In the interest of time, I'll get going. I imagine more people will be joining in the next few minutes. But so first of all, yeah, good afternoon. And thank you so much for all of you for taking time out to be with us. And on behalf of Jen and Brian and Danica and Elizabeth and myself, welcome to the launch of this new series called Tackling Global Challenges. This is episode one of season one of what we hope will be a hit series. So I'm going to take just a couple of minutes to tell you about what we're hoping to accomplish before I turn it over to Mike. I think our goal is pretty simple. We're trying to shine a spotlight on a particular problem area in sustainability in order to help inspire some creative thinking and critical analysis to come up with new solutions. So we're going to have a topic for each season. And the topic for season one is plastic. So sustainability challenges associated with the manufacture and particularly end of use of plastic products and the crisis of plastic pollution. So what we hope you're going to be able to take away from this series is, first of all, a better understanding of the challenges. So the magnitude, the complexities, the nature of the challenges, the technological, behavioral policy, et cetera. But we're not going to wallow in despair. There's plenty to despair about with respect to plastic. So I think more importantly than talking about the problems, we hope that at least some of you will come away from these sessions seeing new opportunities to develop solutions. And at the Tomcat Center, we are particularly interested in helping to support solutions in the form of innovations that lead to new companies and new products. And certainly I think that the dream, if new ideas come about through this series that then turn into teams that then try to translate them, then we would certainly love to help out in any way that we can through the center. We like plastic for this first season because the challenges are multifaceted. There are many different ways of approaching it. You can approach it scientifically. You can approach it from an engineering perspective, from a logistics perspective, from consumer preferences, behavior, policy, et cetera. So there's really a lot to think about in terms of solutions in this space. Just a word about the logistics. So Mike will give a presentation. If you have questions that come up during the presentation, you can chat them. You'll see, please chat them to me. You only have a couple of choices for the hosts. And then at the end of the presentation, we'll have a discussion session. I'll try to pull as many questions as I can to have a discussion with Mike. And then at about 5 o'clock, I understand many people have other time constraints. So those of you who can stay a little bit afterwards will have an opportunity to extend the discussion, depending on the number of participants, maybe make it a little bit more free flowing in the last half hour or so. So with that, let me just give a real quick introduction to our speaker, Mike Biddle. Mike is really eminently qualified to discuss this topic from just about every perspective. So his educational background was in chemical engineering and polymer science. He worked in industry for some of the giants, including Dow Chemical. And then he partly, I think in conjunction with a stand here at Stanford as a Sloan fellow at the GSB, he launched his own company, MBA Polymers, I think a little over 20 years ago now, to try to develop technology to take, frankly, garbage and extract the plastics, separate them, process them, get them back into the hands of customers that can turn those into plastic products. They have successfully commercialized this technology and scaled this technology. Those of you who had a chance to look at the briefing materials can see some of the content around that. So Mike has certainly engaged this from an entrepreneur's perspective. And now he's the managing director of Evoque Innovations, which invests in new ventures working on industrial innovations. So Mike, again, we're very grateful for you to be the pioneer here for this event. And the floor is yours. Great. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for the kind introduction. And let's see. I've got to share my screen here. First or the second. I hope that works. That seemed to work for folks. We still see the side paint. Now it's in the presentation view. Perfect. Thank you. I love it when technology works. Yeah, I titled this Connecting the Dots because the Tomcat team gave me a bit of a daunting challenge. There was a lot of things they wanted me to cover, which I thanked them for. But an unlimited amount of time and on such a complicated subject, there's only so much I can cover. So what I am going to try to do is connect some of the dots. And specifically around the intersection of plastics, of course, the main topic, energy and human well-being. Because I think there's a lot of overlap there and there's a lot of tie-ins. And I hope to connect some of those dots for you. I can't go into a lot of depth in such a short presentation. And because there are so many dots to connect. And that's I hope you had a chance to look at the briefing materials if you didn't. I would encourage you to take a look at them after this presentation because it will fill in a lot of the gaps that I'm not going to be able to cover in a short presentation today. And I realize, I believe, I'm speaking to a lot of students and teachers. So I tried to gear it a bit in that direction. So there's a lot of new material here. I've never tried out before. And Janika will tell you, I just sent her a few minutes ago another version. So it's a fresh work. So this will be a journey we'll take together. This will be my first time giving this particular presentation as well. So there are a lot of dots when you look at these three big areas and the opportunities and challenges in these areas. In fact, this would be a tiny part of the universe of opportunities and challenges that I see in the areas of plastics, energy, and human well-being. So I'm hoping I'm going to identify a few signposts, at least how I identify signposts in my own journey in playing in these three areas. And hopefully some of those signposts maybe won't be your signposts. And you'll be connecting different dots. But maybe there's some learnings from the many mistakes I'll say I made in my 30-year journey that I hope can be applied to your own journey that you decide to take. And hopefully by the end, when your first journey, let's say, you end up in a beautiful connection of the dots that's something valuable and beautiful. But it won't be, I guarantee you, when you get to the end of your first journey, it's not the end. It just keeps getting more. There's more dots to connect, more challenges to tackle, and ever more opportunities. So that's one of the messages I want to send to you. It's a lifelong journey. I've got lots of dots in front of me. I'm going to continue to keep connecting for many decades, I hope. So I'll start off with a bit of my background. Matt was kind of up to give us all. I'll just do this very briefly, because we are a product. I mean, many of the perspectives I'm going to be sharing with you were developed through my own experience, my own career. So let's see how those might have developed and why. And I will say I started off just trying to make a living and ended up now trying to make an impact. It's pretty simple. I don't think that's much different from anyone else. I left college with debt and had to find my own way. So I had a lot of bills to pay, and I had to figure out how to make a living first. So I started off working at some great companies. I learned a lot in my first decade of work. These were extremely well-managed companies, particularly at the time frame when I was working in them, say three decades or so ago. And once I felt I kind of learned what I wanted to learn and I saw some challenges I wanted to try to tackle, I created a consulting company called Michael Michael and Associates, or MB&A for short. And to be honest, that was just going to be a holding pattern. That was going to allow me to figure out what I wanted to do next with my life. But it eventually turned into this thing called NBA Polymers that I'm going to talk a bit about today in the presentation and eventually a multinational plastics recycling company. I then pretty much did the same thing again after I felt like I learned what I could learn and proven what I wanted to prove with NBA Polymers. Eight or so years ago, I decided to form a separate company called Material Solutions, which was, again, a consulting company trying to figure out how to pass along the torch, basically on circular economy. So I actually worked with a lot of Fortune 100 companies all the way down to small enterprises and even startups. I'm trying to figure out how do you embed circular economy principles, both in big organizations and how do you build companies based on circular economy principles? And more recently, I joined Evoke Innovations a little over five years ago where we invest in clean energy, clean tech, climate tech, and carbon tech opportunities, all the new tech acronyms. And by the way, I became a dad along this journey, too. This is an important aspect. And so full disclosure here, there'll probably be some fatherly advice DNA spread scattered throughout some of these slides, particularly since I am. I believe I'm talking to some students in the audience today. I've got an incredible daughter who's a sophomore in college studying engineering, wanting to change the world, and I have an incredible son who's a sophomore in high school trying to do the same thing, teaching me daily, reteaching me chemistry and math almost every day, it seems like. And one of the common themes through all of this is on a sustainability theme. And sustainability, I know it's a bit overused these days, perhaps, but I think it's still important. And you can see it's embedded in MBA polymers from the early days. It's something we thought was really important in a guiding principle. And we've always thought about it not just from the environmental sense, which is how it's usually taken, but in a much more holistic way of looking at what sustainability means. And one way of looking at this is the three pillars, the three B's, people, prosperity, and planet, or if you will, social, economic, and environmental factors. And I like to throw in a fourth P, particularly on my most recent journey. And that's passion because we need passion. If we're going to solve these problems, we need people with passion trying to tap into these or solve these problems and tap into the opportunities represented by trying to come up with a more sustainable future.  