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Matt and Sean talk about CATL’s claims at a massive breakthrough in sodium ion battery costs, and whether it might (or might not) find a place in the energy storage market.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How CATL Made Batteries 90% Cheaper (And What Happens Next) https://youtu.be/Wf84NJSiAeU?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about CATL’s claims at a massive breakthrough in sodium ion battery costs, and whether it might (or might not) find a place in the energy storage market.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How CATL Made Batteries 90% Cheaper (And What Happens Next) https://youtu.be/Wf84NJSiAeU?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 getting salty. We've probably done that before and we've probably done that before with this particular product in mind. But we're doing it again. We can't help it. Welcome everybody to Still 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. I am not Matt Ferrell. There's been a lot of confusion out there. Word on the street is like, have you seen this Matt Ferrell fellow? Got a beard. He just walked through a spider web. No, that's not Matt you're talking about. That's me, Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, I write some stuff for kids. And luckily for me, I'm the older brother to that Matt, who is with us as always. Matt, how are you today?
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing great. Not as good as you, Sean. Walking through spider webs.
Sean Ferrell: Walking through spiderwebs. That of course, can be sung to the tune of Walking on Sunshine. For anybody who wants to do a remix for us and drop into the comments, we're looking forward to hearing it. So today we're going to be talking about Matt's most recent. This is about how CATL has had what they claim as a breakthrough regarding sodium batteries that could drop the price so steeply as to make it a competitive option with lithium right now. Or does it? That is the question, and that's the content of our conversation that we're going to have in a few minutes. But before we get into that, we always like to revisit your comments from our previous episode. So let's jump back into the comments from episode 277. This was a discussion we had around quantum computing and why it isn't just an evolution to the computer tech that we use currently in our daily lives. We, of course have computers that we carry around in our pockets and we have in our desks at home that use ones and zeros to answer all the questions we might have. And quantum computing does something different. And the question is, well, if it's so great, how come we can't buy computers that do that? And Matt and I were having conversations around, well, it's not intended to be that kind of computer. Which led to comments like this from Dean McManus. Dean, you've become a frequent flyer lately, so thank you for all of your comments. It's really terrific. And when I spot your face floating in the comments, I'm always like, here comes Dean, let's see what he has to say. Well, this week Dean said this. Thanks, Matt, for clarifying the major point of quantum computers being specifically designed for solving quantum problems. The exciting prospect and question for the future is how can solving quantum problems relate to creating a better quality of life? To me, this question relates to many new technologies.
When AMD and Nvidia developed their GPUs for graphic processing, they had to develop specific code that split processes and distributed computations across multiple processors to take advantage of the new engineering. Interestingly, this found use and profitability in computer graphics cards and chips to make PC console games run faster and better. But over time, GPUs became vital for advanced machine learning and AI, scientific simulations, complex data analysis and processing, which transformed computing and in turn greatly affected our daily lives. I think Dean is kind of hitting the sweet spot between, well, I've got a computer at home. Why is this thing better? And this is a quantum computer. It's not intended to be in your home. And I think Dean has landed in the middle with, yeah, we don't need the quantum computer in our phone. But the fact that the quantum computer exists could have these kinds of impacts in our lives. Similar to, as he points out, AMD and Nvidia never intended. They were not trying to develop a processor that would be used for AI. But when AI development took off a few years ago, there was then a shortage of their processors because they were building them for computer graphics. And suddenly all these developers were like, we need a million of those today so that we can get this AI thing going. So, yeah, Dean, I think you're right. We're looking at a future where, well, yeah, the quantum computer is going to be a part of our life, but it's not going to be in the foreground. It may be in the background.
What do you think about that?
