Stories Sustain Us #52 – Designing Abundance: Rebuilding Our Oceans with AI, Economics, and 3D Printing

Summary
Episode 52 of Stories Sustain Us is a visionary follow-up conversation where host Steven Schauer welcomes back Fritz Neumeyer for part three of a deep-dive into the bold and brilliant blueprint behind Oceans 2050’s goal of restoring ocean abundance within a generation. Moving beyond inspiration and into detailed action, Fritz unpacks the “what” of ocean restoration—outlining scalable, finance-driven models that blend environmental restoration with the hard economics of real estate development, insurance, and ROI.

From the potential of reefs to act as natural coastal infrastructure to the use of 3D printing and quantum computing to model optimal reef design, Fritz shares how new tools, data, and thinking are helping move marine restoration from idealism into implementation. This episode challenges assumptions, bridges divides between romantic idealism and pragmatic capitalism, and shows how sustainability’s triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—can truly come together beneath the waves.

About the Guest
Fritz Neumeyer, Co-Founder, CEO
As CEO and Co-Founder, Fritz 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
•Concrete over concepts: To gain traction, environmental initiatives must move beyond lofty language and show how projects work at a granular, executable level.
•From carbon to capital: The future lies in localizing environmental finance—shifting from global carbon markets to local value generation via ecosystem services like flood protection and fisheries.
•Reefs as infrastructure: Coral reefs can be designed, modeled, and built like cities—using architectural thinking, AI, and 3D printing to optimize both ecological and economic benefits.
•Insurance is the entry point: Coastal damage risk modeling, informed by cutting-edge data and climate projections, creates a compelling financial case for investment in natural infrastructure.
•Triple bottom line in action: Projects that restore biodiversity, protect property, and support livelihoods bring together stakeholders across political and economic spectrums.
•Design matters: Beauty, function, and cultural resonance must be integrated into environmental design to foster public support and long-term success.

🎙️ Stories Sustain Us is more than a podcast—it's a powerful platform that shares inspiring stories from people working to make the world a better place. Through honest, heartfelt conversations, host Steven Schauer explores the connections between people, planet, and purpose. From climate change and environmental justice to cultural preservation and human resilience, each episode aims to ignite meaningful action toward a more sustainable future.

🌍 Learn more about the podcast, explore past episodes, and discover how you can support storytelling that drives change at storiessustainus.com.

🔗 Follow us and join the conversation:

Facebook: @storiessustainus
Instagram: @stories_sustain_us
X (Twitter): @stories_sustain
Bluesky: @storiessustainus

💚 Your voice matters. Share the stories that move you—and help sustain us all.

Transcript

Steven
What if I told you we could rebuild coral reefs like we design cities using artificial intelligence, 3D printing and real estate economics, and that doing so could protect our coastlines, restore marine biodiversity and drive local economies all at once. Hey everybody, I'm Steven Schauer and welcome to Stories Sustain Us, where we are inspiring action through the power of storytelling. In today's episode, we're diving deep, literally and figuratively

into the cutting edge world of ocean restoration with my first ever return guest, Fritz Neumeyer. I had a wonderful conversation with Fritz a few months back and shared that in episodes 44 and 45. If you've heard our earlier conversation, you already know Fritz brings both visionary thinking and real world pragmatism to the climate conversation. Today, we go even further. This time, it's all about how.

we actually make the bold vision of Oceans 2050 real. You'll learn how coral reefs can be engineered like infrastructure, how quantum computing and AI are revolutionizing ecological modeling, and how turning habitat into investment-grade real estate could change everything we thought we knew about conservation funding. Fritz makes the case that saving the ocean isn't just a moral imperative, it's an economic necessity. And the good news?

we already have all the tools we need to do it. So for those of you who are just joining us, Fritz Neumeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Ocean's 2050, where he's been shaping strategy and systems since the organization's inception. Professional architect with a master's degree from ETH Zurich, Fritz brings a rare blend of design thinking, science and systems theory into his mission.

He's not just building projects, he's building the very architecture of ocean restoration. And he's pioneering a suite of first of its kind digital tools to help ocean communities thrive. So if you've ever wondered how we go from abstract hope to concrete action, or how technology and storytelling can come together to save the planet, this is the episode for you. Let's jump into this fascinating conversation with Fritz Neumeyer here on Stories Sustain Us where we are inspiring action through the power of storytelling.

