We want here it is Wednesday afternoon already. Where did the week go? But we're over the hump on Wednesday. Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm Mitch Ewan, your host. This program is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum who has been in existence for 17 years and we help support implementing smart energy policy in Hawaii. Our funding also comes from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute of which I'm a part of as my day job. So we thank our host and our sponsors for making this possible. So I'm very pleased to introduce you to Matt Moran who comes to us all the way through this magical interface from Ohio. I almost said Oahu but kind of similar. Matt is the CEO of a company called Moran Innovations and the title of our show today is Hydrogen Endgame, the infinity fuel for a sustainable future. And like me Matt is a hydrogen nut and we want to talk to him all about hydrogen and his ideas on where hydrogen is placed in our energy system. So Matt welcome and aloha. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah so the first thing I like to do is just to introduce you to the audience and have you do the speaking rather than me. Just give a thumbnail sketch of your background and your interest in hydrogen. Sure. So I've worked in power propulsion since 1982. Most of that work has been at NASA and for the Department of Defense and most of those systems have been hydrogen based. So a lot of background in hydrogen particularly liquid hydrogen as well as other fuels and oxidizers. Okay so tell us a little bit more about Moran Innovations. I mean you recently recently two years ago left NASA retired and this is your second career. So tell us what is Moran Innovations and what do you do? What are your products and or services? Sure. So as you mentioned I retired from NASA in early 2016. I started Moran Innovation by leveraging my background in hydrogen and looking at some of the global needs and important global challenges that we had and looked at hydrogen systems for energy, for food, for water and built a business model around that and I know we're going to talk about that in a little bit. So that's where the Genesis of Moran Innovation came from and a little over three years doing it. Okay so just give us a quick thumbnail about liquid hydrogen and why we should be looking at it. I mean we'll get into some more details as we go through your slide deck but just a top level 60,000 foot view of liquid hydrogen. Sure. So liquid hydrogen is actually pretty commonly used at NASA for rockets and other systems. That's what most of my background has been in. The benefit for using liquid hydrogen is that it has more than double the density of a high pressure hydrogen gas storage with the state of the art high pressure systems and composite over overwrap pressure vessels. So you can get a lot more hydrogen in the half the volume basically as you can with state of the art compressed systems. The drawback is that hydrogen in its liquid form near ambient pressure has to be stored at minus 420 degrees Fahrenheit. So you've got to understand the engineering challenges associated with that and design the systems properly to handle that old temperature to minimize the amount of heat transfer that comes in from the environment and then provide the refrigeration required to keep it at that temperature. So those are the main challenges but they've all been done in the space and defense industries so it's really a matter of applying them now to energy industry to see what benefits can come from it. So people in our audience may be wondering well why are we talking about liquid hydrogen? I mean that's kind of space stuff and we're not doing any space rockets right now out of Hawaii. So let me just give a little bit of context from my point of view. I mean I'm the hydrogen systems program manager at H&EI. One of the first projects I had when I joined H&EI was to look at the capacity, the potential capacity for hydrogen production in Hawaii and one of the things that seemed obvious was that Oahu will have a very difficult time of becoming self-sufficient energy. We just don't have the land mass. We have a huge population compared to the other islands whereas for example the big island is big. It's really big. It's got a lot of renewable energy including a geothermal which is one of my favorites and so the whole idea is how can we deliver or capture energy on one of our neighbor islands and then deliver it to Oahu and certainly one of the alternatives or candidates is liquid hydrogen because just as you said it's a very great, a very good energy carrier. In fact that's what hydrogen is. I mean we shouldn't view it as anything other than an energy storage medium and then being able to liquefy it on the big island from whatever source whether it's wind turbines or geothermal plants or PV plants and then liquefy it and put it on a barge or other things and deliver it from the big island over here to Oahu makes a lot of sense and I think it's not going to happen soon or tomorrow but I think it's an option we need to be looking at here in Hawaii so that we can optimize all our indigenous resources. So as we go through the slide deck I hope to you know we can identify what some of the issues are what the challenges are what really some of the solutions are that you've already developed that in my knowing you for the last month looks like you know we have some good potential solutions up there that are potentially economic and technically feasible so yeah so without more ado and I'll stop talking because we want to hear more about this from Matt and me I just wanted to set the scene is let's let's go to your slide deck and and look at I just want to say that the you know what we're talking about here is hydrogen is the end game the infinity fuel for a sustainable future so Matt just tell us about this slide and all the various applications that we can look forward to with hydrogen. Sure so if you start at the top and by the way all these touch on systems that I worked on in my background but aircraft for example Matt has just announced that they're going to be doing some research and development for cryogenic hydrogen on a hybrid electric aircraft so that's reaching back actually for some legacy systems. Hydrogen was on a fueled aircraft back in the late 50s for testing and as was one of the explained tests as well with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen both.  Okay. So here on Hawaii we've already looked at an inner island aircraft I believe it's one of the one of the startup companies here is an electric airplane because you know we're not flying across to the mainland here it's just inner island so they're already looking at electric aircraft and so you know batteries are heavy whereas hydrogen is light so you'd probably want to like transition that to a hydrogen fueled aircraft and while you're at it why not use liquid hydrogen so you get more mass for you know the volume so anyway that's right carry on next next point. So you have to get through that slide backup I'll just point out two other ones the next system over comes when counterclockwise a lot of lunar systems I've been involved with in terms of development of landers and and eventually basis that would be based on the moon or potentially mars in the future all of those require hydrogen for propulsion and also for microgrid kinds of operations on those surfaces space station and space shuttle going over to the corner and down to the left space station had fuel cells on board I'm sorry the space cell had fuel cells on board and also use the hydrogen as the propulsion system for the main engines the big orange tank that most people are familiar with was mostly full of liquid hydrogen and I put systems on both the space shuttle and the space station over the years sensor systems and experiments if you go down to the bottom left the grid the energy grid I started my career at a power plant that was a coal fired power plant as a matter of fact so I'm going full circle in a sense only this time with a carbonless fuel and then I did some work for the Navy and the Navy has looked at hydrogen for a number of applications as you know Mitch we sound like we've worked on these a decade apart or so underwater unmanned vehicles that are hydrogen and not liquid hydrogen I'm sorry fuel cell and liquid hydrogen fuel that set up batteries hydrogen cars of course they're on the road already that's the next slide over and I think they're beginning to get some traction now you know when you look at the subsystems involved in battery vehicles a lot of the subsystems are the same they're electric motors so it's electric system you're really just changing out the power plant from a battery to a fuel cell and I like to make the point a plug that we now have hydrogen vehicles here in Hawaii and you can rent one or lease one from surfco from our Toyota dealership the Marai and they have them there and they have a hydrogen station and actually they throw in the fuel for the first three years it's a heck of a deal so yeah so new citizens out there you know the general public should certainly go down to Toyota dealership in Mapuna Puna and check that out so that's that's my plug I think those are the key things on that slide systems engineering I think maybe was the last piece and that's that's a big big part of how we approach the problem right in our company and that's where most of my background is in this is the purchasing things from the systems perspective and then finding the best solution for the overall system performance right and that's important when you're trying to develop the economic and the and the you know the the financial models to show that hey this is affordable or it's it's close to being affordable as we go forward and and you have you have to model these systems to you know get the most optimize all the systems to get the most cost effective solution so that's that's a good thing to do and we'll get a little bit more of that I call it your son of Homer system so it's pretty pretty interesting so let's have the next slide please just just as a quick bit of context if you look at the energy consumption globally it's rising to the left of