305: Having a Think with Dave Borlace

Matt and Sean talk to Dave Borlace from the YouTube channel, Just Have a Think, to discuss the current state of the renewable energy transition in the UK and the US.

Dave’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JustHaveaThink

Chapters:

• 00:00: Intro
• 01:47: Dave Borlace Interview
• 59:15: Previous Still TBD Episode Feedback
• 01:02:44: Undecided Episode Feedback

Transcript

Dave Borlace: It's so important that we get that across to people that critical thinking means, you know, you don't use the emotional side of your brain, you use the intellectual side of your brain. You don't just do a knee jerk reaction to what you see in front of your face, which is kind of what social media encourages us to do. You use the intellectual side of your brain, the rational side of your brain. And that's why science is important, because that's a rational, objective assessment of the circumstances. And that's why sometimes science can say we're not sure. And that's fine, that's completely normal science. But of course, again, the deniers would say, oh, I just don't know what they're talking about. They make it up as they go along. And that's completely, that's completely untrue.

Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're going to be talking with Dave Borlace. We're also going to take a look at some of your comments from our most recent and take a peek at what you've been saying about the most recent Undecided. Welcome everybody to still to be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell which takes a look at emerging tech and we also are doing some deep dive conversations. And today we're excited to talk with Dave Borlace. He is the person behind Just have a Think. It's a YouTube channel that goes back to 2018. Dave is located in the UK. He covers a lot of the same terrain as Matt, just from the other side of the pond. So we had a nice conversation with him doing a little comparing between the UK situation, the US situation and what the two of them are seeing on the horizon as far as sustainable energy and tech. So on now to our conversation with Dave Borlace, the voice behind Just have a Think. So with us now is Dave Borlace and he is of course the voice behind Just have A Think. And he's also a face that looks eerily familiar. We were just talking before recording with no, none of our listeners, none of our viewers. You don't have triple vision, you're just seeing three very similarly hued and glassed and bald men. So we hope it's not too distracting as you try to pay attention to who's saying what. But Dave, thank you for joining us so much. Looking forward to this conversation. So one of the things that stood out as I was looking at your channel and Matt pointed out that this, that we were going to be having this conversation, a very similar Arc between your approach and how you found yourself on this path and what happened with Matt.

So do you want to talk a little bit about how this all started when you found yourself and in a position saying, I think I've got a channel that I want to reach out to the public and help educate on these things and how you made that all happen?

Dave Borlace: Sure. I think we started very similar times actually eight or so years ago. So I mean potted history of me. I didn't really do anything in my career that was directly related to climate, although I do have a, an honours degree in technology. But that's from a long, long time ago. So I had a career in people management in retail and then project management in retail, which is incidentally where I learned a lot of the stuff that I use today in the video making. But fundamentally I was very aware of the climate and I thought I did my bit, you know, I did a bit of recycling and you know, didn't use too much excessive energy and all that sort of thing. But before Greta Thunberg and before extinction rebellion and before really I suppose global, global heightened awareness of what I call the climate emergency, I read a book in 2017 by a guy called Peter Wadhams who is professor emeritus at University of Cambridge and he had spent 40 odd years in various expeditions to the Arctic either in boats or on land or even in US Navy submarines where they do upward looking sonar and to measure the thickness of the ice because obviously they've got to break through at some point, they know it to the millimeter and they keep the records. So he was able to, he had 40 years worth of data which essentially showed the Arctic sea ice getting smaller and smaller and, and thinner and thinner. So the volume of the ice was decreasing over those 40 years really very dramatically. So that's one thing to think, well okay, that's not very good, the poor old polar bears and all that sort of thing. But actually he went into the physics in the book and he explained the, the real consequences of dwindling Arctic sea ice, explained what the Arctic does for regulating our environment, our climate and what happens when, when we let that go. And it was a terrifying book.

And I thought why isn't this being shouted from the rooftops on every news program in the world because this is a catastrophic emergency. So I thought, well at least I can, I've clearly got a lot to learn because I didn't know any of this, not really in any detail. So what do we do? You know, it was like, oh God, what do we do. So I thought, well, I've got these editing skills I've used. I did a lot of video work. I've got Premiere Pro and that sort of thing. Maybe I could just, while I'm still working full time, maybe I could just do some videos. And I thought for my family and friends, maybe just to raise a bit of awareness. And so that's how I started. I was working full time. I got home, I did my research and writing on the train into work. I lived 30 miles south of London, so I'd commute in on the train, and then on Friday night, I would just dedicate the whole weekend to filming and editing those videos. Just about get them out on a Sunday evening. I did that for two years. And then Covid hit, and then I got furloughed, which is. I don't know if you had furlough in America, but essentially you don't work. The government funds 80% of your salary. So I was free to do the video work full time. Everyone else was watching YouTube, which was quite handy. I'm not ballistic in Covid, of course, because I recognize that hundreds of thousands of people are no longer with us as a result of that. So I'm not saying it was a good thing, but it kind of worked out for me, and support levels grew on Patreon, and by the September of 2020, I was able to quit my job and go full time on the channel. So that's where I'm at and never look back, really.

Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: So similar to Matt, you. You landed on this as a layman, where you were the very compelling and very dramatic impression of that book, where you're like, this is terrifying. It's a horror novel without being a novel. It scared you into action, and you came at it from a layman's perspective. And Matt and I were talking about this a bit, and we've talked about this a bit from not only his channel, but also this podcast itself, where Matt's the layman who goes and does the research, and I'm the layman who's depending on the layman who goes and does the research. So that we have conversations where it's just like, Matt's got more information and he can. And he can explain things. So I'm coming to it from a. But what the hell is going on? Perspective. Do you see yourself in a role where you're happy to not be the scientist behind this work so that you can digest it and. And understand from a layman's perspective, from your audience's perspective? What are the leverage points here to really convey this information and what are the questions that they have that maybe scientists forget?

Dave Borlace: I would say not only am I happy to be that layman, I think it's actually essential to the channel that I am that layman. One of the frustrations, I'm sure Matt's found this as well, that I've had over the years is reading scientific papers and finding them to be completely impenetrable. That's one of the frustrations. Now I understand, I know a lot of scientists, I've got to know more and more of them as the years have gone on. And I completely understand that in order to write a peer reviewed paper, you had to write in the vernacular of your industry because it's going to be read by your peers. And therefore there's an imperative to speak in a language that is a bit impenetrable to the layperson. But it's very frustrating when the subject is so crucial, existentially crucial to all of us, whether we're scientists or lay people. So, yes, I, my, my absolute goal with this channel was to, was to read and digest those papers. With some, I had some, as I say, with my degree, I had some experience of reading scientific literature and making sense of it. And so that was what I determined to do, to take this language, try and understand it. Sometimes I had to actually contact the scientist involved in writing the paper and say, look, I just don't, I just don't know what you're saying. And they're always very, very happy, by the way, to jump on a call and explain stuff. But to digest that and to put it into language that I would use if I was speaking with my friends at the pub or the bar. And I speak to the camera, I hope I do anyway, I try to speak to the camera as if I'm talking to a friend. Just them and me talking in a conversation. So there's a lot of, here's what they say and in other words that means and then putting it into language that I can understand. And that's crucial.

I think one of the biggest problems that science has got is communicating the science. And that's why, and I'm sure we'll get onto this later, that's why people who don't want that science to be disseminated find it so easy to give disinformation because they can do that in the language of the masses without wishing to sound dismissive. Whereas the science people have to speak in scientific language because they have to be precise and A good example is where they have levels of doubt, probabilistic science. And something can be certain or uncertain or not certain. Well, that's just a scientific nomenclature or language that says we aren't 85% certain or 95% certain. That doesn't mean we don't know what we're doing. Right. It just means that's the data show is that that's the level of statistical certainty for that particular aspect. Whereas the naysayers can say, oh, you see, you know, they're not. They're not really sure. So they're not really sure.

