#14 - Boyan Slat: Solving Ocean Plastic

33:53What's your take on the de-growth arguments, the sort of de-growth movement as a possible solution to reducing plastic pollution? I understand why it sort of intuitively feels logical. So if you look at historical trends, of course, human civilization metrics have done this, great. At the same time, environmental things have usually gone in the opposite direction. Not exclusively, but it tends to be overall that direction. So from that you could kind of infer that perhaps there's just some fundamental incompatibility between our highly technological civilization and the natural world. and then it's only one more intuitive step to say, okay, maybe to get more, better biosphere, we should have less of the stuff that's causing it.

34:53Less people. Yeah, less. And less of their technology. Some of them make that pretty explicit that they want less people, fewer people. But yeah, some of them focus more on the consumption of goods and of energy. but I think there's a few issues with that so firstly I don't think people want that it's very hard to sell that tomorrow will be slightly worse than today people want the future to be better and then there are just billions of people that have much worse lives because of a lack of energy and goods and they want to live like we do here in the West as well. So it's, and I think it's not fair to deny them of that possibility.

35:48I think they should have every right to live like that. So realistically, the world will be consuming more rather than less going forward. And then, you know, sometimes people argue, okay, maybe we can do with half the amount of energy that we use today. But then if the other half is still produced unsustainably, I mean, it's still not a solution. So sort of reductio ad absurdum, like the only way that that path can actually work is to really go all the way back to the caves. And then even then you can argue that the per capita environmental impact of early hominids was significantly higher than individuals today.

36:38If you feel like you're bored, you can Google the quaternary megafauna extinction, which was this situation tens of thousands of years ago that whenever humans hopped to a new continent, surprisingly, somehow all the big mammals just disappeared quickly. So we're pretty sure that us humans caused that. And of course, we were just with a very small number of humans back then. So probably the per capita environmental impact of humans was actually much greater in pre-industrial societies compared to today. So it's just, I think, the situation that we find ourselves in, the only way is forward. We have to accept we live in this technological world We have to accept people want more and that we need to raise many people out of poverty still.

37:44And what we need to do is we need to develop technology that provides all those goods to humans without having those negative side effects. To design our civilization to be compatible with both humans as well as the natural world. So I'd love to understand more the incentives that are driving plastic pollution in the first place. It seems to me that, again, it's this chicken and egg. Oh, it's the person who's buying the cheap product and they're not dealing with it, just throwing it on the ground. But then it's like, well, it's the companies that are using the cheap packaging. Plastic is cheaper than paper or wood or whatever.

38:30So they're using that. You can keep going back and back and it just seems like it all comes down to incentives and everyone just trying to do the most efficient cost-cutting thing. Would you agree with that? Yeah, definitely for companies plastic is cheaper than other materials. For consumers it's more convenient, cheaper too. So definitely it's good for all the individual actors but collectively there's this huge externality that is not properly priced into the cost of the material. So how do we internalize those externalities?

39:15Can you put QR codes onto every item so that you can trace it back so this was the company that created it? Because that's the thing, these companies, their profit and loss at the end of each year, the actual cost of that item is not being fully incorporated into their P &L, right? The cost that it is having on the environment. There should be some kind of tax, essentially. What role can regulation play? Which regulations do you think are good and ineffective? I guess there are two ways to do this. It's either you invent a solution that is cheaper and does not have the externalities. And of course, this is kind of the approach that seems to be winning when it comes to climate change.

40:07Just make solar power very cheap, make electric cars cheaper than gas cars. That's how you get out of this. or you indeed have some regulation that makes it more of a level playing field where the external costs are properly incorporated in the price through a tax. Yes, I'm not an expert on taxation and what's good and bad examples there. But in principle, and of course people have been thinking about this for a long time about how to do it. But it's definitely a fact that the full price of plastic is not taken into account in the plastic production. Plastic is essentially just way too cheap. It's quite interesting what you see.

41:03So PET is usually the highest value plastic that you find in the environment, and especially in the lowest level of development countries that we operate in. you find very little PET because that still has enough value for waste pickers to take that out of the river or to take it off the streets. So there you really see that, yeah, if all the plastic would be like that and if the price would be high enough also in richer countries, then you wouldn't have this pollution issue. It essentially really comes down to plastic being incredibly cheap. So it's plastic being falsely cheap, so it sounds like it's a failure of markets.

