103: Bringing Sexy Back… in a small way - Carbon Nanotubes

[Music] hi everybody welcome to the still to be determined podcast as usual this is the podcast that follows up on topics from the youtube channel undecided with matt farrell and as usual i am not matt farrell i am sean farrell i am matt's older brother i'm a writer with me of course is matt matt how are you doing today i'm doing good how about you i'm doing okay it's a cold and lazy sunday here in new york city and i'm just realizing how i want to slip into hibernation mode so yeah wish me luck on staying awake during our conversation today we're going to be talking about matt's most recent episode which was revisiting how carbon nanotubes will change renewable energy and this episode dropped on january 11th 2022 before we get into that just a quick reminder you can support the podcast just by watching just by listening or by going to still tbd.fm there's a link there that allows you to support us directly or on youtube you can go to the membership button which is a join button right below the video whichever way you're able to support us we appreciate the help it all does help the channel so matt nanotubes back again t to the e to the avm the right out of the gate your video starts with we're still waiting yes so one of the things that occurred to me is if you were a betting man yes oh god what are you gonna ask me what's the the over under on the number of years it might take for this to suddenly be like oh it's being used it's happening and then my follow-up question is what does it's happening it's being used look like to you okay i would probably say if you put a gun to my head and said you have to pick i'd probably say five to ten years and part of the reason i'd say five to ten years is it's still early days the manufacturing process is the biggest hold up it's easy to prove an idea in a lab it's very difficult to take it from that stage into like a pilot stage and from there into a we're going to produce gobs of the stuff for the entire world perfectly every single time with very little waste that's hard and so it's like that's why i think five to ten years we'll start seeing this in more of a meaningful way and in a meaningful way it's like a battery that is using carbon nanotubes or new wiring that is using carbon nanotubes that starts being put into people's homes or grids you start seeing it showing up in these solar panels that i talked about like here's the first solar panel that uses this technology that captures the heat that's generated from the sun as well as the rays so it's kind of doubling down on how much electricity can generate so it's that's what i mean by meaningful when i talk about meaningful not some like when you're talking about graphene it's like some random company came out with headphones that are graphene headphones it's like no that's not a meaningful use of graphene that's just cashing in on the name it's gonna be five to ten years would be my guess i don't recall seeing what the costs are associated with production of this i know that at this point it's got to be astronomical it's kind of it's gonna be very expensive it's gonna be very expensive and you talked about the one company that produces graphene that is they've effectively been able to a thousand-fold improve their output which means that instead of a gram they're making a kilogram obviously that's not going to feed the world but the stuff is very light [Laughter] a little goes a long way understandably especially considering it's the envisioned uses being wiring and you know extremely extremely thin uh hair wide filaments which if we were to start seeing those things being introduced as you point out solar panels that incorporate these there's the even fabric so i guess the just to be clear about what we mean by the fabric we mean fabric that could potentially do what like you could be you could have a tent that has effectively solar power generation ability or maybe clothing where your phone could be plugged into something in your pocket and it could be charging while you're walking around outside that's one thing yeah to put on your sci-fi hat a little bit it's kind of like imagine sportswear that has these fibers woven into it along with sensors that could take the athlete's temperature heart rate all those kind of things and it's actually being powered by the athlete's own body heat so it's like that's kind of one potential path you could go down with this so maybe a sleeve that they put on you in the hospital and it's monitoring your vitals while you're wearing it and you are also what is powering it you could also be powering but be very very low power kind of stuff but that same basic principle of how that would work can also be applied to i talked about in the video but like you could apply it to semiconductors or electronics because heat control is one of the problems with electronics so you could integrate this into some kind of like heat transfer so that you can pull the heat off of the the processor to help keep it cool and then you're reusing that energy to help even power the device itself so it's like could help to mitigate how much power a device needs to get from an outside source there's all these different ways you can use it it's kind of like you're a writer it's like it's like your your mind can start spinning about all the possibilities but actually making this a reality is the part where it's like you have to keep your expectations in check and for like rice university they're showing that this kind of stuff can absolutely work with solar panels like they're proving it can and so now it's just a matter of can this actually be integrated into a company's production line and can they make it a reality right one of the things your video got me wondering about is have rice researches figured out yet how to grow rice outside a patty but that's a conversation for another video connected to the cost issue there was this question that popped into my head as i was watching this it's the potential is fantastic for as you mentioned solar panel efficiency improvements being able to increase efficiency was it by eighty percent or two eighty percent eight to eighty percent okay clearly that's an incredible number compared