Speaker 1: Pushkin. I grew up in southern California, where there is
Speaker 1: this really striking You could call it a juxtaposition, you
Speaker 1: could call it irony. It's this. You're sitting there right
Speaker 1: next to this vast ocean, and yet fresh water drinking
Speaker 1: water is extremely scarce, has to be piped in from
Speaker 1: hundreds of miles away, sometimes still runs short. So you know,
Speaker 1: as you're staring out from the semi desert, how to
Speaker 1: cross the ocean. This thought inevitably comes to your mind.
Speaker 1: If only we could take the salt out of just
Speaker 1: a teeny fraction of that ocean water, our fresh water
Speaker 1: problems would be solved. And in fact, we can do
Speaker 1: that a little bit. In San Diego County, for example,
Speaker 1: a desalination plant provides about ten percent of the county's
Speaker 1: fresh water. But desalination is limited because it has some
Speaker 1: pretty significant problems. First, when you suck in the seawater,
Speaker 1: you tend to kill some marine life. And then you
Speaker 1: have to push that seawater through a membrane to take
Speaker 1: the salt out, and that pushing requires quite a lot
Speaker 1: of energy, which is expensive. And then only about half
Speaker 1: of that seawater in fact turns into fresh water, and
Speaker 1: what's left is this really salty brine that goes back
Speaker 1: into the ocean and can mess up the local ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And on top of all of that, in a lot
Speaker 1: of places, people just don't want to put a big
Speaker 1: industrial desalination plant right next to the beach. And so
Speaker 1: for all of those reasons, people just don't do desalination
Speaker 1: that much. But there is this other idea. It's actually
Speaker 1: been kicking around for decades. What if you could do
Speaker 1: desalination at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of meters down,
Speaker 1: where the pressure is so great that the weight of
Speaker 1: the ocean itself would push the sea water through that
Speaker 1: membrane to create freshwater. Such an efficient idea. I find
Speaker 1: it just delightful in its cleverness. It wouldn't solve all
Speaker 1: the problems associated with desalination, but it could significantly reduce them.
Speaker 1: If you could get it to work cheaply and at scale,
Speaker 1: maybe southern California and other dry coastal places around the
Speaker 1: world could start getting a lot more of their fresh
Speaker 1: water from the sea. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is
Speaker 1: What's Your Problem the show where I talk to people
Speaker 1: who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today
Speaker 1: is Michael Porter. He's the chief technology officer of a
Speaker 1: company called ocean Well. Michael's problem is this, how can
Speaker 1: you desalinate water at the bottom of the sea and
Speaker 1: do it cheaply enough to compete with other sources of
Speaker 1: fresh water. As I mentioned before, this idea has actually
Speaker 1: been around for a long time. But Michael told me
Speaker 1: that this is a good moment to be working in
Speaker 1: the field, in part because of breakthroughs made by the
Speaker 1: oil and gas industry.
Speaker 2: You know. Luckily for us, the timing is right because
Speaker 2: over the last couple decades there have been major improvements
Speaker 2: in remote operated vehicles and what I would call electrification
Speaker 2: of the seabed. So in you know, a few decades ago,
Speaker 2: the oil and gas industry, who drill for oil, you know,
Speaker 2: not only on land but also offshore, they have developed
Speaker 2: a lot of these high pressure deep sea technologies in
Speaker 2: order to drill deeper and deeper. And so there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance,
Speaker 2: where they're constantly drilling, and so we're leveraging a lot
Speaker 2: of the knowledge that's been gained in those offshore industries
Speaker 2: and applying that to water essentially.
Speaker 1: So the guy who ends up being your co founder
Speaker 1: comes to you some years ago with this idea. At
Speaker 1: that time, like what was the state of undersea desalination
Speaker 1: at that time?
Speaker 2: There have been a couple of tries here and there
Speaker 2: that we were aware of, mostly small whether you call
Speaker 2: them startups or just you know, curious people that have
Speaker 2: the ability to try this technology out. You know, those
Speaker 2: things were out there, but there were really no companies
Speaker 2: other than us and another Norwegian company that were looking
Speaker 2: at this seriously.