Steven
Steven Schauer
Fritz, welcome back to Stories Sustain Us. You're my first return guest. It's great to see you again. It was great. The first two episodes ran a short time ago and I'm excited to have you back. It's kind of for a part three and just for everybody listening or watching. After the first two episodes aired, ⁓ Fritz and I would stay in touch and you

Fritz 
Yeah, Yeah, I talked too much. We didn't get through the program last day.

Steven Schauer 
kind of wanted to go into greater detail and I welcome that. think ⁓ what we've talked a little bit about since then is making sure that there's really detail, like granular concepts here that your vision for returning the oceans to abundance in a generation ⁓ isn't just flowery words on a website that inspire people and provide hope for folks, but there's actual details that we didn't quite touch on.

last time as we were sharing your vision. So let's kind of jump into it. We don't have to learn your history again. Let's just jump into the meat of it. Let's talk about some of those details. I don't know, did I capture that correctly? I'll start first with that. that? Yeah.

Fritz 
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

no. You know, just like, you know, just referencing our nice and long conversations before we start recording. You know, I gave you this compliment about how pleasantly surprised there was. But there's what from, you know, somewhat unusual format from my own experiences where all of a sudden I'm seeing you talk about my personal story in a context of how I work and see things that I've never really seen that way. So that that's, that's kind of interesting. But the ⁓

Yeah, what you're just mentioning is a really important point that's been brought to us from the outside. it's not like I'm being a smarty pants here. ⁓ But what's sort of a general pattern of concern in our environmental work is that a lot of big words are used, and especially because ⁓ a lot of sort of this, go back to the financing ideas of

of foundations and philanthropies and this general approach of nonprofit, even if it's institutional, you're a lot kind of, you're asking for money, right? If you, if you wanted to sort of paint a very broad black and white stroke on one of the principal differences between the business world and the institutional and for-profit world is in one, you ask for money. And in the other stuff, in the other one, you sell stuff, but you create a proposition and you, give someone something that they think is a good thing for them to execute.

And so ⁓ there's a lot of loud words. There's a lot of promises going around. we ourselves are cynical of a lot of these things. I like to call a lot of, I'm gonna get in trouble for this, hopefully. No, not, gonna rephrase it. But some of those sometimes spicy, these articles about when COP happens, right? The environmental summits, and then you see the bitey journalism about how many private jets came in.

you know, while that's a little bit of sort of poignant, you know, probably, I think I'm not sure I'm using the word correctly. There's an element to that, you know, we sometimes get cynical, we like to call these, these conferences the determined to be committed events, right? Cause it's a lot of announcement about announcements and about announcements. And in parallel to that, like the danger that we all run into in our enthusiasm and then the, you know, very justified criticism we often hear.

Steven Schauer 
Right, right.

Fritz 
especially like friendly fire from people that consult us is that we want to make sure stuff doesn't come across as vaporware and we sound like people who are just idealists. And I think we did touch a couple of those threads on, especially like in the second episode about some of these chapters for the future and how important and useful it is to embrace more of like business thinking where you have to put out a convincing product.

And so, what we didn't talk about a lot is the actual details. So we had this surprisingly fun little chapter about my own history that I didn't expect and I really appreciate. It's down to, hey kids, this is how your father grew up. And we talked about sort of philosophical big picture stuff and like this idea of abundance. did you, you we've read the book by now, I presume, right?

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Fritz 
Well, those concepts were interesting. We like sort of affirmative of things we spoke. ⁓ we talked about this ground in the middle and how do we get from a polarized world to the working ground? ⁓ I think we talked a little bit about sort of our first fortunate position as Oceans 2050 and this idea that we've been advocating for the restoration of abundance for now, because we can move into this world and saying, Hey, you know, which culture, which economy, right? No matter how you see the world of that blue thing, you get it both when the oceans are abundant. So

We can kind of organically keep building on that part. but in order to fulfill, you know, the questions of people who are going to buy your stuff, you, need to actually deliver not just concepts and ideas, but you need to show them how the machine's going to work. And down to the detail, right? Like I gave you this funny analogy is for my, for my history as an architect. If you're talking to a client, you'll start at the lofty goals and where does your family want to be? And how does this supposed to feel? And,

You know, like the, the, the sort of the, the more emotional value based things, but you do drill down often in the first conversation because people have prepared onto how the toilet paper is going to be connected. So that, ⁓ you know, you don't have nasty surprises. So it's important, you know, it's important when we, we have to back up this idea of there's hope and the act of hope. And there's like actual stuff coming with technology that can change the frameworks of how we think and what we mean we can expect to be possible.

