April 16, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:14:31
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Hello, Boyan. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And I love what you're doing. | ||
| I've seen your TED Talk. | ||
| I've seen numerous conferences that you've appeared at and discussions you've given on this. | ||
| For people to jump into this right now, what you've done is think long and hard and devise a method to try to clean up some of the plastic that we have floating around in the ocean, famously the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is an enormous patch of garbage that's between California and Hawaii. | ||
| How did you get involved in this? | ||
| You're a young guy. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 23 already. | ||
| 23 already? | ||
| You sound like, oh my god, I'm so old. | ||
| How old were you when you started this? | ||
| I think I started thinking about this when I was 16 and founded this organization when I was 18. That's crazy. | ||
| All you lazy fucks out there that are 16 years old that aren't doing shit with your life, just think about this kid. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I'm so happy there's people like you in the world. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you started thinking about it when you were 16, and, you know, this is something that is extremely disturbing to anybody that's paid attention, especially when you see the birds that have died with all these plastic bottle caps inside their bodies, and, you know, you see their carcasses with these multicolored caps in them, and they thought these things were food. | ||
| It was just one of the... | ||
| Many, many, many problems that occur when you have plastic floating around in just enormous numbers in the ocean. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's really three problems with this plastic. | ||
| First of all, obviously, the ecosystem damage. | ||
| I think there are around about 800 species that actually could go extinct because of this plastic pollution. | ||
| Then there's the economic threat in terms of damage to fisheries, damage to tourism and things like that. | ||
| I think it's around $13 billion a year, according to the UN. And then thirdly, there's the health impact or the potential health impact because these tiny plastic pieces, they actually also end up in the fish we eat that take chemicals with it and that ends up on our dinner plate as well. | ||
| So what was it that prompted you to dedicate, essentially dedicate your young life to this? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, so I've always been very passionate about technology and just building things. | ||
| I think sort of having an idea in your mind and then seeing that become reality and being able to touch it and things like that. | ||
| I think there's literally no better feeling in the world than that. | ||
| So I've been building my own thing since I was two years old, I think. | ||
| First starting with things like tree houses and zip lines, but then going into sort of computers and explosives and rockets and things like that, which was... | ||
| A lot of fun, but it wasn't very useful, I would say. | ||
| So I was kind of looking for something real to work on a real problem. | ||
| And that's what I then came across. | ||
| When I was 16 years old, I was scuba diving in Greece. | ||
| And I came across more plastic bags than fish. | ||
| And I wondered, why can't we just clean this up? | ||
| And that question sort of kept circling around in my head. | ||
| And I sort of thought about, how could we do this? | ||
| The ocean is pretty big. | ||
| I then eventually came up with this idea to use these natural ocean currents to let us collect the plastic. | ||
| Do you have many different prototypes that you started with and you eventually wound up with what you have now and have you started implementing them yet? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, so the concept that was presented back in 2012 with my first TEDx talk, and if you compare that to where we are right now, it's sort of day and night of a difference. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Through testing and through all these prototypings, obviously there has been a lot of development there. | ||
| But the key idea has stayed the same, that instead of going after the plastic with boats and nets, which will take around about 79,000 years to clean up just this Great Pacific Garbage Patch, instead of doing that, we let the plastic come to us. | ||
| So we use basically a network, a fleet of very long floating barriers, which are oriented in a U-shape. | ||
| And they float around, and they kind of act like a massive Pac-Man. | ||
| So, yes, like a funnel brings the plastic towards it. | ||
| The natural ocean currents push it against it, moves towards the center, becomes very concentrated. | ||
| And once it's concentrated, well, then it's easy to get it out and ship it to land for recycling. | ||
| And has this started yet? | ||
| So we were founded around four years ago. | ||
| In that time, on one side, we did the reconnaissance. | ||
| So we mapped the patch with 30 boats and an airplane at the same time to really understand how much is out there, which turns out to be 1.8 trillion pieces floating in this great Pacific garbage patch. | ||
| And on the other hand, we've done all the testing. | ||
| So we've done hundreds of scale model tests. | ||
| We've done prototypes back in Europe on the North Sea. | ||
| And actually right now we're manufacturing the first real cleanup system, which is scheduled to be launched from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in around two or three months' time. | ||
| So has anything been used? | ||
| Is there a proof of concept? | ||
| Have you done real large scale testing where you've shown that you can actually do this? | ||
| Well, I mean, we've done a lot of subsystem testing. | ||
| So the prototypes in the North Sea, for example, were these 12-meter sections, and we managed to keep that in one piece. | ||
| But then also the plastic capturing, that worked very well in the lab. | ||
| But, yeah, the real proof, of course, has to come from this one real system in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch collecting plastic. | ||
| And that's what we really hope to achieve this year. | ||
| So this is the big one, right? | ||
| The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest. | ||
| Between California and Hawaii. | ||
| So there are five areas in the world where plastic concentrates. | ||
| This is by far the largest one. | ||
| There are four others, but they combinedly contain less plastic than this one in the North Pacific. | ||
| Do we know why that is? | ||
| Probably because of Asia. | ||
| So Asia has quite a big problem in terms of that they use a lot of plastic, but they don't have a good infrastructure. | ||
| So by far the largest source of plastic flowing into the ocean is also this one continent. | ||
| And what's being released there, naturally, because of the currents, ends up in this North Pacific patch. | ||
| It's such a strange problem. | ||
| Because it wasn't something that was discussed in the 80s or the 90s. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, somewhere in the year 2000, I remember hearing about the massive amount of plastic we have in the ocean. | ||
| And it just made sense. | ||
| I was like, oh, well, of course. | ||
| Of course it's going to wind up there. | ||
| But the sheer size of it is staggering. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that, to me, the worrying thing is that it's a persistent problem. | ||
| So with many other kinds of pollutions, when you sort of turn off the tap, it will be solved by itself. | ||
| Think about, for example, the ozone hole with the CFCs. | ||
| But with this, like if you turn off the tap, the problem is still there, and in 100 years it will still be there. | ||
| So I think to really solve it, you need to do two things. | ||
| On one side, we have to close the tap. | ||
| On the other hand, we also need to clean it up. | ||
| Jamie just pulled up a... | ||
| A size comparison where it shows 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France. | ||
| Yeah, so this was a study we published a few weeks ago. | ||
| So this was the result of that reconnaissance effort. | ||
| It's kind of funny, like every other news outlet used a different size comparison. | ||
| So I think it was CNN that says it was the size of Mongolia. | ||
| We always use Texas. | ||
| Yeah, Texas is good. | ||
| We're America. | ||
| We use Texas for everything. | ||
| Four times California as well. | ||
| So yeah, it's a pretty big area. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And it's getting bigger, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, so the area doesn't really change. | ||
| It's more the concentration. | ||
| When did we realize that this was an issue, like collectively scientists, geologists? | ||
| Yeah, so there have been sort of small sampling efforts since the 70s. | ||
| Back then, it was the first time plastic was described as being something that floats in the ocean. | ||
| But it really only entered the public consciousness, I think, in the late 90s. | ||
| There was this Captain Charles Moore who was sort of sailing through it. | ||
| And he saw this plastic and he was like, well, we need to describe this. | ||
| And then he did a scientific paper on it. | ||
| And actually, I think he was the one that termed the term Great Pacific Garbage Patch. | ||
| So he was riding his boat through it for a long period of time, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I think he was participating in some sailing race and he went through it and then he just saw that stuff. | ||
| So he was sort of the canary in the coal mine? | ||
