Stories Sustain Us #44 – Restoring Our Oceans to Abundance (Part 1)

Summary
On Stories Sustain Us E44, Fritz Neumeyer shares his unique journey from Berlin to California and eventually to France, exploring the cultural influences that shaped his identity. He reflects on his upbringing in a divided Berlin, the impact of American culture on his life, and how his family's background in architecture influenced his career path. The discussion also touches on the historical context of Berlin's transformation, the effects of cultural exchange between East and West, and the lasting economic impacts of the Soviet Union. The conversation explores Fritz’s marriage to Alexandra Cousteau, his personal journey as influenced by the Cousteau legacy, and the formation of Oceans 2050, an organization aimed at restoring ocean abundance.

About the Guest
Fritz Neumeyer, Co-Founder, CEO, has been shaping Oceans 2050's organization, strategy and concepts since its inception. He is a professional architect with an avid interest in philosophy, science, and sport. Educated in the classics, with a Master’s from ETH Zurich, his role is delivering the architecture of ocean restoration. He applies his unique skillset to design the Oceans 2050 ecosystem using architectural theory, practices and systems design while creating first-of-its- kind digital tools for the ocean community.

Show Notes
Oceans 2050: https://oceans2050.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oceans-2050/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Oceans2050/
Fritz Neumeyer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fritz-neumeyer-oceans2050/

Takeaways
•Fritz's journey from Berlin to California was unexpected.
•Growing up in Berlin during the 80s and 90s was unique.
•American culture had a significant impact on Fritz's upbringing.
•Fritz's family background in architecture influenced his career.
•Cultural exchanges shaped Fritz's identity and worldview.
•Living in California provided a different cultural perspective.
•Fritz's experiences in East and West Berlin were formative.
•The historical context of Berlin's division is crucial to understanding its culture.
•Fritz's architectural education was influenced by his father's work.
•The conversation highlights the importance of cultural connections.  The economic legacy of the Soviet Union continues to affect current generations.
•Personal connections and experiences shape our understanding of history and legacy.
•The Cousteau family has had a significant impact on ocean conservation and awareness.
•Oceans 2050 was founded to shift the narrative from conservation to restoration.

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Transcript

Steven 
What if the key to restoring our oceans wasn't just conservation, but transformation, architected with precision, powered by data, and inspired by hope? And what if the blueprint for that transformation came from someone whose life has been shaped by division, resilience, and cultural exchange? Hey everybody, I'm Steven Schauer, and welcome to Stories Sustain Us.

where we explore the lives of remarkable individuals working to create a more sustainable, just and connected world for all. On today's episode, we begin a two-part journey with Fritz Neumeyer, an architect, strategist and CEO who's helping design a future where our oceans are not only protected, but restored to abundance. In part one of this special conversation, Fritz shares his personal story.

Growing up in Berlin during the final years of the Cold War, navigating the cultural intersections of East and West, as influenced by some of his formative early teen years taking place in California. You hear how architecture runs in his blood, handed down from his father. Fritz also shares about how his worldview was shaped by the exchange of cultural ideas between the Pacific coast of California and the divided and reunited Berlin of his youth.

together with the echoes of the Soviet legacy. Given the history he personally witnessed, it's no wonder Fritz believes that understanding the past is essential for designing a better future. Here's a bit more about Fritz Neumeyer. Fritz is the co-founder and CEO of Oceans 2050, an ambitious initiative that aims to restore ocean abundance within a single generation. Professional architect with a deep interest in philosophy, science, and sport,

Fritz holds a master's degree from ETH Zurich and brings a systems thinking approach to marine restoration. He applies the tools of architecture and digital innovation to build an ecosystem of action, creating first of their kind tools and frameworks to enable meaningful impact in ocean health and restoration. It's worth mentioning before we dive into this episode, Fritz and I also speak a bit about his partner in marriage.

who is also the co-founder and president of Oceans 2050, Alexandra Cousteau. Alexandra is the granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau, and she is carrying on the incredible legacy of her family. She's an award-winning advocate for ocean restoration and abundance, and Alexandra collaborates with world leaders across sectors to influence, convene, and mobilize action to achieve measurable outcomes. Together.

as co-founders of Oceans 2050. Fritz and Alexandra are truly a power couple, advocating for a better future for all and taking actionable steps to return the world's oceans to abundance. Because this conversation was so insightful, I've split it into two parts. Today's episode is all about Fritz's personal journey, his upbringing, education, and the cross-cultural influences that shaped him. In part two, airing next week on June 3rd,

will dive into the groundbreaking work he's doing at Oceans 2050 and what it will take to truly restore our oceans. From divided cities to unified visions, from personal legacy to planetary future, this is a story you won't want to miss. So let's begin here on Stories Sustain Us, where we are inspiring action through the power of storytelling.

Steven 
Fritz, welcome to Stories Sustain Us. Thank you so much for joining me. I've been looking forward to this conversation for many, many weeks now, so it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, no, it's all good. Absolutely. I feel like I've gotten to know you actually a lot better than I've known some of my guests who I've just kind of met for.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Even.

Yeah, thanks for the invite. It took us a bit to get here. Sorry about that. And yeah, mean, we had great conversations leading up to it. that was the...