41:49Yeah, it's very cheap to make and to put in the environment, and it's relatively costly to take it out and to recycle. Even if you think about the cost of recycled plastic versus producing new plastic, it depends on the oil price. but there are times when just making new plastic is just a lot cheaper than reusing plastics that already exists. And that's just because it's quite a costly process to collect and recycle while making new stuff very efficient. And that's part of the reason why we don't have an aluminium problem in the world, because it just takes so much energy to turn bauxite, the ore into aluminium, you'd much rather collect and recycle that than make new aluminium.

42:48So that's why in some countries you see up to 98-99 % recycling rate in Brazil, I believe, of aluminium because it retains its value because it has this embedded energy cost in the material which you don't have for plastic. Producing plastic is super cheap. Yeah, so it's almost like a tyranny of efficiency. Yeah. In some way that that's what's screwing us up, because it's just so energy efficient to make that it'll just keep propagating more and more and more and more. I guess it ties in with this idea of Jevons paradox. Are you familiar with that? Might be. It's this idea of some new energy efficiency is discovered, some new form of fuel or a new way of making something.

43:37And you would think, therefore, that the amount of energy used to make that thing would decrease on net, because it's more efficient. But in actuality, you end up using more, because more and more people then want that thing. It's like adding a lane to a motorway or something. Yes, exactly. It's just like, okay, well, more people get cars, and it encourages more car usage. And so you end up in the same bottleneck. Anyway, Jevens, J-E-V-E-N-S. I actually recommend people go and read the Wikipedia on it. It's pretty short, but it's a really important principle. I think it is important to point out that plastic also has good sides to it.

44:12So I think that's something that's often overlooked by a lot of environmentalists as well, is that it also provides a lot of value to the world. Especially if you go to the lower income parts of the world, people's lives are demonstrably better because they are able to transport water in plastic bottles. It's much lighter. Safety of being able to drink bottled water, to build their roofs out of and things like that. It makes, also here, of course, medical applications, making things like cars lighter. Plastic does provide a lot of good, But the thing is, I guess every technology has good sides and bad sides.

45:06And what's important is that we try and keep the good and get rid of the bad sides to maximize the net benefit of every adventure we do. When I asked on Twitter, oh, I'm interviewing Boyan, what should I ask him? The most common question that came up was, did that plastic straw ban actually do anything? I hate plastic straws. how prevalent are they in the oceans really. My suspicion is that's an example of a dumb regulation. Yeah. Would you agree? Yeah. Why did that happen? It started with this video and then it was popularized by a few people including a well-known actor and once at an event I bumped into him so I talked to him about it and asked him, what are your motivations to focus on these straws?

46:01And he said a couple of interesting things. It's not really about the straws per se, but it's a good conversation starter and it's a beginning and then we hope it spreads to more and more products. and also it's just a way to give people something to do. I guess it says a bit, but it gives them something to feel like they can contribute. And I was thinking about that and I thought, well, sure you have, if we conclude that the benefits of banning straws is relatively small. But I think there is this cost side to it, right? Because I think first and foremost, I think there's this big risk of polarization, of plastic, pollution.

47:05I think the great thing has always been that it was sort of politically neutral. So it's something anyone could get behind regardless of their political orientation. I've really made a strong conscious effort with the Ocean Cleanup to keep it that way and to welcome support from people across the spectrum and I'm very proud that we have support from people like Mark Benioff who is I think traditionally more on the left side of the political spectrum to people like Peter Thiel who is a Donald Trump supporter and everyone in the middle So we're apolitical, this is something that's for everyone, can be supported by everyone.

47:51And then the straw thing came about and suddenly entered the realm of the culture wars, where it was just this, because of course there's some people that are really strong believers in personal liberty and it feels like something is imposed on them and some people are really allergic to that. and it became another battleground. And I think that's like playing with fire because as soon as a problem enters the tribal culture war, it's just very hard to... Can't get it out. It's one more street. Yeah, and you can't make any progress anymore on the issue. So that worked. I think fortunately the whole thing was contained with the straws.