And I probably the image that would have come up in my mind would have been something like this, which is if you go to Wikipedia, this is the image for passion that comes up. But what I have in mind is not that type of passion. It's this type of passion represented by people like Greta. And I'm not the only one that thinks passion is important. Elon Musk, for example, says passion and purpose scale. Always have and always will. Steve Jobs said, you need a lot of passion because what you're doing is probably so hard if you don't have that passion, any rational person would give up. And that's something I can really relate to. I can tell you I've been called irrational more than once in my life. And finally, I'll just one more quote. I don't wanna over quote you, but I love this one from Oprah who says, follow your passion because it will lead you to your purpose. And that's indeed how I'm gonna start off the talk. So the navigation for today's presentation is I'm gonna try to answer four questions. The first is why are we here? What's our purpose? The second is where do we wanna go? Kind of what's the vision for the future we'd like to see? How do we get there? What's our strategy? And who's gonna get us there? Who's gonna take responsibility? Now, it ended up when I finally put this together, I probably get to four more than I get to, before I get to three. And I think you'll understand by the time we get to that point why I jumped to four before I actually answered three. So I'll start with why I'm here. I assume you know why you're here. So I'll explain why I think I'm here. And maybe one question on your mind I get a lot is why in the world that I spend three decades of my life playing with plastics? Well, it has something to do with this equation. And if you don't know what this equation is, that's okay, I'm gonna come back to it. In all honesty, I had to look it up on Google to make sure I had the equation format, right? And if you look at when I entered the plastics world, when I got out of college in the late 70s, plastics were the grooviest material on the planet. You could make anything out of plastics, any shape, any form, any color. And I may or may not have had a polyester suit similar to the one on the right, but I definitely had hair unfortunately, very similar to that in that timeframe. In fact, I wish I had some of it now, but it's gone I think. But even more importantly for me or more interestingly for me, it was the material of the future. At least it felt that way in the 70s and 80s and 90s even. And in fact, life said, hey, we can have a great future with this new wonderful material because we can have a throwaway lifestyle, much easier living. And we're gonna come back to how that's maybe not turned out the way we hoped it would. And of course, I have to refer to this movie. This will date you if you remember this movie. I'm hoping that even though this was probably, this was released well before many people in the audience were born. This is The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman. And it's one of the most famous one line, one liners in movie history. So Dustin just graduated from college. He's getting a one word advice from a family friend at his graduation celebration. And that one word of advice, I usually ask the audience when it's live, what's that one word? And it's amazing, almost everyone in the audience knows of course it's plastics. What's scary is whoever put that in the movie was amazingly prescient. Because plastics have been, have had insane growth since the early 50s and 60s. And in fact, that's projected to continue in this fashion. And this is a good introduction to bring back that equation. So remember that simple equation? Well, it's an exponential function, which means rapid growth up into the ride. And I think the plastics, the growth of the plastics industry, if nothing else is definitely experienced exponential growth since the 60s in particular. So as I was getting out of college, I had popular movies and math pointing me to plastics as the future. And my chemical engineering degree was the perfect entry ticket. So off I went and jumped into the plastics industry. Something else happened in the late 70s. I don't know if anyone on is old enough to remember like me, the sitting in gas lines. There was this thing called the gas crisis. This is actually a picture in California. I remember sitting with my car and my gas guzzling car and gas lines waiting to fill it up in the 70s. And then the 80s, this was followed by the garbage crisis. So if you think about this from a plastics perspective, I was in an industry where the raw material for the industry, we were worried that we weren't gonna have enough of it in the future and its price was gonna be unstable and expensive. And on the other end, we didn't know what to do with all this material. We were making and putting out into the world. Well, on the, what do you do with it after you make it front, at least here in the US, we figured we'll just send it to other countries, mostly China and Southeast Asia. And they would hand pick through the plastics we send them and they would recycle what they could, but most of the stuff we sent them were the very difficult to recycle plastics. So of course they just discarded them and often that discarding them meant down a ravine or in a river.  People will try to recycle this material but the majority of it a human being simply can't differentiate and recycle. The fellow in the lower left and the canoe is pulling straws out of the river because straws are mostly made out of one material and you can try to recycle that. Of course if it's in the rivers it's gonna end up in the oceans. One of the links in the pre-breed materials that I put in was from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on a study they did that estimates that there may be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. And of course when marine life encounters that plastic in the oceans it's usually not a good outcome. If they adjusted it's not a good outcome if they get entangled in it, it's not a good outcome. And National Geographic brought this to our attention. In fact, I think they're suggesting that perhaps plastics will replace our melting icebergs because there's so much plastic on the planet with this cover that they did a few years ago. In fact, I met the author of this pretty substantial article. You probably can't see the quote in the lower left is from Sylvia Earle. She says, plastics aren't inherently bad. It's what we do or don't do with them that counts out. I want you to remember that because I'm gonna come back to that point a little later. And they of course pointed to this exponential growth of the plastics as being the source, the fundamental source of the problem. And they quote studies that have shown that as much as 18 billion pounds of plastic enter the oceans each and every year around the world. 18 billion pounds. I think that's a hard number for any of us to put in perspective. So I'm gonna lean on an artist to help put this a little bit more in perspective. This was a art exhibit at the Zurich Museum of Design. This is amount of plastic that enters the oceans over a certain period of time. And I want you just for the next three or four seconds to think what the time period is. Is it a year? Is it months? Is it weeks? Is it days? So think about what you're gonna ask be honest with yourself. This is how much plastic and you see people on the left to put in perspective. This goes back a long way. This is a pretty big pile of plastic. It's how much plastic enters the oceans every 15 seconds. So of course, if it's entering the oceans, it's probably entering the fish, the fish do nibble on the stuff. And in fact, there's fact most fish have found if you studies have found that most of the fish in the oceans have plastic in them. And these percentages go up each and every year. The amount of the percentage of plastics they're finding in fish or the percent of fish they're finding with plastics in their digestive tracts. So where else do you might say, well, I don't eat fish. I'm sorry for the fish and I'm sorry for the marine life, but I don't have to worry about it because I don't eat that much fish. And of course, if I do this, probably not I'm not gonna eat the plastic in the fish. I'll sort it out. Well, it's in your sea salt and might not surprise you because plastics are in the ocean but it's also in your volatile water. It's in your tap water. It's even in your beer. It's on every corner of the globe. It's in Rocky Mountain, Snow and Rain. They found it in snowmelt, up to 150,000 particles per liter in the Bavarian Alps and even in the Arctic. They found up to 14,000 particles per liter in snowmelt from the Arctic. So it is truly ubiquitous. A study from the American Chemical Society last year or published in the American Chemical Society Proceedings last year estimated that Americans may consume between 39,000 and 52,000 particles of plastics each year. And they said if you include inhalation, it may be over 100,000 particles a year. Now, a lot of this is not from plastic articles. It's from clothing. It's from microplastics where we shed it in our washing machines but it's still a lot of plastic that we're ingesting. So you might ask, isn't this a problem if we're ingesting so much plastic? Well, I guess the good news is at least we know how to get rid of it. Maybe some of the pieces that are meant much of the marine life is ingesting as you saw from the photographs is too large for them to discard but the plastics that are entering humans are typically microplastics that work their way through us, we think for the most part. And in fact, when they did a study of random individuals in Vienna recently, they sampled people from eight different countries and found 100% of the folks had plastic in their discharge. The bad news is coming in, the good news is, let's hope all of it's going out but there's not necessarily all good news if it's coming out. The plastics are acting like little sponges. The good news about them acting as little sponges is they act like little magnets in the ocean for certain types of toxins we've dumped in the oceans for years, particularly oil-based toxins like PCBs and DDTs because they're hydrophobic. They don't like to be in the water, oil and water don't mix. A lot of the plastics are hydrophobic. So what they're finding is a lot of these toxins are preferentially attaching to the plastics and concentrating into the plastic particles which would be great if we could then pull these sponges back out of the ocean because we would have cleaned up the oceans. However, the plastics usually enter the ecosystem before we fish it out of the oceans and in fact, we're not really fishing any of the plastics out of the oceans today. So some of that plastic that is loaded with those toxins is being ingested by the fish.  