Steven 
for the first time here in this interview. So I appreciate the ⁓ up leading conversations we've had to this point. So ⁓ I'm over in Seattle. ⁓ Tell everybody where you are so we can kind of get geographically located on the globe so folks know where we are.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, I'm in Western France, ⁓ in a country side, in a place called the Loire Valley, ⁓ which is a postcard-y kind of place, ⁓ 20 minutes outside of a medium-sized city called Angers. ⁓ Yeah, so we're in a beautiful time of year. And I closed the door so we can't hear the frogs, but there's lots of great stuff going on. Right now, I get to live in a postcard.

Steven 
Yeah.

Nice.

Nice. Nice. That's how I feel about the Pacific Northwest most days as well. So, well, I want to get to Ocean's 2050, but first, you know, the format of the show, we get to know a little bit about you first. So tell us about your life, Fritz, where you didn't always live in a postcard. ⁓ So.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah.

I certainly didn't

think I would end up in France. Yeah. Yeah, so as we started with France, I can go to that. So I'm actually sort of from the European counterpart. I'm German. I'm from Berlin. And then, you know, I can start with the end of that story. Then I married, somewhat surprisingly, and my wife's half French and half American. We'll get to her later. And so now I ended up here. So yeah, I'm a...

Steven 
Right. So what's your story?

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, talking about frogs, I'm also a big city guy. I'm from Berlin. Kind of unique place to grow up in back in the eighties and nineties. that very interesting history and then like the very interesting period to grow up in that you don't really know when you grow up there. But afterwards looking back, it's kind of a very peculiar little period to go through. Yeah. then, yeah, big city guys, a lot of those standard things, love sports, music.

Steven
Yeah.

very yeah huge huge time yeah

Fritz Neumeyer 
clubbing the regular big city stuff. I probably like early mentioned here, lived in the US as a kid. I had my two years in California in middle school in Los Angeles and in Monica by the beach, all that stuff. So I got a good chunk of sort of early childhood Americanizing and English.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah. So how did that happen?

How did you get, you know, what was, I guess, because you would have come with your parents, I'm assuming. So what was, how did that happen? You got from Berlin to Los Angeles. That's a pretty big jump in the eighties, I'm imagining.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, it does.

Absolutely. I get to get type two threads here. So I'm an architect, but I also come from an architect family. My father's a professor for architectural theory. And in the 80s, he published his first book that kind of had a big splash in his field. And back then,

I don't know if they still have it, but the Getty Center was still in Santa Monica, not in that fancy place that they built afterwards. And they had these, you know, they had to, I think the numbers I remember from my childhood is that they had to spend $83 million a year in order not to pay taxes on them. So they built all these beautiful programs. And so they just gave out scholarships for certain things and invited my father after he wrote the book. So we got like this cute little apartment on third street ⁓ at the Getty Center.

Steven 
Yeah.

Nice.

Fritz Neumeyer 
with lots of other people from all over the world. remember literally last week I got in contact with a guy, a kid my age, the hallway, Conrad Shawcross.

who's, I think they were there because of his mother who'd written something, but his father was, his father was this crazy great lord somewhere. And then his mother's new boyfriend was this funky English artist with an amazing accent who would constantly smoke dope. Anyway, was this really great thing. so the other thing that they did, was fantastic. So they had these two houses in Third Street full of these scholarship people.

Steven
you

a lively place.

Fritz Neumeyer 
and they would organize all this great stuff. So we constantly going on these group cultural things. was basically you got a small stipend in an apartment. And at that point for my father, the important thing was you got access to the Getty library, which is a really unique thing. And my father's sort of the world's premier scholar on an art, Mies van der Rohe, very famous sort of historic architect.

and they have all his sort of all his old library stuff so he got to go through books. was for him that was like, yeah, it was a match made in heaven for everyone and all he had to do was research and write and just say thank you to the Getty Center. When he published it went so well that instead of a year we stayed almost two. And so, yeah, had my two years in California middle school, lived three streets away from the ocean and boogie boarding and baseballs and all that kind of stuff.

Steven 
⁓ so he was just in heaven there, yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

middle school. Okay.

Definitely a Southern California ⁓ upbringing there for a little bit. Imagine a big change from ⁓ what would have been West Berlin at the time.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah,

absolutely. And like on many, many, many, different levels and really just really fortunate. I got to say this. So, ⁓ first thing, my wife's very clear about this. If she's, she's adamant that we wouldn't be married if I had a thick German accent, right? That's the first thing. So, ⁓ and then just culturally, I mean, I think in general, there's a big, there's a huge shift as a kid. If you go from a one language mind to a two language mind, I think that sort of is either mono or multi.

Steven 
Yeah.

Ha ha!

Fritz Neumeyer 
So that's a big shift culturally. Obviously it was awesome as a young kid to be like live away, you know at the beach and then California was a great place to be and then The other thing it was great is when I came back we still had ⁓ You know loads of American forces, you know sort of Short blueprint Berlin was divided in four after the war right Russians French British and Americans And Americans say the longest and so we had all this cool stuff in the South like we had ⁓

Steven 
Yeah, the interesting time and period.

Fritz Neumeyer 
You know, PX shops and sports stuff. so after that, I kind of got connected to the American community in Berlin, ⁓ got access to the PX store. And, and so that was really fun. We had AFN, American Forces Network. So I kind of kept in touch with, I mean, I had like the Fresh Prince, right? So I kind of kept up with regular vocabulary and all that kind of stuff and the American TV shows. So yeah, funny how that, how, that matters, right? It's,

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah. Fresh Prince. Yeah. No, does matter.

