Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined. We're talking about a future so bright we have to wear shower caps. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And here on Still to be Determined, we like to revisit Matt's videos. Take a look at your comments there. Take a look at your comments here. Take a look and just chat about whatever comes up. But today, something a little different. We have a deeper dive conversation with Nona Yehia, who is the CEO of Vertical Harvest, the subject of Matt's most recent video. So we're looking forward to talking directly to her. On now to our conversation with Nona. First of all, Nona, thank you so much for being here. It's terrific to meet you. And I understand that, that this all started because of a potluck. You had a potluck at dinner.Nona Yehia: I believe it was that you have false information. Sean. It was a, it was a bachelorette party. It was a bachelorette party.

Sean Ferrell: That's even better. That's, that's even better.

Nona Yehia: At a hot springs. Yeah, yeah. So even better. A bunch of ladies getting together to take advantage of some sulfur.

Sean Ferrell: That's wonderful.

Matt Ferrell: How do you connect a bachelorette party to Vertical Harvest? Like how do you connect those two?

Nona Yehia: Well, let me, let me go back before the bachelorette party. Right. So as I think you both know, I never set out to be a vertical farmer. This is, this is a trade that found me and I think like every good entrepreneur who, entrepreneurship, anyone who's been through it, you know, it's not for the faint of heart and you have to have something that drives you, right. Or else you're just like, okay, this isn't worth it. And for me it's very personal. I have a brother with disabilities. From a very early age, I understood that community wasn't set up to support him the way that it was set up to support me. I got, seemed to get all the advantages and he still had to work to find his way through and to be able to make him work for community. So I became and an advocate before I even understood what the word meant. And that drove me to become an architect because design became my, my tool, my medium for change. And with that I became really focused on infrastructure and community. Like curb cuts stairs, how infrastructure supported people, but more importantly, where it left people behind. And I think throughout my 30 year career, you know, journey as being an architect, I, I was really focused on key success factors. For communities. And food seemed to be at the core of every single one of them. And, you know, when food seems to be the strongest link to human and environmental health. And so I. I was always looking for a way that I could integrate food into my architectural career. So I've lived in Michigan, I've lived in New York. I've spent the last 23 years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And Jackson Hole is a pretty unique spot because it's just filled with risk takers. Right. People who want to push the boundaries. In 2008, if you could put yourself back to where we were, then, there wasn't much work for architects.

And so I had been working internationally and those projects went on hold. And I said, well, what do I want to do? I said, I really want to double down on this idea of community. So I started designing residential scale greenhouses that could last the Wyoming winter for my friends to grow food, because my friends were a bunch of foodies. And then I had worked with the town on a couple of projects, notably the local bouldering project, Bouldering park, and had designed it for them. So I had a lot of connections with the town. And so I was at a bachelorette party and I met our first co founder here, Penny McBride, and she was working to see if a greenhouse could exist in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And she had heard about my work and she said, do you want to help? And I was like, yeah, I do. That would be really fun. And so she didn't have a site, she didn't have a scale, but she then had an architect. And so we started on the journey that has taken me, you know, to a much different place than where I thought we would end up.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, that sounds like. I mean, that. That one answer to that question, you've touched off on about half of our bullet points of things we wanted to talk to you about. So you. I'm curious right out of the gate, I wondered what it was like as you started to approach municipalities about this idea and saying, here's what we want to do. How many of them slowly rolled their chairs out of the office just to pull themselves out of the meeting as quietly as possible. How many of them really understood what you were trying to get to? What was the initial response like back in 2008, 2009, 2010?

Nona Yehia: Well, okay, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I mean, we didn't open our doors until 2016. So it was six years of what? Oh, wait, who are you? Are you a farmer? You look like an architect. You kind of talk like an architect and wait what, you want to solve other problems as well? You don't want to just grow food. You want to employ people who have historic barriers to entry to employment. Because, you know, we met our third co founder, Caroline Crofteste, during this process, and she said to Penny and I, hey, if you both ever get this farm off the ground, would you employ my people? She was an employment facilitator for people with disabilities. And obviously, I was all in. So we were innovating, Sean, at a lot of different levels, sounds like. But from the beginning, you know, there were a lot of community members that saw our vision very clearly. And so we started to amass a really dedicated group of, you know, people who saw very clearly how this could support our community. And actually, you know, I think one of the best stories of Vertical Harvest, and it's. It's been this way ever since, you know, when we kind of got some traction and there was a grant that we could capitalize half the building cost with a public entity called the Wyoming Business Council that was in place to develop economic development. We went down that process. And at the time, it was when the Tea Party was around, right? And I'll never forget, the head of the Tea Party at this time came to me and he was like, Nona, I'm going to kill your project. Like, your numbers don't make any sense. It's public money. You're parading around like a nonprofit. Like, this is done. You're not going to go any further. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, let's. Let's talk. And so I invited him to lunch. We went to lunch for the next, I think, three to four months every week.

And I'll, you know, never forget. I was exhausted. The last lunch that we had, he looked at me and he said, you know, no, no. What happens when you bat down all the no's? And I was like, I'm not in the mood for riddles. Just tell me what you are thinking. And he said, turn it into yes. Turn it into a yes. And he became our biggest advocate. And so we won by one vote with the Wyoming Business Council. But after that, you know, I would say that the chairs all started coming towards us when we got the farm up and running, you know, in 2016, 2017, our story punched a national weight. And that was a lot for us because we had municipalities calling out of the blue saying, we want your model of not only growing food, but creating jobs. Come and help us. And I was like, well, the model's not ready. We have to make sure. That this is scalable, that this is profitable. All of the questions that people have about this type of farming, we need to make sure that we can answer that before we scale. And I'm really glad we did. I think that, like any innovation, people kind of back themselves out of a room at first, but then when you start proving it, they get closer. We're on a second cycle of that with the scale that we've introduced in Maine and what. What you so beautifully covered in the latest piece. And.

And I think that we're very excited to prove this model out at the scale that it exists in Maine.

Matt Ferrell: When I was in the facility in Maine, one of the things I was impressed by was the disability angle was something everybody seemed very proud of.

Nona Yehia: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And everything that I was seeing, it was like, oh, this thing where you put the seating machine in, you can articulate this up and down. So you could be in a wheelchair.

Sean Ferrell: You could be.

Matt Ferrell: It doesn't matter. Anybody could access everything in the facility. I didn't touch on that in detail in the video, but it was something that really stood out at me. All the thought and care that went into the entire facility as a whole. And I'm assuming that comes right back to what you talked about at the beginning.

Nona Yehia: I think having a real why behind the work. Right. We've all seen technology and this innovative way of producing food have a real impact on people's lives. Not only the people that work there, but the people that are in the community in which it serves. Right. There's a real pride in the way that we've solved a real problem. You know, no one. And what I used to say. I'm not sure anymore, but I used to say that nobody can argue with food and jobs. And that's what we were innovating. So that if we are going to reconnect the farm to the urban center, and that's what I set out to do, was create a new type of civic infrastructure like a hospital or at a community center or an airport. But it's a farm that would be located in the heart of a city. And if we are going to reconnect the farm to cities, feed people where they are, what kind of jobs are we going to create? What does this look like? And, you know, there's as. As across the nation right now, we're seeing a labor shortage that is really heightened in the agricultural community. We see. We see stories about that every day now. And that the average age of a farmer in the United States is 58. Well, there's also a segment, a population that has 80% unemployment, that wants to work, that can work, and that just needs specific training in order to work. But they, you know, are a labor source that any industry should be looking at, and that's people with disabilities. And I think my experience and Caroline's experience facilitated that. But it's good for the business and it's really just, it's just problem solving and connecting dots. So it is a feel good thing. And I think, you know, the culture that we built around it is pretty magic.

And you know, any, any company uses the cliche that culture eats strategy for lunch or breakfast or whatever, but we, we live that on a daily basis and the culture is really strong. And I would say that through the ups and downs, our employees with disabilities are the first one to work every day, ready to fight the good fight, and they're very proud of the work that they do. And, and, and people that don't identify with disabilities are very proud to work alongside them. So that's been the pride of my career. No matter what happens in the future, I know that we made true change.

Sean Ferrell: It sounds like you find yourself at the center of a Venn diagram with a lot of overlapping communities where you've got the food source need, you've got the urban center need, you've got the disability community need, you've got the wider public need of just being able to find, produce and that kind of thing. Do you think that, that when it, when you boil it down to that, is that the kind of model that an entrepreneur should be leaning into as far as, like, you're not out there in one community solving one problem. Where do you interface with all the different communities around you and how do they overlap and how do you pin yourself in the middle of that? It sounds very much to me like you accidentally stumbled on that, but it seems, it seems like a smart idea.

Nona Yehia: Well, I think throughout the whole thing and Matt, I think in your tour of the farm, you saw that we do this. Everything's about kind of a portfolio approach, right. That you are able to root yourself in multiple different arenas. Right. So for the product or let's just talk about who we sell to. We don't just sell to retail, we don't just sell to food service, but to the anchor institutions, the schools, the hospitals. Right. That in the pandemic, if we had just sold to culinary, well, then we would have had a problem. Right? So you can shift and really be nimble according to the market conditions. But from the very beginning, I think we set out to develop a company that, yes, addressed climate resilience, but that it could also address other key issues that people care about. Public health, social resiliency in terms of economics, and economic resiliency in terms of our communities. And so when you put all those drivers together, what you do is you create a company that people care about. And what are brands really? They're movements. Right. You look at the brands that are most successful, it's because people want to be aligned with them. They want to be a part of it, and it means something to them, to their family, to their community, to their region. And I think we saw the possibility of that at the very beginning, and I think that that possibility is really not. We have still, our dance card is full. Once Maine proves out the model, we are off to the races in terms of replication. And I hope that that is where this all ends, because communities across the board are very excited to be aligned with what we've built. So I would completely agree with that.

Sean Ferrell: Without naming names, I'm not going to ask you to forecast where you'll be in five years, but without naming names, let's say a year from now, Maine has proven the model. How many different places do you anticipate? You're very close to being able to say, yep, we're going in there and we're going to start doing it there as well.

Nona Yehia: You said five years from now, like

Sean Ferrell: maybe a year from now. Yeah.

Nona Yehia: So a year from now, we'll be talking to two other communities about developing the model, and five years from now, we'll have two more farms in operation with another on the way.

Sean Ferrell: That's wonderful.

Matt Ferrell: Okay.

Nona Yehia: Yeah, we want to. We would like to build a family of 10. So that's. That's the network that we'd start with. Of course, if we are able to find the right partners, the right tools for scale, we would like to do more. But right now, I think where this industry has been, all of us have learned, and I think we knew from the beginning, let's not overreach, and let's really put one foot in front of the other. Let's make sure that this model is capable of. And then we make the promises. And I think that that is really critical to understand.

Matt Ferrell: Well, yeah, I think that actually dovetails nicely into kind of like the industry question, because the vertical farming industry has been kind of like bankruptcies all over the place. Big players, like plenty went bankrupt. There's all these bankruptcies that have happened over the past two or three years. And yet you you guys are still standing and you're still pushing forward. What is it about the way their approaches didn't work versus what you guys are doing that's making it slightly different?

Nona Yehia: Yeah, I love talking about this. Number one, I want to say that I'm very grateful for the first generation of vertical farms. They took the big leaps. They really rooted this idea in the public psyche, and it's a tool that we need very much right now. So I'm very grateful for the risks that these companies took, and I'm always rooting for them to come out of bankruptcy, to restructure, you know, all of the ways that we can all go down this corporate journey together. I think from the very beginning, where there were a few missteps is that it's probably threefold. Number one, they identified as the wrong kind of company. This is farming. This is about operation. This is about unit economics. This is about how can you push margins? What are the products that push margins? We were never going to be able to compete with traditional agriculture, but what we could do is create a counterpart to traditional agriculture that enhances the resiliency of the way that we distribute food in our country today. And that a more regional approach when you're not focused on that operation. What. What kind of company are you building? And I think that a lot of the companies at the beginning thought that they were technology companies, and so they had the valuations of technology companies. If you think about where we were 10 years ago, eight years ago, money was basically free, right? There was a lot of VC who was looking to back the next back big thing. And so put technology and human kind and, you know, big valuations together. Well, you, you have a. A great prospect. And I think that when the companies had to come back to the table for money because they had tried to reinvent the wheel or possibly reinvent a new wheel, that that source wasn't there anymore.

And I think for us, I entered this, as you both know now, as an architect, and I knew I could design a beautiful building, but could it be a farm? So I looked at where there was expertise and, and Matt, you talked about it, that in a country the size of Maryland, the Netherlands is the largest exporter, second largest exporter of food behind the United States. They have been growing hydroponically under glass, horizontally for 30 years. So all of that R&D was there. And as an architect, I just took that. And with great engineers and what I lovingly called the Dutch mafia, we figured out how to adapt it to a vertical format, right and, and with the purpose of feeding cities. Right. So we weren't on the outskirts of cities like some of our colleagues and competitors and nameless, faceless warehouses trying busily to build the robots that would completely automate a farm. We were saying, how do we become the best operators? How do we grow as much food as possible? How do we bring the product directly to the people that need it? How do we not only understand how to grow and operate, but the market is so important. Who is the customer? What are they going to need in terms of how can we supplement what they already get from traditional agriculture? And I think we always asked ourselves those hard questions because I came in too late, I didn't have access to VC, right? And I'm grateful for that now because I think that my colleagues and competitors made big mistakes with big farms and big money. I made big mistakes because it's new and there was no playbook. But I made it in a small farm. Our farm in Wyoming that we've run for 10 years is a 20th of the size of the one in Maine. And we made it with a relatively small amount of money. And we learned from our own mistakes and we learned from the mess, the lessons from the industry.

And we also learned in this new context of what is important to investors, an investment, and how do we create an enduring business? And I'm not saying we're out of the woods, far from it. The markets keep shifting and turning, and I don't know if anyone is right now, but I think that we have built a business that is based on data and is based on 10 years of experience and really understanding what is our product, who is our customer, what are the systems that work, and finally, how do we build a workforce around it that is resilient? I think that's why we're still here. I think that a lot of the bankruptcies and restructures have had some good results. There's one farm in particular, Aero Farms, who really focused on microgreens. It's a high margin product. That's where we were focused from the very beginning. It was, it's more of a national distribution instead of a regional one. But I think that, you know, there a lot of mistakes were made, but now that we're on the second wave of what this can look like, we've learned from where the first wave has ended up.

And like I said, I think it's a good place to be, but it's still not a secure place to be.

Matt Ferrell: The Dutch Mafia sounds like a Netflix show I'd want to watch. Yeah.

Nona Yehia: Well, I owe such a debt of gratitude to our partners in the Netherlands. You know, I think that that was huge. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We didn't need to invent a new wheel. We knew the wheel and we just had to put the pieces of the wheel in a, you know, together in a way that made sense. And, and, and this is really about just. It's a, it's a, it's a manufacturing facility. It's, it's, it's, it's about, you know, how do you move the product efficiently from one place to another. And that was the innovation of it. It's really an architectural innovation. I think the other big thing that hurt our predecessors is there's this idea that you could get the right growing system and then you could put it into a warehouse. Right. And Vertical Harvest is a purpose built facility. And what does that mean? That means that every aspect of, of the facility is thought through for the best cultivation of plants. What people don't understand is the lights are one thing. Yes. But in order to have a healthy plant, it's all about airflow, relative humidity, the temperature, the CO2, all of it. And so to try to put a growing system into a warehouse and retrofit, that is a big challenge. And it's just like in my industry and architecture, you know, a renovation is actually much more complicated than a new build, because a new build, you can address all of the things you're always behind in a renovation, from energy to airflow. That is something that Vertical Harvest took really seriously. And I think that that put us ahead of the game as well. And with each farm that we have the opportunity to develop, we will be able to iterate on that and get better and better through the data of the platform that we're growing. So I think that was really important.

And then finally, I think that a lot of my colleagues and competitors were trying to compete with Budweiser, right? They're like, okay, we have this head lettuce and let's, let's go. We're going to feed the world, right? When you're trying to compete with a commodity product at a scale like that, you're going to be driven to be the lowest cost producer and that doesn't work. So for us, from the beginning, we drove flexibility. We want to be the craft beer, the artisanal blend that is regionally appropriate and that differentiates itself from the commodity produce. So it has a margin that we can work with. Of course, we do grow lettuce, because everybody wants lettuce. But we have the petite greens, the herbs, the microgreens that really drive the portfolio to the margin mix that we need to succeed. And I think a lot of our colleagues and competitors were only growing one type of crop and, and that in the end, when they needed to, to diversify, it was too late.

Sean Ferrell: So do you see your competition is not necessarily the large scale farms, but more the idea that the product needs to come from other parts of the world as opposed to being able to be a community center and a community driven product. Is that the competition here, not the farms that exist in various parts of the country where they're growing things like corn and wheat and everything else?

Nona Yehia: Well, definitely not corn and wheat, but what we're trying to do. So let's look at Maine. Maine imports over 95% of its produce. Maine grows blueberries and potatoes. So we need to have produce in that mix. And so an average head of lettuce travels over 1500 miles to get to me. And so what we're trying to do is everybody, I think, eats romaine, right, or iceberg, because it can handle that journey. But what if we had a locally hyper, local, you know, source of leafy greens that push nutritional value as well as taste value. Right. And so people start to understand that lettuce has a lot more diversity than just iceberg or romaine. So I'd say that our competitors are regional distributors of controlled environment of leafy greens at this moment. Right. So in our area, there's a large scale farm that only can grow head lettuce, but that would be our main competitor and they're out of Massachusetts. So that would be where I see our main competition happening. Or some of the local indoor farms that can grow all year round.

Sean Ferrell: You talked about a lot of the competitors were setting themselves up. We're a tech company. We happen to be solving a problem, which is agriculture, as opposed to going the other direction. I wonder what were some of the places in your development where you had some aspirations to incorporate technologies that you said, okay, we're going to have to incorporate that later. We're going to table that for now because our main goal is this other thing. And what are the ways that you might be reincorporating some of that technology in the future?

Nona Yehia: Well, I think in Jackson everything is very, you know, we have three stories of production with had a real diversity of crops. We grew tomatoes in Jackson and we grew lettuce, you know, herbs, petites and microgreens. And I love that. I mean, we grew 60 different types of microgreens. It was just amazing. Like, you know, micro tangerines, like, just. It was the Willy Wonka of, you know, indoor farming. It was just a beautiful, beautiful place. And I love that, that, that experimentation, because I think that's one of the benefits of this tool. And I think we had to really streamline, we had to say, okay, what is our product mix? How do we excel at this? And so we did. You know, we. And the pandemic helped because we were like, all right, let's. Let's bring it in. Let's streamline the whole thing. You know, we never. We never missed a day of operation, but it's all very manual. We didn't experiment with automation. We did that in Maine, and I'm really excited about the result of that. And then finally, and what we're getting into now is this whole kind of digital backbone. How can we stitch the whole farm together? In Jackson, we have very separate tools that help the farm run, but they're very isolated, each in their own silo. In Maine, we've been working with Siemens to create what we call the digital backbone that connects how the workforce operates, the plants, the health of the plant, our outputs, our sustainability outputs. It's like a digital floor manager that can be remote, right? And we're building that with Siemens, and I'm really excited to even push that further in terms of the data that we can collect and to put a final AI layer on it. You know, to really use physical AI to be able to collect the data that's necessary to optimize the facility and facilities moving forward. I think that's where the real promise of this is.

In Jackson, we were like, okay, that's all really interesting, but if we don't get the product right, we can't do any of that. And so we really focused on the product and the workforce. And like, you know, we went through seven generations of lighting to get to the one that was highlighted in the video and really understanding, you know, the. The benefit of LED lighting and, and how to use it. So we had to really focus on the operational aspect before we. We started to iterate and enhance. And as an architect, I always want to iterate. And I think my team. I think my team. I drive my team crazy because there's never a done right. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, let's get better. Let's do. Do it better, you know, So I think it drives me crazy at a certain point, but I think everybody's in it. Because of that, it's, it's been fun to watch.

Matt Ferrell: Continuing the technology question, one of the things I've seen in the comments already on the video I put out, which was around like the energy use of the building, it's like, here's this one and a half megawatt facility and a lot of people just immediately write it off of, oh, that's not worth it. You can grow stuff out in the open and it's free sunshine. Why are you going to waste all that energy built doing something that nature can do for you?

Nona Yehia: Yes.

Matt Ferrell: What's your response to that kind of comment?

Nona Yehia: Well, I loved it. So many people watched it. My friend who's in the solar industry reached out and he was like, it's only 1.5 megawatts. He's like, wow. I thought it would have been much more, you know, I thought that that was really interesting. It has been the one, you know, focus point for this tool. I would say that in general there have to be trade offs. Right. Are we sure that we're always going to be able to grow lettuce outdoors consistently? Right. I have seen it recently and also in the past where a head of romaine has gone up to market price as like, you know, equivalent to a steak. Right. Because of some of the disturbances in the way that we grow outdoors. Environmental, however you want to look at it, you know, pestilence, any of it. Number one, we better be pretty certain that we're always going to be able to use dirt and sunshine and let's not even get into the quality of the dirt. But I also think that as the grid gets greener, so does this tool and we all have to start somewhere. I like to think about the solar industry. If we go back 20 years ago, everybody said it's too expensive, it doesn't have enough efficacy, it's never going to work. And now solar has been adopted. It took a long time. It panned out in terms of the investment EV vehicles. Right. I just bought my first EV. I feel very happy. It was good timing. But I think that, you know, again, what is the trade off? But now let me get into the specifics of how we handle it. So as I said, this is a purpose built building and Matt, you highlighted some of the tools that we've used. Right. So we're managing energy all over the place and we've had our facility benchmarked time and time again. We've modeled it in and out and now we're getting the data points.

But we have benchmarked about a quarter of the energy of some of our colleagues and competitors because of the purpose built approach. Also, you know, we have the ability to adapt to different market strategies, like Arik was talking about in the video, of being able to use peak usage hours. And now that we have the data, we're implementing that right away. So it is an issue. It is one that people should take note of. But I think that it's not an insurmountable issue. And I think we're doing a really good job at addressing it. And I think there will come a time where this becomes like we have designed our way out of it and that we are a reasonable consumer of energy. Are we there yet? No, but there is the potential to be there. And I'm excited about our ability to do just that. And it really starts with being thoughtful consumers of it. And so we know it's a problem and we're addressing that problem head on. It's one of our biggest priorities.

Matt Ferrell: I asked the question of Arik, I think it was, why not put solar on the roof? And I didn't put it in the video, but along the lines of, you wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to what you would need because the size of the building is so small, you would not be able to produce anything significant.

Nona Yehia: And, you know, everybody's an engineer, everybody's an architect. Oh, we should just put solar on the roof. And we're like, great idea. You know, and so what I enjoy is the conversation. Right. And I think I was really actually very happy with your comments. Everybody was very thoughtful. It's probably the way that you present these issues is through curiosity. And I think we need more curiosity in the world. Right. That replaces reactive judgment. And I think if we're all curious about the things that mean something to us, then we'll get somewhere. I think fighting for our beginnings in Wyoming, as a woman who was not very apparently a farmer, I have skin that's nine inches thick. Right. But I think that by embracing our skeptics as much as our supporters, we have learned so much. And that's how you build a good business. Because your skeptics will ask you the hard questions and. And you better have answers. Right. My colleague very rightly was like, Nona. Okay, now you put the comments away.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yep.

Sean Ferrell: It's important to be challenged, but it's not. It's not worth getting into a mud fight. Yeah.

Nona Yehia: You have to keep your head down and keep moving forward. And I think that's what Vertical Harvest has done. So beautifully. And again, I really hope that we are able to prove the model out. It is. Innovation is challenging always, but there are some ideas that are worth fighting for, and I believe this is one of them.

Sean Ferrell: That's terrific. Yeah. Thank you again for taking the time to talk to us. This has been terrific. If the audience of this podcast has additional questions, I hope we could follow up with you and see about having another conversation at some point in the future.

Nona Yehia: Yeah. Thank you for. For putting our story out there. I think it's one that deserves being told. And. And I really appreciate you doing that. And I also loved that so many of our stakeholders was like, wow, that was brave of you to do it. And, you know, and. And I remember when we were discussing, you know, being a part of your show, we were like, well, we're all about transparency, so that's what we gotta do. Let's keep the conversation going. So, again, thank you for handling it so thoughtfully, and we're excited to continue the conversation wherever it leads us.

Matt Ferrell: I appreciate you taking a leap of faith and letting me come in, not knowing what I was going to come out with at the end. I really do appreciate it.

Nona Yehia: Yeah, yeah. No, our pleasure.

Sean Ferrell: Once again, our thanks to Nona for joining us. I think that that conversation was really interesting, Matt. I. I was struck by the fact that for somebody who did not set out to be a farmer, for somebody who didn't set out necessarily even to be an entrepreneur, it really felt like she followed her passion, she followed her bliss, and she found herself in that terrain, and that's to be. That's to be honored. So congratulations to her. It's. It is very inspiring. Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: I found myself. I found myself thinking, wow, it's. It's really a demonstration of the problems don't seem too big if you really care about the answer, as opposed to yes, I don't have any control over the things around me, so I'm just going to shut down.

Matt Ferrell: So it's the whole reason I pick the topics I do on the channel, because it's like I like talking and learning about smart people doing smart things. This is no different.

Sean Ferrell: So before we close the show, I wanted to revisit a couple of comments that we spotted in the video itself. This is the better than farms video. Why this vertical farm is 500 times more efficient than farming. And right off the bat, I couldn't agree more with Torres, who jumps into the comments to say, it would be nice to revisit this place in six months to one year. I think so. Too. I think it'd be interesting to follow them for the next few years because I. I would think we're going to see more of these sites and potentially more businesses on this model than just this one. So. Yes, agree with you, Torres.

Matt Ferrell: On top of which, when I saw what you saw in the video, they were just starting to scale up the facility. Imagine what that place is going to look like when it's fully humming and you go into the germination room and every rack is filled. You know, it's like, that's going to be a sight to see. Yeah. But it looks like in full operation.

Sean Ferrell: I also liked her comparison to being a craft brewery. Regional, local and how might they differ from one another is really interesting to think about. One part of the country might be leaning into one type of product, whereas another part of the country is going to go a completely different direction simply because of regional tastes, the desire for certain types of food in different areas. Maybe some part of the country doesn't need lettuce in the same way as Maine does. So grow something else that can't be grown in that part of the country. I think it's really going to be fascinating to see what happens. Also, this from Lonnie, who said, I think this makes more sense using the power for this than another data center and its power demand. I think, yes. Not that we're necessarily like pitting industries against each other.

Matt Ferrell: No, no, no, no.

Sean Ferrell: But I find myself thinking like, oh, yeah, you want to. You want to use that power to grow food, go for it. As opposed to ChatGPT's are you wanna use that power for ChatGPT to make a picture of a cat dribbling a basketball. Thank you. And finally, the best, worst comment. We have a twofer right next to each other. Devil Doc jumped in at 4 minutes and 38 seconds into your video, Matt, to say how crazy the Internet is. I went to college with Lindsay. I had no idea this is what she was up to all these years later. So, Devil Dog, I'm really glad you. Devil Dog, I'm really glad you got to catch up on what Lindsay's up to. Yeah, she was there talking about, we're putting the seeds into this thing and we're germinating these panels, so. And then from Polo Dog echoed exactly what Matt and his cameraman said in the video itself. My eyes. Yes, that was a lot of bright pink light. I also, Matt wanted to congratulate you on coining spinach vision. Well done.

Matt Ferrell: You like that?

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I did. So, listeners, viewers Let us know what you think. Jump into the comments. Let us know. We always appreciate your comments and we'll help inform future videos as we continue this conversation. And as always, your comments. Liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all free and easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you want to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. Then we get down to the heavy business, talking about what kinds of lettuce we're going to eat with dinner tonight. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to Be Determined. We're going to be covering a wide range of topics because we are legion. That's right. It's not just two of us, it's four of us. Technically, it's three of us and me. And who am me? I'm Sean Ferrell. Welcome to the Still To Be Determined podcast. This is a follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. You'll never guess who the host of that is. That's right, Matt Ferrell. And he's here with me now. Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing really well. How about you?

Sean Ferrell: I'm doing okay. I'm looking forward to you and I will be talking in a few minutes. For the viewers, it'll be more than a few minutes, but a little bit later you and I will be talking about some comments on your most recent, which was your exploration into some of the things that you did in your new home that maybe you would have done differently if you had known then what you know now. But that will be later because right now we're excited to be able to share with you a long form conversation between Matt and two of his friends, Ricky Roy from Two Bit Da Vinci and Ryan Hughes from Ziroth. The three of them got together, they've been talking and making videos about the Donut Labs battery. So they got together, they chatted a bit about what do they think it is? What do they think about what's going on? This is not a new topic for this channel. It's not a new topic for their channels. I don't know that this is going to go away until the battery is literally in everybody's hands. So we're excited now to share Matt's conversation with Ricky and Ryan as they dive into a Donut. What?

Matt Ferrell: All right, guys. I'm joined today by two good friends of mine. Ricky Roy from Two Bit Da Vinci and Ryan Hughes from Ziroth. They're both YouTubers. We talk about similar topics a lot and thought it'd be fun to have a conversation with these guys about Donut Lab, particularly because both of them have been publishing lots of videos and takes on Donut Lab compared to what I've been doing. And they have a lot more knowledge about this space than I do. So I was hoping to talk to you both, but before we get into that, just kind of introduce yourselves. Let's start with Ricky. How many times have you changed your take on Donut Labs at this point?

Ricky Roy: That's a great question.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.

Ricky Roy: So, hi, I'm Ricky. I run the YouTube channel Two Bit Da Vinci. And interestingly, yeah, we were talking about this. You either know who I am, because Matt and I did this podcast called Vice Versa, which was a lot of fun. And we do a lot of similar topics, like over the years, and invariably every year there'll be three or four episodes where somebody will say, oh, great, all you do is watch Matt Ferrell's videos and copy them because we'll have the same schedule where topics will overlap. But yeah, Matt has been one of my absolute best friends and it's a pleasure to be here.

Matt Ferrell: Ryan, We've met first for the first time face to face at CES a couple years ago. And this year you kind of made yourself known in the Donut Labs booth by harassing them so much that they brought you up to other people that were visiting the booth. What do you think they think of you now?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Those poor people at that booth got an absolute earful from me. I was so curious. I just, I kept going over them and be like, okay, just to get some details. And I'd leave, come back and be like, sorry, just to confirm, did you say that? Oh, God. I pestered the poor people there for hours to try and get as much info as possible so I could share it online. I'm in discussions a bit with the CTO on LinkedIn, like relatively frequently. We've been having some chats and he's a great guy. Um, but clearly we have different views on, on certain things. I'm not sure he would say in private, but to me he's been great. So I think they're all a little bit frustrated with me sharing my opinions online, but I'm quite happy to do. To do that. Anyway, I've been sharing my opinions online about Clean Tech on Ziroth, which is my YouTube channel, for about five years now. I started the YouTube channel just before my PhD when I was doing my Master's, inspired by Matt and Ricky, to be honest, watching these guys making awesome content. So then I decided, yeah, I'll start chipping in, go really technical. Me and Ricky both like to get really into the really technical stuff. And over five years, throughout the PhD it grew. So now since finishing my PhD, it's become the full time thing whilst I travel around a bit too.

Matt Ferrell: To kick this conversation off, why don't we just start with like. I'm curious to hear both of you say this, like, what your gut reaction was when Donut first came out with Their announcement, like, Ryan, what was your first gut reaction when you heard what they were proposing?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, gut reaction when I got to the booth, saw all of the claims together, was just like, no way that that was in. Which is why I was so curious because I just thought, I think I instantly understood the gravity of how important this would be because it's just been something as we all, as we all have been looking into for so many years. And I think some people may be, if you're more like on the sidelines of clean tech or it's just a hobby interest you. You probably saw the battery and thought, wow, this is really cool. But to me, I was like, no, this is like world changing cool. And so it instantly hit me and then I thought, there seems to be no trade off in the battery. And that was the first thing for me where I was like, I don't know, this smells, smells strange to me. But, you know, we still don't have any definitive proof of anything. But that was definitely my first reaction.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What about you, Ricky? What was your gut reaction when you first heard what they were saying?

Ricky Roy: Yeah, I thought it was interesting to do it at CES, which is just such a public spectacle, especially if you're not like, truthful and what you have is not actually verifiable. Just seems like a weird stage to start with, especially because, you know, the argument we've probably seen in our comments is that is deployed to like raise capital or, or some, you know, like, devious plot or something. But if you're going to come to CES and say that there's going to be such scrutiny and there's going to be like such a, like a broad net cast that it didn't make sense that they'd be lying about it. So I kind of started the other way around and I said, okay, this is true. What does it mean? And to, to Ryan's point, like, in engineering, there's typically, there's pretty much always a trade off. Like, you have to choose the best parameters for what you're trying to solve for. But in this case, if it's lithium free and there's no, like, exotic materials and it's easy to make and they've, you know, the energy density is higher than batteries of today and it lasts a hundred thousand, it all just seems hard to justify just from the battery world. And so my first thought was they've done something with like a new electrolyte, like some sort of like a salt electrolyte, or they've done something novel. And my thought was, it was maybe more obvious than people thought. Like, you know, sometimes you, you, you pursue these weird things and then sometimes what you need to do is just kind of step back and go, but hold on. And then there's some little mini breakthrough or something. So I was optimistic, but at the same time thinking, you know, when are we going to know more? And if they're a small company, it'll probably be a while. So I was kind of equal parts optimistic and, and, and skeptical.

Matt Ferrell: I think you both have been taking very interesting approaches to your videos. Like for me, I dropped one video kind of like summarizing my general thoughts. You guys have been putting up more videos. It seems like, Ryan, you're trying to go down that path of what is the battery. You're trying to figure out exactly what it is. And then, Ricky, you've been doing weekly videos. Almost every drop you've been doing a response to. But yours isn't trying to prove or disprove what they're showing. It's almost like a fascination around the engineering of how testing like this happens, what it could possibly mean. So you've taken different tacks and like, I loved how you're both going at it. What motivated you to go down that path for you Ricky?

Ricky Roy: Ryan. Ryan's have been very entertaining, for sure. I love that. The tinfoil hat in the last one for you.

Matt Ferrell: I love that part. I love it so much.

Ricky Roy: And by the way, that $5,000 bet, you better, you better stick with that and, and you better pay up if, if they turn out to be true.

Ryan Inis Hughes: So the money's ready. The money's ready.

Ricky Roy: I actually just kind of miss engineering. So before the YouTube channel, I was a software engineer, which was, which was engineering, but not really, you know, it's not the same as, like when I was a mechanical engineer, I used to do things like this. So for me, it's just been kind of fun. I will say at this point, like week five, you know, it's not as fun as it was like the second episode, for example. But it has been fun just to be an engineer again and just look at it. And to Matt, your point, I'm not trying to disprove or prove it at all. I'm just enjoying the test methodology. So the last, the fifth test just dropped this morning. I don't know if you guys got a chance to look at it yet, but there's some interesting insight there. I mean, they shared some things that they probably didn't have to. Like the, you know, in test two, the pouch had kind of opened up, lost vacuum, which means it's kind of a compromised cell. And they shared that it actually swelled up in volume about 17%. That is a. I mean, they wouldn't have to disclose that. They could have just said it worked fine.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Right.

Ricky Roy: But they're. They're sharing odd details. That, again, to me, is kind of a good sign. But I'm just enjoying the process of being an engineer and trying to, like, figure out what we can. But at the same time, there's so many unknowns. You really. It's like having too many. Like, it's just too undeterministic to be able to make any, like, really concrete claims. But it could be fun to. To see what is potentially going on.

Ricky Roy: So it's been, it's just been a blast.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What about you, Ryan? Like. Like, why did you choose the. I mean, to me, it seems the answer is obvious, but why don't you share with everybody else, like, why you decided to go down the path you've gone down?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, I mean, to Ricky's point, a hundred percent agree. This is just a blast. Like, it is super fun. Like, when does clean tech have some kind of investigative journalism crossed with, like, data? I was like, this is the coolest thing. Like, this is so fun. And it's been. Regardless of whatever comes out, it's been a really useful vehicle to talk about loads of engineering, how things are tested, how data can be analyzed. Like, all of these things is a great activity. Then me and Rick, you've had, like, different takes on it, which has been great as well, because then everyone has different places to get their information on and at the end of the day, make their own mind up. Like, I'm kind of trying to convince people that what I think is right in my videos just because, like, clearly I think it's right. So therefore, I'm gonna say you should think that too. Like, otherwise, why would I think that? But it's not. I'm not really trying to argue it in that way, because just for the sake of it, it's more like I want to chuck that information into the. Into the ring. So then you can combine it with the information Donut Labs have shared. Ricky, shared whoever, like, all the other theories and ideas. And it just creates this, like, pile of knowledge that people can then at least make their own mind up from. Because I guess my concern with some of the coverage was that the scientific literature sometimes was being slightly misrepresented or misunderstood, being pulled into it, or maybe there was some things that had been forgotten. And I just wanted to pull them all together and bring more data to the table rather than any particular narrative. And I deeply, deeply wanted to understand what on earth they were doing. That is, like, fundamentally, I was just like.

And that's why I think I got really excited about the pseudo capacitor theory that has since been clearly debunked or proven not to be true. But the reason I got more excited about that one was because I don't know anything really about pseudocapacitors. I've never looked at them. So I was like, who knows? Maybe this could be a pseudocapacitor? And that's when. I know. When we had dinner together, we all spoke about it at CES, and that was a cool theory. And I think I got less excited when that was nipped in the bud because I was like, I. I know there's nothing in the literature that backs up what's being claimed by Donut Labs. And that's kind of the point, because if there was something in the literature that. That backed this up, then, you know, we wouldn't be having these discussions. So all I'm trying to do is bring all of the things that are in the literature to. To the forefront and say, this is the current state of the art. Clearly, it doesn't align with what Donut Lab's saying. However, that doesn't mean, like, there isn't a world where. Sorry, there could be a world where there's something that has never been brought up in the literature that has completely come from left field.

Like, I'm not 100% ruling it out, but I'm ruling it out enough to say, I'll bet five grand.

Matt Ferrell: It seems like it's like a doctor saying to you, they're not going to say, we can cure you or we can't. There's like, a 70% chance. That's how I feel about this. Oh, there's. Yeah, it could be out of left field, but there's like, a 5% chance that's going to happen. It's like 95%. It's something we already know about.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, exactly what you're feeling like. Yeah, exactly. The chance was small enough that I thought it was worth taking the risk and having a bit of fun with it. And who knows? Everyone knows what my theory is if they've seen my video. If not, I think the. The cell they're testing has all the characteristics of a lithium ion cell. And one of the cool things that this whole discussion has led me to is to seeing how advanced lithium ion cells have got as well, like is, I think some of the claims, or not even claims, some of the things Donut Labs have proven to be true about their cell, which by no, like, I don't want to mince my words, is a really cool cell. Like, whatever cell they have testing is a really cool cell. But what it made me do was think, okay, what is the current state of the art of lithium ion? And I was just like, wow, it's really come along in the last five years. Like, there's this kind of narrative with batteries that we're always fired 10 years away from a new thing. But there's actually a huge amount of stuff that's been in the literature for a decade that has now come to fruition. That means we can have lithium ion cells that operate at minus 30, minus 25 degrees C, up to 80 degrees C without, without damage. High energy densities above 400 watt hours per kg. These are all possible with current lithium ion cells. And I didn't fully appreciate that. 10C fast charging. It's just really, really impressive stuff. And I'm here to represent all of the work of people that have invested time into getting those breakthroughs. And if Donut Labs have surpassed all of them, then power to them. I am the first person that will be buying one of those motorcycles. Me and Ricky have spoken before. We both ride bikes. Have ridden bikes.

Even if they just put the cells that they're testing in the lab in this bike, which it seems like they've done, I personally don't think it will therefore meet the cycle life requirements. And I don't think it will be free of rare earth critical elements. Forgetting that that is a really, really cool bike. Like, that is a. Like that is by far the best electric bike I've seen. And I've been, you know, I've been a motorcyclist for over a decade and into clean tech for a similar amount of time. So I know the electric bike market. And this is, I mean, Verge have always been like the best of the best.

