This lab is using a particle accelerator to build a battery that lasts forever | Hard Reset Podcast
- Do you think about what the ability to control energy has done for humanity, why would we be against the effort to give us more control over energy? And that's what this is doing. - But even if batteries never get to be 100% as efficient as gasoline, it allows us to build cars in a way that they can be twice as efficient. - I'm probably not gonna be able to explain that to you, but I'll be like, you know, they used, Keanu in "Chain Reaction," particle accelerator. This is cool, right? - This is "Hard Reset."
A series about rebuilding our world from scratch. - Hello, and welcome to the "Hard Reset Podcast." I'm Nick Tucker, and I'm here with Taylor Hamilton. - Hi.
- We are the co-creators of "Hard Reset," which is a show on Freethink, all about how we would rebuild the world from scratch. Today, we are joined by Rob Chapman-Smith. - Hi, I am the editor-in-chief of Freethink.
- And Toby Muresianu. - Hi, I'm a community manager at Freethink. - And for this episode we're gonna be talking about the subject of energy density and the work that's being done at Argonne National Labs to reinvent the battery and that entire technology, from the ground up.
To my mind, there's two things happening in this episode that are really fascinating: One is thinking very differently about the chemistry that goes into batteries, and trying to find a new combination of chemistries that can help us store energy effectively. This is clearly super important if we're gonna be replacing fossil fuels. We just need more dense energy storage for cars and electric airplanes and things like that to be feasible. The other thing that I think is really interesting about this technology and the way they're pursuing it, is that they're using this super powerful technology, this particle accelerator, to really peer down deeply into what's happening at the atomic and molecular scale, and build this robust artificial intelligence model, that can help invent new chemistries and invent new types of products. I think that's just utterly fascinating, and I think it's gonna change the way we make progress. - Okay, so let's back up, because I'm a stupid person.
I know what a battery is. I know how to spell it, most of the time. What is in a battery? - That's a great question. There's, I mean, there's different kinds of batteries, for one thing, but generally when we say battery, what we're talking about is something where there's a chemical storage medium where you have an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte, and essentially, as ions flow through that electrolyte between the anode and cathode, that pushes electrons through a circuit. - So like the little gold nub on the AA battery and then- - The one that tastes funny when you lick it.
- Yeah, that one, and then there's like the back one that's smooth, that's the anode and cathode? - Well, they're the positive and negative connectors, and so yeah, they connect to different parts, and through them, the electrons flow. - Okay, so these ions are going back and forth and then like, are they swimming? What are they swimming through? - Well, they're passing through an electrolyte. - Okay.
- And, I mean, oddly enough, electrolytes do the same thing in our bodies, right? That's, you know, we have water. If you're super dehydrated, they might put something in it like salt, or some other things that help it hydrate you better and give you electrolytes, and that is the same thing. It just allows chemical messages to pass between different things in your body. Same thing's happening in a battery. It's just voltage that's passing through- - Is that why Morpheus said that I was a battery? - Yes. - No, no.
- Oh, okay. - God, let's please never reference "The Matrix" as a reference for how batteries work. Because it's terrible. - Morpheus told me that I was a battery. - I love "The Matrix." It's a great movie.
- The first one- - That's not how- - The first one, and we'll count- - There were others? - Yeah. - That's a fair point. - Let's count "The Animatrix." - Okay. - Oh yeah, that's right, "The Animatrix." I do remember that. - Yeah.
- That was a real thing. - Okay, so what is the problem with like, the current technology, and like, why are they trying to make it better? Like, what does better look like? - Better looks like a lot of things. We talked about it in a previous episode. The idea of recycling is one thing, so that would be a huge improvement, but really it's density that we're talking about here.
How do we get more power stored in a smaller, denser space? How do we take something like a battery that can hold, say, you know, 100 watts, and have it hold 1,000 watts? The challenge to that is just chemistry. How many ions can attach to a different molecule? How much can we store in these dense chemical mediums? And we're not there at the capacity for lithium-ion batteries yet, but we're approaching it. So they're trying to find out what's the next technology, what's the next chemistry that's gonna allow even more, and more power to be stored in less space.
- There's a theoretical limit to the lithium-ion batteries in terms of how much density they can compact into them? - Essentially, yeah. - What is that, then, nevermind, sorry. - I have no idea. (laughs) - Yeah, but we're just reaching it. - We're heading towards it, okay, and I've heard people say that we're halfway there, three-quarters of the way there, but at a certain point we will top out the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.