Steven Schauer 
Right, right.

Fritz 
it's important to follow up some of those, those claims with, you know, concrete examples of, you know, going down on questions. So what are you talking about? What kind of technology deliver and, you know, like, what does this actually look like? ⁓ to make sure that there's confidence in these claims down to a, a granular and executable and kind of sort of a detailed precision level. that's a good thing to add.

Steven Schauer 
Absolutely. Well, let's

get into the pipes then of the blueprints. And since we did talk about some of the flowery emotional stuff, which to me is also incredibly important, you got to have that emotional connection ⁓ to want to take action and do something. Otherwise you're not going to, know, facts and figures aren't going to move people into action. It's that emotional tie. we got that emotional tie connected. We want to restore our oceans.

Fritz 
Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
⁓ to abundance that we got that taken care of in episodes one and two. So let's get into the blueprint, the pipes of the blueprint and there's funding aspects

and the economics we could tie in. There's, there's AI and quantum issues that, that we touched on in the last episode. There's the restoration of coral reefs that I really want to dig into. You talked, ⁓ offline, we talked a little bit about some 3d printing and things that are going on that you're working on.

Fritz 
Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
So where do you want to start? Cause I want to touch on all of these things. Do you want to, do you want to start with the funding and economics? Um, do you want to start with AI and you know, quantum computing, 3d printing? Where, where, where, where do you want to go? Yeah. So we're going to get it all of it, but where do you want to start?

Fritz 
Okay, yeah, let's work. ⁓

So I think we can start.

Yeah, sure. So actually, you now that you say that something interesting comes to mind, I was just listening to Simon Sinek on a podcast again, I used to appreciate his like foundational works like the start with why, right? But there are this sequence, why is why, how, what, right? You start with a why and talk about how, but you need to deliver the what in order for someone to really believe it. so let's make it, let's put it this way, right? If I'm, if I want to sell you on this idea that we can rebuild our oceans and

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, he's a big fan of his, yeah. Yep.

Absolutely.

Fritz 
get that sale done, right? So that's a nice big vision to sell. And we've talked a little bit about the how from a philosophical part, right? And so today we can focus a little bit on the what. That's a short answer to what I just, you'd spend five minutes on. I think we can start with financing, but not just as a mechanism, but going back to this idea, it relates to my story ⁓ of, like, I think we touched on this as well, this concept that we had this maturity from

Steven Schauer 
On the what? Yeah, yeah.

Fritz 
carbon to blue carbon to then blue natural capital. And I did mention that ⁓ as a headline, iconic title of either a talk, I think it was a talk that Carlos and Ralph Shamie have called ⁓ Blue Natural Capital is the New Real Estate, which is a theoretical approach to something. when you translate it, it...

it kind of gets us to those mechanics where if you look at real estate development, right, it's really clear the stuff works because the numbers work. We often talk about napkin economics. If you know what a unit is going to cost you and what it's going to give you as a sale or a lease, real estate kicks in. People know what to do. And that's an aspect we want to take into environmental restoration. We want to look at it through that lens where it's not a case that has to be

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
Fundraised and patched together but something that can drive itself in and out of itself, right? So I think we did touch on this aspect as well it takes sort of ⁓ a Data approach because for that you need to start numerifying and identifying Like how ecosystems create returns and how you can connect them to specific values so you can get someone Specific to pay up but the general idea of it is hey we think this from the other side It looks different right? We're still going to act out of idealism

And kickstarting these efforts out of a nonprofit that wants to restore abundance is also kind of an organic approach to it. But we'll have more faith in the power if we run it on an indirectly functioning business system. And that means, we talked about this earlier, just heading up to the call a little bit. I'll repeat it. So if we look at nature financing, and you look at the two principal drivers,

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
like one we're really familiar with, which is this carbon idea. But the carbon idea is a global thing, right? It means you do local something somewhere, right? And aside from your environmental footprint that you have on your region, we're going to look at the emissions you do that affect the world globally. And just a second.

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
I'm sorry.

Steven Schauer 
No worries.

