Boyan Slat’s The Ocean Cleanup tackles the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—twice the size of Texas with 100 million kg of plastic—after early failures in 2018–2019 forced redesigns like modular System Two, now successfully collecting debris, including microplastics down to 1mm. River-focused Interceptors (e.g., Jakarta’s prototype) block 80% of ocean pollution, with plans to deploy 1,000 in the worst-affected rivers by 2025. Monetizing recycled plastic—flip-flops, shoes, or even diamonds—could sustain operations, but funding gaps persist. Slat argues technology, not human nature, holds the key to solving crises like pollution and AI risks, while Rogan highlights profit-driven innovation’s paradoxical dangers, from existential threats to sensationalized media. Their optimism clashes with systemic challenges, proving progress demands both ingenuity and ethical adaptation. [Automatically generated summary]
So we launched our first ocean system from San Francisco in September of last year, and we took it out, and roughly two months later, we figured that, first of all, it wasn't catching plastic, so What we saw was that the system was moving at roughly the same speed as the plastic.
So maybe just take one step back the idea and how it works.
So, of course, we have this Great Pacific garbage patch between here and Hawaii, twice the size of Texas, 100 million kilos of plastic, doesn't go away by itself.
And the idea was to have this artificial coastline that is driven by the forces of the ocean.
We put it in there and the plastic naturally accumulates against it and kind of stays in there so we can then periodically get it out.
Because the big challenge is that although there's a lot of plastic, it's spread out over this vast area.
So we first have to concentrate it before we can take it out because if you were to simply troll the ocean for plastic with boats and nets, it would just take...
Forever, really.
So the idea was to have those artificial coastlines.
We deployed the first one, and then what we saw was that somehow the system was moving at the same speed as the plastic.
So you can imagine if this is like your Pac-Man, and this is your catch, and it's moving at the same speed, it's not going in.
And sometimes it did go in, but it went out again.
So we've been going on at this since 2013. Oh, wow.
Six years.
Yeah, so basically after five years, launching it and seeing it break into two, that wasn't the best start of the year I could have imagined.
But then, yeah, we went to the drawing board, and the team really took it well, and we...
We took those lessons into account, adjusted the design and relaunched really just a few months later, so in June.
And this time we made the system a bit more modular so we could try different things to try and adjust the speed, make it go faster, make it go slower.
And then what we figured was, well, the system isn't going fast enough.
What if we actually turn the problem into a solution?
What if we turn it around and actually slow it down so that it goes slower than the plastic?
And then we figured that that actually works.
And in October, we announced that we're actually catching plastic.
And really just last week, the first two shipping containers full of plastic were landed in port.
So now that we went from zero to one, we have the basic principle of catching plastic confirmed.
We're going to have to make it bigger before we can build a whole fleet of them because we reckon we need maybe 50 or 100 of them to really clean up half this patch in five years.
Do you anticipate that it ever gets to a point where the amount of money that you can generate from the actual resource of physical plastic can actually pay for the whole experiment?
It's still under development, so I think in September we should be ready to launch the first one.
But I think it's going to be things that are durable, that don't end up in ways that will retain their value, so can last for a very, very long time, and that you actually want, and ideally carry around so you can talk about it with other people.
Actually now, so just last week, with that first plastic on shore, we said, okay, now we welcome our supporters to actually make, well, I shouldn't call it a reservation, but kind of make a down payment so that you can be first in line.
So if people go to our website, they can actually put in the 50 bucks and get the right for the first ever products made from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
You'd have to have a way to incentivize people to recycle them.
It would be so ironic for those fucking things wound up back in the ocean.
There's got to be a way to do that.
If you have your own company drop-off points in cities where when they're done with their stuff, if it's broken down or it's old, you could throw it into this bin and you will ensure that it gets converted back into raw materials and utilized again.
Yeah, that'd be a great move.
And people would do that if you made it easy for them.
Sort of like recycling bins.
If you make it easy for them, they'll throw their bottle in there.
So you have these two cargo ships or these two cargo containers filled with this plastic stuff.
Unfortunately, there isn't really any useful recycling infrastructure in the US. So we set up this infrastructure in Europe to be able to first sort it, and then shred it, and then recycle it.
And then make those first products out of them.
So hopefully, and hopefully with that, then generate the cash needed to continue running the cleanup.
And of course, now it's still small scale.
Eventually, we should have those number of shipping containers every day, probably.
So on one hand, we need to clean up what's running in the ocean, doesn't go away by itself, and basically the only way to deal with that is to just go out there and clean it up.
But of course, then there's this other side of the equation, which is there's still huge, huge amounts of plastic flowing into the ocean every day, mostly from countries in Central America, Southeast Asia, where people are kind of at this stage of development or countries are at a stage of development where the people are wealthy enough to consume a lot of things that are wrapped in plastic, yet there isn't any waste infrastructure yet to take care of it.
So...
You literally see people on scooters just drive to a bridge to dump their municipal waste into the river because that's simply the easiest way to get rid of it.
