Physicist Nick Cizek talks about energy and networks during Coronavirus

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast. Nick Cek, welcome to the podcast.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:00:12] Thanks Vance. Thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:00:13] What is going on, man? Normally we do not talk in this elaborate setup. Normally we're holding onto our phones and chatting about what's going on in the world. You live in Northern California and you are building your own farm testing company. We can talk all about that. But first it is April 16th, 2020. Coronavirus Pandemic. You guys are on a lockdown. What is life like where you're at right now, Nick?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:00:43] So we've been in lockdown for, well self quarantining since we're in the middle of our fifth week. So we finished five, four weeks. We've, so we've been more or less in the house for four and a half weeks. We, the only really big difference is, is that we aren't going out. I, you know, the big difference around where we live is people are riding their bikes in the middle of the street and running down the middle of the street. There's hardly anyone driving their cars around. We're fortunate to live in the middle of the Stanford campus, and so there's just not a, not a lot of traffic.

Vance Crowe [00:01:19] And would you say that most of the people that live in your neighborhood, they are right now pretty secure with that they're gonna have a job coming out of this or that they're still making money as all this is going on?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:01:31] Almost certainly. So we live in a neighborhood where only professors can buy, and so at least one person in each household is probably a tenured professor. And so that gives a lot of stability where we live.

Vance Crowe [00:01:44] Wow. So just last night I was tweeting with my buddy Keaton Krueger, and he had posted a question of, what is the first ivory tower that you think will fall in the post coronavirus world? You know, I kind of talk about the traditionalists that are thinking, once coronavirus is done, we'll just go back to normal. And then the people that are living in post coronavirus world are saying, Hey, these are the knock on effects. And I said universities, but I definitely didn't mean a university like Stanford, but I meant like all these universities that have been living on the fact that people have to go to college and they need to be there in person, so they pay a certain amount of money and then they have a degree that doesn't actually help them be a better professional. And I think that is gonna get wiped out of the market Now,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:02:29] It's hard to say that could be right. So Stanford has announced they are, the senior leadership has cut their pay by 20%, as far as I know. I don't know of any, any other universities where that's happened yet, or at least I haven't seen the announcements of that. You know, I track a lot on, I follow, like for example, Lambda School, they are a, an online computer programming school. And it's interesting to see the way they, they, it's kind of all skill-based and you have to pass tests in order to, in order to progress. And so, but I, I still think there's, well, we'll see, there's still lots of room, I think for universities to teach things that are really hard to teach online. Like I, I think it's, well I know you're experiencing this right now with the, the, the book podcast, the book club. Like, it's hard to get the same level of depth outta something as you would from taking a, a class for a semester.

Vance Crowe [00:03:26] Yeah, that's true. But I'll tell you that one of the big switches that happened was that I moved it from being a broadcast thing where I was gonna just talk with one other person and then we'd have a live chat on the side to realizing, wait a second, I can actually have a real book club where people show up and everybody gets to discuss. And so the last time we were just reading just this last month, what were we reading? Oh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and there's eight people that show up and now I can see them, they interact with one another and a much, much richer experience is now grown and my ability to do that. And I was never gonna join a book club where I showed up at somebody's house and, you know, brought some, some beers to share. I just wasn't gonna do it. But this opened up a whole different level of connection for me.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:04:12] Yeah. I think is right about the right number. I was actually, I haven't been on one of your online book clubs. I've read a few of the books but not joined the discussion. I if you go a lot above that, it's gonna be hard to have everyone participate. And so I actually, that's one of the things I think is really interesting about Zoom is that it has this breakout feature. I haven't tried it yet, but that seems like a really nice thing where you can have a big group much bigger than that, and then break out into groups of eight and everyone could have their own little discussion

Vance Crowe [00:04:39] That would make a ton of value for if you were holding an online conference. You know, you can have one big, large, large session and then you could have a group of eight where you have a moderator that says, what did you take away from this? And people could have a conversation the way they do at small tables. I hadn't thought of that.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:04:54] Yeah, so I think that's, I've been in a couple of hangout Zoom meetings where people have either done that or it's, I know people are doing it and using it that way now.

Vance Crowe [00:05:03] Well, I think that's, there are a lot of people right now that are trying to figure out what is the value of having an in-person conference. And a lot of those things that are, that have always been taken for granted, which are, hey, somebody stands up and presents and gives everybody in that room an idea and they get excited about it, and then they have that to talk about as they're networking with one another. And now you're saying, all right, which of these meetings is the in-person component super valuable to where people would put themselves potentially in jeopardy, or at least risk putting money up for a conference that's in the future versus how do we deliver that content online? And that bridge is gonna be a tough one to, to get over. What do you think is the tangible difference between being in person and being online?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:05:50] Yeah, that's a good question. I'm just thinking back to when you and I were in San Antonio at the National Alliance of Independent Crop Consultants Conference. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:05:59] That's right. That

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:06:00] Was sort of, that was in early January. Like we knew about Coronavirus, it wasn't a big thing. It was com you know, it was all in China at that time. But I remember really thinking about like, is this a good use? Not because of Coronavirus, it just, I'm a small business. I, it's a lot of money to go to conferences. And it was interesting that I struggled the first two days to find the right people at the conference. And I sort of, I remember waking up the third day, like, this is kind of like, this is good, but it wasn't really what I needed. And then I found the perfect room to be in. I just had been in the wrong tracks in this conference. I found the right room with all the agronomists and all the agronomists who were doing like going to farmers and helping them. And those are the people that I needed to talk to in my particular case because of my particular business. And a lot of that conference was contract research operations, which just, I, they, they don't match into what pharm test does. And so I was talking to all these people at a different part in the RD pipeline. They were sort of later stage or earlier stage that actually they were earlier stage than most of the research that I do. And so I got a huge amount of value from this conference, but it was really like the last day. And I had almost like, I would say I'd given up, but I sort of was like, all right, I'm gonna try one more day and really go for it. And ended up, I got a huge payback from it. But where it happened was, and

Vance Crowe [00:07:16] What is the payback? What, what exactly is that?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:07:19] Well, I ended up in a room with people who are one of the sets of potential customers for my company. And it was, they broke out into small table discussions to talk about sort of like, what should their conference next year be about? Like what are the problems that are happening that they need to be thinking about and starting to line up speakers and think about for next year that that sort of the emerging problems. And because potentially agronomists are a set of customers, for me that was super useful to hear what they are worried about, what they're thinking about. And then also, I mean, I sort of got to, I, this maybe I could do online, but I got to sort of have conversations not in a group of eight people. So like we all exchange business cards and I got to hear about their operations and what their businesses are like in a way that I wouldn't in a big room where I'm just listening to someone give a lecture.

