My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. This is a story about herbs, two kinds of curves of supply curve and a demand curve. And it's a story about the first job I had after college. I worked at the electric utility in Washington DC called Pepco, I got the job, I believe, because my old neighbor was a guy named John Derek and John Derrick was the CEO of Pepco. My dad knew him. And so he sent my resume over to him. And I'll just share some John Derrick wisdom. As I was preparing for this job interview meeting him downtown. I was thinking of the kinds of questions I could ask someone who ran up like a billion dollar company, you know, that would like create an impression, so that he will remember me if nothing else. So I asked him sort of the classic question, when you meet a person, as you imagine, has seen a lot of people or has a lot of wisdom. A good question to ask that person is like the secret to that or like success, because they obviously have formulated something along the way, and have wisdom to share. So if nothing else, even if I didn't get the job, I thought it would be cool to ask that question and see what I could learn from this guy. And I remembered him for like 10 years, 20 years, whatever, a long time before, but I didn't really remember him as a person just as an adult in my neighborhood. So I had the interview, he asked me questions, I had studied engineering, mechanical engineering, and there was a role at Pepco in their demand side management program, which is about energy conservation, which is essentially using equipment to reduce the energy consumption of big buildings. And there was a rebate program at the utility and its demand side management program where the utility Pepco would would find like millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment for big commercial customers to reduce their energy consumption. And this was my my background to this this kind of thing. So it was a good meeting. So I asked John Derrick, the secret to his success. And he told me a long story, which I'll summarize here, the first thing is show up 50% of people don't show up. And I was like, what he's like, Yeah, 50%. Next one is on time, and on time means ready. So if a meeting starts at a certain time, and you need to, like have like your pencil sharpened, and your coffee hot, and your notebook opened, all those things happen before the start time of introductions on the chitchat. And the third thing he told me was dressed to play was met with the right tools and equipment for the right job, whatever that was, whether it was a hardhat, whether it screwdriver, whatever it was, show up on time dressed to play, he said, you'll be in the top 1% of all people. That Max is my observation of people too. So that was a good lesson, people who show up on time dressed to play typically on the top 1%, of whatever it is. So what the job was, was fascinating to me fascinating is that it's very expensive to build a power plant, like billion dollars, but maybe billions of dollars now, like back then it was coal plants. And they're dirty. And no one wants these plants anywhere near where they are, because they create a ton of pollution. Back then the pollution was just like soot, and some sulfides and some other things. And now it's carbon two, it was known back then to that it was it was carbon. So the idea was, it was less expensive for the utility company to pay people to use less peak electricity than it was to build new power plants, and also the hassle of doing any power plant. Where would they put it? How would they move fuel to it? Well, how are they deal with regulations? How many hundreds and 1000s of people that they need to operate this by they don't want any of that they just want to leave smooth baseload power, this is the idea. So in the course of a day, electricity goes up. And then it comes down as people turn stuff on. And as things like air conditionings and different things come on during the day when it gets hotter and stuff. And they have to build this system, this whole perfectly balanced system. So they always have enough energy to satisfy the demand. And if they don't have enough electricity, you have a brownout or a blackout, and if you have too much electricity, things blow up. Okay, like Transformers and stuff, is it so it has to be like perfectly balanced and it's hard. It It's hard to build these these grids and these systems this way. So it was it was more advantageous to pay people money to reduce the energy consumption than it was to build these, these new power plants. And so my job was to go around to these big commercial buildings, big customers, customers are spending millions of dollars a year, like on one building, like one building could have like, two or $3 million worth of like electricity like, like a campus or like a compound, and basically do an analysis of their equipment, work with their energy team to propose new equipment to be installed. And then and then I was the person who interface with the power company to approve their rebates for millions of dollars to basically prove that they put the stuff in that they said they were going to put in, and that it actually had the effect that we imagined it would have, you know, it was a great, great first real job out of college, because it combined many aspects of engineering, business, and personal relationships, realities of like, construction and budgets, and like things not showing up. Things breaking through real world. I really liked this job. What it really taught me about energy, which was related to my models of marbles, and ramps, and vibrations, and colors, and lighting, is about energy transfer at a macro level at a big level, big equipment, lots of people, millions of people, and how that the energy that was being created, in this case, mostly coal was in the sun, you know, 100 million years ago, and that energy came to Earth, and now it's cool, and you can burn it and release that sunlight, the energy and the sunlight. I thought that was like a fascinating process to be part of this, this process of energy transfer. And I knew that, you know, when I eat food, you know that the energy powering my body and mind was in the sun. Recently, you know, if it's fresh food, like hottie it could have been yesterday that the energy left aside, but he feels like super fresh, like, perfectly timed. But that was fascinating to the world power by sunlight, and they and the power plants. So power by somebody, even if it's wind power, energy from the sun makes the wind go, if it's solar power, it's coming from the sun. Anyway, well part of this system. And I thought, you know, it was cool to imagine these curves, obviously, these graphs, like before, before we go up and down, and then after we kind of go like smoother. And that savings, that incremental savings, shaving the peak of these curves was worth millions and millions of dollars. And I could see it in real life, or before work would be done to optimize. And then I could see the after. And it always matched the projections, because the projections are based on energy. And that's mathematical. So for example, if I knew that there was 5000 light bulbs that we were swapping out and I knew the wattage of the existing ones, and I knew the wattage of the new one. It's easy to do the math and figure out how many hours per day they're on which will stay the same and do the math and figure out that you know, you'll save 30% of the money if you replace these lights and have better lights that you don't have to change every six months changing every five or 10 years is better. So I'm happy I had that experience with this job. And I'm happy I was able to visualize these curves, because I use them later.