Do we really have to do anything? You know, so I think people like Matt9, a lot of other YouTubers and climate communicators who put it, Put that into language that all of us can understand, I, I think are playing a crucial role.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I was, I was going to add to that by saying it's a feature, not a bug, that we're kind of like the layperson.

Dave Borlace: Exactly.

Matt Ferrell: And I don't know if you've come across this. It's like I've talked to a lot of people that are writing these papers as well, researchers, people in the industry, to get at what they want to kind of communicate. And one of the things I found is communications is a skill. And not all scientists are good communicators. They don't have that muscle. So they may have the knowledge that. But not a good way to convey it. And so that's where I feel like it falls to me and people like you to digest that in a way that the average Joe on the street can understand what's going on, because we have to kind of filter it for the people that don't have that skillset.

Dave Borlace: Absolutely. Right, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: So in the years that you have been doing this, and Matt, I'll open this up to you as well. Is there something from 2018, you're geared up, you start doing your channel and now you move forward. We're in 2026. Is there anything you look back on and you say, oh, I had assumptions around that that I do not agree with. Now, what's changed as far as your perspective?

Dave Borlace: I think what I've realized is that governments are just not clued up on that's a bit unfair? They're not. They're not as, as switched into this urgency as I thought they would be. I just figured that they were doing stuff in the background and we just weren't being made aware of it. And if we just raised awareness, we could see that these problems were being Fixed. But I think that's what I found most shocking is the lethargy and the complacency in governments all over the world. And I'm not picking out any singular government for this. It's getting better now in certain parts of the world. But generally speaking, even the most proactive governments are still, you know, if you listen to some of the, like risk managers, financial risk managers, for example, the sort of risks that they're pointing out that they need to account for in their risk planning are not the same risks as governments are telling their public about. So that I think for me that was the biggest surprise, the biggest assumption I made was that it's all being looked after and it really isn't.

Matt Ferrell: I'm in a similar boat. It's kind of when I started this, it was, it seems so obvious. Like when you start to look at this stuff, it's like, oh, of course, why wouldn't you go solar? Why wouldn't you do wind? Why would we be, let's stop burning fossil fuels? Like, look at all the benefits and why are we not doing this? And then the more I was doing it, it was like, oh, for me it's a little more cynical than I think what you just said. It's not about governments per se, but it's about the harsh truth of money makes the world go round.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, okay.

Matt Ferrell: And if people can't turn a profit or you can't do something economically, it's like, why are we not recycling plastics? We know how to do it, but it's cheaper to make virgin plastic, so we're going to keep making virgin plastic. So it's one of those things of I shifted half like a number of years ago where I started kind of hammering on how much money it costs to do these new technologies. And all of that angle comes, comes from that where I kind of shifted my thinking of. It's not just because it's the logical thing. It has to be explained in a way of we want to do this because of money, money, money, money. Like it's not just the smart choice, it's also the financial choice to do it.

Dave Borlace: And we've, in the eight years that we've been doing it, there has been, I think you'll agree, an absolutely staggering advance in all of the technologies that we tend to talk about. Absolutely mind boggling really. You know, to watch battery prices, for example, go from, I don't know, $1,000 per kilowatt hour to pushing $50 now and sodium ion might take us down even further in 10ish years. That's, that's an, that's an extraordinary piece of progress. Solar's the same. Wind's not quite so much, but it's still coming down heavily. But solar is starting to show itself as being the, the main thing that we will rely on in terms of renewable energy and those prices. I know it's a lot of, it's due to China, but that progress has been absolutely staggering. So that's really encouraging for me and it sort of mitigates slightly the dread of the other side of the equation. Although, as you know, I try and it's very difficult to juxtapose those two and balance the content so that I'm, you know, I want to sort of celebrate the new technologies, but I don't want to miss out on making sure people realize that just because this new technology has come along, you know, it's very easy to say, oh, that's good, we've solved it, because we absolutely have not as you know, as well as anybody. So it's a balancing act.

Matt Ferrell: I find it funny that you bring that up because one of the things about my channel is I'm always trying to look at like the little ray of optimism. I'm trying to like in every video, like there is something to be hopeful for. And it's not because the videos you make are depressing, but it's like there's so many great people like you, Simon Clark, there's all these great youtubers out there are doing such astonishing work on the climate science specific aspects of this stuff. I feel like you got that covered. I'm gonna focus more on the little like watch a Dave video and then watch a me video and then we can, you can kind of like balance out like the. Okay, this is urgent, but there are some glimmers of hope out there. So I just found a funny thing.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there's no point. It's difficult because the message is very hard, but there's no point brow beating people and saying, you know, we're all screwed and you know, because then people tend to give up. And that's not the point either. I did project management for many years and you know, and I always think of a project, I'm going to do this with my finger. So people just listening, I'm saying it starts at a high level and then in the middle of the project it goes down through a real dip. Morale gets low. In my case, it was shop fitting. So you wreck the old store and you've got a mess on your hands and then you've got to rebuild the new store. So my job was to really keep the trades upbeat and focused on the end of the tunnel, not the bit of the tunnel that we were in at the time. And that's quite hard. And with the climate emergency, the end of the tunnel is a long way away and one could even question whether we're ever going to get there. That's the risk. So keeping that light and fluffy can be challenging. And I think humor plays a big part of that. Sometimes it's slightly gallows humor, but it's part of what makes us human, isn't it?

Sean Ferrell: It's almost a reverse Dunning Kruger effect. You need to know enough to be able to talk intelligently about it, but not so much to become depressed. You don't want to shut yourself and your audience down, but you need to have enough information to be realistic about what's going on. And like, I like your comparison to project management of the idea of sometimes you don't know what the problem is until you're waist deep in it and then you can assess. And that's a hard place to be. It doesn't make it easy and it doesn't make it fun, but it is vital. So that's, I think what I see when I talk, when I talk to people about what people like you or Matt are doing in your videos. I'm like, it's really getting us into the weeds so that we know where the weeds are.

Dave Borlace: And part of that is this, this concept of critical thinking which, which we, we've, we've all talked about before, but that it's so important that, that, that we get that across to people that, that critical thinking means, you know, you don't use the emotional side of your brain, you use the intellectual side of your brain. You don't just do a knee jerk reaction to what you see in front of your face, which is kind of what, what social media encourages the to do. And some people really major on. You use the intellectual side of your brain, the rational side of your brain. And that's why science is important, because that's a rational, objective assessment of the circumstances. And that's why sometimes science can say we're not sure. We think it's within these boundaries. It's from this estimate to this higher estimate, but we can't be sure in there. There's a lot of noise and that's fine, that's completely normal science. But of course again, the deniers would say, oh, I just don't know what they're talking about. They make it up as they go along and that's completely untrue.

Sean Ferrell: Let's move on now to what we'll call the lightning round, despite the fact that it's not going to be fast and it doesn't actually involve lightning. So let's talk a bit about some of the technologies you guys have both just referenced a few minutes ago. Solar as one of the players in the market that you both have identified as a major player on the up as far as, like, how much it's being utilized right now and where it seems to be going. Let's talk about some of the other technologies that you both visit on your channels. As I said before, this is going to be. I'm going to throw out these topics, but both of you can respond. And I think it would be interesting for everybody to hear from the kind of UK versus US contexts as to what you're seeing, because surprise, surprise, it's not going to be equal. It's not going to be the same, really. Boiler alert.

Matt Ferrell: Not going to. A little different.

Sean Ferrell: There's going to be some difference. There's going to be some difference here. So we'll talk really briefly about some of these things. Let's start off with offshore wind. Offshore wind in the US how popular is that right now?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean, said the guy who lives

Sean Ferrell: in New York City, where the federal government is actively trying to shut down an offshore wind process that was fully approved and funded.

