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Matt talks with Two Bit Da Vinci and Ziroth about Donut Lab’s new battery, the controversy around it, and what they think it actually might be.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Breakthroughs My Net Zero Home is Missing https://youtu.be/hb2x5VcUT0I?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7FwYRnWkpCSkAeFOzrgh5h
Matt talks with Two Bit Da Vinci and Ziroth about Donut Lab’s new battery, the controversy around it, and what they think it actually might be.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Breakthroughs My Net Zero Home is Missing https://youtu.be/hb2x5VcUT0I?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7FwYRnWkpCSkAeFOzrgh5h
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 going to be covering a wide range of topics because we are legion. That's right. It's not just two of us, it's four of us. Technically, it's three of us and me. And who am me? I'm Sean Ferrell. Welcome to the Still To Be Determined podcast. This is a follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. You'll never guess who the host of that is. That's right, Matt Ferrell. And he's here with me now. Matt, how are you doing today?
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing really well. How about you?
Sean Ferrell: I'm doing okay. I'm looking forward to you and I will be talking in a few minutes. For the viewers, it'll be more than a few minutes, but a little bit later you and I will be talking about some comments on your most recent, which was your exploration into some of the things that you did in your new home that maybe you would have done differently if you had known then what you know now. But that will be later because right now we're excited to be able to share with you a long form conversation between Matt and two of his friends, Ricky Roy from Two Bit Da Vinci and Ryan Hughes from Ziroth. The three of them got together, they've been talking and making videos about the Donut Labs battery. So they got together, they chatted a bit about what do they think it is? What do they think about what's going on? This is not a new topic for this channel. It's not a new topic for their channels. I don't know that this is going to go away until the battery is literally in everybody's hands. So we're excited now to share Matt's conversation with Ricky and Ryan as they dive into a Donut. What?
Matt Ferrell: All right, guys. I'm joined today by two good friends of mine. Ricky Roy from Two Bit Da Vinci and Ryan Hughes from Ziroth. They're both YouTubers. We talk about similar topics a lot and thought it'd be fun to have a conversation with these guys about Donut Lab, particularly because both of them have been publishing lots of videos and takes on Donut Lab compared to what I've been doing. And they have a lot more knowledge about this space than I do. So I was hoping to talk to you both, but before we get into that, just kind of introduce yourselves. Let's start with Ricky. How many times have you changed your take on Donut Labs at this point?
Ricky Roy: That's a great question.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.
Ricky Roy: So, hi, I'm Ricky. I run the YouTube channel Two Bit Da Vinci. And interestingly, yeah, we were talking about this. You either know who I am, because Matt and I did this podcast called Vice Versa, which was a lot of fun. And we do a lot of similar topics, like over the years, and invariably every year there'll be three or four episodes where somebody will say, oh, great, all you do is watch Matt Ferrell's videos and copy them because we'll have the same schedule where topics will overlap. But yeah, Matt has been one of my absolute best friends and it's a pleasure to be here.
Matt Ferrell: Ryan, We've met first for the first time face to face at CES a couple years ago. And this year you kind of made yourself known in the Donut Labs booth by harassing them so much that they brought you up to other people that were visiting the booth. What do you think they think of you now?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Those poor people at that booth got an absolute earful from me. I was so curious. I just, I kept going over them and be like, okay, just to get some details. And I'd leave, come back and be like, sorry, just to confirm, did you say that? Oh, God. I pestered the poor people there for hours to try and get as much info as possible so I could share it online. I'm in discussions a bit with the CTO on LinkedIn, like relatively frequently. We've been having some chats and he's a great guy. Um, but clearly we have different views on, on certain things. I'm not sure he would say in private, but to me he's been great. So I think they're all a little bit frustrated with me sharing my opinions online, but I'm quite happy to do. To do that. Anyway, I've been sharing my opinions online about Clean Tech on Ziroth, which is my YouTube channel, for about five years now. I started the YouTube channel just before my PhD when I was doing my Master's, inspired by Matt and Ricky, to be honest, watching these guys making awesome content. So then I decided, yeah, I'll start chipping in, go really technical. Me and Ricky both like to get really into the really technical stuff. And over five years, throughout the PhD it grew. So now since finishing my PhD, it's become the full time thing whilst I travel around a bit too.
Matt Ferrell: To kick this conversation off, why don't we just start with like. I'm curious to hear both of you say this, like, what your gut reaction was when Donut first came out with Their announcement, like, Ryan, what was your first gut reaction when you heard what they were proposing?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, gut reaction when I got to the booth, saw all of the claims together, was just like, no way that that was in. Which is why I was so curious because I just thought, I think I instantly understood the gravity of how important this would be because it's just been something as we all, as we all have been looking into for so many years. And I think some people may be, if you're more like on the sidelines of clean tech or it's just a hobby interest you. You probably saw the battery and thought, wow, this is really cool. But to me, I was like, no, this is like world changing cool. And so it instantly hit me and then I thought, there seems to be no trade off in the battery. And that was the first thing for me where I was like, I don't know, this smells, smells strange to me. But, you know, we still don't have any definitive proof of anything. But that was definitely my first reaction.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What about you, Ricky? What was your gut reaction when you first heard what they were saying?
Ricky Roy: Yeah, I thought it was interesting to do it at CES, which is just such a public spectacle, especially if you're not like, truthful and what you have is not actually verifiable. Just seems like a weird stage to start with, especially because, you know, the argument we've probably seen in our comments is that is deployed to like raise capital or, or some, you know, like, devious plot or something. But if you're going to come to CES and say that there's going to be such scrutiny and there's going to be like such a, like a broad net cast that it didn't make sense that they'd be lying about it. So I kind of started the other way around and I said, okay, this is true. What does it mean? And to, to Ryan's point, like, in engineering, there's typically, there's pretty much always a trade off. Like, you have to choose the best parameters for what you're trying to solve for. But in this case, if it's lithium free and there's no, like, exotic materials and it's easy to make and they've, you know, the energy density is higher than batteries of today and it lasts a hundred thousand, it all just seems hard to justify just from the battery world. And so my first thought was they've done something with like a new electrolyte, like some sort of like a salt electrolyte, or they've done something novel. And my thought was, it was maybe more obvious than people thought. Like, you know, sometimes you, you, you pursue these weird things and then sometimes what you need to do is just kind of step back and go, but hold on. And then there's some little mini breakthrough or something. So I was optimistic, but at the same time thinking, you know, when are we going to know more? And if they're a small company, it'll probably be a while. So I was kind of equal parts optimistic and, and, and skeptical.
Matt Ferrell: I think you both have been taking very interesting approaches to your videos. Like for me, I dropped one video kind of like summarizing my general thoughts. You guys have been putting up more videos. It seems like, Ryan, you're trying to go down that path of what is the battery. You're trying to figure out exactly what it is. And then, Ricky, you've been doing weekly videos. Almost every drop you've been doing a response to. But yours isn't trying to prove or disprove what they're showing. It's almost like a fascination around the engineering of how testing like this happens, what it could possibly mean. So you've taken different tacks and like, I loved how you're both going at it. What motivated you to go down that path for you Ricky?
Ricky Roy: Ryan. Ryan's have been very entertaining, for sure. I love that. The tinfoil hat in the last one for you.
Matt Ferrell: I love that part. I love it so much.
Ricky Roy: And by the way, that $5,000 bet, you better, you better stick with that and, and you better pay up if, if they turn out to be true.
