201: Matt Ferrell AMA (Ask Me Anything)

In today’s episode of Still to be Determined, we’re going to be talking about orange and yellow. That’s not what we’re doing. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, where we usually do a follow up to episodes of Undecided with Matt Ferrell. And that would be a conversation between the aforementioned Matt Ferrell.

And me, his older brother, who is a writer. I wrote some sci fi, I wrote some stuff for kids, and I’m just generally curious about technology and Matt and I usually dive into his most recent episodes and talk about your viewer and listener comments and have a general discussion about the topic, but this week we’re doing something a little different.

Matt opened up the, don’t even know how to phrase it, he opened up the, uh,

Floodgates? Mailbag? That’s the word

I was looking for. I’m a wordsmith. I write. Sean’s a writer. And I couldn’t think of the word floodgates. I’m like, I know there’s a phrase. He opened the something or other, the corral, the The windows.

What if, Sean, what if you wrote your books like that? He opened up this, um, this thing.

Sometimes that is exactly what it feels like. There’s a guy and he’s, uh, he’s got a thing in his hand. Um. So Matt opened up the floodgates. He, he didn’t ask me anything. And thankfully a number of you jumped in to ask him anything.

So we’re going to be talking about your questions. Some of them will be just kind of general interest, like, Hey Matt, what’s your life like? Others of them will be a little more tech ish. So we’ll be talking about your questions and Matt will be giving his answers. And I will be here to make sure a fight doesn’t break out.

So diving quickly into our first question, this is a tough one, Matt, I hope you’re ready for it. Oh boy. Drew Lovely wrote in to ask, what’s your favorite food? And also, do you cook?

Um, I can cook. I don’t. I can. Um, I do things like breakfasts most often, like scrambled eggs, waffles, things like that. I bake, uh, from time to time, but I don’t do a lot of cooking.

Um, my favorite food, uh, pretty much anything that’s, uh, Mexican, I guess I would say. It’s like, I’m kind of obsessed with tacos and quesadillas and things like that. Um, love that stuff. And then anything with peanut butter, I love peanut butter ice cream. Peanut butter cups, anything with peanut butter. And if you watch Undecided, you might have picked up on that.

Cause I sometimes make a lot of references to, it’s like peanut butter and chocolate. It’s like peanut butter and this. It’s like, there’s, there’s, there’s a reason I say that a lot.

I suddenly had a flashback to when we were kids, our mom used to make a salad that would go with dinners, which was sliced banana.

With a peanut butter sauce that was on top and the peanut butter sauce was made from peanut butter mixed with mayonnaise. Which

sounds disgusting. Which sounds

disgusting every time I have mentioned this to anybody who didn’t grow up in the 70s. This is a very 1970s meal. And anybody I’ve described, anytime I’ve described this to people, their response is, ugh.

But it created this creamy drizzly sauce that you would put over the bananas. And it was, as a kid, I absolutely loved it. And I don’t know if you remember, Matt, the time that mom made it with what was then a new product. Which was a lower fat mayonnaise. There was a new type of mayonnaise that had entered the market.

Hellmann’s came up with a lower fat option, which is now you see it on the stores, still the brand, the, the exact same product still is on store shelves all over the place. Yeah. And our mom tried to. Use that in the same recipe. And it had some other kind of emulsifier than regular mayonnaise. So it reacted to the peanut butter and it turned it kind of into Play Doh.

It was like, kind of clotty and not really, you wouldn’t describe it as, as chunky, but it was just kind of like, like wet sand thrown on top of the bananas. And as we sat down and I recognized this doesn’t look right and our mother being the practical woman that she was, it was like, it tastes exactly the same, but there’s clearly something about this mayonnaise that is different.

And so Matt and I both tried to eat it. And I remember saying, I don’t care that it tastes the same. It doesn’t feel right.

Our father gently pushed his bowl away from him and he said, he’s right.

It was a rough,

it was, it was gross. It was a rough meal. Next question. This one’s from Pesig. Who wrote in to ask is, and maybe this relates to, you know, the previous question about what’s your favorite food, is homemade biogas production a way for modern houses? I saw some products, projects for individual houses in Africa and for new development of terraced houses in the UK, but never saw it in real life.

Thank you for your opinion. So biogas, do you want to talk about what biogas is, how is it produced and utilized? And do you think it’s an actual option for a broader worldwide use.

