Bryan Boyan is a 23-year-old entrepreneur who has an idea that could revolutionize the way we deal with plastic pollution in the ocean. He s working on a plan to collect and dispose of all the plastic that s floating in the Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive patch of garbage that sits between California and Hawaii. In this episode, we talk to Bryan about how he s tackling the problem of plastic pollution and the potential impact it could have on the marine environment, the economy, and our ability to live sustainably and sustainably on the planet's most important resource, food. We also talk about the potential benefits to the marine ecosystem, the impact of plastic on our environment, and the impact on our food supply. This episode is brought to you by Oceanographer, a company that focuses on the cleanup of the largest floating garbage patch in the world, the Pacific Gyre, and other ocean cleanup projects around the world. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/tourguide/OurAdvertisers. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! And don t forget to tell a friend about this podcast and/or share it on social media if you re a podcaster! Thank you for listening and supporting this podcast! Timestamps: 1: 2:00 - The Ocean Cleanup Project - 3:15 - What's your favorite thing about the ocean? 4: 5:30 - How do you feel about it? 6:40 - What do you think it's a good idea? 7:00 8:00 | What are you looking for? 9:20 - What s your biggest takeaway from this podcast? 11:30 | What s the most important thing you re looking forward to doing? 12:30 13:40 | What is your biggest challenge? 15:40 16:15 17:15 | What's the best thing you ve done in your life so far? 18:20 | What would you like to do in the future? 19:20 21: What s a good thing that you re working on? 22:30 // Is there something you d like to see me do more of this in the next 5 years? 23:40 // How do I feel about this?
00:00:13.000I've seen numerous conferences that you've appeared at and discussions you've given on this.
00:00:19.000For 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.
00:01:08.000So 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,
00:01:24.000and they thought these things were food.
00:01:38.000I mean, there's really three problems with this plastic.
00:01:40.000First of all, obviously, the ecosystem damage.
00:01:43.000I think there are around about 800 species that actually could go extinct because of this plastic pollution.
00:01:49.000Then there's the economic threat in terms of damage to fisheries, damage to tourism and things like that.
00:01:57.000I 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.
00:02:15.000So what was it that prompted you to dedicate, essentially dedicate your young life to this?
00:02:22.000Yeah, so I've always been very passionate about technology and just building things.
00:02:28.000I 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.
00:02:34.000I think there's literally no better feeling in the world than that.
00:02:37.000So I've been building my own thing since I was two years old, I think.
00:02:42.000First 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...
00:02:50.000A lot of fun, but it wasn't very useful, I would say.
00:02:54.000So I was kind of looking for something real to work on a real problem.
00:03:19.000I then eventually came up with this idea to use these natural ocean currents to let us collect the plastic.
00:03:26.000Do 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?
00:03:36.000I 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.
00:03:52.000Through testing and through all these prototypings, obviously there has been a lot of development there.
00:03:58.000But 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.
00:04:12.000So we use basically a network, a fleet of very long floating barriers, which are oriented in a U-shape, I think?
00:04:39.000So we were founded around four years ago.
00:04:43.000In that time, on one side, we did the reconnaissance.
00:04:46.000So 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.
00:04:58.000And on the other hand, we've done all the testing.
00:05:00.000So we've done hundreds of scale model tests.
00:05:03.000We've done prototypes back in Europe on the North Sea.
00:05:06.000And 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.
00:09:06.000So 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?
00:09:17.000Yeah, I think it's sort of this tragic tragedy of the commons, right?
00:09:21.000Where it's international water, it's sort of everyone's problem, but at the same time, legally, it's no one's problem.
00:09:27.000So, 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.
00:09:40.000There simply wasn't any technology to do that.
00:09:43.000So 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.
00:11:21.000One 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.
00:11:39.000And I felt the same way about the Pacific Garbage Patch and all the other ocean.
00:11:53.000So 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?
00:12:04.000So it's sort of where all the plastic wants to go.
00:12:07.000Now, is it possible to take that stuff, all those disgusting particles, and use it for something?
00:12:38.000Actually, 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.
00:12:49.000So you're wearing sunglasses that are recycled from the ocean?
00:14:43.000The composition of the plastic that we'll be pulling out of the ocean is pretty unique.
00:14:48.000It's quite degraded because of the decades of UV light hitting it.
