this episode is sponsored by audible ever since humans figured out that the Sun is powered by hydrogen fusion we've imagined controlling the process and powering our civilization with miniature Suns but as it turns out the Sun is highly impractical and we're going to need to design something a lot battle [Music] so today we are looking at fusion power how it might walk what's holding up this technology and what cool new options it opens up for all civilization many of these possibilities are less obvious than simply cheap electricity or fast spaceships but just as important this is a topic we mentioned in passing a lot on this channel as a keystone for many of our future technologies and pathways so as we progress I'll pop up the kavod for the relevant episodes I thought we should start by addressing the challenges with achieving a walking fusion reactor there is an overused saying that makes me scowl whenever I hear it that Fusion is the technology of twenty years from now and always will be fusion as a serious concept is a lot newer than many of our other power sources and has progressed neither particularly fast or nor slower than most of them just an example solar power itself an example of how a fusion from the Sun has only recently become economically viable as a primary power source back when I was a kid in the 1980s we really only saw photovoltaics on very low-energy portable devices like calculators as it was very expensive and inefficient it was not new technology then either way back in 1876 it was found that you could generate electricity by exposing selenium to sunlight and Charles Fritts made the force solar cells in 1883 so it took over a century before we even had good enough solo to consider commercial usage of it he was also half a century after those four solar cells before we even knew what fusion was and before that we thought the sunlight running those primitive solar cells was caused by gravitational collapse we had our forced walking artificial fusion source a newer generation later with the hydrogen bomb in 1952 similarly while Ben Franklin did his famous kite-flying experiment with electricity in 1752 he was half a century later before Alessandro Volta for whom the vault is named built the forced electric battery then it was a couple more generations before we saw the forced electric generators and engines and a couple more before Edison and Tesla hit the scene considering how hard it is to experiment with fusion something which only naturally caused in the heart of stalls it isn't all that surprising that we still don't have a walking fusion reactor less than a century after we even realized such a thing as fusion existed it's not helpful when folks go around talking about twenty years from now light that was useful or meaningful when its time line is still shorter than the development of many other technologies from computers and rockets to other power generation mechanisms the other big issue is that you need large high-tech and expensive facilities just to experiment with fusion in a serious way which usually means any time you learn something new from an experiment you need around 20 years just to digest and theorize about that new data draw up a new experiment pitch a grant proposal for major government funding to build new massive and expensive facilities and then build them before you can get your next set of data to refine your models rinse and repeat now ask to the mechanism there's a bit more to it than hydrogen slamming together and turning into helium at millions of degrees at high temperatures the electrons get stripped off atoms and you have a plasma of atomic nuclei in the case of common hydrogen one the nucleus is just a single proton with no neutrons to fuse two protons together you forced have to overcome the repulsion of their positive charges and the closer you get them together the greater the force and energy involved that energy is what we call the Coulomb barrier their normal means for supplying that energy to move the particles together at high speed can be done in a particle collider but the method used in stalls is just heat which is just a measure of how fast individual particle is all traveling one of the things that slowed us down on figuring out what power the Sun was that its temperature isn't actually high enough to overcome that Coulomb barrier that takes various quantum effects and so does binding the protons together once they get there and here's where we get into what makes hydrogen fusion so tricky it's a whoreo that comes Oly in a fairly complicated process when a pair of protons get close enough together the strong nuclear force will bind them kind of into a very unstable isotope called a die proton which nearly always splits right back into a pair of protons very rarely and here's where quantum mechanics comes in that died potent instead emits a positron and decays into a nucleus of deuterium a proton Neutron peor from there they are actually a number of next steps that might take place some of which is that deuteron might fuse with another proton or do neuron to produce various intermediate isotopes that undergo fusion and decay reactions of their own before finally producing nice stable nuclei of helium for which have two neutrons and two protons but the difficult hortal to Cleo the bottleneck in the whole process is that rayo decay of a die proton into deuterium that bottleneck is the reason stars take billions of years to use up their hydrogen the half-life of a proton in the core of our Sun before it is fused into to Tyrion is about a billion years which is to say bouncing around at that temperature in the core way of fusion is actually taking place any given proton only has coin-flip odds of fusing into deuterium in a billion years even though would fuse briefly into dye protons several times along the way that's a good thing for us because we wouldn't be around if the Sun burned fuel faster than that indeed bigger stars create a higher pressure at their cores resulting in faster fusion so they have shorter lives precisely because they have more fuel even then it's pretty slow for all purposes it doesn't come up much in our discussion of fusion as a power source but if you could replicate the conditions inside the Sun in some reactor down here on earth with several tons of fusion fuel inside it that would release perhaps a billion billion joules of energy over the course of a billion years which means it could run a lightbulb and while it would last a billion years you'd have to expend energy to maintain and run the thing - that's the two foremost challenges of fusion reactors getting a net positive energy gain and dealing with all the damage to the components and containment vessel from the radiation fortunately the past few decades of research have unit improvements in the efficiency of the design and durability of the alloys we use in fusion all indeed though still not enough but again such a reactor doesn't interest us much as a power source any more than an h-bomb does so we need something that can run a lot hotle people talk about how hard it is to replicate the conditions inside a stall but we alway past that we usually estimate the temperature of the Sun's core at about 15 million Kelvin while those talk Mach fusion reactors you've heard about can run at 150 million Kelvin 10 times hotter and we've actually briefly produced temperatures in the trillions in labs by ramming particles together so again we are not trying to replicate the center of our Sun because that's not good enough we are also not trying to do proton proton fusion much right now the default approach is to use deuterium or tritium hydrogen isotopes with a proton and one or two neutrons or helium-3 with two protons and one Neutron or lithium which has three protons these isotopes have lower Coulomb barriers to overcome to produce a fused particle and release energy so they are our four step deuterium deuterium or dd fusion is often seen as the most attractive because deuterium while Rayo compared to normal hydrogen is still very common on earth whereas tritium has a half-life not much over a decade so it's hard to find and helium is quite rare on earth and helium-3 even more so handily if you do have a fusion reactor you can build ships that can quite quickly and economically go fetch these rail fuels from all various gas giants and helium-3 is an attractive fusion fuel for reasons we'll get to you in a bit remember how difficult it is to produce deuterium from protons when we fuel a fusion bomb or reactor with deuterium we are taking advantage of the fact that dead stones of whose material our planet is made already took care of the most difficult part of fusion for us thanks universe your ideal fusion reactor though would run basic hydrogen all the way through the various heavy effusion chains to ion releasing energy at each step this series of reactions can be considered the ultimate goal as it's the most efficient use of fuel but achieving such a thing is a long way off I should note that not all fusion reactions produce energy in general those resulting in elements heavier than ion our net negatives these reactions are easier in some ways to its fusion when you add neutrons to uranium 238 to turn it into plutonium 239 for instance so regular fusion is how to