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Matt and Sean talk about using digestive waste (yes, it’s what you think it is) to increase sustainability. Yes, poo can be used to make better batteries.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Manure and Urine Could Power the Future https://youtu.be/6TCmjSIj9Jw?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about using digestive waste (yes, it’s what you think it is) to increase sustainability. Yes, poo can be used to make better batteries.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Manure and Urine Could Power the Future https://youtu.be/6TCmjSIj9Jw?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.
Today on Still to be Determined, we're talking about two separate topics. Well, one topic with two components, and those components are, well, we'll just refer to them as topic number one and topic number two. We'll get to that in a moment. Hi everybody. Welcome to Still To Be Determined. This is of course the follow-up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on your lives.
I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology and with me as always is that Matt from the aforementioned podcast. He is my younger brother, but he is not my little brother because he is big in stature. Matt, how are you today?
I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Other than it's the sluggish days of summer right now, so yeah, I find myself just having a difficult time focusing and I'm trying to be patient with myself and remind myself that yes, the heat, the humidity, it takes something out of you. We try not to talk about the weather because people were complaining.
We talk about the weather too much, but I'm not talking about the weather so much as its effect on my body physically, where all I want to do is lie on a cold rock.
Uh, how yourself, where do you find yourself these days?
I feel the same way. Like a, like a lizard? Yeah. Just finding a cold place to lay down.
They call it splatting when you see animals doing that, and we have animals in our backyard that regularly use, we have a stone wall that. It's in the perimeter of our yard and it is pretty regular that you'll see squirrels come out of the trees and then look for all intents and purposes like they've just died.
And it is a little disturbing 'cause you'll see a squirrel with its arms and legs completely out and its head unmoving and you'll think, do I now have to take care of a dead squirrel? And then it's kind of like a bird. Yes. A bird
just kinda goes out, mouth open, wings out, yeah. And doesn't move. Yeah.
It's a little disturbing.
But to any of our viewers or listeners who might see me at a park later today, if I look like a corpse, I'm just splatting. There you go. Today we are gonna talk about Matt's most recent, as I hinted at so cleverly in the intro. This is his episode, why manure and urine could power the future. So we'll get to that in a moment.
Yeah. But before we get to that, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episode. This is episode 2 72, in which we talked about mushrooms and the various surprising uses that people are coming up with. We talked about Matt's episode in which he had visited a grow site where the mushrooms, for all intents and purposes, like they're just growing giant pillows of foam, but it's edible, it's pliable, it can be turned into a type of leather.
So on that point, there was this comment from ch, from Chlistens. Who wrote in to say, my point for real leather, if you eat steaks or hamburgers, the cow is already slaughtered. Might as well use the leather. Absolutely. I don't think anybody was suggesting we stop using leather if leather is a byproduct of any process that involves slaughtering of animals.
So absolutely Chlistens. That's that's a good point. There was also some feedback in the vein of quick hits that I thought all kind of went together, not because of a theme, but just because of the brevity of their, of what they were trying to convey. Pixel pusher jumps in and says, I watched the debunk video.
This is a video that had been put out shortly after Matt's video. And Matt was made aware of it, and it was described as a debunk video, but after watching it, Matt actually pointed people to it saying, no, it's not so much a debunk as a deeper dive and exploration. And while they may have had issues with some of the framing of Matt's video, ultimately it was somebody knowledgeable in the subject. Mm-hmm. And Matt was happy to point them out as another resource to go to. And pixel pusher points out. Entirely agree. It's not a debunking and it's a great source of even more, more information about this. Then there was Iron Man who jumped in about the mushroom comments and said, well, this was a mind expanding episode.
So a little psychedelia humor in the comments. And then there was this from RyuKageDesu who said, I keep hearing more about these products. Sounds like it's a growing business. Yes, yes. Oh. Thank you. Yes.
Slow clap. There we go. Yes,
everybody. Everybody is accustomed to Matt's videos and how he leans into the puns.
Yeah, to such a degree, and this is one of my favorite parts about Matt's videos, is he leans into the puns to such a degree where he doesn't even let the pun land. They just get swept up in the dialogue. And if you have to stop for a moment and say, wait a minute, was that intentional? Oh, yes. It was intentional by both Matt and his script writer.