Matt Ferrell: I agree with you. And Nvidia is a great example because it's like that company was basically started to make graphics cards for video gamers for video games. That's all they were focused on. And they have completely pivoted hard into AI because they're, they're now the dominant platform for that. And they are one of the largest tech companies in the world right now. And they are just like killing it because they are the predominant, almost monopoly player for providing hardware for AI. And of course, now gamers are going, what about us? Because they're like this tiny fraction of a percent of what Nvidia makes now, because most of their money comes from AI. We don't know exactly where quantum computers are going to filter into our daily lives yet because it's still too early and it's going to have tendrils into our daily life. So I think what Dean is hitting on is spot on accurate and I think the analogy to AMD and Nvidia is a really good one.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. It also reminds me, as you were talking, it reminds me of the thinking around, well, when do we get a computer into our daily life? Just the binary computers that we use daily and the number of computer manufacturers that passed on the idea of creating computers for the home.
Matt Ferrell: Yes.
Sean Ferrell: Is a long one, which includes IBM, which if IBM had had the foresight to jump into the home computer market, they would be what Apple is now. They had market share, they had the technology. But their CEO at the time, and this would have been in the 60s, was asked about, well, what about making computers for home use? And his response was nobody's going to want a computer in their home. That's not what they're for. So that is a great example on that shot.
Matt Ferrell: It's like IBM doesn't stand for, you know, going to the bathroom. It's business machines.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: So it's like at the time they were just completely focused on like business to business consumers. There's no market there.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Why would we buy that? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Sean Ferrell: It's that kind of thinking that is where we are right now. Nobody can foresee what might grow out of this, but I think we can see that it's a, it's a major step. And I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss that it could have an impact any more than if you could go back in time and say to somebody in the 1960s, believe it or not, these machines that are the size of a phone booth and have giant reel to reel spinning tapes and you feed them with computer cards, with punch cards to program them. Yeah. That's not what it's going to look like in the future. It's sci fi. It's sci fi to the person in the 60s to tell them what our current use looks like. And it's no different now for us to say what does quantum computing mean to daily lives? It's going to be sci fi. We don't have an easy means of forecasting that. And I think that's both very exciting and something we need to be paying attention to and cautious about because as we're seeing on a daily basis, the headlines around AI and it's misuse and abuse is real. So we need to keep one hand on the wheel and keep one eye on the horizon at the same time. Then there were two comments that I spotted that felt like they were coming at the same issue, similar to what we just talked about. Briefly, in response to Dean, there was Jack Coates who jumped in to say on the format of a good alternative to he's talking about computer usage and the whole binary computer versus Quantum computing. Jack writes, I'm an old computer geek, sorry, but I still get excited about computers Binary, trinary Yes, the Russians built some, quantum, fluidic and otherwise on the solve one problem at a time mindset. Sorry, that isn't the real world. We need to do basic research where the results and economic viability might be 50 years away and to solve problems today, problems of energy, hunger, nutrition, housing as well as reach for the stars.
At the same time we have the resources, we have the ability, just not the stomach as a people to do it with our competing wishes, desires, goals, economic, political and power struggles against each other. So in some cases I get tired because I see us not getting out of our own way to accomplish anything. To many people, too many people see this as a world of limited resource allocation and not one of optimizing for the best outcome for all of us both today and in the future. Enough soapbox. Now back to my YouTube dungeon. The other comment that was right next to this one when I was farming for comments was from Lyle Dahl, who says simply, if I were allocating resources in the past, I'd have pulled us out of Nam and put more resources into space and science. Yeah, these felt like a compelling like they were holding hands with each other because it feels like a mixture of hindsight is 2020 fallacies around sunk cost expenses and things like that are limits to speculative thinking that we were just talking about in response to Dean. It feels like there's this. There really is this kind of gravity that pulls us to a moment of yeah, but we don't know if it'll work. And it grinds things to not necessarily a halt, but far slower than we wish it could be. I'm thinking of things like the current debates around vaccines and there's this political pullback that is halting things in a way that is really tragic and will hurt people. I think we'll get past it, but in the short run it feels like, oh, this is terrifying to hear the debates that are being made. So it feels like both of these comments are taking a look at the future horizon and saying like, how do we get there in a way that helps the most people.
