Duncan Gillis, CEO, TERREPOWER (formerly BBB Industries)

From infantry officer to innovative CEO, Duncan Gillis' life story reads like a masterclass in determination and reinvention. In this riveting conversation The Driver's Seat host Behzad Rassuli, Duncan reveals how being told "you can't do that" has been the fuel that propelled his remarkable journey from military service to leading TERREPOWER's sustainable manufacturing revolution.

As a young man from a modest New England background, Duncan's educational path began with an ROTC scholarship that opened doors to Cornell University when his parents couldn't afford to send him to college. His military career took him through the grueling Ranger School and deployments across the globe before pivoting to business through prestigious roles at Procter & Gamble and McKinsey Consulting. But the professional trajectory is just one thread in this fascinating tapestry.

The conversation takes an unexpected turn when Duncan shares a profound personal revelation: at age 57, he discovered through DNA testing that the man who raised him wasn't his biological father. This discovery fundamentally altered his understanding of his own identity and ambition, coinciding with other major life events including learning to fly aircraft in his fifties – a childhood dream finally realized.

Today, as the driving force behind TERREPOWER, Duncan is transforming what was once simply "remanufacturing" into a broader vision of sustainable manufacturing. His team's innovative approach to repurposing materials others would discard isn't just environmentally responsible – it delivers superior products at competitive prices. His passionate defense of American manufacturing capabilities reveals a leader deeply committed to proving skeptics wrong, whether about his company's potential or the future of American industry.

Whether you're fascinated by leadership psychology, business innovation, or personal reinvention, Duncan's story offers invaluable insights on achieving what others declare impossible. Listen now to discover how one leader's boulder-sized chip on his shoulder became the foundation for extraordinary success.

To learn more about the Auto Care Association visit autocare.org.

To learn more about our show and suggest future topics and guests, visit autocare.org/podcast

Chapters

• 0:00 Early Aviation Dreams and Pilot Journey
• 4:34 Military Background and Education Path
• 13:30 Family History and Unexpected DNA Discovery
• 28:01 Business Career Beginnings at Procter & Gamble
• 42:32 Lessons from McKinsey Consulting
• 57:33 Building TerraPower and Sustainable Manufacturing
• 1:10:49 American Manufacturing and Leadership Philosophy
• 1:46:37 Leadership Through Inspiration and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Duncan Gillis: 0:00

When I was in high school, I applied to the Air Force Academy and actually got an appointment, but they told me I couldn't fly In those days. You couldn't have any corrective surgery or corrective lenses to be a pilot. So I said, well, I don't want to do that and I ended up doing something else in the military, but it was something I always wanted to do. But fortunately or unfortunately, I guess in 2016, I quit my job and just said I'm going to take a gap year and I went and learned to fly.

Duncan Gillis: 0:36

I did part of it in the Class B airspace in Chicago and part of it in the open air of upstate New Hampshire, which was just, you know, not a lot of other aircraft up there and I learned to fly, started in March, got my certificate in July, then I just flew for a bit on my own renting aircraft, and then I started training for my instrument rating so I could be in the clouds and in adverse weather, finished that in December and my check ride for that was mid-December. The runway in New Hampshire was 80% ice and the instructor says or the examiner says, well, this is the only time I can do this. I said it's all ice, he goes, I'm going to teach you how to take off and land on ice. So not only do I have the stress of being tested.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:33

But imagine, you didn't. Imagine you know, you figured out there's an icy runway after you had your pilot's license. There's no instructor. It would have been way worse.

Duncan Gillis: 1:40

Yeah, so it was cool, right. So he's like let me tell you, just don't touch the brakes. Whatever you do when we take off and when we land, do not touch the brakes. And so I went and, you know, did the check ride, passed the check ride barely, and then we went ahead and landed back on the ice and that was that.

Behzad Rassuli: 2:14

And got my instrument rating and then I bought my first aircraft at the end of December and then moved down here to lower Alabama and started my job with what was young my dad was really into planes. He was actually for the rest of his life and our life, you know, he's been pointing at the skies, you know having us identify planes, et cetera. And so when I was in college I took my first flying lesson and I think I've done two or three and when I got my first job out of college, you know it it was, it was kind of like all right, what am I working for, you know, rather than just like to afford to live like, what are my goals? One of my goals was I want a plane, I want to fly a plane and you know I told you about the, the Cirrus jet that I looked at right I think it was like a million dollar plane.

Behzad Rassuli: 3:05

So, million dollar plane got it. I'm making $34,000 a year, let me subtract my mortgage and my food costs et cetera, and I'm net negative already. So this isn't going to work yet. And then you layer in the instruction it's expensive Hoursours and dollars and so I punted on that goal, but it's reinvigorated in me seeing this here right now.

Duncan Gillis: 3:33

I'm glad you're inspired.

Behzad Rassuli: 3:34

Yeah.

Duncan Gillis: 3:34

It's part of what the community tries to do is inspire other people to become a part of the community. I was 53 when I did this, right, so life gets in the way, right? You know, I had similar situation where I was negative net worth for probably till I was about 40 years old, and so, uh, you know, there was no opportunity economically to do it, nor time. I had kids when we were, you know, morgan, I had kids when we were young, uh so, Mortgage your wife.

Behzad Rassuli: 4:01

Yeah, yeah, um negative net worth till you're 40.

Duncan Gillis: 4:05

Yeah, you know I had debt, you know I had mortgages, I had, uh, cars, I had business school debt, a little bit of debt even left over from undergrad, even though I had a full scholarship just to cover, you know, sort of some of the room and board stuff.

Behzad Rassuli: 4:21

So yeah, Well, Duncan Gillis, thank you for sitting down with me today. Appreciate you having me here at your hangar here in lower Alabama.

Duncan Gillis: 4:34

Well, beza, I've known you for a long time. We've talked about doing this for a while and I'm delighted you came down. I apologize, it took me so long to kind of get organized, but I wanted to get through our TerraPower announcement before we sat down to talk as well.

Behzad Rassuli: 4:46

Yeah, that was a big announcement and we'll definitely talk about that today.

Behzad Rassuli: 4:50

But just sitting around in this room, we have known each other and we've shared stories about our interest in flying You're a little bit further along that journey than I am and other experiences in our lives and careers, but I do want to learn a little bit more about you here today, and I can pick up just a few insights about you just by sitting around in this room. Behind you is a ranger flag, there's a plane off over my left shoulder here, and you just announced the rebranding of your organization to TerraPower and obviously there's something behind that name, and so I want to learn that today. But maybe for us to start with how we got to this room and how I'm having this conversation with you and all of the attributes of you know where you are in life today. I'd love to learn more about how you got here. Just take me back as far as you want to go. You know, starting with your childhood. You're not from Alabama, right?

Duncan Gillis: 6:00

Let me start out first of all by saying you know why we're here, right? It's because, as you know, I sit on the board of the Auto Care Association and I've had a great opportunity to get to know all the staff of Auto Care and to watch you personally.

Duncan Gillis: 6:15

You're very analytical, but you're also incredibly creative and innovative, and I saw what you're trying to do with this thing and I said man this is a guy who's not just out there, you know, providing data to the, to everybody, but he's trying to think of new ways to do things differently and I respect that and that's sort of an attribute I look for, so that's why I'm doing it.

Behzad Rassuli: 6:36

I appreciate that compliment. I will. I'm just going to correct the record here because there are going to be people that view this yeah, To think that that's a true story. But the true story is that our head of comm, Stacy Miller, had a vision for this and encouraged us to hire Jackie Lutz, and they came on and presented this idea of a podcast as part of a broader digital strategy and took a little bit of convincing and I said, great, you know, they put a really solid plan together. They presented it. Then they put out the podcast kind of strategy and the storyboard and everything. And we have these auto care on air and we have four shows. And they told me about the three shows and the fourth show. They said you're doing it.

Duncan Gillis: 7:25

I said no, and they said yeah, you said no, I'm a data guy.

Behzad Rassuli: 7:31

Well, I just, you know it's a, it's a very public um and live, you know, live, uh, format Right. And so you know me, I am, I'll, I can come up with questions all day long and think things through. I don't know if that's exactly like a media personality, right, but uh, they said, you know, listen, your unique way of asking questions, studying people and coming to you know, insights that other people can digest and walk away with. Is is what we're looking for. So, uh, I, I appreciate the compliment, but really it's you don't you? Just I learned you don't say no to Jackie and Stacey. I got it.

Duncan Gillis: 8:09

I got it. Stacey and Jackie are the innovators, yeah, and they delegated up on the execution. Great work, yeah yeah. So there's a lot of great ideas that come from within the organization. Right as a leader, you got to be able to sort of check your ego and identify them and then decide what you want to back. So hats off to you for backing this one.

Behzad Rassuli: 8:30

Well, you have. I've spoken on top of the things around us that give me visual cues about you. I've actually spoken with people about you. These are people that I've known in your organization, but I also contacted some other people and just to somewhat, you know, use the time to return the compliment, but these are more just things that you exhibit on a daily basis and I've discovered are that I feel like I'm going to get a performance review.

Behzad Rassuli: 9:00

Go ahead. It's somewhat of a performance review, and so I won't tell you who this, who these, come from. Let's call it one of those anonymous 360s. The first somewhat of a performance review, and so I won't tell you who this, who these, come from. Let's call it one of those anonymous three sixties, right? The?

Behzad Rassuli: 9:06

the first is that, um, you inspire people and you, uh, maybe it's not the most comfortable in the moment and I'm very familiar with that you know, that feedback, but you really kind of activate people and get the best out of them, uh, and that's through inspiration and ultimately I think people feel rewarded and excited about that. You know kind of actualizing themselves. So I want to learn about that. You've been described as the smartest person in the room.

Duncan Gillis: 9:35

Uh, and uh, I've heard.

Behzad Rassuli: 9:38

I've heard you know when, when Duncan talks, people listen.

Behzad Rassuli: 9:42

But my own observation and this is something else, something that came from somebody else as well is that you'll sit in a room and it can be a board meeting and you'll listen to the whole conversation.

Behzad Rassuli: 9:53

You'll listen to the debate and you're paying intense attention, but eventually you know sides coalesce and voices get louder and one side argues A and the other side argues B and at some point the room will quiet down and you'll interject with a comment and you'll just say this conversation comes down to A or B and the room stops and kind of realizes that there's kind of like a fundamental root cause point that needs to be solved first, and then that gives you the answer. And so that kind of like ability to distill thinking I think is really impressive and I want to learn a little bit about that and see where that comes from and if that's a practice skill. But I also know that there's usually only just one right answer there and sometimes the second answer is a trap and it's for the audience to figure out what the trap is. Is that a fair characterization? I wouldn't call it a trap.