Speaker 1: I read that you built a proto type in your kitchen.
Speaker 1: Is that true? And what was that?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: It's true.
Speaker 2: We came to this impasse where we had to find
Speaker 2: a space to build and the question was do we
Speaker 2: do it ourselves or do we work with a contractor?
Speaker 2: And so we looked at some contractors and ultimately decided
Speaker 2: it's best to do it ourselves because we're going to
Speaker 2: move faster, it's likely going to be a lot cheaper,
Speaker 2: and we're going to learn a lot more. So we
Speaker 2: were looking for a place to do this work and
Speaker 2: I just happened to have a house that was partially
Speaker 2: under construction at the time, So I decided it would
Speaker 2: be okay to move all of this equipment into our
Speaker 2: kitchen and build it in pieces there. So for a
Speaker 2: couple months, two members of my team and I essentially
Speaker 2: lived out of this you know, under construction house and
Speaker 2: built this prototype for several months.
Speaker 1: What does it look like? So, like, what am I picture?
Speaker 1: I'm picturing like a kitchen or it's just like a
Speaker 1: room that's like framed in with drywall, but it's not
Speaker 1: a kitchen yet, Like what's going on in the room.
Speaker 2: So we essentially had a working kitchen. But yes, all
Speaker 2: the drywall was removed, okay, and you know it was
Speaker 2: functional but not aesthetic.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you could cook, Yes.
Speaker 2: We could cook, and we could live there.
Speaker 1: And like in the middle of the room or something like,
Speaker 1: where's the prototype and what's it look like?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, So the kitchen's got a not an island
Speaker 2: peninsula that sticks out, okay, And on one side of
Speaker 2: the peninsula there was enough space to put half of
Speaker 2: the machine, which is about a four foot diameter by
Speaker 2: six foot tall, and then on the other side was
Speaker 2: another four foot by six foot cylinder, and those two
Speaker 2: cylinders essentially needed to be stacked on top of each
Speaker 2: other and married up before they're put into the reservoir
Speaker 2: where we're testing it. Okay, So we built it in
Speaker 2: pieces and then we had to disassemble the thing completely
Speaker 2: to fit it through the door because four feet was
Speaker 2: too wide to fit through.
Speaker 1: The foot door. Did you know that was coming? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did. We play at fourth seed. Okay, it's funnier
Speaker 1: if you don't, right and you're like taking the door
Speaker 1: off the hinges. No, right, Like, okay, so you build
Speaker 1: this thing in your house, you take it out of
Speaker 1: your house, you put it back together, and where do
Speaker 1: you take it?
Speaker 2: So we take it up to North La County through
Speaker 2: a water district called Los Virginis Communicipal Water District. They
Speaker 2: partnered with us to help us on this pilot prototyping
Speaker 2: path and they have a reservoir there, a fresh water
Speaker 2: drinking reservoir where we ran this test. And probably the
Speaker 2: first question you're gonna ask, as well as freshwater not seawater.
Speaker 1: Crossed my mind. Yeah, and how can you test it
Speaker 1: if it's fresh water? I'll take the bait. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So submerged reverse osmosis by itself is just a system
Speaker 2: to you know, remove all the non water molecules, and
Speaker 2: so at freshwater lake, while it is fresh and doesn't
Speaker 2: have a lot of salt, it does have some total
Speaker 2: dissolve solids or salts.
Speaker 1: But it's basically the theory if you can do reverse
Speaker 1: osmosis in fifty feet of fresh water, then it'll probably
Speaker 1: work in fifteen hundred feet of seawater. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The difference is you need more pressure in the ocean
Speaker 2: because there's more salt in the ocean.
Speaker 1: So you put the thing in fifty feet of water,
Speaker 1: and are you piping the water back out? Yes?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we drop it down there, we turn on our pumps,
Speaker 2: and the pumps essentially circulate the lake water through our system.