48:37I think plastic pollution as a whole wasn't super effective. But still, I think that was something I was really worried about. And then also, of course, the willpower of people is really a finite resource. So I think even more so than money or time, it's really people can only worry about so many things. and I'd rather have them use their desire to do something to do something that actually has an impact than letting all that energy disappear in the void because it doesn't do anything. And then also I think it just gave an opportunity for companies to do greenwashing or window dressing. So I remember there was this headline, this article about a well-known fast food chain.

49:43This was in the UK where they made the switch to not proactively give plastic straws, but to let the consumer decide whether they would have to ask for a straw to get one. And then there was this quote from the country manager of the company that says, It's like, we are very happy to help do our bit for the environment. And it's like, you sell beef, which is probably the highest, that's the highest carbon footprint of any type of food, right? So, and what you do with the straw is like absolutely, you know, nothing. Yeah. In terms of impact. I think that, again, I think is kind of a harmful side effect.

50:30And on top of that, if it's really about these second-order effects that this person was telling me about, I think we should be open and transparent about that. I think it's kind of lying to not do that. Right, and it's disrespecting the intelligence of people because most people can see through this stuff. It's what happened so much in COVID. when they were like, oh no, masks don't work, so please don't buy them. And that's what they said to the British public when really the reality was they just were running out of masks and this was early on in the pandemic and they needed them for healthcare workers.

51:13Just tell people that because people aren't stupid. Obviously a mask is going to be better than no mask. It might not be that effective, but it's pretty obvious. I think just as a general heuristic, it tends to be the case that second order effects are smaller than first order effects like if you try and achieve A and it has side effect B probably because you make this conscious effort A is going to be bigger in terms of magnitude than B so I think this is kind of a criticism that we sometimes receive and actually this actor I was speaking to he then started to make the point And he was expressing his concern about our work because he was worried that people would become complacent, that they would think that the problem is solved because of what we do.

52:06But yeah, then again, you're kind of thinking for someone else and you're making these assumptions. Well, probably, okay, this might be a second-order effect. We actually don't really see that. we see that the work that we do actually inspires more work like this. So we see actually a positive snowball effect. But even if that wouldn't be the case, that second order effect is probably many times smaller than the first order effect of actually just solving the problem. Well, one thing I'm perpetually in a tiz about is where should my personal efforts be going into? I would say I'm a deep environmentalist at heart.

52:47I came from, as I said, hated litter. I've always tried to use reusable. Every time I buy plastic of water, something inside of me dies a little bit. I'm like, I could just be reusing, where's my aluminum container to fill up again? But at the same time, I'm aware of the fact that living in the US or Europe, waste management is really good. Landfill is actually very good. They're sealed, it's not like stuff is leaching into the environment. recycling is actually often quite energy expensive. It sometimes gets shipped off to some country, which then just dumps it in the rivers anyway. So what are the sort of trade-offs that someone living in the West, the average person listening to this, should be considering about their own personal usage?

53:31Yeah, I find that's one of the hardest questions to chance, because there is, sure, you can change things in your individual life, but in terms of how big the impact actually is compared to, say, supporting an organization that isn't operating in the countries where most pollution comes from. I think there's just so many orders of magnitude difference there that that's probably the right thing to do. It's not just a shameless plug for the ocean cleanups. There are other organizations you can donate to. But there's an organization called Sungai Watch that does barriers on Bali and there's another organization called Maria Verde that does these things in Panama.

54:20Do you collaborate with any of those? We're not yet operational in those places but if we scale to those places we definitely are planning to work with we always try to work with local organizations for sure. So yeah, because the fact is just the chance that your plastic ends up in the environment, as long as you don't litter, it's just very tiny in a country like the US or Europe. I think from a resource point of view, I think it's still a good thing to avoid single-use plastics, to reuse. So there is, when you look at just the energy balance, just reusing the same thing is a good thing. But I suppose to complicate things even more, producing plastic is relatively energy efficient.

55:21So, for example, a reusable tote bag from cotton, I think you would have to reuse, I forgot the number, but I think it's the order of hundreds or thousands of times before it actually outweighs... The energy cost of one plastic bag. Yeah, or just 100 or 1 ,000 plastic bags, actually. So to just keep reusing, or to not reuse. I see, yeah, the other way around, yeah. I think on that it would probably be good to not avoid plastic, but to not keep throwing it out. That's probably the best thing to do. But that's from an energy and a resource point of view. and then when it comes to the plastic pollution in the environment I think as long as you don't litter it's just very low chance that your plastic ends up in the environment probably the biggest ocean plastic footprint you would have is if you were to spend a vacation in Indonesia or something just because it's that one week in that sort of system with that waste management infrastructure.