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] Yeah, I think it's the shared experience part that opens people up. You know, for example, I really love when I'm giving a talk. I want my talk to be early, maybe not the first thing because it's, it's nice to see how the group is forming, what are they interested in, what are they talking about? But then if I go up and give a talk on whatever culture or storytelling, when I get off that stage, now every person in there, whether or not they think I'm interesting is not the most important thing. The most important thing is they all have something to talk with me about. And so you get to start a conversation and they may wanna talk about what I said on the stage, or they may just want to start a conversation and see where it leads. And so I meet all these people. So when you're a speaker in my example, having that ability to have a shared experience with your audience is really valuable. And I think they get something out of it too. So there is some value of having people in the same place so that you have these serendipitous collisions where it's somebody you wouldn't know you wanted to meet. And under ordinary circumstances on a bus, you might never actually talk to 'em. But because you're here focused on the same thing, you get all the power that comes from network building.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:09:21] That's right. I also was thinking about, well, when I was at the Climate Corporation and, and you were at Monsanto, we would go to the Monsanto Technical Community Conference every year,

Vance Crowe [00:09:33] Huge conference that the, that made Monsanto set 'em apart because they had their own scientific conference where people stand up on the stage and talk about their research and people put out their own scientific posters. It is a hardcore conference, and the only way you can get in is if you are from Monsanto. And they keep that the who gets in and who doesn't get in pretty locked down. Right.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:09:56] Y so that, yeah, so, so climate was bought by Monsanto. So I attended this conference several years in a row, and we, I was actually on the planning committee CCA for a couple years, two years. And we talked a lot about how would we make this online because there are always issues about budget. Like not everyone who should go was able to afford to go. And so I always thought it would be great to do a poster session, a virtual poster session where we just like say the whole company, whoever wants to make a poster is going to be online from, you know, this hour to this hour to talk about their poster. And anyone can come and go in their chat room and and meet with them. Well, you, this was a couple years ago, we couldn't figure out quite how to do it, but I think you could do that now with Zoom and use breakouts, for example. And it wouldn't have to be a, it would help to be in person, but it wouldn't have to be,

Vance Crowe [00:10:46] You know, I'm, I'm, it's just striking me that there's a place for artists in this post coronavirus world, which is how do you take something that's really complicated, like 50 posters and make a visual medium like a website or some kind of place where people can walk into it and they don't have to read the tiny grain detail. There's something that directs them and organizes so that people can have a visual experience about what is this going to be like, or what will I learn here? I hadn't really thought about it, but there is the, for the type of person that can convert their skills into really being digital, the value of being good in the digital space is gonna go way up.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:11:29] That's true. But it's also, I mean, even a in-person conference, you go to a poster session, it's really hard to figure out who you should talk to unless there's really good materials ahead of time that you can look through and really figure out. I mean, typically there's a couple hundred posters and you don't have time to look through ahead of time. Like, I'm gonna go to these eight are the ones I needed to go to. So normally I do sort of a random walk anyway when I get to a conference. Yeah. Unless there's some, like you said, some really good visual queuing of like, this is the area that I should spend the most time in.

Vance Crowe [00:12:00] Yeah. So that's a good point. I, I'm, I'm baffled on what's gonna happen with the online space. Frankly, I don't like giving one talk to a, you know, to hundreds of people all over the place. But it's, no, it's actually not different from a podcast. It's just that the experience of delivering that content that way is just really, really different. Because right now I'm talking one to another person, but then I'm getting, you know, like the podcast gets downloaded a thousand times, so that's like giving a talk to a thousand people e every day. And, but it doesn't feel like that. And so you've gotta figure out a way in which the person presenting has a good connection with a large group of people because there's something about the interaction of the crowd that makes engaging with material particularly interesting. So for example, you and I have both watched Peter Zhan talks, right? Yes. We've both seen him online. You actually think he was so interesting, you went and read several of his books and he talks all about international politics, and we can get into that in just a second. He was really good on YouTube. You can watch one of his videos, but when he's in person, it was like watching a man stand on a tightrope. I had never seen anything like it. It, it was an experience that was beyond seeing any other public speaker I've ever seen. And he finished the end of his talk standing up in front of a room full of nearly a thousand Albertan cattle ranchers.

Vance Crowe [00:13:33] These are the hardcore rugged people living in the northern Canada tundra. And, and he says, you guys shouldn't just secede from Canada and start your own country. You should become the 51st state of the United States. An American had the gall to tell a provide province in Canada that they should secede and become part of the United States. And the crowd loved him for it. We, even if they didn't agree with him, they were stunned that he would say it. And, and the electricity of being there was no different than watching a gymnast land some triple flip thing that they just did.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:14:15] Yeah, that's right. I I obviously I wasn't there, but I can imagine, I think this is the whole part, this will be the magic of how you replicate an online conference will be how do you get those, that feeling of being in the room. And probably you're right that it has to do with the interactions of the audience that now they have something to talk about and they have a time to talk about it.

Vance Crowe [00:14:37] Yeah. Where it's dedicated to it. I mean, that's another, yeah, go ahead.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:14:41] Well if, if each of us watch asynchronously, that's part of the beauty of podcasts is any of us can watch whenever we want. But it would be nice if there's a time we could get together and all sit down and discuss like, I watched this podcast, you watch it, let's, let's talk about it. And that part is maybe lacking and that is part of not having the shared experience.

Vance Crowe [00:15:00] I wonder if the, the place for this will probably be something like Slack or if it'll be like Zoom or both. So Zoom is the, obviously the video conferencing, but for people that don't know, there's a thing called Slack, which is a message board that allows you to, I don't know, how would you, how would you characterize what Slack is? It's

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:15:18] Like, it's like text message. It's like text message, but with groups.

Vance Crowe [00:15:21] Okay. Do you do it only on your phone

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:15:25] Almost exclusively?

Vance Crowe [00:15:27] Oh, I do it primarily on computer. Interesting.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:15:33] I'm trying to not spend a lot of time on it, so I put it in my phone and it's sort of hidden in my phone to, so I just access it when I want to. What I'm trying to think about, this is a good time to do it.

Vance Crowe [00:15:45] So let's change subjects. 'cause we brought up Peter Zhan. I, I am interested in what drew you to his books. How did you find him and why do you, why are you recommending to your friends that they should read his book?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:16:00] Great question. So I, he was a guest on Patrick O'Shaughnessys podcast investor. I invest like the best. And it was a, a message that I just said, it's so contrarian to everything I had heard. It was a, a message of American exceptionalism, but based on geography and essentially says that the American farmland in the middle of the country is the greatest farmland in the, in the, in the world. And it's overlaid perfectly with the best navigable, navigable river system in the world. And when you put those together, it gives the us a huge advantage compared to any other country in grain exports. And so he just sort of says, fundamentally the US has this great, I'm sorry, it's, it's partly that we can grow grain cheaply and transport it well, but also rivers allow cultures to build in a way that you don't get in mountainous areas. And then you add on top of that we have oceans protecting us on the east and west and then forests and mountains of the north and deserts and mountains of the south. And it just says like, we're a really, we have this great center of the country that's very fertile and then we have really good borders. And I just had never heard anyone, it seems like we always hear about doom and gloom about our country. And it was just really interesting to hear like, here's a really concrete message. I think we're actually in really good shape. And it's flies in the face of almost everything I hear I've heard the last couple of years. And so I don't really know if he's right or not. I'm kind of pretty skeptical of everything that I read, but I'm trying to figure out like, do I believe that he's right.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:17:30] And certainly like on the geographical sense, you can verify we have the most navigable riverways. It is a giant area to farm. And so I think there is some fundamental like truth to what he's saying.

Vance Crowe [00:17:42] Yeah, he had some observations about like Brazilian soy, which I thought was really interesting. So Brazil has these gigantic farms that are not measured in acres like they are here in the us They're measured in HEC acres and or how do you even say how, how do you even say that? Hectares, hectors,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:17:59] Well, Hector hectares, but those are roughly, I mean, they're two and a half acres in a hec, so they're not that,

Vance Crowe [00:18:04] But they're also huge volumes. They're not like

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:18:07] Giant farms. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:18:08] Yeah. Giant farms. It's not 10,000 acres. It's like a hundred

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:18:12] Thousand to 80,000.

