What's the most important resource in the entire universe water maybe is it? It's a great dumb question. I'll say wait there can't I don't know I would say I would say water Yeah, because water is the universal solvent and water enables our biological life to happen You don't have water. You're done.
You also need oxygen, but oxygen is kind of in water So if you like in a pinch you could figure out how to get oxygen out of water. It's right in there Yeah, it is. Yeah, but how would you get the oxygen out of the water? Electrolysis is one way I would do it.
Yeah, that's probably how I would do it See that's why I'd go energy. I would just say energy is the thing harnessable usable energy, okay, right? Because food is energy Heat is energy. I mean it seems like if there were ever going to be a situation where some evil tycoon takes over everything with a monocle With a monocle on the side he's got a vest and a derigible that has auto guns.
Yes on all the sides. Yes. He's awesome. He's so awesome Yeah, yeah, does he have facial hair?
No, none. No, he's just really fat It's got like a big chin that goes like a you don't think that mustache curls with the tips the mustache does okay? Yeah, okay, he's gonna stay I think so you're right. Go ahead.
Yeah, it almost holds up the monocle. Yeah, what's this guy doing? Well, he's harnessing all the energy this guy he figured out how to make the energy happen in such a way that he just owns all the energy He discovered a thing that renders obsolete and so inefficient all other forms of gathering and harnessing energy that now all of the energy Business runs through him which effectively brings all governments to their knees and now energy guy. She's the king of everything, right?
Yeah, yeah, okay I mean it sounds ridiculous and steam hunky But also if you owned all energy and nobody else know whether technology could touch your ability to access it you're king of everything You are yeah, you're in control of everything. I was thinking about that today in the shower I was thinking about Putin. I'll say it I was thinking about Putin and I've seen about the meetings he has and he walks out of the doors into the big fancy room And everything looks fancy and I was thinking you've got everything like you like everything you need for your body to work You have every physical thing you would ever need but that's not enough for you. What's that in the brain?
What is that hmm like an all-powerful being it's not so much about me having what I need for myself It's that I need to deprive other people of the things they want therefore they have to go through me Yeah, I was just thinking about that and think about how that might what that does to a human soul So really Putin who I think you shouldn't feel weird about that I think most dudes at some point in their life just go stand in the shower and think about Putin What he's really trying to do here Well done well done. I mean he's trying to harness the most energy and weaponize it for his purposes What is the energy it's the energy of an economy of the state of political pressure of weapons of humans who do the things he says to do But really every dictator every power-hungry person is trying to harness and weaponize more energy than other people can because that's what gets you The bridgeable with autoguns on it, right? Okay. Yeah, basically you want to control other people's access to the things they need Yes, yeah, like say fuel to heat your homes food.
Yeah, right example. Yeah, not hypotheticals in this case Yeah, at all interesting and so throughout history Both in fiction and in reality people pick a target when they want power and they try to harness that energy from that sector or a collection of sectors One of the archetypes that we see not so much in history But in fiction is this evil mad genius scientist who tries to figure out how to do energy better than everybody else And if you can just figure out cold fusion or perpetual motion perpetual motion for example Then all of a sudden he just catapults to king of everything I just went out to Idaho. I went to Idaho national labs and I filmed several videos about nuclear energy I'm a big nuclear energy fanboy. My quest.
I think it's really really cool I think nuclear energy gets a bad rap But I got to see a test reactor and this is a place where they're testing new fuels and new ways to control nuclear fuels So that hopefully one day in the future we can make reactors that just can't melt down for example fuels meaning Elements with names that are hard to pronounce with really high atomic numbers. Yeah, that kind of stuff But there's different types of fuels. I learned there's uranium type fuels. You can have metal fuels You can have ceramic fuels, huh?
Yeah, you can have ceramic nuclear fuel Didn't know that a lot of what's going on is figuring out how to control the heat because ultimately a nuclear plant makes steam is ultimately what's happening You don't make electricity you make steam and then the steam makes your electricity. Yeah, super cool So anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that recently is my point how to make usable electricity how to make all these types of things Where we going with it? So in that situation if a given country just built an incredibly stable safe sustainable Nuclear grid with far more capacity even than is needed and the people owned it then they would all be king Huh? It would have a democratizing effect.
It's interesting that you say this I spoke to a gentleman who was there at the lab and He grew up in the American West where you are. I like it there Yeah, he grew up in Utah and he said when he was a boy people had local energy production capabilities So people would have a generator in town like a town named let's name this freedom bill So freedom bill would have a generator that everybody locally would own and operate and then when they needed lights to come on They would go turn it on as a collective locally. They weren't integrated into the grid so to speak I've got to think about this because the moment you connect freedom bill to I don't know What's the next town over is a good town or a bad town? It's a good town Liberty, Tim Freedom bill and Liberty.
I don't know good good town was pretty good. Good town. Oh, it's good that good Good, so if you got freedom bill and good to know they're right next to each other They each have generators and those generators are producing a hundred and twenty volts 60 hertz AC We're gonna be the mayor if we were in Europe or if we were in England We would have 50 hertz but here in freedom bill We have 60 hertz the moment you touch the grid and freedom bill to the grid and goodton you have to synchronize the electricity That makes sense to me okay Because you've got the signway going up and down if you have them out of phase you basically cancel the power out It's really weird like when you screw things up with your audio recording Yeah, there's certain ways to make it so that you clearly just record an audio But you make an error in the recording in a stereo channel and you actually go and listen to it And there's nothing but then you go and listen to that on a device that can only provide mono rendering and you're like no It's there what the heck is going on yeah? I can understand the principle from sound you know, I can't visualize it.
Yeah, I think yeah additive and subtractive interference What one of the things interesting and aside here on YouTube they have these things when you upload a video and they will analyze The audio track and they'll pull out the words and then be like oh, they're talking about this You know they can analyze things and see compared to other things There was one Scammer or whatever you want to call these people that do things as a countermeasure to YouTube They put a left track and a right track because they they figured out somehow that YouTube was analyzing everything in mono They did this destructive Interference technique and so they made the left track and the right track subtract each other so that when it went into the sniffer algorithm at YouTube It was just a flat line audio signal. I thought that was genius But actual human ears listening on a mono device could hear it listening on a stereo device How did they keep that from phase canceling to the human ear? Oh? Well, I mean I don't know it was left and right ears.
I have no idea. I have no idea I'm realizing there's more to the story. I don't understand at this point, but it was pretty interesting. I like it.
Yes pretty cool All right, so I'm gonna connect freedom bill to goodton and we have to get our synchronization, right? I just think that's interesting He said when he was younger they had these generators then when they started connecting to the grid They started having to worry about all this stuff And then eventually a larger entity at a regional level had to take over the management of the power because all these things had to be taken into account Big-town correct septopolis what up dump, but what he did say is in the future This gentleman feels that we're going back to that because as people are able to generate power locally whether it be Solar whether it be you know small scale interesting things sure orphans on treadmills. Yeah, that's sort of thing. No Clarifying that you're against that.
