Free Energy Tracker Telephone Interview with Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, May 11^th, 2007

Will: first of all I appreciate you reaching out to us skeptics. Back in August when this whole thing started from our point of view, we were thinking its either an X-Box promotion, ARG, April fools prank, but its clear those scenarios at least have been sort of proven false. To date we’ve seen that Steorn is a real company, real employees, real offices, real investors. You kept your word and recruited a jury, with a bit of digging we discovered one of the jurors…

Sean: You think you've discovered one of them

Will: Well we think we’ve discovered one of them. We’ve come a long way since August, other than showing us the goods man, what can Steorn do to convince skeptics of your intensions?

Sean: Nothing, the honest answer to that is that the whole purpose of what we’re doing and the August thing and if you take out some of the ridiculous early theories about us the whole purpose of what were at is to convince people that its real, and we chose a way of doing that which is the jury, the rest is in many ways is kind of noise, people at the end of it can decide that the jury is rigged or whatever. Were never going to convince everybody until its in your car and its in your phone, people will remain skeptical. Our intentions isn’t to convince 100% of the people, we are trying to convince normal companies and normal people. The forum things are funny, because by definition they attract people with very extreme views. People who will never believe it no matter what, and people who believe it no matter what. So they are not really reflective of the type of audience we’re after at all, the type of people were trying to convince are normal people, people who are prepared to listen to a voice of reason.

Will: With that in mind, some people especially posting on the forums and posting on the blog, have said that by you reaching out and doing all this reaching out to the community you are pretty much wasting your time.

Sean: I don’t see it that way, and I’ll tell you why I don’t see it that way. First of all we’re not IBM or some big company, this is a bunch of 20 people working in a small company in Dublin. And that ultimately in a way forums like your own actually do us a service. If you look what has happened, and many people say that there is nothing new about Steorn since August, but all the kind of theories about us basically flounder on, you know in terms of crazier theories anyway, flounder on the rocks of reality. So in many ways this is a process of due diligence. I did a radio interview last week, and they obviously they have their research and digging into it, I had a fascinating conversation with him about all the forum stuff, and it goes back to the point of reference for people to say that we’re not an ARG and we’re not this we’re not that, and why that’s important for example when we meet people, this past August of last year the automatic assumption, there aren’t a lot of people coming up to me and saying you’re the xbox marketing guy, but all of that stuff really does actually wash away. I don’t see it at all as a waste of time, we’ve been asked by Trinity to do a similar kind of thing, ultimately its part of a process of erosion that people have now distilled the view, that I can understand, we’re either for real, that people will say that it is such a small probability its not worth considering, or some kind of fraud. General opinion has actually consolidated into a very black and white vision. At the end of that, the black and whiteness of it will be resolved one way or another. Either we will be proven to be fraud, which we’re not, or we will be proven to be right which we are, and then we can actually get on with the business of business.

Will: There is also the possibility that you made a mistake or do you not see that as a possibility?

Sean: No rational mind would ever rule out any possibility. You have to weight any possibility with the probability of it being right. We don’t have any doubts, and we genuinely don’t have any doubts and we wouldn’t put ourselves in the firing line if we did. But the answer to the question whether we are right or wrong with the technology, everybody will know, we didn’t do that at all with the premise that we were wrong about it, we really believe in what we say.

5:00

Will: Okay, lets move on to some of the debate questions that some of the commenters of my blog have asked. First off, for clarification sake, who initiated the UCD debate?

Sean: UCD, well it wasn’t the UCD debate, it was the Institute of Mechanical Engineers contacted us a couple of weeks ago and said would we be interested in doing a presentation and we do a lot stuff with engineering schools around Dublin anyway, I’m actually on the board of an engineering school here in Dublin and we sponsor awards and all that kind of stuff, so we said absolutely we’d love to do it and then it progressed from there. Its not a publicity thing, I saw this morning that someone took the videos down, it should never seen as a publicity thing because maybe more people were present at the presentation then would watch it on the internet, it’s a bunch of engineers here in Dublin and we decided we’d go and chat with them.

Will: Now you mentioned that the organizers of the debate lied about something?

Sean: Yeah, the history of it is pretty straight forward in that we were asked to do it and we said yes, they came back to us and said that it caused a bit of controversy in the college and would it be okay if there were an academic rebuttal, and we said absolutely we’d love it, we’d like to film it, and they came back with a bunch of reasons why we couldn’t film it, insurance, brand image of the college, and so on and so on, and a couple days before it we were getting pretty frustrated with that, and we offered that since its really nothing to do with UCD we’d hire a conference room a couple hundred yards away in a hotel, discussed it with them, and anyway they pulled out and said they’re not changing for any reason, and eventually we got to speaking to the person who is responsible for issuing approval for filming in the university and he’d never heard of it, and that is specifically what I’m referring to and we were being told that our request for approval was being denied, but actually the person with responsibility of approving it was not even aware of the event.

Will: I actually have confirmation from the youtube poster that someone in the department asked him to remove those videos, just for clarification it wasn’t Steorn.

Sean: Whatever you think of our presentation skills or the content or any of that, the one thing about us is we don’t back down, whether you believe the motives behind that or not are really not the issue, I don’t have an issue with somebody posting a video of a public presentation we did on the net, so be it.

7:52