Chapters

  • 00:00 - Intro
  • 02:08 - Zach Nelson Interview
  • 37:32 - Supercritical CO2 Turbines Discussion

Transcript

Zach Nelson: Something that's a little bit weird to me is like I'll publish a video and I'll usually get like a few really long comments that always talk about how like unsustainable solar panels are because you have to like mine out like the minerals and stuff like that for the glass and the, the metals and things inside of it. And it's, it's very weird to me because you can look that up and like you can offset the carbon it takes to make a solar panel within like the first, like I think 6 months, 12 months or like that, like it's something super small. But the, the comments are weird enough to make me think that it's just like, I, I, I would hate to say that it's just like a bot, you know, like just responding the same message on a bunch of different solar videos. But like for some reason like that comment gets posted quite often on a regular basis on my videos, even though it's not even remotely close to being true.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined, we're going to be talking about wheelchairs, building your own business, some solar diy and luckily I don't have to talk about any of that. I'm just asking the questions. Welcome everybody, to Still to be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I'm not Matt Ferrell, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his older brother. With me, as always though, is the aforementioned Matt. And today Matt and I are going to be talking with Zach Nelson of Jerry Rigged Everything. Quick note. After our conversation with Zach Nelson, we're going to come back with a few of your comments about one of Matt's most recent videos. This is his video, why China's supercritical CO2 turbine matters. But first we're going to talk with Zach Nelson. We've got lots of questions for him because he's building a new business, he's manufacturing wheelchairs at much less than traditional wheelchair manufacturers. He's also, well, he's putting solar on things DIY style. He's putting bunkers in his backyard. He's doing a lot of stuff and we talk to him about a lot of those things. So on now to our conversation with Zach Nelson. First of all, let us start off by saying hello, Zach Nelson. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Zach Nelson: Nice to meet you.

Sean Ferrell: And we've got a heavy hitting question for you right out of the gate. How often do you get called Jerry?

Zach Nelson: All the time. All the time. I think I've been called Jerry more often in my life than I've been called Zach, so.

Sean Ferrell: Right. Have you ever been introduced in a public forum as Jerry from JerryRigEverything?

Zach Nelson: All the time. All the time.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, that's embarrassing.

Zach Nelson: Yeah. And I usually. I just roll with it. Like, I don't correct him or anything. I'm just. Usually there's like a little laugh from the audience. Um, and we just.

Sean Ferrell: We just keep those who know and those who do not.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Then. Then you know who your real fans are, so.

Zach Nelson: Exactly. And when the emails. I get emails. I know if they started with Zach, I know they actually watch my channel. I know if they started with Jerry, then they're just trying to get something out of me.

Matt Ferrell: It's a good litmus test you got there.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, it's nice.

Sean Ferrell: So your channel started as in one particular area where you were just going in, you were tearing stuff down, and it's evolved. You've evolved in a very interesting way, from my perspective and from Matt's perspective, maybe an unexpected trajectory. Do you want to talk a little bit about that journey, about how it started and when you saw opportunities emerge that you just kind of flowed with and how you ended up where you are now?

Zach Nelson: The evolution of my channel has been very intentional. When I first started out, it was a little by accident. Like, I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always been looking for ways to make money and be my own boss. And so in college, I was going to college to make my mom happy and learn things as well, I guess, and my jeep broke down and I didn't have enough money to repair it. It was $1,000 repair to have a shop do it. And so I jumped on YouTube and I found a guy who had the exact same problem with the instructions on how to fix it for 70 bucks. And, like, that was much more doable for me as a college kid. And so I messaged him and I was like, so why do you. Why did you make this video? Because it was super, super helpful to me. And he said that he makes money on YouTube and, like, it helps pay his rent. And he was just, you know, doing it for fun and to decrease world suck. And I thought that was those two things, you know, decreasing world suck and making money were two things that I enjoyed doing. And so I decided to start a YouTube channel as well. And very long story short, you know, it's been like 14 years now. I started, you know, working on Jeeps and consciously decided that, like, there's not a whole lot of eyeballs looking to repair Jeeps. Because not everyone owns a Jeep. But I was also working in a cell phone repair store at the time as well. And I was like, everyone owns a cell phone. So I kind of branched off into the technology side of things where more eyeballs were at if I want to turn it into a career. And then more recently where my channel has been for like the last five or six years. I met this smoking hot girl like seven years ago and we hit it off.

Does your wife know?

She knows now. We hit it off like pretty instantly. Like I knew she was the one on the first date. It took me a while to convince her, but she was in a wheelchair.