Duncan Gillis: 10:53

Sure, I would say it's a. It's an exercise in in rational thinking and bringing facts together to understand what the right direction is, and a lot of times there are multiple options, but it's trying to get people to decide upon the best option and there may not be a single right answer. I just had a call this morning. I spent the last few days with peer CEOs in industrial companies, talking to a variety of people, and I called my COO this morning and I said you know, I've been talking to people about all these tariffs and you know they're thinking about A and you and I are thinking about option B and we're the only ones. So either either we're really really smart or we're big outliers and we're making a huge mistake. What do you think? I said I'm looking for a little bit the rest of them were doing, but we should try what we're doing first in terms of how we approach the tariffs, and it's that kind of thinking that really helps our company. You know, sort of do better.

Behzad Rassuli: 12:17

But that guidance, even through that exercise where you don't know the answer and you're trying to figure out what's going on with something like tariffs. We're sitting here in March of 2025 and obviously there's a lot of volatility around tariffs. Every day the rules change, but it's a new crisis, Gotta have a crisis. But people view it as a crisis and in every other conversation I have, there's just the discussion of the ambiguity what if this, what if this, what if this? What do you think is going to happen here? What do you think is going to happen there? You know that question of what do you think they think? I always I never understand when people ask that question because you can't put yourself in somebody's head. I always try to think about ways to react to the situation within your abilities, to the situation within your abilities. But even when I do that, it's still. There may be like six or seven options. I'm guilty of overthinking often, but in your guidance to your business partner, you gave them two options. You did the.

Duncan Gillis: 13:18

It's A or B, it's the same thing. Yeah, exactly that's why I thought it was kind of funny, but it wasn't a trap.

Behzad Rassuli: 13:23

No, no, that's true, I thought it was kind of funny, but it wasn't a trap, no it was more just.

Duncan Gillis: 13:25

Let's think this through together and are we headed in the right direction? And I'm the one I think we both really want to go in the direction we're going. But it's always a good check to look outside and see what the rest of the world is doing, even outside the industry.

Behzad Rassuli: 13:39

If I just like to push on it a little bit. Yeah, you create an A-B situation. You think you even say listen, we're in the A camp, there are only two of us out of 10.

Duncan Gillis: 13:52

These are very successful companies, very successful CEOs Agreed and I'm like whoa yeah, Outside the industry. Obviously I can't talk about it in the industry with competitors.

Behzad Rassuli: 14:05

But again, you know, the premise of this question is that you're kind of in rooms where there are successful CEOs and I kind of characterize the opinion of you in that light. You have a firm belief around A. Are you asking somebody in that moment to prove you wrong by making a strong case for B that you're not seeing, or are you trying to get them to A?

Duncan Gillis: 14:28

In the example I just went through from this morning it was more just, let's think about this together. Private discussion, just the two of us. If I'm in a room and there's some convincing that needs to happen to get everybody on the same page, it might be a different approach.

Behzad Rassuli: 14:43

I got it, so in that moment you're totally open to being wrong with your approach.

Duncan Gillis: 14:48

Yeah, I mean, this is my chief operating officer, john Amio. Right, he's my, he's my partner in this stuff.

Behzad Rassuli: 14:52

Yeah, Got it. Um, so can we just step back, because I I didn't answer your question.

Duncan Gillis: 15:00

I understand that and I want to.

Behzad Rassuli: 15:01

I want to ask it again, because it's so hard for me, as a you know, as a person, to take everything you're saying without knowing just basically everything about you. Yeah, so I'm not from Alabama.

Duncan Gillis: 15:12

Okay, you can tell by my accent. So I grew up in a in a small town in new England, a very small town. It was called the Irish Riviera, a town called situate S? C, s-c-i-t-u-a-t-e Not too many people can spell it and it wasn't a nice way to describe the town. Right, it was the way it was described by some of the old-time Bostonians because, you know, in the old days the Irish were the immigrants coming in. We talk about. You know other ethnicities who are coming into the country. Now In those days the Irish were the ones coming in and so they put them all down in this little town and called it the Irish Riviera and that's where they all congregated. But it was a nice town.

Duncan Gillis: 16:01

My mother was a secretary. She was with the school system and then at the little town hall there, then never went to university. She started out as secretary at a company called Polaroid, which was a startup in those days. When she was there she was a secretary to the CEO and to the chief technology officer. She had fond memories of that but she ended up, you know, leaving when she became pregnant with me.

Duncan Gillis: 16:27

My father was a salesman. He sold heating equipment, didn't really work very hard but was always at all my different athletic events and pretty supportive of that and sort of reliving his youth through, you know, through all the stuff I was doing as well. But he was pretty tough on me as well, right, he was very demanding and critical at times as well. My mother was more intellectually encouraging, I would say. So I grew up in this little town, didn't have any money, you know, we were sort of on the other side of the tracks and you know I wanted to go to university. I was doing pretty well academically, got a scholarship to a local private high school because of academics and athletics, and my parents said, well, you know, there's no money. So you know you need to get an appointment to a military academy or go to local community college, right, get a technical degree or something. And I said, which is you know code, for you know working on a CNC machine, right, which would have been fine. And I said okay. So I applied, as I said earlier, and wanted to fly, and that didn't work out. And then I applied for a scholarship with the Army and at the time, you know the Reagan buildup was going on. Relative to the Soviet Union that we were talking about earlier. This was a Cold War and so they were investing in young officers and so you could. It was pretty hard but you could get a scholarship, a four-year scholarship, which included a stipend of $100 a month and it paid for your books as well and all your tuition. And in exchange for that you committed to four years of active duty service and then two years in the reserves. And so I applied for that and ended up getting that in October of my junior year of high school.

Duncan Gillis: 18:32

So then I went on to start applying to programs that, or schools that had the ROTC program and that used that scholarship. You know I grew up in New England, so you know if you really wanted to do anything in life, you had to get into an Ivy League school. That's changed a lot and I've learned a lot about that as I've lived in other parts of the country, but you're sort of brainwashed in New England in that direction. And so I applied to a bunch of Ivy League, uh, did all the army stuff and uh then and studied and studied business there. And then, uh, I guess my junior year I had to make a decision Do I want to keep the scholarship and continue on, or do I want to give up the scholarship and and uh, just, you know live a civilian life? The reality is there wasn't an option for me. So, you know, I said I'm in.

Duncan Gillis: 19:32

They sent me down to Fort Bragg over the summer and I did some training there, and then to Fort Benning and went to airborne school and jumped out of airplanes and started really getting into it. And then the people who are running the program said to me you know, we really think you could have a great career in the military and you should approach it like a career. And therefore, you know, you got to go in the infantry right, which is the sharp end, there's the guys who do the fighting. The mission is to, you know, to take, take territory, destroy the enemy and take territory, and that's what the infantry does. And so I said, okay, I'm in. And that was sort of the beginning of my life and how things worked out. I met my wife in college, proposed to her on the day we graduated and I got commissioned, since I had a job. I did it in front of 200 people on one knee.

Behzad Rassuli: 20:29

She said yes it was pretty funny.

Duncan Gillis: 20:31

Yeah, I was a little concerned, yeah, uh, and then we went off and had our life Did your, was your father in the military. He was, yeah, he got drafted. He was, uh, uh, enlisted. He was I. He got drafted, he was enlisted. I think he got out as a corporal. There was a history of service. I had an uncle who was a ranger in World War II, which is when it was all formed. He was in the 6th Battalion and he was 19 years old and was killed in Italy after the invasion of Sicily. And then I had another uncle who was a green beret, special operations. He fought in the V, he fought in the Korean war and the Vietnam war.

Behzad Rassuli: 21:12

Do these inspire you to go into the military too, or was it more just like? You know I want to go the Ivy league route but I also, you know, can do the military because I have family that's done this.

Duncan Gillis: 21:23

So there was an element of service and there was a bigger element of economics. When people tell me I can't do something, it gets me pretty fired up. And so my parents telling me, hey, you're not going to be able to go to school. I want to demonstrate I could figure it out and I did it. Why?

Behzad Rassuli: 21:47

Like what? Why did you? You know, neither one of your parents went to college, right and so, but your rebellious path was to go to an Ivy League school. Like where did that?

Duncan Gillis: 22:01

come from. Yeah, it was just at the time, it was just inside of me something that I, I just had this, uh, you know, driving ambition, a little bit of a. You know, some people have a chip on their shoulder. I probably had a boulder on my shoulder right, uh, saying that uh, you know, tell me what I can't do and I'll prove you wrong.

Behzad Rassuli: 22:22

Did you have a? Did you have any siblings? I had one brother, uh huh, Yep. Um, did you guys get along or was that kind of like? You know, you just constantly pushed each other to to be better and prove each other wrong.

Duncan Gillis: 22:37

So we're very, very different, very, very different people, um, look different, look different, different ambition, different intellect, different, socially different, everything. And growing up, just sort of that's just how I thought people were, and then this is a longer story but in 2017, my mother passed away. I'm sorry, that's okay.

Duncan Gillis: 23:05

And when she passed away, we learned that she had been protecting my father who had dementia, and he had pretty severe dementia. So she passes away. My brother says, okay, I'll keep an eye on them. They're all up in New England. And he does it for a couple of months and then he just gets fed up and walks out one day. It's really difficult and I'm the guy responsible for legally responsible, and so you know, they find him wandering around because he's still living at home and I said, okay, this isn't going to work, so we have to figure out a different solution. And we end up putting him in a memory care facility up there. And then the pandemic hits and I said, well, this doesn't work, I can't get up there, no one's going to see him, he's just there. So we bring him down here to Alabama and he passed away sort of in the depths of the pandemic, like May 2020, a week after my first grandson was born. Oh my God.

Behzad Rassuli: 24:13

I'm so sorry.

Duncan Gillis: 24:14

Think about that emotional rollercoaster right, your first grandson's born during the pandemic. You're trying to go see him, right, and then you're rushing back where it's hard to travel to go say goodbye to your father. So that was pretty amazing. Uh, so he had it. We couldn't bury him because it was a pandemic and he's down here and he wants to. You know he wanted to be buried with my mother up in New England. So uh, had him cremated. And then in July, uh, we went and had our little family thing and put the ashes in, you know, in with her. We're coming back from that and I said, and it just kind of hit me, I don't know what drove it, it just kind of hit me. I said, you know, I'm not sure he was really my father. And my oldest son says to me I know it's kind of weird, right, it's just, sometimes this is how my brain works, sometimes things just pop into my mind, just popped into my, because you know we look different.

