https://youtu.be/6GImikPccQY
Matt and Sean talk about how recycling renewable energy tech is a major step forward, and what comes next. Do we have this problem solved?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How We Solved Renewables BIGGEST Problem https://youtu.be/j1HWNXmmld4?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about how recycling renewable energy tech is a major step forward, and what comes next. Do we have this problem solved?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How We Solved Renewables BIGGEST Problem https://youtu.be/j1HWNXmmld4?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
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Creators & 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.
In today's episode of Still To Be Determined, we're going to be talking about how recycling in renewable energy is a major step forward in making sustainable Energy our main source and what comes next. Welcome everybody to Still to Be Determined where we follow up on the podcast Undecided with Matt Ferrell.
And yet again, this probably isn't going to change. I'm not Matt Ferrell. 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 tech. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt from Undecided with Matt Ferrell which of course takes a look at emerging topics and tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you on this day that has sprung? And by that, I mean, of course, we've moved our clocks forward an hour, which means that I have slept an hour less than I would have liked to.
I was going to say if Sean and I feel or look kind of like perplexed and a little, a little more stilted than
usual, a
little, a
little like I'm looking into the sun.
Yes. We sprang ahead and we're ready to engage with the world or at least I am Matt. How about yourself?
I was going to make the comment I told Sean right before we started this is like when I got up this morning. My wife goes and feeds the cat, and while my wife's feeding the cat, I get up and get the dog up.
This morning when I got up, she's usually awake and ready to go when I get up. And I went over and she was, like, curled up like a little tick. Sound asleep. When I woke her up, she gave me this look of like, what are you doing? It was an hour early.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We all feel it even the pets. But it won't stop us from doing our appointed duty of reading your comments from the last episode.
Yes. That's how we like to start every episode Of this podcast, we like to revisit what you thought about our previous one. And we're talking about episode 257, which we talked about tech battery breakthroughs. And there was a lot of conversation in the comments about the idea of pushing back mainly on the idea that waiting for this new technology to arrive on store shelves is anything but normal. So there were comments like this from Jack Coats. Most people don't understand the R& D lifecycle. Depending on the product, the base level research could be 20 to 100 years old. We spend money and time to learn, and we keep doing it for years.
Eventually, the research turns into development, and depending on the field and tech, it can take 2 to 20 more years to develop a product before it can be turned into an end user product to be monetized. Very few things make it to the monetization stage. And sometimes they are delayed due to other tech not being available to the same or better stages.
I love you talking about the fields in all these phases. So keep it up, Matt. So that's part of an ongoing conversation we've been having in which there's a certain percentage of the audience that just says like, wake me up when it's here. And Matt and I talked last week about that's not really the point of Matt's channel.
Matt's not out there hauking products saying like buy now because he's not reaping proceeds from selling anything. And he's also not going to hold back on saying, look at this neat new research because his entire point is, wow, there's a bleeding edge to all of these things in development. And let's take a look at them and let's talk about them and figure out where they might fall into the ecosystem.
Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Jack. That's what I love that comment, by the way.
Yeah, that's a good comment. There was also a few comments that were pointing toward technology that Matt might want to look at in future episodes like this one. From Simon who wrote, has anybody heard about this new technology from Germany?
Electric motors move and power so much of our world and are incredible pieces of engineering, which is why I was excited to see this new development from Mahle. It removes the need for rare earth metals without harming performance and efficiency. In fact, it may give additional benefits. And Matt, I was curious about this.
So I did a little digging of my own. Yes. You have direct competition now from me, your older brother, I will crush you.
I was curious about what Simon was pointing out. So I did a little research of my own into Mahle electric motors and discovered that Mahle is a leading supplier of electric motors for various applications including passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and construction machinery. And they have also developed what is called the MCT, the magnet free contactless transmitter motor, which does not require rare earth magnets and operates efficiently and without wear.
So quite a change. I mean, you talk about the development of electric motors versus ICE, but in the ICE category, there are different types of ICE engines. Now it seems like we're developing the possibility that there are different models of electric motor in a similar way. So we end up with now options.
Yeah, I mean, there already are different kinds, but it's like the diversity of them is not like ICE engines, but it's, there is a diversity there. It's just very small. And this one, it's funny that, uh, uh, Simon brought this up. I, I, I've not been looking into this. So this was still new to me. But, uh, a good friend of mine, Ryan, he does the YouTube channel Ziroth, he helped me out on my solid state battery video a while back.