And we, our first date like started at 9pm like we just went to go get like a little snack and we ended it at 2am cause we were just talking like all night. Like it was super fun. So she's in a wheelchair. She's been in a wheelchair probably since she was 18. So like a decade before I met her. The math isn't mathing right there. She's. Just to clarify, she's one year older than me, even though she looks far younger than me.

Sean Ferrell: Okay.

Zach Nelson: So I have to, I have to tell the Internet that.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Zach Nelson: And so the last probably six or so years, my life has kind of revolved around wheelchairs and accessibility and off road wheelchairs. Just because of how expensive things were. We decided to fix it together and make more affordable options at the start.

Sean Ferrell: It sounds very much like it was a very organic process for you at the start where maybe you'd hit some sort of problem in your life and say, well, I'll make a video about this because this is the thing I'm dealing with right now. It, it. Cause Matt and I were wondering, was it just sleepless nights, you staring at a ceiling and saying, huh, I wonder if I could electrify a Hummer.

Zach Nelson: I mean, it kind of do. I do have my best ideas do come at night, surprisingly enough. But it's also, it's been a conscious decision. Like the projects aren't just something I want to do, they're also something that I know will get views, if that makes sense. So like I do, I do decide some of the projects based on their popularity, which is, you know, like any business you have, you have to make intelligent decisions as you go through the process. But I knew that I could make enough videos on the electric Hummer project to pay for itself, plus earn money for the wheelchair factory, which has kind of been like the whole goal for the last six or seven years.

Sean Ferrell: So the wheelchair business emerged out of your relationship. Was there a moment in the early days of the relationship where. Where maybe your eyes opened up a little bit wider and you realized an aspect of wheelchair life that hadn't occurred to you before that really made you want to engage with that kind of work?

Zach Nelson: Yeah. I mean, from the very first night, like, obviously we were talking, talking about wheelchairs. Happens when you're talking to someone in a wheelchair for that many hours. And when she told me that her wheelchair cost like $5,000, I, you know, looked at it for a couple of seconds and I'm like, for what? Like, it's just some aluminum tubes and some wheels.

Sean Ferrell: Like, they're filled with diamonds, though, if I remember correctly.

Zach Nelson: Diamonds. And I was like, is there diamonds in the tube? Like, what gold plated titanium hardware are we talking about? And so then, so, like, that was wild to me that, like, they. They have to pay this because it's something they absolutely need. Yeah. So that was annoying. Um, and then also just the fact that, like, the world isn't in a very accessible place. Like, even like a curb that's like 1 or 2 inches high is like a massive obstacle if you're, you know, sitting in wheels where your front wheels are also that same height.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Zach Nelson: And so stairs are. Stairs are our worst enemy. Um, and that's not something I can fix, you know, but I can fix the price of wheelchairs.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: So that actually comes to a question I've got is in the videos that you've been releasing about the business you've highlighted, this wheelchair cost half as much as a prescription wheelchair that you might be waiting months for one. How are you able to get it to half the cost? And then the second question is, why the hell does it take like five, six months or longer for somebody to get a wheelchair? Yeah.

Zach Nelson: So I'll tackle the first question first. One of the ways that we've made it so much cheaper is like, the YouTube channel has subsidized all of the manufacturing equipment so we don't have to pass any of those costs on of the customers. Like, our laser was $400,000. Our CNC bender was $400,000. The sandblasting booth was $50,000. The ovens are each 15 grand a piece. Like, there's millions of dollars in equipment that we now don't have to pass to the customer. So that is one nice little perk of having a YouTube channel. The second part of that was it how we make them be the difference

Sean Ferrell: in deliverability, speed, oh, the time, the Time.

Zach Nelson: Yeah. So I think. And that also kind of goes into the cost of it as well. So like there's just so many hands in the pot. You have to like get a recommendation from your doctor to the ATP to get measured and then they check with the insurance to see you're approved. Because you only get one wheelchair every five years through insurance. And just like a pair of shoes, they wear out way quicker than that. And so there's just like so many levels and so many hoops to jump through and each person takes their own month to respond. Um, it's just part of the problem. So we just bypassed them all and you can just put in your own measurements and get your own chair.

Matt Ferrell: So there's no need for a prescription, there's no need for insurance involvement at all?

Zach Nelson: No. And like you can still go through that whole process and still get your one chair every five years. You still have to pay your deductible and your copay and all that. But like, usually our chairs are cheaper than your co pay and your deductible. So it's. People can choose now which direction they want to go.

