253: Solid, Solid State Follow-Up

 On today’s episode of Still to be determined, we’re talking about definitions. Hi everybody. I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids and I’m also just generally curious about technology. Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt behind undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And it should be no surprise to anybody who is a regular viewer, listener of this program that with me right now is that Matt, Matt, how are you

today? I’m doing pretty well. I just, I got to share a little thing I was doing yesterday. I’ve gone down this rabbit hole of building out my own, like the led strips for lighting like some office shelves.

And I was cutting the led strips and I have a little ESP 32 controller I was setting up and. Get everything set up and this is the first time I’ve done it, but you know, like I I know I’m doing cutting things I’m putting wires everything and I’m wiring it up right before I powered it on I was like if you get my multimeter out just to double check that I’ve got the the red and the white cable plugged into the right things cuz one is Positive ones, negative.

I’m like, what? White’s going to be negative. It’s going to be negative. So I plugged it in, plugged it in and magic smoke came out of my little ESP controller. It’s like the smell of burnt circuitry filled the air and I was like, I should have gotten my multimeter and not been impatient because I would have avoided that.

So I fried a little $30 component. So yeah, that was me yesterday reminding myself. Patience.

And now I will share a story. This morning I woke up and I had a craving. I was like, I would like some bacon, but I’m trying to be healthy. I’m trying to be hard, healthy. So I’ll get some Turkey bacon. That will be healthy.

And I like my bacon crispy and what makes it crispier than cooking in the oven. So I looked up some quick instructions, like here’s a guide and temperature setting and, and how to make sure that your bacon turns out nice and crispy. And I already shared a photo of the results with Matt. Yes. I won’t go on to describe it too much, but maybe Matt can drop it into the editing and, and maybe it can pop up on your screen right now.

Let’s just say it looks like a modern art project. And, I mean, That wasn’t, that wasn’t how I described it. To cut to the chase, it looks a little bit like a plate of burned poo. So yes, yes, I said it looked like burnt tongue, so to, so similar to Matt, the key here is to, uh, be cautious and pay attention to what’s going on around you.

Speaking of being cautious and paying attention, we always like to visit your comments on our previous episode before we get into our conversations about the new one. The new one of course is going to be a rather long video for Matt’s channel. It, normally when Matt’s videos run long, they tend to be conversations, interviews with people.

And the long form of those usually end up on this channel. But in this case, there was a long and winding road that had to be followed. And so Matt’s video this week, it was kind of a whopper. So we’ll get into that conversation in a few minutes, but first we’re going to talk about our previous one, which was episode 252 at the top of that episode.

Mentioned the fires that have been going on in the West, particularly in California and our thoughts and best wishes for everybody there to remain safe and that the fires would be put out and controlled quickly and BK n chime jumped into the comments to say, based on what’s happening in LA an episode centred around what is being developed for fireproofing your house could be an interesting video and I think a timely one and a helpful one for a lot of people probably. So put that on the list matt home safety. It’s a good one. There were also quite a few comments about Aptera. We’ve visited now the Aptera development of a vehicle which They’re not calling it a car and that’s good because it doesn’t look like a car. And lots of conversations around, well, does that matter?

Is that the goal? Comments like this one from Lindsey Hatfield, who said Aptera. I would buy an Aptera before buying a Cybertruck. Both are out there designs, but the Aptera does it for a reason. I like that logic, Lindsay, a simple yardstick to say, well, does this look like this? No. Does this do this for a reason?

If the answer is also no, Hmm, maybe look somewhere else. Yeah. There was also conversations around the Aptera from the perspective of, Is it really about power source, meaning the solar panels and the recharging, or is it about power use? I think this one from Dean McManus summed it up very nicely. Thanks for mentioning my long comment.

I think that Sean is closer to the real point of Aptera. It’s about efficiency, the aerodynamic shape, the lightweight carbon fiber tube, the three wheels, the relatively small battery pack, which still gets 400 miles of range, and up to 40 miles more of driving per day from the sun. It is the anti hummer.

The solar EV capability today is only possible because the Aptera’s efficiency, and it shows what can be done with a super efficient vehicle. For instance Zinc batteries and other chemistries like sodium ion batteries have huge benefits like low cost, smaller carbon footprints for manufacture, long life, and easy recycling, but currently they are only being considered for stationary energy storage uses.