Um, he actually just published a video on this exact thing from Mahle and goes in depth into what this is, how it works, why it's potentially important, the challenges around it. He dives into all of it. So it's like, if you're interested in this, a hundred percent, check out that video. I'll try to put a link in the description too.
We had also had a bit of a conversation last week about the idea of revisiting earlier topics with a kind of update progress report. And I suggested maybe the idea of a summation video of putting them all together and saying, I've talked about a lot of different types of batteries. Where are they all now?
And suggested a ladder scoring methodology of saying like, where on the, which rung are they on, are they making progress or are they still on a lower level? And we had some people responding to those ideas like Goddard is my hero who wrote, I like the summation idea. I think it would be a good use of the playlists.
And then there was also this from Derry who said, use the technology readiness ladder to describe where battery tech was last time reported and where it is now. This would give a much more understandable measure of how things are progressing. And yes, I'd like to see this. So Matt, there are a couple of votes for, yeah, let's circle back on these things a little more often and give a kind of big picture bird's eye view of what's happened in maybe the past year.
With Goddard's suggestion of the playlists, this is going to sound funny as a YouTuber. I didn't think about making playlists about these things. It's fun. It didn't cross my mind if I could make a playlist that's just, uh, Redox flow batteries updates and then just put every video that's about that in there.
It's like, yeah, we do playlists, but it's around not narrow topics like that. It's more around different like styles of videos. Like we do a how and why kind of a bucket of videos. We have one around that series playlist, stuff like that. But I hadn't considered, oh, I could just make some more narrow topic playlists and then they're all in one place and then you could go back and watch them all.
Yeah. Um, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. And on the second thing about the technology readiness level, we have been working those into our scripts where we talk about the TRL and like where some of this stuff might fall. And my producer, Lewis, who Sean knows, uh, has made a suggestion a couple of weeks ago about updating the website, the undecided website and having the TRL meter on every article that we put up with like basically creating a cross linked database.
So it's we could update the TRL in one location, it would update all the pages that that is related to that kind of stuff. So it's like, I wanna do that. Yeah. That takes development work, so it's gonna take a long time to build that together. But on both of these notes, we're actually on one of them. We were thinking about doing stuff like that, but hearing this is something that's gonna make us double down.
And then the playlist idea is something really easy that we could roll out very quickly. So it's like, I'm gonna do that.
Yeah. I will admit as I read that comment and like this is a good use for playlists. Yeah. I was like. Does Matt even use playlists?
I do use playlists.
I've never visited your channel.
I've never visited your channel without being involved as like this part of the channel. So it's like my approach to your channel is not just one of the casual consumer of the videos. I'm going with a specific goal in mind and I'm not really like looking around at the other things you have available.
So the idea of, yeah. Playlists, playlists is the answer.
It's a, it's a feature. I never really think about too much, but it's, it's a, it's a good one. It's really good.
I'll use that moment though, as a, as a, I shared this with Matt previously. I, you may hear it in my voice. Uh, I I'm at the very tail end of a cold and I was sick last week.
And Matt pointed out, like, maybe it was the cold impacting your perception maybe, but I had a kind of weird moment where I was watching videos on YouTube and I saw that Matt had posted his new one and I had been sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea or having soup and the play, the videos I'd queued up were playing and I had dropped Matt's video into a queue of other videos that I was interested in watching.
And when it got to Matt's video and it started, I looked over and I was watching the screen and I was processing it completely as I'm watching people on YouTube and had this sudden moment of just like, Hey. That's my brother
and it really kind of struck me suddenly as strange like, yeah, I'm watching my brother on YouTube. This is wild. It's strange, Sean. This is a wild, wild time. It was a, it was a little bit of an out of body moment and I mentioned it to Matt and he very quickly said, you are sick.
Finally, there was this another one of the like, oh, here's a little topic you might want to follow up on. But it's framed as the, yeah, the world is changing and it's interesting and fascinating. George shared, growing up in the late 80s and early 90s in Romania, we only had three TV channels. Two of those were Hungarian.
One of my favorite shows was Delta. It was presenting emerging tech. I remember how it blew my mind when they presented aerogel. That stuff is only now starting to show up on consumer markets. Yeah, it takes time. And again, Matt, I will crush you. Did some of my own research. I was like, AeroGels? What are AeroGels?
And I found this little article on Wikipedia, which included a picture that I am not convinced is real. AeroGels are a class of synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. without significant collapse of the gel structure.
