Hey, everybody. Today I've got an amazing gas Marcus Erickson is research director and co-founder of the FLAB Gires Institute and recently co-founded Leap Lobby. He's regarded as by many people as the world's number one expert on plastic pollution.

He has studied, I think you've been studying it for 40 years or close to that. He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic pollution and his studies have included over 20 expeditions sailing across all five ocean basins, the Bay of Bengal, the Southern Ocean, the inland lakes and rivers and publishing the first global estimate of all plastic of all sizes floating in the world's oceans in 2015.

And I think that was the year that you built that very strange kind of, it looks like a cataparan in the pictures out of junk.

It's sinking in all the pictures that I've seen of it. It's hard to believe that you sailed it across the ocean.

It was sinking. It was sinking. On day three, we actually, I called my wife from sea on this satellite phone and said, hey, babe, we're sinking.

Not quite a rescue mission, but she rescued us by sending us more supplies. I had to re-inflate all the bottles and get some additional twine to hold a pontoon together.

It was a pile of junk and the intent was, you know, how nonprofits work, you want to get ahead of the game.

We're doing research, you know, still around the world, but to get the grab, the public's attention, you're competing for attention.

We made a homemade raft, 15,000 plastic bottles and we put an airplane on top of it, assessed at 3, 10 aircraft.

I think it's the first airplane to drift across the ocean from Los Angeles to Hawaii.

It was unexpected three months. The phone would take three weeks with no motor, no support vessel. We just had the mercy of the waves.

But we made it and it worked in terms of a PR stunt. It really helped us, you know, capture more eyeballs and more attention to the issue of ocean plastic pollution.

And what was the airplane for? That was your rescue graft.

That was my cabin. It had no wings. It was just a fuselage.

I lived in for three months, me and my co-navigator, Joel Pascold, the two of us lived on this thing.

And my wife Anna Cummins, she was mission control. She was saying, you know, here comes another hurricane.

Stay north, get out of the warm water, get the cold water or the winds die down a bit.

It was much more than a bargain for. But, you know, because I survived, it's a great story to tell.

It looks like it probably had a maximum of like three knots.

It did not look either arrow or hydrodynamic, but I cannot believe you could sail that thing across the ocean.

Sailing is a very kind word. It was really just drifting. So we averaged 1.5 knots.

I mean, I could have walked to Hawaii faster. Really slow.

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