But because the Aptera is three times as efficient and half the weight of your average EV, they could use the lower energy density battery and still get 250 miles of range plus solar. The efficient Aptera is not the Newton in 1993. It is the lithium ion battery in 2007. I thought that was an interesting comparison, uh, not to make too much of a pun out of apples to apples.

Considering he’s mentioned the Newton and that was part of our conversation last week. But what do you think about that comparison of saying like, let’s not compare the it to the Newton, but to where lithium ion was a little more than a decade and a half ago.

I think that’s fair. I also think it’s fair to call it the anti Hummer.

Which I think the interpretation of where I stand in this, I think is still misunderstood. Um, I think the anti hummer is exactly what this is. The hummer is not a mainstream vehicle. It’s not. It’s too expensive and way too inefficient for most people. So that’s why it’s kind of a niche vehicle in its own right.

I think the Aptera is going to be the exact same thing on the opposite side. And the point I was trying to bring in was mainstream vehicles. Think about the Toyota Camrys and the Honda CRVs, the, the cars that the model three, it’s like the cars to the mainstream vehicles, Aptera is not going to be that in it’s current iteration.

It’s just not, it’s going to be a niche vehicle. So it’s the anti Hummer. I think it’s a great example. Uh, but the one thing that he’s leaving out is. There’s a third factor here, an efficiency, it’s the solar panels. And that’s the other thing I was making the argument for, which was part of the reason why we’re not going to see this type of implementation take root in a mainstream market is because solar panels are not efficient enough yet because a typical car cannot get as efficient as Aptera did because Aptera was willing to make the really extreme design choices to make it efficient.

Mainstream vehicles will not be able to do that. So they’re not going to be able to be as efficient as Aptera. So the only other part of the equation of like batteries, solar panels, and aerodynamics, it’s like when you’re pulling these levers and deciding your design, the efficiency of the solar panels, we get better solar panels that we can put on these cars.

You’ll be able to produce more energy, which will help make up for the fact that they can’t become as streamlined as an Aptera. So that’s kind of the argument I was making of like, I think Aptera could be a very successful company in a niche space. It will just never be mainstream in its current iteration.

I think it would be interesting to see if it, I brought this up in our conversations previously. I think it’d be very interesting to see if it ends up being a vehicle similar to the Vespa in certain parts of the world where you would end up going to a place. And for the weekend that you’re there, you rent a Aptera.

And zip around the coastline. And I’m thinking of those parts of the world where access to constant sunlight is more prevalent, where weather is not going to be a factor. And nobody’s going to go to Wisconsin in January and rent an Aptera. But if you’re going to miami, or you’re going to somewhere in Mexico or you’re in some other part of the belt around the equator.

Might we see that as an option popping up as common as you see the moped and Vespa rental market. And I’m particularly interested in that from the perspective of it’s not a car, but you’d be able to get. Two people in it, maybe a little bit of luggage and maybe do a little bit more for those people who like me, are not confident about, it’s just a bicycle with a motor.

Yeah. Don’t wanna ride that around on these curbs. Uh, somebody like me might be more inclined to say like, well, it’s kind of car-like, I’ll feel safer ’cause I’m surrounded. Yeah, exactly. So yes, it’ll be interesting to see if that is in fact a place that we see these in the coming decade. There was also some continuing comments around the idea of new technology for your old home and Mac Fisher jumped in to say new old house technology pellet stoves have a great advantage, but look at where the wood pellets are harvested, ecological and cost issue wood burning outdoor boilers are expensive, but if you have a free source of wood and can justify pumping carbon into the atmosphere, Suggestion for Matt, a video on how to do a home energy audit and where to get the best bang for the buck with an ecological component.

I really liked that cause it was a very specific angle and I don’t think you’ve really touched on that. Like how do you go around your home with a clipboard and your own little hard hat and your own little tape measure. And you can pretend you’re Bob the builder and go around your home and say, like, well, of all the things I have, these things are all impacting the environment in ways that I don’t necessarily like, but this one’s the biggest culprit, this one’s the biggest problem.