I I appreciate the cultural connection. Cause I mean, that was a giant show at the time and seeing that that was mattering, you know, made, made, you know, sense to you and connected with you over in West Berlin at the time. I mean, that's beautiful. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Not only connected, so the other thing that

happened was like in that, so I was in the US in late 80s, ⁓ but in the 90s, know, American culture like took a real foothold in Europe, right? Hip-hop came, those shows, like fresh was a word we used in Germany as an adjective and it came out of this kind of stuff, right? It came out.

Steven 
Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
and words like dope and then hip-hop really changed everything, right? So we all like we had the early breakdancing, graffiti, parties, that kind of stuff. Really that's why Berlin's still famous for clubbing and party culture and it came out of that push. But then also I played, was on the...

Steven 
Yeah.

Big influence.

Yeah.

Wow.

Fritz Neumeyer 
first one of the early German kids to play on the Berlin baseball team. Basically, I was a shortstop because I knew the rules. And so, and then I ended up playing basketball in my life passionately. it's all kind of from that stuff. ⁓ And then there's something else. yeah.

Steven 
Hahaha

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So my father ended up teaching like in CyArk and then at Princeton and Harvard. And the coolest thing ever that I had was, think he was teaching at Princeton when I was in my teens. And so we were there for a couple of months just visiting as we didn't move over. And so I had a Princeton campus ID.

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And that was like the magic thing when I came back to Berlin, because, you know, some of these parties, the American stuff would be American ID only or access to the PX store. And I would just come in with my, I don't have an American, I have a Princeton ID and I was just getting everywhere. It was amazing. So yeah, I mean, you know, and then my teens were like dominated by, by sort of American, American cultural influence. And then, you know, there was other stuff too, like the wonder years, right? Like I'll never forget the Cosby show, like all of, we had all that stuff.

Steven 
⁓ just... ⁓

That was good enough. was your...

Yeah.

Yeah, that's

Fritz Neumeyer 
And interesting,

you likes to finish this period. So the other thing I had is funny story too. In school, I went to like, my first foreign language was Latin. So Latin, then to English in seventh grade, which is obviously convenient for me because when we started having English in class, I'd just gotten back from the US. But my last two years of school, I obviously took like English as a sort of special kind of reinforcement. And my English teacher was this amazing guy.

Mr. Eif, gorgeous daughter too. But he'd married the gorgeous daughter because he'd married this very successful and gorgeous business woman who was German and he'd followed her to Berlin. And he had taught, he was American. so he was like my absolute, because he had taught American literature at Cornell and Ithaca.

Steven
So he was US, he was American. Okay, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Right. And he'd coach basketball. Right. So, and, then, he came to Berlin because of his awesome wife and she was the, you she was the big breadwinner with, business. And so he just got bored. And so he's like, well, you know, what's the best high school I can find here. That's sort of on the Western part. And so he ended up teaching English at my high school for the last two years, but we have a year extra, so it's 12 and 13th grade.

Steven 
just a little thing. ⁓ he was perfect.

Wow, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
But he was obviously completely overqualified. And that's why I learned proper adult English. In two years, I think he ran us through four feet of classics of American literature and the full program. And I got to sit in his classroom. I'll never forget, my most poignant school memories are in his classroom he had two posters, like the iconic posters, these two Nike Just Do It posters.

Steven 
Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah, just flying through the air. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
One of them is Michael Jordan with like, dunk contests where he's sort of flying in the air and the other one,

and then the other one's Jerry Rice from the back holding up the ball with like one of those 49ers touchdowns. And he coached your basketball team. So that was ⁓ kind of my more mature version of, and because before that, my English was TV shows in eighth grade. ⁓ know, I feel so.

Steven
Yeah.

That's wonderful. Yeah.

Pop culture.

Fritz Neumeyer
Yeah. And the other thing about, you know, growing up in California, which is the tough thing with my kids, my wife sometimes gets a little piffy about this is that, when you're in sixth and seventh grade in California, every third word is either like the F word or some other square thing. It's not there, you know, it's ⁓ not very polished. know, I sometimes, I actually literally have to do this in business relationships where I sometimes have to

Steven 
Sure. Yeah, that's how was in South Texas too, where I grew up. ⁓

Fritz Neumeyer 
say hey when I get really excited and my English roots come out I might not have the right sense for what's appropriate or not. Luckily most people are comfortable with where it's at. Yeah, good for me. They come out when I get excited. Yeah, interesting. was a little excursion here. No, so that's, I think that's why I'm married. Actually it stayed, so right, so I.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah, F-bombs are pretty normalized these days. Yeah, good for me too. Likewise,

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
I remember sort of, you know, through university as an architect, spend a lot of time in front of a screen, right? Like open designs was, and I would just always have headphones on and have like all the American comedians on. Like the potty mouth comedian as well. So like that's, that got me through university. So, and then, you know, I still remember my first date with my wife. ⁓ like we, we were set up on a blind date, but the first thing we talked about was, ⁓ was the daily show and, and, and, and John Stewart.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

John

Stewart, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
⁓

back in the 2000 whatever when that was sort of at the five and she was like, this is interesting. Here's this German guy, but he knows John Stewart. So maybe this isn't so bad and he doesn't have an accent. Yeah, so just as we're speaking here, where you started with geography, I do have like, I'm German, but I have a really heavy sort of early Americanized.