| I guess, yeah. | ||
| So is it one of those things where it's hard to get different governments to act on this because, you know, who's responsible for the ocean? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's sort of this tragic tragedy of the commons, right? | ||
| Where it's international water, it's sort of everyone's problem, but at the same time, legally, it's no one's problem. | ||
| So, yeah, and besides that, what I really felt when I started the Ocean Cleanup was that I think everyone wanted this problem to be solved, but at the same time, we didn't really have a way to do it. | ||
| There simply wasn't any technology to do that. | ||
| So that's why I thought, well, perhaps this is an opportunity to combine my interests of A, solving this problem, but B, also developing technology, which is what we did. | ||
| Is there anyone else doing this? | ||
| So there are many organizations working on the prevention side, right? | ||
| So educating people, thinking about policies, those kind of things. | ||
| Which is very important, I think. | ||
| But yeah, unfortunately, we're the only ones that sort of do the hard technology side of it. | ||
| And yeah, I wish more people would do it. | ||
| If somebody else would clean the ocean, that would be fine with us as well. | ||
| But until somebody else does it, yeah, we're kind of the ones that have to do it. | ||
| That's so fascinating to me, that out of the 7 billion people on the planet, sometimes it really does just take one person. | ||
| To act. | ||
| One person do something about something that, I mean, I'm aware of. | ||
| Many people are aware of. | ||
| Many people listening have heard about this. | ||
| And it's sort of one of those things that's in the back of your mind that doesn't affect you on a daily basis. | ||
| So you say, well, that's a tragedy. | ||
| That's a terrible thing. | ||
| But it's not my problem. | ||
| I have my own problems. | ||
| But you, this one person, decided to do something about it. | ||
| And the fact that you did when you were 16 is so fascinating to me. | ||
| And someone has to do it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But isn't that weird? | ||
| Someone has to, but nobody was doing shit until you came along. | ||
| That's very interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I sometimes wonder, yeah. | ||
| Sometimes people ask me, like, why do you do it? | ||
| And my answer would be, like, why not? | ||
| Why isn't everyone doing this? | ||
| One thing that I was thinking was, and this is my same feeling about air pollution, is that once they figured out a way to use whatever is in the particulates in air pollution as a resource and make it valuable, then people are going to be running to extract it out of the skies. | ||
| And I felt the same way about the Pacific Garbage Patch and all the other ocean. | ||
| Currents where they have this issue. | ||
| So is it the currents bring everything together collectively into one area just because of the way the ocean moves? | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| So you have these sort of the current at the equator and then you have these boundary currents and it sort of acts like the sink in your bathtub, right? | ||
| So it's sort of where all the plastic wants to go. | ||
| Now, is it possible to take that stuff, all those disgusting particles, and use it for something? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, sure. | ||
| Actually, I have a few examples with me in my bag, but it's not here right now. | ||
| You can go grab it. | ||
| Do you want to go grab it? | ||
| No, I'll do it in a bit. | ||
| I can describe it. | ||
| It's a podcast, anyways. | ||
| So what we do is we take the plastic out and we recycle that. | ||
| We've developed a process for this. | ||
| And we can turn it into new products. | ||
| Actually, the pair of sunglasses that I've finally been able to wear after a dreaded Northern European winter, we already made that out of plastic that we took out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. | ||
| So you're wearing sunglasses that are recycled from the ocean? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the idea is that we can do anything with this, right? | ||
| So you can imagine sort of a part of your next car or your chair or whatever. | ||
| You can make that out of ocean plastic. | ||
| And what we think is that the material itself isn't valuable enough, but it's really the story behind it. | ||
| So the fact that you can say, well, it's made out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which we think will add value. | ||
| So it's like the difference between a normal pebble and the piece of the Berlin Wall. | ||
| One is worth shit and the other is worth something. | ||
| So that's what we kind of want to use as a way to then be able to fund the operations of the cleanup. | ||
| I think that's a fantastic idea and I think that'll be a huge value for people. | ||
| I mean, I think people really want to buy something that they know is recycled out of something that was choking fish and birds to death. | ||
| Yeah, and not only that. | ||
| Adidas is turning plastic from the ocean into $200 shoes. | ||
| The sportswear maker is teaming up with something to sell three new shoes made with plastic pulled from the ocean. | ||
| Wow, that's awesome. | ||
| That's the kind of stuff you can do. | ||
| So, I mean, in this example, Adidas actually didn't use plastic from the ocean. | ||
| I think they just said that for marketing reasons. | ||
| They make that from plastic that was sort of, they call it ocean bound. | ||
| Oh, those lying motherfuckers? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| They got him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| So it's on the way to the ocean? | ||
| Yeah, which I guess could be anything. | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| It was like, we were gonna throw it out, but we decided to make sneakers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, that's horrible. | ||
| I mean, it's still... | ||
| They got Jamie! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I have some of those. | |
| Do you have some of those? | ||
| They're very cool. | ||
| I like them and I like the people that work on it. | ||
| That's all cute and everything, but that's a lie. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah, a white lie. | ||
| A little bit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The composition of the plastic that we'll be pulling out of the ocean is pretty unique. | ||
| It's quite degraded because of the decades of UV light hitting it. | ||
| So we really had to develop a new process to do this. | ||
| So probably, maybe in a year or so, we'll actually be able to launch the first line of products made out of the real deal, the plastic actually coming out of the ocean. | ||
| That's excellent. | ||
| So you're going to sell raw plastic? | ||
| And is there an issue of who owns the plastic? | ||
| Because it is in the commons of the ocean, international waters. | ||
| I think it'd be hilarious if somebody would sort of raise their hand and say, oh, that's my plastic. | ||
| I put it in there. | ||
| I think then we have another kind of legal issue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But if it becomes a resource like oil, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think there's some, there's like these salvage laws that say if you sort of salvage something from the international oceans, you can actually keep it. | ||
| So that doesn't appear to be an issue. | ||
| But yeah, definitely it will be, yeah, sort of closing the circle will be a fun project too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it sounds like an amazing thing, and I guarantee people would be very, very interested to buy things that they know were made out of something that was really a horrible side effect of civilization. | ||
| Yeah, I think if you have the choice between a normal, well, let's use the sunglass example again, a normal pair or a pair coming out of the ocean, I think 9 out of 10 people would choose the latter. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I mean, I think it would be giant for companies, too, to advertise that we only use 100% recycled from the ocean plastic. | ||
| That would be gigantic. | ||
| How long do you think it would be before this could be a reality? | ||
| So the first system is currently being assembled. | ||
| So we are renting a former naval base at the San Francisco Bay, where it's currently being put together. | ||
| It's still a relatively small system. | ||
| It's 2,000 feet in length. | ||
| So eventually there'll be almost double the size. | ||
| But this one will be launched in pretty late June, early July. | ||
| Then we'll take it out. | ||
| The first deployment will not yet be directly in the patch, so we're just deploying it around 300 miles of the coast just to make sure that it works well, sort of a final rehearsal. | ||
| If that goes well, then by probably around August, we should be ready to take it all the way to the patch. | ||
| And hopefully soon after that, collect the first plastic. | ||
| And then we hope to have the first shipment of first plastic back in port before the end of the year. | ||
| And we think that will be such a symbolic moment for 60 years. | ||
| Man has been putting plastic into the ocean, and from that moment onwards, we're also taking it back out again. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And you feel like you can get 40% of the garbage patch in 10 years? | ||
| It's actually, so with a fleet of 60 of these cleanup systems, we should be able to clean up half this Great Pacific garbage patch every five years. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Which, of course, the more... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and you can do it faster if you want more, if you put in more systems, of course. | ||