56:33Right, the bottled water you drink and so on. Yeah. You need to bring those bottles home with you. Basically squish them into your luggage. Yeah, I mean, I actually don't do that, but ironically that's probably, if you think really about the individual level. Even like the fuel cost of flying at home, because it's pretty light. It doesn't take up lots of bag space. Yeah. Maybe. It's kind of insane though. It is nuts. Yeah. So if you really focus on, say, what we can do here in the West, I think one would be stop shipping garbage that we make here to lower-income countries. We're still doing that?

57:11Some of it, yeah. I think it's also a bit more complicated than some people make it seem because it's actually kind of an economic transaction. There's a lot of recycling infrastructure in these countries, so they buy the plastic. You have very cheap transport usually to these countries because you have the containers with the newly manufactured goods coming to us. So they're empty and you just stuff them with the... Right, so you just fill them with garbage and bring that to countries like Malaysia. But those industries, they tend to be quite shady, so you don't know exactly what happens to them.

57:47Sometimes it does end up in the environment, right? So I think that would be definitely something that would be good to stop. and then just using development money from the West in these countries. I think it's relatively, at least when you think about interception, I think it will be about a million and a half per river to do this. So for about a billion and a half initial investments, we can just close the tap and then, of course, it's not the ultimate solution. I think ultimately we do need to upgrade the waste management infrastructure. but at least to buy the world time to stop that stuff from going into the ocean.

58:29That's, I think, a very cost-effective intervention. So would you say that funding is your main constraint? Right now it's about having the organizational capabilities to do it and the technology still. So I think when it comes to cleaning up the legacy pollution, we're doing it, we know we can do it, but we feel it's not yet responsible to scale to many cleanup systems because we first want to squeeze out all the performance we can from one cleanup system before scaling it up because once you add systems, you add boats, those are expensive so then your cost really goes up. So first, essentially we have to have the discipline to be small first in order to scale effectively later.

59:16so next nine months it's all about maximizing the performance we need to get, I think right now we're at about I think the record we have is about 150 kilos per hour that the system collects we need to get that above 300 to be nominal and to really feel like we're ready to now scale up so that's really just about making it efficient making it cost effective And then in rivers, we're currently having this first batch of 20 rivers that we use to essentially teach ourselves how to do it. So these are many different countries. So we learn how to interact with different governments. They're very different rivers.

1:00:01So there were different types of interceptor we have there. So also to learn how to make those effectively. and so it's really focused on completing those first 20 first before we then start scaling up again because if we don't get rid of the mistakes now and we're going to make mistakes in the next 100 rivers that will be very problematic, very expensive so we want to make those mistakes before we're big essentially so that's why we need to have this discipline so next nine months is about completing those first 20 rivers so that we have all the knowledge we need to scale effectively starting mid-next year.

1:00:44I've been thinking a bit about this idea of, some people claim that technology is values neutral. That it's not the technology itself, it's not guns that kill people, it's the people that do it. To the effect of, a technology is just what it is, it's how the humans use it that determines whether it's good or bad. and then there's this really interesting article by the Consilience Project which basically makes the argument that technology is not values neutral and that depending on the technology itself it will shape behavior so arguably something like Instagram comes along which is very image based that will tend to make people be more vain they'll tend to favor more vanity things or that medium of information exchange as opposed to via words.

1:01:39Or you have some technologies which are more offense versus defense bias, a hand grenade versus a vaccine or something like that. Which sort of camp would you say you fall in on that or how do you think about this? Yeah, I think this phrase technology is neutral. It's just what we do with it. I think it's the biggest lie people tell about technology. I think it's very wrong. I think you already mentioned a few good examples. Just think of some extremes indeed, like an alternative for CFCs that doesn't harm the ozone layer. I think that's objectively a very good thing versus developing a new type of weapon that everyone can 3D print in their backyard or something like that.