We'll stitch that little piece together. yeah, yeah. Yeah. You were saying you were looking at things ⁓ locally, you your, your, your carbon footprint, you know, the emissions you're putting out, the carbon capture you may be doing with your project. Those, those are all aspects of the carbon market.

Fritz 
Perfect. I can start. ⁓

Yeah.

Thank

Yeah. So the way you get paid for environmental work, right, is basically any of those two aspects. So you can either get paid by saying, Hey, we're providing a local ecosystem service that has value. I'll get into some of those examples and specifics. And you can say, Hey, you know, we have this global currency called ⁓ a ton of carbon, where actually what it is, is a ton of carbon dioxide sequestration, right? It just means like the stuff will out and burn. We're going to now get it back into the ground or somewhere permanent.

Steven Schauer 
and capture it one way or another,

Fritz 
going to fix our atmosphere and our oceans from a chemical level, right? But there's no local benefit attached to this payment plan. And so far in the last 20 years, we've built up this whole idea that you can get paid for environmental restoration work through this global system, which are the carbon market. And ⁓ we've not looked with a lot of or an equivalent focus on the other part, which is how can we create the local financing mechanisms?

creating the returns, quantifying ecosystem services, just sort of allocating them specifically and finding stakeholders that benefit from them specifically that can be called to the table to say, hey, you we want to collect money to create these assets here that will then provide economically interesting services for you. And we'll look at them. can be negative, they can be positive. I think we mentioned them in, generally, we can go back to those again in a second. So the carbon ton is sort

you know, maybe a good analogy is sort of the barrel of oil, right? Where certain industry, down to state budgets, you know, Russia, the Saudis, their whole state budget is calculated on the presumption of a price of an oil barrel. I think it's usually around a hundred dollars. That's why when you had those early stage tariff hiccups and the prognosis for the oil barrel price went from 100 to 66. ⁓ That's a big swing for a state budget.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, yeah.

Fritz 
And

now we're, you know, we have to be a little bit cautious about what will happen to that. We've built in a higher industry of carbon trading, even impact investing, you know, many of the, so the nation and sort of practicing investment funds are built on this idea that the principal return will be created by either tons that companies offtake or by tons that you sell, that tons of carbon that you sell on the market.

And with the changes that we've seen in the last couple of months, especially now since the new administration is in place, that might get shaky, right? This idea of whatever it is, most of them like, yeah, they're only going to go up, the ton of carbon is going to go up, especially for nature-based solutions. So $50, whatever. That might look very different. It means that this whole business that we built might find a ⁓ lot of air missing in its balloon to be figured.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

And I think that

business, and from my perspective, you may have a different thought on it. think the carbon capture business already was a little shaky to begin with in a sense that there's questions about verification. If someone's saying they're capturing X amount of carbon from the air or protecting ⁓ Y amount of Amazon forest from deforestation, which is essentially keeping that carbon.

Fritz 
you

Steven Schauer 
already stored in the trees and in the ground. The verification process of those who are selling those credits is sometimes called into question as well. ⁓ So I think the market itself, while very valuable, ⁓ is going to be rocked as you're talking about with the new administration, but it was already on a little bit of shaky ground from my perspective, even though it's been around for a few decades because of that verification aspect, because there's so many stories out there of

Fritz 
you

Thanks.

Yeah,

Steven Schauer 
Folks double selling credits or they protected a forest that no longer exists, things of that nature. So the carbon market's important, but I think there's some challenges inherent in it as well.

Fritz 
absolutely. I mean, those have been very literal. I remember what it was two years ago.

the entire German carbon market. That's called a business field. And it's one of those big, you know, a lot of impact investors, impact investing setups were pushing for this kind of stuff. Got a huge shakeup because of two news articles that basically said this whole idea about what Vera's doing here. So the principle of these certifiers, it's a bunch of, it's a bunch of untrustworthy baloney. And a lot of this is just, you know, papers. Yeah, cause I mean, there are some things in there that are really,

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

It's not challenges. Yeah.

Fritz 
Tricky, right? And so we'll go back to what you said as well is that we can appreciate it for what it is. You know, it's been 20 years in the making. Ralph always says, you know, that's sort of the, that's just the characteristics of a nascent market. Like it has to stabilize, but there are inherent problems with the product, right? And I think the extreme cases are, you you can write a letter saying that ⁓ I would like a carbon credit because of what I'm going to do. This forest that I have here is not going to get cut down. Right.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz 
Feels weird, right? mean, even if there might be a grain to it. Anyway, it's a complicated and very sort of hard to see market, which is why it has all these troubles. It's been really difficult for companies to actually go in that. So interestingly, but we can tie a different piece to it, right? So what we did worked on a lot for a long time, and especially once blue carbon became kind of a luxury item in the carbon sphere, was sort of the way it was done is that, you we started with carbon and then

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, let's do that.