Speaker 2: And as the lakewater passes through our system, we have
Speaker 2: another pump that sits behind our membranes and it creates
Speaker 2: that low pressure on the fresh water or the permeate
Speaker 2: side of the membrane, and that creates that pressure differential
Speaker 2: for the water to come through the membrane, and then
Speaker 2: on the outlet, it creates a pressure high enough that
Speaker 2: it can boost that water up to the surface where
Speaker 2: we then have a little spicket that it comes out
Speaker 2: of at the top and then just discharges back into
Speaker 2: the lake and.
Speaker 1: Did it work. It worked.
Speaker 2: Actually, just last week we passed a pretty big milestone
Speaker 2: of making one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of produced water,
Speaker 2: which is equivalent to about three months more than three
Speaker 2: months of runtime at more than one gallon a minute,
Speaker 2: which is what our system was sized to do. And
Speaker 2: that is the theory that we predicted, and we successfully
Speaker 2: passed it, and so it meets the models that we thought.
Speaker 1: And that's the machine you built in your kitchen. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's great. So okay, the technology seems promising at least,
Speaker 1: but for this to work, it has to be super cheap, right,
Speaker 1: because the product you're selling is just water. So tell
Speaker 1: me about the economics of the business.
Speaker 2: You know, I like to think about it in three
Speaker 2: sets of costs.
Speaker 1: So you have your cap X costs building the play into.
Speaker 2: For equipment, you know, building the actual physical equipment, and
Speaker 2: you have your operational costs, and I like to separate
Speaker 2: that from the energy costs. The energy we know is less,
Speaker 2: so we have about a forty percent energy savings there.
Speaker 2: The capital costs are actually likely to be less or
Speaker 2: at least on par with what you see on shore,
Speaker 2: and that's because we don't have to create an artificial
Speaker 2: pressure environment. And so what that does removes a bunch
Speaker 2: of big pumps and big heavy piping that they would
Speaker 2: typically use on shore to create that artificial pressure environment.
Speaker 1: That's the good news. There's a bad news part.
Speaker 2: The bad news part, yes, the bad news part is
Speaker 2: you can imagine it's pretty easy to just walk up
Speaker 2: to a plant on shore and put your hands on
Speaker 2: a vessel that is leaking and fixing it, right, that's
Speaker 2: very hard to do when you're fifteen hundred feet deep
Speaker 2: in the ocean. You have to take a vessel out,
Speaker 2: which are often expensive, and then you have to either
Speaker 2: lift the system up or bring an rov down because
Speaker 2: it's too deep for humans to go, so you can't
Speaker 2: send divers down, and you then have to either maintain
Speaker 2: in place or pull the system up, and that is expensive.
Speaker 2: It's not unfounded. This happens all the time in the
Speaker 2: oil and gas industry, but it is expensive. And so
Speaker 2: that's the trade off that we get there.
Speaker 1: So as long as you build a machine that never
Speaker 1: breaks your goal.
Speaker 2: Done exactly, and so we've essentially developed what I call
Speaker 2: a pilot program where this reservoir test that we're running
Speaker 2: is one piece to that overall puzzle where we're testing
Speaker 2: lots of different systems in different environments, including the ocean
Speaker 2: in the deep and shallow ocean waters, and using all
Speaker 2: of that data, we can then develop models of our
Speaker 2: own to predict what that membrane life will ultimately be
Speaker 2: in the deep ocean. And I'm really focused on membrane
Speaker 2: life and and filter life because those are the things
Speaker 2: that will foul up and essentially stop production other things
Speaker 2: like pumps and structures and all the you know, the
Speaker 2: parts that's used to build the frame and all the
Speaker 2: piping that's well established material selection problems.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the stuff that oil and gas companies use.
Speaker 1: It's the membrane and the filter is what is what
Speaker 1: you're doing differently and therefore is not right tested in
Speaker 1: a kind of industrial setting.