Matt Ferrell: That's something. I think it gets lost in this conversation because people seem to be falling into two camps of either lab or they're saying it's all BS and they're scammers and they're just trying to get money. And there's a nuance here where it's like the battery cell they've got is very impressive. So even if it doesn't meet all the checkboxes that they're claiming they can tick. It's still a damn impressive sell and something that we should be kind of excited about regardless. But then there's the marketing aspect of it that's really kind of like taking everything over. And that's personally where my fascination with this is. It's not necessarily the battery itself you just brought up.

Ricky Roy: There's.

Matt Ferrell: There's lithium ion cells that out there that do a lot of this stuff already. Like, I've done videos in the past about Amprius. This is not a theoretical cell. It's being sold today. I talked to the CEO at CES. They've been selling batteries now for a couple of years, and it's over 400 watt hours per kilogram. It's like, this is not theoretical stuff. It's. It's actual products. But the cycle life on that battery is. You're talking low thousands, not a hundred thousand. And that's where Donut Lab is getting kind of like into the. Wait, what do you. Wait, you're claiming something that doesn't seem physically possible, but just to kind of recap they've been doing was that the tests they've released are fast charging, self discharging, a high temperature, the real world motorcycle charging. And then just today when we're recording this, they released. What's the one they released today, Ricky?

Ricky Roy: It's like a safety test.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Safety testing.

Ricky Roy: They took that test tube with the high temp and saw how it played out with 50 more charge cycles after.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, and all of us have commented in all of our videos that this is VTT, a very reputable company, but they're being paid for by Donut Lab. This is not validation by a third party. This is just proving specific things that they wanted tested. And so I'm curious, what tests do you think would need to be. What's. What's still missing from what they're releasing? That would just settle debate. Just completely settle it. What do we need to see?

Ricky Roy: Well, I mean, by the way, the next test is. It's been every seven days, like clockwork, for the last five, Right? Every. Every test has been seven days apart. This next one falls on April Fool's Day.

Matt Ferrell: I know, I know. I don't know what to make of this.

Ryan Inis Hughes: I'll tell you.

Ricky Roy: I'll tell you what, though, Matt, to your point, if this battery doesn't work out, they should just become like a marketing firm. They'll crush it. Like for sustainable tech, for kind of nuanced, nerdy things like this. Like they've captured the attention of people in a way that is very interesting. So for me, I think the obvious one, and I've looked at the comments and kind of looked at what questions remain. It's obvious, right? It's the biggest claim I think people care about. Number one would have to be the energy density. To Matt's point though, the 400 number is not ludicrous. They're not saying 800, which would be like what, how are you getting such a order of magnitude? But weigh the cell and then give us a sense of the energy density. I think that's the number one question. Obviously the number two. Well, for me, number two is just like the chemistry. Like tell us what this thing is in, you know, in at least vague terms like is it, is it a sodium battery? Is it, you know, is it aluminum battery? Because they're not going to give, you don't give us the exact composition of what kind of ceramic you have or you know, the electrolyte or something, but give us a sense of, of the thing. And then finally the cycle testing. There's a lot of, it's kind of tricky to, to nail that down. How they would test it. Is it a full zero to a hundred, a hundred thousand cycles? Is it cycling from, you know, like I don't know how they came up with some of those numbers, but there's three. Those two tests would tell you pretty much everything. For me also, I'd love to see that cold weather test. There's probably some chemistry insight you could gain from that. I was really hoping after the hot temp, that'd be the next test. Not every test has been as fun as all the others. Like the self discharge. That could have been an addendum on another test.

There was no reason to have a week just for that. Those are the ones I'd want to see.

Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ryan?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, 100% agreement. April 1st is just hilarious.

Ricky Roy: Yeah, it's all just been a joke. Have we just been.

Ryan Inis Hughes: It's gonna be the CEO CTO just riding together on a bike, putting up April Fools. Oh man, I, I, I'd love to see that. The, my guess is that it's kind of like, you know, this whole thing's been quite playful and, and quite like trolley for one of a better word. And my guess is that they're gonna do the weighing and have the, the 400 watt hours per kilogram claim on April 1st. And I think that would be their like slam dunk, like because it is like Ricky said he's, you've seen all the comments. It's it's the number one thing like weigh the damn thing. I saw a comment earlier that was like you never ask a woman her age or a donut, Donut Labs to measure their battery. Which I thought was great and I, I think that they'll get, I think they'll have third party validation weighing it and showing 400 more or less watt hours per kilogram. That's my guess because it's kind of. It'll be like the biggest like FU to some of the, the doubters as far as I'm concerned. I, I know that that's possible with Amprius or similar cells. Specifically the chemistry I'm betting on is one lithium. Financially I've put money on there but more specifically I reckon it's probably an MC with a silicon composite or enhanced anode. So that would be similar to like that is what we'd expect about 400 watt hours per kilogram. What we would then have is low cycle life. So for me the real tests I'm actually looking for because I think they, I think they will release my. That was my, that's my guess on April 1st it's going to be 400 watts per kilogram. What I'm really interested in is the cycle life is, is in terms of a test of the cell that you could physically do. But I don't know. I actually just don't know enough about cycle life cell testing to know how you would infer that without physically doing all those cycles.

I presume there's some kind of extrapolation but even like 5,10,000 cycles would be pretty like damn impressive. But then fundamentally I just want someone to do some chemical testing. I always butcher the name but it's like electron spectro microscopy or something. There's a solid state battery that me and Matt have like analyzed before together in a video. And when I was at university doing my Ph.D. we took one of the cells from the manufacturer and interestingly the manufacturer was the one that sent it all. The, you know, the, the person. Yes, the, the company taking the cell and putting it in a product. They were the one which, which is from what I can tell roughly a similar position to Donut Labs in terms of they've got a cell potentially from a third party or they're not fully involved in the deep tech side of the chemistry and they're putting it in their product. It was the same thing with this company. They, they had taken a solid state cell that they thought was a solid state cell. They were so confident in it they sent it to me to do a test. Me and my friend Howard put it in the lab. The lab got all of the chemical composition and it was not a solid state battery.

Matt Ferrell: It's more semi solid state.

Ryan Inis Hughes: It was like. Yeah, yeah, but it had like some. It was like again, a really cool cell, but just not what they thought it was. And this is kind of why, you know, maybe that's confirmation bias, but it is kind of leading me down that potential path that I think donut labs are confident in their cell. And I'm not sure there's a way to test or to prove either way without the chemical composition. So for me, that's the only thing I really care about at this stage. But the cycle life again would be cool for me.

Matt Ferrell: I'm curious about what the chemistry is. I'm just curious. But to me, it's the life cycle that's the most important one. Because like in my video that I put together, I interviewed Professor Mircea Dincă about his experience in this. And the way he described to me I thought was so perfect. It was chemistry wants to destroy itself. Like the battery cell is literally trying to rip itself apart as it's doing its thing where a capacitor is not, which is why you can go a hundred thousand cycles and it's just fine. But a lithium cell dies after 2,000 cycles. And because of that, it's like this scale. It's like you can have one, you can't have the other. And their donut lab claiming it has both is what's making everybody go, what the hell are you doing? Because that's part of why it's like, the chemistry is interesting, but to me it doesn't matter so much as at doing what it says on the 10. So like the other battery you and I took apart, it was, it did what it said on the 10 as far as like cycle life and performance and all that kind of stuff. It met all this stuff. It just wasn't a true all solid state battery. And so it's like getting caught up on what the chemistry is is not as important to me as does it actually have a hundred thousand cycle life? Does it actually have 400 watt hours per kilogram? I think they're going to hit those numbers, all of those numbers. It's just the life cycle one that I'm like incredibly dubious about.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's on a capacitor. How could it last that long? It's not possible. So that's kind of where I'm stuck up on it.

Ryan Inis Hughes: That was definitely the, the One like figure. The rest of it is super impressive.

Ryan Inis Hughes: But that was the one figure that really jumped out at me. And yeah, like you said, I don't. I mean, I now care because I have five grand on the line of what the chemistry is. Yeah, but, but I don't actually like if it, ah. I mean, it's good not to have critical materials for a whole load of geopolitical and otherwise reasons, but if it met all of the other criteria that they've. That they've let out, set out, and it did have lithium, I would still like, that would still be amazing. That that is more important in my, in my opinion. But I'm also. Yeah, I'm just curious and I've been very public about speak in my mind of what I think it might be and putting predictions out there. Do you guys have any thoughts about what it could be or if there's. I've heard some hints from Donut labs, like the CEO shed Ricky's video and on LinkedIn and said, this guy's onto something. When you were sharing about the sodium ion sort of theories. And then I've seen. I've had messages with the CTO about it being like a completely different ball game. Like, he was basically like, you're thinking in the box and we're not even outside the box. We're in a different universe. So I'm intrigued. Yeah. If you guys have any thoughts.

Matt Ferrell: Well, mine is. I brought it up in the video that I put together, which is. It's Mirchudinka. He invented something called Tack. I don't think it is Tack, which is an organic sodium ion cathode material. I don't think it is that specific thing, but I think it might be in that family over there somehow, because Mir Dink has been doing stuff with like graphene and carbon nanotubes, just even like a 2% in the mix. And it has tremendous uptick. So I'm curious if that's in the realm of what they're doing. And part of what gives me a little like, maybe is after my video came out, Marko Lehtimäki, the CEO of Donut Lab, shared my video on LinkedIn and what he wrote. If you read between the lines of what he wrote, he basically said the mystery isn't solved, but basically they're getting closer. And so I was like, okay, okay, maybe we're starting to get on the right path now of what they're doing. What about you, Ricky? Yeah. So you're not putting $5,000 on the line. Don't worry. About it.

Ryan Inis Hughes: No idiot would do that. That's a stupid idea.

Ricky Roy: Yes.

Ryan Inis Hughes: You know, we've.

Ricky Roy: Yeah, we've had various opinions about what it could be and we've kind of seen them disprove and they've done a good job of that as well. Right. That self discharge test. See what you will. As far as it was kind of underwhelming. It did kind of put the capacitive capacitance aside and make us think, okay, chemical battery is what's happening here. I've always gotten the feeling from them and it's a bit smug, but if you have something killer and breakthrough, I think you, you're entitled to feel a little smug. But when I chatted with them even all the way back at CES to your. I think it was. Matt, you mentioned we're not even playing. Oh no, I think Ryan said it. We're not even playing in the box. Like we're so far in left field. That was the feeling I got from chatting with them. They said there's no lithium in this cell. Right. To your point about if they're not actually involved in the actual. The hardcore battery manufacturing process and there's like a third party component. They might not know, they might have been told that and be mistaken. But I feel like there's feel like there's like for example, you know, you look at the alkali in the first row of the periodic table, the first column, and you start looking at what the different things are. We now have sodium kind of start. We're starting to figure that out. We're starting to see batteries roll out with sodium ion batteries and that. You know, there's a whole slew of other potential candidates. I feel like there's something that we all just wrote off because it wouldn't work for some reason that. And that one reason was kind of solved, right? It was. There's something that's happened that has made pre conceived notions of what was not possible before suddenly possible. That's kind of my thought process from the very beginning. As far as what exactly. I wish I had a better answer for you.

I'm in the camp with Ryan. Like we've talked about trying to see if there's. Ryan chat with me because I had this graph in one of my early videos that was taken wrong. The video team made a mistake on one of the graphs. But we were trying to see like is there a way to make sodium work here? Is there a way to, you know, is there some exotic formulation that we haven't thought of yet? Or haven't seen yet. And I don't have a better answer for that. But at this point, what I'm trying to think is if there were, you know, it was kind of like, there's this really cool experiment that I always point out in science. I think it was Professor Lenski at Michigan State University did this test with, with like, I think it was like E. Coli or some other bacteria. And he had this whole thing. He, he tested out a bunch of test tubes and he put it, you know, and he wanted to see kind of how they propagated, how, how these, how these bacteria mutated and stuff. And then in one test, and this was done over like generations and generations with his lab team, but in one test tube, the population of the bacteria doubled. And he got mad because he figured some lab assistant screwed up something and he went back and looked like, no, there's nothing wrong here. And what he found out is that he kind of traced back to all the generations and he figured out that there was this mutation that happened in the bacteria early on. It happened in two vials. The other vial that didn't have the second mutation, nothing changed. But in this one particular strain, two back two mutations happen over again. It's like they clone every like 17 minutes. So there's thousands of generations here, but these two mutations happen. And it gave the E. Coli the ability to synthesize the citric acid, which was like a base, it was just part of their soup to float around.

And it wasn't supposed to be food, but it could metabolize citric acid. And all of a sudden the potential food source doubles and the amount of bacteria doubles, right? So what I always think is, this is what I think about whenever I think of science this way is a lot of life is like this, right? I mean, even just us being here talking on a webcam might have been imperceivable without a couple of these things kind of working out. So in my head I'm thinking there's maybe two things that no one's ever thought to put together. Maybe they've done it. I don't know. I, maybe I'm crazy. I don't have $5,000 on the line or any other financial incentive, but I'm wondering if there's something that they've done,

Matt Ferrell: you know, but again, that comes back to the, hey, maybe there's a 5% chance of that happening. And the other 95% is, it's, it's something that's already being done, but maybe less talked about that They've, you know, tapped into. Yeah, I'm, I'm just fascinated where this is going to go. Which brings me to them as them is a marketing machine. Like Donut Lab right now is a genius marketing machine. And this is my fascination with what's going on right now. It's like the fact that they've trickled the information out week to week, they're stringing this out. It's like, okay, I understand why they're doing this. It's keeping the hype cycle going. It's keeping us all on the hook. They're. They're leading right up to the motorcycle coming out. Everything about this makes marketing sense. I still can't square the damn circle on if they're lying, they're gonna get caught. Like, it's, there's no way around this. And if they're not lying, the tactics they're taking are the tactics scammers often take in hyping things and trying to get people invested into doing things. And again, I can't square the stupid circle on why they chose to do it the way that they're doing it, because it seems like they're gonna get screwed one way or another on how they're stringing us along. And it's a really risky game they're playing. I mean, what do you guys think about that? Like, Ryan, what do you think?

Ryan Inis Hughes: I've got a few thoughts on the topic. One is that the marketing, clearly, I mean, I've been watching this feels like a Netflix series that's dropping like a new episode. So, like, I'll be very much lying if I said they haven't got me. Um, so in that way I'm like, yeah, this is awesome. Like, I love the marketing. I then also flip flop between like, well, maybe it's. It is easier to market something that is earth shatteringly revolutionary so that there's, that doesn't discredit like the hype they've built. But I am also like, okay, it's easier to market something when it's so unbelievably, like, impressive or otherwise. The marketing cycle of it is, for better or worse, had me completely. I've fallen down into the funnel and I've been enjoying it. Maybe thought I had. Is, are they marketing the sell or are they marketing the motorcycle? And I mean, I have no idea what the answer is, but the, the only product, you know, offered to anyone really, unless you're a B2B consumer. And it sounds like that's a huge wait list if you're trying to get access to the cells, the only way to get your hands on these is through the motorcycle. That is, you know, a strange way potentially to first bring such a revolutionary thing to the market. But I'll allow it in this take because of the connection to Verge motorcycles. So like it's not like crazy weird if we follow my hypothesis of saying, is this a really impressive lithium ion cell that does a lot of the things they say can have this amazing fast charging which they, they showed at the charging station, like this is clearly very capable, has loads of benefits. If the motorbike got a range of 200 miles and the battery does last a thousand cycles or 1200 sort of way, I've seen some of these cells. That's like a quarter of a million miles on a motorbike. Like no one's. Not many motorbikes get to a quarter million miles.

Like I've got a motorbike, my motorbike's got about 30, 40,000 miles and it's like, well, okay, that's like starting to mature now. It's, it's a, in its middle age. So 200,000 miles on a motorcycle is a lot. So it doesn't really matter if they've got a hundred thousand cycles. So and, and it's a, it's an extremely premium motorcycle. So cheaper cells makes absolutely no difference is, you know, premium stuff. So all of this marketing, is it for the sell or is it for this motorcycle that whether the sales is real or not, is a really good motorcycle.

Matt Ferrell: I hadn't made that connection before and that to me makes me feel like Marco and his brother are playing three dimensional chess with how they're marketing this. Because one of the things that's been, one of the things that's been back in my mind around the cell specifically is they're hyping this and it's like you're hyping it to sell the cell. And no major company is ever going to buy this cell until it's absolutely proven rock solid. Toyota's never going to use it, VW is never going to use it. None of these people are going to use it. So why are you hyping the cell so much? And like by you saying, oh, is it marketing the motorcycle? It's like, yeah, they actually are marketing the motorcycle. And if the motorcycle proves out to be awesome and fantastic and then it shows itself to be rock solid, then you potentially start bigger players coming in and saying, oh, we want to try it too. This may just be the, they're looking a two years down the road for where they want their cells to be, to be able to sell it to a Toyota versus where it is now. But right now, we're stuck so in the weeds. It looks like they're just marketing the cell to hype the cell, but they're actually hyping the motorcycle. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. That's crazy.

Ryan Inis Hughes: I'm, like, one of the biggest, like, at least publicly anyway. One of the biggest, biggest people saying that I don't think this set is real, but, like, I'm probably one of the biggest target audience for the motorcycle, and I want that motorcycle, even though. Which is like the hilarious thing about it. And I mean, I've ridden the. The earlier generation Verge motorcycle, and that thing is a rocket. It’s awesome.

Matt Ferrell: I've also seen the argument that they're doing this to buy time. Like they're stringing us along to buy time. I don't. I don't buy that argument at all. Because the batteries take forever to develop. By buying themselves two months, suddenly they've got it figured out. It's like, no, if they don't have it figured out, they're not going to have it figured out in April or June or July. It doesn't matter. They're stringing us out a few weeks. But, Ricky, what's your take on how they're marketing this whole thing?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.

Ricky Roy: So, first of all, Ryan, I'm going to be in Europe, probably around Estonia in early August. We should write to them and tell them to give us two virgin motorcycles and we'll go ride all around Estonia. I got some. That'll be. That'll be fun. And we will promise not to tear it apart and rip up the cells.

Matt Ferrell: And that's a YouTube series I would be happy to watch.

Ricky Roy: So, yeah, as far as, as far as the marketing, motorcycles are just a. They're a pretty small market. It's not like with the right gasoline, you know, pardon my pun, that they're going to sell a million of these overnight or something. I think the people who want to buy electric motorcycles are going to buy them. And as far as, like, pushing that, the sales funnel, it's probably not going to be very impactful to what you said about as a, as a test bed. It is the perfect test bed. Right. Because it is a smaller pack. If there's other things to prove out, I think it's a great platform for that. You're not going to sell a million bikes this year. It's probably going to be in the tens of thousands or so. So the scale of it is just perfect for that. To your point about buying time, it could potentially be a manufacturing process problem. So I met with Quantumscape. I'm sure you guys have covered or, you know, looked in the Quantumscape and it took them a couple years to figure out how to take their solid state electrolyte and be able to manufacture it in any kind of a scale. Otherwise you, it would be such a slow process, like the bake process in particular, to finalize the form. It was taking them like 12 hours, six hours and so on a plant, if you're going to do that, you'd have to, here's the rest of the cell line. And then you'd have to allocate times the floor space to these ovens to bake this thing. And so the throughput just wouldn't make sense. The capex cost as a function of manufacturing output, it just wouldn't, wouldn't scale. Well, they got that down to like this 20 minute process. And that took them, I think, the better part of over a year, year and a half, two years to be able to figure out how to make this thing in some scale that they could have a, you know, a constant throughput of battery manufacturing for it to make sense.

So maybe it's a manufacturing thing, maybe they've got something that works, but there's some part that is just taking too long to be scalable in a meaningful way. And they're trying to figure that out. That's what makes this hard, guys. It's one thing to even make it work, to Matt's point that the chemistry is literally trying to rip this thing apart with every charge and discharge cycle, which is hard enough by itself. Now you also have to make it, you have to manufacture, you have to build the machines to make it. You have to put it into a line, have it come out and have a scrap rate sufficient enough for it to all be worth it, to be able to sell at any price that anyone would ever buy. That's all, that's all that guys. That's it. That's all we got to do. All we got to figure out is all of those things.

Matt Ferrell: It's funny you bring up the manufacturing because like when I talk to them, when I talk to them at CES, you know, they were like adamant, you know, this is all solid state. There's no liquid electrolyte and it's got no lithium. And we can print it in any kind of form we want. Like snowflakes like you talked about, Ryan it's, they talked about, with me about all of that and when I asked him, well, what's your capacity? Oh, we'll be at a 1 gigawatt hour production by the end of the year and then we'll be in tens of gigawatts by the following year. And when he said that, that's when my spidey senses was going off and going, oh, no, you're not. That's not happening. Because every company I've ever talked about, any CEO I've ever interviewed, CTO, it doesn't matter who it is, they all talk about manufacturing. Hell, you could have the best product ever made. But if you can't figure out how to scale it, scaling it up is the hardest part of doing the whole damn thing. And for them to come out and just be like, oh yeah, we got 1 gigawatt hour this year and we're going to be tens next year, it's like, that seems unlikely. So to me, that's probably where some of this might fall short, where even if they come out and say, yeah, the life cycle matches and we've hit the watt hours per kilogram and they're not going to be able to produce it the scale that think they can because there's going to be so many unknowns they're going to run into as they scale this up. It's. This is kind of crazy.

Ricky Roy: The two numbers that really got my spider senses tingling to your point, were the a hundred thousand charge cycles. If they had sent 10,000, I could have gone, okay, well an LFP is right in the 3 to 5,000 already.

Ryan Inis Hughes: 10,000.

Ricky Roy: Cool. You've done something cool. A hundred thousand just seems kind of ludicrous. It's almost immeasurable at that point. You call it infinity at that. Nothing's going to use it up.

Matt Ferrell: Lifetime battery.

Ricky Roy: Lifetime battery. Battery. Put a shell on top of it, change the car out. Yeah. The second is the manufacturing. You're telling me that a small little company of like 50 or 60 employees has figured out and you're going to scale to gigawatt hour capacity. That to me just seems ludicrous. Just from how much coverage we've done, the companies we've met with all the people, the three of us, between the three of us, we've covered so much of this tech. That just seems like, come on, it took Tesla was like years from, oh, we're going to have, we're going to have our own dry electrode process. Right? That took forever. It took years and years and years for them and and they're a trillion dollar company.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, the, the manufacturing of any company I've spoke to is just been the biggest headache. Like scaling up manufacturing just sounds horrific. And I think I've said in one of my videos like I'll, I'll give it a 0.1% chance of like, I mean you could say coming out where whenever but say say a 0.1% chance of coming out in the next like couple years. And which sounds like pretty bleak. But the way I was reasoning it as well is like well you've got with a general startup that has one big breakthrough, they've got a 10% chance of like success say and like when you stack together like you know a bunch of claims like no lithium, cheaper manufacturing, scaling up so fast like all of these things, if you times 10% together three times, you're at 0.1. And they've got a lot more than three claims. So it's again this whole thing of lots of things together but the manufacturing like god, they seemed very relaxed for people that were scaling manufacturing. From my experience talking to senior executives at companies.

Matt Ferrell: There is a question that's come up to me and I haven't had a good answer for folks. You guys will absolutely have a better answer than I could have. But a lot of the things that's come up is around VTT measurements showing that the cell was like was it 298 watt hours per kilogram that they're currently testing? That's the best guess we've got right now. That's obviously falling short of the 400 watt hours per kilogram. How can that circle be squared? Like how could it potentially be a 400 watt hours per kilogram pack that they're claiming they've got when the cell is only like basically 300.

Ricky Roy: I think Ryan, you'd, you mentioned that in one of your videos. I think that's based on the, the cell dimensions that we, we kind of saw. But there's no guarantee that that exact cell dimension is what they use in the testing. These could be like prototype cells or one offs and things. It could just be like different pouches or cells or you know, variations.

Ryan Inis Hughes: I think when I mentioned that in one of my videos, basically anything that I've said in the videos it's like on its own you could like disprove it or argue it. Like the 300 or 298 watt hours per kilogram. Yeah. Was like Ricky says just based on the tested capacity versus the cell weight they gave at CES which they said they were just working on one cell. And you know how much I spoke to them. They said they were working on one cell to drop in. But that might have not been completely accurate or they might be like plus or minus a bit in the cell. So I definitely, that's, that's far from enough evidence to have any conviction. But all of these data points that I've tried to like bring up, like voltage curves, energy densities, like all of these things on each one on their own isn't enough. But I'm just trying to paint a picture with enough points on it to draw the dots. And that was one of the dots that I put down, whether that will prove to be valid or not. And now looking more into, you know, the really advanced lithium ion stuff, I have a good feeling that they probably do have a high energy density cell and it's probably just slightly lighter than what they quoted at CES would be my, like, latest guess. But, you know, we keep getting new information and there was a really high density of information coming out in the tests at the start. And it's definitely like weaned down a lot now, to say the least, which has still been like cool data. And it's been fun kind of trying to read between the lines. I mean, the latest, if you want to know my. I haven't got the tinfoil hat near me, but like the. On the latest test results, the pouch puffed up to, you know, and it looked. I wasn't there to poke it, but it looked like pretty ballooned up, which would mean there was gas inside of it that expanded it. And they said previously that it had been the leak that broke.

And it's like there are reasons why maybe, I don't know, the obvious reason is that gas was produced inside and it popped up the cell. That goes against what they said about it leaking. So that wasn't direct data that they provided. But if you read between the lines, you can kind of try and piece things together. But it leaves us in a situation where no single data point is particularly conclusive or strong. But it's quite fun just to try and be a little bit of a journalist and investigate it. And that was just the bit in the latest test results that I found surprising.

Ricky Roy: So I'll say the latest test is definitely very interesting. And I was trying to go at it with if the pouch is open and air, moisture, nitrogen, oxygen, like the composition of air is exposed to the cell, what else it could be and stuff. So that is interesting. It could potentially actually be some like side side effects of a completely solid battery as well. To your point, everything seemingly could go kind of two ways and we're not there to like. To Ryan's point, I wanna, I wanna push on it. Is it a solid, is it like a block? Is it, is it gaseous? There's. For every test that they show, seemingly I have like two questions. And if they would just answer those two questions, it'd be a really valid and meaningful test. I will say doing these videos for as long as we all have at this point, I've, I've learned a couple of tricks to try to understand what people are saying. And one of them is you gotta figure out what they're not saying. Right. When I met with Quantumscape, they were talking about how they, they struggled to get the solid state battery to work. And even theirs is partially solid state. There's still a liquid electrolyte on the anode side. They, it's a solid state from the, on the cathode component. And then they struggled to get, to manufacture it and then they did it. And they were celebrating that they did it. I was like, okay, well great, so mission accomplished. Like, what aren't they saying? And then I, and again, this is unofficial because they didn't tell me this, but what they didn't say is the scrap rate. So in my, my thought process is they've got something great, but the scrap rate from their, their approach is higher than what like CATL has, which is, you know, the 90s or I'm actually not sure.

Whatever it is, the scrap rate is too high, which means you're throwing too many of these cells away, which means the cost is going to be higher. You're not gonna be able to compete on price. And they got to figure that part out. And I kind of deduced that from what they're not saying. The problem with Donut is they've said it all like it's this, it's not, it's not lithium. 100,000 charge cycles. You got manufacturing all sorted. Like they've left themselves no out. And I would almost, yeah, it might have almost been more believable or easy to digest if they had left some kind of an out. You know, it does. There's a question I like to ask Matt, if we have time, which is it's such a hard thing to do what these companies are doing, to invest to get people to, to buy into like, you know, pursuing sustainable energy technology, which is just really important for as I think we three can agree, you know, Quantumscape or whatever they're working on is suddenly obsolete overnight because of what Donut has done. Does that make it even harder now to get investment or to have people support sustainable tech? Because, like, you know, Toyota has famously kind of avoided EVs because they're waiting for something like this, some breakthrough moment where like, yeah, told you guys, you shouldn't have wasted your time. Now is the point we're going to hop on. Does it make it worse? You know, Matt had a video where he was talking about waiting for solar is a bad idea. And I, I've been a believer of that too.

I'm on my third EV at this point and I, I, I wouldn't hold back, but is this Donut thing that people are thinking about now bad, potentially for future investment?

Matt Ferrell: My answer to that is a big yes. I'm concerned about that. If this turns into like an Elizabeth Holmes situation where they were scamming and they're caught scamming, this is going to do a lot of damage to small startups that actually have a product and can't get backing because it seems too good to be true and people are skeptical of even giving them the time of day. So it's like I'm concerned that this could have a very bad effect on the broader industry. Like, what do you think, Ryan?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, I think, I mean, it's. Either way, it's a quite a disruptive thing to have happened. I mean, on the, the beneficial side, if, you know, if it turns out to be true, then there's a whole reshift of, you know, infrastructure and everything. Manufacturing. Yeah, I mean, everything, like cannot be overstated.

Matt Ferrell: That can't be understated. That cannot be understated. If this is true, everything. This changes the game completely. Like we, on YouTube, we use I know, too much.

Ricky Roy: But this time this is truly a game changer.

Matt Ferrell: If it's true.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Well, normally it changes everything about the very small subdomain that it works. This changes everything about everything. This is everything squared. This changes everything squared. That's disruptive. That's, that's good disruption. If it really, if it does it that way, like, however, the cynical side, which I'm concerned, maybe the, the outcome is that it ends up. And already, I mean, I know like I'm very connected to a lot of people that work in the space and already this has had impacts on the amount of funding that small startups, battery startups are either getting or are going to get in the next rounds because there's been a lot of pressure on a Lot of them, a company I was speaking to who have been developing lithium sulfur, they were just like, our investors are messaging us constantly, like, why haven't, why didn't you do this? Why on. You're doing 100,000 cycles. So it's like, it's not, it's not, yeah, it's not if and when. It's like now and which is painful for these companies regardless of the outcome, but it's especially painful if it ends up not being true. And that's, those are the people that I'm trying to like speak for when I'm bringing literature. Because even if, even if Donut Lab does have the battery and it is true, or I'm, I'm at least trying to like bring to those investors that are putting pressure on the companies they've invested in, I'm at least trying to say, like, don't blame these companies. Like, if Donut Labs have cracked something here it is blindsided all of us. Like the whole of the scientific community would be completely blindsided. And you cannot, you know, fault whoever you've invested in for not finding it.

And on the flip side, if it ends up, you know, it might at least also give some doubt to the investors to say, okay, I'm not going to put too much pressure on now because we need to, we need to see how this, this comes out. So, yeah, it is really mixed up the, the world of clean tech investing, I think, and it will have impacts regardless of the outcome. Speaking to a friend, Dr. Ben Miles, who runs a great YouTube channel too, he is, he founded a venture capitalist firm that invests in deep tech stuff. And he just said, this is crazy from an investor standpoint, information dissemination, everything is just completely strange. And he even said if it turns out to be true, this way of disseminating information is not particularly great for like just the industry as a whole. I mean, it's great for Donut Labs if it turns out to be true and they've made this big hullabaloo and they get loads of publicity. But he was like, almost if it's true, it also sucks. So it's kind of a lose lose in some ways because it means that other companies that either do have scams or just want to create a big circus, they can say, look, Donut Labs did it and it ended up being true. So, you know, we're doing it in this really weird, sketchy way as well, but it also is true. So I'm kind of, oh God. It's quite a skeptical viewpoint.

But I'm not sure it's good whether the battery's true or not.

Ricky Roy: Yeah, there's a lot of layers to it. I think you, I think you guys both nailed all the different issues, like all the way from the Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos type of. If it's not, if it's not true, it always hurts our entire industry. It's not good. But if it is true, there's a lot of ramifications as well. I'm meeting Energy X to have a new lithium extraction plant and near the border of Texas and Arkansas. But this is all on the premise that we need a lot of lithium in the future. But then, then you have sodium ion and then you have this thing, whatever this is. How do you, how do you, like, how do you, you know, some of these things take five or ten years to figure out if you're trying to supply, to secure supply chain for lithium or graphite, whatever it might be. It could be a five or ten year process. And so now I have to make decisions about what the future is going to be like with this constantly, like quicksand landscape of new things emerging. I just hope it doesn't hurt sustainable tech overall because people will be like, I'm not going to. Whatever. As great as I think your thing is, I'm not going to give you money or invest in you because who knows, like, two years from now someone's going to throw your whole thing out the window. I don't know, I feel like there's, you know, that there's, that evolution is a great thing. You want to just have nice. The MacBook is good. Next year it'll be a little bit better. No one is throwing their MacBook out because, oh my God, we just revolutionized. Like, we don't have quantum computers like there. You want predictability in markets and, and this could potentially kind of disrupt that, I think. I don't know.

Matt Ferrell: Well, to kind of round out our conversation, I want each of you to say, on a scale of 1 to 10 or 0 to 10, do you think, do you think what they're doing is actually gonna be a thing? Do you think what they have is real? On a scale of 1 to 10.

Ryan Inis Hughes: But can I clarify on the question, the cell that they're testing or the cell that they say they're testing?

Matt Ferrell: The cell they end up delivering, like what the cell they end up, not what they're testing, but what ends up in the motorcycle. What ends up beginning, ending up in any evidence. Do you. If it. What's the odds? Like on a scale 1 to 10, do you think they're actually going to do it or do you think this is all smoke and mirrors?

Ryan Inis Hughes: God, I give it a 0.01 out of 10 of, of them the lowest

Matt Ferrell: you can potentially go.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, yeah. Of them. I'm an optimist. You got to remember Matt, I'm an optimist.

Matt Ferrell: That's right.

Ryan Inis Hughes: So of them delivering on all of the claims that.

Matt Ferrell: Right.

Ryan Inis Hughes: That they've said as, as said. But which is why I was making the clarifying point though. Whatever the cell they do have, that is that they are testing, which I think will meet a lot of the claims. Now I think that that has seven, eight, I don't know, whatever they've got, which I think other people will also have just to say. Yeah, I think is, I think is a revolutionary chemistry.

Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ricky?

Ricky Roy: There's. Yeah. There's two ways to look at it. The odds that 100% of what they're saying is true seems hard to fully imagine. But if 70 or 80% of what they're saying is true. And you gotta remember too, like, there's a lot of nuance. So 100,000 charge cycle test, is it in a, in a freezer? Is it under, you know, 50 atmospheres of pressure? There's so many different ways to measure some of this stuff. And if at the end they go, you know, all this stuff is true except it turns out at normal, you know, in real world applications it's only 5,000 cycles.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Home runs.

Ricky Roy: That's still a killer battery. Right. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna use a combination factor. It'll be a. I'm gonna put myself at 7 out of 10 and it is a 7 out of 10 in terms of what the actual promise, like the accuracy of all the things that they're gonna deliver and then the optimism of if they'll actually deliver it. I don't think every one of the things that they're saying is even possible.

Matt Ferrell: You know,

Ricky Roy: seemingly breaks the laws of physics, but we'll see.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: On the marketing claims, I would say it's like for me it's like the lowest you can go. It's a one if it's delivering on everything they claim. But having a kick ass battery, I think there's a high likelihood it's a kick ass battery. So 7, 8 or 9 for sure. Really cool. Just badly marketed.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.

Ricky Roy: Or greatly marketed.

Matt Ferrell: Greatly marketed.

Ryan Inis Hughes: It's up to you to decide because the, I guess the, the thought on that is how well do I Think this is going to end for Donut Labs? I'm like one out of ten. Like not one out of ten. Because even whatever my. Yeah, I've been open. My hypothesis of the very impressive sell they have is a sell that other companies already have had for a few years and are scaling up production. So, like, I don't. So therefore that doesn't lead to. Well for Donut Lab, but it leads well for the chemistry that they seem to be testing. That that's like my guess. So regardless, yeah, I'm not. I wouldn't invest in Donut Labs, put it that way, but I would invest in the chemistry and I would also invest in technical due diligence companies that are going to have their work out for them after this.

Matt Ferrell: And your $5,000 will be saved.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or if it all turns out to be true, the world's revolutionized. $5,000. Wow. Who cares? We're in a new age of the world, baby.

Ricky Roy: Who gets to pick the charity, by the way? Is it Donut? Donut gets to pick the charity to donate to.

Ryan Inis Hughes: Okay, I've messaged a few times like, you know, I'm ready to donate when the test comes out and just the messages get ignored every time. So I'm like, come on, guys, at least tell me which charity so we can like really make an emotional case for this. Ye.

Ricky Roy: Because.

Ryan Inis Hughes: But no, yeah, they'll choose, they'll choose. But at the minute they've not given any hints.

Matt Ferrell: Thanks guys so much. This has been a great conversation. Great catching up with you on about this as well. Just catching up in general. Ryan, where can people find you online?

Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, if they want to after all of this. Or if they want to block me.

Ricky Roy: He's on MySpace.

Ryan Inis Hughes: You want to get on MySpace.com that's my main presence online. You could Ziroth on YouTube. Z I R O T H or Z I R if you're English and. Or on LinkedIn. Ryan Inis Hughes, you can find me there.

Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ricky? How can people track you down?

Ricky Roy: Yeah, so it'll be Two bit Da Vinci on YouTube and. Yeah, well, until I get bored of this or the tests are not as interesting, we'll try to keep covering it.

Matt Ferrell: Thanks, guys.

Sean Ferrell: So a brief moment to say to our viewers and listeners right now, if you want to jump into the comments about anything having to do with that conversation, do so now. But Matt and I are also going to continue our conversation and very much in normal form, we're going to jump over to the comments in Matt's Most recent and talk about from his episode the Breakthroughs My Net Zero Home is Missing. This was his most recent in which he went about his home and said, look at the things I got. Kind of wish I didn't have it. And reported. Reported on the whole. The thing about this video is it was very clearly a. You don't have any regrets. You just have things you would do different today than you did some years ago. It's not like the home broken. I've been in the home, scrap it.

Matt Ferrell: It's very nice.

Sean Ferrell: There were a lot of people who in the comments leaned in very quickly to say, yeah, you should have a basement. There seems to be just this overriding like basements, you need them. It kind of felt a little bit like almost a spasmodic, like, what do you mean you don't have a basement? How can you possibly not have a basement? I know some of your thinking around building the house included aging in home, aging in place. Was that part of this, that why build a space that in 20, 25 years you might not physically be to easily get down to? So that's part of the logic here.

Matt Ferrell: It. It was. I mean, money was a factor, but it was also the aging in place. I don't have stairs in this house. So it's like I don't have to go up into an attic. I don't have to go down below. It's just all one floor. So it's gonna be easy to get to things. The other side of it is not gonna throw our parents under a bus, Sean. But I'm about to throw em under a bus. They had a basement that turned into the world's largest storage facility for boxes that nobody knew what was inside them. And by not having that basement.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: It forces me to be very conscious about what things I'm storing and holding on to to not end up in a kind of a hoarding situation. Yeah. Not that my parents are hoarders, but just along those lines. So there's that benefit. And then, you know, I don't have kids that are like empty. I'm not in an empty nest situation. Because people were saying things like have said with a basement you can expand into it and grow into it. It's me and my wife. We're not, we're not growing into the basement. It just built a new house that we fits all of our needs, so there's no need to have a basement that we will grow into. When you looked at all of the things that for the reasons that some people might want a basement. Most of them just weren't getting checked for us. So that's part of the reason why we just kind of skipped it.

Sean Ferrell: It all makes sense to me, especially the. The aspect of limited amount of space keeps you from over keeping like. And you said our parents aren't hoarders. I don't know. The hoarding gene feels very strong in me. I'm. I'm inclined to say, like, well, this spring just fell off of that door. But it's a. Still a perfectly good spring. Maybe I'll find a use for it someday and stick it to a drawer. Just a few months ago, my wife was like, can something happen with the things in these drawers of our entertainment center? And I was like, I will be very strict about looking at the stuff. Yes. And I went through it. We now have three empty drawers. Those drawers haven't been empty in 10 years. Why were the things in there? Because there was space to put it. And it really does. If you build it, it will come. It's. It's true about holding onto stuff too. So that's not to cast aspersions at anybody who enjoys a basement. Just saying.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: There were some people coming into the comments with not necessarily rebuttals, but kind of footnotes to some of the things you said. Like imaginativity says. I think you might be overthinking the rainwater thing. A thousand liter IBC tanks are basically a waste product in some areas. Once they've been used to transport their contents or available relatively cheaply new. I just put one in for $150. It's essentially a backup plan for the periods of hose pipe restrictions in order to have water for a vegetable patch. So there are ways of kind of diying this if you really, really felt like you wanted to and just like, yeah, you wanted to have a little bit of gray water to be able to splash around your yard. The water things when it's dry period, or you're potentially in a drought situation, you can make ways of doing that. So are any of those kind of projects you'd play with?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, there's like very simple, just rain barrels you can get for like 100 bucks and you just redo your downspout off your roof and you have it feed into the rain barrel and it's got like a little spigot on it. Super cheap, super effective. Works really well. I've been thinking about doing that for us. But what I was talking about was something larger than that. If you wanted more of an irrigation system in your garden and yard. And you wanted to have huge amount of storage. I don't want like 500 gallon tanks sitting in my backyard.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: You probably bury them. You do stuff to like hide what they are, where they are. So that's what I was talking about, like the cost of doing something like that. But doing like a little rain barrel off your roof. It's super easy to do. Very fun little DIY project. And you can still get a lot of use out of it. So it's a smart thing to do.