Matt Ferrell: So, yes, if you asked me this question a few years ago, Sean, my answer would have been very different. But now we have a government that is literally bribing energy companies to cancel contracts, like paying out a billion dollars to a French energy company to cancel their project off of New Jersey. I look at what the world is doing and I see wind is having quite a moment right now with what it's been able to do over the past year. And here in the US we're like racing the other direction, trying to shut it down before it picks up too much steam or wind, depending on who wants to say it. But yeah, that's. That's kind of where I am at right now. On my assessment to the us we're running in the wrong direction. Where we were going the right direction. We've just completely just turned around, tripped over a rake, falling down in our face. I don't know what we're doing.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, I can't imagine why or who has driven that.

Sean Ferrell: No, yeah, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: It's a mystery. It's a mystery.

Dave Borlace: Conversely, in Europe, of course, and especially in the uk, I mean, the European, funnily enough, when I was doing my degree, which was 90, mid-90s, mid to late 90s, Denmark had already cornered the wind market by then. It was already a $4 billion a year market. And they'd done that, funnily enough, because in the 70s, when we had the oil crisis, the UK had just discovered the North Sea oil and gas. So our government said, well, we're just going to. Just going to get the oil and gas out of the North Sea. Denmark didn't have that facility. So they did the really democratic thing. They said to all their farmers, I mean, roughly speaking, they said to all their farmers, you've got kind of windmills on your farms, try and see if you can make them generate power. And we'll set up a center of excellence in Copenhagen. Bring your best practice to the Copenhagen, and we'll cobble together something because we think we could probably help power our country with wind power. And that's what they did. And so by the mid-90s, they were the world leading power in wind. So I think it sort of. It was born in Europe. I think this ambition to use wind a lot more and offshore wind in particular, is something that we've managed in the uk, have managed to harness, because we are literally the windiest country in Europe, for obvious reasons. We're an island and we've got wind gone all over the place and a lot of it is in the North Sea as well. So I think at some. Before China got into the act a couple of years ago, up until about 18 months ago, I think our wind farms were the biggest wind farms in the world. I think China's got one that's bigger now, because China, you name it, China's going to China. They've gone big. That whole philosophy of offshore wind has been imbued in the British psyche for many years now, and we have a good mechanism for regulating the prices.

What hasn't been so good has been onshore wind. Because the Conservative government effectively banned onshore wind. They made the regulations so difficult to comply with that effectively. It meant there was no point trying to do off onshore wind. This labor government has just completely reversed that. And they're getting more and more aggressive with loosening the regulations in a way that allows renewables to be rolled down across the country. As well as working with the Crown Estates. The Crown Estate, the King essentially owns our bit of coastline. We have to work with the Crown Estates to develop that. And that's all happening at pace as well. So it's interesting, not only is there a much more realistic assessment of the benefits of wind offshore and onshore across the whole of Europe, certainly Western Europe, we also came from a. Probably, to be fair, we came from a more advantageous starting point because we got going really, in Denmark's case in the 70s, and certainly in Europe well into the 90s. We were well into. Into developing wind as a technology. So. But you, you know, you know this. You look at the American coastlines, you know, you've got. The Eastern seaboard is a shallow shelf, so you can do your own offshore wind easily fixed offshore wind. But even on the west coast, where it drops off very precipitously, floating wind is, Is becoming a thing. That's that. In time, I'm sure, when perhaps when future administrations come in with a slightly different viewpoint, I think you'll see. I think you'll see massive volumes of offshore floating wind, you know, off the shore of California in the Pacific.

So the potential across certainly the United States of America is unbelievable.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I mean, there's a lot of wind, the center of the US So it's like onshore, onshore for sure, a lot already.

Dave Borlace: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: But it's the offshore that's like, really depressing. It's just those are getting slowed down or stopped.

Dave Borlace: I mean, the irony in your country really is states like Texas, who, you know, have this reputation, well, are the oil capital of the world, but. And yet have got more, you know, they're building more wind and solar than almost every other state, in fact. Every other state, I think, aren't they?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, they've just beaten out California now for like, I think it's solar. And it's what I said before, money makes the world go round. It's so cheap now. Texas is just chasing the money and that's why they're just building this stuff like crazy.

Dave Borlace: And I think resilience. The recent video I did was starting to talk about, perhaps we don't need to be talking about the climate issues so much. I mean, we should. But in terms of convincing people why to do these things, resilience is a very big part of that now as well. The climate is changing. Extreme weather events are becoming more common. Texas had its big freeze a few years back and it wasn't resilient and it wasn't the fault of renewables. Not entirely, at least. There were some things. I mean, as I understand it, because Texas is so hot most of the time, they didn't bother winterproofing the Turbines like they do up in the north. So that was a simple thing they could have done, but they didn't bother because it'll never get cold in Texas and that's where they. So it wasn't the technology, it was the operators that failed. ERCOT didn't do a good job of installing the turbines.

Matt Ferrell: That didn't stop the misinformation though.

Dave Borlace: Sure, absolutely. Renewables, same with the Spain on the, on the Iberian Peninsula more recently, when it had a complete blackout immediately was blamed on renewables. And that's not. And now the evidence is out, it's not what happened at all. It was a fault in a substation somewhere that caused a voltage overload and they weren't interconnected properly with France and then that didn't kick in properly. And, and sure, the renewables got kicked out as well at the same time and they haven't got. They've got grid following inverters, not grid forming inverters. So they couldn't kick start the blackout, backup all these sort of technical issues. They weren't legislating for the worst case scenario. And now I think people have realized that almost anything can happen. So they need to be absolutely belt and braces. And the thing is, the technology exists and it's not that expensive anymore. It just needs to be engineered correctly. I think that's the biggest challenge is engineering the system, the infrastructure to be correct. And God knows that challenge is as big in your country as it is anywhere in the world.

Matt Ferrell: I look at some of this as these, these are mistakes that are happening because the transition is happening so quickly. We're kind of learning as we go, so we're seeing what the growing pains are from these blackouts and things that are happening. It's not like you said, it's not inherently a renewables problem, it's just a implementation problem of how it was put together.

Dave Borlace: Correct. We are right in the mix at the moment, this decade or so, we are right in the thick of it and it's exciting and scary at the same time, I would say.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I think it's been scary for quite a while and I'm hoping that we turn a corner where things stop being quite so exciting.

Dave Borlace: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Be nice to be a little bored for a while.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, yes.

Sean Ferrell: A topic that Matt and I have talked about quite a bit and Matt has personal experience with in his home and has made multiple videos about in investigating his own experience are heat pumps. So want to talk a little bit about that as one of the, the techs that are becoming More commonplace.

Matt Ferrell: I've become heat pump obsessed. Like, I just heat pump all the things that's all. It's like that's just heat pump everything. Heat pump, dryer, heat pump, like, you know, water heater, heat pump, H vac system. It just makes so much sense, especially if we're electrifying the grid and we're going to be getting rid of fossil fuels. We got to do this because we got to, we got to meet the kind of meet in the middle. We're increasing energy demand. We gotta find the most efficient way to use that energy. It's heat pumps. It's. It feels like it's breaking the laws of physics. And it's really cool to see how it's catching on here in the United States. It's finally feels like it's catching on. The old saying of like, oh, heat pumps don't work. They don't make you comfortable in your home. They don't get hot enough. I'm starting to see that kind of like dying. It's not dead, but it's dying. And there's more and more people willing to get heat pumps in their home or get the heat pump, water heater instead of a natural gas one. And so I see a lot of optimism. Even though we just talked about like what the US Is doing with wind at a consumer level, not a, like a federal level where there can, they can restrict things. It's just making a lot more common sense with how it's being implemented. I do worry about things like tariffs and things like that, slowing that adoption down. But there's a lot of US Companies that are making some really interesting moves in this space. I just, I did a video one on one called the Callus Systems. They have this smart heat pump water heater that they're making. They're located here in Massachusetts. Awesome technology. Taking a great technology on heat pumps and make it even better with some intelligence built on top of it.

