Today on Still to be Determined. We're drilling deep into topics around sustainable energy production. That pun will make sense to anybody who watched Matt's most recent video. Welcome everybody to Still To Be Determined. This is of course, the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology and luckily for me, my brother, is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell And guess who's with us here today? Why it's that Matt. Matt, how are you doing today? I thought you were gonna say it's Gary. Yeah. No, Gary couldn't make it today. That's why you're here. It's good to see you. How you doing? Good to see you. Uh, I'm doing okay. Looking forward to this conversation because this video really felt like, it felt like watching, it felt like watching something from science fiction just be here. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, we're gonna use lasers to drill into the earth and pull heat out, and it's gonna be great. It's gonna be clean. And we're actually doing it. And when is this happening? Oh, it's happening on Tuesday. Yep. All right. But Sean, I also can't, every time I think about this, I always picture the scene from the first Star Wars movie, the original Star Wars movie. Yeah. Inside The Death Star, with all the guys pulling levers and the giant beam going down the, yeah. Yeah. I like the, the fact that they're able to, we'll get into this conversation in detail, but one of the things that I found astounding was, yeah, the bore is a certain size, but it can make a bigger hole than that because we can just do science with these things. Using science to make the beam bigger so that the hole is bigger than the device itself. And. Right around the time that that was being described, you included in the video a clip of the Death Star. Mm-hmm. Doing the opposite thing with its beams, where the beams all come together and then shoot toward the planet. And that always struck me as science fiction goofiness. Like even as a kid, I was just like, how would beams come together and then combine and then turn in space in that way to be like a bunch of angles and triangles that come together. And then these guys are just like, yeah, we're just taking the beam and we're reshaping it. I was like, alright. Alright. You win. Yeah, you win yet again, science. Yeah. So as I mentioned before, we're talking about Matt's most recent. This is how Fusion Tech just changed geothermal energy forever and. Before we get into our conversation about that, we always like to revisit our previous episode. That would be from episode 2 74, where we talked about regenerative breaking, and there were some comments like these from Neils who there were many people who I think heard our conversation and understood what we were saying, but forgot why we were saying what we were saying when we were saying it. You follow me? Yeah, I think I follow you. Neil's represents kind of that zone of comment, which says, for the internal use of the regenerative braking, could the batteries not be put in the station instead of on the train? Then you don't have to carry the heavy batteries on the train. Yes, that's largely the point of the technology that Matt was talking about and our discussion. The point about having batteries on a train was we were responding to commenters who said, why not just use the energy on the train? Yeah. And we were saying, well, in order to do that you'd need batteries. So it ends up being this kind of feedback loop where we were commenting on commenters, who've now drawn comments. It's comment inception. Inception, Sean. That's what it's, it's comment inception. When will the top stop spinning? We also talked a bit about ammonia in relation to hydrogen as a energy source, and Dean McManus jumped in to say yes. I recently read stories about a new, more efficient electrolyzer for clean hydrogen and improvements in ammonia hydrogen membrane filtering to improve H2 transportation and storage. But as the years pass and no new hydrogen or working infrastructure has been announced or even rumored for use, I've put hydrogen, especially for cars on the back burner, right along with synthetic gas, cold fusion, and carbon capture schemes. It all seems like the oil company's justification to keep them doing business as usual, by defunding EVs, quietly supporting renewable energy. While they keep making trillions each year still, I am hopeful overall because of the ongoing advancements in renewable energy and storage. This seems to be a popular trend. Mm-hmm. Of you gotta take your victories where you can find them. And I think that that's a good angle for people to take. And I applaud Dean for taking that. At some point you say, Hey, this looks like a great option. I wish this was the the one that would take off. And it doesn't. And instead of saying. Everybody's an idiot. You say, well, alright, I didn't get my first choice, but what is out there and what is happening? Big picture. And I think that that is the kind of optimism that your channel represents in looking across the board and saying, look, the world feels like a dumpster fire in a lot of different ways right now. But there are some places where people are trying to put those dumpsters out. You and I have talked about this before, where like you're a glass half empty. I'm a glass half full, but I would say my glass half full is a pragmatic optimism. Mm-hmm. If that makes sense. It does, yes. Like when it comes to renewable technologies, I don't have, I don't feel like I have a horse in the race, you know what I mean? Like I don't want a specific technology to win 'cause there is no winning. It's like if all of them kind of advance, we win. Some of them advance, we still win. It's like, I don't care. So it's like, that's why I talk about so many different things, because somebody's gonna fail, some of them gonna succeed. They have different use cases and different things where they work well. And so like the hydrogen issue, it's, yeah, me personally, I think the whole hydrogen car thing, that's, it's never gonna happen guys. Give, give up. But hydrogen does have a place in the future. It's just what niche, is it gonna find, where is it gonna fit in? That's the big question. And as Dean points out, there's not a