So you might think of the plastics as being a keystone contaminant. They're allowing the completion of the circular economy from all the toxins we put into the ocean and enter back to their source, namely humans. So what can you do? Well, you could help increase awareness. I love the picture in the upper right that's from Ben Van Wong. He's an artist in San Francisco. I got to hang out with him last year on a boat when we were going through the North Atlantic Chire and seeing all the plastic in that particular garbage patch, if you will, of the ocean and he tries to bring people, tries to bring attention to the how much plastic we consume and discard of each year through his artwork. Other people, you see other forms of artwork here, some more pointed than others. The one that I would suggest that you might spend some time looking at is a film called, by Chris Jordan called Midway. Chris is an artist that uses art, both film and photographs to shine a light on a lot of the challenges that we face in modern society. And he, one of the things he's done called, the film called Midway is he went to Midway Island, which is breeding ground for the largest albatross in the world. Tens of thousands of these albatross breed on Midway Island and Midway Island is kind of in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't really have a population other than a few scientists on it. So there's no plastic waste being generated on the island. However, it's like a net in the middle of the ocean. So a lot of plastic waste that's in the ocean finds its way to Midway Island and the birds eat it either because there's food that is grown on the plastic or they mistaken it for food. You can see cigarette lighters, bottle caps. It's amazing what they find in the residue from these albatross carcasses. And he's made a film about it. It's only, you can watch the trailer. It's only about three and a half minutes. I strongly encourage you to do that. And I challenge you to try to leave without shedding a tear after watching this film. I know every single time I watch it, I can't walk away without tearing up. It's very well done. So art's one way. We can draw people's attention to it, but maybe we should be more direct and just ban these horrible materials, right? I mean, after all, you could consider them the ocean steadily as predator. And as my kids like to say, Dan, it's complicated. You certainly be in good company. Or you'd be in lots of company, I'll say, if you wanted to ban plastic. There's dozens and dozens of NGOs. I know a lot of the people that run these NGOs who would like to ban plastics. You can get a self-help book that will tell you how to injure relationship with plastic or to go plastic-free or how to shed plastic from your life. Or you can ask the government to ban plastics. So India passed not too long ago one of the world's toughest anti-plastics laws. And you can see why. I've been to India. I've seen streams like this. I've been to Southeast Asia, China. It is heartbreaking to see these streams, these rivers, just where you have really struggled to see the water in them. So you can see why they would go to this extreme. But I'd like to ask, do you think banning plastics would lead us to a better future? Turns out plastics are often the most efficient and best environmental material choice which is why they're used. So let's just look at a few examples. And automobiles are durable goods. This was a study done in Europe. If you replaced plastics with the next most logical material, which would be a metal in most cases, you dramatically require much more land use. Your mineral depletion would be significantly higher as would your energy use, your water use and your CO2 emissions. None of these things. That's not the direction we want ahead in making material choices for the products we enjoy. You said, fine, okay, that's durable goods. What about packaging? What about single use materials? Well, this study looked at consumer goods which included packaging and included food packaging as well, which is often considered a single use one-way plastics. And they tried to, it's a group called TrueCost. I know the CEO TrueCost, they do pretty good work. It's imperfect, but at least they took a shot at trying to put costs on things that are hard to figure out costs such as ocean damage. So they said using plastics in a business as usual approach, there's probably about $139 billion worth of environmental costs associated to plastic every year in the consumer goods sector. If you switch to more sustainable plastics like Matt and his group at Stanford are trying to do, come up with better plastics that have a more sustainable lower footprint, lower environmental footprint. You can lower that cost pretty substantially, but it's not gonna go to zero. And if you use alternatives to plastics, you can probably figure out where this is going given the scale on the left. They concluded that the best alternatives to plastics would have a much more significant environmental footprint. And if you tease this out a bit and ask in what way, if you look at just climate change, health of humans and ecosystem and damage to the oceans, again ecosystem, excuse me, True Cross tried to do that. And these were the differences they came up with. Now, again, this is an imperfect study, but it's the only one I know of where they've actually tried to rank materials, alternatives to plastic on these types of dimensions. A very difficult thing to do, but at least someone's trying to do it. So now I was faced with a problem, what do I do? This materials, it's got a bad rapid because the space age sexiest material on the planet when I entered the industry and now it's got this tarnished image and it's complicated, right? So what do I want to do? I don't think I want to not use plastics, but I also don't want them to end up in the waste room. So I said, why can't we turn lemons in the lemonade? Why can't we change the traditional way of making plastics? If we start with waste instead of petrochemicals, we've got a plentiful and growing supply and we've got lower costs that's not tied to oil. Our plants turn out to be a lot lower capital costs to build. They consume 80 to 90% lower energy and I'll come back to that. I'll share some data with you on that point. And these plants will make any type of plastic you feed them. A petrochemical plant will make one type of plastic for its entire life. So if the market changes for that plastic or the dynamics change, you're stuck with a huge capital investment making one type of plastic or a recycling plant will make what comes out of the back end depends on what you put in the front end. And we sell a plastic that has a one to three tons lower CO2 per ton of plastic footprint and we get to close the loop and make more sustainable products. And that's indeed what I did at MBA polymers.  That was, I sent a lot of links in the pre-reads and some of those were videos which would take you, walk you through some of the MBA polymers plants but I thought it was kind of interesting what some of the popular press came up with. Forbes said, here's a company making money out of junk and here's a company, one of the few companies on the planet that actually likes high-priced oil. And I said, yeah, I like very high-priced oil. I still do today, frankly. I wish I'd like to see oil much higher price for lots of reasons, frankly. I actually like this one better because I used to say we do above ground mining and I still think that's what you do when you're recycling materials. Instead of digging a hole in the ground or drilling for oil or natural gas underground, you're taking stuff that's already been refined to a certain point and simply pulling it out of the waste stream and reusing it again. It's a much better business model to be in. So we grew from, literally from my garage here in the East Bay of San Francisco Bay Area to a pilot plant in Berkeley and a cement production plant in Richmond. Then we designed, built and operated three world scale production plants and we operated those in three different countries. The first plant we built was in, the first world scale plant we built was in Guangzhou, China. The second one was in Austria and the third one was in the UK. And each one of these plants were bigger, more capable and more capacity and could take much more complicated, each one could take more progressively more complicated waste streams. These three plants together, were able to have a processing capacity of over 250 million pounds a year. So we achieved quite a bit. Nobody thought we could even get one of these plants operational and we got three up and running commercial, making money. Another factor, if you're building a mission driven company, one of the, I would say, one of the competitive advantages that you have that sometimes is overlooked is that there's a lot of organizations that are eager to help you. If you're out to save the world in some way or another, just to pick any problem that we face, there's a lot of organizations out there and we received a lot of help. The Economist gave us their 2010 Innovation Award. That was the same year Steve Jobs got an award for consumer products. We got the Gothenburg Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize in the environment. This was previously won by people like Kofi Annan and Al Gore. I was able to pick this up from the Crown Prince of Norway and Davos a few years ago, the Circular's Award. And we won the very first Davos Prize that same year, where the seven category winners, and mainly companies like Patagonia Nike, the audience voted on who should, who had the biggest impact on making a difference. And they selected us over these much larger companies and organizations. So that felt pretty good. And, okay, this is a little bit about bragging rights, but it's more about if you're a mission driven company, this is a secret weapon that you can tap into. People really want to help you promote what you're doing. It makes fundraising easier. It makes communications easier. It helps your whole business. And this is a secret weapon you need to tap into when you're a mission driven company. I learned lots of lessons along the way. I raised money from every conceivable source, started off with 7 million non-dilutive. I encourage all of our entrepreneurs that we work with to get as much money from non-investor sources before you take money from us as investors, raise $150 million of equity from every, again, every conceivable source, starting with friends and family, angels, small VCs, corporate VCs, strategic, you name it. And we were able to leverage our partnerships in each of these countries by using their balance sheets. That's when we were able to have access low cross debt. I learned how to scale hard tech literally from a lab, tiny lab, well, literally from my garage, to a lab, to a pilot, to a world scale. Probably one of the most important lessons I learned was to hire people different and better than myself. And once I realized I didn't have all the answers, I couldn't possibly be expected to have all the answers as when my business took off and started bringing on people smarter, better and very different than me. I had to manage teams spread across three different continents and three different multi-time zones. And I also learned that the types of investors you have really matter. We were blessed with some very good, strong, understanding investors. The only thing I wish they had had was entrepreneurial experience. And that's something I'm trying to fix now in the job I have now at Evo. So now it was time for my next pivot. Where do I wanna go? I felt like I'd shown that you can make money and solve a problem. You can have a different business model. You can make money doing