I believe it was Plato who first said that beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
Personally, I think that all depends on what you're holding.
What am I looking at exactly?
What's happening now.
Is after we unload the jellyfish.
Now we need to separate.
Uh huh. Who is this?
Juana. Juana.
Miguel. Hello, ma'am.
She's my mom. She's your mother?
Yeah.
How's business?
At the beginning, we only sell to the Japan, But the 2004 we start sell to the giant
China. The quantity just wide open.
Really? Yes.
Well, that's exciting, right?
I mean, yes. To have a market.
Yeah. Why do they have to be separated?
Because of the when they consume.
It's a different purpose.
The top. Usually they use it for slice.
Do you eat both?
Both.
But this tastes very different than this.
It's not too much different.
But the crunch.
This one actually is.
It's more crunchy than this one.
No, no. Just simply pull it apart.
Right? Yes. So you work your way around it like that, and then it just sort of just pops
out. It's just impossibly slimy.
Very good. Very clean.
The jellyfish with a lot of slime.
So we need to wash them.
Wash the slime off.
I like this job so we can't eat until we solve it.
Nope.
Can't eat till we solve.
All right. I remember.
Jesus. What's he doing?
He is pouring our secret solution that gives our jelly balls the crunch.
You didn't tell me there was a proprietary secret.
Ancient Chinese secret.
If you don't wind up doing this solution, you have a jelly fish that's going to either
be really brittle, right.
Or floppy and wilted.
So it's kind of like getting a soggy dill pickle.
So if you have a bad dill pickle, you can remember that bad dill pickle.
If you got a crunchy dill pickle you can remember it is.
Disappointing when the pickle is, as you said, floppy, floppy and soft soft.
So this is going to be the preservative.
And what we're wanting to do is we're wanting to add enough salt to where we can
get that VAT to equal 85 to 90 degrees salinity.
No bacteria can grow in that.
We make the Dead Sea look like a mud puddle.
So what you're going to do is you're going to grab a shovel.
Hey, Suze, how many shovels?
Six. Six.
So three for you. Three for him.
That seems like good math right there, April.
And this is just regular table salt.
Yep.
You got to spread it out.
By the truckload. Six truckloads a week.
You know, there was a time when salt was worth more than gold.
You got to feel that shovel up.
I'm sorry.
What? What? What? Do you not know how to shovel?
You need me to help you? It's my first day with a shovel.
Sorry. After the balls are salted and dehydrated, they're packaged and sent off to
parts unknown. Where I'm assured people can't get enough of them.
But how do they go down here on the docks of Darien?
Whole thing. Down the hatch, you bite it.
Can you demonstrate? If you're a betting man, I'd go ahead and just do the whole thing.
Down the hatch.
One, two, three.
Mm. Mhm.
Just throw it in Michael's mouth.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm. Welcome back to Magee, Mississippi, where I'm 200ft in the air, finally cleaning a
municipal water tower.
We're getting all that out.
Yeah. Fortunately for us, we've got the right tool for the job.
A tool that provides pressure.
Lots and lots of pressure.
You see what I just did? I got.
This. Say hello to my little friend.
Like the dead skin being slowly peeled off a sunburned back.
The tower sheds its layer of filth with a little coaxing from the pressure washer,
sending up a blast of H2O from 20 stories below.
A pump at the bottom will refill the tank.
Then it's up to gravity to push the water to the faucets of the good people of McGee.
Work our way around. Yup.
All the way down to the middle.
And that's it.
This is. I got to be honest, it wasn't easy getting here.
Seven hours to get to this.
Well, once you get here, it's a dream.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's a dream.
All right.
Again, there are literally tens of thousands of water towers all over America.
Some are taller than others and some are cleaner than others.
Oh, yeah, This is happening.
This one actually is in pretty good shape.
But like anything else, pretty good is relative.
Summer job for a kid.
You're in South Florida.
I'm assuming there's going to be a fair amount of backbreaking manual labor.
And, you know, just the constant excitement of never knowing what lurks beneath the
surface.
We got to get this water out of here.
That's number one. So this is our workhorse on the operation today, just trying to get a
nice, snug fit so we don't have any air leaks.
So where's the water going to go That gets sucked out that way.
We just try to get it as far away from the pool as possible.
If you're just joining us, we're waiting for these pumps to do the job of sucking out the
8 or 9000 gallons that were in here.