00:14:54.000So we really had to develop a new process to do this.
00:14:57.000So 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.
00:15:29.000I 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.
00:15:38.000So that doesn't appear to be an issue.
00:15:42.000But yeah, definitely it will be, yeah, sort of closing the circle will be a fun project too.
00:15:47.000Yeah, 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.
00:16:03.000Yeah, 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.
00:16:53.000The 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.
00:17:04.000If that goes well, then by probably around August, we should be ready to take it all the way to the patch.
00:17:09.000And hopefully soon after that, collect the first plastic.
00:17:12.000And then we hope to have the first shipment of first plastic back in port before the end of the year.
00:17:20.000And we think that will be such a symbolic moment for 60 years.
00:17:24.000Man has been putting plastic into the ocean, and from that moment onwards, we're also taking it back out again.
00:17:30.000And you feel like you can get 40% of the garbage patch in 10 years?
00:17:34.000It'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.
00:17:45.000Yeah, I mean, and you can do it faster if you want more, if you put in more systems, of course.
00:17:50.000Where are you guys getting funding from?
00:17:52.000So, so far we've been very generously supported by mostly individuals, actually.
00:17:58.000So, 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.
00:18:09.000If someone wanted to donate, how would they do so?
00:18:11.000Yeah, just go to the website, theoceancleanup.com, and feel free to get in touch with us.
00:18:21.000Yeah, 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.
00:18:35.000So that should get us to the point where it's proven technology.
00:18:39.000And then for the scale-up, the idea is that basically any company can go and fund their own system.
00:18:44.000We estimate the cost of every system to be around $5 million.
00:18:48.000Basically, the system will be around a kilometer.
00:20:04.000It's really fascinating because I think that that will be a hugely desirable form of construction.
00:20:13.000Like 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.
00:20:25.000I mean, it's still more expensive, obviously, than just normal plastic because we have to collect it from 1,200 miles offshore.
00:20:34.000But on the other hand, so just by selling it as plastic, I don't think that would be a good business.
00:20:40.000But 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.
00:20:53.000So that would take about maybe a dollar to collect.
00:20:57.000And, you know, what's a dollar on a $120 pair of sunglasses, right?
00:21:03.000So I think that really going all the way up to the value chain, that's where you can really add the value.
00:21:09.000Well, 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.
00:21:18.000That hemp plastic is actually biodegradable.
00:21:21.000Yeah, and sugarcane, and there's many sort of bio-based types of plastic.
00:21:26.000The 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.
00:21:38.000So you can make plastic out of, say, sugarcane.
00:21:42.000Which is chemically exactly the same as plastic that was made from crude oil.
00:21:47.000And it would take the same amount of time for it to degrade.
00:21:51.000So biobase doesn't necessarily mean that it's biodegradable and vice versa.
00:21:58.000It's a very complicated world that even sometimes are experts on plastic pollution being confused about it, let alone the general population.
00:22:10.000In 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.
00:22:21.000And then when it, for example, enters the ocean, just degrades in a matter of days or months.
00:22:27.000But I think that would be a great innovation.
00:22:31.000Is the quality of biodegradable plastic inferior to biobased but non-biodegradable?
00:22:37.000Yeah, and it's mostly limited in the terms of applications, so you can't really do everything with it.
00:22:44.000The actual physical plastic, does it feel different to the touch?
00:23:09.000You have compostable plastic, which you can use for water bottles.
00:23:13.000But 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.
00:23:25.000So 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.
00:23:42.000This is another thing that they're working on.
00:23:45.000Yeah, so that, of course, would be great to have on landfills and things like that.
00:23:49.000And 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.
00:24:03.000And from that biomass, you could make anything else again.
00:24:07.000So you could make bio-based plastic, for example.
00:24:10.000So, does this change your relationship with plastic?
00:24:13.000I 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?
00:24:23.000Yeah, but on the other hand, I'm also not against plastic because I realize that without plastic, say, modern medicine would be very difficult.
00:25:00.000So, yes, I don't think we can live without plastic and I don't think we should want to.
00:25:07.000I 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.
00:25:23.000And there needs to be good infrastructure for that.
00:25:25.000And 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.
00:25:39.000But I don't think we can live without plastics.
00:25:42.000And 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?
00:25:54.000So most of the plastic really stays on or near the surface.
