Why Natural Gas Could Be Critical to the AI Data Center Boom With Peter Snell of Petrovybe

In this episode

Artificial intelligence is creating a new layer of pressure on an energy system already tasked with supporting businesses, communities, and a rapidly electrifying economy. As data centers expand, reliable fuel sources and the infrastructure required to turn those resources into electricity are becoming increasingly important. How can natural gas developers help meet AI-driven power demand while managing the financial, operational, and stewardship risks involved?

According to Peter Snell, who leads natural gas development for PetroVybe, meeting that demand requires more than simply producing additional fuel. Developers must understand where resources are located, the infrastructure required to move or use them, complex mineral and land rights, and opportunities to connect energy production more directly with large power consumers. Peter also emphasizes planning for failure, using third-party accountability, and treating investor capital as a resource that must be managed with extraordinary care.

On this episode of Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen welcomes Peter Snell, Founder and CEO at PetroVybe, for a conversation about natural gas and the energy demands of AI. Peter explains PetroVybe’s strategy, stranded gas and infrastructure constraints, mineral rights, investor stewardship, planning for failure, third-party accountability, and the leadership lessons he learned through Navy SEAL-led training.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Peter Snell on LinkedIn
• PetroVybe
• PetroVybe ONE
• PetroVybe on LinkedIn
• Joseph Rios on LinkedIn
• Ray “Cash” Care 
• Leadership Under Fire Program 
• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Rise25

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Transcript

Chad Franzen  00:03

Hi, Chad Franzen here, one of the hosts of the Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25 We help B2B businesses reach their dream relationships and connect with more clients, referrals, strategic partnerships, and get ROI through done for you podcasts. If you have a B2B business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way to do it than to profile the people and companies you admire on your own podcast. To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at support@ Rise25.com. My guest today is Peter Snell, the founder and CEO of PetroVybe, a natural gas development company fueling the energy behind AI today and building legacy wealth tomorrow, he has grown operations from zero to roughly 1300 BOEPD across around 400 producing wells and 58,000 acres, delivering 4x revenue and 5x EBITDA growth year over year, a 21x fair market value increase in in a project and a 10x team growth with 94% retention after founding a management consulting firm, co founding a health healthcare tech company to a 4x exit and closing 339 million dollars in revenue over five years in healthcare management. He is a disciple of Jesus, a husband, father, an advocate for biblical stewardship and objective thinking. Peter was a bold voice on the collision between the AI boom and the energy multiverse. Hey, Peter, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?

Peter Snell  01:35

Thanks, Chad. How are you, man?

Chad Franzen  01:37

Good, thanks. I’m looking forward to talking to you. Let’s kind of talk about maybe a little bit about your background. You had a career that began outside of oil and gas, and eventually led you to this. What kind of? How did that kind of work out?

Peter Snell 01:51

Yeah, I mean, it was a relationship like most interesting or good things are. We, I was in management consulting in that season of life, and had been doing that, and what that meant is, is I was a business fixer, so I went into broken businesses for new CEOs that would come in and need a tip of the spear to drive change, and so I was that tip of the spear usually, and and so that was the that was really the the the crux of the management consulting I was doing I really focused on growth and culture and as well as leadership and so those were the areas of focus and then that led to through a relationship I was at a volleyball game and got to know one of the other dads from our daughters playing together, and that turned into some support in the oil and gas business. And I often worked in places where we were not-I wasn’t necessarily in that business, and that was a lot of an advantage, to be honest. I mean, that gave me a perspective where, you know, I loved hearing. That’s the way we’ve always done it. When I’d go in and do some exploration or some analysis, we’ve always done it that way. That was an automatic trigger for. Let’s spend some time there and find out what’s going on inside. So anyway, that’s how I got. It was a volleyball game, talking in the stands, and you learn about each other, and that pulled me into oil and gas. And I was able to focus on the same areas of the business disciplines, but ended up falling in love with oil and gas as an industry. And I wanted to, instead of being a management consultant, I don’t know. I kind of look like I feel like I took that in, even with our startup at PetroVybe. So after finishing that project, I immediately went and started PetroVybe, and that was the transition into actually becoming an operator. Sure.