it. What do I do next? I wanna leverage what I learned. I wanted to continue working on stuff I cared about. I wanted to try to solve big and important problems using cool technology and working with other highly motivated people. And of course, let's not forget that curve that goes up into the right. Well, investors like curves that go up into the right. I know I certainly painted the picture that our curves are gonna go up into the right. Now I have to say our curves took longer to go up into the right than I initially projected but they eventually got there. In fact, investors like what is known as hockey stick growth. We also saw about this timeframe when I started looking at what to do next which was let's say seven or eight or nine years ago. It was pretty clear that the clean tech 1.0 bubble was busting and a lot of the traditional investors were moving away from clean tech and there was this huge void of investors. It's not so much the case today but that it was certainly the case six or seven or eight years ago. And all the investors stopped looking at clean tech and started looking for unicorns. So what we find is that the reality of unicorns is more closely related to this. And much of clean tech involves hard tech or tough tech. And what does that mean? That means you need lots of money and lots of time. Neither of which investors are too inclined to spend with startups. More importantly, I believe at the time and I still do that there are a number of areas with more urgent real exponential growth not just the financial exponential growth. A lot of these you're gonna be very familiar with and that's the population explosion, right? It took us what was, it took us 130 years to go from one billion to two billion. It's only gonna take one 10th that time to add the next billion, 13 years. That's exponential growth. Another very sad exponential growth is our loss of species. A lot of people call it the sixth grade extinction. We're losing between 150 to 200 species every single day. It's mind boggling. And if you put these graphs over on top of one another, it's hard to think that there might not be some relationship between population growth of humans and the population extinction of other species. It seems like I'm always attracted to tackling tough waste problems. This is a waste that I'm currently focused on which is CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We all know about this. I assume everyone on this is not surprised to anyone on this particular Zoom call. And of course, if you look at the temperature relationship with the carbon dioxide, there's been a very close relationship to that, to these two phenomena. Maybe until recently. So look at what's happened to CO2 recently and look at the lag with temperature. And if we zoom in on this last, this is 20,000 years, but if we zoom in over the last 100 plus years, you see that, yes, there is an upward trend and they do seem to be tracking and starting that temperature curve is finally starting to turn up, which is pretty dead on scary, it's accelerating because that has some huge implications. And you might ask, so why in the world has there been this huge lag with the CO2 doing this and the temperature still not quite heading straight up? Well, part of it is most that heat, the earth's a really big place. So it takes a long time to heat up the earth. Think that's a good thing. We got this lag time, but the oceans have been our heat sink. So most of the heat's been dumped into the ocean. So not only are we dumping plastic into the oceans and toxic waste for decades, we're now dumping heat and CO2 into the oceans in the same scale. I mean, in some ways, we have to be thankful for the oceans that we're not experiencing more dramatic changes here on earth, on land, because of the oceans, but the oceans are being impacted just dramatically by both ocean warming and acidification. On the warming side, ice starts melting, obviously sea levels start rising. We all know we've all heard about that. And if we lose some of the big ice sheets, we're gonna see some significant, not these inches or even feet type of rises. We could be in store for very serious. If you don't believe me, talk to Steve Chu over at Stanford. He will set you straight on what we might really be expecting in the future for sea level rise. And of course, just last year was a record year for our ocean temperatures. That's not slowing down. What's the, besides coastal cities being flooded, which will lead to this huge, potentially lead to this huge mass migration, climate led migration, there's droughts and there are floods due to climate change are increasing. And the UN now estimates that between, at least 200 million people might be on the move by 2050. We know in the last few years, what a few million people, one or two or three million people on the move has done to upset society, particularly in Europe. Can you imagine what not 10 times this amount or two or three times this amount or 10 times this amount, but a hundred times that amount of people on the move, what that's going to do to disrupt society? And some estimates say it could be a billion people by 2050. I think these are extreme. I certainly hope they're extreme, but it doesn't matter. 10 million, 50 million, 100 million people on the move is not, it does not bode well for the future versus aside for social unrest. So you could look at climate change as an accelerant, this climate stew that we're brewing.  We're worried about, we got political stress, we've got employees stress, people out of jobs, we've got fires here in California and other places. And of course we got COVID. Just wait until climate rage becomes an epidemic. Your younger generations are starting to get the idea that the future may not be as pretty for them as it was for us. And I'm worried about that too. That's why I've been doing what I'm doing. Just wait until they lose their homes. Just wait until they can't find food. That's going to be a stress on a whole nother level, but we haven't not yet experienced. So where do we want to go? Whoops. We certainly don't want to go here. We don't want to see for lots of reasons. We don't want to see hundreds of millions of people displaced and desperate to find food and housing. So we need to move to more sustainable business models and communities and we need a future generation that can take all the benefits we've enjoyed that we've taken for granted and enjoy those same benefits for decades from now.  So what about the usual suspects? Government and NGOs, I'm not going to go there because I could spend hours expressing my frustration on the government and how slow it moves. I actually spent a few years flying between the West Coast and Washington DC and the Obama administration trying to get some aspects of the climate policy pass that never happened. So I have to say I'm a little frustrated with that whole process even when we had what we thought were tailwinds. So what about industry, large companies? That's the other group that's often looked to to solve the problems. What about small and medium enterprises and what about individuals? So I'm going to talk about these last three. Let's start with big companies. I'm just going to give you two examples. So Unilever is hailed as one of the leaders in the world in sustainability space. When CEO Pullman came to charge or became CEO of Unilever, he said, we're going to double in size and half our carbon footprint at the same time. That was a pretty audacious goal. And they've actually made some great progress on that. From 2008 to 2014, they reduced, they saw a million metric tons of CO2 reduced from their operations, which is about 167,000 metric tons per year and about one metric ton per year per Unilever employee. I just want to put this on an equal basis so we can compare impacts. CCE is Coca-Cola Enterprises in Europe. They also made some very audacious CO2 reduction goals for themselves and achieved even double on a per year per employee impact compared to Unilever between 2007 and 2013. This was the data I had available. So what about individuals? Well, what can individuals really do? We often ask everyone, I love this quote from Leo Tolstoy. He says, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. I think individuals can do a lot. And let me just give you one example that I kind of know about. So we made four lifestyle changes. These aren't lifestyle changes. I suggest that you have to make, but these were four we've made. We went solar. We use bikes and trains more than cars. Our entire family. We air dry our clothes outside, which is a little strange here in Northern California, but that's what we do. And we've gone mostly vegan. Not a hundred percent, but we've gone mostly that way. If you add this up, that works out to be about five metric times per year per person. So we made five times the impact of what a much more, a bigger multinational like Unilever was able to make with all of its efforts towards climate change by making what I would argue were positive changes in our lifestyle.  I flew a lot in my previous days. I'm trying to fly out less these days. Just a small round trip to Denver would be a negative point five. So it doesn't take very many flights to erase my entire savings just by these four lifestyle changes. Just saying. So I, for one, very much like these Zoom calls because it means I can talk to people around the world and not have to get on an airplane. What about small to medium enterprises? I love this quote from Margaret Mead. It said, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. I completely agree with that. So another example near and dear to my heart, one I know about this was our plant in Austria, a research institute called IMPA in Switzerland did a LCA life cycle assessment on our process. And they concluded, and it was refereed by a very difficult, I would say, LCA expert in Sweden and made them change their calculus many times. But in the end, they came out with a savings for our plant of 90,000 metric tons per year, which works out to be 900 metric tons of CO2 per employee per year. So my point is a business, a small to medium enterprise can make a lot more impact just by coming up with a more sustainable business model than anything we can do as individuals or large corporations. So that leads me to how do we get there? And I'm gonna use, I know I'm kind of gone heavy on the quotes today, but I love many of these quotes. People say it much better than I can. Buckminster Fuller pointed out that you can't change things by fighting the existing reality. And boy, I can tell you, I've learned that the hard way myself, you have to, if you wanna change something, you have to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And that's what I tried to set out to do with MBA. I tried to show that there was a better way to make plastics from waste versus petrochemicals. And even better examples are Tesla, SpaceX and Apple. They didn't try to change the existing reality. They just showed people the way. They created that new reality. And that's what I'm trying to do today. I'm trying to help people a lot smarter than me and more passionate than me through our startups, create a new reality on many different fronts. So I first tried to do it myself. As a startup advisor, that's what I did with material solutions or an angel investor, but I quickly realized I couldn't write very big checks and I was spread way too thin. I tried to start my own venture fund or I thought about it, but it was nearly impossible after clean tech 1.0 bubble burst. All of my former investors on my board said, you're nuts, Mike, we're all leaving clean tech. No one wants to invest in clean tech right now. That bubble, that train left a long time ago. I could try to join an existing fund, but they're typically looking for financial engineers and we're turning away from hard tech. Or I could listen to my own advice, which is sort of following the rules of the C blank model, go out and talk to dozens of investors, find out what the real world is like and challenge, go back and challenge my assumptions.  