To your point, what's easiest people will do?
And so it's not really that people don't care there or that they are less civilized or something, but it's really a combination.
There's a lot of people and there is no infrastructure that they can make use of.
Back in 2015, we were like, okay, maybe at some point in time this ocean thing will work out.
Who knows?
But then we're stuck with this problem that there's still so much plastic flowing in that we would just have to keep going forever.
That would just be not very motivating and we want to be this project with a beginning and an end.
So we're like, okay, so where's the plastic coming from?
And then we figured, you know, probably rivers.
Rivers are like these archeries that carry the trash from land to sea, because when it rains, plastic washes from streets to creek to river to ocean.
But then we found out that there is 100,000 rivers in the world.
So that's kind of a big amount if you want to do something about it.
So we started doing measurements in rivers.
And then what we found was that just 1% of rivers are responsible for 80% of the pollution.
So really just a very tiny amount of rivers, if you were to tackle those, could really address the majority of the plastic going into the ocean.
And it's mostly like these relatively small rivers in capital cities like Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur.
We have very high density of people.
Near the coast, that's where most of the leakage, most of the emissions occurs.
So...
So since 2015, we've been kind of as a secret side project, been working on seeing, well, can we actually develop something to intercept the plastic in those rivers?
And we just launched it a month ago.
We call it the Interceptor.
And it's this scalable system that's almost like plug-and-play.
So you bring it to a river and you install it, and it just works.
For people that are just listening, we're looking at this thing pull enormous amounts of plastic out of this river, and it's also doing so, and they're stacking it into these bags.
And we kind of wanted to make it look like a spaceship, just so people would like it.
And so it has this barrier that concentrates the plastic to the mouth of the interceptor where you have a conveyor belt that then scoops it out of the water.
Again, fully solar and battery powered, and then deposits it onto this moving shuttle conveyor, which then distributes it across these big dumpsters, can hold roughly 50 cubic meters of trash, and it just works by itself, so that's what it does.
Well, now that you've actually pulled these cargo containers filled with plastic out of the ocean, that must give you an extreme feeling of satisfaction, right?
So I was kind of hoping for that feeling, but then when you get to that point, you're like, okay, but you can really only see the amount of work that's still ahead of you.
So it's actually really hard to enjoy successes in a way.
This is a sailor called Charles Moore who was participating in a sail race between Hawaii and California.
And while others would go further north, he thought, well, let's try and cut off this piece.
And then he was looking at the water and he just saw all that trash.
Then he went back, he was so shocked about it, and then he decided to take some measurements, publish the results, and that kind of popularized that whole concept of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Yeah, so that's what happens over time, is that these larger objects basically enter the ocean due to the working of the waves as well as the sun breaks down into these smaller and smaller pieces, which is actually not really a good thing because these smaller pieces are then easier to ingest for fish and other wildlife.
So the smaller it gets, in a way, the more harmful it gets as well.
Fortunately, what we see is that still 92% of the plastic is still non-microplastic, so big stuff.
But of course, if we don't clean it up over the next few decades, all of that big stuff will also become microplastics, and then we're in a much worse state.
Well, so that was actually one of the positive surprises that we had this year, is that the cleanup system in the patch wasn't just catching plastic, not just the big stuff.
We're not exactly sure how it was able to do that, but we just saw huge amounts of those microplastics in the system.
It probably has to do something with the radiation of the waves, so you have that big pipe that keeps the system together.
And because waves are kind of crashing against it, it reflects waves as well.
And almost like a lens, it was concentrating those microplastics into one patch in the middle of the system, which was kind of just holding on into the system.
So that was really, we weren't expecting to collect microplastics, but there we were.
So now, where are you at in terms of trying to expand it to a point where you could, you know, really get this goal of half of the plastic of the ocean in five years?
Yeah, so it would probably be easier if we had one goal, but we now set two goals for ourselves.
One is the 50% of five years for the patch, but the other one is that we want to Have interceptors into the 1,000 most polluting rivers, the ones that do the 80%, in the next five years.
Yeah, and I think the exciting thing for me is that I picked this problem as the first one because I believed it would not just be solvable, it's solvable by a relatively small group of passionate people.
Yeah, so of course what I hope is that with the OceanClean we can kind of create this blueprint of how you solve a problem and how you make civilization a bit more sustainable so that hopefully with that blueprint we can not only solve more other problems in the future but also inspire others to do the same thing.
There's definitely not going to be a shortage of ideas.
So I keep this little booklet that's kind of overflowing, but...
What I realized is to be successful with the cleanup, I really need razor sharp focus and I can only do one thing at the same time.
Ideas are like viruses and when they enter your mind it kind of expands and evolves and it's really quite dangerous actually to have new ideas.
I forgot who said that, but somebody recently I heard saying, the best thing you can do is having one great idea and then never having any other ideas in the rest of your life.
What do you think, though, about what I was going to get at was, do you ever conceive a possibility of coming up with something that removes carbon from the atmosphere?