You can take waste, organic waste product and make biogas out of it. It’s like, maybe this isn’t completely correct, but it’s like fermenting or like, you’re just kind of like letting things decompose and you’re using the gas that it’s producing and the things that it produces to run diesel generators or to run whatever you need to.

Um, It’s a very, it’s a totally viable way to do things. And there are some, uh, some super green homes that are like off grid that do this exact thing because you can be completely self sufficient. You don’t necessarily have to buy it from a supplier. You make it yourself. The problem is It takes a lot of that stuff, that leftover stuff to make biogas.

Um, so typically you often see this most often on farms, like farmers. This is like something that pretty much all farmers should be doing, because imagine you have cattle and you’re taking the waste product of the cattle and you’re using that to create gas that can then run your tractor. You wouldn’t need to buy gasoline for your tractor.

And by producing your own, you’re kind of creating a nice little, uh, closed loop cycle so that the, you’re not adding additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Cause it’s just like, you’re just kind of like, it’s just the closed loop system of, yeah, it’s going into the atmosphere, but it’s coming kind of right back out through all the food that the cattle are eating and then excrement and the other stuff that comes out.

Um, so it’s like, you’re making use of the full cycle. So there are definitely ways to do it. My personal take. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for like a single family home. Like for me, I would never want to do this. It’s just, it’s just too much work. There are other things I can do that are going to be less maintenance and will still get me great, uh, end product for what I’m looking for.

Right. But yeah, it’s a, it’s a really cool technology and a, and a good practice. It just depends on your use

case. Right. Yeah. You say biogas production. I think it’s a load of crap. Oh. From Chris M who wrote in to say. Matt, do you deal with existential dread, or the feeling that no matter what you do, it will never be good enough, and therefore, okay, sorry, let me read that again.

Do you want me to skip this question? No, go ahead.

This question from Chris M. Who wrote in to say, Matt, do you deal with existential dread or the feeling that no matter what you do, it will, and therefore you will never be good enough? If so, how do you deal with it?

I don’t know if you feel the same way, Sean. That’s just my life.

That’s, that’s what it means to be a Ferrell.

You’ve asked the right people. That’s my response to this, Chris. You ask the two people who can answer this better than anybody else on the planet.

It’s, it’s our British Irish background, kind of like, that’s just. Yeah. In our DNA. That’s it. Yes. The answer to that is yes. I just live with that all the time.

Yeah.

It’s the British side that feels like that and the Irish side that laughs about it. Um. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh, seriously though, Chris. It is a reality of the human condition, I think. I think there is a part of the human evolved brain that holds onto the you’re not good enough to drive a continued pursuit of improvement.

I think that is a part of the human condition. And I think that it can be exacerbated by circumstances of lived experience.. So, I think there’s a part of the brain that just is ready to fire that message out. And then there’s our lived experience that sometimes triggers it to over production. And then there are other times where lived experience helps mute it.

So Somebody with a particularly troubled childhood might have that signal override most other messages. Somebody might have a physical condition that drives that message too often. And how you deal with it is And I’ve had a lot of practice with this recently, uh, not just with myself, but with other members of my circle.

Um, really take a look at how you are viewing the things that are under your control. Are you viewing them as a single massive entity that needs to be dealt with? Or are you taking the opportunity to break them down into distinct sections and parts? That are more manageable, you can gain a sense of progress and again, again, a sense of improvement.

If you see yourself ticking off tasks in a way that seems like motion forward. If you say to yourself, I have this project I have to do, and all that remains is one massive. Monolith in front of you, you may never feel like you’re getting anywhere toward completion, but if you realize that the monolith is actually made up of a hundred small steps, and at any given day, you might be able to check off one or two over a period of time, you see the progress you’re making.

And it is difficult sometimes to do that. It is sometimes difficult to learn how to approach a project. I know Matt, you’ve done a remarkable job in the past several years. Of really developing an approach and maybe this goes back even deeper than that. I’m, I’m thinking in terms of like your approach to your channel and how you’ve developed the business that you do now around your channels, but I may be even longer term in your professional career before you.

Begin to use YouTube the way you do. You have what I think is a very admirable approach to project management and being able to take something and break it into those distinct parts and be able to say, like, how do I manage to do this when the whole seems impossible, but the parts are manageable? What is your approach to all that?