whole lot of like public movement. Yeah. There's no protests out there clamoring for hydrogen to be put into their cars. Yeah. No, no. It, and it does seem to be like the technology that your video is about that we're gonna talk about in a few minutes. Public's not climbing for that either, but it is a breakthrough driven by an individual who is trying to square a circle in a way that I really appreciated, which was the leverage point here is not the ability of the tech to do a thing. It's the ability of us, and this is what we talked about I think last week. It's the ability for us to do this in a way that shows a profit motive that will bring those who are reluctant to us, whether you view them as evil incarnate. Mm-hmm. Or whether you think the oil companies are simply pro following the dollar and are refusing to budge until the dollar lures them. The kind of company that that gentleman is setting up really does feel like it's seeing the world in a pragmatic way that you just described of Yes. Yeah. There's a leverage point here. It's the dollar. If these companies see an ability to do a thing in a way that's going to generate money for them, watch them line up. Yeah, that's essentially it. Finally, I always like to, uh. Include a couple of more lighthearted comments and I found myself debating between two, so I decided to clean, include them both. First, a nice pun. Pixel pusher jumps in to say, you know what really grinds my gears. Regen breaking. Charges me up every time. Well done. Pixel pusher. Yes. I like that a lot. And then this from George, who just points out that in our last episode. From eight minutes, 25 seconds to nine minutes, 30 seconds, there was a lot of poop talk. Then right at the end of it, I tried to transition into our actual conversation by saying, okay, Matt, time to hang onto something solid. George, would you believe me if as I said that I thought, oops. Thank you for pointing it out. On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent. I've already mentioned it a couple of times. This episode made me feel like it was coming from a very optimistic angle, and I liked this comment from Jack Weems for that exact tone of the conversation. It's very encouraging to see them talking about real hard numbers and not talking about how they're going to need subsidies to stay afloat. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is a startup company, and I have to say it's a startup company. It was refreshing to see a person talk about what is ultimately a dramatic change in how something can be done while demonstrating a real understanding of how the world operates. Yes. This doesn't feel like a guy who's trying to sell a monorail to Springfield. It felt like this is a guy who has taken a very measured approach. Yeah, and as you've said multiple times in your video, you visited them before, so you saw it when it was the, we've got an idea, we're doing all these things. This is proof of concept time, and now you're seeing them when he is very clearly, proudly saying, this is no longer proof of concept. We are selling a product. This is it. It is going to happen most likely in Oregon. I'm curious, in the time between your two visits to this company, same tone, same energy, same optimism, same everything, or is there a, do you get the sense that these people feel like they are at a turning point? That they're looking at a moment where things are going to shift for them fundamentally because they're actually gonna be doing the thing? What was the vibe that you got between the two visits? It was definitely that there was a lot of pride. Yeah, I got a sense of pride in every person I talked to of like we're doing it. Like there was this attitude of, you know, some people probably when they started were very skeptical and now they're basically like actually executing on what they were promising and they're doing it in a timescale. That's really impressive how fast they've been advancing. I was impressed just like how fast they've gotten to this, and when I say fast, it's taken years. Yeah. So it's like this stuff can take a very long time, but like in the time that I would've expected, it's shorter than what I would've expect it. And so it seemed to me from all the people I talked to that there's definitely a sense of, you know what I mean? Like, um, yeah. You know, all it's a moonshot. We're doing it. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing it. And, and the other aspect I wanna call out, it's not just on this company, it's there's, I've had the privilege of talking to a lot of different CEOs and founders and innovators in different companies. Sometimes you get that "I got a monorail" attitude from some of these companies where it's like they're promising everything. It's gonna make your life better. It's going to cook your meals for you, it's going to make us all live on the moon. And you know, they're selling some truth with a bunch of snake oil at the same time. Yeah. And then there's people that are very, they're promising a lot, but they're very calculated and cautious about how much they promise. 'cause they don't wanna over promise, under deliver. And my conversations with Quaise feels like that. They feel like they're, they know what they're capable of 10 years from now, but they're not. But they're talking about next six months, they're talking about this six months or next year. They're setting realistic goals that they know they can achieve that are still impressive. And they're not overselling their stuff. And I've talked to several different companies. There's another company I've talked to for the past several years, and I'm gonna be revisiting them hopefully in the next few months. Same thing. It's like in my off off the record conversations, they've talked about where they think this stuff can go in 10 years. Right. And it's crazy if they can even get a fraction of what they think they can do, it's gonna be bananas. But publicly they're like. We're only talking about this right now because we do not wanna set false expectations. We don't wanna hype things up. We wanna make it realistic and pragmatic and deliver on what we promise. Things that we know we can, things we can guarantee, we'll talk about. If there's stuff that's still