So I’ll tackle that first. So I thought that was a very interesting angle to take. Yeah, it is. It’s

it’s, that’s the one thing I’ve always talked about when. Like the low hanging fruit of it, the low hanging fruit of a energy efficient home is always getting that home energy audit, getting a professional to come in and do that for you.

And some states do it for free. Like here in Massachusetts, you can contact a group. They’ll put you in touch with somebody that will come in and give you a free home assessment and do exactly that. That’s not the case everywhere. And so it’s like, how would you do that on your own? Would be an interesting video of here’s how you can kind of assess your own home.

To kind of hit that low hanging fruit of where can you get the biggest bang for your buck to make your house as energy efficient as you possibly can for as little money as possible.

Not to tell you how to, yeah, not to tell you how to do your job, but maybe there is through that service, through that, um, organization that sets people up with that.

Maybe somebody would be willing to be interviewed and talk about that as a, like, Big picture, what can people do when they don’t have access to that? That would be very interesting. I think it’s going to do. So once again, Matt’s older brother tells him what to do.

One final comment from last week’s episode from J juicy, who jumped in on the question I had around the right to repair. We’ve been talking about right to repair. We’ve been talking about naughty and nice corporations and John Deere got called out last week. With a John Deere is terrible at right to repair, but there was no further explanation.

But Jay Juicy comes back with this about that John Deere. Tractor is basically a big computer that you are not allowed to fix, modify, or do anything else than drive. Only John Deere technicians are allowed to ask with his computer what is wrong and change that failing component. Yeah. That’s what irritating.

Yeah. Yeah. I could get it. And I am not an engineer and I know that tractors are complicated machines, but it does seem very complicated, very complicated, but it does seem, it doesn’t seem right that somebody who purchases a vehicle wouldn’t have the ability to go to their choice of mechanic to have something fixed.

I agree. Instead of going back only. So John Deere, I understand the complication of the machinery and the proprietary software and all that, but that doesn’t seem like it’s on the up and up.

But at the same time, I can understand why John Deere is doing that because they’re pushing from their perspective.

Their tractors are getting this autonomous vehicles. It’s like their tractors can drive themselves and do stuff. So it’s like they’re pushing into territory, which is very computer heavy. So it’s like, I can understand it. I don’t agree with it. Liability too. I agree. They don’t want have

somebody, they don’t want the headline to be.

John Deere tractor drives off farm and destroy a school bus. . And then, yeah, the subheading weeks later is, oh. It turns out that the person who owned the tractor had monkey round with the software and broke it. The follow up headline will be lost in the ether. The main headline will be John Deere Tractor Kills School Bus.

But in defense of what J Juicy is bringing up, it’s like, that’s not the case of what we’re talking about here. It’s just like a farmer who bought a John Deere tractor, just trying to maintain it himself should be allowed to do a bunch of the servicing on their own. It doesn’t make sense.

On now to our conversation about Matt’s most recent, this is, is this solid state battery, really solid state.

And for anybody who’s sitting here thinking, why do I feel like I’m having deja vu? Yes, you are. You are, this image is very close to the original image of a different video that Matt had. This was how many months ago now? It was, I think it was last November, uh, no September, October. It was a while back.

Yeah.

Four or five, maybe six months ago, five months?

Matt brought out this battery from Yoshino and said, well, there’s a solid state battery on the market and here it is and talked about it and didn’t endorse it. Didn’t push it. Didn’t suggest you run out and buy one immediately, but just said, here is a solid state battery.

And then people in the comments were like, no, and there was a lot of pushback. And Matt and I had a conversation following up on that in which Matt said, okay, I’m going to dig deeper. Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally four or five months later, here’s Matt with his followup. And it is a whopping 40, is it a 44, 45 minute video?

Yes. Normally when I watch Matt’s videos so that we can talk about them with my side being somewhat intelligently. I like to watch the video once and kind of have it on the background. I’ll put it in a list on things on YouTube and I’ll listen to them in the background and I’ll, and I’ll pay attention to his in the background and then I’ll circle back and I’ll rewatch it with more detail now that I know what’s coming.

So I think about what comments I might want to pull out. I pull, I think of my own comments. And this time around, I, I kept lapsing into like, Oh, did I inadvertently like, let it slip into another video? Did I inadvertently click into a playlist off of Matt’s channel? And I, am I in the same video? And I would go back to it and be like, and I’d, I’d focus in on what he was saying.