Steven 
Yeah, big deal.

Yeah, clearly you were kind of, you know, that integration

Fritz Neumeyer
Yeah, no,

Steven 
into US culture and language and everything seems very clear as part of your upbringing. Did you always know you were, oh, go ahead. I have another kind of transition question, but before we leave that conversation, what was your last thought there?

Fritz Neumeyer
it's interesting now, you know, we've talked about it, right, where in this period specifically, which is very, you know, unique in the historic context of like the last 60, 70 years, right? So, ⁓

Steven 
Yeah,

Fritz Neumeyer 
And now

Steven 
Truth.

Fritz Neumeyer 
we're seeing sort of America leading a period of change with all sorts of, you know, very sort of world changey disruptive dynamics. But on the opposite, you know, we're just talking about American culture. for my father and their generations, like the Americans are still like, they're the saviors, right? Those are the guys that came in and kind of rescued everyone from, you know, my country did a little bit of damage last year.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

A little bit

of history there, yeah. Yeah, I was in South Korea a few years ago, and I'm not military, but just older generation of South Koreans just walking on the street of Seoul were kind of like, you know, acknowledging as you walked by, I'm assuming they were assuming I was US military, but I think that that connection to some older generations of the United States of, you know, the 50s, 60s.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So.

Steven 
70s, 40s, that changing world that was happening at that point in the 20th century ⁓ still reverberates for some of older generations, which is nice on some levels, because we are undergoing some change that I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit. But let me ask you that transition question about change in your life before we catch up to kind of present day change. ⁓ Did you always know you were going to?

Steven (15:08)
you know, go into architecture, you know, because it was

a kind of that's what your father was doing or when you left to go on to university and start your own studies and growing into adulthood, you know, did you already know that or was there a story there about how you kind of came to that?

Fritz Neumeyer
Yes, that's interesting Yeah,

actually there is I guess so you can kind of say it's by osmosis right so Yeah, and you know in a Really cool kind of way like from the classics to you know that most time my father spent with me like we were either drawing like

Steven 
Yeah, yeah, if you're around it so much,

Fritz Neumeyer 
coming up with stuff, Legos, building things, and then ⁓ just other stuff, like deeply, deeply cultural. As Europeans, do we travel a lot, right? And in Europe, things are a lot closer. So if you're on the road for a couple of hours or in a plane for a couple of hours, you're in very different cultures. And so we would spend, I remember in my childhood, we ⁓ we'd be in Greece multiple times a year. We'd be down in Italy.

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Nice.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So, but when we did the interesting thing about, you know, the, family context there, my father's specific, my mother is an architect too, she was a smaller scale, know, practicing architect, but, ⁓ you know, other people were lying at the beach. I was running around in temple ruins, right. And in pestilence and Greece and like, you know, the Acropolis is one of my earliest raisins. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah, nice.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, and then when I was a teenager, I basically had my own lecture series wherever we were going, like through Florence. It's funny, when I was in Florence with the family for the first time last year, I'm walking through these things and all of a sudden I can feel this disc coming into my head and I've got these lectures that I would just soak in from my father. I'm coming and I'm telling to my kids. It was kind of a really sweet generational moment of how those kind of things work.

Steven 
Nice. Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And then, you know, I guess, you know, we talked about the Getty Center. I've just been always been around it. then sort of starting with that, actually, you know, I was, you know, I talked about like the way that they would do things with us and put these groups together. And so I'm an only child as well. So my parents took me everywhere, right? From the earliest days. then I would, you know, this, this thing, like when your father's a professor and then it's sort of in that Princeton kind of Ivy league kind of level.

I was just always sitting at the dinner table with the most important names and other friends. I'm still friends with the son of Frank Gehry. I ended up playing in their house after school every day because they'd take the sweater on the corner and Alejo was like a good buddy.

Steven 
Well, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And just, that's just, I grew up with it. Right. And so actually I, when you asked, I didn't always know, but it is sort of architecture is that kind of discipline where lots of stuff comes together. And I was not, I was always sort of, liked doing lots of stuff. ⁓ I grew up with this kind of complexity and, and a lot of the stuff that interested me. And I do remember like, I showed my kids the other day, my high school yearbook, you know, where other people write stuff about you. It wasn't all complimentary, but one of the, one of the things that was in there was like, you know,

Steven 
Yeah, just kind of there.

Yeah.

Hahaha

Fritz Neumeyer 
I'd like to do something between architecture and philosophy. that was there. And then we had this, my generation still had this lucky thing called, I mean lucky thing, but sort of in this context, lucky thing called military service, right? So finished high school and I it was the last year in Berlin and you got a year to think about it, right? So by the time I was through that, yep, that was the last year that.

Steven 
Kind of that seed was there, yeah.

Sure, in West Germany, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it was compulsory. You had to do it, right? was, everybody had to,

yeah, yeah. Were you, were you in Berlin when communism, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the wall came down? Were you there? I mean, what ⁓ an incredible, wild, emotional time that must have been. At least that's what it seemed like from the news in.

Fritz Neumeyer 
last year that had to do it.

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean yeah I was yeah I was there.

Yeah, to watch.

Steven 
newspapers and reading about it and watching about it, know, from my high school in San Antonio, it was incredible, you know, but I don't know, you what was it like, obviously living in it.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So that's the funny thing is.