Sean Ferrell: You mentioned a second ago, you referred to off road wheelchairs. I mean we see it every day on the streets. People take off road vehicles and drive them around like normal cars all the time. So is the intention here to use a term on the wheelchair that sends the message that this is going to be able to go anywhere and still be your everyday chair, or do you have customers who might even have more than one depending on the need that they're going to be using it for?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, so with wheelchairs you kind of need a different chair for every situation. It's, you know, it's like a, it's like a tool. Right. So there's like an everyday manual chair that you can use to, you know, go to the store, take it apart, put it in your car. You have a different chair for like wheelchair basketball where like instead of the wheels being up and down, your stance is like way more spread out, solidified, there's more solid stance. And then like an off road wheelchair, you have to have like four wheels on the ground with an even wider stance and more power and it has to be electric. And so our off road wheelchair, they're different categories basically. But we still own the cheapest product in every segment basically because we can build it all ourselves. Right.

Matt Ferrell: One of the concerns I had when I saw one of your recent videos about the, the off road, basically, what was it? The ones that had some motor on the front and the back. Yeah, Yeah, I kind of want to drive one of those around. Do you have any concerns about people who don't need wheelchairs buying the wheelchairs and like forcing people who need the wheelchair to have to wait longer because they're kind of cutting in line when they don't need to be?

Zach Nelson: No, it's totally fine with us. And we, right now we're not constrained on how many we can produce. So anyone who wants one can get one. Yes. So it's totally fine. Regular, we call them able bodied people can take them and ride them wherever they want, except for there's, there's more rules and regulations on where they can go. You have to follow like the normal. Like if an E bike is not allowed, our machine would not be allowed either, unless you have a recognized physical mobility impairment. And if you do have a mobility impairment, it's actually federally protected by the ADA and which is like, amazing. Like the United States. The ADA is one of the best things that the United States has ever done. And that's, that's saying something. Um, but it's, we are classified as an other power driven mobility device and we can basically go anywhere where the general public is allowed to go as long as you have a mobility impairment. So I mean, if your leg was broken, then you can take it to a national park or something like that.

Sean Ferrell: Right? So as this idea, which one of you was the first to say maybe we should make wheelchairs? You were.

Zach Nelson: It's been me, like 95% me. Cambry's a little bit more, she's more conservative and she's interesting that like, even though she's in a wheelchair, she doesn't think about her wheelchair very much. So like when we went to go, like, she had had her wheelchair for a long time when I met her and we dated for a year, got engaged and we were getting married and I was like, so lady, like, your chair is like really old and if it breaks before our wedding, like, you're not going to have a chair for our wedding and I'm just going to have to like push you around in like an office chair. And so she had to get her measurements to get the wheelchair for our wedding. And it was like six months away. And I was like, these things take forever. Like, we got to get going. We were able to get her a chair in, in the right time, but it was like a little nerve wracking to make sure it would, it would get here.

Sean Ferrell: So is her role in the business, Is she coming at this from A “I'll be involved when you want me to be”, or has she jumped in and is she helping to steer the ship more than you thought she might?

Zach Nelson: She was more nervous about the project. She. She likes being one of our testers, but she does. She's not really involved in like the day to day business operations. And she was nervous about like all the regulations and hoops and stuff that we would have to jump through and like pricing. And if it was up to her, she would price everything at free, which is like, great, but it's not very sustainable.

Sean Ferrell: Proving she's a good person.

Matt Ferrell: But yes, one question I have for you about the facility, the manufacturing facility. Building that out, that's a huge one. That's a huge task. But how much of it was an excuse just to buy really cool toys?

Zach Nelson: That's a good point. So I really like making videos is fun for me. So anytime I buy a new machine, I get to make another video about it. But also, it was a big leap jumping into the space. So our, our rent, like our monthly rent at this space is $30,000 a month.

Matt Ferrell: Whoa.

Zach Nelson: And yeah, it's wild. And there's. It's a whole different ball game when you're working with commercial leases. When I first started looking into the space, I assumed that landlords in commercial spaces were human beings. But it turns out they're not. Um, so they are. You have to go into the commercial space realizing that they are. They don't have any feelings or emotions. And you gotta advocate for yourself sometimes legally, to make sure that you get what you are promised and make sure you read your contracts in those situations as well.

Sean Ferrell: And their response is like, oh, you're making wheelchairs. That's cute. It's still this much money. Okay.