Wasn't there something, Jamie, that we had talked about where they had figured out a way to make these building-sized, essentially vacuum cleaners they were going to put in the center of certain cities?
I believe it was in Asia, maybe perhaps China.
They'd come up with this.
I don't know if they implemented it yet, but the idea was to have these enormous things in place that look like a skyscraper.
And really, it was just a huge vacuum cleaner for carbon.
Like if you drive over or fly over Manhattan rather and see the density of the structures and how many buildings are in there, you know that people can make some pretty insane shit.
They are doing that now, where they are making commercially made diamonds.
Diamonds are made of carbon.
So they form as carbon atoms under a high temperature and pressure.
They bond together to start growing crystals.
That's why a diamond is such a hard material because you have each carbon atom participating in four of these very strong covalent bonds that form between carbon atoms.
Recreated salty diamond deposits in a high-pressure, high-temperature experiment suggesting that many of Earth's diamonds form when the mantle crushes ancient seabed minerals.
Isn't science and the Earth cool?
I mean, if you do get to do this, here's another problem, okay?
Here's a big one for the ocean.
We're depleting it of seafood, of life.
I mean, you know, I had, how do you say his name again?
Because of course plastic pollution, climate change, overfishing, I think it's all part of one big problem to make civilization sustainable.
The way I look at it is that, of course, over the past 200 years, humanity has made tremendous progress.
So, of course, since agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, humanity has been kind of stagnant, no progress, just very, very slow progress, number of people, lifespan, it was all kind of flat, nothing really happened.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when we learned how to utilize science and our knowledge, collective knowledge, to turn that into progress, basically every possible metric for humanity has improved tremendously.
If you think of wealth, health, violence, education, Writes, all these things.
I know you've had Steven Pinker on.
He's much more knowledgeable on that topic than I am.
Yet, so truly, at this point in time, it has never been a better time to be alive for humans than today.
Not saying that it can't get better, but we have made tremendous progress.
By one hand, I'm imagining things that don't exist yet, so inventing technologies and also inventing institutions.
And on the other hand, our human ability to collaborate effectively in large numbers, which includes the corporation, which is a very effective way for people to work together.
Now, all that progress has also had its negative side effects, which are most pronounced, of course, in the area of the environment, where we put things into an environment that shouldn't belong there, and we take too much out of it, then nature can replenish, which includes the fish, and on the other hand, you have the plastic going into the environment, etc., So, then the question is, well, how do we solve that?
And, of course, one hand is to say, okay, it's kind of the...
Maybe the luditis may be a bit of a negative way to phrase it, but the reactionary approach of saying, okay, we should...
Consume less.
Corporations are bad.
Technology is bad.
We should all get rid of all those things.
And I think the modern environmental movement, which is really kind of this romantic movement, has this image of back in the day, everything was great and we lived in harmony with nature.
So let's get rid of all this modernity and try and return to that pure original state.
What I, however, believe is that, first of all, I don't think it's a very realistic thing.
People want to keep their iPhones and their cars and people want to move forward.
And at the same time, I don't think it's really the most effective way to solve these problems because it would be like fighting a leper tank with bow and arrow.
Technology is nothing more than an enabler of human capabilities.
It enhances our power.
Why not use that power to also try and solve these problems as well?
Rather than try and reject business, reject technology, I truly believe that we should embrace those forces that make us human and has created this amazing world to also try and solve these negative side effects as well.
That's why I believe The overconsumption of fish is not going to end by people all becoming vegan, but rather through fake meat.
I think that the transport emissions are not going to be solved by people not flying anymore or not going anywhere anymore.
Realistically, people are going to fly more, so we better invent technologies that allow people to do that without harming the environment.
The same thing, I think, would be the case for plastic and really other energy uses as well.
No, I think that's a very wise way of looking at it, and it's a hopeful way of looking at it.
Today, even though you're dealing with statistics and factual information, like the fact that it's safer to live today, there's less violent crime, it's easier to get by this more technology, more innovation, medical technologies improve radically, all these things are true, but you still have to say, it's not where we want it to be.
I'm not saying that the world's perfect.
You have to say that, even you.
It's the worry about people barking at you.
It's still terrible in parts of the world.
It's still terrible for people of color.
It's still terrible for trans.
I get it.
No one's saying that there's not room for improvement.
But you have to say that.
Even though you felt compelled, it's still not perfect.
I think there's just a lot of people looking for every single opportunity to complain, even to someone like you who has objectively done nothing but good.
I mean, Steven Pinker took a ton of heat for saying that.
And even though he's talking about actual scientific statistics, he's not saying the world's perfect and everyone should shut up.
What he's saying is we should look at this from a bird's eye view, look down and understand that although there's much work to be done, we're in a great place in comparison to the rest of human history.
And it's hopeful to realize that progress is possible.
Just imagine that there's something that feels intuitively right, as if every step forward would also have to equal a step backward elsewhere.
Yes.
I don't think that's the case.
There's plenty of things that you can invent that are not that.