The result is a solid with extremely low density and extremely low thermal conductivity. Aerogels can be made from a variety of chemical compounds. Silica aerogels feel like fragile styrofoam to the touch, while polymer based aerogels feel like rigid foams. And then there's a photograph that is described, thankfully, completely.
A block of silica aerogel in a hand. So
wait, can I, can I blow your mind a little bit? Yes, please. Do you, do you know what's in this? If you say
aerogel, I'm ending the call early.
Here, let me hold it up here. I have a little piece of aerogel that looks exactly like that picture.
There you go, Sean. And from the size of the aerogel that Matt just shared, I'm assuming he uses it as a dummy quarter when he goes out into the public and needs to use a machine that requires a quarter.
I bought it from a, I bought it from one of the companies that makes aerogel. And you can order samples from them for like five bucks, something like that.
And I had ordered one a number of years ago. It was before we started the podcast. I did a video on installation, kind of cutting edge insulation and how it's being used. And one of the things I mentioned in the video briefly was like aerogel. So I bought this as a prop, but I've had it now for years on my back shelf.
Behind me, sitting over there, this little dime sized piece of aerogel.
So there you have it folks. Once again, Matt beats me to the punch on now to our discussion about Matt's most recent. This is of course the one I watched in a fever Dream. It was titled How We Solved Renewable's Biggest Problems, and it is, as I mentioned at the top of the show, sustainable tech is great.
Sustainable energy is great, but making garbage, we humans just make garbage. That's, we do that in all of our endeavors. It's unavoidable. Oh, I'm going to go do that thing. And then you leave behind a trail of things you didn't want while you did the other thing. It's unavoidable. Kind of like walking your dog.
Yes. It's unavoidable. That is life's impact on the world. So how do you mitigate that? How do you say, well, we want sustainable energy. We want to be able to have a better impact on the planet. Look at us producing all this energy from the Sun and now a hundred years from now, look at all these garbage panels that nobody knows what to do with because they don't work anymore. But as some people in the comments pointed out there is a life between new and dead. There is, well, it still does a little bit of what it's supposed to.
So maybe don't junk it too quickly. Yeah. The idea of over fast replacement isn't one we want to support either. So there were comments like this from Peter who jumped in to say, just use the older panels on non essential as a non essential roofing material. I have a rather large series of compost heaps is about 30 feet by 10 feet.
I buy used solar panels for next to nothing. Use the best ones for real applications and then use the worst ones as basically cheap roof tiles over the compost heaps. Hooked them up to a cheap battery and you basically have an electrical outlet without having to run wires out there. I use it to keep a wifi router going.
I also use the nearly dead ones as roofing for chicken coops. Used solar panels still produce a lot of electricity for non essential things even after the efficiency has dropped substantially. Peter, as I read this, I could not help but picture you typing it out on a laptop while you were sitting next to a chicken coop connected to a Wi Fi router that was mounted on a compost heap, but not plugged into anything.
And I had to say, I tip my hat good sir. Yes. Well done. You really seem like you're living the, uh, I don't need people to do it for me life. Yeah. Not everybody lives that life, but Peter's not wrong. There are ways of taking advantage of things that are maybe not a hundred percent, but it doesn't have to be a hundred percent to charge a battery, charge a wifi router, little applications.
And if you have the know how and the space, there are ways of doing that. Matt, you did something recently like that yourself, right?
Yeah. I had some older panels, panels I'd gotten from a company that made something and I just like put them on my shed. I was like, okay, I'll put these in my shed. And I had an EcoFlow battery that I wasn't really using much in the house.
So I put it out there and I have a little microgrid set up on my shed and I have all electric power equipment. So I have an electric mower and now I can charge the mower batteries. In the shed where the mower is stored all off grid. I'm mowing on sunshine. It's like, it's fantastic. And to kind of lead into what Peter had said, there's actually a great, uh, ecosystem of second life panels because the panels that are used in solar farms have a very short life.
It's not that they don't last long. It's that the companies replace them like on a really short time scale, like every decade, they're changing them out and yet they have 30 years of life, so they're getting rid of panels that still may have 90 percent of their efficiency or 80 percent of their efficiency and yeah, they're degraded a little bit, but they work just fine.
So you can, if you're a homeowner and you're a DIYer, you can go to these places and buy these secondhand panels that were used on the solar farm are perfectly good. And just chuck them up at next to nothing on your own roof and get really, really cheap DIY solar. It's kind of incredible. So it's a, it's kind of a secondhand market that most people don't even know is there.