Vance Crowe [00:18:12] Yeah.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:18:12] Yeah, that's right.

Vance Crowe [00:18:13] So, but then he also made a point that I had never thought of in that Brazil may be growing this in less than ideal conditions, but they also have to transport it and they don't get the benefit of their major river, the Amazon, so they have to pass it over mountains, which means the cost of goods is actually really high, which is a good way to think about that. And in all of my time talking about agriculture and commodities, nobody had ever pointed that out to me. So I have to give him credence that he sees the world through a different lens than I do

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:18:45] Do. Yeah. And it's interesting. He says one of the other areas he really talks about is, has a lot of great potential is Argentina. And that's because they have the great farmland and they have this great river system also. And actually he says in his newest book that some of the crops in Brazil are now going to Argentina and then coming out the rivers in Argentina. And that's cheaper than the overland driving route that they've taken in the past Wow. For certain areas. So,

Vance Crowe [00:19:14] So in any case, you've, you've enjoyed his content, but what makes you say, out of all the things you've read and all the things people could be paying attention to, you've been recommending to your friends that they read this book. Why, what's going on right now that makes you think that this is the time to read a Peter Z handbook?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:19:30] Oh, this is not about it right now. This is, this is a, this is a book about the next 50 years, so you don't need to read it right now. It's just that I've read it right now and I want to talk to somebody about it, but because I'm trying to figure out like, do I believe this or not? I mean, there's really concrete ramifications if, if you think he's right. You know, most, most investors say like, you need a diversified portfolio. And so they'll say like, you have, you should have some in the United States and some international, if you think Peter right, you should have all, virtually all United States. You shouldn't really be doing international. And that I think almost all investors would say, like, that's a crazy idea. That's, but if you truly believe in his hypothesis, then you would really invest in the United States in a few key areas.

Vance Crowe [00:20:19] You know, it, it strikes me as when I talk with people from other parts of the country or other parts of the world, rather, they view the United States as teetering on the brink of ev, everybody knows that they're just gonna get shut outta the world economy. Everybody just knows that. And I try and talk with them about like, Hey, you know that a lot of the food of the world gets grown in the United States and we are a net exporter and food's really important. It's not in their calculation for how they think the order of the future is gonna be. And it's something that strikes me that is, is I, I wanna make sure that I'm not being US arrogant and thinking that the, that the post coronavirus world couldn't possibly be without the United States at the center of it. So I don't know, like I, it's really enticing to hear Zhan talk this way, but it also makes me wonder if I'm becoming arrogant because of it.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:21:17] Yeah, I agree. It makes me worried that it's news that I wanna hear in a way, right? Like, I wanna hear my country's gonna do really well. And he goes so far as to say like, we almost can't screw it up. Right. I mean, and that's, well it's, it's nice to hear if it's true, but if it's not true, you definitely don't wanna hear that message.

Vance Crowe [00:21:35] Yeah, that's right.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:21:36] So that, that's why I'm, that's why I'm trying to figure out like, do I really believe this or not?

Vance Crowe [00:21:40] Well, I can tell you that I would love to have that guy on the podcast, but I think he is rather elusive. I met him at the Alberta Beef Conference, or I didn't actually meet him. I saw him on the stage and he was so busy that I never actually got a chance to talk with him. So I, I think he's very Did you curious character,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:21:58] Did you speak before or after him?

Vance Crowe [00:22:00] I spoke before him about a day before him.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:22:03] Oh, okay. So he might not have been there the day you were there.

Vance Crowe [00:22:06] That's right. Yep.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:22:07] Okay. I think he's pretty sought after is my impression.

Vance Crowe [00:22:12] Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I've, I've heard from people involved with the military that the Navy is a big fan of him because he talks about blue water navys and that's saying something, you know?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:22:23] Yeah. I just, one more point about like, is this argument, right? I mean the, you could have, so like Britain was like the world's superpower, the United Kingdom 200 years ago, and he would basically makes this argument like there are reasons why they aren't anymore. And so it's interesting to think like he has a good reason for explaining that. And then when he gets to the United States, he doesn't have, he is saying like, no, no, like those factors don't apply to us. And again, it comes down to this, this farmland and like how far we are from any threats. Like Britain is still very close to Europe and anyway, it's, it's, it's interesting. So he could be right, he might not be, I don't know, but I would like to figure it out. But it's not urgent. We don't have to figure it out over the next year. It's just,

Vance Crowe [00:23:10] Well, I guarantee you there are people that listen to the podcast that will reach out to you if they want, if you wanna talk about it. Because I, I had somebody this morning write me to say, I should have Peter Zhan on, I had it two days ago, somebody tweeted it at me. So there are definitely people that are listening to the podcast that would wanna hear that. What I think one of the things that, that people should know is that while you're in ag right now, you are starting up your own ag company, which we can talk about later. You actually come from a physics background and are, are really well acquainted with a topic that's pretty interesting, which is the storage of energy. And right now we are seeing oil be at an all time low and people trying to figure out like, how much of this can we get out of the gr buy from these people on the markets and shove it into storage? And so I'm interested in talking with you, you one time built a concept for a grid sized battery, meaning not just like a battery large enough to power a car or a house, but actually how would you build a battery if you were gonna charge it for an entire city? So, you know, something about, and those, those patents are now owned by large, you know, a large who Google owns them now.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:24:24] Yeah, so I, I, I'm a physicist. I, my background originally was in optics and so I was an optical engineer for a couple of years and then I went to grad school. And while I was in doing physics and grad school while I was there, I sort of figured out I wanted to work on energy security. And so I went to the Department of Energy after I graduated, just after I got my PhD and I, I went to an area, an agency called the Advanced Research Project Agency Energy. It was a new agency model off of darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. But so funding, high risk, high reward projects, new technologies in energy that could really kind of change the trajectory of, of where our country's headed. And so while I was there, I actually, I'm really familiar with oil prices going up and down. I I, I helped start a program to fund at home refueling systems for natural gas cars and much cheaper tanks for cars. So that instead of like a plugin battery, like a plugin electric car, you could drive to your house and have, if you have natural gas for your oven, you could have a, a small cheap compressor in your house that would fill up your car with natural gas every night. And, and the tanks wouldn't have to be cylinders or spheres like normal, like it wouldn't have to fill up all your trunk. It could kind of be weird shape things that could fit in the spaces in the car where you could, like a normal gas tank is like a really weird shape. So it was just interesting though, like when we funded that program and we, I, I wasn't the program director in charge, I was a, I was a a an RPE fellow and so I helped kind of find the space and figure out what we needed to, what we needed to fund.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:26:03] We put $30 million into 15 companies in doing different things in this space that we thought could really make a difference. And the payback was like if we could make this work, like these cars would pay back within two years. Like, because oil was so much more expensive than natural gas because shale had just sort of come online and three years later, like oil prices went, just crashed and like all those projects got wiped out. Like the economics just did not work at all. And so a similar thing is, I mean that's what's happening right now with oil prices so low is, well, it's making it putting a lot of pressure on all sorts of energy technologies. And so you could go back to the, the Gridscale battery. So I, I left RPE and started a company with a, a professor at Stanford. He's a, a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Robert Laughlin. He invented a, a battery that takes electricity in and converts it into it basically stores it in by heating up a molten salt to a, a higher temperature. And that's where the energy is stored. And I started the company with him and another RPE fellow named Phil Robert Shell, and this is a, this battery, so if you want to use renewable power, it's intermittent. So solar sun is only working outputting during the day and wind only outputs when it's windy. And so you need a battery to make it dispatchable. It needs to be a very cheap battery. And unlike the battery in your phone where you need it to be lightweight, a stationary battery just needs to be cheap. So instead of like energy per kilogram like you need in a car or a phone, you need energy per dollar.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:27:36] That's like sort of the metric that people care about. And so Bob invented this, this battery that works sort of like the smallest scale is maybe a thousand houses. And so we worked on that for a couple years together, we started a company together and then