| Where are you guys getting funding from? | ||
| So, so far we've been very generously supported by mostly individuals, actually. | ||
| So, ranging from people that just donate 50 bucks to people like Mark Benioff, who's the founder of Salesforce, and a couple of other very high net worth individuals. | ||
| If someone wanted to donate, how would they do so? | ||
| Yeah, just go to the website, theoceancleanup.com, and feel free to get in touch with us. | ||
| So mostly individuals, mostly wealthy philanthropists? | ||
| Yeah, so that has gotten us to around $35 to $40 million right now, which has been enough to fund all these years of research and development, the whole mapping of the patch, as well as the construction of this first system right now. | ||
| So that should get us to the point where it's proven technology. | ||
| And then for the scale-up, the idea is that basically any company can go and fund their own system. | ||
| We estimate the cost of every system to be around $5 million. | ||
| Basically, the system will be around a kilometer. | ||
| There's plenty of space for logos. | ||
| The world is watching. | ||
| So it's like this massive billboard floating out there. | ||
| So the idea is that any company can sort of fund, or individual even, can fund their own system. | ||
| So Nike can be like, fuck you, Adidas. | ||
| We're actually doing this. | ||
| For real. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Just kidding, Adidas. | ||
| That would be hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, it would be hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what is the process in taking the plastic from the ocean and converting it into usable plastic like that you would use in sunglasses? | ||
| The first thing you do is you wash it, you sort it, you scrub it to get these very clean fragments of the plastic. | ||
| There's a process called compounding where you sort of remelt it and add some additives. | ||
| And make it into what you call pellets. | ||
| So these are sort of these bead-sized particles which can be fed into any machine in the world. | ||
| So say an IKEA machine for furniture or a Tesla machine for cars. | ||
| And that process we kind of had to custom develop tailor-made for our feedstock because it's such a unique composition. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| It's really fascinating because I think that that will be a hugely desirable form of construction. | ||
| Like if you can prove that the plastic that you use was made and is actually, it's a benefit to get that plastic and make things out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's still more expensive, obviously, than just normal plastic because we have to collect it from 1,200 miles offshore. | ||
| But on the other hand, so just by selling it as plastic, I don't think that would be a good business. | ||
| But making it into sort of going further in the value chain up to the consumer, I think that can make sense because, again, to use the sunglass example, it's probably around 100 grams of material. | ||
| So that would take about maybe a dollar to collect. | ||
| And, you know, what's a dollar on a $120 pair of sunglasses, right? | ||
| So I think that really going all the way up to the value chain, that's where you can really add the value. | ||
| Well, you know, one of the things that was shocking to me when I was investigating plastic is that I didn't know that plastic, you can make plastic out of hemp. | ||
| That hemp plastic is actually biodegradable. | ||
| Yeah, and sugarcane, and there's many sort of bio-based types of plastic. | ||
| The thing is, though, that this is a very sort of complicated and controversial world of sort of the bioplastics because you have something called bio-based and you have something called biodegradable. | ||
| So you can make plastic out of, say, sugarcane. | ||
| Which is chemically exactly the same as plastic that was made from crude oil. | ||
| And it would take the same amount of time for it to degrade. | ||
| So biobase doesn't necessarily mean that it's biodegradable and vice versa. | ||
| It's a very complicated world that even sometimes are experts on plastic pollution being confused about it, let alone the general population. | ||
| In short, there isn't yet the holy grail of this type of plastic that On one hand, it's very good in terms of performance in its usable life. | ||
| And then when it, for example, enters the ocean, just degrades in a matter of days or months. | ||
| But I think that would be a great innovation. | ||
| Is the quality of biodegradable plastic inferior to biobased but non-biodegradable? | ||
| Yeah, and it's mostly limited in the terms of applications, so you can't really do everything with it. | ||
| The actual physical plastic, does it feel different to the touch? | ||
| Yeah, so it usually makes more noise. | ||
| It's more sort of crumbly. | ||
| Oh, so it's brittle or something? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, that makes sense, right? | ||
| So if you're going to make water bottles out of biodegradable plastic, they're probably going to leak everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, that's not possible yet. | ||
| So they're compostable. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| You have compostable plastic, which you can use for water bottles. | ||
| But then the only way for it to degrade would be to be in sort of this industrial composter where you have a temperature of 100 degrees and pressure and things like that. | ||
| And it wouldn't degrade in the ocean. | ||
| So it's a very complicated area of Yeah, and I know that I had Paul Stamets on, who's a mycologist, and he was talking about all the different fungus that could be potentially engineered to eat plastic. | ||
| This is another thing that they're working on. | ||
| Yeah, so that, of course, would be great to have on landfills and things like that. | ||
| And actually, it's a process that we're also investigating for recycling because one thing you could do is you could take that plastic and then using either enzymes or indeed fungi and things like that, you could turn it back into biomass. | ||
| And from that biomass, you could make anything else again. | ||
| So you could make bio-based plastic, for example. | ||
| So, does this change your relationship with plastic? | ||
| I mean, when you sit there and you're drinking out of this plastic bottle, do you think, I might have to clean this fucking thing up someday? | ||
| Yeah, a bit, yeah. | ||
| It must, I mean... | ||
| Yeah, but on the other hand, I'm also not against plastic because I realize that without plastic, say, modern medicine would be very difficult. | ||
| Without plastic, a lot more... | ||
| Food waste would be produced, and without plastic, we wouldn't be able to clean the ocean. | ||
| Actually, a lot of the components of our cleanup system... | ||
| Actually, maybe you can pull up an image of the thing being built right now. | ||
| Yeah, please do. | ||
| So that's actually... | ||
| A lot of the parts of that are made out of plastic. | ||
| That's kind of ironic. | ||
| Yeah, or poetic. | ||
| Cannibalism. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Solving fire with fire. | ||
| So, yes, I don't think we can live without plastic and I don't think we should want to. | ||
| I think it's really just about managing the material in a way that it doesn't end up in the ocean, which means that it either comes back to the material being valuable enough at the end of life, because if it's cheaper to recycle than to not recycle, well then obviously it would happen. | ||
| And there needs to be good infrastructure for that. | ||
| And then I think as a final safety net, we need technologies like this to sort of intercept it in river miles, as well as sort of clean up the legacy of the 60 years that we're having in the middle of the ocean. | ||
| But I don't think we can live without plastics. | ||
| No, I don't think so either. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| And when you're looking at the water and you see the plastic that is in this specific garbage patch and all the other four patches, how deep does that plastic go from the surface? | ||
| So most of the plastic really stays on or near the surface. | ||
| So we've done expeditions for that to measure it. | ||
| And that's actually why our system only goes three meters deep, because below that there's virtually no plastic anymore. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So it's only about nine feet. | ||
| So when you see the little tiny itty-bitty pieces, it seems like as the plastic breaks down over decades, it becomes almost like a gelatinous sort of chunky thing. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Yeah, it's called microplastics. | ||
| So you have sort of these particles that look almost like grains of sand, really, which are really small. | ||
| Even those we measured are primarily in those top three meters, or nine feet indeed. | ||
| So, another surprising finding, I think, from those expeditions was that still more than 99% of the plastic is larger than a millimeter, so larger than those very tiny pieces, which means that on one hand, I think that's good news because that means it's not too late because obviously the smaller they get, the more harmful they get. | ||
| They end up in the food chain, but they also are harder to clean up, right? | ||
| So, So on one hand, it's not too late, so that's the good news, I think. | ||
| But on the other hand, it also means that there's still 99% of plastic out there that over the next few decades will become microplastics as well if we don't clean it up. | ||
