Barrett Cousins 8.31.23

In this episode, Barrett Cousins and Jeff Davis discuss the dynamic world of oil and gas, focusing on how technology has shaped and continues to reshape the industry. With a history in software dating back to 1994, Cousins shares his journey from digital imaging to real-time production systems in oil and gas. The conversation covers essential lessons learned from missed technology trends and how they've informed his current focus on leveraging AI and machine learning for full-field optimization. Both guests explore the evolution of technology, from the days of DOS and Commodore 64 to the present state of fracking and data collection for maximizing oil production. The episode offers a deep dive into the complexities and opportunities in optimizing oil and gas operations through modern technology.

Tune in to learn about the intersection of technology and the energy industry, and how AI and data analytics are shaping the future of oil and gas production.

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Transcript

Jeff Davis: 0:00

Look guys. We all know supply chain and logistics provide a stable job and income for the most part. The problem is this is W2 income and it holds global hours. It is around the clock. So we're married to our jobs and it's really hard to find a safe. But outsized returns. So our hard earned money. Can work for us. Real estate has proven to be safe and reliable. But seriously, how can we be? Sure. Which opportunities are the best and the safest. My goal. It's to provide supply chain executives deals that we can partner on together. Equity opportunities with cashflow tax benefits and appreciation earning 18 to 25% and more per year returns. So that we can all grow our portfolios. Together without taking time away from our jobs. Or our families. I'm Jeff Davis. And thanks for listening to chain reactions, podcasts. If you want more information. Check out. Chain investor. Dot pro. welcome back everybody to another episode of Chain Reactions. Today we're gonna take a step into the software world with Barrett Cousins. He's an executive in the energy software space. I think he's gonna challenge me a little bit on that, but we've been talking for a little bit and Looking forward to diving into this, especially from some of the conversations I've been having with, with our oil and gas brothers here in, in the Houston market. So, Barrett, if you would give every, everybody a little bit of a background where you been, where you going, what's going on in the energy space? We were just talking about weird place

Barrett Cousins: 1:55

oil and gas right now. It, it's the oil and gas world is an interesting place to, to, to solve problems and to work in. My history, I've been in software since 1994. Started off with capturing digital images and putting it on a card. Our claim to fame back then, you might not be old enough to remember, was you would actually go into the bank, take a picture, and then a week or two later, your Visa card would show up with your picture on. That was our software. Wow. Yeah. And then we, that was cool. Then we got to doing, you know, Access control plugging into access control systems for airports, for universities for prisons, for factories. So did that for a while. That was a, was in a very interesting business. That was a time when everything was bespoke when you needed a camera. So you bought this very fancy lens, this camera. Hit cameras and s b printers and the, that became from a, a very bespoke custom business. Comm.

Jeff Davis: 2:56

Yeah. Like this, right? Like what I Yeah.

Barrett Cousins: 2:59

Ab absolutely. It was in, in instead of a camera being$5,000 and a printer being$50,000, it was the camera's 50 bucks and the printer is 500 and holy macker. And then software seemed to be coming out of the, out of everywhere. And so that was one of my first early exposures to. A, a a not successfully navigating the business world. You know, we, we were at, at that time everything was do green screen typing, all your commands. And windows was just starting to come in and like, yeah, we have, we have a year, we have two years to kind. Migrate our product. Nope. We had, we had six months and we missed the train. And so that was a, a great lesson for me that you really do have to keep your eye on the ball with, with, not necessarily what's the cutting edge technology or what's the bleeding edge, but what's, what are technology trends that you need to pay attention to? So that was fascinating. A hard lesson, but a very good lesson.