the dotted line on both the charts on the left is history and on the right is the projections everything's growing but you can see the fossil fuels are still in the top what one two three categories and they're going to remain there although renewables are coming on strong they still represent a minority of the production of energy globally if you go down to the bottom left you can see that the the areas that are actually going to have the biggest growth or are the are the areas that are economically growing fast Asia mostly and to a lesser extent the Middle East and and parts of Africa so we have to look at this and from the global context getting back to that systems approach to things because you know energy demand is growing and right now we're we're doing a lot of fossil fuel burning which of course is adding to the greenhouse gas issue as well as the other ecosystems out here right okay next slide please so this is a very complicated slide that is always always confused me but Matt knows what this what the story is behind this slide he's going to tell us so over to you Matt yeah so if you if you drill down to the U.S. and just look at the U.S. I won't go through all the details of this slide it's a fascinating slide it's put out the annual lead by Lawrence Littlemore National Lab which is one of the Department of Energy Laboratories in the U.S. on the left hand side is all the energy sources that are used in the U.S. and then the magnitude of those lines going across is the quantity of that energy source that is used in various applications so you've got electric generation at the top and then residential commercial industrial transportation in the pink boxes to the right but what's interesting to point out is again if you look now at the U.S. over eight percent of the energy sources are fossil fuels electric I'm sorry hydroelectric wind solar and geothermal make up a little over six percent which is a vast improvement over over the years but still a small minority of the power sources that we have domestically and then the other takeaway I think from this chart just from a big picture view is that we waste more than two-thirds of the energy that we create because of inefficiency so any improvement in efficiency of our systems for energy use is it's like adding potential power generation capacity virtually because you're you're improving the efficiency of the system so it's both ends of the equation you know more renewable resources so we can decarbonize and then also better efficiency so we're we're using our energy more wisely so what what form does the rejected energy take I mean I think it's heat correct yes that's correct almost all efficiency comes out it's waste heat so we're dumping that heat somewhere usually into the environment yeah so in Hawaii we have a lot of oil powered generation electrical generation here so you put it in this big boiler and like 75 percent or so of that energy content of that fuel goes straight out the chimney I mean you can try to recover a little bit through you know various processes for heat recovery but it's a significant loss of energy and you look at the fact that we're paying for that energy that's being just thrown out into the atmosphere we're not getting any value out of it so that's a waste so absolutely correct yeah and as you know fuel cells have a much higher efficiency than just about all you know heat driven type of power cycle so that's another advantage you're going to a hydrogen-based system because you can bribe your generation and your fuel cells with higher efficiencies okay well we're coming up to our first break now Matt so just hang in there for a minute while we give a few plugs to other organizations and we'll be right back thank you great Aloha I'm Stan Osterman a host here on Think Tech Hawaii a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii we provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness here on the island we are a Hawaiian non-profit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going we'd be grateful if you go to thinktechawaii.com and make a donation to support us now mahalo hello my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of security matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios I'll bring you guests I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe your co-workers safe your family safe to keep our community safe we want to teach you about those things in our industry that you know may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because security matters Aloha okay here we are in Hawaii the state of clean energy we're back from our break and we're live with Matt Moran all the way from Ohio through the magic of our modern-day technology so Matt we're going to have a look at so the rest of your slides we'll zoom through those because we've already burned through you know half of our show it goes by fast I told you the next slide please Robert there you go this is just a quick slide showing you know the effects of all that fossil fuel burning one of the effects this is just scratching the surface I mentioned to the viewers who are interested that the lower right hand corner is the source of that it's put out annually by our federal government and it has the brightest minds in scientists in the US government looking at this every year and updating it and it talks about rising sea levels more violent storms droughts worse droughts in some areas heavier water and flooding and others and all these effects that are coming from our increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and on the left hand side just around the middle you'll see those little black dots that's Hawaii and of course we're already feeling the effects of sea level rise and these storms our beaches are eroding and we just we can't wait around we've got to get off the dime and we've got to do something about it and frankly hydrogen is one of those solutions because it is a clean energy source and it is much more efficient than the fossil fuel system so next slide please so tell us about your approach Matt yeah so our approach you know with that context what we dug our heels in about three a little over three and a half years ago that's to get a look for a solution for this was a hydrogen based system and it's an architecture which implies that you can change various parts of this to optimize the system and tailor it to whatever you want to use it for so you've got inputs on the far left energy sources preferably renewable which doesn't have carbon a water source you can also use biomass anything that has hydrogen locked in it again there's processes out there to read get that hydrogen released and then it can be produced in the middle there and stored various methods of storing we talked a little bit about liquid hydrogen it can also be stored as compressed gas or or is absorbed into various metal hydrides is another method of storing hydrogen depends on the application what's the best approach and then you use that the time shifting is what's important here when you store that hydrogen uh then you have it available when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing to uh to drive into a fuel cell for power generation if that's your interest i just i just want to make the point we should we shouldn't look at hydrogen as this you know gas or this liquid we should we need to look at it as through a different set of eyeballs is like it is energy that we're storing so we see hydrogen storage it's really energy stored and that's really really important so when our wind turbines are turning and generating electricity in the middle of the night but nobody can use it what do we do just do we just throw it away or do we want to save that energy and one of the greatest ways of saving that energy is uh is using hydrogen because it's got such a high energy capacity so that's the plug i want to make on on that part of your slide and then why don't you carry on after i interrupt you that's a very good point it's you're right it's an energy storage method so going back to that slide then if you take a look there's also a beneficial byproduct to come out of it depending on how you produce that hydrogen oxygen other things you can also burn hydrogen it's been demonstrated just about every kind of internal combustion engine as well as there's turbines out there now that are running on hydrogen so if you want to have a turbine for either a jet engine let's say or for electricity generation that's also possibility one of the unique characteristics with hydrogen is you get potable water to say is a primary byproduct so that can be used depending on what the application is as well for drinking water agriculture irrigation for example and then you've got heat recovery we were talking about those inefficiencies waste heat well if you recover that heat it's a longer wasted if you use it for let's say a combined heat power application or if you use it to drive a refrigeration cycle or some other heat driven cycle you can begin to improve that overall system efficiency which is another one of the key challenges with hydrogen system that's bringing up that system efficiency to to make it more competitive with battery energy storage right so one of my friends is an astronaut he did uh i think he did uh seven space missions i think he's tied for the most the number of shuttle missions and he was telling me he says they generated so much water on their uh on their missions from their fuel cells that they didn't know what to do with it i mean they i mean they couldn't dump it obviously and they they slowly but surely fill up all their available space with bags of water it was amazing so it generates a lot of water so to your point absolutely pure water as well so it can also be recycled through an electrolyzer and you know if you had a closed loop system you could actually regenerate your your hydrogen and there's lots of systems out there that are doing that now so let's jump to the next slide please yeah so i won't get into the details here but what we did was we developed a software program that basically uh codifies that the architecture so that a user can pick what pieces they want to have in the input the storage the generation and the