Yeah,

it’s it’s kind of a kissing cousin to existential dread. Yeah. But there’s something referred to as. Uh, Impostor Syndrome, um, which I have sometimes have a crippling case of Impostor Syndrome my entire life, but, uh, it was in my professional career. It was like when I was a very young, I became a director and I was felt like a fraud in what I was doing.

And I went to a conference and one of the keynotes was talking, the guy who got up on the stage was somebody I respected and admired. He got up and talked and his entire speech was about imposter syndrome. And when that happened, I had this light bulb go over my head of like, I’m not the only one who feels like this.

This is normal. This is a lot of people feel this. And so once you kind of understand that you’re not in it alone, It makes it a little easier to kind of do what you’re talking about, to kind of break things down and realize the group of us can kind of tackle this together. It’s not just me. I don’t have to be the only one that’s doing this.

So that existential dread on a personal level, I try not to do that. I try to Not to pawn it off on other people, but it’s not just a me, it’s a collective. And I try to break down projects, break down what I want to do. I tend to have that milestone of where I want to get. Okay, well now how do I get there?

What are all the things I have to do to get there? And then just come up with a list, prioritize it, just start chipping away at it. And you’ll see before you know it, you’re making a lot of progress along that path.

It can be tricky. And Chris, I wish you the best of luck. And if you, uh, there are so many resources available and everything from therapy to just finding people to spittle ideas with, like just, and as Matt described it, being in a room with other people and having somebody say, like, I sometimes feel like I am an imposter.

Letting you know that you’re not alone is that’s free. Usually like finding a group of people who are interested in the same thing you’re interested in can be a great way to start building that kind of community. And I know Matt describes it from his professional career. I’ve had that in my professional career.

I have a full time job where I, I have now been working at the same place for 24 years. And I was talking with a colleague recently and I said, for the first. Eight. I thought any minute now I was going to get fired. Yep. And it was eight years, uh, unnecessarily looking over my shoulder thinking like, when are they going to find out?

I don’t know what I’m doing. And I said that to somebody who had now been doing the job that we do for six years. And she said in a moment of like anxiety, she said, I’m just absolutely convinced. I don’t know what I’m doing. And I said, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I felt that way for the first eight years of my career here.

And now I’m at my 24th and in my other professional career, my, my writing that is. A constant exercise. And you want to see, you want to see anxiety in human form, go to a writer’s conference. It is a marvel of, uh, there’s a, uh, a line from a David Foster Wallace story in which he says, I went to a graduate writing program where anxiety and neuroses is like oxygen.

And that is such a truth that you get into a room full of writers and every single one of them is convinced that everybody else is producing, and they alone are the fake in the room. Uh, so a writers conference might as well be called a fakers conference. Um, and you want to talk about having to do long term planning around existential dread?

Try writing a novel, it’s, it’s an exercise in that, and it really forces the approach of okay, I want to write 300 pages of words, but before I can do that I have to write one. And so you are effectively training yourself to not write one 300 page project, but to write 300 one page projects. That’s how you get to the end.

So yeah, whatever it is you’re dealing with.

Yeah. So this applies directly to like sustainability, renewable energy and stuff like that. Like if you want to live in a house, it’s a net zero home, but you can’t afford to do it. That doesn’t matter. List all the things you’d like to do. And like, are there any on that list that you could do right now that are affordable or that you can do yourself?

It’s like, you can just start. Picking things off one by one to start working your way towards whatever

goal it is that you want. So whatever it is you’re dealing with, Chris, you’re not alone in it. And look for the group of people who are headed the same direction you are and start sharing some of your thoughts.

And you’ll hear back from a lot of them. They’re dealing with the same thing you are. Best of luck. Keith Fleming writes in to ask for a deep dive on automotive cyber security, specifically focusing on Cybertruck’s Etherloop, the potential threat. From that, from a bad actor is something that they are concerned with.

So that’s more of just like, put a pin in it for you. Uh, is cyber security around vehicles? Something that is on your radar as a possible topic.

It wasn’t for vehicles, but cybersecurity is something I’m very interested in across the board because I’m really into smart home tech. Um, the technology that can be applied to utility scale solutions as well.

Um, cybersecurity is massive because if you don’t do it right. You could take an entire power grid down of a city or you could, your house could kind of get out of control or hacked or something bad can happen. So with vehicles, that’s, that’s an even more, um, concerning one. If somebody could take control of your vehicle or do something nefarious with it, that’s pretty scary.