Jeff Davis: 3:58

I remember Doss, I learned I was in school and I can remember my teacher at that time telling us unfortunately for you, you're learning this and technology is, you know already creeping up on you because there's Microsoft Word. So what I'm teaching you, It's obsolete, but you have to, you have to do it. And so that was on the Commodore 64. I remember

Barrett Cousins: 4:24

that. Yes. Abso that's awesome. That's a, a great platform. I had, I had Commodore and at. Yes. We've all wilded away the hours playing on that. It was

Jeff Davis: 4:36

what's happening now? what is the cutting edge technology? the last thing I remember in that, Space. was fracking. That's what I remember. Yeah. Do they have something else on the horizon

Barrett Cousins: 4:48

I don't know, candidly, that's the, the fracking is still, they're still making that more and more efficient there. Wow. How do we, from a, from a conceptual, my background, after we did the ID thing, I got into oil and gas software on SCADA systems. it was real time in the production space. So what they're doing on kind of what all happens below the surface. I have some understanding that that's not my, the world that I, that I have a whole lot of familiarity with. It's once you've punched the hole and you're gonna do something with it, that's where I have my familiarity and my, my experience. Okay. But still on that side, there is so much, so much efficiencies that they're still gaining on doing all the fracking that from a, you know, that side. And then when you get to the production optimization, so, I've punched the hole. I frack the, well it produces, you know, it does the, you know, the Beverly hair billies it, it has production. That's great. Cool. Well then someday it stops and then I have to go do tertiary or secondary, tertiary production to pull that out. I'm gonna go, do, you know, an E S P N electronic submersible pump? I'm gonna drop it down there. It's a high volume. Well then I could do plunger lift or I can do gas lift, or I, or at the end of the, I put my big. A sucker rod pump. And so optimizing those pieces are where I have a lot of experience. And one of the big things now at, you know, surprise, surprise, this word pops up, is AI and ml, you know, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yeah, I know. Is being able to, let's look at, so think of I'm gonna do gas, so I've got my one. Well, I'm gonna inject some gas, bubble, the oil and it, and I'm able to produce that. Well, it's not just, it's not, you know, that all comes out of one reservoir. So think, imagine the analogy that a, that a production engineer gave me one time that's stuck, is imagine you have a really big slushie. I'm gonna stick a bunch of straws in it. Well, if you go and you've stuck on your straw really, really hard, that's gonna kind of reduce it for everybody else. Mm-hmm. You. And so if you think of those instead of individual straws, those are well, so instead of I just have one producing it maximum, that's gonna affect all the others, really what I'm looking for is as a, as a company, say I'm Oxy or Chevron, or you know, it's Barr, Brent, and Jeff Oil and Gas, and we have our 50 wells. We wanna maximize the production out of the, out of the reservoir. So how do we do that? So using AI and ml and a lot of the, the more modern data collection. So let's bring all of this data back and see, maybe we turn these three wells down, maybe we turn these wells up, maybe we do something different. And so it's really around full field optimization, not just single well optimization. And we're seeing that with how do I collect more data? How do I tie all this data together? How do I get instead of just, you know, we have a lot, we've had technology for a long time to say, Hey, if something happens on this particular well site, I want something to happen. If the tank is about to overflow, let me shut it in. If I detect a fire, let me. Shut everything in and deploy the fire extinguishers. Well now, because, you know, we can de deploy like iot, we have edge computing, we can bring a lot more data back. We have a lot more computing in the cloud to where we can look and say what's happening, not just with this well, but in this whole field and how can I adjust the, the production on the field in real time? And so that is my, my friends and associates in the production space. That's really been the kind of the next big thing. Okay.

Jeff Davis: 8:20

What does the timeframe, from the time of poking to getting some of these data points that you're. Referring to,