1:02:30I think there is a very highly pathogenic virus or something like that. So it's kind of this, Stephen Pinker has this great book called The Blank Slate about the denial of human nature, where for all sorts of political reasons, people deny that there is this kind of, there's a direction in part embedded into us in our DNA, in our genes. And I think a similar situation is the case with technology. I think there's a denial of technology nature where indeed the inventor already embeds a certain direction into the technology because by shaping something you limit what it could be used for and yeah I don't think technology I think it's a spectrum right so some things are extremely net negative extremely net positive and then you'll have stuff that is roughly in the middle but yeah I think what you often see with leaders in technology they will gladly take credit for the good technology does and how they're helping the world with their technology and how they're curing cancer with their new AI or whatever but yeah they bring up these technologies neutral arguments if they're talking about the bad sides.

1:04:20And yeah, I don't think you can have it both ways. And so I'm almost like thinking, I don't think engineers and inventors and technologists realize how much power and influence they have over humanity's future. If there's technologists listening, are there any heuristics they should and could be following? Is it like they need to be better, spending more time in the R &D phase, spending more time in the pure research of like, let's simulate through how, if this technology is maximally successful and is deployed, how the world might look. Should there be much more resources going into that phase, essentially simulating the impacts?

1:05:08What do you think? I think it should start with engineers being aware that they have this much power. Yeah, that's step one. Yeah. Admitting you might have a problem. I mean, doctors have this Hippocratic Oath. I'm not the first one to suggest that maybe, you know, just like at med school, you learn about ethics. Maybe we should have ethics classes in engineering colleges as well, so that people become more aware of, okay, the actions I take actually have an impact on the future. And then whenever I speak to technologists that are working on something that I think is sort of morally questionable, the thing I often hear is like, yeah, it's cool.

1:05:54It's so cool what I'm working on. And yeah, I just, I would encourage engineers to really think through what I'm building, how could that be used? Do I think that's net positive, net negative? Is it uncertain? What could I do to move towards the positive side on the spectrum? Could I embed certain safeguards to do that? Because again, when you think about the development of any technology, people are shaping the direction of the future. People tend to think in terms of financial investment, like we should divest from fossil fuels. There's often a lot of focus on the money side, but I think realistically what's most often the true bottleneck to advanced technology, it's people.

1:06:58it's intellectual resources it's smart people who want to work on it so you as an engineer have tremendous power if you choose to work on say a net good technology versus a net bad technology you can truly change the cause of humanity because you might be the bottleneck for certain technologies to either come to fruition or not. Were you a competitive person at all growing up? Did you like sports? No. Winning games? No, I did dip my toe, I think, in that realm. and I think at some point in time I did try to be the best in my class but there's always this one guy that had higher grades and we were friends so I didn't feel very bad about that and I was very stereotypical Dutch but I was an ice skater and I was just doing this for fun and one time there was this competition and I fell down and I was second to last while I was actually a pretty good ice skater.

1:08:27So now I just felt like, oh, this doesn't really make me feel happy.

1:08:34And then there was this whole other realm, which were all these hobby projects of mine where there was nobody else doing those things. It was just me asking myself, okay, how far can I take this? And I guess I was insanely competitive in the sense that I was competitive with myself of never being satisfied with what I'm doing. Even today, I don't feel I'm particularly successful. But I do have a belief that I can be successful in the future. but yeah that's more like a competition with yourself and I guess competition is wrong there because it's more, I guess you call it more ambition It sounds like your source of motivation as a non-competitive person conventionally competitive person is as you say with these different versions of yourself so it's a form of like you're creating an artificial form of zero-sumness amongst these different old personas of yourself.

1:09:48Yeah, future me is in competition with present me. Exactly. And that is what drives you? Or do you think you would still have your ambition without this sort of dissatisfaction feeling? I just find it very hard to cherish the moment. and also the nature of what I'm doing you can always be better so we had this I guess insane uptick in cleanup performance in recent months two thirds of everything we've collected so far was collected in the past few months in the past four months so yeah so it's kind of cool but of course just focused on the next thing. Okay, how do we double this again? How do we triple this again?