He’d be like, blah, blah, blah, Yoshino. And I’d be like, Oh, what? It’s the same one. And after about probably 30 minutes, I finally was just like, what is going on? And looked carefully at the screen and realized, good Lord, this video is like a Netflix special about what happened to the Yoshino, like expected there to be moments where somebody sitting in front of a lamp.

With just their silhouette showing and their voice change was garbled. And I thought it was going to be solid state, but then I saw some juice.

So all of that is to say, this is a surprisingly long video that I think does a terrific job of questioning the approach that Matt himself took and then questioning the approach. Of pretty much all the players, you know, how you develop, market, sell a thing. And that, how do you question that thing? And how do you research it?

I wanted to say real quick. Uh, Ziroth Tech, that team that you had taking this thing apart, they were in the comments. They jumped in real quick to say, thanks for having us on Matt. It was a great adventure getting to the bottom of this with a big happy face. Uh, really great guys to be a part of this.

They were very, very charming and very measured in their response. I guess people who are studying PhD chemical engineering at that level, they are careful with their words as they should be. And they’re a demonstration of being careful with your words in a way that as Matt’s video pointed out, maybe marketing teams aren’t quite as cautious with.

So I wanted to get really quickly into that part of the conversation, like this comment from Rick who says, the engineer did a good job. And then marketing got carried away. I see this time and time again, in my industry, Rick does not point out what his industry is, but he seems to be speaking from personal experience.

And then there was a follow up to that one from cam McCull’s who said, I have no doubt that there were arguments in Yoshino meeting rooms between texts and marketing, but the manager making the decision went with the marketing team because it was quote just semantics. So, I mean, if we’re looking for.

The bumper sticker version of what this is all about. Do you think that lands on it? Do you think that’s the, the result here?

My personal take is yes. Um, that’s why it’s like after all my conversations with Yoshino, I never once from all the stuff and digging we did, got the sense that they were lying to me, right?

I don’t think they’re lying in the capital L lying at all period. They’re not. But they are playing in a gray area, in my opinion, this is completely my opinion, deliberately. They’re playing in this gray area, knowing that it’s a gray area, and that’s the problem. So yes, I do think that this gets kind of to the root of it.

It’s like, you have The marketing and product side of a business trying to figure out how to market this thing and make themselves stand apart from the competition. And then you have the engineering side that has done something that’s, I would say, in some regards is a remarkable and they’ve done a really good product.

Yeah. And the two kind of like are a little bit in conflict and it’s not that the marketing is lying, but they’re playing in this gray area and it’s just created this mess that they could have avoided by not playing in the gray area if they had just avoided that. There would have been no controversy.

They would have been selling their batteries and they’d be a nice, profitable company with a really good product and that’s it. But they kind of made their bed and are refusing to land to a certain extent. Um, yeah. So yes, I do think that’s the case for the most part.

I, I couldn’t help but think as I was listening to the, the parsing that was going on in the language of the marketing materials and the responses from the marketing team.

And I agree with you completely. I do not think they’re a line. I do not think this is a misrepresentation of anything, but I could hear the lawyers in the room behind the marketing team. I could hear the lawyer saying, technically you can say that. Technically. Yeah. Like there was a giant filter and the filter was letting that language get through and truth.

Well, it’s truthy and

well, he, I mean, brought it, I brought it up near the end of the video, but like Sean, Sean, for those of you who don’t know, Sean and I actually went to the same college and we actually had the same major and we were both in this professional communication information design major.

And I don’t know about you, Sean, but when I was there, I had to take classes in semiotics and the evolution of language and all that kind of stuff. And there’s something called semantic drift that happens with language. It’s like a word and a definition around something happens. It’s not static. It’s always evolving, always changing.

And while they say technically. This is a solid state battery because it has a solid state element in it, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, okay, technically you may be accurate and you may be truthful there. The problem is 99 percent of the people out in the world do not understand it that way. When you say solid state, they think of this other thing.

That’s semantic drift. So you can play the technicalities all you want. It doesn’t matter if the public doesn’t see it that way. Even experts in the industry don’t agree on that. Even though they claim that the industry does agree on it. I wish introduced me to these people because I didn’t talk to a single one of them.