Yep. And then finally there was this from Robert Guarded is my hero, wonderful username who writes in to say, and this is picking up on something that we talked about, the glass half empty, the glass half full. And I of course said. I'm wondering who the hell is drinking my water. But Robert Goddard is my hero, says every time I hear the glass is half full versus the glass is half empty statement.
I wonder why the glass is twice as large as it needs to be.
Can I ask you a question, Sean? Yes. How would you categorize yourself? How do, would you say you're a glass half full or a glass half empty?
I tend to be a glass half empty. Yeah, I tend to be the, I mean that's, I mean, that doesn't come as any surprise to you, I'm sure This is, no, not at all.
This is, uh, hard, it, it's deeply baked into both of us that when we were kids, I think we both recognized that in any given moment, Matt was gonna be the one who was going to wander off happily and just be like, like, well, this seems like a good time. And I was the one looking over my shoulder wondering.
When somebody was gonna make it all stop. And I think that's continued into adulthood where Matt's looking on the horizon and saying, look at all the tremendous technology ahead of us. And I'm looking over my shoulder and saying, they are coming to get us.
I'm picturing a 1970s sitcom, Sean, right before the credits roll and I'm just going, yeah.
Freeze frame and then you're in the background. Just going, Yeah!
Drawing a dark circle with a pen. Yes. On now to our comments and feedback from Matt's most recent, why manure and urine could power the future. This is of course, topic number one and topic number two. Let's take number two first. By which I mean topic number one being manure.
Why you smirking Matt?, it's very easy to understand what I'm talking about. Number one is number two. That's what I'm trying to say. So first, number two. There was some people in the comments who were pointing out that manure does get used today in the form of fertilizer. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you weren't trying to say finely people are gonna be using cow dung?
No, you were trying to say something different from that. Do you want to run a little bit on that topic before we get into the direct feedback of comments?
It's more about using waste products in ways that we normally don't do it. So yes, we use it for fertilizer, but it can be used for way more than that.
There was an, this was kind of a follow on episode to something I did two years ago I think it was, which was about hydrothermal carbonization, HTC. And it was about waste treatment plants. And this new process that, well, not new, it's an old process that's finally getting used where you can take the waste, you put it in there, anything with carbon and it heats it.
It's like a, think of it like a, uh, pressure cooker. It just like cooks the hell out of whatever you put inside of it and breaks it down to its component parts. So you end up at the end of the, the whole process with kind of just almost, it's pure carbon that you're left with and it can be used to. As a material for battery manufacturing, whatever you want.
So it's like this HTC process has a lot of potential to, to do a new thing to wastes that we have never done before. And it's the same thing with this. This is part of the reason I went and re-explored it again, was because here we are using cow dung, Yeah, for fertilizer. But hey man, we can make a plastic replacement that can be put into battery production.
It's like, that's where it's like, wow, it's expanding the horizons of how we can use waste in new and novel ways that could reduce the cost of manufacturing batteries and other man, other materials that we're trying to make. And it's like you always, it's like this is the stuff that nobody wants to think about 'cause it's gross and it's smells right.
And it's like, yeah, we don't wanna deal with that. It's like, well, this stuff that we normally turn our nose up at, literally. It's kind of a gold mine for dozens and dozens of things that we can use it for beyond farming. Yeah. So it's kind of, that's kind of the point I was trying to lean into.
Yeah, it's, it's kind of tricky.
It's kind of tricky to keep in mind that all it is at the end of the day is a bunch of chemicals. Yeah, it's chemicals. There's of course bacteria. There's stuff that you wouldn't want to ingest. That's true of lots of different chemicals. You wouldn't walk up to a battery plant and say, I can go in and touch and potentially not be afraid of everything in that building.
Well, of course there's gonna be acids, there's gonna be chemicals that would burn you, and you wouldn't walk into a farm and say, I'm gonna go around and touch everything. Well, of course there's bacterias. There are things you didn't want to be exposed to. And so at the end of the day, if you look at this as, this is a resource that could be utilized. It starts to become something, which one of our commenters that we'll get to kind of points out the, did it take us this long or has this been something we've been headed toward for a long time to understand how we could utilize this? Let's start off with a comment from a person whose username looks like it would be impossible to pronounce, but I am gonna do my damnedest.