Zach Nelson: You have no idea. So I. When I told them that I was making wheelchairs, he tried to the landlord, I say he. As if he was human, but he's not. He came back to me and he's like, all right, but you. You are not allowed to have people in wheelchairs try your wheelchairs on the premises. And I was like, buddy, what. Can you give me that in writing? Can you write that down? Yeah, that I'm not allowed to have wheelchair users sit in wheelchairs in my property. Because, like, that's the biggest lawsuit of all time. Kind of shows that, like, I don't know. I'm not a huge fan of our landlords.

Sean Ferrell: That's wild. What a.

Matt Ferrell: You hide it well.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Zach Nelson: We've had, we've had words legally and physically.

Sean Ferrell: Oh, one of the things that Matt pointed out in our notes as we were putting this together was you tear stuff down. But repairability seems to be an aspect that is a focus of the wheelchair company. And is this the kind of product that you're hoping people are going to be able to continue to swap out parts and make it last as long, or are you at the same time developing new models of chair not to try and gouge customers, but just to improve the product? That may lead to a point where that kind of repairability will have to stop at a certain point simply because the product changes dramatically enough that there's a, there's a hard line there.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, so with our chairs, we try to use like the same size bolt for everything. You know, that, you know, there's bolts on the casters, bolts on the flip up handles and stuff. So like if you lose a bolt, you just can get one, you know, at the hardware store that's the same size. And we sell everything to the customer directly. So there's no like hoops you have to jump through. Like with distributors or, you know, reaching out to like medical suppliers or asking your insurance to pay for it. Like someone asked for another set of axle risers, it's 50 bucks. You know, if they were to go through insurance, it would be, you know, quite a bit more than that, even though it's just a piece of welded aluminum. And one thing that's interesting. So like I do for my channel, I do a lot of like smartphone durability tests and stuff. And one question that people have quite often is like, oh, why do you break these phones? You're creating so much e waste. And I, I agree with that first knee jerk reaction. But at the same time it's, it's being educationally destructive is what lets people know that these devices are repairable. Because, like, I'll destructively take it apart while teaching how it can be fixed at the same time. And so like one phone might die, but then a million people watch that video and like how many phones are going to live because they realize that they actually can be fixed usually sometimes. So I don't know, it's fun.

Sean Ferrell: Or you're stopping a million people from trying to do something that can't be done. And that's another educational aspect of this that I think is important.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, yeah, there was a huge drop off. So back when phones could be taken apart with a screwdriver, like there was, I was part of, to fund my channel, I would sell like toolkits and Replacement parts and stuff like that. But then immediately, like with the L, with the Samsung Galaxy S6, I think it was, they glued it shut and there was just like an immediate. No one wants to take a heat gun to their phone. And repairability just plummeted as soon as they started gluing things together. Wow. So that was interesting.

Sean Ferrell: Nobody wants to take a heat gun to their phone. Why?

Matt Ferrell: What's the most surprising thing or the most difficult thing that you've discovered as you were starting to scale up the manufacturing?

Zach Nelson: I would say the most difficult thing is probably working with people. I think I'm the type of person who just likes to do everything myself. You know, it's like, it's hard for me to delegate. Like, Even on the YouTube side of things, it's just me, an editor who's one of my friends from high school, and my Manager. So there's three of us on the YouTube side of things, but there's 18 of us on the, on the wheelchair side of things. And so collaborating and, you know, making sure everyone knows their roles and positions at the company has been a process and communication between, you know, everybody to make sure that you're. You're a. The machine that's hardest to get working is the people creating and running all the machines. So that was. That was probably the most difficult thing. And it's an ongoing, you know, everyone has different ideas and opinions and thoughts of how to do things. And also, like, it's a super huge passion project for me, and so it doesn't feel like work. But I also want to respect everybody else where it is just their job, you know, like, they're coming in to do a job and they might not be as passionate about the work as, you know, me or my wife, but they still, they're still getting their work done. I don't know. I want it to be a fun place to work, too. So there's like a balance of everything.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, you're. You're walking that line of seeing your employees exercise the same passion as you would be incredibly rewarding, but not likely. It's. There's a reality which is it's a job. So, yeah, one of the things that, about the manufacturing that I was wondering about is what is the scalability here? Like, are you working at max capacity and meeting the demand right now? But do you see demand scaling up and are you having to scale up at the same time, or do you already have in place enough for right now to be able to meet increased demand?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, so a little bit of of everything. So with our, with our off road wheelchairs, those are way easier to mass produce because, you know, there's only like three variations. We have a two wheel, four wheel and then the giga rig, which is like a super duper torque, high torque four wheel drive with geared hub motors and everything. But the manual wheelchairs, we did the math. And with all the different variations, there's 16 quintillion different possible potential variations of the chair. And so like you literally

One of each?