Vance Crowe [00:27:48] The the smallest, so you're saying you start to get efficiencies of scale once you get over a thousand,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:27:55] That's sort of the very smallest you could make this battery and make it sort of make economic sense.

Vance Crowe [00:28:00] Where does it really start paying off

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:28:04] Like a city of a million say, you know, it's, it's, it's really, this is like a city size battery like Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, like the the power company for your big city in your area would, this would be the sort of battery that they would put in.

Vance Crowe [00:28:18] And this would be, so you could go out and, for example, harvest sunlight in the middle of summer and then store that energy for later.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:28:28] No. Okay. That's seasonal storage. That is a whole other ball game. This is daily storage. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:28:34] Or,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:28:34] Or maybe like for a week, like sort of those sort of things, but not, you need something else way even in order magnitude cheaper than this thermal battery if you wanna do the seasonal storage.

Vance Crowe [00:28:44] Okay. I don't think there's a great solution for that yet. Make, so you've got wind and it happens to be blowing right now and you can store it away in a battery and if the wind goes down you can still power everything and you can kinda generally cycle between those

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:28:58] Or, or wind is blowing in, in Texas, they've got a lot of wind in Texas and if the grid is connected the right way, you could put a battery next to your city and buy that for example.

Vance Crowe [00:29:06] Oh wow. So what what goes on when prices,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:29:13] Sorry, Texas is not connected to the rest of the grid in the normal way, but that's like sort of the, the dream of where we're headed is that the grids will get better interconnected. It's some people's dream, not everyone's dream, but if that happens and you could cite batteries wherever is convenient for the grid and you would be able to use more, more domestic power essentially.

Vance Crowe [00:29:33] So I mean the difference between what you're talking about a battery that is molten salt and oil is right, oil is storage of energy that you can transport, you can do it in tankers and you can do it in trucks. Yeah. But the challenge is you can't just set it in in a field. Like you actually have to have tanks and reservoirs to be able to hold it. What do you, what what should we know about energy storage that that maybe the regular person wouldn't? I mean I just, the most storage I have at my house is a five gallon gas can.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:30:05] Yeah. So you almost, from a physics perspective, it's hard to get more energy dense than liquid fuel, especially in something that you can pour and move around in such an easy way as, as a liquid fuel, sorry, besides nuclear power, but but chemically it's almost like does, I mean it's a fuel, it's designed to store energy, a lot of energy in a small volume though, to be perfectly honest. Like lots of things have that same energy density, your butter in your fridge has the same energy density roughly as the gas in your car 'cause it's all hydrocarbons.

Vance Crowe [00:30:40] Oh wow. And we're eating, we eat a just different kind of hydrocarbon then

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:30:45] It's, it's a a different length of the hydrocarbon. Yeah, that's right.

Vance Crowe [00:30:49] Holy, holy cow.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:30:50] And, and different kinks and whatever. But it's like, it's the same carbons and hydrogens and well and you add oxygens and you have carbohydrates and so that's sort of, all of those are kind of related chemicals. I'm trying to remember your original question advance. I think we went off on a tangent.

Vance Crowe [00:31:06] Well I wanna talk, I talk about the, the storage of, of oil. Like right now you're watching the price of oil go way, way down. What do you think, how does this change the world in ways that we might not expect?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:31:18] I'm actually not thinking about it a lot from the United States perspective because our shale oil is, shale oil is easier to ramp up and down it. You can respond to price better than you can if you invest billions of dollars in, you know, where you have to like pump the oil outta the ground in a conventional, in a conventional oil play. And so as prices go down, I think the US is, it's easier for us to turn off our production of, of oil from shale. It's not easy, but it's easier than other countries would have. And so actually I don't like, sure we, so the way you store oil is you, like the US has a domestic or a security like national security related reserve where they have a essentially caverns underground that they pump oil underground. And I don't know, maybe they're filling it right now. I'm not sure it would make sense to you right now. The the price is good, but who knows, maybe they were full already. I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:32:17] So I wanna go back to this thing about being able to turn these things on and off and it's not as difficult. I can imagine that if you're doing offshore oil drilling in the North Sea and you turn that thing off and you evacuate all those people off, you fire 'em. So you don't have the employees there. I can imagine that bringing that thing back online is, is difficult and those people might have jobs somewhere else and so you can't just go hire anybody off the street, but is that, yeah, you don't

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:32:44] Turn those off.

Vance Crowe [00:32:44] So that's not the case then with the shale oil that this is a different thing. You don't need as much expertise or how can you turn these on and off easily?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:32:55] So a lot of times when you find shale shale oil and, and the gas that comes with it, you, you can sort of stage when you frack. So you can decide like based on the prices, how much should I frack it? I normally you wanna frack the whole thing while you're there, but then you can cap it. You don't have to get it out. And I, I keep, I gonna say like, I'm not an expert on this, but this is all stuff that I've, I've sort of picked up and I may be getting some things wrong here, but you can essentially, you can, I think you can cap the wells is one thing. And also a lot of it, the, the, a lot of the oil and gas comes out right away when you start producing. And so by titrating, the controlling the rate that you are fracking new wells essentially controls the rate at which you get the oil outta the ground. And so, you know, there's, there's a price and as the price goes up and down, the number of drill rigs out there changes. And so as the price goes down, you know, companies are gonna suffer. They will, you know, they won't have the same amount of cash flow that they had before, but you know, so the price will go down, the number of drill rigs will go down and the amount of output will go down and then eventually, you know, the things will stabilize and then the, the prices will start going up again. And so

Vance Crowe [00:34:13] That, that's it's particularly stick stands out to me because I was flipping through Twitter this morning actually right before we got on this call and somebody was talking about pink slips are going out to oil workers in the, is that true Texas? I, I think even Oklahoma area. And so it was like, man, okay, yeah. So we should, that's that's tough.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:34:33] And this honestly is where like we really should have Peter Zi Zion talk about this because he knows a lot more about it than I do, but he, there are a couple of the shale basins where the price is much cheaper. And so what's probably gonna happen is assets will tend to move towards those areas and and people will have to move to those places. So we're that some of them are very cheap and then a lot of them, you know, when oil prices are really high we could explore everywhere for shale. And a lot of those are not economic at the low prices today, but some of them are economic. And so probably what will happen is drill rigs and people and personnel will tend to concentrate in those places where it, where it actually is still cheap.

