Are We Reading the Water Market Right?

Yeah.

No, I got it.

All right.

Um, last question, and this is kind of for the industry as a whole.

How often do industry members have these kind of abstract conversations, and do you think they should happen more? Does Bluefield have them? Like, I've been here for, you know, a couple months, and I, I think, like, having the space to hold these conversations is really, really valuable because it helps us all keep in mind, you know, what are we moving towards.

Um, I guess this is also, this is my perspective.

Um, but yeah, I, I'm curious to see what you think.

So I think they do happen.

I mean, you know, this is w- I mean, like you said, we've been talking an hour, right? This is one of the longer one.

We've covered a lot of ground here.

Within the industry, they do happen at conferences.

There are forums, I mean, at everywhere from, you know, the Aspen Institute to, you know, they have their own water forum, to Swan, and what does that mean for digital solutions? Um, or Stockholm Water Week or Climate Week in New York, or rethinking, you know, signs capital.

They have Rethinking Water, which I think is in, that's with, in affiliation with Columbia University.

They do that in New York.

I think this year it's in October, October 20th.

So they happen.

I think the challenge is you do it once, you do it twice, you do it three times, and what action, what's the actions that come out of that? So there's a maybe some built-in or the frustration that comes out of it, partly 'cause the water sector, it doesn't move fast.

It's like a battleship group.

It doesn't, it's not, like, nimble like a cat.

So it's not like everybody wakes up and said, "I had this awesome conversation.

Hey, we're gonna focus on leakage across 49,000 water systems, and we're gonna deal with this in the US." Well, everyone's like, "Where's the money?" And then you say like, "Oh, fine, we're private capital.

We got tons of money.

Let's go deploy it.

There's an opportunity here." And then the public sector, whether it be the s- public stakeholders say, "Wait a second.

We don't want private capital because, one, it's not your system, and two, we don't want you touching our water because we don't trust you 'cause you're private." [laughs]