We're just not gonna be able to, it doesn't ramp up forever. - Gotcha. - We did a video with, I believe it was our video with Archer Aviation, which is an eVTOL company. So it's these electric planes that take off vertically and can operate- - Are you pitching an article again? - I cannot take credit for this.
I wish I could. It's a great video, but one thing they mentioned in the video is how many advances in like transportation have come on the back of advances in energy storage. - Right. - So when you can create more energy in a smaller and lighter thing, then you enable more possibilities, like planes that are cheaper and don't need gasoline or jet fuel. And, you know, you look at things like drones and what if a drone could have twice as much power but not weigh any more? Then you enable all sorts of new scenarios, like shipping or whatever, things like that. So that's one of the reasons people are really excited about this, in addition to, obviously, you know, switching off of fossil fuels more generally.
- I'm curious when they're thinking about like, we're needing new chemistry, we're needing new materials in order to create these new batteries that would have potentially more ions and what-not packed into them, and thus denser from a capacity standpoint. - Right. - What are- do they have targets, right? Like they're not inventing like new elements in the periodic table. That's not what they're looking for, or are they? Is that what this- - They're not inventing new elements in the periodic table but they are finding new ways of combining all these elements that we know.
- Gotcha. - And, you know, different elements combine with each other in different ways, you know. And carbon is really great because it can bond with so many different things in ways that other atoms just can't.
And so what they're trying to do is find the right combination of molecules to store energy in a way that A, will be more dense, and B, will not break down as easily. - Mm-hmm. - And form the sort of degradative effects that we see in lithium-ion batteries 'cause like your phone eventually stops working, right? Your battery just charges and recharges and charges, and it just doesn't work anymore after a certain point. Well, if you can build a battery where those sorts of problems don't occur, then you can build a battery that can last indefinitely.
So that's one of the things that they're looking at. But that's not as important for some applications. So they're also looking at like, well, what about a battery where we don't care how much that forms, because it's easier to recycle and we can just replace that with another medium when we need to. So they're weighing all sorts of different things.
They're very clear about the fact that there is no perfect battery. - Right. - Because, you know, the battery that's perfect for the cell phone is not as good for the car, and is, also that is not as good for the grid. - Right.
- So they're really trying to find the right purpose-built battery for each application. - I understand now, like what they're looking for. How does the particle accelerator fit into all of this? - Right, well, A, it's a great movie reference. - If it looks familiar to you, it's probably because they filmed the 1996 Keanu Reeves film "Chain Reaction" here. That makes Venkat the Keanu Reeves of this whole operation.
- Correct. - And one of the things that we were told as we were working with the media contact there is that they filmed the movie "Chain Reaction" there. - Underrated. - Underrated movie. - The underrated movie. - The underrated movie. It's a masterpiece, in fact.
- I wouldn't say that, but- - He didn't say that. - Underrated. - It's a movie. - Is it more or less scientifically accurate than "The Matrix"? - It's hard to be less scientifically accurate than "The Matrix".
But "The Matrix" is not trying to be scientifically accurate. Okay, it's a philosophical experiment. Anyway, in defense of it. It's a very cool place. They use particle accelerators essentially like a microscope, this super-powerful tool where they're speeding up these electrons to the speed of light essentially, and firing them through things allows them to look through a battery, and they can actually see how these chemicals are interacting. And what's really exciting is they're using AI to build models that can predict what's gonna happen, test it with a hand-built battery that they make there, and then refine that model further and further and further.
And then the information that comes back, goes back into that computer and creates this huge feedback loop, that makes a computer that's smarter and smarter every time, and creates this really robust engine for invention. So I think it could be the beginning of an era where computers start to invent things instead of us, where this thing could actually start to predict, where you just describe to the computer, "I want a chemistry that does this, performs this way," and it just comes up with that chemistry on its own. - That's bizarre. - Is this how Ant-Man entered the Quantumverse? - That's exactly right. - Oh, okay, I understand that more.
- It's a fun place to see, like, it's fun to be around all this stuff, 'cause it does sort of evoke that sci-fi feeling where it's, you know, the incredibly powerful tools being used to do cutting-edge super science. But yeah, unfortunately no one shrunk on set, yeah. - Yeah. - Okay, yeah, I mean, this might be the nerdiest "Hard Reset" episode. - It's, as we were saying earlier, it's very dense.