| So there's sort of this ticking time bomb out there that if we just leave it there, the amount of microplastics could increase over 100-fold over the next few decades, and then we would be in a much worse situation than we are today. | ||
| So have marine biologists done studies on the impact in that particular area in terms of populations of fish and marine life? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So there's many species that are being affected on one side due to ingestion, on the other side through entanglement. | ||
| So actually another finding of our study was that almost half of the plastic by mass is things like ropes and fishing nets, which of course are disastrous. | ||
| Well, first of all, for propellers, for boats that go out there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, God. | |
| Look at that photo. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| This is a terrible photo of a turtle that looks like it's caught in a bush. | ||
| It's just this massive net that this thing is swimming around with this thing attached to its body. | ||
| That's one of the things that I was going to ask you about is cleaning up the nets. | ||
| Because we had talked to someone that was explaining that every time they fish, A lot of times they'll cut the nets loose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's probably a combination of accidental loss and intentional loss. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, the amount of nets really was quite staggering. | ||
| Do you remember who was bringing that up, Jamie? | ||
| Somebody brought that up that they just released the nets and that it's commonplace. | ||
| And it was stunning because we were like, what? | ||
| Every time they do that? | ||
| Yeah, the nets get cut and they get damaged, so they just cut the nets loose. | ||
| Yeah, and the nets are plastic too. | ||
| But that's insane that that's legal, that they do that, that they don't have... | ||
| Yeah, it's not legal. | ||
| It's not legal. | ||
| No. | ||
| So there are laws for this, but obviously, how do you know that people do this? | ||
| It's very hard to monitor in the middle of the ocean. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess. | ||
| You should probably have some sort of a GPS tracking on your net. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that could be one thing. | ||
| Or you could think about, we need market-based solutions where there would be a financial incentive if they bring their nets to shore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And some sort of a penalization if they don't. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| The impact on abandoned ocean fishing nets on marine life. | ||
| I think it might have been Chris Ryan or Duncan. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
|
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That's what Google says. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| That is just so... | ||
| It's so sad that it's such a wasteful... | ||
| Dismissive sort of thing to do. | ||
| Just cut it loose and it's gone. | ||
| It's in the ocean. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that's a very obvious kind of impact. | ||
| And then another thing, there was also a study done by us recently. | ||
| So we looked at the concentrations of plastic versus naturally occurring marine life. | ||
| In this garbage patch, and then what we saw was that there is 180 times more plastic at the surface than sort of natural food for birds and for turtles and things like that. | ||
| So you can imagine if you are a turtle at the surface of this garbage patch and you sort of take a bite to eat, there is 180 times larger chance that you eat plastic rather than a piece of plankton, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what we found was that this concentration is so high that it can actually have this chemical impact where these chemicals have a potential health impact on these organisms as well as species further up the food web, including us humans. | ||
| So have we noticed that, have people been tested and shown to have ingested plastic that they've gotten through eating tuna or something like that? | ||
| So the plastic itself isn't the thing that... | ||
| The chemicals. | ||
| Yes, so it's chemicals that attach to the plastic. | ||
| And, for example, what you see is that, for example, in Greenland, the native communities that really rely on fish, they have much higher cancer rates, they have much higher concentrations of mercury, so other heavy metals, as well as these persistent organic pollutants, these things that attach to the plastic. | ||
| In Greenland? | ||
| Yeah, like these native communities that rely on fish and other sea life to eat. | ||
| So this is a recent trend that they have higher rates of cancer? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how recent it is, but probably in the past few decades, I can imagine. | ||
| But yeah, that's really linked to their consumption of marine sources. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But obviously it's hard to say, well, how many percent of that is just... | ||
| Heavy metals. | ||
| Yeah, versus what's coming by plastic. | ||
| But sure, if you look at the kind of chemicals and you look at the lab tests that they've done with that, those chemicals, yeah, they are not very good for you. | ||
| Now, I've heard that if you leave a water bottle like this in your car and it gets hot out, that the plastic will leach into the water. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Yeah, so I think it depends on the kind of plastic, but you have, I think with this, you probably have a liner that contains phthalates and things like that. | ||
| So yeah, I wouldn't do that. | ||
| So when you look at those chemicals, you have two kinds of things you should, I think, worry about. | ||
| One is the chemicals that are actually in the plastic, and secondly, there's these chemicals that just float around in the ocean. | ||
| And then can attach to the plastic when they, yeah, because they sort of act like this chemical sponge. | ||
| The plastic wants to repel water and there's chemicals too, so they kind of act like a magnet towards each other. | ||
| And especially the latter one, it's well studied and we see that a lot on the plastic. | ||
| But the former one, yeah, I mean, it's even an issue here in your car, for example. | ||
| It's an issue in your car? | ||
| Like how so? | ||
| Yeah, well, if you leave it like in a hot car. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| Now, my question was, even if you're scooping out all that plastic out of the ocean, is it still leaving chemicals that we'll never be able to get out? | ||
| So I think the chemicals mostly... | ||
| Actually, it collects more chemicals than it sort of leaches out. | ||
| So because of those sort of legacy chemicals like the PCBs and DDT... So those things that we use for insulators and pesticides back in maybe the 40s to 60s. | ||
| So these actually, the plastic attracts those chemicals. | ||
| So in a way you kind of also remove a bit of those chemicals and we actually have to wash them out before we do the recycling because you don't want those in your products. | ||
| So there's actually some sort of a benefit to having those plastics in the water? | ||
| I mean, not that you would encourage people to put plastic in the water, but there is some natural benefit? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I cannot really say how many percent of those legacy chemicals we would be pulling out with the plastic. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, you could say, you could argue it's sort of an added benefit to removing it, not to having plastic in the ocean. | ||
| Now, have you extended this line of thinking to some of the other problems in the ocean, like these heavy metals? | ||
| What I really hope is that the Ocean Cleanup can become a symbol of how we should use technology to solve problems of our time. | ||
| I think a lot of it comes down to that we shouldn't protest what we shouldn't agree with, but we should build a future that we do agree with. | ||
| So, when you look at the past few hundred years of modernity and our civilization, what we see is dramatic positive trends in terms of health, wealth, education, violence. | ||
| I mean, you had Steven Pinker on your show, right? | ||
| So I think that's really positive trends, and we've done a good job in that. | ||
| And that all comes down to our ability to sort of imagine things that don't exist yet, so sort of technology and innovation, and being able to work together in an effective way, which is think about the corporation. | ||
| So I think those have been very good trends. | ||
| And I think what we should do is we should also think about how to apply those to the area outside of our own species and to the rest of the environment. | ||
| Because when you look at all those positive trends over the past few hundred years, that's all good. | ||
| But there's one very big exception, which is the impact to the environment. | ||
| It's almost like we've... | ||
| I had all the success at the cost of the environment. | ||
| But I think that instead of, there are some people that have sort of a more reactionary feel to this, and they say, well, look at all these problems. | ||
| It was created by businesses and by technology, so we should stay as far away from those things as possible. | ||
| And I think that's sort of stupid. | ||
| I think that it really just shows that these are very powerful ways of getting things done. | ||
| And I think a much more effective way was to apply that what has worked in other areas and then also apply that to the area of the environment. | ||
| So I don't think... | ||
| For example, I think that the car problem is not going to be solved by banning cars. | ||
| I think it's going to be solved by electric cars. | ||