So we're seeing a lot of this stuff, even kind of like springboarding still here in the US Even though we're having headwinds when it comes to this kind of technology.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, well, that's good to hear. And I think there is part of the story that there's a difference between what those of us across this side of the pond here coming out of the White House and what is happening on the ground in many cases. And, and it's good to hear that the normal average American person is also able to read numbers and work out how things really work because they're not stupid and see that it's a very obvious choice. Again partly for resilience, partly because of money. Heat pumps for a long time in northern Europe been very popular in Scandinavia most people have got a heat pump of some description. Of course it's worth saying that Scandinavian homes are also built to withstand Scandinavian winters. A bit like, let's say Canada is a good analog really. So Scandinavian homes are typically triple glazed, almost passive house standard anyway, even before passive house came in. You know, they're very well insulated and they're very tight. So it's much easier to to heat those homes with a heat pump. That's not to say it's impossible in other homes. I've got my home is more than 100 years, about 120 years old. It's an old brick built Victorian building. The front of the house has got double walls with a little bit of insulation. In between the back of the house is a single brick wall construction got double glazed windows and I've insulated as best I can in the loft, et cetera. But it's probably a bit leaky still. But I've got a heat pump. I had a heat pump for five years and it's fine. It costs costs no more than even with the difference between electricity and gas, which is considerable in this country, it costs no more than running a gas boiler. And it's on low and slow 24 7, 365. It just keeps the fabric of the building, the walls at 20 degrees all the time.

And as you say, it's a bit like magic because it's pulling its energy from the air outside. And we can get spotty about nerdy about the Kelvin scale and the fact that energy is in. You get below 0 degrees Celsius, there's still plenty of energy in that air. So I think in the uk, the only caveat to that is in the UK the progress of heat pumps has been disappointing. More and more are being sold, but the government set quite strong targets and they put in this seven and a half thousand pound grant to encourage people to get heat pumps. And that doesn't appear to have sparked public excitement in the way that I think they perhaps hoped to. I think the stat is something like 1.6 million boilers or furnaces as you'd call them, get replaced every year in this country. I think we're in the just into some hundreds of thousands of heat pumps. So we're Nowhere near the 1.6 million. And that means every year, you know, way over a million gas boilers. Are being fitted often in distress because a boiler breaks in winter and people just say, just get me a, get me something to get me through the winter. That's another 10 years of missed opportunity. So there's a big, I think there's a big task for the UK government to sort of re enliven that and get that, get that cracking again.

Because we're not quite meeting our goals on that one.

Matt Ferrell: I heard from one of my patrons who's in the uk. I don't know if, if you've heard of this. She said something about there's some kind of UK scheme where you can kind of go into a neighbor's home that has a heat pump to see what the heat pumps like, what it sounds like, what it feels like. And she said she's had three different neighbors come in to experience her home and she has a heat pump.

Sean Ferrell: Are you sure she's not being robbed?

Dave Borlace: Could be, could be.

Sean Ferrell: Keep going back. She doesn't stop. You just tell you you're there for the heat pump.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great idea. Fantastic idea. And I'm sure it's true. I haven't heard about it specifically. There is a company over here called Heat Geek who are sort of leading specialists. You'd probably see them on YouTube. They're leading specialists in heat pump installations. And I'm pretty sure they do that on their own sort of initiative. But I didn't know it was a sort of government sponsored thing. I've missed that one.

Matt Ferrell: Sean lives in the New York City area and there's a program from the NYCHA that's upgrading entire apartment buildings with in window heat pump units. And so it's incentivized by the city, but it's also, the owners of the buildings would want to do this because it will lower the overall energy use of the building so it can save the landlord money, it saves the electric company energy. So it's really cool to see those going on. And the pilot project, it was such a success, they've been rolling it out to more apartment buildings now.

Dave Borlace: Fantastic.

Matt Ferrell: So they're really kind of like literally again picking up steam. They're like pushing this stuff out as fast as they can.

Dave Borlace: And funnily enough, on, on a larger scale, given that you're talking about New York City, District heating systems can benefit from air source heat pumps as well. To bump, to bump up the temperature and put more efficiency into district heating. I don't know whether it would work in New York. It's based on steam, isn't it your district heating? Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Steam is the big mover there.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know whether that worked, but certainly there are cases I've seen in Europe where because district heating is very popular again in northern Europe and other parts of Germany and places like that. I think as you say, Matt, wherever you put them, you improve things. No question about it.

Sean Ferrell: How about EVs? This is another one. Matt just had a video in which this was a big part of the focus the gas price spike. Is that translating into people going out and buying EVs? Not really.

Matt Ferrell: Answer here in US is no.

Sean Ferrell: No. And the US just recently did with its federal incentive program to encourage EVs. What do the two of you see as the trend right now and where did things seem to be headed? Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about your most recent video as a jumping off point?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. You'd expect with gas prices heading towards $6 a gallon here in the US that people would be strongly considering EV. And you're not seeing that in new car sales for new EVs. In fact, new EV sales I think went down a little bit, but used EVs has gone up and that kind of makes sense because the incentives are gone and a brand new EV here in the US still typically costs a little bit more than an equivalent gas car where a used ev, the market has kind of like bottomed out so you can get a really great EV for next to no money on the used market. So that kind of makes sense. But it's still depressing to know that there are probably people out there that would buy an ev but but just aren't because it doesn't make financial sense because they got rid of the incentives. Again, running backwards, tripping over a rake. Here we go.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, I mean I can say it cause he's not my president, but he's an absolute idiot. And I cannot believe your country's run by such a blinkered buffoon as the one who's in your White House. It's tragic. We look at it from over here on this side of the pond and we think, you poor people, everything's being retrograde and pushed backwards by this stupid old man who's only in it for his own embezzlement and his own gain, doesn't care a jot about the American people. He's got these stupid old fashioned ideas about how the world works. And the sooner he's gone, the better for everybody as far as I'm concerned. Not just in America, but all over the world. I'm sure part of the problem you've got with EVs in your country is that people have been. A lot of people have just been so. So browbeaten by this man for 10 years now that they. It's almost hardwired into them that new stuff is bad. Not everybody. There are some people who can apply critical thinking, as we said before, but most people who. Not because they're thick or stupid or lazy, but because they've got kids to feed and jobs to get to and lives to lead and food to put on the table and they're just worried about if there's enough money at the end of each month. Normal working people haven't got the headspace really, to apply critical thinking to these sorts of things. Most people do just take what's given to them in the media and at the moment, as far as I can see, the media is giving them gibberish in your country and to a certain extent in ours as well, at least. The difference, I would say, is we've got a very clear direction from the UK government, and I think Europe have got. The European Commission has given a very clear direction in Europe as well. Electric vehicles are the future. They are absolutely the way forward. They absolutely must be embraced. We have that.

We have an understanding in our government. We've got the Climate Change Committee, we've got the Climate Change act in this country. There's no. Until very recently, there was absolutely no debate amongst politicians that the climate emergency was real and that the energy transition was essential. We are starting to get dissenting voices now in parties like Reform, who are essentially Satan's love child from Donald Trump's loins, if you like. Nigel Farage is Mini Trump and he's going to cause all sorts of trouble in this country if he's allowed to get into power. But I'm getting a bit too political, so I'll shut up now. The point is, at the moment we've got acceptance in the governments that it's the right way forward and that makes a big difference. So we just sold 2 million EVs last year. Something like 23% of all cars sold last year in the UK were EVs. Sorry, that's not true. The figure went up by 23% year on year, so. And that's new EVs. EV prices have just reached parity with.