Hold on. Matt, I'm hoping to do this in one take, this comment from zygmuntthecacaokistocrat6589. I think I did it. I think you did. Wrote in to say, my uncle told me, told me stories of his childhood in the depression of the 1930s where his family blended cow dung with mud, sand, and straw, and made a form of flooring concrete that lasted in the utility areas of his farmhouse until the 1960s.
I've seen some photos of the rooms it was in, it looks like swanky, polished, concrete. He said it was warmer than Portland cement concrete, easy to care for, not tiring on your feet, and sound absorbent and only needed re rendering every five years or so. Pretty remarkable. This would be, I imagine, yeah.
The kind of recipe that would've been passed down from farmer to farmer, father to, you know, parents to children, over centuries. I imagine this is a kind of flooring technique that had been used for a long time prior to the depression in the 1930s, and then I'm sure it was largely marketing and availability of increase of modern concrete production that would've turned it from, well, you've already got products you could use to make this.
Some salesman shows up and goes, you want a floor? Let me show you how to make a floor. Yeah. Was any of this kind of use of dung something that you came across in your research? Were you looking No, not just at future possible uses, but past actual uses of, dung.
Like it kind of goes into the whole thing we just talked about with the fertilizer aspect.
We weren't looking at things like this specifically. We were looking more at like. What you mentioned chemicals like, okay, here's, here's a, it's basically like battery recycling. It's like a battery dies. You can break it apart, break it down to its base components, and then separate those out and use them any way we want.
That's what we were focused on, is like, how can you, how are they taking dung or urine and breaking it down into component parts to make something completely different out of it. It wasn't more about you could just take this and mix it with something and hey, you got a brick. It wasn't, we weren't looking at that.
'cause that kind of stuff has been done for centuries. Right. So it's like we were looking at the more new novel approaches.
There was this comment from Chlistens who says, this sounds promising. And it's important to remember for that, for applications like concrete under five, MPa.
Yeah, it's mega Pascals and it's, it's about how much pressure it can take.
Yeah. So Chlistens goes on to say there are options such as soil cement stabilization, insulating concrete, foamed concrete, and likely others. These materials aren't suitable for every use, but if they can help address challenges related to current waste stream and do so profitably, then it's a clear win.
So the profit aspect, the ease of access, pro, uh, aspect came up in my mind as I was reading this comment. The companies that are looking into this, what would the creation cycle, what would the production cycle look like if you were trying to mass produce this? Are we talking about potentially factories located near farms?
Are we talking about factories, like one of the research facilities that you talked about, you mentioned was in New York City. Mm-hmm. There's not gonna be a production site in New York City unless you're talking about human waste. So like is this something that is like dung specific, farm specific, or is this something that, okay.
Waste treatment plants in an urban environment. Here is a way we could retreat these things, instead of figuring out what to do with all this waste in a let it break down sort of way as instead, well let's use it sort of way.
This is the kind of thing where you'd be building facilities near, not next door, but near where the material is being originating from.
You'd be one to be relatively close just for logistics and costs. And also New York City. I love it in New York City. Sean, you live in New York. Uh. Upstate New York is anything that's not New York City and you don't have to go that far outta New York City to suddenly you're in upstate and you're still down the lower corner of New York.
There's lots of farmland, not too far out of New York City. So it's like there's gonna be a lot of dung, but this specifically does not necessarily need to be cow manure. It could be. It could probably be a lot of different things. So it, these kind of facilities might be able to be near waste treatment plants.
They might be near other kinds of farm animals other than cows. So it's like there's a lot of potential here, which is why I thought it was an interesting topic to cover because it's. Human waste, cow waste, you name it, has a potential to be a feed stock. Ugh. Into this. Yeah. So yes, you, you, you would need to build this close to where the supply is.
And New York Sean, has a lot of supply.
Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And we are proud of that. That's right. John Doudna jumped into the comments. And said, chemical fertilizer may be more cheaply transported and dispersed on agricultural land, but it does not contain the fiber and other nutrient contents of manure, which supports the life in and of soils, which build it up rather than just suck it dry.
This raised for me a question around is there potentially a aspect of some of this, which might be like, are we looking at a waste product supply that so greatly outstrips our ability to use it in one way. That we would be using it in multiple ways and still have plenty left over. In other words, organic fertilizer.