| And I don't think... | ||
| The meat pollution problem is going to be solved by everyone becoming vegan. | ||
| I think it's going to be solved by things like lab-grown meat and other kind of alternatives. | ||
| That's why I also think that the plastic pollution problem is not going to be solved by people trying to do their own little bit and trying to live without plastic or things like that. | ||
| I think it's going to be solved by You know, things like plastics that do not harm to the environment as well as technologies like the ocean cleanup to sort of clean up after itself. | ||
| So, yeah, and I hope that the ocean cleanup can be sort of a symbol of that approach. | ||
| I like what you just said there because I've always thought that technology will most likely sort out most of these issues if we apply enough attention to it. | ||
| And that one of the real issues is when someone creates some sort of a new technology, they really don't have the ability to see 50 years down the line what's going to happen with the side effects, the residual effects. | ||
| And I think that's a big part of what happened with plastic. | ||
| And I don't think the solution is, you know, making an axe out of a piece of rock and living in the woods. | ||
| I think that the solution is trying to have a long-term, comprehensive approach to how we use various technologies and also various resources so that we don't have another Pacific garbage patch and some new technology 50, 100, 200 years from now. | ||
| I mean, if you went to the ocean 200 years ago, you would see none of this. | ||
| So this is a very, very, very recent issue that's compounding at a staggering rate. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| So I agree with what you say there. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that think that technology is inherently neutral, like it's not good or bad. | ||
| But I think that's not true. | ||
| If you compare some bioterrorist weapon which you could invent or you could invent a machine to clean the ocean, I would argue those are not equally good things to develop. | ||
| So when technology isn't inherently neutral, it means it's sort of deterministic, so the inventor kind of puts a certain direction in the product already. | ||
| And I think that can be used in our advantage or to phrase it differently, I think there is a responsibility with inventors and entrepreneurs to build things that are more good than bad. | ||
| And actually plastic, I would still argue that plastic is a net positive technology and it was once invented as a solution. | ||
| It saves a lot of weight. | ||
| A lot of people got hurt when people use glass bottles and things like that. | ||
| So Back in the day, this was invented as a solution, but it has this negative side effect. | ||
| So then I think we should now think about, well, what technologies can we develop to manage that negative side effect? | ||
| And probably those have, again, a small negative side effect, but you can think about it like a compounding staircase of net positive technologies. | ||
| I think eventually that's how we can actually solve these problems. | ||
| So, in this country, there's a tremendous amount of recycling, but how effective is that recycling? | ||
| Yeah, I think the amount of recycling is actually pretty low in the U.S. compared to other countries. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| We always think we do everything better over here. | ||
| Yeah, I've noticed that now. | ||
| What country is the best at it? | ||
| I think Germany or Switzerland, those kind of countries. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And what do they do differently? | ||
| I think they just put more money in it. | ||
| And I think most of the waste in the U.S. is actually being landfilled. | ||
| And what used to be recycled actually was sent to China. | ||
| But now, I think this year or last year, China said, well, no, we don't want your waste anymore. | ||
| So now I think there will be a lot of investments in new recycling facilities in the U.S., Now, how does that get recycled? | ||
| Say if you use this water bottle and you empty it and then you throw it in a recycled container, what happens? | ||
| It very much depends on the location. | ||
| To just use an example of where I live back in Holland. | ||
| They collect the plastic separately and it goes to a facility where they sort the different kinds of plastic, they get out all the contaminants and make them into new pellets. | ||
| The problem there is really the lack of demand for recycled plastic because I think a lot of companies that build products because basically Virgin, so new plastic is so cheap, they'd rather just do what they're used to and they don't want to see any risks with their materials so they just choose for the safe option the new kind of plastic. | ||
| I think if you want to promote recycling, I would actually say, well, promote the use of recycled material, because as long as there's a demand, then the price will go up, and then automatically more recycling would happen. | ||
| Yeah, there's very little demand for recycled plastic. | ||
| It's not something that you hear about on a regular basis, like people that are clamoring to get only recycled plastic. | ||
| Yeah, and I think maybe that could be another nice side effect of what we do because we can kind of make this sort of recycled plastic a bit more sexy. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say sexy too. | ||
|
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Perfect word. | |
| Yeah, I think that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Have you extended this line of thinking to other environmental concerns like pollution in terms of chemical spills and pollution in the air and things along those lines? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have quite a few more ideas, I would say. | ||
| But, yeah, I would really... | ||
| It really wouldn't be good for the ocean cleanup if I would get distracted by... | ||
| Well, I want you to farm those ideas off to other people because I think guys like you are insanely valuable. | ||
| Like, that one person really did... | ||
| Sort of germinate this seed and get this project moving. | ||
| It's very unusual. | ||
| Outliers like yourself, you're a very humble guy, I'm sure you don't think of yourself as an outlier, but you most certainly are. | ||
| It's one of the most valuable things about civilizations, the occasional person who steps out amongst the masses and does something pretty radical that almost everybody around them was aware was an issue. | ||
| And that's what you're doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there could be much more people that do things like that. | ||
| Yeah, I would think so, but I don't see it. | ||
| That's what's so fascinating about guys like you, is that this is not a very common thing to do, but it's a very common problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, maybe that's because when you hear about people doing cool shit, it's usually when they're already sort of doing those things, and it's not when they kind of started thinking about this. | ||
| Then I guess people could be intimidated. | ||
| I don't know how to run a company of 100 people. | ||
| I don't know how to get these things done. | ||
| But when I look back at myself four or five years ago, I really didn't have a bloody clue of what I was doing. | ||
| Well, you were a baby. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Five years ago, what were you, 18? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a baby. | ||
| I wasn't even born yet, no. | ||
| But that really doesn't matter. | ||
| I mean, it's just about just getting started and being willing to learn and just being open to feedback and just trying many different things and seeing what works and what doesn't work. | ||
| Especially at the beginning, I've done hundreds of things that didn't work. | ||
| The first time I tried fundraising, I sent a cold email to 300 companies to ask for sponsorship. | ||
| And I think one replied and said, this is a horrible idea. | ||
| You should go back to school. | ||
| Just print that one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put that one on your wall. | ||
| I will do that. | ||
| It's a good idea. | ||
| So that was very successful. | ||
| And then I tried crowdfunding and raised a few million bucks and allowed us to get started. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's just about sort of doing this trial and error. | ||
| So just like we developed the technology in a very iterative fashion, it's also about developing yourself, I think, in an iterative fashion and sort of just get started. | ||
| Well, my point being is that when someone like you does make something happen, and once you get the ball rolling, you can be a catalyst for so many other projects getting launched because it's attached to you. | ||
| Like, you're a person, like, you've got the fire. | ||
| You've got the fire. | ||
| So you put the fire over here. | ||
| Now this fire will start. | ||
| Here, let me bring an ember to this project. | ||
| This can start. | ||
| And it seems to me that getting that fire, getting that initial ember, is one of the most difficult aspects in creating any sort of technology, especially in terms of something so complex where you're... | ||
| Extracting things that are potentially dangerous from the environment and creating a net positive effect and then using that plastic to recycle. | ||
| There's so much good karma, for lack of a better word, attached to something like that. | ||
| And for a person like me, when I hear that your sunglasses are made from the Pacific garbage patch, I get excited. | ||
| I'm like, ooh, where can I buy these fucking sunglasses? | ||
| Next year. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'll buy them. | ||