1:10:44So yeah, I think that's kind of the, I guess it's for most entrepreneurs. It's this uncomfortable situation where, or I suppose it's a tragic situation where

1:11:06I think if you are satisfied, I think that can lead to complacency. I think there's this hunger for more and dissatisfaction. I think that is, I suppose that is in a sense what you need to keep pushing yourself. You know, when you say, oh, the motivation that drives you to fix the ocean plastic problem is coming from this deep, almost like discomfort and dissatisfaction. And I feel like a Buddhist would say, well, you know, if you took that kind of philosophy to its extreme, where everyone is just in a permanently happy, satisfied with the moment state, then problems, you know, yes, it's true that many problems wouldn't be created in the first place, but at the same time, many problems don't get fixed.

1:11:54So it feels to me like we need to harness the energy of the dissatisfaction within people like you. you've found a way to direct that energy into something that's clearly a net positive for the world. And for the most part, a lot of great entrepreneurs have also done that. If I think about all the big entrepreneurs that I've met, they also have this same, not working hard enough, need to be doing more, need to be doing more. That is not a good or a bad thing, it's just a tool. And the question is, what is it directed towards? What is the goal that is being optimized for? Is the goal clearly a win-win, or is it more a win-lose, or is it actually a lose-lose?

1:12:31I mean, as a rationalist person, you always love to complain about biases and everything, but without optimism bias, there would be no people like me. It's completely irrational, starting age 16, thinking you can clean the ocean. What's the probability of that? It's like, check your priors. But still, I guess it's important to be irrational at times. What advice would you give to anyone who's watching and is inspired by this, who now wants to go out and figure out what best problem they should be working on? One thing that people probably don't think about enough is that you need solutions that people want.

1:13:26so I think especially in environmentalism I see a lot of people with the mindset of this is the solution I'm pushing but tragically nobody wants this solution if only people were different, if only more people would be like me

1:13:50so you need to have solutions that are in sort of a Venn diagram that A, are effective in solving the problem and B, are things that actually are compatible with the way humanity works and how the system works. Because if it's not, it can look great on paper but it will never work in reality. So I guess that's an argument of pragmatism but I think it's important to, I think you can design your solution in a way that is appealing to the masses. It's something that people really want. How would someone think about going, whether a problem should be solved as a non-profit versus for-profit? Because presumably with the ocean cleanup, there was no real way for you to do it as a for-profit, at least certainly not from the outset.

1:14:45Do you see a path to for-profit at some point? Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish the legal entity structure, so non-profit, 501c3, for-profit company, whatever, and whether or not you have business models or whether you're just reliant on gifts and philanthropy. I don't think those two things are necessarily, you think of one being connected to the other, but I think they're actually independent things. So I think it's very hard for us to ever not be a non-profit, it, but that doesn't mean we can't have real business models to make this self-sustaining to a degree. Of course, at some point in time, we want to help ourselves out of business.

1:15:29We don't want to exist, so we shouldn't be too sustainable in our business models. But at least to scale, I think you need to have some kind of exchange of value. And definitely when I started the ocean cleanup, there was just no thinkable path that it could be a for-profit. The upfront investment required to develop the technology to take those risks in light of just a very uncertain prospect of whether there would be any money to be made with that, just made it completely impossible to get any for-profit money. So then we just said, okay, this needs to happen, so we just do a non-profit.

1:16:22And I think that has been amazing, the support we've received from literally millions of people around the world over the years. It's something I just can't get used to. So just, it's, yeah, if there's anything that sometimes makes me emotional, it's just this, you know, just the amount of goodwill we've received over the years. And, yeah, it's just school children running around their school to bake cookies. There's something to raise money for us. It's just really, really cool. but that's amazing and it has gotten us to the point of where we are I think to scale you do need a degree of sustainability that at least you can make financial commitments that are a bit longer term if you have to acquire assets or have longer term contracts with operators etc so I think that's important to scale the team that's risky if you continue to live paycheck to paycheck.

1:17:35And also just the magnitude to scale up. I do think this is the world's cheapest world problem. For a few billion, we can solve this. That's actually crazy. So you think for under 5 billion, we could solve ocean plastic forever? Yeah, so that's the right ballpark. Is that to stop more plastic going in as well? The interceptor side, I think it's cheaper than actually doing the legacy pollution. So I think if you can, you don't want stuff to go into the ocean because it's just way more expensive to get it out later. But it's just ballpark. So it's in the ballpark of five billion. So to put that into context, that's two Las Vegas spheres.

