https://youtu.be/5gs1Gr8BhQo
Matt and Sean talk about how AI is impacting us today. As well as a recent change in lithium-sulfur battery research, and how that might change the energy storage market. Stinky sulfur may finally be leaving its mark.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How This Overlooked Battery Might Change Everything https://youtu.be/AzU78eq3Kzw?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about how AI is impacting us today. As well as a recent change in lithium-sulfur battery research, and how that might change the energy storage market. Stinky sulfur may finally be leaving its mark.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How This Overlooked Battery Might Change Everything https://youtu.be/AzU78eq3Kzw?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (01:15) - - AI Ethics
- (15:56) - - Previous Episode Feedback
- (21:34) - - Sulfur Battery Discussion
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Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/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.
On today's episode of Still To Be Determined, we're talking about Sulfur, why it smells, and why he who smelt it, dealt it. Welcome everybody to Still To Be Determined. This is of course, the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Once again, I am not Matt Ferrell. That will probably not change in the foreseeable future.
Who am I? No, 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 luckily for me, my brother is the aforementioned Matt. Yes, that Matt from Undecided. Matt, how are you today?
Sean? I'm, I'm good. Sean, I just to take a tangent for a second.
I don't know if you're the same way, Sean, but like when you get something in your head and you can't stop thinking about it, you just become obsessed and just go down a rabbit hole on that thing. Yes. Does that happen to you?
Matt? You and I both have a Star Trek podcast in which we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order.
I think the answer is yes. Yes,
I have gone down this rabbit hole of automation. I'm running a ser, I have a little Mac Mini I run server software on to help my business, and I've been trying to automate parts of the business that are just tedious tasks, and I've gone down the rabbit hole, Sean, of using AI agents and creating AI agents to do work for me and do things, and it's been eye-opening doing this. And it's also been, oh my God, what are we gonna do in five years when nobody has a job anymore? And then last week OpenAI released their latest updates to their, their service, and they now have an image generator that's just part of chat GPT now, that is, I don't know what to say. Sean, you could take, I could take a picture of myself.
Mm-hmm. Put it in the chat box. Say, remove every person from the background, and suddenly it's just me and nobody in the background. And then I could say, put me standing in front of the Taj Mahal, and suddenly that image of me is now me standing in front of the Taj Mahal. And it looks realistic. It is right.
Horrifying. I find it absolutely horrifying. Yeah. Especially as somebody who, in my early career, Sean, I was a graphic designer for a while, right? I was paid good money to spend eight hours a day working in Photoshop doing this stuff, and now you can just go to a text box and go boopty, boop, and then suddenly you've got an image that's would have taken somebody 20 years ago, you know, a couple hours to do.
And it does it in a matter of minutes. I'm horrified. Yet, I can't stop playing with this stuff. So you're part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I think the, I'm trying to understand it. That's basically what I'm trying to do. Yeah. I'm trying to understand it. I wanna understand like, what is it, what is it capable of?
How can it actually benefit, like what I'm doing and what are the like ethical ways to use it and the unethical ways to use it. I'm trying to find like all that stuff, and what I'm seeing is, oh my God, with no guardrails, this stuff is. Yeah. Horrifying.
Well, it's, I, I'm, I'm of multiple minds on this as, as you know, we've talked about this before and I guess this is kind of a mini episode embedded within the introduction of this episode Yeah.
That we weren't expecting to do, but I think it's an interesting conversation. Um, yeah, and it, I'm of multiple minds on it. I, as a creator of art, do not like the fact that not only are people using this as a shortcut to say like, oh, I'm gonna like have it write a novel for me. And there are YouTube videos I that have been added to my feed recently, which yeah, are along the lines of, oh, you wanna write a novel? How do you use chat GP to do that? And I'm like, alright. Now the person on YouTube who's promoting going into using chat GPT is effectively encouraging plagiarism because the only way chat GPT can do that is because they uploaded stolen content to the model so that it could do what it does.
At the other end of the spectrum, I am realizing that a tool changes the paradigm, and if the tool changes the paradigm too fast, you get whiplash. And that's, I think, culturally we're experiencing whiplash right now because, yeah. At one point, there were people whose job was simply to be a word processor, to sit and type up a document that somebody else had written.
There would be somebody who might transcribe it and then have to type it up. Somebody would dictate, or somebody would jot down notes and hand it to somebody else and say, type this up. And somebody would sit down and type it. And then over time, word processing on a computer changed that paradigm. And it became, everybody just sits down at their computer and just has templates or a system that automatically generates a boilerplate version and then they adjust it themselves.