The average price of an EV is now 750 pounds cheaper than the average price of an internal combustion engine car.

Matt Ferrell: That's.

Dave Borlace: And the same as Your country used EVs are cheap, man. They are cheap because a lot of fleets, most new EVs in the last five years were bought by fleets fleet operators. So as those become moved out for new cars, a whole bunch of cars are hitting the market and they are, they are real bargains because they're brilliant cars.

Matt Ferrell: The other thing I would say is the difference between here and the UK is what EVs are available. Like there are entire swaths of cars that just are not available here. Like we've got tariffs on Chinese EVs. There's no Chinese EVs here which are dirt cheap. So it's like we don't have real competition here for EVs. We only have a handful of choices where in the UK you guys have way more choices for what EVs you want.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, we've decided. The UK specifically has decided not to tariff Chinese EVs for example. So the likes of BYD and MG, which is owned by Geely and others, JQ and many others are coming into this country. Chery is another one. They're all fantastic cars. Europe has applied tariffs, but they are happy for Chinese companies to come in and build factories in the European Union or just outside the European Union and then import cars from there. That's fine, that's tariff free. So there are workarounds and the European Commission's are happy, but accepts that that's the reality and they're not going to fight that. And I think it comes from a slightly different place. Again, the European Commission's tariff logic is to try to give their legacy automakers just a bit of time to catch up because they've been slow. Whereas I would argue that the, the tariff regime in the States is just to stop it happening altogether. Because the automakers, look how they've responded. They've just immediately gone back to doubling down on internal combustion engines. Even Ford, who Jim Farley was saying we're going to go all in on EVs and even he's rode that back, which I think is a great shame. So two different markets, two different sort of philosophies. We'll see, we'll see.

Sean Ferrell: Transitioning now to smrs. Nuclear power, the boogeymen of Three Mile island and Fukushima continue to be brought out. But are both of you seeing similar transitions toward looking at nuclear as a potential power source for the future? Or do you think that solar is going to have a strong enough grip that it's going to be leaned on heavier and heavier as we move forward, forward in time?

Dave Borlace: So there's nuclear and there's SMRs. So small modular nuclear reactors are not the same as nuclear reactors as I know you know, but nuclear is, to your point about Fukushima, et cetera, is the safest energy technology we've ever created. Statistically, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of incidents per kilowatt hour generated. If you compare that to coal, which kills, you know, millions of people a year, and the oil industry is not much better. Fossil fuels are a catastrophic disaster for fatalities, not just in their creation, but of course in their combustion and the, and the air pollution that they create. Nuclear, you know, all right, we've had two or three very dramatic incidents in the last 50 years. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, which obviously that was catastrophic, but you know, even that obviously people died, but you know, it didn't kill the country. And now modern, modern nuclear reactors are, are so safe that accidents like that just can't happen because there's mechanisms that just drop out the whole thing and it just stops happening. The reaction isn't, isn't there to happen anymore, if you like. So that's one thing. Nuclear. So I would say existing nuclear power plants that are running well, we'd be mad to close them down. Germany closed a lot of theirs down after Fukushima. That was a crazy decision. And they've paid the price because they've gone back to burning lignite in some places, which is the dirtiest of dirty coals. Keep nuclear, existing nuclear plants going. There is a question about nuclear waste, but there are technologies that are now looking at nuclear waste in recycling it back into providing nuclear power. So that's nuclear, that's large scale nuclear. Ton 1 giga watts or more small modular nuclear reactors.

The very best information that I've been able to glean from industry experts is that they are probably not going to be a good solution from an economic point of view. But given the impression that you just make a nuclear reactor, stick it on the back of a semi or an articulated lorry, as we would say, and just drive it to a field and plonk it down and switch it on, that is absolutely not how they work. You still need massive infrastructure on the site. You still need all the civil works. So the economies of scale that you get with big nuclear projects, you just don't get with the small nuclear projects. But you still need all those things doing, as I understand it in reality, when they start getting rolled out, if they do, they're going to come up against a wall of economic difficulty that will make them probably unfeasible and in the meantime, as you say Sean, wind and Solar will, by 2035, which is when we'll start seeing these things, if they do exist, probably coming online. We'll all be relying on solar and wind by then it'll be almost done.

So, you know, we might not need them.

Matt Ferrell: My, my take is somewhat similar. It's like I'm definitely not anti nuclear at all. It's like it's the safest technology that we've created. It's great at baseload power, all these kind of great things. And I see in my comments all the time when I talk about solar or something else, they're like just go nuclear. And it's like that simple. And my response to it always comes back to money makes the world go around. Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of energy. It's great, but it's also way more expensive than hydro. It's way more expensive than wind and solar by orders of magnitude in some cases. And it's getting, the gap is widening. And when it comes to SMRs, it's the same thing I've been saying too Dave, of the promise is that it was going to be cheaper because you could mass produce and not have to do all these bespoke gigantic installations. And so for the actual reactor that's true, but for the installation it's still bespoke, it's still all that craziness you have to do. So the actual cost of SMRs right now is actually more expensive than the gigantic traditional nuclear price. Yes.

Dave Borlace: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: So it's like when you look at it that way, it's like, oh my God, it's like. And to get, for SMRs to potentially get to a scale where the price starts to come down, it's going to be 20 years from now, it's going to be 15 years from now. And at that point it's like why would you do that when you've got solar, wind, batteries, energy storage systems that their prices are dropping like off a cliff. They're, it's kind of like being in a marathon. Solar and wind and battery storage have now lapped nuclear a few times and they're going to keep, they're going to be speeding up and here's nuclear, they're still at the starting gate, like right at the, like, yeah, the gate, yeah.

Dave Borlace: Battery storage you mentioned, and that's a good point actually. It's not just solar and wind and there are obviously there are other renew, other renewables are available but battery storage is going to be Key to it all. Because once we've got, and you know, again, 10 years ago, people saying you can't, you'll never make enough batteries to do battery storage. Well, you know, look around, look at us now. It's happening, it's happening at pace, and it will continue to accelerate into the next decade. And 10 years from now, we'll look back and we'll be like, what will we do? What were we talking about? You know, people would just be taking it for granted that, you know, grids are stabilized during the evenings with batteries. Essentially, that's how it'll work.

Sean Ferrell: You'll both be relieved to know that we're leaving the lightning round. So no more panic in your eyes as I start to talk. Let's move now to a quick question about from each of you, a technology that you think is flying under the radar right now. Maybe something that you're going to talk about in an upcoming video from your channel. Is there something that you have bubbling in the background that you can't wait to share with the public?

Matt Ferrell: It's funny, I just brought up energy storage, how it's taken off. There is a niche of energy storage system that I think is going to take off like wildfire at some point. Many people refer to it like a balcony, solar. There's storage systems for the home that won't require an electrician, any kind of crazy installation. You literally take it out of a box, you plug it into an outlet, and it will provide power to your apartment or to your home. And it requires no permits and it can move with you and it can expand. You could just chuck three of these around your house and suddenly you've got instant energy storage. And the prices of these things are going to be affordable, that most people can afford them. I think we're going to see that really start to take off. And one of the things that's been holding it back is electrical code. Like here in the US you can't do. You can't feed power back into your outlet here by code, but in Utah you can now. Okay, and they're working on updating the electrical code. I can't remember what the number is. It's like UL 3700 or something like that. There's 26 states and DC that are working on passing this right now. And it's just going to be like dominoes. Once the majority of the country goes, the rest of the country will go, which means anywhere in the US at some point down the road, you'll be able to do these systems Wherever you want. Germany can do it right now. So it's kind of, we're going to start to see this kind of like roll out more and more where you can just plug into a regular outlet and feed things in and they can link up with your utility. You can do time of use rates to help shift energy loads. So basically, virtual power plants, all that kind of stuff. Once you reduce the permitting and the upfront costs to a level where consumers can do it, utilities could give you these batteries as an incentive.