Shouldn't take too much longer.
I guess it's moving water.
We just got to clear a little pocket for it so that it's not sucking up all that debris.
They just had the roof done.
And roofers don't care where their trash goes.
The roofers literally threw the crap straight in the pool.
Have you ever.
Heard the old saying everything rolls downhill?
Yeah, I've heard a version of it.
Yeah. Guess where downhill is In Florida.
The bottom of a swimming pool.
What's this?
It was an old pool cleaning hose.
Look. Or you could reach over and grab it instead of unraveling the whole thing.
Mike.
This is better TV, Dan?
Trust me. We can make a meal out of this.
All right, let's clear out a space for this pump right here.
All right. This pump is like a garbage disposal.
Yeah, it has teeth inside of it that grind up and pulverize what's going inside of it.
Don't put your fingers in there.
Whatever goes in there is going out that way in a little, regardless to whether you.
Want it to or not. All right?
Yep.
Man down. Man down.
Man down. Man But he's back up.
Zack, don't touch that.
That's a garbage disposal.
I'll turn you into little pieces.
Zack. I like Zack.
He's a fine field producer and a good friend, and I would love to see him avoid the
deadly garbage disposal for as long as possible.
Hey, I found some sunglasses here.
Yeah.
Look at that. Hey.
Hey.
Trash cans. So we often get what would be just sort of considered trash put into our
bins. And that's one of the fun things we get to do here is sort all that stuff out.
Well, that sounds terrific.
You are going to get your hands dirty.
Recycling soap. Will I have.
To wash my hands when I'm finished recycling soap?
We recommend it. Just add water and you're good to go.
We start by weighing and opening the hundreds of boxes that are being shipped from over
7000 hotels all over the country.
I'm looking at bottles, I'm looking at soap, I'm looking at I hate to say it, but I'm
looking at pubic hair.
We sort out the soap from what you call the why is it brown?
Why is it brown, not soap?
Weighing the boxes lets us know the impact that each hotel is having on the planet.
We can calculate exactly how much weight we're keeping out of landfills, £41, 41, as
well as how much water and energy are being saved.
This appears to be mixed.
There's lubricant.
There's all of it.
Now, normally you'd have a couple of people doing this.
Yeah, for sure. Carlos, you want to come in here?
Why don't you come and help Mike introduce yourself.
How you doing, Mike? Carlos, How are you?
Carlos? It's great to meet you always.
What's your official job title here?
I'm the soap whisperer.
The Soap Whisperer?
Yeah, I'm the soap whisperer.
So why don't you and I work on this together?
Clean The world receives up to 40 boxes of soap from hotels each day at £40 per box.
That's over four tonnes of wheat.
What's the weirdest thing you ever came across when you opened up a box of what
should have been just soap.
Used, Condoms.
Used condoms? Good.
Yeah. Because nobody throws away the new ones.
41, maybe 39.
Getting close.
You might want to pick up the pace a little bit, Mike, because we got other jobs to go
to. Just just a little.
Not too much, but just a little.
Mike First of.
All, Carlos, I'm working with razor.
Sharp implements.
Secondly, I'm dealing with real human hair.
Oh.
I don't want you to see that part.
Mike. I'm pretty sure that's scalp hair.
Oh, pretty sure could be back here.
Carlos gets the feeder going, which will push the items down this conveyor belt where
Shawn and I will separate the soap from the bottles, from the trash and put it all into
different boxes.
So when did this whole business become a thing to you?
Like, when did the light bulb go off?
So about 13 years ago, I ran a global sales team for a tech company, and I was on the
road four nights a week.
Yeah. And in a hotel.
One night I called the front desk and asked what happened to the bar of soap and bottle
of shampoo. And I was done with it.
And they said it was thrown away.
So I did some research, kind of did some math, figured out if all hotels were throwing
their soap away. We were throwing away millions of bars of soap every single day out
of hotel every day.
It's mind boggling.
But the real aha moment for cleaning the world came when we found a bunch of studies
that back in 2009 there were 9000 children every day dying to hygiene related illnesses,
pneumonia and diarrheal disease.
Right. And all these studies showed that if we just gave them soap, we could cut those
deaths in half. And so that kind of became the moment that I said, wow, we can we can
take this soap, prevent it from hitting landfill, recycle it and send it to mothers
and children locally and all over the world who in so many cases are literally dying
because lack of proper hygiene.