Barrett Cousins: 8:28

Hour, minutes, hours. I mean the most, well, oh, this isn't years. no, I can get one second data off of it. Oil well today. There's, I can go buy that. That's that package of, of equipment that I need. And if there's communication infrastructure I can go pipe that data out now. So that's the interesting thing is this data has been around and the volume of data has been around for, you know, 25 or 30 years, but it's one of those now we have tools to do something meaningful with that data. Hmm. So if we look at there are several large oil and gas companies won't say philosophy. I'm gonna go collect all this data and the production engineers are like, why are you collecting, you know, one second data. Why are you doing all this? This is expensive. So forth and so on. Because yeah, they have to store all the tapes. Yeah, you have to store well, yeah. There, well there's the communication is the cellular backhaul satellite to bring all that data back and then I have to store it. Well, storage has gotten significantly cheaper, so Peopleto. These large companies made a bet 10, 15, 20 years ago saying, I, I firmly believe technology will evolve, that we'll be able to do something meaningful with that data, and then at some point in the future we'll kick ourselves for not having this granular data. And so we're actually seeing that today, that where your data scientists and your production engineers are going, man, if I had five years, 10 years of data to train my models on what this looks like, I could really do some cool stuff today. And these large companies are going, as a matter of fact, we've, we've, we've got that data and so it's how do I extract value out of some of these investments that they've made? And it's, it's, it's bubbling up with the, the AI and the ML stuff over the last five years has been really interesting to watch, and especially probably the last. Nine to 12 months with the large language models like your chat, G p t and some of the more industrial focused applications that are looking for data to train. So that's, that's as a, as a science nerd and a and a computer guy, that's something you can latch onto, okay, I can go solve some meaningful problems and I can solve them differently. So that's been fun. Wow. So

Jeff Davis: 10:43

AI is even creeping into the drilling world.

Barrett Cousins: 10:47

Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it may be, I know for a fact it's on the production side. Okay. So I, in my mind, I really break it up as if you are a very aggressive person and you're comfortable with a lot of risks, You play, you know, next to the drill bit, next to the rock. And as you go farther away from that, you know, you don't have as much dividends, but you also have a little bit more security and, and stability. And so I'm one that I like, I can take a decent amount of risk, but I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not one of those. There's drillers and those, those guys on the exploration side, my comfort level starts at the production once you've Yeah, yeah. Proven it.

Jeff Davis: 11:26

Yeah. I, I've worked with some drillers. They are, it's high demand. High risk man. Yes. so forgot where I was gonna go. And then risk, really low risk would be on the refining side. Right, right. Which we were talking a little bit before. That's kind of where you've been playing.

Barrett Cousins: 11:46

Yeah. The last four and a half years, I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about that industry and it's refining and, and really about how do I make an industrial facility very, very reliable. And so we have a lot of relationship capital and we have a lot of refineries here in Houston, so that's a, a space that we gotta play. But a lot of those same methodologies and philosophies work in say, a paper mill or say a a mine. So I go to a big mine and once I get the rock and I kind of pummeled the rock and I turned it into this flurry. The processes. Yeah, look just like they do in refining.'cause I'm taking something out of the earth and I'm running it through these chemical processes. Extract out different things. And so that's what you're doing. I mean, that's what Refinery Oil, they just do oil and gas not. So seeing that technology how it plays in that and then, you know, simple. Traditional reliability philosophies apply in, in a lot of different things. So in wastewater, you know, I want to make sure I keep the wastewater in the pipes. I need it to stay where it's yeah. And how do I do that efficiently? You know, we all want, when we turn our water on, we want our water to be reliable. We always want our hot water. We always want the toilets to flush. We always wanna have clean water. So making sure those, that, those pieces of infrastructure Are as reliable and available as they can be. And so again, those, the philosophies that we learned in refining can apply to a lot of different places. So that's, that, that's been fascinating to learn about and how that applies. Let's,

Jeff Davis: 13:22

the oil industry's in a weird place'cause you know, Previous years, 50 bucks a barrel is okay. 80 bucks is great for the industry, right? You're selling, you're drilling, it's doing well. The vendors are, are doing well. But now it seems like it's. Not any insight to that or do you agree?'cause I'm getting some insight from my customers that it's a little bit