There are not people whose job it is to straight up just word process. I say that as somebody who, my current job, my original job at the company that I worked for, I was a word processor. That is all I did, and that job went away because people could use the computer is to do it themselves. That paradigm shift was slow motion compared to what we're seeing now, where one day somebody's like, I wanna write a novel, but I don't have the time, skill, focus, whatever missing X factor it was.
Then they woke up one day and somebody said, what about this artificial intelligence? And they went, okay, I'll try that. And I suddenly have a 60,000 word novel. Somebody online. I saw a social media post from somebody who said, I think the problem that we're having right now with AI is that I want AI to do my laundry, but it can't.
Yes. What people are using it for is to have a shortcut on the things I want to do with my free time. I want to write a novel. I don't have time. Yeah. I have to go do laundry. Can AI do my laundry? Therefore I can write the novel. We've got it inverted. And I thought that that was a really interesting framing because if chat GPT's entire goal was, Hey everybody, come try Chat GPT, it'll dust your house for you. Nobody be pushing back. Nobody would be, nobody would be complaining. It is. The fact that we are having this social change around the fun and creative things instead of the tedious and mundane things
that, that's exactly what I've been finding is that, and that's where, yeah, it's
a
hard, yeah, go ahead.
For, for, for me, it's. There's things about what I do that I can't stand doing. Yeah. It's just the monotonous, tedious things of you're trying to pull some research research together, or you're trying to get your thumbnails ready, or you're trying to upload it to YouTube, or you're trying to do, like, there's aspects of what I do that's just like, oh, God can't stand it.
The things I find fun are like, well, what idea, what are we gonna make a video about? What do we need to say about this? What do we wanna say about this? That's the part that I find engaging and I wanna do. So it's like my, my view is like the unethical way to use it would be like you created a bunch of AI agents that do everything and you just put in a prompt that says, make me a video about X.
Right? And then it goes out, writes the script, does a fake voice, does all the B roll. It like that to me is horrifying. Yeah. But for. I'm doing a complex topic and me and my researchers and writers are trying to pull stuff together. It's like we could use perplexity, which is a service I've been playing with recently, where you can do deep research and say, I'm trying to find as much information about this company, this technology, and this thing, and it goes out and it scours 130 different sources, research papers, websites, Reddit, people, posts like everything, and it pulls together a summary with all those sources.
Then you can then, as the human being, sit down and start reading through the stuff it found, start doing your own digging and own research to kinda pull in more stuff. Right. So it kind of jumpstarts you, it kickstarts you further into the process, saving you time, but it doesn't write the script for you.
Right. And that's where it's like, I'm trying to find ways how to use it that way, because I will never use AI to write a script for the video. I will never use AI to edit the video. It's like there's a human touch and human creativity that I think is essential to pull put into the, yeah the videos. But as I'm doing it, I'm seeing why there's so many YouTube channels that are just AI generated schlock.
Yeah. Because you spend a few days putting these agents together and then you could be pumping out videos every single day. Yeah. With just a couple of text prompts and it's like, to me it's such, it's depressing.
Well, it's, there was recently news that Spotify admitted that they are starting to add AI generated music, yep, to the content. So it's along the lines of Sean's out there, bebopping to the White Stripes and Spotify's algorithm identifies that I listen to the White Stripes quite a bit, so the algorithm points me toward AI generated White Stripes like music. That is not the White Stripes, but it has a band name and a fake album and it generates everything.
So that now I'm walking along and I'm like, oh, this new band is a lot like the White Stripes. I really like them, and it's not anybody I, that's, that's the greasy side of this. That really, it's gross. Grosses me out. That's very cool. Uh, YouTube videos, like you said, the ones that scour the internet and find high performing videos and just rip the content.
Regenerate images and then post it up as a regurgitation. And I actually watched a video from a guy who said, we can poison pill the AI. Mm-hmm. And he went through a process where it adds some steps to the human generative process. But it is basically, you use YouTube's closed captions, feature uhhuh. You take your video and you use that feature and you unlock the closed captioning and put it into, effectively there's, there's a way that it ends up in two places.
One is a place that will show the text on the screen. The other becomes effectively hypertext in the background. The hypertext one is the one that the AI's would see, so you change that text. And now what the AI scours takes and regenerates as a new video has gobbledygook text, so the AI generative voice or whatever that is going along with like, and his example was a video, which was about South Park.