So that's the funny thing, right? It's emotional now when I look at historic footage. Back then we were what? This was in 89 when the wall came down. was barely 12. And I remember there was this thing, yeah, the wall's coming down soon and our school was not far from it. So we had a day off and went away. But we were just in it for us. West Berlin, I

Steven
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
historic kind of rarity, but it was this little island, right? In Eastern Britain. We'd always grown up with this strange stuff. If we wanted to drive to my grandparents, we would have to pass the border twice, like into East Germany and out of it. the highway would be in this weird tunnel thing because, you know, it's basically an extension of a wall. So for us, it was just this, there's always oddity. And then, you know, if we really like, for us, it was more like an in the thing experience.

Steven 
Right, right.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Then,

you know, it took a while and I think so the came down in 89 and we also driving at what? Yeah, like mid 90s. And that's when it got interesting because like old place, the old Russian military camps that we would go on these.

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
discovery trips and then sort of the famous legendary Berlin party scene of the 90s was all of this stuff and all these unused places and You know the the wall went right through the center of the city, right? That's what they rebuilding over the last whatever they 20 years to kind of stitch that stuff together with all that prime real estate But there was just all of the stuff that you see in the films You know that that's kind of the thing that the Berlin of the 80s, you pre and post and Cold War times had that strange

Steven 
Wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
singular flair to it. For us it was kind of our playground. Actually, yeah, no, the first experiences were when they put the sports leagues together. So I was playing basketball and field hockey at the time and all of a sudden, all of a sudden you're on a train for an hour driving out to this place that feels like it was literally a different world. So East Berlin on the outside specifically, especially in the early years, was...

Steven 
Yeah.

Mm.

integrating with East Germans and

Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So I mean, just like the socialism, communism part of it, the satellite parts of town, there's literally no physical difference between an away game sort of in far East Berlin, then you would, you, you, if you got out of the train and got out of the outskirts of

I mean, I've never been to Moscow, but you see the... or like Prague or Warsaw, whatever is those, Easton, they're all... it's all the same, down to like how the chemical products smell. So I still have all these funky, visceral memories, but it was more for us, it was more like a playground thing. And man, was it strange. Culturally the difference is just...

Steven 
Wow.

Yeah.

Sure, I can only imagine. ⁓

Fritz Neumeyer 
It was really like when you went to those parts of towns it was a kind of, I'm not going to call it an out of body, it was a very different experience.

Steven 
Yeah,

yeah. Well, I imagine reverse for the folks who grew up in the East under the Soviet block that it was a mind blowing experience to visit to the West and see what they had access to that they didn't have access to in the East. I'm sure going both directions, it was just an out of body experience and just a, yeah, wow. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it still shows, right? We can finish this

off here with like, we know we just had our elections and so we've, for the first time in history, we've got the, what we call like the far right on the rise. And when you look at the voting map of Germany, it's literally color coded, like the former Eastern States, we've got five states, 11 old ones. You know, they're sort of a different color code to everything else.

Steven 
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And you know, and people try to make a point of that, but it's interesting when you see the underlying economic maps, they're the same, you know, like education levels, employment levels, wage levels, like all this kind of stuff that you would... Same thing. Yeah, it's going to take ages. Yeah, it's really going to take ages to get that multiple, multiple, multiple generations to get together.

Steven 
Yeah, the ripples of the old Soviet Union are still being seen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, wow.

Rebalance. Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So back, like, let's tie that knot to the front because

that was the big difference, right? So the West behind the leadership of the US decided that Western Germany needed to be built up. And while the Russians just kept sort of draining, draining, draining. Well, you know, some sort of hybrid, they, you know, it was more taking than giving. And that's what made that discrepancy so, so grave.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah, took everything they could. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Right. Well, let's continue on your journey to the early 2000s. And I guess you're an architect, you're in the US and you'd mentioned earlier, this is around the time you met a young woman who probably was influential in your life.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, so it was actually a little later. ⁓

Steven 
Okay.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So I wouldn't call myself, you know, young. So I was an architect. No. So the only time I lived in the U S was in the eighties. I mean, I kept my connections. kept coming back. I had kept some of the friendships and then obviously for, for us, like the U S would be a destination and friends of mine moved over and did their part. Like actually one of my best childhood friends from Berlin spent his sort of high school year over in Santa Monica. So I go visit him and hang out with the, went to the high school where all the people went that I was in junior high school with. So those connections kept,

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer
I but I studied, I finished my architecture studies in Zurich, right, the ETH down there. And then I went back to Berlin to work and then founded an office with my first partner. And then in my, what was this, 2009, so this was early 30s, I met my wife.

Steven 
Okay, yeah.

Okay.

Fritz Neumeyer
And then things changed, right? Changed, changed, changed a lot. So, ⁓ yeah, my, my wife's comes from a really, really famous ocean family, right? So her, grandfather is sort of a household name for, for, I mean, not necessarily our generations, but the ones before, know, Jacques Cousteau.

Steven 
Things changed, yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, household name in my generation, from my

home, my father was a scuba diver. So we had, you know, ocean books that, you know, I learned who Jacques Cousteau was when I was a teenager because of my father's interest in scuba diving. So. ⁓

Fritz Neumeyer 
Hmm.