Sean Ferrell: Human being jumped into the comments with a little bit of worry for you, Matt. Matt. At 6 minutes and 42 seconds, I can see the metal retention clip that holds the filter to the heat and humidity exchanger core are missing. You shouldn't be able to see the core. There should have been four of these that arrived with the unit. Is something missing from something in your heating room?

Matt Ferrell: No, no, no, no. I will say eagle eye.

Sean Ferrell: I was thinking the same thing. I was just like, human being.

Matt Ferrell: Holy cow. Yeah, I'm filming. I'm doing things with my ERV. That's. That footage that's in that he was talking about specifically is from two years ago. So it's very old footage, but it was. I had opened it up, propped it open, taken things out so that I could film it and show what it looked like and do different things with it and then put it all back together again. So nothing's. Nothing's missing. It's fully functional. It's in great shape. But yeah, it's. It's just funny how, like, I hope nobody saw that and thought that's how Matt keeps it. Because no, I don't do that.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you, human being, for the, for the comment. I wanted to make sure I raised it to Matt because I thought, is this something Matt should know? I'm like, it really the, the experience of the, of the viewers on this channel always astounds me because you guys know so much about this stuff already.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: So thank you, human being, for jumping in with that. Finally, there was this from Edward Green Jr. Who says the future proofing through infrastructure is a great lesson. There will always be a new version or innovation down the line. But having the ability to adapt instead of renovate is key. This is of course, in reference to the idea of things like building in areas within the walls where it'd be easy to feed pipes or tubing or that kind of thing to be able to rewire or do something new in your home that you don't even know you're going to want to do in 10 or 15 years.

Sean Ferrell: So you talked a little bit about that. Are there any other aspects of infrastructure development that you're aware of now that weren't in the video?

Matt Ferrell: I think I covered most of it. It really comes down to, like, just trying to plan ahead when you're building a home or you're doing renovations. You know, back when we were kids, it'd be like, oh, you make sure you have phone lines to these different rooms and things like that. It's just obviously that's not today. It would be like Ethernet lines for networking. Even if you don't think you need them right now, you're gonna need them down the road. So it's like, just start thinking in terms of what can you do that could set you up for success later? Because things are always going to change and evolve over time and just trying to find ways to make it. Sure. Make sure your house is modular enough that it can grow with you over time. And what's funny is one of my neighbors down the street saw this video, and he brought up to me because he's been doing renovations on his house, like extensive renovations of his basement and basement and other aspects of his house. And he said that when I brought up the conduit, he's like, guess what I did. He already did that on his. He's got conduit hidden away all over the ceilings and walls and stuff like that. In anticipation of. At some point, he may want to expand his solar system or he may want to do something different in his basement with, like, what's in what room and you might need to fish Ethernet lines or something. So he's got everything already mapped out. So he did. He did exactly what I wish on this house. So I thought it was pretty funny.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's good to know that this information is getting out there and that people are already thinking in those ways. It's not only forward thinking for yourself, it's forward thinking for the longevity of the home for its entire existence. You will not be the last person to live in that building. And if you're making those kinds of decisions now, just think about the person who sends you their blessings. You're no longer there. But they're like, thank goodness for Matt Ferrell putting this in when he did. If only he put in a basement. So, yes, listeners, viewers, what did you think about the. This episode? What did you think about our brief conversation just now? But more importantly, what did you think about the longer conversation that Matt had with his friends talking about the ongoing questions around Donuts Labs, Solid State and question marks, battery, let us know in the comments. As always, your comments are a huge part of this program. We appreciate that. We also appreciate your liking subscribing, sharing with your friends. All those are great and easy ways for you to support us. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can do it right here on YouTube at the join button. Or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about Donut batteries for the rest of time. Time, time, time. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to Be Determined. We're wondering if donut batteries are actually full of jelly. Welcome, everybody, to Still to be Determined. This is of course the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And here on Still to Be Determined, we follow up with Matt. Yes, that Matt. And yes, I am not that Matt. I am his older brother. I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. I write some stuff for kids. I'm a writer that pretty much covers all of it. It's been a strange day. Let's just. No greater details than that. It's just been a lot going on in my day. So I'll end my rambling and say to Matt. Hello, Matt, how are you today?

Matt Ferrell: Good. I feel the same way, Sean. I don't know which way's up right now.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's the past three days for me have felt a little bit like I woke up and found myself super glued to a bull. And it's not that the bull is angry or doing anything really dangerous, it's just, it's a bull. So I'm not in control. So the bull wants to walk over there, I'm going over there. That's how my days are.

Matt Ferrell: We're going into a china shop now.

Sean Ferrell: Yes.

Matt Ferrell: I don't want china.

Sean Ferrell: And the bull is just like, look, I placed an order, they said to pick it up on Wednesday. Today is Wednesday. So as I mentioned at the top, we're going to be talking about Matt's most recent. This is a return to a topic that has come up again and again for the past couple of months. Basically ever since the announcement dropped at CES. Matt and I'm going to frame it like this. Basically, Matt and everybody in the YouTube tech sphere, like Matt have all been talking about this donut battery and the claims it may or may not be making. And that's the important caveat. Are they in fact making claims? That's what we'll get into in this conversation. But before we get into that, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our most recent conversation. And when I mention that, it raises an interesting question for me, which is, where is Alec? Why isn't Alec here? And some of you may be saying, who's Alec? Well, yes, Alec Watson. He joined us last week. What a great conversation that was. And I'm not going to take it personally that the viewership on that episode skyrocketed through the roof because of Alec, within hours of the episode dropping. It dwarfed our previous episode, which of course was just Matt and me. I'm not going to take that personally. No, no, no, no. But we'll get into it now. We'll take a look at what you all had to say. There was this right away from Babarudra, making me feel better about myself. I'd never heard of him or his channels. I'll have to check them out. And though Matt is a fantastic host and he holds his own when it comes to interviews, there seemed to be a bit of a better flow with Sean steering the ship and letting Matt have more of a conversation with the guest. So the question is, how long until the collab with Project Farm or hydraulic press channels, perhaps? Matt, it seems I shared this comment not because he's saying, Sean did a great job. I would never do that.

Matt Ferrell: But you did.

Sean Ferrell: I would never do that. Seriously, that is completely outside of my realm of comfort. I do not like it when anybody says, hey, good job, Sean, I usually say, and then leave the room. The reason I shared this is because the question of, like, future collabs, are you looking for opportunities for us to have more conversations like that? What do you think about the kind, of like, you and I doing meet and greets more often on the channel?

Matt Ferrell: 100%. I've actually been talking to two of my friends that were in that Donut Lab video, Ricky Roy and Ryan from the channel, Ziroth and Two Bit Da Vinci, about having them come on the show at some point. And then the group of us can kind of just like discuss the insanity of what's going on with Donut Labs, because we all have very different takes on it, but we're all kind of in the same boat. But the way that we all are viewing it is very different from each other. It's pretty funny.

Sean Ferrell: I wanted to include this next one from Bill Haley because I think it perfectly encapsulates when it comes to the technosphere on YouTube, the wide range. Because Matt is out here saying, maybe you want to think about this, maybe you want to think about that. Where are you getting your power supply? Is it sustainable? All that kind of stuff. Are you building a home? Are you converting an older home? That's at one end of the conversation at the other end. And it's not less important. It's just at the other end of the spectrum are conversations like this from Bill Haley. Alec showed me that powdered dish soap was best. And to add soap to the pre wash and Indent on the dispenser. Dishes are much cleaner and cost way down. I also learned that I just need to use the quick wash cycle on my clothes washer. Another big savings Alec is doing. We talked about it in conversation with him. He really is. He's in public education, which yes, never set out to do, but he finds himself in that corner and I think that the daily impact he's having is demonstrable. When people are showing up to that hour long conversation we had with him and they're saying, he taught me where to use my dish soap. That's great. That really is saving water, conserving on chemicals being dumped into our sewage. Like all of these things add up. And I just wanted to point out that Alec is. Alec is in his own domain, but it is related. So yes, tip to Alec. Octothorpe jumped in to say, it's interesting to me that Matt and Sean mentioned Alex last third of his alternative energy video was different. As a longtime watcher of his channel and here, obviously I didn't think it was different at all. It was all in the context of learning and closing the loop into action. It was all on brand, as it were. Perhaps more explicit, but still the same message.

It just seemed a logical destination based on the first 2/3 of that video. Thank you, Octothorpe, for those thoughts. I think that's a very concise and thoughtful way of reframing what his video actually was and demonstrating in a very clear way it wasn't necessarily the outlier that I may have framed it as.

Matt Ferrell: I would actually say the reason I still, I personally still frame it that way is it's still very much technology, connections, the logic, the way it's told, the way it wraps it all up. It's. It's very on brand from that. But what's not on brand is it's very political and he never does politics on channel. It's very political and he is visibly emotional in how he's talking about it. So there's a lot of emotion coming across it.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: In the video. And that's. That is typically what we don't see on his channel. His channel is very matter of fact, presenting the facts, talking about something. Wry smile, dry jokes, bloopers at the end. That's right. The very passionate appeal that comes through in what he's saying is what's very different from me. So even though his logic and the way it's put together is 100% Alec, it's just that emotional aspect of it that was different for me.

Sean Ferrell: A little bit of a nudge our way from Yang M. Who writes in to say, I think I'm beginning to understand Alec's take on rooftop solar. And it's funny it took me so long because that represents much of my own dilemma. Like, I could save so much money on electricity bills if I had the money to afford solar panels. We have a saying, dinheiro chama dinheiro, which roughly translates to money begets money, which fits this situation so well. I would love to see you guys developing more into this subject, perhaps collaborating and writing a policy proposal to be pushed to politicians or something, because it seems like they would rather copy paste than come up with something of their own nowadays. Very good framing of the dilemma for so many people, and that includes me, where I'm in a position where solar panels are not an option for me at this stage because I rent. I'm not in a position to do that. And the idea of, well, leaning toward sustainable energy production or getting politicians to move the needle in that regard is what I have available to me. So, Matt, have you thought at all about making a more direct call to action in your main channel in a policy stance?

Matt Ferrell: It has come into mind on occasion, but again, that would be for, like I just said about Alec and his emotional fount of 30 minutes on that one video. That would be very different for me, even though it would obviously be presented in a very undecided, factual way. It's venturing into a territory where I typically have deliberately stayed away from. That's kind of why I've been kind of like on the fence of doing it. But I did a video about a year ago where. Or a year and a half ago maybe, where I did go into the policies and discuss why it's kind of a myth that me having solar panels on my roof raises electric prices for my neighbors.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: And that's where I disagree with Alec a little bit, because there isn't the wealth transfer happening that a lot of people think there is. It's. It doesn't happen that way. But what Yang said is 100% correct of to save money, you have to have the money to put the solar panels up there in the first place. And then on the back end, there's policy decisions that we're making in this country that are just stupid, where there might be incentives in place that give the homeowner with the solar panels more kickback than they probably should be getting. That's fair. And so that's the wealth transfer that a lot of people refer to. And I'm 100% in agreement on that. That should not be the case, that that needs stopped. And as somebody with solar on my roof, I'm basically saying, give me less money back. I mean, it needs. It needs to be done in a fair way. I've thought about doing a video, a deeper dive into this, about what I think the policy should be. I just kind of shied away from it, but maybe I should just stop doing that and just do it.

Sean Ferrell: It's an interesting dilemma because I think that we all collectively have a. A kind of internal yardstick that we think we're consistent in our responses and our approach, but I think that we, by just design of being human, end up moving the yardstick. And it's that drip, drip, drip of, oh, somebody should do something about this. Somebody should do something about this. Somebody should do something about this. And you keep moving the yardstick a little bit forward as far as, like, if it reaches high enough, I will respond, but you're moving your measurement, and you're not taking that moment to reassess. And I think it sounds like you're kind of looking back and reassessing, has it moved far enough that you're finding yourself in a place you didn't anticipate? And. And, yeah, I know from. I know, I know you, obviously, and I know from previous conversations on this channel that you're not somebody who wants to jump in without knowing you've settled on it in your own self. You don't want to go in and say, like, I've got an opinion, and I don't yet know what it is, but as soon as it comes out of my mouth, I'll know it.

Matt Ferrell: And.

Sean Ferrell: Right. And so I. I detect that in your response of, like, I'm still assessing, but it also sounds like you're. You're landing in a place where you're saying, I actually wonder if I'm actually done assessing.

Matt Ferrell: So I kind of have. Yeah, I know. I know where I stand on this now. It's just. I just need to put it into words.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Finally, the best worst comment on this episode, which was episode 299, happy 300th episode of this podcast. I mean, I remember. I remember when we were driving in a car, and I was just like, hey, do you want to do a podcast together? Maybe we could do something wrapped around your show. And you were like, hey, that could be interesting. Little did we know, 300 episodes later, 300 episodes later, I'd be saying, like, I gotta move our recording time, but I wanted to share this comment as the best worst. Not because it's the worst, but because there were so many that echoed this comment I had in combing through the initial comments on this video, finding things that didn't say this was a little challenging. Super tensions writes this was confusing at first. I did not expect this collaboration. I respect it though. Always great to see two channels that I'm sub to collaborating. So many people, so many people were just like, hey, it's Alec. What's he doing here? So that was a lot of fun. So. And once again, just to wrap up on something that we talked about last week when we did talk to Alec, it was such a pleasure. He was. He's so nice and it was. He's so smart. And just the whole conversation, I felt like, wow, we're really lucky to have a guest like this on the show. So here's to hoping that we can have future collaborations with him and other people so that we can continue this conversation in a engaging and entertaining way with people who really know what they're talking on. Now to our conversation about Matt's most recent this is why everyone's wrong about this Solid State battery. Oh, donuts to dollars, right? Uh, we.

Matt Ferrell: Sean, the jokes write themselves. When you were talking about jokes write themselves with this.

Sean Ferrell: Um, yes. Before we get into the commentary, can you just real quick sum up the dilemma? CES announcement coming seemingly out of nowhere. People saying, are they saying this is Solid State or are they saying walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. What do you think it is? And then the great debate begins with you, other people who are at CES at the same time. You've shared this before on the channel about how you. You basically, you and the other people that you're friends with in this cohort were kind of talking about nothing else. And some people were scrambling back to their hotel rooms to make videos about this very, this very battery. And it doesn't feel like anybody's landed on firm ground yet, but it feels like everybody can see firm ground from here because, correct me if I'm wrong, we're so much closer to somebody actually tearing one of these things apart. So.

Matt Ferrell: Correct.

Sean Ferrell: Did I miss anything? I asked you to wrap it up, but then I think I wrapped it up succinctly. But like, what did I miss in that?

Matt Ferrell: If anything, the best way to wrap up the controversy is that they could have just come out and said, we've got an all Solid State battery. And everybody would have been like, prove it. That's all they would have had to say. But they didn't just stop there. They're like, it's an all solid state battery with 400 watt hours per kilogram and a cycle life of a hundred thousand cycles. And like all these claims they were making individually, there are batteries already available that do individual things. But the fact they were saying it does all of these things together is what made everybody go wait, what? Because that's not possible physics. And so everybody's been calling them a scam, right? Call them BS and just nobody buys what they're doing. And there's a whole bunch of controversy around the founders of the business and there's a whole bunch of stuff. But that's what sparked the real controversy. It wasn't just that they were claiming one aspect of the features that they highlighted. It was the fact they had them all together in one thing. And people are saying it's not possible to do all the things they're claiming it can do.

Sean Ferrell: So right out of the gate, I'm going to preface this with an oldie but a goodie. Right out of the gate. Top comment. When we look at the comments on Matt's channel to pick what we're going to talk about, we. We go with the ones. I forget what YouTube calls it. There is of course chronological order, but then there's like best comments or whatever.

Matt Ferrell: Like upvoted.

Sean Ferrell: Upvoted.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Lillian Axon jumps in with each week. I see a fresh video claiming that it's not true, followed by another one declaring that it is. I have never felt such excitement to learn the reality liked at the time. I clipped this at 604 upvotes with several responses. This is another porn bot.

Matt Ferrell: Are you kidding?

Sean Ferrell: The porn bots are driving the conversation now.

Matt Ferrell: I missed that. Oh boy.

Sean Ferrell: For those of you who wonder how quickly I'm able to close a window on my phone, let me describe it this. I was at work when I identified that this was a porn bot.

Matt Ferrell: Oh God.

Sean Ferrell: And you're asking yourself, how do you identify something as a porn bot? Well, you click on the profile picture, it takes you to their page, you click at their about me. You get some images of related channels.

Matt Ferrell: Oh no.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Woo.

Sean Ferrell: I. I've got a burn on my

Matt Ferrell: thumb from how fast you hit the button.

Sean Ferrell: That's from the friction against the air of how quickly I moved to close the window and it actually made a thunderclap. It was. It was quite a moment. Eccentric believer jumped into the comments to say, my Go to Green tech channel has somehow turned into an industrial mystery thriller. I Like that one. That's.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, me too.

Sean Ferrell: This really is the. Yeah. I heard the Pink Panther music while I watched your video. It was a bit of like.

Matt Ferrell: For me, my fascination over the battery has almost kind of like, I'm over the battery. I almost don't care at this point about the battery. I'm more interested in the what. What are they doing? Just like trying to figure out the why they're doing this is more interesting to me than the battery itself because like I said earlier, physics.

Sean Ferrell: Which takes us right into Stephen Byers comment, which is all I know is non scam companies do not operate the way Donut Labs has been. However, I am more than happy to be proven wrong.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: One of the things you point out in your video, and this is something that's come up in our conversations before, which is, are they simply calling a capacitor a battery so that they can say these things about it? And you're not wrong, Steven. Companies don't typically make business out of misrepresenting what the product is. But you keep going back, Matt, to saying physics when it comes to the physics of it all. Have we reached a point where. And I, and this is a legitimate question that I just may be. You may have an answer that's like, oh, no, you're wrong because there is a difference. But are we reaching a point where it doesn't really matter if it's a battery or a capacitor to be used as a battery?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And does that mean that the word no longer quite has the same meaning or usage? Are we seeing a shift in language here? And if we are, is it a shift in language that's fair from a physics perspective, or is this a shift that's being driven completely by marketing?

Matt Ferrell: This is not a shift being driven by marketing. The Professor Mircea Dincă, the gentleman I spoke to in the video, one of the reasons we reached out to him and I wanted to talk to him was because I wanted to talk to an expert in the field that's worked on capacitors and batteries to understand what's the distinction here. And it comes down to this is oversimplifying it. But there isn't like a hard line where it's like suddenly it's a capacitor, suddenly it's a battery. It's a. It's shades of gray. There's two ends of a spectrum and you can kind of dial it up and down. And a capacitor is going to have incredible cycle life, but low energy density. And a battery is going to have high energy density but low cycle life. Because again, physics, chemistry, it wants to kill the battery. It's going to die much faster than the mechanical way that a capacitor works. But you can go between the two and kind of dial it in. And you can have capacitors that have liquid electrolytes inside of them and kind of behave somewhat like a battery. And that's where you start to get these weird names of, like pseudocapacitors or super batteries. And it's like, that's kind of where you get into this weird kind of gray area in the middle where they're starting to kind of meet and cross each other. And so it's. Whether the Donut Lab's battery is a battery or a capacitor, it doesn't matter. It doesn't. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is, does it do what it says on the tin as far as the abilities, does it last a hundred thousand cycles? Nobody knows. And all the stuff that they've been releasing on idonotbelieve.com for the past four weeks has not answered that question. They've talked about all the other stuff, but notice that they've left that stuff out and they have not released that information yet.

So my friend Ryan just released a video today. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but he's found a lithium ion battery, or I think it's lithium, that. With a silicon kind of anode that meets the specs. Except for the cycle life, because like I said, physics, chemistry wants to kill a battery. So you got the watt hours, you got the. All the other voltages, all that kind of stuff matches up. But the cycle life is way lower than a hundred thousand, like crazy lower. So it's like if it's. If the cycle life is the lie, then he may have found basically what the battery could be.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: But if the cycle life is true, it's still like, well, come on, what is it? So it's. That to me, is we shouldn't get wrapped up in terminologies because like a year ago, Yoshino, I did that video on the Yoshino solid state battery, which turned out to be all solid state. Wasn't all solid state. It was semi solid state. Even though they called it solid state. Because they said, we're not. We're not claiming it's all solid state. We just say it's solid state. That's marketing, playing with languages. And it's the same thing that's probably happening with Donut Lab. There's probably a lot of, you know, playing fast and loose with some terminology. Yeah, we gotta get in the habit of looking past that and look at what they actually claim it can do and see if it does what it says. That's the only thing that matters.

Sean Ferrell: So follow up to that. Do you think this might be a case of, let's say it does everything that it says on the tin.

Matt Ferrell: They're not lying.

Sean Ferrell: Do you think this is a case of like, the physicists are like, and we're done and hand it off to the marketing team? And the marketing team is like, if we don't answer their questions, everybody's going to keep talking about this.

Matt Ferrell: That's, that's why I'm fascinated by why they're doing what they're doing. And there's, there's two ways you can look at this. They are scamming, trying to scam people out of something, probably money, whatever. They, the claims are against them. I'm not saying that they are for doing this for sure, but like, if they are lying about this and they're trying to play fast and loose to do some kind of quick money grab and get out of town, they're going to get caught. But if they're not, if they're telling the truth and it does exactly what they said on the tin, and they may be playing fast and loose with the marketing aspect of makes sense why they're doing what they're doing, because it's like, it's keeping people talking about them, it's keeping the controversy going. The danger is these are the same tactics, as one of the commenters pointed out, is that scamming companies, scammers use these same exact tactics. They'll release a little drip of information and somebody will come and say, that's not true, that's bs and then they release another piece of information that proves that that commenter was wrong. Discrediting the commenter, meaning that the next time that person comments, they can say, hey man, you were wrong about that before. You can't trust them. They were wrong about that before. This is a tactic that scammers use. And if they are an honest company and they're using those tactics, there's a part of me that's like, it's genius marketing. It's keeping us talking about them. It's really clever, but it's also incredibly dangerous because it's helping to set a precedent. It's helping to kind of, it's going to potentially open the door for real scammers down the road to play the same. Right? So if Donut Labs, let's say they're completely legit and at the end of the day they deliver better, that does everything they claim. And then there's going to be how many companies down the road they're going to go, look, look what Donut did. Let's just use their playbook and we can probably make millions and then get out of dodge. So that's the concern to me around this. Is it setting a dangerous precedent for what we'll see more of in the future?

Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best worst comment from Tanka, you who writes, I just wish it looked like an actual donut.

Matt Ferrell: Me too.

Sean Ferrell: Tanka, you. Me too, yes. So listeners, viewers, what did you think about this? Is there anything you think that we missed in our conversation about Matt's most recent? Or was there something you wish you'd drop into the comments on our previous episode but you didn't get a chance and you'd like to bring us, bring it up now. Please do jump in the comments. Don't forget to like, subscribe, share with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support this podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, click the join button on YouTube or go to StillTBD.fm. Click the join button there. Both ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy business, making ourselves hungry for donuts. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.

Alec Watson: That's the sort of thing I'm really trying to consciously do, is just like, the world is wonderful and amazing, but, like, you gotta look at it, and you can't just let other people tell you what's interesting and what's not. And, like, I felt that we have this. I used to call it a crisis of curiosity. Now I'm not sure it's quite that. It might just be a crisis of, like, people ask a question, but then they don't ask themselves how they can find the answer to that question.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to Be Determined, we're talking about making connections. Welcome, everybody, to Still to be Determined. This is, of course, the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell for the, let's see, 299th time. Holy cow. I am not Matt Ferrell. I am Sean Ferrell. I'm Matt's older brother. And with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt. Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing really well. I'm very excited for today's conversation Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Today's conversation is going to be a good one, and I'll tell you why. Because Matt and I are sick of talking to each other. So we brought in a special guest. We've brought in Alec Watson of Technology Connections. I'm going to provide a brief intro to who Alec is to everybody, but I am going to assume that most, if not all of you are already very familiar with Alec. Alec is, of course, Technology Connections, a channel on YouTube that has more than 3 million subs. He lives in the Chicago area and he takes basically a look at technology in our lives, where Matt takes a look at technology's changes and its impact on our lives moving forward. Alec's angle is much more. Where are you right now with that refrigerator or that coffee maker or how do these light bulbs work? What are you putting on your Christmas tree? And so we've all seen these videos. Matt and I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Alec, and we're very, very excited to share that with you here. So we'll move on now to the conversation we had in which we talked about everything from solar panels to how videos get put together to what does he actually think about whether or not you should put stuff on the roof of your house? So on now to our conversation with Alec. Alec, thank you for being here with us.

Alec Watson: Thank you so much for having me.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation because I really want to find out why is it that I have to screw in my light bulbs clockwise so Take it away, Alec.

Alec Watson: Well, I mean, are you aware that there are counterclockwise light bulbs?

Matt Ferrell: See, there are?

Sean Ferrell: That's why you're here.

Alec Watson: There are. They were designed primarily for hotels, so they had light sockets that were backwards and nobody could steal the light bulbs because they'd be useless at home.

Sean Ferrell: I absolutely love you. Love that. I love it so much.

Alec Watson: I mean, I'm not sure if that was the main reason backwards light bulbs existed, but like a lot of hotels to this day, they don't use Edison's crew bulbs. They use the GU10 base, so that way they're useless to guests.

Sean Ferrell: I think that's fantastic. Well, you've already.

Matt Ferrell: That's phenomenal.

Alec Watson: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: We start before we started recording. Alec warned us. He comes into these blind. He doesn't want to do too much to try to load up the interview from a certain perspective. But there he goes. He's opened the door to the perfect starter conversation, which was Matt and I talked about inviting you to share your path to where you are now. What was it that brought you into the YouTube sphere? Because we know that you have a background in hotel and guest management. So based on your channel, you would say, here's somebody who has background in building these things, putting these things together. And yet that doesn't seem to be the case. Were you like, Matt, the person who took things apart when you were a kid, and you just like, I know how these things work now, but I don't need to go to school for it.

Alec Watson: A hundred percent. My mom tells a story that I was like three or four and one of my toys had the battery died and she brought. I said, I need a screwdriver. And she brought me a flathead screwdriver. I was like, no, mom, it needs to be a Phillips. And like, apparently I've just been like this my entire life, just taking stuff apart and figuring out what I need to do to get other things to do things. And, you know, I didn't really know how to turn that into a job, so I went into hotel management basically just because you gotta have a career of some sort. And it was my mom's suggestion, we just going by a hotel and asked if I thought about that. Cause I looked into engineering degrees and stuff, but. But that is so much more math than I want to be doing professionally.

Sean Ferrell: Right?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. I reminded Sean yesterday when we were talking about the call today. Like when I was a kid, I was about 4, 5 years old, I took my mom's egg timer apart because I was really curious how it worked. I took the bell off the egg timer and I started taking all the gears out. I was fascinated by it. And then my mom came in the room and it was all laid out in front of me and I got in so much trouble. It was not supportive of like, oh, my curious son. It's like, you broke my egg timer.

Alec Watson: Yeah. Luckily I didn’t. With that, I had very supportive parents who would find things for me to take apart. And, you know, later on, the kind of. What really got everything started was I bought a broken jukebox on ebay. Like, I'm gonna. I bet I can fix this thing. And it took like, I bought this when I was in sixth grade. So what is that? You're 12. So, like, I didn't buy it. My parents bought it for me. But it took me a very long time to figure that out. But that was basically just like, this is what I need to do is just find broken things and fix them and explain how things work. And I don't know, it's my. My weird compulsion I turned into a YouTube channel. But I didn't expect this to happen. So I just went into hotel management as my. What I thought would be my career.

Sean Ferrell: What was the first thing that you were putting together as far as a project you were working on? You were like, I'm going to set up a camera and record this and talk about it and then put it up on YouTube. Do you even remember now?

Alec Watson: Well, I know. I know some of the projects that got my original channel, which is still there, but most of the videos have been unlisted because they're terrible. I remember some of those projects. They mostly involved terrible things that high school age children think are fun to do to cars. Um, so lots of blue LEDs in my past, but. Which is very funny because now I'm just like, I can't stand that we have blue LEDs on everything. I want that to be over.

Sean Ferrell: I saw that in your last Christmas light video.

Alec Watson: Oh, gosh, yes. It's so funny to me. That's a topic that a lot of people innately understand. There's something very different about Christmas lights now, but they don't really have the vocabulary to explain what it is and why it bothers them. And so basically I was just like, I guess somebody needed to make some videos and explain to people it is fundamentally different how the light is being produced, and that's why it looks wrong.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. You've become part of my annual Christmas tradition. We put up the tree and then, and I'm like, I'm gonna go see what we have to say about Christmas lights this year.

Alec Watson: Well, listen, I don't know how much longer it can keep being a thing if the industry keeps fixing itself as it seems to slowly be doing. But we'll see.

Matt Ferrell: You're having an impact. That's what I'll say.

Alec Watson: Yeah, a weird one, but I'm glad to have it.

Matt Ferrell: On that note, you actually have also had an impact on the EV industry, like with Hyundai with that video that you put out, like hammering about the way the tail lights.

Alec Watson: Well, if only I could get them to listen to me about manual battery preconditioning, because that's still not a thing. But yeah, that. I mean, I give a lot of credit to that to Consumer Reports because I don't think Hyundai was going to listen to me unless Consumer Reports picked up the video, which they did. But yes, I'm very proud that eventually I was like, this is a serious problem we need to fix. And one automaker actually fixed it. So that's really cool.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, job well done on that one, by the way. I have the same exact car. And the manual, the manual preheating, it's driving me bonkers this past winter, it's like.

Alec Watson: So you have a pre 25?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, I have a 25. It's like. But it doesn't do automatic preconditioning for when I go anywhere.

Alec Watson: Oh, no, no. I want manual battery preconditioning. I don't want my car. You have to use its navigation system. Its logic is terrible.

Matt Ferrell: But the button that they've put in there is hidden. It's like really hard to find. And then you can customize the screen to get it to a better place. And for some reason on my car, it will not remember it. It resets itself back to the original setup every time. So it's buried in a menu. I can't stand it.

Alec Watson: It's amazing because it's like, I really didn't think Hyundai was going to become gm, but they kind of seem like they are because it's like you're 90% there, guys. But there's this 10% you gotta really just sit down and fix, but you're just not doing it. So. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Is there a place where you've seen one of your videos have traction that you didn't anticipate? You know, other than the thing with the Hyundai incident, is there been something where you've been surprised at having had an impact or having gotten the attention you've received?

Alec Watson: The way I would answer that question is, it's not really about impact. Just I've been surprised at some videos for how popular they were. Just me thinking, there's no way anybody's gonna wanna watch this video. But then they do. As far as, like, real world impact, the thing that really frustrates me is my dishwasher videos have not really increased the number of people that are skeptical of the pods.

Matt Ferrell: That's me.

Alec Watson: Because, I mean, like, you still can't get anything that's not pods. I mean, you can, but it's really difficult. And I'm very proud of the work I did with Good Store to. I can't say to come up with a formulation, but to promote someone who did come up with the formulation just to prove that we can actually do this. It's just the profit margin isn't there. So they're not making them because they know. Because, like, seriously, that. That product, I've been testing it, you only need a teaspoon almost all the time. And it's just like they're selling you the pods because then they know you're getting 50 washes out of this. You're not going to stretch that out. But, you know, Midwesterners aren't in charge of anything anymore, which is a problem.

Matt Ferrell: The pathetic Midwesterner.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Given that our mother grew up in the Midwest, she grew up in Nebraska and Iowa, and so we grew up with that. So we're familiar with the, like, you don't need the flashy. Like. I think when you talk about the pods, the thing that went through my mind through that entire conversation was, how are you going to make the product you're promoting that you were talking about as pretty as a pod? Because that is doing the heavy lifting for the marketing right there. It's got that really swirl on it. It's different colors. It's easy to look at and say, ooh. It's not as sexy to say, like, do you have a teaspoon? Yeah, it's just not going to. It's just not going to get people lining up in the same way. And it's just so easy to say, like, here's a bucket full of pods and look how pretty they are when you open them up.

Alec Watson: I'm really trying consciously to, like, get more people to just be conscious of that kind of marketing and that not gonna, you know, judge you for preferring dishwasher pods. But, like, it's soap, it's a commodity product, and you don't like. One thing that really bugs me is like, why are. Why is Dishwasher detergent scented. Why you're not. Are you going to open up your dishwasher mid cycle to really get that lemon scent or are you just going to have the vague hint of lemon that you kind of get? It's just, you know, there's a lot of stuff like that that I'm very dissenting in.

Sean Ferrell: Dishwasher. Dishwasher pods is to me reminiscent of the fact that banana flavored candy doesn't taste like bananas do today. Oh, my God. It tastes like bananas used to. And it's just this kind of like, what's the point of. What's the point of calling this what you're calling it when it's not actually meeting a need that the lemon scented steam that comes out and hits you in the face, that's not a. That's not a pleasant experience.

Alec Watson: Yeah. And so it's just like, I don't know. I mean, I totally get putting scent in laundry detergent because, like, you'll smell that, but not dishwasher detergent.

Sean Ferrell: Just before we hit the record button on this, you mentioned and it landed right into one of the questions that Matt and I were wondering about. Is there a project that you've been working on where you're just like, I accidentally grabbed a tiger by the tail and it's in control of me. I'm not in control of it. And you kind of gave a hint that there's something you've been working on where it feels a little bit like that.

Alec Watson: Do you share any videos on this podcast? Because the thing I'm talking about is right over there.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, sure.

Alec Watson: Okay, hold on one second. So I have this engine block and.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, my God,

Sean Ferrell: Suddenly this looks exactly like one of your episodes.

Alec Watson: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Where you're just pulling out a giant piece of metal.

Alec Watson: I mean, that's going to be the bit is I need to take this engine apart real quick and then here's the block. But there's just so much to talk about. And a lot of it is like, gearheads are not. And I wrote in this script, like, if you're a gearhead, you know all this, there's nothing here for you. I'm really like, honestly, the. One of the reasons I'm making these videos is because I want the layperson who doesn't think much about engines to be like, these are insane. Like, the fact that we're just used to this and we're. We're like, yeah, sure, it's fine. These are insane. If you actually, like, take one apart and you start looking at all of this stuff has to work perfectly or the engine will kill itself. Which is the, you know the hook I have for this video which is the. If there's one light on your dashboard you should never ever, ever ignore, it's the oil pressure warning light. So. But it's basically just been like, I have so much stuff I would like to discuss and really the ulterior motive for a lot of it is basically just like, this is crazy, we're used to it, which is why it doesn't feel crazy, but it's crazy and maybe we should stop. But I'm not exactly, you know, saying that. Just basically like here's everything that's actually going on inside of an engine and maybe alternatives to it in any form are good. Yeah. EV or E bike or transit or walkable cities, anything. I don't want to pick a lane. Just it's nuts that we've been manufacturing millions of these things and we're all like, yeah, you turn the key and it goes. It's like it's a miracle that that works. It really is.

Matt Ferrell: We've gotten really good at it though. That's the thing.

Alec Watson: We got really good at it. And now we know how to make these things, but they're still crazy.

Sean Ferrell: So it's a little bit like what you and Matt are doing in your channels seems a little bit like a calling to public education. And do you feel that as a part of what energizes the work that you're doing? You of course have the light hearted stuff that's just like let's take a look at Christmas lights and these are simply ugly versus these that are very pretty. And there's that, there's that video, but then there are videos like the one you're putting together around like here's an ice engine. What is actually happening in here? Are you aware or the video you had about renewable energy in general, your long form video and where you explored the pushback against sustainable energy production. And it really feels like there's a kind of clarion call in that to say like hey everybody, wake up to, to these issues that are in your lives all around you, but you're not paying enough attention to them. Is that something you feel?

Alec Watson: Yeah, absolutely. That's a big, like every one of my videos has to have a point. And sometimes the point is just here's an interesting piece of old technology that we're going to look at and think about how we used to do things. And so the point there is very subtle because it's really just like, hey guys, a lot of progress happened. We should pay attention to that, learn the lessons or remember the lessons we have already learned and just remember that like humanity is really cool. We're doing a lot of cool stuff. But, but a lot of people just aren't thinking about a lot of stuff. And it's basically just like, I just, I made a video about the. On my second channel about the universe of energy attraction at Epcot and how it's kind of like we used to be a culture that was like, hey guys, we're going to build a theme park about learning stuff. And now we're just like, meh. And so like, I really am trying to, in a conscious way, I don't like the phrase, but really what I'm doing is tricking people into learning stuff. Just like, here's some, here's some brain Candy on your YouTubes. But it's not just candy. There's some nutrition here.

Matt Ferrell: It's a similar thing for me. It's, it's. I. That video where you talked about Epcot, I was a little, you know, 12 year old kid going to Epcot for the first time. It was my favorite park in the world. It was just, I just loved the learning aspect of it. And that's basically my motivation behind what I'm doing now. It's like I like exploring the context

Alec Watson: and there's so like, you know, I. Growing up in Chicagoland, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a fantastic place. If you've never been, I would highly recommend going. And it's just like that, that's the sort of thing I'm really trying to consciously do is just like, the world is wonderful and amazing, but like, you gotta look at it and you can't just let other people tell you what's, what's interesting and what's not. And like, I felt that we have this. I used to call it a crisis of curiosity. Now I'm not sure it's quite that. It might just be a crisis of like, people ask a question, but then they don't ask themselves how they can find the answer to that question. And this is a really weird thing that's been happening more and more lately. And a weird example I'll give off the cuff is that this ties back to a video that I made back in 2018 about LED traffic lights and how I think it was 2018, how there's so many people that were like, well, they can't melt the snow, so we shouldn't use them in snowy places. And it's like, I understand that impulse, but let's, you know, think about other ways we could solve that, because there's a lot of advantages to them. And so just the other day, I happened to notice that on a road near me, the red lenses, or the shroud over the red lenses of the traffic lights was suddenly really big and longer than the rest of them. And I was like, what's. What's going on with that? And then I finally stopped at a light at an angle, and I could see. And I had read about this in Japan. There's a big transparent cone on the front of the lens, and the shroud is designed to catch the wind so it throws snow off of there. I was like, oh, wow, cool. We're starting to get those here. And so I just posted on bluesky, and I got like, five questioners, like, no shade, if you happen to be listening to this.

But I got five people that were asking, why did they only do the red lights, though?

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Alec Watson: And I'm just like, let's think about it. Come on. Yeah, let's just think about it.

Matt Ferrell: Which one's gonna save lives?

Alec Watson: Which one's gonna save lives? Money isn't infinite. Like, yeah, there you go.

Sean Ferrell: Nobody ever yelled in a panic, oh, my God, go. It was not the. Well, just behind.

Matt Ferrell: If you live in the Boston and New York area, Sean, people act like that's true.

Alec Watson: That's true a little bit around here, too. But, yeah, that's just the sort of thing where I'm just like. I don't know. I'm just trying to really get more people to realize that, like, it's great to have to be curious about things, but, like, pull on the thread yourself.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Alec Watson: And see what you can find, because there's so much stuff out there that's going to help you, but you gotta, you know, you. You gotta pull on those threads.

Matt Ferrell: I think that kind of dovetails into the. The renewable energy video that you put out recently where you basically described how, like, everybody's lying to you about this, and then you had your, like, last half hour. That was that tack on that you did. That's one of the reasons I reached out to you and said, could we talk on the podcast? Was because that video was. It was such a normal video for you for the first 2/3. Felt very much like a technology connections video. But of course, the final bit was completely different from anything you've ever done before. Talked politics a little bit, which you've never done before. I don't talk politics on my channel. Very deliberate reasons why I don't. I'm curious what made you feel like this was the time that you had to kind of break and do something different?

