 Welcome back to the Independence Investor Channel here. All we have left here is speculation. So that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to engage in some speculation. And I think by doing that, we could actually generate some pressure to provide the transparency that is long overdue and very much needed amongst the investor shareholder base. I just reviewed the community discussion off of the Discord group. I do want to give some shout outs here to CBM Outdoors for reposting to YouTube. Always appreciate his efforts. Thank you for that. Andreas was facilitating the interview as well as contributions by Silent Alert and Excalibur and a few others as well who made some fantastic contributions to the community. And I did hear the word speculation or presumption about 20 times, about halfway through the discussion. I decided to go ahead and stop the discussion and jump over and do my response to some of the things that I heard during the interview that I do want to discuss now. The gleaming elephant in the room that we will discuss, and this will be a longer discussion, is the speculation of a takeover from Cummins. I thought Excalibur made the best point during the first half and I will review it at the end as I'm interested in the story. I think with the technology and the products specifically on the ERX side, the question is have they done enough to generate the necessary churn in the Class 8 space to get people's attention? Now, they've dumped hundreds of million dollars of research and development. They have a viable product. It's certified. And the announcement as ill-timed as it was, we're going to talk about its potential effect to orders. That question came across the board. You'll benefit from my opinion to tell you it doesn't mean a thing. Hyalion is not able to take massive orders right now. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they were to take an order from DSV for half of the initial Agility 1000 orders for 500 orders. It wouldn't matter because they would be so tied into or reliant upon those other entities to pull through with what those orders would call for the customers in meeting the demand along those timelines. So I think when you look at the strategic pause, you can look at it in a couple of very specific buckets. Number one, it's an all-stop. And the Hyalion project dissolves away and it ceases to exist. That's actually what people have pledged with their complete liquidation of their shares. Could they be right? Absolutely. I'm going to be presumptuous just like everybody else. Could they be wrong? That's the scarier question. As we speak, Hyalion Holdings, might I remind you of the obvious, does still exist as a publicly traded company. We're a couple of weeks away from closing out Q3. We are a couple of months away from entering into 2024, which actually promised to be a banner year with some positive road map projections to start to commercialize Carnot. This discussion came up in the community, that of which I am not excited at all about it. I think the technology is great, but there was a couple of points in the discussion to double down on their inability to scale well anything at this point, and especially Carnot. I think the reason for GE chopping the technology to Hyalion because it wasn't a viable product is just about as imaginative as I can possibly think. In other words, my opinion on this is that Carnot has extremely good value. And there was a point by one of the community members, and I wish I had the name because I would provide my appreciation for their insights. Fantastic. It was one who had about 15 years of manufacturing experience who was lending his comments on the inability to mass scale the 3D print, I totally agree. Hyalion just doesn't have the resources here necessary. Everything has to be manufactured from scratch. They can't go out and expect to buy 30 or 40 printing machines and expect that that's going to carry them to mass scale and commercialization. I thought that the interesting point was that the complexity of the Carnot parts that go into the generator itself are too complex for standard manufacturing means. However, Excalibur did chime in on this case and I think the reason I put out this video is I would like everything in way of Twitter banter. My Twitter banter and I appreciate X bringing it up. I thank you for the mention. I really do. My pressure is specifically aimed at a lack of clarity at present. I find it interesting how a group of retail investors can find time to come and discuss a topic that they are passionate about and the CEO finds it convenient to not say a word since the shot heard around the world. Could it be very well the case that they are bound by discussion right now because if in the one camp this project is a ceaseless to exist and evaporates into oblivion, it would suggest that potentially there are things at play here that are not publicly disclosable at present. Interesting. Silent Alert made an interesting point about and Thomas Healy has actually coined the last three years of evolution of this company as pre-commercial as a step to being a commercially viable product. Has he succeeded in that? He has. If there's pause in your answer, I'm going to tell you that he has succeeded in bringing forward a commercially viable product. I would go so far as to suggest that he has succeeded in providing the fuel agnostic option. I