And also looking backward at examples where we missed the mark, Lyle hits a very compelling argument to say like we could have gotten out of Vietnam and those resources could have done more for space research and advancements of science that could be benefiting us today. And yeah, hindsight and also foresight. Finding that balance, learning from the past, It's a huge topic. I'm not asking for you to weigh in with an answer that like gives us the way, but just in general. How do you feel as you're doing research on the topics that you talk about now? How do you feel about the balance between these two things? Learning from history and looking forward to and doing it in a way that benefits the most people? What do you see in your research that gives you the kind of maybe hope that we've talked about in the past few weeks? We talked about the glass half full versus the glass half empty debate and you have consistently said I land in optimism. And I'm wondering what do you see that gives you that landing space as opposed to doubling down into. I mentioned before we started recording, I, I find myself lately, unfortunately doom scrolling and really trying to look for ways to pull myself out of that.
And where do you find the ladder out of that?
Matt Ferrell: It's getting harder, but it's one of those with the way the world is right now, it's politics, it's beliefs, it's agendas that are driving things right now in a way that's very divisive. And finding the optimism is when you cut through all that noise and you look at the people that are doing the science, the hard engineering, the figuring this stuff out, it's just noise, it's just white noise above it all. And they're still trying to do their work, they're still trying to do their research, they're still finding ways to move things forward. It's just getting a little harder because there's more headwinds in front of them than there were a decade ago or 20 years ago. But they're still making forward progress. So it's a little depressing that we're in a period right now where things are slowing down a little bit because of these headwinds, but they're not stopping. And part of the reason for that is when there's a better technology or a better way, it's going to win out. Even if somebody else for political reasons hates that thing. I come back to solar panels on this all the time. It's like you can think solar panels are a hoax for political reasons, but guess what does not change with that political viewpoint? Solar panels are the cheapest form of electricity generation today, full stop, incentives or no incentives. And the fact it's the cheapest way to generate electricity means that utilities are going to use it, companies are going to use it, homeowners are going to want to use it because it is the cheapest, best way to generate electricity, full stop. So you can try to put up roadblocks in front of that. It's going to slow it down, slow down adoption, but it's not going to stop it. And so that's kind of my kind of glass half full. I'm just using that as an analogy of like a whole bunch of different things.
Whether you're talking batteries or nuclear, whatever the topics I talk about in the channel, there's always things you can look at that are like no matter what the political headwinds are, it's not going to stop the advancement of what we're talking about because it makes too much sense or it's, it's got so much going for it that it has a really good chance to stand on its own no matter what else somebody else says about it. So it's kind of hard to hold it back. So for me, that's kind of where I get my optimism on some of the things I talk about.
Sean Ferrell: Let's hope that speaking for myself and maybe some of our listeners, maybe we can lean on that as a way to keep our heads up and keep looking forward because there are certainly a lot of things going on right now that make it seem like we're sliding the wrong direction. But.
Matt Ferrell: Yep, yep. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So thank you, thank you for the thoughts on that. On now to our discussion of Matt's most recent. This is about the CATL breakthrough in cost. Couple of questions, Matt. Is this a breakthrough in cost that is born of a sourcing of the materials or is it a breakthrough in cost in the way it's produced? What is the key that CATL claims they've unlocked that has broken this price barrier in the way that they've talked about.
Matt Ferrell: It's hard to answer that question because CATL is being very close lipped about the details. But some of it comes down to we've known for a long time that sodium ion batteries are going to be incredibly cheap eventually because sodium, it's just super cheap. So that's why so many people have been interested in it. But making it energy dense enough to be competitive against other technologies that are already out there, like lithium ion phosphate, which is in a lot of EVs, it's in my home, batteries in my garage. It's a robust, safe, great chemistry. It's actually fairly affordable. It hasn't been competitive against that. So whatever CATL has been doing has been able to make their sodium ion batteries of a similar energy density. So they've got the lifespan, they've got the energy density that makes it finely competitive with LFP. And because of that, as they scale up production, the benefits of just being sodium are going to pay off in the long run with this huge price drop because sodium is cheaper than iron and the other materials that go into LFP batteries. So it's just material wise is going to be way cheaper. The actual machinery that manufactures them, you can do it on the same production line. There's some changes you have to make, but it's not radically different. So you can repurpose existing factories and stuff like that to make these. So I think the problem I have with this whole thing is that CATL is like super close lipped about the exact details of what they've done to make their sodium ion batteries as good as they are to make them competitive with LFP. I'm keeping my eye out on that. I'm hoping somebody figures it out because I'd love to know. But yeah, it really comes down to them just making it competitive with existing technologies finally.