So it's like, I think we're about to see something potentially explode in the coming years around this, this kind of niche market right now.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, I think that's right. The democratization of these things is going to be a big deal. I agree with you. On an industrial scale, one of the biggest energy users is in heating and cooling, as we've sort of talked about earlier. But in industrial applications, one of the biggest draws of energy in those industrial applications is the compressor. Compressors are in refrigerators and freezers and obviously air source heat pumps and all sorts of other gizmos in industry. Compressors today are either a piston that pushes air and pressurizes it or a scroll that sort of does the same thing. It pressurizes the air. There is a company, and for full disclosure, the people that run it are friends of mine and I featured them on the channel called Magtor who are developing a magnetic compressor. And they're not the only one. There are other people who are developing better versions of compressors, but this is a particularly clever one that captures the electromagnetic field around a magnet and sort of doubles up the amount of power that it gives. And you have a negative and positive pole on the magnet and it repels or attracts, without going into too much detail, that gives you the push at either end of this device that pressurizes the air. The clever thing is the way they'd captured the electromagnetic waves from a magnet that would normally just dissipate into the air. They've constrained that and put it back into giving energy into the system. They think that's going to give them about a 33% energy saving compared to a normal compressor. And as I say, there are other people working on this problem. So I think that it's a really dull topic for the average person to get their mind around because it's not sexy, it's not shiny and you know, whiz bang, but it really, it runs the world. You know, if we didn't have compressors, we, we wouldn't have anything.

We Wouldn't have cold food, we wouldn't have warm homes. We wouldn't, you know, wouldn't have half the industries that operate. These are just a really essential component that just run quietly in the background. Sometimes not quietly in the background, so that those sorts of developments that are. That are shaving 10, 20, 30% efficiencies off these things or improving efficiencies by those margins are, Are going to make massive differences to just using less energy in the first place. So that's quite exciting for me. Less energy, you know, use less energy in the first place is a great thing to do.

Sean Ferrell: A critic might listen to that and say, why is Dave excited about refrigerator magnets? But as you were talking about it, but as you were talking about it, my mind immediately went to like, that is so cool. Using magnets to compress air sounds so future. We've had refrigerators for 100 years, and the compressor has always been a compressor. And if somebody comes up with a better mousetrap, it's still a mousetrap, but it's a better one. So replace that compressor with the next level. And then eventually they're like, yeah, what's your refrigerator do? Oh, it's full of lasers that compress the air. And then people are like, yeah, everybody's refrigerator does that. Who cares? Big deal.

Dave Borlace: So, like I've said for many years, I'm sure you said similar things, Matt. While the world is bickering and hollering and worrying about whether or not things like climate change are real, there are millions of engineers and scientists all over the world who are quietly getting on with addressing the problem while we all sleep and argue and bicker and disagree. It's just happening. And I think that's incredibly encouraging.

Matt Ferrell: It's why I make the videos I do. I'm inspired. I'm inspired by these people.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, I was going to say that's a perfect transition to the next portion of our conversation, which is about that, about. Do you find yourself in a place where, in not addressing, let's talk about what the truth is, let's just accept that certain things are true. Do you find yourself in a position where sometimes you question, is that the right approach? Should I be trying to convince people more often, or do you think that you've landed in the proper terrain to say, look, let's just talk about the reality with a certain amount of understanding that there is a bedrock of truthiness and science beneath what we're talking about?

Dave Borlace: Oh, well, for me, I've certainly, in the early years I had constant anxiety about where to pitch the videos. You know, how many doom and gloom, as some people call them videos or disaster movie videos do I make and how many uplifting technology videos do I make and where does that line fit? Honestly, there's never been any doubt in my mind about the veracity of climate change. It's just, if you read the physics, it's physics. Arrhenius worked out the physics in 1880 or something called it carbonic acid, carbon dioxide. If you put that, if you burn coal, he said, you're going to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And physics says you put carbon dioxide into an atmosphere, it gets warmer. It's just, it's not, it's not a political debate, is it? It's just physics. So there's never been any doubt in my mind about the veracity of the argument. I suppose the doubt that I've had is, A, as I say, A, how much of the hard message do we give versus the encouraging message? And B, how well the climate community has been communicating and how, what shall I say, how unified they have come across. Because within the client community there have been disagreements and some of them have become quite strong disagreements, almost to the point of one saying the other is just plain wrong. That's dangerous. And I think we need to be careful because it's just manna from heaven for the climate deniers and say, look at these, look at these clowns. They don't know what. They can't get their act together. That's not true. And it's very dangerous to give that impression. So that's been my anxiety over the years.

Matt Ferrell: I would say I'm in the same boat where it's like, climate change is happening. It's a fact, it's just a fact. So I came to a conclusion a number of years ago of just like, I'm just not going to debate it. It's like, I'm not even going to try. That's going to be a losing argument for me to try to argue that point because. Because the people who are so entrenched, they're not going to listen to me because as soon as I open my mouth and start saying, climate change, climate change, climate change, they're just going to tune out. It's kind of like communications101, which is you say a trigger word to somebody at the start of a conversation, they're going to, the wall will go down and they'll start to ignore everything you say after that. So I started to go the path of, okay, well, this new wind turbine that's being done or this new battery technology is of course essential for climate change and the energy transition. But I don't need to talk about it from that point of view. I can talk about it from energy resilience and security and lowering your electricity prices. I can talk about it in ways that would resonate with anybody. Whether you believe in climate change or you're a climate denier. It's like that's kind of been my approach of trying to find the widest path in, to get people coming in the door to at least listen to the solutions and not worry about debating the cause for why we need those solutions, if that makes sense.

Dave Borlace: I think you've got another advantage in your company, which is this. I think you've got a much bigger, if you like, prepper community in the United States. People who don't want to be told what to do by the man, they want to be off grid. And we haven't really got that in the UK because our grid's great. But I don't think so much in Europe either. You've got, that's a really big culture in your country. So that's a good angle as well to say a lot of people are interested in these technologies, not because they don't give a monkeys about climate change, they just don't want to be on grid. And that's, that's, that's quite a different thing. That's quite interesting in your country that we don't really have.

Matt Ferrell: It's a big part of my, my audience. It's funny because I've done kind of like the avatars of like, who the typical audience member is that watches my videos and a sizable group of that is like the DIY prepper. If I talked about climate change, they wouldn't be there, they wouldn't be listening, they wouldn't be watching my videos. So I'm trying to make it as inclusive as I can.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, yeah. The end goal is important. That's the only thing that objective, orientated management. And as long as it gets us to where we want to go, I don't care how we get there, as long as we get to the end point.

Matt Ferrell: Exactly.

Sean Ferrell: That's almost verbatim something Matt has said in previous conversations where he's like, I don't care if the reason that you've transitioned to sustainable energy is for money. Who cares? Like, you're doing the right thing for a reason I don't agree with, but you're doing the right thing, so hats off.

Dave Borlace: So, yeah, a hundred percent.

Sean Ferrell: Well, Dave, this conversation, I think we promised you a slightly briefer conversation than we actually provided you, but it's been fascinating. And thank you so much for dropping by. And just to give everybody, the viewers and listeners, a bit of a jumping off point to your channel, do you want to talk briefly about your channel, what your channel is, and what might be coming up in the future in an upcoming video?