And we see it, for example, with carbon right now that there's countries where, like Sweden, GDP has grown a lot past 20 years, carbon emissions has gone down.
So they call that the decoupling.
And I think what's really the main challenge in this century is to Decouple human progress from those negative side effects.
I think the way to do that is not reactionary.
It's really, again, through innovation and through collaboration.
I agree with you, and I think that a lot of times people just assume that these are the consequences of innovation, that there's a pro and a con to everything, because there has been so many things.
There have been so many things that are inventions that there are a pro and a con to it.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be that way.
No, and even if things have a pro and a con, it doesn't mean the pro is as big as the con.
So if that would be the case, all the technology, every technology would be neutral, and it wouldn't matter what you invent, but it would mean that an atomic bomb is morally as neutral as an ocean cleanup system, which I just but it would mean that an atomic bomb is morally as neutral as So I do believe that inventors, entrepreneurs, they put certain morality into their creations, into their technology.
There is a certain use that you prescribe with your invention.
I mean, you don't use nuclear bombs to wash your car, right?
I mean, you use it not for benign uses unless maybe you want to terraform Mars, which some people propose to do with atomic bombs.
I don't know if that's a good idea.
But, yeah, I don't think technology is neutral.
It has a morality.
So what that means is that as long as we consistently develop net positive technologies...
Eventually, the world does get better and better.
If, say, a technology is 60% good and maybe has 40% downside, okay, but then we can invent a solution for that 40%, and maybe that's, again, net positive, and you kind of get this cascade of ever-improving world.
Well, I just don't think that being against something is very productive.
It doesn't really move us forward.
Right.
Rather than, you know, protesting against the things that I don't agree with, and there's certainly things that I don't agree with, but again, I don't think it's very helpful.
Rather than doing that, I'd much rather build towards the future that I do agree with.
Do you think that, I mean, when you're looking at this possibility of getting 50% of the ocean's garbage out in five years, do you think that's realistic in terms of, like, the resources that you have, the funding that you have and all that stuff?
It's amazing that this is taking you so long and that you've been working on it so hard that you have all this energy to be able to pursue something like this.
I mean, was there ever a time while you're doing this to be like, Jesus Christ, I don't know how long I'm going to be able to do this?
A lot of people don't realize that the biggest asset they have in their life is their time and to spend that wisely.
You have this 80,000 hours, which I believe is 40 years, 40 hours a week.
It turns out that's 80,000 hours.
That you can use for anything.
And I do believe that people often have a lot more potential than what they turn out to be doing if they were to realize how valuable that time is.
And sort of the classic model also for...
More wealthy people is to work very hard and then to kind of donate here and there.
But probably you could be a lot more effective if you were to just use your brain, use your time directly on, you know, working something that matters.
Well, I mean, just a video, I think, is good enough.
Just a video of you explaining your philosophy.
I mean, you have accomplished so much, and your idea that you're doing is so noble and actually effective.
There's something that people need to hear sometimes about...
Different people's philosophies on how to spend their time and their energy.
And your perception of instead of wasting in on other things, just concentrate on something that you think is going to make an impact, something that you're drawn to, something that...
And yeah, when you do that, then you have a cause.
Then you have a thing that you're working towards.
It's not just simply showing up and doing something that someone's paying you to do that you don't necessarily want to do, which is a trap.
Pollution drifting downriver, when you see that stuff, does that feel almost like impossible to capture all of it or pointless because people keep throwing it in there?
So we don't position these interceptors as being the ultimate solution for the whole plastic.
So, of course, eventually, you have to make sure plastic doesn't end up in the ocean or in the rivers in the first place, right?
But I was standing.
So a few weeks ago, I was in Indonesia and Malaysia to see the machines and talk with government people there.
And I was standing on the interceptor and you see this constant, literally, torrent of plastic going into the interceptor and I was looking upstream and I realized, well, there's more than 5 million people living in the catchment area of this river and they have limited infrastructure,
they consume so much and just trying to imagine All that plastic not ending up in the river with such a diffuse source, 5 million people, was just so hard to imagine.
And of course, that's where we have to go to.
But realistically speaking, it's just going to take a while.
It's going to take maybe two decades, three decades, something like that.
So, I think rather than kind of staring at kind of the perfect solution and really just working on that, which of course is very important, I think we also need to be a bit more pragmatic and also realize, well, okay, it may take 20-30 years, let's at least make sure that during those 20-30 years we don't have 10 million kilos of plastic flowing out of this river.
It's a phrase from economics wherein the insurance industry is kind of a thing where people make more damage once they're insured because they're less worried.
I don't buy it that much as an argument for the plastic problem because it's not like it's a conscious cost-benefit analysis whether you're going to throw something on the street or not.
It's more of an unconscious thing.
You just do it, right?
Or at least I hope you don't, but some people do.
And then it's...
With that same logic, why maybe municipalities should also stop sweeping the streets?
And maybe we shouldn't even collect garbage at people's houses because it only incentivizes the creation of garbage.
You don't believe that though, right?
No.
