What was the theme or what was the message that you want, uh, in total, that you wanted to provide to the ADSTAR effort from an AOC perspective for RF and, and spectrum? Was it about the cutting-edge technology on the horizon or force design? What was the theme for this year's show?

That's a big question.

Um, and I suppose I can, I can answer it not so much from a theme, but, um, what, what were we trying to achieve? And I think the biggest kind of message and takeaway from partnering with ADSTAR and combining our kind of, um, opportunities here by combining the conferences was to provide that- Guidance and, and leadership from a operationalization perspective where you're actually, what are we researching and what are we, what are we driving forward in that RF domain, and how can that be focused on what the actual needs are from a research community and a, and a defense, and a government and defense perspective? Like, where are those needs and gaps that need to be filled, and where to focus our effort moving forward and to evolve to and take our, and our, obviously our discipline to in support of the nation.

Um, so I think that's the, that's the big, uh, takeaway I have.

ADSTAR as a, as a conference itself was very-- it's absolutely multidisciplinary, so whole bunch of different types of research, whole bunch of different types of initiatives, uh, from the exotic and quantum to, uh, everything down to, um, standardization of hose fittings, which actually in an authorization, in a, in a Navy sense is really important, I found out.

That, uh, if you don't have the right hose for the right fluid, ships stop going.

Um, so there's little things like that.

Mm

What's been, you know, IT, you know, in technology in general has in the last 20 years has really changed, right? Like, you know, you think back when you started, how important was IT? And then today, how important is it? Like, what's been that shift? Like, you know, talk a little bit about that journey of the importance and maybe even how the team at Titan grew over the years because of that importance.

When I started my career, there was about five locations.

So at that point, technology, that layer was making sure the price books were up to date, making sure the business system was alive, all of the green screens, all those kind of things, and making sure the parts catalogs Since they weren't internet-based, they were CD-ROM or DVDs at the time, right? Really important still, right? We had to keep all those up.

But as technology changed, as it ever evolved, yeah, massive shifts, right? So it went from a period where we were hosting a lot of servers online internally to the cloud shift, right? So used to have racks on racks of servers and a major push to cloud somewhere in there.

And then another push to SaaS, where these SaaS partners really take care of you and help you manage and help you grow.

You don't need as much folks in the back end to support all that.

You can focus more on the front side.

I mean, where do you see this going? What's the role of the equipment dealer? How is it going to change over the next five years?

Okay.

You have a lot more material to work with.

You have a lot more decisions you can make.

And in our lab, we'll actually do multiple types at once because we don't know at the end of the day what will work with the strain that we're working with.

We don't know the conditions it was growing in.

We don't know the history on it.

We don't know how much stress has been on it.

Mm-hmm.

So what part of that approach would you immediately reverse that? How would you use the office's legal posture in order to maintain law and order?

I mean, number one priority is to reverse the damage that Ken Paxton has done.

He sued the Biden administration 106 times.

It's no longer politically helpful for him to sue the President of the United States because he's beholden to the President of the United States.

He sued Trump zero times across both of Trump's terms, as I said, 106 times against the Biden administration.

He is suing Islamic groups.

He's suing Catholic groups.

So, Nathan Johnson, what can Attorney General do about affordability issues, particularly as we're seeing things like big data centers moving into Texas, taking up a lot of electricity, pushing up prices?

And with all the toys you have, I mean, is there a temptation to manipulate those sounds too a little bit?

Oh yeah, we did a lot of manipulation, yeah.

I mean, they're definitely like, the idea was to grab really interesting sounds and then, you know, slow them way down, make them way louder, just like to kind of present... a sound that you would maybe hear in everyday life in a different way that you're not used to hearing it.

Is that how you work as well?

You know, a bit of both.

We definitely started in the home studio when I'm cataloging the sounds that I've found and then creating the new instruments out of them.

But then we went in and we...

It's interesting because with an electronic... score, the tendency is that everything sounds gridded and perfect, which is very much not my aesthetic and very much not Ryan's aesthetic.

In our murder mystery scenario, Senator Johnson is like the witness watching in horror as the scene unfolded.

I think the whole notion of, uh, passing laws that interfere with the private flow of capital is anathema to the whole Texas ethos of being a business-friendly state, and it smacked of big government interference with markets.

Johnson says this anti-ESG legislation looks to him like a campaign to slow down the transition.

Which I think is silly.

The fossil fuel industry is well-integrated with the renewable energy generation industry.

Wind farms and solar farms are powering oil and gas operations.

So it's unfortunate that we're having this silly conversation right now, because it's helping no one.