Ryan Inis Hughes: So the money's ready. The money's ready.
Ricky Roy: I actually just kind of miss engineering. So before the YouTube channel, I was a software engineer, which was, which was engineering, but not really, you know, it's not the same as, like when I was a mechanical engineer, I used to do things like this. So for me, it's just been kind of fun. I will say at this point, like week five, you know, it's not as fun as it was like the second episode, for example. But it has been fun just to be an engineer again and just look at it. And to Matt, your point, I'm not trying to disprove or prove it at all. I'm just enjoying the test methodology. So the last, the fifth test just dropped this morning. I don't know if you guys got a chance to look at it yet, but there's some interesting insight there. I mean, they shared some things that they probably didn't have to. Like the, you know, in test two, the pouch had kind of opened up, lost vacuum, which means it's kind of a compromised cell. And they shared that it actually swelled up in volume about 17%. That is a. I mean, they wouldn't have to disclose that. They could have just said it worked fine.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Right.
Ricky Roy: But they're. They're sharing odd details. That, again, to me, is kind of a good sign. But I'm just enjoying the process of being an engineer and trying to, like, figure out what we can. But at the same time, there's so many unknowns. You really. It's like having too many. Like, it's just too undeterministic to be able to make any, like, really concrete claims. But it could be fun to. To see what is potentially going on.
Ricky Roy: So it's been, it's just been a blast.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What about you, Ryan? Like. Like, why did you choose the. I mean, to me, it seems the answer is obvious, but why don't you share with everybody else, like, why you decided to go down the path you've gone down?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, I mean, to Ricky's point, a hundred percent agree. This is just a blast. Like, it is super fun. Like, when does clean tech have some kind of investigative journalism crossed with, like, data? I was like, this is the coolest thing. Like, this is so fun. And it's been. Regardless of whatever comes out, it's been a really useful vehicle to talk about loads of engineering, how things are tested, how data can be analyzed. Like, all of these things is a great activity. Then me and Rick, you've had, like, different takes on it, which has been great as well, because then everyone has different places to get their information on and at the end of the day, make their own mind up. Like, I'm kind of trying to convince people that what I think is right in my videos just because, like, clearly I think it's right. So therefore, I'm gonna say you should think that too. Like, otherwise, why would I think that? But it's not. I'm not really trying to argue it in that way, because just for the sake of it, it's more like I want to chuck that information into the. Into the ring. So then you can combine it with the information Donut Labs have shared. Ricky, shared whoever, like, all the other theories and ideas. And it just creates this, like, pile of knowledge that people can then at least make their own mind up from. Because I guess my concern with some of the coverage was that the scientific literature sometimes was being slightly misrepresented or misunderstood, being pulled into it, or maybe there was some things that had been forgotten. And I just wanted to pull them all together and bring more data to the table rather than any particular narrative. And I deeply, deeply wanted to understand what on earth they were doing. That is, like, fundamentally, I was just like.
And that's why I think I got really excited about the pseudo capacitor theory that has since been clearly debunked or proven not to be true. But the reason I got more excited about that one was because I don't know anything really about pseudocapacitors. I've never looked at them. So I was like, who knows? Maybe this could be a pseudocapacitor? And that's when. I know. When we had dinner together, we all spoke about it at CES, and that was a cool theory. And I think I got less excited when that was nipped in the bud because I was like, I. I know there's nothing in the literature that backs up what's being claimed by Donut Labs. And that's kind of the point, because if there was something in the literature that. That backed this up, then, you know, we wouldn't be having these discussions. So all I'm trying to do is bring all of the things that are in the literature to. To the forefront and say, this is the current state of the art. Clearly, it doesn't align with what Donut Lab's saying. However, that doesn't mean, like, there isn't a world where. Sorry, there could be a world where there's something that has never been brought up in the literature that has completely come from left field.
Like, I'm not 100% ruling it out, but I'm ruling it out enough to say, I'll bet five grand.
Matt Ferrell: It seems like it's like a doctor saying to you, they're not going to say, we can cure you or we can't. There's like, a 70% chance. That's how I feel about this. Oh, there's. Yeah, it could be out of left field, but there's like, a 5% chance that's going to happen. It's like 95%. It's something we already know about.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, exactly what you're feeling like. Yeah, exactly. The chance was small enough that I thought it was worth taking the risk and having a bit of fun with it. And who knows? Everyone knows what my theory is if they've seen my video. If not, I think the. The cell they're testing has all the characteristics of a lithium ion cell. And one of the cool things that this whole discussion has led me to is to seeing how advanced lithium ion cells have got as well, like is, I think some of the claims, or not even claims, some of the things Donut Labs have proven to be true about their cell, which by no, like, I don't want to mince my words, is a really cool cell. Like, whatever cell they have testing is a really cool cell. But what it made me do was think, okay, what is the current state of the art of lithium ion? And I was just like, wow, it's really come along in the last five years. Like, there's this kind of narrative with batteries that we're always fired 10 years away from a new thing. But there's actually a huge amount of stuff that's been in the literature for a decade that has now come to fruition. That means we can have lithium ion cells that operate at minus 30, minus 25 degrees C, up to 80 degrees C without, without damage. High energy densities above 400 watt hours per kg. These are all possible with current lithium ion cells. And I didn't fully appreciate that. 10C fast charging. It's just really, really impressive stuff. And I'm here to represent all of the work of people that have invested time into getting those breakthroughs. And if Donut Labs have surpassed all of them, then power to them. I am the first person that will be buying one of those motorcycles. Me and Ricky have spoken before. We both ride bikes. Have ridden bikes.
Even if they just put the cells that they're testing in the lab in this bike, which it seems like they've done, I personally don't think it will therefore meet the cycle life requirements. And I don't think it will be free of rare earth critical elements. Forgetting that that is a really, really cool bike. Like, that is a. Like that is by far the best electric bike I've seen. And I've been, you know, I've been a motorcyclist for over a decade and into clean tech for a similar amount of time. So I know the electric bike market. And this is, I mean, Verge have always been like the best of the best.
Matt Ferrell: That's something. I think it gets lost in this conversation because people seem to be falling into two camps of either lab or they're saying it's all BS and they're scammers and they're just trying to get money. And there's a nuance here where it's like the battery cell they've got is very impressive. So even if it doesn't meet all the checkboxes that they're claiming they can tick. It's still a damn impressive sell and something that we should be kind of excited about regardless. But then there's the marketing aspect of it that's really kind of like taking everything over. And that's personally where my fascination with this is. It's not necessarily the battery itself you just brought up.
Ricky Roy: There's.
Matt Ferrell: There's lithium ion cells that out there that do a lot of this stuff already. Like, I've done videos in the past about Amprius. This is not a theoretical cell. It's being sold today. I talked to the CEO at CES. They've been selling batteries now for a couple of years, and it's over 400 watt hours per kilogram. It's like, this is not theoretical stuff. It's. It's actual products. But the cycle life on that battery is. You're talking low thousands, not a hundred thousand. And that's where Donut Lab is getting kind of like into the. Wait, what do you. Wait, you're claiming something that doesn't seem physically possible, but just to kind of recap they've been doing was that the tests they've released are fast charging, self discharging, a high temperature, the real world motorcycle charging. And then just today when we're recording this, they released. What's the one they released today, Ricky?
Ricky Roy: It's like a safety test.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Safety testing.