to the panels that are currently available i wondered would this immediately create a situation where you'd have multiple tiers of panels with a very high end that would only be available because of cost to a select few yeah or do you envision this being something that current solar panel usage would jump at because of the efficiency numbers being so high compared to current panels in other words if a power company is putting out a solar panel farm and tomorrow they found out that oh there's this new panel do you think that a company would regardless of cost immediately switch over to that newer panel just because of the 80 or do you think this would be the sort of thing where there would have to be a person who would be pushing out multiple levels of product with the hope of being able to push the cost of the higher level down eventually to become more widely widely consumed it's going to be that it's going to come out at an expensive high tier that very few people would want to take a risk on especially when you're talking about commercial scale installations they're not going to want to jump at this until they can prove that the return on investment is there so it's going to be very high for kind of an elite crew and then it will slowly the price will come down as the manufacturing gets better and better better and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper it's like pretty much any technology there'll be a trickle down in that technology as it comes through and one thing to point out is there already is tiers in solar panels today it's like the solar panels that are put on satellites that nasa is shooting into through the galaxy those things are crazy efficient they're like really efficient they're using those 50 efficiency panel kind of things they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make and so that's why you don't see those on my house because they're i'm just gonna ask are they on your house yet but no i wish they were but it's like it's it's possible to do this kind of stuff it's just crazy expensive and until the manufacturing becomes perfected to do it at a better cost it'll never come into the mainstream so that's the biggest challenge for carbon nanotubes until they can get the cost down it'll never became become a mainstream product and some of the research that you described especially the research at rice university there were obvious government including department of defense grants being used to create this how much of a concern is there that there will be a point where this will not become publicly available would this be something that could effectively be used in a way that somebody might say well this is this has become government property at this point that this is you know being used in a way that in order to maintain it's happened in the past it goes back you know 50 or 60 years but there have been patents that have been held by the government out of a sense of like we need to control this because this is too destabilizing or this is too risky to to use yeah it's it's not even that far in the past in the solid hydrogen video i did about plasma kinetics they were in that situation just like a decade ago their patents were held by the military as being like too dangerous to lease out or they thought they wanted it for themselves and so the patent was put on a list that it couldn't actually be patented by the company because they didn't want to let it get out there right so it took a lot of fighting to get it released and the program that was doing that was called i think the acronym was saws it's now defunct that that program doesn't exist so it's harder for the government to do to them to do to others what they did to them so it is a risk but with solar panels i don't think that would happen i really don't there's not like it's not a technology that can be warped there's not a solar panel race between us and the soviets right and there's not some solar panel ray gun you know what i mean it's like it's not like it's gonna be yet yeah i know but it's like you can understand why a military would want to invest in this because imagine putting this on your humvees and your tanks and sure you know you have pop-up military bases that have these small crazy efficient panels that can power that little facility yeah so it reduces the need for even an individual even an individual soldier with a solar panel built into a backpack that allows them to power whatever computer device they need to use right so you can understand why they want to do it but i don't think they would patent that into a black hole that would never get to the public they would get it first obviously and then it would probably trickle out a lot of the technologies we take advantage of today like gps that was a government military thing that was put out there now everybody uses gps so it's right this kind of stuff would eventually trickle out but it might slow it down which is which would be a concern yeah in my head now i i can hear the siri voice directing an army to veer left at the next turn so if there was a multi-tier market for something like the solar panel what do you think the top tier would look like out ignoring nasa's needs and nasa's willingness to spend you know here's a million dollars worth of solar panels on this one satellite ignoring them who do you think the market is that is looking at those i would look to as an analogy the car market it's like think about luxury cars i would probably be looking at luxury roofing solar roofing so look at the tesla solar roof look at there's a whole bunch of companies like solarroof.se there's these companies are coming out with different solar tile technologies that look like shingles and stuff like that i could totally see companies like that that are serving a high-end market anyway leaning into this a little bit because then it can trickle down because the people that can afford to buy that will buy it because it's the newest latest best and it's gonna be crazy efficient i could see companies like that make high-end solar panels like you're talking about like lg they could have a tier of just regular solar panels for residential homes that are just crazy efficient they may not be big sellers but they could be