Barrett Cousins: 13:50

slow. It, it, it really depends on where you are in the industry. Okay. You know, that what we're the, the world that I, that I get exposed to is that the world, the industry's doing well and at kind of at, at the very, very macro level. And it's because they've invested in a lot tools. If you think of it like I'm going, I wanna run just a, a generic business, you know, I wanna make sure that I want to have my support cost as low as possible. I wanna run everything as efficiently as I can so that, you know, every dollar that comes in, I can make sure that, that that hits my bottom line, or I can invest that intelligently. And so, oil and gas companies have had the, the fortune and misfortune have. They go through these cycles, they have a lot of cash come in. So they can, they go in these spending free spending sprees and get very, very aggressive in placing their betts and not worrying about some of the, the inherent or some of the inefficiencies in their, in their, in their day-to-day business. Yeah. And so I think the last. Five years really have shown us that those companies or those companies have learned, we need to get really, really efficient with what we've got so that where we can weather these, these ebbs and flows and when we're, when we, when we have a, when we have cash to invest, that makes that cash so much more powerful when we do invest it and as well as when we're very efficient. If we're in these, in, in the, in the doldrums, then we can weather that a lot better. And so that's, from what I've seen, is there's, they're investing a lot more in, you know, how do we do more with mm-hmm. Even though we have cash coming in, let's, let's pay down of our debt. And let's get ourselves kind of build up our war chest. That may be why you're not seeing so much drilling as, Hey, look, let's, let's get our war chest built up. Yeah. With our technology, with our processes, with our operations to where we can weather these things and then kind of really no matter what the, the economy is doing, we can weather that. Let's, let's, let's, let's use the demand signal from, from the consumers to. How we drill and what we do. Not necessarily just, oh, I've got a pile of cash to sit on. Yeah. And so investors have been driving that to where they need to be. You know, I can go and invest in a, in a software company that's got high r o i and those guys are, you know, you know, 90% margin on software. I go invest in an oil and gas company that's not that. And so you look at access to capital is really, really gotten expensive recently. And so, They're having to really clean up their asphalt act on the financial side. So that, that's been interesting to watch. And the, the, you know, some of it is just business 1 0 1. The other is how do we leverage some of this technology to make us more efficient in, in doing our day job?

Jeff Davis: 16:31

Yeah. Access to capital is difficult. I can Yes. And speak right? I mean, the banks are, are, are tightening up. They're giving lower leverage. Private investors want more. And they want it four less, right? Like they, yep. It's, it's a tough lending. And that's on hard assets, right? I'm on commercial. Their, their product is

Barrett Cousins: 16:55

unpredictable. Yeah. I mean, so again, I, I play in, in both the, the oil and gas world as the software world. So I talked to. You know, people in oil and gas, they can take a geologist report. They can take, you know, history of these wells. So there, there's some tangible there. It's interesting on, on the software side, what they're asking for is it's not just an investor. It used to be if I had a really solid business plan and I could, and I had a nice deck, I could go get some money and go, go fund my ideas. Now they wanna see, no, what is your actual software development roadmap? What does that actual plan look like? Who's doing your marketing? What does that marketing plan look like? They wanna all of those details before they, they do some of that funding. So that's been interesting with some of the, the people that I've met recently, how they're. They have a good idea and they're smart business people, but they're really kinda like, man, I, there's, it used to be I could do six months of work and go find some capital. Now it's, you know, I gotta do nine months of really due diligence to be able to just, just scrounge by.

Jeff Davis: 17:59

Well, the, the dumb money is gone.

Barrett Cousins: 18:01

Yes, yes.

Jeff Davis: 18:03

Literally, it's gone. It has, it has vaporized.

Barrett Cousins: 18:07

So it's, yeah, it's, how are we gonna go? Convince those people that have been smart with their investments to invest in you

Jeff Davis: 18:15

investing'cause they're, and you're a hundred percent because there's a lot of people, especially in that software space, that technology space. Look at that ssb, what is it? SS v B Bank, right? Right. Yeah. That was all software money.

Barrett Cousins: 18:30

Yeah. The sv, yeah, the Silicon Valley Bank and. The startups in, or a lot of the companies in San Francisco in that model there. It, it's a struggle. And it, you have to look at kind of some of the problems that they're trying to solve and how they're solving it and how they're running their businesses. So that's, it's been interesting to watch. It used to be as long as you could have some reoccurring revenue. Didn't, I mean, it could be 20% of your spend or whatever. You could go get a series B, c, d, you know, just continually, once a year, once every two or three years, go back to the well and get more investment. Yeah. Recapitalize. Yep. And we're not, you know, investors are getting wise to that. Oh, if you're on series D or E, that means you have, haven't figured out how to make money outta this thing. Why do I wanna, why do I wanna continue throwing, throwing money after this? So, Because that's how Amazon