Alec Watson: Well, I can identify the moment which was when we did whatever we did in Venezuela. Who knows what we're calling that. But when that happened I was basically just like we. I have got. Because like now at this point I am basically not using petroleum at all. I have my two. Well, the cube is for video making, but I do have my stupid the Nissan Figaro which I drive. I think I probably fill it up twice a year at the most, but otherwise it's just like I don't use petroleum products. And it's like we are at a point where it is possible to live your life without caring about oil at all. So why are we still doing this? And I mean, I know why, but basically just so many people are still stuck in a mindset of 30 years ago that like solar and wind are a one day future thing. And it's like, no, it's here now we just need to do it. So that was the moment that really was like, I'm so sick of what's happening, I'm just gonna start talking about it. But I started writing a script possibly the day after the last election, maybe the same day. And it was just titled like why I do this. And a lot of that script got reborn in that section on the end, which is just like, I am not trying to trick you, I am not trying to sell you anything. I just want you to be aware of what technology is around you, what the consequences are of burning stuff to live our lives and the fact that we no longer have to do that. But there's just constant, constant pushback when you say that. And I got just so sick of the fundamental disconnect of the people that say like, well, lithium's just going to become the new oil. It's just like I. Do you really. Is it just not clicking yet that we set fire to oil? Because like, and I had a number of people who were very flattering and said I'm so like they liked that I said disposable energy. Because nobody had framed it like that before.

I'm just like, I don't know why nobody framed it like that before, but I think it's because most people that are thinking about this sort of thing find that self explanatory, but a large amount of the population is just not thinking about that sort of thing. And so you gotta kind of just do what I did, which was kind of trick them and be like, this is a video which is about renewable energy and how good it is. And also, oh, by the way, there's a people that keep lying to you about this and here's who those people are. So yeah, that's why that happened. It was just basically, you know, pent up frustration and then like, are we really doing this? And you know, now with the war in Iran, it's just like, oh yeah,

Matt Ferrell: it's clear as day right now what's happening.

Alec Watson: If only we'll remember that's the problem. So we gotta, you know, we just gotta talk to each other and be like, remember this is why we're doing this. Because our current energy system is incredibly precarious and it doesn't have to be, but we need to do work to do that.

Sean Ferrell: One of the things that came up in your video was talking about what you can do as an individual versus what we can do as a society and the personal responsibility to listen to sources that are providing actual factual information, digest that, push our politicians and our representatives in those directions to double down on the truthiness of things. And then there's another side of it which I think is the side that Matt and I most often come to these conversations from, which is what can you as an individual do in your lived experience like electric vehicles or the sources of your electrical power in your home and stuff like that. Matt has solar panels on his house. You have said solar panels in your home may be doing a counter, they may be pushing against what would be a commercial scale solarization so that you, your sources of power by design are, I'm not going to do it on my own roof, I'm going to do it this way because this way encourages the for profit energy industry to move that direction. So I wanted to invite you to talk a little bit about these trends and what you see as far as, is there a tipping point that you can see in the future of mass scale energy production? In that, in that vein, is there the opportunity and do you see it in your own research and in your lived experience where you're seeing the growth of that kind of corporate, yeah, we're following the dollars, but we're doing something that's more morally defensible as opposed to saying, well people, you're on your own, you got to start putting panels on your roof.

Alec Watson: The thing I said without saying it was I think we need to nationalize the power grade. But like, fat chance that's going to happen anytime soon. No. So my take on rooftop solar is basically just a lot of it comes from the fact that I follow a lot of voices in the urbanist community. And when we look at the kind of sustainability that those folks are really moving towards, it kind of precludes the idea of rooftop solar altogether. And that's why I'm kind of just like rooftop solar kind of does move against our need to build densely because in order to have self sufficiency you need to have more sprawl. Basically. I just like there's so many issues that we open up by promoting rooftop solar. And that's my frustration is that it's a really good idea, but it ends up being like, well, can you buy your way out of a power bill? Well, that's only going to happen, you know, only people wealthy enough to purchase their own photovoltaic systems are going to be able to do that. And then I'm genuinely worried that like we're going to have a point where the power grid becomes something that people would rather not connect to. Because the way that we have created these billing structures to compensate private individuals for purchasing their own photovoltaic arrays just does not smell very fair to me at all. And I know that there are some countries that are doing a pretty good job at this, like Australia. But I'm still, I have to admit, I'm still very skeptical that the idea of turning consumers into producers is logistically sustainable.

Matt Ferrell: I actually have a video that I'm working on right now that's going to be addressing some of this. I've spoken to people in the industry, like gentleman named Carl Rubago who worked for utilities and he worked on the other side as well. He's done advising for like corporations as well as utilities regulations and he's a huge believer in residential solar and more of a. There's a phrase called Internetification of our grid.

Alec Watson: Yeah, yeah, I've heard a lot about this.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. Where it distributes. It distributes it in a completely different way and I'm a big believer of that. Solar panels have unlocked something that has never existed before. We can make our own energy. Like we don't have to rely on a gigantic nuclear power plant to distribute for an entire region. We can distribute that everywhere and you can have your cake and eat it too. Like here in New England and Vermont, there's Green Mountain Power, I think it's, it's called where they provided batteries to people's homes and it's used as a virtual power plant for the,

Alec Watson: that I'm like I can totally see that working.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: But it's the same thing for. It's the same thing for solar, though. They can do the same exact thing,

Alec Watson: except a ton of people don't have the agency or the space or anything to put solar panels on their roof. And that's why I'm like, I don't. People who are very gung ho about it tend to live in the suburbs. They tend to drive electric cars. They tend to be doing a whole bunch of things that, like, are better than our life now. But I don't know, I mean, I live in the suburbs. I don't really want to live in the dense city. But like, I'm more aware of the fact that like, okay, great, my neighbor can buy a bunch of solar panels and disconnect from the power grid, but then that doesn't help the people living in Humboldt Park. So it's, you know, I mean, that's

Matt Ferrell: the thing where I kind of disagree with you a little bit because I. I'm not seeing that trend. People that are getting solar are still grid connected. They're still tied into the grid.

Alec Watson: Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. To be clear. But I'm saying that those people need to have some form of compensation to make that worthwhile for them. And I really don't know how we are going to make it such that it isn't just a wealth transfer towards people who can buy their own solar panels. I'll admit that that's a pretty lefty take of mine, but that's the reason why it is what it is.

Matt Ferrell: Right? Well, that's the thing. It's like, the more reading I've been doing this, there are ways to get there. There are 100% ways to get there. And it's. For me, it's not a. Yeah, it's not an either or. It's like a little bit of everything is kind of the way I look at it.

Alec Watson: I agree with that. Except we do not have a very good handle on policy right now. No, no, we do not.

Matt Ferrell: No, no, we don't. No, we don't.

Alec Watson: And so that's why I'm kind of like my Midwestern thing of like, you already have wires that are already in your house. The most important thing we should be doing is getting your everything on those wires. And potentially rooftop solar will be a way to avoid some of the grid upgrades that that would require. And that's something that I am interested in. But I'm also just kind of like, I don't know, the math doesn't math right in my head right now. And that's the main reason why I don't push people towards installing our rooftop unless they want to. Like, I'm not going to say don't do it.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Alec Watson: But it's just. And I should also say, like, I opened that video with. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Because every single time I have ever talked about renewable energy, people say, well, I can't install solar panels on my roof, or I can't afford solar panels. Or I've looked into this and I'm like, I don't care if you get solar or not. I just want you to realize we can do this. And you should stop listening to people who tell you we can't.

Matt Ferrell: I did the same exact thing. Every time I talk about my solar panels, I'm like, this is my situation. This is not your situation. It's going to vary depending on where you are. You have to do your own evaluation. I can't tell you if you should get solar or not. It's like, that's the first thing I always say.

Alec Watson: The technology itself is very simple, but the changes that it's going to make are very difficult. And that is something that I just am not. I'm not thrilled with how we're doing it right now. I'll just put it that way.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: We're currently doing it in the mode of let's pretend we're not sick.

Alec Watson: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: It's a little bit of just like I'm going to ignore these symptoms. I wake up in the morning and my hip is killing me, but I'm just going to continue to walk around and pretend I don't have to go to the doctor. So it's. It feels a little bit like that to me. One of the things that I enjoy most out of your channel are the deep dives into. Oh, you know that thing. You just bought a brand new one and it cost you 150 bucks. The one that used to cost 15 bucks back when you were a kid is doing the exact same thing. Something like a drip coffee maker. Now the drip coffee makers are coming out with good news, everybody. It's got AI in it. And. Okay, did I need that? So there's kind of like the one half of your content in which you're like, things are changing and they're changing in fundamental ways, and we can go in a whole new direction and really make a difference. And then there's the side of your channel which is you're not really getting improvements. You're Just getting a high price point. And some of the things that we've been making, like this little tiny coffee maker over here from 1978 is doing exactly what the 2026 coffee maker is doing. How do you balance out for yourself when you're contemplating things? You're going to talk about the line between sometimes progress is only the marketing side of it and sometimes progress is legitimately something we need to talk about and embrace. So what's your thought process around that?

Alec Watson: It's interesting because I haven't ever put this to words, but now that you've asked this question, I have a very good answer, which is, does it feel to me as though you're being tricked? And if it feels to me as if you're being tricked and you're being sold something as new, even though it's definitely not, I will very much try to, try to bring that to people's attention. And it's difficult because sometimes I run into this. So like something I've, I've had multiple conversations about this on social media where I'm basically like, why do you want your washing machine connected to the Internet?

Sean Ferrell: Right?

Alec Watson: And people, people will then say to me, well, it's nice because it lets me know the clothes are done. And I'm like, yeah, there's no other

Sean Ferrell: way to find out.

Alec Watson: There's no right. And I'm like, you have, you, you have a phone in your pocket. You could set a one hour timer and then as a reminder to go. But then like there's other people who hate when their appliances make noise. So I'm like, well it makes noise so you can hear that it's done, right? Like that's the reason it's there. But then they're like, I don't want it to make any noise. I'd rather have my smartphone do a thing.

Sean Ferrell: I would rather have a second house with all of my appliances and then Internet connectivity to those appliances to let me know when I need to go next door.

Alec Watson: Yeah, yeah. And like that's. So I don't necessarily feel as though that's a trick. I just feel as though like a lot of people are sold solutions to problems that they don't actually have or that they don't realize they could solve themselves, themselves with a tool they already have. So that's like, that's a big part of it is basically just like, I don't want people to waste their money. And like one of the things that I, a lesson that I learned very early on is basically just like, you're going to buy a lot of new gadgets and some of them are going to really disappoint you. So why don't you just wait until you actually have a problem. Right.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Alec Watson: And then you look for a solution to that problem.

Sean Ferrell: Does that mean you've got a third channel on the way that's going to be called Tricksnology Connections?

Alec Watson: I, I doubt it. I doubt it.

Sean Ferrell: What's the thing that you've bought that you have six days later been like, oh boy, did they really get me?

Alec Watson: Well, I'd have to like, as far as something in my personal life, I'd have to give that my thought. But the freeze dryer is absolutely that.

Sean Ferrell: Oh, that one. If you had started a three season long deep dive drama around.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: That I would have watched every episode with gusto. Because watching you eat freeze dried food that never should have been freeze dried watching.

Alec Watson: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I mean it was amazing.

Alec Watson: I mean that, that's like. But the thing is that's the most fun you can have with one of those machines. Otherwise. Oh my God, there's such a pain in the butt. But there's this big influencer campaign that like there's multiple companies that make freeze dryers. So who knows how this actually got started. But there's a ton of influencers like you know, homesteaders and preppers and stuff who've just like, oh, you should have a freeze dryer. Like, you're not being honest about what people are signing up for if they buy one of these things because it's a pain in the butt.

Sean Ferrell: And like, good news, now you've got some place to put that 60 pounds of venison. Like, no thank you.

Alec Watson: Yeah, well, and like I live in Brooklyn.

Sean Ferrell: I'm not getting, I'm not getting a, I'm not getting any of those anytime soon.

Alec Watson: Yeah. It's just so like that's a, that's a perfect example of something that like in general, I think people, you know, there's something that I've heard multiple people say now where it's like, there's too much money in the world right now. And there's, there's some people that are just like, I'll just blow three grand on this freeze dryer and think nothing of it. And I'm just like, you know, this is terrible. Unless you have an. And you know, like I'm starting to see more and more freeze dried candy appear on, on shelves and stuff. And they all seem to be made from like small mom and pop operations. I'm like, is, I bet It's a bunch of people that bought 10 or 12 of those freeze dryers and they've just created their. And I'm like, cool. That's a cool entrepreneurial business. But like, unless. And I know someone who has like, really, really severe food allergies and a freeze dryer is useful for doing, like, packing food for traveling and stuff. But the general purpose or the general, average person has no legitimate use for a freeze dryer unless they want to have fun with it. So. And I'm not having any more fun with it because it's such a pain in the butt. Like, I'm actually kind of. Costco is selling them now, and I'm kind of a little annoyed at Costco for selling them because I don't. Don't take this seriously. This is. This is just a very expensive toy that makes a lot of noise and uses a lot of energy.

Matt Ferrell: So there's a thing like buying things you don't need. There was a company that sent me, I'm not going to name who they were, but they sent me a robot snowblower for your driveway. They sent it to me saying, hey, we want to check this out. And I was like, sure, why not? It was the worst thing I've ever tried out. It made me furious every time I tried to use it. And it got so much attention from UPS drivers who'd be delivering something to the house and they'd be like, what is that? Is that a robot snowblower? Do you like it? How much was it? I'm like, you do not want to buy this. This is like the worst thing ever. Don't buy it. Don't buy it. It's amazing how much. And the thing costs like five.

Sean Ferrell: Five grand.

Matt Ferrell: It's like, I can't believe people are.

Alec Watson: Well, actually. Okay, so I have a snowblower. Hot take, actually, which is. It's actually not about snowblowers. It's about. It's the exact same thing. People buying. Buying stuff just in case. And so, like here, here in Chicagoland. I mean, lately we don't seem to get that much snow anymore. I wonder why.

Sean Ferrell: But certainly not because they're lying to you.

Alec Watson: Yeah. So I'm sure everything's fine. But like, you know, it is pretty rare that we get more than 8 inches of snow at a time. And so, like growing up, my mom and dad, because they're sensible Midwesterners, just bought a single. You know the difference between a single stage and a two stage snowblower? They just bought a single stage. One And I remember I made a video on my second channel just about whether stable actually works or not. Which it looks like Project Farm did a video on. It does seem like it works. But anyway, I got so many comments. They're like, that's not a real snowblower. You need a two stage one. And I'm like, no, what you gotta do. Okay, look, if you know you're gonna get two feet of snow, you do the driveway multiple times. You just don't like more power to you. If you want to spend an extra fifteen hundred dollars on this snowblower so you can wait until the snow is done and then go out there and do it once. But I would rather save $1,500 and just do it. And honestly, every single time I've seen someone using one of those big two stage machines, they're just like crawling along. Whereas with my single stage I've always just like I'm just going down the drive. So I'm just like people, so many people think like I have the better one and then they don't do any actual analysis of whether they needed that thing. And I'm still. That's like my whole personality is like figure out what you actually need and then maybe go a little bit beyond that. But don't go crazy.

Sean Ferrell: The flip side of that question is is there a thing that you are stunned is not more widely popular when you're like it does what it says it's supposed to do and it does it. Well, I don't get why this thing isn't what everybody's going for.

Alec Watson: That's huh. I can't pick. So nothing comes to mind immediately.

Matt Ferrell: I've got one that you've talked about.

Alec Watson: Okay, well then what was that?

Matt Ferrell: Induction cooktops.

Alec Watson: Oh. Oh yeah. Except. Well, except the problem is I'm so Midwestern that I, I'm fine without induction. I'm fine with conventional electric stoves. But yes, induction is a, is a wonderful example of like we've had this real. We've had this better than both technology for close to 50 years now if you count what was going on in Europe. And we're just like eh, this is king. I just installed a 120 volt heat pump water heater at home. That's going to be a video in July. But I'm waiting. This is going to be like bit spoilery but there's going to be a switcheroo which is like oh, that's why I installed it in February. Because everybody like I, it's exactly what happened I knew I would have a hard time finding a plumber that would want to install this because they're like, why do you want this? I'm like, because it's cool.

Matt Ferrell: And heat pumps rock.

Alec Watson: And also, like, I live in the exact situation where someone would say, why do you want this? Because I live in a townhome. I don't have a basement. It's in a utility closet that's part of my living space. And I live in the Midwest where it gets very cold. And so I'm like, But I bet it's not really that big of a deal. And it's totally not. It's totally not that big of a deal.

Matt Ferrell: No, I get that too. With mine, people are like, it makes the space colder. I'm like, okay, yeah.

Alec Watson: And like, I think the lowest it makes the room, it's in about 5 degrees cooler after it's been running for a couple hours. Which brand?

Matt Ferrell: This is going to be a tangent, but which brand did you get?

Alec Watson: Okay. I went with the A.O. Smith one because it actually is a hybrid and the collars for ducting the intake and exhaust are much more useful than any of the other models.

Matt Ferrell: Okay.

Alec Watson: So. But I know it doesn't seem to be the most reliable, so I'm taking a bit of a gamble on it.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Because I have a Rheem. And the thing that drives me nuts about the Rheem is like, in the app, when you're. You can configure. Configure it in different ways. There's an energy saver mode that anytime I open the app at the top screaming red banner, put it into energy saver mode. I have it in heat pump only mode and it keeps screaming at me to put it in energy saver mode. And I find this infuriating because I did a test. I ran. I ran it as energy saver for a little bit and I ran it for heat pump only. And I've gone back and forth and done an analysis. It uses more energy. Energy Saver uses more energy than the heat pump mode.

Alec Watson: I'm not, I'm not surprised. I think what they're really. What they're really doing is they're calling Energy Saver, like the default cycle. And, and, yeah, like, so the one that I got, because it has. It's a plugin with resistive elements, so they're only 900 watts. But also, that's another point I wanted to make was like, why does nobody just sell a 120 volt water heater? Like, if you're okay. With the recovery time being 10 hours, why can't I just buy that? Because like if you have a 65 gallon tank of hot water and it's gonna take 10 hours to get hot, if you run out of water, out of hot water, that doesn't matter when you don't run out of hot water all the time. So I find it very frustrating that nobody was just selling a 1 kilo, you know, just a big water heater, but with 1 kilowatt heating elements. Yeah, well, A.O. Smith kind of does. So I'm going to play around with that.

Sean Ferrell: So what do you have coming up that you'd be able to share some teasers on? You already talked about potentially in July having a heat pump video. But do you have other things in the pipeline right now that you'll. That you would be willing to share with us here?

Alec Watson: You know, I'm going down a bit of a personal rabbit hole with. It is related to clean tech. Old CFLs. I'm starting to buy old CFLs on eBay because I'm starting to get a little fascinated about the history of how they were developed. And a video might end up coming out of the works of that. But like I found some weird old ones from the days before we really figured out how to make them. Well, but what. The reason why I went down this rabbit hole was because I remembered there was an 11 watt IKEA weird tubular bulb that I remember from my childhood. And I was like, that light had a better. It was more convincing like incandescent light than most other CFLs that I remember. So I just started going down this rabbit hole to track them down and try to figure out like how did the phosphor formulations change over the years? That may happen, but I don't know. It's a. It's a little navel gaze-y. Silly. But it is interesting finding some of the original packaging and seeing the things that they used to market these for. Like this will save however many pounds of coal or gallons of oil and stuff. But otherwise it's. It's the stupid engine videos and that's. That was gonna be. I was really hopeful that I could have shot the talking head on Wednesday, yesterday as we record this. But no, that didn't work.

Sean Ferrell: How long from inception to conclusion does your video process take? It's. I know that I've talked to Matt about that and it's a lot longer than people would.

Matt Ferrell: Longer than people realize. Yeah, say that.

Alec Watson: Oh yeah. So I have the video production part down to such a process that once I have a finished script, it is rare that it takes me more than three or four days to actually finish the video. But the script part is what. Is what takes forever. And in this case, it's basically just there's so many different forks in the road that you could choose to take. And I just, you know, I've been going through the script and being like, well, I need to. Right, I need to say that. But then that changes the, you know, the flow up. And so this one's just been quite frustrating. So I finally, you know, I finally found, like, this is a good hook, this is a good narrative. But then when it comes to, like, okay, we're talking about an inline four cylinder. Should I mention V engines and the fact that, like, this is. This is probably the most common type of engine in a car, but they're not all like this. So there's other ones. Do you know what a V8 means? But, you know, so that was in the script and then got removed. But now I'm like, should I put that back? So, yeah,

Matt Ferrell: I was going to ask you, like, how do you thread the needle of. Because I'm always struggling with this. Of, like, how much to put in and what to cut out. It's like, for me, it's like there's a narrative flow I try to hit in every video, but I could go down to five different tangents and it would make the video from 20 minutes to an hour. And it's like. And if it's an hour, it might be boring to people, but if it's, you know, too short, people are going to be going. But what about in the comments

Alec Watson: I was going to ask, do you. You also bristle at. You forgot to talk about. Which is my. Oh, it's like, oh, that's my least favorite comment. Because it's usually. No, I chose not to talk about this, actually, because there's not enough time. So, yeah, it really is just like, you know, sometimes if it's funny enough as a bit, I will go on layered tangents. But, like, if I feel it's distracting, I might just cut it. And I. I don't know whether I want to cut the V engine or not, because it is, you know, with the point when I'm getting to demonstrating the crankshaft, it's like, well, you could put two pistons on the same bearing and have them point in opposite directions. That's what a V engine is. But it's also, like, it's not really important to the topic. So I don't know, I haven't decided.

Sean Ferrell: It doesn't change the argument. Yeah, yeah. Is there a sweet spot for you as far as like video length? Like are you, do you aim for a consistent goal in that regard or is it just once you're done with that topic? The video is what it is used

Alec Watson: to have a consistent goal, but I've blown past it so consistently that now I just don't care. Right.

Matt Ferrell: What was it, what was your goal

Alec Watson: that you tried 20 to 30 minutes but then it was like, well now they're all regularly like 40. So.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, but people watch them.

Alec Watson: So I guess just. And so the script right now I just did a read through, it's about 35 minutes. And so I'm like, I have, I could, I could push that in there. But like it's kind of, you know, by the time I get back to the like here's why the oil pressure light is so important. We're like 20 minutes into exploring all the parts of the engine. So it's kind of like, I feel like that's a really long wait. But yeah, we'll see.

Matt Ferrell: I've been struggling with it. It's like back long time ago it was like 15 minutes. I was trying to target 15 minutes and then my videos started to get to 20. Now they're getting up to like 25 at times. And so it's like I keep creeping up longer and longer because there's topics getting more and more complex. But at the same time I am riveted watching you talk about Dishwashers for like 45 minutes. It's like it's riveting television.

Alec Watson: Yeah. I mean, thank you so much. I, I don't, I don't know what I'm doing, but I did, you know, that's like, that's part of why I made the renewable energy video as I did because it's like I do have some sort of talent to hold people's attention. So why not use it for good and then slap some of the people that haven't really been paying attention.

Matt Ferrell: How was the audience reaction to that video?

Alec Watson: Oh man, I was so worried putting it out there because I was, you know, I, when I committed to it, I put on my Patreon and said, hey, I just want you all to know I'm going to do this. If that makes you upset, you are more than welcome to leave, but I'm going to do this. And I had a few angry and I mean like I knew my Patreon is largely going to be self selecting so But I still expected probably losing a few dozen patrons at least. But I only had a few cranky people in the comments. And then when I released it publicly, I had a. One of my Patreon members suggested setting the video to only allow comments to people who have been subscribed for a week, which, honestly, I didn't realize you could do that.

Matt Ferrell: I didn't know you could do that.

Alec Watson: Yeah, it's.

Matt Ferrell: Oh my God.

Alec Watson: It's pretty deep in the layers, but you can. Per video, you can do different. Not monetization, moderation settings. And so Chloe suggested that, and I was like, that's a really good idea. And so the comments are way less toxic than they would normally be. But Likes Dislikes is still sitting at like 95%, which is so much higher than I was expecting. And I just crossed 3 million subscribers when I released that video. So I was like, let's see how quickly I end up going below 3. But I did not lose any. I mean, I did, but there were enough new subscribers that I'm still net positive. So I was pretty scared of releasing that video. But I was just like, you know what? Screw it. Things are falling apart so fast that if I end up alienating half my audience, that's worth it. But it ended up just not being the case.

Sean Ferrell: Well, you mentioned self selection, and I think that's an important thing for all of us to remember. Anybody in any kind of creative space, and you know, you are definitely in that space to remember that you can't live artificially in order to maintain audience, you have to be genuine to who you are and listen to the call of why you're doing what you're doing. And it seems like you may have become an inadvertent YouTuber kind of like backed into the space with like, I do these things and I make these things and I'm sharing these things. And then suddenly you realize people are listening to what you have to say in a way that maybe wasn't your first intention, but you found yourself there with that opportunity. I'm wondering, was there a moment for you where you. Where that kind of thing came online for you, where you were suddenly, like you said of yourself, I have the ability for people to pay attention to me. Was there a moment where that kind of clicked and you said, I have something here that I am doing? Or is that something you've always had in you? Have you always known of yourself that when it comes to this kind of public education or even just conversing with an individual, you're like, people trust me when I tell them the things I tell them.

Alec Watson: You know, looking back on, like, when I was growing up, I certainly did not believe I had any sort of unique ability in this regard. In fact, I think I would describe myself as frustrated that I could not convey why my particular fascinations were so fascinating to me, to other people. I just came to a realization, which is that I am a professional show and tell person.

Sean Ferrell: What a perfect frame that is.

Matt Ferrell: Yet it is.

Sean Ferrell: That's the perfect frame. That's amazing.

Alec Watson: Yep. And I'm like, I didn't know you could make show and tell into a job, but you can. You gotta be very lucky, but you can do it.

Sean Ferrell: That's great.

Alec Watson: And it was the moment when I realized I do have a talent was it wasn't, you know, just watching the success of my, of my channel. It really was the video on the red fridge that got so out of hand with the scripting. And I was just like, no one's gonna watch this stupid thing. And yet I think the video's sitting over 2 million views at this point. And so I was like, okay, people will watch my stuff no matter what it is. Yeah. So maybe I should start leveraging that a little bit.

Matt Ferrell: Does it carry a weight for you as well that you're more cautious about what you say? Because, you know.

Alec Watson: Absolutely. Yeah. It's its own kind of trap because I'm kind of pigeonholing myself a little bit. And then what happens to all YouTube creators is our standards, Like, I try to fight real, really hard against this. And there are some ways where I deliberately do not follow best practices, because I feel like everybody on YouTube just follows best practices and everything starts to look the same. So there's some reasons I deliberately do not do that.

Sean Ferrell: It boils down to leaning into the authenticity of who you are and the voice you have. And then, ironically, it's that very authenticity that continues to feed you the audience that you do. So I'm not gonna walk. The walk that everybody else is walking is exactly why people are paying attention to you. And I think that there's a lot of. You should be proud of that for yourself. I think that that's a. It seems like instinct brought you there, and that was a very good instinct. So, you know, hat tip to you for having had those instincts that got you where you are.

Alec Watson: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I don't get a lot of real feedback, so when I get it, it's very nice.

Matt Ferrell: That's like par for the course for a YouTuber. It's like I'm talking into a. A camera, and it's like, is anybody. Like, is this thing on? Is anybody listening to this stuff? And then you meet somebody in the real world, and it's like, oh, okay, I am having some kind of impact.

Alec Watson: Yeah. And now it's. It's really weird in my position because it's like, I don't. You know, so the. The costume, whatever you'd call that I wear on video, like, ended up being an accidental stroke of genius because in public I look so different that I. I rarely get recognized. Like, it's maybe quarterly. It's very surprising to me because, like, other people, I know that I've spent time with them, it's just they're getting recognized constantly. But there have been two, actually four occasions, if you count at conferences where I have been talking to someone and then I explained what I do and then say, oh, yeah, you might have seen some videos about dishwashers. And then they immediately remember who I

Sean Ferrell: am, as opposed to, like, a Hank Green. Hank Green's never not going to be Hank Green.

Alec Watson: Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I am so happy I stumbled into that because it means I can live a fairly normal life. But it also, you know, like, just today, before we recorded the podcast, the fire department showed up at the office to do an inspection, and I was just kind of like, oh, great. Because everything here is just. There's an engine that's taken apart on the desk, and there's just. There's a whole bunch of crap everywhere. And I'm like, well, come on in, guys. And then they're like, so. So what do you do here? And I'm like, oh, I'm a YouTuber. And. And so, yeah, that. That part of life has been really weird.

Sean Ferrell: They get back into the truck and they give each other looks, and they're just like, yeah, he's a YouTuber.

Alec Watson: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Okay.

Alec Watson: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: For myself, I just want to say thank you. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Alec Watson: Oh, you're very welcome. I like what you're doing with Undecided. It's good to. It's kind of one of my main news sources for clean tech. Well, just. Just because, like, I mean, other social media, too, but, like, you know, it's. It's curated, which is what we need these days. We need humans deciding what's important and, you know, humans directing our attention and not just machines. Hopefully. Hopefully we get to a point where people appreciate that more.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. Something tells me, it's going the opposite direction.

Alec Watson: Yeah, right. For, for now. For now. But I, I do think we're getting. There's an increasing awareness of like, this is not doing what it says it's supposed to do. So we'll see.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Huge thank you. And we will, if anybody sends us any kinds of questions that we think would be valuable for you to hear and maybe get your feedback on, we'll reach out. But otherwise, just thank you so much. Yeah.

Alec Watson: And if there's enough questions to do another episode, I'd be happy to.

Sean Ferrell: So our thanks once again to Alec for joining us and to all of our viewers and listeners. Was there anything in that conversation that you're like, darn it, why didn't they ask him that? Because we are, of course, Matt and I are more than willing to reach out to Alec if there's follow up conversations that need to happen. So we will once again hunt him down, stuff him in a bag, tie him to a chair and force him to talk to us. That's not really what happened. He was a very nice man and he was willing to sit down and talk to us on his own. So let us know in the comments what you thought about the conversation and what you thought deserves more exploration. As always, your comments do drive the content of this program and we look forward to reading what you have to say. But don't forget to like, subscribe and share with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support this podcast. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to StillTBD.fm and click the join button there. Or you can click the join button on YouTube both ways. Let you throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business, talking to very smart people about very interesting things. Thank you so much, everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're gonna be diving into something different for a change. That's right, Perovskites. Someday. I don't mean to get dark, but someday I will be dead. And I'm anticipating that carved onto my gravestone will be the phrase, today we're going to be talking about perovskites. Welcome everybody, to Still to be Determined. This is, of course, the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Matt's older brother. I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. And with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt, here today to talk about his most recent, which is an analysis of whether or not you should be waiting for the next gen of solar panels to arrive on the market or whether you should jump in now. So, of course we are talking about perovskites. It makes sense. I don't have to be happy about it to have it make sense. So we're going to be talking about perovskites. But before we get into that, Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm happy to talk about perovskites, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Sure, you're happy as a pig in crap to talk about perovskites, but here I am having to hold up my end of that conversation. I joke, of course. I always enjoy talking to Matt about anything tech related. And I do find these conversations interesting because Matt does a good job of finding a different angle. And today's angle is an interesting one because it is near and dear to my heart, and I think it's near and dear to a lot of our hearts. The question of, is it too soon? Will I miss out, what should I do and when should I do it? So we'll get into that in a minute. But before we do, we always like to take a look at what you have had to say about our previous episodes. So we're going to dive into your comments from episode 297. This was the long form conversation between Matt and Paul Breren. The two of them compared their heat pump situations where Matt has geothermal and Paul has its forced air. Right. It's the.

Matt Ferrell: Yep.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. So he has a source here. Heat pump. Yeah. And the two of them were comparing costs, monthly costs, expectations, whether they were met or not, as a way of helping guide people who might be making those decisions today about which model might be best for them. And in the comments, we saw a lot of you come in saying you are in the midst of doing exactly that. Like Seb jumped into the comments to say, as a person going through the process of modernizing a house from the early 1910s, it's very informative to hear what Paul has to say. Matt's house is optimized to the point that much of the advice is not applicable. I fear a blower door test. So we've talked before, talked before about the simplicity of insulating, replacing doors, replacing windows. So on a home as old as this, this might be simply my bias because we grew up in a house that was a house from the 1910s. It may not have been a Craftsman house, but it was something pretty darn close. If it wasn't, in fact that. And correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, sometimes those older houses are actually better at being insulated than things that were built a half century later, from the 1950s and 1960s, where fuel costs later on being as low as they were convinced people that it was okay to go cheap with the building of the structure. So sometimes the newer homes are actually harder to insulate and heat and cool properly, as opposed to a home built in the early 90s. Am I right about that or is that just like me revealing my bias of like you like an old home?

Matt Ferrell: I mean, there is some bias there, Sean, but it's, there's, there is a nuance there. Like there is an element to that. There are houses that were built in the early 1900s or late 1800s that may have really thick walls and are made of. They're brick and they just do a better job just insulating themselves than a house that was built in the 60s that has like two by fours, not even two by sixes for walls, and like thermal bridging and very little insulation. So it's kind of funny, but it is funny. Not haha, but like funny. Oh God. Like we did not do a good job building these houses and they're very difficult to update. Yes, yes.

Sean Ferrell: So, Seb, this is me calling out to you, let Matt and me know how your decision making process goes and what sorts of discoveries you make along the way. Because I think it would be an interesting path to follow as far as like what your experience is like and what sort of successes or hurdles you deal with as you go through this process. Because as Matt mentions, every time he talks about this subject, he built a home around all of this. So he's going to have a very current and contemporary experience of all this. But there are so many homeowners who are in your camps that would be maybe benefit from some anecdotes around what you go through. And that goes for everybody across the board. Of course people should share their experience. Like this one, this username. I just sat in awe. Jabba the Spud wrote, when I moved in. I love it. When I moved in, the attic was unvented and there was a bit of spray in insulation on the ceiling making unconditioned space. Unfortunately, that's where the air handler was. I replaced the 3 ton furnace AC with 2.5 ton cold climate heat pump. Then six weeks later the insulation was vacuumed out of the attic and and 4 inches of closed cell spray foam was added along with new windows and doors combined. These dropped. And this is remarkable, these dropped energy use for heating by 60%.

Matt Ferrell: Whoa.

Sean Ferrell: Making the heat pump oversized. Well, winter mornings can drop in the low 20s, but usually are somewhere around 30. Having a cold climate heat pump meant not having heat strips. Since I knew I was going solar and battery full, electrification was always the goal. I also live in Northern Arizona, so humidity is never an issue. Growing up in Phoenix, low humidity is wonderful to me. My place stays at about 40%. Jabba the spud, first of all, username, best username ever. Thumbs up. Second of all, you describe a living climate that seems absolutely idyllic. 40% humidity. It's cold in the morning, but it warms up during the day. I've been to Arizona. Matt and I were there a few years ago together as a matter of fact. And it's a beautiful. The scenery is incredible. It seems otherworldly to see who grew up in north in central New York.

Matt Ferrell: But Sean, in the middle of summer, it's the surface of the sun. That's the one thing.

Sean Ferrell: Hey, I've said it before, I can't get my hand. Give me a hot rock. That's all I want. That's all I want. When it comes to relaxing. Just give me a hot rock, I crawl out. I'm the lizard. I'm just going to drape myself over that thing. I'm going to soak in that heat. So like, lovely. But the experience I think is an interesting one because it kind of puts in an order of operations for everybody. Change your insulation first.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Also because it's like as you. As he noted, and as Paul noted, the HVAC installers sometimes do not take that into account when they're sizing the system for your home because reasons. So doing that first means when they come in and do the calculations, it'll be more accurate for them. In my case, I had a mechanical engineer that was able to kind of spec out what the stuff was going to look like with my home and plan ahead. But there's extra calculations and not every installer is going to go through the extra work to figure that out.

Sean Ferrell: And you mentioned Paul's experience. Well, Octothorpe had a question for Paul. I'm curious though, Octothorpe writes, how an HVAC contractor got all the way to coming to the house before discovering they were over their head and jetting. Likewise, having a contractor come up with a terrible in slab duct system, was it a failure of vetting on Paul's side, He writes, did you not ask the right questions or did the contractor ostensibly lie about past similar projects? It seems to me that considering the rarity of net zero highly efficient homes, the first question would be how many net zero houses have you done? That question may in fact be in hindsight exactly the sort of question Paul ought to have asked. And I'm not going to guess at what Paul did or did not ask in this situation. But I'd be willing to bet, given the relatively recent emergence of Net zero homes, the difficulty and unequal treatment of that as a term from state to state and from region to region, that a lot of contractors might approach this issue. As I'm a contractor, I know what I'm doing and the idea of certification and training is probably wildly uneven across the board. So you end up with, okay, we as consumers are probably going to have to do our due diligence. You're not wrong to say Paul may need may have needed to ask a different question, but he did say something that caused the guy to run and hat tipped that contractor for owning up to the right thing. I'm not going to be able to do this.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: So it really does put the onus on us, the consumer though, to know what are the requirements for contractor training in my state? What are the requirements for being able to achieve Net zero where I live? Is there anybody I can find regarding certification in that regard so that I know I'm going to the right people? Like the commenter Octothorpe says, write down a list of questions that challenge right out of the gate. Have you done this before? Can I get some referrals? Can you show me some examples of the work you've done? Those kinds of things? What'd you think about all that?

Matt Ferrell: I agree with you. Being able to hit it up front like that is going to help. This is related. I went to last year, I went to the New York Geo Conference, which is a conference about geothermal installers and the geothermal industry in New York State. And I went to their conference. I was invited out to go see the sessions and sit in, in there. And it was eye opening. It was fascinating because one of the sessions I sat in on, they were talking about how there aren't enough qualified geothermal installers yet and how to, how to fix that was what the session was about. And one of the people brought it up. And this kind of goes back to, it's not that installer has, is trying to con somebody or cheat somebody. It's just they don't know what they don't know, they think they know. And this person said, she, she trains geothermal installers and she said I could count every finger in toe. Almost 100% of the time you get an HVAC installer coming in that you're going to train on how to do geothermal. And they come in going, oh, I got this, I know this. As she pointed out, doing geothermal is so different from doing HVAC. It's night and day and they don't realize how different it is. And then she said plumbers that come in to learn how to do it actually are better at doing it because they don't seem to be coming in with the baggage of I know HVAC inside and out. They come in going with an open mind and then they pick it up really quick. I think it's just a. They think they know. Yeah, but they don't. So he calls, Paul calls or whoever calls and says, I need a. I want to install a heat pump. They're like, yeah, I got this. They come out and then it's. As soon as they're talking and finding all the details, there's, oh my God, no, I gotta get out of here. So I think that's probably what it is. It's just, it's not hubris. It's just you don't know what you don't know.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. And like I mentioned, it's, you know, it puts it back onto the consumer to really like dig into what's expected by, like there are people in this country who are installing these things because their state doesn't bother with any kind of certification process. Like there are going to be people out there doing this who shouldn't be doing it. And then there are going to be places where the certification process is more challenging and the training exists. And it's just like where you live is a defining factor. Finally, for the closer on this episode's comments, I wanted to share this one from Dean McManus. Dean is a friend of the channel and he shares this nice discussion. Great job in showing the difference between geothermal versus air source. Mr. Not a robot. Yes, Dean is evoking our comment about a large discussion in Matt's previous video which was spurred on by a porn bot. Thank you, Dean, for not being a robot. Appreciate it. On now to our conversation about Matt's most recent. Which is why waiting for better solar costs you more. It's a look at, well, if you've got this solar panel now, but if you wait 10 years, you could get that solar panel, then is it worth waiting for that one then? If that one's going to be so much more efficient And a lot of number crunching in this one, Matt. Boy, did I hate to send you this comment yesterday. I sent you this comment because I was like, I gotta give Matt a heads up just in case he hasn't seen it. Chill633 jumped in and said, wait a minute, are your numbers accurate? Since you're targeting the same output of 6 kilowatts in Matt's equations, wouldn't the efficiency difference simply mean fewer panels for perovskite versus silicone? If you use 400 watt silicone cells at say 20% efficiency, then you need 15 silicon panels. But if we talk 30% efficient perovskite, that's 50% more efficient than 20% silicon.

