Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1402 - Boyan Slat
Uploaded: 2019-12-17T20:00:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1402 - Boyan Slat' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1402 - Boyan Slat' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1402 - Boyan Slat

3, 2, 1.
What's up, fella? How are you? Good to see you again, man.
Likewise.
I've been reading that you are having some great success with your machine,
finally.
Everything's up and running. Last time we talked, you had yet to implement it,
actually out in the wild.
And now, explain to us what happened. You had some bumps in the beginning,
right?
Yes. Yeah. So, it's been quite a few years. Finally, something's happening.
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.
Sure.
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.
We got a video of it, what it was doing.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah.
So, this is the basic idea.
But it wasn't doing that.
So, and then, you know, we thought, okay, that's all right, we'll learn from it,
we'll try and adjust the systems.
And then, literally, exactly a year ago, the system broke into two.
And so, with the structural failure forcing us to tell the whole thing back to
land and go back to the drawing board.
So, we didn't have the best start of this year.
How much time has been lost?
Or how much time has been spent, I should say, in the beginning phase, the
initial version that you launched versus where you're at now?
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, you know, went to the drawing board and the team really took it well.
And 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 what 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.
Wow.
So, it's really recently up and running the way you expected it.
Yes.
Now, how long does it take to accumulate two shipping containers full?
Yeah.
So, that was roughly a month, month and a half.
And how big are these shipping containers?
Twenty foot.
So, probably two of these rooms.
So, the only thing that's really stopping it from getting more is like the
actual size of the net itself.
Yes.
So, that's the next step.
So, now that we went from zero to one, we have the basic principle of catching
plastic confirmed.
We now have to make it bigger before we can build a whole fleet of them.
Because, you know, we reckon we need maybe 50 or 100 of them to really clean up
half this patch in five years.
That's the objective.
Half the whole patch in five years.
That's the real objective?
That's what we want to do.
Wow.
Is that really possible?
If you have enough systems.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Now, where are you at in terms of like trying to get these systems made and
implemented?
So, now we just finished this first step with the system number one.
That's how we called it.
And the next step is to develop what we call system two, which is indeed going
to be a bigger version.
And the idea is to minimize the amount of vessel use that you need for it.
So, that comes because boats are really fucking expensive.
The boat that we have costs roughly 15,000 euros per day to keep running.
Wow.
Just one boat.
So, boat.
You don't want boats to, you know.
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?
I mean, I hope so.
That's what we want to trowel next year by making products from the catch that
we make.
And the material itself hardly has any value.
It's really the story to it.
You should make straws.
You should make straws so people don't feel guilty.
Yeah.
It's a recycled straw.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Throw them in the ocean.
Yeah.
That's a terrible idea.
I mean, it would be a very sustainable business model.
Yeah.
Just keep going.
What are the products that you're thinking about creating?
Oh, well, we have a few ideas.
We, so it's still kind of 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 you actually, that will retain their value.
So, it 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.
And actually now, so just last week we, 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.
So, you're just trying to figure out what products will have the most
sustainability, what products people keep for the longest?
Yeah.
And things that people want, right?
Right.
You don't want some kind of gimmick that's just going to be this paperweight.
Flip-flops seem like an easy one, right?
Yeah.
Don't they?
I'd love to buy flip-flops if they bought flip-flops.
Yeah.
Especially people that are like, sort of like outdoorsy type folks.
Sure.
Appreciate the beach.
And maybe have to write these things down.
Flip-flops?
That's a pretty easy one.
Any other ideas?
What else, Jamie?
What else would be a good one?
Belts.
People like belts.
Or shoes.
Any flip-flops.
Or shoes.
Yeah.
Shoes, like definitely some Yeezys.
Some dope recycled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some recycled sneakers.
Like what is foam?
Like the foam that they make running shoes out of?
That's a very specific type of, that's not actual plastic, right?
It's probably made out of something else.
It's a type of plastic.
Yeah.
We might be able to foam this material as well.
I think we've done tests with that.
Oh, really?
Turn it into foam?
Yes.
Oh, through some sort of a process.
Yeah.
Take athletic shoes.
That'd be easy.
Right?
People, but they would, you'd have to have a way to make, to like incentivize
people to recycle
them.
It would be so ironic for those fucking things wound up back in the ocean.
Yeah.
You know?
There's gotta be a way to do that.
Just tell, you know, like have like, if you have your own company, like drop
off points
in cities where when they're done with their stuff, if it's broken down or it's
old, if
you've used it, you could throw it into this bin and you will ensure that it
gets converted
back into raw materials and utilized again.
Right.
Yeah.
Circular economy.
Yeah.
That'd be a great move.
And people would do that if they, if you made it easy for them, you know, it's
sort of
like recycling bins.
If they make it easy for them, they'll, they'll throw their bottle in there.
Sure.
Yeah.
These two cargo ships or these two cargo containers, uh, filled with this
plastic stuff.
Um, what do you do with it now?
Yeah.
So now it's going to Europe.
Unfortunately, there isn't really any useful recycling infrastructure in the U
S.
So, um, so we set up this, this, um, infrastructure in, in, in Europe to be
able to first sort it
and then shred it and then recycle it and then, um, make those first products
out of them.
So hopefully, um, and hopefully with that, then, you know, generate the cash
needed to,
to continue, uh, running the cleanup.
And of course now it's still small scale.
Right.
Eventually we should have those number of shipping containers every, you know,
every day.
Probably.
So do you have like a group of people that's trying to come up with ideas or
what to make
out of the plastic?
Yeah, it's a little team in, uh, inside the ocean cleanup working on that.
And, um, yeah, so they, I think they say that by September they should be ready
to, to launch
the first product.
So that's great, man.
That's the, the, the whole idea behind it's beautiful.
Don't you have a river system too, as well, right?
Yes.
So, so that's the other thing, right?
So on one hand, we need to, we need to clean up.
What's, what's running in the ocean doesn't go away by itself.
And, um, yeah, basically the, the only way to, to deal with that is to just go,
go out
there and clean it up.
Um, but of course, then there's this, 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, um, you know, central America, um, South, Southeast Asia, where people are
kind of
at this stage of development or countries are at a stage of development where,
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, on scooters, just, uh, 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.
You know, what's easiest people will do.
And, uh, so it's not really that people don't care there or that they, um, 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.
So, so then back in 2015, we were like, okay, maybe at some point in time, this,
this ocean
thing will work out.
Who knows?
Um, 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.
And that would just be, you know, not, not very motivating.
And we want to be this project with a beginning and an end.
So, so we're like, okay, so where's the plastic coming from?
And then we figured, you know, probably rivers.
Rivers are like these, these arteries that carry the trash from, from land to
sea.
Because when it rains plastic washes from streets to Creek to river to ocean.
And, um, but then we, we found out that there is a hundred thousand rivers in
the world.
So that's kind of a big amount if you want to do something about it.
So, um, so we started doing measurements and rivers.
And then what we found was that just 1% of rivers are responsible for 80% of
the, of the pollution.
So really just a very tiny amount of rivers, if you were to, to tackle those
could really
address the majority of, of the plastic going into the ocean.
And it's, it's mostly like these relatively small rivers in, um, in, in capital
cities
like Manila, like Jakarta, like Kuala Lumpur.
We have a very high density