outputs of the system and once those are chosen and you can see some of the choices up there on the screen you've got a tailored customized system for that particular application in the last dialog box at the lower right is so if you want to create a system model and the uh the software then creates a system model which is on the next slide of whatever parameters you chose in that architecture so essentially you can look at and this is a good way to look at it so you can look at this to size the various components in your system like you know if i have this much wind or i have this much solar you know how much hydrogen can i produce or how much can i store you know what size of fuel cell do i need and the bottom line is you know what's what's my output here so why don't you walk or walk us through this slide yes that's that's exactly right mention um yeah so the left hand side shows you the system model and it shows all the energy and fluid flows so as you mentioned it allows you to start to size the system to design it to optimize it and to simulate it so you can basically do all of those up front things virtually before you start to cut hardware and and put the system together and you've got a good sense of how the system's going to operate and how to optimize it for your application so on the far right side is it's kind of the dashboard piece of this system model you can change the the loads that you want to simulate where the power is coming from how much and then it's got a few graphic snapshots of you know your distribution of power sources in your loads and how much you're storing in terms of excess energy that you can use to create hydrogen and store this energy and then what's your waste feed and fluid flows are so you've got everything kind of there on one screen that to take a look at and you can walk through hours in a day or or days in a year or whatever combination you wish and start to really optimize the system for for the for whatever your application is right so it's a really really effective and useful tool for system design so let's uh oh sorry go ahead no that's right I was just going to say where we're we're beginning to apply it in some of the first case studies and now with some of the pilot demonstrations that we're beginning to get some traction on so I notice you put up the energy target markets if you look at those there's some very large markets that are we believe are prime for hydrogen introduction some of them most of them actually already have some hydrogen systems in place but there's a lot of room for both growth and improvement in the performance of the system so grid and stationary storage as you mentioned being able to store some of that renewable energy when it's produced and use it when that when it's needed when the renewable energy isn't high enough the grid to meet the demand you also have micro grid and off the grid situation again states like Hawaii and island nations this starts to become very interesting because you can start to consider you know isolated systems in a sense energy systems that are self-sustaining and secure and have a high resiliency and then the final one is transportation which actually see quite a bit of hydrogen uh introduction already as you mentioned you've got parts already on the road there in Hawaii that are driving with fuel cells in high so and soon these are right right opportunities and soon buses I have my uh three hydrogen buses we're like almost there it's so close I can taste it I want to ride yeah me too so next slide please so now you can brag a little bit about your background here Matt I thought I'd show this because it gives a sense of what's possible in terms of scale with these systems this is the liquid hydrogen tank uh do order that was used to for all the shuttle launches so what's a doer what's a doer so so a doer is a double-walled tank that has insulation between the two walls and it's also back ejected so it's a vacuum inside it's like a giant thermo I was just gonna I was just gonna interrupt you and say yeah like a big thermos bottle yeah exactly sorry but with additional insulation to improve its performance so I was part of the design team Kennedy Space Center wanted to build a one of these that was 50 percent larger for the new rockets that are coming online the space launch system so I was on the design team and my responsibility was to design the system that would keep this giant ball essentially a 10 stories high through the right temperature refrigerated and prevent any losses from boil off and also reliquify vapor that was coming in hydrogen vapor from various processes so we did that it was completed at the end of 2017 and it's in the process of being trusted right now so a very large deal 1.25 million gallons of liquid act so could you design one for us for the big island and so we can collect all that hydrogen then we can offload it here to a lot of love to awesome we'll bring you out so we have we can kill those parts so so and we can chill our beard down with it minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit so last slide we just talked about the vision let's talk about the vision yeah I thought this was a good slide to put at the end so this was the vision that we put together three a little over three years ago for the company and and all of this is attainable with hydrogen and we're beginning to put projects in place demonstrations in place to do justice it's to provide secure reliable energy generate water for drinking and agriculture recycle a lot of our our bio waste and biomass materials and do it all in an environmentally sustainable way and in fact you admit you brought this up when you deal with agriculture you actually have a carbon net I'm sorry carbon net negative system because you're pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and you're producing no carbon emissions at all so and we can do this anywhere on the globe 24 hours a day seven days a week right an energy food and water with a hydrogen system so that's that's our vision and that's what we aim to prove excellent well Matt believe it or not we're at the end of the show so thank you so much for participating in this and sharing your insight and I'd like to have you back and we'll bring you back you know every now and then to update everybody on the latest with Moran innovations and what you're doing is good good stuff so thank you so much and thank you so thank you everybody that wraps up our show and we'll see you again next Wednesday at Hawaii the state of clean energy


Hey guys today. I'm gonna do a boomerant from this couch. I hope you guys don't mind I've had a heck of a day already today. I've put in a full day's work today on a Sunday of all days But you know, I've been trying to improve the audio quality of the office I'm in the office today and you know I've made four or five videos from this office and with each and every video the audio quality does seem to improve But there's still a little bit of echo still a little bit of reverb in this room But you know, I keep adding acoustic panels I've hung some curtains and I think the final piece of the puzzle and this occurred to me two or three days ago was what? This office really needed with some more fabric. It needed a piece of furniture. It needed a couch, right? So what I did this morning is I went and got a love seat. I loaded it up myself moved it myself Put it in this office Myself had to rearrange some of the furniture in the office and I've I'm wore out. I'm not going to lie I'm not going to the gym today because I was gonna do back day at the gym today. I don't have to do back day now I got that in but one of the things that I was thinking about doing is I was gonna do a backyard boomerant But instead since I got the couch here I just you know turned the camera around pointed it to this couch and we'll just do the backyard rant from here And what was on my mind was I haven't had a home computer for about two weeks now And it has really taught me some lessons because you know not having a computer at home I haven't been on the internet at all when I'm at home You know I come to this office to do some work for a few hours a day Then I go home and I don't have any internet, right? I don't have you guys know. I don't have a TV I don't watch TV. So I'm completely disconnected from the world I do have a phone and I know the phone is always connected But you guys know I don't actually use my phone as a computer, right? If I want to do something on a computer, I need a physical computer I don't do any kind of real work on a phone. The only thing I have a phone for is to make phone calls That's the only reason I have my phone Occasionally I send text messages other than that I don't like watch YouTube and Netflix and all of that kind of stuff on my phone I'm not connected to social media or anything like that on my phone. So it's really strange It's almost like going back to the 1990s If you guys were around in the mid 1990s the early days of the internet It was really cool because you were disconnected from the internet by default, right? If you wanted to connect to the internet you had to dial in we had dial-up modems back then which were Over your plain telephone lines, right? So what you had to do was when you dialed in to get internet You actually did it over your phone line meaning you didn't have a phone while you were on the internet So you couldn't receive phone calls on your landline at your house. Nobody had cell phones back then very few people did anyway But you know that was that was nice. It was the opt-in internet, right? You had to opt in to be connected to the internet if I wanted to be on the internet I had to choose when to connect because I didn't want to tie up my phone if I was expecting phone calls, right? So I planned it out. Hey these few minutes I'm gonna jump on the internet and do something You know, whatever it is I wanted to do back then and then when I was done I had to hang up the phone so you know, I could have my phone back at the house and I liked that. I like that approach. I like that opt-in approach because right now everybody is connected 24-7, right? You have a home computer and you have standard, you know cable internet or DSL You're connected 100% of the time. You're connected by default unless there's a problem with your service Same thing with your phone, right? Your phone is connected 24-7, 365 and why?  