Jeff Davis: 19:24

started, right? So Amazon started, they didn't make money for a very long time. Well,

Barrett Cousins: 19:30

the difference is they were, they were cashflow positive, but Jeff Bezos was writing those checks back in. He was investing back in the business. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So it wasn't that the, I mean, these are companies that, you know, they spend an example I'm thinking of they spend 500,000 a month. They make 2 million a year. There's, you know, so they're, they're way on the, yeah, exactly. So it's not like they're making, you know, six or 7 million a year and they, you know, they can reinvest that to where they're just like Amazon, when they were doing that, their EBITDA was close to zero because he was reinvesting that back in. Okay. Which from his perspective, cool. He can write himself a paycheck. The business is making money. It's how do I choose to invest that? And there's a lot of strategies on how, you know, yeah. There's all

Jeff Davis: 20:16

algorithms,

Barrett Cousins: 20:17

right? Yeah. And, and back then, and there's, there's just good business, good business sense. You pick your r o I pick your battles and, and go down that road. So there's, there are companies that would love to do that, but they're not. Their business model hadn't taken off for whatever reason. So they're having to continually go back to the recapitalization side. And so those guys are really, really hard hit. And so it's been just interesting watching that and how that risk aversion by the people with capitalist trickle down to to, to some of the other folks. And so, yeah.

Jeff Davis: 20:49

You know, I met, I've met a couple of guys who. Are you know, catastrophes of that, you know, they, they were working for some, I don't know, auto trader that was, you know, had this new platform and blah, blah, blah. And then turns out they were heavily funded by venture capital that was in SS v B and. Now they're done. So I mean, it, it does trickle. Right. And that might've been a dude in Austin that I have met, and then another guy. And so yeah, man, it's, it is trickling through and I wonder how much longer that's gonna last. Well, it just,

Barrett Cousins: 21:26

it's gonna make everybody really up their game. So if that means if you go and you get capital, that means you've done the business plan, you've done the business planning, you've done the marketing, you've done the research, that you're solving a valuable problem, and you've got a viable path to go actually solve that. One of the, the interesting things is there's. We talk about interesting paths and twists and turns. Looking for my next, my next adventure. I'm really not limiting myself to oil and gas. That's mm-hmm. That's been home for the last 20 years, so I'm comfortable with that. I have a lot of great relationships. Maybe that's where I, where, where I will end up. But I've been dabbling on the medical side and so like Methodist opened up a new innovation center. In the Ion, which is a, an incubator place for, for startups and, and companies to office and kind of a, a community of, of entrepreneurial spirited folks. And so they opened up this innovation center looking for, Hey, we've got these problems in medicine to solve. And we realized we're doctors, we're not, you know, We don't build cool cameras, we don't build cool software, we don't build cool hospital beds, we don't build all these different things. We, we need solutions. So working, kind of exposing themselves to industry, saying, Hey, here's our bigger problems that we need to solve and we wanna partner with you to do that. So, and it's interesting forcing that community to say, Hey, I've got a great idea. Cool. And it can help solve a, a problem with Methodist, for example, that could help somebody have a better experience in a hospital, get better care ended up leading a healthier life. And that's cool. But again, we go back to that rigor. Just because they got a cool idea doesn't mean it's a product, doesn't have all the marketing around it. Does it have the tooling around? It doesn't have the security around it to secure you. We don't want our, our health data and our social security numbers and all that floating around on the internet or whatever. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm glad they're taking that. It just, so, it just means that, you know, like everything else, it's helping us as a community up our game to make sure we're, we're solving the right problems and we've got a, a we're solving them with, with viable methods. Wow.

Jeff Davis: 23:36

Yeah. I like it. I I love the talk about capital.'cause that's, that's where a lot of my time is spent. Right. Is, and I mean it, it is a huge factor in, it's, what many people don't realize is it's a huge factor in what is turning the economy with what, it really starts with the interest rates. And even, I didn't realize this right?'cause you talk real estate, you talk business. I had no

Barrett Cousins: 24:03

idea how much.