Ricky Roy: They took that test tube with the high temp and saw how it played out with 50 more charge cycles after.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, and all of us have commented in all of our videos that this is VTT, a very reputable company, but they're being paid for by Donut Lab. This is not validation by a third party. This is just proving specific things that they wanted tested. And so I'm curious, what tests do you think would need to be. What's. What's still missing from what they're releasing? That would just settle debate. Just completely settle it. What do we need to see?
Ricky Roy: Well, I mean, by the way, the next test is. It's been every seven days, like clockwork, for the last five, Right? Every. Every test has been seven days apart. This next one falls on April Fool's Day.
Matt Ferrell: I know, I know. I don't know what to make of this.
Ryan Inis Hughes: I'll tell you.
Ricky Roy: I'll tell you what, though, Matt, to your point, if this battery doesn't work out, they should just become like a marketing firm. They'll crush it. Like for sustainable tech, for kind of nuanced, nerdy things like this. Like they've captured the attention of people in a way that is very interesting. So for me, I think the obvious one, and I've looked at the comments and kind of looked at what questions remain. It's obvious, right? It's the biggest claim I think people care about. Number one would have to be the energy density. To Matt's point though, the 400 number is not ludicrous. They're not saying 800, which would be like what, how are you getting such a order of magnitude? But weigh the cell and then give us a sense of the energy density. I think that's the number one question. Obviously the number two. Well, for me, number two is just like the chemistry. Like tell us what this thing is in, you know, in at least vague terms like is it, is it a sodium battery? Is it, you know, is it aluminum battery? Because they're not going to give, you don't give us the exact composition of what kind of ceramic you have or you know, the electrolyte or something, but give us a sense of, of the thing. And then finally the cycle testing. There's a lot of, it's kind of tricky to, to nail that down. How they would test it. Is it a full zero to a hundred, a hundred thousand cycles? Is it cycling from, you know, like I don't know how they came up with some of those numbers, but there's three. Those two tests would tell you pretty much everything. For me also, I'd love to see that cold weather test. There's probably some chemistry insight you could gain from that. I was really hoping after the hot temp, that'd be the next test. Not every test has been as fun as all the others. Like the self discharge. That could have been an addendum on another test.
There was no reason to have a week just for that. Those are the ones I'd want to see.
Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ryan?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, 100% agreement. April 1st is just hilarious.
Ricky Roy: Yeah, it's all just been a joke. Have we just been.
Ryan Inis Hughes: It's gonna be the CEO CTO just riding together on a bike, putting up April Fools. Oh man, I, I, I'd love to see that. The, my guess is that it's kind of like, you know, this whole thing's been quite playful and, and quite like trolley for one of a better word. And my guess is that they're gonna do the weighing and have the, the 400 watt hours per kilogram claim on April 1st. And I think that would be their like slam dunk, like because it is like Ricky said he's, you've seen all the comments. It's it's the number one thing like weigh the damn thing. I saw a comment earlier that was like you never ask a woman her age or a donut, Donut Labs to measure their battery. Which I thought was great and I, I think that they'll get, I think they'll have third party validation weighing it and showing 400 more or less watt hours per kilogram. That's my guess because it's kind of. It'll be like the biggest like FU to some of the, the doubters as far as I'm concerned. I, I know that that's possible with Amprius or similar cells. Specifically the chemistry I'm betting on is one lithium. Financially I've put money on there but more specifically I reckon it's probably an MC with a silicon composite or enhanced anode. So that would be similar to like that is what we'd expect about 400 watt hours per kilogram. What we would then have is low cycle life. So for me the real tests I'm actually looking for because I think they, I think they will release my. That was my, that's my guess on April 1st it's going to be 400 watts per kilogram. What I'm really interested in is the cycle life is, is in terms of a test of the cell that you could physically do. But I don't know. I actually just don't know enough about cycle life cell testing to know how you would infer that without physically doing all those cycles.
I presume there's some kind of extrapolation but even like 5,10,000 cycles would be pretty like damn impressive. But then fundamentally I just want someone to do some chemical testing. I always butcher the name but it's like electron spectro microscopy or something. There's a solid state battery that me and Matt have like analyzed before together in a video. And when I was at university doing my Ph.D. we took one of the cells from the manufacturer and interestingly the manufacturer was the one that sent it all. The, you know, the, the person. Yes, the, the company taking the cell and putting it in a product. They were the one which, which is from what I can tell roughly a similar position to Donut Labs in terms of they've got a cell potentially from a third party or they're not fully involved in the deep tech side of the chemistry and they're putting it in their product. It was the same thing with this company. They, they had taken a solid state cell that they thought was a solid state cell. They were so confident in it they sent it to me to do a test. Me and my friend Howard put it in the lab. The lab got all of the chemical composition and it was not a solid state battery.
Matt Ferrell: It's more semi solid state.
Ryan Inis Hughes: It was like. Yeah, yeah, but it had like some. It was like again, a really cool cell, but just not what they thought it was. And this is kind of why, you know, maybe that's confirmation bias, but it is kind of leading me down that potential path that I think donut labs are confident in their cell. And I'm not sure there's a way to test or to prove either way without the chemical composition. So for me, that's the only thing I really care about at this stage. But the cycle life again would be cool for me.
Matt Ferrell: I'm curious about what the chemistry is. I'm just curious. But to me, it's the life cycle that's the most important one. Because like in my video that I put together, I interviewed Professor Mircea Dincă about his experience in this. And the way he described to me I thought was so perfect. It was chemistry wants to destroy itself. Like the battery cell is literally trying to rip itself apart as it's doing its thing where a capacitor is not, which is why you can go a hundred thousand cycles and it's just fine. But a lithium cell dies after 2,000 cycles. And because of that, it's like this scale. It's like you can have one, you can't have the other. And their donut lab claiming it has both is what's making everybody go, what the hell are you doing? Because that's part of why it's like, the chemistry is interesting, but to me it doesn't matter so much as at doing what it says on the 10. So like the other battery you and I took apart, it was, it did what it said on the 10 as far as like cycle life and performance and all that kind of stuff. It met all this stuff. It just wasn't a true all solid state battery. And so it's like getting caught up on what the chemistry is is not as important to me as does it actually have a hundred thousand cycle life? Does it actually have 400 watt hours per kilogram? I think they're going to hit those numbers, all of those numbers. It's just the life cycle one that I'm like incredibly dubious about.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's on a capacitor. How could it last that long? It's not possible. So that's kind of where I'm stuck up on it.
Ryan Inis Hughes: That was definitely the, the One like figure. The rest of it is super impressive.
Ryan Inis Hughes: But that was the one figure that really jumped out at me. And yeah, like you said, I don't. I mean, I now care because I have five grand on the line of what the chemistry is. Yeah, but, but I don't actually like if it, ah. I mean, it's good not to have critical materials for a whole load of geopolitical and otherwise reasons, but if it met all of the other criteria that they've. That they've let out, set out, and it did have lithium, I would still like, that would still be amazing. That that is more important in my, in my opinion. But I'm also. Yeah, I'm just curious and I've been very public about speak in my mind of what I think it might be and putting predictions out there. Do you guys have any thoughts about what it could be or if there's. I've heard some hints from Donut labs, like the CEO shed Ricky's video and on LinkedIn and said, this guy's onto something. When you were sharing about the sodium ion sort of theories. And then I've seen. I've had messages with the CTO about it being like a completely different ball game. Like, he was basically like, you're thinking in the box and we're not even outside the box. We're in a different universe. So I'm intrigued. Yeah. If you guys have any thoughts.