Dave Borlace: So it's just have a think. It is all about the climate emergency and the sustainable technologies that will help us mitigate and adapt and become resilient to the changes that are coming our way, whether we like them or not. And that's, you know, there's some hard messages in there, but it's mostly about things are happening in a good way that we can, we can still change, we still have agency, it's still within our power. So that's essentially what the channel is all about. In terms of what's coming up. There are a bit of both. There's some, again, there's been a lot of hard science this, this year in 2026, we've got an El Nino coming up which is going to be probably a record El Nino. So that's one for us all to brace ourselves for in 2026 and 27. From a climate point of view, probably looking at a record warm year in 2027. But from a technology point of view, there's everything we've talked about in the last hour that we're going to hopefully cover on the channel. Solid state batteries are always going to be an ongoing saga. They're always five years away. They seem to be chipping away and getting closer and closer. So that's one we'll be following carefully on the channel as well. Sodium ion is another one. There's just such a lot of exciting technology coming through that we're going to be looking at.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you for that peek behind the curtain and we hope we can reach back out to you if we get viewer and listener feedback that might include some questions for you. So we'd like to reach out to you if that's possible. But thank you so much for the conversation. It's been terrific. And speaking for Matt, both of us, really, really enjoyed. I could tell he enjoyed it because he smiled through most of it. So that's.

Dave Borlace: Well, thank, thank you for having me. He's got a tail.

Matt Ferrell: I like talking to Dave.

Dave Borlace: Yeah, it's been a very enjoyable conversation for me as well. Much appreciated.

Sean Ferrell: So once again, our thanks to Dave for joining us and viewers listeners. Is there anything in that conversation that stood out to you that you think we should do a follow up on? Jump into the comments, let us know. We'd really like to hear from you. And just personally, I think reaching back out to Dave and having another conversation would be a lot of fun. I kind of just want to do that just because he was fun to talk to. So yeah, he was on now to some comments from our episode 304, the Jerry Rigged Wheelchairs episode, in which we talked with Zach Nelson about his developing of a company that can provide wheelchairs faster and cheaper than traditional wheelchairs. There was this from Sly Chicken who pointed out, I really appreciate how much Zach advocates for people. His comment on the ADA is so right. I have severe dyslexia and I rely on my accommodations every day of my life. Because of these accommodations I get to live just as much as anyone else. And that matters for people with physical disabilities too. Accommodations are what allow people to fully participate in life. I wanted to share that comment mainly because in recent years there's been some slippage in enforcement of the ADA and even some discussions about ways to pull back some of what the ADA does. And so this is kind of a public policy call. Let people in power know how you feel about things like the ada. It is a good thing. It is a tremendous thing. As Zach points out, it changed the world for a huge percentage of the population. Those with disabilities are all of us. It's really that simple. Everybody has a thing that stands in the way of their being able to do exactly what they want to. And shouldn't we all enjoy those freedoms? So I just wanted to read that comment from a perspective of you're right, it's terrific. Let's keep it going and let's move the needle forward further.

So, Matt, anything you wanted to add to that? Are you anti ada?

Matt Ferrell: I'm not going to comment.

Sean Ferrell: We got him folks. We finally caught him.

Matt Ferrell: Gotcha.

Sean Ferrell: And then a couple of best worst comments from our most recent. This is especially ironic considering the conversation we just had with Dave. Animaniac jumped into the comments to say Sean is the long haired hippie in this round. Yes, we now have two episodes in which Matt and I sit down to talk to people who are even balder than me. This is not the theme of still to be determined. It is not just bald people talking. We promise, we promise that's not all it's going to be. But Animaniac, thank you for the comment. It made me laugh. And right next to it, Barry with an Important question. So really important question. What are the comics that are in the boxes in Sean's background? Wouldn't you all like to know? Well, I don't have a link at this moment, but in the future, a lot of these comic books are going to be for sale. I have a friend who's going to be helping me sell them. He has an online store. When that stuff is up and running, I'll share the link. You guys can find out what's exactly in these boxes. It's a lot of stuff from the late 80s, early 90s. So, yeah, it's a lot of good stuff.

Matt Ferrell: There's some good stuff.

Sean Ferrell: Some good stuff. Yeah. Thank you for the question, Barry. And then from Matt's most recent, this is how the worst oil crisis in history is backfiring and big picture. Matt, what are you talking about here? The expectation, oh, oil's going up, means there will be a transition to all these other alternatives. Just doesn't seem to be happening. But it's very much a mixed bag, am I right, that the take is like, yeah, it's not doing exactly what you'd think, but it is doing something. So you want to talk a little bit about that in general?

Matt Ferrell: Yes. In general, it's basically that it's. That it's push. You'd think that it would Push Solar, buying EVs, it would push all the stuff that would help counteract the rising oil prices, but it's not quite working like you'd expect. And on top of which, here in the US we're doing some really stupid things where we're literally paying billions of dollars to companies to not build wind turbine farms. Yes. Money to stop building a wind turbine farm. We're doing stuff like that. And EV sales have not gone up. They've actually gone down a little bit here in the US So it's like there's all this weird stuff happening where in some parts of the world it is having an impact, in other parts of the world it's not. And the one group that seems to be profiting from all of this is the fossil fuel industry. So it's. It's a whole bag of. Ugh.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. There was this comment from BTS who jumped in to say geothermal is advancing rapidly. My cousin Tim Latimer is the CEO of Fervo Energy and. And they just had an ipo. Using advanced technology, they will be able to install geothermal plants in areas other than geo hotspots. Matt, you really need to do a story of that tech and where it can be set up. You've talked about geothermal before. It's something that you are yourself, is part of your home and it's set up. Have you heard of this company and is there a chance that you're going to be returning to conversations about this tech, potentially even with this company?

Matt Ferrell: I will definitely be touching back on this topic at some point down the road. I'm not exactly sure when that will be, but I am aware. Fervo. I've actually had some emails with them over the past, I don't know, month or two. So I am aware of them. I know what they do. They're a very cool company. And for those of you who don't know, they can. They have technology. They can like drill down and then horizontally. So they can from one drill site, drill multiple wells in different locations. It's a really fascinating technology they've got. I've talked about another company that basically uses. They hate it when I say this. Quays. They use death rays. They like literally like laser beam their way down, way down to drill their holes, which means they can go far deeper than other people can go. So there's really cool technologies happening around the geothermal space. And geothermal is like the well, duh technology for baseload power because it's just 24 7, just humming away. It's like a nuclear plant without the nuclear waste. It just is. Just keeps on humming. So it's a great technology that we'll probably see roll out more and more. So I definitely will be doing another video on this. I'm just not sure when.

Sean Ferrell: And then like the ghost of Christmas Past that rises up occasionally and puts out its. Its icy claw to wake Matt up in a sweat. A question from multiple people like this comment is. Is meant as a kind of placeholder for a conversation that took place in the comments of Matt's. Matt's most recent it's not the first time comments like this have come up. It's not the first time Matt and I have talked about it. But here we go again. Longtime listener, I'm concerned that the script was written by AI perhaps I'm just hearing it everywhere. Care to comment? And Matt, I know you don't want to comment, but throw it out there anyway.

Matt Ferrell: The answer is yeah. The answer is no. I get this every once in a while and I get it. I get it. I get why people say this. AI is everywhere. It's oversold. It's being used by. There's a lot of AI slop out there. There's it's just overused. And there's a lot of stuff where people start to have a self calibrated sniff test for what they think is AI. The problem is you're going to be wrong 90% of the time because some AI is so good you will not know and you will think it's legit and it's not. And then there's other times where it's legit and you might think it has a little bit of whiff of AI. That's this and part of the. I understand why people had that feeling because in this specific video there was a lot of transitional phrases that you hear a lot on YouTube and it's not necessarily you don't hear it a ton on my channel. But one of the things about this specific video is I produce this video deliberately with a different tone from my normal episodes because this is kind of a downer episode. And usually my episodes are kind of have a ray of optimism and kind of like are not, I wouldn't say upbeat, but like more upbeat. And so this one was more of a somber, oh man, this is awful. And so different music, different technique for the script. And that I think is what people are picking up on and they're taking it as AI. It ain't AI. Here's a little behind the scenes for my channel that I don't talk about because I don't think it's interesting. But people might want to know I'm not a solo creator. I have a production team that I've formed because otherwise I would not be able to produce the videos I produce at the rate I produce them. Case in point, this specific episode. The human writer and researcher that helped me with this script clocked in something like 32 hours putting this script together.