Jeff Davis: 24:06

The federal funds rate would affect the economy. And he cranked, he cranked that thing up. So many points that it was just impossible to lend, right? That why are they gonna lend if you had floating rate debt on real estate or on a business loan? Many commercial loans. They're on Prime Plus look at credit card right now. That's really affecting a lot of people. It is just interesting when, when you look at it from a macro standpoint, capital is what drives the economy. And so I'm curious what happens in the next 18 to 24 months because I don't think it has trickled all the way down.

Barrett Cousins: 24:52

Not yet, but it, we go back to some of the oil and gas folks that are, that are, that are feeling that pinch. You know, a company may have had, Hey, look, we've we're servicing a a, a a note and I've got some capital on, on the side that I can fund a project, I can fund an innovation project, I can fund an efficiency project. Well, all of a sudden, if that interest rate goes up and they have to pay an extra a hundred thousand dollars a month on that debts, on that debt service that goes, that pulls the pro, that pulls the project budget for a lot of these innovative things or efficiency things. And so and people say, Hey, I, I can, I can go get a little extra. There's not a little extra to go get because they're having to use that little bit of extra for servicing those debts because of the interest rate stuff. And so we'll see how that, as that, as that comes down. We'll, it'll be interesting to see how businesses reallocate that capital. Yeah. And

Jeff Davis: 25:48

that's, that's, You said it a lot better than I did, so that's exactly what I was trying to convey. Right. Is like it, there's loans out there on businesses, on properties, on land that, that the owners are having difficulty servicing. Yep. You know, and so that's going to come due and some difficult conversations are happening as we speak

Barrett Cousins: 26:17

that, that it is. Working with a medical provider here in the Houston area and she's looking at, you know, the next phase of her business, you know, is one of those having not necessarily for, for, well it's for economic reasons, not necessarily for super profit, but for controlling your environment and being able to manage expenses and control her experience. She's looking at, you know, either buying or building her own building. So what, you know, what is, you know, building your own doctor's office and then you build your own or, and the, the, all the finances through that. And then in this day and age with the high interest rates, and it's interesting, the, the real estate thing has come available. Both that. Buildings you can take over or lots that historically have been very expensive watching those come down a little bit. So it's fascinating to watch how that plays out. Yeah. And because the other really big industry in Houston is on the medical side, huge. So it's been interesting, you know, and having that conversation with others of, you know, there, there are, are our powers and numbers, so, hey look, one is good. Why don't we try to recruit three or four others and go into that And, you know, that could be a force that, you know, reduces your risk. That also kind of, It messes a little bit with your, your ability to have control and manage some of that consistency make, so you gotta make sure you ring in the right partners. But it's just, it's interesting how many people kind of, I don't wanna say come out of the woodwork, but it's like, wow, that many people's heads popped up when you said, do you wanna invest in an or? Do you wanna invest in a, in a build, you know, in a medical facility and think things of that nature. So it's been interesting to watch how those, how that community wants to deploy their capital and And how they wanna tackle that, you know, solving that particular set of problems. Yeah. Speaking my language now, buddy. So, fun stuff. You got me interested.

Jeff Davis: 28:14

So look, we got a little dark there and depressing, so I wanna kind of turn it around. I like to finish these little podcasts with a little off the wall question. Okay. That you have no idea what's coming.

Barrett Cousins: 28:31

So

Jeff Davis: 28:32

in your humble opinion, I'm assuming your humble opinion. Yes. Where is the most interesting place on earth?