Speaker 2: And we are using commercially available membranes and filters, but
Speaker 2: we're doing them in a different environment that's relatively unknown,
Speaker 2: the deep ocean beyond two hundred meters, which is known
Speaker 2: as the aphotic zone. That means you have about less
Speaker 2: than one percent of light that shines through. It's relatively
Speaker 2: unknown and unexplored, and just like on land, you know,
Speaker 2: you'll have regional variability, global variability in the ocean, and
Speaker 2: so we really need to know, you know, in the
Speaker 2: site that we want to install the system, what does
Speaker 2: that site look like, what does the seawater like, they're
Speaker 2: the bioactivity, where the currents like. And then we have
Speaker 2: to design around that site for understanding how long the
Speaker 2: system will actually work. Each site will be a little
Speaker 2: bit different, and so the focus for us is twofold.
Speaker 2: It is making the system last as long as possible
Speaker 2: and making the cost of intervening on that system or
Speaker 2: maintaining that system as low as possible.
Speaker 1: So assuming you're able to do that, then the marginal
Speaker 1: gallon of water you produce is going to be cheaper
Speaker 1: than when produced on land, right because your energy costs
Speaker 1: are lower. That's what's driving the marginal cost. And as
Speaker 1: I understand it, that actually is part of the way
Speaker 1: you're hoping to solve the brine problem, the problem of
Speaker 1: desalination plants putting out salty brine, because the economics will
Speaker 1: mean that you don't have to separate as much fresh
Speaker 1: water per unit of sea water, which means you don't
Speaker 1: have to create such nasty brine. And that's how you're
Speaker 1: solving the brine problem. Sort it seems like that's potentially
Speaker 1: or you tell me how do you deal with that?
Speaker 2: So there's two parts to this. Like you said, we
Speaker 2: don't squeeze as much water as possible through these membranes,
Speaker 2: and instead we're just lightly sipping the water off the membranes.
Speaker 2: As a result, our brine is only about five to
Speaker 2: eighteen percent saltier than the surrounding ocean, rather than the
Speaker 2: two times saltier from an onshore plant. So that's a
Speaker 2: good starting point. The other thing we're doing is brine,
Speaker 2: which has more salt in it than seawater, is heavier
Speaker 2: than seawater, and so it wants to sink to the bottom.
Speaker 2: And what would happen is if you were to discharge
Speaker 2: it near the seafloor, it would essentially pull up on
Speaker 2: the seafloor and create something called a brine pool, which
Speaker 2: is generally toxic to the native biological life in that area. Okay,
Speaker 2: So what we're doing instead is we have what we
Speaker 2: call a brine riser, and it discharges the brine above
Speaker 2: our system high enough that it doesn't settle on the
Speaker 2: seafloor and cause any problems to the benthic environment on
Speaker 2: the sea floor. So this brine riser allows us to
Speaker 2: essentially discharge our brine into the open water column into
Speaker 2: natural currents where it will be rapidly diffused. And we've
Speaker 2: run some initial modeling on this brine discharge and diffusion
Speaker 2: and our model suggests it will be much less than
Speaker 2: one percent above ambient salinity within the first meter of discharge.
Speaker 1: So that's the brine problem. What about the sucking in
Speaker 1: marine life problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sucking in marine life problem is on the
Speaker 2: intake side. The first thing is we're in a different
Speaker 2: environment than the surface. So while there still are organisms
Speaker 2: down there, microorganisms, macroorganisms, there's still life down deep, it's
Speaker 2: not the same type of life. You don't have all
Speaker 2: the phytoplankton that live up there that need the light,
Speaker 2: and those are Earth's primary producers. They generate a lot
Speaker 2: of the oxygen that we breathe, and we generally do
Speaker 2: not see those down at that depth. The other organisms
Speaker 2: that are down there, the big ones are easy. You
Speaker 2: just essentially screen off your intake system so the big
Speaker 2: ones won't go through the screens, and then the little
Speaker 2: stuff that could fit through these screens. We have essentially
Speaker 2: developed this filtration system that allows us to catch those
Speaker 2: microorganisms and then backwash those organisms back out of the
Speaker 2: system unharmed. And we've got some initial data from our
Speaker 2: reservoir testing that says this is absolutely possible. We've actually
Speaker 2: seen little critters get sucked into our system and then
Speaker 2: we blow them out and they're still swimming around on
Speaker 2: the other side. So this life safe system is really
Speaker 2: one very unique thing about our system, as well as
Speaker 2: the brine riser that make it more environmentally friendly than
Speaker 2: just say, taking an onshore plant and putting it on
Speaker 2: the bottom of the sea floor.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a minute. So you did
Speaker 1: this pilot in a freshwater reservoir. It worked. What's next?