would suggest that he has also been successful three tier on the ability to leverage the relationship with Heizen who is more than capable in bringing forward a hydrogen fuel cell iteration of the HyperTruck ERX. Well, hold on a second, Ryan. I sold all my shares. I'm betting that the company goes into the dustbin. No problem. It's your prerogative to do so. Just like it was my prerogative to upon that news reduce my exposure in the company, that of which I've actually clawed back about 65% of those shares because I wanted a couple days of monitoring to monitor the share action because I didn't know how exacerbated the sell-off would be and if there was a potential to grab some shares closer to the 50 cent mark, which it's looking like, it may settle out here. It may continue south. I'm not in the business of speculating whether or not I think there's enough uncertainty in the market to drive this company down to a 50 million market cap because I would go so far as to suggest that three weeks removed of the earnings call. This announcement did not need to happen unless it needed to happen. See the psychology there, guys? There has to be a reason why. If they were too stupid to realize that the stock would drop 50% after an announcement like this, but they still released it anyway when they didn't have to release it, then that would be extremely problematic. It is my presumption, again, since we're having fun with presumptions and talking about, well, hell, maybe Procter and Gamble will take over highly on at this point. Why? Because nobody knows. Nobody effing knows. But I am going to bring this home at the end of what I presume to be at play here based on all of the behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt that I have heard on this project and what could potentially be going on. But I honestly think if we take a step back and look at the risk to reward that it had to have been weighed before this announcement was made in the most unprofessional of manners, it was like a big kick right between the legs over and over again. You've seen those monks getting kicked in between the legs and they just sit there and take it, man. They just take it. That's what it was. A 415 release with a BS-recorded call the next day spoke to me as if they were meeting, not exceeding, meeting the regulatory minimum for an announcement that they deemed absolutely necessary based on what is going on and we are unprevved to at present. So if you haven't ended up liquidating your entire position, you have liquidated more on the unknown than the known. Because if you're going to suggest to me that the ERX will never see the light of day when it comes to commercialization because Hylian can't bring it to commercial on their own, I would agree with you on that point. And that would have been the fundamental reason to go ahead and reduce exposure, which was part of the reason why I reduced exposure, because I sensed that if there were something arrive there with a large company like PACCAR, Peterbilt, Cummins relationship, etc. that would put Hylian in the back seat in the delivery of their vehicles as a sole independent supplier and really needing more of Peterbilt than Peterbilt needs of Hylian. I think that just begs the question to suggest look Hylian may be doing the greatest favor to shareholders that was identified in the news release for the strategic pause as being the primary reason as to why this move is being made at the at the current juncture. I say that if you take again a step back, which is a lot of what is necessary in stock market investing as a whole, but in this particular project instead of sniffing the person in front of you with your eyes closed and being blinded by the smell by that person in front of you, if you actually just pull your nose out of the crevice for two seconds and do some thinking on your own, who is the largest share owner in this company? Thomas Healy. Has Thomas Healy accumulated shares at these low amounts? No, he's taken his strategic sales along the way to render some profits for a project that is his. This project is his. It's not yours. It's his. You own shares. It's a partially yours of the company. This project is his and he has strategically looked to take some shares of the company over the course of what has been a horrendous ride lower. When we look at the decision that was made to release the information at 4.15 in the afternoon and then come out with a recorded call the next day, eight days after carb, there was a point made that they had known that this was a strategic view before the carb certification. That's a presumption that I do agree with, but it was made with, again, all expectations of the stock market not receiving that information correctly and hurting share owners. Thomas Healy being one of them. If you owned $25 million dollars in shares and you were the CEO of the company, would you make that announcement in your own best interest or the best interest of share owners as a whole? Or from the company perspective, you choose. If you were the CEO, would you make that announcement if you knew that you were going to wake up the next morning and you would be out 12 and a half million dollars? I'm waiting. This is business. In turn, would you make that announcement if you knew that it was going to not only hurt your own share base, but the shares of the retail and institutional investors that you are