Do you think there's a, from the corporate thought process, do you think there's a rather than wait for any panel to break rather than go through the time to test the panels rather than do work to measure efficiency? It's just simply cheaper on a decade by decade rotation schedule to just replace all the panels and then sell them to a second hand.
It all comes down to cost. Yeah, it all comes down to cost. It's like, it's the same thing. Like a rental car company doesn't keep a Toyota that's 10 years old. They replaced their thing every few years. And then those go on to the used car sales market. So they can recoup some of the cost of the car by selling it to the secondhand market while it's still good to sell.
It's the same thing here. It's like there's a benefit for them changing it as frequently as they do because it keeps the efficiency really high because they're trying to produce a consistent level of power over time. Yeah. And their secondhand market allows them to recoup some of that cost. So it's actually really cost efficient for them to do what they're doing.
It's all about money.
Yeah. In the conversation about the changes around the recyclability of some of the tech, one of the topics that Matt talked about in his video wasn't necessarily about recyclability as much as changes in manufacturing, changing what's actually in the product. Well, if you're removing some of the elements that are as dangerous or costly as they are in a standard panel by creating a new panel using high fangled lasers to seal things in with the vacuum. And there's no need for any of the adherence. You change what's actually in the panel so much that it becomes easier to recycle and less toxic.
When it's life is done. Well, the idea of lasers being used this way really jumped out and created quite a bit of a conversation in the comments started by Wavyan who said it's actually insane the sheer number of lasers, the sheer number of uses we've found for lasers. Which then led to server surfer to respond in a hundred years, people will be laughing at our crude and rudimentary techniques couldn't agree more.
I absolutely believe in a hundred years people are going to be like, can you believe what they were doing in the early 2020s? It was nuts. They didn't know what was going on. And this then led to further comments, which included this one from Aaron McKinnon, who said, don't forget the sharks. Yes. Sharks with laser blades, sharks with lasers on their heads.
We all know that that's coming eventually. There was also an ongoing conversation. We've had, we've had a number of videos recently that had to do with wind turbines and no different from the solar panel recycling. Matt visited the idea of like solar farm or wind farms as well deal with recycling issues because the blades and the towers are manufactured from products that eventually when their life cycles up, what do you do with those? And Victor Benner jumped in saying I'm retired now, but I used to deliver oversized loads to wind farms and believe very much in wind energy. I was frustrated a couple of years back when I heard that no one had thought in advance on how to recycle the wings.
So this was great news on that subject. I will add though, that because of transportation issues, I had thought they should have a mobile machine that you take to the farms that grind up the blades and then truck the material to the recycling plant, vastly reducing transportation costs and reducing fuel use and air pollution at the same time lowering the carbon footprint. Victor, that sounds like a million dollar idea to me. That sounds like
you should be doing that.
That sounds like
come out of retirement,
coming out of retirement and starting an LLC and looking into how do you start putting together that plan? Because that's, that's a brilliant idea.
Like if you can't take the mountain to Muhammad, get Muhammad to the mountain. This is. And as I was reading your comment, I was like, why isn't somebody doing that to like?
But this is, but this is what I could try to get at. Like I'm always bouncing around the topics, but it's like. Renewable energy is still a baby.
It's still an infant. It's still growing up. And so a lot of these comments come up about what about X? What about Y? Oh, you can't do this. You can't do that. The ecosystem around renewable energy is still springing up. Like we can't forget it's a hundred years of combustion engines, which is why there's gas stations in every freaking corner.
And why like, yeah, we've evolved it to this stage. And like, There's going to be like these like little needs that pop up around the industry that somebody is going to go, Hey, I could create a million dollar business just by supporting that need. So it's like, we're in that state right now where the whole kind of ecosystem is growing up right before our eyes.
So a lot of these, Oh, you can't do that and you can't do this are getting answered. ideas, like what Victor's bringing up here. It's like, there you go. There's a business right there. Yeah. We'll come to you. We'll grind up your blades. We'll haul it away and we can do it cheap. And then we can take it to some kind of recycling center or something like that, that can break it down.
Yeah. Very cool. In that same vein of what you just said about, you know, like we've got all this infrastructure built up around a thing and it becomes the norm to us so that we stop seeing it in the same way. I think that falls right in the same vein with this next comment, which is from Benny Mac, who said something came to me while I was watching this video.