He took a video about South Park talking about how Kenny was the main character of the show, and he changed the hyper text in the background to gobbledygook about like the what the origin of the universe. Yeah, and the AI version of this scoured video was images of South Park, but the audio is just this gobbledegook about the origin of the universe.
And it was brilliant because he's, he's like, all I'm doing is using the tools that are within YouTube, and I think that the, there's a reason why, I don't remember the reason why there is this feature to say to YouTube, generate closed captioning, but use this text instead. I don't remember what the logic of that is.
There's autogenerate, it doesn't auto-generated subtitles, and then you can upload your own subtitle files,
right?
Separately. I, I do that stuff. So it's doing something, it's
something along the lines of like, it, it has that ability to say like, here's what's seen on the screen. So if somebody does need closed captioning, you're not destroying their ability to use it.
Right. That's what's crazy. So your video is like, hi, my name's Sean Ferrell, and it says, hi, my name is Sean Ferrell, and then in the hyper text it says, I am Moses come from the mountain. And so it's this weird like, like you create the ability for the, for the AI to not know. And the guy points out in his video, he's like, they can fix this.
Yeah. The people who are creating these AI bots can fix it, but it's not worth their time. And that's like nobody who's generating an AI bot is gonna take the time to actually go in and do work. That's the entire point of why they're using the AI.
But at the same time, not to take this tangent even further, but like as I've been using perplexity, that would screw up things like perplexity.
So it's like that, that not only damages the nefarious uses of it, it also damages the good uses of it. So like if I'm trying to do a perplexity deep research thing on a topic, and there's this video that's the perfect topic that I could be using as a source, but the AI looks at the script and of that, that source file.
It doesn't look like it pertains, but it actually does. It won't give me that source. So it's like you're kind of screwing yourself in that regard. So it's true,
but it's like where do you draw the line if you are somebody who's creating content along the lines of like. There is an aspect of like what you just said, that goes back again for me to the fact that my content was taken without my permission and used without my permission, right?
There is an aspect of this, which is like, yes, if everybody was willing to do attribution and point to their sources, absolutely keep all that information clean and clear and searchable, but that's not what people are doing with it. People are taking it and they, and the people who are using it and don't realize that it's culled from stolen information, I think is a big part of what's going on right now.
Mm-hmm. Having this cultural pushback where the creators are pushing back and saying, you're stealing from me, and the people on the other side don't understand how it's stealing and there's a gap in understanding there. Yep. Um, but I also see what you're saying about the looking for the ethical applications I have for a while now.
I had a knee-jerk reaction with AI is gonna take people's jobs, AI is gonna take people's jobs. And then at work, there was something going on with conversation amongst several colleagues and we were talking about like, this is drudgery. This thing that has to happen is drudgery. And it suddenly occurred to me, I was like, holy cow, we should have AI do it.
Yeah, you could set up automations and get rid of that task. It's
just like, it suddenly was just a moment of just like, ugh, like. Yeah,
no.
Here is thing where lots of good, here's the thing where this is absolutely drudgery and, but yeah, who could do this? Well, a computer could do it in an afternoon. So interesting conversation there.
We're not gonna land on any kind of solution. God knows. I mean, nobody's gonna say in 50 years. It was two brothers who grew up in Rochester, New York, who eventually solved the AI crisis by saying this in a video about sulfur batteries like nobody's. Nobody's gonna say that, so like totally tuly Tuly.
Fast forward, let's move on to our typical discussion. We hope you've enjoyed this 15 minutes of, Hey, hey, you know what occurred to me today?
As our regular viewers and listeners know, we normally start our discussion by taking a look at what you all had to say about our last episode. This would be episode 260 in which we were talking about ice source heat pumps, and there were some questions that about the, and this is something we talked about briefly in our conversation, what happens with the water, the, the entire, to give people who are jumping into this at this point without knowing what we're talking about, ice source heat pumps generate heat through the freezing process of water.
It is a weird, absolutely unintuitive, uh, aspect of freezing that when, when something moves from a liquid to a solid, it releases heat. And so the ice source heat pump is a technology that says, we'll take this water, we'll turn it into a slushie, and as it turns into a slushie will capture that heat. And now you've got a warm room and cold icy Slush.
And Cecil Martin jumped into the comments to say about that slushy water. Well, we talked about you could just get rid of it. You don't need to keep it. It can just go off somewhere. It'll melt and it'll just be dirty water. And Cecil jumped in to say, wonder if this would overload wastewater treatment systems, as most rainwater doesn't go into wastewater treatment plants, which then spawned Theggle to jump in and say, I also don't understand why it would need to, it's just frozen water.