do particularly as we had to do it better than star scan and with far less mass and gravity to walk with so what are the methods well force there is the h-bomb which use a fission explosion to make fusion a core in much the same way we use conventional explosives to set off the fission reaction we can make power with this and I mean usefully - you can make small fuel pellets of plutonium and your fusion fuel essentially small H bombs and set them off in something that can absorb the energy like water or preferably molten salt which you then tap for power more slowly using conventional heat engines like many power plants use then all you have to do is set a new one off every so often to reheat the liquid medium this is a fission fusion hybrid arguably a chemical fission fusion hybrid since it uses chemical explosives to Knight the fission to ignite the fusion but bomb grade explosives on cheap and neither is weapons-grade uranium or plutonium for the fission or deuterium and tritium for the fusion at least the tritium anyway deuterium actually is relatively cheap and more so when you have an abundant cheap power source for SEPA near from Waddell so it's pricey but the cost would get low or scale these need to be big plans and the big or the battle ideally ones powerful enough you only needed a few poor country but at least it lets you get a lot more juice out of your fissile materials whether or not it would be competitive or cheaper than existing power is debatable but that wouldn't necessarily matter if you're running out of material for those existing sources now you could make smaller bombs for smaller reactors using transionic elements beyond even plutonium but that wouldn't be for earth-based power but someplace where you needed a small and short-lived but powerful reactor all these out high-tech futuristic technology incidentally I'd say we could build one tomorrow but the scale of such a plant would imply many years of construction to make something big enough and sheer enough to absorb even small blasts however this sort of approach is more attractive if you've got cheap superconductors since it means you can have very few but very large plants or ones in isolated areas without losing lots of your energy to resistance in your electric wires of course superconductors also make awesome magnets which is the keystone of the best known approach to fusion taça Max and other magnetic confinement systems hot hydrogen and helium turned into plasmas of charged particles so very susceptible to magnetic fields and so we can use them to contain all plasma and this is important because that plasma needs to be hundreds of millions of degrees and even our best alloys can only handle thousands of degrees so if the plasma could touch the containment vessel it would slag the whole thing your basic taco Mack is a big toy Boyt or donut created by using magnets to contain the plasmas and to exhort the force on them to speed up and start slamming particles around so they get hotter the primary problem is that doing this takes energy hence concept of breakeven so you need a reactor that produces more energy than it takes to heat everything up the next problem is actually utilizing that energy and the general assumption is that you'd be absorbing the radiation given off as heat in the containment vessel and exchanging it with coolant with which you'd then generate power through a normal heat engine and there's a lot of losses in such a process which means your real breakeven in a practical engineering and economic sense is even higher the next problem after that is that you are irradiating that containment vessel you have to if you want to get power after all and while magnets are good at continuing protons and electrons they don't protect against gamma rays neutrinos or neutrons all of which are being produced though the neutrons are the major kin so on none of these are thought to be unconquered or problems and we've been slowly approaching the break-even point over the years but we've also been encountering other issues as we progress the tokamak tends to be the default fusion reactor everything else gets compared to and comes in other shapes than two voids like spheres but it isn't the only approach even focusing only on magnetic confinement there are many other variations another method is inertial confinement which usually use a laser or charged matter beam to slam enough energy into a fusion fuel pellet to ignite fusion and is conceptually pretty similar to the technique we discussed for making goo-goo bullets black holes only a lot easier this is the approach the National Ignition facility uses another confinement approach is inertial electrostatic which uses electric fields to speed up the plasma rather than magnets though the poly well approach combines the two you've also got magnetic and electric pinch approaches a pinch in this context is where you get some electric filament such as a plasma and compress it magnetically and you actually see this in the sky a lot with lightning bolts and the Aurora there's a few types of pinch designs but the main one is the Z pinch which you might recognize from the Z machine or z post powell facility at Sandia National Labs this is also an example of post Powell same as the h-bomb rounds where the idea is to produce it in quick enough boss that has essentially continuous for practical applications there are all many other methods but I'd like to get on to the practical impact of fusion so we'll skip them though I don't want to imply the old mission reflects badly on them while the idea of cold fusion has a deservedly shady reputation a lot of other fusion experiments get tainted by association with that usually unfairly the last thing I wanted to mention real quick is helium-3 and a neutronic fusion most fusion approaches produce a lot of neutrons which damage and a radiating we don't want that if we can avoid it helium-3 produces a lot less neutrons in its various fusion chains like helium helium helium deuterium or helium lithium it's how to do than various deuterium and tritium reactions but it would permit longer-lived and lital reactors which makes it especially tempting for spaceship engines there is very little helium-3 on earth and the moon isn't really a great source of air either due to its very low concentration in the regolith but there is plenty of it out in the gas giants and that could easily drive colonization of Uranus and Neptune as we discussed in colonizing Neptune as they have the highest concentrations and plenty of deuterium - the key thing is you don't need much of it on the earth or the moon to start using it since the moment you have a fusion reactor good enough for spaceship you've got a spaceship that can easily run back and forth to Neptune to collect helium-3 and a reactor that can easily power refineries and habitats around those gas giants fall from the Sun indeed it's good enough for interstellar travel - potentially allowing speeds of 10 to 20 percent of light speed though more realistically probably less than that check out atomic Rockets if you want a detailed breakdown of the various hypothetical fusion drives Winchell's website goes in the details without bogging it down in techno speak obviously the biggest application for fusion normal or a neutronic is power generation since down on earth you don't care about power to mass ratios fusion rockets are the other as we just mentioned but it's not so good for ground to spaceships because while you can't accelerate slowly in space which fusion is really good at you really need high thrust to get out of an atmosphere and your default high efficiency high power fusion torch drive does not radiates containment vessel to warm it up and run a heat engine or superheat some propellants but rather it dumps all that hot plasma out the back as the propellant which is decidedly unhealthy not that standing in a normal rocket flame is very healthy either but a super hot plasma exhaust with lots of gamma rays and Neutron flux is a whole new level of hazardous especially considering such ships probably need to be quite large too they also might not be great for power generation in space at least not reasonably near the Sun fundamentally while fusion is very energy dense fusion power is really not you're heating something up to run a normal heat engine and in space you could achieve the same thing by taking a bunch of thin parabolic Neos and aiming them at some walking medium considering how cheap Amira is how much sunlight there is and how much empty space there is to put the meals in you all probably going to find it's cheaper in the no solar system in terms of both money and mass for stationary power generation to just use so long though as with every power generation method there's likely to be occasions where one system now performs another for a specific use even if in most other cases it does not now down on earth what's the advantage forced you're not beaming any energy down from space as we discussed in power satellites or dealing with clouds or night time for ground-based solo second even if you are limited to deuterium or even helium-3 and tritium you're going to get a lot more energy from those stockpiles on earth or throughout the soul then you would from chemical or fission fuels there is no such