Duncan Gillis: 25:12

My brother is different. I'm different than all my cousins on that side of the family.

Behzad Rassuli: 25:16

This is in 2020, though this is in 2020 this is not after you passed away, you have a whole life to figure out a whole life in between there, right, just never occurred to me.

Duncan Gillis: 25:26

And it pops in and my oldest son says who's a computer science guy, big tech guy? He says he laughed and he goes well, just take a DNA test. So they're all up there in New England. I come back here to go to work and I said maybe I'll do that. So I took two tests. I took one with 23andMe and one with Ancestry and they both came back and said your Ancestry was not what I thought it was. Did your brother do one? And then I had my brother do it and it turns out he was my half brother. I had my sons do it. They're both my sons. So that was good, okay. But it turns out that my um, my mother, had had an affair with, with another man and I was the outcome of that. And so you think about it from from my father's standpoint. Right, he had to raise me knowing, and so that created some of the tension that we had growing up. And then it also for me. It says okay, so you know who's the guy.

Behzad Rassuli: 26:34

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to stop you right now. What, yeah? So you didn't find this out from your mom or your dad?

Duncan Gillis: 26:42

This was never addressed, no, that generation didn't talk about this stuff, right? They held this their whole life. This is sort of. I found out afterwards the fact this is documented right. It's called the NEP, not expected parent. That came out once these DNA tests became more mainstream.

Behzad Rassuli: 27:00

Wow. So you're like.

Duncan Gillis: 27:01

There's a community of people.

Behzad Rassuli: 27:02

There's a community yeah, since these DNA tests come out like you're not alone in this, no is. Are there like online forums about like wow?

Duncan Gillis: 27:10

just learned. I'm not from my two parents. I don't do a lot of online forums. I just looked it up and learned the term. I can't, I'm sorry so, um, I wasn't looking for support, I was just trying to figure out. Wow, this is interesting, okay, uh a little shocking.

Behzad Rassuli: 27:22

So mom was. You said she was at Polaroid at the time. Yeah, In Boston Were your parents married at the time.

Duncan Gillis: 27:31

Yeah, yeah, they got married in 56 and I was born in 63. 19, that is.

Behzad Rassuli: 27:44

So does your brother now know that you're my half brother.

Duncan Gillis: 27:48

Yeah, we laugh about it. Yeah, we laugh. I mean it's, it's all you know. We were, we were, the outcome right, it's all history how did your wife react to finding out?

Behzad Rassuli: 27:58

She laughed too, because she's kind of with a different person now overnight, right.

Duncan Gillis: 28:03

Uh, same person, Just as she said. Her view was same person, right? Just you know, you have these new facts, but so what?

Behzad Rassuli: 28:09

Well, what were some of the new facts? I mean, I'm sorry, there's so many implications of this. Like when you talk about your health background, you know, like at a doctor's office.

Duncan Gillis: 28:21

Yeah, everything that I thought was my. You know the history of my health and you know how were your parents and did they have this disease or that disease? For 50% it's accurate. For the other 50% it wasn't accurate. So that's what, really, what drove me to figure out, okay, who was my birth father?

Behzad Rassuli: 28:39

It just makes me think that, like a lot of longevity research and mortality, research is totally skewed, because sometimes the data, the input data, is just wrong. You don't know who you are.

Duncan Gillis: 28:50

I mean like you don't know you don't know your genetic, you don't know the source. You know your genetic background. You don't know the implications of that with your, with your parent, but you had the you, you had the DNA still. So in my case, for instance, you know I was, I grew up, my father was, his family came from Scotland and they were persecuted Catholics who moved to by the Brits who moved to Nova Scotia, canada and then came down the coast into England, and my mother's family came from Ireland.

Behzad Rassuli: 29:25

This is your father, the one who raised you.

Duncan Gillis: 29:27

The one who raised me and my mother came from. Her family came from Ireland, persecuted by the Brits as well during the potato famine, and they emigrated to the US. And so I was always told you know, you're Scottish and Irish, which is kind of an American thing, right, with your background. You said you know I'm Iranian. Right, that's how you identified yourself, right? Not I'm American, right, I'm Iranian.

Duncan Gillis: 29:51

My family came from Iran and so the Scottish part wasn't true. I was think about that. Being raised Irish Catholic and finding out you're you're half Jewish in your DNA in your dna, so your, your kids, learned that they're how many kids.

Behzad Rassuli: 30:30

You have two boys, so they learned that they're quarter jewish. Yeah, uh, okay, sorry but they're the same people they were before maybe we cut some of this out later, but I just have to go down some tangents here. So do they? I mean, did you ever look up, uh, who you did you ever try to find? How do you find out who your father is?

Duncan Gillis: 30:48

Yeah, so I did a lot of work on that and I did it several different ways. My mother always spoke about her days at Polaroid, Always kept all her mementos from her days at Polaroid, and she stopped working there after she became pregnant In something like 2006,. I was in Singapore working and she called me and she said so-and-so that I used to work for, passed away and left me some money in his will and I was like, oh, that's nice, Wow, that's really amazing. And then, after all this happened, I thought about it and I said, who does that? I mean, what senior executive you know who worked with someone in the 60s passes away in 06 and leaves her money? Who does that? So that that sort of.

Duncan Gillis: 31:48

Finally, I started putting some connecting some dots. Uh, and then I what I did is I got a whole bunch of books about Polaroid. There's a lot there about the company. It was pretty amazing company back in the day. It was founded by a guy named Edwin land um who was a mentor, the mentor to Steve Jobs, and he's the guy. Steve Jobs was all about finding the intersection of the humanities and science right, and that's how he thought about the Macintosh computer, for instance, which you may not know what that is. Of course I know what the Macintosh is.

Behzad Rassuli: 32:25

I was raised on the Apple IIgs doing the number crunchers.

Duncan Gillis: 32:28

Okay, so you know. So he was all about that. You know, he was really into calligraphy and that's where all the fonts came from and all kind of changing the way you think about computing. Well, ed Land was the one who was doing that in advance of him and sort of mentored him on all that Um, and he did it through Polaroid, which was, you know, the. He was an inventor, he's an inventor.

Behzad Rassuli: 32:54

He had, I think, over 500 patents.

Duncan Gillis: 33:07

He was a big, big inventor, kind of Thomas Edison kite type inventor, um, including digital photography, which you know everybody takes advantage of today.

Duncan Gillis: 33:18

But they held it back because they would have destroyed their business model back in those days. So I read a lot about Polaroid destroyed their business model back in those days. So I read a lot about Polaroid, learned a lot, you know. And then I also sort of traced the relatives that you can do through these DNA companies, right, and so you can look at some of the last names and from there you can start to figure out on that side of the family who things are. And so I was able to trace back the name of my birth father. And then I did some online research because he was actually pretty well known and there was a like a 200 page document that had been written in by someone who was doing an oral history of him for the industry, some guy out of the University of Pennsylvania, and so I got a lot of information about him professionally and personally, and then I got some photos and that's when I kind of realized that you know what had happened. Did you look like him?

Behzad Rassuli: 34:30

I had photos from his 40s.

Duncan Gillis: 34:30

Yes, okay, yeah, so it was pretty clear. I mean the dna we're I was related to you know, people in his family and all of that.

Duncan Gillis: 34:37

so it was very clear, um, and when I looked at his traits, you know, strong intellect, intellectually curious, a lot of drive, a lot of ambition, had experienced some decent success, adventurous. And so I said, okay, now at least I know where all this came from, Because it didn't come from you know the way I grew up to your point right, when did it all come from? That's at least the genetic part of it.

Behzad Rassuli: 35:18

So you know who your genetic father is.

Duncan Gillis: 35:22

Yes, I never met the man. He passed away away obviously in 2006 he was an executive at polaroid.

Duncan Gillis: 35:29

Yeah, do you know his name yeah, I'd rather not say it though, because, uh, you know, one of the things, one of the choices I made was to not reach out to any of his family. Right, I don't want to disrupt their family. Um, oh, oh, yeah, cause they don't know. They don't know, yeah, and why do you want to? And you know, you really want to learn that your father, you know, had an affair in the sixties, or you know you were.

Behzad Rassuli: 35:52

you don't want to really talk about my God, but part of you. They're probably all pilots and like the, I mean I yeah, I, they aren't.

Duncan Gillis: 36:03

I looked up enough to know they aren't, but they're all professionals, very well educated, very intelligent, doing well in life. Those that I could learn some information about.

Behzad Rassuli: 36:13

Okay, so the, but this person, without identifying them, I also don't know their financial situation.

Duncan Gillis: 36:18

I don't want them, you know, sort of okay, that's fair, Totally for financial support.

Behzad Rassuli: 36:22

That makes a lot of sense so, but this person is documented and obviously you know successful enough and impactful enough that people study he was he was in government, he was in business, he was startups, mature businesses.

Duncan Gillis: 36:43

He was quite out there and you learned this in 2020 yeah, I knew you in 2020. Yeah, I wasn't, I mean so my family was aware and I told a few people, but you know it didn't. It doesn't come up in normal conversation, since you're asking me about it.

Behzad Rassuli: 37:00

I'm sure I know, but I can't get off this.

Duncan Gillis: 37:02

I'm sorry, but because, like you're, sure you don't want to talk about terror power.

Behzad Rassuli: 37:06

I do want to talk about terror power, and we'll get to terror power eventually. I'm sure this has to do with terror power, but I would be two different people on 2019 and then 2021. I would just, I mean, I obviously you probably did all the work. You probably had so many questions, but you probably I mean you did a little bit of it probably explained so much of who you are, and I mean I'll just play out like a scenario that that struck me. You defined yourself as somebody who kind of has a boulder on your shoulder and you, when you're told you can't do something, has a boulder on your shoulder and you, when you're told you can't do something, you do it around the company.

Duncan Gillis: 38:23

We call it achieving the impossible right. When you're told you can't do something, you double down on trying to do it okay, so let's transition into that.

Behzad Rassuli: 38:31

But you may not have had that context if your world was different. You may may have if you were raised by. Theoretically, there's a world where you're raised by your your genetic father Could have been and he tells you you can do everything. And lots of advantages, a lot of advantages, things given to me.

Duncan Gillis: 38:53

Oh yeah, whole different scenario. Yeah, that's the, that's the sort of the nurture part, right?

Behzad Rassuli: 38:58

So are you. So I mean you're, yeah, we're all a function of both right it's nurture and nature it's both, which ones for you are the nature side and which ones for you are the nurture side, like which the nature is, you know, I think it's the ambition.