Matt Ferrell: Well, mine is. I brought it up in the video that I put together, which is. It's Mirchudinka. He invented something called Tack. I don't think it is Tack, which is an organic sodium ion cathode material. I don't think it is that specific thing, but I think it might be in that family over there somehow, because Mir Dink has been doing stuff with like graphene and carbon nanotubes, just even like a 2% in the mix. And it has tremendous uptick. So I'm curious if that's in the realm of what they're doing. And part of what gives me a little like, maybe is after my video came out, Marko Lehtimäki, the CEO of Donut Lab, shared my video on LinkedIn and what he wrote. If you read between the lines of what he wrote, he basically said the mystery isn't solved, but basically they're getting closer. And so I was like, okay, okay, maybe we're starting to get on the right path now of what they're doing. What about you, Ricky? Yeah. So you're not putting $5,000 on the line. Don't worry. About it.
Ryan Inis Hughes: No idiot would do that. That's a stupid idea.
Ricky Roy: Yes.
Ryan Inis Hughes: You know, we've.
Ricky Roy: Yeah, we've had various opinions about what it could be and we've kind of seen them disprove and they've done a good job of that as well. Right. That self discharge test. See what you will. As far as it was kind of underwhelming. It did kind of put the capacitive capacitance aside and make us think, okay, chemical battery is what's happening here. I've always gotten the feeling from them and it's a bit smug, but if you have something killer and breakthrough, I think you, you're entitled to feel a little smug. But when I chatted with them even all the way back at CES to your. I think it was. Matt, you mentioned we're not even playing. Oh no, I think Ryan said it. We're not even playing in the box. Like we're so far in left field. That was the feeling I got from chatting with them. They said there's no lithium in this cell. Right. To your point about if they're not actually involved in the actual. The hardcore battery manufacturing process and there's like a third party component. They might not know, they might have been told that and be mistaken. But I feel like there's feel like there's like for example, you know, you look at the alkali in the first row of the periodic table, the first column, and you start looking at what the different things are. We now have sodium kind of start. We're starting to figure that out. We're starting to see batteries roll out with sodium ion batteries and that. You know, there's a whole slew of other potential candidates. I feel like there's something that we all just wrote off because it wouldn't work for some reason that. And that one reason was kind of solved, right? It was. There's something that's happened that has made pre conceived notions of what was not possible before suddenly possible. That's kind of my thought process from the very beginning. As far as what exactly. I wish I had a better answer for you.
I'm in the camp with Ryan. Like we've talked about trying to see if there's. Ryan chat with me because I had this graph in one of my early videos that was taken wrong. The video team made a mistake on one of the graphs. But we were trying to see like is there a way to make sodium work here? Is there a way to, you know, is there some exotic formulation that we haven't thought of yet? Or haven't seen yet. And I don't have a better answer for that. But at this point, what I'm trying to think is if there were, you know, it was kind of like, there's this really cool experiment that I always point out in science. I think it was Professor Lenski at Michigan State University did this test with, with like, I think it was like E. Coli or some other bacteria. And he had this whole thing. He, he tested out a bunch of test tubes and he put it, you know, and he wanted to see kind of how they propagated, how, how these, how these bacteria mutated and stuff. And then in one test, and this was done over like generations and generations with his lab team, but in one test tube, the population of the bacteria doubled. And he got mad because he figured some lab assistant screwed up something and he went back and looked like, no, there's nothing wrong here. And what he found out is that he kind of traced back to all the generations and he figured out that there was this mutation that happened in the bacteria early on. It happened in two vials. The other vial that didn't have the second mutation, nothing changed. But in this one particular strain, two back two mutations happen over again. It's like they clone every like 17 minutes. So there's thousands of generations here, but these two mutations happen. And it gave the E. Coli the ability to synthesize the citric acid, which was like a base, it was just part of their soup to float around.
And it wasn't supposed to be food, but it could metabolize citric acid. And all of a sudden the potential food source doubles and the amount of bacteria doubles, right? So what I always think is, this is what I think about whenever I think of science this way is a lot of life is like this, right? I mean, even just us being here talking on a webcam might have been imperceivable without a couple of these things kind of working out. So in my head I'm thinking there's maybe two things that no one's ever thought to put together. Maybe they've done it. I don't know. I, maybe I'm crazy. I don't have $5,000 on the line or any other financial incentive, but I'm wondering if there's something that they've done,
Matt Ferrell: you know, but again, that comes back to the, hey, maybe there's a 5% chance of that happening. And the other 95% is, it's, it's something that's already being done, but maybe less talked about that They've, you know, tapped into. Yeah, I'm, I'm just fascinated where this is going to go. Which brings me to them as them is a marketing machine. Like Donut Lab right now is a genius marketing machine. And this is my fascination with what's going on right now. It's like the fact that they've trickled the information out week to week, they're stringing this out. It's like, okay, I understand why they're doing this. It's keeping the hype cycle going. It's keeping us all on the hook. They're. They're leading right up to the motorcycle coming out. Everything about this makes marketing sense. I still can't square the damn circle on if they're lying, they're gonna get caught. Like, it's, there's no way around this. And if they're not lying, the tactics they're taking are the tactics scammers often take in hyping things and trying to get people invested into doing things. And again, I can't square the stupid circle on why they chose to do it the way that they're doing it, because it seems like they're gonna get screwed one way or another on how they're stringing us along. And it's a really risky game they're playing. I mean, what do you guys think about that? Like, Ryan, what do you think?
Ryan Inis Hughes: I've got a few thoughts on the topic. One is that the marketing, clearly, I mean, I've been watching this feels like a Netflix series that's dropping like a new episode. So, like, I'll be very much lying if I said they haven't got me. Um, so in that way I'm like, yeah, this is awesome. Like, I love the marketing. I then also flip flop between like, well, maybe it's. It is easier to market something that is earth shatteringly revolutionary so that there's, that doesn't discredit like the hype they've built. But I am also like, okay, it's easier to market something when it's so unbelievably, like, impressive or otherwise. The marketing cycle of it is, for better or worse, had me completely. I've fallen down into the funnel and I've been enjoying it. Maybe thought I had. Is, are they marketing the sell or are they marketing the motorcycle? And I mean, I have no idea what the answer is, but the, the only product, you know, offered to anyone really, unless you're a B2B consumer. And it sounds like that's a huge wait list if you're trying to get access to the cells, the only way to get your hands on these is through the motorcycle. That is, you know, a strange way potentially to first bring such a revolutionary thing to the market. But I'll allow it in this take because of the connection to Verge motorcycles. So like it's not like crazy weird if we follow my hypothesis of saying, is this a really impressive lithium ion cell that does a lot of the things they say can have this amazing fast charging which they, they showed at the charging station, like this is clearly very capable, has loads of benefits. If the motorbike got a range of 200 miles and the battery does last a thousand cycles or 1200 sort of way, I've seen some of these cells. That's like a quarter of a million miles on a motorbike. Like no one's. Not many motorbikes get to a quarter million miles.
Like I've got a motorbike, my motorbike's got about 30, 40,000 miles and it's like, well, okay, that's like starting to mature now. It's, it's a, in its middle age. So 200,000 miles on a motorcycle is a lot. So it doesn't really matter if they've got a hundred thousand cycles. So and, and it's a, it's an extremely premium motorcycle. So cheaper cells makes absolutely no difference is, you know, premium stuff. So all of this marketing, is it for the sell or is it for this motorcycle that whether the sales is real or not, is a really good motorcycle.