Yeah, we're trying, we, you literally cannot like, you know, build the same chair twice. Like there's going to be so many different colors and options and accessories. And we can't pre make chairs because every chair is very specific to the human who's ordering it. But we have created our process in a way where it's all digital and most of the, like the blueprints and the planning and the drawings are all computerized. And so we just pull up the drawing on the laser and the laser cuts the pieces specific to that wheelchair. Take it over to the CNC. The wheelchair. CNC looks at that same set of drawings and bends everything for us. And that whole process takes like, you know, 10 minutes on each machine. So we have a fully cut and bent wheelchair within like 20 or 30 minutes. And that's huge. Like that's, that's, that's the whole game right there. Welding is a problem, is a big bottleneck that we're still trying to figure out. Um, but right now the option for scaling is just hiring more welders. We have three right now. We have built our factory and bought the machines in a way that we can build probably between a thousand and five thousand wheelchairs a year.

But we estimate that our potential future in manual wheelchairs could be anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 chairs a year in which we would need more machines, quite a few more people, and also a way bigger space and hopefully nicer landlords.

Matt Ferrell: Manufacturing is very difficult, but with these kind of automated machines and the laser cutters and all those kinds of things that we have available today, it feels like the, the barrier to getting a manufacturing facility rolled out and scaled up is easier than it ever has been. But it's still incredibly difficult. Would you. Do you agree with that kind of point of view?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, for sure. Luckily I have friends in the manufacturing space and so I based a lot of our machines and our capabilities and our processes off of OSH Cut. They're literally right next door to us. And we, we bought the building right next to them. Not bought. Leased the building right next to them because they have backups of all the machines that we were buying. So like, let's say our laser goes down. I can just immediately turn around and use OSH Cut’s website to get the laser cut pieces that I need. Part of like the manufacturing and having everything here stateside is, is the speed of it. So like we can literally build a wheelchair within three days, probably one day if we really wanted to. But we have a three day option on the website and OSH Cut as the same thing. Like if someone orders metal parts from them, whether they're tube or sheet metal, laser cut parts, like the lasers are just so fast, you know, and it's all done with computers and CNC and it's pretty impressive. But yeah, the, the whole tariff situation has kind of screwed us over. As well as raw aluminum. Like there's just really no place, you know, in the United States that you can get, you know, raw aluminum. At least not at the scale that we are yet. Maybe there's, you know, if we were doing millions of pounds of metal, we could get better rates and stuff. But yeah, the tariffs have been super annoying. Like we bought a bunch of motors for our off road wheelchair and like the tariffs almost doubled our cost, which like, obviously we have to pass that on to the customers, which is annoying.

Sean Ferrell: How much of this buildup of this company was new research for you? I don't know. You mentioned you went to college to make sure your mom was happy. Did you come out with a business degree? Did you know how to put together a company? What was the legwork like just from starting a company from scratch?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone, even if you go to college, I don't think you come out with like all of the expertise to start a business. And I did graduate with a business degree. Just a bachelor's though. Nothing, nothing crazy. And I, I don't know, a lot of it was just talking with the right people who have done something similar in the past and then also just crossing my fingers and hoping I did everything correctly.

Sean Ferrell: You've either got the right fingers or, you know, the right people.

Matt Ferrell: I wanted to kind of transition a little bit to your experience with solar because you put out so many different videos about putting solar on your own house, DIY style. And then you'd done a bunch of different videos obviously with like ecoflow as part of the package. But on other people's homes. How many homes have you had your hands in on like installing solar at this point?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, it's actually really difficult because, like, for every new solar project, I have to find a new friend or family member who would let me, like, get on their roof. And so we're probably at like 5 or 6. And like, it's so hard the last time because not only, like, do you have to find a roof that's, like, good for the video, but then, like, organizing everything. So, yeah, five or six of my friends now have just solar for free, which is nice, right?

Matt Ferrell: Doing those, all those installs. Like, what are the gotchas that you've come across in putting solar in people's homes?