So you don't need the same number of panels. 10 instead. Matt, I shared this comment with you. When did you stop crying?

Matt Ferrell: Just before we started recording this.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: It was one of those. When you sent that to me, I was, oh, no, I misapplied. I misapplied it. The reason I fell into that trap was I wasn't looking at it. When my team are looking at this. We weren't looking at it from the point of view of how many panels would take. We were trying to abstract it to, okay, you have a roof and you have 6 kilowatts being generated here. What would that look like? Because there are no real panels on the market yet that we can get for our roofs. So we were just trying to abstract it out based on the numbers per square meter. You know, how much does it cost for perovskite versus this and that? That's how we were looking at it. And that's how we fell into this trap of, oh, no, we should have been looking at this from the point of view of the number of panels because you would need fewer panels for the same amount of power, which means all that kind of stuff. So we had misapplied it. But that does not change the takeaway because even if you correct for that, it still holds true that there's opportunity cost at the end of the day for waiting for four or five years to get a perovskite panel on your roof when a silicon panel today would have met your needs. And when you work out the math, it's still going to come out just fine in your favor for getting the solar panels today because you'll have four to five years of immediate relief, immediate savings, immediate benefits of being more energy independent. So there's all these reasons why waiting doesn't make sense. So it doesn't change the takeaway, but the math we applied, it had a flaw in our rationale. So, yes. Oh, man. Yeah, that makes me sad.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I was sorry. I was sorry to. I was sorry to see the comment, but I was pleased to see the comment from this perspective.

Matt Ferrell: Me, too.

Sean Ferrell: You've got very good viewers who are able to parse everything that's being said and think things through in a way as if they're a part of your team and being able to give you that feedback. And I just want to say, also to chill the tone of your comment.

Matt Ferrell: Perfect, perfect. You addressed it to no notes.

Sean Ferrell: You addressed it to Matt as a, wait a minute, is this accurate? And then ran through the logic of why you didn't think it was accurate. It wasn't. This dope doesn't know what he's talking about. So thank you for that. Thank you for being a part of the conversation instead of a critic of the conversation. We appreciate that so much. I wanted to jump onto that conversation regarding. Do you wait? Do you not wait? One of the things I don't recall you talking about in your video, and I was a little surprised that you didn't, was, okay, here are the numbers. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Here's how things stack up. Crunch, crunch, crunch. We're walking through the snow. Crunch, crunch, crunch. And you didn't mention the secondary market for solar panels. Going out and getting solar panels. Yeah, from the secondary market, where they're going to be maybe older, maybe not as quite as efficient, but much cheaper. Is there a recalculation along those lines that says you might need, you know, the, the efficiency might not be there, but since the price point is even lower, you might recoup your cost even sooner. So depending on what your needs are, looking at the secondary market, there might be the equivalent of saying to somebody, oh, you Need a new phone. But you do need the brand new phone. Maybe you can get one off of the secondary market that would meet your needs. So that's another aspect of this that I was curious as to why you didn't go into that. Is it just because too many numbers, too big a spreadsheet, not enough time?

Matt Ferrell: It it, yes, it is kind of a. It was kind of a can of worms. The more you pop it open and start to. It's just a can of worms. Wanted to keep it simple, straightforward. Just comparing a new silicon versus new perovskite or new next gen solar, whatever that is. What you're bringing up is almost like a completely video on its own. Should you get new solar or should you get new anything? It's like buying a car. If you want to be the most, get the most value out of a car, you should not be buying a new car. You should 100% be buying used. Never buy new because as soon as you drop it off the lot, you know the value goes down by like half. It's just. Yes, the secondhand market. My friend Ricky from Two Bit da Vinci, he's done this, he's bought panels for parts of his house on the used market and their former commercial solar cells from solar farm somewhere and they still have maybe 18, 20% efficiency or whatever. It is plenty good. And the cost of these panels is nothing. They are dirt cheap. So if you have the space for it, yeah, they're not as efficient. But toss on a couple like three or four more extra panels, you'll get the same output and it's going to cost you 25, 30% of what it would cost to go new. It's, it's bananas really. Really is a smart path. If you, if you're looking for the biggest bang for your buck, it's do it yourself and buy used.

Sean Ferrell: Jumping into the Do I wait? Do I not wait? A couple of people, I paired them together. They were right next to each other in the comments so I didn't have to work very hard. I just cropped both of them together. Very good reasons to not wait. Why wait for next gen when you're Terry Harrigan. I'm 68 years old, wanted solar since forever panels going on in a month. I am too old to wait for the next generation. Terry, I don't think you're too old. First of all, if that's you and your user's photo, you're wearing a bicycle helmet and you look like you're biking in some sort of competitive mode. So Terry, hats off to you. You're out there. The cardio's great. Thumbs up. Second of all, 68 just doesn't seem super old to me. So from that perspective, also thumbs up. But, yeah, that's a consideration. How old am I? How long do I want to save money via solar panels? Why wait? And then Aaron jumps in at the other end. I got solar just because the data center skyrocketed my electric bill.

Matt Ferrell: Yep.

Sean Ferrell: Another consideration. Power is getting more expensive. Right now we are looking at. Just today I was watching an analysis of how oil costs are going to go up as a result of the US Military actions in Iran. We're going to see our bills go up again. And that's going to be another factor that could say, oh, you've got an oil furnace. Maybe you want to look into ways of changing that. So, well, this, none of this is, none of this is in a fishbowl. It's all interconnected. Right.

Matt Ferrell: Which is part of what always gets lost. When I've talked about solar in my house, going back to my previous house, always see comments about if you just invested that money in the stock market, you would have got a return of blah, blah, blah. As soon as you make that argument. Completely missing the point. It's energy independence. It's not just about money. It's energy independence. Oil prices going up. I don't use oil in my house. I don't use oil in my car because my car is electric and I charge enough. Sunshine. So if gasoline prices go up again, doesn't impact me too much other than the cost of goods and stores going up because gas has gone up. There's reasons why going this path can make extra sense and give you that energy security because you're, you're generating it yourself and you're doing it yourself. It gives you extra bonuses. When stuff like this happens in the world. It gives you a little more control over your own destiny. So there's pros not waiting. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: The argument of, like, if you'd taken that money and put it in the stock market, you'd have X dollars by now. It's a little bit like saying if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. It's just like, like, what are you talking about? And finally, the best worst comment from JoPo. JoPo has been the best worst comment a number of times. I'm beginning to think that we need to get them a T shirt made. Jopo jumps in to say, we need a group of experts to get together and explain this. Clearly some kind of solar panel.

Matt Ferrell: That's so good. That is so good.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Chef's kiss.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. No notes. Good job, Jopo. Yeah. So, everybody, was there anything about this conversation that you think we missed? Is there an aspect to Matt's video that you wish we would dive back into? Let us know in the comments. We'd love to hear what you have to say. As always, your comments really do drive the content of this program and they help shape Undecided, as was demonstrated by a comment that led Matt to going back and leaving a. Leaving a correction in the description about the previous video. Like, you guys are critical to all this, so keep those comments coming. We really appreciate it. If you'd like to support us more directly, there's a join button on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm. Click the join button there. Both those ways let you throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about the ways that we are wrong. Thank you so much, everyone, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined, we're going to talk about heat pumps. And if you're all having deja vu, you're not the only one. That's right. We're getting heat pump conversation again, but we're doing it a little bit differently. We are leaning directly into Matt's most recent. This is of course Undecided with Matt Ferrell where Matt took a look at heat pumps but he didn't do it by himself. This time he brought a friend. Paul Braren joined Matt to talk about heat pumps because they have two different types and they compared their year long or more than year long results with having run the heat pumps in their homes. And we have a special treat for everybody today. Normally what we do is we would visit our mailbag here on Still to be Determined and then we would jump into the mailbag on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Today we're jumping right to Undecided with Matt Ferrell because we're also going to share the complete full conversation between Matt and Paul as they discussed everything about what they had seen in their homes and how the numbers compared from one home to another. So we hope you'll join us for that deep dive later in this video. But before we get into that, as usual, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some horror. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Matt, how are you today?

Matt Ferrell: Sean? I'm ready for winter to be over. Yeah, we, we. I'm done.

Sean Ferrell: We have been trying to avoid too much weather talk because you don't want to, you know, some viewers pointed out, hey, you talk about the weather every time. All right, fair enough. There's also the entire. You kind of like to have these be a little like bubble so that they're timeless. Hey, here's a conversation. It's from six months ago. Why are they talking about snow? We try not to do that too much.

Matt Ferrell: I got cabin fever. Sean. I got cabin fever.

Sean Ferrell: Tell me about it. Yeah, you got cabin fever, but you have a car. So when you want to go someplace, you can. You go from where you are where you're home and you're warm and go somewhere else where you're also warm. Ah, it's been a long winter.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it has.

Sean Ferrell: Anyway, as I mentioned, we're going to jump into the mailbag from Matt's most recent. This is his look with Paul. Not what I expected. Did I get the wrong heat pump? It's a comparison of one type of heat pump to another. And Matt, do you want to give us, before we dive into the comments, a a very quick explanation of how are these two heat pumps different?

Matt Ferrell: Okay. Yeah. My house has a geothermal heat pump system which means I have a 400 foot deep well that has a tube that goes down and then back up again. And I basically get the heat for my house from the earth. And Paul has an air source heat pump which extracts the heat from the outside air to heat his home. And there's pros and cons to both of those, which is why I wanted to make this video to kind of demonstrate the pros and cons of those systems.

Sean Ferrell: We received a lot of emails or not emails. We received a lot of comments on your video which point to people's experiences with different types of models. A lot. There were so many comments and I did not pull. I did not pull them because they were all anecdotal. But it's very interesting from a, if you're considering heat pumps perspective to dive into the comments in Matt's most recent. Because there are so many experiences shared which are specific to I live here and had this experience and somebody else. Well, I live here and I had this experience. Not all of these line up one to one. And where you are in the country is going to have a big impact. As Matt has talked about previously in the channel and he just described here, he's getting his heat from a geothermal digging into the earth. Digging into the earth is not going to be an option for everybody. Right, Matt?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's going to be tough for some people.

Sean Ferrell: So depending on where you are, Paul in his experience may say, oh, Matt had benefits that I don't have. Depending on where you are, you may not be able to access the benefits Matt does simply because your geography doesn't allow it. So all of this is to be taken as a starting point. I don't think Matt would say I have definitively answered the question. I don't think Paul would say he's answered the question. But both of them have experiences as well as all those commenters. So jump back into the comments on that video and take a look at various experiences. I think it's a really interesting perspective. There were also comments like this one from Zippy Mouse. Zippy writes in to say, here in South Carolina we run AC most of the year and my wife always hated our big ugly, noisy air source unit disturbing the peace in the yard. When the condenser failed a second time, I replaced it with a horizontal loop for the Mrs. And she couldn't be happier with the new quiet and space freed up in the garden. Scored major brownie points with that decision. I think this goes into the category of happy spouse, happy house. Like I'm glad that both of you are happy and interesting that here is one of those commenters who experienced both sides of it and pointed out, yeah, there's a certain noise factor that you don't have to deal with, right?

Matt Ferrell: In a way, yes. I don't have the big honking condenser on the outside of my house that makes a lot of noise for the neighbors in the environment. But the compressor is inside my house in my mechanical room. So there is noise that's introduced inside the house that wasn't. Isn't there typically for somebody who has an air source unit, but that noise is very minimal. If you have in a basement or a mechanical room, it's going to be very minimized. So it's not that big of a deal. But it's nice not having the eyesore on the outside of your house, that space taken up, having the noise for the neighbors. It's just really nice having the peace of quiet around the house.

Sean Ferrell: There was this from Jeremy who came into the comments to say the lesson learned is to keep the ERV ductwork independent and not tied to an air handler. These are among the best insights of this video. So do you want to give a little bit more detail there as to what exactly they're pointing out it? I know that there was an insulation question. We'll get deeper into that in a moment. But what are the various options? Does some of this boil down to the manufacturer of the unit that you buy or are these all kind of modular where you can go say like I got this thing and I've had this person put it in and they had to added this thing on top and it was perfect.

Matt Ferrell: It's not necessarily manufacturer, it's more of a like mechanical engineer designing your system. Those decisions are made at that point. So for my system it was put in line with the HVAC system. So they were basically doubling up and using the same ducts that take air conditioned air and put it in the room. It's just putting the fresh inside air into that same ductwork sharing the system. And there's an efficiency there of you don't have to run separate ducts. It saves on costs, it simplifies the whole setup. But the problem is is that my RV doesn't have enough oomph behind its fan to kind of reach the most extreme rooms of the house to get that fresh air in there. So like without the air handler running consistently, you'll notice the CO2 levels like in the bedroom get higher than you'd expect. In the den they get higher than you'd expect. But then you turn on the air handler into a low setting which just constantly feeds just a slow bit of air through the vents. Suddenly everything equalizes and gets great. So that's kind of like the pro and con of that approach. It's not that it's bad, it's just not efficient on the fresh air side of things. It's efficient on the setting it up side of things, if that makes sense.

Sean Ferrell: It does. Finally, I wanted to share this comment from Tinkertry. If you notice a theme in the way that Tinkertry talks about themselves, it's because they are in fact Paul. So yes, Paul jumped into the comments to say, so happy to see this video go live and so grateful for the opportunity to put my home out there with Matts. I think it will be helpful to a lot of people. I'm looking forward to reading through the comments and hopefully having some time to respond to a few of them. He continued, I realize I'm likely to get roasted for how bad an idea it is to put ductwork in unconditioned space, something I cover in more depth in my article. Know that my overall intent is to help others learn from my imperfect experience, including just how important such considerations are when starting to shop for HVAC contractors. Hopefully videos like this will help move the needle of electrification a little further to the right. So thank you Paul for that comment. And with that, I now would like to introduce the full conversation between Matt and Paul as they compared their homes and the heat pump system each of them have experience with.

Matt Ferrell: So Paul, I want to first just thank you again for being willing to do this comparison between our systems. I mean, we did this with our solar panels and battery systems. What was that a year ago or something like that between your solar roof and my stuff? And I of course reached out to you again. I'm like, your house and my house aren't that different. It would be interesting to talk about air source versus geothermal. So I want to thank you again for being willing to do this.

Paul Braren: No problem at all, but also very worthwhile. This is great. I love to share how my experiences have gone all along the way.

Matt Ferrell: I shared the script with you before I put the whole thing together so you could kind of see what the data I found, what we kind of compared. So you know exactly what's in the video before it gets released. I wanted to ask you the big question for me is what was the thing that you found most surprising between our comparisons of our two systems? What's the one thing that jumped out at you?

Paul Braren: Let's see. The similarity in the experience was actually a surprise to me. When you talked about not setting back or changing your thermometers much, that's true here too. Now I do have zoning, so one room might be 3 degrees warmer on purpose than an adjoining room. But I leave it. If I set it back, it gets too fancy and it's got to catch up in the morning. And whether it's geothermal ground source or air source heat pump, you don't really want to mess with your temperature much. If you're only leaving the house for four or eight hours, that is nothing like a regular house or how my houses used to be.

Matt Ferrell: For anybody that's out there because like the conclusion of the video is basically like heat pumps rock. I don't care which kind you get, it's like it doesn't matter what it is. What's the one piece of advice that you would give somebody that's considering transitioning to a heat pump? Whether it's geothermal, air source, doesn't matter. What's the piece of advice that you would give?

Paul Braren: Not only do you need to trust your contractor, use your spidey senses that they're going to do good work and they've done this many times before, but also that they're going to make the right choice for you. Not for them. Not a four year old heat pump that they have in stock. No, you want the latest cold weather heat pump with the latest refrigerants. You will save money in the long haul for sure. So that's the biggest thing and it's a doozy because when it dips below and you do resistive heat, the efficiency is so low and you talk about that Matt 3 to 4 to 1 when it's summer, but winter your cop is more like 2 to 1. And then if auxiliary resistant heat strips go on, your bill will skyrocket pretty quickly cause it might be on for hours. So all of that is part of just trusting the contractor, making sure you vet them and the hardware they get. Do your own research on what they've chosen and what reasons they chose it.

Matt Ferrell: Do you have any advice on how to select a contractor? It's like for me it's like I always have a hard time with this one, Cause it's like you've mentioned spidey senses. Listening to those like little voice in the back of your head. It's like listen to that voice. If a little yellow flag is waving in the back of your mind. My opinion is just like listen to it. Because if you don't have a good vibe, but there's gotta be something more concrete that we could give people to go on.

Paul Braren: Yeah, I'll be honest. In 2022, poking around like Mitsubishi was the hotness, the one that people were trying to get while it was eight months back ordered in 2022, supply chain problems. If you're well I'll look for super highly rated installer of Mitsubishi meaning they do a ton of heat bumps and maybe we're open to other brands. I did that. It did not work out well. But I also had a very short timeframe. I only had a few hours to get in the house before we closed on it three months later. So whoever needed to come to the house needed to come in that four hour window. And that was a setup for a difficult process where I wish I had three, four, five different bids. I did not. So that's the other piece of advice. If you have some time to do it right, you're going to want multiple quotes because they're probably going to be completely different than one another prices and the equipment.

Matt Ferrell: That's actually a fantastic piece of advice because like most of the time people are changing these things out because they're under duress. So like your water heater has died and you have to replace it. Doesn't give you a chance to go shop around, find the best thing. It's like just I need a water heater, put a new one in. My HVAC system just died. The guy came, said it's not worth repairing. You got it. You got to make a very quick call. It's like most people wait to that point. So for this it's kind of like you need to kind of do your due diligence before you hit that point. Plan ahead I think would probably be a, a good call out. I was the same thing in my house build. It was like there were a couple of things I would have done differently but we had already kind of like cast the die and like it was too late. And even though there may have been a chance to do it, it would have been so costly to kind of change directions. It just like my hand was forced of like oh shoot.

Paul Braren: I was thinking as you're talking about that is you and I compared our numbers. The stats are pretty alarmingly different. Right. Pulling your energy out of the dirt, that's around 50 something degrees turns out pretty good idea. But if it's a last minute purchase or you're under a time constraint meaning something just died. Yeah, you're probably not finding a contractor who's going to dig a geothermal thing and it'll hurt for you. But I wish that was possible because yours is looking pretty appealing, right. As a source of energy rather than relying on the utility company or your own batteries and solar. Still, you've got even more independence with your energy. Right. I don't know, 10ft below your. Or you dug a deep straight down one. Right. These are all just watching people watching a video like this is a huge start because once they are under duress, at least they have some knowledge under their belt what these systems can do about how much they cost. That's where you're bold in this. We're actually going to talk about that and reveal what it costs to own it for a full year. Heating and cooling the entire year.

Matt Ferrell: On that point though, it's like I don't honestly don't think the gap between my water furnace system and your, your, your units are actually that wildly different, even though it looks like it on paper with the energy difference. Because I think the biggest difference is our houses themselves. I mean you're still in the process of updating the insulation and all that kind of stuff. I'm really curious to see when you're done, how close is that gap? Because I think it's going to be much closer than it is right now. What's your take on that?

Paul Braren: Good point. My house built in 1990 had two by four exterior walls. Eight years later, that wasn't code anymore. Two by six. Just start with that. You put gypsum board in the inside. You put some sort of a plywood instead of osb. I like plywood better on this house. And then we added 2 inches of foam and then, and then new siding that's thicker. So I added to the R value quite a bit. But nothing like, you know, Matt, you've got what, 10 inch, 12 inch seals around your windows. It's fantastic.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Paul Braren: And it's factory built where there's no thermal coupling from the inside outside. Yours is engineered to do amazing things with heat transfer. So you make a good point trying to sift through how much of that is your incredibly efficient house with really good R value all around and no thermal bridging between inside and outside where possible. And really high quality windows with, like a lever that pulls the seal that is hard to pull out. But my house is probably more typical of what most people are facing. If they're doing a retrofit. That's kind of the good part. It's a retrofit versus new that's also helpful.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I think your experience is going to be what most people would experience. Like, as far as what the cost is to run it. Like, I was looking up the averages of your house, like, for what a heat pump should be. And like, you're square in the middle of, like, where you should be. That's why I was kind of thinking that my house is kind of like skewing the results a little bit because of the efficiency of the house itself. But what are the updates that you are planning next?

Paul Braren: Sure. My basement and this extended cold snap. February 2026. By far the coldest winter of the four winters my heat pumps and my wife and I have endured. The whole basement gets to 53-54 when it's sustained cold like that for a week. That means the entire 1856 square feet flooring underneath my feet is cold. Now, if I aim a camera at it or a thermal camera, okay, it's not 53 degrees, but some of the stone areas or tiles, yeah, they're low 60s, maybe upper 50s. That's a giant footprint of coldness. Then there's the ceiling. That's R40, most of it. But of course, reworking and having to do some work in the attic, putting in new catwalks and putting in new ductwork meant only about half of that R40 that we blew in when we moved in. The house is still 40. A lot of it settled or moved and disrupted. So those are two major areas. 1850 square feet below and above me could be better. That's the starting points. Rim joints around the basement that we sprayed with foam to seal it. That was typical in an area where air will just come right in. And then triple pane windows all around, including the basement windows, need to be replaced. Those projects for lower hanging fruit. These remaining ones, they need to be done when all renovations are done. And there's still one piece of renovation which involves electrical and maybe probably no ductwork. When that's done, then we'd blow the air 40 smoothly all over the whole attic again. So those could have a pretty good effect. 6, 8%. I don't know.

Matt Ferrell: The just the duct-run stuff you already did, like you were estimating, it might be around that 15% area of improvement. It's like I think you might be too conservative for what you might say. I bet you see more double digit gains from the additional stuff you're gonna do.

Paul Braren: The way I look at it though, the way I'm. I'm becoming a net zero energy cost per year home is by fighting laws and policy changes, meaning that virtual power plant thing that I'm in now that gives me about three grand a summer to endure winters and come out even. I need to kind of assume that's going to go away. So I'd like to chip away at these things I can do. And that's the way I look at it. His budget allows and his return on investment might be, you know, the five year, 10 year timeframe a little more compelling than 20 years. Still, it's intended like yours to be a forever home, many times decades. If you're going to be moving soon, these projects tend to not make as much sense. Yeah, but that's another common area.

Matt Ferrell: We have the other thing about your duct work and how you've streamlined it so well now for like how much you reduce the length of the runs and stuff like that. It kind of comes back to when I hired my mechanical engineer. He was an independent mechanical engineer. So he was not associated to any HVAC installer company. He was not associated to the water furnace. He was just an independent guy. So he had no horse in the race as to what I chose to do. He just worked with me on what I wanted. He said to me, all the brands, they're all about equivalent. It doesn't matter which one you go with. They're all pretty on par with each other. He said it comes down to the installer. He said you could have the best unit that you could possibly spend money on and have a crappy installer put it in and it's going to be the worst experience ever. He said you could have a mediocre version put in by a great installer and it's going to give you 20 years of happy use. So he said it all comes down to somebody who knows what they're doing. Your duct run change to me illustrated that it's like somebody who's taking care to try to truly optimize the system for this specific house can really make or break the energy use that you're going to see. It's going to make or break the results you're going to get.

Paul Braren: No good point.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's kind of frustrating to see that you have to do all of it yourself. And like the installers, not that they dropped the ball. It seems like some installers probably are not taking the care or the time that they need to. And there may be reasons for that. But what's your take on that?

Paul Braren: All right, in our confessions period here, not only are the ducts too long, but like ECOB thermostats, factory default is let's go to resistive heat. Anything below 40 Fahrenheit. Well, my heat pump's designed to run happily dial at minus 15. Not happily, not as efficiently. But it won't even turn off until minus 15 Fahrenheit. So turning it off at 40 makes no sense. You want the heat pump running all the way to even the deepest -5 degree Fahrenheit weather. But when the ductwork is long or twice as long or some spots even three times as long as it needed to be, yeah, that's a lot of attic. That's unconditioned space to travel through. So instead of a 5, 6 degree temperature drop, you might see 7, 8, 9, 10 degree temperature drop. So you're basically paying to heat your unconditioned attic. So it's another bit of advice. If you can do a conditioned or at least a basement like mine, where it's not as big a temperature difference between indoors and out, you're going to take up a lot of basement space with ducts. But in my case it was tricky. There was tile floors. You'd be making the holes for registers in the floor. It'd be difficult. The existing HVAC stuff was in the attic. And replacing that did make more sense. But boy, if you live in a part of the country where it's common to have conditioned space in an attic and they know what they're doing, they're not going to like ruin your roofing. Because some areas of the country condensation is a huge problem. You can't just willy nilly insulate an attic. Those are other considerations that, yeah, I could save money. But like you said, the ductwork coupled with being in unconditioned space. My attic varies from 105 down to about 25 Fahrenheit. That's a pretty big range, not ideal. The other thing is code is now R12 for Flexduct. Check your state.

In mine it should have been R12, but it's R8 and the inspector didn't flag it. So that didn't really help me as the homeowner. So all these little things to be aware of. You can do your own research. If your town says it's supposed to be R12 insulation on that flex duct they use for labor reasons. It's incredibly quick to pull the slinky out of a box and shove it in, but it doesn't mean they're going to pick the alt the right one, and it doesn't mean they're going to pick the right path. As we talked about, the length is a big deal because the airflow will just be half. Some of mine took like two almost right angle bends.

Matt Ferrell: I mentioned this in the video. Not to keep harping on installers, but I mentioned in the video how, like, I had an installer that completely overengineered my system. One of the first engineers that was working on this, but they came up with a system of I'm slab on grade. And they had designed this entire system where duct work was going to be embedded into the foundation, which is not unheard of. It is done. Not something you really want to do. And when he proposed this, my first thought was, what happens in 15 years if something goes wrong with one of those ducks and it's now ins cement? It's not going to be easy to fix. And then he sent me the renderings of what it was going to look like in the foundation. And he was using this old school methodology of every heat vent has to be underneath a window. It's kind of traditional. You put them underneath windows, around the outside of the walls. And it was this spaghetti monster of tubing that would have been in the foundation, not just one level deep. It was like it looked like if you did a cross section of the New York subway, it was like tubes on tubes on two, like three layers deep going all over the house. And I asked him, I'm like, why is that necessary? This house is so energy efficient. The manufacturer of the home said you could just get some mini splits and put a couple mini splits and it might be enough for you. And he had no good answer. And that's when I realized he doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know a thing about highly efficient homes. He doesn't know how to properly spec this out. Which is why I ended up shifting to that independent guy. You had somebody that just peaced out and like walked out of your house like, I can't do this.

And even the person that you did have didn't properly size the system because he seems to not have understood how efficient your house would be after your upgrades. I don't know what to say. I don't know what my question is for you other than just like, do you think the takeaway for you is also that it's just a lot of installers just know what they've been doing for the past 10, 15, 20 years and they're just not versed in what's coming or what's changing or how to adapt to it. Or do you think it's a, I don't know, willful ignorance or like just set in their ways and they're not willing to learn the new stuff?

Paul Braren: Well, here in Connecticut, it's a whole lot of oil furnaces and natural gas furnaces in suburbs. Oil in the more rural areas. That's what they're experienced with. And you'll find a lot of them aren't designing systems from scratch. They're just replacing a boiler, replacing a furnace, not designing ductwork. So even though I talked to the manager of the company saying whoever you send, they need to understand what they're getting into. I need a clean slate design. Because right now there's only one supply, one duct at each door, relying on undercutting the door. I want some soundproofing when I close the door and I want a return and a supply in each room. Cause this is gonna be heating that coolant if the person you're talking to is afraid of even that. Right. Because you're heating the house with your heat pump and that's new to them. Yeah, there's no way you want to use them. They need to adequately size it for a huge temperature difference between indoors and out. But yeah, the one contractor literally announcing, he's walking away and just. It got quiet and he literally walked out the front door. And I'm standing there like, well, that just happened. The manager sent someone who didn't. At least he admitted he was in above his head, that he did not know how to a ductwork system from scratch. That means plenums, air handlers, returns, all of it. Some of them are just doing air conditioning in Connecticut where they're just doing supplemental gentle blowing and the cheapest, shortest duct rung they can run at the least amount of labor to each bedroom. That's it. That is nothing like heating, where you really need to properly do it on the whole perimeter of the house and not have pipes freeze in your basement. If someone designs it wrong and all

Matt Ferrell: that, I will say I actually tip my hat to that guy because it's better to have an installer do that and than to just push forward and just stumble into something. He doesn't know what he's doing. It's like I'd rather have an installer just upfront go. Can't.

Paul Braren: No. Yep. No, Good point. Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: One of the other questions I had for you was around the ERV stuff because, like, I brought up in the video how, like, I have a regret about tying it into my HVAC system because the air handler has to run at a low speed pretty much all the time to give enough force to the ERV air to get it, make sure it's circulating and wish I had done something like a Zender system or something. Something that was a dedicated unit. Have you had any. Do you have any regrets or concerns about your ERV system, the way it's set up, or would you have done something completely different as well?

Paul Braren: No, I definitely share your regret on that. It would with the budget, of course, so it's easy to say in hindsight, oh, it would have been good. Well, there were so many other things going on that we were having cost overruns. Easy to say now. But here's the thing. Turning on the air handler, it's only like 85 watts. Stage one, the first fan speed on a Bosch IDS 2.0 system that I have, or about 130 watts on the second stage or second blower speed, but I have two of them. The house is divided in half, so it's kind of like you run a data center. There's redundancy. If one half of my house went down, heat pump died. Ice falls into a fan blade. I sent you a picture of someone in Tennessee with that. One inch thick. And there are fan blades and they're compressed. Their outdoor unit. Anything can happen. If you're away from the house for a week, it'd be nice to have your pipe's not freezing your way. But anyhow, for all of that, the ERV having to turn it on every hour or so. When I'm in this office to get right now, my CO2 I'm looking up is 750. But in about an hour it'll be up to 950. And then the air handler's gotta turn on and then the ERV is bringing in fresh air to mix with that air. It would be good if that was a separate system. If you don't turn on the air handler and just try to shove fresh air into the system and hope it'll blow into the ducts. Doesn't really work. So, yeah, that's a regret. And then the other regret is summer. If you're very efficient. Heat pump system like sear20, like mine is, is designed for some hero numbers on how Efficient it is. It's probably not dehumidifying enough. You and I have talked about that a little bit. So if it's a rainy day also and you're turning on the RV and your RV is not amazing for its efficiency, you're now bringing in outside air in a system at kind of high speed.

So these super cold spells are super hot spells. It's not great to turn in your duct system if there's no heat at the same time, for example, in the winter. But all I need is CO2 in this room right now, not heat. You can see how it's tricky. So my home assistant, my $120 Raspberry PI is basically filling this gap. It's intelligently trying to figure out, okay, either a shower's made the bathroom really humid really quickly. So I can sense that, and I need to bring it down. Turning the RVs or CO2 levels building up, turn on the ERV. But it needs to do that smartly because if it's 5 degrees Fahrenheit out and it's taking 40 degrees to recover from humidity or CO2 from too many people, you got a problem. Cause now the temperature's dipping, it's gotta start calling for heat. But until it calls for heat, you're blowing 63 degree air on people in the room. Whereas a Zender would be blowing so gently from a central spot in the room, you'd really never think twice to just leave it running on at super low speed.

It's a big difference in behavior that you might not think about when you're shopping.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, like, for me, it's like some of the minor issues I have with my system, I've just. Like you, I have a little home assistant server running where it's like I've just done my own automations and things like that to kind of fill the gaps of my system. But I'm not normal. You're not normal, we're not like normal Joe. Off the street. A normal person is not going to be setting up a home assistant server and going and doing automations. They're going to basically just use the system as it was installed. So for me, it's kind of frustrating that I've had to monkey with it like in the way I have. And I'd feel bad for somebody that wasn't in my mindset to do that kind of a fix. They would just probably live with this less than ideal setup and just be frustrated by it and not know how to fix it. It's a problem.

Paul Braren: This industry seems so ready for disruption. A turnkey solution where the thermostats and everything's just handled by like Octopus Energy in UK or something. Right?

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Paul Braren: One phone number to call to just install the heat pump the right way and the temperature control the right way where the homeowner has someone to call. And I got as close as I could to that. I'm using off the shelf Ecobee thermostats but and I'm glad I didn't pick Nest at this point. Ecobee, they don't talk to each other. They're five independent thermostats. They have no sense of oh I'm in the same house and I'm on, I'm controlling one heat pump. So you have a zone damper controller that adds complexity. So we reached our goals. Humidity control year round humidification, winter dehumidification, summer and the shoulder months and comfort in each room and individual temperature control. But the cost was complexity which it's good. You have multiple vendors, you're not tied to one but you definitely have different numbers to call if something goes wrong. And it's really just the way it is in our country right now. We've got a ways to go and the controls for all of this.

Matt Ferrell: I want, I do want to talk about like the utility side in a second but something just popped in my head which was we've both, we are currently still living through it but there's been a massive cold snap in a huge portion of the country. We had the big storm that came through and it was funny because as we were putting this video together it was, that was happening. I've never experienced temperatures like this in this region. Here in Massachusetts I don't think I've ever experienced temperatures that were like negative 15 -18 without. That was not the, that was not the feels like temperature. That was just the actual air temperature was negative 18. I don't think I've ever experienced that. 25 years I've lived here and you

Paul Braren: came from Rochester, right? Growing up.

Matt Ferrell: I grew up in Rochester where it got cold but we had more, it was more snowy than it was cold. And it's now been two weeks of abnormally low temperatures in this area. So it's been interesting to see how my geothermal system is handling. It's handling a champ. But it's funny to look at the loop temperature. It normally is like 46 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit and right now it's like at 37 it is really cold. Because.

Paul Braren: Wow.

Matt Ferrell: But the air temperature in the house, like the house feels no different. So it's working within specs. It's all fine. But it's been fascinating to see how cold the loop temperature has actually gotten on my system. And it basically has an antifreeze in it. So even if it gets below freezing, it's not going to freeze. But it's still interesting to see how cold it got. How has your system handled the past few weeks?

Paul Braren: It's kept up. We're both wearing short sleeves. That's kind of.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it should be a stun or something.

Paul Braren: So we don't care about the weather too much. But yes, I did struggle where there was a wiring issue where when my resistor heat went on, my heat pumps were turning off. That's not good. You need them both going because it could barely keep up with one or the other. If you have one to the other off and it's hitting -5 Fahrenheit for many hours. And then the next day was only going up to like 8, day after day. I've lived in this area for 30 years. Never seen that either. This is a sustained cold snap for about a week. Yeah, it. It struggled a bit. It's working harder. The unit's outside. I never seen them defrost. Have to defrost quite as often. So that's another thing where you have an advantage of a heat pump indoors, minor outdoors. They need to turn off and defrost well when they didn't wire correctly and the air conditioning is turning on for 10 minutes. In the winter, it's not unreasonable for my wife to wonder, why is the duck blowing 37 degree air for three minutes? Well, because the auxiliary heat is supposed to turn on at that moment and have her not notice. Well, that wasn't fun to notice that when it was 8 degrees and I'm out there looking into it with touching bare metal when it's 8 degrees and windy. It was rough, honestly. But now that I have it all figured out and working, oh, man, it feels good. I understand it all. I totally get it. Everything's tuned right. It's quite comfortable. And now my electric bills. Next winter they are going to be less than the last two. I now know I fixed some stuff that just should have been fixed all along, but nothing like a cold snap like that. The ultimate torture test. The best one in 30 years to shake out the kinks in my system. I'm always an optimist. That was good. I'm home and fixing it. It's fine.

Matt Ferrell: But then again you're closing that gap to my system. Like this is another one of those like bricks in the wall that you're building of just narrowing that gap which I think is super cool. Okay, so for the costs, I did bring up in the video how like there's the spark gap problem, which is a real thing. Definitely a lot of people are like, I'm not going to do a heat pump because natural gas is so cheap. Why would I switch? That's a huge issue. What's your experience in Connecticut with the utility and what you've got? Because I believe you have special. A special rate for your heat pump system. Is that right?

Paul Braren: Massachusetts version of Eversource did roll that out to you.

Matt Ferrell: I'm in the process of enrolling. I haven't gotten the final like, okay,

Paul Braren: so next winter will be different for you. But yeah, we don't have that yet in Connecticut. I sure am hoping we get that it's still ever source where I am. That would make a big difference for me when I made the kind of pitch to my wife in 2022, hey, we're going to spend over 100,000 living here in the next 12, 15 years in this house. We're going to renovate. Should we put that money into solar batteries, roof and all that or just keep, you know, paying the electric company? I said we can probably come on net zero if we're enrolled in virtual power plant. That was always part of the plan. I knew winter, the sun, we've one sixth of solar energy in the winter that we do in the summer. You've seen that with your system, we're just too far north. You would need a massive amount of batteries to endure three or four days of bad cloudy winter weather in a row. So I knew you're going to be grid tied and I knew we could sell back and get paid handsomely for summer selling back of electricity. So again that worked out and it's about three grand a year for. Because in the winter is when we deplete our negative energy bill and now we go positive. We owe the money and it can be over a thousand. Speaking of that, when I moved in, remember I said the 4040 degree set point is where the factory default ecobee was. That was a $1,200 mistake. When we got our January bill, the year we first moved into the house, 1,200 pounds. That was not fun to talk to my wife about that one to find out the heat pumps going on at 40 degrees, not 4 degrees, 5 degrees like it should or something. That was brutal. It's confessions here. Those rough edges. Your contractor should know all that. Not you have to explain a major mistake like that.

Yeah, I don't want, I don't want people to be scared off, that they should be encouraged that if you get a contractor that's installed a few, you're probably going to be pretty darn happy in wearing short sleeves in the winter, not worrying about it because it works pretty darn well to not leave the temperature alone year round.

Matt Ferrell: I mean, that's, that's actually a good question that we could, you could ask an installer is how many heat pump systems have you installed?

Paul Braren: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Get a sense of like, oh, I've, I've done a few. It's like, oh, maybe you find a different installer. But somebody's like, oh, I've installed, like, I can't, I've lost count. Around 20 or 30 or 40 or something like that. It's like, okay, this is a guy that probably knows what he's doing.

Paul Braren: And then a follow up would be, let's say someone sends you a quote and you have a hydronic system, you have baseboard heating and you have air conditioning for your ductwork. Well, I have a friend who gave me a quote to look over. And what do you know, it didn't include reworking his ductwork. I asked him, I said, so your house is built like 12 years ago. Yeah, the air, the ductwork was built just for air conditioning. He goes, yeah. I go, so there's no. It's going to be really loud in the winter to try to pump air through your existing ducts again. I guess the question you ask your installer there is tell me about what needs to be changed about my duct work to actually handle heating, not just the air conditioning it was designed for. And that's super common here in Connecticut. Just a few small ducts for a 20 degree difference between indoors and outdoors. Maybe 25 degrees. Way different than an 80 degree Fahrenheit difference between indoors and outdoors. Needs to blow more air. So, yeah, it's another question to ask your contractor. Are they prepared to look at your ductwork and tell you exactly how much it'll cost? And a lot of that's labor. It's not the metal bending parts making part. It's a lot of labor.

Matt Ferrell: So is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you'd want to touch on? Like, are there any, like, words of advice or anything that you'd want to give?

Paul Braren: Wintertime dryness, so health reasons it'd be pretty good to keep your house between 40 and 60% year round. More like 35 to 50% for comfort. And that's difficult and energy intensive. So I know we kind of left that out of the video for simplicity, but I'm actually blowing steam into my ducts and they need to blow steam in my ducts only when a motor's running. So you need to have a check there to say do not blow steam into the cold attic in the middle of winter if the fan on the air handler dies for whatever reason. So it's a pressure transducer to say don't flood the ceiling and ruin it when someone's at home if something fails. This part is crazy, but they're old fashioned steam. Basically a boiler that throws steam into your air handler while it's running and keeps you comfortable in the winter. Not something I really thought of until I realized that's a heck of a lot better than filling a humidifier console thing I was doing every day at my previous house. Yeah. So these are things to think about. If your contractor can handle winter and then summer to make darn sure the HVAC system adequately dehumidifies and have answers for that, then you probably have a good contractor that understands you want them comfortable all year round, including shoulder months. April and October, when no HVAC is running well, you still need to control CO2 and you still need to control humidity. When it rains three days in a row, ask them that question. See how they respond.