Right? Why not just put it back out on the curb and into the storm system the way it was going to before capture and use? Yep. So yeah, there's, I think that there's maybe a disconnect between some of the things we said and maybe what we, um, suggested at one point, I think we did say something about you could treat this water and turn it into potable water.
Yeah. I don't think we were saying you had to.
No. Nope. This is just water that's, you could do whatever you want. So it's like the easiest way to get rid of it would be put it back into the storm sy uh, storm water or put it back into the, uh, wastewater that's already built into the house. It's like there's different ways you could get rid of it.
Um. You could put new pipe work in to take it someplace completely different. So it's like there's any number of ways you could handle this in a way that would not overload the system. So it's, it's not gonna be that much water that you wouldn't be able to handle it.
And depending on the source of the water.
I mean, there are certain sources of water, like if you were taking fluid that was coming out of some sort of sewage system or something like that, that would be contaminated and full of bacteria. You wouldn't necessarily wanna do anything like this. But if your source of this water was just rain runoff, then that's one of the things you could take this slush and just dump it into a near water way, a river or a lake, if all it was going to do was turn into Lake Water in the first place and you caught it, turned it to ice, used it, and then got rid of it, you could put it back in the lake. Yep, exactly. There was this one from David Toll who was jumping onto the conversation we've been having off and on for a couple of weeks now about hybrid electric motors and the idea of, well, instead of making an electric motor that has a battery that connects to an electric motor.
You have to charge the battery separately from driving. What about having a vehicle which has a generator of some sort connected to the battery, connected to the motor? And effectively now you're not filling a gas tank in order to burn the gas, to drive the tur, the to drive the rotors. You are burning the gas to charge the battery to turn the rotors and it's more efficient.
And David Toll jumps in to say what Edison Motors is doing has been done for decades with Diesel Electric locomotives. The BYD Shark is a new vehicle that does the same thing, electric propulsion with an engine to charge the battery when needed. I'm not sure, but I think the Ram Recharger and the Scout, a new vehicle in a couple of years will do the same thing.
So this is definitely something that meets a nice halfway point without it being overwhelming on a, any kind of infrastructure around charging stations and needing to rebuild infrastructure around a new technology. It becomes a halfway point where the old infrastructure continues to operate, but at a much more efficient level.
How do you feel about the idea of, instead of seeing more electric vehicles that are straight up electric plug into your garage vehicles, the hybrid model being a solution for some people?
Yeah, I, I'm not an absolutist on this. It's like there are definitely use cases where burning something is gonna be the primary way of getting energy, it's gonna be really hard to get rid of. So lean into it. Just find the most efficient way to do that. And this is, to me, one of those things on top of which, even if it's a stop gap, I, I said this before about Edison Motors. It's like the motors and the battery don't care what the energy source is that's feeding into it.
So if there's a better engine or a better generator down the road, you could change, you could change that out at any point. So it's like right. It seems like a no brainer to me to go down this path.
On now to our conversation about Matt's most recent. This is his episode titled How This Overlooked Battery might Change Everything.
Matt, I hate to point out that sounds similar to other titles. I know, I
know.
There's, uh, this is the,
this is the YouTube game, Sean. Yeah. This is the awful state of the YouTube game. It's the algorithm. It stinks.
I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I, I think for me it's, I hate it. Less the, might change everything, but just the overlooked battery because as we've come around to thinking in our past, I'd say past year, you are bringing to surface a lot of technologies that are not brand, brand new, but are just breakthroughs around older tech. So when you say overlooked. Lots of things have been overlooked and not even necessarily overlooked. They just haven't hit the right spot yet, and now they seem to be.
So this week we're talking about a battery that uses lithium sulfur instead of lithium ion. And as we just said, not a new technology, but a new way of building that technology that avoids some of the missteps in the past. What was the biggest item, do you think that's holding back this technology from the lifespan catching on the lifespan of the battery?
Yeah. It's like just the, it, it, it's one of those, everybody knew sulfur has a really good energy. The, this is not the correct way to say this, but the best energy density. It like had an, it has an incredible amount of energy density and potential, but every time you charge and discharge it, it basically eats itself. It destroys itself in that process really fast. Which is why it was kinda like, that doesn't work. Toss it away. Kind of a idea of like, it would be great, but it doesn't last long. And the ch things that have been happening just over the past few years are like, I did a video a while back about the accidental breakthrough.