And then there's this other effect called the broken window effect, which I think it was back in the 60s in New York, what they found is that in streets and neighborhoods where you have buildings that show obvious sign of decay, like broken windows or litter, that actually would incentivize other unlawful activities.
The similar effect has been observed with a park.
If a park doesn't have any litter, people litter less than when there is litter on the ground.
So Radha, I think, is the opposite.
If you truly believe that the ocean is going to be polluted forever and it doesn't really matter, it's already dirty, that's not really a strong motivation to not litter.
But if you say, okay, well, the ocean is clean now, They love effort for that.
And once it's clean, I think that would actually be a motivation to not litter.
I think some of those videos where you see shorelines that are so thick, I don't know what part of the world it is, but that are so thick with plastic you can't even get into the water.
It's so disheartening and you wonder where the world will be if not for people like you that are trying to come up with a solution.
Where the world will be in 50 years.
50 years ago this wasn't the case.
Now it is.
If you could see like a time-lapse video of these oceans from like, go back to like 1900 to 2019, and then go back before 1900, it was relatively unchanged for thousands of years, right?
And then all of a sudden this massive change very quickly with the Industrial Age.
I hope this worry that we all have will translate into improvement and progress.
And I always say the same thing, that we're in some sort of adolescent stage.
Of society and evolution, that we're in this weird sort of state where we're aware of how much we can change our environment, but also still contributing to the detriment of our environment in a non-sustainable way, and then eventually it's going to have to come to a head.
You know, when you see people screaming about climate change and all these different things, I mean, this is people realizing that there's a lot going on that maybe not everyone is completely and totally aware of, but I'm with you.
I think it's...
It's good to be optimistic.
It's healthier to be positive.
And I think it's logical that people will find a way out of this.
So for me, yes, of course, really since the beginning of 2013, there have been people, a relatively small group of people, but there have been people that have been opposing it.
And most of them, ironically enough, are people that care about the ocean because they don't feel it's the right way to tackle the issue.
But the way I deal with it is, at least what I used to do in the beginning, now unfortunately there aren't many new arguments anymore, but just basically write them out, every single argument, rationally analyze them, no emotions, emotions only model your thinking in that way.
And make a distinction, okay, is this something where this person has a point?
If so, great, because I'd rather have somebody else pointing it out to me than us having to learn it in the field and having an unnecessary failure.
And if the person doesn't have a point and if it's just an assumption or unfounded or whatever, then it's very easy for me to just ignore it and And then the question is, well, what motivates people to be negative?
And I think there's probably four reasons.
First of all, it's genuine skepticism whether it can be done.
And I think that's healthy.
And I think we've proved most of those arguments wrong now.
But, of course, there's still the whole scale-up thing, which we still have to do.
So there's still a bit of that, but it's kind of morphing now to a few other things.
I think one thing is...
Human risk perception, which sometimes I think is a cause of some opposition where it's very easy for people to ignore the baseline when they look at risks.
So, you know, you can, for example, say, okay, nuclear power, super risky, we shouldn't do that.
But then if you compare it to the baseline of other sources of energy, that's actually probably the least risky source of energy there is.
Even solar energy causes more deaths per megawatt hour than nuclear power because people fall off roofs.
So if you ignore the baseline and if you say, okay, doing this cleanup, we shouldn't do it because there's all these potential risks, right?
Potentially, there's some sea life that may be caught.
Potentially, there are these moral hazards.
There's all these risks.
And basically, the best thing to do is not do it.
What people then are ignoring is sort of the certain hazard of this hundreds of millions of kilos of plastic that's already in the ocean.
And if you were to kind of pose the opposite question and say, okay, so if I were to go to the ocean right now and just dump the equivalent amount of plastic that we were to take out, we'd dump it into the ocean.
Would you think that's a good plan?
And then, well, probably the answer is no.
So I think there's a bit of this, you know, of course what we're doing, it's new, there are risks involved, but as long as we map them well, we take things step by step, I think they're manageable.
And there are definitely reasons to not do it because, of course, the baseline is that there is already a lot of harm being done by the status quo.
So I think that's one argument behind people's opposition.
There's also a bit of what I call zero-sum game bias where people are saying, well, you shouldn't do this because the resources would be better spent elsewhere.
I saw an op-ed in Wired a few weeks ago where people were saying, well, or just one person actually was writing where this person said, You shouldn't worry about the plastic pollution issue.
You shouldn't do anything about it because climate change is the biggest issue and all our attention should go there.
Yeah, I mean, should you not wash your dishes because your carpet is dirty?
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
Both of them are a problem.
Clean both of them.
This idea that you should only think about climate change.
It's like, oh, don't think about the giant Pacific garbage patch that's twice as big as Texas?
Are you fucking serious?
It's a dumb argument.
Both of them are important.
To think about both of them are important, but...
A part of writing an article today is writing something that people will get upset about.
Part of it is generating outrage, clickbait stuff, having controversial opinions, being contrarian.
All those things are profitable today.
It's a giant part of why people write articles.