Fritz 
we would start talking about co-benefits, right? So the idea was that you would sell a ton of carbon, but you could get more for it on the market if it did other things, like, you know, go through whatever your kind of value is you'd like represented. Biodiversity was sort of the first, second currency that now, you know, did look like it was going to mature really well into its own kind of segment. And it's, I always preferred that one.

because it's got more of a hey, here's the kind of world we would like to have. While carbon offset is just sort of this, there's nothing to sell except non-negativity. It's not very exciting. Biodiversity, you can at least imagine birds, right? There's some sort of, hi, you this is gonna give a world that my grandchildren will enjoy more. But still it's an abstract. I mean, we touched on this literacy issue, right? That for me, who's been in this now for 10 years,

When I say a certain word, actually see a lot of stuff on my inner eye, like biodiversity for me means wetlands. For most people, it does something else. And for many people, it's still a very abstract term that I think is difficult to get excitement for. And it's got another interesting issue right now, which just has the word diversity in it, which is at the moment, one of the leading keywords you want to be selling at the moment.

Steven Schauer 
Yep. Yep.

True. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, not in the US at least. Yeah.

Fritz 
Yeah, and the world still follows a lot of the US leads, right? So ⁓ that's just to look at. And we don't need to judge it here. I do think I've always had, I've never found it entirely convincing. But to keep spinning this thread, we attach these local outcomes, biodiversity again, sounds like something global, but what it actually is is fish in a special, it birds in a concrete place, right? It is a local, it's actually a local outcome.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it is what it is right now.

Right. Very local.

Yeah.

Fritz 
So we

would use these local outcomes and attach them to the ton of carbon as co-benefits to get more on the carbon market. And so that's sort of, we were sticking the local part to the global currency that we were trying to sell. And what we're seeing now is almost like, I would almost call it a role reversal here where ⁓ there's this MAGA acronym for Make America Green Again, right? That agenda is also in the new administration.

It comes with that shift where like, we want to see the local benefits, right? And then we can see if we can use like the ton of carbon to get some extra cash in for these projects on a global market, but it's going to be looked at from a local lens first. And, be it what it may, ⁓ what it does is it puts the ball closer to like closer to real estate development and closer in my wheelhouse as an architect where ha.

Right? Like, we can start showing local benefits, and that means we can put them into place, and if the leverage is right, we can use that to create energy for projects. Right? And so, you're frozen for a Okay, good. So, let's get this into some concrete examples, the two easiest ones, I'm not sure how much we touched on this on the last one, so sorry if there's redundancy here. The two easiest ones are coastal protection.

Steven Schauer 
Absolutely.

Please.

Fritz 
And abundant life, right? And you can see how like revenue streams are attached to that. So, ⁓ I just mentioned leverage. let's take Florida, right? Where there's a ton of leverage in both ways. Right? So you've got, you know, got Palm beach, you've got Miami day, like those counties where you probably have the most dense value of real estate on the coast and any place in the world. And, ⁓ so, you know, if, if you don't have a reef that can break and attend you, your wave energy and

maybe seagrasses and mangroves that will stop the floods from entering, you'll have a lot of damage on land when storm patterns change and the more you have of them, the more damage there's gonna be. And so that's not like, you know.

Steven Schauer 
which they're already

having by the way. mean, this is not a future, you know, vision of climate change 20, 30, 40 years from now. I mean, was in Fort Lauderdale last year for work and looking at some of their stormwater management and, you know, sea walls issues that they're already dealing with because they have what they call sunny day flooding. The tides are already...

⁓ coming over the existing seawalls and flooding out neighborhoods on a beautiful day. ⁓ So this isn't an abstract climate change is going to hurt Fort Lauderdale and 2100. It's damaging them now. I didn't want to stop your thread of thought there, but I just want to let the audience know this. Again, this isn't about future problems. This is about how do we solve existing problems and keep future problems from being worse.

Fritz 
Yeah, absolutely.