Well, I'll be honest,

didn't fully, I mean, I kind of like kind of a vague idea, but I still just went, I had vague idea. So I do remember my father told me we used to watch those when I was really young. He also said, I mean, this is something you often hear actually from sort of the one generation behind ours is that he would go with his father to go watch those things every Sunday. And that's something that I've heard a lot. One of the really funny things, of funny, but really interesting things about that.

Steven 
Yeah.

Wow, hear ya.

Fritz Neumeyer 
being married to my wife. So I didn't really know what I was getting into from that perspective. that family just meant a lot to people in that generation. mean, there's simple facts around it too. We can get this out of the way really quickly. I mean, I remember seeing this was really fun, interesting. In the 70s, Jacques Cousteau was the second most known or slash famous person in the world.

Right? And in the world is always as interesting as it's actually like a parlor dinner game I play with people and who was number one, right? And then people go to the Pope and whatever musicians and that's always this Western view. I'm like, no, no, no, you know, talking.

Steven 
Yeah.

Muhammad Ali or

Pele is my guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
No, it's Muhammad Ali, right? That's the thing, right? Because

even Pele is soccer and there's a whole part of the world that doesn't care about soccer. The one thing everybody cares about is, you know, fighting. So it's actually, it's actually Muhammad Ali. But so, so her grandfather's number two in the world, right? And so, you know, talking about Eastern, like one of my best friends I grew up with is Russian.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And I remember, I remember the first time he told his father who I was marrying, his father like lost his shit. Cause they, they were watching this stuff in the three thousands just because they didn't have, know, different, you know, less, television programming. Um, and her father, so, you know, there's, there's Jack and then there's my wife, Alexandra's father is, is Philippe. Um, who is the one who did all the cool stuff with us, with, with, with, uh, with, uh, with the big guy. Um, he was number seven.

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Just catching up, sure.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Right? So it's like, that's so, you know, I didn't really know, I looked it up a bit and was like, what's this? And then my friends didn't either. So I think it's really, it's kind of a generational thing. But then again, with people who have connections to the oceans, it's a really big, you know, he's the iconic guy with the red hat. you know, interestingly, a lot of people think he's a marine biologist. He's like very much not. This guy's like an inventor.

Steven 
Wow, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
explorer and the first guy to film but he literally you know the regulator if you do scuba the thing you breathe through that's still the invention.

Steven 
Yeah, yeah, that's how I learned of him is kind of through

my father saying this is the guy that kind of invented all this stuff that I get to go do on the weekends. So, really?

Fritz Neumeyer 
was meant to be a car park, by the way, right?

Steven 
how things change.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, yeah. mean, and I'll say this honestly too. I didn't, I've only recently caught up like on the details. mean, obviously I've kind of, I've lived a lot through this and not only in the nicest ways, you know, so just to finish the history here. So Philippe was the guy who did all the, the, know, filming and the storytelling with his father. And he had this, you know, the two famous vessels or the calypso, the boat.

And then was Leap who had this flying calypso with a boat flying like an air, what do call it, airplanes that can land on water ⁓ in the same coloring. And ⁓ he's also the one who changed the narrative quite a bit. know, Jacusto is sort of this, you know, Navy officer out of the second world war, you know, escaped death a couple of times. Like, but this is sort of that badass generation.

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
you know, that sort of the explorers drive, let's say. So then he's the one who brings the oceans to the world. like, think one of the real reasons why he's sort of this such a magical person for everyone is because he's actually not a marine by loss. He's like, he's a storyteller, right? He often says this. He's like, I'm not a scientist. I'm a cinematographer.

Steven 
Explorer Smart, sure sure.

Fritz Neumeyer 
That's what he actually is. He's like this magical storytelling person, you know, going back to what we talked about in the pre-run here is like that. Exactly. And that's how humans do history. that's the stuff, ⁓ how we gel the gajar together and stuff. It's actually really funny. There's a great documentary on national geographic called Becoming Cousteau. I think it's even on Disney. And there's a biopic called What You See and stuff. there's...

Steven 
Yeah, the power of storytelling, yeah.

Absolutely.

Okay. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
The recent years there have been some movies that actually got me up to date on some of the details because the tragic part is that my mother's father, Philippe, died in a plane crash with his flying calypso when she was four or something. So he died early, but he'd been the one who'd kind of introduced what now is the Cousteau legacy, more than the exploration, which is this.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer
He was kind of one of the driving force behind the Cousteau Society being founded and this whole thing becoming something that isn't dirty little secret, it's in all the movies so I can talk about it. The early expeditions of the Calypso were founded by oil. They were diving, but they went and found oil. A lot of the Middle East is sort of based on the stuff they found in the ocean.

Steven 
Sure. You had to get revenue somewhere, Somebody had to pay for it.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And then that changes when they found the Cousteau Society and the whole thing becomes a nonprofit and it becomes a ⁓ natural sort of an ocean advocacy brand. And so Philippe literally co-founded that whole idea of conservation and the conservation ethic and this idea that nature has an inherent value and they have this...

Steven 
Yeah, found it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's conservation ethos. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
after his death, Antarctica thing, they're saying that moratorium, like all that stuff comes out of that part, but I wasn't familiar with any of that. So I've caught up on that stuff in the past. Those movies actually really helped. Yeah, so I marry into that not really knowing.

Steven 
Yeah.