charged to look out for. Finally, the option is would you release the information if you were compelled to do so in the best interest of the company or what is perceived to be the best interest of the company, whether or not that is the best decision at this point, is too premature to speculate on and to engage in that line of thought would be indeed speculation at present. We're still very, very much raw from the wounds that have been inflicted from the release itself. I think what I appreciated about the community discussion was an attempt at sewing over what we know, sewing over what the progress that's been made thus far, which has been remarkable. This company doesn't deserve to be trading at 62 cents. It is still a pre-revenue company. Let's be real. Don't expect, and Excalibur mentioned, the expectations should absolutely be dialed back for the Q3. My expectations are at zero. I've credited the last few quarters of zero, and I will continue to expect zero and more than likely award credit of zero. If I'm pleasantly surprised, so be it. I expect not to be, so therefore my life goes on and everything is okay in the wide world of owning this company and keeping my expectations in check for the Q3 call that's coming up. I will be hungry for any clarity. I would be interested in a strategic apology to share owners, but an explanation as to why perhaps my hypothesis that this was in fact in the best interest of the company, any clarity or color that can be provided around the decision and the timeliness of that decision and what we could potentially put on a little bit more defined of a roadmap going forward would be much appreciated by me as a shareholder and would actually give me a little bit more clarity on whether or not this was number one, a selfish move by the CEO. That seems to counteract the very rationale that human beings act upon to have others share owners in the best interest, but also really not wanting to pull a clinger and shoot themselves in the foot. Thirdly, the color that I would ask around, which we have not been provided any on, was that this decision was made with the best interest in mind of the company itself in spite of the fact that there was a projected expectation that this news would not be received by the grander stock market as a whole and that presumption would have been correct to lose 50% of the value in the company. I looked at it and I asked myself the question rhetorically, did this announcement even need to be made? Is it really necessary to come out three weeks before the earnings and announce this just with the sheer merit behind it of being good for the company? Nobody has that type of premonition and that's what continues to lead me back to it is coming from substance. There is something behind this that we are not prevy to at present. And again, if you are selling on the unknown, rather than the knowns, and there are plenty of knowns here that are basically available for us to infer safely in that Hylion cannot attempt mass scale and commercial based on the current relationship. They just can't do it. Demand has been stymied based on market conditions. We will get into that next. Timelines cannot be met when you have one specific OEM holding the cards on the majority of the components that go into your flagship product. If you sold based on that premise, I think you would be safely correct in that in that I think now going forward, it is safe to suggest that Hylion working directly with Peterbilt and having the supply of the components to Peterbilt from Cummins just out of the goodness of their heart is a dead proposal. It's no longer something that I will discuss when surrounding Hylion. What I will continue to discuss and start to discuss a lot more heavy is the speculation. And from my small voice on Twitter, it will start to move toward the speculation that, yes, here it is, buckle your seat belts. And again, yes, buckle your seat belt, sit back, chill. The news that I'm about to provide to you is potentially life changing, and it may give a jolt to your heart. So those of you who do have a heart condition, please prepare yourself accordingly. Cummins will acquire Hylion. They will acquire Hylion for the ability to take on their technology number one, number two, their fragmented relationships as we speak with the Maud Centers, IE, PACCAR, Peterbilt, as well as whatever arrangement has been made with Heizen. Now, if there's internal struggling going on at Hylion right now with Thomas Healy and his inability to parlay and see that the sheer reality is such to suggest that they will be unable to reach commercialization and mass scale and selling thousands of orders as originally projected, then he is sorely mistaken in this. And it is the main fear that I have is that a stranglehold between the CEO and the board of directors is not going to be good for anybody. It is unfortunate that the company has been driven down. I don't see the company realizing any more than four or five hundred million dollars of value. And who knows, Cummins may be looking for a bargain basement deal here, but I don't see them paying any more than 100% premium to cash right now. And acquire that cash really is just a token to Cummins to leverage their existing relationships with their suppliers, parts providers, and that way margins get cut immediately. The value to be paid out by Cummins to Hylion share owners would be to