Vance Crowe [00:35:14] Well it's kind of interesting to think, so you know, my buddy Dwayne Faber, d Faber 84 on Twitter. Yeah, he's a dairy farmer, but he, because of the way that he does milk trading, right, he has to think about futures and, and so he has a very unique view and he wanted to know about which company should I invest in to, you know, because if I had invested 200, you know, $20,000 into shell 20 years ago, it'd be worth gangbusters, it'd be awesome, I would've killed it. Which one of those should I do it in now? And as I'm, I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking you wanna figure out who is going to be the more adaptable to have their capital wherever these basins genuinely are. The cheapest, like the margin on how to get that gas outta there is gonna be super, super valuable over the longer term.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:36:06] And then on top of that, it's not just the oil and gas producing companies but the ones that use that as inputs. So like the US is gonna just have a competitive advantage because we are gonna have really cheap natural gas compared to anybody else for 10 years at least before anyone can catch up. And so that's enough time that chemical things that use like plastics companies and and whatnot, those companies will start moving back here and, and we'll be using those cheap inputs. And so,

Vance Crowe [00:36:39] Well it definitely strikes me that we will be reshoring a lot of manufacturing back into the United States and, and that there's a whole bunch of companies that have moved for cheaper labor and I think, you know, the labor costs in the United States likely will not go down. It will actually become more expensive, which means I think companies are gonna reshore capital their assets and automate way, way more than they have in the past. I think that this post coronavirus world creates a deep incentive to have constant automated labor that you don't have to worry about bringing them into a confined location that's now gonna be a pressure on businesses the way it hasn't been in the past.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:37:22] That could be right. Yeah. I have to say the one that I worry the most about is schools. I just don't see how you social distance schools without making them online. And I think that's a big challenge that's gonna, people are trying to figure out right now, I, you know, there must be plenty of school districts, everyone out there is trying to figure this out.

Vance Crowe [00:37:42] Well, and

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:37:43] You put half the kids in the room, I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:37:44] Yeah, I mean I, so I had a conversation with Jeffrey West yesterday. I wasn't able to publish it because we got, my internet got knocked out, so am I in two towns around me, they had no internet for 12 hours and you saw like how much this coronavirus has has been alleviated the pressure of it because I have internet. Sorry,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:38:03] Time out for that. Do you have still did yourself stayed up though yourself

Vance Crowe [00:38:07] Covered myself stayed up so I could do everything on my phone, but I don't get great cell phone reception. So I was able to like be on Twitter, but if I wanted to upload a photograph or if I was on Slack, there were things that just didn't come through as fast and I realized I would love to have this be faster than it is, but to go slower is death. It's like, it felt like I had the old like modem and I was like, wanted to pull my hair out. I just gave up and read a book. But, so it wasn't that bad. But in any case, where was I going with this about the, oh, Jeffrey West.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:38:45] Jeff West

Vance Crowe [00:38:46] And he was talking about why it is in New York City that the disease spread so much deeper into its culture. And he was talking about, he comes from the Santa Fe Institute and they study emergence and complexity and he goes into great detail. I'll let him do the whole long draw out of, of how cities map. But he essentially says New York City moves so much faster because there's so much more value for a person to go from one network to another, meet this person for coffee, meet that person for a lunch meeting, meet this person over here for more interactions because you are, every person you meet, you get the benefit of their larger network. But that also means because there's a higher value for you meeting people, you're gonna get more disease and it's gonna spread faster. And it blew my mind. I bet we can map out the cities based on density and how fast people walk on which ones dealt with the coronavirus problem the fastest first.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:39:43] Yeah, I would bet that's right. And certainly within, say within a country, you should be able make a graph of population density and coronavirus, I don't know what metric, but how well, how fast it spread maybe growth rates or doubling time or something that should be a, would be a graph that would look like a, some kind of predictable line. And so maybe it's different from, you know, China to the US but within each country I bet that there is a, a, a, well, you know, something, like I said, it would look like a, an easy to predict curve if, if you knew what you were doing. I suppose

Vance Crowe [00:40:18] When I look at the coronavirus things that we're doing to separate people so that you don't have that density and you don't have people moving in between networks. One of the things I see is that grocery stores for the next 18 months are going to be where everybody focuses their attention on. And I have to wonder if a new system is not going to emerge because by putting you, you're either having people go and stand in lines to go get into the grocery store or you're having a, you're buying hiring a shopper, you know, from Instacart or whatever to go around and do this shopping for you. But the store layout is still set up like somebody that wants to browse and has a lot of time and the interactions when they run into their neighbor is kind of cute and fun. But if you organize that for efficiency or optimized it for efficiency, you could cut down a whole bunch of that.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:41:10] Yeah, I mean I've sort of wondered for years why it wasn't easier to just show up and have your groceries ready. And so I know obviously the people, country companies have been doing that and a lot more of that's happening now. But yes, you're right, there's a lot of optimization that could happen in a grocery store.

Vance Crowe [00:41:29] Well, and I think you could optimize delivery. I also wonder if, because of right now with the meat packing plants having trouble staying open because the sickness spread so much through there and people don't realize it's not spreading through there because it's like the jungle where everything is, you know, out of order. These places are so clean, you could do surgery on a human being in there and you'd feel pretty comfortable. They are extremely clean. So it's not the act of them not being cleanly that's spreading that disease. It's the fact that people are coming to a single location and going back home to their families. And that's, that's exactly what's going on at grocery stores just at a much wider, more diffuse area. And so eventually we're going to have a point when that is where people connect and spread that disease. I I can't imagine they won't be.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:42:20] Yeah, I mean we have to have food so we have to get it somehow. And you're right, the the, the distribution is gonna be tricky.

Vance Crowe [00:42:29] So this has led me to thinking that we're gonna see a lot more farmers selling directly to people or at least butcher shops or ways for people to decentralize that. And yeah, I think localized food is gonna be really a lot more highly valued than it was in the past.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:42:46] That could be right. I mean I've sort of felt the same with, you know, I've, I've read or I've listened to all the Jared McDaniels podcasts on the meatpacking industry with I know r af and the other different advocacy groups and just coming out of that, it just seemed really clear to me that Jared or various people are, they will find a way to do direct to consumer beef. Like it's just, that's like fast forward 10 years, that's what the solution is gonna be and how we actually get to maybe fast forward 20 years, I don't know. But there's, it will be that way and it's, it's going to go that way because beef wants to deify in the same way that coffee has. And I actually think with beef or steak or meat, like you could do that people care about their health and they care about things or they, okay, maybe this is all like pre coronavirus. So maybe I not update my thinking, but I think, I think there is room and at least in a world where coronavirus isn't decimating everything, where people will start wanting like, just like people pay more for, some people pay more for, for coffee. Like they would pay more for a cow that was raised a certain way or had and or given certain food for example.