Matt Ferrell: I hadn't made that connection before and that to me makes me feel like Marco and his brother are playing three dimensional chess with how they're marketing this. Because one of the things that's been, one of the things that's been back in my mind around the cell specifically is they're hyping this and it's like you're hyping it to sell the cell. And no major company is ever going to buy this cell until it's absolutely proven rock solid. Toyota's never going to use it, VW is never going to use it. None of these people are going to use it. So why are you hyping the cell so much? And like by you saying, oh, is it marketing the motorcycle? It's like, yeah, they actually are marketing the motorcycle. And if the motorcycle proves out to be awesome and fantastic and then it shows itself to be rock solid, then you potentially start bigger players coming in and saying, oh, we want to try it too. This may just be the, they're looking a two years down the road for where they want their cells to be, to be able to sell it to a Toyota versus where it is now. But right now, we're stuck so in the weeds. It looks like they're just marketing the cell to hype the cell, but they're actually hyping the motorcycle. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. That's crazy.
Ryan Inis Hughes: I'm, like, one of the biggest, like, at least publicly anyway. One of the biggest, biggest people saying that I don't think this set is real, but, like, I'm probably one of the biggest target audience for the motorcycle, and I want that motorcycle, even though. Which is like the hilarious thing about it. And I mean, I've ridden the. The earlier generation Verge motorcycle, and that thing is a rocket. It’s awesome.
Matt Ferrell: I've also seen the argument that they're doing this to buy time. Like they're stringing us along to buy time. I don't. I don't buy that argument at all. Because the batteries take forever to develop. By buying themselves two months, suddenly they've got it figured out. It's like, no, if they don't have it figured out, they're not going to have it figured out in April or June or July. It doesn't matter. They're stringing us out a few weeks. But, Ricky, what's your take on how they're marketing this whole thing?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.
Ricky Roy: So, first of all, Ryan, I'm going to be in Europe, probably around Estonia in early August. We should write to them and tell them to give us two virgin motorcycles and we'll go ride all around Estonia. I got some. That'll be. That'll be fun. And we will promise not to tear it apart and rip up the cells.
Matt Ferrell: And that's a YouTube series I would be happy to watch.
Ricky Roy: So, yeah, as far as, as far as the marketing, motorcycles are just a. They're a pretty small market. It's not like with the right gasoline, you know, pardon my pun, that they're going to sell a million of these overnight or something. I think the people who want to buy electric motorcycles are going to buy them. And as far as, like, pushing that, the sales funnel, it's probably not going to be very impactful to what you said about as a, as a test bed. It is the perfect test bed. Right. Because it is a smaller pack. If there's other things to prove out, I think it's a great platform for that. You're not going to sell a million bikes this year. It's probably going to be in the tens of thousands or so. So the scale of it is just perfect for that. To your point about buying time, it could potentially be a manufacturing process problem. So I met with Quantumscape. I'm sure you guys have covered or, you know, looked in the Quantumscape and it took them a couple years to figure out how to take their solid state electrolyte and be able to manufacture it in any kind of a scale. Otherwise you, it would be such a slow process, like the bake process in particular, to finalize the form. It was taking them like 12 hours, six hours and so on a plant, if you're going to do that, you'd have to, here's the rest of the cell line. And then you'd have to allocate times the floor space to these ovens to bake this thing. And so the throughput just wouldn't make sense. The capex cost as a function of manufacturing output, it just wouldn't, wouldn't scale. Well, they got that down to like this 20 minute process. And that took them, I think, the better part of over a year, year and a half, two years to be able to figure out how to make this thing in some scale that they could have a, you know, a constant throughput of battery manufacturing for it to make sense.
So maybe it's a manufacturing thing, maybe they've got something that works, but there's some part that is just taking too long to be scalable in a meaningful way. And they're trying to figure that out. That's what makes this hard, guys. It's one thing to even make it work, to Matt's point that the chemistry is literally trying to rip this thing apart with every charge and discharge cycle, which is hard enough by itself. Now you also have to make it, you have to manufacture, you have to build the machines to make it. You have to put it into a line, have it come out and have a scrap rate sufficient enough for it to all be worth it, to be able to sell at any price that anyone would ever buy. That's all, that's all that guys. That's it. That's all we got to do. All we got to figure out is all of those things.
Matt Ferrell: It's funny you bring up the manufacturing because like when I talk to them, when I talk to them at CES, you know, they were like adamant, you know, this is all solid state. There's no liquid electrolyte and it's got no lithium. And we can print it in any kind of form we want. Like snowflakes like you talked about, Ryan it's, they talked about, with me about all of that and when I asked him, well, what's your capacity? Oh, we'll be at a 1 gigawatt hour production by the end of the year and then we'll be in tens of gigawatts by the following year. And when he said that, that's when my spidey senses was going off and going, oh, no, you're not. That's not happening. Because every company I've ever talked about, any CEO I've ever interviewed, CTO, it doesn't matter who it is, they all talk about manufacturing. Hell, you could have the best product ever made. But if you can't figure out how to scale it, scaling it up is the hardest part of doing the whole damn thing. And for them to come out and just be like, oh yeah, we got 1 gigawatt hour this year and we're going to be tens next year, it's like, that seems unlikely. So to me, that's probably where some of this might fall short, where even if they come out and say, yeah, the life cycle matches and we've hit the watt hours per kilogram and they're not going to be able to produce it the scale that think they can because there's going to be so many unknowns they're going to run into as they scale this up. It's. This is kind of crazy.
Ricky Roy: The two numbers that really got my spider senses tingling to your point, were the a hundred thousand charge cycles. If they had sent 10,000, I could have gone, okay, well an LFP is right in the 3 to 5,000 already.
Ryan Inis Hughes: 10,000.
Ricky Roy: Cool. You've done something cool. A hundred thousand just seems kind of ludicrous. It's almost immeasurable at that point. You call it infinity at that. Nothing's going to use it up.
Matt Ferrell: Lifetime battery.
Ricky Roy: Lifetime battery. Battery. Put a shell on top of it, change the car out. Yeah. The second is the manufacturing. You're telling me that a small little company of like 50 or 60 employees has figured out and you're going to scale to gigawatt hour capacity. That to me just seems ludicrous. Just from how much coverage we've done, the companies we've met with all the people, the three of us, between the three of us, we've covered so much of this tech. That just seems like, come on, it took Tesla was like years from, oh, we're going to have, we're going to have our own dry electrode process. Right? That took forever. It took years and years and years for them and and they're a trillion dollar company.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, the, the manufacturing of any company I've spoke to is just been the biggest headache. Like scaling up manufacturing just sounds horrific. And I think I've said in one of my videos like I'll, I'll give it a 0.1% chance of like, I mean you could say coming out where whenever but say say a 0.1% chance of coming out in the next like couple years. And which sounds like pretty bleak. But the way I was reasoning it as well is like well you've got with a general startup that has one big breakthrough, they've got a 10% chance of like success say and like when you stack together like you know a bunch of claims like no lithium, cheaper manufacturing, scaling up so fast like all of these things, if you times 10% together three times, you're at 0.1. And they've got a lot more than three claims. So it's again this whole thing of lots of things together but the manufacturing like god, they seemed very relaxed for people that were scaling manufacturing. From my experience talking to senior executives at companies.