Zach Nelson: The biggest thing is, like, connecting to the electrical panel in their home. Like, sometimes they're in, like, the hardest place to reach in the basement. And like, I wish there was just a more accessible place. And like, if their basement's finished, like, it's a nightmare trying to get wires run down. Like, if the basement's finished, it's almost not worth it. Yeah, you have to be very dedicated and have to want to do a lot of finish work to get the wires down there into that box. The one really, really, really cool thing that we're doing right now. So a company, Solar Wholesale, reached out to us and they're like, hey, we want to put solar on your factory. And. Yeah, 100 kilowatts worth of solar on the factory. Damn. Yeah, I know. And so we. And I'll give you some pictures of it, but luckily the landlord, those guys, it didn't.

Sean Ferrell: It didn't have wheelchairs on the panels, so he was okay with it.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, yeah. So very long story. We. We got approval for it, and so we've set it up, but we haven't connected it yet. It's been. We did it over the winter, and instead of just putting them in like a rectangular shape, we've actually put them in the shape of two brontosauruses on the roof. And so it looks. It looks pretty freaking cool. We’re right next to an airport as well. It's like the planes flying over and it might be on Google Earth now. I don't know if it's how often they update their maps, but you can see two brontosauruses and solar panels on.

Sean Ferrell: That's great.

Matt Ferrell: Why brontosaurus?

Zach Nelson: Just fossil fuels, you know, just like the next generation of. We wanted to still use fossil fuels on our roof as brontosaurus.

Matt Ferrell: What about in. Because you're in Utah.

Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: How are the regulations there for getting it activated? Do you have to wait long period of time? Is it difficult to get it spun up?

Zach Nelson: Yeah, so it's been more difficult than I think either of us anticipated. So we have all the solar panels on the roof and like, as we were going to the city saying like, you know, hey, we got the permit, we're ready, we're ready to connect. And they said, hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute. Now we have to change the thickness of wires that are going to the control panel because it's a commercial grade solar installation. And I, I can't remember the exact gauge of the wires, but it was like 2R or something like that. So like I had to drop like an extra 30 grand just on wires to run from our roof to the breaker panel. And so that's been a hold up. They should, they should have been here like a week ago, but we're still waiting on the wires to do the final connection.

Sean Ferrell: How much of your power needs will that actually meet?

Zach Nelson: It should be a hundred percent. Like I haven't sat down to like actually figure it out. But like right now our, our electrical bill at the factory is around 1400 dollars a month just in electricity and it should offset all of that. But it's also weird in a way that like we were set up as like in a utility with the city, so like our factory will use the solar power first, but it also won't like, we'll still have a bill no matter what and then we'll get like a credit back. It's just like a, not a super organized way. It's as if we installed the solar panels somewhere else even though they're directly connected to our building.

Matt Ferrell: Being such a public figure doing all the solar stuff. What are the kind of comments and feedback you've seen that surprise you around? People still think that around solar or they don't. Is there anything that surprises you that doesn't click with folks? Like what, what jumps out at you?

Zach Nelson: Something that's a little bit weird to me is like, I'll publish a video and I'll usually get like a few really long comments that always talk about how like unsustainable solar panels are because you have to like mine out like the minerals and stuff like that for the glass and the, the metals and things inside of it. And it's, it's very weird to me because you can look that up and like you can offset the carbon it takes to make a solar panel within like the first like I think 6 months, 12 months or something like that. Like it's something super small. Um, but the, the comments are weird enough to make me think that it's just like, I, I, I would hate to say that it's just like a bot, you know, like just responding the same message on a bunch of different solar videos. But like, for some reason, like, that comment gets posted quite often on a regular basis on my videos, even though it's not even remotely close to being true.

Matt Ferrell: I see something similar. So it doesn't surprise me too much.

Zach Nelson: It's always so long that I'm like, I read the first couple lines and I'm just like, all right, it's one of those again. And I just don't know if it's that type of person or if it is like a legitimately just a bot who's programmed to go do that kind of stuff.

Sean Ferrell: It's getting very hard to tell. Matt and I have had in. It's been a running theme of recent videos on this channel, a joke where I am going through the comments to pull out comments for us to talk about on the show. And very often the most popular comment seems at first glance as if it's appropriate. It's like, wow, this really made me think it'll have some comment that will be on point. And then something makes me click on the user icon and it's a porn bot. And so there's AI that is harvesting from the comments, generating a response that actually is on point. But then the entire point of it is to get people to go to this porn bot. And it's happened four times now. I stopped actually mentioning it to Matt. It's happened so many times. But yeah, so I wouldn't, I would not doubt that you're seeing comments which are, I would guess probably anti solar farm bots, which is, as you pointed out.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: How do you fight that kind of information misinformation? Do you even respond or do you just like, I'm just putting panels on people's houses.

Matt Ferrell: Leave me alone.

