Soccer, Mining, and Investing: Ashley Grosh of Breakthrough Energy Fellows

Jesse Reimink: Welcome to PlanetGeo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you.

 As usual we are releasing today, a short clip from our interview with Ashley Gross, who is the vice-president of the breakthrough energy fellows program. Follow us on all the social medias we were @planetgeocast. Send us an email planetgeocast@gmail.com. Hit that like subscribe, follow button on your platform and leave us a review that really helps us out.

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Chris Bolhuis:

Ashley, you live in Denver. And you said before, you really do like the outdoors. I'm going to be in Denver this summer. Actually, we're going to catch a concert at red rocks and we're, going to climb longs peak and then we're heading out to the Tetons for three weeks. Um, just my, my family. So what's your favorite hike, backpack climb, whatever in the Denver

Ashley Grosh: Okay, I'll give you two. So I went to the university of Colorado, go buffs I'm in Boulder. And I do think just this'll be your warmup is you should go to Chautauqua park and the flat irons, and there's a couple of hikes. There's the blue bag. one and two, and it's just a way to get acclimated to the altitude, but the flat irons are just incredible. And you can, go up there and kind of look at the Boulder valley. Um, so I think that that would be your warmup. The other one I might have you do is come a little further south to Castlewood canyon and or garden of the gods to, I don't know if you've done that.

Chris Bolhuis: I've been there.

Ashley Grosh: Okay, so that's a more flat, but still a geologists standpoint, you know, pretty interesting, but castle wood canyon, instead of going up, you're actually going to go down. And so you actually hike down into, um, kind of this, uh, cave area, but it's outside too. There's in, inside and outside, trails, but it's, just incredibly beautiful down there. So that would be my couple ideas.

Jesse Reimink: So, Ashley, you were a collegiate soccer player. I think you said you went to UC Boulder or at CU Boulder, whichever one. I always get it confused what it is, but I think you also coach as well. And you know, Chris and I are well, former athletes, I suppose. I don't know Chris, uh, one of us had a, maybe a more successful, successful athletic career. I won't say who, but

okay.

Chris Bolhuis: of work?

Jesse Reimink: I love sports. I think especially team sports. I think they're like, so instrumental into, they teach you so many life skills. Can you speak to that? I mean, how has it impacted your life personally and in coaching? What do you tell, you know, your players that you're coaching?

Ashley Grosh: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, sports has played a fundamental role in my life. I come from a crazy sports nut family that everybody's played sports. I'm a third generation collegiate athlete. So my grandpa and my dad both played, , in college, played football. and so just sports have just been at the center of my life. But to the lesson standpoint, I think, you know, having the grit take on something like climate, you know, really comes from a love of sports and doing hard things from resilience, determination. but as a team, right. I don't know how to do anything unless there's a team involved. So maybe that's why, again, I go back to this people component is anytime you're going for something super hard, you can't do it alone. Right. And so you need a team. And so I've just, you know, playing soccer, right. I might be good at one thing, but the other person's good at something else. And so the two, that's just how I thrive in feed, to get to, to a mission and to get to a goal is to work in together, playing on different people's strengths and weaknesses. And I do, even though I coach competitive soccer on the side, for my daughter. You know, I do think a lot of what my role is within the fellows program is coaching and mentoring. and I love that. I love coaching people up that, Hey, it's really hard, but you got to keep got to get up again and don't let them nose, you know, where you down, you've got to develop that thick skin. You've got to be optimistic. You've got to keep trying. And you know, this notion of there's a whole team around you, that's going to help you. So I do think sports and coaching when you're tackling something really hard in life, having that mentality, can help, right. Can help you get through the resiliency that's needed. And certainly at breakthrough, we are team that's growing. And, uh, so, you know, we need, we need a lot of coaches around us, a lot of advisors and mentors, all working together. So sports for me, is the center of, of how you, how you really do everything.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I really appreciate that. Ashley, because I think, you know, your, your athletes are lucky to have you as a coach because you're deliberate about those lessons that they need to take off the field. And I think that doesn't happen enough. sports and the, the lessons that we learn should be, it's a vehicle to take with us throughout life, but it has to be deliberate about like, Hey, this is what we learned. This is how it applies off the soccer field or off the football field, you know, those kinds of things. And, um, I can tell that, you know, that's, that's what you believe in. That's what you do.

Jesse Reimink: So what

position did you play? Ashley.

Ashley Grosh: So in high school I played sweeper. So that's the last person of defense. And then in college I played left full back, so left defender. So always more on the defensive.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, team sports. I love team sports and I, I didn't really know much about soccer growing up in Michigan. But when I moved to Canada for grad school, I lived with a bunch of Europeans. And so

Ashley Grosh: Oh, you

Jesse Reimink: we'd have, oh my God. You know, premier league was on every Saturday and Sunday morning, you know, it really got ingrained with soccer. And I really learned to appreciate the similarities between soccer and basketball. Like the flow is very similar to the passing and cutting dynamics. It's just, you know, a much bigger field with less points, but otherwise it's very similar game. Anyway,

Ashley Grosh: Yeah. I stayed up too late watching, uh, right now I'm watching playoff hockey. The abs Colorado is still in it. And then last night we watched the warriors. So,

Jesse Reimink: oh yeah, I headed to the final.

Ashley Grosh: big fan of Ted lasso too, obviously.

Jesse Reimink: Ah, yes, that's a great one. We love deadlines though. That's a great one.

Ashley Grosh: Okay, one more, one more story here quickly, just from a geology standpoint. So one of the tech, one of the, Yeah. so one of the technologies we saw this week at RPE is called impossible mining. And so mining, right? Big issue because we've got to have it for everything we're doing from limestone in cement for lithium, for energy storage. And so impossible mining is a seabed technology exploration. So in the ocean, but in, in more of the shallow piece, there's these rocks and I'll send you a picture of it. You guys probably know the name more than me, but this gentleman has developed an AI robotics machine that can go under and similar to, like I was saying in the field, and consents where life is on. So this machine uses these arms and pulls up a rock and it can sense if there's any life on it. It puts it back. If there isn't, then it collects it. And what's incredible about these sediments is they have nickel copper and one other one I'll have to send it to you. but those can then be taken back and he uses a biologic enzyme to break down the sediments in there and is able to cleanly. You know, get those materials out. And so it's a really interesting way to think about mining. He's launching it in the cook islands. so a little plug for impossible mining, but I'll send you the video because again, back to my visual learning, but just seeing this, like, those are the types of, out of the box things without disturbing the environment, but finding those materials. and so anyways, that was just a really cool way to think about a different way

Jesse Reimink: That it's very cool. That sounds

amazing.

Chris Bolhuis: cohort one then?

Ashley Grosh: No. So this is something we're looking at, um,

Chris Bolhuis: Okay.

Ashley Grosh: for potentially cohort two or three.

Chris Bolhuis: Gotcha. Hey Ashley, did anybody reapply from cohort one that didn't make it through?

Ashley Grosh: did. Yes. And so, um, I'm not sure cause we're just wrapping up cohort two, but we encourage that. We encourage people to continue applying because they may have made gains right from the first time they applied. Again, keep taking the shots on goal.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, Wow. Very cool.

Love some cool geology mining

Ashley Grosh: I know I had to get

Jesse Reimink: That's amazing.

Ashley Grosh: in the room. So I'll send you

Jesse Reimink: absolutely.

Ashley Grosh: in the link because I

Jesse Reimink: great. That'd be it. That'd be amazing.

Ashley Grosh: it's a cool idea. So. All

Jesse Reimink: super cool. Awesome. Thanks Ashley. Take care of this has

been great.

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