kind of out there, we'll keep it to ourselves. And those are the, the leaders and innovators I really respect because they're. Not promising self, driving every year for the past 10. Their mouth is not outpacing the reach. Yeah. Like another CEO that we all know that's been promising. Yeah. That their cars can drive across the country without any drivers in them for 10 years. Yeah. Every year it's the next year. It's like there's a difference in attitude that I really respect, um, for how they do it. And on that note in the video, I don't know if you have a comment coming up for this, but one of the things that came up I saw in the comments was like, well, how deep can they drill? How deep have they drilled and. I published this video. There was not a public, here's how far they drilled so far, and literally like the day I published my video, they put out the press release for how far they've drilled. So right now I think it's so they have successfully drilled to a depth of a hundred meters using their proprietary millimeter wave technology in central Texas. So they are, it's not like they're just drilling like a couple meters down, like, Hey, look what we can do. It's like they've gone right. A hundred meters. That's not insignificant. Yeah. So they're, they're making some real, real moves and some real progress. I wonder if part of this is, how much of what they are doing is tech that was already ready. My understanding was the emitter was fusion tech that was already active in using. And what they ended up doing is the articulated arm that takes it down is the new breakthrough that they've managed to, to make work. So it kind of goes back to, you know, how, how at ground level is your starting point. If they are standing on other tech and they're looking at the drilling process itself. Making the argument this replicates the use. The, the, the drilling process itself looks a lot like the normal drilling process now, and the tech over here is what we've pulled over to use in this case. Yeah. And it, in that moment, it starts to feel like this. Part of the genius of this is simply taking a step, a step back and looking what can be done in the moment as opposed to, oh, we have to wipe the sleep, slate clean. Is this, is there part of the momentum in that as well of these things were ready to be cobbled together in this way? Kind of like a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B, and it just took somebody with the intelligence to, to say like, we don't have to reinvent a bunch of wheels. All these wheels are ready. I would hate to use the word cobbled together because it's not cobbled together. But yes, there's an aspect to, oh, I don't, I know people are gonna hate it when I make this analogy. Apple. Apple's typically not the first to market with a technology. They're sometimes the second or third to market, but they're the best to market. They're the best to productize it and turn it into an actual thing. Samsung creates a folding screen for a phone seven years ago, and it's hot garbage because it breaks so easily and they're blazing a trail with, Hey, look at this, but is there a product there? We don't know yet. They keep experimenting, keep experimenting publicly, and then coming out with new ones. And when the technology finally gets there and Apple looks at it and they're like, can we make a, a, a, a product out of this that we think people will actually want to use? Then they go, okay. So it's the same thing with AI. It's like AI this and AI that. It's like, oh, you can talk to this chat bot. Well, how do you productize that? How do you turn it into something people actually want to use? Right. That's kind of how I view this. It's like, okay, a gyrotron, it's existed for a long time. They've, we've known how to do millimeter waves, which, you know, you're basically shooting lasers. We've known about this for decades. But it took Paul Woskoff to kind of go, huh, we could melt through rock. Maybe we could use this to drill. And then it's like, well then how do we do that? It turns in at that point. It's not like a, the theory is sound, but it becomes a huge engineering challenge. How do you design the wave guide so that it can articulate? 'cause the, yeah, how is that, how gonna work? And then we also have to make sure that the beam, we have to design something that the beam can fan out in a way that it's larger than the tube we're put in the ground. So you have to figure all this kind of stuff out. So it's a, it's a massive engineering challenge, not a theoretical science challenge. So like, as you pointed out, like all the physics and all the things were there. It just took somebody to kind of, how can we put this into a product that nobody's done before, kind of mentality. Yeah. Um, and then engineering around that. Some additional comments that jumped out at me, like this one from Enoch. Who says, this is why you can't just cancel research randomly. You never know how badly we'll need the discoveries of today when tomorrow comes knocking. It really does feel like this is, like I said, sci-fi. This is mm-hmm. Something out of it feels like it's something wholly new, even though it's made up of, as we just said, all these pieces that already existed and it just took somebody putting them together in the right way to make it feel like it's dramatically a step forward. Yeah. Well, I could relate that to, uh, the fusion industry, which obviously fusion is always 30 years away, and that's the joke. Mm-hmm. But you have the ITER project that's happening in Europe, which is th. It's a huge, you could look at it as a boondoggle, how much money has been spent on this gigantic, uh, Taurus that they're building to. It's a scientific research project. It's not gonna put power into the grid. It's a research project. And then you get Commonwealth Fusion systems here in Massachusetts that starts this little startup that is basically building a Taurus that is a fraction of the size of ITER, and it may actually be operational before ITER is. Mm. And the reason it is so small and they are moving so fast is because over the 30, 40 years that this stuff has been going on, they've, uh, a d completely different research team discovered how to create like, um, a material that could