Chad Franzen  03:55

Was there something about the oil and gas business before you kind of dove into it that made you decide there was a problem worth spending the next chapter of your career solving.

Peter Snell  04:05

Yeah, I liked the tangibility. So the personal side of this, I like the tangibility. You know, I had been a management consultant. You’re somewhat great because you get a lot of variety and you can get tangibility. But I wasn’t like on the ground floor running it. I was providing consultation, which is a great job. It’s a great type of work, but I needed to be engaged in the actual risk and reward of a strategy and execution, leadership. Actually, you know, doing it as opposed to consulting on it or coaching on it, which I was doing that in my company too. But you know, 98% of our effort was with our clients, and so those were the tangible things that, for me personally, I needed to really be engaged in. I also liked the idea. Of it being a utility, so when you think about it being a utility, it’s something we are all in oil and gas. You, we need it. It’s an absolute necessity, and I was super fascinated with sort of the lack of pomp and circumstance that’s related to oil and gas. Right, it’s a hard business. It’s a dirty business. It’s highly rewarding. And what I’ll tell you is that there’s good and bad people in every industry. But I have really grown to love the people in oil and gas, and that was very attractive to me. And so I saw those things. I mean, when it comes down to like at my core as a purpose, you know, as a disciple of Jesus, that’s my first identity is in Him, and I saw the opportunity with all those tangible things. What I really wanted to do was run a business that would put Him at the top, and and and which is interesting because I actually he’s at the foundation, so he built Punch and Vibe on biblical stewardship. So he’s not just him being at the top like he’s integrated into everything we do. His identity, who he is, why we do the things we do, how we handle failure, how we plan for success, how we handle success. All of those things are run through a biblical stewardship lens, and I hadn’t. It’s not that I couldn’t do that as a management consultant, because we were boutique, and so with you know we weren’t spending as much time on our business as we were on helping others with their business, which was one of the challenges I needed to overcome. Also, I had difficulty making both of those things work at the same time. Not that oil and gas was easier; it’s not. It’s arguably harder, but that is really at the crux of. I’m 54 in a couple weeks. This would be really when I chose to start PetroVybe, which has actually been three years ago now. When I made the decision, it was at that time I was like, “Look, if there’s a time, it’s now. And so that timing had something to do with it too.

“When you’re that committed to something, you will find a way, even if you don’t know how to do it.”

Peter Snell, Founder and CEO, PetroVybe

Chad Franzen  07:15

So when you say biblical stewardship is kind of woven throughout every facet of what you do, can you give me kind of a practical example of that?

Peter Snell  07:23

Yeah, which is exactly the problem I had when I said that, and I was like, okay, I’m doing it in spots as a management consultant, but I hadn’t really codified that. I hadn’t put a frame to it, and I didn’t want to over engineer it. I wanted it to be real and that would last, and it would be something that would be, you know, genuine, really. And so, you’ve asked about the practical aspect. It took me some time, but I essentially went to scripture and I prayed about it. And I actually had a job as a management consultant. I had a lot of practical skills around how to build, you know, frameworks for information and strategies and things like that. So I had some skills that God had already allowed me to develop over my career, but I got into the Word and I felt a little bit nebulous. I was like, I’m not sure where to start. So I started just reading and didn’t get too far because I had already been memorizing scripture, which I’m not actually very skilled at. I have become skilled. It’s a development thing, right? But I actually got there faster than I thought. I felt a little overwhelmed at first. I was like, “I’m doing this. When you’re that committed, this is really important, Chad. When you’re that committed to something, you will find a way. Even if you don’t know how to do it, you’re going to say, “Well, I don’t know, but I am so committed to this. I am going to make it happen if it kills me. And it didn’t. It was great because God had already been doing a lot of work in my life so that I could get there quickly. Again, talking about memorization, I was actually more plugged into scripture. I’d been in a Bible study with one of my dearest friends, Joseph Rios. He actually works on my team now, but he was training, and he’s uniquely gifted in understanding scripture as I would definitely call him a theologian. But we were doing Bible study together, and he was going through Master’s Seminary, John MacArthur’s school in California, which I happen to be a fan of, and so I got a lot of likes, I would say, just what do you call that, like ripple effect from him? You know, just as we studied the Bible, he just had some depth that he was learning, and he was able to bring that into the two of us. And he moved from Texas to California, and we still kept doing it every week for a few years. And anyway, I sell that to say that you asked a specific question. That was the journey to it. When I got into the word, I landed on the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, and what we were building in oil and gas required us to to to build asset value and return that back to investors, not just me, but other investors, and that was the practical a critical practical goal that we had, like any business, you want to profit. I mean, we weren’t unique in that respect, but in oil and gas, it was unique because its declining asset, Chad. So that was going to be hard, and I was like, “How am I going to create a multiple out of a declining asset? Declines more difficulty than any other businesses, so you have to really like to plan around that. So I had the parable of the talents, which is a story about what Jesus tells, where that uses a financial best practice of this. Basically, you got to go and create a multiple when something is steward when you are provided someone else’s resources and you need to steward that, and the the servant gives three guys, or excuse me, the master gives three guys, three servants, each a talent according, or a number of talents according to their their skills. One got five, one got two, the other one got one, and the call to action was to make a multiple. The guy went and the master goes away on a long journey, comes back. The five guys turn it into 10, and talents are money. Back by the way, back in biblical times, so it’s not talents like oh you know steward your abilities.