| But that does get exciting to people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It seems to me that this excitement that you're bringing is contagious, and you could potentially use it to spread other ideas that could also be environmentally positive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I certainly hope that other people will think about sort of what kind of the ocean cleanup can I build, which isn't cleaning plastic from the ocean. | ||
| So I hope people sort of already do that. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it's a good point. | ||
| They should sort of think about sort of what to do with these other ideas. | ||
| Like, yeah, a few of them I'm sort of so excited about that I kind of want to do them myself eventually, which would not be in the next few years. | ||
| Do you have like a long-term plan for all this stuff? | ||
| What are you going to do if the oceans are all beautiful and blue? | ||
| You're like, shit, now what do I do? | ||
| And the goal is really to help ourselves out of business, right? | ||
| So one day we hope we're done. | ||
| I don't want to be the garbage man of the ocean forever. | ||
| It's not the best title, anyway. | ||
| So I think the target that we set for the ocean cleanup was to really get to a 90% reduction by 2040, which I think is achievable, both on the influx side and the stock side. | ||
| But yeah, so but I think that already before that, I think maybe five years from now, it will just be sort of a steady operation. | ||
| And then for me, it wouldn't be very exciting anymore. | ||
| I would be involved until really the end. | ||
| But maybe at some point in time I would be able to broaden my time over multiple projects. | ||
| But that's at least years away. | ||
| Because of course there's still a lot of things that need to happen. | ||
| We need to First, prove the technology, first and foremost, this year. | ||
| Then we have to scale up, raise hundreds of millions to build this entire fleet out. | ||
| Then there are four more patches in the world. | ||
| We need to make it into a self-sustainable business. | ||
| And then we also need to think about what can we do on the source side. | ||
| So there's quite a few pieces of the puzzle still there to be found and put together. | ||
| Yeah, so I won't be bored for the next few years for sure. | ||
| You certainly won't be. | ||
| One of the reasons why I'm asking this about you and what your ideas are with cleaning up other problems in the world is because... | ||
| There's millions of people listening to this, and there might be another Boyan out there who's a young kid who says, well, why don't we do this? | ||
| Or how come this hasn't been done? | ||
| Or why hasn't someone tried this? | ||
| And next thing you know, there's someone who's figuring out how to extract heavy metals out of the bottom of the ocean. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think that would be great. | ||
| I definitely welcome people to just start. | ||
| What kind of other thoughts? | ||
| I think another thing that's important when people Try and solve problems is that they actually think about how to solve the problem. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that are very well-meaning and they want to get involved, but then what happens is that they So at least I can kind of make a dent and then hopefully that dent sort of grows. | ||
| But I think what a lot of people forget to do is that when they sort of start tackling a problem, they forget to sort of look at the whole problem first and see, well, sort of what's required to actually solve the whole problem and then sort of reason your way back to, well, what's the first step that I need to take? | ||
| You know, if you don't do that, well then I think it will be very hard to kind of get the skill you need to actually sort of solve the problem. | ||
| So, and it's, yeah, I can imagine it can be quite intimidating to think about that. | ||
| But, yeah, I think that would get us to much more sort of effective solutions to sort of this sort of top-down problem solving, as I would call it, instead of sort of this bottom-up problem solving. | ||
| So, when... | ||
| Have you talked to anybody that also had an idea of how to clean up the Pacific garbage patch? | ||
| No, I've read about other proposals from the past, for sure. | ||
| But no one has really actively pursued anything? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I mean, the thing is, of course, all these other ideas were based on boats and nets that would go fishing for plastic, taking 79,000 years for just one patch. | ||
| There was one that I saw that looked like some gigantic floating thing. | ||
| It looked like a spaceship and it was kind of like moving across the surface, sort of skimming it. | ||
| Is that one of those? | ||
| That could be actually some artist's impression of one of our earlier concepts. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's probably what it was. | ||
| Like a silver sort of entry. | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| Yeah, that was ours. | ||
| So what other, I mean, if you don't mind talking about them, what other ideas have you had in terms of like cleaning things up? | ||
| Yeah, I'm kind of hesitant to joke about them. | ||
| But I mean, there's plenty of other problems out there. | ||
| So if you just think about what other big problems are out there. | ||
| So how about water pollution? | ||
| Yeah, I usually, so what I do is actually, I try and actively force these ideas out of my head, just because sort of once you have an idea, it sort of starts to grow. | ||
| And then, you know, sometimes, you know, with any project you're doing, there are these weeks that things don't go very well, and sort of everything seems to be against you. | ||
| And in those weeks, it's always very tempting to start thinking about, well, I have this other idea, and, you know, and sort of It starts to grow, and you should be careful that it doesn't take over your entire mind. | ||
| Right, I know what you're saying, getting too scattered and spread out. | ||
| Yeah, so I think it's of paramount importance for the ocean cleanup to happen is that I stay 100% focused on what we do. | ||
| If there's one mission, rid the oceans of plastic, and that's what we're doing. | ||
| So what I usually do is I sort of write them down in my notebook and keep it next to my bed and that's where it stays until, you know, maybe a few years from now. | ||
| So probably when you were to ask me, like, so what's the top three ideas, other ideas that you have, I wouldn't be able to, wouldn't even be able to say them because, yeah, they're sort of out of my head and I really try to keep it there. | ||
| But, I mean, what I can say is that they're all sort of technology-based, so they're all things that aren't possible now, but I want to make possible in the future. | ||
| And they're sort of all connected in terms of negative side effects of civilization and trying to make sure that that doesn't backfire to us. | ||
| What I always like to do is I try to think Like, if we sort of try to imagine a future in 10,000 years from now, how do we make sure that, well, civilization is there, but zooming out, humanity is still there, and zooming further out, just, you know, general life can prosper. | ||
| And, yeah, when I look at... | ||
| If I try to extrapolate the current situation to the next 10,000 years, I don't think we're at that point yet, but I think it's a challenge that we'll have to solve. | ||
| Well, it's certainly a challenge that we're going to have to solve and a challenge that I would hope more people like you tackle and start approaching these issues with this sort of 10,000-year mindset. | ||
| A big one, of course, with the ocean is overfishing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Right now you have quite a lot of excitement and a lot of startups in the area of artificial meat, right? | ||
| Why not artificial fish meat? | ||
| Because there seems to be this natural evolution from wild hunting to farming to this more lab-grown stuff that doesn't involve killing or all these resources being wasted. | ||
| And on land, we're kind of in stage two now, going to stage three probably in the next few decades. | ||
| But if you look at fishing, it's still just hunting, right? | ||
| So it's still just wild cod, most fish. | ||
| There's some farm raised, but it's also thought to be not as valuable or as healthy. | ||
| Yeah, and I think they also use a lot of wild-caught fish as a feedstock for these farmed fish, so that's kind of odd. | ||
| But that seems to be sort of this natural evolution, so I think that would be a way to kind of solve that. | ||
| But isn't there a potential, I mean if we're looking at this in terms of long term of what we've done with plastic and the downside, there's potential downsides to even this lab grown stuff. | ||
| Like we don't know really the health consequences of consuming it yet. | ||
| We don't know what the side effects are. | ||
| We don't know what sort of byproducts are created in manufacturing this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, possibly. | ||
| And we need to look carefully at this. | ||
| But I think, at least on paper, it does have a lot of potential of being able to do more with less. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to wait for a while. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just seems to me like, boy, this could be one of those early adopter things. | ||
| It could be a giant disaster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure they do good testing there. | ||
| I'm sure they do, too. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure I'm just ignorant, but I'm still paranoid. | ||
