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https://youtu.be/BQoniKPE8Nw
Matt and Sean talk about sodium batteries, why lithium prices are falling, and your comments.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The 90% Price Crash That Changed Everything https://youtu.be/nrTCgZmUFCY?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about sodium batteries, why lithium prices are falling, and your comments.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The 90% Price Crash That Changed Everything https://youtu.be/nrTCgZmUFCY?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 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.