In the 13 years we've been doing this, the death rate of children under the age of five
dying to hygiene related illnesses has come down by 60%.
And the United On.
Are you serious? Millions of children's lives.
Are you getting all this man?
Because, I mean, one minute you're standing here, you're feeling like a knucklehead
trying to separate bottles from soap and the next minute you realize you're saving lives.
You're making a big.
Biochar now began as an attempt to do something useful with tons and tons of wood
that nobody wanted.
Trees burned down by forest fires or killed by beetles.
Scrap lumber and broken down cargo pallets.
The crap. In other words.
We're creating a special type of carbon that has special properties.
Right now, we're the environmentalist's favorite because everything we do is carbon
negative. We're actually pulling the carbon from the air at scale.
And where are you putting it? Back in the ground.
Back in the ground or back in other products like concrete or asphalt or plastics or all
kinds of different things?
There's a lot of science.
See, a lot of lumber.
That lumber gets put in those kilns.
Yes, sir. And those kilns burn real hot.
It's actually a chemical reaction.
So it's really not burning.
That chemical reaction is called pyrolysis, which according to Google, is the thermal
decomposition of wood at elevated temperatures in a static atmosphere.
In this case, that atmosphere is a kiln.
Pyrolysis helps the environment by reducing waste, greenhouse gases and water pollution.
After pyrolysis, the contents of the kiln are dumped onto the hopper and onto a
conveyor belt for inspection.
We sort through them hand sort.
We've had trash come through metal and there's pieces of raw wood in there.
Only carbon you want going down the line.
I didn't meet you guys.
I'm Mike.
Mike. Nice to meet you. I'm Caleb.
Mike. I'm Lane.
Mike, Ben Lane and Caleb are removing any contaminants that would decrease the quality
of the biochar.
I'm just trying to keep up.
Tell me again what I'm looking for.
Anything that's not.
Carbon. So, like, this doesn't look quite charred.
Correct? That is wood.
We toss that out. Toss it.
Yep. Here's a rock.
Here's a rock. You only want carbon to go through the rest of the system and into the
bags. So this is a good piece of carbon.
It's burned all the way through.
You can still see the rings in it.
You guys are all moving pretty quick, but you're looking for stuff that isn't like
that.
That's carbon.
That's good. Yeah.
So that goes.
Just at a glance. I got to say, it all just looks like black stuff.
That's good, right? Yeah.
This is carbon. That's good.
Carbon.
Well, what's the difference.
Between This is still wood.
I feel like this might still be wood.
Can you crack it open?
Oh, that's carbon. That's carbon.
Yeah. I don't know that I was properly trained for this.
Today. I'm in Fort Mill, South Carolina, with this masochist, Smokin Ed Currie,
creator of the world's hottest chili Pepper, the Carolina Reaper.
So to review, these are the Carolina Reapers that you invented and that is currently
considered about the hottest pepper there is.
It is. You want a bag?
I do not know.
I do not. A big part of pucker butts revenue are seeds.
In order to extract the seeds we blend the peppers with water to separate the seeds from
the flesh. We then add this mixture to a bucket of water and let gravity do the work.
Seeds sink to the bottom because they're heavier.
It's science, you see.
And then pour it in.
The kids call it poop soup.
Because it'll make you poop.
Mostly because when you eat Carolina Reapers, you get the cramps and the runs.
Usually I just.
Don't feel like you're really selling it.
In a sauce.
It's good. Sliced up into little teeny pieces with a whole plate of food.
It's good. I get it consumed in a reasonable quantity.
It is delicious.
It's delicious. Yes.
So it's just really all about.
Just the tip.
You know, I can see why being outside is better because the fumes of this stuff inside
would be. Yeah, it.
Doesn't bother.
Me. No, but again, you're not entirely human, are you?
No, I'm not. See how the seeds are bouncing around in there?
You got to wait for them to settle, then pour it into the mesh.
Oh, my God. That doesn't bother you?
Not really. Excuse me.
Oh.
Here's the seeds. Normally in a day I do 20 to 30 of these buckets.
We sell Carolina Reaper seeds for $7 for ten.
Ten seeds. Ten seeds.
Seems like a bargain.
This is approximately 25,000 seeds.
And you sell them for how much?
For what?
$7 for ten.
12? I think he's got thousands of dollars in that strainer.