Yeah. I’m going to put a pin on that and look into it for a possible video.

H4K4 writes in to ask, are there any lawmaking or lobbying efforts you support? Stuff around incentivizing smart home tech, labeling, open software standards, and interoperability or data privacy. He goes on to say that he’s interested in the balance of your channel.

And he appreciates it, but he feels like there’s also questions around what the cutting edge is and the management of the cutting edge from a legal perspective. So what is your take on not any particular advocacy point, but on advocacy in general? Is there anything you’re aware of that people could look to to say, how could they be a part of a push for more, uh, focus on these issues?

That’s actually a really good question that I’ve actually been looking into for myself. Uh, because in a previous episode of the, of the show, I just talked about how my local government has made some bad decisions when it comes to broadband accessibility, when it comes to how the, the regulations around battery storage in your home, there’s some bad Stupid regulations out there and agreements that have been made.

And I’m trying to get more involved myself into helping local community, my local community be smarter. The decisions they’re making, like literally going into town meetings and literally trying to like make proposals to the town and to the state. I want to start doing that for myself. So I’ve literally just recently started to look into that for myself.

So I don’t have a good answer off the top of my head of where people can look. But it would just be looking to your local, um, like if you’re in the United States, look to your local, uh, house of representative, like look at your, go to your local representative and voice your concerns about what you want.

Ask them if there are organizations that you could help with. Um, they might be a good resource. To get moving on something like this, uh, but yeah, this is something I’m getting a little more passionate about myself because there’s a lot of stupid stuff that’s happening and I want to try to help push that in a better direction.

Question

from Bert Brecht who wrote in to say, I would like my next car to be electric. I would like it to have it last 20 years, which means replacing batteries a couple of times. What challenges can I expect to face? I’m interested in the first part. of Bert’s question in which he says battery replacement would be required.

Is that in fact something that Bert and others like Bert should be taking the approach of? If you’re looking at a 20 year vehicle, are you looking at multiple batteries?

I don’t know many people that hold a vehicle for that long is the first thing, but this is something that is shifting in the EV industry right now.

There’s a misperception that batteries need to be replaced every 10 years. Current batteries in let’s say a Tesla, they have current chemistries that they have right now they’re working on that could go literally a million miles before you’d have to replace them. That’s like 20 to 30 years of driving for most people.

So batteries are getting to the place where you may never have the car itself. May rust apart and need to be chucked because the physical car breaks down before the battery pack does. That’s where things are heading right now, very quickly. Um, there are solid state batteries coming online from like QuantumScape and others that have shown a thousand charge cycles and two thousand, three thousand charge cycles with very little degradation.

Like, batteries from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, in a matter of 5 to 10 years, might go from 100%, whatever the kilowatt hours is, down to like 80 percent of that value. These new batteries, after that number of charging cycles, might go down to 95%. So you’re not, it’s an imperceptible loss. That’s where batteries are heading.

So right now, it depends on who you’re buying a car from. Um, you’d want to buy a car from a company that is using some of the more cutting edge chemistries that have this long track record. They do exist. They are out there. They are available today. And you would never have to replace them. And the only reason you would have to replace them is if there was like something like a mechanical defect, something wrong with the batteries themselves, something like that would be covered under a warranty.

Um, if it’s not anything that would be. That kind of failure, it’s going to last way longer than you’d expect. So I don’t, I personally don’t think that’s going to be an issue, especially in the coming years. Interesting

question here from Gabriel Fortin, who writes in at the intro to say, I’ll try not to make this too long.

So prepare for a slightly longer question, but I think it ends on a very interesting note and I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Gabriel writes, I’ll try not to make this one too long, but there is some context needed. I like to see myself as the mad scientist kind of guy, I believe lots of your viewers do.

The problem is I struggle in finding the right kind of people to accompany me on my inventive journey. I took part in the Carbon Removal XPRIZE, but was forced to give up due to a rule penalizing non corporate entities. I, however, did some math, designs, and prototyping. Everything seems to check out, but I still found it impossible to be taken seriously by anyone with money to spare.

That money would have come in handy for the patenting process, which I wish to use as a means to ensure the intellectual property rights and to ensure that there is non competition and nothing is stolen from me. My question is this, do you think that the current process inventors now have to follow slows down the rate of innovation?