Duncan Gillis: 39:12

You know some of the intellectual curiosity, but the the the drive to prove that I can do things when people tell me I can't do it right, you can't go to college, you can't afford it I figured it out. There's no way you're going to get into Ivy League school. I figured that out. You know you're not tough enough to be a ranger Kind of proved I could do that professionally. You know you're not smart enough to go work at McKinsey. Well, got a good job there, had a good time there four years, did pretty well there. Joined UTC and you know you don't have the right background to be a general manager here Went to Asia, made that leap and ended up being president of Asia Pacific for carrier air conditioning. So it was successful doing that. You know, throughout my life it's been telling me things I can't do and then we go do them.

Behzad Rassuli: 40:07

So, and that's what we're doing with TerraPower. Let's okay, let's get back. Let's get back on track and get to TerraPower, and thank you for sharing that with me. I really appreciate that. And I know that that was personal for you.

Duncan Gillis: 40:17

It's all right.

Behzad Rassuli: 40:18

And if I reacted too, too?

Duncan Gillis: 40:22

intense. The shock, the shock factor, please forgive me.

Behzad Rassuli: 40:29

So you were in the ROTC program at Cornell and you went to the Ranger School?

Duncan Gillis: 40:36

Yeah, did you, and you got your MBA I went back to cornell after I got off active duty so I got commissioned, went down to fort benning, did my training, went through the ranger course. Uh, lost 40 pounds in the ranger course. It was unbelievable, it was really intense. Um did that and uh, that was required to go to my first posting, which was a conversion to what was called a rapid reaction brigade or a light infantry brigade in Hawaii where you would deploy you know, there's no wars in Hawaii, so you deploy all over the place, went to there and deployed you know a couple of times to Korea. That was know, same stuff that's going on today with South Korea, north Korea, deployed to northern Japan. We were in December or February. We were with the special ops group and we were practicing joint exercises with the what's called the ground self-defense force. The Japanese aren't allowed to have an army following World War II, but they can have ground self-defense force. The Japanese aren't allowed to have an army following World War II, but they can have a self-defense force. And we were practicing repelling the Soviets because if they were going to attack they would come in through the north, through Siberia, come over and go into Japan that way, and so we were up in the mountains on skis practicing warfare, with them Deployed down to Panama.

Duncan Gillis: 42:03

Back in those days there was a guy running Panama named Noriega. He was a bad guy. He was, you know, helping move the drug of choice. Today it's fentanyl. Back then the drug of choice was cocaine and he was believed to be, you know, a major enabler of cocaine coming from Colombia into the United States. He had started, we owned the canal back then. It's kind of funny, right with all this drama around the Panama Canal. Back then we owned the canal and so we had an airborne brigade in the canal and some Navy guys and one of the Naval officers had gotten picked up and beat up by the Panamanian forces and so we were sent down as a show of force to sort of send a message to the guy, and we spent 30 days going through the jungle operations training center. So the Panama jungle is kind of nasty.

Behzad Rassuli: 42:54

I can't imagine.

Duncan Gillis: 42:54

And we spent 30 days training and then we came back and that was sort of the end of my my uh commitment, Uh, but then, and so I went back to Cornell then and got my MBA and sort of retooled to go start my business career, Uh, and during that time we then invaded Panama and, you know, captured and put them in prison. So when you, when, you were in school when I was in school.

Behzad Rassuli: 43:17

yeah, Did you did you kind of wish you were in the military, or you're kind of happy you didn't have to go risk that.

Duncan Gillis: 43:23

Yeah, so when you're training in the military, you're training for the real world. You want to kind of be able at some point to use the skills you're practicing for. Yeah, in my case in 1989, the wall came down, the Berlin Wall, and so Francis Fukuyama wrote an interesting essay once about the end of history. Right, the fall of the Soviet Union was the end of history, which didn't really turn out to be the case, but it was intriguing Economically.

Duncan Gillis: 43:53

The belief then was that there was going to be a peace dividend, which was code, for military is going to be downsized dramatically. We're going to take that money and put it into the economy. So I didn't really see a future in the military and so I made the decision to go back and get my MBA, and a bunch of us did at the time and a lot of the guys I worked with ended up being, you know, very successful business people, a lot of people I was in the in the army with, specifically in in my unit in Hawaii. Um, so went ahead and did that and, uh, you know, rest is history.

Behzad Rassuli: 44:31

When you're um throughout your business career which. I want to just double click into some of the phases. Uh, does military strategy and vernacular show up a lot. Like you know, we need cover fire over here. Or you know, let's fire some.

Duncan Gillis: 44:46

I don't think so. The people I work with think so.

Behzad Rassuli: 44:50

Well, I will you communicate in military time, so I'll just give you that one. I do that.

Duncan Gillis: 44:54

Yeah, that's that's makes it easier, you have to do you have to write an AM or a PM. Yeah, sufficiency, that makes it easier, so you don't have to do. You don't have to write an AM or a PM. Yeah, it's efficiency.

Behzad Rassuli: 45:02

I do have to do math when you do that, though. Right after you got your MBA, what did you? What was your? Do MBAs have a focus right Like what was your focus on the MBA?

Duncan Gillis: 45:13

Kind of finance and accounting. More analytical stuff, Some some analytical marketing as well. More analytical stuff, Some analytical marketing as well. I spent my summer at Merrill Lynch in New York in investment banking when I was getting my MBA. That was the days when you know it was all about investment banking. That's where everyone wanted to be. Private equity didn't even exist at the time. Yeah, and did that and decided there's no way, I want to do this.

Behzad Rassuli: 45:49

I was driving a spreadsheet, I want to be a leader of people and building a business, and all of that thing that really stuck with me. He said he got advice in his youth to go study accounting but not be an accountant. He said accounting is probably the most useful skill you can have in business. And would you kind of concur with that? Or I mean, would you encourage people to go the accounting and finance route?

Duncan Gillis: 46:14

So so I took, you know, basic, intermediate and advanced accounting at Cornell and it has helped me a lot. So I absolutely encourage people to deeply understand accounting and for those who really love it, if you want to go into accounting, go ahead and you want to stay in it, go ahead. If not, go do something else afterwards. But it's a great basic skill. But if I had to do it again, I would have I would have majored in psychology, because you know the leadership part. There's all the technical skills in business, but it's really about leadership and your part, about inspiring people, motivating people right, and so you know, determining how to do that and how to be authentic and work with people and the psychology involved in that is absolutely critical psychological skills that are important in terms of understanding who you're negotiating with or, in my case, a lot of times I'm negotiating through other people in the company, with a customer or with a company we're buying, or with a supplier, and it's figuring out how to manage that as well.

Behzad Rassuli: 47:34

It's. I'm so happy you said that, because I walk around just thinking that everything is a psychology problem. It's just like I'm just psychologically forward and in negotiations there are always like terms and some objectives and money or whatever it is. At the end of the day, I always feel like I'm solving for an unspoken fear of the other person. Somebody has something that they don't want to happen, or they're worried about, or they'll look like, or people will think of them, and so I just push the documents aside and I try to figure that out. And when you solve that, then the rest is like oh, we're just doing business, Right? Yeah, I'm really happy you said that.

Duncan Gillis: 48:18

Um, so uh, I wouldn't do it to make you happy. But that's sort of. You know what I believe, what I've learned all this gray hair.

Behzad Rassuli: 48:28

Thanks for doing it.

Duncan Gillis: 48:29

anyways, I'm glad I made you happy. Well, now I can walk around and telling people you know, not just I think that way, but Duncan said so too. That may or may not help you Remember. Remember all those people who've been telling me I'm a bastard for all. These years are right.

Behzad Rassuli: 48:43

Oh, my God, I want to, I so want to not keep going back to that but I, I can't help it. Yeah, so OK. So what was your first job after you got your MBA?

Duncan Gillis: 48:56

I thought you're going to ask my first job ever, which was a paperboy cutting grass and paperboy at seven or eight years old.

Behzad Rassuli: 49:03

I obviously didn't want to know about that, but for the sake of time, it's probably more relevant, I was washing dishes in a restaurant at 14.

Behzad Rassuli: 49:08

I wasn't even legally able to supposed to be working. I was. I was feeling divots on a golf course when I was like 15 also and I always like to bring that up with my younger nephews and or younger cousins and tell them, like you know, when I was your age or. But honestly, like the feeling divots I don't like if I tried to pull that on my team, like oh, you don't understand, like I was on a golf course at three o'clock in the morning but I don't know how effective it would be.

Duncan Gillis: 49:36

No one cares.

Behzad Rassuli: 49:47

Yeah so, but more kind of like. I always find the more formative phase of somebody's career is like as soon as you get out of, kind of like college or in your case it'd be you getting your master's, like the, your first real world job. Years is a little bit different, because you were in the military, but like your first corporate job.

Duncan Gillis: 49:58

Yeah, so. So I told you, I, you, I did the thing at Merrill Lynch, right, which I just didn't like, yeah, so I went back, you know, from my second year of graduate school and I said, okay, I got to retool. And Procter Gamble reached out to me and said, you know, we really love ex-military guys. And I was like I'm marketing I don't know. And they said, no, it's all about products and customers and brands, and then that's what drives business. If you really want to learn business, you go to Procter and Gamble. It's going to be like getting a PhD. So I went to Cincinnati. I first they came up and I met the, uh, the interviewer, and he was a guy named Chip Berg, and Chip had been in the military as well. I've been in the army. You remember the interviewer's name? Oh yeah, chip. Chip ended up, uh, being the CEO of Levi's.

Behzad Rassuli: 50:53

Oh, okay.

Duncan Gillis: 50:54

There's people throughout my career who've just done incredible stuff. Um so career who have just done incredible stuff. Um so Chip ended up being the CEO of Levi's. He ran, uh Gillette for a while. After PNG bought that, integrated that in and he said, uh. He said you know, you just got to understand. If you want to learn business, this is where you start. He said this is what I did, this is where you start and you're going to learn business. And he was absolutely right. It was a PhD in business. I was the. I got the job moved to Cincinnati. Morgan really didn't like Cincinnati, but you know she was from Hong Kong, right, so for her it was a lot.

Behzad Rassuli: 51:30

Midwest big change.

Duncan Gillis: 51:31

She wanted to go to New York. Right, I want to go to New York, and uh, so I did that and ended up being the brand manager of Hawaiian Punch, which was losing money, and I really liked the business side of it.

Behzad Rassuli: 51:46

Was this when it was like the you want a Hawaiian Punch, sure. Or was it when they had the big, like I'm thinking Kool-Aid? No, sorry, go ahead, no, this was yeah, do you want to?