Nice, nice. So let's, yeah,

yeah. So obviously there's a lot that happens between the meeting, the marriage, and the ensuing years, but let's maybe take a jump in time and talk about the, to where we are now in the formation of Oceans 2050 that.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah.

Steven 
your co-founder of with your with your wife, Alexandra Cousteau. so can you talk about the formation of the organization? It's a great story that you told me one time off camera. I'd love to kind of get it on camera here because it was such a moving story about how you guys came to create this organization.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, so that's actually, yeah, that's.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, sure. ⁓ So I met my wife. That did change my trajectory, right? So that's why I talk about my former partner as my former partner, because all of a sudden I'm like, oops, you know. So I was in Berlin when I met her. She was in Washington. And then things went kind of quickly, right? Just, you know, in your early 30s when you know you know. ⁓ So I moved over. We lived in Washington for a while. We got married there, had our daughter really quickly. ⁓

and moved back to Berlin. And so for a number of years, you know, I'm still practicing as an architect. and I'm, you know, kind of proudly playing this role of supportive husband, you know, it's like, my wife, does all this cool stuff here in Mars, know, ocean advocate, whatever. not a bad look. You want to just, remember that. And, you know, and I help where I could sort of on a thinking perspective and stuff, but she was running her own thing. When I met her, she did this really cool, like she was

Steven 
Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
on a, on an expedition tour on John McCain's old, ⁓ what's that thing? The something express. Yeah. Something expressed his bus. Yeah. Something close. I got to look at it later. ⁓ so they literally had that bus through the rebranded it and then they had their, you know, it was called expedition blue planet.

Steven 
when he was campaigning, the... it was... Yeah. Yeah. I want to say it's like the hard truth express or something, but that's not quite it. But... Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
So they've done a global version of that storytelling around water, very broadly, ocean, water, all sorts of different things. And they've done that, it was well received. She became a National Geographic Explorer and a Young Global Leader and all this kind of stuff. And it's funny, she did that on a global, they went in India and the Middle East, but they did an American part as well. And then ⁓ the American sponsors are like, this is great.

Steven 
Okay, everyone.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
so happy we don't have these issues. And they're like, are we sure about that? And when he did, they did this expedition through Canada and North America on this bus. Straight Talk Express. That's right. Even the same driver, we branded that. And so when I met her, she was on that. She was on the road for like three and a half months. don't know how many thousands of miles. This absolutely crazy schedule. I would kind of fly in and meet them somewhere and be like the intern that holds the sunscreen and gets everyone coffee.

Steven 
Yeah.

Straight Talk Express, that's what it was. yeah, yeah, yeah, that was it.

⁓

You

Fritz Neumeyer 
No, and so then we moved back to Berlin because of my work and living conditions and other private stuff. ⁓ And then, so what I would watch her over the years ⁓ just sort of get more and more, like, you know, I could kind of get to see the lights dimming in the back. She would come back and you could kind of feel how she.

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
you know, like, I mean, not going to be too strong here, but you know, losing hope. You could see it going down, of in getting more like we're losing this kind of thing here. And then it got, that got exacerbated by our daughter, right? So there was, mean, if you have kids, you know that like when, you do, um, this is interesting moment in life that happens where your perspective shifts from where your own life is not only about your own life anymore, but all of a sudden this, you know, this, this, this generational perspective and you spent most of your life's energy.

Steven 
Sure.

Fritz Neumeyer 
building up the future of these kids. And for Alexandra specifically, she had this bitter thing where she came home one day and she's like, man, is it gonna be like, you know, our daughter's job as the fourth generation of the Cousteau's to write the obituary for the oceans? I was like, that sounds ugly. Yeah, and so I was watching that until one day in 2019, she came back from an event where she'd been with Carlos.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's harsh. Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
that's Carlos is professor Carlos Duarte. ⁓ it's also our chief scientist and, ⁓ I think we can say this now. He's like officially the most decorated Marine scientists of our time. He just won the Japan prize, which is, understand for Marine biology, it's the kind of the equivalent of the Nobel prize and he's the most published and all this kind of stuff. However, great guy. She, she, she was, she, she was with him at an event and she, she, she, the way she came back with it was like, Hey, I just asked him, you know, Carlos, are we.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Are we done here? Are we just sort of going through the motions in a game that we know we're going to lose? ⁓ so the great thing about Carlos is that he's got this unshakable science-based optimism, which makes it credible. It's not hypeware. You always get this package of vision and scientific underbelly of it. It's a great one-two punch.

Steven 
Yeah, it was doomed. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And she's like, you he's like, no, it's the opposite. Um, no, it was not the opposite. He's like, can we, can we still turn this around? He's like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, the, other thing you always hear from Carlos, I'm writing a paper about it. And so he was in the midst of, of literally that was my nickname for him for a while. I'm publishing a paper about it. And so he published this, they were in the midst of this big paper called rebuilding marine life, which ended up being published in 2020, I think in early 2020, it was this big thing that worked on for years.

Steven 
Yeah.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
But it is sort of the name's the game. It's rebuilding marine life and it's the scientific blueprint for how we can not only conserve the little that's left, right? That's the one thing Alexandra often talks about, sort of conservation protection isn't interesting when you've lost half of what's going on, right? This is from her perspective. ⁓ And so in this paper, he and his colleagues laid out this whole plan for how we can rebuild abundant oceans, not just sort of conserve a little, but get back to historical abundance or whatever.

Steven 
Right.

Rebuild it.