After all, there was a time when progress came mostly from ambitious individuals and not from corporations. I immediately hearken back to, uh, like stories of like Nikola Tesla. Like laboring away with his genius, uh, or, you know, patent clerk Einstein coming up with theories of relativity, uh, while doing a different daytime job.

I don’t know if we. Do still live in an era where that kind of laboring away in a passion project can result in that kind of technological breakthrough, given the level of complexity of most technology now. But I’m interested in that. What do you think about rate of innovation and the period of innovation that we’re currently living in?

What do you think the model is?

I, this is a complicated question and my thoughts on it are very complicated in their own way. I’ll try to simplify it, but patents are broken. Our current patent system is completely broken. And I don’t know if I’m in the camp of we shouldn’t have patents at all, but the current system does not work.

And it really doesn’t work for small inventors because big companies can buy up small companies or buy patents from small inventors and then just sue you out of existence. So you could even come up with an idea. That’s what somewhat novel, create a patent. You try to bring it to market and a big company, here comes an Apple, here comes a Google, here comes a whoever else that has their own patents that are kind of similar.

They have deep pockets and dozens of lawyers that will sue you out of existence and squash your patent to get that knocked out. Um, it’s a problem. Uh, the only way around it is to, if you have come up with an idea is to really try to bring it to market yourself, to get people to help you. Pull it together so that you can get it to the point where it’s about to hit the market before you even talk about it publicly.

Or a big company can just swoop in, steal your idea, and just turn it around way faster than you could because they’ve got the deep pockets. So I don’t know if there’s a solution. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do think that the current system is Stifling innovation. I really do. It’s, it’s the big companies just have the deep pockets and they can just basically do whatever they want at this point, unfortunately.

Not a happy

answer. Not a happy answer, but an honest one. And, and, uh, Gabriel, best of luck with With the projects that you’re working on. I, uh, I, you know, you’re already demonstrating that you’re online because you posted this comment. Um, I would hope that you are part of, maybe there’s innovators forums.

Maybe there’s forums where engineers and professors and, and people in the same sort of mind space that you’re in are sharing ideas and thoughts and plans, not in specificity around their own projects, but about how to pursue them. Maybe there’s a place for you in there. This question from Rob Langley is a short one.

You mentioned your team. Can you introduce them to us?

Oh yeah. Yeah. This is something I have to do more. Um, I have a team of six kind of core individuals that help me with the channel. Um, I have two video editors. Uh, one is Sonny. He edits all of my videos for Undecided. So if you like the editing style.

That’s all Sonny. I love the guy. For the podcasts like this one, it’s edited by Peter, who’s actually a friend of Sonny’s. The two of them are good friends. Uh, Peter does all my podcasts, YouTube shorts, things like that. Um, and then for production, um, there’s a gentleman named Lewis. Who’s actually, he’s from the UK, but lives in Poland, but he basically acts as my producer.

He helps me decide what topics we’re going to make. He helps me, uh, kind of pull things together. Just make sure that from start to finish, the videos are getting produced and getting, coming up with good titles and good directions for the videos and helping to actually get them published. And related to him is another gentleman named Ollie, who’s kind of our virtual assistant.

He kind of helps me comb through all the comments. There are so many comments, so many emails that come in. I can’t do them all. So he’s helping with that. He’s also helping with the logistics of like literally uploading the file to YouTube. Typing the title, typing in the description. He’s the guy that’s handing all that stuff.

Um, then I’ve got, uh, uh, 2, right? I’ve got 2 kind of researchers slash writers. Uh, there’s, uh, John Akun, and there’s Vincent, and the 2 of them are the ones that like when we decide Like Lewis and I decided, okay, we’re going to do this video. I’ll put notes into like what my thoughts are around it and what I think we should probably focus on.

And then I’ll work with one of those two to kind of go do a super deep dive on like, help me find more context around this. And they’ll help pull that together, write a first draft, and then there’ll be back and forth with me on this final script, getting it all buttoned up. That’s the kind of the core team.

And then there’s even a team beyond that, that I call my science advisory board. That’s made up of right now there’s five people on it. And these are all scientists, engineers. So it’s like mechanical engineers, material scientists, physicists, people like that. Um, some of them work in the industry. Like one of them actually works for a major wind turbine place.