Speaker 1: You can put what are these in the ocean soon? Yes,
Speaker 1: we are.
Speaker 2: Currently near the final stages of building a system that's
Speaker 2: going to go off the back of the boat and
Speaker 2: be tested in the ocean, and we're gearing up to
Speaker 2: design the next stage or scale up from that, where
Speaker 2: we'll be building a bigger system that will also go
Speaker 2: into the ocean for a longer period of time, and
Speaker 2: we need to know how long this thing can last
Speaker 2: so that we can make, you know, relatively accurate projections
Speaker 2: of its economics overall, which is what our customers want
Speaker 2: to see.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about where you are with the technoeconomics, Like, sure,
Speaker 1: presumably there are places where they would take that trade
Speaker 1: off Huntington Beach, you know, wealthy communities where they would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll pay a little more for fresh water if you
Speaker 1: can put it on the bottom of the ocean, even
Speaker 1: if they don't care about the environment, just so they
Speaker 1: don't have to see it right, And maybe they care
Speaker 1: about the environment too, Like where are you with the technoeconomics?
Speaker 2: So ultimately the cost is going to be tied to
Speaker 2: how long the membranes will last and how often we
Speaker 2: have to swap them out or do maintenance.
Speaker 1: That's the big unknown that that's the big unknown that
Speaker 1: you have to put the thing in the ocean to
Speaker 1: festra out.
Speaker 2: And so we have, you know, one piece to that
Speaker 2: puzzle figured out, and over the next couple months we'll
Speaker 2: be getting data on the rest of those pieces where
Speaker 2: we'll be able to make fairly accurate models of how
Speaker 2: long memoranes last subc for sure.
Speaker 1: Well, and then there's also all of the other parts
Speaker 1: of the system presumably, and I know, you know, in
Speaker 1: individual components they have been under the sea before, but presumably,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Things just break right as you said,
Speaker 1: like it's really hard to fix a thing at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean. So there's the life of the membrane,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, straightforward. It seems rather straightforward to test,
Speaker 1: like when you worry or when you think about what
Speaker 1: might not work and might not work, I don't even
Speaker 1: mean fail, I just mean might make what you're doing
Speaker 1: economically not feasible, Like what do you think about what
Speaker 1: might not work? Besides the membrane?
Speaker 2: I mean, a lot of things can break down. But
Speaker 2: one of our more expensive components, for instance, is the umbilical,
Speaker 2: which runs the power from shore to our pumps, and
Speaker 2: it's one power line.
Speaker 1: How far is that, by the way, how far is that?
Speaker 2: It will very much depend on the location. For example,
Speaker 2: the Big Island of Hawaii, you only have to go
Speaker 2: just under a mile offshore. In California it's about five miles.
Speaker 2: Around the Mediterranean, you'll say anywhere from like three to
Speaker 2: seven miles, but generally speaking, I would say anything about
Speaker 2: less than ten to fifteen miles is where we are
Speaker 2: most economical.
Speaker 1: And you were saying, there's one essentially power cord, one
Speaker 1: wire that you need, and presumably that wire needs to
Speaker 1: not break exactly.
Speaker 2: That's the thing that for me gives me the most fear.