Yes, yes, it does good things for the land, but if we start taking dung and using it in other ways, are we going to negatively impact those places that are trying to organically use fertilizer. I just gut check moment. I'm like, I highly doubt we're running out of poo.
Is that some, is that an aspect of this as well? There's more than enough to go around. So this is a resource where some of it will continue to be spread on farms by farmers just because that's what they can do and others will say, yeah, you can take a lot of this off our hand 'cause we got too much.
This is oversimplifying and it's very complicated answer, but it's like, yes, we have more than we need.
I wouldn't be concerned about that. But if you're talking about like cow manure specifically, as more and more people eat less meat. We might need less cows, which might mean there's less manure to go around, right? Correct. Which is why I said earlier, this is not necessarily just about cow manure, it's more about just waste, which could theoretically be human waste, could be part of this.
So. When you start factoring all that in, we will never not have a supply of poo. It's just part of biological life. So it's like we will ultimately have more than we need. Mm-hmm. And so it's, it's one of those, I would not be concerned about not having enough organic fertilizer for farming because of stuff like this.
Um, I see it kind of like they can both coexist and we'll be just fine and we won't have to worry about chemical fertilizers. And in fact, there's a. There's a movement for, uh, what's called regenerative farming, which is a move away from that. Uh, trying to do more for the land to make sure it extends the life of the land.
'cause chemical fertilizers, you basically are just destroying the land that you're trying to grow on. So regenerative farming is a very good approach to make sure that that land stays fertile for long term. Um, and that's a growing movement that's happening right now in the farming industry.
So have you thought about doing a video on that topic?
I have numerous times.
I just haven't done it yet.
Right. Bogo the monkey and thank you Bogo for dropping by writes definitely worth it. Should have done research for it long, long ago. So my question to you, I can't imagine this is new research. I imagine this is something that's been going on for a long time because my first thought when I read Bogo's comment was, I imagine there have been scientists looking at this for a while, because as you pointed out, we're never gonna run outta poo, and I want everybody to remember they heard it here first.
Taking a bold stand Sean. We're never gonna run outta poo. We're never gonna run outta poo. So says Sean. And drop a I am in into the comments if you want Matt, to make a Still to be Determined, We're never gonna run out of Poo t-shirt because I'm gonna throw this out there. If we get a hundred I'm ins, Matt's gonna make that t-shirt.
All right. It'll just be Still TBD and a little poo emoji. We're never gonna run outta poo. It's gotta be, we're never gonna run outta poo poo emoji. Alright, so how long as you looked at the various research projects going on around this, how old is this research?
Oh, this is, some of this stuff is not. I mean, it's, most of it's not new.
What usually happens, like you're going back decades and decades for some of the understandings around this stuff, even longer. But the reason that it's becoming a thing now, and this happens a lot in the topics I talk about, is that it's, there wasn't really an application for it. It was like, okay, they know theoretically this could be done or that could be done, but it's one of those, yeah, we could do it, but, but why?
Like it's gonna be too expensive. It's much easier just to take that waste and turn it into fertilizer and haul it over here and do that thing over here. And it's just like there's no use case for this. As we've been moving into this kind of electrification of everything and we're moving towards renewable energy systems and energy storage.
There's this need for materials to do this stuff. And there's a concern that there's not enough. And my response to that is there's plenty. We just have to build up the infrastructure. This is a whole new thing that we're doing, so we have to build it all out. This is one of those pieces and why there's a lot of kind of like reigniting interest in old ideas and topics of like, oh, there's actually a use case for this.
Now let's do some research into that to see if we can figure out how to do it cost effectively. So that's what we're seeing around a lot of this stuff.
I'm curious, you touch accidentally onto an interesting question, which, how many years have you been doing Undecided now? Seven. Seven. I think seven. I'm wondering about, and this feels to me like I'm throwing out for you to do a big project that I don't have to do, which is exactly how I envision this.
Mm-hmm. It's easy for me to say it's hard for you to do, but looking back at some of your videos that are around that kind of tech, we didn't have a use case when this research made a breakthrough in 1970 or 1940 or 1910, and now there's this resurgence of like, oh, there's a thing we could do with this.