The recycling aspect is often cited by the anti renewable crowd, but with renewables, once the thing is constructed, you know exactly the amount of energy needed to produce, the exact amount of material used, and that will need to be recycled. With fossil fuels, that's not the case. So a ridiculous image popped into my head, where an ice vehicle turned one gallon of gas into two gallons of an imaginary substance that, if it had the density of water, would be about two gallons in volume.
And imagine the vehicle operator was in charge of collecting and disposing of this substance. Like for every ten gallons of gas, twenty gallons of waste went to a different tank that they had to pay to get rid of. What a wonderful thing that would be. Instead, we have this giant disposal in the sky that everyone uses at no cost, and they believe they can continue doing so forever with no downsides.
That's fantastic, Benny. It's a good, it's a good image. It really, and it reminded me, Benny, I don't know if you are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, but it reminded me of a Kurt Vonnegut esque look at the world. It's the taking the absurdity that lies behind the assumptions that people make and putting that in the forefront.
That's what this analogy does. If people actually had to take care of the waste that they're producing, it wouldn't be the invisible assumption that they carry around with them. So when they look at a solar vehicle or they look at a solar farm or they look at a wind turbine and they're like, X, Y, Z isn't going to work because it's not as great as this thing, which is so easy and they don't even realize that the thing behind them is guttering plumes of exhaust into the air or that the very production of the thing that they're driving around in is actually more impactful on the environment than the thing they're complaining about. That's brand. Exactly. It's, so it's, it's a big, it's a big paradigm shift and it's hard for people to wrap their heads around it. I was curious, Matt, big picture. Do you feel like some of those knee jerk responses, do you see a, uh, shift in attitude across like, and I mean like very wide spectrum, like, is this beginning to change? Are people simply starting to ignore the fact that there's a solar farm instead of complaining that there's a solar farm, or do you think this is an ongoing issue that we're still watching play out?
Sean, in the world around us, or too big a topic to even answer.
You just, you're touching the third rail a little bit, cause it's like, I would have said a few years ago, Oh, it feels like we're getting some traction of people kind of getting it. Uh, today. No, I feel like people have gotten more entrenched and have gotten into their teams in a lot of the discourse.
You're a lot of the comments and the anti sustainable tech is not coming from a place of reason. A lot of times it's coming from a place of belief, political bias. You're buying into an ecosystem and a lot of misinformation that spouted is almost word for word verbatim, the same, no matter who is saying it, it's just become doctrine.
So I feel optimistic. But in this current state we're in right now, it's, it's, it's hard to keep that optimism because it's, it feels like people have actually got more entrenched. So I feel like there's more fighting to do, more education to do more talking about this stuff. Um, and I've also, I've talked about this with my patrons because we're touching the third rail right now, but I deliberately keep politics off of my channel.
Like I don't talk politics. I don't want to get into politics. I don't want to cause people to devolve into just endless bickering. Uh, so it's like I still have the bickering, but I try to keep it just on the topic itself. It's part of the reason why I don't do videos just that delve into arguing about climate change.
It's like, this is an argument to me that transcends that. It's like, that's an argument not worth having anymore. It's like, let's talk about this piece of technology and talk about what it can do for your life. Period. That's it. Full stop. Uh, because I don't care about winning an argument about whether climate change is real or not.
Cause that doesn't change a thing. It's more about, Hey, look at this thing over here. Whether you believe in climate change or not, look what it can do to impact our lives in a positive way. It's a little bit like. Yeah. It's a better way. It's, I think that's a better way to have a discussion to try to get more people into the conversation than just falling into the trap of the politics and division that we have right now,
it feels like a little bit like you are recommending, like going to somebody and saying, Hey, if you cut sugar out of your diet, it will help you feel better today, as opposed to if you cut sugar out of your diet, you won't get heart disease when you're 80, like it's, it's the immediacy of the thing.
And it's the, what is the application for you and how might it make some of what you're doing better, easier, cheaper, as opposed to I'm prescribing something which long term is ideologically where I think the planet should go.
Yeah. Don't, don't get solar panels in your house because it's going green. Get solar panels on your house because it gives you energy security.
Power goes out. You still got power because you're independent of the grid. Saves you money over time. Look how much money you can save over time. It's an insane amount of money. So it's like, there's all these benefits that you can get out of it today and it's an amazing technology. Um, but you don't even have to talk about the climate change aspect of it, because for some people that's not even a part of the conversation.
So why end up in an argument over it? It's just, we can, we can move the needle without having to win an argument about climate change. It's kind of like where I sit. And like you mentioned, it's to kind of go back to your question. It's just like, that's part of the reason I'm optimistic because there's so much great progress being made on these individual things I talk about.