Matt Ferrell: There is a question that's come up to me and I haven't had a good answer for folks. You guys will absolutely have a better answer than I could have. But a lot of the things that's come up is around VTT measurements showing that the cell was like was it 298 watt hours per kilogram that they're currently testing? That's the best guess we've got right now. That's obviously falling short of the 400 watt hours per kilogram. How can that circle be squared? Like how could it potentially be a 400 watt hours per kilogram pack that they're claiming they've got when the cell is only like basically 300.
Ricky Roy: I think Ryan, you'd, you mentioned that in one of your videos. I think that's based on the, the cell dimensions that we, we kind of saw. But there's no guarantee that that exact cell dimension is what they use in the testing. These could be like prototype cells or one offs and things. It could just be like different pouches or cells or you know, variations.
Ryan Inis Hughes: I think when I mentioned that in one of my videos, basically anything that I've said in the videos it's like on its own you could like disprove it or argue it. Like the 300 or 298 watt hours per kilogram. Yeah. Was like Ricky says just based on the tested capacity versus the cell weight they gave at CES which they said they were just working on one cell. And you know how much I spoke to them. They said they were working on one cell to drop in. But that might have not been completely accurate or they might be like plus or minus a bit in the cell. So I definitely, that's, that's far from enough evidence to have any conviction. But all of these data points that I've tried to like bring up, like voltage curves, energy densities, like all of these things on each one on their own isn't enough. But I'm just trying to paint a picture with enough points on it to draw the dots. And that was one of the dots that I put down, whether that will prove to be valid or not. And now looking more into, you know, the really advanced lithium ion stuff, I have a good feeling that they probably do have a high energy density cell and it's probably just slightly lighter than what they quoted at CES would be my, like, latest guess. But, you know, we keep getting new information and there was a really high density of information coming out in the tests at the start. And it's definitely like weaned down a lot now, to say the least, which has still been like cool data. And it's been fun kind of trying to read between the lines. I mean, the latest, if you want to know my. I haven't got the tinfoil hat near me, but like the. On the latest test results, the pouch puffed up to, you know, and it looked. I wasn't there to poke it, but it looked like pretty ballooned up, which would mean there was gas inside of it that expanded it. And they said previously that it had been the leak that broke.
And it's like there are reasons why maybe, I don't know, the obvious reason is that gas was produced inside and it popped up the cell. That goes against what they said about it leaking. So that wasn't direct data that they provided. But if you read between the lines, you can kind of try and piece things together. But it leaves us in a situation where no single data point is particularly conclusive or strong. But it's quite fun just to try and be a little bit of a journalist and investigate it. And that was just the bit in the latest test results that I found surprising.
Ricky Roy: So I'll say the latest test is definitely very interesting. And I was trying to go at it with if the pouch is open and air, moisture, nitrogen, oxygen, like the composition of air is exposed to the cell, what else it could be and stuff. So that is interesting. It could potentially actually be some like side side effects of a completely solid battery as well. To your point, everything seemingly could go kind of two ways and we're not there to like. To Ryan's point, I wanna, I wanna push on it. Is it a solid, is it like a block? Is it, is it gaseous? There's. For every test that they show, seemingly I have like two questions. And if they would just answer those two questions, it'd be a really valid and meaningful test. I will say doing these videos for as long as we all have at this point, I've, I've learned a couple of tricks to try to understand what people are saying. And one of them is you gotta figure out what they're not saying. Right. When I met with Quantumscape, they were talking about how they, they struggled to get the solid state battery to work. And even theirs is partially solid state. There's still a liquid electrolyte on the anode side. They, it's a solid state from the, on the cathode component. And then they struggled to get, to manufacture it and then they did it. And they were celebrating that they did it. I was like, okay, well great, so mission accomplished. Like, what aren't they saying? And then I, and again, this is unofficial because they didn't tell me this, but what they didn't say is the scrap rate. So in my, my thought process is they've got something great, but the scrap rate from their, their approach is higher than what like CATL has, which is, you know, the 90s or I'm actually not sure.
Whatever it is, the scrap rate is too high, which means you're throwing too many of these cells away, which means the cost is going to be higher. You're not gonna be able to compete on price. And they got to figure that part out. And I kind of deduced that from what they're not saying. The problem with Donut is they've said it all like it's this, it's not, it's not lithium. 100,000 charge cycles. You got manufacturing all sorted. Like they've left themselves no out. And I would almost, yeah, it might have almost been more believable or easy to digest if they had left some kind of an out. You know, it does. There's a question I like to ask Matt, if we have time, which is it's such a hard thing to do what these companies are doing, to invest to get people to, to buy into like, you know, pursuing sustainable energy technology, which is just really important for as I think we three can agree, you know, Quantumscape or whatever they're working on is suddenly obsolete overnight because of what Donut has done. Does that make it even harder now to get investment or to have people support sustainable tech? Because, like, you know, Toyota has famously kind of avoided EVs because they're waiting for something like this, some breakthrough moment where like, yeah, told you guys, you shouldn't have wasted your time. Now is the point we're going to hop on. Does it make it worse? You know, Matt had a video where he was talking about waiting for solar is a bad idea. And I, I've been a believer of that too.
I'm on my third EV at this point and I, I, I wouldn't hold back, but is this Donut thing that people are thinking about now bad, potentially for future investment?
Matt Ferrell: My answer to that is a big yes. I'm concerned about that. If this turns into like an Elizabeth Holmes situation where they were scamming and they're caught scamming, this is going to do a lot of damage to small startups that actually have a product and can't get backing because it seems too good to be true and people are skeptical of even giving them the time of day. So it's like I'm concerned that this could have a very bad effect on the broader industry. Like, what do you think, Ryan?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, I think, I mean, it's. Either way, it's a quite a disruptive thing to have happened. I mean, on the, the beneficial side, if, you know, if it turns out to be true, then there's a whole reshift of, you know, infrastructure and everything. Manufacturing. Yeah, I mean, everything, like cannot be overstated.
Matt Ferrell: That can't be understated. That cannot be understated. If this is true, everything. This changes the game completely. Like we, on YouTube, we use I know, too much.
Ricky Roy: But this time this is truly a game changer.
Matt Ferrell: If it's true.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Well, normally it changes everything about the very small subdomain that it works. This changes everything about everything. This is everything squared. This changes everything squared. That's disruptive. That's, that's good disruption. If it really, if it does it that way, like, however, the cynical side, which I'm concerned, maybe the, the outcome is that it ends up. And already, I mean, I know like I'm very connected to a lot of people that work in the space and already this has had impacts on the amount of funding that small startups, battery startups are either getting or are going to get in the next rounds because there's been a lot of pressure on a Lot of them, a company I was speaking to who have been developing lithium sulfur, they were just like, our investors are messaging us constantly, like, why haven't, why didn't you do this? Why on. You're doing 100,000 cycles. So it's like, it's not, it's not, yeah, it's not if and when. It's like now and which is painful for these companies regardless of the outcome, but it's especially painful if it ends up not being true. And that's, those are the people that I'm trying to like speak for when I'm bringing literature. Because even if, even if Donut Lab does have the battery and it is true, or I'm, I'm at least trying to like bring to those investors that are putting pressure on the companies they've invested in, I'm at least trying to say, like, don't blame these companies. Like, if Donut Labs have cracked something here it is blindsided all of us. Like the whole of the scientific community would be completely blindsided. And you cannot, you know, fault whoever you've invested in for not finding it.