Yeah, I don't think anybody was clear on that his point was as people start to generate power locally Whether it be a wind turbine or whether it be any of these things and you plug them back into the grid people are gonna have to start managing Things locally again, the holy grail or the thing that people really want right now is small scale nuclear And so the idea is hey, what if every little town had a small containerized nuclear reactor what is containerized me? Logistically a pallet is a unit that you can move around and all the infrastructure is built around moving pallets forklifts You know what a pallet looks like it You know what it's like it's holes in the bottom You just go pick something up Yep, and you load these pallets onto containers containers are the big metal boxes and on the corners of the containers They have these really interesting cam black lugs cam lock Yeah, cam lock lugs And so if you ever look at one of these trucks have a container on the back and you look at the corners You can see that there's these little I don't know how to describe the shape It looks like an arrow head that goes into the corners and there's a little lever and you throw the lever and it locks the container onto the truck Yeah, all these distances are standardized and so you can have a 40 foot container 20 foot container You can order parts from Hungary and they'll put it on a train and then they'll ship it with a train to the ship And then they'll put it on the ship with a crane and then they'll put it You know that they'll send it across the ocean and then in Mobile, Alabama They have another crane with the same lugs and they can take it off and send it all the way to your house if you want I don't know who created that as genius who ever did that be that'd be a great deep dive to understand that Yeah, so whoever came up with a container change the world because everybody standardized their infrastructure to be able to do that So the idea is if we have a container that is a nuclear reactor that can generate power that'd be amazing I know the military is looking at that they would love away when I have a fob a forward operating base It'd be amazing to be able to use the backbone of the military infrastructure to be able to just like oh We're gonna forklift a nuclear energy device out there And this is a safe nuclear energy device that we're not gonna melt down or anything like that our fuels are designed in such a way that They're safe their low level and they give us just enough heat to do what we got to do and make electricity But there's no huge environmental impact if we'll say a bomb gets dropped on it because it's war You know what would happen if a bomb got dropped on it because it's war I have no idea I have no idea. Well, I would want somebody to know that yeah, they'd probably figure that out one of the players something Yeah, but I think it turns out it's super bad it turns out yeah, that stinks But I think it's interesting because moving forward I can imagine freedomville having a small nuclear reactor Tiny that does what it needs to do Maybe it's a kind of I don't know sterling engine or maybe it's a turbine or you know something that's simple to operate and so They're talking about making these small-scale nuclear plants in factories that would be amazing small-scale plant inside of a factory that fabricates Something having nothing to do with energy. Well, I mean just think about it.
So imagine a car factory I'm imagining it. Okay. Now instead of a car being rolled along the line You have a little metal pressure vessel looking thing Okay, and that is the nuclear reactor and that nuclear reactor has the ability to you know You have all the goes into this and the gazellas You know the all the things that go into it and go out of it And they they hook them all up and then they move that forward and then that gets put into and then at the end You're sliding that into a container like you're like you're shoving a whole stack of Pringles into a Pringles can you know? Okay, and so you just combine the words shoving and sliding and your previous iteration Shlighting and I loved it and I'm going to incorporate that into my eyes.
I think you said sliding okay You didn't I'm doing it the same way my dog you saw me check my text messes it right along from a pocket there So you know that was we slipped down into 75% brain for a second kids combined pointy and pokey to create pointy Oh, yeah, I'm never giving that up either. No, you just grab those things when they come all right So the idea would be then instead of drawing power for fabrication some sort of fabrication plant from the same grid that is powering a community That power would be isolated in some sort of little tiny nuclear reactor dedicated to that factory that plant is that what you're saying? I can imagine a future where a town has the ability to hook into the grid and the grid is smart and the grid can make decisions at the nodes Right now there are little switches on power poles and alignment or a line woman or whatever we're saying He says we'll go out and just flip that switch okay and like break off a whole section of the power grid in the area Okay, so decisions are being made at the extremities of the power grid But there are also these intertwined things that have to be balanced in the power grid the difficult thing about electricity is that it's It's it's a now kind of thing it's expensive to bank it Oh, it's super expensive to bank it But but when you produce it it has to go somewhere so if a nuclear power plant is running at full capacity Which is what you want nukes to do you just want to ramp them up and just steady state? You know just I'm gonna run this at 100% power and I'm making two megawatts or two gigawatts or whatever right now I'm just gonna hum along like that well.
You got to send that power somewhere. What if you don't? You dump it to a some type of load some type of resistive load okay You know that's different than a sink because a sink is dealing with heat energy here It would just be just a resistor chug a rubber or something like that. It's just grounded out It's interesting you bring that up because in Finland they have this place where they have a furnace and they heat a whole town They have pipes under the town and they'll just heat the whole town So like I'm assuming you're buying heat in your house and kind of a radiator kind of thing And so when they produce extra heat they send that heat into the ground and let heat up the rock is my understanding I could be wrong and then that Gradually makes it so that there's passive heat you can go down as well when you need when you need heat later You can just go get the heat from the ground because you put it in the ground So they're creating an artificial geothermal environment a thermal flywheel.
Yeah pretty neat, huh? Okay, what is the flywheel a flywheel is a way of storing energy? Okay, so let's say we have a motor and we have the ability to produce electricity Somehow we can turn that electrical potential into kinetic energy We're gonna do that by rotating a large heavy object and that heavy object once we get it going We are storing our energy in the form of kinetic energy because this flywheel has rotational inertia and Probably has been designed so that it has more rotational inertia So there's more mass out on the edges we get that thing spinning really really fast and then let's say We don't have electricity anymore Well, then we can start running our motor that was powering it We can just flip the electrical contacts on it and we can use that motor now as a generator Okay, and in that same motor that spun it up We can now just change the circuit and now it is gonna pull that energy back out of that flywheel So as we put a resistive load across the contacts on the motor the motor voltage will now you know won't we'll not be able to use it so a flywheel holds that energy for later access a Sync is used for by product energy energy that you don't need to redirect anywhere It just needs to go somewhere I'm not familiar with the term sink in that way, but I see I see what you're saying it makes sense Yeah, but there is a difference right if there are gonna be opportunities where you can hold energy for later use Because a flywheel isn't a battery. Yeah, right?
I mean batteries chemical it's a form of battery I mean I don't know how you want to define battery so so I mean electrochemical battery like a voltaic pile back in the day It's like one of the first batteries that was ever invented There's a jar and you've got a stack of dissimilar metals and you've got some type of fluid in there And then you know some type of dielectric type substance I don't know and then you're able to get an electrical potential out of two different contacts there But one of my favorite ways to store energy that I've ever seen is super simple. It's in Chattanooga, Tennessee It's called raccoon mountain. I thought you're gonna say abdominal fat fat is good though. It's an option raccoon mountain Yeah, so this so they have a power plant.