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Peter Snell  11:37

It’s a talent. It’s very simple money. The two talented guys turned it into four talents. They were both rewarded with more. Then the one guy comes back and he gives him back the talent because he had buried it in the ground and been messing around and not turning it into something. And the master said, and then he gaslights him. Didn’t know gaslighting was in scripture as I’m reading this story. I’m kind of chuckling, but he says, “I knew you were a harsh man with no basis for that statement, whatever. And so he gives it back to him, and basically is passively, aggressively blaming him for why he didn’t do anything with his talent that he was stewarding. And the master says, “You could have at least given it to a banker and drawn a modest interest. And he throws them out into the utter darkness where there’s gnashing of teeth, and which is a metaphor for hell. Anyway, it’s not even a metaphor. That’s what it’s really going to be like. But the reason I liked that whole story so well is because it showed the seriousness of it. It demonstrated stewardship, and it also demonstrated that there’s a practical piece to that. Now, I didn’t give all the tools to that, but I went back and said, okay, that’s my baseline for the stewardship foundation. But what are the things in the business that I know would actually be cornerstones for us to build on to do that, and I’ll just give you one of the four because we don’t have time. But the one that I probably like the most is the third party accountability, which is bringing in parties outside of us to check our homework and our math. We’re asking people to invest in our business. In doing that, plus other vendors, you know, we have a lot of business partners, and so there’s a lot of people that have to have trust and faith in us. And we’re not always going to get it right. What does that look like? Well, a really important thing is to have someone who’s outside of our business check our homework and not a regulator. You have that already whether you want it or not, and it’s a good thing by the way. There’s value in regulatory oversight, not overdone. There’s a balance in that too, but that’s one of the things I love. So we have third party engineering. We have a third party auditing firm, which is our CPA, but they have standards they have to meet in order to deliver an audit. That if they were audited on that, they would have to be able to, you know, note that they followed procedure. And we also have a bank who lent us money, and they have their own third-party approach to things. So that’s a really important way to make sure that you’re not operating in a vacuum and hiding things. That you have transparency and visibility, and that you’re willing to have someone else criticize your work before you go and do it. So there’s three other cornerstones. We don’t have them, but that’s one of the really practical ways you can do that. Now, other people can say, “Hey, we do that in our business too. Okay, but I’m-I get that. For me and what we’re doing at Petra Vibe, I’m doing it to honor the King of Kings. It’s not just what I’m doing; it’s why I’m doing it. It’s so that I can look people in the eyes and know that I’m being held accountable. But when you’re not looking, I also care about that to the extent that we almost go overboard on it. I would argue, but that it’s really important for us to commit to that, not because it sells or because it helps us in some you know way that eventually leads back to us. It’s because it’s the right thing, and it honors our King of the Kings.

“It’s not just what I’m doing; it’s why I’m doing it.”