thing as a truly renewable power source but we count the Sun as the next best thing and Fusion parallels or beats that it also doesn't generate the highly radioactive waste that fission does though I should note that the Pheo of radioactive waste from fission especially with modern methods is decidedly exaggerated it also doesn't produce carbon dioxide nor does extracting deuterium from ocean water cause any ecological issues associated to mining in fact since carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is produced by adding oxygen to hydrocarbons and producing water and carbon and energy it's worth noting that you can run that process backwards just paying energy to do it and that's not advanced science sucking carbon dioxide and water out of a or to make hydrocarbons and oxygen in reverse is quite easy it's just going to take you more energy than you get by bone yet but if you've got a huge source of energy though not a mobile one you suddenly can stop making gasoline out of air as a nice compact carbon neutral power source chemical fuels are awesome ways of generating power compared to even all best modern batteries so if you can synthetically produce a cheap unlimited and ecologically safe supply of them the impact would be huge it could be carbon negative too since you could dump that carbon out of the air into mine shafts or maybe make diamonds or graphene out of it needless to say those are valuable to us too but diamonds might be energy prohibitive to mass-produce as a construction material unless you have good fusion reactors there is also aluminium though and for that matter steel aluminium is awesome stuff for building many things but cost prohibitive because it takes a ton of electricity to make simile while you do need carbon for steel the main use of it in steel making is for heat so Fusion lets you make both cheaper than and if you are using it to run carbon sinks it lets you get away with using concrete to your heart's content without carbon concerns it also makes a vertical farming or cold climate farming in greenhouses economically viable as you can now run lighting and heating at competitive cost to natural open AO farming amplifying the amount of food you can get out of a chunk of land you can also disseminate Waddell and pump it anywhere with that kind of energy allowing the conversion of arid deserts and Tundras for agriculture similarly with cheap power you can recycle virtually any material economically and extract new metals in more environmentally friendly ways we only touchy on the options available which we've discussed in a lot of our episodes particularly the impact of fusion episode in all shows for season and the arcologies and accomplice episodes there looked how far you can go with vertical farming when you have a ton of cheap energy this is a power source that basically eliminates most ecological problems directly or indirectly allows interplanetary and even interstellar space travel and lets you tell form planets or build and light and heat artificial habitats I think sometimes the skepticism toward fusion as mentioned at the beginning has to do not with it developing particularly more slowly than most other technologies have but rather in part from its breakthrough and Wando status it being seemingly miraculous now there are still some downsides and limits for staff the cost of power is notch as the cost of fuel which is not free even for fusion especially if you need to use rare isotopes than deuterium or plain hydrogen power plants need maintenance electric grids need maintenance but you'd expect to see a big drop in cost and possibly more of a subscription approach rather than a poor unit approach like we tend to do with phones and the internet you pay for access to a sort an amount of power whether you use it or not rather than poor unit of energy which might mean big industrial users get their energy very cheaply as everyone's really paying for their electric lines and building and maintaining the power plants you'd also have huge knock-on effects to the economy when gasoline fertilizer construction with Tyrael and many manufactured goods all get cheap all the price of power might only get cut in half but if everyone is owning twice as much and paying half as much for many goods it's not just a tiny cut in your electric bill it's an economic snowball and it's why I usually count fusion as more the handful of technologies that if you've got it either by itself or maybe with one other instantly kicks you into a post-scarcity civilization putting it bluntly within a couple of decades of us developing a viable commercial fusion reactor even one that can only match modern energy cars whether that be tomorrow or a century from now will almost certainly push humanity into an era of universal prosperity since so much of what's holding us back from that today is the limited stock powers of fuels and the wars over their usages of course it's not a total into ecological war is like global warming either greenhouse gases trap heat but if you're using enough power green or not you can start warming up fortunately you need to have trillions of people living on earth before that was a serious issue and we discussed some ways to get around that in ekam innopolis --is planet-wide cities one of those approaches was great big space towels or or blow rings for radiating heat or bringing food and materials down to earth cheaply so you could reduce how much heat you made here on the ground and active support structures which require a lot of power is something fusion is great for - and that's fusion in a nutshell unsurprisingly the power of the Sun when we get it walking offers us a very bright future Fusion is one of those technologies like smart automation that offers a key to unlock the galaxy to us and make our own world into a paradise mini athos tend to write dystopian science fiction to add tension and challenge but while those often make for great stories they often feel very unrealistic to me even if they have good house science in them there is more to realistic science fiction than just getting the science poet right the civilizations aren't display have to feel realistic for the setting and Technology - and of course paradise is really without its own new challenges and can be a bit subjective one of my favourite authors in that regard is Peter F Hamilton particularly as Commonwealth saga beginning with the novel pandora stall set in the 24th century the book shows us me fantastic and immense ideas but also gives us a close look at day-to-day life and how those wonders like energy and land abundance and life extension begin shaping that civilization later books in the series follow that civilization into future centuries the series is also narrated by John Lee who as I've mentioned before is my favorite audiobook narrator and as usual he gives an excellent performance that only improves and already excellent series you can get a free copy of Pandora stall at audible.com slash Isaac or text Isaac to 500 500 audible offers a 30-day free trial but each month your member you now get a free audiobook and two audible originals and those credits roll over to the next month or year and stay yours along with ebooks you got even if you later discontinue your membership and with their convenient app you can listen on any of your devices and seamlessly pick up where you left off whether you're listening at home commuting running errands or off jogging or at the gym audible makes it cheap and easy to access a vast collection of amazing stories so a couple quick announcements before we hop into the schedule for the rest of the month forced and updates and apology back around the beginning of the year I grabbed a post-office box after a quest I give folks a non-electronic way to send me things and obviously didn't want my home address up there on the internet but some confusion during the set up was often in a lot of that guinere a tone to sandal and I didn't find out for months that should be fixed now and the address is still Isaac o thaw at P o box five to nine geneva ohio for four oh four one in the united states second we have a new extra episode upon nebula about the butterfly effect and I'll leave the promo link in the episode description so you can use the seven-day free trial to check that out and our previous one the paper clip Maximizer Nebula is a new streaming service a bunch of us creators got together to make as an experimental alternative hosting platform to give us more flexibility in content and control of all content and its launch exceeded even almost optimistic expectations there's a lot of material I and other creators on YouTube mostly don't create because we worry about getting punished by the recommendation algorithms and nebula is designed to help us with that and we'll keep adding features as it grows in general the stuff I upload there that is just bonus episodes will migrate over to YouTube after a couple of months but other contents like extended commentary or behind-the-scenes material that folks ask for but which would get butchered by the YouTube algorithms will likely stay exclusively they are and will get challenged specific links for patreon supporters integrated into that in the near future too as you probably noticed we had a lot more callbacks to prior episodes than normal as this topic is very integrated into a lot of our episodes and these days there's about 200 episodes many look at things which seem nyam possible but technologies like fusion might one day bring them into existence with that in mind we'll be having our 200th official episode things which will never exist in just two weeks before then though there's another topic we discuss a lot and that is mega structures or other giant constructs like generation ships or artificial planets and something we don't look at much when discussing those is how you go about maintaining those and sweep up all the debris you generally need to clear out or generate in making and using them so next week we'll take a look at the untidy underside of our big bright future in space genitals and make a structural maintenance for lost windows and other episodes come out make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell and if you enjoyed this episode hit the like button share it with others also if you want to check out any of those mini past episodes we mentioned today check out the playlist for the channel here on YouTube or our website isaac althought net until next time thanks for watching and have a great week [Music]