1:18:13Yeah, two balls. Yeah, two Las Vegas spheres. Don't get me wrong, I think that thing is amazing. I heard they're good, yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. I've heard it's absolutely incredible. But just two of those would basically solve the marine plastic problem. Two massive balls, yeah. Two big balls. We just need to trade off some balls to clean the oceans of plastic. That really does just put it into perspective, I think. It's not unthinkable that it will happen. I think it then becomes a question of willingness of the world. Do we really care about this enough to do it? I think we see the will.

1:18:53People do care. I know it's a pretty across-the-board issue that most people are like, would you rather there be more or less plastic in the ocean? 99.9 % of people will say less. So the will is there. I think it's probably a combination of people who don't believe it's possible. I think it's just a completely intractable problem, which is not the case, as you've said. And again, it comes down to a little bit like the methodology, perhaps there's disagreements on how it should be done, and the reasoning, which comes down to this conflict versus engineering mindset thing, but even that is like, ultimately I think most people would get aligned if it's happening.

1:19:34So yeah, maybe it's in part, when you have something like the sphere, again, the people who build it directly get rewarded. They're going to get rich from that sphere, right? As they should, it's a great piece of art. The people who build, who clean the oceans of plastic, The biosphere. The biosphere, here we go. Wow, just puns up the ass. Aren't, I mean, at the same time, there are credits to be given. And I imagine you're getting some positive feedback, obviously, clearly from the work you're doing, right? You've got a lot of awards and so on. So we need to, again, it all comes down to incentive structures.

1:20:19How do we create the incentives that will motivate more people, whether it's very rich people to fund these projects or politicians to make it their pet cause? How do we do that? You tell me. I don't have the answers either, but I'm just throwing it out there. If you have any suggestions, please get in touch. Theoceansleaf.com So let's say the 5 billion has been raised and it has been successfully deployed and the oceans are now clear of plastic. what would you turn your sights to after that? So my general mission in life is to make our civilization sustainable to at least help advance that and I love humanity I love the technological civilization that we've built sometimes I actually get emotional I'll just think about it.

1:21:19I was sitting in an airplane recently to get here, and it just hit me like, this is actually insane. If you think about what we have achieved as one species of overevolved monkeys in just the past 200 years. Flying through the sky. It's beautiful. It's amazing. I'm just so proud of my fellow humans. And I guess people can get accustomed to everything. And it always strikes me that it's so ironic that people are kind of de-growthers and are rallying against civilization and technology, how they write all their angry blogs on advanced technological things like an iPhone or a laptop. So, yeah, you get, very quickly you get used to this, but the fact that we're inside now and enjoying this comfortable temperature while it's freezing outside, it's not normal.

1:22:33If you look at the course of humanity, it's still mind-blowing to me. And I think that's something that I think I want to make sure we can preserve. I want to make sure that all humans can reap the fruits of that and that we can actually take that much further because I don't think this is necessarily the best state we can achieve. I think humanity can advance a lot more. But at the same time, I think we are, it's a fragile civilization. And I think it would be such a tragedy if that potential is lost. You know, the sort of infantile relationship we have with our, you know, the biosphere, I think that is a critical one to solve.

1:23:31and there are of course other risks and side effects coming from our technology as well that I think we need to get under control to safeguard human potential so I hope I will live long enough to have the pleasure of working on more problems in the future But I do really need to have the discipline to work on one at the time, at least for now. Because I think I can't do the next thing if I don't have the credibility of having solved at least one problem. Because of course that will require probably way more resources still. and also if we're not successful with this I think not only is there not some other organization that will just stand up and fill that void but is actually going to actively work against the cause because people will say they had funding, they had all these smart people working on it but even they couldn't do it so probably it's impossible to rid the ocious of plastic.

1:24:53So I think that is something that weighs heavily on my shoulders. I feel like we really have this responsibility to be successful because if we don't do it, I don't think it's really going to happen, at least any time soon. So there we go. thank you so much for watching or listening, whatever format you are consuming this in. Huge thank you to Boyan for taking the time to sit down with me. I mean, it's just so great that there is someone out there willing to just dedicate their life to cleaning up after our civilization. And if you enjoyed this, which hopefully you did considering you've made it to the end and are now listening to this, please like and share it.

1:25:42I mean, Boyan's message is so inspirational. So I want as many people to hear about it as possible. On that note, thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.