Vance Crowe [00:43:55] Well, and I think people don't realize how the beef industry is set up that it's not like every farmer that's raising beef is going to wanna decommoditize, you know, there's gonna be people that are saying, Hey, I wanna do this as a living, I want my culture to be imparted into this beef. But then there are other people that are saying, my mom owns 400 acres in central Missouri and in order for her to get her taxes paid and to have a little bit of income, she lets somebody graze cows on this. They graze it because there's nothing else you could do with that land. It's brush filled and there's, it's got grass, it's good grasp, but then you get it to a certain point where the cows have gotta be fed at scale. You take 'em to a custom feedlot, they get fed a really precise ration so that, and are watched over while they get fatted for a couple of months and then they get put into the system and you get lots of beef at the grocery store and most people are gonna want that. But a lot more people than just a couple of months ago, months ago are gonna want the experience of knowing my farmer, knowing that the beef is gonna show up. I'm not gonna look like a jerk if I get so much beef that it fills up an entire freezer. So I think that, I think that that's, that cultural change is gonna happen.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:45:11] That's probably right. And it will be interesting how much the social part of that plays in with, certainly at our grocery store there have been limits on, I don't actually think the last week not so much but on like how many packs of chicken you could buy, for example, that

Vance Crowe [00:45:25] That's a really uncomfortable thing for an American. Right. And I think one of the reasons that we have that tradition here to put, to put on how many people can buy is because we do not have a tradition of price fluctuation. And I think that we should not have this cultural, we should be very careful to get rid of the cultural stigma against prices rising because that's what keeps us being able to avoid having shortages. And it's a tough situation because you want the poor to be able to afford things, but you also want them to be reacting to a market the way that it is happening in real time. If you delay prices going up, you're only harming them in the fact that people can hoard for much cheaper prices. Whoever gets there first gets it.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:46:13] Yeah. I it's just gonna be, it's gonna be tricky the next year making sure, I mean I think on a sheer calorie output, the US should be in good shape, but how we produce that food and make it so people, especially if people aren't working how we make it so they can afford that food is gonna be challenging. I don't know how we're gonna do that. I think that's a lot. I mean that must be what a lot of the discussions going are are, you know.

Vance Crowe [00:46:41] Yeah. I was struck by, I, I spoke with Kevin Fulta yesterday and we were talking about that 50 to 70 million pounds of tomatoes are not being harvested every day in the state of Florida. Wow. So they're, they're plowing under that many, that is a huge amount, you know, just scale. And he was saying, well the problem is that those were the tomatoes for restaurants. 'cause you pull a tomato out of a Florida field, these have been specially bred and cared for to get seven perfect slices that then go into salad bars and on burgers and on all of this infrastructure. And we don't have a tradition of eating that much fresh produce. So it's not like you can just change it from the boxes of hundreds of tomatoes that you take into the back end of a steak restaurant or a, or a, an Italian restaurant that's not going to people that are eating it. So we're, our consumption of vegetables in a weird way is going really, really down. I don't know if it's being made up at the grocery store.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:47:39] I don't either. Yeah. I'm not sure. Good question.

Vance Crowe [00:47:45] Are you eating more fresh vegetables or less right

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:47:49] Now? I've noticed our produce has not been as high quality, but I'm just thankful we have it.

Vance Crowe [00:47:54] Yeah.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:47:56] You know, I cooked some snow peas last night and I know probably throughout one in 10 of them were sort of like pretty old, but, and like, I mean, six months ago that never would've been the case.

Vance Crowe [00:48:10] Yeah. You

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:48:11] Know, you would throw out like one or two outta the whole bag. It would just, maybe it's the fluke. I don't know. It was just a, a data point that I noticed.

Vance Crowe [00:48:20] Are you having, are you going to the grocery store?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:48:24] We have someone who goes for us. So we, we use a service

Vance Crowe [00:48:27] And then I, I don't know if you're like me, and this may be wild overkill, but my wife and I have gone to the greatest links to make sure that, that we don't bring it into our house because she's pregnant and we don't know what the impact will be. So I've gone to the extent of saying how far do I want to go to ensure that there's some sort of airlock between my outside and my inside. So every single piece of grocery that comes into the house, I wipe off with bleach water that I create at the time that I get everything delivered because I don't want that bleach to be diluted. So I make a spray bottle, I spray things down, I wipe everything down before it comes in the house. And my wife has nothing to do with it. It is all clean before she touches it. Is this overkill? Am I going too far?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:49:14] I don't think we know enough about the effect on, on pregnancies. I listened to your Yoshi Bach PO video and to talk about the the children from the born during the Spanish flu was really interesting that there were like measurable effects on, on this couple this year of kids. So I would be, if I were in your situation, I would be taking precautions. We are not that cautious. We, but we have stopped taking packages into the house and that includes our groceries. So the groceries, there's so many that I, I essentially, I, I unpack it and I put it all in the fridge, but I unpack it on the front and I'm, I'm not doing bleach wiping it. I probably should. It's, it's just How do you Well actually I don't know that I should. It's, there's only so much time in the day and so you gotta pick, you know, to put your emphasis where it makes the most sense. And so, but yeah, like the boxes we get, we're obviously like so grateful that we have people delivering everything, you know, and then I basically walk it around the house and we have like a, a box, a, a cleaning station for that sort of stuff, that stuff that's gonna be in the house for a while and, you know, things that we don't need right away. We just let it sit out for a couple of days and hopefully that whatever's there goes away too.

Vance Crowe [00:50:32] You know, I'm, I'm struck by your comment about the delivery person. I wish that there was a way that I could consistently get the same delivery person, because when you get one that's really good, I am completely willing to pay them more because I wanna make sure that they have enough money to take care of their family, to make it so they can take whatever precautions they need. I wish it wasn't such an anonymous system. I still tip high because I'm hoping that the general system does better, but I would like to take away from the tragedy of the commons where there are people that say, I, you know, I can't afford to give them a tip, and so I'm not going to, so it's not as lucrative for the person. It'd be much better if I was able to have personalized service for everything. Right. So that way the people that understand the value of it can tip. And then that can be a reciprocal, a, a positive feedback loop.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:51:22] Yeah, I, I hear what you're saying. It also, it could make you more error prone more, more less resilient if that person gets sick and you have one person that you work with. Anyway. I hear what you're saying though. It's, it's an interesting point.

Vance Crowe [00:51:38] No, that's a good, I mean, like, I wanna find, the reason I'm bringing it up is 'cause I wanna find holes in this idea. I wonder if things like TaskRabbit aren't getting more business right now for people that wanna hire somebody. Do you have TaskRabbit where you're at?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:51:52] We do. Where we are. Anything that's, you know, we're on quarantine like most places, and so there's a lot of it things that are considered non-essential services that are, you're not allowed to do. So we, you can't have, we normally have a, a landscaping company come once a week and they're not allowed to come.

Vance Crowe [00:52:13] Wow. That is not true here in St. Louis. It's bizarre. Bizarre. Definitely here. Bizarre.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:52:18] It's really bizarre because, you know, it's not, anyway, it's strange. Well, that's an, for whatever reason, that's what was decided.

Vance Crowe [00:52:25] That's an interesting thing. I mean, my wife and I made plans, you know, like what happens if you can't mow your lawn? Like we have a guy that does it and it saves me a ton of time. Right. So it's always been worth it. It because the time working on my business was worth more than the time and the equipment and the energy to, to get out and do it myself. But what we talked about is, let's say you knock out lawn mowing services from essential services, you will instantly have more mosquitoes, which those more mosquitoes at once the grass gets growing and there's lots of water out, at least in St. Louis, the tall grasses, the not knocking things down. If people don't get it done, you are going to increase mosquitoes. And imagine if we had the same panic now in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic that you then also have a Zika epidemic, or you have some other, you know, mosquito based disease passing up. You do not want that. So you, your essential services, you really have to think through things because here it would be a major problem if that happened.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:53:26] So wait, mosquitoes grow in tall grass when it's wet?