Sean Ferrell: And is this a major step forward in this becoming. Let's say it's all true. Like they did it, they made something that, let's not even say it's on par with the battery you have in your house. Let's say it's 75% as good, but it costs $1,000 as opposed to $10,000.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Does that then become. This is a little bit of a speculative, you know, put on your sci fi hat and let us know what the future looks like if that happens. Does this become a. Well, probably most homes would simply have one. And it then becomes a means of providing not just reliable power for a home during something where there's a power outage of some sort, but it then encourages more of an expansion of sustainable energy production on the homeowner's side. Because, well, if a battery is that cheap and solar panels are as cheap as they are, why not? Even if it's not the most efficient thing in the world, just slapping a panel on the roof of your house and putting a battery in your garage, why not? And then it becomes part of our norm. Is that what this potentially does?
Matt Ferrell: Yep. It's like as soon as you yeah, this is a simple answer. It's like as soon as the prices hit those commodity level prices, you know, like the things that we have in our daily lives that we don't even think about, like, that are just parts of our homes. You know, everybody has a water heater in their house. Like everybody has a, you know, refrigerator. It's like once we hit those prices that make them affordable for everybody. This is the time where it's the potential of every home just has one in their garage. Maybe it's not enough energy storage to carry you for 24 hours without in a blackout, but maybe it's enough to carry you through a short blackout of a couple of hours. It's enough that you wouldn't need like natural gas peaker plants on the grid. Because, like, energy use spikes in the early evening when people come home from work and they're cooking dinner and the sun is going down. So in those hours of like, you know, 6 o' clock to like 9 o' clock at night, energy use spikes and then it drops off the cliff overnight when people are in bed. So what if every house had just enough storage to shave off that peak? You'd need fewer power plants. It would offset the weird duck curve that's created from renewables like solar panels. So yes, these kind of prices are what makes that future possible. And I've made this. I've been on a couple of podcasts recently talking about this stuff. And it's like when you look at all the data, it's like when you talk about virtual power plants. There is a huge case to be made for putting a battery in every house versus building gigantic battery farms for the grid. So imagine if every home, every apartment building had some level of storage in it. So it'd be a small cost for those massive buildings all over the place and they work together in conjunction with each other. It would be transformational for the grid.
Like absolutely transformational.
Sean Ferrell: Comments like this from Taffy Geek and Taffy Geek, I gotta say, I like your username. I don't understand the origin of it, but I'm all for it. So Taffygeek writes, if batteries fall to $10 per kilowatt hour, they don't need to last forever, as long as the battery pack is easily swapped out. You could swap out the battery pack three times during your lifespan of the car. And as long as the swap is easy, still be half the price of LFP. We already accept shocks, brakes, exhaust, and even the starter battery in ICE cars need to be replaced several times during the life of a car. I think that this is a very good thing to point out that the more we can develop a component mindset to products like an electric vehicle, the idea of maintenance becomes easier to interpret and decipher. Well, what do you do with an electric vehicle? Well, if you can swap out the battery pack, yeah. It becomes easier to say. I could see the length, the longevity of this vehicle being almost past my own lifespan. If all you had to do is maintain like, well, the frame isn't really breaking down. So if we swatch out the battery pack and all the moving parts keep moving, this thing could last for forever. But are they building them like that? That's the question.
