What happened to the contractor? Did you guys let go of the contractor or did you get the contractor to actually work with your scope that you were able to build out? Sam, Sam, right? Yeah, Sam,

Sam.

So it was a tricky situation because the contractor was a yes man.

There's a lot of contractors that are yes mans.

And see, I want to be clear with something.

I do have a contracting background, built a construction company, you know, built – small construction companies to a multi-million dollar construction companies.

And I love GCs.

lot of

But tell everyone a little bit about how you got into the sport of trail and ultrarunning, and if you want to, a little bit about just your athletic background, um, outside of running too.

Yeah, of course.

So Leadville actually means a lot to me because Leadville was my intro into ultrarunning and trail running in general.

Um, I ran the Leadville 100 for the first time in 2021, and that was actually my first ultramarathon ever.

I had never run a race longer than a 10K on a track before I did the Leadville 100.

Um, I was in college during COVID and I ran-- I was running cross country and track for Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

And being in college during COVID was really hard because all sports were shut down.

Do you have either performance or just general, um, goals of, of kinda how you hope the day plays out?

And so tell me a little bit about, like, the empathy, why you feel like it's so important to bring that sort of, like, empathy and experience and connection into this work.

Yeah.

So without us comparing notes ahead of time, I love that you brought up the, that kind of consultant, and I hope I never come across that way with anyone.

But I have these vivid memories of sitting in a conference room with a consultant just rattling off all the things that we needed to do.

And in this situation, it actually wasn't anything that we didn't know.

It's like we didn't have capacity to do it.

We didn't know what we could stop doing.

So there are so many times where I'm like, "Oh, don't do it," you know? Like, inside me I have to self-coach to make sure that I'm still showing up in service to them.

Yeah.

Um, I suppose first question was, it was m- a little bit about me.

My background is a Australian Navy member.

I spent 23 years in active service and a number of years in reserve.

I spent most of my time in submarines but did some s- time in surface ships, and in that time ended up as executive officer in HMAS Farncomb, and in surface ships did, uh, frigate time and patrol boats doing border protection and fisheries.

Shore time, I spent a lot of time within Navy headquarters and capability branch, but also looking at, at some, uh, dual work within the intelligence community out at HQ JOC.

Uh, second question was about Elysium.

They, they're all key parts of the maritime environment that are so intrinsic to our security.