They don't write articles.
They don't write articles to state an objective, well-thought-out perspective always.
Sometimes people do, but a lot of times people make some click-baity bullshit and they kind of twist a story and twist an idea of who you are, twist it to sort of make their narrative be more compelling and sell more or click more and get more ad sales.
I mean, the fact that Facebook's algorithms, in a sense, support outrage, right?
Like, these things are designed to support...
My friend Ari Shafir tested this, and it's really interesting because he tested it to find out what does it actually support.
What it actually supports is what you're interested in.
And if you're interested in being outraged, it'll show you things that outrage you.
So he decided to just only YouTube puppies.
And that's all YouTube would show him.
It's puppies.
He's like, no, you assholes.
This is what you're into.
If you're into fucking getting mad about the border and getting mad about the climate and getting mad about abortion and getting mad about whatever the fuck it is, that's what it'll show you because that's what you're interested in.
You know, my YouTube feed is mostly muscle cars and fights.
Why?
Because that's what I'm interested in.
And occasionally science things.
But that's just because that's what you search for.
I think the issue is, human nature, we are compelled to get upset about things, and I think a lot of it is people that feel disempowered in their own existence.
The people that you were talking about that are stuck in cubicles and that are staring at that clock, waiting for the buzzer to ring so they can go home.
Those people are online.
They're tweeting, they're taking a shit and tweeting, fuck this guy, this little kid thinks he's going to fix this fucking shit.
There's a lot of what's going on.
There's a lot of people that are upset.
It's fun to be upset when your life sucks.
It's fun to shit on somebody.
It's fun to get mad about the border.
You're living in fucking South Dakota.
You're nowhere near the border.
What are you worried about?
What you're worried about, you're just angry.
People are just angry.
These aren't logical discussions that people are having.
They're shout-offs.
It's a natural part of human nature to get upset about stuff.
Even someone who's doing something as beautiful as your perspective or your idea, instead of just saying, this guy is doing something amazing, we need someone like this who's just as innovative and just as inspired to try to tackle this climate issue.
We need more people like him.
This is amazing.
Instead of that, you're spending your resources incorrectly.
And I also think technology is going to make a lot of what we're concentrating on obsolete.
I think we are really, really close to some crazy breakthroughs in terms of distribution of information that's going to make it obsolete.
And people aren't going to care as much about clickbaity things because, you know, you're going to be able to feel things from digitally created media.
I think we're very, very close to augmented reality becoming an essential part of people's lives.
You know, the same way your phone has become an essential part of your life.
Twenty years ago, no one carried a phone around.
It was very rare.
And, you know, 1999, I mean, a small percentage of people had phones on them.
Now it's 100%, right?
All this stuff is happening at this exponentially increasing rate.
When they implement augmented reality, and who was telling us that Apple's somewhere around 2021...
Yeah, so I think it's underappreciated how much our behavior is also guided by technology.
I mean, of course, we have our genes, our genotype, which kind of lies at the most fundamental level of how our behaviors are formed.
That's why there is such a thing as human nature.
But then there is this whole sort of cultural layer that we humans created around us, Which I call the technosphere.
Maybe other people have different names for it.
But it's indeed everything read.
We interact with something like 30,000 inventions or 30,000 technologies through our entire lives.
That's a huge amount.
And I think that environment that shapes your behavior, it decides what kind of genes are expressed in And the interesting thing is that it's not just a natural environment, but it's an environment we create.
So probably, you know, when you think about people being born thousands of years ago, their genes were very, very similar to the people today.
Yet...
How they behave is completely different.
Look again at violence.
And why is that the case?
It's thanks to these inventions, not just physical inventions, but also cultural inventions and institutions that we created that shapes our behavior.
And probably...
Human behavior is very hard to change unless it actually benefits what we do.
Look at smartphones, how fast that happened versus how long it takes for smoking to go away.
One is incentivizing the continued use of it through addictive products, while with smartphones, again, it's something that you want to use.
So I just wonder whether that interaction between humans and the technology that we create incentivizes inventors to become morally better and better, because Did you lose me already?
And I hope that people's ability to express themselves through social media, although it's often negative and bitchy, sometimes also can give you a sense of the moral landscape of the culture.
Like, not just the people on the far fringes that are the most angry and vehement about things, but people that have objective...
Real rational thoughts like the fact that you were able to read that article and objectively assess whether or not someone has any good points or not.
If we could all do that about everything, you know, if people had that sort of perspective instead of being so reactionary, instead of being so angry about things, just look at criticisms, look at possibilities, look at all these different things and then shape technology to fit within our ethical and moral boundaries.
So there's – and also it's very profitable, right?
Because if things don't feel – if you don't have like a guilty feeling about buying something – like every time I get a plastic straw now, I feel guilty, right?
If there was something – That people, they innovate to the point where you don't feel guilty supporting products and you feel like this company has the same sort of ethics and ideas that you have.
That's all good.
And I think we're moving more towards that.