Matt Ferrell: The answer to that is, in some cases, no. But the thing I would push back on this is, and there's a misconception by a lot of people, and it's understandable why we have experiences with our phones. My battery on my phone doesn't feel the same in year two that it did when I got it new, and I have to go to the store and get the battery swapped out because it's absolute garbage. There's a huge difference between that which has one battery in it that is getting hammered, because you're probably charging it to 100% and then draining it down to 5%, and you're hammering it, which is going to make the battery's lifespan shorter, versus a battery pack in a car, which is made up of thousands of cells, which are managed by a battery management system that is doing its best to spread the load around those different cells to make them last longer. And you're typically not charging your EV up to 100% and then going down to zero. You're typically going 80 down to 30 or 70 down to 50. You're bouncing around this middle range, which is much better for a battery pack. You're not stressing it by pushing it to the edges. Battery packs in cars today, the batteries that already exist, the battery that's in my car, in my garage, could last 300,000 miles, 400,000 miles. I don't know about you, Sean, but I know in internal combustion engine cars, the engine will most likely not last that long. You might actually have to swap an engine out of a car to after a few hundred thousand miles. So the battery I already have in my car today could theoretically last way longer than an engine of current technology cars. And this is why I come back to EVs are just like the smarter technology. Lower maintenance, longer lifespan. But there's this perception that batteries don't last long. They have to be swapped out. So as Taffy Geek makes the point. Yeah, 100%.
Like if you make these batteries so cheap and they're more componentized so that you can replace them easily, that makes it even better. So it's like having car car frames and car bodies that could theoretically last for a million miles of driving. That's a generational car. Yeah, you know what I mean? That's a car I buy and then like my kid has. You know what I mean? It's like that's.
Sean Ferrell: You have to put it in your will along with your gray parrot because both of them will live longer than you.
Matt Ferrell: I know.
Sean Ferrell: On the topic of whether or not we can depend on what the producers of the batteries tell us, effectively saying, can we trust what CATL is? Taylor Moon jumps into the comments and says and yet again I find myself impressed, Matt. You got people in the industries paying attention to your channel. This is terrific. Thank you Taylor for dropping by. I work in the battery industry and there's a few points I would have liked to see you include. First, the most important thing to me is that these have been tested by a third party, which they have. So many battery companies will make outlandish claims that it's not worth getting excited about anything until somebody else proves the results. Second, I think it's important context that experts predict that at least in the US markets, EVs will not out compete combustion engine cars until we get energy densities far greater than NMC, let alone LFP or this new technology. You're absolutely right to point out the utility of pairing this with other chemistries or using this for home backup. But I remain skeptical of shifting the market toward low energy density EVs. But maybe I'm biased because I work for a lithium sulfur startup. So Taylor, thank you for the comment. You cover a lot of really, really cool stuff to talk about now and you also even point out your own potential bias. So like, great approach to giving us feedback. Thank you so much for that. So Matt, on any of these points, what is your thinking? Like, are you seeing what Taylor is saying and you're like yep, yep, yep or is there anything there that you're like that's not quite where I'm standing when I when I think about these topics.
Matt Ferrell: First, I love Taylor's input here. It's awesome to hear from somebody in the industry say something like this. I completely agree with him, having a third independent third party verify claims is essential. Need that 100%. The one area where I kind of like would push back is how important he thinks longer ranged EVs are essential for adoption here in the U.S. When you look at the statistics, the average miles per day driven and yes, miles. I'm going to do Imperial here folks, not meters, metric system here. When you're talking about mileage driven, it's 50 miles a day on average. 50 miles. It's like I don't need a thousand mile range car. It's like there's a balance that has to be struck somewhere in here of how many miles do you need on your car? Are you somebody that goes on long road trips every week? Then yeah, you're going to need a longer range car. But if you're the average person in the United States, if you had a car that had 150 mile range on it, it's going to work as a daily driver, no question. Because you drive to work, you drive home, you drive the store, you drive home, you plug it in overnight, next morning you get up and you've got a fully charged car. Do it again. I push back on that mindset of the amount of miles that a car has, the range it has is super important. If we have good fast charging infrastructure which is currently being built out right now. Yeah. So like even my car, which has 300 miles of range is plenty. It's like I can drive to visit you, Sean, no problem. Because there's dozens of EV chargers, fast chargers on the way to New York City that I can stop at and charge up 15 minutes, go on my way. So I kind of push back on that. I would say it's probably more important to have robust, long lasting batteries in a car that can charge quickly for things like that.