They, they discovered a way to make sulfur. They weren't trying to solve the problem that they solved. It was a byproduct of different research. Yeah. Correct. And it was like, oh man, well this didn't, this did something we didn't expect that, oops, we may have actually solved the problem for sulfur. That kind of a thing, right?
That kind of stuff is what's happening now over the, just the past few years that's making, so it's making that lifespan way longer and not just a little longer, like dramatically longer, where it's like, oh crap, this might actually be a highly competitive battery now. So it's an old idea with some new breakthroughs and new advances that have just kind of unlocked the potential that was always there.
Regarding that timeline that you just pointed at, Tear down Dan had a interesting comment, which he created his own means of measuring how long forever is.
I like this very much. Tear down Dan wrote, how long is forever? For me, a reasonable definition would be the lifetime of the application, excluding material and manufacturing defects, neglected maintenance and accidental damage. If a vehicle is made of aluminum and stainless steel to avoid corrosion and nominally lasts 20 plus years than a forever battery would have to last 20 plus years.
I think that that's a very practical and applicable yardstick for what we mean by the lifetime of a battery, this will last you a lifetime. Well, if it lasts you as long as that thing that you own, then yes. It's lasted a lifetime. Yeah. So you buy that car and when you get rid of that car, the battery still was working.
No harm, no foul. The fact that it eventually will, as all things must come to an end. Well, yeah. That's just a, a little wrestling with mortality that we best leave to the artists. And as far as the usefulness of sulfur, I liked the idea that this is using something that is so readily available. Yeah. This is not us going out and saying like, well sure you can replace the cobalt with this other thing, but it's just as horrible to collect It's, it's just as rare the human rights issues, like all of these things.
Craig Lord jumps in to say, man. Sulfur is produced in the tonnes as a byproduct of oil and natural gas production when it's produced from what's known as sour gas. I can't express just how much raw elemental sulfur is just still outside in gigantic piles. Outside of oil and gas production facilities in Alberta, the scale is almost hard to believe.
One example can be seen on Google Maps, and then he gives the address on Google Maps. That's fantastic. So yeah, if there's a demand for sulfur, boy, oh boy, do we have the supply? I, this is like, this is an aspect of the, like nobody's, nobody's running out of sulfur. No, there's not a whole lot of, like, that smell alone drives people the other way.
So, uh, the one element of this that I did wonder about, it's, it's lithium sulfur. The lithium is still an issue.
Yeah,
yeah.
Kind of.
What sorts of solutions lay in the future as far as lithium production?
There are. The main thing about lithium that I would say to people that I think gets overlooked a lot is there's different ways to extract the lithium.
There's direct extraction, which is typically not how it's done today. It is done this way, but it's not done in quantity. It's mainly those brine pools that you've probably seen photos of where it's like acres and acres and acres of just these huge kind of like pinkish hued pools of water. Yeah. On the, on the ground.
That's the cheapest, easiest way to do it, and that's typically what you see, but direct extraction has a footprint of, oh wait, look, it's a large building over there that that's the kind of footprint of it, and you're basically just drilling into the ground and you're extracting the water from salty brine from underneath the the surface, and then you're basically just filtering out what you need and then putting the water right back in the ground again.
So it's less damaging to the environment. It's got a smaller footprint. It's very fast where the brine pools can take 18 months to get the lithium out. You're talking days and you have the lithium you need, so it's faster, it's less environmental impact. Those kind of systems are becoming more prevalent now and there's more lithium in the world than people think.
And people typically talk about like, well, China and like, you know, down in South America, it's like that's where the main lithium hubs are right now. That doesn't mean that has to be the only place, like the United States has a huge lithium supply, but the parts per million is lower than it is in South America or China.
But it's there. Yeah. And with these direct extraction systems, we can now get to it and we can start processing our own. And it's the same for other countries around the world. So there is, there is enough lithium to meet our demands. Uh, it's just a matter of, we just have to get to it. So I would say it's like.
Lithium's kind of like the X factor still in this discussion, but it's not that it can't be gotten, we just have to start doing it and we are right. It's like that's, that's ramping up right now.
There was also this comment from JRP and I wondered about, he puts together kind of a a little mini equation about what success would look like, and I'm wondering if you agree with his measurement or if you think that it's missing anything.
JRP writes, if energy density, cycle life, charge speed, and cost can provide a 400 plus mile range, 10 plus minute charge time and at least a thousand cycles for 400,000 miles total for a reasonable cost, IE lower than lithium. It could be a game changer. Do you think that those are the criteria by which to measure success here or is there anything missing from that?