So some thoughts on that. Where do we mine plastics? Well, we either mine it and concentrated sources or in dilute sources. And in fact, I was a part of this group and this is the North Atlantic Chire, the Sargassum Sea, where we were trying to look at the, how much plastic was in the ocean. We had a lot of brands out there with us like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical was out there. We were floating around the sea trying to show them where the plastics end up and the impact it has on the marine life. So possible solutions make less of it, of course. We talked about that. Captured at the source or remove it later. And I can tell you we're removing it from the oceans. I'm not counting on that happening, at least not in my lifetime. It's a very difficult thing to do. What about CO2 and other greenhouse gases? Well, it can be found in concentrated forms or point sources they're called. And of course, as we know, it's in the air around a little over 400 parts per million. What are some possible solutions? Same thing. We can make less of it, which we're trying to do. We can capture it at the source, which we're doing a little bit of. And we can remove it later with things like called direct air capture and mineralization approaches. And the businesses are also very similar. You gather it, you purify it, and you do something with it. And in the case of CO2, one good thing to do with it is sequestering it because it stays where it's put if we sequester it properly. But you can also make products out of it, which is a great thing to do from an economic standpoint, but the problem with some of these products is they're short-lived. So you just put the CO2 back in the environment again, you got to make sure that there's a solution for for that product at the end of life if you really want to have a long-term solution for the CO2. So finally, what am I doing at Evoke? This is exactly what we're doing at Evoke.  My now partner, Marty Reed, who is the CEO of Evoke Innovations, he was asked to run this organization a little over five years ago and then reached out to me and asked him if I would help. It's a unique partnership between the British Columbia Clean Tech CEO Alliance, SunCorp Energy and Synovus Energy. It was founded in 2015 with a $100 million commitment. It's led by unusually experienced entrepreneurs that's very unusual in a VC fund. Clean Tech experienced Clean Tech investors and energy executives. And our mission is to protect the environment by investing and strengthen the economy by investing in commercialization of clean technologies. One of our major focuses is CDR, which is carbon dioxide removal. In fact, all of our investments must have a positive environmental impact, especially around climate. And in the CDR space, we've made two investments directly in that space so far, both here in the Bay Area. One is Mosaic Materials, which came out of UC Berkeley and Cyclotron Road. And the other is probably well known to some people on this call. It's Opus 12, which came out of Stanford, Tomcat, Sardex and Cyclotron Road. So Mosaic is a super absorbent for CO2 and Opus 12 turns CO2 into new materials, new chemicals. So it's this CO2 utilization. So I'm just gonna end with a few more quotes, sorry, but I love some of these quotes because I think that they kind of summarize some of the points I've been trying to make. You gotta be a little crazy. You gotta be out there. You need to have the passion. You gotta be willing to believe that you can make a difference. Otherwise you're not gonna have any chance of doing that. And my message to you is you can. If you have the passion, if you're doing something you really care about, you can make a difference. And I found this quote just this evening, right before this call, Jobs actually talked about connecting the dots. He says, you can't connect the dots, looking forward, you can only do it backwards. He says, you have to trust in something.  I think that was from his days when he spent in the Far East. This approach has never let me down and has made all the difference in my life. Now I'm hoping, I think something else he also said is that there's one thing that differentiates people who achieve from those who only dream. And it was just, the achievers are ones who aren't afraid of using four simple words. Can you help me? So that's been my mission in this whole presentation is to connect just a few of the dots, point out a few signposts that work for me and pointing me in the right direction and ask for help. I could have never gotten to where I am today without enormous help from enormous numbers of people. Just ask. And along those lines, I encourage you to go take a look at the pre-brief, there's some help in there, there's some, I think most of that is, most of this is in the pre-brief and I'm here to answer questions if we have time. Thank you, Mike. Before we start on questions, I just wanna say for the participants, you're gonna get a follow-up email. There's a survey. We would love to hear your feedback on this series and any sort of suggestions. Also, plastic is the main theme for this year. So we're gonna have a couple more sessions. So your suggestions on focus areas to discuss there. And also there's a, we have a LinkedIn network that we've connected people to through our innovation showcases before. We also have a chance to connect through that. So there'll be a link to that through the email as well. So, Mike, again, thank you for giving that perspective and connecting the dots. I wanna start with a question around recycling. The question is maybe ultimately a technical one, but since you described this kind of, as a journey through the perspective of your personal journey, I'll ask it as a personal question actually. So I'm not sure I fully understand or I fully buy your pivot number two because you lay out this problem and this garbage problem that is coupled to an exponential growth of plastic production. And then you spent 20 years developing a solution and then not only that, going from lab to world scale faculty. So you showed that the technology can work and can succeed. But I mean, so that is the entry point then to solving the problem, right? So my personal question is why not stick around to try to scale that to get exponential growth of recycling to solve the problem? If we make the connection to Tesla, if Musk had stopped at the roadster, who would be talking about electrifying the transportation fleet right now? So I guess I don't understand that. If you see like, and I'm sure it relates to some of the challenges of scaling recycling. So my real question is about scaling recycling. What are the prospects for that to grow at the same pace of the growth of plastic production? And what are the challenges to that? And at the personal level, why not try to pull that off? No, that's an awesome question. It's a really good question. I hope I have a decent answer. We'll see. There's many reasons, frankly. I will tell you the first is I was a bit bored. I've been doing it for 20 years. I felt like I had done most of what my personal passion could accomplish and my personal interests could accomplish and my personal talent set could accomplish. The bigger reason was and sort of forced my hand but I was heading that direction anyway. I think he even said, I left MBA. I stayed on the board. They made it worth my while to stay on the board but I left MBA, started material solutions before we sold the company. But they brought me back to help sell the company. But I did that because I felt like I had learned the majority of what I could learn and I had contributed the majority of what I could contribute with my passion and my talent set, my set of talents. And I will tell you that Tesla was not invented by Elon Musk, right? Elon Musk is the one that took a good thing and turned it into this phenomena that still to this day amazes me how successful he's been. So I didn't know if I was the right person to do that. Number one and number two, I, well, I knew I wasn't the right person because I bit lost the passion. My interest had gone from plastics to literally climate change. And I think that's reflected in my conversation. And that was the signpost for me. As I said, that's the signpost that matters for me. That's the problem I wanna solve next. That's where I have passion. My passion jumped from plastic waste to climate change. And that was the real reason I decided I'm not the right person anymore to this effort. And it goes back to my very first comment. If you don't have the passion, it's not good for you and it's not good for the thing that you're listening to stick with that. So that was the main reason. And we sold the company to, so the third factor is I had VCs and we were well past their time. One of the things that my partner, Marty, brilliantly changed with the model of our model is we have a more like an evergreen fund. So we don't have this 10 year typical time frame that almost every single venture fund has on the face of the planet other than breakthrough energy ventures, which is 20 years, most are 10 years. So that means when they invest in you, typically five, six, seven years, they're looking for an exit. Well, my investors were past that. Yeah, they weren't the right, it needed to be in the hands of a much bigger entity that could finance it with lower cost capital and venture capital. That's the other reason. So it's... It was trying to transition it to someone that had passionate for doing exactly as you said. And I'm hoping it's in those right hands. I follow it a little bit. It's only built one more plan, it's looking at another. I was hoping it would go faster. Yeah, so can you comment a little just on the, maybe just from the technical perspective, what are the scaling challenges? And the plastic, so the waste that you valorize or you extract the polymers from, is that, what's the overlap between that waste stream and the stream that ends up in the ocean? Is it the same or would it? Also, two really good questions. So I'll answer the second one first because that's easy. So we focused, they're actually related, we focused on, and you'll see it from the videos that I provided links to