The political discussion has me kind of going, uh, it's like, I feel like there's still a lot of work to be done.
Yeah. Finally, this from future dev who said one of the biggest challenges renewable anything faces really is industry inertia. Replacing old dirty technology with new clean technology is expensive and doing nothing is cheap in the short term.
It'd be great if there was a way to make replacing everything with better things, the cheaper option short term, or make doing nothing prohibitively expensive. And that goes really into the incentives and policy argument, effectively, because there is a point where, yes, absolutely. Doing nothing becomes cheaper in the long run.
If the thing you happen to be utilizing could conceivably last for decades. And you're looking at, well, we need a change now. So that's a, that's a big part of the argument that you just said you aren't going to get involved in.
Well, while we're, while we're actively touching and grasping this third rail at this point, uh, I, what I will say is I love this comment because one of the things that drives me nuts is one of the comments I see a lot in this misinformation, that kind of doctrine I see in the comments all the time is like, Oh, well this would only works because of subsidies like solar only works because of subsidies.
And I'm like, okay, so clearly this person is an anti subsidy person. That's totally fine. I'm not going to have an argument whether subsidies are a good or bad thing. This is like, okay, well, if you're in that camp, then let's get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels, because you know what would happen to gas prices in the United States if we got rid of subsidies for fossil fuels, it would probably cost you eight to 10 a gallon.
That's what would happen. So when people come in my comments and comment that solar isn't a viable technology and it's no good, it's a scam because without subsidies, it will never earn its keep. Which, one, is factually incorrect, but let's take them at their word. Okay, well then let's get rid of the subsidies for your gasoline, because guess what would happen?
You wouldn't be able to afford to drive to work anymore, and prices would skyrocket and everything. There's a reason why we have those subsidies still in place. Because it makes our modern life here in the U. S. and around the world possible. Without that subsidies, it'd be crazy expensive. So it's just one of those, uh, I, that's where it's like, I go back to the, the political argument of sometimes it feels like I'm bashing my head against a wall just repeatedly.
Cause it's like some of this misinformation is so myopic and ignoring some of the realities around it. It's just kind of astounding at times.
Well, I find myself really scratching my head sometimes at the fact that people think it's somehow better and cheaper to take oil out of the ground in one place and then transport it hundreds, if not in some cases, thousands of miles to a different location, put it through a processing system to convert it into various aspects of its original makeup so that you can take one of those, just one of those, and put that into a vehicle that is somehow better and cheaper.
Oh, you're leaving a step out, Sean,
then you have to take that and transport it back to places where that people can then put it in their vehicles to burn it.
So it's
like, it's so inefficient. That is
somehow cheaper and better than figuring out a way of harvesting electricity using either solar or wind locally, putting it into battery storage locally, and then putting that into your vehicle wherever you are. Like, like there's a, there's a, there's so many stages that people are, are forgetting about. And it goes back to our earlier conversation. This is not people in. Like a majority of cases, this is not people being willfully obtuse. This is simply, we have a civilization, a society of these built in ways that takes all of those stages that we talked about and makes them invisible because we just forget about them.
We forget about them the way we forget about the wind. It just is. So, the transition to the new thing is hard. It is, it is a fundamental truth about the way our brains work that our brains don't necessarily like change, uniqueness breeds unease. And it is why we, we just talked about it at the opening of the show, we have natural circadian rhythms in place.
And when we take our manmade clock and say, it is now time for this to jump forward an hour because of reasons. And then we wake up and we're like, I haven't had enough sleep because my body is responding poorly to what we've decided to do for reasons. That's what we're dealing with on a small scale today as we leap forward in time.
And in a big way, it's what we're dealing with in the mindsets that are in conflict all around us and saying, change is here. Get ready. And those who say not on my watch. They're not wrong. It's not wrong to not want change. It's
hard. So it's, it's why I end all my videos now, Sean, with keep your mind open.
Yeah. Stay curious. That's why I say that in every video. It's like, it's important that we all, even to us don't get stuck in a rut, keep your mind open. So it's like. Yeah, if we, as soon as you started closing that down and with the YouTube algorithms and the social media algorithms, it kind of puts us into little bubbles.
It's about trying to burst that bubble and make sure you're keeping your mind open and looking elsewhere and keeping your, getting all your facts straight.
Well said and well intended. And with that listeners, what did you think about this conversation? Jump into the comments. Let us know. Comments, likes, subscribes, sharing with your friends.
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