Barrett Cousins: 28:40

Ooh, I know. Wow, that's the most interesting place on earth. I, wow. So you'll get a little bit of stream of conscious because there's a couple of things. I recently have have gotten this fascination with the desert. It just, it's interesting. It seems dead, but there's so much. No, this was a year and a half ago. I got the, the opportunity to go drive around Death Valley and you think desert, whatever, and Oh, okay. It's like that landscape would change in five miles. You think Desert's desert and I learned very, very quickly. Not all desert is all desert. Oh, okay. You have, you have the sandy dunes look like they should in Saudi. Shrub, you know, shrub grass like we see in West Texas. Just so I've become fascinated with the desert. So for me, one of the more interesting places is Death Valley. Another interesting place,'cause it's just kind of a polar opposite, literally, is the glaciers in Alaska. Just fascinating places, such harsh environments for such different reasons. Yeah. And so those, they're opposites. Yeah, exactly. It was. But you think humans have What? The other interesting, fascinating thing for me is humans have survived in both of those places, you had people that survived in Alaska when it was negative 80 or negative 90 degrees. They buried underground. They did what they had to do. They used all the, the resources around them and they survive. Yeah. And you have people, you know native Americans that survive in 20 heat. So temperatures. You know what you would think. Completely different environments, but some similar techniques. Yeah. But I think if you said absolutely the most interesting place on the planet, I would say the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. I

Jeff Davis: 30:28

love deep ocean. I documentaries, dude. I love it. I,

Barrett Cousins: 30:33

I'm a space guy. Like I wanted to be an astronaut. I know how to, I had the, the. The shuttle space manual, so I could go through the checklist on how to launch the shuttle. That was my jam. However, there's so much that we don't know on this, on this rock, and just the, the life forms and the, the interesting things that we can learn from that. I think the most interesting place is the bottom of the ocean right now.

Jeff Davis: 30:58

Yeah. I mean, I feel like we continually are finding new species. Mm-hmm. The deeper they go with

Barrett Cousins: 31:06

these vessels. Yep. There's new, new, new algae. There's new life forms, there's new fish, new new fish, new things. The, the earth is doing interesting things down there and, and so I just think there's so much that we dunno that's covered up by miles and miles of water. To me. That's pretty fascinating. Yeah, it

Jeff Davis: 31:26

it, it's crazy looking. Yeah. I just was watching something. I saw some kind of clip probably on a YouTube short, and Sam Kenon, the old comedian, he has this like, hilarious bit about about the desert. And like the people who live out there, like ending starvation. So I'll let you Google that.

Barrett Cousins: 31:47

I will Google that. That's interesting. Yeah. It, again, there's, there's a lot of fascinating places here on the planet. I've been fortunate to visit some of them, not all of them. Yeah. The, the bottom of the ocean. I don't need to crawl in the submarine. You can send the D S R V with the cool cameras and stuff like that and we can go check it out. Yeah, you'll pause there. I'm an adventurous person, but you know, if I could, if I could borrow one of the big boats from the Navy that, you know, with, you know, with a nuclear generator and all these thick walls. Yeah. We can go to the bottom of the ocean of that. Yeah.

Jeff Davis: 32:17

Yeah. You're not gonna go in a private vessel.

Barrett Cousins: 32:20

No, not me. Nope. Not me. Not me. Well,

Jeff Davis: 32:23

Barrett, I appreciate it. How can people get in touch with you,

Barrett Cousins: 32:27

Barrett dot cousins@gmail.com? Sounds You can, you can dig me up on LinkedIn. So I'm, I'm here to, I like to solve difficult problems with technology. That could be an oil and gas problem, that could be in medicine, that could be in logistics, that could be in security. There's a, there's a whole host of problems out there and the technology changes and evolves a solution that I would've. Recommended or, or we would've dug up and built for somebody five years ago. Is is a bit different today. Yeah. So I'm not, I'm not married to the specific technology, so let's go, let's go solve your interesting business problem. Yeah.

Jeff Davis: 33:05

I'll have your information in the show notes and everybody can just click and email and anybody with a, with a business problem. Reach out to, to Barrett. He's got a, a ton of experience And we are sponsored by Bridgestone Capital. So check out if you are interested in commercial real estate of any types, new land development or multifamily, Go check out Chain Investor Pro. We are always looking for partners and partnerships and increasing dividends, increasing our portfolios together. Barrett, it's been fun talking with you, man. Absolutely. Yeah, thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks everybody for joining another episode of Chain Reaction and as always, please like and share. I.