| I would just go, what are you doing? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| How'd you make that? | ||
| You made that in a lab. | ||
| Okay, good luck eating it. | ||
| I'll be over here. | ||
| It's funny how some things just take a lot of time to get used to and other things once it's there you're kind of used to it in a second. | ||
| For example, earlier this week I was driving a Tesla on autopilot and I was driving it for five minutes and then already you're kind of doing your emails and And then when you take it off, it just feels like you're back in the Stone Ages and you're just kind of have to drive this yourself. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| So you do your email while you're driving? | ||
| You're not even paying attention to the machine to make sure that it doesn't hit some homeless lady who steps out off the median? | ||
| Like that one thing that did happen? | ||
| Yeah, with the Uber car. | ||
| I think things like this will come up more rapidly than people think, and I think people will be very quickly that we're used to it. | ||
| But you're supposed to look at the road, right? | ||
| You're not supposed to be staring down at your laptop. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Just erase everything I said for the past minute or so. | ||
| Have you ever seen the video of the guy that's falling asleep in San Francisco traffic? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's completely asleep. | ||
| He's behind the wheel of the Tesla like this. | ||
| And the car's like slowing and going with the pace of traffic. | ||
| It's really fascinating because this happens so quickly. | ||
| I remember a buddy of mine got a Tesla a couple of years ago and he's like, dude, I let my hands off the wheel on the highway. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| Like that's happening already? | ||
| But it's not just happening. | ||
| People plug into their navigator. | ||
| Here's this guy. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| This guy is stone-dead asleep in his Tesla in bumper-to-bumper San Francisco traffic, and the car is performing flawlessly. | ||
| I heard there was this Dutch guy who actually just went on the back seat and started changing his clothes. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yeah, and then apparently they now included a safety feature that you kind of have to touch the wheel every minute or so. | ||
| Oh, that's a new thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and BMW, I believe, has a similar system, but you have to have your hand on the wheel at all times. | ||
| Yeah, it's probably better until it's... | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, I would imagine. | |
| Yeah, people are probably doing all kinds of freaky shit in their cars while this thing is on autopilot. | ||
| It's really quite... | ||
| I don't want to know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's quite amazing how... | ||
| I mean, you were just about to show a video of Tesla autopilot crash compilations. | ||
| It's saving people from crashes is what it's... | ||
| Oh, I'm sure it does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's unbelievable is how few crashes there are. | ||
| And they said there have been two fatalities so far. | ||
| Okay, how many fatalities per capita versus non-autopilot cars? | ||
| I mean, I would imagine it's far less. | ||
| Yeah, obviously these cars are also just safer in general, so they're much safer than, I don't know, a 1990s Toyota Corolla or something. | ||
| In terms of the way of the construction? | ||
| Yeah, just safer when they crash, so I don't know how they compare the statistics, but yeah, I'm very impressed too. | ||
| It was fun trying it out. | ||
| Yeah, I'm impressed and I'm very hopeful. | ||
| My only concern, I had my friend Matt Farrow was on last week and he's a car expert and they've actually started an organization to save human driving. | ||
| They're literally going to be like lobbyists to stop laws. | ||
| Yeah, well that's the concern is that one day they're gonna say you cannot drive your own car and they're really worried. | ||
| What was the name of his organization? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| But they're very serious. | ||
| He's like, it's going to happen quicker than you think. | ||
| It's going to be very difficult to drive your own car, and then it's going to be illegal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe they should keep areas like the Highway 1 or something like that. | ||
| It's just something. | ||
| Some freaky road where people can get crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at me, man! | |
| I'm steering! | ||
| I'm hitting my own brakes! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, again, these are things that... | ||
| It's most likely inevitable. | ||
| I mean, this technology, the way it's progressing, it's going to be safer, it's going to be healthier, lower emissions, all these variables that are going to come into play where people are going to say, no, the benefit of driving your own car is not worth the detriment to society. | ||
| Yeah, and next to that, just if you think about the normal rate of converting the entire car fleet to electric, it would be around 20 years, because that's sort of how long cars last, and you only produce a few hundred million cars a year, and there's billions of cars, so... | ||
| So, you know, if you don't want that to take 20 years, well, I think autonomy then really has to come into play because if you have autonomous cars, you need much less cars out there than you would if you would have to drive themselves. | ||
| Because obviously cars are just driving maybe 3% of their time. | ||
| Most of the time they're just being parked so they can drive themselves. | ||
| I think the utilization of the number of cars would be much higher. | ||
| And I think that whole transition to electric cars would happen much faster. | ||
| The Human Driving Association is what it is. | ||
| Here, pull it back up again so you can look at it. | ||
| Yeah, the war on driving is here. | ||
| A little paranoid. | ||
| They're a little paranoid, but you've got to remember Matt Farah is an automotive journalist, so his livelihood depends on talking about cars, and he's a real legitimate car nut. | ||
| What is this wrong answer? | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I picked the electric car. | |
| Oh, you clicked it? | ||
| It says wrong answer. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| You go there, it takes you to the shop. | ||
| Well, why is this... | ||
| It would be a shame. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just a joke. | |
| Oh. | ||
| I get it that it's just a joke, but why would it be the wrong answer? | ||
| It's just an answer. | ||
| Do you drive? | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Do you drive an electric car or a regular car? | ||
| Actually, I don't have a car. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| No, in Holland you don't really need cars. | ||
| You just have a bike. | ||
| But it's fucking freezing there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have a coat. | ||
| You just put a coat on and just drive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow, okay. | ||
| Hardcore. | ||
| Listen, I'm a big fan of Holland because I kickbox. | ||
| So you guys have some of the greatest kickboxers of all time. | ||
| Came from this one small place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very unusual. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Why is that? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| We just have to punch people, I guess, when they cut you off with the car. | ||
| Oh, is that what it is? | ||
| But Holland is a very unique place, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, it's a very unusual country. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Sometimes people wonder, why do you think this, you know, the ocean cleanup is based in Holland or sort of came out of Holland? | ||
| And for us, it makes a lot of sense in that we live below sea level, so we're, like, we have, per capita, the highest number of hydraulic engineers and maritime engineers around the world. | ||
| So it's just very good access to human capital. | ||
| And... | ||
| Yeah, so it really makes sense for us to be there. | ||
| There's a lot of offshore engineering companies that support us and are involved with as contractors. | ||
| So for us, it's not really very strange, but I don't know about the other things. | ||
| There's quite a lot of innovation coming from such a small country. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of innovation and really unique, intelligent people. | ||
| I've met a lot of people from Holland and just really fascinating people. | ||
| Wim Hof, do you know Wim? | ||
| Yeah, I've never met him, but... | ||
| Fucking guy's the best. | ||
| He's so lovely. | ||
| He's just such an amazing person. | ||
| Every time you're around him, you feel better, like somebody gave you some coffee. | ||
| Like, ooh! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, he's just, he's very contagious. | ||
| And, I mean, I have quite a few friends from Holland. | ||
| You gotta check your watch. | ||
| You gotta take off soon, right? | ||
| No, it's still fine. | ||
| You okay? | ||
| It's just I am fascinated how variable people are and how these cultures like Holland sort of arise. | ||
| And I just find so many people from Holland. | ||
| I'm waiting to meet assholes from Holland. | ||
| I'm sure you must have them. | ||
| They do exist. | ||
| I'm sure they do. | ||
| But the people that I've met from Holland are friendly and happy. | ||
| It's a very unusual place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I kind of feel the same way about the U.S. West Coast as well. | ||