Hm.

Yeah, and this one is really easy to communicate, right? Because you can make this about abstract sort of economic values. What it is that everybody understands is this is an insurance issue of the greatest category, right? So very simple analogy coming off of more recent news. The fires of California are the floods of Florida.

Steven Schauer 
Please. ⁓

Fritz 
Right? So the other thing you want to know is that ⁓ whether or not you want scientific data out, whether or not you want to trust scientists in the climate sphere and their prognoses, which, you know, I'm going to stay neutral here, but I can understand the case of some people who don't trust the neutrality of the data because of the inherent system that sort of doomsday scenarios get you more money. Right? I'm not one of the people who believes that. have a lot of faith in a lot of our scientific fellows and their integrity.

And there's some great work done on these flood modeling things that sort of using, you know, cheese on quantum maybe, but like some of the modeling scenarios that are, you know, Mike back in the unit at university of San Diego, there's a lot of like good work being done on this stuff. ⁓ but what, you know, the other thing that's just really interesting is if you, the best data is in Las Vegas and with the insurances, right? That's it, right. Cause that's how they make their money. And there's a lot of leverage on that. And so

whether you call it climate change or not, it's like, it's just talk to the insurance guy. And they're telling you right now, these patterns are telling us this, that means, you know, risk exposure X, and that means price. It means price increase, and it means even worse. I think we touched this too. Like if you look at insurance as a red band, right, if the two or three of the last storms that were harder and out of line and calendar, they shift the prediction model for this entire band. And it means everybody who is insured will have to pay more, but it also means other people will drop out.

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
So

it's not an issue just for the super rich in their super mansions and the high leverage condos. This is a risk for everyone who's trying to insure their home in one of these areas. And so, right, this is all lot of negativity. So this is damage prevention, but damage prevention is a massive financial lever. So if we can come in and say, hey, we can plan and build reefs like infrastructure assets that will reduce these flood patterns, that's a way to finance this. You can either go bond it with the community,

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
You can go in with the insurance and create a bond or you can literally start finding investment. say, okay, well, if we get the insurance to say, even if we build it, they're going to reduce the insurance premiums. Then you can finance the gap. Right. All of a sudden we're in, we're in real estate logic in a very kind of clean way. A lot of great people can do that really, really well. Right. You just need to start putting those cases. It means a lot of modeling. It needs a lot of data and it needs a couple of jumps of faith because of

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, I love that.

Fritz 
You know, the fact that some of this modeling is still built on predictions, don't, you we will have to affirm over the years, but we also know how much smarter AI and quantum capacities make us in terms of predicting things like the weather and storm damages, right? So insurances use these kinds of things. So if we work with them to use it, right, that's one way to create financial leverage to build these projects like real estate projects. So the more romantic piece is the positive one where we'll go back to Florida again. We touched it, right?

was it 14, 15 largest economy in the world? And as you know, our friends tell us without being able to verify this, the revenue for the state of Florida from recreational fishing is about 14 billion a year, right? Recreational fishing reminder again, that's not people who go out to sell fish on the market. And it's not people who have to catch dinner. That's people who like to be out on a boat and drink beer and smoke cigars and catch fish, right? Like they've done with their fathers, their fathers did that with their grandfathers, right? And so

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
That's an economic and cultural identity. so, ⁓ know, debated or not, science or not, people down there in the Keys and before they know that their fish are going down, right? And we also like, we know that when you build habitat, you get the fish back. want a lot of systemic other issues to address. I'm not gonna admit these, know, climate change, warming waters, chemistry issues, like all of this stuff needs to be incorporated there. But the general idea is going back to building, you know,

as our client, Derek Thompson's, like, let's build more of what we want and then we'll have abundance for both sides. And not do it about the housing sector, but let's take the parallel. If you build fish homes and crab homes and urchin homes and protections, right, you're gonna get more of it. And interestingly enough, I think we did touch this on the coral reef was sort of one example where you can see them together. Interestingly, those two things, the negative and the positive are produced by the same ecosystem if it's done right, right?

Steven Schauer 
Right, right, right.

Fritz 
Like now we're looking at financing, you know, restoration through damage avoidance or through fishery abundance. We're interestingly not putting all those threads together because then all the other stuff comes on top, you know, water quality issues, cultural things, know, diving, tourism, whatever it is, you know, they kind of layer on. So the more we get better at ⁓ being able to track the complexity of these stack values, the more we'll be able to create funding to actually build them. And so good news is there's already funding.