be used for basically creating a magnet that is basically super magnets at a size and scale that wasn't achievable before Right. And then somebody at Commonwealth Fusion systems is like, holy crap. We could use that and create a really tiny Taurus, because we could still create the same amount of magnetic field that we have to, and we don't need a gigantic thing like they're doing over at ITER. Right. So it's, I'm oversimplifying it. Sure. But that's kind of the thing. It's like you never, it's like you don't know what you don't. You don't know what you don't know. Right. And it's like group A can come up with a breakthrough that looks like. What's the application for that? And a group over here, like Group D is like, holy man, that just unlocked a door that we've been like banging our head against for the past 10 years. Yeah. So you never, it, it's this kind of stuff. This, this is why I'm a huge fan of just this. We need to learn. Yeah. It's a little bit like we're having development now. Yeah. At a stage where, and this goes to the, the lifespan of development cycles now where it feels like. It used to start with year zero, and then it would be year 30 before a thing happened. And that is shrinking now. Yeah. Over time. And so it's a little bit like, well, in theory you could build a computer with pneumatic tubes and a steam driven device of some sort. You could do that. Yeah. You could build this thing that has all these, like do hickeys running and you could punch in numbers and it could calculate results and. It would be much later where we'd get the development of that technology in ways that we're accustomed to today. But now those two worlds feel like they're overlapping more. Where? Mm-hmm. Oh, it's gonna be a Taurus of a certain size and then, oh, no, no, no, no. It's in your lifetime. We made it this big. Yeah. And how did that happen? Well, everything is happening a little bit faster now. So Wild time to be alive. There was this comment from Johnny Lopez who shared some details that I think highlight how this technology is really about not something completely wholly new. It's about introducing a technology into areas where it would've been impossibly before. Johnny says, interesting I enjoyed this documentary. Here in Costa Rica geothermal energy has been used for many years to produce power, mostly near volcanoes. Our electricity in Costa Rica is fully from renewable sources, ground, lakes, and air. This is not an, this is not much different from Iceland, where Yep, geothermal energy is a norm and the sustainability of their energy production is been in place for decades. The issue is, well. You can't do it in Oregon yet. You can't do it in New York, or that's in New York, parts of Europe. Or name a place that doesn't have, well, Iceland, Costa Rica. Yeah. You got those volcanoes right there. The heat's very close to the surface. Heat's close to the surface. Yeah. But even in those places, it wouldn't surprise me if part of the selling point from this techs perspective would be, as you point out. When you can reach certain temperatures, the energy production skyrockets. Yeah. Yep. So it's not just about where in the surface it is, it's how deep you've gone to get to those super, super high temperatures that seem impossible otherwise. Yep. And then this one from Madonis, who I always appreciate all of you commenters, you viewers, you listeners who jump in and reveal such a wide lived experience where you, in some cases have had your hands on technologies like this, done these things as part of a profession, and then share it with all of us here. I think it's really, really amazing. Madonis writes that was the coolest video yet on your channel. I used to work in the drilling industry, making electronics that mounted just behind the drill bit, enabling directional drilling. We also made computer measurement systems that were up on the drill floor. High vibrations, flammable gases, 350 degree temperatures, just the worst conditions. Insert joke about Texas weather here. It's amazing that these guys are sending gyrotrons out into the field. Also Death ray, accurate lol. So I mean, this is tech that people who have done these kinds of things before are jumping into the comments and saying, wow, this is, this is a step forward. This is amazing. Yep. I think that that's a demonstration of this is something that should be given the this attention. And I'm curious, do you have in the next few weeks, months, can you give a teaser about maybe another technology that you're looking at where you're like, yeah, I think this is another one that's gonna be like that kind of like, oh, people in the industry are gonna be wow about this. That company I alluded to just a little while ago about that other CEO that's not wanting to over promise and under deliver, they're, do I like, I'm gonna be very vague. I am gonna be having some, I'm gonna have a follow up probably in the next couple of months on them. So that's what I'll say is that they are doing something that is widely, like, looked at with a skeptical eye of like, eh, it's not gonna be a thing. And they're, they're doing it. They're making it happen. So it's one of those just like this, it's kind of very similar to Quaise. I hope everybody who's watching or listening is enjoying watching Matt be very particular with his words as he talks about people who are very particular with their words. Yes. Finally, I wanted to share the best idea I've heard in a long time from Felipe Carmona. Felipe writes, so this would probably drill through a vault, right? Asking for a friend. You and me, Felipe Simpatico. So. Listeners, viewers, what did you think about all of this? Jump into the comments and let us know. As you can tell from this very conversation, the comments really drive the content of this program. They also help inform what Matt does on Undecided. We'd love to hear from you, and don't forget while you're doing that, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, click the join button on YouTube or go to still tbd fm. Click the join button there. Both ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of getting down beneath the mantle of the earth. Thank you so much everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.