Vance Crowe [00:53:29] They, they can oftentimes,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:53:31] I thought they grow in standing water.

Vance Crowe [00:53:32] They do. But when you have tall grasses, there are more areas for puddling to occur. Oftentimes when you have people that have tall grass end up having more mosquitoes like brush and things like that grow around it. Yeah.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:53:45] Okay. Yeah. I, I will. So the, yeah. Anyway, I'll have I that gives more an idea incentive to, to get out and mow.

Vance Crowe [00:53:54] Oh really? IG

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:53:56] Well, I mean, we don't, one of the beauties of where we live is we don't have lots of mosquitoes, but we do have some, and I'm not worried about, I, I mean, Zika's not around in the United States much, so I'm not worried about that. But

Vance Crowe [00:54:10] Yeah, my call was like, the larger, if you start taking away these services, you're gonna have other knock on things. You're gonna have, like, you know, we see these pictures of wildlife and it's cute, but there are certain aspects of that wildlife that we wanna be knocking back. Right. We don't wanna be having come back because they bring with them diseases and other kinds of problems.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:54:32] Yeah, that's interesting. Going around the Stanford campus, there are coyotes in the area, but there are, we see more of them now.

Vance Crowe [00:54:39] Oh, interesting.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:54:41] Yeah, just there's less of people here so they, there's more room for them to roam around.

Vance Crowe [00:54:46] So one of the things that I've noticed is it took me a little while to get into my regular routine for working out. Like when I do it, I used to do it and I wake up at 4 45 and I'm, I'm out running by five and, and I'm, I was very on target, but now I've started staying up later. So I got my work in later, but now I've finally gotten adjusted and said, Hey, I'm in post coronavirus world. It isn't like snow days anymore. Get to bed on time, wake up on time. But one of the things that I've noticed is that in my neighborhood, the walking and exercising and jogging has gone back to pre coronavirus levels, which tells me that most people have readjust, at least where I'm at, have adjusted to a new normal. And they're back on that, like the walking and the jogging went way up when people first had a new normal and they're like, I'm gonna go out and exercise all the time. And then life happened and they aren't doing it. Are you noticing that where you're at?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:55:40] No, I see tons of people out walking way more. Yeah, that's interesting. We actually, they had to shut down our, we have a a, there's a path called the, the Stanford dish. It's a, a telecommunications dish microwave. And they, it's a three mile loop, but they, they closed it down because so many people were coming and using it and it was really hard to stay six feet apart. And so they shut that down. So yeah, there's tons of people out walking.

Vance Crowe [00:56:10] So I mean, there's a lot of people that listen right now that are either getting their planters set up or doing whatever they have. Yeah. The, the concept of what you're describing about things being so packed that you can't go for a jog in a park has gotta be blowing some minds for somebody that lives in West Lafayette, Indiana or Texa, Oklahoma, you know,

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:56:31] That could be.

Vance Crowe [00:56:32] So talk about your, your project. How is everything going? You're, you're entering your first planning season, how about your Yeah. Farm test. Tell, tell everybody what that's all about.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:56:44] So farm test is a, a, a company I started last October. And what we do is I am trying to automate for farmers so they can measure farmers and agronomists and input for producers what management practices pay off on specific fields on a field by field level. You know, does fungicide pay off in this field or not? Or did the 200 pounds of fertilizer per acre I put on this field, was that the right amount or would I have gotten more profit with 170 pounds of fertilizer per acre or 240, you know, what's the right amount? And really designing experiments where you can get a really confident result, a result that you can be confident in. And so automating the, taking a lot of the complexity of the experiment and reducing that by embedding it in a, a machine readable file that you could load into the planter or the fertilizer applicator that will just go through the field and do the experiment for you when you're doing your normal operations. And then I get the application data and the yield data back and can generate a report very quickly for that customer.

Vance Crowe [00:57:49] So you can write a program that controls their sprayers such that it's saying, don't spray it right here, 'cause this is gonna be the control or spray this amount. That's right. And they're just driving along like normal, sitting in the cab while the GPS is going. That's right. And then you can come back later and compare their harvest data over how those sprayers were programmed to run.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:58:11] That's exactly right.

Vance Crowe [00:58:12] And then figure out is, was this experiment one that I can learn from and apply to larger areas of my field next year? So you're running like scientific level experiments on individual fields? Yes.

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:58:27] That's idea to take kind of do research grade experiments, but with commercial grade farm equipment. So that's, that's what I'm trying to enable

Vance Crowe [00:58:36] Is that exist right now?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:58:39] You can, but it takes a lot of work to do it. So if you, a professional agronomist can use software like Ag leader SMS and go in and create experiments just like this and, but it takes a lot of work. And so I'm trying to, I'm trying to make that easier.

Vance Crowe [00:58:58] What is the experience for the farmer? How do they, what what do they do in order to be able to decide that they're gonna run tests on their field using your system?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:59:07] Sorry, what do you mean? The,

Vance Crowe [00:59:08] So like a farmer says, I wanna run tests on my field. What, what, what goes on then?

Physicist Nick Cizek [00:59:13] So, okay, so I, if a, if a farmer works with me, typically they come to my webpage, it's farm test.ai, and they, there's a place that says try it. And so if they could go on there, there's a little place you can fill out some information about your operation, and then I, I hop on the phone and call them and find out what they wanna measure and find out about their equipment and what the limitations of their equipment and if it's, and then I basically can design an experiment. It, the real big limitation is does a, a farmer have variable rate capable planter or a variable rate capable fertilizer applicator or sprayer? And if they have that and if they have a yield monitor, then, then we can make experiments for that sort of equipment where you can control the rate on the fly as it's going through the field.

Vance Crowe [01:00:02] So, so you left Bayer, which you were still working at climate and you started this company and you actually, you and I started approximately the same time you were out in California. I was doing my own thing. Yep. And so I've, I've watched you kind of progress along this path, but what made you decide, I'm gonna leave a stable huge corporation where I'm working on some of the most cutting edge stuff I was getting to do physics and this business, which has no customers to start with and nothing going on. Like how did you decide this is what I wanted to do?

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:00:36] I I told you earlier, I, I care a lot about energy security and that has evolved over time into food security. And I, I actually think this is the best way to make yields and farm profitability increasing, is to give farmers the ability to measure what pays off and what doesn't. And I, I worked on similar things at climate and I, I'm eternally grateful for having been at climate. It introduced me to all the problems that farmers have and all the opportunities there are. And so I, I just really kind of got a, a burn my saddle and wanted to come out and figure out how to do this. And it was, I wanted to just focus a hundred percent of my time on this problem, help farmers figure out what pays off and what doesn't. Because I think it will accelerate not only farmer profits, but also it will make, there's tons of really great products that are sold to help farmers make more money. And it's really hard for farmers to know which ones of those pay off. And so this will enable successful products to either adoption accelerate and there are some products that don't do that well or do well on certain fields and not on other fields. And this will help everyone figure out what products work well in which places.