They have a bunch of power plants all up and down the Tennessee Valley It's part of the Tennessee Valley Authority. There's a lot of hydroelectric dams. There's several Nuclear plants that operate. There's a lot of stuff I mean, we're very blessed in this area to have many different ways to produce power and a lot of them are clean and So that's really cool But one of the things I do at raccoon mountain is they have all these ways to produce electricity But sometimes they're like oh we're making electricity and it's no longer peak time So so when do you think the most powered demand if is that a word?
Demanded? How do you say what the sentence I'm trying to say one time? It would be the most in demand. Yeah, there you go Okay, when do you think that would that would be the case what times of year what times of day?
I would say Pre-electric vehicle revolution it would be midday through the afternoon and the hottest part of the day when you have to Use climate control and people are at work post-evi revolution I would say we are either there already or we are trending in this direction that it's going to be late afternoon into the evening where You're still doing climate control people are still on devices, but the vehicle is already in the garage and plugged in oh interesting Yeah, the I would think dead of winter cold cold cold time of day if you have electric heat and stuff Electric heats pretty unusual in the West so my mind didn't go there Yeah, if you've got a house and you're trying to heat with electric heat you've done it wrong respectfully kind Yeah, and that happens when you're way out in the sticks You know house that was built 20 30 years ago before there was development in the mountains or whatever I mean you can get electrical out there But then you're paying Unbelievable money to heat that house with electric so the little place that we had in the woods. Yeah, you remember that Yeah, you'll notice that we had baseboard heat throughout that entire rickety old cabin that we were trying to fix up and You'll also notice that it was never on do you remember how we heated that house? Yeah, a pellet stove, right? Yeah And you had to like put these pellets a little rabbit turds and you would put them in this little burner and it would like feed them in right?
Yeah, there's an auger that went from the reservoir and it would spin them down at a certain pace where they would yeah They're sawdust pellets basically. This is what happens to your sawdust it gets repurposed for heating There's some sort of process by which they get I don't know packed together and covered in a little organic seal that holds that packed Sawdust in a tiny little you described it well like a rabbit turd pellet And then you get them in bags They're 45 pound bags same weight as a plate for your bench press and you dump them into a reservoir and you set your temperature And the way that thermostat works is that the auger just runs harder when you have it set at a higher temperature The auger runs lighter when you have it set at a lower temperature And so you turn it on there's an ignition pot down in the middle of this When you know whatever cast iron cast metal stove and you'll just hear the clinks all day clink clink clink clink and it's burning at any given time We have 15 or 20 of those little rabbit pellets is is there like a flame or is it a smolder? It's a flame if it's smoldering your house is smoky and smells bad and it's not efficient But it's a finely tuned ratio where the mixture of oxygen and fuel and circulation throughout that device is really well balanced for a Hyper-efficient burn and you can tell if you've got a good stove and if you're burning properly because you go outside and what you see coming out of the chimney No smoke correct. Yeah.
Yeah, nothing if you get a bunch of black smoke coming out of the chimney I mean it just means that you're a total mess and you need to go clean out the pot What does it mean if there's white smoke coming out of the chimney? There's wet pellets new pope so the new pope Man my audio is kind of messed up. Can I just record this and then you edit it on your side with my blue vehicle? Oh, yeah, I just phone call or you sound I mean you sound great to me.
Let's do it. Yeah, absolutely So this episode of Netam questions sponsored by Hello Fresh and Matt what's the deal with Hello Fresh? Hell if rush is a meal kit delivery service that takes food geniuses and puts them in a room and It makes them figure out what would be a good thing to eat and all the components you'd need and how to get the good components And how to design a recipe they do all of that the food geniuses Then you just sign up for the service and they send it to you and then all you got to do is follow the instructions and cook it And it tastes good and it makes your family love each other more was that I mean that square with your experience Yeah, the family love each other more that you don't expect but it doesn't actually happen The food geniuses part if you were to create a food genie you were to cultivate them for some big, you know Futuristic food genius competition. How would you do that?
Yeah, well when I was in sixth grade There was a five-week special all one series episode of GI Joe where Cobra tried to make the perfect evil dictator And so what they did is they went and rated the tombs of the greatest evil geniuses of all time They stole their DNA and they put it all in the same bucket Yeah, absolutely So they created serpentor they took all the evil geniuses and they dumped all of the DNA in a bucket and they spun the bucket real hard And then a science lady moved some levers and knobs and then hit it with a bolt of electricity and what came out of that goop a guy Where in a snake costume riding a floating snake chariot and he was and he was you would expect so based on what I Under about the end the 80s. Oh, they clearly did it worked on the first try did you? So I would go and get all of the food geniuses. I'd harvest their DNA Which you gotta get the guy who invented Yeah, okay, Julie the Caesar who invented little Caesar's pizza and the Caesar salad You gotta get Paul Newman.
He made that dressing everybody likes dick and Catherine were chest to shire So you gotta get them a pretty sure those are the inventors of that. I'm doing all the heavy lifting here What are you? Turn these microphones on like hey, it's under record the hell of fresh at it. You just hold all of that What is your brain is so fascinating dude?
All right incredible and then you put it on the DNA in a bucket you swirl it up and you get the guy who makes the The hell of fresh recipes. Yeah, I think you know look at the guy that the Italian chef guy And I think I would get better what Justin Wilson the guy that Garellon P that guy I think he should be in there Oh, so yeah, and what's the lady she oh she had a show she was Meryl Streep no Julie child. No, you got it. You got it.
Yeah. Okay. Anyway, the point is hell of fresh Yes, if you want meals that are prepared by I mean, I don't know if we told you that but Matt and I went and got all the DNA from Holy chef and we put it in a bucket, huh? And we spun it up real hard than what we did it with a bolt of lightning That's right and then out pop the hello hello fresh chef And they decided they were gonna give you this following offer if you want to go to hell of fresh calm slash in DQ free That's like no damn questions in the DQ in DQ free and use code in DQ free for breakfast for life No, Matt we have explained breakfast for life.
That's a big. Yeah, that's a big deal So here's what I've done to learn more about that. I went to hello fresh calm Slash and DQ free on my smart device. It's exclusive offer for podcast listeners of the NDQ audience here You get the free breakfast for life and so then what I see right under the free breakfast for life are four circular waffles that all look delicious I'm scrolling here.