And on the flip side, if it ends up, you know, it might at least also give some doubt to the investors to say, okay, I'm not going to put too much pressure on now because we need to, we need to see how this, this comes out. So, yeah, it is really mixed up the, the world of clean tech investing, I think, and it will have impacts regardless of the outcome. Speaking to a friend, Dr. Ben Miles, who runs a great YouTube channel too, he is, he founded a venture capitalist firm that invests in deep tech stuff. And he just said, this is crazy from an investor standpoint, information dissemination, everything is just completely strange. And he even said if it turns out to be true, this way of disseminating information is not particularly great for like just the industry as a whole. I mean, it's great for Donut Labs if it turns out to be true and they've made this big hullabaloo and they get loads of publicity. But he was like, almost if it's true, it also sucks. So it's kind of a lose lose in some ways because it means that other companies that either do have scams or just want to create a big circus, they can say, look, Donut Labs did it and it ended up being true. So, you know, we're doing it in this really weird, sketchy way as well, but it also is true. So I'm kind of, oh God. It's quite a skeptical viewpoint.
But I'm not sure it's good whether the battery's true or not.
Ricky Roy: Yeah, there's a lot of layers to it. I think you, I think you guys both nailed all the different issues, like all the way from the Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos type of. If it's not, if it's not true, it always hurts our entire industry. It's not good. But if it is true, there's a lot of ramifications as well. I'm meeting Energy X to have a new lithium extraction plant and near the border of Texas and Arkansas. But this is all on the premise that we need a lot of lithium in the future. But then, then you have sodium ion and then you have this thing, whatever this is. How do you, how do you, like, how do you, you know, some of these things take five or ten years to figure out if you're trying to supply, to secure supply chain for lithium or graphite, whatever it might be. It could be a five or ten year process. And so now I have to make decisions about what the future is going to be like with this constantly, like quicksand landscape of new things emerging. I just hope it doesn't hurt sustainable tech overall because people will be like, I'm not going to. Whatever. As great as I think your thing is, I'm not going to give you money or invest in you because who knows, like, two years from now someone's going to throw your whole thing out the window. I don't know, I feel like there's, you know, that there's, that evolution is a great thing. You want to just have nice. The MacBook is good. Next year it'll be a little bit better. No one is throwing their MacBook out because, oh my God, we just revolutionized. Like, we don't have quantum computers like there. You want predictability in markets and, and this could potentially kind of disrupt that, I think. I don't know.
Matt Ferrell: Well, to kind of round out our conversation, I want each of you to say, on a scale of 1 to 10 or 0 to 10, do you think, do you think what they're doing is actually gonna be a thing? Do you think what they have is real? On a scale of 1 to 10.
Ryan Inis Hughes: But can I clarify on the question, the cell that they're testing or the cell that they say they're testing?
Matt Ferrell: The cell they end up delivering, like what the cell they end up, not what they're testing, but what ends up in the motorcycle. What ends up beginning, ending up in any evidence. Do you. If it. What's the odds? Like on a scale 1 to 10, do you think they're actually going to do it or do you think this is all smoke and mirrors?
Ryan Inis Hughes: God, I give it a 0.01 out of 10 of, of them the lowest
Matt Ferrell: you can potentially go.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, yeah. Of them. I'm an optimist. You got to remember Matt, I'm an optimist.
Matt Ferrell: That's right.
Ryan Inis Hughes: So of them delivering on all of the claims that.
Matt Ferrell: Right.
Ryan Inis Hughes: That they've said as, as said. But which is why I was making the clarifying point though. Whatever the cell they do have, that is that they are testing, which I think will meet a lot of the claims. Now I think that that has seven, eight, I don't know, whatever they've got, which I think other people will also have just to say. Yeah, I think is, I think is a revolutionary chemistry.
Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ricky?
Ricky Roy: There's. Yeah. There's two ways to look at it. The odds that 100% of what they're saying is true seems hard to fully imagine. But if 70 or 80% of what they're saying is true. And you gotta remember too, like, there's a lot of nuance. So 100,000 charge cycle test, is it in a, in a freezer? Is it under, you know, 50 atmospheres of pressure? There's so many different ways to measure some of this stuff. And if at the end they go, you know, all this stuff is true except it turns out at normal, you know, in real world applications it's only 5,000 cycles.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Home runs.
Ricky Roy: That's still a killer battery. Right. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna use a combination factor. It'll be a. I'm gonna put myself at 7 out of 10 and it is a 7 out of 10 in terms of what the actual promise, like the accuracy of all the things that they're gonna deliver and then the optimism of if they'll actually deliver it. I don't think every one of the things that they're saying is even possible.
Matt Ferrell: You know,
Ricky Roy: seemingly breaks the laws of physics, but we'll see.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: On the marketing claims, I would say it's like for me it's like the lowest you can go. It's a one if it's delivering on everything they claim. But having a kick ass battery, I think there's a high likelihood it's a kick ass battery. So 7, 8 or 9 for sure. Really cool. Just badly marketed.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah.
Ricky Roy: Or greatly marketed.
Matt Ferrell: Greatly marketed.
Ryan Inis Hughes: It's up to you to decide because the, I guess the, the thought on that is how well do I Think this is going to end for Donut Labs? I'm like one out of ten. Like not one out of ten. Because even whatever my. Yeah, I've been open. My hypothesis of the very impressive sell they have is a sell that other companies already have had for a few years and are scaling up production. So, like, I don't. So therefore that doesn't lead to. Well for Donut Lab, but it leads well for the chemistry that they seem to be testing. That that's like my guess. So regardless, yeah, I'm not. I wouldn't invest in Donut Labs, put it that way, but I would invest in the chemistry and I would also invest in technical due diligence companies that are going to have their work out for them after this.
Matt Ferrell: And your $5,000 will be saved.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or if it all turns out to be true, the world's revolutionized. $5,000. Wow. Who cares? We're in a new age of the world, baby.
Ricky Roy: Who gets to pick the charity, by the way? Is it Donut? Donut gets to pick the charity to donate to.
Ryan Inis Hughes: Okay, I've messaged a few times like, you know, I'm ready to donate when the test comes out and just the messages get ignored every time. So I'm like, come on, guys, at least tell me which charity so we can like really make an emotional case for this. Ye.
Ricky Roy: Because.
Ryan Inis Hughes: But no, yeah, they'll choose, they'll choose. But at the minute they've not given any hints.
Matt Ferrell: Thanks guys so much. This has been a great conversation. Great catching up with you on about this as well. Just catching up in general. Ryan, where can people find you online?
Ryan Inis Hughes: Yeah, if they want to after all of this. Or if they want to block me.
Ricky Roy: He's on MySpace.
Ryan Inis Hughes: You want to get on MySpace.com that's my main presence online. You could Ziroth on YouTube. Z I R O T H or Z I R if you're English and. Or on LinkedIn. Ryan Inis Hughes, you can find me there.
Matt Ferrell: What about you, Ricky? How can people track you down?
Ricky Roy: Yeah, so it'll be Two bit Da Vinci on YouTube and. Yeah, well, until I get bored of this or the tests are not as interesting, we'll try to keep covering it.
Matt Ferrell: Thanks, guys.
Sean Ferrell: So a brief moment to say to our viewers and listeners right now, if you want to jump into the comments about anything having to do with that conversation, do so now. But Matt and I are also going to continue our conversation and very much in normal form, we're going to jump over to the comments in Matt's Most recent and talk about from his episode the Breakthroughs My Net Zero Home is Missing. This was his most recent in which he went about his home and said, look at the things I got. Kind of wish I didn't have it. And reported. Reported on the whole. The thing about this video is it was very clearly a. You don't have any regrets. You just have things you would do different today than you did some years ago. It's not like the home broken. I've been in the home, scrap it.