Because if you can charge your car quickly, it relieves the need for having a battery pack that can go 1,000 miles.
Sean Ferrell: Right here's where I land somewhat in Taylor's camp and I am throwing, I'm going to throw out a bunch of stuff and I'm not going to do anything to follow up on it.
Matt Ferrell: Okay. I like it.
Sean Ferrell: That is my prerogative. As I mean this is where when you look at Matt and me, for any of our regular viewers or listeners, there's a lot of overlap. Obviously you can take Matt and I and put us in a room together and ask us for our opinions and our takes and our interests and there's going to be a whole lot of overlap. But where there's a, a massive divergence is I land happily in the. I'm gonna make shit up and write fiction. And I'm gonna do anything I want in there because it's fiction and I can make stuff up. And Matt's like, yeah, but what does reality look like? Let's get down to the hard brass tacks and talk about reality. And I'm like, reality, reality. So that's where Matt and I diverge a bit. So I'm going to throw out some stuff and I'm not going to follow up on any of it. But I think it would be interesting to know in the research around this topic, are they asking people how much do you drive? And are they asking people, how much do you think you drive? Yeah, that's the leverage point that I think is being missed in the EV marketing. And I see it in car commercials. They talk about Bibbidi, Bobbidi, boo. Here's how the car is like, here's our new electric vehicle. It's the electric version of our older vehicle. Here's the F150, blah, blah, blah. Here's this car. None of them are marketing from a to meet your needs, which are probably not what you think. And it's about how much do people think they drive and how much of our consumption of vehicles is built around a misunderstanding of what we actually need. Because I think that's playing a part here because you just said it yourself. If you have a vehicle that can do 150 miles and you drive, let's. Let's even expand it past the 50 miles a day. Let's make it. I drive 120 miles a day. 150 mile vehicle is going to meet my needs.
But I've got some like ungodly commute where I'm commuting 60 miles every day to get to work and then coming home. But if I plug it in overnight, I'll be fine. But that is a fundamental change in the mindset from the person who has a car that they only have to go to the gas station once a week and they don't think of fueling up their car as well. I'm plugging in every night. Somebody who thinks I'm gonna have to plug it in every night. That's gonna cost me as much as gas. They're gonna be wrong.
Matt Ferrell: Yes, very.
Sean Ferrell: But they're gonna think that. They're gonna think, you mean I have to plug this in seven days a week. That's gonna cost me just as much as gas would. And I just think that the EV marketing is missing the actual target. They are trying to say. And Taylor's comment I think reflects this. The thinking is a EV car needs to walk and quack just like an ICE car. And it doesn't, as you keep pointing out, it doesn't need to walk and quack like that. But the marketing and the companies that are developing these products seem to think, yeah, that's the only way to get there, to make it walk and quack like an ICE car. Well, it's. And I think there's.
Matt Ferrell: You're talking about feels. Yeah, it's like there's the logic and then there's the feels. And the feels. People are like, 300 miles is not enough. It's like, well, what is the mileage that's enough that would make you go, oh, it's 500 miles. That's. That's probably more than enough than I need.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Like, if you just think about it, like, how far can you drive a one tank of gas in your car? Yeah, nobody thinks like that.
Sean Ferrell: Nobody thinks there's a gas station.
Matt Ferrell: There's a gas station.
Sean Ferrell: People think about the convenience of, like, how often do I go to the gas station? I only go once a week. You mean I'm gonna have to plug this in constantly? Well, that seems like garbage, but that's.