What is you pick your preferences? So I went through that I said I like the protein I said what are you trying to accomplish here with your hello? Freshing and I said I want healthy food that I can make quickly by myself and so then it put that in its hello fresh Computer hit it with a bolt of lightning pull the lever a bunch of smoke comes out And then they figure out what meals would fit that profile for me and they send me awesome things Which it looks like is going to be a lot of meat and veggies is what it's telling me. Yeah, given the input Yeah, what did you say?
Let me explain the free breakfast for life thing if you go ahead and go to indicate Basically hell of course calm question DQ free use the code in the key free they give you one breakfast item per box while your subscription is active So I think this is a this is a program where if you sign up now you get that breakfast item in every box as long as you keep that Description active that's awesome. That's a good idea. That's like if you heard about the guy that bought I forget his name, but it was some airline where he bought a ticket for $25,000 for like airline tickets for life Yes, I don't like that only your breakfast item every box of hello freshers One secret subscription that that's that work Yeah, and they finally gave up trying to run that guy off and finally they just erased it and we're like all right mister fly Five flights every single day because you're allowed to you got us. Let's make it a thing I think you want to be that person with hello fresh breakfast.
Yeah, like you and your cell phone plan I know about that. Oh yeah, so go to hellofresh.com slash in the key free use the code in the key free for free breakfast for life One breakfast item per box while subscription is active with a grateful Yep, again, that's hello fresh comm slash ndq free and use the code ndq free for free breakfast for life The boxes are gonna show up on time stuff's gonna be fresh. There's gonna be a recipe card in there That's gonna be easy to use it's gonna want to save you haven't tried out hello fresh You're gonna love it If you have tried it out it's time to get back on that because the hellofresh is doing free breakfast for life and it's delicious Thank you very much for supporting the sponsor that supports mat 9 do people a little podcast that we hope you enjoy It's a really impressive device and we had two of them there in that house And so what we'd have to do is take the truck down into town and you buy a whole bunch of bags Or maybe you have them deliver a palette and then your heating routine for your house is you sling up a bag Yeah, bring it in I had a way that I cut it I was like I'm like an assassin I had this really cool cut that I would do on the bag made me feel rad and then you dump it into the resume Basically perform sapoo on the exact right. I know what the word is.
I know what you meant. Yeah, it sounded far eastern Yeah, and then you know, so part of my nightly duties you have those as a husband and man of the house You lock certain things you check certain things you arm certain things whatever Part of my nightly duties was got to put that fresh bag of pellets in the stove So everybody's warm all through the night It's just a very different routine to heat your place So why would I go through all of that effort and energy on that cabin way out in the woods far from the most of the infrastructure in the grid To heat my house when I could just use electricity well cost I could heat that that whole poorly insulated home out in the woods with pellets for a reasonable amount But electricity was four or five six times the cost is insane But you got to have that because if you travel even if you're gone for you know a whole long day You can't keep the pellets full and so you set it to 48 degrees and your pipes don't freeze There's also a new grill design is by company called Traeger Okay And it heats the grill with these little pellets or smaller pellets like they're not they're closer to rat turds than pellet Then rabbit turds, but it'll also augur in and it can as a burner a little element right there That's pretty cool. That's neat. Yeah, does it have a smell to it?
Like can you buy potpourri smelling? Oh, I mean well, yeah, okay So these kind of so some of them have a hot area on top many do not Mm-hmm, but the ones that have a hot area above the burner you can get a real heavy cast iron pot that has the spring to dissipate heat For the grip you can picture it Yep And you can set that on there and there is entirely natural potpourri that you can throw in there with water it humidifies Yeah, and you get that potpourri smell Yeah, the wood burning stove in here has a has a flat grid on top and I remember the power went out one time We were hitting the house with it and we cooked pancakes on it. Oh really? It was really cool.
Yeah, I always threatened to do it and we never did it what I got is I had the little pot that I would use on my Wood burning fireplace and on my pellet stove We had two pellet stopes in that cabin and a wood burner in our previous place in Wyoming But eventually my fan started to break down and make noise You know the fireplace unit on all of these it has a fan or else the heat just sits there It doesn't do you any good? Yeah, and it was expensive I just didn't have the money to do the repair is a very expensive fix to make that fan work So I ordered in parts I replaced everything I could but when we ran it it would work, but it was super loud There's nothing I could do without replacing the whole unit So what do you do? You can't watch TV you can't talk maybe every now and then really warm up the house fast You run it, but everybody's super excited to turn it off Well, then I went and visited a buddy an old mountain man of the woods and do boys And he had these simple machines that were entirely made of metal and they sat on top of the fireplace I've seen these they're like a sterling Basically, it takes the temperature differential and it operates a fan. Yes.
No external source other than the temperature differential Yes, that's amazing It was the coolest thing ever and so I just bought a few of those and you set them up there and you just watch your fireplace heat up And that little fan blade is just sitting there. It looks like a almost like a windmill tower like a miniature black matte black windmill tower But there's sort of this heat distribution set of prongs up at the top like blades heat blades up at the top like a heat sink on a Processor in your computer exactly that. Yeah, the heat would move up that and you would just see the silver blades of the fans start to twitch Oh the heat demons are back look how kids and then pretty soon I think we just kick heat across the whole room was it fast. Yeah, move hard I mean you could put your finger in there and it wouldn't gas you but it didn't feel good Yeah, either.
I mean so it was enough to move air Yeah, two or three of them it would really cover the room pretty well It wasn't instant heat distribution like the loud fan that I repaired half repaired But it would move and I thought that was the coolest thing because I'm not doing anything I'm just using this passive energy to make it do something active that I want it to do kind of me That's cool because energy was gonna go in the room anyway. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool So what it is is an even localer energy management strategy now. I'm sure there are people listen to our conversation There's cringing at the idea of burning biomass Because I mean it's easy to get that mixture wrong and have that burn ugly But also I think a lot of the assumptions people have about the polluting qualities of burning biomass are a little bit antiquated Because I tell you what the the pellets though That was in that place that we bought was on its last leg It was super old it was not tuned and it was not efficient You could see it in the box the way it burned You could see it coming out the chimney that it wasn't burning efficiently You could feel it in the unevenness and unmanageability of the heat in the living space And you could see how inefficient it was and how much it cost just in pellets How often I had to put more in eventually it just broke a quick running well enough to justify it And maybe the biggest expense that I put into trying to fix up that house I went bought a super efficient new pellet stove And that thing was incredible It was real quick.
I misspoke. We had a wood burner on one side of the house and we had a pellet burner on the other in this place I said two pellet burners. Yeah, so at any rate this new pellet stove It was incredible the just immediately like our cost went in half in terms of how much we were burning So right there I can tell you that this old stove that wasn't tunable was consuming double the resources for less of the heat Right than the new stuff. So just anecdotally I should get the impression that we have made big strides in terms of efficienting and being more efficient with biomass consumption But I mean does that square with what you've seen and what you've heard or am I just making stuff up from my own experience?