Do you think quality of life would improve without the internet and the last couple of weeks Have taught me yes, because you know when I'm sitting at home and I know I can't really do anything on my phone as far as computing I have bad connection at my house too because it's kind of in a dead zone So even if I wanted to do like mobile stuff on my phone It's not a great spot to do that kind of stuff in and also not having the computer So what I'm doing is I'm just sitting there Most of the time I'm sitting at the house and don't have a TV and what do you do you think right? You just get lost in your thoughts. You'd be surprised how refreshing that is how Re-invigorating it is sometimes just to sit in a quiet room and think or to pick up a book and read I can't remember the last time I read. I'm was an avid reader years ago But here lately it's gotten to the point where anytime I want to read something I get on the computer and I go read it at the computer You know if I go read wiki articles and things like that and now the other day You know I picked up a book a couple of nights ago for the first time in years and it was so refreshing You know a book I had read, you know like 10 15 years ago and re reread it and it was great It was one of the most enjoyable evenings.  And this was not the case when I was a kid Yeah, I said I was going out and playing a game or I was just going to play a game What I was doing is I was going outside I'm just gonna find a few friends and we were gonna start tossing the football around or we're gonna, you know make a Baseball diamond and you know play a baseball game or something or ride some bikes You know and the trails in the woods by the house Kids don't do that now because they're connected to the internet a hundred percent of the time They don't know what it's like to not have role-playing games and first-person shooters and all of this stuff You know available to them 24-7 they they don't know that world and it makes me sad because You know look like not being connected to the internet, you know just having nothing to do sometimes sitting at the house You know and you think I'm gonna go see some of my friends. I'm gonna go see some of my family You know you have more personal connections You probably it would improve relationships if people got off the internet think about the people that have gaming addictions Think about the people that have porn addictions, you know these people that can't go 15 minutes without viewing something like porn hub if they didn't have that Available to them so readily available to them think about how their life would improve how their personal relationships their romantic Relationships would improve if all of that stuff was was not there Anyway, I know this is a real boomerant because I know I'm gonna just be speaking to a brick wall because Especially the young crowd is gonna they're not gonna want to listen to this kind of message at all But I really think that the internet should be opt-in I think by default we should all be disconnected from the internet and only connect to it when we really really need it I also think I mean for security reasons I mean, how do you get your computers hacked? How do you get ransomware and malware and all of that stuff? Well, you get it over the internet, right? Well, do you think you would get that stuff as often if you weren't connected 24-7? Of course not, right? You would be much more secure if you were disconnected Anyway, ran over guys, and I'm gonna go back and hopefully check out the sound quality of this video I know the sound quality is gonna be drastically improved it can only Go up because of having this couch in here But I want to see how much improved it is and see if I need to keep adding stuff. Alright guys Peace


Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had the pleasure of speaking to one of my good friends, Tabie Hanbury. We were at uni together and had a lot of interesting business conversations over the years and it's been great to see him and hear him talk about his journey from setting up a business in his parents' front bedroom to getting warehouse space and building a proper sustainable business which is awesome. We talked about that journey, we talked about his industry which is automated retail and selling healthy products and we talked about the good old uni days so hope you enjoy it. Boom! And we're live. Boom's my new tagline. I keep saying it all the time so I'm going to make sure I'm consistent and say it on every podcast now. Tabie? Chill. Boom backwards is the mood. That is true. That is true. And you? I do. And yours are much bigger than they were a few years ago. So you've not been eating your healthy snacks there? Maybe I eat too many of my healthy snacks. That is true. We were just saying, or fair, that we started uni together 20 years ago this year. 1999? Yeah, crazy. We should go back to Magaluf and have a... Is that where we first met? Yeah, I think so. Yes, it was before 1999. No, it was summer 1999. Yeah, before we started university. Crazy.  Who even thought of podcasts 20 years ago? Who even thought we'd have our own businesses 20 years ago? It's like a radio show actually. Yeah, the cool thing is that with technology now, you can literally just plug in. It costs nothing and the world can hear your thoughts and it's crazy. We started out using lapel mics. Right. But now, so we did the first few with lapel mics and then to upgrade and get better sound quality, we invested in this little mixer and these two cool mics with arms which you can swizzle and stuff. Brilliant. Which is great. It's a cool set up. Yeah, thanks. So when I was at a level, I realised that if you've got a pair of headphones and you plug them into the microphone jack of a radio, you spoke into one of the headphones, one of the earphones. It was a microphone. Really? Yeah. So I used to plug it into a little radio that I had. I used to broadcast my back garden and then I had my radio station. At uni in the first year, I really liked, well, I love hip hop and I wanted to be on the radio. So I don't know if you remember, but I managed to get the- Get your addition for the radio. Yeah. Right. I auditioned to go on the university, it was like hip hop hour was like, I think it was like 9pm until 11pm or something. And so the guy who was the DJ who was like third or fourth year, was like, yeah man, come in and stuff. And he was starting to grill me on all the hip hop music I knew, which I then realised I knew none. My audition lasted about five minutes and he was like, yeah, this might not be for you mate. He was like, go select your best tune and I was looking through the records and I just found like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. And he was like, do you know anything else? I was like, not really. That was when my radio career started and ended. I have never listened to hip hop so. Fair enough. So you are an entrepreneur and how did you start? Thanks. The Healthy Vending Company. How did it come about? If you recall, I bought into a Healthy Vending franchise. Was it straight after university or how? No, after uni I was with UJS for the year and I moved on. I was once again food retail, food service. And I worked for a sandwich company, do you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, oh sandwich. Oh yeah, yeah. And I ran two of the outlets, which was really good fun. I enjoyed it, but it was hard work. And I decided and then after that I left and went traffic with Emma. Yeah.  So that was a good plan. And I sat around for a while, not doing very much. And back someone said to me goes, you're going nowhere fast. Can't remember who it was, but it was, I was sitting around. It was for a sandwich, it was a good bit of an R. It was probably Adam. It might have been my dad. Anyway, so I went to a franchise exhibition because what I really wanted was a dominoes or a subway. Nice. That would have been good. And franchises in the family. Yeah, my dad was a franchisee of Coolquid printed. Cool. So I think it was the first franchise, Coolquid franchisee in the UK. It used to be Quick Coffee in the US. I mean franchises are a great thing, but we're really far behind the US on that sort of thing. But I joined a healthy vending franchise. It was on the pulse at the time. Jeremy Oliver was going into all the schools and talking about healthy this and unhealthy that. But they turned out to not be very good people. Why not? I won't get into detail. They weren't very good people. And their model wasn't working. There wasn't any balancing. Back then there wasn't much product. I see. But the franchise model itself, though, was a good way for you to start to get all the infrastructure and... Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I probably had a good education in how not to do things. Perfect. Wait, so this is a vending machine franchise. Yeah. Fine. Effectively, they would have been better with the licensing model. Fine. What's the difference? Is there much of that? Similar. Similar. Yeah, they are similar, but it's not something that would be a vast difference. Fine, fine. And so what point did you... How long did you do the franchise for? We... It was about three or four years before I really got going with a healthy vending company. Fine, okay. So it gave you a nice runway to... We weren't really doing much business with the franchise. So we, I was looking to pull away, pulling away for a while. You did it on your own, so... And then starting again and getting going took quite a while. But back then I was doing it from my parents' garage. Awesome. Running the business from our... So it's Steve Jobs. What was the playroom in my parents' house when we were kids? It was the cable stop. A stop room. Amazing. So yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She had some vending machines out. She had the product in your parents' house. And then you'd be filling, selling. I would be out in the morning, filling machines, back out, selling on the phone, just doing everything. But it was... There wasn't a lot of product. It was actually more difficult to find product than it was to do anything else. So why did you decide to do healthy rather than cake, chocolate and... As I said, because I'd started... Because of Jamie Oliver's staff and... Gone into a healthy vending franchise. And I had healthy vending machines out. Okay, fine, fine. So if I was going to put away from a franchise, I had to do healthy vending. So we called ourselves the Healthy Vending Company. Awesome. It wasn't taken. It wasn't taken. No one else was doing it. There's a few players in the market now. But as I say, you just couldn't get the product. There was a bit... Here is how we're going to fill these machines. And the difference now is that actually, we, day in, day out, new brands, new products, new innovation, exciting new things, different ways of producing snacks and drinks, using different ingredients. The most recent thing that's really quite fine is the Black Eyed Pea Puff Snacks Betts. Really? Is that made by the Black Eyed Peas? No, it's not made by the Black Eyed Peas. I don't think it's really made by the Black Eyed Peas. It's just a different example. What is it, a pink? They take a black... They take a black... You have to ask them how they make them. What is it, just like a... I'll ask them how they make them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on that, how do you select all these products? How do you find about them? Do they just send you... They tend to come to us. They send you samples, don't they? Yeah. Constantly receiving new products, new brands. And in essence, there's only finite space in the machines. Yeah, yeah. And there's only finite space in our ranges. And we could go to three or four hundred different products or skewns if we wanted to. So a big internal issue for us is how big should our product range be? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and how diverse. I want to have more and more product, but it's a big process to have. So how many roughly do you have in each machine, then? Was it varied from site to site? Depends on the size of the location, how big the machine is that can fit through the door. So I tend to refer to vending machines in numbers. So you get a three and a six, which would be three selections on a crisp shelf. Oh, OK, right, right. And doing inverted commas because you don't always have crisps. Five.  So it'd be three on a crisp shelf, six bars or snacks on a stack shelf, and then the same for cans or drinks or bottles. Nice, nice. So you get three and six, a four and an eight, a five and a 10. The biggest ones now are a six and a 12. Oh, OK.  Yeah, yeah, massive. Touch screen, LCD. Oh, wow. Baskets. Touch cards or cash. All of our machines have cash or something. So no cash anymore. We're going about 65 to 70 percent of ourselves go through cashless every month. Oh, nice. Yeah. Really cool. It's just the way it is. Yeah. And it's a how do you, what is a healthy snack? What is not a healthy snack? What is not a healthy snack? Crisps, chocolate. Are they unhealthy if I have one of them? Or is it everything in moderation? Well, it's a good point. Probably everything in moderation, but I think it's probably university recognized that a pack of wine gums isn't healthy. But they're so good. Well, they are great. But the thing is about a pack of sweets is that you're not eating them to be healthy. You're eating them to be bad. I saw a guy this morning walking out of Watford Junction Station drinking LucasAid and eating Haribo at 10 to 9 in the morning. What was the first thought that went through your mind? I wish I could eat. I wish I could just think to think of eating that for breakfast. But at what point does that pop into someone's mind that they're going to have fantastic Haribo and LucasAid for breakfast? Amazing. Maybe it was the end of his night. That's a good point. Fair point. Thursday night, Friday morning. So what is a healthy snack? There are certain things that we don't like to put in the machines specifically. So we've got a spartan or a sussle-fane, K-free for artificial sweeteners. In general, I don't know. But a lot of the functional product that we work with, so if it's a gin or a fitness or a leisure center, it's difficult to get away from sucralose, for instance. Okay. How come are they in the LucasAid? A lot of the, let's say, the functional products, the protein shakes, they can use a sweetener like sucralose. Everything's moving a bit more towards stevia. I can't stand any sweetener. Stevia, sucralose, I can just taste it quite susceptible to it. And then, I guess the biggest issue I have is you get the kids' products. So you get fruit juice. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone thinks fruit juice is amazing. But it's sweetened with a sussle-fane, K-free and a spartan, and artificial sweeteners. And why do children even need a sweetener? For sure. Be in a drink. Why can't they just have fruit juice and water? Yeah. Do you don't sell those? No. No. Artificial sweeteners. Do you sell stuff for kids? We've got great ranges for kids. In fact, actually what we're working on at the moment is something I've been trying to work on for a couple of months, but we've had bigger projects to go out. But our parent and toddler vending machine will be a go-to location or a go-to venue at Westfield. Oh, nice, congrats. We will be launching a parent and toddler-focused vending machine. Amazing. And this is in Westfield? It will be in Westfield, London. Yeah, yeah. And what does that mean? It means that it won't be much different to our other vending machines, but there'll be more product for toddlers and children within the machine. Awesome. So yeah, it's cool. That's really cool. And so you've spent a lot of time developing the range and stuff for the kids? And I don't need to spend time developing the range. I just have to say these are cool brands.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it might be if we can, like to get something like an app to mill or a calendar gate and there as well. So why shouldn't this stuff be in a vending machine? No, definitely. And is it branded parents and toddler? It will be a healthy vending company machine powered by Touch Automated Retail. Fine. Automated retail. Yeah. Is that your kind of umbrella term now for the business? Yeah. So we began with the healthy vending company. Yeah. And then one of my clients said to me, can you do some unhealthy vending machines? Because, you know, you're giving us a good service, but I've got to get those chocolate machines out, because no one's been to fill them. And so, I'm a businessman. So I wanted to carry on growing my vending business. Yeah, yeah. So we created the classic vending company brand, still using the same visual imagery of our logo with the tags. So we have the classic vending company, and it enables us to give the customer a choice. Great. So we don't dictate to people what they should and shouldn't do. No, no, absolutely. We just give them a choice. So the classic vending company started to place machines in the same areas as the healthy vending company. But it was really difficult to be pigeonholed as a healthy vending company, because then, whilst it's great for business, we also find that our clients, our business and industry clients, so law firms and accountancy firms and consultancy firms, they're buying their coffee machines from other companies. They don't realise what we do, if that makes sense, because they think we're the healthy vending company. So, but we're just doing it. All right, I see. Yeah, so it's just, it's the difficult, it was a bit schizophrenic in terms of our brand strategy. Fine. So you wanted to do a vending solution, and depending on what the customer wants, you stock them with healthy or whatever else they want. I went to a public health Milton Keynes event for small enterprises, a bit of a networking thing, but just to show people what healthy vending was. And the only inquiry or the only real bit of business that came out of it was, we were asked if we could put e-cigarettes into vending machines. Oh, wow. Yeah. My first, my response was, I don't know if that's ethical. Fair enough. Or legal or moral, because, you know, e-cigarettes contain nicotine that's addictive. Yeah, yeah. But what we found out was there's a real problem within the NHS for the mental health sector, for the acute mental health trusts, because all of the canvases, all the hospitals are going, smoke-free. It's a massive drive on smoking cessation within the NHS. Interesting. So you can't smoke in and around the hospital or outside or what you do if you're an acute mental health patient and you're not allowed out. So what you do, you can't smoke. And we've been discussing, talking to some trusts that are spending between £5,000 and £10,000 a month on e-cigarettes. Wow. Wait, so they buy them in for there? They have to buy them to give them to the patients. Wow. So what we've done is we've created a smoking cessation vending machine. So for us, it's not just stacking the machine full of e-cigs. It's where we can, where we're able to. It's sugar-free sweets, fiddle toys, stress balls. Amazing. We started with e-cigs and we're gradually bringing in these other items and working with the trusts that we work with. We now work with two NHS trusts, two NHS. Wow. So these vending machines are in a hospital and vending e-cigarettes plus stress relief. Yeah, so a couple of, one of the trusts have e-cigarettes and healthy products. Great. Healthy snacks and drinks. And the other trusts will have, they go live next week and they will just have e-cigarettes to start with and then we will bring in the smoking cessation and ciliary items as we record. But we can't do that until the healthy vending company under the classic vending company. So Touch AR, Touch Automated Retail, is our new umbrella brand. Great. But we also have our Vend IT model. Which is? Which is? When we were asked could you do SIM cards? Can you do calculators in the University Library? And the answer is yes, there's no reason why not. We just buy in a new SKU, goes on a different shelf, gets a different product code and the guys at the warehouse just pick and pack it as the machines require. Amazing. So now really