From your experience and the frameworks that you use, Scott, I'm curious, what are some of the specific practical things that leaders can do on the regular?

Yeah.

Yeah, the biggest thing I teach leaders today is when you have to have a high stakes conversation, that's what I call them.

There's serious consequences one way or another.

So if you have to have a high stakes conversation, the four part framework that I use is called the calm framework.

Very easy to remember.

The C in the calm framework is control emotions, yours and theirs.

yeah

But you go to work and negotiate the most high-pressure situations.

Yeah.

I mean, it was stressful.

I was never the officer who wanted to shoot the guns.

Like I shot the guns because it was part of the job.

I was one who would much rather talk people out of escalating the situation.

And so negotiation worked out well for my mindset.

What's the leader skill when someone's really passionate and you want to match that or even go above it to actually keep your emotions in check?

Uh, talk to us about how this started and what those crosses on 131 represent.

Yeah, we started four years ago from just a letter in the mail from 22 A Day saying, "We're looking for a place to display the crosses," and explained the program and, uh, Post 2 took off with it and, uh, the rest is history.

We've got, uh, just two more days of placing crosses, and there'll be 660 crosses in that field representing the 22 A Day's veterans that pass.

Uh, uh, so when, uh, this year is done, and Scott, uh, c- can you reflect just a little bit on, on your years at the helm of this thing?

Yeah.

It, it, yeah, it's been amazing because when we started, there were four of us in that field every day at noon, and it's grown now to where the riders have accepted the challenge and it's 15 to 20 people.

Many families show up.

Uh, I think of the Ingersoll's from last Sunday, and, uh, Uncle Tony's family shows up and everybody's there to help.

Like, what do you think is the real problem these days with communication?

I think the biggest problem today is we live in a world that doesn't ask you to listen much.

You know, the TLDR is a huge thing.

Too long, didn't read.

You know, you send me the email, it's too long.

The social media post, it was too long.

Because I'm supposed to be producing content.

So does the charisma factor, I guess, is that like come naturally or did you have to work at it? Or like, how do we like replicate this cool skill?

Same spot along 131?

It's a, it's the same spot between the ballpark and Greenleaf.

Greenleaf gives us, uh, Greenleaf Landscape gives us the land that we place the crosses on.

And we do 22 crosses a day for 30 days, representing the 22 veterans and military people that take their lives on a daily basis, on average.

Talk to us a bit about how we can do that, especially with this specific event.

It, we started out as a- an awareness program.

This is our fourth year.

And as we had people come by because of radio and television advertisements or, um, broadcasts, uh, w- we started out thinking, "Well, we're just gonna be able to talk about the problems." And we did a little research and it's, uh, 17 on average veterans a day, and five enlisted people a day, uh, that take their lives, and that's 85%, uh, of ...

Scott, no doubt, has some ideas.

Yeah, I think it is an increasing challenge for mitigating storage.

And I share your view that we have to think hard about whether it even makes any sense to mitigate a lot of that storage.

And an important thing to step back and think about what we're doing in California and the West is there are some days where we have to have that storage full going into the peak and we have to have it or we can't meet load.

But on a lot of days, that isn't the story.

We got enough gas that we could meet the load without the storage.

What we're using the storage for is to shift solar into the night at a cost that's lower than gas, avoid the emissions cost.

Scott, what's your take on whether these types of things are at all valuable or whether it's interesting? This

What is the topic you find interesting at the cutting edge?

I think for the whole, not just the California ISO, but the entire Western net EIM, the challenge that's been really dominant for the last 10 years is dealing with net load uncertainty associated with intermittent resources and their growing importance.

And the KISO has been at the forefront in dealing with that.

MISO and SPP have been working on it and dealing with some of the same issues.

But California and the West are really the cutting edge.

And it's got many complicated components.

One is just forecasting that load uncertainty.

What's your takes? What's standard market design versus EDAM? What's in, what's out, what's wonky?