I think, I think JRP basically has it. Uh, I don't think they're equal. You know what I mean? Like, I wouldn't put those all on the same level. They have to, they don't have to hit a level. Yeah. No, I, I, I think the number one is cost. Mm-hmm. You know, like, it's like if you, if you had a battery pack on a car that could only go 250 miles but could charge in five minutes and is dramatically cheaper than everything else that's out there, I think that would tick a lot of boxes.
Um, where. It's not gonna be 400 miles, but because it charges so fast and it's super dirt cheap, it means EV's gonna be cheaper. And all we just need to do is put out more ev charging infrastructure out there so that you, like we have today with gas stations. And so suddenly range anxiety isn't a problem.
Fast charging. So it's like, it's kind of like, um, you're, you're, you're tuning dials Yeah. To hit the optimum thing. So those are the things that you're looking at. But I would argue cost is probably the most important one of those of all of them.
Yeah. I also think it's interesting to think in terms of like range.
Range for people who know about electric vehicles and are looking at electric vehicles and want electric vehicles, seems to be very much from the perspective of somebody who is already measuring miles per gallon very closely. Because if you say, oh, it only gets 250 miles. Yeah, well, a 10 gallon tank of a car that gets between 25 and 30 miles per gallon, you're gonna get about the same range.
Yeah. Do you think that there's an unfair expectation on electric vehicles to outpace what is probably close to an average for ice engines?
Yes. It's funny, just yesterday I had a, a Zoom call with a bunch of my patrons and we actually talked about this exact topic, um, about how range anxiety is a thing that I think is around people who don't drive EVs.
The longer you drive an EV, the less range anxiety you have because you realize it's not a big deal at all. Like there's this push to get to the fastest charging like BYD just over the past few weeks showed off a one megawatt EV charger. And there are cars that can charge at one megawatt. Keep in mind, the fastest EV chargers we have here are 350 kilowatts, so they have a charging infrastructure starting to ramp up in China.
That's three times the power and. That's a car that could charge in five minutes. And that's appealing because people have range anxiety and they wanna be able to, like, I wanna be able to charge, if I'm going on a long road trip, I wanna make sure I, I don't have to worry about how long it's gonna take me to charge.
I don't wanna set a charger for an hour. Yeah. I, I wanna be able to make it to my destination without fear. So there's a psychological aspect that I think we're trying to hit with these numbers that we're trying to hit. Oh, we need EVs that have 600 mile range and it has to charge in five minutes. It's, we're only focusing on that because people who don't drive EVs don't quite understand.
It's different. It's scary, it's strange, but when you see those big numbers, it's like, oh, I can definitely get to my mother's house with the kids at Christmas because it's a 400 mile journey and the car can go 600 miles. So there's less fear. It's all about convincing people who don't already drive EVs, that that range anxiety isn't a concern.
So I think it's an unfair burden we're putting on it. So for me personally, it's like in this conversation I had with my patrons just yesterday, it was like we were all kind of like, yeah, 250 kilowatts or 350 kilowatt chargers like we have today. They're great. They're actually really good right now, but yet it's not that 10 minute charge time.
But when you actually drive the EV you realize it doesn't really matter that much. It's like, it, it, you can do long road trips and it's just fine. It doesn't add that much time to your trip, but you don't know that until you do it, do it right, and you live with it. So it's, it's, it's one of those, like a chicken or the egg kind of situation.
You kind of have to like convince people that it's good. It's, it's unfair, but I, I understand why we're chasing it.
Yeah. Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about pronunciation and where you put your emphasises. Yes.
Monash. Yeah. Monash emphasis on the man Mons says Peter hoes, Monash. Monash, emphasis on the mon, correctly pronounced the mon part, but you emphasize the ash Monash. I feel you might be saying that a lot in the future. And Blake Stone jumped on to say, nice to see someone pronouncing the name of M'Nash University in the original Klingon.
Well done Blake. Yes, we mentioned it at the top. I'll mention it here. Matt and I have a Star Trek podcast called Trek and Time. Check it out. We're looking at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. Blake, if you're not already a viewer, you might enjoy it. Yeah. So listeners, viewers, what did you think about all of this?
Do you think that Matt should continue to practice his Klingon? Let us know in the comments. Oh, dear. And as you should know, by now, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, all very easy and free ways for you to support the podcast. But if you wanna support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or go to still tbd .fm, click the join button there. Both of those ways a allow to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about M'Nash University, ka blah. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.
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