I've never had a pellet Peter or anything like that But I definitely think we're getting more efficient that in engineering it's a thermodynamics and heat transfer course and uh It's it's a thing that all mechanical engineers do and we all just like let's just kind of grit our teeth and get through these classes Okay But eventually you appreciate it because it teaches you to think about the the world in terms of thermodynamic laws And so there's this thing that you always calculate which is Ada looks like the capital letter the Greek letter Not Ada. Yeah, yeah, okay. Gotcha. Yeah, it's fine.
Yeah. It looks like a capital cursive in And you learn to always calculate Ada, which is the efficiency of the system and you know, of course the goal is a 1.0 efficiency We'll never happen. What does 1.0 efficiency mean repeatable perpetual motion? Well, not Well, basically the amount of power that you put in is the power you get out So so that's 1.0.
So it's not perpetual motion that is maybe it is. Yeah, I mean like you know You're having to put energy into the system. Sure. Okay, so to get something out, but you you're always going to get out less energy than you put in Always that's just thermodynamics and so but the but the balance between the two Obviously it doesn't go away.
It it's just it's lost. It's distributed in some other way that isn't efficient or useful correct Yeah friction heat like you're losing loss and heat maybe even the material itself Maybe you're converting it to strain energy I mean there's a really weird ways that you can lose sound like you're making sound and that sound vibrates the air molecules And that takes power to do that you sound heat. Oh gosh Sound is a lot of things. I okay.
Yeah, I mean sound is complicated and a pressure wave through air is super super complicated I took a couple of classes on that kind of stuff or that it was in my classes And you start hearing words like oh the adiabatic compression of in or whatever and then you're just my eyes just kind of glisten I know compression adiabatic that when I didn't have no. Yeah, it's a yeah You start talking about entropy and enthalpy and you know Isentropic adiabatic you start using these words and then every engineer that I know they hear those words and like okay Yep, I know those words and in a pinch I could go grab that book over there There you go And I could get you back to it But we got words like that too like pumps and all this kind of stuff You'll look at the enthalpy charts and you'll figure out like well if I'm getting this energy out of the system putting this energy in It's a complicated thing And as you compress and you know you you compress fluids and as you convert water to steam You can get just the fact of the phase change over between water to steam that alone is incredible Because ideally you would have water at 211 Fahrenheit And then you had to put just a little bit of energy into it Bam you blow it in the steam once you cross that that phase change and you get the expansion You can do incredible things with steam and then nuclear plants you can do superheated steam So what they'll do is they'll they'll have water under incredible pressure And it'll be past the boiling point at atmospheric pressures, but then they expand it and not only does it just flash the steam immediately But because it's superheated steam it just does crazy stuff that I don't understand And I'm not an expert in that that area, but I just it's incredible what these engineers are doing these days This episode of not on questions is sponsored by morrison nordman wealth management That is new haven't said that on the podcast before that's interesting right the reason it is sponsored by morrison nordman is we put a call Out and we said hey, we would love to open it up to anybody that listens to the podcast that's interested in sponsoring Because we want to talk about people that like the podcast the companies made by two people matthew nordman Scott morrison and they do wealth management and I already had somebody that was working with to do financial management stuff like that Matt you actually called and did the 15 minute getting to know you call right Yeah, I did the 15 minute get to know you call and then I did another one after that and Look the company has wealth management in the name and I don't really think of wealth as something that I have But we do save every month we do have a little retirement plan thing that we do I mean we're trying to do smart things with whatever extra we have like theoretically everybody's doing every family is doing But dude, I have no plan. I don't know what to do. I don't know how this works I'm busy doing things and so the 15 minute get to know you call was great Because they told us a little bit about what they do and took some of the edge off in terms of the question like do I even qualify Am I wasting your time here?
Because I don't I don't have what I would consider to be well They took the edge off of that explained what they do and they just asked a bunch of questions about who we are and what we're Going for with life and things like that and that was really it there now You know who we are and we know who you are you want to keep talking We can look at your stuff and give you some opinions on that and I guess that was the second step in the whole process And I jumped on that first call not the one that you did but the one before we were like hey What do you do? Why do you want to sponsor? No questions and I remember talking about like the whole process and like hey is this actually worth it to you like would sponsoring? No dumb questions be beneficial to you guys and the answer was yes because they're a I would call it a virtual office So if you're looking to talk to somebody that manages finances They can help you if you're at the stage where you don't really know how to get everything in order But you know it needs to happen it would be worth time to call these folks And so the thing I thought was interesting is I was just very honest I said hey would it benefit you to run an ad on no dumb questions And one of the reasons why I was cool with it is Matthew said yes If we did this and I was able to get a client that worked out well and it was mutually beneficial Then it would have been worth it to sponsor no dumb questions And that's when I start feeling good about it And so then you took the ball and did the due diligence from our side to figure out Hey, is this something we actually want to put in front of the listeners and no dumb questions So thank you for doing that and what did you find overall on the personal side for me?
It was an unsticking process Maybe there are people in the third chair who feel this Like you're going through this part of life whatever you're in And there are things you know you should be thinking about and organizing and getting in order And you imagine everybody else has a plan and has all of this stuff in order Like everybody's got a team with all the people that do the taxes or estate planning wills Whatever any of that stuff But you're like I but I don't have that I don't have a clear plan on that I was feeling that and also feeling kind of stuck and overwhelmed Matt just did a great job of breaking it down into manageable parts that I could understand Really offering effectively what was a second opinion on how I have things set up right now It was so helpful not just from a you plan some boring detail stuff perspective But it was helpful because we got right past the things that I thought would be really boring And into here's what that looks like Lifewise here's how that unsticks you and your decision making and moves things forward And I found it to be a very empowering conversation I guess I didn't expect it to have any kind of counseling cred But it was super useful for Camilla and I for getting unstuck And feeling like we have the beginnings of some kind of plan in this aspect of our lives now Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely like retirement is scary Like that's a scary thing And so if you don't have a plan for retirement They do this thing I'm reading this right from the website They do this thing called income conductor Where basically they they look at where you're at and they set up milestones And then they can break it down into like short-term goals Mid-term goals long-term goals and what kind of return you hope to get Based on what your investments look like That's what they do They wanted to support notum questions by getting us basically to let you know that they exist What do you do Matt? How do you sign up for the call? How do you do that?