this video has been sponsored by Ray Khan for as long as I can remember I've always been a big fan of energy drinks but maybe surprisingly it's not even for the caffeine I just like the weird chemical taste that they have and for some reason I've always liked Red Bull the most my only issue is that I think I'm a bit sensitive to caffeine and if I ever have one later than like 4 p.m. it makes it almost impossible to fall asleep so for years I've wanted them to make a caffeine free Red Bull that I'd be able to drink at night I never really did anything to make this happen until this past January when I decided to email Red Bull I honestly didn't think they'd ever respond but I figured that it was worth asking just to see what they'd say I was very surprised that they actually got back to me in less than 24 hours but I was very unsurprised that they completely rejected my idea now knowing that they weren't gonna help me at all I had no choice but to somehow do it myself the only issue though and the main reason why I didn't try doing this years ago is that it might actually be impossible this is because most of the time when you extract something you're willing to completely destroy the thing that you're taking it from in this case though I had to somehow take out just the caffeine and not touch or modify anything else that was in there I also couldn't use any chemicals that might be left behind and if I took out even small amounts of certain ingredients it could really change the flavor this left me with very few options and after thinking about it for a long time I felt that there was only one way to do it by using an organic solvent that doesn't mix with water it might be possible to selectively pull out just the caffeine I did something like this years ago where I used the solvent called DCM to extract the caffeine from tea and coffee the caffeine that I got was surprisingly pure and it didn't seem to pull out much else there is a major difference though between coffee and Red Bull and that is acidity in general coffees slightly acidic with a pH of around 5 but Red Bull and other sodas tend to be a lot more acidic and this is a major problem because caffeine doesn't like to get extracted when things are acidic when I did it with the coffee I didn't care about the actual coffee and I threw in a bunch of bass to artificially raise the pH however in this case I wouldn't be able to add anything I was able to find a chart though and Red Bull is apparently one of the less acidic sodas out there which gave me hope that this extraction might be possible but it was still quite acidic with a pH of three point four three and this meant that a lot of it might not be extractable however knowing the pH it should have been possible to calculate how much I could take out to do this I just needed a property of the caffeine called the pKa the pKa is kind of a measurement of how acidic a molecule is and for most common chemicals this number is pretty consistent but for some reason it seems like nobody knows what's going on with caffeine I found some sources that said it's PKA was as low as point six or 0.8 and some said 14 others said that it was 0.8 and 14 and some said that it was just eight point three or ten point four the problem here is that if it is actually less than one then a hundred percent of it is extractable and everything should work perfectly but if it's actually eight point three or above it's closer to zero percent extractable and it's a complete waste of time my personal feeling just by looking at the caffeine molecule was that it was probably closer to the lower values so I figured it was still worth trying out before if you get started though I also had to look at the ingredients list on the can I had to check the solubility of each ingredient and to see if any of them would dissolve in DCM from all the named ingredients I was happy to see that caffeine was apparently the only one however I was a bit spooked out by the artificial flavors and colors because it was very possible for those to get pulled out along with the caffeine the color didn't really matter but the flavor was definitely an issue and unfortunately there was no way for me to find out exactly what these artificial flavors were so just like with the pKa I kind of just had to try it out and see what happened to get this all started I got a couple cans of Red Bull and I emptied them into a dish then after that I put it into a food desiccator that's normally meant to dry things like fruits and vegetables what I was trying to do here was get rid of most of the water to reduce the scale that I had to work on this was just make things easier in general and it would let me use less solvent for the extraction at the same time it would also get rid of all the carbonation which would have made the extraction absolutely impossible I set the desiccator at the lowest temperature setting because I was a bit worried that it might mess up the flavor if it got too hot I had no idea if this was actually even an issue but I felt that it was safer this way and the only difference was that it would take a bit longer I also had no idea how long to run it for but I just randomly felt that 10 hours was probably good so I just let it run overnight and this was what I had the next day it looked like most of the water was gone but what I really liked was that it didn't look like it had become too syrupy what I had to do now was taste it to make sure that leaving it overnight in open air hadn't messed up the flavor just tastes like concentrated Red Bull it's actually pretty good okay that's good guys okay so it seemed to be fine and I could now move on to the extraction part to do this I first poured it all into a beaker to see how much I had it was apparently only a hundred mils which meant that I'd gotten rid of 400 mils of water I'm not sure how much water was left but I can't imagine there was very much I then poured all of this into a separatory funnel and on top of it I added 30 mils of DCM the DCM had a much higher density and it also couldn't mix into the syrup so almost all of it just quickly sank to the bottom the idea here was at the caffeine and hopefully nothing else was much more soluble in the DCM this would cause the caffeine to prefer being in the DCM and it should slowly get pulled from the syrup but just letting it sit like this wouldn't work very well because the two liquids are barely touching to have an efficient extraction I had to maximize the surface area between the two and this is usually done by just shaking it so I sealed the funnel with a stopper took it off the stand and I really tried to mix them together when I felt that I had done a decent job I put it back on the stand and I waited for it to separate again however it was at this moment that I realized I had made a huge mistake over the last year I've done very few projects that required me to do a liquid extraction like this using DCM and because of this I totally forgot about one of the biggest problems with DCM it really likes to form emulsions and with some things if you shake it too hard it can take days to separate to fix this you can usually add salt or something to break the emulsion but in this case I couldn't add anything I tried non-chemical methods though like using an ultrasonic bath or just heating it up but both of them completely failed as a final last-ditch effort I tried just adding a bunch more DCM it ended up kind of working and I did get some separation but the bottom DCM layer was still a pretty bad emulsion so I unfortunately had to start over again but thankfully I wasn't actually too far in so it wasn't that bad I just cracked open a couple more cans of red ball and poured them into the same dishes before I then put it back into the desiccator and I let it run overnight the next day I again had a hundred mils of concentrated stuff but for some reason it was a lot darker than the first run and I'm not really sure why but either way I poured it all back into the separatory funnel I then added the DCM just like before but now I had to