Speaker 2: You know, what they do in when they build these
Speaker 2: umbilicals is you know, if you need say three three
Speaker 2: lines of copper, they'll build in six so that if
Speaker 2: one fails, you can just move to the other. So
Speaker 2: you know, there is some redundancy in that system along
Speaker 2: with others like the pumps. You know, we're we're looking at,
Speaker 2: you know, what is that trade off between having redundant
Speaker 2: pumps versus the cost of having two versus one, or
Speaker 2: three versus one, And so these are the things that
Speaker 2: we need to consider when we're you know, scaling up
Speaker 2: and building a commercially viable system.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting optimization problem. It's like a techno economic
Speaker 1: optimization problem, right. It is more pumps are more expensive initially,
Speaker 1: but you really don't want to have to go to
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ocean to replace a pump exactly.
Speaker 2: And surprisingly, my background in biomechanical evolution actually lends itself
Speaker 2: well because I was studying the optimization of trade offs
Speaker 2: that nature uses to you know, optimize solutions in natural
Speaker 2: systems like Darwin's finches for instance. Or I actually used
Speaker 2: to look at seahorse tails and compare the mechanics of
Speaker 2: a tail and how it could be potentially used for
Speaker 2: you know, a robot arm. But then I looked at
Speaker 2: all these different mechanical features. You know, it's a multidimensional
Speaker 2: problem with many, many different variables, and looking at how
Speaker 2: nature optimizes these things. So in many ways, I'm applying
Speaker 2: those same methods of looking at these multidimensional trade off
Speaker 2: problems to help us optimize you know what, that right
Speaker 2: number of pumps is to make our system redundant and
Speaker 2: reliable but not too costly.
Speaker 1: Survival of the fittest is survival of the most optimal.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yes, and we're trying to be that fit company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, evolutionary biologists talk about things being costly,
Speaker 1: right When fish that live in caves evolved to not
Speaker 1: have eyes anymore, it's like it's costly to have eyes
Speaker 1: that if you live in a dark cave, you're wasted
Speaker 1: your energy budget on eyes exactly. So when are you
Speaker 1: going to know if it works?
Speaker 2: Well, know when it works when it's down there working.
Speaker 1: If it works, when's that going to be.
Speaker 2: So we're targeting twenty twenty eight as our first you know,
Speaker 2: commercial demonstration, and along that path, we have a handful
Speaker 2: of varying scale prototypes and varying environments that we're going
Speaker 2: to be testing, and so we'll be building confidence along
Speaker 2: the entire path.
Speaker 1: If it works, what'll, you know, what all the Pacific
Speaker 1: coast of the Americas look like, or what'll the world
Speaker 1: look like in what number of years? Shall we say,
Speaker 1: ten years, fifteen years?
Speaker 2: Sure, so you know, ideally, in my head, you know,
Speaker 2: my sort of more long term, grander vision of this is,
Speaker 2: if you know, if the ocean well really does do
Speaker 2: what it's designed to do and takes off around the world,
Speaker 2: we will see more water staying where it belongs. For instance,
Speaker 2: in California, in southern California, most of our water comes
Speaker 2: from the Colorado River and from the north through what's
Speaker 2: called the State Water Project. And those two sources of
Speaker 2: water are not local. They both travel really far distances
Speaker 2: to get to us, and it takes a lot of
Speaker 2: water away from the natural ecosystems that exist there on
Speaker 2: the Colorado River and in northern California, and it also
Speaker 2: takes away from all the residents in places like Arizona
Speaker 2: and Nevada and Colorado. And so I would like to
Speaker 2: see that water stay where it belongs naturally, so that
Speaker 2: all the eCos systems and the planetary systems that we
Speaker 2: need to sort of keep our climate and our planet,
Speaker 2: you know, thriving for generations, can continue to stay healthy essentially.
Speaker 2: And so you know, my goals that we can make
Speaker 2: some of these coastal cities that are currently not what
Speaker 2: I would consider sustainable in terms of water more sustainable
Speaker 2: and allow these other ecosystems to continue to thrive, you know,
Speaker 2: maintaining their own local water resources.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 1: I want to do a lightning round. Now, Okay, where's
Speaker 1: your favorite place to surf?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I mean I have many favorites
Speaker 2: in different locations. I mean, I've been lucky that, you know,
Speaker 2: I did my master's out in Hawaii, and so I've
Speaker 2: got a handful of spots out there that I really liked.