acquire a stake in Cummins for each share of Hylion held. And that would be music to my ears because I am in fact pledging to you now I'm no longer invested in this company for the ability of Hylion to scale anything commercially and that includes Carnot. I'm sorry to sound scathing on this, but I think Carnot is a wonderful idea, but it only in the hands of an established company, a company that has plenty of money to really further the technology and improve it to the point where they can leverage their existing stationary business that being Cummins with the augmentation of potentially putting some R&D infusion behind Carnot and actually making this a viable product to the commercial. And the points that were brought up in the Discord community discussion today would suggest that that is a dead end road. It is a dead end road in so far as Hylion taking their remainder of their 300 million, which if I was just going to throw out a round number would be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions, maybe even reaching the billions of dollars of capital infusion that may be necessary to actually put the Carnot into a place of realizing real profitability. Hylion is not capable of doing that. Hylion came to public markets as a $10 stock. Hylion charged up to about $6 billion in market cap in its heyday. And it has since digressed to the $250 million mark, $150 million. I don't even know where it sits right now. It doesn't even matter. It's digressed so far that even the prospects of gaining some strategic capital is now being put into question, which is another bearish sentiment around this name as to why you would or would not invest in the company if it does rely with Thomas Healy to actually parlay with some of these assets because he's a hell bent on holding on to commercializing this all on his own because he's got a massive ego. He will be incapable of doing so and the company will falter and he will take it to his grave and it will go down as one of the biggest industrial missteps in the history of the stock market quite frankly because I'm not being hard on Thomas Healy. What I'm being hard on is when I sit back and I look at both of these products, they both have extreme promise. Now the Carnot I think is a longer way away. I think it is lip service to suggest that it will be sold commercially next year. I don't believe it just like I don't believe anything. I'm scarred by this company. I don't trust them anymore. I did a month ago. I don't anymore. There was a few apologies in the Discord group about now being angry or now feeling kicked in the teeth or feeling deceived. There was a few people that skirted around the idea that they didn't feel like they were being honest with as a share owner to suggest that Thomas Healy is deceptive. I'm not in that camp either. Misleading? Absolutely. I think when you get momentum behind you and you come to markets like they did in 2020 and the feeling in 2020 euphoria, it was not the same now as it is now as being fearful. The tone and tenor of the market as being fearful would have required somebody coming to public markets now to exercise a little bit more tact, a little bit more care, a little bit more prudence in coming to financial markets, knowing that they were stepping into headwinds that do in fact exist in today's marketplace that probably existed then, let's be real in 2020, but was perceived not to exist because everything was all pleasant with the euphoric state and there was nothing that was going to stop this train, this pack train from seeking billions and billions of dollars of riches for share owners. That has since died away and it is gone. It is non-existent anymore. I think if there was a short opportunity and window with the hundreds of millions of dollars of infusion that were made, I think Silent Alert made a phenomenal point when talking about spreading your resources out so far. I think it was missed a little bit in that the, and X said it perfectly, all of those octopus arms of what is highly on i.e. relationships with Packard, Peter Belt and Cummins and many other vendors, Heizen as well, all get solved by an acquisition from Cummins and I will suggest that it is no reason to own a company for the prospects of a takeover. A lot of people are in it so deep and there was one admission to be in down 80% and just why not keep the stock? Perhaps maybe they decide to sell widgets and they sell them for $1.99 a piece and they go viral and highly unable to realize some top-end revenue by nature of selling widgets to people. I find it interesting how you can take $700 million and squander it away and not have a commercially viable product some three years after the fact of embarking on that journey. But I digress to what I said at the very top of this video. Do they have a product or not? Is it a commercially viable product or not? I've answered those questions for you. You will have to go in on your own and evaluate whether or not you think that those products are commercially viable. Now, they're commercially viable in way of a prototype and will need to be commercial. But I have heard Thomas Healy and I've listened to every word he said over the last three years and he has always been a very steadfast in talking about the funding that went in on the initial SPAC process was to get the ERX to commercialization. No more. Karna was a bonus, my friends. Don't think for a second that you need to get over zealous and expect that that SPAC money was aimed at not only taking a product that was more prototype than that we gave credit for and to bring that prototype to commercialization. Did he do that? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. The product is commercially viable now. I believe that there is one EPA certification that is lingering yet to be awarded. I think much more easily awarded and a lot more logistically run of the mill if they do end up just thrown in the towel on this deal and allowing themselves to be taken over. It'd be a lot of fun, a lot less stressful to watch the ERX, a little bit disappointing in what I think we all hoped to be and it was a pipe dream and is now the nail in the coffin as far as highly on leveraging their relationship with that. That was all made up. I think there has been advancements with the OEM hubs disclosed just on the last dooner interview when he talked about doing some of the work at the mod centers and working with the facility in Austin to make sure that those 30 iterations that are still going to go out and be delivered to the fleets are delivered. But the all pause, I believe, speaks to Hylion's inability to continue on with this with an inevitable fate of actually burning the remainder of their few hundred million dollars left and then being stuck in a market where they cannot raise funding and have a total loss of confidence and I think now is the prudent time to do it and I think that to speculate that Hylion somehow did this just to hurt share owners, I'm not in that camp. I think if there was a lot of smart people around the board of directors that looked at this thing and said, it's going to hurt, we have to do it. We've got some sort of an interest on the table and it is probably the particulars of that and I really hope I'm right. I cannot say one way or the other whether or not this is even a discussion or if I'm completely making this up. But we are left as share owners to do nothing short of speculate at this point because we have absolutely no color whatsoever on the direction of this company. We have no idea. Thomas Healy is probably going to come on and I think it would be in poor taste to do so to defend his reputation as far as following along a milestone. I think that would be a huge, huge mistake because I've looked at those milestones as being just this, a declaration to share owners while they burn $135 million per year to walk 10 steps. And the goal is going to be that in four months they can walk those 10 steps and that when they've achieved walking those 10 steps that they were going to check off of that box and then declare to share owners that they have walked those 10 steps. What I mean by that is those were things that I don't think needed to be on a roadmap to success. I don't. I think a checkbox that I would have liked to have seen is draw the first initial $10 million of top end revenue. Draw the first $25 million of top end revenue. Drive down margin sequentially. Initial margin set at negative 10%. We get to even margins on our sales of our ERX. Those are milestones, my friends, not a commercial certification. I don't think those are milestones. I think that those are run of the mill, logistics steps in the process to get to an end. Why do I say that? We do not have a company unless there are products to sell, unless there are generating revenues with an anticipation that they get to some sort of profitability at some point in the future, then the project is absolutely dead. I'm here to report to you guys that the dream that was this company making it on their own is absolutely dead. They are up against a mountain of cash spend and that cash will be spent down. If they cannot during the strategic review realize that they have a sales team right now that are making $100,000 a piece in salaries sitting on their haunches and there is a gag order for each of those sales teams to not receive new orders, that's insane. We have a CEO that's making $1.1 million in salary to advance a company that by his own admission can't advance. That's a problem. We have a warehouse full of workers that are making a product that will fall futile on the books as a losing proposition. Why is that? Because the components cost too much money, because we are dealing in low volume production. It is because we have a workforce that, yes, we wanted to pay handsomely to do the job, but we do not have a promise of making any return of any sizable revenues that could help to augment those operating expenditures that we thought just up to a month ago and the previous three years was absolutely in play. We don't have any of that anymore. I think to take these fragmented pieces and to augment them with Cummins is the only way to go. Now, that's my response to the discord community. I want to talk about a few minutes about why I think this decision is now. We have two global conflicts going on, my friends, right now. We have an anemic $40,000 at tax incentive and an ERX that MRPs at $440,000. That is not going to work. I don't believe that reducing the truck down to $300,000 is even possible, to be honest with you. I don't think that the government as nonproductive as they are has the ability to offer any more incentive than the $40,000. In other words, I think if the government came out and said, look, the bridge of this technology is just too wide for