Vance Crowe [01:01:55] And that's

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:01:56] Sort of my,

Vance Crowe [01:01:56] Right now you have, you have a salesman that comes by and says, Hey, these are the products that we have and this type of herbicide does a really good job on this type of plant. And they're giving you the best data they have because they're doing sampling on lots of other fields. But the thing that they're not sampling is your field. They're not doing it where they're, that's they're testing that product on. And I think people that aren't in farming don't realize the amount of variability across one individual farmer's fields. I mean, you, depending on how far you zoom the camera lens out, you can say, Hey, the soil in this area is kind of like this, but as you zoom closer, then you can start saying, well, in this particular area there's more clay in the soil, or there's, there's more seeds from weeds that happened 10 years ago. They had a weedy patch here and they've never been able to get the weeds out. So chemicals and products that people use to make their field grow really as, as well as they can differ meter by meter across the field. And I think that's one of the most fascinating things is it seems to me like you are opening up people's ability on an, on a, on a really tight basis, high fidelity, what can I plant that is the best seed, the best fertilizer, the best chemical to protect it in this spot right here and just move forward just a little bit more. And maybe we would make a change, but the only way we would know to make a change is if we did really high grain testing.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:03:31] That's, that's the vision I I would like to get to, I guess the vision is there will be a day when every farm decision is made on the basis of sound data backing it. And that already happens in large part today, but it's not always quantitative data. So I, I'd like to have the farmer take all of their qualitative and their quantitative data and augment it with, you know, sound statistically sound experiments.

Vance Crowe [01:03:58] Man, I have been excited about this from the beginning and you and I talk at least once a week, oftentimes more. And it's fun to have sat down and have recorded a podcast. I, I'd, I'd love it if you came on, I don't know, a week or two and we'll find out how things have been going for you and just kind of check in.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:04:19] That'd be fun. Vance, I really enjoyed the chance to talk to you publicly, it was really fun.

Vance Crowe [01:04:25] So last question, where do you think the world will be in two weeks?

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:04:31] Sorry, just a sec. We gotta, that was a street sweeper. Can you hear me?

Vance Crowe [01:04:37] Yes. So where will, where will the world be in two weeks?

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:04:41] Ooh, good question. It seems like cases are starting to slow down in the us. I sort of have my eye on, I'm trying to see, I'm tracking my local area and I'd like to see the absolute number of new cases per day start to go down. I don't know if that'll happen within two weeks. I'm in Santa Clara County, which is one of the more harder hit of the counties in, in California though. So we have a 1600 cases as of yesterday. So I, I've sort of just got my on that, I, I think the, the early on the exponential growth was, it, it's still exponential growth, but the, the the, it was a really straight line before and so on, on a log room in the plot. And so it's, the soap is changing for the United States and it's changing in the area where I am. And so it's, it's getting flatter. And so, so it's still growing, but it's, it's not as fast and I'm just, I think, so it's all hard to predict where things will be because the four weeks ago it was a really, like, it was just like a straight line and that was why it was easy for me to say, you know, two weeks from now it's going, it's doubling every, well it's going up 30% a day, but now it's, it's slightly different and it's, it's, it's more in flux. So I'm, I'm actually really hopeful that we are starting to get things, at least in the area where I am, that it is starting to curve down and hopefully in places that are hard hit, that's, that's starting to happen.

Vance Crowe [01:06:06] Well, so just so everybody knows, I have like a little whale pod, a group of people that are connected from all over the US that talk and, and Nick put up a, a post or like, you know, where he thought the trajectory of the, how many cases would happen by a certain time and you were dead on, I mean, alm almost exactly on and blew everybody else out. So I'm interested, I'm glad to hear that you see it as, as settling down in the curve. Do you think we will watch the curve go, go back down before summertime?

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:06:44] Oh, great question. I really don't know. I, I'm hopeful but I, I don't know for sure. I mean it's so hard. I I I sort of, what I'm sort of thinking is that we will, so my family's gonna, we're gonna probably, well we're gonna be told to stay in until at least probably maybe you'll see absolute cases go down for a certain period of time. Absolute new cases, is that gonna be two weeks? I don't know, probably something like that. Two to four. And then at some point people will say like, well let's, let's start relaxing these restrictions and maybe people will go out before that. I don't know, we'll probably be conservative and stay in for some period of time to see as we relax these restrictions, do we see another bump? Certainly, I I I, I've sort of stopped tracking a lot of it because it now feels like instead of a sprint where every second counts, it feels like this is more of a marathon. And so I've really started to shift my thinking from trying to predict what's gonna happen tomorrow and the next week and a two weeks from now to thinking what are like the things I can do now that will help me over the next year. And so this is like things like, well you had a tweet about this and I responded to that. I am thinking about putting in a nice easier way for me to, I just would love to be able to like sort of eat dinner with my parents virtually, like with a, like a, maybe I'll move my TV into a where next to our kitchen and trying to find a way to kind of do kinda like FaceTime, but with, with that TV

Vance Crowe [01:08:18] For example. Well, and you're, you're answering the question and I'd love to hear what other people think of this is if you, if you were just to accept that we're in a post coronavirus world and nothing is going back to normal for the next 18 months, what would you change about the way things are set up around your I was kind of thinking office and it's just a way to get people to think more permanently because once you start getting into that mindset, you get off the, hey, we're on a snow day, or it's a holiday and you get back to live and grinding and trying to make things happen,

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:08:52] Things happen. But I, I should just wanna pause there though. I think over the course of the next one to two years, things will be different, right? But I sort of think five years from now things are gonna kind of be a lot back to normal. I hope, I hope I could be totally wrong, but I, we've gone through pandemics and things go back, the question is like, is this one a recurring one? Does this add to the four coronaviruses that constitute the flu every year? I don't know, I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet.

Vance Crowe [01:09:25] Yeah, I think, I think you're right about the, we'll have contact and we'll have people go into games and things like that.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:09:31] Yeah, there'll be kids like playing soccer five years from now. There will be,

Vance Crowe [01:09:37] But there's going be, there will be some changes. Our system there be, there will be residual, like we will make changes to the way we wash our hands and what's expected of you on a plane and like the, there will, the, the scars of the fire that's gonna burn through here. I think life right after a forest fire, it's like two days and you start seeing green sprouts come up and it's beautiful. It's like one of the most amazing things to see. But even though the green comes up and it gets pretty afterwards, there's still scars from a fire. And if you walk around in the old redwoods, you can see like, hey, look at that burn mark on this giant tree that happened 20 years ago. So I think there's gonna be a burn on, on, on the landscape, but we are definitely, people should be moving away from the world is going back to what it was. Those are the traditionalists, I think they're gonna be not correct.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:10:27] I, I guess the way I've been somebody somewhere, some podcast I, it might've been yours, I don't know, said instead of thinking about this as a Corona blizzard, like this is a corona winter. And that's been really helpful for me to reframe like, what would I do if I knew I was gonna be like kind of locked in for the winter? So anyway, that's sort of,

Vance Crowe [01:10:50] Well that's a great way to, to end it with, with the two week question. Nick, thanks for joining me and we'll have you on again soon.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:10:59] Take that. Oh

Vance Crowe [01:11:00] Wait, appreciate Nick, what's your Twitter handle everybody? I've been telling everybody about your, your, it's great to tweet with you.

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:11:06] Okay, it's NC, so it's N as in November, C as in Charlie, I in India, Z as in Zulu, E as in echo, K as in kilo.

Vance Crowe [01:11:17] Alright, I will put that into the show notes and highly recommend people follow that and go check out farm test.ai Nick's website for his project. All right man, we'll talk to you later. Thanks

Physicist Nick Cizek [01:11:29] S take care.