Matt Ferrell: That's interesting because at my house, I found something interesting that the house seems to be holding onto its moisture level way better than my old house. My old house, middle of winter, it might be like 30% humidity. My hands would get so dry. Awful here, not doing anything. It's been hovering around 40% most of the time. And I haven't done anything, but it's still kind of dry. So I still have a humidifier that I have in my room that I have to fill every day to remember to fill. So the bedroom gets a little more humidity overnight just for comfort. But it's. It's been surprising to me. I didn't expect that, that this house would hold on the moisture. I think it's because it's so airtight and the moisture that we are giving off, I think that might be what's keeping it at that about 40% level. Just because of how airtight it is.

Paul Braren: Yeah, no, that's. That's a very important point. Mine's gonna be more typical for what most people will deal with. Oh, yeah, you're probably gonna plug up your chimney. By the way, chimneys are awful, awful common here. There's a whole lot of heat escaping there. You might want to consider convincing your significant other to plug up that giant hole in your house. Because my flue was so rusted out, it had like a half inch gap blowing heat out, you know, and these are the worst.

Matt Ferrell: Don't get me started on them. Because they are the worst. You. You create a fire in your house to get nice and warm and toasty. All you have now succeeded in doing is creating a system that will now pump heat out of your house so fast it'll make the rest of your house cold. Even though you're toasty warm in the living room with the fire, you've now made every other room in your house colder because you're just. It creates a suction that pulls all the heat out of your house.

Paul Braren: Yep.

Matt Ferrell: Don't do it. Please don't do it.

Paul Braren: Or as a compromise, we put a fireplace insert that looks like fire and it covers the giant hole. So you still have the aesthetic and you can turn it on. I didn't bother putting. Putting its resisted heat elements. Those you don't have to hook up. It's just an LED light that looks pretty when it looks like a log. So that's a compromise. Right. Where these are important little barriers. And then of course, washer dryer. Right. If you can do a dryer that doesn't blow that condition air you paid for out of the house in the middle of winter. Another thing you brought up in your videos. Those are not easy decisions. And we haven't gone that way in our house on all of them. And I suspect people listening to this or in the same battle, you're gonna be bucking other people. But if it comes down to money and math and an idea of how much money you're talking about per year, that might make the conversations a little easier. And I haven't really seen anyone. Matt Reisner kind of did something about makeup error. Right. Turning on range hoods and turning on a dryer. But how much it equates to what it cost you to keep that dryer on versus a heat pump dryer. Yeah, that's harder math to do. And it's a difficult thing. Yeah. Don't be scary, though. It's all good. I mean, the local builder that put

Matt Ferrell: my house together from Unity Homes. So Unity Homes designed and constructed the house, and then a local installer put it together and finished it out the local installer, when I was telling them, I don't want an event for the dryer because I'm gonna have a heat pump, they kind of gave me a look of like, wait, what, what, what? No vents. And they were like, why? I'm like, I don't want that. All the house air going out that vent. It's like, that's why I'm getting a heat pump dryer. And they were kind of like, oh, it kind of makes sense. Like, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. There's the same thing for the. For the vent hood. It was like there was a big debate about whether we actually vent the outside for our vent hood or if it's just kind of a filter hood kind of a thing. And then we rely on the ERV to help evacuate air out of the kitchen to. To make it more energy efficient. And that's the direction we went. Just again, to save as much of the heat that we're keeping in the house, we want to keep it in the house as best as possible. So fewer vents to the outside.

Paul Braren: You know, it ties into our previous topic of a gentle steam. Humidifier is what you have there when you're drying your clothes. Yeah. It's anything else. You have a very efficient house, and that's supplementing your winter low humidity problem.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I never considered that just living in the house would provide probably just enough moisture to keep it comfortable in the winter. I did not see that coming.

Paul Braren: Your house runs on two hair dryers of energy in the winter when it's really cold. That's incredible. Right? Houses were not built that way in the 90s. Probably 99.9% of the ones in Connecticut are not built that way. So this. That's just the reality. So you building new. An excellent approach if you can do it.

Matt Ferrell: But most people aren't going to have. They're going to have a house like yours. Most people. That's why I wanted to share your story as part of this, because it's good to see what people are experiencing and what you've been experiencing. People learning from what you've done. I think it's going to be very valuable to see. So, again, thank you again for participating in my part two video comparing our houses together. We'll have to come up with a part three.

Paul Braren: There's all sorts of stuff and yeah, thank you. The home automation is another angle, too. A lot of people are interested. It's weird that we have $100 raspberry PIs running the comfort of our homes. Right That's a good story, too. It's pretty easy. It makes it pretty easy to back up if it dies. That's. That's kind of you.

Matt Ferrell: Again, thank you so much for taking the time and participating.

Paul Braren: No problem. I always enjoy hanging out with you and I love sharing whatever I learned with other people to help them avoid some of the pain I went through.

Sean Ferrell: So we hope you've enjoyed that long conversation between Matt and Paul. And before we close the episode, wanted to share a couple more comments that I thought were interesting takeaways, like this one from Abel, who writes, the takeaway is improve your house with better windows. At least double glazing, but triple is even better. And insulate the heck out of your house, which not only keeps heat in or out in the summer, but also blocks sound from the outside. With the better windows, your fuel and power costs will go down if the house is properly insulated. That's the one piece of information out of this entire conversation that is the universal, wouldn't you say, a hundred percent.

Matt Ferrell: Like before you consider doing anything with heat pumps or anything. Look at insulation. It's the che. I won't say cheap. It's the most effective thing you can do for your house, full stop. That's it.

Sean Ferrell: And aren't there some simple little tricks that you experienced when you were having your home built? Do I remember correctly that the simplicity of seeing where if you light a match and then blow it out where the smoke goes can be a way to find those locations where you didn't realize where the draft was coming from or where the air was moving toward little gaps in the insulation. So you might be able to track down some stuff like, oh, that door in the kitchen that leads to the outside entrance to the garage, maybe bleeding air that you don't even realize. Little things like that.

Matt Ferrell: Exactly. Yep, a hundred percent.

Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best, worst comment and a little story behind it. Bianca jumps into the comments to say, matt, this is the fourth occasion you've shown geothermal heat pumps to the class. To which John responded, it's to make up for how little it gets mentioned on other channels. Smiley face. And then that was followed up by Jerky who jumped in to say, and I will watch every single one, especially now that Dandelion and Fed credits are out of the game. He goes on to complain about the change in basically public funding to help people put in this kind of system into their home. And as I captured this image, I couldn't help but think, well, there's something about this that doesn't Strike me right. This seems like a strange comment to make. This is the fourth occasion you've shown geothermal heat pumps to the class with no other comment. It wasn't a positive, it wasn't a negative. It was just a blank statement. So I clicked on the username. This is a porn bot. It was an AI porn bot. So the AI has gotten sophisticated enough that it's able to go in and leave a comment that doesn't say something completely out of left field. It doesn't say something that's, like, out of context. Like, why is this commenter saying this? Like you, we're all accustomed to the generic comments that say things like, I found this video very helpful, and it really helped me solve my problem. Like, no, that's. That's. That's spam. But this time it actually is able to look at the content of your channel and come up with a comment that has context. And I found that.

Matt Ferrell: This is terrifying. This is why AI is going to destroy everything.

Sean Ferrell: That's right.

Matt Ferrell: The end of days we're in, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: So the reason this is the best worst comment is not because of the conversation it generated, but because of the source. Thank you, Bianca. Thank you so much for jumping into the comments. And all of you listening to this, all of you who are not porn bots, please jump into the comments yourselves. Leave a note. Let us know what you thought about this conversation. Let us know what you thought about the long conversation between Matt and Paul. Was there anything in there that you found surprising? Anything you wish Matt had shared in his original video? Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. As always, liking subscribing and sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can do it right here on YouTube by clicking the join button. Or you can go to StilltBD FM, click the join button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts.
And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business, trying to figure out where the AI porn bots are coming from. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're talking about videos that lead to spin offs. You might not get it now, but you will. Hi everybody. Welcome to Still to Be Determined. This is the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I sadly am not Matt Ferrell and I say sadly often when we start this show as a joke. And I know all of you laugh. I can hear the laughter. But today I say it more out of selfishness because I wish I was Matt Ferrell. Because Matt Ferrell does not have a cold. Sean Ferrell has a cold.

Matt Ferrell: That's right, I'm fine.

Sean Ferrell: Sean Ferrell's normally lucid tones are a little gravelly and where his nose used to be is now just a bunch of individual cells barely holding on. I'll try and make it through this without sneezing or coughing or falling asleep, but I make no promises. As I mentioned, this is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. With me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt Ferrell. Matt, I already let the cat out of the bag. You're not sick, but other than that, how you doing?

Matt Ferrell: The fact I don't have a cold. Sean, I am very happy.

Sean Ferrell: We are going to take a look at Matt's most recent in a minute, which is his talking about flywheels. This is a topic that has come up before on his channel and on this channel, but there's a new take and an unexpected follow up which I will be honest, I'm not even fully informed about what we will be talking about. Normally I'm the one who's helping pilot the podcast and choosing a course, but this week Matt was just like, oh, guess what? Something it happened and we got to talk about it, so we're going to talk about it. Before we get into that, let's take a look at the mailbag from episode 295. This was our conversation about aluminum batteries and we had a bit of a conversation about the grid and power supplies. And there was this from thegle who jumped into the comments to say for the discussion about the grid and supply and whatnot, ERCOT in Texas only shows the fuel mix each day, hub pricing, et cetera, all on their website. I've been watching the fuel mix religiously as I think it's pretty interesting to see how solar, wind and storage all interact. The batteries flatten the peaks in mornings and evenings when prices are highest and look to be charging during the day and at night when prices are lowest. In fact, I think that the battery systems are now a high enough draw that they're keeping prices at or above $0 all the time when they would have dipped into the negative territory in previous years. So we've talked about this before, Matt, about how the grid and power companies, it's not equal across the country or around the globe as to how they manage all of this. And we talked about in some places the possibility of actually earning rebates effectively because you are putting more energy into the grid than you're actually taking out.

This seems to be the power company figuring out a way to keep the floor effectively at at floor level and not allowing people to dip into the basement by storage and evening things out at peaks is the Texas description that has been given in this comment. Is this becoming more common or do you think that we remain an uneven and strangely hodgepodge collection of policies across the country?

Matt Ferrell: Unfortunately, it's uneven. It's not par for the course. Like ERCOT is doing some interesting things. ERCOT is actually surprisingly progressive when it comes to solar and renewables on their grid and energy storage systems. And the political climate would make you think that's not the case. But it is, because cheap energy generation, money to be made, energy companies are going to do what energy companies do, which is try to turn a profit. So they're going to go that direction because that's where the cheap energy is. But this comment actually highlights something that I love, which is a lot of the misinformation and people that push back against renewables are like this area of the country that has a huge amount of wind turbines. The energy prices go negative, which throws everything into turmoil and it causes all these problems. And while that may be true in the short term, like right now, it's happening because things are growing so fast and in ways that we're experiencing for the first time in this transition. And so we're finding our way through it. And it's not that it's an inherent problem of wind or solar, it's that we just have to figure out how to manage it properly to make sure that that doesn't happen. So it's. I love this comment because it comes back to the whole idea of there are ways to manage this. If you're smart about how you implement it and you make sure you have proper storage systems, you can, you can take all that into account and prevent those megawatt hour costs from going negative.

Sean Ferrell: We had a bit of a conversation around what you might do if you, like me, have a gas stove and you want to move on from that. The stray wolf jumped in with a good suggestion to keep in mind, important if you swap from gas to electric permanently, that you cap the gas line. A gas stove dose does, does leak a very small amount of gas all the time. And if you're swapping to get rid of the problems with gas and purify the air, you need it capped. That's a really good comment. Thank you for that reminder. There was also a comment which I didn't clip, which said to me, Sean, you're nuts. You know, gas isn't good for you, but you're not doing anything about it. Why aren't you switching? And then he went on to explain the affordability of his I think it was a convection, convection oven and very well received. Appreciate the comment. However, some of us are renters and we don't get to choose what appliances we have, so.

Matt Ferrell: But Sean, you know, you could do. You could buy an induction, just countertop little element.

Sean Ferrell: I'll let you, the next time you visit me, I'll let you find the counter space for that.

Matt Ferrell: I know your kitchen, your counter space is about the size of what this thing would be. Yeah, exactly.

Sean Ferrell: And then from our conversation last week, the best worst comment from the weathered elder who jumped in to say, Sean, you may have just strengthened the economy. Aluminum tin foil hats equals gullibility. Salt equals skepticism. A new industry in which employees wear a tinfoil hat with a wire attached while another wire is attached to their skin. They watch YouTube videos all day and take grains of salt as inspired. The contrast should make them living batteries. Sometimes I roll my eyes at myself, weathered elder. I don't roll my eyes at that at all. I appreciate it. It was a great image. And given my proclivity for really weird imagery in some of my writing, I may in fact steal this. It's kind of a comical matrix, isn't it? Instead of like humans being in pods wired up as batteries, they're just watching YouTube with all the electrodes and it generates the power.

Matt Ferrell: I always. I was picturing like a scene from Brazil merged with the Matrix. It's like human batteries. Yes, but from the movie Brazil.

Sean Ferrell: Yep. I loved it. Thank you for that comment. On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent about Mechanical batteries, how 40 ton spinning wheels are saving the power grid. We've talked about. We talked about this just a couple of weeks ago, if not last week, and you hinted that this episode was on its way. So I was excited to see this one, just because the physicality of this technology, the simplicity of it, it's really, it taps a vein, which is this kind of, like, retro future that I really enjoy. There were people in the comments. We'll get to those in which people tapped into the same energy, no battery pun intended. Like this one from Wayne, who says at 12 minutes, 29 seconds in your video, they store and release energy quickly, but it's not for a long time. So it's basically a mechanical capacitor, is that.

Matt Ferrell: I will say, I will say, yes, I think that analogy is great, but there's gonna be a whole bunch of, like, people pushing their glasses. A capacitor is very different from a flywheel. It's not even close to the same thing. It's like, yes, yes, but for the idea of something that can release energy and a lot of it very quickly. Yes, it has a lot in common with the capacitor.

Sean Ferrell: So, yeah, yep, it's really, it's. It's fascinating.

Matt Ferrell: Bring it on. The comments, everybody. Bring it on.

Sean Ferrell: There was this from Thomas, who again, the retro future. There was a time when people thought about using flywheels to power cars and buses. The math almost worked out, but then batteries got better and better. There were buses with flywheels for regenerative braking in Stockholm, even if they were abandoned fairly quickly, as I recall. Are you familiar with the history of this kind of technology? And is it revisitable in a place where it's like, well, you got that, you got these city buses and they're running around on now clean energy. They're using electricity or they're using. In some cases, like here in the city, they run on a kind of natural gas as opposed to liquid. Liquid gas, yeah. So you end up with, is it possible that somebody would be like, well, let's start using some of these flywheels in here to take the burden off the electricity or the, the gas energy? Is that something that you. I wouldn't say.

Matt Ferrell: Would you bet on, but no, I would 100% not bet on it. And the reason why is, like, it is a thing. It was tried. The Stockholm bus thing is a really fascinating story. And if anybody wants to watch this, I'll put. I'll try to remember to put a link to it in the description. A friend of mine, Ricky from Two Bit Da Vinci, has an entire video about that bus, about the flywheel, about why it was designed the way it was, how it worked, and kind of why it failed and went away. That's part of the reason why I would say, this ain't coming back. It's like, it doesn't make sense today because, like, we have incredible batteries. We have incredible super capacitors that take up far less space than a flywheel would in a bus because it took up a lot of space in the bus. And then the reason why you practice be hauling around, it's. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn't make sense today, but it was an interesting experiment. It did function. It did what it was supposed to do. It just didn't catch on for kind of obvious reasons.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: But it's a really fascinating story.

Sean Ferrell: Fukuokai International wrote in to say, and if I mangle that in any way, I apologize. But Fukuokai says I followed flywheels for 45 years. Back in the day, the Soviets had a project for ultra thin systems that span that spin at insane speeds. They used U.S. videotape of all things for the mass. This had the advantage that if there was a failure, the tape would unravel and lose speed as it spread out. If it did not vaporize, they could reuse it. I think it was abandoned mainly due to the costs and, and difficulty of obtaining tapes. What I like the idea that the technology was abandoned not because it didn't work, but just because the Soviet Union had a difficult time getting a hold of tapes. Hey, come to any goodwill anywhere in the US you're going to find lots of VCR tapes. Let's get these flywheels spinning. I love the idea that in a catastrophic failure people would be standing around white lab coats with their clipboards and their pens watching something and then somebody would be like something seems to be going wrong and the result is just. There's just a bunch of.

Matt Ferrell: It gives a whole new meaning to the Betamax versus VHS debate.

Sean Ferrell: It's literally a Soviet experiment. It would be red tape. They'd be, they'd be, they'd be smothered in red tape.

Matt Ferrell: This movie is writing itself.

Sean Ferrell: That's all I have to say it is. I've got flywheel buses, I've got giant flywheels made of videotape. It's. I mean, I love it. So finally our best worst comment. Alex jumped into the comments to say that the flywheels sounds like a of lot, lot of circular reasoning. But we can circle back to that debate. In any case, it got my head spinning. Wow, Alex.

Matt Ferrell: Oh God.

Sean Ferrell: Slow clap, slow clap on that one.

Matt Ferrell: That is next level pun.

Sean Ferrell: That's a three.

Matt Ferrell: Well done.

Sean Ferrell: That's a. It's possibly even a three and a halfer. That's pretty good.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I think it is a three and a half. Er, yeah. So the Olympics are punning.

Sean Ferrell: Normally this would be when Sean would say, hey, everybody, did we miss anything in this conversation? Jump into the comments and let us know. But if I said that right now, Matt would have to jump into the comments because there is a part of this story that we haven't talked about yet. There was an upshot to Matt dropping this video. A conversation started in the comments on the video. Am I correct in remembering the day of the video drop that you dropped the video? And there was. Very quickly there was a conversation that started. Take us through what happened and take us through what has come of this since then.

Matt Ferrell: Okay, so within hours of the video being up, somebody dropped a comment that said, Salt Lake City International Airport has nothing to do with Torus. And in fact, they have sent a cease and desist order to Torus to stop promoting the fact that they're doing something with the airport. To which I replied, do you have a link or anything online? Because I didn't. Nothing about this comes up online. Do you have any kind of information? His response was, no, I don't have a link to it because it's not online. But all you have to do is go to Google Maps and you'll see that there's no imagery of any kind of like, installation like this anywhere around the airport. To which that raised an eyebrow. Because I'm like, that's not proof of anything because it doesn't mean it has to be like, literally on the airport grounds. And how long ago is that overhead image taken? Like, that's not gonna be proof of anything.

Sean Ferrell: That's a list of reasons.

Matt Ferrell: But that made me assume that, yeah, the person that left that comment is clearly probably affiliated with the airport in some fashion, because otherwise how would they know this is going on? I'm not saying within. Yeah, within probably about two hours of that exchange with him in the comments, I got an email from somebody in the communications department from, from the Salt Lake City International Airport saying, could you please issue a retraction on your description saying that the airport has no affiliation with Torus and Torus is not doing what they're saying. And then they told me in the email, we've reached out to Torus to try to clarify this and get to the bottom of this as well. So I immediately went to the description and pinned comment and put a little thing saying, kind of like, correction, something's happening here. More information coming. But the airport saying that Torus has nothing to do with the airport. Happenstance was my video had been out for a few hours and I got an email from Torus saying, hey, we saw your video. Which this always freaks me out, Sean, because my video has literally been out for probably three or four hours. And the airport's reaching out to me and the company, one of the companies I spoke about is reaching out to me saying thanks so much. You know, they just want to kind of like say hello. And I responded to them saying, glad you liked the video. But they're claim the airport's reaching out to me, telling me that I have to retract this stuff because evidently you don't have any kind of relationship with the airport. To which they responded, that's not the case. We need to dig into this. We'll get you an answer by the end of the day. And then by the end of the day my contact at Torus came back and said they're still getting to the bottom of it.

And they asked me some follow up questions because they're still trying to narrow down what was going on. And around this time is when I started to piece together what I think has happened. I think this is the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at the airport. I think what happened is, I don't have the specifics because I have gotten follow up from Torus since then and I'm waiting to hear back from the airport for confirmation. But Torus has basically said they, they figured out the communication snafu, everything's fine. Like, cause like it was literally people not knowing what they were talking about.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So it seems to me like maybe Torus has a deal with the utility or the energy supplier of the airport and maybe not the airport directly, but these things are being tested. And so the airport wasn't aware that this stuff was actually happening for the airport, even though it is happening to the airport.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: I have a feeling that's probably what's going on here.

Sean Ferrell: A utility provider could very well be talking to the airport and say, we're going to provide you X amount of energy at X price over X period of time and never say, and some of that is going to be from a flywheel installation that we're putting down the road five miles that you won't even know exists. I could see that that could happen.

Matt Ferrell: Or it could just be that the, the airport is such a massive operation that literally like the engineering department of the airport didn't want the communications. Communications department. No. So it's like it could have also been that. So whatever it is, everybody's talked to each other now and it seems to be that they're all up to speed. But I thought it was a really kind of funny just how quickly it like snowballed.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And made me go, oh, is there something seriously wrong with my video? Doesn't look like there is, but it's still kind of unfolding. When I do have the final word, like if I can get confirmation from the airport again about everything's good, I'll put a pin put it into the pinned comment for the latest update.

Sean Ferrell: That's all very interesting and I appreciate the fact that you said that everybody was getting up to speed on the flywheel. Well done for that. Now I'll say it. Listeners, viewers, what did you think about this conversation? Was there anything you feel like was left out or anything that you wanted to jump on? Let us know in the comments. As always, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. They help inform not only this show, but also help steer Undecided with Matt Ferrell the Mothership. If you'd like to support the show more directly, you can go to stilltbd.fm or you can click the join button right here on YouTube. Either way allows you to become a direct supporter. You can throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy business of Sean trying to figure out if he's actually making sense. Because the cold. The cold, the call. Thank you everybody for taking to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined. We're talking about aluminum or aluminium. Aluminum. Aluminium. Aluminium. Depends on where you are in the world. We're talking about something. Anyway, welcome to Still to Be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his brother. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, some horror, some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt. Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing great. How about you?

Sean Ferrell: You ready to talk about batteries for a change?

Matt Ferrell: I'm all charged up, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Oh, boy. Well, yeah, if you're looking for bad jokes and dad puns, well, I've got a comment for you. Just wait till we get to that point. Before we get into talking about Matt's most recent, in which he's shared some recent breakthroughs in aluminum battery technology. We're going to take a look at our most recent episode, which is 294, in which we talked about heat pumps and other items from previous episodes and of both our podcast and of Matt's podcast. And there was this right off the bat, we had been talking about sodium batteries and the weathered Elder jumped in. I like the username Weathered Elder. It presents a picture of like, you're still ticking despite taking a beating. So good for you. They write the Silver Symbol Channel just did a puncture test on a bluetti with a sodium battery. It was a fireworks show. I have no clue whether this fits in the battery safety conversation, but I don't feel the need for a grain of salt just yet. So one of the things we've talked about, sodium batteries, the option is a good one from a safety standpoint because they don't explode like everything else explodes. Or do they?

Matt Ferrell: They can.

Sean Ferrell: They can. I think this is one of those things where if you're testing whether something does something, when you drive a nail into it, what are you testing at that point?

Matt Ferrell: Well, well, there is something called a puncture test that is typically done when you're testing safety. And there's different ways to do it. And typically in a professional lab, they have a little rig that can puncture the cell in the same way every single time.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So you can do apples to apples to apples. Something in their garage, just ramming a nail through it or rooting at it and digging into it. It's like you're going to get very mixed results. You're not going to be able to replicate that each time. For a scientific study, this is just a dude in his garage doing something. It's not to say it's not valid. It's just you got to take it with a giant grain of salt, pun intended. But any battery, the amount of energy that's stored in a battery. Batteries can be dangerous no matter what they're made of, because there's just so much energy that's just crammed in there through the chemical reactions and everything that's going on inside. So that has to be kept in mind. Second thing is one of the things that burns is the electrolyte. The electrolyte can burn, the polymers can burn that are like encasing things and doing the separators, all that kind of stuff can burn. So when you puncture the separator between the cathode and you get that little spark of life going and you make that connection, it's going to arc and it's going to cause things to burn.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: It doesn't mean the sodium is burning. It means the electrolytes and the polymers in there are catching on fire and sparking and causing issues.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So it's not that they are thermal runaway proof. It doesn't mean that they will never catch on fire. It means they are far less prone to having that happen. And the thing that to keep in mind would be like, you know, remember a number of years ago when the Samsung phones were just catching on fire all by themselves? Yeah. And the. Those little scooter things you could get, those electric scooters that people were buying were just catching on fire left and right. It's because they were poorly manufactured batteries that were just. You dropped it once and suddenly something inside the batteries went a little wonky and a little dendrite formed and something happened and a little arc and then suddenly the thing is just swelling and catching on fire by itself. That's what some of these batteries are far less prone to have happen. So it's like, I think it's kind of like I don't want to cast shade on anybody. But it's, it's. There's a misunderstanding, I think, from a lot of people going on around this. There's a lot of nuance and nuance. It doesn't do well on social media. So. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: I remember when CDs came out. Showing my age now CDs came out. And one of the things that. I don't know if you remember this, Matt, but the marketing around CDs right out of the gate and this in hindsight is just absolutely ridiculous. The marketing around CDs was, they're indestructible. You can do anything to them. Nothing harms them. And I had a friend in college who bought some CDs, and he was just like, yeah, these things are indestructible. And he started chucking them like Frisbees at the wall. And he ended up destroying, like, 12 CDs of music that he had purchased because he and his friends were just chucking them like Frisbees, and they were scratched all to hell. And then he put them in, and everything was like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And it was, what happened to indestructible? And I watched this guy's face fall, and he went pale because at that point, they were $15 a pop, and he had just destroyed all this stuff that he had spent money on. And I feel like there's this again. We're talking about. The media sees one line in a research paper, and then they turn it into, oh, well, this thing is like, these things don't ever explode. You're gonna.

Matt Ferrell: But. But it's also that nuance. It's like sometimes what's said is not incorrect, but without the. The context around that phrase that is stated, it sounds like it's. It sounds like something that is not. So it's like saying, these are far less prone to catching fire. It's like, oh, well, they're fireproof or they won't burst into flames. Like, no, they're less prone to it. They're gonna be. They're gonna be a little more robust and can take more of a beating than a typical battery, in theory, should. So it's. It's the same thing for solid state batteries. It's like the same thing is said about them. It's like, they're gonna be far safer. And, like, there are solid state battery camps that show their cell, and they'll take scissors and they'll, like, cut a corner of the cell, the pouch sell off, and it's still going, and it's not catching on fire. It's like, that's a great demo, but bend it a few more times and stab it a couple more times, and then it's going to suddenly swell and catch on fire. So it's like, you have to. There's a lot of nuance to this.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. I don't know what it says about me and my social media feed and the algorithm that I've created through what I enjoy watching, but I saw a video recently of a. It was from a security camera above in in like a pawn shop and people are taking apart phones and like taking out the battery and taking the, you know, stacking up the phones and taking the batteries out and putting them on the, on the counter. And there's this one guy and he picks up one of these batteries and he starts to absent mindedly chew on it.

Matt Ferrell: Oh my God.

Sean Ferrell: And then it explodes in his mouth and it's so like a fireball erupts from his mouth and kind of envelops his entire head and then he like falls backwards and it, it's over as quickly as it started. So like he's fine, but he, he's literally spitting fire from this battery. And again, I don't know what it says about me and my algorithm, but I watched that.

Matt Ferrell: That's why you're getting that, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Then there was this from junkers who writes about our conversation around the gentleman who did a mini split in his home which started in his garage and then it spread to his home proper and then the power of his, his furnace died and he ended up being able to be in Montana in sub freezing temperatures. But he was comfortable. Not super, super cozy, but comfortable in his home because he had done this and junkers jumped in to pat him on the back with the complement of nice mini split solar story. DIY is the bee's knees when it, when a person is able to do it. I diyed my whole home solar and battery system and I am seriously considered diying a whole home heat pump replacement for my furnace and home AC this year. I've been running a small portable heat pump window unit in my living room this winter as a test with good results. So I want to ask you, Matt, on a scale of 1 to 10, one being no shade intended to our mother, but one being our mom could do it, and 10 being you need to hire a professional to take care of this. Where do you think DIYing of this scale and this type of DIY lands? Because I know, I hear you talk about DIY. I hear this from commenters. I see the comments from people who say I did this, I did that. I'm like, I know it's possible. I know with research and time I could probably do it myself. But my immediate reaction is a gut check of no way, shape or form am I going to try and do anything like that. I'm not diying electrical or heat pump or just on the off chance that like, what do you mean this is under pressure and then kaboom. I don't want to toy with that. But is that just Sean's nervous or is that. Yeah, the DIY scale. Somebody like junkers, somebody like our commenter from last week, they have some sort of experience or technical know how from maybe school or lived experience or just somebody who's taught them these things that gives them a leg up. So on that scale of 1 to 10, where do you put this kind of project?

Matt Ferrell: The problem is, Sean, that scale is gonna be different for every single person. But I'd be putting like this kind of stuff. If you're doing a mini splits, I don't wanna say those are easy, but they're definitely easier. So I could see that being maybe like a 5 or a 6 if you're handy doing. If you're doing something like what I've got, where you're having, maybe you're installing new duct work and then you're having to have a central system where you're having to do a manual J to calculate how much like tonnage of your system you. All that kind of stuff on top of like custom electrical stuff. That's where you're starting to get into the like 7, 8, 9 territory for me of like, oh boy, you might want to. Unless you actually are an electrician or you've been doing this your entire life and you feel super comfortable with it. You should not screw around with that stuff, in my opinion. But that's just me. So everybody's scale is going to be different.

Sean Ferrell: But yeah, there was this from Tanaku, who wrote in to talk about sodium batteries again, in the perspective of could they be something that you would have in your car in the future, replacing the current technology, which we've talked about it before, a little more safety and a little more weatherproof. Tanaku says I could see sodium batteries being used in this as the smaller batteries to start cars as well, since it holds heat better and maybe have lithium for the bigger battery. Do you think that this is a pairing that makes sense or is this the kind of thing where you're going to have a car that's going to be one or the other?

Matt Ferrell: I think it could be. We could see hybrids. I mean, we already do to a certain extent. It's like you have your lead acid battery as your starter for a lot of EVs, and then you have nickel manganese cobalt batteries on the bottom of the car that are actually making the car go. So it's like that's kind of par for the course. Some companies have transitioned to those being lithium ion as well for the kind of like ancillary electronics. But yeah, I can totally see some case where it's like you've got a small battery, a sodium battery system for exactly this kind of use case where the rest of the battery pack is some kind of lithium ion chemistry that's a little more energy dense and lighter weight. So I could totally see that. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And is the lithium going to be affected by the weather in the same way we talked about lead acid?

Matt Ferrell: They all have different temperature ranges. But like, if you're talking about like a typical lithium ion battery, like a nickel, manganese, cobalt, once you get below freezing, it's the. The car will go like you can get in your car and push the little start button and it's going to drive just fine. But you try to charge that sucker up and it's going to be like, nope, not right now. Kind of warm me up there, buddy. I'm a little frozen. Where sodium ion battery might be able to still be charged because it can go to a lower temperature than nickel, manganese, cobalt.

Sean Ferrell: And what about a sodium battery that is in the car and part of its job is to help warm the lithium battery?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, just like a mini charge that's just there to keep it at the right temperature if you're driving in cold weather. So, yeah, BK Nesheim came into the comments to say to you, Matt, maybe it's time for a refresher video. Matt has included it before, but it should really get more attention. And that is using electricity for cooking. It saves energy and is much better for the indoor climate. We talked about this previously where we talked about not only is it cost effective, it's not. And it's better for the environment, the indoor climate being what they, they said in their comment. But it's really about toxicity in the indoor environment. Gas cooking, it's not so good for the health. And I say that as somebody who has a gas stove and uses it every day and discovered that I was. I noticed a trend in certain months when the windows were closed. Yeah, I would feel terrible by the time everything was done cooking. And it's reached the point now where here we are. This is by far the coldest winter we've had in easily a decade here in the city. Temperatures last weekend we were hovering at about a 5. It was going down to negative with wind chill.

Matt Ferrell: This is Fahrenheit, by the way, everybody.

Sean Ferrell: This is Fahrenheit. Yeah, we're not talking. Yeah, we are not. We're not somewhere in deep space. I didn't mean to imply to anybody who's thinking Celsius. What are you talking about? No Fahrenheit. And we have a AC in our kitchen window today. Like, we just. We left it in because I was like, it's better for us to have this draft. It's healthier.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: That's so bad. Yeah, so bad. It's better. That's the thing that drives me nuts about, like, you watch those home improvement shows and they redo the kitchen and then got this massive, just gas burner, and I'm just like, what are you doing? It's like, I love cooking with gas and hope Timmy doesn't have asthma. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's so not good for your health.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. On now to Matt's most recent. This is what this aluminum ion breakthrough means. So take us real, like, quick sketch, picture what has happened that has led to this breakthrough. What do they think they can do with aluminum that they couldn't do, didn't think they could do a few years ago?

Matt Ferrell: Well, it's not. They didn't think they could do it. It was just trying to get it to a stage where they can actually start making it, manufacturing it, and getting it out there. The big takeaway for this is around what these aluminum ion batteries can do where they're not going to be as energy dense as what we were just talking about before. So you're not going to see this in a car. But these are fantastic potential things for the grid, because on the grid, you need incredible response times. So, like, a lot of times, capacitors and super capacitors will be used to manage those very quick fluctuations that happen. Because a capacitor can't store a lot of energy. It stores a lot of energy, but it can't. It's not like kilowatt hours. It may be able to run for a couple minutes at max power, where a battery could have hours of energy stored in it. Where these aluminum ion batteries are kind of like this wonderful kind of hybrid. It's kind of got a little bit of a capacitor behavior for how much power it can just pump out quickly, like super fast. But it can still have a little more energy density than a capacitor typically has. It's more like what you'd expect out of a battery. So you kind of get this wonderful kind of bit of both worlds where you. You can really shore up for those voltage spikes that happen on the grid that could lead to blackouts, things like that. So it's like this is kind of the stuff that's going to help stabilize the grid and make it more effective.

Sean Ferrell: Is there a possible use case like this one pointed out by commenter Stalkin, who says these batteries, from what it sounds like, would be great at a car charger station, A slower grid could constantly charge them as they provide a high dump to an EV fast car charger. So is that the kind of thing that we're talking about where it's just constantly filling up and bottoming out as the energy is being shunted into the vehicles? You're not trying to use it in the form of long term storage, even overnight?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of similar for your house. Let's say you buy an EV and you want to put a level 2 charger in your house, which means you're going to want to get a higher power charger. Typically, if you live in a house in the United States and you have 100amp service, an electrician's going to show up and go, you need to upgrade 200amps to be able to support this. And this can be a very expensive upgrade. It's a similar thing for EV charging at scale because you could have build out a whole like supercharger station that has 12 chargers on it and there has to be special, you know, electric lines run and upgrades done to the grid to help support that extra power. This might help to alleviate systems like that where you don't have to do that. You could just have a lower grade. Maybe something already exists in that location that's already driving power to it. You don't have to do utility upgrades. You just put some kind of like high power system like these aluminum ion batteries that act as kind of like this glorified capacitor that can kind of charge itself up. So when people are charging, it just discharges really quickly to charge the cars fast. But it helps take the burden off the grid so you're not like, it's distributing how that power is being delivered. That's exactly where this kind of would shine.

Sean Ferrell: Quick question from me about this technology and the ability to put it to market. We've talked in the past about one of the key things at play in all of these technologies is the availability of the materials. What is the availability of aluminum in this case to be able to start building these kinds of tech? Because we've talked before about like, well, you know, we could do it, but this is going to be super expensive because there's not a lot of availability of this thing. And it feels a little bit like we keep pointing to advancements, but, yeah, there's not advancements in availability necessarily. So aluminum. I remember a couple years ago there was talk about, like, there's kind of an aluminum shortage.

Matt Ferrell: Aluminum is one of the most. It's one of the most abundant metals on the planet. It's infinitely recyclable. It's one of the best metals we could use. So it's like, think about like the tin foil in your drawer. It's just like, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous, it's easy to recycle, it's easily available. It's not like, oh, all the aluminum in the world comes from China. It's like, nope, it can come from pretty much anywhere because it's all over the place. So this would not be a supply chain shortage issue with something like this. This is the kind of materials, sodium ion batteries, sodium is everywhere. Aluminum is everywhere. It's very easy to get to. So these are the cheap materials that we want to use for stuff like this.

Sean Ferrell: Suddenly the future seems like it is just tinfoil hats and salt. There was this comment from Ken Johnson that stood out to me because I think it's an important one to keep in mind when we have these conversations, because I think there's. Sometimes it's easy to land in a confusing spot when you can use the terms that sound similar but do not mean the same thing. And I wanted to get a sense of where you think this new technology lands and what we've been talking about most recently in a lot of our videos, Ken points out grid stability and grid storage are entirely different applications requiring entirely different battery technologies, which can work conjunctively. So lately it feels like we've been talking a lot about grid storage. This one feels like it's more about grid stability. Do you think that there's one or the other of these two angles that is getting too much attention? They both are important, but they are not, as Ken points out, they're not interchangeable.

Matt Ferrell: If you're talking about, like, battery batteries, like what we're typically talking about on the grid, like these gigantic, like Tesla's big megapack system in Australia and all these other ones that are springing up, they tend to be for grid stability. And part of the reason for that is it still has been very expensive to get. Like, you can build out a battery system that can give you three to four hours worth of, you know, output, but you'd actually, for grid storage, you'd want 12, 24, 48 hours of storage ideally. And that's when you're getting into like, systems that exist today are like pumped hydro, where it's like literally a gigantic lake that funnels water down to a lower lake and you recoup the energy and you pump it back up to the top. That's, that's grid storage. But these other systems that are out there are mainly for grid stability because it's basically doing energy arbitrage where it's like, you know, buy low, sell high.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: So it's helping to shift things to make the energy cost cheaper, it's helping to maintain the voltages from renewables, all that kind of stuff. So that's basically what all the systems have been doing today so far as far as like chemical batteries are concerned. So this aluminum ion doesn't really change that equation specifically, but it's a better battery for that task. Meanwhile, other chemical batteries are getting so cheap, we're actually able to start to get to that 8, 10, 12 hour range now. So it's like, I think Ken is 100% correct. It's two kind of different tasks. It doesn't have to be one battery type. It's kind of a combo that we'd be looking at for the grid.

Sean Ferrell: So Ken kind of points out at the usage stage the kind of overlapping technologies that could be at play at that angle. H.W.Keir comes into the comments kind of at the in your home stage where you started off your video talking about your lights flicker. And H.W.Kier points out, when my lights flicker, the most likely cause is a branch falling on a line. A recloser trips, then recloses. It is usually a local event on the distribution line. It could be more widespread, but most often isn't. These are the kinds of interactions with our daily usage that make it hard for people in their home to fully engage with what's going on in the bigger picture. What do you think other than watching your channel? What ways do you think that the public could become more informed about what's at play? When like recently we've been getting our utility bills here at my home and my wife received a utility bill and was like, wow, this is double what it was last year. And there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case, including it's colder right now than it was a year ago. It is, you know, like we have maybe more competition in buying electricity. Electricity prices are higher. There could be any number of things that go into that. But it all feels so opaque on our side. We turn on the light, we turn off the light. We get a bill, say, holy cow, that's twice as much as it used to be. So what are ways that people can get more informed? Like HWKier is pointing out, my lights just flickered. Was it because the grid is fluctuating or is it because it's a windy day and a branch fell on a power line? What are ways that people can become more informed about what's going on in their lives in the bigger picture? So there's less confusion and maybe more opportunity to advocate for change.