Fritz Neumeyer 
we think that is, within one human generation. And so it's having, it's got recovery wedges, it's got KPIs, so it's this very, very broad visionary approach, ⁓ or not visionary, but it'd be aspirational approach, but it's underpinned with science and stories, there are all these great reference markers. We got the whales back, that was one of the big things of Save the Whales in 70s, we actually, that worked.

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
then there are these other stories about, you mentioned Korea, Like Vietnam, Delta restoration, like some of those war scars, like really successful ecosystem restoration reference projects. And then this is the one that's a little cynical, which is the nuclear testing they did in the, what is it, the deep, Southwest Pacific or whatever it is, the hills, right? Where they basically,

Steven 
in the atolls. Yeah, yeah, bikini atolls and things like that,

Fritz Neumeyer
blew them to pieces and then didn't come back for 30 or 40 years. And when they did, they found that sort of natural life was doing better in those areas where humans had not been for 40 years than in the adjacent ones. So it turns out it's better to blow a nuke and not have humans come for 40 years than it is to have humans around, which is, it's cynical, it's not true.

Steven
Yeah.

You

Yeah, yeah,

let's avoid the the nuclear part blow up part, but yeah, see if we can Yeah, figure out how we can get to that part. Yeah

Fritz Neumeyer
No, but the other thing about humans too, right? So human...

You know, because there's no, this is, you know, I'm just quoting Carlos here. Um, and, and, know, this, cause this, this, this is important not to fall into this narrative that humans are the bad guys, right? So, because in COVID we saw the opposite. COVID we had this really interesting parallel of places that flourished because humans weren't, you know, pushing on them and others that didn't because the human stewardship was missing.

Steven 
Right.

humans weren't there to continue the, yeah, absolutely. And we're part of the system, right? We're not the bad guys or the good guys, we're just part of the system. We've overused the system in many places, but we're still part of it. So we have a role to play in the restoration of it.

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Right. So this is, you know, I just want to make sure we don't fall into this. ⁓

Steven 
Absolutely. I love that story

going from the deep-seated worry and concern and probably fear of your daughter and her generation being the ones to write the obituary for the oceans to, no, no, that's just a generation that can see the oceans come back to life and come back to abundance. mean, what a shift of perspective from

Fritz Neumeyer 
Yeah.

Steven 
You know, the, the darkest of thoughts to the brightest of hopeful thoughts. We've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of work to do, but it sounds like that's why you guys formed your organization is to get people doing that work.

Fritz Neumeyer 
you

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just nailed it there. ⁓ So for me, that was that interesting, you know, that was sort of the most contrast in it to go from obituary. And so I literally saw the lights change, right? She comes back from this event and like the sparks back on, right? And just, Hey, you know, this is exciting. And ⁓ it was the same for me, right? Because I literally like those two words, abundant, restoring abundance, right? Like, ha, right? That sounds interesting.

Steven 
Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
sounds much more interesting than the old narrative of protect and conserve. Yeah, so there was a cynical one-liner that I used to throw around in our early years, which was sort of the best day in conservation is one where you don't lose, right? And that's just, that's difficult to sell as an exciting proposition, right? It's kind of like a, hey honey, we only lost a little bit this week. It's really, ⁓ and.

Steven 
conserving what's left, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer 
And the moment you take that and you say, Hey, we're going to be restoring abundance here. We're going to rebuild something. We know where we're going. And we've got this goal for like all of that energy flips. And that's, that's where I got a lot more interested in. then we talk a lot about history here, like as a German.

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah, you get that creative energy going, right?

Fritz Neumeyer 
We know the potential of how much collective energy rebuilding can unleash. We don't even have to make it about rebuilding, just building a future together that's more interesting. Maybe that's the topic we can use to take for later. We as Germans know how much that can work. And then...

Steven 
Yeah, go forward, sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Fritz Neumeyer
Same thing, like we're checking a lot of my boxes here. We go from protected conserve to where I was like, I can't sell this idea to my guys. It's not exciting. I can't even sell it to myself. ⁓ To, hey, here's the stuff we get to rebuild something and restoring abundance is aspirational. That's fun to work for. We can all, you know, I can get a lot more people out of bed ⁓ to do that than the other proposition. And so, ⁓ yeah, that's when we founded Ocean 2050.

And I got really involved sort of from from the early days here because of that narrative change

Steven 
That wraps up part one of our incredible conversation with Fritz Neumeyer. I hope you found his journey as fascinating and thought provoking as I did. But trust me, this story isn't over yet. Join us next week for episode 45 of Stories Sustain Us, where we continue our conversation with Fritz and dive deep into his groundbreaking work with Oceans 2050. It's a powerful discussion about shifting the narrative from ocean conservation

to full scale restoration and how we can actually rebuild ocean abundance within a single generation. You won't want to miss it. Episode 45, part two of this amazing conversation drops June 3rd. As always, it'll be available at storiessustainus.com, where you can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And before we go today, if you've been inspired by today's episode,

there are a few great ways you can support Stories Sustain Us. Subscribe to the show, leave a rating or review, share it with a friend or visit us at storiessustainus.com to learn more. Following and sharing our social media content is also very helpful. I appreciate all your support. Thank you so much for being here today. Keep showing up, keep believing in the power of story and keep doing your part to make the world a better place. Until next time, I'm Steven Schauer.

Please take care of yourself and each other. Take care.