- So how can everyday people get involved? - Yeah, well first of all, here's how you build an electromagnetic particle accelerator. - Which I think Michio Kaku did. - Don't do that, yeah. Don't do that.
- Wasn't a fusion? I can't remember. - Oh yeah, it was some ridiculous thing you shouldn't be able to build in your garage. - Yeah, yeah, don't do that. - I mean, I think it's super cool that they can even build homemade batteries in a laboratory. Like I would think you need a big manufacturing facility to be able to, you know- - Yeah. - Put one of those out.
But I guess, how do they do that? - Yeah, it's really fascinating to see how batteries get made there. And they are sort of like these, we were joking, it was like, these are like the artisanal, homemade, one-off batteries, like bread. - Like, yeah, exactly.
- It's my own sourdough - Accelerator at the table. - Sort of hand-blown light bulbs from Portlandia. But no, they have this process where they refine the chemistry, they lay these, you know, sometimes molecule-thin or thin film coatings of different chemistries down on sheets. They lay the insulators between them, sandwich 'em all together into these little batteries.
And they can do them both as the kind of little square packet batteries like you might see inside of your cell phone. But they can also do it as a round cylinder battery where you lay this out on a long strip and then roll it up with an insulator between them. And they have to do it all in this dry lab, which is just kept super dry to keep moisture from screwing up all the chemical reactions. - One of the things that is tough for me to wrap my head around, 'cause like I generally understand the principle of a particle accelerator where you're like, essentially like, and so in the context of cylinder, they're like smashing things smashing together in order to find specific particles. And that's how we found the Higgs Boson particle. - Right.
- But- - That's not what they're doing here. - That's not what they're doing here. So what, like, what exactly are they like spinning, like shooting through the accelerator? Is it smashing into these chemistries like- - Well, yeah, at the end of the day, they're creating this beam of super-fast electrons that they're firing through something and observing how those particles scatter out. - Gotcha. Okay. - So it's a way of looking through things the same way I would take an X-ray of you, but instead of using X-ray particles or X-ray wavelengths, there's something very highly energetic so it can pass through even more material.
- Gotcha. - Does it come out with an image like an electron microscope or is it like- - It's not as easy as see- - Numbers. - It's more like numbers. I mean, there are images you can see that it does come through, but it's not very intelligible to us.
But through analysis they can break that down and really understand what's happening at the molecular and atomic scale. - It's fascinating. Did they give it a different name than a particle accelerator? Did they have a more technical name or is that the- - No, they call it a particle accelerator. - Interesting.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - Amateurs. - I know. - Did you have to wear safety goggles for this one? - No, for this one, oddly enough, no.
We're recycling batteries. Put on your safety goggles. Here, we're creating super deadly radioactive beams. Fine. Yeah, exactly. It feels like, I think at that point they're just like, the goggles are not gonna help.
- Yeah, exactly. - If you get in the way of this beam, you're just gonna be cooked. - Splitting into two.
- Yeah. - That's actually kind of funny. - But yeah, it was a fun episode to film, the crew there is really interesting and I really enjoyed speaking with their head battery scientist, Venkat Srinivasan, who's super smart, super charming, and like me is a huge nerd about AC versus DC, and so we've got to nerd out about whether AC or DC is better. - Oh, I thought you were talking about the band. - No, we're not. - Oh, okay, okay. - Which one do you think is better? - I think DC is better.
I think AC is great for long distances and DC's better in the home. - Our subscribers are plummeting right now. - Of course a battery tech would say DC is better, right? - Right, it's all DC but that is a bit of a tangent that we didn't get to explore, but hopefully soon. - My skepticism here isn't, I actually, I don't know if I have a lot of skepticism here. I'm interested in how like the particle accelerator can help accelerate the progress here, so to speak.
But like I am in general pretty bullish on these types of endeavors and the government doing like pretty impossible things for most other organizations to do. Like outside of something like CERN, which is like a huge conglomerate of multinational organizations, sort of like combined into one. But, so I don't know what I'm out to be skeptical about other than just... Is this anything other than like a fanciful research project? Like I think there's, I think this is the only thing that- - I'm not skeptical, but is this all bullshit.