be very careful this time I didn't shake it and I just gently rocked it back and forth this unfortunately makes the extraction a lot less efficient but I really had no choice after doing this for about a minute I put it back on the stand and the two layers immediately formed one thing that surprised me was that the DCM was still completely colorless I mentioned before that I thought that it might pull the dye out as well but it apparently didn't touch it at all this gave me hope that it also wasn't touching or removing any of the flavour but that was mostly just wishful thinking I waited 30 minutes for the layers to separate a bit more and then I drained out all the DCM this first extraction probably took out most of the caffeine but some of it was still definitely there so I repeated the exact same extraction three more times but instead of using 30 mils of DCM I only used 15 after each extraction I drained out the DCM and when it was done I had about 75 mils in this DCM was all the caffeine that I had removed but I'll come back to this in a bed the syrup that was still in the funnel should now be hopefully caffeine free however it now has a lot of DCM in it this is because even though the DCM wasn't able to mix with it a small amount was still able to dissolve into it so drinking it like this would not only be dangerous it would also probably taste terrible but thankfully DCM is highly volatile and it's very easy to get rid of by just pulling a vacuum on it to do this I poured it all into a round bottom flask and I washed the beaker with a bit of water to make sure that I had transferred everything after that I dropped in a stir bar and attached a vacuum adapter that I had already hooked up to my vacuum pump I also closed the valve because it would make an absolute mess if I just instantly pulled a full vacuum with strong stirring I turned on the pump and I slowly opened the valve and this caused the DCM to start boiling the goal now was to slowly open the valve and to gradually bring it to a full vacuum this had to be done very carefully and it took about 40 minutes to completely open it at this point almost all the DCM was gone but I still had to keep pulling a vacuum on it for at least several hours this was just to really make sure that there was absolutely no DCM left while I was waiting for that to finish I went back to the DCM solution that should have all the caffeine in it to know if I had actually made caffeine free red ball or to know if I'd even take in any of the caffeine out I had to ice to do this I basically just had to evaporate off the DCM but before I could do that I had to clean it up a bit this was very similar to what I just did for the extraction and I poured it all back into a separatory funnel then on top of this I added some saturated salt solution which would dissolve some of the syrup that I accidentally drained along with it and it would also help dry the DCM just by looking at it that DCM didn't look particularly wet but just like how some of the DCM dissolved into the syrup some of the water that was in the syrup was able to dissolve into the DCM like before I shook it very carefully and I waited for the layers to separate after about an hour the separation still wasn't perfect but it was good enough so I drained out the lower DCM layer all the salt solution that was still in the funnel was just waste and I was able to get rid of it even after this the DCM was probably still a bit wet and to really dry it up I added some drying agent I let it stir like this for a few minutes and then I filtered it through some cotton I also thoroughly washed both the beaker and the drying agent with a bunch of extra DCM I did this just to really make sure that there was no caffeine left behind now to get the caffeine out of this I just gently heated it to evaporate all the DCM when there was only a very small amount left I transferred it all to a vial I did my best not to spill anything but hot DCM has a tendency to throw itself out of pipettes I was initially doing a pretty good job avoiding that but I of course messed it up with the very last bit it was only a drop but it still made me a bit sad to make sure that nothing was left behind I also wash the beaker a few times with a small amount of fresh DCM then after that once everything was in the vial I continued evaporating it there was eventually almost nothing left and I started to get worried that maybe I had barely extracted anything however at the very end a small amount of solid stuff thankfully appeared this was hopefully just caffeine and the amount seemed to be about right in the original red ball syrup there was only supposed to be a hundred and sixty milligrams of caffeine and just visually that kind of looked like what I had it did smell though just like red ball which meant that I definitely pulled out some of the other stuff as well I then mixed it up and I let it sit there for a bit just to make sure that all the DCM was gone after that I went and waited to see how much I actually had I was really hoping that it would just magically tell me that it was exactly a hundred and sixty milligrams but that of course wasn't what happened however it also wasn't as horrible as it could have been I had apparently taken out 46 milligrams but if I include the drop that I lost on the plate it was probably closer to 47 as I mentioned before there was actually a hundred and sixty milligrams in the Red Bull which meant that I had removed about 29% of it so my Red Bull wasn't exactly caffeine free and it was looking more like it was caffeine reduced I had to make sure though that this was actually caffeine and the first thing that I tested was its melting point to do this I poked at the caffeine with a capillary tube and I got a small amount of it stuck in the end I then tapped it against the table for a few minutes to knock it all down to the bottom the sample was now ready and to test it I loaded it into my new and fancy melting point machine from this I saw that it started melting when it was still below 200 C but then it really slowed down and this was probably just caused by some impurities the majority of it was still solid and it only started melting again once it got to around 215 it then took until it was above around 233 for it to completely liquefy a pure sample of caffeine melts between 227 C and 235 which meant that this definitely wasn't pure but what I had was pretty close the fact that it was so close was pretty good evidence that what I had here was caffeine but I still had to confirm things further to do this I then did something called thin layer chromatography or TLC for short to set this up I dissolved some of my dirty caffeine in acetone and in another vial I dissolved some pure caffeine this pure caffeine is actually something that I've had for years and it's from way back in the channel when I extracted it from caffeine pills I shook them around to make sure everything dissolved and I dropped in some really thin capillary tubes it's kind of hard to see them here but the point was that a very small amount of each sample was getting pulled into the tubes I then used them to load the samples onto a TLC plate when I did this I had to be very careful and to only just barely touch the surface this caused the small amount of the liquid to transfer onto the plate and you can see the little dot that it made I then waited a few seconds for the solvent to evaporate and I added a second dot I did the exact same thing for the pure sample of caffeine and after this the plate was good to go I then carefully loaded this into a beaker that had some solvent at the bottom with this setup the solvent will slowly climb the plate and pull the samples along with it at the same time though the silica on the plate is pulling back on the molecules and preventing them from moving they are still able to move though and the distance that they travel depends on how much they like the solvent in comparison to the silica when the solvent got close to the top I pulled out the plate and I let it dry I then shot it with my UV light and I saw that my extracted sample had traveled the exact same distance as the pure caffeine there were also no other spots which told me that what I had was mostly caffeine there was a bit of darkness around the top though and this was probably from a small amount of impurity so between this result and the melting point what I had here was definitely caffeine however it wasn't completely pure and I felt that saying it was around 90% pure was probably a decent estimate I think the caffeine that I had here was also in the hydrated form which meant that each caffeine molecule was associated with a water this would increase its weight a bit and I felt that it was a good idea to adjust for that as well so between that and the purity I felt that I probably had more like 39 milligrams of caffeine this meant that I'd taken out even less than I originally thought and the Red Bull was probably more like twenty four percent reduced now knowing that the project wasn't a complete failure the last thing that I had to do was turn the syrup back into the soda at this point the syrup should have been DCM free so I turned off the vacuum pump and I poured it all into a beaker I then washed the flask with a whole bunch of distilled water to make