Maybe we can make it viable. Going back through. Seeing where those products from the earliest days of your channel are or aren't now after seven years. Yeah. Kind of a look back, and maybe that's a, maybe that's a anniversary project for the channel of like, yeah. Every, every year do one video that looks back seven years ago and looks at.
Maybe this anniversary that's coming up for you. Look at year one and find those topics that you're like, where are they today? And, and revisit them. Shotgun style, because I think that you're, you're always pointing out like, look at this thing. And they didn't know if they would ever do it. And now they're trying.
And occasionally we do have those update videos that are specific. Revisiting airships, revisiting wind turbines, revisiting. We just did, a few months ago, we had the ones that were about capturing wave energy, and we've done that a couple of times, but I wonder about year one, what was there in year one that you look back and say like, oh yeah, they actually have that product now they're doing that thing.
Yeah. And which ones are like, oh, they're still scrambling, or it fell apart, or. They couldn't make it happen.
What I find funny, Sean, this is going to be a tangent that we'll have a point, but AI. I've been building out a lot of, uh, automation tools to help producing the videos, make it more, um, easy to do.
'cause we do a lot of research. We do a lot of like a flood of ideas come in, and then we try to process those ideas as quickly as we can decide which ones we want to tackle, which ones we don't. Yeah. And so then build out these automation flows to kind of help streamline that process and make it easier to do, and this is not AI writing scripts or anything like that.
This is just automation and some AI stuff to help do kind of like what I call content grading of like, here's a news article. Then there's, I have this vector database I created that has every single script I've ever written that's been put down to a vector database, which is a, something that an AI can use and do a comparison between, here's a news article, here's what everything you've talked about in the channel before.
Yeah. Is there an overlap here? And it kind of gives me a content creative of like, yeah, this is a topic that might be perfect for you to look at. Right? And that way it helps me filter it down to the news articles that might be the most relevant, right? That system that I've built it out. I could use it for something just like this, where I could say, look at all the topics I wrote a year ago, you know, five years ago, and boil it down to all the topics, all the, the people and the things I researched.
And then go and find if the, what the update is for now. Like, I could very easily have reports generated as to like where things currently stand. Uh, that could be fun. That can be a lot of fun. Interesting. This is be, is one of those uses for, for AI and automation that I'm like, I absolutely love, it's helping me work faster and more efficiently.
Yeah. Um, but again, I do not use AI to write the scripts Full stop.
Yeah. That's, we won't go into another AI conversation. We've done that before and yeah, and it's, and it's complex. It's a very complex thing. But I do think that from what you've described, I mean, that does sound like a great use to be able to say, and, and I do have an appreciation for what AI can do when it's in a fishbowl.
I think fishbowl uses where it's like, oh, you wanna talk about a specific thing and you want a process that goes in a certain way, a certain logic placed into a discussion on a topic, and creating that fishbowl environment that can do that. I think that can be very useful. And I've seen uses in my own life in that way that I was like, as I went into it, I was like, oh God, AI really.
And then as I used it, I was like. This is cut right through a lot of chatter. Yeah. To get to the thing. And I find myself thinking like, okay, this is a use case that I get, you know, the other side of it, which, you know, we've talked about before, um, AI shows up and people say it's gonna save us all this time, and then people use it to create art.
Yeah,
yeah.
No. Which like, okay. Like, all right, so we won't get into that. Finally there was this from Rots who jumped into say, this is, of course, I always like to close with this kind of comment. Rots jumps into the comments to say, so you're saying they've turned poo into a battery announcement. Don't battery announcements normally turn into poo.
Love it.
Ross gets it.
Yes, he does. That's fantastic.
So listeners, viewers, what do you think about this conversation? Please jump into the comments and let us know. As you can tell, your comments really drive the content of the show and help shape the future of not only this program, but the main channel as we just discussed.
And just a reminder, once again, I'm in equals, Matt makes a t-shirt in which he says, we'll never run out of poo. Make that happen. So thank you as always for your comments. Don't forget to like, don't forget to subscribe. Don't just share. Don't forget to share it with your friends. Those are four easy ways for you to support the podcast.
And if you'd like to support us directly, the join button on YouTube or the join button at Still TBD fm. Either one of those allows you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts, and then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about what we do with our bathroom waste. Ew, thanks so much for listening, everybody.
We'll talk to you next time.