- Right, that's a fair point, fair point. But like there of all government research stuff that's happening, there seems to be a characteristic of just like, when does this become real? Right - Right. - And the more removed the like, practicality of the experiment is from something that can be turned into a product, the more unlikely it is, it's gonna become a real thing that we interface with.
- Right. - But chemistry is a bit different than all of that, 'cause really, it's just understanding how to manipulate the fundamental information of life. And at the fundamental basic level, chemistry is information.
That's what all of these things are. We talked to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, a geneticist by the name of Paul Nurse. He wrote this book called "What Is Life?" And he talked about the five categories of biology, and the fifth category was, is information. And the first category was chemistry.
And they're sort of just like, he made this linear argument all the way through, but information you can manipulate in a lot of different ways. And it seems like what they're doing in Argonne is just getting information, and that's always going to be valuable. But yeah, so I dunno, that's my loose train of skepticism.
I'm curious, you were there, you saw them manipulate these materials and like do these types of things. What questions arose in your mind in terms of like, when is that battery gonna enter into my cell phone? - Right, yeah, I think it's a lot of these batteries they're building are these chemistries they're trying out have are... I don't think that there's a very long roadmap here. I think everyone is looking for the new battery technology. Everyone is making this progress very quickly.
People are adopting the newest battery technology all the time so there's a huge demand for it, and it's not like they're gonna be waiting around for years for someone to come and grab that technology. There might be a manufacturing process that needs to be spun up before it actually starts to hit, you know, consumer products. But there is a huge demand for this within industry. So that is already happening. The batteries in your phone, in your computer, in your Tesla, all those batteries have all been impacted by this type of research; if not this directly from Argonne. So that's already happening.
The interesting stuff that I think is on the horizon are things like solid-state batteries. - Yeah, you've mentioned this a couple times- what are solid-state batteries? - So solid-state batteries are essentially taking the fluid electrolyte, which is typically literally a fluid and replacing with a solid electrolyte. So something like a very thin layer that allows ions to pass through it. This makes a battery that is less susceptible to things like catching fire. And so it's safer, but it also means that it's less likely to form the sorts of like dendrites and things like that that can cause batteries to degrade over time. - Right. - We have another video
where they talk about it, but it's like, you know, whenever you have, essentially a moving part and these- - Yeah. - Hands are moving parts. You have, you know, the ability to degrade over time and so it's stuff like that forms films over one and over the cathode or it dries out and it becomes less effective and yada yada yada. And I think when you have solid state, you just produce the amount of variables. - Right, and so solid-state batteries really feel like they're one of the next big steps and that'll allow more energy storage, you know, per volume, per weight. And they're also looking at new chemistries like instead of using lithium as ion, can we use things like, you know, what are the next chemistries there? So, and I don't wanna go too directly in that because frankly, a lot of the technical details are way above my head.
You have to go in pretty deep and understand this stuff, which has happened a couple times with this video already. One of the things that I think our commenters and viewers did really well was pointed out that I misspoke in this episode as I was trying to describe how batteries worked. - We had a very epic skeptical question. - I love when people- - Final boss- - Stupid. - It's up to the questions. SwooshifyMe says, "I'm a battery researcher just like our guests here.
In fact, I sometimes come to Argonne for similar experiments. There's problems here." And then he has five separate time codes and- he goes in, you know, "Lithium scarcity is BS.
It's one of the most common elements in our crust. You know, 325 lithium is not the electrolyte. You know, this is a fundamental thing to mix up." - Well, where I misspoke was that, primarily, that I had said that lithium was in the electrolyte.
There is lithium in the electrolyte and lithium ions passed through the electrolyte. And so I misspoke in saying that the electrolyte had the lithium in it, but it's really just a medium for the lithium ion. So it's not that big of a miss up and it definitely is harder and harder to get lithium. - Yeah. - Despite the fact that it's so common.
And so it was one of these things where I think we were talking past each other a little bit, and we did send this to Argonne for fact-checking. They didn't raise any alarm bells when we said that. - Would you bring this up on a first date? - Depends. What do they do for a living? - I was gonna say yeah. - Battery. - I was going on a first date with Venkat Srinivasan, absolutely.
- Start off by discussing AC versus DC. - Right, of course. - Like, look, I think we have some chemistry here.
- Oh, there we go. Battery joke, finally. - Oh my gosh. - And actually- - You have electricity. - In terms of jokes, I'm surprised we didn't make a joke about battery and battery.
