine. And then it will leave that facility and then go to a series of reinjection wells, or what we call disposal wells, where the brine will then go back into the formation. So we put a lot of thought into that as far as because you don’t want to dilute what you’re pulling out of the ground. So we do that in a way that minimizes dilution, but where we know where it goes and we know how it behaves. And so it’s something that over time minimally affects your operation and minimally degrades the quality of that brine, you look at, again, the bromine industry, it’s those plants that Lanxess operates have been operating for decades. They’ll likely operate for many more decades and it’s still very good quality material that you’re able to work with.

Jeff Standridge: 

Gotcha. So go ahead, Jeff, I see you’re gonna ask a question.

Jeff Amerine:

That was going to, you know, in terms of, so, so first of all, that was kind of fantastic background and clears away much of the haze I think that people probably have and how lithium is actually made to be useful. We’re sort of in the game of thinking about how do you create vibrant innovation ecosystems, how do you think about the value chain? So we’ve got this amazing resource, smart people and companies like yours are going to figure out how to get that out of the ground and make it into useful lithium. We don’t want to be in the business of just being an extraction-oriented state where this stuff gets sent somewhere else to be turned into high value. Talk to us about the crystal ball or kind of your dream of what could happen in terms of that innovation ecosystem around this play. What else, what are the other pieces that are needed for Arkansas to win? So to speak.

Jesse Edmondson:

Yeah, no, I really love that question, Jeff. And it’s something I’m really passionate about for the state of Arkansas and to give credit to Hugh McDonald and to Clint O’Neill and to the governor too for really being open to these, to some of the conversations and some of the ideas I’ve had around this and really just running with it. So I’ve, if one of the things, if you look at the Southeastern United States compared to the rest of North America, in terms of how it’s become a potential hub for EV supply chains. It’s really fascinating. I mean, we’ve in really five years time, what I kind of imagine could happen here has been completely blown out of the water. It’s I’ve mainly been working even on the Arkansas boy, Arkansas native, happy to be working back in Arkansas. I’ve spent a lot of time further east in Alabama and Georgia over the last 10 years working on projects. And so in those states have nailed down some really big projects and opportunities, particularly the state of Georgia, which I’ve actually had the opportunity to be a consultant for Governor Kemp and for his team and help kind of get them a blueprint for their state, which, you know, I had a small part in crafting and them running with it as well and becoming extremely successful. And so when I started working with Standard Lithium as their director of government relations, I immediately reached out, I had the opportunity to meet Hugh and Clint and basically challenged them by saying, listen, you if you look at the Southeast, again, we’re becoming this hub for the supply chain, yet if you look at the state of Arkansas, we’re pretty empty on the map as far as the dots of major investment projects compared to an Alabama or Georgia or Tennessee. And how can we do a better job? Because there was you know, historically significant amount of federal money on the table for a lot of these opportunities. There’s just industry, there’s venture capital around these opportunities right now. And so, you know, how do we get the state really kind of firing on all cylinders for this? And so, because you’re right, you’ve got a globally significant resource of lithium. You’ve got a very industry-friendly, business-friendly state that’s right in the middle of the country. That’s got this fantastic interstate system. We’re right on, we got the Arkansas River going through us. We’ve got a history of being one of the, some of the logistic super houses on the planet are from our state. And so we’re just, kind of all the stars align that Arkansas should be able to really capitalize on the opportunities around the supply chain. And the thing is too, is that the critical mineral supply chain is one of, I think, the most bipartisan opportunities in the world, in that it has something for everybody. Now, whether you see it as, oh, this is all about electric vehicles and green energy, or you see this about, no, this, well, whatever this is, this is the future of technology. And so controlling these supply chains is very important. And when you look at right now, most of these supply chains come from China. You know, and we’re getting basically, you know, our tailwinds handed to us by the Chinese right now. This is an incredible opportunity to secure American supply chains and do it in a sustainable fashion. So it doesn’t matter if it’s it’s OK, we need to be worried about China. And that’s the main reason I care about these supply chains or whether it’s the energy transition, the thing is, is everybody’s agreeing that this is really important. And the thing is, is not only is it the critical minerals, it’s the components of the battery, it’s the battery itself that are also controlled by China. Yet each one of those is an opportunity for billion billion-dollar industry for a manufacturing facility that’s going to create a thousand plus jobs. You look at like cathode manufacturing, battery manufacturing, electric vehicle manufacturing. And so, or to me, Arkansas isn’t the right place. We do. We, we want them at the raw material of, you know, lithium in the form of chloride to come out of the ground in Arkansas, but we absolutely want it to be transformed into a battery-ready chemical in Arkansas. Something that standard lithium wants to do something that a lot of the other aspiring lithium companies want to do. And so that, that in itself, you’re creating a vertically integrated, you know, lithium raw material all the way to lithium chemical industry right in the state of Arkansas, whereas like I said right now, it’s coming out of the ground in Australia, then goes to China, then goes to the rest of the world, or it goes to South America and then to China. So the fact all of that could happen at one facility essentially in Arkansas, but then you take a battery-ready lithium chemical and get it to a cathode manufacturer. So, you know, cathode is basically half of the lithium-ion battery, that’s where the lithium goes into.