Yeah, you can call or you can go to the website which is Morrison Nordman Nordman has two ends at the end Nordman Dot com Morrison Nordman dot com Sign up for one of the 15 minute get to know your meetings Which can then roll over into a longer discovery meeting You use the language earlier that I heard Matt use a lot when we were talking The idea of a virtual family office that collaborates With all of the existing team that you have or that we have in place Those conversations provide a second opinion on how you have things set up And what you're doing Also kind of a weird way it's sort of a fear of missing out insurance Mm-hmm That if you never talk to anybody else You know like I don't really know why this is what we do We talked to one lady one time at a thing and she said do this And we just signed up and now we've been doing that for 15 years I really came away and like okay Somebody else has put eyes on this and they did so efficiently end up at that That was really helpful and I think the other thing that they could be really useful for Would be somebody who's really seen a lot of growth in their family or what they're doing In terms of their income or where they're at in life And maybe they've kind of outgrown the team that they have worked with And they want to start the process of building a new team or adding new elements to their team For all of this aspect of life Seems like they're really good at seeing the big picture of that as well Yeah, the impression I got from Matt from the call I was on with him is he's looking to build relationships with people In order to do that at 15 minute call they're gonna make sure that your values are aligned And your goals are aligned or at least he wants to understand your goals And then he's gonna use that information to help you align with what you're trying to do Like he's gonna try to set up a plan for you My understanding is the 15 minute consultation basically is just a Hey, let's chat. Let's see if it's a good fit and if it's a good fit great And anybody can do that and you just go to their website morrisonnordman.com To ins on Nordman if you scroll down There's a little sign up for the 15 minute call thing Once you do that, it's like a calendar you just pick a calendar just do it right now There's a thing that says schedule a discovery meeting And then you just go right there you can select a time and just do it Hopefully it'll help your life, help your family in the future Also, I think it's really awesome that Matt recognized that we were looking for a sponsor here on Nodean Questions And he jumped in to do that I just want to say thanks That's really cool of you Yeah, I agree and the service was really really helpful We've implemented a ton of stuff that came out of these two conversations in our household and in our plan This is kind of a watershed moment for our family in terms of what our plan looks like We've taken a lot of his advice and very helpful That's awesome a big thank you to Matthew Nordman and Scott Morrison for supporting the podcast They went to our little thing, notemquestions.fm.com They put a bid on the sponsorship slot for the podcast to support the podcast We're grateful if you'd like to show them that you're grateful Please consider going to morrisonordman.com and schedule your getting to know you call the day Last little thing I have to say here is securities offered through securities america Inc member Fi NRA slash SIPC advisory services offered through securities america advisors Inc Morrison Norman wealth management and securities america are separate entities Thank you very much for supporting the podcast You're back to the biomass thing and I suppose in keeping with what you're just saying biomass in a sense is that local vision that the dude in Utah was telling you about at the simplest localist level that is energy you are responsible for energy that you manage and make decisions for it's just incomplete energy it only does so much But the principle is there I mean from the dawn of time humans have managed their own energy usually heat energy to meet needs augment things about their natural environment to make things go It's only really very recent that we are managing that at such a grand corporate scale with so many influences and so many hands in that honestly it seems like it's going pretty well one of the things I do not have big gripes with is the grid in America yeah fair in the upper midwest or mountain west I know there are other places where people might have complaints about how the grid works yeah but we've got a company called Black Hills Energy that has black hills in the name but it's you know Iowa and Wyoming and Colorado and it's just this gigantic energy company that's at Rapid City, South Dakota I have no complaints it seems to work it doesn't seem to be politicized it doesn't seem like there's a bunch of stupid debate and argument and bickering about it basically people would like to have affordable energy in their homes and for the most part they get pretty affordable very reliable energy in their homes how would nuclear make that better either locally or regionally in your opinion well number one is cleaner so no matter what you think about climate change I mean there are people that have very strong opinions about this what I've decided to say about this is hey what if we do everything cleaner and all we have to show for it is this much greener cleaner earth man that sucks that's right that's a crazy way of thinking so I'm all about clean energy no matter what you think and I think we should be doing things cleaner in France for example they're at 80 percent of their grid nuclear energy did you know that what's Germany at I don't know it's getting less every day but right they're reducing it because shutting down nuclear plants with that which I think is for you know why I think it's political I don't know why a political party would want clean energy to go away I just don't understand I usually have a pretty good sense of the political matrix yeah oh if you have this theory yeah then right now it's fashionable to be against this and really for this in a way that everybody knows that's how politics works yeah this is one of the places where my political grid just breaks down I don't understand who it would benefit to be against nuclear right exactly especially when you're bringing in a big pipe from Russia and you're coupling yourself in a very very real political way to an unstable dictator I don't know he says a dictator but an unstable country that does drastic things in a short time frame so if you're the kind of president where there's a possible threat of imprisonment for playing a fake staged hockey game with him and if you hit him or disrupt his goal scoring your family could suffer consequences I think you're a dictator it's pretty wild I think that's it he skates pretty well you gotta get the guy credit he moves even if he's an old duty who's pretty well in skates anyway I mean I think it makes sense to have more nuclear plants I do I think and so I'm about making that push on smarter every day I'm gonna start talking about that but I'm gonna try to do it in a really cool way I got to go to the first ever nuclear plant the first place in the world that produced light from nuclear energy where's that it's an Idaho it's there at Idaho National Lab is called EBR one experimental breeder reactor one how big is it it's not big at all it's not big at all it's like a grocery store it's tiny and there's a tiny reactor and they had they had a little old-school steam turbine left over from world war two and yeah it just flicked on lights for the first day and it's really cool they have on the wall there written in chalk and said this place was the first place in the world where nuclear energy created usable power for people it said something like that it happened on this date and these people were present and they and they wrote it all down and then at the end they said yeah a couple days later they had the janitor come sign it too so the janitor came and signed as well and then they they immediately covered it in glass so this is a big deal we're uncovering glass and so it was declared a historical site yeah it's no longer producing electrical power with nuclear energy but it's all preserved you can see the hand drawn curves from the engineers that were running the different things like for example if you're to try to measure temperature of something and you have a thermocouple do you know what a thermocouple is i don't take two dissimilar metals and you create a junction just think of it as like soldering kind of okay soldering a junction between those two dissimilar metals you take that and you put it somewhere the fact that it is there's a temperature difference at that location i don't remember what the effects call it maybe that it's not the peltier so you're taking two metals where you know the the conductivity value of copper and e-mail or just somehow comparing that yeah it's how you draw the well no it'll produce a voltage it'll produce a voltage really is that yeah you take two dissimilar metals and and there's all types of standardized thermocouples and you put them together two wires and you and you put them in a place where there's a change in temperature and you will get a voltage out of that in fact you can create energy like this it's a i think it's called a pile i don't remember but anyway so this is a thing you can do but