sure that there was no syrup left behind what I had to do next was diluted even more and bring it back up to the volume that I started with which was five hundred mils however after I had done this I realized that I had made another mistake throughout this whole process I had lost at least a few mils of the syrup and this meant that it was now a bit too watery I instead should have only brought it up to around 480 Mel's I honestly kind of panicked here and I thought that I had ruined everything but then I realised I could just use the desiccator again so that's what I did and I poured it all into a dish and I ran it until it looked like I had taken away 20 mils I then poured it back into the beaker and just by chance it was pretty much exactly where I wanted it to be I thought I was probably gonna have to add some extra water or put it back into the desiccator but this was perfect now to get it carbonated again I just had to use one of those home soda makers and I went with the SodaStream the last time that I used the SodaStream was when I made the diamond water but thankfully this time I didn't have to modify it or anything I could use it how it was actually meant to be used and I just attached the bottle and clicked the button this caused a bunch of co2 gas to rush in and my goal was to get it as fizzy as possible when I felt that it was good I removed the bottle but I had to be a bit careful he'd really liked to froth up and I had to depressurize it slowly or else it would have just overflowed what I had now was hopefully some beautiful caffeine reduced red ball the big question though was whether or not it still even tasted like red ball I had faith that it did but the fact that the caffeine had smelled was a bit worrying and it was very possible that I had pulled out some of the flavor however there was only one way to find out and I was pretty excited to try it okay so it's finally time to try it and see if all my work was actually worth it I think it tastes surprisingly normal yeah I did I I thought it was gonna I actually thought it was gonna taste terrible but it tastes pretty normal it kind of just tastes like regular Red Bull just from this sample it tastes almost exactly the same I think except maybe just a little bit different but not necessarily in a bad way it just it's it's just maybe a bit off it's still very good and I it's more than drinkable but I think I'm gonna have to compare it to some regular stuff too to really see the difference okay so it's it's definitely different than a regular Red Bull the first thing that I noticed was that this has a very distinct smell but the stuff that I made basically has none or it's very very very slight it's almost not even there and that kind of makes sense because the caffeine that I got smelled like Red Bull and I guess I extracted all of the smell what I think is interesting is that the flavor is almost completely separate from the smell I've always known that odours and other scents were added to drinks like this but I never really thought about it too much and I've always thought it was just to maybe add to the scent a bit or to complement it I didn't realize that in stuff like Red Bull it's almost completely faked and it has nothing to do with the flavor I think my whole conclusion from all this is that I'd be totally fine drinking this instead of the regular stuff and with less caffeine I can drink it a bit later so this project was technically a success I think the real dream though is still to make it completely caffeine free but I honestly have no idea how to do that so if you guys have any ideas I'd love to hear them and if any of them seem viable I'll try them out this whole project wasn't exactly world-changing but it still took me a long time to plan for it and to put it all together whether it was worth it or not is definitely debatable but regardless of that it wouldn't have been possible without my supporters on patreon and the sponsor of this video ray con ray con has supported this channel before and a few months ago they sent me a pair of their everyday e25 earbuds I've been using them since then and they turned out to be perfect for when I do lab work and I now use them all the time I really like the little carrying case that they come with and it's been way better than carrying around wired earbuds I've always hated having a wire mess in my pocket but this case has completely eliminated that and it's also small enough that I barely notice that it's there they also have good base a comfortable noise isolating fit and six hours of play time on top of this they're surprisingly affordable and despite sounding just as good they started just half the price of other premium wireless earbuds I personally really like them and I definitely recommend checking out ray Kahn if you decide to pick some up you should also use my special link in the description by Ray Kong comm slash Nile red which will give you 15% off your order as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube you'll also get access to all the older videos that I had to take down and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here


so there's a particularly flawed idea about media criticism that has gained a lot of popularity recently it's the idea that we can judge art quote-unquote objectively a kind of criticism that focuses exclusively on things like plotholes and whether the events of a story makes strict logical sense the goal of this criticism is to establish that a piece of art is objectively good or bad I find this position pretty damaging to film discussions as a whole so today I'm going to explain all the many reasons there is no such thing as objective criticism it's going to take me quite a while to get there so I just want you to hold on to this one idea before we begin the dark night the movie every film bro keeps on a shrine at his bedside has more plot holes than virtually any other movie you can name just hold on to that real tight because we'll come back to it so first let's get the semantics straight you can make objective statements about art Star Wars was written by George Lucas there are spaceships in it the main character is Luke Skywalker these are called facts you enter subjectivity the moment you make a qualitative statement about those facts George Lucas is a brilliant writer these spaceships are cool Luke Skywalker is well-written these are what's called opinions I know this is some simple stuff so far but I need to say it because the idea I'm reacting against is the all too common phrase this movie is objectively bad which presents an opinion as a fact the proponents of this idea will assert that the objective critic is only speaking about the tangible facts of the matter while so called subjective critics only talk about their feelings but this is a false binary it's totally possible to speak entirely emotionless Lee about the themes of a particular work for instance I could say that the original Star Wars film is about why nature is superior to technology and I could point to the climax where Luke puts away the targeting system and embraces the force and that doing so helps him defeat the technologically superior Empire nowhere in that analysis have my emotions factored in but I haven't described an objective quality of the film either I've used evidence from the text to support a position and in the process I've revealed something about my subjective perspective but someone else could say the scene isn't really about nature versus technology it's about atheism versus religion the rebels won because Luke had faith while the Empire lost because they belittled religion your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes or given you clairvoyance enough to find the rebels hidden Fortin we've come to two slightly different readings of the same film and neither of them is objective they are steeped in the perspectives of whoever believes them to be true and both of our hypothetical critics here could use their analysis as a reason to claim that the movie is well-made and they would be speaking just as subjectively as someone claiming it is well-made because the plot makes logical sense they are opinions based on evidence that are held up to a personal standard but this lands us in a bit of a pickle that is a sticking point for a lot of people if all value judgments are subjective then how do we know what's true doesn't that make everyone's opinion equally valid I mean why can't we just agree on a standard of quality and then judge everything against that wouldn't that be objective well these are questions that plagued to 18th century thinkers most responsible for how we think about this today David Hume and Immanuel Kant historically speaking thinking that you can judge art objectively is not entirely unheard of too many ancient and medieval thinkers the idea of beauty being located in an object was a very popular position it was as objectively true to say that a rose is read as to say that it is beautiful but in 1757 Desmond I mean David Hume publish of the standard of taste which relocated Beauty to the eye of the beholder Beauty is no quality in things of themselves it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them and each mind perceives a different Beauty one person may perceive deformity where another is