Speaker 2: I actually learned to surf in Costa Rica. That was
Speaker 2: a very fun experience. And then I don't know, a
Speaker 2: big rock out here in La Joya, where I currently
Speaker 2: live is kind of my local favorite.
Speaker 1: Right now, tell me about one wave.
Speaker 2: One wave, I'll say the first time I got a barrel,
Speaker 2: that's probably the one that stands out. So I grew
Speaker 2: up in Virginia, and growing up in Virginia, the waves
Speaker 2: aren't great, but we live driving distance from Cape Hatteras,
Speaker 2: which are the outer banks of North Carolina, sticks out
Speaker 2: further in the Atlantic than anywhere else. And when you
Speaker 2: get these hurricanes that come through, the ones that don't
Speaker 2: hit land but sit right off the coast just pump
Speaker 2: beautiful waves into the shore. But yeah, my first barrel
Speaker 2: was in Hatteras on one of those days, and you know,
Speaker 2: it was well overhead and head high. That's how we
Speaker 2: talk about the height, I guess, you know. And it
Speaker 2: was one of those things where you see it coming
Speaker 2: in front of you and usually I would have just
Speaker 2: crashed and fallen, but I made it through and it
Speaker 2: came over and I was fully standing up on the
Speaker 2: other side and it was a beautiful moment.
Speaker 1: You wrote a paper on the shape of the seahorse tail,
Speaker 1: because the seahorse's tail is a square, and in the
Speaker 1: paper you asked why is the tail of the seahorse
Speaker 1: that shape? Why is it square? And like, first of all,
Speaker 1: why is that a question? Like would you expect it
Speaker 1: to be like a triangle like other fish, seahorses, a
Speaker 1: fish or what. Yeah.
Speaker 2: For my PhD, I worked in a lab where we
Speaker 2: looked at all of these different natural organisms and we
Speaker 2: looked at the structure and function from a mechanical perspective.
Speaker 2: And so in that class, we had to give pitches
Speaker 2: on what we were doing that we thought might turn
Speaker 2: into a company. And so I took the seahorse tail
Speaker 2: as my sort of product. And I was like, I'm
Speaker 2: going to turn the sea horsetail into a robot arm
Speaker 2: or a catheter or you know something that could you know,
Speaker 2: help in the medical field. And I was giving this
Speaker 2: pitch on oh, the seahorse tail would be great for
Speaker 2: this and that and that and this, and someone in
Speaker 2: the audience said it's square. You know your veins are round,
Speaker 2: so wouldn't you want it to be round? And I said, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you could make it round. Sure, we could just make
Speaker 2: it round. And so I went back to the lab
Speaker 2: and I was like, Okay, I'm going to print out
Speaker 2: a round version of a sea horse tail and you know,
Speaker 2: satisfy this question. And then I started playing with the
Speaker 2: round version and I was like, this thing's terrible. It
Speaker 2: doesn't work anything like the square one does. And that's
Speaker 2: where the question came from, Well why is it square?
Speaker 2: And then we wrote this whole paper with some biologists
Speaker 2: to sort of explain the evolutionary advantages that a square
Speaker 2: tail had to a roundtail.
Speaker 1: What are the advantages of it being square?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's two main advantages, I believe. One is
Speaker 2: that it resists this twisting or over torquing the tail itself.
Speaker 2: So you've got this spinal column that runs through the center, okay,
Speaker 2: and you can imagine if you take a bunch of
Speaker 2: nerves and other things that are running through your spinal
Speaker 2: column and twist them, that would be bad.
Speaker 1: And if it's round, it's like more likely to twist.