Matt Ferrell: I can't remember off the top of my head, but there's this great website that you can go to. It's US specific, but you can go to and you can like, basically put in where you live and it will show you what your ISO, which is what your utility section is like. You and me, we live in kind of a New England ISO grid. And you can see exactly like it shows you precisely where the energy is coming from. Like X percentage is coming from nuclear right now, coming from coal, coming from natural gas. Whatever it is, it will detail that exactly where the generation is coming from. It's things like that that need to be surfaced more to all of us to understand where our energy is coming from. Because like you said, it's opaque and it's opaque on purpose, which is really frustrating.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And it creates a situation where. Let me back up for a quick second because I'm actually working on a video right now with one of my writers, the ticket, when I created it, I called it the National Grid is Dead. All hail the Grid. is what I wrote. I'm doing a deep dive in why micro grids. And an interconnected grid with less generation from one central location is actually a better approach. And in digging into this, we've stumbled upon a bunch of experts that have already been pushing this for years. I'm actually interviewing one of them tomorrow. So it's funny that you brought this question up, but one of the things that this person I'm going to be interviewing.

Sean Ferrell: To our listeners and viewers, not by design. I had no idea about this.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, he had no idea. But one of the things he's written about for the past 30 years is how the system is opaque. And we don't even, because it's so removed from us, we don't take into account. You plug something into your wall outlet and you don't care where the electrons come from. It's just things. Power on, lights flicker, who cares? It's like you don't think about it because you don't think about it and you don't know about it. We don't advocate for change. We don't understand the dangers that are involved with things that are happening or why our prices are spiking when if we knew what was going on, we might actually advocate for please stop doing that or what the hell is this on my bill saying special disconnection charge. What is that? Renewable energy charge. What the hell is this? Renewable energy charge. That's $6 on my account. There's all opaqueness that utilities put in there by design. And it's like the best way to do it is to get informed, understand what your energy generation is on in your location, understand where it's coming from and then try to basically just advocate for yourself with your utilities. In some locations you have choices for where your generation comes from. Like in Texas and ercot. They you could change. It's like changing mobile providers. You could like shop around every month and go to a different company that has better rates and better things. But in where you and I live, we don't have that choice so much. So it's. It's pretty frustrating, I should say.

Sean Ferrell: So finally, the best worst comment we have two this week on Matt's video. Sometimes it's hard to pick. This is one of those weeks. Colin jumped in to say, Matt, you missed the opportunity to say a disturbance in the force at 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

Matt Ferrell: Yes. Yep.

Sean Ferrell: And then James jumped in to say if battery density increased the way that the groaners per video density increased, we'd be finished researching battery technology. Yep. James, I told you there'd be a comment about bad dad puns and there it is. Thank you so much, James. Thank you so much, Colin, for your comments and to everybody for leaving a comment. Listeners, viewers, what did you think about this conversation? Was there something you think we missed? Jump into the comments and let us know. As always, your comments not only form the content of the show, but they help drive the content of the mothership Undecided with Matt Ferrell. If you'd like to support the show, leaving a comment, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support us. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button right here on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of apologizing for making bad jokes. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're going to talk about pump, pump, pumping it up. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Still To Be Determined. This is the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. As always, with me is Matt Ferrell to talk about the most recent episode, which in this case is heat pumps. But before we get into that, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episodes. But before we get into that, Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: Your intro caught me off guard. Well done, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: It's always my unspoken goal with every intro. Can I get Matt to laugh in what is effectively off camera? Because I'm sure at this stage of the video it's my face, so I get to see Matt's reaction while the rest of you don't. And they probably even edit out the laughter. If you are hearing nothing but my voice, trust me, there is laughter. There is laughter. As I said. We're going to get into Matt's newest one about heat pumps. Basically an analysis of heat pumps from the Are they a scam angle. Spoiler? They're not, no. But we'll deal with that later. For right now, we're just going to take a look at what you had to say about our latest episode, which is 293 The Sodium Battery Fade. The discussion that we had about sodium batteries having been viewed a few years ago as a great cheap alternative to lithium batteries. And then the price of lithium dropped and suddenly price parity meant sodium was starting to look like a lesser option. But we had a bit of a conversation about how well every dog might have its day, so these batteries might still find perfectly fine use cases. And your comments followed a. In some cases, a response to the earlier discussion that we had that week about. Well, there was a conversation around water and a water bottle and AI in the water bottle and the AI changing the water by adding hydrogen atom. And somebody last week came in and said, that makes deuterium. And we were like, ooh. And then Darth Sirius showed up this week and said, no, that doesn't make deuterium, it makes tritium. So Darth Sirius shows up and just says adding a hydrogen atom to water would be H3O and it's called hydronium. Chemistry is fun. I'll take your word for it, Darth. I'll take your word for it.

Matt Ferrell: I love that this discussion about a water bottle that had AI and a water bottle that made extra hydrogen is still going. And it's been like three weeks.

Sean Ferrell: Yes. It's more conversation than a water bottle with AI deserves.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, 100%.

Sean Ferrell: We also had a bit of a conversation last week about the winter storm that had come through the United States and Matt's need to deal with all that snow and questions about whether or not he was using a product that he had had a number of years earlier, which was a robot snowblower.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: He informed us that he in fact does not still have that robot snowblower because it did not work very well. But some people have jumped into the comments to point out the technology has progressed. Lyle Dahl jumped in to say regarding Matt's robot snowblower, it sounds like he was describing an earlier incarnation of a robot snowblower slash lawnmower recently put to the test by Tom over at the State of Charge YouTube channel. He set the thing loose during the big storm and just let it run continuously. It did pretty good apparently. I guess the tech has improved in the last five years, so no surprises there. Yes, the technology, absolutely. My knee jerk response would be like, yes, absolutely, the technology will have progressed. But I will say this, Matt to you. My expectation is based on what you said about your experience with the storm and the snowblower you do have. You don't feel a mad rush to go buy another robot.

Matt Ferrell: Not at all. There's a reason why that robot's in a farm up in upstate Sean. It's roaming free with all the robots. Yes, I will say it was a first generation model. So it's like it's definitely had improvements and I think somebody else will sent me that. I haven't watched that video yet, but I want to check it out because I do know the company has made multiple iterations, multiple changes based on the customer feedback, which is fantastic. So I'm glad it's working great now, but I still don't feel a desire for it because it's like, I have a great snowblower. It takes me like 30 minutes to go out, just like snowblow the driveway and it could be a foot and a half deep. Do it just fine. Where I'm sure that robot would have to be kind of like he says, going pretty much non stop during the storm to keep up with it. Because those robots cannot do anything over like a foot deep. They just can't. They're just not big and beefy enough. So it's like, is it worth the $3,000 it would take to get that robot? Or just stick with a good quality electric snowblower that can do in 30 minutes.

Sean Ferrell: There's a number of different trade offs here. It's one of those situations where use cases are going to vary widely and everything. From the snarky response of Matt, the exercise is good for you. I mean, it is, it is. But if you were, let's say you were the owner of a commercial site and you had a robot that could wander back and forth in front of your building and make sure that the sidewalk is cleared, and you're like, I'm paying $2,000 for this robot to only clear this sidewalk when storms come in, but I'm avoiding lawsuits. So, like, that use case might make a lot of sense. So it's like, not everything is equal. And that's one of the places where some of the stuff that we talk about, we end up in those little corners where we're like, well, not everything is equal. There's going to be the use case where this product is fine for you and not okay for me.

Matt Ferrell: Not to give a mini review here. But it's like a robot vacuum. They're so good now. It's just like, you take it out of the box, you set it up, program it, let it map itself, and then just set a schedule. And you basically only have to just like, empty the bin every so often. Very minimal maintenance. This robot was requiring so much maintenance. I do zero maintenance on my push snowblower. And this was requiring so much maintenance between seasons, making sure it was clean and clear. And every time I went out to try to use it, Sean, every time, every time it would lose its wifi connection. I'd have to do some kind of Bluetooth reset to get the app connected and then get it all rejiggered. And sometimes it would be like, I forgot the map. You're gonna have to reset up your driveway again. And it was like, it's snowing right now. It's freezing out here. I can't feel my fingertips because I'm using my phone. It's like I wanted to snap my phone in half and just rage at the thing. So it's like the technology still has a ways to go to get that simplicity of. You take out the box, you set it up, and it just works. When I was using it, not even close. It was so aggravating.

Sean Ferrell: Also frustrating to have that much off season time to be spent to maintain it when the entire point of it is supposedly to save you time.

Matt Ferrell: That's my point. It's like it would, if it was working, it would save me time during the snow blowing but then it's like, oh, the oiling this thing and taking this heavy thing off the front of it and making sure the doctoring and the babying that it was taking to make this thing function was just. It was aggravating. It wasn't an enjoyable endeavor. So it's like, that's where I was just like, nope, you're going to the farm. You're not welcome here anymore.

Sean Ferrell: I will admit to being confused about why you dodged out of the way of saying you wanted to rage against the machine. It was right there.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Mysterious soulreaper jumped into the comments to say based on our conversation around the sodium batteries and the safety that is inherent in them because they do not have the same explosive quality as lithium batteries, I for one don't think we should understate how important the safety factor of sodium is. I would much rather put sodium in my home as a battery storage than lithium. Yes, I get that it's ironic because we have too many lithium items in homes already, but they aren't nearly as large. The scaling factor is a big deal. Would you ever install a circuit panel in your house if there was a reasonable expectation it could light on fire, blow up most of the homeowners insurance companies won't insure a home anymore with a battery system. The irony is not lost on me that this important safety message is brought to you by a user whose name is Mysterious soulreaper. I love that it is a good angle to take. It is an important it is like there are a number of different factors in home batteries, not the least of which is when you talk about safety and lithium batteries potentially blowing up. We've seen dramatic videos of cars suddenly spontaneously turning into fireballs and all of that. Let's take that kind of completely out of it. You can't permanently say that a battery in your home will never have a catastrophic accident occur to it. You could have, let's say, a fire in your home where your battery might get damaged. You could have an accident in your garage where a battery, if that's where it is kept, could get damaged. Nothing to do with the quality of the materials, the safety of the battery. If it's completely safely used, things can happen. And so yes, having a battery in your home that is not going to add literal fuel to the fire is preferable.

And so sodium may find that as a perfect use case, while you may end up with different storage solutions in the large scale in other locations. Would that be something you would say you'd expect?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, 100%. And one little note I want to add is I do this too. But like saying lithium catches fire, there are multiple lithium chemistries and some are much safer than others. So, like, what you typically see in a car is nickel, manganese, cobalt. Not so much anymore. They're more and more becoming lithium iron phosphate. But like, what I have in my house for my home storage is lithium iron phosphate, which is far less prone to thermal runaway and the issues of like nickel, manganese, cobalt. So sodium is even safer than that. So yes, there's a reason why safety is a huge issue. And that's why I only wanted lithium iron phosphate for my home energy storage, because I wanted the safest, cheapest battery I could get. And if sodium becomes the safest battery you can get, I'd want that instead. So this is definitely going to be something that's going to be on people's minds as we move forward.

Sean Ferrell: This comment from the Liggle caught my eye because it's kind of a twofer. It touches on two different parts of our conversation last week. One about Ryan Hall y'all and the other about NASA and 3D printing and what it might mean for the trickle down for future technologies. First, the whopper of the weather didn't just hit the east coast though. Here in Texas it was almost all ice. Ryan Hall y'all had a busy week tracking the winter storm. The that was from way west Texas to New York at one point. Yes, we did not mean to imply that it was an east coast only thing. In fact, I think here in the east coast we culturally are okay with this. It lands. We know what to do with it. We have snow tires here in New York City. It became very quickly a well now the snow and ice is gross. It's all piled up in the walkways. And now crossing the street is a little trickier. But it's just part of the normal winter expectation that we have and, and we haven't had to face it for probably a decade now. But when it hit, no big deal. As far as where Matt is, 2ft of snow hitting Boston is just 2ft of snow that hit Boston. That's, that's that we completely understand that in parts of the country it, we were having temperatures in the freezing range all the way down to the tip of Florida. That's not something freezing. It's freezing rain. We had long bitter cold. It's going to affect growth of like agricultural stuff is going to be destroyed. Like, I can't imagine what it's going to do to the fruit Plantations and stuff like that in Florida and across Texas and across all the southern states where it was coming down as freezing rain, taking out power and affecting people in their homes. We hope that everybody's been able to get back to normal. I believe there's still some families that are without power even to this point and spend a couple of weeks now. It's. It's awful.

And I say that as somebody who Matt and I grew up in western New York. We grew up in Rochester, where 2ft of snow would be considered a dusting at certain times of the year. And we lived as late teens, we went through one of the most major ice storms to hit the Rochester area to hit. All of it hit from Ohio, across the state of New York, and there were families without power for six months. It's no joke.

Matt Ferrell: It was devastating. It was devastating.

Sean Ferrell: There's no. Yeah. Thank you for writing in. We didn't mean to imply in any way that like this was just an east coast thing. We understand that it was hitting a lot of other people. And yes, Ryan hall did a fantastic job. I'm another commenter last week said, I didn't expect to hear you guys talking about Ryan Hall y'all. I mean, this guy. I mean the science at work. This is what meteorology is. It is understanding how to interpret scientific data, looking at computer modeling. And he does it with a kind of down country charm. But it's like the science is science. Yeah. And I just love listening to him in the background when he gets that hour long video up on YouTube, YouTube. And he's just like, here's what I think is coming for the week and he lays everything out and he really called all the particulars of that storm in a way that I found really, really remarkable. So shout out to Ryan Hall. The other part of the Legos comment is about the conversation we had around technology advancements that come out of something like NASA developing a new thing so that they can have a doohickey on Mars and they want the doohickey to do hickey. And then 25 years later, people in their homes are using a thing and they don't even realize it was born of the doohickey technology. So we had a brief conversation about that and the legal jumps in on that to say how NASA is looking at the hab printing thing is similar to Formula one tech that eventually ends up in standard vehicles. I was watching a video last night about how they're using additive metal printing to print their pistons and probably more, and was thinking that as they Improve the capabilities and costs go down.

We might see more complicated metal structures printed for all sorts of uses in the way that government subsidizes certain things that can help drive down costs by artificially driving down costs and therefore driving up demand. These places where price doesn't matter. Space, military, sports as much as success matters. Or we see interesting things created for everyone's use. I am likely the only one. But I think a video diving into formula one tech that has ended up in standard vehicles would be cool. It's a really fascinating angle. And thank you so much for pointing out space, military, sport. Sport isn't just about tech. Sport is also science. The things that they can do with reconstructive surgery now are a lot of that is born out of what athletes do to their own bodies. And then doctors go in and try and fix it and they develop new techniques. So the things that we take for granted. Oh, I blew out my ACL and they were able to repair it. And then I'm feeling much better. And now I don't have. I don't have anything, even a limp. I just have a scar on my leg. Is born of the fact that at some point 30 years ago, a doctor had to help a quarterback who got tackled the wrong way and his knee was blown out. So like sports. Yes. Is something I think that Matt and I have kind of had a blind spot for as far as like the kind of tech talk that we do. But it is an interesting angle Matt and I wondered, what do you think about the idea of deeper dives along those lines?

Matt Ferrell: I almost did one that was sports related, Sean. Believe it or not, it was. I went down a rabbit hole around sneaker design and you're. You're bringing up sports. It was the level of engineering and science that goes into some of the most cutting edge sneakers you can get for athletes is mind blowing. It is absolutely mind blowing what goes into these sneakers. The amount of like, data they collect from having sports players playing things, their sensors in these shoes. They can see exactly what's happening to the foot inside of a shoe and redesigning it in a way that will give better support and do different things. I can shave off a half a second off your sprint time. It's like the amount of engineering that goes into these things into golf balls, it's like, it's. It's absolutely wild. And I went down one of the biggest rabbit holes and I had a whole idea of like, I'm going to do this video breaking down these sneakers. And when we looked into like, would anybody want to watch this video? The solution I came up with was, no, I don't think anybody's going to watch this video except for this guy. So I killed the topic.

Sean Ferrell: This guy would watch it.

Matt Ferrell: So yes. So there's two of us that would watch that video. It is something that I'm very passionate about this kind of stuff. The Formula One angle is really interesting. Yeah, I might have to revisit this. Yeah, there's some cool stuff.

Sean Ferrell: I feel like. I mean, there's got to be a kind of mashup that could take place where you could take a look at different things, not just sneakers, but like multiple things. That would be an interesting look. Michael Anderson jumped in to point out some details about battery storage options in Australia. We're always happy to hear from our listeners and viewers in Australia, Michael says. Latest from CATL is Naxtra. Batteries are being put into vehicles now in China as of January 2026. Sodium batteries now being sold in UK and Australia for home energy storage. But is expensive at Australia $854 per kilowatt hour versus Lithium's $500 per kilowatt hour. I recently received a quote for a 17 kilowatt home battery, Australian dollars 14,609. Then the national rebate of some 5200 leaving net out of pocket of 8789. Not a bad rebate considering it's at almost 15,000 and then it's taking off a third roughly. So all in all, it really seems like the Australian angle is let's make this happen from a governmental perspective. So that's nice to see. Interesting to see the numbers. The $850 sodium angle versus the lithium $500 sodium angle. That's really highlighting what you about in your video Matt of yeah, five years ago people would have expected the opposite. They would have said sodium is going to be cheaper. But is this a byproduct of simply they got better at producing the thing. So yeah, the price dropped because they got better at making the thing.

Matt Ferrell: It's also a byproduct of just supply of the materials that go into it, driving costs down. So it's like sodium has an uphill battle, which is why you're seeing it higher because it's so new. I do like the way he broke down the price, showing the difference. Like when I did my house, one of the batteries I was looking at was a battery that was using a chemistry called lithium titanate. And it is, it's like if you want like the gold standard. It's like, that's it. It's like, it is robust. It's incredibly safe. It can take a hammering. It lasts 30 years. Like, this is a lifetime battery. If I got this lithium titanate battery for my garage, it not only would be safe, it would last me the entire time. I'm gonna live in this house. I would never have to worry about ever replacing it. Problem is, it was expensive, it was way more money. So it's one of those. If you're trying to factor in, like, the costs, it's like, here's this extra cost of 854 versus 500. It's like, how long is this battery gonna last you? How long are you gonna be using that battery? All these calculations have to go into, like, is that worth it? It's like, in most cases, no. And that's the challenge right now for sodium is just trying to hit that price point where people will finally pull the trigger and start to buy it.

Sean Ferrell: Scooter Rosie jumped in to drop a suggestion in the suggestion box. Matt. I would like to hear Matt's opinion on the difference between Tesla's new dry coating battery and solid state. Thanks. Any plans to do a video that might take a look at that, or do you have opinions right now?

Matt Ferrell: I have opinions right now. I did a video on this. It's what he's referring to, I believe, is the dry electrode process for making batteries. And that was. I did a video about that, like, four years ago, I think it was. But there's a big difference between the dry battery electrode manufacturing and a solid state battery. Because the way a battery is made, when you're making the anode and cathode, typically it's a wet slurry that is then like coated on a surface. And then they are literally put into drying ovens. And it takes hours for them to dry out. And then once they're dried out, you roll them up and then you inject the liquid electrolyte in there, seal up the canister, you got your battery. The dry electrode process is. It's not a slurry. It's actually just dry powder that is put onto the surface. There's no drying. You can immediately roll it up, put the liquid electrolyte in there, seal the can, you're. You're done. So that's oversimplifying it, but that's the big difference. So it's not a solid state battery. It's just the manufacturing process. And the big gain there is if you have a factory that's 100,000 square feet. Half of that or a third of that might be the drying ovens.

Sean Ferrell: Drying out.

Matt Ferrell: If you don't need the drying ovens, you've just. You don't need as much space, which means you could have more machines making more batteries instead of having 30% battery. Yeah, think about the energy costs of running those ovens are huge. So it's like you're going to save money because you're not going to need as much electricity to dry out the cathode in the anode. So it's like that's the big gain. It's not really, and this is oversimplification, but it's not a gain in how well the battery performs necessarily. It's a gain in how it's manufactured and the speed of manufacturing, the cost of manufacturing. It's good for the manufacturer. It's going to simplify it and make it cheaper. And Tesla's not the only one doing this. There's several other companies that are doing dry electrode manufacturing processes that are all kind of doing something along the same lines as Tesla's doing. It's very cool. I did a video on it a while ago, but it's definitely very different from solid state, which does not have a liquid electrolyte in it. So it's like there's no liquid injected. The anode and the cathode are separated by a ceramic layer or something like that. There's something solid in between the two of them. So there's no. If you puncture it, nothing's going to leak out, nothing's going to catch fire. It's very safe, supposedly long life, depending on which solid state you're talking about. So it's not one to one. And this is a confusion. I see a lot out there.

Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best worst comment from our episode last week from Babarudra. Maybe that Matt could look into a fifth channel about deep science tech. Inconceivable with Matt Ferrell. Just a thought for all that free time you have. Thank you, Babarudra, for that comment. Yes, Matt, how many channels do you want to have?

Matt Ferrell: I'm just one. I think I have too many. But two, All I can hear in my head is the Princess Bride. Inconceivable.

Sean Ferrell: Inconceivable. Yeah. On now to our conversation about Matt's most recent. This was dropped just a day ago. Are heat pumps a scam? Right off the bat, we end up with Arnold Reiter jumping in with a comment, talking about. No, they're not. First let me say I live in Montana and I understand cold winter days. Several years ago, I took my two car garage workshop off grid with solar and batteries. Three years ago, I installed a mini split to replace the window ac. It cut my power use dramatically. That winter I started using it also to heat my garage as pellets for the stove were getting more expensive. Two years ago, I installed a mini split in the living room to cut down the high cost of cooling with my central ac. Again, I saw my electric bill go down dramatically. So as the weather cooled, I used it to heat my 2,000 square foot home. Two weeks ago, my gas furnace self destructed during the night and I had to rely completely on stopgap space heaters and the mini split. After three days, I knew the mini alone would keep the house at 68 degrees with temps down to 28 degrees at night. Those are both Fahrenheit. Both mini splits cost me about $800 each and I installed them myself. My replacement gas furnace cost was $4200 and I was told that was a bargain. My plan now is to add more solar panels and batteries and use the mini splits every chance I have. Being able to provide my own power turned a potential disaster into a minor inconvenience. A really great story, personal anecdote showing how one of the things that stood out to me about this was how it's an incremental analysis. It's not I built my home and I did this from day one. Or I built my home and lived in there for 10 years and then I changed everything over to this other thing. It's literally the drip, drip, drip of oh, I put that in my garage and I'm seeing benefits.

So I'm going to put it in my living room and I'm seeing benefits. And then to have the unexpected winter storm when the furnace fails and really sorry that that happened. That sounds terrible.

Matt Ferrell: Bad.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. This is, I think, a really neat example of it works and you end up with the direct benefit of you got the panel on the roof, storage in the battery feeding into the heat pump, you're fine.

Matt Ferrell: Yep. Yeah. I love that it's the slow electrification of his home. It's like.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And quite honestly, it's like this is a similar story that I hear a lot of people that start out gradually and it ends up like a slippery slope because once you start to discover, oh, this kind of works and I've got solar, which means I'm generating the power that this thing uses, which means I'm going to save money over here and it's like you start to see all the Lego pieces start to make sense. It's like I see numbers, you're seeing the formulas and everything kind of fill out in front of you. It's like this is a very similar story that I hear from other people as well. It's really, really cool.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you, Arnold, for the comment. There was this from B. Uppy who came in to say, when our state decided to partially fund mini splits, I noticed the price at Costco went up accordingly. So the customer's out of pocket expense was the same. Think legislators may have invested in that, then may have invested in and then demanded prices to rise to line their pockets. The coincidence was angering it. Whether there was conspiracy, market manipulation or anything like that, like let's take all of that out of the equation. This could simply be a company seeing an opportunity to line their own pockets. Yeah. They jack up the price knowing that customers were willing to pay, let's say it's $1,000 just to make the numbers easy. And they, the company reads about a $500 rebate that the government will give. So they add on a $500. They're now increasing their profits by 50%. They know customers were already buying it, but with the rebate it's going to gain more attention. So it's free marketing. That's just gross.

Matt Ferrell: It is.

Sean Ferrell: So other than buying directly from government, which let's all, you know, like, I understand what I'm saying here.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Other than buying directly from government, how do we get a rebate system where companies don't do this kind of slimy, underhanded deal of profiteering?

Matt Ferrell: Sean, that's a hard, that's the hard question, man. It's like you could, you could potentially have regulations that require, you know, meeting not, I don't want to say price fixing because that's going to be awful. But like, you know what the going rate of a thing is. And if the regulators were keeping track of that, they could see which stores and marketers are jacking prices up beyond that in an unreasonable way and kind of slap their hands. That's really the only way you could do this is just kind to keep tabs on the marketplace to make sure there's not kind of price fixing in a bad way happening.

Sean Ferrell: Well, it's been, it's been gutted recently. But I would say the consumer protection bureau would be like if it had teeth. If you out there are writing to your representatives and advocating for a consumer protection bureau that actually has teeth and the ability to come down on companies that do this kind of thing, that would be one solution. But I'm sorry that that experience occurred because think about all the people who did not take advantage of the rebate option.

Matt Ferrell: Yep.

Sean Ferrell: Simply because they saw prices that now were higher than they had been previously, and they're like, well, now it's not worth it. That's infuriating. Tim had an experience which is kind of the flip side from, like, oh, here's a rebate option, but, oh, somebody's manipulating and price gouging, so I'm not gonna do it. Tim's experience. Just about a year ago, I called up my power company to try and see if I could get help to figure out why my electricity bill was so high. And wouldn't you know it, they were not much help. I think the guy knew less than I did about any of this. One thing he actually said is heat pumps lose all efficiency when the outdoor temperatures drop below freezing. They are no better than my standard resistive heater. At that point, I thought to myself, that can't be right. Anyway, I quickly thought it through and responded that he was flat wrong and he really should go back to school to learn about how things work. So it felt good to say. It still didn't help me figure out my large bill at the time.

Matt Ferrell: You go, Tim.

Sean Ferrell: This is. Yes, you go, Tim. I also think this is probably a byproduct more than anything of companies, and I include, like, municipalities, electric companies, like, outsourcing their customer service. Things like this are problematic when the people on the phone are not well versed in the information. I would be willing to bet that this was a call center that has a script, and the script is probably not well written or informative, and so the people are winging it. So when you say, I have a feeling he knew less than I do, I would bet money that you were right. I would bet money that the person you were talking to had no idea what they were saying.

Matt Ferrell: Well, clearly so. But that's why I made this video.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, that's why you made this video. And this kind of thing gets worse, Matt. I mean, this, for me is one of the frustrations as companies move more and more to AI for customer service.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, boy.

Sean Ferrell: AI is a rung below bad human customer service. Other than everybody watching your video to understand what's actually happening with heat pumps, how do people deal with this kind of headache? When a company like, the simple thing is, like, the electric bill may have gone up because fuel costs went up, and therefore it was passed on to the customers because electricity was more expensive for your electricity city provider to give to you. But they should be able to say that. They should be able to give you.

Matt Ferrell: An explanation or help your customer understand what they can do in their home to discover where their energy use is going. I mean, just don't blame a heat pump. It's like, well, we can't tell you offhand what's causing this, but if you, there's these meters you can get at Home Depot for 15 bucks and you can go track your major appliances and see how much energy they're actually using, you might be able to track down the big energy users of your home to figure out what, what's causing it. It's like you could give them guidance on how to figure it out, but to immediately just go, heat pumps lose all efficiency in the cold. It's like, no, no, dude, that's. That's not helpful. Two. It's. It's wrong. Um, yeah, it's frustrating. There's a video that's gonna be coming out soon where I'm comparing my house's heat pump setup, which is geothermal, to a friend of mine who lives in Connecticut who has an air source heat pump system. And we did a very apples to apples as best we could between our two houses, like what our experiences were, how much it cost to run, all that kind of stuff. And Paul, who's the other gentleman in the video, he had a bonkers experience talking about people not knowing what they're talking about. He tried to get an installer, a quote for how much money it would cost for him to install a couple heat pumps in his house. And he had the guy in the living room describing to him what he wanted. And the installer basically just went, I don't know how to. No, I don't. I can't. Nope. And just left. He, he at least admitted, I don't know enough about heat pumps and what you're asking for, so I can't do this. I'm not your installer. And walked out the door. But Paul standing in his living room.

Sean Ferrell: Good on that guy to admit he had a limit.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Like, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: So it's like, at least he didn't go, I don't know what I'm doing, but yeah, sure, I just want to get the sale.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: It's like he didn't just push through with his ignorance. At least he just was like, I, I don't know, I can't. I'm not the right installer for you.

Sean Ferrell: I did not pull a comment from the comments on your video. It was very long from a guy who said, I used to do installation of HVAC. And his comment was very interesting, but I felt it was a little too off topic. But based on what you just said, I encourage viewers and listeners to go find the comment. He talks about the current trend in the building industry toward basically lack of knowledge within the various spheres of carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, HVAC, gaps in knowledge of the people doing that work. And he rests a lot of it in gaps in knowledge of what the consumers know. People don't know any longer what goes into building a home. Therefore, they do not know how to talk to people about what is going into the building of a home. So it's done substandard, people cut corners and people are not well trained. And he talks about after 40 years in the industry, it breaks his heart to see the quality of what gets made now and how it gets passed on. And it feels like that is the what the commenter was complaining about is the same thing. But the flip side of what you just described. There's a contractor who's willing to say, I have my limits and I can't do that. So good on that guy for not just taking the bucks and then walking away. So wow. But a weird experience that must have been like kind of a Looney Tunes moment of like a bunch of spinning bobby pins and a little cloud of dust and you're like, what happened? Where did they go?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Bounce jumped into the comments to say it amuses me to see the heat pump discussion and the scam part of it. These things have been in use in Europe for ages, at least in the northern parts where people actually have serious winters. These things are great. The only ones that do not work during the cold are the ones not designed to work during the cold. Usually the cheaper ones, they get sold to you with a huge smile and a lot of empty promises. So yeah, that's one part of the conversation that we didn't have yet, which is these are not new people.

Sean Ferrell: In the US For a long time.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's like, Sean, I don't know if you remember this, but when we were living where we lived when we were teenagers, I remember there was a time where something had to be done with the furnace. And I remember dad explicitly saying this when it came up with somebody that they knew in the church had a heat pump and it didn't work in the cold. I remember dad saying that vividly. And so every time I'm working on these videos. Sean, I hear Dad's voice saying they don't work in the cold because at the time that actually was true. It's like the heat pump systems then were using different refrigerants and they weren't good below, you know, barely below freezing. But the problem is that mindset of they don't work in the cold. Fast forward 35 years, things have changed, but yet that still persists. And that's kind of like what I'm pushing back on with these videos. But balance, you're 100% right. They're far more prevalent in Europe than they are here, but they are still here. But the problem is that misinformation from like 30 years ago just won't die, won't go away.

Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best worst comment for Matt's most recent well, we have a tie. We have this one from Tracy Reed who said, wow, an undecided video about a technology, that it is actually commercially available right now. This is a very special occasion. The snark is enjoyed Tracy. Matt and I were just recently talking about the fact that people will say how come Matt doesn't talk about things that are actually available? And Matt's comment back to me was he talks about things like that all the time. They exist. These things are real. So Tracy, I hope that was tongue in cheek. But even if it wasn't, I enjoyed it. And then there was this from CT Hellis who wrote about this conversation being about heat pumps and whether they're a scam. Looks for technology connections in the comments. Knife in teeth. Yes, the big Undecided Technology Connections. The showdown people are clamoring for where Matt goes toe to toe against ALEC to see who is right. Listeners, jump into the comments. What did you think about this conversation? Is there something we missed? Is there something you wish we had said instead? Let us know. We appreciate the comments. They do drive the content of this program. We also appreciate your support in that way because it helps shape Undecided. As we talked about, there are a couple things that came up in this conversation that might lead Matt to making a video or two about some other topics that had not been considered. As always, your comments, your likes, subscribes, and your sharing with your friends are all greatly appreciated. Those are easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or go to stilltbd.fm, click the become a Supporter button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads.

We appreciate the welts and then we get down to the heavy business of talking about heat pumps or sodium batteries or… … … Thank you, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined, we're talking about which batteries we're going to put on our pretzels. It's. It's sodium batteries. So. Sodium batteries. Sodium. Sodium batteries. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Still to be Determined. This is the podcast that follows up on topics from Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his older brother. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, I write some stuff for kids. I have to figure out a shorter way of saying that, because at this point that feels like I'm saying a lot. Anyway, with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt. Yes, that Matt, my brother, here now to say hello. Say hello, Matt.

Matt Ferrell: Hello, Matt.

Sean Ferrell: Well done. Yes, in a little bit we will be talking about Matt's latest, which, as I mentioned, is about sodium batteries. I'm sure you all enjoyed my joke as much as I did. But first, we always like to visit our comments from our most recent episode. This would be from episode 292 in which we talked about a contender who seemed to be sideling up next to perovskite as the material to make solar panels. And it was showing some promise. And in that episode, we started that episode in a way we hadn't started in an episode in a long, long time. And we didn't even start this episode this way. Talking about the weather. That's right.

Matt Ferrell: That's right.

Sean Ferrell: We had a long streak of opening with accidentally always talking about the weather and then got called out for it. And last week we revisited it because we did of course have one whopper of a snowstorm that hit the east coast of the United States. And in response to our brief chat about the weather, Babarudra jumped in to say, as a weather geek, I for one welcome the occasional weather chat. I was wondering how Matt's robot snowblower made out during the last snowpocalypse. Or did it go out into the storm, never to be heard from again? This was just one of multiple comments that I saw of people saying, hey, what about Matt's electric snowblower? And then, Matt, do you want to take up the next part of the story? Which he did not know. I had tagged this comment to bring up in this recording. And a few hours ago he said, I'm really kind of tickled by this. Why don't you go into what you found?

Matt Ferrell: I'm in YouTube analytics in the YouTube Studio and one of the most viewed videos on my channel right now is my five year old video, five year old video of my review of a two stage electric snowblower. And I was like, oh, well, that makes sense because of the huge storm that just came through. So I took a snapshot of what the view graph look like to Sean and sent it to him, like, here's a five year old video that's having a second life right now because of what's in the zeitgeist. And he's like, oh, we were going to talk about that in today's episode.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Which I thought was fun.

Sean Ferrell: It is interesting regardless of how long it's gone by. You pointed out in the graph it had its initial viewership and then it plateaued and then it had another little lift and then it plateaued and now it's had a more recent lift. Clearly dependent upon the weather. Clearly dependent upon people going. People probably going to Google and saying, it just snowed. I hate this. And they're probably thinking, I wonder if there's an electric snowblower out there that I could find. I imagine that's what's going on. So let's address Babarudra's question. How did your snowblower weather this storm? This was a big snowfall, so yes.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: So unless your little robot was out there just cruising the driveway non stop, I don't imagine that you actually did a whole lot with it.

Matt Ferrell: Well, there's two things here. I had a robot snowblower that I've talked about, I think on this show a couple of times, but I never made a video about it because it wasn't very good. It was. There were issues I had with it.

Sean Ferrell: Did it complain about the cold?

Matt Ferrell: Well, it was designed to be this system where it's like, it's a snowblower for your driveway and then you take this gigantic front thing off and then you can put a mower attachment on it and then it mows your lawn. When in reality the thing is built like a tank, literally has tank treads, weighs a ton and destroys my grass. The first time I tried to put it to the grass and I was like, yeah, this sucks. And when I tried to do the snowblower stuff, it would never stay connected to the Wifi. It would never get its GPS correction stuff correct. And it was like, I did not trust that thing and it doesn't live here anymore. It wandered off into the never to be seen again pile for me. But I still have my hand push ego snowblower from that video from five years ago. Which is electric, Sean. It. Yes, it's electric. Runs off of two little batteries that you put in it. And man, that thing is a champ. Like I had a gas powered Ariens snowblower, big old beefy guy. And at my old house I'd get to the end where the snow plow, you know, plows the end of your driveway in. So there's like, you have two feet of snow. It's like a four foot drift at the end. It always struggled and would just choke and like stall out when I'd be trying to get that stuff at the end. This ego snowblower. Cuz electric motors are like all torque, right? It doesn't just matter what you put in front of this thing, it's going to chuck shoes through the end of the driveway, no problem. And we got about somewhere between 18 and 20 inches of snow. And at the end of our driveway the next morning it was three feet high and that thing just went right through like there was nothing there. I love it so much. It's fantastic.

Sean Ferrell: That's great. Related but unrelated, how did the dog enjoy the snow? Not at all.

Matt Ferrell: She's a Southern. She's a. She's a Southern.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I was gonna say she's from Louisiana. So she's probably like, what the heck is this?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, what is going on here? There was one night where like the snowstorm is happening actively and it's 11 o' clock at night and can take her outside to let her go to the bathroom before we go to bed and open the back door. She's got a little snow coat on. She takes one step out and a gust of wind came and, and a whole bunch of snow just went whoosh into our faces and it was that cold, like bitter, like so cold. And she just immediately did a 180, turned around to walk back inside, but I'm behind her. So all she succeeded in doing was walking into my legs like, no, we're going out. So I pushed her out. She was just like, nope, I want to go back in. Didn't want anything to do with it.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah. Dogs that are raised indoors the way that your dog is, enjoy the super cozy. It's rough and I don't care what anybody says. I used to have a dog that actually had expressions. And when the weather was bad like this, he wouldn't even make it outdoors. He would look out through a window and if I said anything about going outside, he would give me an expression like, you're crazy. That's, that's not happening. I don't know who you think you are, mister, but I'm not going outside in that. There was this from BK Nisheim who responded to our brief conversation about the cost of solar now being the cheapest form of electricity. They responded that solar is the cheapest is not true everywhere. At high latitude you end up with very low to no production when you need it most, you up end even with the midnight sun, the yearly production is down to 1/3 and lower of the production at the equator. Wind and water make more sense since they can produce the whole year. These things are true. So it's, it's another case of we spoke without referring directly to context, but within the context of the main portion of the United States and countries at this point. Latitude. Yes, yeah, solar is winning. And yes, there are contexts where solar is not going to make sense. There are going to be places where, yeah, it would be great if they could use solar, but mountains or climate or whatever experience they have at that specific location, it's not going to make sense. But on the whole what we're seeing is that electricity from solar is, is becoming the best option across most of the planet. So Launchpad86 visited the comments with an off topic comment that I wanted to share with Matt just to see if he had any thoughts on this. Launchpad writes, I would love your take on NASA and its SIBS and 3D printing them in space. Wonder what you could do on Earth with that tech.

Matt, do you know what SIBS is?

Matt Ferrell: No, I'm looking up right now because I was like, what is that? Oh yeah, okay. Simple biosphere model. Yes, I know about this. If they're designing something that like, go to Mars, print up a habitat, go to the moon, print up a habitat. That's what they're designing, which you'd of course need. Yes. I think this stuff is fascinating. Yeah, Every, every time I've ever made a video about like space stuff, it doesn't go over very well.

Sean Ferrell: Do you think that's because most of your audience is in the mood to watch something that they might actually be able to go out and get as opposed to.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Deep science tech? I mean like, yeah, I mean that's your fault, isn't it? Because you basically said it's about technology and how it's impacting our lives, not technology and cool stuff. So. But very, very briefly, let's visit. I anticipate that whatever is going into the development of that technology would have a relationship to technology here on Earth in the same way that there were like six degrees of separation between NASA's moonshot and technologies that ended up being used in gadgets and developments outside of the moonshot. It's a trickle down as opposed to a direct one to one. There's no, oh, we're going to go to the moon and now Bob down the street just bought a rocket. I think it's highly unlikely that somebody's going to say, oh, we can now build homes, because this technology, which I can't even imagine how astronomically expensive the tech to do this would be, but I could imagine there would be trickle down in the form of maybe, maybe at some point somebody is 3D printing homes quickly and affordably as an offshoot of this kind of tech. So it will be interesting to keep an eye on.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, I am. There's actually a company I've actually spoken to a couple times that has a material that they can manufacture and 3D print for homes just like this that does have a relationship to this exact kind of thing. And it's really, really cool. But it's so early days. That's why I haven't made a video about it. But this kind of stuff is the stuff that trickles down and will eventually impact us here on Earth. But right now we got to wait a little bit before we get to that stage.