So battery is the way that we say it in the United States and battery, the way that they say it in the U.K.- - But it's wrong. - Well, battery is beating somebody up. - Right. - Battery is what powers your electronics. - I did not know that. - Yeah. - Wow.
- What if you power your electronics by beating them up? - Well then, yeah, that's just rock 'em sock 'em robots, - Right. - You go around saying zebra, are you one of those people? - No. - It's just zebra. - But I don't- - Just agree on that. - It's just a horse.
- Yeah. Okay, what else was Nick wrong about? - Oh, let me crack my knuckles. - Oh, there.
- Let's see. So, you know, fast forward we do get to these, but to go through the full list, you know, two, three times of what? There's a place for zinc and mercury batteries, but they also fundamental downsides, yada yada. We'll put a link to this. You know, Argonne is not the only place where they do this. Lithium doesn't explode, it doesn't even catch fire.
It's, you know, etc. Appreciate the skillful narration, but there's a lot of fundamentally wrong statements in here too. Did the scientists that appear here get to see this video before release? - And the answer is "yes." - They did? - Yeah. - By the way, this is uploaded 843 times. - Yes, yes, it was.
- So 843 people had exactly these same sentiments. - They are also scientists that are... I think what you have to realize is that Nick nor I are scientists. - No.
- Nor have we ever practiced any of this stuff. So we talked to people that are smarter than us and try to take their smart language that is usually a little boring to listen to, and then put on a bunch of jokes on top of that and pop culture references, and condense it down into something. I've been pleasantly surprised but also terrified of how smart a lot of people are at Freethink. I remember we did this video on a switch reluctance motor to which I was like, "Okay, well let me try to figure out what AC and DC power is now.
And then all the comments in the video were just like, "Oh, this is not deep enough. What about this? They've been doing this before." You're just like, "Oh my God, who is out there that knows this stuff?" - I mean, I wonder if YouTube's algorithm is being like, "Oh, you took advanced material science 401." - Of course, of course. I would love to explain - You should explain- - Someone's science to them. - Right.
- Yes, well this isn't my Master's thesis on battery chemistry, so I apologize to the folks who were hoping for a bit more scientific accuracy. I definitely was wrong about some stuff in the voiceover. - I hope that- - And I misspoke. - I hope that MIT invites you out for, you know, like, to- - You mean MIT? - Yeah, well it- - I would love to go to MIT, yeah. - It's also, we did like actually send this to Argonne. And Argonne didn't have any issues with the factual nature of this.
There was one thing that you misspoke, but even there it was like a slight misunderstanding of these things. And I think everything else in that person's comments, which I think it's a smart comment and they're smart quibbles with the thing that they're doing. They're also like, they're room for debate.
- Yeah. - Right, and so- - We responded. - Yeah. - We responded point by point and we, you know, talked to people smarter than ourselves to like, get feedback on it and yeah, it kind of verified in, you know, not all cases. There were some misspeaking but you know, in most cases it's kind of splitting hairs. - Well I think just, it's the nature of science journalism that most of the people who are writing or making videos about the things that scientists are doing or technologists are doing are not also people who have technical degrees in those fields.
- I went to art school guys. - And I think to have to condense down something like particle physics and chemistry into an 11-minute like video that also has jokes about Duracell- - Right. - And like a narrator who is also a character to some extent, like I think we do a really damn good job.
- Well, we make these videos for like kind of 16 to 18 year olds. Like that's kind of what is usually in my head in terms of like the kind of humor, the kind of language that we're using, like the density there, like that really is our target. - Yeah. - 'Cause guess what? A lot of people on YouTube are about that age.
Right? - That's true. - And we wanna make this stuff interesting and appealing, right? Our goal here is that there's so much cool stuff that is happening out there in the world that it's just doesn't get a lot of press coverage. It's just hard to understand, and how can we just make it like- - Interesting. - A little interesting, like a little, like this is cool, right? Like when your cell phone lasts for three days without a single charge like how'd that happen? And I'm probably not gonna be able to explain that to you, but I'll be like, you know, they use Keanu in "Chain Reaction" article accelerator and then they have a magnesium battery and then that's how it works. - Right, exactly. - Yeah, right? - Yeah, but I mean, the guy who's gonna write that kind of response, the jokes aren't there for him.