| It's just, yeah, I mean, I'd definitely be able to live in a place like San Francisco, maybe just because of the high percentage of engineers and entrepreneurs that kind of makes me feel at home. | ||
| But, no, but I mean, U.S. in general, I feel like, yeah, people are very friendly. | ||
| I could take you some spots that suck. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's a few spots that suck. | ||
| But yeah, you're in a good spot right here and San Francisco is a fantastic spot in terms of innovation. | ||
| How well has this been received in America and particularly in California? | ||
| I mean obviously you're here to do some business and talk to some people. | ||
| Is this something that people are very excited about and you feel like there's a lot of momentum behind it? | ||
| Actually, U.S. is the number one group of supporters for us. | ||
| Because we know we fucked up a lot with the ocean, and it's right there. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| I mean, that's your guess. | ||
| But no, I think people are very supportive. | ||
| Maybe it's also because the geography of the patch, it's right between two U.S. states. | ||
| It's like Canada, but different. | ||
| So, yeah, so it's... | ||
| Yeah, I think we've received a lot of support from the US. | ||
| I think that our biggest support group is from here and everyone I talk to here, they really want to get involved. | ||
| So yeah, I think we're kind of lucky that it's next to the US, I guess. | ||
| So you've raised all this money. | ||
| Is this going to be a profitable business? | ||
| Actually, we're a non-for-profit entity. | ||
| So we're not even allowed to make profit. | ||
| But eventually, the idea is that this plastic business would be sort of a separate thing, and that would then create the funding for the cleanup. | ||
| So everything would be reinvested in the cleanup. | ||
| Oh, that's fantastic. | ||
| So do you have a name for the plastic business? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right now it's just under the Ocean Cleanup still. | ||
| We're actually thinking about some kind of brand name, but see you next year. | ||
| Yeah, please let me know. | ||
| I mean, we'll promote the hell out of that. | ||
| I think that's a fantastic idea, and I'll try to buy as many things out of Ocean Plastic as they can sell. | ||
| I think, yeah, I mean, think the more things you can buy, maybe PlastiCell. | ||
| Get this guy in on it. | ||
| Fong, where are you, buddy? | ||
| The guy makes these. | ||
| This guy carves all these himself, and then makes these molds, and then hand paints all of these. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, he's a little wizard. | ||
| I don't know if he's little. | ||
| He's a wizard. | ||
| Maybe he's a big wizard. | ||
| Is this his actual size? | ||
| Me? | ||
| I'm a little taller than that. | ||
| But my head's not that big either. | ||
| But yeah, these things are... | ||
| I mean, to have a line made completely out of ocean plastic would be amazing. | ||
| Maybe he'll do a Boyan version. | ||
| That'd be creepy. | ||
| I wouldn't buy that. | ||
| It's a little creepy looking at me over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's a weird face, too. | |
| But, yeah, I mean, there's really... | ||
| The sky's the limit in terms of applications of your plastic. | ||
| And, again, I just think it'd be so attractive to people. | ||
| I mean, especially out here. | ||
| California, at least... | ||
| Posing, you know, as being environmentally conscious. | ||
| There's a lot of environmentally conscious posers out here, for sure. | ||
| I mean, they would like to just be able to say that, you know, like, oh, my dog's leash is made out of environmentally conscious plastic that we put from the ocean. | ||
| I was actually a part of the expedition. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| That was a good idea. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, really, it's just, I just think the sky's the limit in terms of just the attractiveness of that kind of plastic. | ||
| Yeah, and on one hand, it's a problem that everything is made out of plastic, but it does give huge potential for alternative materials like this ocean plastic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you feel you're going to be doing when this is done? | ||
| Like, say, if you get to this point where most of the stuff's pulled out of the ocean, what do you plan for the future? | ||
| You're 23 years old. | ||
| I mean, you could really basically do anything you want. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Maybe go on a holiday for once. | ||
| And then I'll probably just be working on the next one. | ||
| I think this is what I love doing and I hope I'll get the opportunity to work on many more problems like this in the future. | ||
| So you feel like you will be a problem solver? | ||
| Like that's your thing? | ||
| That'd be... | ||
| I should put that on my business card. | ||
| Problem solver? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, that's essentially what you are, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's just nothing more fun than sort of solving a problem. | ||
| And when you think about a project like the Ocean Cleanup, sure, you're solving part of a massive problem, but just the whole road to it is just like one little problem after another little problem. | ||
| And I think it's just very intellectually satisfying to be confronted with this new weird problem, and then you have to think how to solve them. | ||
| As the CEO, you're the accumulation zone, the garbage patch, as it were, for problems within your own organization. | ||
| Everything that other people cannot solve ends up with you. | ||
| Yeah, I kind of like that. | ||
| It's just fun thinking about things. | ||
| So, for example, just this week, we had, I think it was last week. | ||
| So on Monday, we have this assembly yard, and there was a fence that was seven meters too far to the left. | ||
| And there was just this... | ||
| This email from the government saying, well, if you don't move it within 10 days, you have to stop your operation. | ||
| I'm like, oh shit. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it's a little problem and you just have to do a few calls and think about, well, how can we now arrange the assembly yard in a way that it's still big enough so we can assemble this 2,000 feet thing? | ||
| And then the next day, it turned out there was sort of a slight misalignment of one of the connection strips on one of the flotation elements of the system. | ||
| And you kind of have to figure out, well, how can we still attach it while sort of working with this? | ||
| And, you know, there's sort of just details, but there are details on a daily basis. | ||
| And, yeah, that's kind of what makes it fun for me. | ||
| If it would all go flawlessly, it would, yeah, be pretty boring, I think. | ||
| Well, that's what's fascinating about a guy like you, is that your personality perfectly aligns with this kind of problem. | ||
| I mean, and that's a very unusual thing. | ||
| Did you... | ||
| Were you a puzzle solver when you were a kid? | ||
| Were you into, like, mysteries? | ||
| Like, what is... | ||
| Not really, I was just building things. | ||
| So actually, one of the things that I, a funny anecdote, is that when I was, I think I was about 13 years old, I had this idea of doing, getting into the Guinness Book of Records with launching model rockets. | ||
| So I was really into those kind of things and I built them myself and they shoot up like 300 feet in the sky. | ||
| And what I then did was sort of organize this whole thing. | ||
| There was media, we had sponsors, and we had the university collaborating, and we just had this sports field with 300 people who would all at the same time, they would all launch their rocket. | ||
| And actually, I think we launched like 213 of them at the same time and actually got in the Guinness Book of Records. | ||
| So I always had my projects, let's put it that way. | ||
| Have you thought about potentially working with companies that produce environmental waste? | ||
| Like maybe a company brings you on as a problem solver for some sort of an issue that they have a residual issue of something that they produce? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would be very interesting to be a consultant or anything, but yeah, I mean, definitely sort of after this, I want to do sort of solve more or work on more big challenges like this. | ||
| Yeah, like oil spills, things along those lines. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can keep guessing. | ||
| Yeah, you'll see. | ||
| You'll see. | ||
| Well, I'm sure we will see. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I'm so happy that you exist. | ||
| I'm so happy that there's someone out there that's actually doing something about this. | ||
| And I've seen, like I said, I've seen many of your talks. | ||
| I think it's a comprehensive approach. | ||
| I think it's amazing. | ||
| And I really hope that something comes out of this and it really works. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| And thanks for doing this, please. | ||
| And tell people one more time how they can get to your website. | ||
| Yes, it's theoceancleanup.com. | ||
| We're also on social media, just at The Ocean Cleanup to follow us as we launch the first system this summer. | ||
| And your social media accounts are? | ||
| Boyan Slat. | ||
| S-L-A-T. Yes, B-O-Y-A-N-S-L-A-T. That's Twitter, Instagram. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| All of the above. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thank you, Boyan. | ||
| This was a lot of fun. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yay. | ||
| Alright. |
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