Zach Nelson: Yeah, it's like solar is so cheap and like, you actually make your money back in like six to eight years. And it's like, if you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. Just let the rest of us make money, you know, it's, yeah, it's fine. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of your guys's channel, though. Like the, you're crushing it right now. And I've thought to myself, like, your channel is what my channel pretends to be with, like your intellectual level and the way you communicate everything, like freaking amazing.

Matt Ferrell: Appreciate it. I really appreciate that. Speaking about getting geeky on something, I also want to ask you about the bunker. I talked to you about this at CES when you and I bumped into each other. What's going on with the bunker? And I'm curious, are there going to be more follow ups to what's going on with bunker?

Zach Nelson: So the bunker, it was another one of those, like, decisions on like, what project can I do to make more money for the wheelchair factory? Um, and just like off the top of my head. So I did the math on the bunker, like a couple videos into that series and it was, it cost me around like a hundred thousand dollars to make that bunker, not including like the man hours and stuff, but it was, we earned back probably like 3 or $400,000 in like sponsorships and Adsense and stuff like that. So it was like of, you know, 4 to 1 ratio of, of revenue generation. And so.

Sean Ferrell: So I can't afford not to really. Is that what you're telling me?

Zach Nelson: Exactly. Everyone needs a bunker as long as you make videos about it. But yeah, then we kind of like reached the end. Like it was in the ground, it wasn't like furnished or anything like that. But then the wheelchair factory, like, it just requires so much of my attention that I can't justify because it's like, I also did the math on like how long it takes to make a video and it's like a hundred, it's like a hundred hours to make one bunker video. Where like, if I were to make a cell phone tear down or durability test, then we're looking at like 10 hours. And so I can make, you know, 10 smartphone videos to one bunker video. And it just came financially more intelligent of me to do the easier videos instead of a bunker video, which is what I have to do right now because, like payroll at the wheelchair factory is like $1.3 million. And so like, hey, the money is being used for something good, right? But like, I still have to make a crap ton of money to make sure that the factory is sustainable, right?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And five years from now, the factory's humming along, it's doing what it's supposed to be doing and it's not requiring a lot of the stuff is managed by other people. You've got, you've got people who are senior managers and they know what to do and you're able to step back a little bit more without. You're not signing a contract here. You're not making a promise that you have to fulfill. But is there another thing on the horizon? You're like, I'd love to take a shot at that.

Zach Nelson: Yeah. So something that's been on my mind for a little bit and I imagine like YouTube is really fun. Right. Don't get me wrong, like I, I think I'll still make, you know, maybe like one video a month or something like that on just like projects that I enjoy or like factory tours. Like going into the channel lock factory a couple ago was so cool. Like seeing how a hundred year old factory makes freaking pliers was, was way fun. And I still want to do stuff like that. But something I've been thinking about mostly because my wife orders so many things from Amazon, is like cardboard recycling. Like I would love to have my own like cardboard because you get people's trash and then you like literally make a new product that you can sell, you know, trash to treasure type of thing. And so owning a cardboard recycling facility would be amazing.

Sean Ferrell: I think is impressive about all of that is your approach to all of this isn't about I'm trying to change the world. It's just I'm trying to do this one thing and if you add enough of those one things together, you start to have an impact on the world. So I have a lot of respect for your approach to these as individual issues. But you have a North Star in yourself that makes them all feel connected.

Matt Ferrell: I find what you've been doing on your channel very inspiring. From the library, the book donations you've been doing, the wheelchair factory, everything that you've been sharing has been very inspirational to me. So I really appreciate it.

Zach Nelson: Well, thanks.

Matt Ferrell: Just want to say thanks.

Sean Ferrell: Well Zach, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We've really appreciated it. And if we have any follow up questions from our viewers or listeners on this, I hope we can send you a couple of quick follow up notes and maybe get some additional responses to share with everybody. But in the meantime, just thank you so much for your time.

Zach Nelson: No problem. Thanks for having me. It's been great talking to you again.

Sean Ferrell: Once again, our thanks to Zach for stopping by to chat with us. We hope you enjoyed his answers to our questions, but if you feel like we missed something, jump in the comments and let us know. We'll see if we can't ring his doorbell, slide a piece of paper under the front door and then run away giggling. No, that's not what we're going to do. We'll see if we can follow up with him and get some answers to your question. But now we're going to visit some of your comments on one of Matt's most recent this is his episode Why China's supercritical CO2 turbine matters. And Matt, refresh our memory. Notice how I use the royal Our when I really mean my. Here we have a turbine.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Here we have a turbine. It's not flowing with gas, it's flowing with something else. But it's not fluid either. Am I remembering it's this quasi. What is it?