There’s really minimal cathode manufacturing right now in the United States. Tesla has built a facility in Corpus Christi where they’re making now cathode basically so they can control their own destiny and their own supply chains. There’s probably between now and 2030 gonna be, if I had to guess, two to three more major cathode manufacturers that come to the United States. So if Arkansas could land one of those, that would be just completely poetic as far as where, what’s happening right now. And that’s something that again, Clinton and Hugh I think are working really hard on. And then further downstream from that, the actual battery manufacturers, there’s other components of the batteries as well. There’s separators, there’s electrolytes. So just to our South in Louisiana, you guys were at the lithium event. There was a company Cora there. Cora makes, fluorine-based chemicals and they’ve just got money from the Department of Energy to build an electrolyte plant in Louisiana. It’s called LIPS6, but it’s basically the secret sauce to lithium-ion batteries. They’re going to be making that just south of us in Louisiana. So it’s going to be one of the only electrolyte, the first electrolyte plant of its size in the United States. It’ll be a regional neighbor to us. The lithium that comes out of the Smackover will have the opportunity potentially to be in that electrolyte. So here within a half a day’s drive, you’ve got the raw material going into the secret sauce. So you can see these opportunities to where there’s not really another place on the planet that I’m aware of, correct me if I’m wrong, but that you can draw a circle of about, let’s say a one day’s drive in a semi-truck during one shift. And you can be at a raw lithium, manufacturing facility, a battery facility, an EV facility, and all that’s happening. I don’t know of any other place on the planet where you have the entire supply chain within a day’s drive of themselves. There could be some stuff like that coming to light in Europe, but nothing that’s in where you’ve got that whole ecosystem now. So potentially in the state of Arkansas, the lithium, it never leaves the state before it ends up in the final product. Worst case scenario, it goes across the state line maybe or a couple state lines, but it stays in the southeast. So it’s really a great opportunity.

Jeff Standridge:

Well, that’s awesome. So we have, and we’ve got a short time here. I want to, I want to hit this one last question quickly if we can. So we have a number of ancillary service providers who really served the, the gas play in North Central Arkansas, you know, in the boon that we had that are looking at this lithium play, so to speak, and trying to figure out how they pivot their services from those well site management services and other ancillary services. So still on the extract extraction side, can you kind of give us an idea, our listeners, an idea of what other kinds of ancillary services do the standard lithiums, the albumarals, the other folks need around them to help them execute on their strategies in this regard? Does that make sense?

Jesse Edmondson:

Yes, sir. Yes, I’d say, I mean, most of the job opportunities are going to be around operations. So people that can turn a wrench, people that know how to make fluids flow from the subsurface to the surface. And so certainly a lot of the service industries around oil and gas, they do translate. If not directly, they’re kind of close cousins. And there’s people, there’s certainly people that have been in that industry that are gonna be able to kind of quickly and easily find opportunities involved. I there’s still, I mean, the smack over formation is still largely under explored as far as looking at Texas, South Arkansas, Louisiana, into Alabama even. I think that we’re confident at Standard Lithium that where we’re at in Southern Arkansas is in East Texas are the best places to be, but there’s still gonna be a lot of even exploration work, looking at other opportunities. And then on the direct lithium extraction side too, I mean, there’s a lot of different technologies, direct lithium extraction is just a broad industry term, but it refers to at least a half a dozen different other kinds of technologies that can all be deployed. And so figuring out what are the best ones for the right opportunity in terms of the geology and the geochemistry is gonna be really interesting. But yeah, again, because of Southern Arkansas in particular, the fact that you’ve got this established oil industry, you’ve got an established brine industry, you’ve got a lot of people there that know what this looks like, know what it sounds like, know what it smells like, and they know how to make this industry work. And so it’s a fantastic opportunity where, like you look right now, standard lithium, we’ve got the most advanced direct lithium extraction facility demonstration facility in North America. That employs 34 local operators that all live within an hour of that plant. And they come, a lot of them from the oil and gas industry, from various chemical industries from the defense industries, from advanced manufacturing on the defense side. So, you know, we’re again, really fortunate in Arkansas to have a lot of muscle memory, a lot of brain power, and a lot of that ecosystem is already in place as you guys referred to, and it’s a great opportunity to kind of fill in the gaps, continue to attract industry to Arkansas that’s really just symbiotic with everything that’s already, already happening there.

Jeff Standridge: 

Fabulous great great stuff. We’re talking with Jesse Edmondson the director of government relations for Standard Lithium talking about the Smackover Formation, a primer for everyone in terms of what’s what the opportunity is for the state of Arkansas. Very good stuff Jesse, we appreciate your helping us unpack that. Lots to unpack there and we may want to have you back at some point as the state begins to progress, in this regard, to have you back and talk a little more about where the where the state’s going.

Jesse Edmondson:

It’d be my pleasure. Really, really great talking to you guys. Yeah, pleasure being on the podcast and yeah, certainly keep watching the space. There’s going to be a lot of, I think, interesting announcements this year and years to come around opportunities in Arkansas. Really grateful to Arkansas Economic Development and the governor’s office for being so supportive of this industry and really putting their weight behind it as far as bringing the right people together and again, I think because of that, you’re going to see a lot of great things to come in the very near future.

Jeff Standridge:

Great stuff.

Jeff Amerine:

Jesse, thanks for coming on and just one final comment. It was miraculous that you, in about four months time, you were able to pull together that lithium innovation summit for the state with over 600 people there. I mean, it was for those of us that are kind of in part in the events business around innovation, that was a spectacular job. So kudos to you and the folks you partnered with to get that done. It was really impressive.

Jesse Edmondson:

Yeah, thank you. No, it was a really we just wanted to plant the flag for Arkansas that we were open for business. You know, I think as you said during his open remarks, we still got a lot of work to do before we can like, you know, claim that we’ve planted that flag. But we wanted to, you know, show that we’re open for business, highlight the lithium industry. And, you know, because I’ve been going to these events and we’ve made the right friends over the last five to 10 years, you know, we’re able to pull all those people in to be speakers and really great opportunity and Hugh put the right people behind us at the Venture Center. Arthur and Mimi are just world-class. They’re super good at putting on these kinds of events. They made it super easy. Ellie Baker at Magnolia Economic Development just did a ton of work. Becca Caldwell, there’s a ton of people that did a lot of work, and together it made it look seamless and super easy. But there was a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes. But it – you know, again, hats off to Hugh and his team for, for, you know, running with the idea, but assembling really kind of an all-star cast and make sure it was done right. But it was, yeah, it was really a pleasure to work, work with all those, those folks. Cause it’s, it’s one of those things where a man is sure a pleasure to work with, with high functioning people and you can get them all in the room, the same room at the same time to work on a full project. Really good things can happen. So it was yet just a small part of that, but it was, it was really, um, really amazing to see it play out as well as it did. Yeah, because it was…

Jeff Standridge:

It was a great, great event. We enjoyed being part of it. And Jesse, we thank you again for spending your time with us today. We’ll look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Jesse Edmondson:

All right, look forward to it, gentlemen. Thank you, have a good one.

Jeff Amerine:

Yeah, thank you.

Jeff Standridge:

All right. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining.

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