Every single person I’ve talked to people casually, like when I was out in Vancouver at the fully, uh, everything electric show, the fully charged show, there were people at that, that are mechanical engineers like Sandy Monroe. And I was on a panel with him and he said something about solid state batteries that made me go, because it was like, what he said was nobody has made a solid state battery period.

There’s nothing on the market. And in my head, I’m like saying that that’s not true. Uh, TDK actually has a solid state battery that’s on my market. It’s not for EVs, but it does exist. There is a, there is a solid state battery on the market. And then it was kind of like. He’s taking the definition of all solid state is solid state.

And this is an expert, a mechanical engineer, a guy who has decades of experience talking to battery researchers. Same thing. I was getting different definitions every time I talked to somebody.

Yeah.

And so it’s just one of those, this is the semantic argument that’s happening around this. And the fact that Yoshino is playing in that playground and saying, everybody seems to agree that this is, it’s like, no, who is the everybody you keep talking about?

Yeah. I’m reminded of like a botanist or a scientist searching through the Galapagos and saying, well, this is this type of flower. And this is this type of flower by very strict definitions. And the scientist who’s like, I think that is a turtle. And I think it is related to other turtles, but it’s different in a different way because it lives in a different environment.

And then you roll back the clock and you go back to the early exploration of the seas and you go back to sailors on the ocean. They thought there were mermaids and dragons because they’d never seen pods of dolphins skipping through the water. And they mistook it for ridges of one creature going through the water, like a giant water snake or beluga whales.

Is that a person beneath the boat swimming deeply is the kind of blurry edge of the beginning of a thing. And I feel like this market, this technology is maybe so new that we have a lot of blurry edges between How to talk about a thing in a scientific circle. And the scientists are like, this is a butterfly and this is a bird.

And then. In the more everyday world where marketers are talking to us, they’re like, they fly and kind of hand waving about both of them being flying creatures. So it doesn’t really matter which one’s the bird, which one’s the butterfly. And yet you then go out and say like, this is a butterfly. And people are jumping in and saying like, ah, that’s a bird.

That’s a bird because the marketing speak has landed in this gray zone. There’s a comment here.

Yeah, go ahead. Before we go to the next comment. I was going to say, this is something we see in everything. It’s like, whenever I’ve talked about batteries in the past, I will in a very kind of colloquial way to say the energy density of this battery is blah, blah, blah.

I will have, without a doubt, at least one, if not a dozen people that will come in that are mechanical engineers that go, well, you’re actually talking about is specific energy. It’s like, yes, I know that’s the technical term is specific energy, but for 95 percent of people like walking down the street, they don’t know that.

And so it’s like just calling it energy density. They can, Oh, I kind of get the idea of that. And that’s why they talk about it in that way. So there’s this disconnect there. It’s also, I could say, right now we’re all experiencing AI. Like, everything is AI. Everything, every device you buy is AI that.

It’s like, it’s technically not AI. It’s, there’s been machine learning algorithms that create an algorithm that’s then hard coded into that device and the device is actually not doing any kind of thinking. It’s just running an algorithm that was configured on a server they figured out. So it’s like, It’s, but in a public consciousness, it’s all AI, but in reality it’s, no, it’s machine learning and it’s algorithms.

So it’s like, you know what I mean? It’s this disconnect between what the industry experts are doing and what the public perceives. There’s always a gap and the marketing is always trying to simplify it for the

masses. And there’s those two points that you just pointed out. There’s the public understanding, there’s the engineering technical understanding.

And then there’s the third understanding, which is how marketing can talk. That brings us to the next comment that I wanted to share. This one from Scott Bob, who says, reminds me of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. They say made with a hundred percent white meat chicken, but that does not mean that the nugget is a hundred percent white meat chicken.

Just that the chicken used in the nugget is white meat. It also has oils, soy, flour, and fillers and white meat chicken. It’s just worded to give the illusion that the nugget is a hundred percent chicken. That is great. I think this hits it right on the head. Like this comment for me jumped out and I immediately was like, yeah, when I go shopping for juice.

And you have to stand in that lane for an hour looking at the ingredients of 100 percent juice as like, you know, it’s pear juice, not grape juice. I want a grape juice. And this is pear and apple juice. It’s not a lie, but it is also somehow not the truth.