in the briefing, we focused on durable goods, end-of-life durable goods. So automobiles, computer scrap, electronics, appliances, things like that. And the reason we did that is because there was a really well-developed infrastructure for collecting that waste and managing it through its entire life cycle, which meant proper recycling of all the components in that waste in Europe and in Japan. Okay. And it came to, eventually came to South Korea, excuse me, and other regions of the globe, other regions of the world, except of course for the United States. In fact, you might notice that, yes, my first two, my pilot plant and my semi-production plant were in the US, but all of our commercial plants were overseas. And that's because that's where the feedstock was. And that's the answer to your second question. So the reason we focused on those durable goods streams, A, nobody else was focusing on them, they are super complicated, much more complicated than the stuff that you put in your waste at your home. So it's got toxic materials, it's got bromide flame retardants, it's got heavy metals, it's got batteries, it's got electronics, it's got beryllium. I mean, there are so many toxic material concerns that our process had to be super complicated to deal with this very complicated mix of materials coming in. And we were able to do that through a fully automated process. And we were able to do a better name on the plant, it's still to this day, as far as I understand, as far as I know. Not easy, as you'll see from the videos, but we managed to pull it off. I tried, I will tell you, I tried for a decade to try to reproduce that model in the U.S. So why isn't MBA, why aren't there 20, 30, 40, 50 MBA plants around the world? And particularly, why aren't they here in the U.S.? Lack of feedstock. And that's because there's not the infrastructure to sort the durable good way. I mean, there's gotta be the same volume of stuff for more, right? It's insane. So the U.S. has more feedstock than any place on the planet, but up until very recently, all the stuff from Merse, so your household waste, all of that was shipped, you saw the outcome of that, it was being shipped overseas to China because it was difficult. We would, the Merse material recovery facilities here in the U.S. would pull off ones and twos. I have some diagrams that we have time I can show you. We pull off the easy stuff and send all the difficult to recycle plastics overseas and you saw what happens when you do that, right? It ends up in the wrong place. I tried, I cannot tell you how many discussions I had with the big name waste companies. I could name them, you know who they are and many very frustrating conversations over a decade trying to convince them all I wanted from them. The only thing I wanted from them was a long-term supply agreement. Without that, I could not finance a plan. I had those in Europe and Asia. I could get long-term supply agreements because they were required that the stuff coming from durable goods was recycled responsibly. And we could prove that we could do that so we could get long-term supply agreements. I could finance a plan. Without that, I can't finance a plan in the U.S. And they said, well, we'll probably send it to you but of course, if a Chinese broker pays us a penny more a pound, literally I had this exact conversation with every CEO of every waste company in the U.S. including Recology here in San Francisco. Sorry, Mike. I love Mike San Jacomo. He's awesome. I know him well. But he said, no, penny more a pound. I have to sell it to the trader. That's my job. My job is to make money for the city in order to try to reduce the cost of my operations. And do you think that that, I don't know how long ago that was. I mean, do you think that has changed? It's changed now because that outlet's gone thanks to the, it used to be the green fence. I saw four or five generations of green fences but now they've got, what is it called? The somethings sword, national sword. And that's more serious. But yeah, those outlets are, they're not there anymore. Or they're not as abundant as they were. So now they're going to Vietnam. I can actually know for a fact. They're going to other places in Southeast Asia. They're going to Africa, but it's hard. It's hard to move that amount of plastic waste. I wish to be honest. I can't tell you how many times I said, we sold the company like six or seven years too early. And so the, I guess at a sort of more global level. So why, I mean, are we really running out of landfill space? If that's like, it sounds like shipping our waste is the biggest source of that pollution stream for the ocean. It's probably worth, let me see. If you do mind if I share it again, I've got three slides that I think that will, will touch this better than I can with words. If you don't mind, let's see if this works. I hope please work. Is that working here if I see that? Yeah, yeah. So really quickly, I think this will explain the problem. So here's the evolution of household waste recycling. You may read, I lived in Germany for a while. I had to carry my waste down to the end of the street and put them in these little e-glues they were called. You know, and I had to sort it. So human sorting, that doesn't work in the US. People aren't up for that. They worked in Germany. They actually had garbage police. It was pretty impressive in Munich where I lived. So we moved to this thing called Blue Bins thanks to Toronto. They came out with this Blue Bins program and kind of swept the nation for a while. But even, yeah, Americans aren't really up for even this level of sorting, even a curbside sorting. So we went to single source, right? We dumped everything in one bin. And that's what I have here at my house today. I put all the recyclables in one bin. So paper, metal, glass, plastic. That goes to a Murph, material recovery facility. That Murph from the plastic standpoint typically sorts out PET-rich streams and polyolefin-rich streams or polyethylene primarily, some do polypropylene as well. Those get shipped overseas or they might get shipped to local recyclers who then sell those products domestically or overseas and that waste, which is often the mixed plastics, goes into either landfill or incineration. The mixed plastic residual, what are often called the three through sevens, the difficulty to recycle plastics, the ones that aren't typically sorted in these Murphs have, as we talked about, used to go overseas, still due to some extent or it went to landfill or incineration. There's one thing in this photo that I see that I got any other folks see unless you've been in recycling world. There's a big, big problem with this picture. Way too many touches. The only people making money in this scenario are the truck drivers or the ship drivers, right? Look how many times this material is touched. Look how many times it's transported. You cannot make money recycling a low value material touching it this many times. It is nearly impossible. In fact, well, and in fact, so one other factor that you alluded to that it's hard to send the stuff overseas. So 180 countries, over 180 countries, not including the U.S. Does that sound familiar? Let's see, Kyoto Treaty, what else have we signed up for? Agreed to restrict global plastic trade, everybody but the U.S., right? So we can still send plastic anywhere we want, legally if we find a buyer, but most of the world has said, no, you got to stop doing that, it's crazy because it ends up in the oceans.  So what we need to do here in the U.S. to address the problem and to, if we signed up for this waste ban, we'd have to do more processing in the U.S. and here's how you do it. You touch it once and move on. Any recycler, anyone in the waste business will say, fewer touches the better, which is why most merchants just like want to touch it very little and then sell it to somebody and be done with it, right? So what we demonstrated with our technologies, you can send completely mixed plastics instead of these pre-sorted streams of PET and pre-sorted streams of polyethylene, which you can of course, upgrade with very simple recycling technologies. Well, we developed a much more complex recycling technology where we can send in plastic, you know, seven, eight, 10 different types of plastic and sort it out in one facility. We don't get it all, it's impossible, even with our sophisticated process. So the rest would go to chemical recycling and energy generation. You'd have a near zero waste solution with a scenario like this and you touch it twice instead of all of those times that I showed before. This will lead to lower handling cost economies. You get economies to scale because you're able to build a bigger plant because you're getting more material to a single plant. You're making multiple products, you've got less market risk, instead of just making one product. And as I said, you get to near zero waste. Therefore, finally, plastics do become more sustainable. The problem with plastics is not inherent of the material, it has huge benefits. That's why we use so much of it. It's how we manage the waste, it's that simple. So the problem, like the reason that this is not implementable today is that first truck, we just don't have a good screen. Yeah, well, this facility that I'm kind of trying to circle with my little pointer here, it needs to be financed. But that obstacle to that is bad, is you just don't have a guarantee. You need this guarantee right here. This is what you need. And I still, so I challenged one of the big companies, again, careful not to mention too many names, but there's only a few very large waste companies in the US. So I challenged the head of sustainability for one of these waste companies on that boat that I talked about where we were in the Sargasm Sea this last summer, and said, will you sign a long-term supply agreement with me? If you will, I can make this plant happen. And in fact, you can own it. I'll show you how to build it. It can be yours, or I can find someone else to build. All that needs to happen is you sign a long-term supply agreement. Oh, Mike, we still don't do that. Well, what are you doing with it today? Oh, we're putting in landfills, which unfortunately, the waste companies make more money putting in landfills than they do recycling it. So they don't mind putting in landfills, they just charge their communities more. They own lots of holes and they own lots of trucks. So that's the problem. You need to, this is the problem right here. It's these people that operate these mers. They're not motivated to sign up for this solution. Thank you. That's really helpful. So I think it has to be done. So the cities are the ones that get the contracts. Unfortunately, those contracts are 10 to 20 years. So I said, oh, wait a minute. You won't build this Murph unless you get a 20-year contract from the city? That makes sense.  