Duncan Gillis: 51:54

how would you like a nice Hawaiian Punch? Yeah, Very violent yeah yeah, but kind of fun.

Behzad Rassuli: 51:58

I know it was much more violent time back then.

Duncan Gillis: 52:05

Kind of more fun. I had young kids right, so bringing you know tchotchkes home with Hawaiian punch stuff and letting them drink sugar water. We also had another brand at the time, sister brand called Sunny Delight, which was super popular it was kicking butt.

Duncan Gillis: 52:14

So it was doing great making all this money and we were losing money and it was a big turnaround. And they're like, okay, you know we're going to give you the tough assignment. You got to figure out how to turn this thing around and you have a business team, your brand, people report to you and the rest are just, you know, you're the hub and the spokes and that's a model. And, uh, you know, long story short, we ended up making a profitable turn it around, um, convincing the company to make some investments in it. And I just learned a ton about business. Worked for a guy named Mike Griffith who ended up being the number two guy at EA. Electronic Arts, which is a gaming company, did really well there.

Duncan Gillis: 52:56

So I just worked with some super talented people very fun and my reward for that was a bigger business, billion dollar business. You're going to be we would like you to be the brand manager of Charmin toilet paper. It was a big promotion. I was like, okay, so there's really not a lot of marketing to toilet paper, it's a lot about pricing and costs. And you know P&G was vertically integrated. So you had a factory in Mahoupany, pennsylvania. You had wood going in. You know, timber going in one side and toilet paper coming out the other side, and I was like, well, I'm not sure I want to do that and the focus groups are just not going to be that fun.

Behzad Rassuli: 53:48

Right.

Duncan Gillis: 53:50

So I said okay, I'm not going to get into bathroom humor. But I said okay, and at the same time, uh, a guy had been worked within the army. A guy named Tony Guzzi, who ended up being still a very successful CEO, said, you know, we served together. He was a year behind me in Hawaii. We were very close friends. He went to Harvard Business School, I went to Cornell and then he went to McKinsey and I said, okay, well, I really don't want to be a consultant.

Behzad Rassuli: 54:22

Can you just for a second step into? You know the plane, because we're. It was just unavoidable that we're surrounded by them. You know you. You wanted to be a pilot. Uh, you wanted to be in the air force, uh, originally.

Duncan Gillis: 54:36

I wanted to be a pilot and the air force was a way to go to college and then do all that stuff.

Behzad Rassuli: 54:42

Yeah, and then obviously so it didn't work out your vision wasn't up to the military standard, but so you pursued it anyways. And so now is it like a hobby for you, or is it? You know? Do you integrate into your business, like I know that you fly to our board meetings, but how important is it? So um?

Duncan Gillis: 55:00

the. The plane is a tool, right, and it's it's a time machine for me. It it, I can get from point A to point B very, very efficiently, which then allows me to spend more time on the business. Um, it's not a hobby. Uh, because you have to maintain proficiency or you'll kill yourself or kill other people. You know it's super dangerous. But if you do it appropriately, you train appropriately, you maintain your proficiency, you make good, you know aeronautical decisions, you can do it safely and that's always my goal. The economics are difficult, right, in terms of, for a hobby they would be very difficult. So I think about it as just another investment in my company. I'm heavily invested in my company. My wife and I are by maintaining the airplane and maintaining my proficiency at my own expense and then using it to support my role as the CEO of the company. So, customers, suppliers, factories my factories are in a lot of hard-to-get-to places and I live in a hard-to-get-to place, so that's how I think about it.

Behzad Rassuli: 56:21

That's what it's done for me. Yeah, so it wasn't you know. Uh, you're taking your kind of gap work here and thinking that you're just going to get a plane and fly around the world. It's more like this is you know, the? The next business is? I'm going to have this as my tool for? Yeah, it wasn't that well thought through it was.

Duncan Gillis: 56:41

It was take the gap year, do something you always wanted to do, Um. My first plane was, you know it was more like this one over here, this blue and white one um, which is doesn't give me quite the same flexibility to get everywhere I need to get to, regardless of of weather and time and all that stuff. It's not quite as fast, doesn't go as high. So I actually reinvested in the in the red and white one um, as a tool. That was a conscious decision. After I became more proficient as a pilot, I then said, okay, now I'm going to really turn this into a tool, and that was in 2020 as well. 2020 was a big year, yeah.

Behzad Rassuli: 57:25

A lot going on. Yeah, any one of those things is like a lifetime year for a one person, especially your first grandson. Yeah, I'm not there yet, but I'm not at the plane yet either.

Duncan Gillis: 57:36

I suppose I've also inspired others to take gap years, by the way, have you? Yeah, and they've. They've actually. What's your pitch At the end of their gap year? They've written and thanked me publicly on, you know, linkedin or Facebook or whatever those social media. I'm not huge on social media, but, um, they've done that. It was like super cool.

Behzad Rassuli: 57:57

How do you know when they're ready? I feel ready right now for the pitch. So if you can just pitch me on my gap year, is now my time or should I? Just when do I know it's my time for a gap year?

Duncan Gillis: 58:06

Yeah, You're probably a little early for your gap year. I know you might feel like it, you're. You're still sort of uh, earning your way there, but it's um after you've achieved. You know some of the success you want to achieve. But before you start thinking about you, know seriously about you know the next phase of your life. You're better off taking that gap year while you still have your health and you have. You know some more things you want to do and you're able to do them. You go do them. Then you go back to work and what I find, and what some have found, is they're more energized at work and they want to work longer. Right, because they're not now saying I can't wait till I retire so I can do X, y and Z. They already did it.

Behzad Rassuli: 58:56

You had a taste of the retirement.

Duncan Gillis: 58:57

Yeah, tony Huber, a guy I worked with at Procter Gamble and then I recruited into McKinsey when I was there, ended up, you know, running PE portfolio companies. His dream was to do an Ironman and so he took his gap year and trained for and completed an Ironman triathlon, which is a heck of an achievement. Oh, yeah, right, triathlon, which is a heck of an achievement, right? Uh, pj Friedenberg was a, you know, marine recon pilot. You know hardcore different wars. Then he was working for, uh, one of the tech companies helping uh you know, three letter departments of the intelligence community. He quit and ran a fixed-base operator, an FBO, and was the chief pilot for helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for a year and he went back into the tech stuff. Yeah, right, so it's just like, depends what it is you want to do. Yeah, it's super cool. Because then you know he might not be able to do that when he retires. Tony probably is not going to be able to go do a triathlon when he's, you know, 65.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:00:07

That's no small. I trained for an Ironman once and I just over-trained and collapsed two weeks in advance. And I'm happy I did that, because I probably would have drowned on the first swim or something um.

Duncan Gillis: 1:00:19

But when you finished it, he writes it on his profile it's a real achievement iron man, complete, you know, completed, an iron man it's a real achievement yeah, so it's super cool right um, I imagine a lot of people come to you all the people in my company don't tell me they're gonna go take a gap year after this, so I would prepare for that yeah, I'm just, I'm not saying they're going to but I would just prepare for that, and if you do it, bill Hanvey is going to be pretty unhappy with me.

Duncan Gillis: 1:00:43

So you're not quite ready yet.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:00:45

I'll say you know, let's just assume he doesn't watch this. And I'll say it didn't come from you. How's that? So you mentioned McKinsey after Procter Gamble. Can we step back into your?

Duncan Gillis: 1:00:57

career trajectory a little bit.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:00:59

So you were um thinking about doing um.

Duncan Gillis: 1:01:04

I wanted to run businesses. Charmin toilet paper was on the table. Tony Guzzi calls me and says hey, you got to try this consulting thing. I said you gotta be kidding me. I'm, you know, I'm a leader of people. I'm going to run businesses. I don't want to be a consultant. He said you don't understand what it is. This is different. We're in Pittsburgh, it's a startup office and, surprisingly, got the job. I mean, everyone told me I wasn't smart enough and I didn't have the pedigree, so McKinsey in those days.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:01:48

So you love that. You love people telling you that's smart, yeah.

Duncan Gillis: 1:01:51

So, mckinsey, in those days, you know you had to have pedigree, which was code for you needed to go to Harvard business school, right, cornell didn't make the cut and so, just, you know, having done that and then gotten the job, was pretty cool and so I decided to pursue that, and you know it was the right thing to do, because I learned about corporate strategy, you know, not just business unit stuff but corporate strategy and problem solving, and I worked with some really really smart, successful people. I mean, we started out with nine people, this little office, nine new consultants starting out, uh, dave McCormick. And Dave, uh had been at West Point, he was a year behind me. He, you know, was in the Gulf War, uh, got a bronze star, he was in the 82nd Airborne, he was an engineer. And then, uh, you know, I had gone to the Ranger course and he had been like the guy, right, he had gotten the, the award for the best Rangeranger, and all of this Got out, went to the Wilson School, got his PhD in internationalver, just rocketed through the place, ended up leaving, became CEO of a company called Free Markets, which was one of the early or the pioneers in terms of these purchasing platforms that did reverse auctions, right, and really took cost out of companies, sold that off.

Duncan Gillis: 1:03:44

I forget who he sold it to. Might have been SAP and then he would join the government. We used to have these debates. We used to have these serious debates about you know, government versus business, right. And you got all these former military officers and he and another guy named Chris Dugan who was a former SEAL would argue you know, the problem with with the government is, you know, you know the really good people don't want to go into it. I said, yeah, I don't want anything to do with the government, I want to be private sector. So that's a problem. And you know, and we got to change that.

Duncan Gillis: 1:04:17

Dave actually did it. He went back and while I was over in Asia with United Technologies, he was undersecretary of the Treasury for International and then we had the global financial crisis, so he was helping to figure all that out. Left and went and ran a hedge fund called Bridgewater Super successful Ray Dalio's fund yeah, super successful. Ceo of that, which is like this really distinctive, difficult culture, right. Super successful. Ran for senator for Pennsylvania, lost, ran again and won recently. So now he's a freshman senator. I mean, this guy. I hope this guy runs for president next time around. He is the most qualified candidate I could think of in terms of someone to run the company and think about it.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:05:14

I started at McKinsey with this guy, I mean McKinsey, I know that. So I had experience in consulting and in five years, the hardest thing I've done in my professional life. I once a quarter either slept at my desk or just didn't sleep and went the 24 48 hours and it builds, like you know, calluses on it, like psychological calluses, uh, in this, in the same way, training for an Ironman, does you know, like your endurance, for the ability to work, I don't think you do your best work after 40 hours of, you know, no sleep but, um, I think I can understand that experience there. But there's something unique about consulting firms, I think particularly McKinsey, about recruiting. You've said like you didn't go to business school but they find amazing talent from all over and learn and have ways of identifying that talent. Have you taken that with you Doctors?