helping that high-end market i think that's most likely where it would start and then once they got to a scale they might get to a point where then it hits commercial because then you'd be hitting large commercial installations where it's like a solar farm that might do one megawatt can suddenly be producing two megawatts and if the cost isn't crazy high they could see that return on investment so it's i think that's most likely the way it would work kind of an expensive residential then commercial and then it would trickle down to more of a broad broad market i'm wondering now about those solar farms that already exist they've gone you know we see them popping up more and more lately i would say the first time i started seeing them driving on the highway started seeing solar farms within the past five years they're all over noticed them didn't didn't notice them in my in my driving which is limited but didn't notice them in the routes i take until about five years ago and so i'm wondering let's assume that solar panel farms five to ten years old at this point how long are those panels potentially going to last people can correct me if i get this wrong but from my understanding from the people i've talked to commercial solar farms change their panels out fairly frequently they don't wait 20 years to change them out they might be changing them out after 8 years or 10 years and it's not because they're broken it's because they're trying to hit a certain max efficiency max efficiency max efficiency for return investment as well as you know making sure that everything is operating smoothly right so they do a constant turnover and because they do that there's actually a huge market for buying used panels from commercial installations right dirt cheap like ricky roy from tube davinci he did that in his previous house that's how he got his they were commercial panels that were sold off and their performance was great one of my patrons has doing the same thing he's building out a small little kind of like tiny house from a trailer and he bought dirt cheap used panels that were like 45 bucks a a panel or something like that it was like crazy cheap so there's a market for it because they change them out so much and the panels are still good they just have slight degradation or maybe a tiny crack in the corner but doesn't impact performance so there's a constant turnover in facilities like that okay so that was my question then about like if a new entry into the market included something like this tech and you had these panels out there that are on these farms i wondered at what speed at what pace if a company decided they were going to switch over what that would look like so it seems like it could actually be fairly fast if five years from now a panel was introduced and it economically made sense that within five or ten years a solar panel farm could be 100 transitioned into that newer that newer more efficient panel you might see a couple rows changed and then you know a year later a few more rows are now in this new panel so it's like they're going to be changing them out on a cycle so it's you'd see in the next five to 10 years all these kind of things slowly transitioning to these more efficient panels pretty quickly right on to some listener comments that caught my eye like this one from nolan who wrote graphene wires as a copper alternative would be a huge breakthrough these steps bring us closer to carbon-based electrics which open up so many new avenues and i know that from your video one of the things about conductivity is the inclusion of a metal in the production so that you end up with the metal incorporated into the nanotube so would a copper alternative necessarily have to be copper or are they looking at other metals that end up with the same sort of conductivity as copper itself in the labs i believe they're looking at all kinds of metals for this but i think you'd most likely still see copper going forward um right at least short term and if that was happening that means that copper would be still being used but less of it would be used per filament than normal copper wiring possibly yes which is a good thing because copper is crazy expensive right now and it's like people who are building new homes sometimes will find their wiring ripped out yes it's it's worth a lot of money so if finding alternatives that are as performant or better it's gonna happen it's just a matter of when yeah there was also this from hooyah fish which huya fish i like the name especially given the somewhat pessimistic comment of huia [Music] i've literally been waiting for graphene to take over the world for 12 years excuse me if i'm not more excited yeah so 12 years from now you i asked you earlier if you're a betting man and you gave a five to ten year window but 12 years from now to take huya's time frame that he has been waiting do you think huya will be in a place where he will be saying finally it's here or do you think it's going to be one of those things that you talk about all too often in your channel which are there are invisible changes happening behind you and bingo as they step into place you don't even really feel it yep that's what's i think it's gonna be more of that i don't think it's gonna be like carbon nanotubes are everywhere it's gonna be so i'm not gonna walk out of my carbon tube house and get in my carbon tube car and drive on a carbon tube bridge no you're going to see the solar panel farm and it's going to have panels that have carbon nanotubes in it but you don't even know you're just like oh there's a solar panel right so it's going to be one of those it's just going to be in the background and it's not you're not gonna be really aware of it that much but if you look into it you're gonna be like wow there are quite a few products out there that have graphene or carbon nanotubes in them and i think it's gonna kind of catch you by surprise at some point but it's not gonna like be pervasive it's not gonna be like like i mentioned those graphene headphones you're not going to be seeing graphene on the labels of everything i don't think that's i actually think we will i think we will i don't think it will necessarily mean there's actually graphene in the product but i think we will