industry to take, we're going to give you $150,000 of credit. That would change the game and it would help augment some of those costs. I think even with that tax credit, it's not going to matter because I don't think Hylian is prepared to be self-sufficient on their own to offer this product with the dynamics that I've just disclosed to you. The market in general right now is a headwind. With the conflict, the supply chain issues that affect some companies and perhaps not others, certainly affecting the industrial realm and is rearing its ugly head right now will not get better in 2024. Sorry to tell you, it's not going to be roses. It's not going to be euphoria. We will have a real estate market that continues to digress on us. Things will be becoming more expensive. Inflation will be curbed, yes, but the cost of capital will remain high through 2024, as I think we're probably dealing with a Fed chair that is less likely to engage in quantitative easing because a lot of what has been blamed on the last decade of growth really has been blamed on that accommodative environment that we've all enjoyed from 2010 until 2020 after the mortgage-backed security crisis of 2010. I see that as being persistent. I think it's going to continue to persist for the foreseeable future. I don't think that in that environment where we were safe to speculate three years ago, we are void of that luxury of speculation at this particular juncture. I think a takeover is the only way forward. I think it is the only option. It is in my best interest as a share owners to try to put focus on the hope that does in fact exist for Hylian to write a good piece of business that is good for, as Thomas Healy said, the share owners in the company. That is to provide value where there's a ton of cash on the books and where there's value in the technology and where there's value in what I would perceive to be, hey, we've got a three vertical commercially viable product here ready to go. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars and quite frankly hundreds of billions of dollars of share owner money through R&D and burned up all of the share owner trust. That is in fact gone. It is a way of the past. I don't think there's anything on Q3 that Thomas Healy is going to be able to say that's going to reinstall my trust. I share in that sentiment with other share owners. I am the voice of those share owners as well. If they don't share in that sentiment, I apologize. If you're just gung-ho and you think that this company has the ability to make it on its own, I'm here to tell you that in my best fundamental assessment of where this company finds itself at present, my friends, the truth is that they cannot make it. They cannot make it. It is over. The end of the road is here and we are on currently a hiatus that sees this in this deliberation behind the scenes that is going on at present and I will be eagerly awaiting the announcement of a highly on Cummins collaboration. Thanks again to the group and those that I shouted out at the beginning of this video, CBM Outdoors, Silent Alert, Excalibur, and Andreas, as well as the couple of others that I didn't get names. I apologize. I was watching it on my phone, but the project still does march on. Certainly has evolved in a fairly negative direction as far as I'm concerned because in and of itself, this is not a reason to invest in any company with the hopes of a takeover, but with the idea that perhaps maybe even taking this as anemic as the parts might be now and actually fortified for the few years going forward that I think it'll take to actually get this product into the hands of the Class 8 space. Highly on doesn't have the capital and they don't have the infinite time. They don't have the bandwidth. They do not have the supply chain. Really, they do not have anything at this point to bring to the table to lend and play with the big boys. It is over. It is absolutely over. And I encourage Thomas Healy to actually sell the company outright, sell everything with it, allow themselves to be taken over, sit back with your millions of dollars and enjoy that you brought this to public markets to be taken over by somebody who can actually see it through. Because right now, Highly on is 100% incapable of taking this to full commercialization without some level of assistance. So I will continue to speculate on this. I will continue to tweet on this front. I will try to generate as much churn as I possibly can to try to force their hand and becoming more transparent, more transparent, more than zero to would be share owners right now that have been quite frankly just kicked around for the last three years and provided zero reciprocation from this company that has made massive progress and the decision is theirs to make. And I'm just hoping that they make a good decision that absolutely does have share owners best interest in mind. Thank you so much for tuning into the video. Leave your comments at the bottom of the video. You're welcome to subscribe to the channel. If you like content like this, if you don't like content like this, hell, don't subscribe to the channel. You can unsubscribe for crying out loud if this pisses you off. Hit the hit the thumbs up button, the notification bell. You'll be notified of future videos that I put online. Thank you so much for your time in enjoyment to this video and good luck in your investment future.