I think for me, the final comment I wanted to share kind of wraps all of this up. This is from Unbay Bleeder. Who says Yoshino engineering had a lot of faith in their work to send free batteries for breakdown. I don’t see it as useful for the marketing department to hurt their image so they can feel like they’re ahead of the curve.

The product is good. And embellishing can only hurt. Do you want to visit a little bit again? You said this earlier and I wanted to loop back around to it. If they simply came out with, here’s a great new battery for you to try. It does these things really well, and it includes some solid state components.

So we’re trying to push the envelope on what we’re developing. Would this battery be seen as a advancement in battery technology?

I would say no, it would be seen as an advancement for the portable battery that you can buy for yourself because it would be as good or better than what’s out there. So in that regard, yes, it would be an advancement.

That was, that was what I was thinking

is like, it would have been a good product and they could have marketed as like, we’ve pushed great product.

To give you a little, I’ve had many phone calls and conversations with, uh, Vince Kato from Yoshino, who’s the head of marketing and product. And one of my final calls I had with him was along these lines of him kind of lamenting of like, I’m not sure how we would market this if we can’t call it solid state.

And I basically said what you just said right there of like, you could have just hammered on the benefits to the user and just left it at that, you know what I mean? Like, like this as more, it’s more energy dense than the competition. It lasts longer than the competition. It’s just as safe as the competition. So it’s going to be a lightweight battery pack that you can chuck in the back of your truck.

It’s going to be like, you could have just focused on that. And then once you, cause like, this is a stepping stone for Yoshino where they’re developing their batteries. It’s like to call it solid state and say, we’re done, we made a solid state battery is not what’s happening here. We can’t go straight to an all solid state battery because it’s really hard.

And so every company that’s trying to do it is doing it in steps. So this is Yoshino’s first step. They have a second step and a third step and a fourth step that they’re working on right now. And I’ve, I don’t have specifics, but I’ve been told basic things of what’s going to happen in the next iteration, the next gen one, and it is damn impressive.

So this is one of those, this is a first step in that direction. So whatever their next gen product is that comes out is going to kind of like potentially blow people’s minds as to what it can do. And so it’s kind of, it’s so frustrating that they got so caught up in the solid state as the marketing differentiator

buzzword.

Yeah, right. And they should have focused less on the technology buzzword and they should have focused more on the user benefits as what lean into that, because then even in their next gen product where it’s like this crazy stuff. It’s like at that point, you can start to maybe lean into more of the technical side of it.

Like when you really do differentiate in a more substantial way, you know, that’s hindsight is 2020. But as I talked to Vince about that, he didn’t, I don’t think he completely saw where I was coming from. So there was definitely a disconnect in my conversations with Vince about what they’re currently doing and what I was suggesting.

Cause I talked to him about the semantic drift. I talked to him about like, there’s a disconnect here, but I feel their pain because they’ve kind of made this situation themselves, and they’re stuck in it and they’re trying to get out because it is impacting their business. They are seeing, uh, a negative hit from this perception that’s out there about their batteries right now.

That is unfortunate. And it is unfortunate that it is something that they themselves had a hand in. And it’s something that, I mean, it goes back strangely to the idea of like clickbait And how quickly you can pop the, the bubble of trust that you build around what that takes years to develop.

So, yeah, we will have to tune in later and see what those new developments lead to. And here’s hoping I have nothing against the company and their attempts to get this kind of product to market and to develop it even further. And I hope for the best because I do see this kind of tech as having a positive impact on, yes, the way we, we impact the environment around us. So I will keep my fingers crossed for them. Please let us know. Do you think that there was anything that we missed in this conversation or is there anything you’d like to share that you have from your perspective? Jump into the comments. The comments, as always, are a huge component of this program.

They really help drive the show and they help shift the content on Matt’s main channel at undecided. Where he takes some of this feedback and incorporates it into future videos, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are very easy ways for you to support the channel. And if you’d like to assault us with coins and thereby more directly support the program, you can go to still tbd. fm click the become a supporter button there, or you can click the join button on YouTube. Both of those ways make us easy targets for you to give us quarters. Appreciate the support. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.