when you do this you get a voltage out and you have to equate that to a temperature so the way you would do that is if you had a cup of ice water like this cup of ice water i have right here okay the water in that is what temperature cold you know what temperature it is what's temperature the water how do i know what the temperature is i mean it's just ice water it's i don't know 34 degrees it's the freezing point so it's got to be above freezing point or that would all be frozen i mean you have ice water there so it's got to be just a little bit above because your ice is gradually melting right so i'm holding the cup and so everything outside the water is above the freezing point right and so heat's going into the water and then that's slowly trying to heat the water up but the ice is keeping it from doing that because the ice it's a boundary condition so you got a boundary condition outside the cup you got a boundary condition at the ice but my assumption would be that that heat working from the outside in is not evenly distributed through that water i mean you did shake it just a little bit yeah at the micro level you're right you got some convection going on so the you know yeah you're right but for the most part it's right freezing put a thermocouple in there and uh you just have water put a thermocouple in there so it'll be at whatever room temperature is right you drop ice in it then the temperature of the water is going to go down until it gets to the freezing point to the ice temperature right and then you've got this tug of water that's happening between the temperature of the water and the temperature of the ice and they kind of neutralize right at the freezing point okay and so the ice itself could be colder than the freezing point right well yeah sure yeah that makes sense yes so the temperature is going to it's going to stay right there at that level until all the ice melts and then the temperature will start to rise again likewise when your boil water same thing happens it's two hundred twelve Fahrenheit hundred degrees c that couple water right there is basically zero degrees c thirty two point one seven Fahrenheit whatever it is and so what you can do is you can take this thermocouple that we were talking about and you can make an ice water bath and you can put the thermocouple in there and you read the voltage and it says five volts so we know that on our little chart five volts equals thirty two point one seven degrees Fahrenheit no i had no idea how that worked and then we go to a boiling water and we stick our thermocouple in the boiling water and we say okay that's seven volts and so seven volts is equal to i'm making things up seven volts is equal to two hundred and twelve Fahrenheit or one hundred degrees c and so we now have a scale between zero degrees centigrade and a hundred degrees centigrade from five to seven right yes i understand yeah so what temperature is six volts well i don't know a little more oh come on you know did that from zero to a hundred okay five volts to seven volts so what is six volts fifty yeah you said it in this new nuclear power plant the first place they ever created nuclear energy there were charts all over the place so you'd have a meter that would say current and it would be an ammeter so be measuring amps right beside it would be a little bitty frame and a piece of graph paper just sitting there and it would have somebody's hand-drawn curve and what they did is they said okay well this this thing right here is the level of water in that tank over there and they have some kind of device in there that when the tank was empty because somebody went measured it with a uptake measure when the tank was empty where it four volts when the tank is full where it 12 volts or 12 amps or whatever the device however the device was measuring it sure and so they just literally drew the graph and they drew it on the page there that's how you measured it so you read you read your meter like oh we're at 12 amps and then you go over to the graph and you left it okay okay we're at 36 inches of water in our tank it's cool it's cool to see that how these people were trying to figure out how to measure all the things and they didn't have the instrumentation so they just made it and i'm particularly fascinated by the implications for all of this in terms of scale and that gets us pretty close to why i brought this whole thing up the relationship between energy and power not energy power but power power to expand the influence of the individual or to expand the influence of a noble state or to expand the influence of an ignoble state it seems like power is very attached to energy every single stupid action sci-fi comic book movie seems to understand this relationship there's a blue light laser going into the sky that's a bad guy trying to harness energy so that they can rule the world and it seems to me that a great way to democratize power not just through the force of the law and saying we're going to have democracy and saying we're going to respect that we're going to respect the nobility of the individual it seems like a great way to do it is to come up with more ways that take energy make it safe make it clean but put you in charge of it yeah everybody gets their own little fusion reactor because power is power which is a little bit of pause over the fusion reactor side of things but solar and the local wind generators they don't get this done it doesn't accomplish this vision that i'm talking about here and the reason is because it's cyclical like the sun's only out at certain times a day if you're in fenland you get several months where you just don't get sun they should vote to change that the wind uh you don't get to decide when the wind kicks on and so you do in wyoming do you always really yeah it's always on do you guys have a lot of condor cusen arts out there it's the uh i don't know these windmills were like gonna save the world right and then they noticed i don't remember where it was maybe it was california where they were starting the birds could see just a bird blender is a bird's letter to the condor cusen arts but the windmills or wind turbines i always try to say turbines not windmills so a mill is a thing that grinds up the grain a turban is a thing that you know it's like a gear train you can create power with it so i always try to say wind turbine so i think the wind turbine is the promise of a beautiful future that al gore gave us all but then i don't think it's actually what it all cracked up to be because there's many issues with wind turbines like at the end of the life cycle how do you dispose of that thing it's proven to be brutally difficult i mean we're making giant landfill graveyards with parts of these non-recyclable wind turbines and it was fun to imagine that would be clean but there's a huge economic energy and environmental cost to getting rid of the thing and my impression is that the equation is upside down the negatives in those three categories are outweighing the positives i could be wrong i'm not against wind power i'm against power that doesn't do what it's supposed to do and if wind power is what i'm starting to get the impression it is then i'm against it because it would mean the only reason we're really doing it is performative it makes people feel good you know it makes me it looks neat to have a big thing i saw that that's gonna pivot then because things that make people feel good but aren't what they thought it was as soon as it quits making people feel good people turn on those things aggressively i think the important thing is you have to be intellectually honest we talked about eta before efficiency in order to be intellectually honest about nuclear power we have to take into account the diesel fuel that was in the dump truck or the big loader that helped get that uranium out of the ground yes you do and we have to take into account the energy in the welder the power being used in the welder that helped make that reactor yeah and if you really want to get it how about the three dollar and fifty cent gasoline for the person running the welder to get to work that day yeah how many people had to show up what did it take to put food in their bellies i mean all of those things they go really are part of the equation they go into the equation and so the interesting thing is uh a lot of people don't like nuclear because it feels bad in their minds i feel the exact opposite but if you look at the amount of people that have been killed by nuclear power versus the amount of people that have been killed by for example what was it kentucky or tennessee where they had this big ash flood we talked you know we were talking about our floods that's all these people that died as a result of this storage facility of all this coal fly ash or whatever it was called how many people have been killed as a result of nuclear power not including nuclear attack oh it's very very small you know who knows it's the internet in fukushima i think the answer was zero wasn't it was a one was one guy who went in it was late in life the one engineer who was like somebody needs to go in there i'll do it like spock and star trek two or whatever it was we went and i think just you will just spoil a movie from me in a heartbeat and just like star trek two from 1982 with zero from 1982 inhibitions you're like you know what dude you have had four plus decades to go and watch that there's a literally existed for your