You know, like the jokes are there for the person- - He knows what he needs to know about battery. - It makes the rest of us who are interested and curious and are trying to find something to hold onto to make it fun. - Oh man. Is there a spinoff show here? The Harder Reset podcast? - The Harder Reset. - Yeah.
- Oh no, that's going back to "The Hard Reset." - Yeah. - Yeah, Deeper Reset. I don't know. - Deeper Reset? - Yeah. Exactly, like who wants to go to these topics more? We do have platforms to that. - I mean that- - Yeah, give us a 10-minute response video on this stuff.
I mean, I'm curious. I mean- - We could do a Big Think video with him where he breaks down all the chemistries of all this stuff. - There we go. Boom.
Green light it. Do it right now, Rob, on air. - No. - I mean, to be fair, sometimes people like want a lot of technical details and there are a lot of, you know, we sometimes you see videos that like people are coming into our videos from and you know, you watch 'em, and they can be pretty technical. - That's right. - It's not like, I wouldn't say it's, you know, graduate student in physics technical, but it's, you know, it's like they really get into the details.
- This is why I love YouTube is that there is a channel out there for everyone. I've watched these like 20- to 30-minute long videos with literally no music, and no one speaking of a guy just like taking apart something mechanical and like taking off all the rust and reassembling it together. It's like who would've thought that video had 20 or 30 million views? - Yeah.
- Well speaking of our 20 or 30 views, what other comments did we have or other questions that the audience had? - So we had a lot of questions about other technology, you know, aluminum air batteries, carbon nanotubes, you know, we've talked about this before, but like there's a lot of viral content on this or that new technology that people get excited about and there's a lot of different companies exploring that new technology because like, hey, we don't have enough to, you know, supply all of the Teslas in the future so Elon Musk wants to build batteries without rare molecules or with iron batteries instead of blah blah blah. So we had a lot of questions about that. Like those specific technologies. - Yeah, and I think a lot of these are gonna be tested by the market.
Some may or may not be feasible. And I think again, like it's all the things, not just one of the things. We're gonna have all sorts of batteries that don't, we can't even recognize today as batteries.
I've been really interested to see the very unconventional energy storage methods that people are looking at, like lifting up large weights and using, you know, turbines that are generating electricity as they come down or pumping water up into elevated basins and when you have electricity and rolling it down through a turbine when you don't, these all make sense. They're just, they're batteries. They're not chemical batteries in the same way, but they are an energy storage medium. - I mean it's a pretty cool time when you think about we're exploring all of these different battery or we, you know, humanity, you know, in different organizations and stuff is you doing all these different things.
But it's also like they work, you know, like you can have a million new technologies that haven't been adopted at scale but work and we're gonna find like the top- - Yeah. - 1% of those viable technologies. And so we'll probably get some pretty cool results when things actually get, you know, built out to scale. - Yeah, and I think with this one specifically, we're looking at density of like how do we make electric planes? How do we make electric cars that go farther and have longer range and how do we do things that up until now have really been limited to just hydrocarbon fuels? You know, I think, and there was one thing that I think in the comments was a little bit debated back and forth is we compare energy storage and batteries to using gas, which is both an energy storage medium and a energy source unto itself, right? - Right. - And so I think a lot of people were upset or confused by that comparison, but essentially, when you were looking at, "Hey, I've got 10 pounds or 10 gallons worth of stuff that I can put into my car, how far is it gonna get me?" Right now, the 10 gallons of gas is gonna get you a lot further than the 10 gallons of battery material.
And so it's really big, how do we make these batteries compete with hydrocarbons? And I don't know that we'll ever get there. It doesn't seem like there's a roadmap for batteries to be one-to-one. But what is interesting is that batteries open up all sorts of other avenues to make up for that difference. So even if batteries never get to be a 100% as efficient as gasoline, which is super, super powerful, dense energy storage medium, it allows us to build cars in a way that they can be twice as efficient. You know, because instead of having a transmission and a rear differential, you just have four motors that are super efficient and it just allows you to design cars in a way that's far better. And so these technologies are gonna have second and third order consequences that we can't quite anticipate, and that's going to be really powerful too.
- Yeah. I'm drained by these comments. - You need to recharge, Taylor. Are there any other mean comments? - Oh, there's mean comments. - Something- - We have mean comments. - Something wonderfully mean-spirited and harsh.