Sean Ferrell: There was also this from 5Clark who responded to our brief conversation around a comment that referred to adding a hydrogen molecule to H2O. And we had a quick back and forth about that. Wouldn't be H2O anymore, would it? Well, 5Clark jumps in with water with an extra hydrogen molecule is heavy water deuterium. You know, the stuff that was used to make atom bombs. Hoboy. Thank you 5Clark, for jumping in.

Matt Ferrell: With, with that knowledge. Which is another reason why that device is complete bs.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: What. What are you doing? You're not, you're not making deuterium frozen drinks.

Sean Ferrell: It's an AI powered water bottle. What is the AI doing? I'm going to kill the humans. I'm going to feed them heavy water.

Matt Ferrell: Drink your deuterium.

Sean Ferrell: Drink your heavy deuterium, you bag of water.

Matt Ferrell: Sleepy. You feel sleepy.

Sean Ferrell: Finally, a big part of the conversation last week was around Matt's visit to CES and his having seen, along with a number of other YouTubers, Donuts at this point. Solid state question mark battery. And this thing is coming and we're going to be releasing it soon. And all the YouTubers kind of like taking their brains out of their heads and swapping them back and forth trying to figure out what could we do to actually know whether this is in fact a solid state battery or not? Well, we still don't know, although there are some claims with certain YouTubers saying I think it is other YouTubers saying I'm still doubtful. But then there's this from Cyber who came in with the best worst comment. The donut is filled with doubt and has a big hole of missing information in the center. You still buy it as you hope the aftertaste is real genius. Yes, Cyber, thank you for that.

Matt Ferrell: That's great.

Sean Ferrell: I enjoyed that very much. Now onto our discussion of Matt's most recent this is the 90% price crash that changed everything. This is Matt's most recent in which he is taking a look at what happened to sodium batteries. Because the forecast a number of years ago was sodium will be a great option because lithium is so expensive and battery prices being as high as they are, a cheaper option will be great and then totally toodle toodle. We move forward in time and what happens? Lithium prices drop. Battery prices using lithium drop. Sodium is now on par with lithium. Not the cheaper choice that everybody might have thought a few years ago. And so we're beginning to see some of those companies that were leaning into sodium disappear. So there is a piece of information in the comments which later viewers of the episode might scratch their head at because there's references to Northvolt and their sodium battery comments like this from Claus Lundgren who says, sorry, you make it seem like Northvolt is a sodium ion battery company. They were building lithium ion batteries and they went bankrupt because they could not deliver the regular lithium batteries. Sodium was barely out of the R and D phase. There were a number of commenters who came in. All of the comments I saw were respectful in saying, you've misread the tea leaves here. The reason that company failed was because they had a deal with a car company. Was it BMW or Volvo?

Matt Ferrell: BMW.

Sean Ferrell: BMW. They had to deal with BMW to supply lithium batteries. They weren't able to meet that contract and it ended up crashing the company according to the commenters analysis. So do you want to talk briefly about how the Northvolt ended up in your video?

Matt Ferrell: Oh yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And your discussion about it and then how you unknotted something that may have been an error.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, this. This was an oopsie. This was a mistake. And here's how Matt's pea brain ended up in the position I was in. I have a team that helps me put the videos together, researchers and writers. And I'm not blaming anybody else on the team. The buck stops with me. But my every I knew Northvolt made more than just sodium batteries. And I knew this, but every time I've talked about Northvolt in the past year or two has always been around. Oh, and they're trying to develop this sodium ion battery. Because I've talked about sodium batteries a couple times. And so in my head, they were just lodged in there as Northvolt equals sodium. And so when we were pulling the script together and had this thing, there was like two sentences at the front of the paragraph talking about them that made it sound like they were only a sodium battery company and they failed because of X, Y and Z. So the story we told in the video about how they failed was accurate, but they're not just a sodium battery company. So the framing of it was completely wrong. And when I was reviewing the script and finalizing it and making tweaks to it before I was going to film it, my little pea brain had that little thing lodged in my brain of Northvolt equal sodium. And so when I got to that part of the script, it didn't jump out at me, like, with flashing red lights. I was like, no, that's not right.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So my fault. So what I did on the video, if anybody goes back and look at it, I've put a correction in the. In the description, a pinned comment. And YouTube actually has an edit functionality that you can go in there and, like, trim things out. So I just cut that entire section out of the video. So it's now gone. Um, so if you go back and rewatch it again, you'll be like, it's 7 minutes, 30 seconds. Doesn't talk about Northvolt anymore.

Sean Ferrell: That's right.

Matt Ferrell: That's why.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So I made the correction and everything in the video. And thankfully for everybody who commented, I caught this within 24 hours of the video being out. So it's like it wasn't up there very long before I got it corrected. And so I want to thank everybody that commented on the video about it. And I will say 90 plus percent of people were very respectful about it. 10% tell little stories about my motivations and all that kind of stuff that are just, like, wildly and yucky.

Sean Ferrell: I mean, it's one of those things where, yeah, a mistake was made. And as I was going through the comments in preparation of making this, and I saw people calling out the error and calling you out for the error. What I saw was mainly people saying, like, oh, yeah, there was a mistake here. I don't know how you could attribute motivation.

Matt Ferrell: You can't people try.

Sean Ferrell: Step one, make a claim that they're a sodium company. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. I don't see. I don't see what the angle would be. But having said that, thank you to the commenters for jumping in and pointing this out because it really did lead to Matt being able to revise the video so that there isn't that confusion. And I would also point out for anybody who's saying it's not right to go in and revise the video at this stage, leaving in an error when people aren't going to see the error, when people aren't going to see a clarification in the comments. And it would just foster ongoing comment discussion around a mistake as opposed to leaning into the things about the video that are factually more accurate.

Matt Ferrell: That's actually one of the things that drives me nuts about YouTube is that they used to have a correction system that if you put corrections and you put the timecode and you put a little note, it would. On the video, as you're watching, a thing would come out like a little overlay saying correction, blah, blah, blah. That's basically gone now. You can't do that anymore. It does still have like a little flag, but you will totally miss it on certain platforms. It's too subtle and so most people will not see it. I hate the fact they removed that. I also hate the fact that we can't re upload a video and replace it in case there's an error.

Sean Ferrell: And they give excuses to you if that was an option, but it's.

Matt Ferrell: It's not. And they give a technical reason why, which I worked in software for 20 years, so the explanation they give is just doesn't fly. I know how this stuff works. Doesn't fly. On top of which, there was one time where I had a video that I put up and I was saying the word kilowatt hour, but it was on screen. The text that we had done the overlay said kilowatt. And I didn't catch it. And like, so it was causing confusion in the comments and there was no way for me to fix it. I couldn't trim it out. I couldn't like fix it with the tools I had. So I contacted support and explained exactly what was wrong. And I said, I just want to be able to re upload this video with corrected text on the screen. You know what they did?

Sean Ferrell: They did it.

Matt Ferrell: They did it for me. Yeah, they had me upload it as a new video. I gave them the two links and they did something on the back end where they basically relinked, so all the comments and views and everything carried over to the new one. So it's like it's technically possible to do it, but they just for some reason will not make it something that you can just do on your own.

Sean Ferrell: Or do you think it might be? I mean, it's. I completely agree. I can understand the frustration there. Do you think that there's an angle to this where they are trying to keep people from bait and switching getting activity from a video that is maybe not theirs, or maybe something that they're doing only to entice responses and then swapping it out for something else so that they can generate artificial response to something?

Matt Ferrell: I would say. I would say yes. And I've heard that argument before and I don't buy it. And here's why. Because the video is fed to viewers based on what they want to watch. So if you've swapped the video out and they keep feeding it to people they think is going to want watch that, but yet you've completely changed what the video is. Those people are no longer going to want to watch it because it feels like bait and switch, which means the algorithm will naturally suddenly downvote that video and stop feeding it. So it's like. Right, but if you were somebody through the algorithm.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, but if you were somebody who was doing something like making a claim about somebody in the public sphere and you knowingly slandered them and then swap it out to replace it with a video that does not include the slander comment as a means of hiding your action, is that potentially something they're trying to stop?

Matt Ferrell: No, because the YouTube editing tool would allow me to do that. I could take the existing video, go in there, and where I slandered them at one minute in, I could just cut that 30 seconds out and now the slander's gone. So it's like it doesn't make. There's no product design reason rationale that I've ever been able to come up with of why they would limit this. I think it literally comes down to a technical reason that it takes work on their part to make this a thing. And when you look at other video platforms like Vimeo, you can swap things out on Patreon. I can swap things out like other video platforms that do videos. Serving them up. Yeah, you can swap them out, no problem. But YouTube I think is old enough and probably has enough spaghetti code that maybe it's just. It's just too difficult to make it work. That's my, my hunch, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Have you considered a video about this topic, about the history of YouTube, about that's interesting, about what's underlying it, about where it might be going, about what major. I mean it's even the sort of thing like would it be the kind of thing where maybe interviewing some of the big names on YouTube about the difficulty or positives of the experience of the system itself, not just being a youtuber but utilize this tool and maybe some of those challenges and where they would want to see things head. It would be interesting to know if you're solo in that experience of I wish I could do these things or is that a more. If that is a wider. If that's a wider experience, it'd be interesting to know.

Matt Ferrell: I have a bunch of YouTuber friends. We all talk about this stuff. This is stuff that drives us all nuts. It drives us all nuts. I'm not alone in my disdain for the limiting aspect of how you can correct a video if there's something wrong in it. The worst case scenario is you have to take the video down. I've done that twice now, three times. Twice where I've unlistened a video and then I made a brand new video. So I didn't repost the old one. I just made a new video talking about the mistake in the old one and then did a better video with the correction as part of it.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: I've done that twice. Yeah, that I think was the only way I could have handled that. Whether or not I could have re uploaded or not, I probably would have handled that the same way. But for something like this I would have preferred to be able to re upload something on top of it because I could have corrected the first two sentences that were the problem, rewritten it, re recorded it, then put it up and it would have been great. So it's. But I couldn't do that. So I had to cut out an entire section I didn't want to cut out, but I had to because of two bad sentences. Yeah, frustrating.

Sean Ferrell: That is frustrating. So here's maybe looking forward to a video that includes a zoom conversation between Matt and four of his YouTuber friends talking about YouTube itself. Back to the comments from Matt's most recent. There was this from DigigStraight who weighs in with an argument that part of the problem with this kind of here's this research, it's going this direction and then suddenly the bottom falls out. He writes, this sounds like investors with zero patience for long term investment. And that's the sort of thing that is making the west fall behind. How much accuracy do you think there is to that? Companies in the west relying on outside investors and stockholders to be patient in this way, helping to drive the research and development and the release of products and even what gets slapped on the packaging. We've talked now about two different cases of solid state batteries and the classic one from last year where the battery ended up getting torn apart literally and figuratively, so that people could say, ah, it's not really solid state, but it's solid state, depending on how you define it. And now that same sort of conversation taking place around Donut, solid state battery. While the results initially would indicate maybe Donut has actually landed there, it still creates this kind of is there really a there? There is this is, is this true? Is it not? What is it trying to do? And is the free market part of the confusion here? Where in other parts of the world where it's maybe like in China, the government is saying, go try and build this thing. So they go and they try and build that thing and they keep working at it until they build it. Is that part of what we're seeing here with the bottom falling out of this part of the market?

Matt Ferrell: I think it is a playing a role in there because the two companies that are doubling down in sodium, and I made a previous video about it, are BYD and CATL. And they're two gigantic, I mean, huge battery companies. So they also have the Chinese government doing who knows what to keep them going. But they also have deep pockets on their own. They're so such massive companies, they can afford to take the hit in that longer term play of they see where sodium is going to go in 10 years, 15 years. So they got to start working on it now. So let's try to advance it as fast as we can right now and we can be the leader in the market by the time it does catch on. I think that's what they're doing. So they're playing the long game. And I do think you're right. So when you're talking about the European market and the American market, there might be less tolerance for that. We don't want to wait a decade. We want to see something two years from now and the market shifts and you're three years in and it's like, oh, this is going to set us back for who knows how long. And then investors are like, I don't want to wait, I'm out. You know what I mean? It's like that could be what's helping to cause some of these kind of failures and struggles to happen. Yeah, I think that's a big part of this.

Sean Ferrell: Interesting to see how it plays out long term with those companies that are willing to stay in despite the short term difficulties. Especially when you consider the next comment from Philip lamaru who points out from their perspective, the safety factor is sodium's big advantage. Exclamation marks. That's the end of the comment. So is that what you see playing here as well? You mention it can weather the weather better than lithium and it's safe because unlike lithium, it, it's not necessarily going to burst into flames. So long term, are those two checkboxes in sodium's favor that you think might keep it as a player in this long term even though it's having these difficulties right now?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, those are. I don't think it's a big advantage. It's a key advantage. I still come back to the economics because it's the sad reality of money makes the world go round. And when you look at all the projections of how sodium batteries costs are going to drop in the coming years. Jordan Gasogee from The Limiting Factor YouTube channel did a fantastic video around Seattle's announcement. It was around that time frame where he broke down and showed all this research showing like this group thinks it's going to come down to this price by 2040. This group thinks it's going to be by 20, late 2030s, 2050. It's showing where it's going to. All those projections may be a little too conservative, it may happen sooner. But there is not really any disagreement that sodium is going to be so dirt cheap to make. There's no question that it's going to become a massive player just because of how cheap it is. It's like you think about lead acid batteries, they're super cheap to make. We recycle almost all of them. They're fantastic. But they're extremely like not energy dense, which is why we don't use them in a lot of stuff for the big ticket items that we're talking about. Sodium has much better energy density, but it's going to potentially have a price similar or better than lead acid batteries. So it's kind of like it's kind of a win win. It's like everybody sees where it's going to be 10, 15, 20 years. The debate is when it's going to happen, not if it's going to happen. So for me, the economics is always going to be the, the trump card, so to speak. Safety factor and longevity are also key players when you're talking about that. So when you put all three of those together, it's kind of just a winning recipe to have all three of those things together.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. There were people in the comments who were pointing out that they envisioned sodium batteries replacing car batteries. That that would be a use case where cheaper, safer, doesn't have. If it breaks in any way, it's not going to leak all sorts of terrible chemicals everywhere. And of course, as you've pointed out, the fact that in sub zero temperatures, it's not going to stop working, whereas lead acid can. Sometimes, depending on where you are, your car might not start simply because your battery is literally too cold to go. There was this comment from Scarface, and I thought it was an interesting comment related to recent news, which I also wanted to bring up. So Scarface writes, there is a reason for the lithium price drop. Sodium making progress. Sodium technology marks the upper limit lithium prices can go. And with sodium development progressing, lithium battery prices will continue to drop. By the way, that's valid for all alternative technologies. We need them. Even if they don't have a product ready for the market, they exert the pressure on the big players to continue improving. I wonder how much of that is actually at play or as you point out, is its supply doing more than the lithium battery manufacturers? I am sure keep an eye on the competition's prices and adjust accordingly because they don't want to be. You don't want to be making a roduct that costs three times as much as a alternative that could take market share from you. But lithium's availability. There was recently just an article I saw about a lithium discovery here in the US in Washington that surprised a lot of people. Do you want to talk about that briefly?

Matt Ferrell: I don't know the exact specifics of it, but it’s a massive lithium reserve. The United States actually has a fair amount of lithium. We just haven't really started mining it yet. We're locating these new pockets that are absolutely massive and will give the US its own lithium supply. That's going to make us not just supply what we need, but potentially become one of the bigger players in the world for supplying it elsewhere. That is a possibility. So it's pretty exciting that we've found this stuff. But at the same time, I would kind of link this back to the oil cartels and to what's happening right now in computer RAM prices because the AI has taken over everything. And there's RAM manufacturers that have said they're going to stop making things for consumer products because they're focusing on their AI clients because that's where the money is, right? And it's causing RAM prices to skyrocket. And in the past, these companies, there's only a handful of them make ram. They've been caught red handed, colluding together to manipulate market prices. Oil cartels do it. So it's like if things start to get a little, like, competition starts to heat up over here, they can suddenly overproduce the amount of oil they're making. And it drops the price of oil, which kind of squeezes out competition out of the market. So there might be a little bit of that happening. But from everything that I've looked into, the position we're in right now is kind of a. It is a supply issue where it's like the demand for batteries was so high and the market couldn't keep up. Demand was outstripping supply. And so the world kind of like shifted and was like, so there's money to be made. So these companies started ramping up the manufacturing to be able to like, basically building gigafactories. And the number of factories that were being built was being built at an astonishing rate.

And so all those things started to come online. Meanwhile, there's other factors at play where some demand started to not show up like they were anticipating. And so suddenly we had a gap where we have an oversupply. We have way more production capability than we do demand. Even though demand is still growing, it's still growing, just not as fast as they thought. And there's pockets. So we have this kind of flood of lithium mining and. And supply coming in and manufacturing capabilities. And so it's caused battery prices just to plummet. And that's what's happening. So that is where I don't think it's just like the oil cartels or the RAM cartels. I think it's more complicated than that. There may be a little of that at play, but there's too much macro stuff going on that to explain it. So I don't think it's a conspiracy, more than just we overbuilt and outstripped demand. And that's why the prices are kind of artificially low right now.

Sean Ferrell: Having said all of that, there is an aspect of Scarface's comment that I think is irrefutable, which is the new technologies, you can see it, they do push the grandfather technologies to try to up their game. That doesn't mean that they're able to, as we've all seen technologies fall to the wayside and replaced by newer things, but they do try. So thank you for that comment, Scarface. Finally, the best worst comment from Michael Smith, who jumped in to say, as someone who also works hard but still fails, I deeply relate to Sodium. Me too, Michael. Me too.

Matt Ferrell: You sound salty.

Sean Ferrell: I do sound salty, don't I? Oh, here we go. So everybody jump into the comments and let us know what you thought about this conversation. And as always, thank you so much for commenting, liking, subscribing, and sharing with your friends. Those are very easy ways for you to support this podcast. We appreciate the time you take to do that, and it does create the content of this show and helps with the feedback and shaping of Undecided with Matt Ferrell as well. As always, those steps you can take to support us without it costing you a dime. But if you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of figuring out how I can make more salt jokes. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're talking about. What's that? Was that Perovskite in the background crying? Aw. Today we're talking about a new contender that might be challenging perovskite in the future. Yes, that's right. We've been talking about perovskite every other week for three and a half years, but now we're going to talk about something else. Welcome to Still to be Determined. This is the podcast that follows up on topics from Undecided with Matt Frell. I am not Perovskite. No, I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his brother. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, write some stuff for kids. It sounds like I write a lot. I guess I do. Anyway, with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt. Matt, how are you today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing really well. Are you bracing and not to talk about weather to everybody, but there's a massive storm hitting the United States, across most of the United States that's going to dump a ton of snow. Are you ready, Sean? Are you ready?

Sean Ferrell: I mean, many of our newer viewers and listeners may be scratching their heads and saying, how come these guys never talk about the weather? What? They never bring it up. They never chat about it.

Matt Ferrell: That's what they're asking themselves.

Sean Ferrell: That's what they're asking themselves. Well, a few years ago, Matt and I used to open this program saying, hey, what's. How's it going? And inevitably, we would talk about the weather, and people in the comments were like, why are you guys always talking about the weather? Stop talking about the weather. So we stopped. This is different.

Matt Ferrell: I was gonna say for. Yes, well, this is a different storm, but also it's. For me, it's like bad timing. I'm supposed to be going out on Monday morning to the Boston area to go see something that Microsoft is doing.

Sean Ferrell: I don't think they're going to do it and I don't think they're going to go, yes.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, I can tell you I'm most likely not going. I'm kind of disappointed because I was hoping to see it. So it's like I'm trying to work out with them if they're going to do this little demonstration at a different time or not,

Sean Ferrell: because, yeah, the timing sounds really bad. For people who wonder about our shooting schedule. Yeah, we're shooting this at the end of the week, right before, like, literally this. The weather patterns are going to be changing today, and we're going to start seeing A dumping of for huge portions of the country. Freezing rain. Apparently, there's extreme concerns about freezing rain through the south, through Appalachia. I've been Ryan Hall, y'all. I mean, I know that you pay attention to Ryan. Shout out to the Ryan Hall, y'all fans. The latest I saw from him was saying, we're going to be going live with this storm and we'll be live as long as I'm not sleeping. Which I thought to myself, I'm so glad Matt and I don't have that shooting schedule. Can you imagine if we were like, well, we're going to start talking now about technology and we're not going to stop. If we're awake, we're going to talk about it. No. Thank you. Well, to everybody. By the time this drops, the storm will have been behind us all. So I hope everybody has weathered the storm safely. So it's like past Sean wishing future you well. That's weird. Anyway, we're going to be getting into it. Matt's most recent, which talks about a recent breakthrough, which may point to, I say recent breakthrough, as you point out in your video. This is yet again another case of they've known about this for years, but they didn't know how to do it. Now maybe they're figuring out how to do it, which is something that's not perovskite. That could improve solar cell efficiency in a way that makes perovskite look like, well, thanks for showing up, but we don't need you. Which is weird because it's been nothing, but perovskite is coming. Thank God for perovskite. And then I watched your most recent, and you were literally like, yeah, yeah, we don't really need that anymore.

And I was like, some of them.

Matt Ferrell: I didn't. I didn't say that.

Sean Ferrell: You did say that. You said, you know, who sucks perovskite? More like suckskite. Anyway, before we get into our conversation about that, we're going to talk about our most recent, which is episode 291. There were some people jumping into the comments in regards to the donut battery, electric vehicle. Who is it? Where are they? What are they doing with it? Is it truly solid state? We're going to get into that. Matt and I had a conversation about all of this. It felt like it was very of the moment, the donut breakthrough. Matt having just been to the conference and seeing it and all the head scratching that was going on. A lot of you in the comments are really on top of not only our conversation. But other YouTubers. And it was really interesting to see people bringing in links to other people who think they may have in fact figured out what Donuts Solid State is. So we'll get into that. But to start us off, there was this from Dean McManus who talked about. Matt, you were scratching your head for a moment, like which motorcycle manufacturer was it that was teeming with Donut? Dean jumps in to say Verge EV Motorcycles was the partner company you were alluding to. Verge Motorcycles came out in 2018 and shut off innovative hubless in wheel motors last year at CES. Donut Lab is a subsidiary of Verge Motorcycles. The other partner contributor to this is likely Nordic Nano, who has much of the scientific experience and technologies that Donut Labs technology is based on. And. And he's one of two people who point to another YouTuber who claims they may have figured out what this is. We'll move into that right away. Which is Darth Sirius jumped in saying, I'm sure you guys are aware by now. But the Ms. Go Electric team put out their investigation to the Donut Labs product. And it absolutely puts Ryan from Ziroth’s examination to shame. Haha. With all the massive mountains of salt taken, it makes it seem like it's much more of a real product. So to talk quickly about the Donut suggestion that they're actually there and the cagey ness with which they were talking, as you pointed out, it didn't seem cagey in a we're not gonna. We're not really doing this sort of way. But it was kind of. We're not ready to drop full details yet. Have you seen any of these other YouTubers? Have you seen Ms. Go? What did you think about their coverage and what do you think about the discussion that they're having?

Matt Ferrell: It popped up on my feed probably when it popped up on Darth Sirius's feed as well. So I watched that video too. I wouldn't say it puts Ryan's to shame because you have to put things in context. Ryan literally put that video out while he's at CES. He woke up in the middle of the morning and was like, I gotta make a video. He made the video. So his was kind of a hot take trying to do on the fly digging while at the show. And for that I think he did a fantastic job on that video. Ms Go Electric has a team helping and they came out many days later and so they had more time and spent more time doing their digging. I still think there's more, there's more shoes to drop in the investigation on this, because I'm doing my own digging with my team and. And we're finding interesting things, too. So it's like this is a story that is, like, still currently very much unfolding.

Sean Ferrell: So.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, but I have seen this video. It's a very good video. It's definitely worth watch.

Sean Ferrell: Do you think we're seeing the natural evolution of nerds who grew up in the 80s playing where in the World is Carmen Sandiego to now investigating breakthroughs in battery technology and trying to figure out where, what, how, when, like, putting all those pieces together. Because as all of you scramble about and you're like, he was at CES and he put together a video. She's got a squad and she's looking into it. Over here. I have my team, and I'm suddenly like, what a bunch of nerds we all are. We're all. Do you think this is an evolution of where in the world is Carmen? San Diego? Yes or no? Answer the question. Don't wait for the translation.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you.

Matt Ferrell: Thank you for that.

Sean Ferrell: Another comment from Tenkai, who says iFixit has an award ceremony every year for the products with the worst repairability. Two AI products shared first place. The smart open fridge was the ultimate winner, but the AI girl was the one that won the community vote. So I'm wondering, oh, my God. Were you aware of this award? And is this something at CES that you wish you could have given? Is there anything, if you had a blue ribbon for worst product idea. Let's call it that. Without naming a corporation. Was there a thingamabob doing thingamabobbies that you were just like, that's dumb. Why is that here.

Matt Ferrell: There's two, and they're both in the same vein. They were both water bottles. There was this water bottle, that had AI. A water bottle, that had AI, Sean, was it a water bottle?

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: With AI. Don't. Don't ask questions. Don't ask questions. There's no explanation. It makes no sense. The second one, Sean, was a company.

Sean Ferrell: I'm not going to name their name. No, I can't move on. I can't move on.

Sean Ferrell: What is it?

Matt Ferrell: But hold on, it gets weird. Sean. Okay, this second water bottle, it makes. It makes. I can't remember how they. Their marketing phrases it, but it's like super water. Basically, they're infusing. I'm going to put this in air quotes, extra hydrogen atoms into the water, which is beneficial for your health. Just. Just think, think, think about. Think that I want my Fire to burst into. I want my water to burst into flames. That's what I want. Inject some more hydrogen into it. Because guess what? H. H2O is H2O. You can't, you can't, you can't. You can't, you can't, you can't. It's like it's the most snake oil, snake oily thing I've ever seen. But anyway, yeah, the AI water bottle and the hydrogen water bottle.

Sean Ferrell: I. When you said the bottle has AI, I envisioned the bottle going, yeah. Psst, psst. Aren't you thirsty? Hey, hey. Are you thirsty?

Matt Ferrell: So if you want to know basically what they claim it does, it tracks how much water you're drinking because that's.

Sean Ferrell: Your drinking to remember to figure out.

Matt Ferrell: Correct. To figure out when you need to hydrate and makes recommendations about you need to hydrate. Now you. Here's something that I have. I feel thirsty, so I drink some water.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I don't need an AI.

Sean Ferrell: There was recently an article about the recommendations for drinking water that recent research was pointing to. People are over hydrating and as a result, like their body, they just go to the bathroom more often because your body, believe it or not, can self regulate. And yeah, so the recommended the. The reporter then asked this researcher, so what would you recommend as far as hydration? And the researcher's response was, drink when you're thirsty. How many millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on research? And be like, yes, we have results. Drink when you're thirsty. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, finally this. And I first of all, thank you for this comment. Ryukagudesu. I don't remember why we didn't talk about it. I thought we might have, but maybe we did offline. But Ryu jumps in the comments and says.

Matt Ferrell: We may have talked about it offline.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. He says nothing about the collaboration with Hank Green, talking about big deals. Sure, it was on Hank's channel, but having two of my favorite channels in one video together was a big deal for me. Ryu.

Matt Ferrell: Appreciate that.

Sean Ferrell: I'm so glad that Matt and Hank could be there for you in that way. That's really great that you enjoyed their conversation. I did as well. And yes, we didn't talk about this, but probably should have. Do you want to give a bit of a big picture? How did that all come together, your being a guest on Hank's channel?

Matt Ferrell: It started with a random email that I got that was said, Hank Green here, I'd love to talk to you about plastic recycling. And I did a double take of like, that can't be real. Yeah, that can't be real. This gotta be a scam. And so I took the email address, looked in it up a line. I was like, oh, oh, oh, that actually is Hank Green. So I wrote back. We made an arrangement to have a call, had a fantastic conversation. Really fun. Like, as soon as we got on the call with each other, we were kind of just kind of geeking out at each other. And Hank at one point was like, oh, my God, we should be recording right now and just hit record because we. We just immediately started kind of geeking out. So it was. It was a very fun chat. And he's exactly like you'd expect him to be. He's just an awesome, awesome dude. He's really cool, very friendly, very nice, insanely smart. But it was just. It just kind of. He just reached out and he just wanted to have a fun chat, as he put it. He liked talking, talking to smart people. Which I was like, I wouldn't put myself in that category. But I had just put out that video about the new plastic recycling stuff that had been kind of percolating. And he was, as he put it, getting extremely depressed as he was putting this video together about plastic recycling. Because there was nothing that was like a ray of sunshine. And he stumbled upon my video and was like, oh, thank God.

Sean Ferrell: Little.

Matt Ferrell: Little glimmer of hope. Which is why he reached out to me to talk to me.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, which is why he does what he does. It's why you do what you do is why we do what we're doing right now, which is there's too much information out there for anybody to get all of it. So by putting more stuff into more channels, hopefully this information gets out there. And it is easy to become very dispirited about the state of the world, because it seems like everything that we hear from mainstream media is the house is on fire, but we're gonna pretend it's not. And it's channels like yours and Hank's that are talking about, well, there are real problems, but what are we doing to fix it? There are smart people out there trying to do that. So it was a great interview.

Matt Ferrell: I was also joking with. I was also joking with my wife that not to put both of us down, Sean, but I referred to us, to Hank, as the B tier Green brothers. You got.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I would say. I would say tier. Yeah, I would say C tier. Yeah, we're like. We're like the made for TV version of, like, if there's a movie about the movie stars.

Matt Ferrell: And we're the TV stars.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, we're the TV version. We're the. If you like that at the theater, these guys. These guys might be fun. So. And from our most recent, the best worst comment from Code Monkey, who writes to me, I believe, for April 1, can you say that you are Matt Ferrell? Yes, yes, Code Monkey. I will make a note. As of this April Fools, I will try to say that. So everybody who's watching this episode, pretend you didn't hear me say that. But thank you, Code Monkey, for the comment. On now to Matt's most recent. This is why this solar breakthrough matters more than perovskite. That's right. The rug's been pulled out from underneath perovskite. Take that, Perovskite. Hit the road. And don't let the solar panel hit you in the butt on the way out. So, Matt, how many kesterite videos can we look forward to making in the next, oh, four years? A million? One million videos?

Matt Ferrell: One million.

Sean Ferrell: The comments right out of the gate. Top comment for me from Ziff, who says, quote, a material you've probably never heard of. Me thinking, doubt it. Mechanical engineering and materials background. Pretty sure I've Kesterite. All righty then. Never heard of that. Indeed. Yeah, this.

Matt Ferrell: That's great.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I thought that was terrific. And you say in your video, like, a lot of the stuff around solar panels, so much of this is so old. What was the year of the first solar panel?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean, it goes back over 100 years. It's like, it's. It's actually. Let me look. Look up really quick. 1883.

Sean Ferrell: Right? 1883.

Matt Ferrell: 1883.

Sean Ferrell: Were they making electricity? Yeah, they used it to make electricity. To do what?

Matt Ferrell: It was the first selenium solar cell. Coated it with gold. Sean. It was coated with gold.

Sean Ferrell: Yes. Now, I want to make a story about, like a great train robbery, but what they're trying to steal is a gold plated selenium solar panel. I don't know. So kesterite lurking in the background.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: The one thing holding it back was, why did everybody lean into perovskite before they leaned into kesterite?

Matt Ferrell: It's kind of like any advancement. It's like one of them is easier to do than the other. And perovskite. Making perovskite is. I wouldn't say easier because they're still working on a lot of the kinks. But it's like, that's been the topic.

Sean Ferrell: Of our videos is like there's this thing if they could just get a hold of it. But it's tricky. It requires all these little moving parts to do. And it's like, is that crack? Is that. Is that true of Kesterite? And Kesterite was sitting there just going like, you could be making me, and I'm not quite as toxic and maybe I'm a little more efficient, but nobody's paying attention to poor Kesterite.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I mean, when you make the Kesterite, the problem is it's got lots of imperfections. And trying to figure that out to make it consistently is where perovskite. They figured out a lot of that, which is part of the reason why it's toxic, because they're using lots of lead and things like that, because it helps with the manufacturing of the perovskite cell. So it's like they are trying to figure that out on the kestrate side, which is why it's been lagging behind. So I think that's the big thing. It's like, which, you know, perovskite, we can actually figure out how to use basically an inkjet printer and print this onto a surface. And, hey, we have a solar cell that works where kestrate. They're still trying to figure out how to get it to that kind of a stage. They're just lagging behind.

Sean Ferrell: Is there anything in the research that you saw that indicates the path might end up following perovskite, which might make all of this just kind of academic? Like, oh, the process we've been using for perovskite also works for kesterite, therefore.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, I'm not going to take a guess at that.

Sean Ferrell: You didn't see it. There's basically your answer that is, no, you didn't see anything in the research indicate that.

Matt Ferrell: No, I did not. I did not see anything that made like, oh, there's a clear path over here that could follow perovskite. It's like, I didn't see anything. My team didn't see anything that would have indicated that. No.

Sean Ferrell: David T. Jumps into the comments to say this isn't uncommon in science. Throughout history, a technology that is on the verge of breaking out gets leapfrogged by another unforeseen one. So there's a possibility that could happen here. We're not. I mean, we're not prognosticators. We're not giving stock advice. We're not saying, like, find your local kestorite dealer and, and, and buy, buy, buy.

Matt Ferrell: But no, no, no.

Sean Ferrell: All things that you saw in your research would you. Would you say that you do see kesterite at a stage that is eerily familiar with where perovskite was previously?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And you're like, yeah, if everything plays out the way it did before, five, ten years from now, we will definitely have these cells.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. If you go back 10, 15 years, it's like, it feels like what perovskite was then. So it's like if you fast forward 10, 15 years from now, it might be where perovskite is right now.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Or maybe it's a little further ahead. Well, it's like it's. If I was going to prognosticate, that's what I would say. But to kind of circle into why I made the video was, I look at perovskite as kind of like a Solar 2.0. It's kind of the next evolution of where solar is heading. And I was just asking myself, like, what is Solar 3.0? Which is when I came across kesterite, and I was like, oh, didn't know that was a thing, and so kept digging in, and that's when I decided to make a video about it. So I see this as the next evolution, which is going to be a decade or two away. So it's definitely way down the road, which is also why I come back to say this is not going to kill perovskite. Perovskite is going to be a thing. It's going to definitely be a very predominant player in the market in the future. But it's like this other one that's waiting in the wings could end up becoming very appealing because it could theoretically potentially be cheaper, it could be just as efficient or better. And then, of course, you sidestep all the toxicity issues that you have with, like, lead in the perovskites.

Sean Ferrell: Does that also make them. You've talked and we've talked about recycling of solar panels. Does the kesterite model potentially look like it's easier, or do you think that that's kind of. That all comes out in the wash? Because we're currently at a state where recycling is achieving levels of growing success. So that. That becomes less and less of a. Oh, that's the ultimate goal.

Matt Ferrell: I think it's going to be a little bit of a wash. Like, I don't think it's like kesterite's easier to recycle than perovskite. It's more of. It's going to be safer to recycle than perovskite because it doesn't have These highly toxic materials in it. So it will be. Imagine like the recycling facilities that would be recycling those kind of things. You have to. There's certain precautions you have to take so that you don't get. You don't poison your workers, right? So it's like, because you're tearing up the panels, so it's like with something like kesterite, that becomes less of a concern than it would be with something like perovskite. So it's like, that's the only difference I really see in it for recycling it, because one's not better than the other in terms of that.

Sean Ferrell: And you've also talked about the longevity of panels. This seems to me like this would be the natural evolution in. Corporations are always going to want to innovate because they want to introduce a new product that they can say, oh, this is the brand new shiny toy. And yeah, it's going to cost you a lot right out of the gate because it's so brand new and it's so good. So that there would be motivation on the part of the corporations making these things to have that new thing in 15 years when they can no longer innovate on panels that are being designed today. So this, this new material, the ability to slap a new name on the packaging to help sell them is going to be beneficial. But nothing about this means that we won't have perovskite panels out in the world, because the ones that are being made today are going to be working in the next 30 years, 40 years, they'll be out there and they'll be in the secondary market, potentially, but they'll still be out there and working.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, exactly. It's like when you're talking about solar panels, you're talking about decades and decades that these things will be in service. So it's not like it's going to be a turnover like somebody flips a switch. It's going to be a slow, gradual evolution.

Sean Ferrell: And just for fun, to go back to David T's comment talking about leapfrogging of technologies, can you think of another recent example of a technology that came out and leapfrogged? The one that everybody was anticipating was the thing people saying, like, oh, here it comes, we're just five years away and then suddenly, boink, something shows up and like, oh, never mind. We found this instead.

Matt Ferrell: Not in the sustainability space, nothing's jumping to mind, but this is not a great analogy. But like in consumer tech, I can think of, like the evolution of DVDs, like when we went to Blu Ray and there was HD DVD. There was these two competing high 4K formats. And they both came out the same time. And it was clear, like, beta versus vhs. One of them's going to die, One of them's going to win. It's like, which one's going to win? And then it's like, okay, Blu Ray, it's the winner.

Sean Ferrell: Wow.

Matt Ferrell: We got streaming, so Blu Ray is going to go nowhere. Yeah, it's kind of like, all right, Blu Ray's the.

Sean Ferrell: We all bought Blu Rays for like one week end. Yeah, it was like. It was like I just bought this and I also hooked up my computer to my television and never mind.

Matt Ferrell: Physical media. Who needs physical media?

Sean Ferrell: Another comment from the community in your, in your audience that I'm always amazed by the big brains on Brad. Here it comes. Michael Sertion, who says, wow, that substrate holder at 33 seconds is my design. It's rewarding to see something I worked on contribute to progress, even if it is a small step that might be a dead end. Wow. Okay. Somebody's just out there like, here's this thing and it's part of this massive research project. Okay. Congratulations, Michael.

Matt Ferrell: Very cool. Very cool. Nice flex.

Sean Ferrell: William jumps in to say, I love the virtuous cycle. The more money spent on solar, the more money spent on solar research panels get more efficient, costs go down. More money is spent on solar. Yeah. Would you say right now it feels like that is the cycle we're in and we could start seeing like the adoption curve. Does it get steeper as you move forward in time? You recently talked about more electricity being made via solar than at any time previously in history. Does that record get broken next year and the year after? Do we continue to see that curve spike?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, that's the stage we're in right now. It's like if you look at the reports of how much solar is being added every year, it's kind of like, don't quote me on this, but it's almost like it's doubling. And so it's like, we're going to be this year will break records from last year and then 2027 will break 2026. It's like it's going to keep going because we're in that hockey stick, huge adoption curve right now because solar is the cheapest form of electricity generation in the world, full stop. Not even talking about subsidies, which you can make the argument for. Then we don't need subsidies anymore. And in some cases that's true. But it's like the industry is now it's not mature, but it's definitely past the point of Will this actually become a thing? It's like it is here. It's going to keep becoming more and more of a thing. And I love the virtuous cycle comment. I love that Will's comment because it's like this is what we were hoping for. Yeah. What I was hoping for for the past couple decades is that solar would get to this point where it could stand on its own two feet and an entire industry would shape up around it. I don't want to get on my soapbox about like the big beautiful bill and all the stuff that is happening in the US with kind of stuff back to try to bring coal back and try to support the natural gas industry. There are more people working in the solar industry than the natural gas industry than the coal industry. It's like it is the one of the largest areas for employment for R&D, for all of this stuff. It's, it's undeniable at this point.

Sean Ferrell: So, yes, 100% here's hoping that people wiser than us can make decisions that make sense in that regard.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best worst comment on this episode. Question man jumps in. I think this is worthy of being on a bumper sticker. Question man quote, I'm impatient right now is my new catchphrase. Yes, Question Man. Yes, I'm impatient right now as well. Listeners, jump into the comments. Let us know what you thought about this discussion. Was there anything that you were hoping we would talk about that we missed? Or is there something we said that you wanted to push back on? We look forward to hearing what you have to say. And as always, the comments really shape not only this program, but they help inform Matt's main channel, Undecided. If you'd like to support the show, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support us. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to stilltdb.FM and click the Become a supporter button. Or you can click Join right here on YouTube. Either way, it throws coins in our heads. We enjoy the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of figuring out what's the next thing that's going to replace the last thing we talked about. Thank you for joining us, everybody. We'll talk to you next time.