entire life the dude Leonard Nimoy has been dead for the better part of a decade just saying i'm just saying it's a blind spot okay that's fair hey like i'm not trying to be a jerk yeah i actually am ester gets the king to execute haman at the end of the book why would you tell me that you should have read it you had a chance to read it it's been out since 450 b c if you didn't get around to it that's your own problem we're just why would you tell me how good you uh no i want to know uh how many total deaths from nuke layer i got a book in here that tells me that okay all right here we go pal engineering dot com february 2021 have we had any nuclear meltdowns that have killed people since 2021 not that i'm aware i don't know where i'm aware of you there so let's assume these numbers are somewhat reliable there have been three major accidents and nuclear power plants since their inception in 1951 sure noble three mile island of fukish nailed it yeah yep all right you're three mile island it's new york that's what i thought too this says middleton pennsylvania really i thought it was new york i did too i was wrong about that then i mean i would have said that with absolute confidence kind of like you did you know where sherry obelis uh that's in uh that's like west texas right according to this hady really i huh i who would have thought fukishima uh fukishima that that's in mexico right no it's japan gummy i thought i knew this stuff there was a pattern and you failed to pick up on it all right capacity factor by energy source i don't okay the ratio energy looks like nuclear looks really really good there all right loss of life in nuclear accidents here we go with the caveat that no loss of human life should be considered acceptable hey good writing yeah that's good we did not classify it why didn't i think of that i agree with that caveat i affirm it the international atomic energy agency okay so they're going to be a little bit biased in favor of atomic energy i think i don't know that they are the international atomic energy agency they're pretty good all right i mean the nuclear regulatory agencies are incredibly depending on who you talk to like if you work at a nuclear plant you would almost view them as oppressive okay i can picture that yeah because i mean people are scared of nuclear so they go over the top to make sure it's safe the iaa is uh it kind of serves double duty because they want to make sure nobody's refining stuff more than they should okay how many people do you think they say died it's your noble i don't know i don't know i don't know i haven't watched the hb o series i don't know they say 31 wow yeah two of those deaths were due to the explosion okay 29 were first responders okay but isn't there like life shortened by cancer and it's got like that from share no bowl it's got to be i mean i guess that's a comorbidity at that point whereas the first responders and obviously yep regrettably getting exploded yeah that's not a comorbidity like if you had covid when share noble exploded and you were in share noble i think that's just a share noble death i think we should kind of touch okay fukushima 20 000 died in the earth wow in the earthquake itself 20 000 in the flood in the earthquake dude that's a lot of people godly that's a lot of three lander wyomings wow that's amazing total number killed is uh from the radiation exposure it was one there's one guy that's amazing that said an additional 573 indirect deaths are attributed to the disaster mostly due to evacuation stress a weird yeah oh and here's the one that i always heard about when i was a kid total deaths at three mile island i don't know zero yeah since 1951 six hundred sixty seven nuclear power plants have been built across the world today 440 are operating across 32 countries and account for more than 10 percent of total electricity produced to put these numbers into perspective in 70 years and with a total of 667 nuclear power plants that have ever operated only three major accidents have taken place and the combined death total is 32 this sentence is amazing in fact estimates on the number of deaths caused by the nuclear energy sector overall is 90 per i don't know what these numbers and letters mean i'm going to show you 1000 capital terawatt hours huh that seems pretty good they estimate that coal if nuclear is nine per what i just say 1000 terawatt hours yeah coal they say is 100 000 whoa those are very different numbers those are very different numbers if that is to be trusted those are very compelling numbers yeah yeah that's amazing interesting so my initial thought was i like nuclear power and i am bulky about the idea of any kind of democratization of that any local expression of that but we if if you could take those safety standards and have them applied at more local levels and we could get those numbers that amount of energy with that amount of safety or even close to that amount of safety i don't get why we wouldn't do that yeah but you're thinking about traditional reactors too like some of the newer reactor technologies are incredibly safe some of the newer reactors they're working on they can't melt down because they're already molten so melt down though that doesn't that's not just an expression for like break meltdown is a specific heat reaction it's a specific process that occurs i'm not prepared to talk about this and this is why because i am on the beginning of my journey to learn a lot about nuclear power and for example one of the videos i recorded and it's amazing is how to measure the temperature of a nuclear reactor core anal thermometer close except for the anal part it's not okay so you don't nothing nothing there's no i think there's a special tip on those i didn't know if none of that okay so just a regular one i don't know i don't i don't want to talk about yet because it's it's so cool and i went so deep down the rabbit hole and it's uh it's amazing it's amazing like the fact that you can monitor inside of a nuclear reactor is incredible because the fact that the reactor is running means you are irradiating the device that you are using to record temperature and so the ability of that device to measure temperature changes and so you remember the curve we drew earlier between ice and boiling water so what that means is your thermometer the curve that it responds to different temperatures is changing as you're measuring so it's it's kind of a weird differential equation and so it gets more complicated than just sticking that thermocouple down there you have to do really neat things including i got to meet a scientific glass blower and uh he showed me how to make a thing that could tell you some that's as opposed to like an artisanal medieval renaissance fair glass blower yes okay exactly yeah it's uh it's a whole thing it's a whole thing so instead of using soda lime glass they're using quartz they're using borosilicate and they're using you know like which is pyrex they're using really interesting things which means the the working time they have on these materials is lower because they don't have this uh this plateau of workability in the temperature curve i don't know okay we're not done with that conversation deep rabbit hole and i understand that the biggest thing that i wanted to pick your brain about and you were the right person i mean dude the fact that you could just engage in an hour of that with no warning no notice no heads up and take me down that rabbit hole is great but if you recall all the way back at the conversation we're talking about the monocled steampunk superman who controls all the energy yes it's a derigible with auto guns and for some reason he looks like wario in my head yeah yeah and it's a curly moustache up the monocle maybe not the hat it's a little overweight but he has suspenders so it's working and this is suspenders are metal okay we're picturing the same guy right yeah he's angry on that perfect it's a laughable caricature obviously but also there's a reason that motif keeps coming up in storytelling it's because it's a believable motif power he is power if you distribute actual power not imagined power like we will not comply we're gonna resist okay cool but actual practical usable energy if you distribute the control over that i think human rights abuses are harder to happen i think justice is more likely to happen with power comes resources it comes with the ability for people from any background to speak any language coming from any story just history aside here's access to energy and power that you can just do things with build things with be creative and i think the result could be i think there could be answers to some of the questions we have societally about justice about how we move forward about community and unity and being one people in the democratization of energy so i wanted to pick your brain a little bit about what that could even look like and this was really helpful thank you very much for asking these questions i've got so much stuff in my head right now and i'm scared to say any of it because it's not fully formed and i want to revisit this in the future because i've got some i've got some ideas that i want to run past you including the geopolitical ramifications of certain countries using certain types of reactors yes i'm down for the conversation and also i have another whole thread of questions about this that i want to pick it right about we'll do that in a future episode as well