the focus is automated retail and you don't really mind what products the customers you're placing the vending machines in wants to vend from it. Bye. Like as the shops on the High Street close, you open another vending machine. That would be nice because there's a lot of shops closing. But it's true. I mean I think they were like when they, I'm sure in China they were vending cars, weren't they? I think like you do your biometrics and then depending on your on your credit rating or the scoring that they give you, they'll like open the doors to your car and then you can test drive it. In the broadest sense, yeah, technically it is vending. Yeah. The Latin word for to sell is bendy, bendy. Right. Right, so any sale is a bend, right? Doesn't matter where you are. I don't, it's a bendy. I don't know. Yeah, definitely. I mean you've got like just low cost way of selling stuff. Like not always low cost though because sometimes you know the machines, the machines can be quite expensive. Yeah, but it's cheaper than a human. Yeah. And rent on Oxford Street. And you know, I mean if you wanted to like, if you wanted to sell the healthy products, healthy snacks on Oxford Street, it's much cheaper to stick a vending machine there than it's great. I think it's, you know, I think you're going to see more and more. Who do I speak to about the vending machine on Oxford Street? That'd be cool. Stick it out, you know, like also the tick offices are closing or they will probably close in all the main stations. So like what's going on in there? It's space. It's space, yeah, where you can stick a computer with any machine and products that people want, which is great. I think you're going to see this more and more as time gets on. People have, the way I see it is, yeah, we're a vending company, right? Yes, we do business and industry led vending solutions. We do snacks and drinks. We do coffee machines, water coolers, hot taps, all the things you'd want in your office space. But the conversation more and more is how we can give people solutions to their problems. And I've always said, I said to clients all the time, we're solutions driven. If you've got a problem with anything, let's get to a solution. Every business should be. Yeah, I see. Right. We are the more people we speak to. There's always an issue with retail, the business. We're talking to a couple of universities at the moment where they're catering outlets are really struggling. They're catering. Catering outlets are struggling in certain areas of the university. They have to have fresh food. They have to have some hot food, but they can't afford the staff. Do they want to spend money on redoing the kitchen? The kitchen is breaking. So, and this is similar to what we did on the Jamie Oliver show. What did you do? It's called Friday on Feast, right? Fine. What did you do on that? We created a vending machine. I didn't create the vending machine. We used an existing solution. And we created a machine for them that vended hot fresh food. And fresh food comes out of the machine and then the consumer can go and microwave it. Perfect. It's a very nice food. It was good. And so that is what made on the day by whoever... It was made by Jamie Oliver. Fine. So, in the show they did, he went in and they talked to the guys who only had chocolates and crisps at night because it's a cool centre. Right, right. And they want fresh food, but the fresh food stops being served at 2.30, 3 o'clock because the cafe or county closes. Yeah. They have a kitchen on site. It's the same with this university. Fine. That was two universities. Right. They have a kitchen. Yeah. Right. They're producing fresh food from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. There's no reason that they can't make that same fresh food, put it into an ice, buy the gradable compostable cardboard box, stick it up and stock it in the vending machine. Nice. The beauty of the machines, this is the cool bit, is that the chef makes the food and knows that it's going to take two minutes and 50 seconds to microwave that product. So if you program the machine, which has got a built-on microwave tower, to when someone buys selection 11, it operates the microwave for two minutes and 50 seconds.  And that microwave is timed for two minutes and 50 seconds. Amazing. That's fresh food, automated retail. And then they've got, is that like a fridge? The machine is refrigerated. Amazing. And they stock it daily. Wow. They don't need a third-party company to come in and give them. So they just, so you deliver the tech, the vending machine, and it's their responsibility to develop and make the products. It's all programmable and customizable. If they want to, if they want to make the food on site, box it up, pack it up, and put it in the machine, they can do that. Otherwise, there are plenty of quality providers of delivery, all over London who would jump at the chance. Yeah, there's quite a lot of like these fresh, farm-produced, or like what, farm-to-fork type food delivery things. That's really cool. And so you're going to roll that out with a couple of unis, and then if that goes well, the rest of them. It's just an indicator of the interesting consequences that are taking place and the way in which the market is moving. Yeah, now that it's great. It's not always snacks and cold drinks. It doesn't have to be snacks or cold drinks. No, no, no, no. So you can, yeah, you can vend anything. Interesting, because then you can start, yeah, serving the food 24 hours, increase sales. 24-7. Love that. Is that the biggest kind of trend you've, is that how like?  For the heated food, the food specific. I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be. The technology's there. And people are making fresh food everywhere, so why not? No, absolutely. Absolutely. We should stick one in here, it's true. Although I'd probably eat more, though, if it was readily available. But anyway, I might not. Discipline. What's been like the biggest challenge you found running your own business, growing it, reacting to all these different trends and business opportunities? Probably similar to the problems that you have running your business, I would suspect. Finance, people. Every service. Everything. Yeah.  That's true. That's true. There's good busy and bad busy. Yeah, that's true. However busy you are for good busy, you're always, always bad busy. I mean, we're dealing with having to change our vehicles because of the ultra low emissions zones and, you know, it's just managing all of the stuff that comes with running a distribution business. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, someone tried to break into one of the vans a couple of weeks ago, so you've got to get the van off the road, you've got to hire a van, deal with the insurance company. Then you've got to think, well, okay, then we've got to get the, if we get the door replaced, then we've got to get the, it's got to be a resign written. Yeah, it's all like peripheral nonsense that's stopped. True, true. It takes your focus off what you really want to be doing. You've got some good support around you, right? I've got a great team, I've got a really great team.  And actually, not many of our friends or our peers run their own businesses, which is quite interesting. There's only a handful of us. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the best things I, the best things that I ever did was start with joining a network group. And I extracted myself from being on my own most of the week. When you started, you mean? Yeah, going into a room full of 50 other people, 50 other businesses, using their services, using their skills, their knowledge, their services, where necessary, but also just like having a sounding board. No, true, because when you start a business, I was the same, you start on your own and you're like Janitor, the finance guy, the sales guy, the HR guy, like you're literally everything until you start to identify jobs that you can outsource to other people. And then you can start building a business. And then the great thing about the networking stuff and also just having friends that also have their own businesses. Should look like calling you or you're calling me and be like, hey, I had this issue or what do you think about this or an employee's done that or how should I do with this client? It's quite, it's really useful. So yeah, I think it's important to have people that you can share your experiences with. The most common thing I say to my friends or my peers who have their own businesses and they tell me they've had a problem you've had a problem, just make sure it doesn't happen again. You just learn from it. We're not learning. Absolutely. The contract doesn't say this, but okay, now you know, the contract should say this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also the mindset because nothing goes perfectly and it's all just a journey. And as long as you're evolving and getting better every day, it's great and you're moving forward and you have the right kind of, if you have the right mentality about these things, it becomes, it de-stresses a lot of the stuff that people get stressed about when they're running businesses. I know, so the key for me is that the client never sees what's going on in the background. As long as the client's getting the best service. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter what's going on in the background. No. Because every business, every business that you're interacting with there's something going on that you wouldn't want to know about. Well, it's just, you know, it's just the trials and tribulations of running a company. You know, whether it's like getting the product from A to B and something's happened in between or... Have you heard what I mean? McDonald's, the issues they're having on the menu. McDonald's? Yeah. No, you go. So they've introduced about, I don't know how many weeks ago, it must have been four, five, six, two weeks ago, this vegetarian wrap. Right. I've got these vegetarian tofu pieces all over the country. People are being served chicken wraps instead of a vegetarian tofu wrap. Yeah, because the pieces of tofu look like chicken, and they can't get there. They have... I mean, this is a business with, like, serious systems in place. Of everything they do. Have tofu wrap sales then gone off the roof? I know two people have had a chicken wrap or a vegetarian since I read it in the newspaper. And they've never become vegetarian again. Well, they're not best pleased about it. No, no, no, no. But yeah, it's a point. And also, this links back to what we were talking about when we first started, which, if you watch The Founder, which is an excellent film, have you seen it? No, I haven't watched it. Brilliant film. The success of the franchise is in the same thing happening each and every time. Turkey's solution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. Repeatable, reliable. Yeah. Good quality processes. Yeah. They do sell fried chicken now. Or dolls. They've always sold fried chicken, haven't they? Watch the film. Really? Five piece chicken silhouette. No, it's interesting. Do you have a mentor? Like someone to... Yeah, I have a couple of mentors. Have you always had a mentor? No. Yes, I have always had a mentor. My dad, he's a very good mentor. An excellent mentor, if you think. And because he went through 30, 40 years of businesses, lots of different businesses, but mainly retail businesses. And then I think my dad started with drug stores in South London. South London? He started with drug stores and then he went into Coolquip. And I have Tim, who you know. Yeah. Business coach. But then I would say being in my networking group, I have up to 15 contours. Yeah, yeah. I've got... There are loads of different people who I can sound off for different things and I do it all the time. It's so important. Yeah, because you could get quite lonely being like the entrepreneur or the founder of the business. And a lot of people don't like sharing their problems and experiences with others, you find. But being able to do that is it's really awesome. Well, I guess one of my mentors or one of my sounding boards was always Alan. Yeah. My good mate Alan Beth who joined that, who joined me in the business and is now in my business as well. Yeah, yeah. So we're really fortunate that one, we both know each other very well. Yeah. We both know each other's strengths and faults. Which means that we can have a really good row and then carry on for the rest of the day. We'll just go home and carry on the next day. Great. But the fact that we we used to mentor each other when Alan had his own business. Okay. A lot used to phone each other. Yeah, yeah. What's going on this is happening. Yeah, yeah. And actually we have differing opinions quite a lot which means that on most things that need to be done we end up meeting in the middle or we get to the correct solution quite quickly. Perfect. Yeah, that's perfect. And that's been a recent, like the last year or two. I think it's all, I think it's just over three years. It's three years of my talent. Wow. And so if you found it really helpful, obviously, because you were the only guy before, have you found it really useful to delegate some of these responsibilities to someone that you trust and you know well? Has that helped you to then focus on what's important? Yeah, absolutely. And I think at first it was quite difficult but then our business has changed so much. The processors and the systems in place and we've got some really, for what we are, we've got some really big name clients and when you draw up a list of them it's actually quite exciting. Yeah, it's great. It's really nice clients. But we've been able to do that by having systems in place. So one of the first things I did when I was filling machines on my own from my parents' garage and I had 13 bending machines or something and I was running around London and I was like, this is ridiculous. I had no idea what to put, what to take out to put in these machines or even if it's worth going out just because I just didn't know if the machine was empty or not. No, so we re-invested in telemetry which was a little box in the machine, connects to the motherboard of the machine, SIM card in the aerial on antenna and it would audit the machine a certain number of times a day and tell us what we needed for the machine if someone had switched the machine off.  Because the client doesn't make it off. All the client has switched it off or clean has switched it off. But with the telemetry tell you it's off? It's off. Yeah, we'd get a power down report. So I'd phone the site and say, could you switch the machine back on? Awesome.  And then really early on we'd said the same thing about cashless. So we put, I think it was about five years ago I say we, it was I at the time. I said, all right, I'm a cashless reader on every machine. So we are 100% cashless and have been for five years. Great. Did you find that cash was getting stolen or stuff like that? It's like risky to have cash in your machines overnight. Again, as soon as I employed somebody else to fill the machines, I invested in lockable cash. Was that risky? Yeah, yeah. So we put lockable cash bags on the machine. So once the bag comes off the machine, it locks. Would it destroy the bag to get to the money? Fine. But now you've got with the cards and all the telemetry. I mean, you can really target, I guess, what sells, what doesn't. All works well in different locations. It's like a plethora. You must have loads of data. Amazing. It's an asset. Yeah. Crazy. Awesome. That was really good chat. Thank you very much. I hope it continues to go well. And I look forward to vending machine in our office. That sounds good. I'll send you some prices. I thought we'd get a trial. Send the prices over. Send the prices over. And what are you going to do a switch on this? You're going to get someone to podcast with you or the other way around. Talk about your business. Have you done that? Well, I haven't done that yet. No, but we do the recruitment show. So we've done two so far. So maybe once a month we're going to be doing some advice or talk about recruitment-related topics soft skills, flexible working. Stuff like that. Key trends that are going on in work and in the workforce. Because it's all changing so quickly now. AI, robotics, automation. There's really, really interesting. So yeah, we're going to start doing that a bit more. And then maybe we might switch the mic up and see what happens. But yeah, no, we'll do that. Excellent. Thank you very much. Pleasure. See ya. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.


for your super chat ft said can you explain to mr auto pants that you can use facts about the world to get moral judgments is there's an is odd gap uh gotcha thanks for that adam kennedy i think auto pants is a person in the chat they were debating with adam kennedy thanks for your super chats that theas have you seriously looked at the arguments for the catholic church having the correct interpretations of the bible what is unconvincing to you yeah i've actually had debates with a good friend of mine trend horn who's a well-known catholic apologist but that's a little bit beyond the purview as to why i'm not a catholic gotcha and frustrated atheist thanks for your super chat said for matt playing devil's advocate if i'm holding to a deity without saying you have to believe can i be reasonable to hold that position it's interesting that we picked the word reasonable there i will answer your question briefly and the rest of it's tied up in in the closing remark that i'm gonna make um whether or not you are reasonable is determined by whether or not your belief and the justification for it are consistent with the facts of the world not just what's in your head and it doesn't matter whether you're trying to can whether you're trying to say i need to believe as well the only thing that matters is are you asking me if you're reasonable which you just did and so then i must use the criteria that i have to determine whether or not your reason gotcha and thanks for your super chat ronald bentonka said superhero cast and moderator appreciate that this has been a one of my favorites i've just honestly loved it shane pierce thanks for your super chat we have only two left including this one said ellie's camera recorded nine hours of footage during those two seconds in the movie contact interesting but it's still it didn't show anything as i recall there was just kind of a garbled but the fact that there were nine hours of it in that tiny space is the point that somebody is making yeah but uh yeah it's a good point but whether or not there is nine hours sort of under determines the issue that the vividness of her experience could have been something that could allow her to believe it even if others were not justified in doing so gotcha and jl warren thanks for your super chat said matt your lack of nicotine has made you powerful let the precision and snark flow through you appreciate that you've got another fan out there let's see i think that is it for today let me just oh we had one last one come in said thanks for your super chat j pp 3030 said good show thank you james and to all the speakers well thank you for hanging out with us gentlemen want to say thanks so much wait matt did you say you want to do a closing oh were we not we can do that i i just had a couple comments for like a minute or so i didn't know gotcha we do a final thoughts yeah go ahead i'll go first and that'll give everybody else time to do this and then they can say whatever they want that's fair and then i won't have the last word i have a friend who refuses to debate a version of this topic a he won't debate is belief in god rational that's not what this topic was today despite the fact that we heard that many many times talking about rational talking about reasonable the subject of this debate was is there sufficient reason to believe in god and that that presumes reasonableness and that we are going to be presented with specific reasons so can you be rational and believe in god sure does that mean that your belief in god is rational yeah maybe the reason my friend avoids debating this topic is because it is entirely possible for someone to argue that as long as the model is internally consistent it's rational and so then if you have somebody who knows nothing other than they've been told this and they've been