Well we had a few people talking about the fossil fuel industry. "The fossil fuel industry is so much more than gas and diesel, lubricants, plastics, fertilizers, medicines, other petrochemicals. This moronic thought that we would not need the fossil fuel industry is laughable and sad that people's knowledge is severely limited. Yes, electric vehicles will have a place, but the energy density and ease of transport of fuels still makes more sense now and in the near-future." - Yes, that is true. - Yeah.
- Yeah, there are no wrong. I don't think anyone's saying otherwise. We definitely will still need these things, but our dependence on fossil fuels is the problem. It's not the fact that we have it, it's the fact that we depend on it, and that it's like 99% of this is is the problem.
- Yeah, it's like, it's hard to have other options other than fossil fuels. The fact that we've built the modern world around fossil fuels, yeah, 'cause they work, like that's why we do it. But the efforts like this is to help us, give us more options. If you think about what the ability to control energy has done for humanity, why would we be against the effort to give us more control over energy? And that's what this is doing. - Yeah, I think people sometimes overlook because it's so ubiquitous how powerful and amazing of a substance gasoline is in terms of the energy density of it, and how much of all you see is a result of that. Like when we talk about our energy use, it feels abstract, but it's like, I've gone on this tangent before, but like everything you see, if it didn't grow out of the grounds like that, it was transformed through the use of energy whether it's this microphone or even like, you know, how warm or cold the temperature of this room is, you know- - And then shipped somewhere in the world.
- Like that all takes a lot, a lot, a lot of power, and that's what fossil fuels are used for. - I mean, even the stuff that's grown out of the ground, it's from energy, right? It's just that we don't have it's wild energy. We don't have control over that energy in that process. We can manipulate it a little bit, but like the energy that we have control over it built all of this so. - Yeah, I mean it'll be interesting to see what the, you know, down slope of the petrochemical industry is, you know, if, you know, certain things like transport don't end up requiring as much, but you know what happens to plastics? I mean, obviously, there's a lot of people working on substance use of plastics too, so it'll be interesting to see, you know, the knock on effects - 100%. - Yeah, yeah.
But I think there will always be some demand for these products For sure, for fossil- It's never gonna go away. - Oh yeah. - But it's the reliance, I think that is gonna go. - That's why my jeans are so soft. All that petroleum in there. - We had a similar, I mean I guess it's, you know, people, it is a little bit of a different concern, but "I prefer hybrid and I don't wanna rely on governments to dictate what form of energy I can use.
As far as fossil fuels are concerned, they're always ready to go and they can't be shut off by dictators." I was like- bad news about- - I mean your government is actively determining the kind of energy. - Yeah, and fossil fuel can definitely be turned off by dictators like that's, we've had several crises actually, you know. - Yeah, I think people like, "It's funny I already hear that."
Like, and plus people have this idea that, "Oh, if the world has an apocalypse, I'll have my pickup truck and I'll still be able to use it, 'cause of course I'll still have a gas station." - Right. - Yeah, watch "The Last of Us," they have a good, good roadmap for this. - Very true.
- Anything else that you wanna go over? - Two more comments. One, "Slow progress towards the perfect battery is the ultimate proof that we have not been visited by aliens. And in particular, that aliens have not given us their advanced technology because if we did, if they did, we would long ago have had fantastic batteries. All praise to their consistent dedication and hard work by teams of scientists and engineers." - I think I agree with that. - Yeah, I agree. - I do too. Was it right?
- It's like a different route to the same conclusion. - Correct. - Aliens don't exist, is that what that- - Yeah, yeah. - Well, I think they don't exist.
Just that they haven't given us their batteries to us. That's not fair? Yeah. - Keep pulling out. - There's this meme of like, they had us in the first half, I'm not gonna lie. Like that's what that.
- So then I don't know if it's a mean comment, but it's, "I like your informative and even funny way of delivering the information. Funny might be a bit strong, but not stupidly overwhelmingly dumb. Like some of these things, found this very interesting." Again, you know, I appreciate it. - Yeah. I thought it could've been funnier too.
- I agree with this person. Let's go buy him a drink. - Thanks Mom. - No, that wasn't- - It's like a fair- - Backhanded compliment kind of a thing, yeah.
- Well, thank you guys for having this conversation. It's always fun to revisit these episodes. They're super interesting to me, and I appreciate your feedback and I appreciate the audience feedback so make sure you like and subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode of the "Hard Reset Podcast."
2024-06-25 09:35