Speaker 2: Exactly because the square structure and the way that it's
Speaker 2: built with these little pegs that sort of stick into
Speaker 2: the sockets of the square component in front of it,
Speaker 2: it resists over twisting that section of the tail. And
Speaker 2: so as a result, it would help it not get
Speaker 2: hurt or essentially even die if it were to be
Speaker 2: pulled in one direction or another. So that's one advantage.
Speaker 2: The other is that these square plates, the way they overlap,
Speaker 2: they're like little L shapes, and so you have four
Speaker 2: l's that overlap each other a little bit, and so
Speaker 2: those overlapping sections allow them to slide a little bit.
Speaker 2: So you can imagine if a predator was to come up,
Speaker 2: like a bird come up and grab the sea horse,
Speaker 2: it would crush the tail if it was to grab
Speaker 2: onto the tail, and these little plates would allow them
Speaker 2: to slide because the square and the overlap creates these
Speaker 2: linear sections of slide. It allows it to just sort
Speaker 2: of absorb the impact and bounce back.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: But the circular structure, the circles don't allow have that
Speaker 2: sort of linear overlap. Now you've got these two overlapping
Speaker 2: sections that want to pivot, and so that pivoting would
Speaker 2: cause more damage in the tissue that would tear away
Speaker 2: when it was grabbed. And so those are the two
Speaker 2: sort of primary reasons why this tail is square. And
Speaker 2: then I say a third would be it also allows
Speaker 2: more surface contact onto things that it's grasping, So it's
Speaker 2: better for grabbing grasping, and it's better for armor.
Speaker 1: Did you ever end up coming up with a commercial
Speaker 1: application for something built on the model of a sea
Speaker 1: horse's tail.
Speaker 2: No, I mean we had many ideas, but nothing that
Speaker 2: actually took off. And after I left, I've casually kept
Speaker 2: track of what else is going on in the seahorse world.
Speaker 2: And there are new groups out there that have been
Speaker 2: developing robots that mimic the tail and they look quite cool.
Speaker 2: There's one funny paper where they even made a life
Speaker 2: sized human scaled tail and stuck it on the back
Speaker 2: of a human to see how it changes the balance
Speaker 2: of a human as they're running.
Speaker 1: Oh, if they're running. I thought they were going to
Speaker 1: put them in water. It was going to be like
Speaker 1: a mermaid, some kind of a robot mermaid.
Speaker 2: There are some interesting academic ideas out there. Yeah, Academics
Speaker 2: is a lot of fun and often leads to some
Speaker 2: really cool, groundbreaking knowledge, often really silly stuff too.
Speaker 1: You've talked a couple of times about sort of comparing
Speaker 1: academia and industry and work, you know, working in the
Speaker 1: private sector, Like, what's one thing you would want to
Speaker 1: tell your colleagues in academia about industry, What's one thing
Speaker 1: you wish professors understood about business or working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: I would say.
Speaker 2: That you have to work within the system that you
Speaker 2: you live. So, you know, we live in a economic driven,
Speaker 2: capitalist society for the most part, at least Western culture,
Speaker 2: and really nothing gets done without some economic incentive, it seems.
Speaker 2: And so in academics there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 2: alarms raised on climate environment, you know, the mass extinctions,
Speaker 2: things like this, but it's very rarely tied to real
Speaker 2: economic incentives or real you know, real things that would
Speaker 2: move the needle. And I think there needs to be
Speaker 2: more emphasis on how the two can work together to
Speaker 2: make solutions happen. For instance, with ocean Well, you know,
Speaker 2: we have identified a commodity water that can be sold
Speaker 2: to make money, and we are developing a technology that
Speaker 2: can hopefully put a dent in one area at least
Speaker 2: of planetary health and climate. And so I think there
Speaker 2: needs to be more of that type of thinking in academia,
Speaker 2: just bringing in the whole picture of what human society
Speaker 2: really is right now.
Speaker 1: Michael Porter is the chief technology officer at ocean Well.
Speaker 1: Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We
Speaker 1: are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
Speaker 1: show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who
Speaker 1: was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah briguerrett.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Pop