Matt Ferrell: Kind of my point of, like, the fast charging. It's like if you saw an EV fast charger in every corner, even though we don't technically need it, but you saw them everywhere and you heard, oh, this EV can charge up to full in like, 10 minutes, five minutes. You start, you might start to go, oh, it's not different from what I'm doing today. And so it's like, to me, it's not only the mileage, it's the whole experience. And once people can kind of wrap their feels around the, oh, I see EV chargers at the Target parking lot and over here and at work and over there. If they understand that, oh, charging this car is not going to be an issue, they'd be comfortable with it. But right now, that is an issue of, like, I don't think I can charge this everywhere. So I need a car that has huge range. So I don't think it's as simple as it's just mileage or anything. But the range anxiety, the feels 100% real. And EV companies are not marketing it in a way to make that clear. Yes. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I agree with you on the topic of why a transition to a new technology may not be dependent upon the economics of an older tech. And this is in response to a question that Matt asks in the video at 10 minutes he asks why would we switch to a new technology when the old one just got cheaper? In reference to lithium batteries having had their own price drop. And Ron jumps into the comments to point out source and profit are why people would do that. CATL is China owned. It now has 13 plants in China even though they do have some production in other countries. China is number three in lithium production with numbers around half of the leader, Australia. But guess what? China does lead in the production and development of various key cathode materials for sodium ion batteries. If the market is dropping for lithium, they will create a new market as leaders. So here's an answer to the question of why. Because production in and of itself can drive production. It's a weird, it's, I mean effectively it's, if you build it, they will come like they start building these things to build other things and then eventually they build the market for both as a result. Is that part of what you see in your research?
Matt Ferrell: Yes, 100% yes. But the problem with that though is it takes a company like CATL to have the wherewithal to push that. Do you know what I mean? Like you're not going to get a little startup that does this. It's going to take either a government to do it or a large battery manufacturer that can take the hit. The operational costs of spinning it up because they see the long term vision. So it's like I agree 100% with that point of view. But it's also there's a reason why we see CATL and BYD, both Chinese companies, trying to push into sodium like this because they see the future of they need to do this to build it and they will come kind of a thing. They clearly have that vision for sodium ion batteries. And it's just, I just wish there was, me personally, this is not about the just general CATL stuff. It's just like I wish we were seeing this in the US, I wish we were seeing this in more places because right now China is just driving, it's driving the bus. We're all on board and China's driving around and yeah, here's where we're gonna go with batteries next. So it's like, okay, here we go.
Sean Ferrell: Also there was a brief discussion on AI which broke out in the comments, but not about anything having to do with our conversations. They were more about, well, us. Larry Stone jumped into the comments to say, I don't know what to make about this channel. It seems legit, but each episode is about some world changing technology available now. Yet here we are in the same world. To which Gravemind jumped in to say to Larry, I'm pretty sure this dude is AI, but then again so is everyone. Well, for his grave mind, I don't think that's necessarily true that everybody is AI, but I will point out that I remember when Matt was a child.
Matt Ferrell: So.
Sean Ferrell: If he is in fact AI, I don't know what to make of that. What does that mean about me? Thank you both for jumping into the comments. There was a lot of response to Larry's initial comment with people pointing out the gist of your channel. I don't think you need to weigh in unless you feel like you want to. But but Larry's question raised a lot of responses from people saying like look, he's sharing where technology seems to be headed and what might happen. He's not talking about things like snap of the fingers getting better. But thank you Larry for jumping to the comments. We do appreciate it. And Gravemind for what I am fairly sure was a deeply in cheek tongue comment. Thank you for your comment as well. And as always this is becoming a trend with me. I enjoy sharing what I think is the best worst comment in the comments for the episode and jopo jumps in and jopo, I believe you've had the best worst comment a couple of times. I haven't been tracking this but your name seems familiar so I believe you are a multi winner. JoPo jumps into the comments to say this sounds great but if you get in a car accident you could be charged with a salt in battery. I'll see myself out. Thank you JoPo for seeing yourself out and not forcing me to do it for you. Listeners. What did you think about this conversation? What did you think about Matt's previous video? Let us know in the comments. As you can tell, your comments really do drive the content of this program. We thank you for them and don't forget liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends while commenting. All are very appreciated and easy ways for you to support the program. 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 of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads.
We appreciate the welts which are real because we are not AI and then we get down to the heavy heavy business of talking about salt. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.