But again, we're dealing with a very short window of time where human beings have had to adapt to this incredible amount of change that takes place during a small period of time.
One way to look at problems is that it's kind of this chasm between human nature, human behavior, and how we want the world to be.
And indeed, social media, that's the case.
But similarly for environmental problems.
We humans are driven by certain things.
Self-interest is definitely...
A big part of it.
And yet, that's not creating the world right now that we want to live in because the technosphere, the technology that is interfaced between the world, sort of nature and human nature, that interface.
It's not compatible with both.
So you either have something that's compatible with human nature, so it's like a big car with a V8 engine, but that's not compatible with nature.
Or you have something that's compatible with nature, which is probably walking, but it's not really compatible with human nature because we're lazy and greedy.
So ideally what we do is rather than trying to change humans, which I don't think is a very futile activity because there is such a thing as human nature.
We have genes.
We have this evolutionary history.
Rather than trying to change that, I think it's much more effective to change the technology around us.
It enables our inner desires and behaviors to be positive rather than negative.
Probably we can engineer social media and our information technology to incentivize people to do good things, but indeed now it's probably incentivizing the use of scrolling through timelines because you watch more ads.
Also, I think it's our bodies and our minds and the way we view the world.
We're not designed to live in this digital realm.
This is a completely new thing for the species, and I think we don't really know how to handle the dopamine rush that we get.
From clicking on Instagram and scrolling through your feeds and checking your DMs and reading your emails and constantly interacting with people and checking, did he text me back?
Oh, what did he say?
Oh, well, that's interesting.
What about this and that and this and that?
You're just all day, all day interacting with some digital device.
And then you have very bright engineers somewhere in a big shiny building, A-B testing all day to see whether a red dot on a certain icon in the social media app makes people click more or less.
Like, look, is it fair if you decide to get a face tattoo?
Right?
It's up to you, man.
If it's fair, it's like, hey, man, my credit card company told me they'd give me 10% off if I stick this, you know, this credit card chip under my skin somewhere.
There's that and there's also the big concern is what if these – I mean we're talking about income inequality in this world.
A big one would be, what if there's a jump that you can make in enlightenment, in intelligence, access to information, number crunching, the ability to assess risk versus reward.
This is all done computer-wise and it's done through some sort of additional piece of hardware.
That they give you or put in your body, but it costs a lot of money.
So the people that can afford it initially are the people that have money in the first place.
They're the wealthy people already.
Because it's very valuable.
But then the people that really need it, they can't afford it.
So by the time it becomes something, all the money's gone.
Well, that's what people are worried about when it comes to longevity too, right?
They're worried about technological innovations that are allowed people to, you know, nanobots and all sorts of different weird things are going to repair cells and allow people to live for extended periods of time.
But then who are these people going to be?
Are they going to be the king class?
You know, are they going to be these super duper wealthy people of the future that are going to, you know, hold this over the poor folks who can't afford the technology?
Yeah, so it truly seems like the technologies that we're developing, or at least are not too far away, our institutions aren't ready yet to really cope with those.
Yes, that is one of the major concerns when it comes to this sort of rapid change that we're facing right now.
You know, another one, of course, is artificial intelligence.
There's people that I respect very, very much that have a very negative view of what the future of artificial technology is going to mean to the human race.
Yeah, both of them scare the shit out of me every time I talk about it.
Sam and I did an episode where he talked about artificial intelligence and the rise of it and the fact that once it's uncorked, it's really not going to be able to be put back in the bottle.
We talked about it for like an hour and a half.
After it was over, the rest of the day I was bummed out.
I suppose a very optimistic and pessimistic view of technology at the same time.
I think on one hand it allows us to improve the world and that's what we've seen and it's gradual and it continues probably because people want to solve their own problems and with that inadvertently solve other people's problems.
That's how progress happens I believe.
But then at the same time, while the world is getting a lot better, it's also getting riskier.
I mean, 2,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, there was no way to wipe out humanity.
There simply wasn't.
Even if you wanted it to happen very badly, you know, you could scream, wouldn't happen.
Now, though, there are actually people who have the power to do that.
But imagine if that goes from a few people to quite a few corporations to maybe even everyone.
I think there's this sort of brain teaser or mental experiment that Nick Bostrom came up with that says, well, what if you could have kind of this atomic bomb that you could just make yourself in your microwave?
It's like, well, maybe at some point in time it would just not be economically feasible anymore to rebuild cities because it would just… So I don't know.
On one hand, I think that's kind of the scary, risky aspect of it.
At the same time, when you think of it, I would much rather trust or entrust an average person today with the button for a nuclear detonation device than somebody a thousand years ago.
Yes, that's where it gets weird when you deal with the...
The number of potential civilizations out there, the number of human beings, the amount of time that life has had a chance to evolve, not just here, but everywhere in the entire universe, where the possibilities that a simulation has occurred already, very high.
With the possibilities that we're in a simulation right now, also pretty high.
This dystopian view of the future, it's, I mean, I get the perspective.
I get the dystopian perspective.