And that doesn't account my hours going in there and rewriting sections and adding stuff and manipulating it. And then it doesn't account for the hours of the science researcher, my science advisory board looking at it and reviewing it and adding comments and tweaking it. So there were three people, three humans that had their hands on the script. So when I see, was this written by AI? If I had had hair, I'd be pulling it out. It's like, no. So when you account for all the people that had human hours on this script, it was easily somewhere in that 40 to 50 hour range of time spent on this script. And that doesn't even account for the video editor's time producing it and the amount of time it took to make the thumbnails and the amount of time that it took to get it all scheduled and published. So this video probably is like an 80 hour ish, maybe even 90 hour ish production time for this specific video. And this is actually a short one. I have videos that clock closer to 100 to 120 hours to produce. So when I see this, it just. It makes me sad. It doesn't make me angry. I understand why people are saying it. So I'm not lashing out at people that say this kind of stuff. My plea would be understand that AI was not trained in a vacuum. AI was trained to write from us. They learned to write by literally. Sean is a writer. His books were stolen to use to train AI. My YouTube videos, I know for a fact, because there's databases you can look yourself up in. My stuff was ripped off to train AI. AI learned to write from us. So. So when people say, oh, like, there's EM dashes in this, it's an AI. Do you want to know how it learned how to use EM dashes? Because everybody seems to use EM dashes. I see it. Sean uses it. What's funny is, Sean, for me, stylistically, I've. For my entire life, I've always hated EM dashes. So I don't use them. I do. I use ellipses all the time.

I use, you know, parentheticals with commas and parentheses. I just avoid hyp. I just avoid them. I don't know why. I just don't like them. But when people see them in writing, they immediately go, oh, that's AI. And that's not the case. You see it over scientific literature for years. You see it over news articles for years. I have friends that I know write with these things and have written with them their entire life. So it's like the idea that AI, you know what makes AI, I challenge you, recalibrate your thinking on this. But I don't. I don't lash out at you saying, shut up. Don't say this stuff. I understand because I don't want to watch AI slop. I don't want to see the degradation of human quality, human thought, and human thinking that goes into creating these things. Art takes work. It takes effort. And so, like, I am very much in that. So for me. No, no, no, no, no. Three humans worked on this video.

Sean Ferrell: My. My ironic anecdote about all of that is, as you. As you mentioned, stylistically, my fiction. I. I love using EM dashes. I love using a kind of echo of threes where I'll say, this thing was like, this or like this or like this. I like that stylistically, I like those rhythms. Those two things specifically are always talked about that as the tell for AI.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: If you see it used the rule of three. And if you see EM dashes, those are the tells. And that has been my stylistic choice the entirety of my writing career. I had multiple books, as Matt mentioned, that were part of the stolen goods of hundreds of thousands of books that were taken from pirate websites and uploaded into the large language models that created like anthropics work in AI. So it's like I am one of those authors that was stolen from to teach it how to write like me. And then when it writes like me and people look at my work, they're going to say, oh, he writes like AI. I bet he's AI. I'm like, the irony there is delicious. I understand. It is. It is a perfect, like, oh, perfect like, oh, they stole his writing and now people think his writing is stolen. You can't escape it. Other than those cases where the tell is not the style. The tell is when it's hallucinatory. The tell is when it's just flat out wrong or self contradictory. The use in writing of, oh, I can tell AI writing because of the EM dashes. No, it's when it doesn't use EM dashes properly. The tell is when the rule of three are three things that actually do not support one another as a metaphor. So, like, these are the tells. The tell is not. I think that this well thought out message around sustainability must be from AI. The tell would be, oh, this video about sustainability doesn't actually say anything that would be the tell. But other than that, even, even if you're trying to dig that direction, the way AI works, it finds content and then it regurgitates that content so it will say things. And it's. We've really entered a very weird realm. And I'm with you, Matt. I don't, I don't see that question and see it as a, like, let's shut this guy down for asking this. I think we're in the midst of people walking around and saying, I'm not sure which of us are humans.

It's a weird sort of sci fi replicant Turing test that we're going through to say, like, how do we identify true and real?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, exactly. It's the truthiness of all of this. And to the people that think, oh, this sounds like AI writing. The thing I, I think that comes most from the people who don't experiment with it. I Experiment with AI not in writing. I experiment with AI in mundane tasks. Like I use AI to help. Help, like triage my email, like for my receipts, stuff like that. It's stuff that just saves me, oh, that's five minutes here, 10 minutes there. It's not writing me scripts, but it's doing little work for me every day. A little Claude cowork session and working in the background to take care make sure that my receipts get saved into a proper folder so that for my taxes, I got them ready to go. That's literally how I use AI. You can train AI to write just like you. Like, you just give it samples of your writing and it will find the patterns in your writing and it can create an instruction sheet for you. And then anytime you ask it to write something for you, it will write it just like you. And you will not be able to tell full stop. And again, I'm not, I am not. But it's gotten so good and it's so easy to train this stuff. It's, it, it's. I don't know what we're doing, Sean. It's like we're living in a world now where you can't believe your, your lying eyes. It's like we're gonna have videos of people that look like people. You have, you know, faceless video Ch. YouTube channels where the voice sounds completely real, but it's all AI slop. It's like, yeah, we can't trust anything. It's creating this situation. Yeah. And I don't know how, I don't know how we. I don't know how we solve this.

Sean Ferrell: I don't either. It's confusing. I do think that there will be pushback. I think I've said this to you before. I envision there will be a movement toward brutalism in our culture where people will, audiences will, I think, be drawn to art. And that includes YouTube videos. It includes potentially even movies, television shows where human error, human style, human. Like think about the movies from the 1970s where you literally had scenes of actors shopping for broccoli. Long, weird, sort of slow, just slice of life moments. I think we're going to be headed toward that kind of exposure again in what we consume because we will be drawn to that for having the human elements that we will otherwise miss in, as you said, talking head video that doesn't even have a talking head. It's just a voice over images. And you suddenly slowly realize, wait a minute, I don't think this is actually a human.

Matt Ferrell: Like I think at the same Time talking head. It's like I just stumbled upon a channel two days ago or last week. It was last week. I shared it with my. I have a group of YouTube friends on a Discord channel. I shared it with them. I'm like, I feel like we're all screwed. And it was two different channels and one of them was called Dr. I can't remember what his name was. Like somebody who has a PhD talking about these sciency topics. He's not real. Yeah, it was completely AI. It was a fake guy doing what I do. So it looked like a guy in a studio talking to the camera and then it would do B roll shots, all that kind of stuff. It was really well done. But there were some video tells where it's not quite real enough yet. There's still that uncanny valley for video. So you could kind of tell his lips weren't doing the right things when they should have been doing the right things. So it was like, oh my God, that. That guy's AI. Which means this is AI slop. But it's getting so. It's so. It was so good. The video is actually good. Like the content and it was actually decent. And then you had a dude that's 90% real looking. It's like, what happens when they get to that hundred percent level? My channel's screwed. We're all screwed.

Sean Ferrell: So on that note, listeners, I know viewers, what did you think about this one? Jump into the comments like I mentioned. Jump into the comments with any questions you might have for Dave, any follow up from our conversation, or if you just want to follow up on some of the comments we shared from our previous episodes, let us know. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. As always, jumping in the comments, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy and free ways for you to support us. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to stilltdb fm or you can click the join button on YouTube. But those ways both allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts because we are real people. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.