Matt Ferrell: It's technically, it's still a fluid.

Sean Ferrell: It's.

Matt Ferrell: It's weird. It's pretty mumble.

Sean Ferrell: It's like it's.

Matt Ferrell: And a liquid at the same time.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's good.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. You can put pretty much any gas into a state where it's like in that in between state. And this is about doing that with CO2 and using that for turbines. So instead of pushing steam through, you're pushing this super cool CO2 through, which is thicker. It's got more oomph to it. So you get more power out of the system than you would with something like steam.

Sean Ferrell: One of the comments, multiple comments on this episode. They longed for friendlier relationships, basically saying, imagine if it's literally the John Lennon song. Imagine if all the scientists from all the places could all come together and hold hands and work together. Because people in the comments were pointing out, yeah, the Chinese are working on that, but other countries are working on this over here. Wouldn't it be great if they could all come together? Is there something in your research on this that you spotted that you thought, oh, that really would plug in beautifully in this spot here in the US that you were just like, oh, it's really too bad that it can't happen?

Matt Ferrell: Not really. The thing that was jumping out at us as we were pulling this together was it's more kind of cultural differences as to how one group is working on it versus another group. How fast one group is working and just pushing as fast as they can and the other ones being a little more cautious and laid back. But it wasn't necessarily that ideas aren't getting shared because they are. It's like these ideas are still getting shared out there in the scientific community. But it's more about like how China is this kind of like pushing really hard, moving really fast, and they'd probably be moving faster if they had more open communications and access to certain things. Because as was brought up in the video, China didn't have access to certain manufacturing technologies because there's been, you know, legislation from different countries don't allow that technology to pass back and forth. So they had to figure it out on their own, which slowed them down. But at the same time it's just the approach that they're taking versus what we're taking in other countries is the biggest difference from what, what I saw. Not necessarily they're thinking of something that they're not they're keeping behind closed doors and not sharing how it works. It's more of a just a philosophical approach to how they're trying what they're trying.

Sean Ferrell: In the comments there was this one that stood out, which is from Worm Dirt, who wrote a video on The STEM supercritical CO2 in Austin, Texas with their 102 to 10 megawatt demonstration plant would be a huge look into what's happening in the U.S. are you familiar with the project that Worm Dirt is bringing up here and do you have any plans to revisit this issue?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, yeah, I am familiar with that project. It would be cool to check it out. So if anybody, if anybody's involved with that project, be open to talking to you. We probably will do a follow up on this down the road. I tend not to do follow ups like right away because I like to let enough time pass where things can be tried out, experiments, pilot plans can evolve to let kind of a critical mass of information kind of build up before we do another follow up video. So this is something that I could totally see myself revisiting and focusing on the US side of the equation on that one.

Sean Ferrell: And of course all of this is built around like we need more electricity, we are using more and more and we aren't going to stop soon. Which led to a comment that I absolutely loved. B. Mobert jumped into the comments to say it's funny how one of the arguments against electric cars has been the instability for either the electrical supply or grid to scale. But when AI comes along, the electric supply must scale. Bloody typical. Yes, yes, B. Mobert. Yes, I completely agreed with that. It just depends on whether you want or have a connection to the thing that you will argue against your own argument depending on which topic it's dealing with. That's really sadly human nature.

Matt Ferrell: It also kind of comes down to unfortunately how much money can be made. Yeah, data centers, AI, there's a crap ton of money that's being made right now. Or they're trying to.

Sean Ferrell: Make an electric vehicle and you're not making money.

Matt Ferrell: Yep.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. No, before we get too depressed, I wanted to visit the best worst comment. It's this one from Illumina Blade who wrote finally, we can stop spinning turbines with a wet gas and spin turbines with a dry gas. Ew. Thank you, Illumina, for that. And thank you everybody for jumping to the comments. As always, we appreciate your comments. They do help form the content of this program. But also, we hope you're enjoying these long deep dive conversations with our guests. We're exploring the world of content creators and people who just are doing really amazing things, and we're hoping to elevate some of that so that they have a little bit more of a platform to let everybody out there know what's going on. And we hope you're enjoying that. Jump into the comments, let us know what you think about it. And if you think that there's a person or a topic that you think would be interesting in this kind of a bigger deep dive conversation, let us know. We'd love to see and hear what you think would be worth our time and yours. So thank you so much, everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.