00:25:59.000So we've done expeditions for that to measure it.
00:26:03.000And that's actually why our system only goes three meters deep, because below that there's virtually no plastic anymore.
00:26:12.000So 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.
00:26:28.000So you have sort of these particles that look almost like grains of sand, really, which are really small.
00:26:35.000Even those we measured are primarily in those top three meters, or nine feet indeed.
00:26:41.000So, 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,
00:26:57.000I think that's good news because that means it's not too late because obviously the smaller they get, the more harmful they get.
00:27:04.000They end up in the food chain, but they also are harder to clean up, right?
00:27:08.000So, So on one hand, it's not too late, so that's the good news, I think.
00:27:13.000But 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.
00:27:25.000So 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.
00:27:38.000So have marine biologists done studies on the impact in that particular area in terms of populations of fish and marine life?
00:27:48.000So there's many species that are being affected on one side due to ingestion, on the other side through entanglement.
00:27:58.000So 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.
00:28:08.000Well, first of all, for propellers, for boats that go out there.
00:30:05.000So that's a very obvious kind of impact.
00:30:08.000And then another thing, there was also a study done by us recently.
00:30:12.000So we looked at the concentrations of plastic versus naturally occurring marine life.
00:30:18.000In 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.
00:30:30.000So 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?
00:30:43.000And 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,
00:31:00.000So 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?
00:31:11.000So the plastic itself isn't the thing that...
00:31:15.000Yes, so it's chemicals that attach to the plastic.
00:31:18.000And, 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,
00:31:34.000as well as these persistent organic pollutants, these things that attach to the plastic.
00:32:09.000Yeah, versus what's coming by plastic.
00:32:11.000But 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.
00:32:21.000Now, 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.
00:32:31.000Yeah, 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.
00:33:26.000Now, 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?
00:33:41.000Actually, it collects more chemicals than it sort of leaches out.
00:33:45.000So 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.
00:34:03.000So these actually, the plastic attracts those chemicals.
00:34:09.000So 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.
00:34:17.000So there's actually some sort of a benefit to having those plastics in the water?
00:34:21.000I mean, not that you would encourage people to put plastic in the water, but there is some natural benefit?
00:34:29.000I mean, I cannot really say how many percent of those legacy chemicals we would be pulling out with the plastic.
00:34:36.000But, 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.
00:34:43.000Now, have you extended this line of thinking to some of the other problems in the ocean, like these heavy metals?
00:34:52.000What I really hope is that the Ocean Cleanup can become a symbol of how we should use technology to solve problems of our time.
00:35:04.000I 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.
00:35:14.000So, 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.
00:35:30.000I mean, you had Steven Pinker on your show, right?
00:35:32.000So I think that's really positive trends, and we've done a good job in that.
00:35:39.000And 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.
00:35:56.000So I think those have been very good trends.
00:36:00.000And 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.
00:36:10.000Because when you look at all those positive trends over the past few hundred years, that's all good.
00:36:16.000But there's one very big exception, which is the impact to the environment.
00:36:22.000I had all the success at the cost of the environment.
00:36:25.000But 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.
00:36:35.000It was created by businesses and by technology, so we should stay as far away from those things as possible.
00:36:46.000I think that it really just shows that these are very powerful ways of getting things done.
00:36:53.000And 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.
00:37:11.000The meat pollution problem is going to be solved by everyone becoming vegan.
00:37:15.000I think it's going to be solved by things like lab-grown meat and other kind of alternatives.
00:37:22.000That'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.
00:37:35.000I 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.
00:37:47.000So, yeah, and I hope that the ocean cleanup can be sort of a symbol of that approach.
00:37:53.000I 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.
00:38:04.000And 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.
00:38:16.000And I think that's a big part of what happened with plastic.
00:38:19.000And I don't think the solution is, you know, making an axe out of a piece of rock and living in the woods.
00:38:24.000I 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,
00:39:10.000If 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.
00:39:22.000So 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.
00:39:33.000And 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.
00:39:46.000And actually plastic, I would still argue that plastic is a net positive technology and it was once invented as a solution.
00:39:56.000A lot of people got hurt when people use glass bottles and things like that.
00:40:00.000So Back in the day, this was invented as a solution, but it has this negative side effect.
00:40:07.000So then I think we should now think about, well, what technologies can we develop to manage that negative side effect?