Duncan Gillis: 1:06:10

physicists. I mean, we had all sorts of different, you know, former military officers, just a really eclectic group of people and some seriously successful people after the fact.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:06:22

Do you, as we get to TerraPower, do you attribute a lot of your kind of career success for, like, how much of it is your experience at McKinsey from an employee's perspective and how much is it observing the culture of that business and the recruitment side of that business?

Duncan Gillis: 1:06:42

Yeah, I think so. First of all, the success we've had at TerraPower is driven by the culture of the company, and we can talk about that whenever you want, but it is really what drives everything at the company. In terms of me personally, you know I've always said a career is a collection of experiences right, and so any success I've had, as in my role at TerraPower, has come from all the different experiences I've had, whether they're in the military, procter Gamble, life experiences, mckinsey, united Technologies and everything I learned there about business, my first two PE portfolio companies, which you know didn't go as well as this one. All of those, the good, the bad, all of it provided lessons that have come together today with you know what we have at TerraPower.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:07:40

I need to learn about your. I know we're we will talk about TerraPower, but I have to learn about the path there more thoroughly to understand the mistakes and lessons that you learned and the successes. Can you just pick two of the most important projects you did at McKinsey that you think gave you kind of a different perspective or a? I can think of that from my experience, but you know so it makes me think about the question for you.

Duncan Gillis: 1:08:06

I'll give two. I'm not going to disclose the client names, if that's okay, just because it's sort of their culture. I want to respect their culture, not because I'm trying to be coy about things, Cause you know people do that sometimes as well.

Duncan Gillis: 1:08:18

So I worked trying to save a major retailer who was competing with Walmart during the late 90s and they were really struggling. They had a high-low pricing strategy. Walmart came in with this very efficient supply chain, everyday low pricing strategy, all these stores going up everywhere. They weren't the Walmart, you see today. They were really just growing at that point and trying to help them figure out how to compete effectively in a very tactical level and the reason I talk about this is because you know, when I work with our retail customers in automotive, all those lessons come back to me. But it's very tactical in terms of how do you lay out a store right, what are the adjacencies? How do you think about profit per square foot or profit per square inch if you really want to get micro Profit per shelf?

Behzad Rassuli: 1:09:16

inch right.

Duncan Gillis: 1:09:17

Per per, yeah, for for vertical and horizontal right. And how do you lay that out? And how do you do it in a way that the shopper is going to buy more and it's going to be convenient for him or her and the basket size is going to grow and the profitability is going to grow. All of that was a lot of lessons, in that we ultimately in the front of the store, and then there was all the supply chain work as well, we ultimately weren't successful and the company was sort of broken up and then sold off. But a lot of good lessons there. So sometimes you learn more in your failures than your successes, and it wasn't necessarily because of the work we did. I'm not sure it was a problem that could be solved just because of the momentum and the model that Walmart had developed, and it's certainly endured.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:10:07

Yeah, there's a whole business school lesson on what Walmart did in itself. So in studying the competition of the client, you're helping. I'm sure you learned a ton about what kind of like formidable operations look like.

Duncan Gillis: 1:10:25

I'll tell you. What I learned about is the value of you know, thinking about the role of a retailer as just a point in the value chain between raw material and the end consumer, and what your role is and how do you optimize that all the way through. How do you work? So when I was at P&G, we were just starting to work with Walmart in dedicated customer teams down in Bentonville, category management was nascent. P&g was at the forefront of that, I was involved in that, and so all of that really taught you. Forefront of that, I was involved in that, and so all of that really taught you how to.

Duncan Gillis: 1:11:03

How do you work with these big customers in order to grow your business and their business productively? You know, by driving in value and taking out costs right, which was a super important set of lessons. And then some of the guys in our industry. It was pretty funny when I got into this industry, you know, I got to know their cultures a little bit and I said, boy, these seem very similar to Walmart. And then I would ask some of the senior executives and they would, you know, share some of the history with Sam Walton, from some of their founders and and sort of the lessons they learned and how they applied them at their own companies.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:11:36

Yeah, I mean, uh, that's just like the the the story of of business history. Right, there are some people that just reinvent a model of some sector of the industry and everything changes from then on. Right Like the history. Uh, the way that business was done is is no longer. I mean, that's, it's innovation, yeah, it's innovation, and there's consolidation around it.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:12:00

I mean it becomes. Sometimes you find a business model that you think of, as you said. You know you bring the supply chain back down from the raw material to the customer and you just think of that whole business rather than your role in the supply chain. You think about the entire supply chain and there are ways that that have that's been solved, that make it almost impossible to compete with right.

Duncan Gillis: 1:12:22

Really tough really, really tough, as I like to tell my my eldest son. You know the, the computer scientist who's starting his own company. You know there's lots of different types of innovation, not just ones and zeros. It's not just about software. I know when you're in in how you grew up, it's all been about software and now it's AI. Right, yeah, but there's lots of different ways to innovate, to win.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:12:48

But that is really. I mean, there's probably a technology change that sparks a lot of new industry. I think of Uber, right, uber could not have existed without the iPhone, right? So you get the iPhone or you get the smartphone, you're able to put kind of like the technology at the point of service, to the point of the customer and have them communicate real time. Never able to do that before, when I was growing up, you had to call for a cab, whatever, like an hour in advance. That was never going to get more efficient, right?

Behzad Rassuli: 1:13:22

Uh, amazon's ability to um, to take retail I mean Walmart's mousetrap was unbelievable, but and and competitive like really, really good competitors tried and failed to compete. And then Amazon came in with a completely new tech layer. They said we're not going to compete head on, we're going to come out from a completely different angle, leverage the technology of today, and I often see that that's how major incumbents get derailed is because they cannot adapt to the technology that is present today. And if you started your business today, it would be completely different. It's so hard to take an old business, a hundred-year-old business, and make it a today business versus starting a today business, you know.

Duncan Gillis: 1:14:11

You certainly need fresh thinking. But there is complacency that goes in, and part of it depends on the business model as well, the ownership structure, the incentives, all of that. But there's certainly that complacency, you see it seeping to certain businesses. But it all comes down to culture as well. Right, the culture is, you know, customer focused, winning healthy paranoia and ambition, but not psychotically ambitious. It can work for your favor, but if it isn't, you sort of end up being roadkill along the way it happens. We see it in our industry.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:14:54

Yeah, I've seen it in the industry, but I've also seen some of your operations specifically. I've seen in the industry, but I've also seen some of your operations specifically. And you know, without revealing too much of your internal processes, you done in some of the businesses in the way that you're doing them, and what I mean by that is BBB. Now TerraPower does remanufacturing, which is now what you call sustainable manufacturing. So that in itself is an innovation we'll talk about. But when I was at the facility, I saw auto parts, as I expected, I saw heavy duty parts, as I expected, but then I saw solar panels, I saw ground up glass, I saw batteries from EVs that are no longer functional and I saw a team of people who had the EVs are no longer functional, not the batteries, I hope.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:16:08

Exactly, the EVs no longer function with the battery. I mean, the battery may have had a problem with it, but what I saw was a group of people who had a childlike giddiness and joy about creating new things out of you know, like basically the equivalent of a kid who takes apart a radio and is like, oh, I wonder how this works, let me see if I can fix it. And I remember asking I was like what are you doing with all this ground up glass? They're like I don't know, but we're going to figure something out. You know, what are you doing with those batteries? And they're like I don't know. But let me show you what we did.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:16:39

And the invention, the inventive spirit, the invention, the creativity that was going on there, uh, really really changed my perspective on. I mean, it didn't change my perspective, it reaffirmed my perspective that we can still invent in this country. And, uh, uh, your business. When I met you, you defined yourself as, or you introduced yourself as, an industrial CEO. You weren't a retailer, I don't run this company. You're like I'm an industrial CEO. Just that one introduction made me think of you, gave me the impression that your worldview is more broad. Right, your worldview is more broad than more broad than a specific industry or a specific. Well, it's a segment industrial technology. But doesn't you didn't say you're an automotive ceo?

Duncan Gillis: 1:17:35

no, I didn't say I was a tech ceo either right, it's just yeah, we make stuff.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:17:41

You make stuff. Make stuff and some of the things that you're going to make?

Duncan Gillis: 1:17:44

We remake stuff, you remake stuff. Yeah, sustainably make stuff now.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:17:49

Okay, well, let's just get into it. I wanted to learn a little bit more about some of your projects at McKinsey and some of your private equity experience leading up to this, but I think and the excitement of this conversation is kind of naturally taking us to what's going on with your company today. So if you can, you know, talk a little bit about the company that you joined, maybe why you joined it, or there was no way you could have envisioned this company being where it is, because of the nature of invention, that it's just a kind of undefined path.

Duncan Gillis: 1:18:36

Okay, um, it's a lot of questions in there, but let me, let me try a little bit chronologically and a little bit of I'll jump around a little bit. Um, so did the gap year right? Got a call saying had a bunch of calls coming throughout the year and just sort of put them on the back burner. Got a call in that fourth quarter saying hey, what did you think about automotive industry in Alabama? I said you got to be kidding me, right? I said no, no, we're serious. We think this would be an interesting one for you. I said well, tell me about the company. Learned a little bit about the company, said you know there's going to be a group of people from the company there, the private equity investors and some of the family members in New York, and would you come down? I was in New Hampshire at the time Would you come down and meet?

Behzad Rassuli: 1:19:30

with them.

Duncan Gillis: 1:19:31

I said, okay, sure, Went to their offices and spent some time with them and met Don Bigler and met Jeff Bigler and learned a lot about you know sort of how both of them thought about business, how they thought about the company, sort of where the company came from, what they thought was needed in the company, and I said it was pretty interesting.

Duncan Gillis: 1:19:56

They told me the company was, you know, between Mobile, alabama, and Pensacola, florida, and I said well, I know nothing about the deep South. I had been, I've lived and worked everywhere. My wife and I at that time moved 18 times throughout our marriage, right, and so we've been all over Hawaii, cincinnati, pittsburgh, singapore, Baltimore, and we've been Chicago, right. And I said okay, so came down and met some of the team and then was invited to see the operations by Jeff and the private equity guys, to see the operations in Reynosa, mexico. And that's really what got me excited, because what Jeff had built there was truly distinctive. I've been in manufacturing a long time built there was truly distinctive. I've been in manufacturing a long time. And what he had built there in terms of one piece flow, lean operations, the ability to deal with you know, in remanufacturing or sustainable manufacturing, every piece of raw material is different and you've got to start with that. And then the magic is how you transform that into something that's as good as OE or better at a much lower cost point. I said, wow, this is a value proposition I can do something with. And these operations are here. We can do something with this. So love the culture, love the people, love the focus on customers that Don Bigler, in particular, instilled in the company, love the excellent operations that Jeff had built and said, wow, I think I can do something. So talked to Morgan. She said I'm game for another adventure. We'll try Alabama. Right, you've gone with me to all these cities. She loves big urban areas. We'll try a more rural area for you.