see graphics being used in marketing yes it'll be in the market but it's not going to be real that's why i say meaningful a meaningful use of the product the rca graphene 3000 television screen coming to your home and it's not going to actually incorporate graphene in any meaningful way that i think will happen okay that's fair i'll i'll agree with that yeah so i guess at a certain level yeah you might be waiting for just really good marketing to feel like you've finally reached that promised land sadly but i guess does that lack of and you've you've done a lot of videos around a lot of different types of tech and you've and you've looked at a lot of different industries does that lack of a splashy obvious hook hold back the funding that could go into research like it's thinking in terms of like battery research right elon musk has had his hand on the throttle by simply saying i am i am choosing to change the way cars are made i am choosing to do this and driving an industry forward at a much faster pace simply because he has put so much energy and money into something that does have a splashy hook look here's a car you can see it on the street you can get in and you can drive it and it's different from all these other cars and that's got an obvious hook solar panels are not that sexy hook nobody is out there saying did you see that black rectangle look how much sexier it is than this other black rectangle so i'm wondering does that impede interest in those investors who might have venture capitalists is there something that an industry is it really beholden now to the the number crunching inside of different industries to say oh yeah this panel would actually help save us 15 so it's worth it so we'll put money into that as opposed to a sexy public hook i don't think a sexy public hook is gonna hold a lot of this stuff back because there's behind the scenes there's like public sexiness and there's like behind the scenes sexiness yeah i guess what's sexy to uh uh right cfo at a company is very different from what's going to be sexy to a consumer right in general though if you're talking about renewable energy sustainable technologies that entire space is kind of sexy right now because the climate change and there's a huge drive to get up fossil fuels and so it's like there's an insane amount of investment in research going into all this stuff right now so i don't think carbon nanotubes would have a problem making that sales pitch publicly or privately at this point yeah but there's a double-edged sword of like a lot of times universities researchers whatever it is fall into a trap of over hyping to get the finding and then that over hype gets caught by the press and that comes very public the public gets super excited two years pass and people are going where's my flying car and so it's like there's this double-edged sword to that hype like you know carbon nanotubes graphene had that huge surge of hype and we've now kind of come off that crest but it's still happening it's still important but it's not splashy anymore so it's that's where i closed out my video saying i think the lack of hype around this is actually a good thing because it's got us into a more realistic expectation but there's a potential that this could ramp back up and the hype could get out of control again and analogy fusion energy isn't a hype cycle right now like the same amount of funding everybody's like we've solved it we're gonna have fusion energy let's makes it sound like it's five years away it's like no it's not five years ago we're going we don't need roads and right it's like there's incredible progress but it's getting overhyped calm it down it's one of those things so it's like it comes in cycles right so like for this right now the cycle is on the low side because people got burned out from the hype 10 years ago but it's actually still happening so that's kind of where i was saying the public sexiness isn't as important because you're talking a little bit it sounds like you're touching on on effectively micro tech bubbles bubbles within each within each little avenue of the bigger tech industry as opposed to the doc you know like the dot-com bubble that was very specific to the internet as people who did not know internet suddenly said internet and put money in internet that make me money and then when that all fell apart and everybody said they're scratching their heads yeah like well yeah having a dot-com doesn't mean you have a business i worked in that bubble that was not pleasant when that bubble burst yes i remember i remember you you weather in the storm as best you could yeah but it being a storm nonetheless oh another round of layoffs this is gonna be fun yeah so to our listeners i asked you talked about the the sexiness of the product the idea of hype and the bubble nature of some of these different texts that matt talks about is channel and i'm wondering from all of you do you believe the hype and not just about this product but about any of the things he's talked about recently do you think that you see an overhyped conversation going on in the public sphere or do you think that things are kind of like coasting under the radar let us know whether you are yourself excited about this or that or if you think that certain of these things are a little too promoted or under-appreciated let us know in the comments you can go directly below this video on youtube and leave a comment there and if you're listening to us through a podcast provider you can go to the contact information in the podcast description and reach out to us that way a reminder you can go to stilltbd.fm

and there's a support the podcast link there that will allow you to support us directly or on youtube you can just press the join button and become a member on youtube both those ways are great ways to support us but if you can't do either of those we appreciate you listening we appreciate you commenting reviewing and sharing with your friends all of that really does help the podcast podcast helps the channel the channel helps matthew and then matthew helps me bring the sexy back we'll talk to you next time everybody thanks so much for listening [Music] you

2022-01-21 20:47

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