sensible of beauty and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment without pretending to regulate those of others oh you sweet summer child if you had only live to see YouTube for Hume you need a perceiver to exist for beauty to exist but of course this creates the problem we're running into if everything is subjective then how can we make any truth claim about a piece of art Humes answer is in the title taste basically people can improve their tastes over time and make well-founded judgements that we can trust strong sense United to delicate sentiment improved by practice perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice can alone entitle critics to this valuable character in the joint verdict of such wherever they are to be found is the true standard of taste and beauty so Humes answer is we can't know what's good for sure but we can get pretty close by listening to an expert and that anyone can become an expert with practice it's also better if we listen to critics as a whole instead of just one person because by joint verdict he means that critics tend to come to a consensus on great art over time basically since great pieces of writing tend to withstand the test of time the fact that they have been well regarded by so many critics in so many times and places functions like an objective standard making it uncontroversial to say that Hamlet is an excellent play for instance it's sort of like polling data a few decades later Immanuel Kant was a little disappointed by Humes essay thinking that he hadn't gone far enough to solve our problem in 1790 he published the critique of judgment a landmark and enormous Lee influential book that tried to get as close as possible to figuring out how we perceive the world around us and I mean how we perceive the entire world around us Kant isn't just talking about art here and is actually trying to find a way to describe why art is different from just about every other kind of object we encounter so I'm not gonna read all this out because Kant doesn't write like a regular human but instead like a computer describing math equations but what he says here is that taste is inherently subjective when we feel pleasure or pain when looking at something it has nothing to do with that object it is taking place within our own minds the essence of subjectivity now as Kant often does he splits things into categories when you experience pain or pleasure the object responsible for that belongs in one of three groups actually four but we can safely ignore the sublime for the purposes of this discussion since it alone would be its own hour-long video ok so three categories there's the agreeable the beautiful and the good the main difference between them is based on which we desire let's say you're starving and a man offers you food because you need the food you're in no position to judge how it tastes you can only say that it is agreeable likewise our judgments of what is good are also prejudiced by our desires we want things that fulfill their function so we say that they are good if they do but when we look at something like a flower we can call it beautiful because we don't need it for a specific purpose it's an unbiased judgment there's another important distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful and it helps us solve part of the problem of total subjectivity things that are tied up in the idiosyncrasies of our senses can never be anything more than simply agreeable you may find the color purple' agreeable I prefer blue and there is no conversation that we can really have there our senses just like different stuff but the beautiful is different when we see something beautiful we actually feel that we have a good reason to believe that everyone should see it the same way as us we actually believe it to be a true quality of the object even though it isn't this phenomenon is what Kant calls and bear with me through all of these terms subjective universality yeah that is that is a big weird phrase so I know what you're thinking this sounds like an oxymoron how can something be universal if it is subjective and I hear you but Kant is using this phrase to talk about the fact that while we can't refute ibly prove that we are right about something being beautiful what matters here is the fact that we feel like we have a good reason to believe that other people should agree with us we have a justifiable of pain it's in this space that all conversations around art take place so to recap can't theory so far taste is inherently subjective however to talk about the beauty of something you can't be biased towards it you cannot need it or see practical value in it and the terminology of the agreeable let's a set aside totally abstract personal opinions from those we think should have universal validity whoo boy that is a lot of stuff Kant is literally the most difficult literary critic to figure out but there is one more distinction to clear up and it's between the beautiful and the good and I think this one helps to explain the impossibility of objective critique I said earlier that things that are good have a specific purpose and we can say objectively whether or not they are good at achieving that purpose the weird thing about things that are beautiful is that while they don't serve practical purposes they feel like they do so when we say that a flower is beautiful we're not talking about the practical purpose it serves as the reproductive organ of a plant what's beautiful about a flower is that it feels like it was designed to please even though that is not its purpose man can't really does talk about flowers a lot a piece of art is a little different than nature though since we are constantly debating what the purpose of a piece of art is a painting or a film doesn't serve an obvious practical function and even if the author creates it for a specific purpose art tends to take on a life of its own and can fulfill many unforeseen functions and this is really important if there's one idea I want you to take away from this video it's this one because how can you establish the objective criteria for a piece of art when art doesn't serve a definitive describable purpose like you can say that a particular hammer is a good hammer because it is good at hammering nails since hammering nails is the purpose of a hammer but with art the perceiver has to invent the purpose of whatever they're looking at is it to entertain provoke thought communicate a message stir emotions or nothing at all with every piece of media you encounter those questions are up for debate so if your criteria for a story is whether or not it has logical consistency if that's the box you need check to have a good time that's fine what I'm arguing is that implicit in that belief are a lot of assumptions about what the purpose of a piece of art is for instance you may believe that movies are primarily about escapism and so anything that takes you out of the narrative is an enormous flaw there's just nothing that makes that belief any more correct or incorrect than any other assumption about what art should be so whenever we critique the quality of art we first make an arbitrary assumption about what its purpose is then we invent criteria to decide whether that purpose is achieved and it's only after that that the analysis proceeds logically let's look at a concrete example perhaps you're writing a review of oh I don't know Star Wars the last Jedi typical film totally at random and for no other reason in the first scene the rebels use these big bombers against the first order and they get destroyed really quickly because they are big and slow but aha you've been watching Star Wars your whole life and you know that there is another kind of ship called a y-wing which is also supposed to drop bombs so why aren't the good guys using that ship since it's smaller and faster and would survive longer that would make more logical sentence checkmate Rian Johnson okay now it's totally fine to dislike any scene in this film but let's talk about why this is not an objective criticism it's partly because most people do not know what a y-wing is and even fewer know what its military purpose is so to even make this critique you have to have a certain knowledge of the lore but on top of that you have to believe that adhering to the lore established in other films is more important than the immediate impact of the scene the fact that the Bombers are big and slow is a nonverbal way of communicating an idea to the audience it justifies in our mind why the ships are destroyed so easily whichever side of the argument you land on it's simply a personal preference and it's based on a bunch of beliefs about which aspects of a story are more important than others even though none of them are inherently more important than the rest artists are constantly faced with these kinds of trade-offs where they can choose to sacrifice the logic of a scene to a degree in order to improve other qualities of the film here's another Star Wars example that is the purest version of this it's often said the first Star Wars film was saved in the Edit you can check out rocket jumps video for more on that and one example of the editing changes to the film is that the original edit lacked the ticking clock elements in the finale instead of the death