00:40:13.000And probably those have, again, a small negative side effect, but you can think about it like a compounding staircase of net positive technologies.
00:40:23.000I think eventually that's how we can actually solve these problems.
00:40:27.000So, in this country, there's a tremendous amount of recycling, but how effective is that recycling?
00:40:34.000Yeah, I think the amount of recycling is actually pretty low in the U.S. compared to other countries.
00:41:31.000To just use an example of where I live back in Holland.
00:41:36.000They 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.
00:41:52.000The 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.
00:42:17.000I 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.
00:42:31.000Yeah, there's very little demand for recycled plastic.
00:42:34.000It's not something that you hear about on a regular basis, like people that are clamoring to get only recycled plastic.
00:42:40.000Yeah, 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.
00:42:54.000Yeah, I think that's exactly what it is.
00:42:56.000Have 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?
00:43:32.000Outliers 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.
00:43:38.000It'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.
00:44:06.000Well, 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.
00:44:20.000Then I guess people could be intimidated.
00:44:23.000I don't know how to run a company of 100 people.
00:44:26.000I don't know how to get these things done.
00:44:30.000But when I look back at myself four or five years ago, I really didn't have a bloody clue of what I was doing.
00:44:53.000I 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.
00:45:04.000Especially at the beginning, I've done hundreds of things that didn't work.
00:45:08.000The first time I tried fundraising, I sent a cold email to 300 companies to ask for sponsorship.
00:45:15.000And I think one replied and said, this is a horrible idea.
00:45:35.000So it's just about sort of doing this trial and error.
00:45:38.000So 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.
00:45:48.000Well, 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.
00:46:00.000Like, you're a person, like, you've got the fire.
00:46:11.000And 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...
00:46:25.000Extracting things that are potentially dangerous from the environment and creating a net positive effect and then using that plastic to recycle.
00:46:32.000There's so much good karma, for lack of a better word, attached to something like that.
00:46:37.000And for a person like me, when I hear that your sunglasses are made from the Pacific garbage patch, I get excited.
00:46:44.000I'm like, ooh, where can I buy these fucking sunglasses?
00:46:52.000It 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.
00:47:05.000Well, 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.
00:47:13.000So I hope people sort of already do that.
00:47:18.000They should sort of think about sort of what to do with these other ideas.
00:47:22.000Like, 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.
00:47:33.000Do you have like a long-term plan for all this stuff?
00:47:36.000What are you going to do if the oceans are all beautiful and blue?
00:47:54.000So 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.
00:48:10.000But 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.
00:48:21.000And then for me, it wouldn't be very exciting anymore.
00:48:25.000I would be involved until really the end.
00:48:29.000But maybe at some point in time I would be able to broaden my time over multiple projects.
00:49:15.000One 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...
00:49:25.000There'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?
00:49:55.000I think another thing that's important when people Try and solve problems is that they actually think about how to solve the problem.
00:50:04.000I 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.
00:50:19.000But 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,
00:50:36.000well, what's the first step that I need to take?
00:50:39.000You 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.
00:50:48.000So, and it's, yeah, I can imagine it can be quite intimidating to think about that.
00:50:52.000But, 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.
00:51:24.000Well, 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.
00:51:34.000There was one that I saw that looked like some gigantic floating thing.
00:51:38.000It looked like a spaceship and it was kind of like moving across the surface, sort of skimming it.
00:52:19.000Yeah, 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.
00:52:29.000And 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.
00:52:38.000And 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.
00:52:49.000Right, I know what you're saying, getting too scattered and spread out.
00:52:52.000Yeah, so I think it's of paramount importance for the ocean cleanup to happen is that I stay 100% focused on what we do.
00:53:01.000If there's one mission, rid the oceans of plastic, and that's what we're doing.
00:53:05.000So 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.
00:53:17.000So 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.
00:53:31.000But, 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.
00:53:41.000And 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.
00:53:55.000What 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,
00:54:10.000humanity is still there, and zooming further out, just, you know, general life can prosper.
00:54:20.000If 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.
00:54:31.000Well, 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.
00:54:44.000A big one, of course, with the ocean is overfishing.
00:55:05.000Because 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.
00:55:24.000And on land, we're kind of in stage two now, going to stage three probably in the next few decades.
00:55:31.000But if you look at fishing, it's still just hunting, right?