That's all. I just want a 10-year contract. So I can build my plant to take your waste. It seems so obvious, right? But no, we don't have any plants in the US. I will say that it's starting to happen. There is a plant trying to get off the ground in Ohio. There's a few other plants trying to get off the ground. More, either following just the mechanical recycling model or the chemical recycling model, I would say the chemical recycling model is being promoted largely by the plastics industry right now. And I get it for handling the entire instead, just send this truck to the here is what they're suggesting. But I know chemical recycling really well. You still have to do something to it before you put it in one of these plants. Otherwise this plant really is unhappy. So if you're gonna do something to it, extract value from that something and then send that material that's okay, you have to take out things like PVC, they don't tend to like chlorine in these plants, things like that.  And then you've got a, you've got an economic large scale, almost zero waste solution in my opinion. But it all starts with getting these folks to offer the same agreements that they demand from the cities before they'll put in their sorting facility, their waste facility. Great, thank you. I know it doesn't make any sense, but yeah, again, I just tested it last summer. In an environment where we were all talking about solving the plastic waste problem. Surrounded by waste. Yeah. I wanna take a question from one of our audience members. So Monim, if you could, I am unable, now there you go. And by the way, I pivoted to solving for climate but you can tell I'm so passionate about this and it needs to be solved. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for, this is great. I am a founder of a startup that has been climbing through this really big struggle to do something. And so I'm a materials engineer, we have five patents related to conversion of thermo chemical conversion of mixed waste. And as you know, in the US here, we have 268 million tons per year of total municipal sort of waste. Out of that is about 20%, we're talking about 50 million tons per year of mixed residual waste, which is plastics and paper. It's about 60% paper and 40% plastics. Plastics that is not recyclable, film plastics. And that is, a lot of it goes to landfill. The problem is that not only that plastic carries a lot of energy content in it and it goes to a landfill and sits there forever. The paper that's trapped in it is a major, the major source of greenhouse gas emissions from landfill. You know that we've got 600 tons per day carried by the company you mentioned earlier from the area from Mountain View up to San Francisco to every day, two hours, to Sacramento to a landfill. So we've been struggling to find the way to solve the problem. We focused on the MRF and we invented not invented, but somehow came up with models for something called integrated materials and energy recovery facility, as opposed to materials recovery facility. So that, you know, the best you could do it out of MRF as you know, is to get about 20% recyclables, including plastics, everything. And then you have 40% food waste and organic waste and luckily we've got composting and aerobic digestion for that. And then what you have is that 20%, even up to 30% of that mixed dirty packaging plastics that has film plastics, which we cannot eat food without food without it, you know, no matter what it's all packaged. That is what we focused on. We've been working with companies in the recycling business to introduce our system to the market and help create these integrated materials and energy recovery facilities. Unfortunately, not very successful in doing that. So I did a similar thing a few years ago and I spoken to the same company that, and the CEO told me, look, go to the companies that create the waste because of California we got requirement of 70% diversion right now. But how do we get there? So these people don't wanna send their stuff to the landfill. Go convince them that they should fund an MRF here in the Bay Area and then we can build it. So I actually, we started talking to the source companies and we said, okay, why don't we find a way to create a solution at the source as opposed to doing the MRF. I'm not talking about the plastics that you're tackling the ones that actually that are recyclable. Talking about the unrecyclable mixed waste that is there. So we've been focusing on creating something that is integrated within a facility, within like a campus facility. If you got any campus facility, it uses, it has a boiler. It uses energy, natural gas and all of them they either cafeteria waste or kinds of different waste or lab waste, significant amount of waste. So we've been trying to create this model where we go to an industrial facility or a campus facility and install our system that takes the residual waste and turn it into energy and send this, what we call a power fuel along with to the boiler, this way that that waste is not transported anywhere. And this is the start of our climb through this new challenge, which is not significantly not easy to do. I'm sure you understand what I mean. Yeah, there's, and I put some links to some gasification by Rolises companies in my pre-grief materials, which are doing somewhat similar things, some on small scale, some on very large scale. And I think the thing that you, if you're gonna, particularly if you're gonna be doing it locally, you have to worry about emissions, right? You have to worry about potential dioxins and other effluent coming off of whatever it is you're driving the energy from. I think it would be helpful since there was a lot of interest in this area and some of the questions we got ahead of the event. Can you give some perspective on the notion that, okay, why don't we just try to convert as much as possible to biodegradable? I would sort of summarize your thoughts on that. Right, and again, I touched on the pre-grief. It's a contentious subject. Let's just say, depending on whose perspective, I'm gonna try to be as balanced as I can. I could be more balanced now that I'm not living and dying by recycling like I used to. So everything that was not recycling was not good. This is in my book back in the day, but now everything's good as far as I'm concerned. So you see me promoting waste energy, chemical recycling. I think biodegradable plastics absolutely play a role. And where they play a role is where, well, first let's talk about, you can have biopolymers in this. I just wanna spend a moment here because people get confused. So you can have polymers that are made from bio-sourced materials derived from bio-sourced materials that can be biodegradable or not. They can be standard. And then you can have biodegradable plastics that can be made from biopolymers or they can actually be made from petrochemicals. They can still be biodegradable. And I think, Matt, what you asked about was just biodegradable, so is that correct? Right, yeah, just to give perspective on is that, how much can that solve the pollution problem? And I think it absolutely has a role for things that are not gonna be recoverable. And I think film is one of those areas that you have to think about. I have to say that film is a pretty valuable material. We do film recycling in my house, they now take it. We make a little football out of it every week, right? We stamp stuff all the plastic bags in one bag and tie it off and throw it in the recycle bin. I'm hoping it gets recycled. They can make things like plastic lumber out of it. So you call that downcycling, but I can tell you trex plastic lumber is a pretty quality product. So I'm okay with that personally. But I still think there's a lot of single-use plastics that were biodegradability is probably the best answer. Simply because they're not gonna find their way to recycling route. Now, is it a better, there's people that have done life cycle assessments and I think I've touched on that just briefly in my pre-grease, depending on how you run the life cycle assessment and what you've got. I mean, particularly if you're doing a biopolymer derived one then you have to grow the crop, you have to put fertilizer on it.  And now you're kind of at the starting point where you are with petrochemicals. So the whole LCA doesn't always pan out. I'm not saying it can't, but you have to consider all of those factors as well. But I think the degradability aspect, and again it doesn't have to be derived from biopolymers to be biodegradable is really important. The other thing I think I pointed out in the pre-brief, I can walk out on my back deck right now and show you a four-year project we have with biodegradable plastics sitting out in the hot California sun here in the East Bay year after year, non-stop, they're still intact. They're fully intact after four years. These are PLA? These are all PLA or? I think they were mostly PLA, but they just said biodegradable. I know some were from nature works, so they were PLA, but some were, I don't know where they came from. Some, I don't know if they were PLA or PHA or PHP. I don't know what they were, but they, they're still intact. They're a little brittle and they're a little dusty on the surface, but some of my other plastic that's sitting out outside for that four years, I put them in saltwater and I put them in water and they're also there. So biodegradability, yeah, it's usually, usually require special conditions in a compost facility. So there are truly biodegradable plastics. There's a USDA protocol, I believe it is, or FDA that verifies whether they're truly biodegradable in a reasonable timeframe or not, but there are also some that say they are or they aren't, and that's been part of the problem. Yeah, and just for everyone's benefit, there's compostable does not equal biodegradable. I mean, there are different technical standards for both. So things can be compostable, which won't degrade on a human timescale on your patio, but will or supposed to at least in a proper composting facility. They need the right microbes, the heat, the moisture, et cetera, yeah. Well, we are right up at the end of our time limit. So let me just thank you again for providing a really fantastic kickoff to this series and perspective on this topic and connecting it to climate and sharing some of your personal story along the way. It's really been enjoyable. So thank you so much, Mike. Thank you everyone for joining us today and we certainly hope to see you at the next episode. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Thanks.