told that and the and and this is true they might as well believe that too that that becomes rational this is what we've seen throughout this in the sense that randall was essentially advocating that the rational is based on what you already believe and i would argue that the reasonable is based on the best understanding it's about what we understand the bulk of humanity it's not like it's reasonable to believe that the earth is flat but it may be rational to believe that the earth is flat if you're saying i only have these three pieces of evidence and i haven't looked at anything else all of a sudden it's rational but it's never reasonable and you don't have good reasons to believe the earth is flat the defeaters for simon's belief until defeated are a people can be wrong in the in their description and understanding is of their experience in what they're attributing it to that method of direct experience and people reporting has no demonstrable no demonstrably reliable efficacy the experience leads to conflicting beliefs and the method has no reliability and demonstrated unreliability those are the defeaters for it it doesn't mean that it's false it means that as a method your method is garbage for reliably getting to the truth it is no better than a coin toss which is why i asked for someone to demonstrate that it would be if testimony can lead you here and there please demonstrate that it's more reliable than a coin toss otherwise your method is no reliable more reliable than a coin toss and that doesn't mean it's a path that should be used to truth are we going to flip a coin on whether or not i'm guilty of murder whether or not randall's guilty of murder i i make no bones about the fact that i'm a huge fan of humor and i will end with the two two two of the things from him one is to proportion your confidence to the evidence that the strength of your conviction for proposition should be proportional to the evidence in support of it and the second one the greatest thing that i whom ever taught any of us is to reject the greater miracle and the important thing here is if you're presented with two things hey i experienced a god or hey i experienced something that i am wrongly attributing to god reject the greater miracle and hume does not say except the lesser miracle because hume knew better than that but we should at least reject the greater miracle and between some people got it wrong about god or god is actually real and is confusing a bunch of people that's the greater miracle and so i will continue to consistently reject it and i will not accept the lesser miracle until it has sufficient evidence to warrant belief and currently it does not gotcha any final words from anyone else uh um yeah i'd like to say that i think it's perfectly possible for there to be evidence of a god or the supernatural all you need is testable predictions just like science if you can give some way to differentiate your imagination from reality like saying if supernatural being x exists and i pray to supernatural being a gold brick will appear in front of me every time and that occurs i'm happy to grant that as evidence of the supernatural all you need is testable predictions just like anything else in science or any other belief but i think that theism hasn't presented any so i don't think there's any reason to believe in theism any more so than any other belief that has no predictions gotcha and only if you want to say something then i'll go last sure so at the very beginning his comments matt said belief in dog is mundane belief in god is not mundane and that's a nice sort of capsule summary of what i'd want to say in response to matt so as i've argued actually for the vast majority of people on earth god is not extraordinary it is in that sense mundane and by the same token a dog could relative to a particular group be an extraordinary claim if a person or a community had no experience of four-legged animals they only knew about snakes and lizards uh then maybe to talk about something like a dog would sound pretty extraordinary and that gets us back to the topic of debate which was is there sufficient reason now matt i think the way that matt is interpreting this maybe is different than the way i'm interpreting it so sufficient reason can be both sufficient grounds such as a properly basic experience and also a discursive process of reasoning so i argued the first and sam argued the the second point now tom i accused him of scientism he pushed back on that but i think again in his final comments he kind of comes back to it so he says well what would you need to believe in god you'd need testable predictions just like anything else in science and i think right there what he's doing is imposing a particular epistemic standard as the requirement testable predictions for belief in god and that is something that comes from science i think that's an example of scientism and again uh the question would be what's his epistemic basis for accepting the principle itself as an absolute principle because how do you develop testable predictions the support principle uh my last word is to say i really enjoyed talking with you guys it got heated but in the best possible way and it was a lot of fun so thanks a lot for participating in this you betcha and yeah uh i i just want to close by saying that i'm really grateful to be able to uh you know team up at randall and discuss with tom someone who has discussed many many times and especially to to discuss with matt and i look forward to continue discussing with him hopefully uh somewhere closer to home matt yeah maybe even yeah sorry you say maybe even in malaysia i appreciate it thank you yeah so uh yeah hopefully that that turns out that i really enjoyed this let me say in closing that i i don't want this this closing statement to to be a rebuttal to anything that matt or tom have said but uh essentially when uh what uh when the topic of debate was sent out by email uh that is uh is there sufficient reasons to believe in god randall sent out a email to uh james confirming and saying that's we doesn't mean that you know it's rational belief in god is rational uh and i and i believe that james replied in all caps yes you are right i think that that was uh so that randall was writing the assumption and we worked we framed the debate based on that and based on what james said uh i have we i've i've tried i've realized that we hold to very different frameworks i'm not a naturalist i don't believe we should be confined to naturalistic framework i don't believe that we god should be testable uh in the same way that you know physical objects or things and phenomenon are i think that god is something that is can be very near and very intuitive even children as i mentioned debra kelemann and paul bloom have demonstrated both of them are even treated that it's something that we are hard wired to work so it doesn't take a lot of intellectual effort to believe in god and developmental psychologists are demonstrating that is it rational to to basically on the basis of our experiences and the intuitive nearness of god to conclude that god exists i would think so in the absence of any defeaters what would be interesting is i mean i think that matt brought out three or four defeaters at the end of it i'm not going to respond to him because he will not get a chance to respond back uh but uh what i would say is that uh but then again i have with regards to conflicting revelation i've mentioned we can take what all these religious experiences have in common but uh in conclusion i just want to say that uh it's something that is near you can basically suppress that and say it's not there because ultimately what we believe is that god is a person it's someone you can relate to that implies personhood in some way uh so uh i mean this would lead this is not a conclusive discussion but i've really enjoyed my time discussing with all of you thanks for that gotcha thanks for that and appreciate we have just a couple of last super chats things luminiferous ethan thanks for your super chat this came in late they said thanks to all participants stay healthy and safe we had brian stevens who said tons of children believe in santa is the claim of santa no longer an extraordinary claim i think this is just regarding the uh idea that tons of people believe in god or find it intuitive if you have anything on that uh yeah i do uh show me one person i mean i'm talking about show me one person that someone who is mature especially who actually believes and says i believe that santa claus actually exists i mean i'm not saying they said show me someone show me a claim is there a literature out there it's there i believe say the cause exists okay and and i think i think since you have never told me this term there's i i suspect you have deceived on that one okay so uh but yeah in the absence of any evidence of defeat we should trust it that's all yeah i mean that's that that's the obvious point is well the first point is that there's a clear disanalogy there that the vast majority of adults on earth do not believe in santa claus and actually relative to children yes children are rational to believe in santa claus they're not irrational even though it's a false belief you can have all sorts of rational false beliefs gotcha and thanks so much adam albillia appreciate your super chat they said dr randall you are a reasonable reasonable person i repeat you are totally reasonable it's just that your position on god is ridiculously detached from reality you've got a critic out there uh if you want to respond you can if you don't want to add no problem and uh do want to say i think we had one more from adam thanks for your super chat from adam said for tom jump and matt delahunty they said their combined appearance is as close as we would ever get to jesus's second coming so you apparently have a huge a super fan out there so do want to say we really appreciate everybody being here we hope you have a great rest of your weekend thanks to so much for the speakers for spending their time with us and as mentioned one last time they are linked to the description if you'd like to hear more from them so keep sifting out reasonable from the unreasonable everybody take care