Duncan Gillis: 1:21:51

We came down here and in the first 90 days I met with the team and I said okay, so let's talk about where we want to take the company. And the company at that point had had several CEOs. There was a CEO who sold the company to the private equity firm, who, you know, left within 90 days. Then there was a search and it was kind of rough. Then the private equity firm took one of the external directors and made him the CEO and he was like on site three days a week. He got really sick and passed away. Don Bigler, you know, leaned in for a while.

Duncan Gillis: 1:22:36

Then the one of the operating partners was coming over from London and trying to run the company and the team was just. You know the the lack of consistent leadership was tough. So they just wanted someone you know, who was committed so I had moved here, I was committed and who, you know, shared their enthusiasm to do something exciting with the company. So we got together, so let's talk about what we want to do with it. I said, let's you know, where do we want to take the company?

Duncan Gillis: 1:23:05

And we're, you know, normal debate, lots of people talking, and I finally said, well, let's talk about where we want to be in 10 years. Oh, 10 years, who knows? And you go through all that drama. I said, well, okay, let's go backwards. Where was the company 10 years ago? Well, they could articulate that very well, right, and here's where it was today. And they said you know, we're four times bigger now than we were 10 years ago. I said, okay, I said so, let's see if we can make it four times bigger than we are today, 10 years from now. Pause, and they laughed me out of the room, right, they said you got it. We were small back then.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:23:46

There's no way we can do this.

Duncan Gillis: 1:23:51

I said, okay, well, let's think about it. And you know this, this goes back to, you know, two things I've been talking about right, tell me something I can't do. And this whole notion of achieving the impossible. Right, tell me a little bit about, uh, you know, edwin land. I talked about him from Polaroid. There was a book, a biography, written on him that said it was called Insisting on the Impossible. Well, I wasn't insisting on it like Edwin Land, who is one of my heroes, by the way but I was. I am into achieving what people tell me is impossible.

Duncan Gillis: 1:24:25

And so, you know, eventually the team came together and said, okay, we'll give it a shot and we're going to try to, you know, quadruple the size of this company in the next 10 years. See what happens. And then we had a strategy and pieces and it's, it's evolved over time. You know we've had a global pandemic and all sorts of you know things happened during that time. We lost, you know, our founder, our you know, really the father of our company, our patriarch, don Bigler. Jeff retired and he's now on our board. But the company's, you know, continued to evolve and continued to grow and it's just been a unbelievably rewarding experience to do that with the people who are here today as well, with the people who are here today, so, as the people who aren't here today, who helped you know, sort of make what it is, make the company what it is.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:25:14

I'm really happy we're having this conversation, specifically because I learned the frame, the phrase, insisting on the impossible. I can take that back to work and now I have language around. Uh, uh, a trait of mine that I, that I that was not defined, but something that I bring to work. So now I can just say I learned it from Duncan and there's a phrase so why did you change the company's name to TerraPower? What does that do for the business?

Duncan Gillis: 1:25:47

What does that do for the business? So there's multiple parts of the answer. When EVs were starting to become a—the belief was they were going to be a bigger part of the business and there was a lot of investment going on we decided that we were going to get into lithium-ion battery sustainable manufacturing, as well as some other components. We also decided we were going to get into solar panel sustainable manufacturing. As part of that whole strategy, our investors at the time was Genstar Capital, and the board asked that we keep that part of the company separate because no one was sure how that was going to evolve. There were all these SPAC deals going on.

Duncan Gillis: 1:26:38

And we said, okay, let's keep our options open, and so we needed to name it something differently. We thought about different names. And then a guy named Tim Roth, who was our head of strategy and M&A and I were talking about it. I said, you know, we got to do something that kind of talks about sustainability but also sounds like, you know, is very different from where we are today. And I said and at the same time I was going through this, you know, kind of innovation, rejuvenate, rejuvenation, uh, because of the whole story I told you about, uh, polaroid and all of that I started throwing out the idea of land right, and he thought I was talking about earth, right, and it was kind of a double entendre.

Duncan Gillis: 1:27:35

It was about the founder of Polaroid who, by the way, is not my biological father, but the founder of Polaroid as well as about our sustainable principles, right, and how that drives our value proposition. And so he took it and ran with it and said, you know, we started doing some brainstorming. And then he took it and worked with our in-house attorney and they came up with some ideas and somehow, between all of us, we ended up with TerraPower as the idea that worked and, you know, we could trademark and all of that, and so we used it for that division of the company for a while. And then, when Clear Lake Capital acquired the company in 2022, we sat down as part of that process and agreed that, you know, the Biglers were moving on and it was probably time to update the name of the company as well, as we thought about where we wanted to take the company, which was, you know, a broader, even broader vision, and so we agreed on that and we started a process. It took us two and a half years.

Duncan Gillis: 1:28:50

We looked at 600 different names, tested them in lots of different research and did it all over the world because we operate in lots of countries. Terra Power came out as the winner in terms of the strongest message, most likable all the different attributes you'd look at and so we landed on Terra Power and brought all that data to the board. The board, you know, rightfully said you're just taking the easy way out because you've been using this name, and we said no. We looked at all these different options and this was the best option and we ended up with TerraPower, and the company has. It was primarily directed internally to bring all these different companies that we acquired together, bring all these different cultures together. It's worked well there and it's worked well externally, at least so far Early innings still. So let me tell you about my other project. In fact, I'm going to tell you about two more projects. Is that okay? Absolutely, Please.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:29:55

All right.

Duncan Gillis: 1:29:56

First one is when I first got to McKinsey I had been working outside the office with other offices a bit and they said why don't you start do a project locally here? I said cool. He said we are going to work with a bunch of different people around Pittsburgh to develop a growth strategy for greater Pittsburgh. Remember, pittsburgh at the time had been coming out of you know, all the steel mills, shutting down stuff, moving to Asia or moving south and moving to Asia. And it was.

Duncan Gillis: 1:30:29

It was a recovering city, it was tough, it was a rust belt, and we got together with University of Pittsburgh, Medical Center, carnegie Mellon, some of the foundations, ceos from the big companies, pnc Bank and HJ Hines, etc. And they all created a steering committee and there was four of us on the team. We broke it up into two work streams economic, business development or business attraction and visitor attraction, because at the same time there was this controversy going on around convention centers and sports stadiums which still goes around in cities, and so we broke it up that way. We went and did all of our work and we came up with a series of recommendations on the business development side. The economic development side, business attraction side, I should say it uh life sciences and technology, and it was leveraging uh UPMC university of Pittsburgh medical center, uh the capabilities of the university of Pittsburgh and then Carnegie Mellon tech capabilities as well. Uh, and today Pittsburgh is a vital center of both of those industries.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:31:51

Yeah, didn't Uber launch their autonomous vehicle program in Pittsburgh?

Duncan Gillis: 1:31:56

In Pittsburgh. Through Carnegie Mellon right, Google and Gates put a bunch of money in for Microsoft.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:32:01

And this is from the work you did with them through McKinsey.

Duncan Gillis: 1:32:04

This resulted afterwards. I mean, I was long gone from the firm at that point, but you can see the thread of the recommendations we've had in the development of the city. You're a consultant, so you put a book together and you say here's what we think you ought to do, and then someone else runs with it. But it can be gratifying to see that it actually gets executed. My problem was I always wanted to. I always thought I could implement better than the people who I was leaving it with, which is why I eventually left consulting. But it was. It's gratifying to see that On the other side, on the visitor attraction side, they built the convention center, which has been fantastic, beautiful, right on the river there, and they built a new stadium for the Steelers, which was very, very controversial.

Duncan Gillis: 1:32:51

But now that whole part, that whole section of Pittsburgh, they got a baseball stadium, football stadium, convention center. It's just been great for the city. And so we had to show the economic benefits of all of that, which is pretty hard to prove right, because there's an economic multiplier effect that occurs with those investments. And you've got municipal dollars and people are saying why are you putting tax dollars in? Why doesn't the Rooney family do it and all of that drama, but it's just been so nice to see how Pittsburgh has come back as a city, and I like to think that our four-man team had a role in that.

Duncan Gillis: 1:33:29

That's amazing, bringing people together, but we didn't implement right. The credit goes to all the people who actually did it after us. Yeah, no, that's true, and it's been 20, almost 30 years now.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:33:41

That's true, but you must, and I'm sure you've been to Pittsburgh or kept in touch with it, but you went back, yeah.

Duncan Gillis: 1:33:48

My son went to Carnegie Mellon my oldest one, so yeah, I mean so, okay.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:33:51

So when you go visit, you must like see the silhouette of your fingerprints on some parts of the city, right, like this was an idea we had.

Duncan Gillis: 1:34:00

It was an idea, right, it was. It was words on a page that people actually turned into buildings and businesses and vitality. The government plays a role, everybody plays a role in having that occur. That's amazing. A lot of entrepreneurs and you offered up a bonus, yeah, so this one is interesting.

Duncan Gillis: 1:34:19

I was working with a global fruit company, right, and this was during, do you remember I'm guessing in my head, won't say it do you do you remember internet 1.0? Right, web, web, web 1.0? Uh, yeah, it would have been. You know, late 90s to 2000, right, just getting started. Yep, and there are all these startup companies.

Duncan Gillis: 1:34:46

Everyone wanted to figure out how do you take advantage of the internet and what are we going to do? And so this company was struggling. They had, you know, basically they were a leader in certain fruits, but what they really had was this they were a logistics company. They had these great, almost like their own Navy right that they had invested in, and they really understood logistics. And so they asked us to come in and do some strategy work for them, and I worked with one of the senior executives who was just, he just thought differently. This is a classic consulting thing where you know you think you're telling the client what the answer is. The reality is, the client already has an idea and they want you to help them figure it out. And we did that.

Duncan Gillis: 1:35:36

And uh, the their idea was super innovative was to say look, you know, fruits have a certain life and they're all part of the cold chain, and so you got to get them to the grocer at a certain point in their life so they can be out there for the end customer.