Peter Snell, Founder and CEO, PetroVybe

Chad Franzen  15:25

Okay, very, very nice. In terms of PetroVybe, I mentioned when I introduced you that it’s a natural gas company fueling the energy behind AI today and building legacy wealth tomorrow. Tell me a little bit more about PetroVybe and how it kind of came about.

Peter Snell 15:43

Yeah, PetroVybe. We develop natural gas. We’ve got 400 plus producing wells across Texas. We’re in 17 counties. We’re in oil and gas terms. We’re a pretty small company. We were over a little over $10 million in revenue a year, and so we’re our thesis or why PetroVybe really what we’re pursuing is we see a massive, and it’s not like rocket science at this point, but there’s a massive increase. I’ll call it compounding demand in electricity, and electricity requires a fuel source to exist. I mean, it’s kind of interesting. We could, you know, step over to EVs. I like EVs. It’s interesting because EVs do not have a tailpipe, so there’s not an emission there. But there are emissions that go into producing. an EV, but the good news is natural gas is relatively a safe middle ground for people on different sides of the the view on hydrocarbons as a form of raw resources that we use to to live in the world we live in today, and so and and that’s what’s at the source of it is is you need natural gas to fuel turbines to create electricity, and it’s actually the number one fuel source that powers the grid today by a country mile. It’s almost half of all fuel. Coal is right behind that. It’s about half as much as what’s in natural gas, a little less than that, and then you’ve got nuclear and wind and solar. And wind is-I am not a fan of wind. I actually like solar. I like nuclear power. I think we need hydro. Those are all sources. But Petrovite’s focus is to develop the natural resources, specifically natural gas to meet that demand, and we have a thesis that really builds on getting the company started, but then finding a path, and we’re getting there faster than I thought we would, to be honest. But finding a path towards becoming direct to source, so we have designs on working directly with a with the large, and could be not large, but with tech companies that are willing and able to do a resource play, an energy play behind the meter, so that they don’t have to disrupt the grid too much because the amount of demand that they are requiring they they’ll tell you they have some compute limitations, but their greatest limitation right now is actually fuel for energy, and so we see that we’re in a window right now, and our our play is really ultimately, and as soon as we can get there, I actually have a meeting. I’m excited about next week. Not sure when this airs, but that meeting is actually pretty exciting because it’s the meeting before the meetings. But we think we have an entry point to this because they’re already looking for it, and you know, big companies in the dueling industry, so to speak, don’t always play nice together. You need a small innovator that can come in and be nimble and operate quickly. And we think that that’s the opportunity for Petra Vibe, and we’re making some traction there. So, what that specifically means is, is you know, let’s say you had a Google or a Meta, or you could pick a number of large companies that want to buy natural gas at its cost, essentially, and build out their own power infrastructure for a data center or a series of data centers that’s available to them if they’re willing to talk to the right people. That’d be me. So,

Chad Franzen  19:44

okay. Why can large amounts of natural gas sometimes become stranded or constrained even in a major producing region like the Permian Basin?

Peter Snell  19:54

Yeah, that’s a great question. Like you actually. So let’s let it cost. And it’s all oil development. Oil is the premium in the Permian Basin. They have lots of natural gas, but it is like you say, locked or isolated, land locked. There’s multiple reasons for it, and I’ll touch on some of them. But to give you an idea of the pain that it is, they actually have to pay. They used to just flare it and burn it off. There’s still some of, in limited cases, some of that allowed. But the environmental changes that have been implemented have adjusted that. But they basically have to pay seven in some of its worst economic moments as much as $7 per MCF. That’s per 1000 cubic feet. M is 1000 because it’s using that system. But per 1000 cubic feet of gas, they have to pay to take that off. So, it still costs them to get rid of it. And the reason for that is it’s expensive to port it. So there’s not really an infrastructure, but it’s limited based on the amount of volume that is there, so you basically have one side of Texas competing with the other side of Texas. There’s not a real, there’s no infrastructure to keep it low cost, and you’ve got a little bit of a protected market, if you will, on the other side of Texas and South Texas that already owns it. If I can produce it closer to the Gulf, it costs me less to get it there, and we have plenty of it. I don’t need what’s up there in the Permian. It’s just not worth it because of where it’s located and the infrastructure to get it out. Now, there’s all kinds of arguments to why it is still a landlight light? Why can’t we build data centers out there? Well, they’re exploring that. The challenge is, is most of the players in the Permian are big players, and you start doing the math for them, and you could argue it’s not much of a conversation piece for them to on their balance sheet to really support doing that, and so again, it comes back to that leaves a gap in the market for opportunity for small guys like us where we could say, hey, we can we can make that worth our while because we don’t have to carry certain, you know, big business, we we don’t have big business demands on our balance sheet or our P and L, and and we don’t have, you know, we’re not a global exploration company. We’re really niche, and so that’s why that’s why that’s trapped, and there’s more reasons why. I mean, again, I mentioned the infrastructure. I didn’t really spend enough time on that, but there’s just not enough offtake capacity. They just launched a new pipeline, which did help a little bit temporarily. I think in June, out of the Permian, it still didn’t really. I mean, it did reduce prices to a less costly number, but overall, it’s still. And we have a lot of it. We have a lot of natural gas, even though the demand is up. We have a lot of it, so it’s still fairly inexpensive to produce hydrocarbons. Is