00:55:34.000So it's still just wild cod, most fish.
00:55:37.000There's some farm raised, but it's also thought to be not as valuable or as healthy.
00:55:42.000Yeah, 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.
00:55:49.000But that seems to be sort of this natural evolution, so I think that would be a way to kind of solve that.
00:55:59.000But 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.
00:56:09.000Like we don't know really the health consequences of consuming it yet.
00:56:14.000We don't know what the side effects are.
00:56:17.000We don't know what sort of byproducts are created in manufacturing this stuff.
00:57:03.000It'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.
00:57:15.000For 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,
00:57:31.000it just feels like you're back in the Stone Ages and you're just kind of have to drive this yourself.
01:00:10.000Yeah, I'm impressed and I'm very hopeful.
01:00:12.000My 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.
01:00:22.000They're literally going to be like lobbyists to stop laws.
01:00:29.000Yeah, well that's the concern is that one day they're gonna say you cannot drive your own car and they're really worried.
01:00:36.000What was the name of his organization?
01:01:08.000I 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.
01:01:21.000Yeah, 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,
01:01:39.000So, 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.
01:01:53.000Because obviously cars are just driving maybe 3% of their time.
01:01:57.000Most of the time they're just being parked so they can drive themselves.
01:02:02.000I think the utilization of the number of cars would be much higher.
01:02:06.000And I think that whole transition to electric cars would happen much faster.
01:02:10.000The Human Driving Association is what it is.
01:02:15.000Here, pull it back up again so you can look at it.
01:02:23.000They'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.
01:03:38.000Sometimes people wonder, why do you think this, you know, the ocean cleanup is based in Holland or sort of came out of Holland?
01:03:44.000And 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.
01:03:56.000So it's just very good access to human capital.
01:05:18.000I mean, I kind of feel the same way about the U.S. West Coast as well.
01:05:23.000It'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.
01:05:38.000But, no, but I mean, U.S. in general, I feel like, yeah, people are very friendly.
01:05:44.000I could take you some spots that suck.
01:06:35.000I think we've received a lot of support from the US. Our biggest support group is from here and everyone I talk to here, they really want to get involved.
01:06:51.000We're kind of lucky that it's next to the US, I guess.
01:06:55.000Is this going to be a profitable business?
01:06:58.000Actually, we're a non-for-profit entity.
01:07:01.000So we're not even allowed to make profit.
01:07:04.000But 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.
01:07:15.000So everything would be reinvested in the cleanup.
01:08:38.000Posing, you know, as being environmentally conscious.
01:08:40.000There's a lot of environmentally conscious posers out here, for sure.
01:08:43.000I 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.
01:08:51.000I was actually a part of the expedition.
01:08:56.000Yeah, 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.
01:09:05.000Yeah, 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.
01:09:59.000I think there's just nothing more fun than sort of solving a problem.
01:10:02.000And 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.
01:10:16.000And 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.
01:10:30.000As the CEO, you're the accumulation zone, the garbage patch, as it were, for problems within your own organization.
01:10:40.000Everything that other people cannot solve ends up with you.
01:11:16.000But 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?
01:11:27.000And 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.
01:11:36.000And you kind of have to figure out, well, how can we still attach it while sort of working with this?
01:11:42.000And, you know, there's sort of just details, but there are details on a daily basis.
01:11:46.000And, yeah, that's kind of what makes it fun for me.
01:11:49.000If it would all go flawlessly, it would, yeah, be pretty boring, I think.
01:11:52.000Well, that's what's fascinating about a guy like you, is that your personality perfectly aligns with this kind of problem.
01:12:00.000I mean, and that's a very unusual thing.
01:12:09.000Not really, I was just building things.
01:12:10.000So 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.
01:12:26.000So I was really into those kind of things and I built them myself and they shoot up like 300 feet in the sky.
01:12:32.000And what I then did was sort of organize this whole thing.
01:12:37.000There 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.
01:12:48.000And actually, I think we launched like 213 of them at the same time and actually got in the Guinness Book of Records.
01:12:54.000So I always had my projects, let's put it that way.
01:12:57.000Have you thought about potentially working with companies that produce environmental waste?
01:13:05.000Like 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?
01:13:16.000Yeah, 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.
01:13:31.000Yeah, like oil spills, things along those lines.