Duncan Gillis: 1:35:55

And then the trucks are coming back empty. All the big grocers in the country using the McKinsey network and figure out if there was an option to create almost a co-op with this company at the center where the fruits were brought in. And then there was backhaul across the industry to better utilize the trucking right and to use technology to do that. And so my job was to go out and talk to the ceo of, literally you know, all the big grocers in the country, lay out this vision and just gauge their interest in doing something like this. So you had to network into them, you had to have your pitch, you had to lay it out and see what they thought and then bring it back and figure out if we wanted to do it. Ultimately, it was a fantastic idea, but you could never get everyone to want to collaborate on it.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:36:57

Yeah, I know how that goes.

Duncan Gillis: 1:37:02

Yeah, and so it didn't work, but it really inspired me in terms of just thinking differently and trying to think differently about ways to reinvent companies, and if it doesn't work, you find another way. But don't be afraid to try.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:37:18

Reinvent companies, but using their own assets.

Duncan Gillis: 1:37:21

Using their core capability Core capability right. Their core capability wasn't growing fruit, their core capability was in, you know, very sensitive logistics to get the product in and not have a lot of waste.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:37:36

Yeah, so now with TerraPower, you've kind of reimagined what the business could do, thinking of you know, the core capabilities of a business, and diversified it into. You've talked about, like, the electric vehicle future. You've talked about the solar future, um is this hydraulics right?

Duncan Gillis: 1:37:59

Industrial hydraulics? We're in all sorts of stuff now yeah.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:38:02

Are you just at the start or are you kind of like, is this?

Duncan Gillis: 1:38:06

winning, are we in baseball season's coming.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:38:09

Yeah, yeah, I'm always expecting some kind of military analogy right. Like, we're just we're just putting our troops on the beach, or something like that.

Duncan Gillis: 1:38:16

I don't want to do too much military, but it's, it's uh, you know, as I think about the company going forward. Uh, we're, we're about a third of the way there. We're in the third inning and we've got a couple of other identified segments of the economy that we want to help realize the power of sustainable manufacturing and what it can do in terms of a strong value proposition for the end customer and also do some good for civilization as well, and that's important to us. Both are important, and that's really the difference between remanufacturing and sustainable manufacturing. Right, remanufacturing is a subset of sustainable manufacturing because we're always looking for ways to reduce our emissions footprint and reduce what's going into the waste stream, and we do that not just for the betterment of civilization, but to take cost out of the business. We are passionate about taking cost out of the business and I'll tell you you know I'm probably the least good at it among everyone on the team. I got some people on this team that are great at it, really great at it.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:39:30

What do you mean? Taking costs out of the business? It's not like reducing drinks in the in the I mean?

Duncan Gillis: 1:39:36

I mean figuring out how to use more of the core right, the core is the raw material that comes back to use product, how to use more of that right.

Duncan Gillis: 1:39:48

The more of that you use, the less cost material cost you have. That takes serious, serious innovation to figure out. How do you not have to throw something away. So we have these scrap bins in our factories and I got people who are great at going through those scrap bins and then figuring out how do we reuse this? Right, that's the gold. No, no, kidding, that's the gold. They're red scrap bins. Go in there, figure out what's in there and reuse that and bring it back. And it's got to meet the quality standards. Right, it's very important. That's one way.

Duncan Gillis: 1:40:26

The second way is driving labor productivity. Labor rates have gone crazy over the last few years. Whatever country you're in and this is in Europe. We operate in Poland labor rates have gone up there, mexico, us, everywhere. They're going up up. And it's about how do we use lean principles to reduce the number of people that we need in our processes and then reuse those people to help us grow right, the people we don't need. We don't necessarily want to get rid of them. We want to use them over here to help meet additional demand as we continue to grow. Now, if we stop growing, that's going to be fewer jobs for people. So growth is a really important part of our our formula as well.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:41:16

It's interesting that you bring up labor specifically in this arena that you're in, in sustainable manufacturing. It is manufacturing at the end of the day. I mean, you're talking about like turning wrenches, banging out, you know, old core parts and reprocessing them and you know, inventing around them. I said I was inspired by seeing your business and that you have to probably ask then, like, why was I inspired? And you know that means that prior to that I was disheartened. I don't know. I have this sense that American manufacturing is not what it used to be, and maybe that's me just getting older and doing what everyone does and says like, oh, this isn't. You know, and I don't mean to be critical, but I think that everyone is living in the same world. And you look at an unbelievable and unprecedented companies like Boeing, with their safety risks and a lot of their you know the kind of like concerns about the production of their airplanes.

Duncan Gillis: 1:42:36

You look at so let me stop you there. Sure, have you worked in other countries or lived and worked in other countries? I've not lived to work in other countries, so you know the US market. So, having lived and worked in other countries, I've not lived to work in other countries, so you know the US market. So, having lived and worked in other countries, what I like to tell people is the US market is the largest, most competitive market in the world and if you can compete in this market, you can compete anywhere in the world. Point one. Point two If you think about the evolution of manufacturing in the US, what we do here today is amazing. So you talk about recalls. First of all, the American consumer wants it fast, they want it cheap and they want it cheap and they want it the way they want it. That's why I went to the grocery store. I was traveling this week and I ran out of deodorant. I went to look for deodorant. Do you know how many different types of men's deodorant, old spice, has?

Behzad Rassuli: 1:43:45

oh yeah, the my decision anxiety is insane.

Duncan Gillis: 1:43:48

Correct Because we do it? Because the American consumer wants it the way they want it.

Duncan Gillis: 1:43:54

I think there's even organic deodorant If you look at a vehicle, whether it's a vehicle with wings or a vehicle that just has wheels. The complexity in those vehicles is incredible. The number of lines of code, the number of processors is incredible. So, yes, there are recalls. But if you think about the average age of a vehicle today right, 12 years, I mean the quality has gone up incredibly. So, yeah, there are recalls because people are rushing to market to get it to market, because you got to be first it's so competitive and then you got to figure it out from there. That is not a reflection on American manufacturing. American manufacturing is very, very strong, it's forward and America is doing a great job of figuring out how to use innovation to compensate for higher labor costs, which a lot of advanced economies have struggled with. You watch what happens with robotics over the coming years. It is incredible.

Duncan Gillis: 1:45:04

There's an argument to be made that we do a lot more assembly here than actual manufacturing right, so that Yesterday, right Yesterday, talking to the CEO of this company, understanding how he's thinking about tariffs, he invited me to walk around the factory. This is. I was down there for some training anyways, so this was my PTO, so day off. And now I know how I spend my days off learning about airplanes or walking around factories.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:45:44

I don't think you have days off is what it sounds like.

Duncan Gillis: 1:45:46

And this was a very highly vertically integrated factory, right. I mean, they had chunks of metal, different materials there that they were putting through CNC machines, so CNC machines coming out with components that were then going into the aircraft, and they did everything, except for the only thing they bought in was the propeller, the landing gear and the engine. Everything else was vertically integrated. They were doing themselves.

Duncan Gillis: 1:46:13

This was serious, serious manufacturing and this was not a new company, right, so it is very strong here and we do real fabrication. Real fabrication starts with CNC machines and there's, you know, I've run companies. My last company we had probably 300 CNC machines, three or 400. I mean there's a lot all around the world that's real fabrication, it happens.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:46:40

Well, I appreciate you letting me you know, present the challenge and pushing back so with such a full throw of defensive manufacturing, I mean, I think you make a lot of really good points.

Duncan Gillis: 1:46:49

Kat and John Deere are my customers right, serious great manufacturers. Yeah, just great manufacturers. Some of the process industries I worked in my last company, john Crane right, petrochemical facilities, paper mills, I mean just great processes. That's what gives you the products that you have today. We're very good at it. We're running out of labor, we have a labor problem, we're very good at doing this In your defensive manufacturing.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:47:22

right there, I just saw your passion. I saw your energy and I can see how, being on your team, that comes out when you're passionate about something that company should do. Let me convince you why I'm right.

Duncan Gillis: 1:47:37

That's what you just got a full-throated Duncan Gillis. I'm going to convince you why I'm right. Yeah, but it's, but it's you know it is.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:47:44

That's probably the definition of inspiration, right? It's like, if you're, if you're, if I just like a hundred percent disagree with you, I'm just going to disagree with you, but you will have been, you will have presented your best case, but if you make a good enough case, you, what you did is you just jostled out of me an opinion that I didn't have. Right, and that's probably the mostful leadership skill there is is getting someone to think something that they either had an opinion they didn't agree with originally or they never even thought was a possible opinion that they could have. And so you do. I think you do that. Obviously, it's evidence in the business success. And I have one piece of evidence.

Duncan Gillis: 1:48:26

Uh, about two weeks ago. Uh, we had this thing where you had these little post-it notes and you write something nice on it about somebody in the office. Some of the team had put this together. It was around.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:48:39

I don't get those.

Duncan Gillis: 1:48:39

It was around Valentine's I don't know Someone, someone came up with the idea. I love when people come to these little innovative ideas, so they put them in the break rooms and you write something and you post it on their cube or their office or put it on the bulletin board or wherever. And uh, uh, someone came into my office and I was on some video call or whatever knocked and I couldn't, couldn't speak and they just put it up there on the whiteboard and I went over to look at it afterwards and it's still there, because it said, uh, you inspire me, you inspire others. It was just and they signed it and I was just like, wow, this is why I keep working. Right, it was super cool. I mean, that's my only data point that I inspire people, though.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:49:23

I can, I can, I can tell you that, um, I've, I've I don't think I've maybe six years, seven years we've known each other something like that, and sporadic board meetings. But I totally agree with that Every time I speak with you, there's some invigoration or inspiration, and I mean this genuinely. I could probably sit here and talk to you for another four or five hours and, uh, take your plane for a spin, have you sit in the passenger seat while I fly it around and talk to you even more, but, um, I do want to be cognizant of your time.

Duncan Gillis: 1:49:59

I want to thank you so much for spending time with you flying it around. Just have a safety issue.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:50:05

Take a nap, we'll be fine. I'll get us there. I'll wake you up when we're landing.

Duncan Gillis: 1:50:09

Just don't tell my insurance company All right or the. Faa.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:50:13

I really appreciate you spending time with me today. Honestly, I hope that people listen to this and feel the inspiration and motivation that I feel, just like sitting in front of you, and I know that. I've heard from your team and people have been around you. I really appreciate you spending this time with me and can't thank you enough for it.

Duncan Gillis: 1:50:31

Well, thank you for the invitation, thank you for coming down to Alabama, thank you for listening to some of my boring stories. I don't really love talking about myself and telling these stories, but you did a great job, of sort, of getting me to share more than I might've usually so well done, thank you.

Behzad Rassuli: 1:50:48

All right.