Chad Franzen  23:34

Are there other things that maybe data center developers often overlook about mineral rights and rights of way?

Peter Snell  23:41

Yeah, I mean they don’t know what they don’t know, and it’s not because they’re not capable or intelligent enough either. But it’s like anything in life. If you don’t put in the time and you don’t know the right people, you don’t understand the basics and really what that feels like on the ground. So I could read about things, I could understand concepts. I can even understand the practical aspects, but you don’t know what it’s like on the ground to talk to landowners that have maybe some of their mineral rights, but over the last century and a half, mineral rights have been sold, resold, resold, resold, and have changed a lot of hands. Gone through families. There’s a lot of difficulties, and then there’s you know laws and regulatory protections that should be there that protect owners. That if you can’t reach them, you know how you get to everybody so that you can actually secure a lease? And it’s more like spaghetti leases, royalty owner rights, royalties in general, in all over Texas have become highly complex. So you have to really understand what it’s like on the ground with the people. A lot of times, you’re going out. You have to go out and knock on a door or call somebody who still has a landline. Sometimes it’s a credit. You know, the old rancher wife who you know may be a widow and doesn’t want to talk to anybody, or she may want to talk. You know, say you got to talk to my son, and he may have a different view on it. So you have family dynamics, and it’s a lot of really unique situations that you have to pack together at volume. So think about that. You have to understand how that works and know how to work in it efficiently in order to make it worthwhile. And energy companies, and they wouldn’t tell you they know that. I’m sorry, not energy companies, tech companies. They wouldn’t tell you they know that. That’s why you look at Mitsubishi; they bought Athon for a you know above market premium. Frankly, what the market had been delivering because they saw for them what is the value long term. Well, Athon is a mature development company that has a lot of meat on the bone left. I know why Mitsubishi bought it. They weren’t trying to get out. They weren’t trying to become an energy company. They were trying to acquire one so they could get control of the resources for their long term development. That’s smart play, but they didn’t like to start from the ground up. So I think that was, you know, paying a premium. That’s fine because you know that the bigger prize is bigger for their long-term play. That’s smart on their part, and they’re out in front of it. The other companies, you know, you saw Microsoft. I think they did a Three Mile Island nuclear restart on one of the reactors there. They did that because there’s already infrastructure in place, but they weren’t doing that without having the right conversations with the right people to get that going. Anyway, that’s not the only story out there. There are many others you can look at.

“Science is a discovery process for things you don’t know.”

Peter Snell, Founder and CEO, PetroVybe

Chad Franzen  26:50

I saw that you’ve talked before about planning for failure as part of PetroVybe’s model. What does that look like in practice?