Matt Ferrell: It's very nice.
Sean Ferrell: There were a lot of people who in the comments leaned in very quickly to say, yeah, you should have a basement. There seems to be just this overriding like basements, you need them. It kind of felt a little bit like almost a spasmodic, like, what do you mean you don't have a basement? How can you possibly not have a basement? I know some of your thinking around building the house included aging in home, aging in place. Was that part of this, that why build a space that in 20, 25 years you might not physically be to easily get down to? So that's part of the logic here.
Matt Ferrell: It. It was. I mean, money was a factor, but it was also the aging in place. I don't have stairs in this house. So it's like I don't have to go up into an attic. I don't have to go down below. It's just all one floor. So it's gonna be easy to get to things. The other side of it is not gonna throw our parents under a bus, Sean. But I'm about to throw em under a bus. They had a basement that turned into the world's largest storage facility for boxes that nobody knew what was inside them. And by not having that basement.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: It forces me to be very conscious about what things I'm storing and holding on to to not end up in a kind of a hoarding situation. Yeah. Not that my parents are hoarders, but just along those lines. So there's that benefit. And then, you know, I don't have kids that are like empty. I'm not in an empty nest situation. Because people were saying things like have said with a basement you can expand into it and grow into it. It's me and my wife. We're not, we're not growing into the basement. It just built a new house that we fits all of our needs, so there's no need to have a basement that we will grow into. When you looked at all of the things that for the reasons that some people might want a basement. Most of them just weren't getting checked for us. So that's part of the reason why we just kind of skipped it.
Sean Ferrell: It all makes sense to me, especially the. The aspect of limited amount of space keeps you from over keeping like. And you said our parents aren't hoarders. I don't know. The hoarding gene feels very strong in me. I'm. I'm inclined to say, like, well, this spring just fell off of that door. But it's a. Still a perfectly good spring. Maybe I'll find a use for it someday and stick it to a drawer. Just a few months ago, my wife was like, can something happen with the things in these drawers of our entertainment center? And I was like, I will be very strict about looking at the stuff. Yes. And I went through it. We now have three empty drawers. Those drawers haven't been empty in 10 years. Why were the things in there? Because there was space to put it. And it really does. If you build it, it will come. It's. It's true about holding onto stuff too. So that's not to cast aspersions at anybody who enjoys a basement. Just saying.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: There were some people coming into the comments with not necessarily rebuttals, but kind of footnotes to some of the things you said. Like imaginativity says. I think you might be overthinking the rainwater thing. A thousand liter IBC tanks are basically a waste product in some areas. Once they've been used to transport their contents or available relatively cheaply new. I just put one in for $150. It's essentially a backup plan for the periods of hose pipe restrictions in order to have water for a vegetable patch. So there are ways of kind of diying this if you really, really felt like you wanted to and just like, yeah, you wanted to have a little bit of gray water to be able to splash around your yard. The water things when it's dry period, or you're potentially in a drought situation, you can make ways of doing that. So are any of those kind of projects you'd play with?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, there's like very simple, just rain barrels you can get for like 100 bucks and you just redo your downspout off your roof and you have it feed into the rain barrel and it's got like a little spigot on it. Super cheap, super effective. Works really well. I've been thinking about doing that for us. But what I was talking about was something larger than that. If you wanted more of an irrigation system in your garden and yard. And you wanted to have huge amount of storage. I don't want like 500 gallon tanks sitting in my backyard.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: You probably bury them. You do stuff to like hide what they are, where they are. So that's what I was talking about, like the cost of doing something like that. But doing like a little rain barrel off your roof. It's super easy to do. Very fun little DIY project. And you can still get a lot of use out of it. So it's a smart thing to do.
Sean Ferrell: Human being jumped into the comments with a little bit of worry for you, Matt. Matt. At 6 minutes and 42 seconds, I can see the metal retention clip that holds the filter to the heat and humidity exchanger core are missing. You shouldn't be able to see the core. There should have been four of these that arrived with the unit. Is something missing from something in your heating room?
Matt Ferrell: No, no, no, no. I will say eagle eye.
Sean Ferrell: I was thinking the same thing. I was just like, human being.
Matt Ferrell: Holy cow. Yeah, I'm filming. I'm doing things with my ERV. That's. That footage that's in that he was talking about specifically is from two years ago. So it's very old footage, but it was. I had opened it up, propped it open, taken things out so that I could film it and show what it looked like and do different things with it and then put it all back together again. So nothing's. Nothing's missing. It's fully functional. It's in great shape. But yeah, it's. It's just funny how, like, I hope nobody saw that and thought that's how Matt keeps it. Because no, I don't do that.
Sean Ferrell: Thank you, human being, for the, for the comment. I wanted to make sure I raised it to Matt because I thought, is this something Matt should know? I'm like, it really the, the experience of the, of the viewers on this channel always astounds me because you guys know so much about this stuff already.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So thank you, human being, for jumping in with that. Finally, there was this from Edward Green Jr. Who says the future proofing through infrastructure is a great lesson. There will always be a new version or innovation down the line. But having the ability to adapt instead of renovate is key. This is of course, in reference to the idea of things like building in areas within the walls where it'd be easy to feed pipes or tubing or that kind of thing to be able to rewire or do something new in your home that you don't even know you're going to want to do in 10 or 15 years.
Sean Ferrell: So you talked a little bit about that. Are there any other aspects of infrastructure development that you're aware of now that weren't in the video?
Matt Ferrell: I think I covered most of it. It really comes down to, like, just trying to plan ahead when you're building a home or you're doing renovations. You know, back when we were kids, it'd be like, oh, you make sure you have phone lines to these different rooms and things like that. It's just obviously that's not today. It would be like Ethernet lines for networking. Even if you don't think you need them right now, you're gonna need them down the road. So it's like, just start thinking in terms of what can you do that could set you up for success later? Because things are always going to change and evolve over time and just trying to find ways to make it. Sure. Make sure your house is modular enough that it can grow with you over time. And what's funny is one of my neighbors down the street saw this video, and he brought up to me because he's been doing renovations on his house, like extensive renovations of his basement and basement and other aspects of his house. And he said that when I brought up the conduit, he's like, guess what I did. He already did that on his. He's got conduit hidden away all over the ceilings and walls and stuff like that. In anticipation of. At some point, he may want to expand his solar system or he may want to do something different in his basement with, like, what's in what room and you might need to fish Ethernet lines or something. So he's got everything already mapped out. So he did. He did exactly what I wish on this house. So I thought it was pretty funny.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's good to know that this information is getting out there and that people are already thinking in those ways. It's not only forward thinking for yourself, it's forward thinking for the longevity of the home for its entire existence. You will not be the last person to live in that building. And if you're making those kinds of decisions now, just think about the person who sends you their blessings. You're no longer there. But they're like, thank goodness for Matt Ferrell putting this in when he did. If only he put in a basement. So, yes, listeners, viewers, what did you think about the. This episode? What did you think about our brief conversation just now? But more importantly, what did you think about the longer conversation that Matt had with his friends talking about the ongoing questions around Donuts Labs, Solid State and question marks, battery, let us know in the comments. As always, your comments are a huge part of this program. We appreciate that. We also appreciate your liking subscribing, sharing with your friends. All those are great and easy ways for you to support us. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can do it right here on YouTube at the join button. Or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about Donut batteries for the rest of time. Time, time, time. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.