But right now, as we said, like, you know, according to Pinker, according to statistics, things are really better than they've been before.
And my concern is that, my concern is one of the things that Elon said, we're the biological bootloader for artificial life.
Right.
Look, when a caterpillar makes a cocoon, it doesn't know what the fuck it's doing.
It just does it.
It just makes a cocoon and becomes a butterfly.
We're buying the iPhone 36 and the Cybertrucks and trying to get a...
Solar-powered plane off the ground.
We're probably giving in to this thing.
Look, what we have right now is more than sufficient for survival.
If we had just decided, if we got all the people in the world to say, hey, watches, we make watches that keep perfect time.
Computers, they get online.
It's great.
You can download YouTube videos.
Cameras, they're very clear.
They take very clear pictures.
TVs look great.
Everything looks great.
Internet speeds, pretty fucking good, man.
Especially with 5G. Let's stop!
Everybody stop!
Stop.
Stop making stuff.
Everything we have right now, just keep making it.
No new innovation.
Let's just enjoy life together.
That sounds so logical but yet also so ridiculous.
No one's going to agree to that.
That iPhone 37 is already in production, bitch.
It's going to be better and faster and it's going to wrap around your dick and keep you comfort at night.
They're going to figure out better stuff no matter what forever.
It's part of what makes people people.
We have this unquenchable thirst for innovation.
That's one of the weird things that freaks me out about this move towards technology is that materialism, which seems to be this like really standard behavior with a giant percentage of the population like people are really into things and this desire to have the newest greatest things is what propels innovation because there's a financial incentive because people are making money off of selling you these better watches that you don't really need or these better cars or these better computers
and all these things just keep getting better and better and better and better and a lot of it is fueled by this weird desire that people have for stuff Which doesn't make any sense.
Like, where'd that come from?
Well, that might be the stuff that makes the caterpillar make the cocoon.
So probably that's going to happen, but what does give me hope is that to my point of the nuclear detonator a thousand years ago versus now, it seems like we are getting more responsible and our ability to foresee the future allows us to invent things, but it also allows us to think about the risks and to try and mitigate the risks before they happen.
I don't think there's nearly enough attention given to these existential risks.
But the fact that some people are thinking about it is kind of hopeful.
And I'm posing these things about this dystopian potential future just because...
Really, it's probably something we should think about, but I am hopeful that as technology improves, our understanding of humans improves along with it.
And also that perhaps some technology, like I'm not exactly sure what this neural link thing is with Elon that he's coming up with, but I think some of it has to do with a much more rapid access to information.
You know, that has to do with increasing bandwidth.
Yeah, increased bandwidth, yeah.
Hopefully, that will become, I mean, you don't want to say hopefully some fucking wires they stick in your brain will become standard because that seems like we are merging.
1964. Imagine if that guy called it in 64. So definitely, it's a broader point a lot of people make that we are, in a way, enslaved by our technology.
I think in the book Sapiens by Harari, he makes the point about grain enslaving us because with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, We didn't really become better, according to him.
It was less nutritious.
It was just a worse way of living than the hunter-gatherers did.
But it was very good for the population of grain, and there was no way back for us.
So I suppose that's the thing with all our inventions.
There are these lock-in effects that can kind of lock us into an inferior position.
Of course, the risk with artificial intelligence is that a similar thing happens, and that's not very benign.
We didn't foresee those consequences that we will be locked in in the year 2065 or whatever it is.
It's one of the more fascinating things about people, though, that we have the ability to contemplate the possibilities, that we have the ability to look at this and go, oh, okay, what are we doing here?
Hold on.
Hold on, we're making a mistake here.
Look what wheat's got us doing.
Look what rice has got us doing.
God damn it.
Look how much people there are in this city.
There's so many people in this city.
We've got to feed all these people.
Shit!
We didn't think of this.
We just kept breeding.
And, you know, that's the big concern when people start developing into new areas.
When people start expanding the technological or the rather societal sprawl.
When you see these urban sprawls just slowly encroaching on new land and pushing out into areas where there was no houses before.
It's always weird for me when I drive by a place.
Boulder, Colorado does a really good job of limiting the amount of construction that gets done there.
They're pretty fierce about it, but even they have been sort of lightening up a little.
Things have been getting built, and every now and then I'll drive by.
If I'm in Colorado, I'm like, oh, that wasn't there before.
Now it's there.
Everybody thinks it's harmless.
No big deal.
Just a new building.
Used to be an open field.
Who's that helping?
It's not helping anyone.
And then another building outside of that.
And then you have the ability to look in time 50 years from now.
You see this spread where this weird wart of humanity starts moving across the globe.
There's this cool feature in Google Maps where you can have, or Google Earth, where you can have time lapses from satellite photos for the past six years.
And for example, if you look at Dubai, 30 years ago, nothing.
I mean, he might be getting paid to still do it as, like, a stunt person for movies because he did one for a movie recently, but he has a video from this year recently that says, like, YouTube demonetized all his videos, and he's just been posting car stuff.