Peter Snell 26:59

Well, I mentioned third party earlier, so it’s having third party insights to what they think is real in what you’re pursuing. So you know, it’s a science project because you’re doing a lot of things, and science doesn’t make it automatic. You know, people have kind of overvalued the word, not kind of. They’ve overall the science says. Well, science is a discovery process for things you don’t know. You take things you know, and you try to learn about things you don’t know, and you use methodology and math to try to come to a reasonable conclusion that reduces risk and helps you learn new things. So we, in our space, that’s the science is geology and it’s engineering, and you bring those things together, just like I said in simple terms, and you have to understand that that failure is part of the bigger picture. What you’re trying to do is is use your methodologies, your expertise. We are heavy AI. We’re almost AI native at this point. We are big users of AI to accelerate our ability to do those things I talked about with science and test even the AI. Like we don’t just take AI and go, “Oh, you’re brilliant. I mean, I’m more skeptical of AI than I ever have been. Yet it has massive effectiveness and efficiency results that we can gain from it because it works so quickly, and it is actually intelligent in a lot of cases. So you just have to know how to work with it in order to make sure you’re not getting ahead of your skis and believing everything it tells you. So, anyway, I say that to say that planning for failure is understanding what science really is and making sure that you’re when you get excited about things is to make sure that you understand what it would look like to fail, and what things do you have to be ready to do if you do fail? What levels of failure are possible? How do you quantify that, both in time and money? Those are the things that we consider inside of the construct of science in order to account for failure, and then lastly, I would say just be transparent in communicating the risk when you talk to people about investing money in the company. Because I mean, we’re actively raising capital for PetroVybe, and we’re very. I mean, I would say in a lot of cases, it’s helped a lot of people say, “Oh, this isn’t for me. And in others, you know, I understand the risk. Like I hear what you’re saying, I’m diversified. This is what I want to do because I like what you’re going to do on the upside. So it makes for a lot more real conversations with investors, and that has been super helpful. Just got to be honest internally and externally with the fact that that communication piece is really important.

“Make sure that you understand what it would look like to fail.”

Peter Snell, Founder and CEO, PetroVybe

Chad Franzen  30:07

What do you think about the responsibility that comes with managing other people’s capital?

Peter Snell  30:12

Well, I don’t think any of it’s anybody’s. First of all, I believe that God allows people to have money, and he even talks about that he who is faithful with very little will be faithful with much. I’m convinced that God is that it’s all His, and not because He hoards it or He needs it. I mean, He is the creator of all. He it’s not. It’s a tool. It’s a resource for him to actually, I would say, use or allow us to use, so that we can find ways to honor him better. And it’s the one that he talks about money. I think it’s number three or four in as far as topics in scripture in all of Scripture, it’s talked about all the time. Jesus talks about. I just gave you an example of how he uses a financial best practice as a metaphor. For he was talking about discipleship. I didn’t mention that earlier. That was actually the core application. It doesn’t mean there’s not a secondary application, which is what we also use it for, but that’s the whole point. It’s a blended application, and so I take it seriously. People say, “Well, treat it like it’s your own. Well, I don’t really think that’s actually the right way to look at it at all. With all due respect, I understand what people are attempting to do there, but I think that’s problematic because a lot of times, what I want to do with my money is, I like cars, so I’d like to go and buy fancy cars. I don’t want to think of it that way. I also like to invest. Obviously, there’s, you know, you can have balance amongst those things, but I think that making sure that I think if you’re genuinely honest about, hey, this is somebody else’s money. I really need to steward and care for it in such a way that I’m just I’m pulling it in and I’m applying it to work, and I need to make sure that I get the most out of it because they’re entrusting it to me, just like Jesus talked about in the parable of the talents. It’s not yours, so you actually need to have a higher level of care in your mentality for that because it’s not yours. It’s, I think that’s a different way to look at it, and I think, and it’s a higher responsibility. And that’s the other thing. If you don’t view it as yours, and that’s why it’s so important that, like at PetroVybe, we don’t use fundraising to create profitability for the company. Which you’d say, well, why would you? Well, you’d be surprised. So there’s a lot of things going on in this world that shouldn’t be going on. But I had to learn that. Like that was a process I learned over time when I got into this business, but to say that it’s not a fundraising is not a profit center. It’s a capital source that we have expenses that we need to pay, and you need to manage through that in order to deliver it for making a return, and so it that’s that’s a really important distinction to say. Look, I’m I’m I I’ve got to make sure I have as much of that available that makes sense in the balance of things, so that this can produce the outcome that we seek with the best probability available.

It’s not yours, so you actually need to have a higher level of care in your mentality for that.