star being moments away from blowing up the rebel base which imbues the scene with an incredible amount of tension and makes the heroes feel like underdogs the original ending has them being the aggressors the Death Star was just hanging out in space somewhere and the rebels went and blew it up but changing the ending introduced a handful of plot holes Leia says that their ship was being tracked and yet the heroes foolishly lead the villains directly to the rebel base on the moon of a planet called Yavin the Death Star teleports into the rebel bases solar system but on the other side of the planet meaning that they have to wait to blow up the moon base when they could have just teleported right next to the moon and at any time they could presumably shoot their laser at the planet and let the rebel base spin out of orbit now if you are in the shoes of the great Marshall Lucas the editor on the original Star Wars 2 versions of the film stand before you the whole thing has already been shot there is no third solution so you have to choose do you and Georgie release the cut that has tension for the one that's more logical there is not an objective answer to this question this male just seemed like a semantic grievance to insist that the terminology of objectivity versus subjectivity is wrong here but I think it's more important than that implicit in the terms is a hierarchy the idea that objectivity is better than subjectivity and that we have to agree on what something is objectively first before we can even get into subjectivity the terms empower those who want to end discussion rather than those who want to encourage it okay so up until this point I've been arguing about why it's impossible to say whether a piece of art is objectively good or bad and if you want more on this I recommend checking out Jack Saints video on this topic which just came out last week and touches on a lot of stuff I haven't talked about here but I also want to speak more broadly about why the things that are typically brought up in these kinds of discussions aren't as and as they are often treated mainly plotholes and I want to make the case for why in my opinion other kinds of criticisms are from my perspective just plain better now a lot of great smart people have already talked about this too I recommend checking out Patrick H Williams video on it as well as film critics si the point I want to make about plotholes is this they are usually not the real reason people didn't enjoy a movie there are almost always deeper and more personal issues with a film that prevented people from connecting with it which aren't as easy to identify or articulate as plot holes are the plot holes are very easy to explain and since you didn't like the movie and the plot hole is a problem in the movie it's very easy to fall into the trap of saying you didn't like the movie because of the plot hole and I believe this because there are a bunch of movies with a ton of plot holes that pretty much everyone really likes remember what I said about the Dark Knight a million years ago when this video started it has more plot holes than any movie you can name the Joker's plan makes no logical sense in virtually every scene he's involved in it requires him to have information he couldn't possibly have move things to places they couldn't possibly get to or need literally months of planning despite the fact that he claims that he doesn't plan anything money doesn't burn this fast what happens at the party after Batman jumps out the window how come none of the bus drivers are alarmed that one of them drove into a bank and how did the Joker still get away with this why does a cop stand inside the cell with the Joker when they already have him safely locked up since this creates the risk of a hostage situation which is exactly what happens can you really get a fingerprint off a shattered bullet how did Batman build the super computer while everything else was happening why is Batman so worried about not killing the Joker when he very clearly kills several people in this very movie you could literally talk for hours about the logic in this movie not adding up and yet people still love the film because it has incredible pacing great acting compelling characters intense action interesting provocative and relevant themes and gives the viewer the vicarious sense of being Batman along with a hundred other reasons which all successfully distract you from its logical failings to put it simply there are some terrible films where the logic holds up and some excellent films where it doesn't this is not to say that the logic of story never matters of course it does literally every choice in the artistic development of a story matters and it's totally fine to have an appreciation for films that get the logic right but what I'm saying is that to make a better case against a film it's important to demonstrate why the presence of a plot hole impacts other aspects of the storytelling if you notice a plot hole in one movie and not in the dark night it's because the dark night has better pacing so why does all of this matter why am I so committed to the idea that this kind of criticism should occupy a smaller fraction of film discussions three reasons first since my channel is dedicated to writing and is meant to be useful to writers I think it's especially important for writers to embrace other forms of criticism analyzing the content of media the ideas it's communicating and not just the form is the best way to improve your own writing if you treat stories purely as logic puzzles to be solved I think you are only setting yourself up to produce superficial pieces of art you have to read deeply to write deeply second because the quality of art and the quality of criticism are interrelated it is hard to say if greater want of skill appear in writing or in judging ill but of the two less dangerous is the offense two-tire our patients than mislead our sense those lines are the opening words of alexander pope's an essay on criticism published in 1711 and in them he makes the case that bad criticism does more harm than bad writing since bad criticism will influence more writers in the wrong direction than a bad story would for Pope criticism creates the grounds from which great art springs and so if we want better art we need better criticism film discussions that are too focused on logical inconsistencies will lead to art that is too focused on logical inconsistencies at the expense of story character and theme I don't want future artists to decide actually I won't write this story since it doesn't make perfect logical sense I mean who wants to live in the universe where the Wachowski sisters don't make the matrix because their idea didn't adhere to the law of thermodynamics our culture would be immeasurably poorer for it lastly for both writers and non right I think this conversation matters because media analysis can for lack of a better phrase nourished the soul it helps you make sense of the world often when we see a piece of art we are confused by it confounded by it it's only through the act of creating and absorbing criticism that we can bring sense to that experience and bring the insights of that process into our everyday life the kind of criticism I think you should seek out or produce is one that seeks to understand what is being communicated in a piece of art a criticism that puts those messages into context one that demonstrates how art affects us both personally and socially and that shares a unique perspective that can make something beautiful even more so criticism can do so much more than say whether something is good or bad and I want to do more to show you what criticism can be that's why this episode is the first in a new mini series on this channel that I'll be calling the history of arguments we talked about Kenton Hume today but what about Plato Aphra Behn and Oscar Wilde there is a 2000 year long history of critics debating a small collection of interrelated questions that I want to explore foundational questions like what is art what should it do and how should we interpret it that still influenced how we talk about art today I'm really excited to get into all that and if you want to help ensure that those videos get made then click on over to my patreon and chip in as little as one dollar a video [Music] so if you've seen my other videos then you know that this one looks very different than my previous work what with all these hand-drawn animations and stuff I hope you like the new format because it really helps me free up what I can talk about in these videos and making the videos look this way meant that I had to pick up a few animation skills so it's fitting that this episode is sponsored by Skillshare since that's where I learned how to do this stuff Skillshare is a great place to learn new skills and has over 25,000 online classes to choose from if you're looking for help with animation then I recommend checking out Jake Bartlett's courses about After Effects the first 500 people to click the link in the description of this video will get two months of Skillshare for free you can also sign up for a premium membership to get unlimited access to all of their classes thanks for watching everyone and thank you to my patrons for supporting these videos keep writing