And I'm here to talk to you today about how you can tell stories with Traceroute. So let's start with what Traceroute even is in the first place. So it's a networking tool. You can find it in both Unix and in Windows, though in Windows it has a different name. And it's a way of showing the path that your request takes through a network and how long it took to get to each stage of that network. You can think of it kind of like breadcrumbs, right? If you're going on an adventure to your destination, you will leave this trail of breadcrumbs that you'll come back and look at later. And it will show you which path you took to get there. It has some pretty verbose and kind of intimidating looking output. You don't need to look at it in too much detail. But we're going to break it down so you understand what's actually happening here. Essentially, this is a Traceroute to github.com, mostly because it has a very informative set of host names. But if you break it down line by line, there's four pieces of information for each step. The first piece of information is the hop number. So this is which router you're at. The second is the host name of the router. The third is the IP address. And then you get three different latency measurements, which is how long it took to get to the router three different times. So you can see whether there's high variability. And if you want to understand the path that your request took through a network, what you really want to look at is probably the host names and IP addresses. So if we take a look at just those in this trace, you can see the path that we took, in this case, from Sydney Airport to get to github. So we started off going through a local router. It's probably a local router because it doesn't have a host name defined. Then we go through Vocus's network, which connects from Sydney over to San Jose. You can see that in the different host names returned. Then from Vocus, we go to Telio, which is an interconnect network provider that goes up the West Coast. And finally, we make it to github. And this is kind of really cool because I can see that my connection from Sydney goes through San Jose to get to Seattle, which isn't necessarily immediately obvious, and is super useful if you live in Australia. Because if my internet goes down, I don't necessarily know which part of the connection between me and a server in the US is actually broken. Looking at over here, we can actually see with those latency measurements where we make the hop across the Pacific. So the first two steps are very fast, only about two milliseconds to get to them. But by the time we're at the third, it's taking 200 milliseconds to get there. That's because it turns out that crossing the Pacific takes a while, even at the speed of light. And I use this a lot because I don't always know if it's my Wi-Fi that's broken or my internet that's broken or the link between Australia and the US that's broken or just the server on the other side. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. So that's how Tracerate is meant to be used. It's meant to be used as this debugging tool, like why did my packets go away? But back in 2013, I read a super cool story about a network engineer called Ryan Wubber, and he actually lives in Boston. And back in 2013, there was some pretty bad snowstorms, and he was bored. And he really liked Star Wars. In case anyone's not familiar with Star Wars, it's very famous for having this crawl text at the beginning of each film that gives you a narrative background, and it's kind of slow. You slowly get to read the story of what's happened in the background context for the movie. So he decided that he would build this, but with Tracerate. And this is pretty cool, because if you look at it, you're getting, like, 270 milliseconds, and it takes a little while for each line to appear, so it does actually kind of seem to crawl up the screen. And I thought this was the coolest thing ever. So I wanted to build my own. But the problem I had was, when I went and looked up how he built it, he's a network engineer, so he has access to, like, commercial grade routing equipment, and he had two different routers bouncing these packets between them so that he could print this out. I wanted my own, but I do not, in fact, have access to commercial grade routers for my side projects. So I wanted to see if I could build this in the cloud with a single server, but that meant that I needed to understand how routing works on the Internet. So at a high level, this is the Tracerate we saw before. You know, we see my laptop connection going to a router, then through focus interior, it's a little bit zoomed out, and then on to GitHub. But this is kind of more like what the Internet looks like, right? It's very interconnected. It's very unclear which path you should take. How do we know which path we should go down in order to get to GitHub? Well, it's kind of like being lost in a foreign country. But without your phone, either it doesn't have data, or it's flat, or it's the 1990s. And so you're trying to get to a friend's house. You don't know how to get there. So maybe you ask a friendly stranger, hi, here's my friend's address. How do I get to this location? And they say, ah, I don't really know exactly where that is. But that suburb, to get there, you need to take the train to Town Hall. So you do that, take the train to Town Hall, and you get off the train. Ask the next person, hi, trying to get to this address, do you know how to get there? They say, oh, I'm not sure exactly where that is, but that's straight. You want to walk north to get there. You keep doing this until you actually get to your friend's house. That's what's happening with Internet routing. My laptop doesn't know how to get to GitHub. But it does know that GitHub's on the Internet, and the best way to get to the Internet is through the router. The router also doesn't know where GitHub is, but it knows that it's in the US, so it takes the focus path. Focus doesn't know where it is, but it knows it's in Seattle, and the best way to get to Seattle is through Tillia. And then Tillia does know how to get to GitHub. So that's what it chooses to do. And this all works fantastically, assuming there's no loops. But you can see that we could run into some troubles if focus and Tillia disagree on where they think GitHub is. If focus thinks it's on the east coast, say because they think GitHub's west coast data center is down, and Tillia thinks it's on the west coast, we can end up with this loop. And then our packets and requests are just going to kind of loop around forever and get stuck. So the way we solve this is by adding what's called a time to live counter. And this is literally just a number on every request you send that gets decremented with each hop. So it might start at, say, 64, or it makes it to the local router, and we'll decrement it by one, because that's one more step. And we'll keep doing this. And if we ever get to the point where the counter reaches zero and we haven't gotten to where we want to go, we'll send a special message called a TTL-expired message back to the person who sent the original request. And this basically says, look, you said to try for like five minutes, and it's been five minutes, and it hasn't got there. So I'm going to give up now. So let's go back to those breadcrumbs. Let's say you want to have breadcrumbs of where your request has been, but you don't want to have to implement anything special in the protocol to get support for this. How could you do this? Well, you can imagine that you can send a packet to GitHub, but set a time to live of zero. It's going to make it one step, and immediately the router's going to be like, I'm all out of time. I'll send you back an expired message. Cool. So then you can print that the router who sent you that expired message was the first step. Then you'll send a counter with one. This time you'll make it to focus one step further, print the message, and then print that you made it to focus. We'll do that for Tealier as well. And then when we get to GitHub, we'll get a normal response back. So we'll print that we made it there, how long it took, and then we'll stop incrementing that counter. And that's actually how Traceroot works. But since Traceroot itself is a hack, I can abuse it with my own hacks. So rather than sending TTL-expired messages just if I get a packet with a TTL of zero, what happens if I also send it for any packet that has a TTL less than a certain amount? Say the amount we want to pretend that we're farther away by. So concretely, if I got a request like this, time to live is zero when it gets to me, but the packet was destined for me in the first place. So I should really be sending a normal response. But instead, I'll send a TTL-expired response. Then when I get a response with a TTL of one, this time, or a request for the TTL of one, this time I'll actually send a normal response. To Traceroot, it looks like this happened. There was this one extra hop along the way, and so it's gonna print out one extra line. Looks a little bit like this if you implement it in like pseudo code Python. So we see two duplicate lines in there. And we can obviously add multiple steps and we can smooth who we send that TTL-expired message from to control the IP addresses that we see in this output. And that's all very well and good, but we said we were gonna tell stories. And stories aren't told with numbers, they're told with words. Which means we need human readable names on these, not just IP addresses. The way Traceroot is defining the host names on those, each of those steps is using reverse DNS, which is like everything else in this talk, a hack on top of DNS. So DNS is very simple, it just lets you map a host name to an IP address. That's how we resolve names on the internet. But let's say that you wanted to know, given I've got this IP address, which host name does it go back to? That's not immediately obvious because it's a one-way lookup. What we could do though is, DNS has this cool property that for a host name, you can strip off any prefix and you'll get to like a broader source of truth basically. So if I wanna know who owns color.io, I can strip off the color and just ask who owns .io. They should know who owns color.io. So if we wanna do this for IP addresses, we could, hypothetically, reverse the IP address, stick a special thing on the end and then do exactly the same mapping, which is what reverse DNS does. It's a total hack on top of DNS. But because it's a total hack, that means there's no actual protocol requirement that those two things match. I can set the reverse DNS record to something totally arbitrary. And not only can it be totally arbitrary, it doesn't have to match the forward pointing record, it can also just not be a valid host name at all, which is what we've done here. So if we put it all together, basically what you gotta do is buy some IP addresses that you control, set reverse DNS on them to whatever you want. I recommend doing this with providers that are less strict. Some providers like Amazon say that you have to have a forward pointing record, but do you find a really sketchy hosting company? Don't have to worry about that. Even with the really sketchy hosting company, I managed to find who would also let me buy IP addresses and not stick them on, like, stick machines on them. Still costs about $3 for each one. So that means that essentially each line of your story is gonna cost three bucks a month. Kind of expensive. This is kind of what it ends up looking like. And now since Julia's thing is beefy, let's do a demo. So live, this is from a server actually in San Francisco because my other server is in San Francisco and it kind of just speeds things up. We can see that we make it to the Palo Alto internet exchange there, and then there's this huge long wait because Amazon refuses to return any information.  Can wait a little bit longer. And there you go.