Um, so it’s like, I have people that work in different industries, have different backgrounds. And so when we’re pulling stuff together, From the very beginning phases, it’s like, okay, we’re looking at this battery. Here’s what we think about it. Well, let’s pull so and so in from the advisory team to see if they can kind of help us tease this apart to make sure we’re not misunderstanding something, or if they’re finding something else out that they think we might want to highlight.

So we have a group of basically experts that we can refer to, uh, to help us kind of button things up. There’s a Fairly large team that’s working on undecided to

make this all work. If I can make a recommendation for the edit of that section of your answer, uh, if any of your team members are willing to share a photo of themselves, whether it’s identifiable or not, whatever image they think should represent them, uh, flash those up on the screen and for the science advisory board, just use a silhouette with a bunch of question marks over their heads.

Another short question, this one from Maxwellian, who wrote in to ask, are you sure Sean isn’t your twin?

If we are in fact twins, Max, it was the world’s worst and longest labor that our mother would have been in. A three year, three year, four month long labor. God bless her. Uh, we were 27th of a month, not the same month. But both of us on the 20 different months, but the 27th of each day. And I think that maybe lends itself to your theory that we are, in fact, with question from Kevrel who wrote in to ask about electric vehicles and your coverage of them.

Have you ever considered doing a spot on EVs with your great factual informational content? I think an overall take on EVs would be great. I’d look for really great deep content and out of the box insight and data. And it’s interesting, Kevrel, that you Suggest this. How long have we been doing this now, Matt?

This is now three years, three years, three years. Yeah. Uh, three years ago, much of our content was around electric vehicles. That is sort of how this all started for us with our conversations, focusing on Matt’s videos and Matt’s videos at that time tended to focus. It was very pre him building his new home, him doing all the tech, and also three years.

And it’s, I do think this is true. Three years, a lot of new developments and new technology has emerged. Into the market from solar panels, wind power, water power, battery storage, like there’s been massive changes. So the scope and vision of Matt’s main channel has really broadened and evolved over time.

Whereas originally it was like. Taking kind of like a hard look at the tech in your life. And at that time, electric vehicles were making the biggest splash in people’s lives. And so our earliest videos and conversations were about that. So to return to that would be interesting. This is a recurring theme in our conversations that Matt has an opportunity.

To effectively loop back on himself now and have entirely new videos that could dive into the evolution of the technologies he’s already talked about, EVs being one of them. Yeah. Your thoughts

about that? And one of the first videos I made that made my channel kind of what it is, is I talked a lot about my experience with my Tesla Model 3.

Which was brand new at the time, so this is 2018, uh, did a lot of videos on that, the evolution of what Tesla was doing, and then I kind of, like you said, gravitated towards bigger, broader topics, so I kind of moved, not moved away from EVs, I just stopped talking about them as frequently, but it’s still something I’m very passionate about.

There’s been a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the EV market, especially around like charging infrastructure and standards that are really going to push things forward and make EVs far more accessible to everybody. Uh, new, the battery technologies that are going to make them last longer.

Like we just talked about the batteries that can last 20, 30 years on an EV. It’s like that kind of stuff. Um, I’m still very focused on and looking at, so I, I probably should. Make an EV video every once in a while because it’s still something that is definitely a passion of mine.

Just a little anecdote about electric vehicles.

When we first started this channel, Matt and I would talk about EVs. Seeing an EV, I live in New York City, you know, millions upon millions of people here. And would never see an EV. Like you just didn’t ever see them on the street. EV sales, I’d be very interested to know if the early days of EV sales, the early days of Tesla, I would imagine a huge percentage of the sales at that time were outside of major metropolitan cities.

Because inside the major metropolitan cities, you wouldn’t have ease of charging, you wouldn’t have a garage, you wouldn’t have, like, somebody in a suburb could buy that car, drive it around, bring it home, plug it in in their garage and have a place to charge it. But in a city like New York, where we do street parking and there’s alternate side parking and I won’t even get into the complexity of what that means.

You don’t have a standard parking spot, you don’t have a standard place to charge and even if you do, I’ve Seen people charging their EVs with extension cords that come out of their home and cross the sidewalk to get to their car. Now, here we are three years later, there are city built charging stations that are in various neighborhoods.

I now pass them all the time. I’ve even seen them now in Manhattan. They were built in Manhattan. I think probably last, I think the design was the boroughs, the outer boroughs where people tend to live. We’ll put them there first. We’ll put them in Manhattan second. The other day I was walking up the street with my partner, the two of us were on one of the side streets heading up to one of the avenues in our neighborhood and what seemed like a suspiciously quiet Ford truck was coming toward us and it was pulling into a spot right next to us as we came by it and I looked at it and in an instant I knew what it was.

