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Matt and Sean talk about Donut Lab's solid state batteries, connecting with other YouTubers, and your questions.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Everyone's Wrong About This Solid-State Battery https://youtu.be/C8ljwigh9jA?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about Donut Lab's solid state batteries, connecting with other YouTubers, and your questions.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Everyone's Wrong About This Solid-State Battery https://youtu.be/C8ljwigh9jA?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
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.