Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry celebrate a milestone: Trane's Graduate Training Program turns 100. Kris Gagermeier, Trane’s Director, Technical Training Center of Excellence joins to walk through the program's origins, how it's evolved over a century, and where AI fits into the next chapter of HVAC workforce development, including what it takes to get through 14 weeks in La Crosse.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: Repair revenue is eating a bigger slice of mechanical contractors' business — up from 21% to 31% since 2021, with more jobs, higher ticket sizes, and lower costs. Plus: Bill Gates-backed TerraPower is breaking ground on a 500 MW sodium-cooled nuclear reactor in Wyoming, targeting 2030.
• Stat of the Day: Dan mulches it over and shares some surprising landscaping industry stats.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry sit down with Matt Caldwell, Director of AI & Cloud Data Centers at Hyper, a company building low-voltage electrical equipment for the data centers powering the AI boom. Matt makes the case that the US-China AI race makes the 1960s space race look like a warm-up lap — and explains why the industry needs to rethink how it designs, manufactures, and deploys infrastructure at speed.

We also have:

• Listener Hot Takes: Uncle Tom's hack for checking building pressurization, and Broadband Jesus’s EnergyNet.
• HVAC Headlines: Should your HVAC company have a mascot, and a Winnipeg case where rooftop HVAC metal theft caused around $500,000 in damages.
• Stat of the Day: Domino’s delivers how many pizzas a day? And just how much did the Apollo program cost in today’s dollars?

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow, too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry sit down with Mike Dawson, VP of Sales at Parklane Mechanical, a company that's been solving industrial noise problems for over 30 years. Data centers are booming, and we've all heard the noise about them. Turns out, they're also just literally loud. Neighbors have opinions about that. Mike breaks down how noise control works, why it needs to be part of the conversation earlier than most people think, and what the job looks like on the ground.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: How data centers helped keep the lights on during Winter Storm Fern, Trane's new collaboration on oil-free compressor technology, and a 25-year cheese study that has absolutely no business being this interesting.
• Stat of the Day: Which U.S. states gained the most residents in 2025.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.