It was the new electric Ford F 150 Lightning. Massive. Truck, huge vehicle, running, silent, like a ninja coming down the street. And I looked at that thing and I said to my very uninterested partner, that’s the new Ford electric vehicle. That’s remarkable. I think it’s fantastic that that’s just driving down the street.

It’s going to make a quieter city. It’s going to make a quieter city, but it made an impact on me as like, these things are not just real, but people are interested in them. Here’s this person in the city driving around with a Ford F 150, doing all the stuff that a truck person wants to do, and it’s an electric vehicle.

So it’s a, it’s a diff three years. Doesn’t seem like a big span of time, but it has been, it’s been a big, it’s been a big span of time. Yeah. For me,

it was like around my area. It was like, I started seeing Teslas everywhere, just Teslas. It’s like, but there are other EVs, but I’ve never seen them. Just this past year, I see Hyundai Ionix.

Everywhere. I’m seeing more far Ford, Mustang electric vehicles everywhere. It’s like, so I’m seeing way, way more non Teslas around and it gets me super excited. It’s like, okay. We’ve, we’ve kind of hit a turning point now where it’s, it’s not just one company that you’re seeing out there. You’re seeing a bunch of different cars and EVs and even in kind of more rural areas, I don’t, I kinda live in a suburb, but more rural, so it’s like.

Even out here, it’s like I’m seeing them all over the place. So it’s, it’s definitely a very different landscape from just even a few years

ago. Final question here from Robert Roberts, who writes in to say, I would love an episode, a kind of deep dive into POE, power over ethernet. I’m interested in how you wire something up.

What is it actually controlling and how are you providing electricity to the device? For example, lights, TV, computers, kitchen appliances, whatever. Right. So POE over ethernet.

Yes. Poe, Poe. Yes. So, Poe is something that is going to become more and more popular in the coming years, especially in the home market.

Um, there’s companies that are coming up with kind of geared towards residential commercial buildings, that kind of thing. There’s, this is already, Kind of big in commercial buildings, but it’s going to get more and more into the residential market. There’s a startup called Lumen Cache that has a really interesting system that’s very modular, very easy to install.

You’re not going to be running appliances off of most of the stuff that I’m talking about. It’s going to be more lower voltage stuff. So lighting is like the big thing that would probably be running off of this. And it’s not that you can’t run bigger appliances off of it. It’s just. It’s going to probably start with the lower end of things first.

Um, for me in my house, I was, I considered doing POE for our lighting system, but it’s so early days for the home market. There weren’t a lot of options. And as soon as you figure out an option, it’s like, you’re kind of limited into like, what kind of light switch do you get? What kind of bulb do you get?

You really start to get limited pretty quickly as to what you can do. Um, that’s going to change. Very fast. So if I was building my house three years from now, it would probably be a very different answer. I probably would be doing it because it’s a very efficient way to do things. But I do use PoE for the camera I’m actually talking to on right now.

My studio camera is PoE powered. It’s just one ethernet cable comes out and plugs into the wall. And that’s all it needs. Um, my security cameras on my house use PoE so it can do, it can do A lot beyond that, but I think we’re in the very early days of that becoming a thing.

Thank you everybody for your questions.

As you can tell, uh, your comments are usually a big driver of our program and of Matt’s main program, Undecided, with Matt Ferrell, but in this episode in particular. They’ve been the heart of the content. And so thank you for your response to Matt’s call for questions. It’s been great. And I think we’ll be doing this again in the future.

So stay tuned. Keep your ears open for the clarion call to send us your questions. We can’t wait to hear what you have to say. If you’d like to support the show, please consider leaving a review. You can leave a review wherever it was you found this podcast, whether it be YouTube, apple, Spotify, Google, wherever.

Go back there, leave a review. Don’t forget to subscribe, and please do share it with your friends. All of that really does help support the channel. And if you’d like to directly support us, you can click the join button on YouTube, or you can go to still tbd fm. Quickly become a supporter button. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads.

They hurt. Yes, but we’ve got ice and then we heal and then we make the podcast and with the makeup you can’t even see the welts. Yeah. Not a one. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to listen or watch. We’ll talk to you next time.