Peter Snell, Founder and CEO, PetroVybe

Chad Franzen  33:40

Very nice. Hey, I have one more question for you, but first, tell me how people can find out more about PetroVybe.

Peter Snell  33:47

Yeah, so PetroVybe.com. It’s p e t r o v y b e. PetroVybe.com, and you can, if you like, to find out more specifically about the project we’re working on, slash 1o n e so petrified.com/one. I’m on LinkedIn if you like content, and I’m a little bit on Instagram and not really Twitter. I’m probably X. Sorry, that I’m more active on LinkedIn and X than I am on Instagram from a content perspective, and so, but yeah, check us out on our website. That’s a great place to learn more. So,

Chad Franzen  34:30

Hey, last question for you. I, you know, you’ve had a very successful career when it comes to leading companies and people. I saw that you graduated from a leadership under fire program management managed by US Navy SEALs, tell me a little bit about that and kind of how that prepared you for a successful career in leadership.

Peter Snell  34:50

Yeah, it was nuts. If you get on and I want to, I want to prop up my body. That he wasn’t my buddy that weekend. It’s definitely a weekend warrior program. I mean, about as close as you’re ever going to get to warrior training if you’re not a warrior. And my hats off to all our warriors who have another gear in their mind. And Ray Care, Ray Cash Care. He’s on LinkedIn. He’s a motivational speaker. I haven’t talked to him in a few months, maybe longer actually. But we stay in touch from time to time. I’m shouting at him because if anybody’s listening to this and has an interest in connecting with him, he’s a fascinating human being. So, and but anyway, and by the way, I was 40 years old, so this is 14, almost 14 years ago, and I would actually do it again. I mean, I don’t need to because I’ve already done it. I would say, but basically, that was a modified form of buds training that the seals do in a four-day condensed program. It was in San Diego, actually in Coronado, and was led by retired seals. And we had a smaller group for that particular class. There were 11 of us, and all I can tell you is I probably got a total of about over four days, maybe seven hours of sleep, and five of them were the night before they taught us that before they did handgun training with us, real handgun training. So I know why we got sleep that night, but we basically didn’t sleep, and it was 52 degrees the whole weekend, and it rained the entire weekend, and we were outside the entire weekend except for the five hours that we slept on Friday night, so we could, you know, do training. So it was crazy. They physically, I’ll just say, challenged us beyond you know normal measures by a long stretch. But the interesting thing is that I can tell you so many stories in that one I have to like you know and land the plane here. The thing that I appreciated the most about it was is that even though you know there’s an end to it on Sunday, it it can feel like forever in the moment because of the physical degradation that you go to go through and the mental toll that that takes on you, and of course that’s why they train these men that way over time in the in the real training. We just got a taste of it, but it was one of the most physical, and I’m I do you know I like the mud runs and all the. I played college football. I trained in Brazilian jiu jitsu for 10 years. I’ve done a lot of physically demanding things in my life, and it was definitely at the top of the list in a short condensed method because of mental strain. It’s just constant, you know, for such a long period of time, and that’s what’s unique about it. And what I learned was, you know, it was a good test of my mental fortitude under physical duress. And I’m glad that I had done a lot of other things that I didn’t know. I kind of suspected it would prepare me for that, but I believe I responded pretty well, but I would go back to the biggest lean I had was in my faith in Christ. I knew that even if I died on this weekend, which wasn’t really realistic, but I knew even if I had died on that weekend, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be with my King on the other side of this sin suit that I’m learning to shed over time, and so I think that was a piece that passes all understanding. So even when I was in it physically and feeling broken and mentally, I was just like, “Oh my gosh, is this ever going to end?

Peter Snell  38:55

I know it is, but it doesn’t feel like it. And all those things, I was like, “It’s all right. I would just be able to go right into Jesus loves me, and I’m a part of a royal priesthood now. And it wasn’t by anything I did, which I can have relief in. It’s what He did on the cross and in the resurrection for me. The end. So I got through it pretty okay.

Chad Franzen  39:17

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, great stuff, Peter. Thanks so much for all of your time today and all of your insights and your stories. Really appreciate

Peter Snell  39:24

it. Thanks, Chad. Great questions. Appreciate you, man.

Chad Franzen  39:26

So long, everybody.