Steven Schauer 
Yep.

Fritz 
there on massive scales. We're talking infrastructure scales here from the smart people down there in the Keys, for example, because they know if their fish are gone, you know, they lose their economies and they lose their culture. Right. And so, you know, us being able to connect those dots is going to to to allow us to find more. And maybe this is one of those things where we can start talking a little bit about technology. Right. Because just like in real estate, what this requires ⁓ is almost like how do you sell a real estate project? Right.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
needs to be planned really, really well with all the numbers that you need, right? Like good predictions on how much square footage is going to be produced. What's it going to cost? What's the value of that square footage? Like what's it if you sell it? What's it if you buy it, if you lease it, if you rent it out, okay, then if you rent it out, what's the facility going to cost you over the next 20 years? Like how do these numbers work and how reliable is the prediction and the technology underlying these predictions?

Right now real estate, we know that because we've been building for hundreds of thousands of whatever years. And from the birds to us, like we're very, we're very, we're very comfortable with it. and so, you know, back to my seat as an architect, like I'm used to that. That's how I used to sell my work. And so what we're doing now is bringing more of that into, into this world, right? Which has so far been scientifically dominated. Many projects are run by nonprofits.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
Non-profits are usually populated by former marine scientists, administrators, all sorts of beautiful, great jobs, but what they're almost never populated by is architects and real estate developers.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah,

economists. Right.

Fritz 
Economists, I mean,

some of these guys are very economically smart, but that kind of thinking is not prevalent. going back to technology, what we're doing now is building all those tool sets out that we would use in a development project on land. When you want to plan an intervention like this, you build a digital twin for it before, where you can see every piece of geometry. That's the thing that will drive the building process.

Steven Schauer 
Right, but yeah, right.

Fritz 
You go somewhere, you can go scan the oceans now. So you have a proper 3D footprint of what's going on there. You can take an acoustic footprint to see how much life is there. And you can light our scan, you whatever you want. can take DNA analysis. So you can get a baseline that will allow you to say, hey, this is the before. And after we came, we had all this. You had fishery increases. Other things is great example, great story by the way. And so we're still thinking a lot of these things on a theoretical level. We've got to do this, like trying to figure out how to map these kinds of different patterns together.

so we can show people that the value streams are connected. And then I think I mentioned in episode two, like our great guy we work with and sort of fishing Republican for Florida. And he's like, yeah, well, why don't we just put something on the buoy that counts how many boats come by? And you're like, ⁓ yeah, thank you. That's it. Yeah, it's like, but if you count the boats, all of a sudden it's like, yeah, that's one of the base metrics of tourism. Thank you, we didn't think of that.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, it's like a trail counter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz 
But that's

the great part of living, working with these people who actually know what that sort of looks like in real life and what are the relevant numbers. ⁓ And so the good news about that is that, about this whole thing, let's say, is ⁓ the good news and the bad news. The bad news is that for environmental restoration, we're using tools that are just hopelessly outdated if we compare them to what we do in the professional world. ⁓

So the good news, that's the bad news. The good news about that is that means it gives us a huge innovation gap that we can exploit now. We'll be able to get a lot better, a lot faster. we're convinced that A, this is going to give us a really fun road when we introduce these kind of tools to this work, like proper visualization, exciting stuff, videos of how life comes back, a real virtual twin of what you're going to build, infrastructure type, of looking at Reefscapes almost like a city core.

like an urban development thing where everything's planned out, right? Down to from crab homes to fish homes. And we'll get to production technology in a second, but other building analogies, like you've got a virtual thing that is a precursor to the real thing. In the environmental space, we can use that to fundraise and crowdsource and do all sorts of fun things. So then your model drives your building and then it becomes your digital twin, virtual twin that you use for facility management. So all of these things are kind of...

They're just in line, ⁓ haven't connected those dots. So that'll be fun. And we're really confident that once we introduce this kind of stuff, there are going to be a lot of smart people who see the value in this and are going to jump on that train. So I think that the speed of change you'll see in the industry will be quick. ⁓ And specifically with what you said, ⁓ when you jumped in earlier, this is an economic reality. And so the great

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
News is we don't have to have ideological discussions with the people on the ground who know what's happening. They know the storm damages are getting bigger. They know the fish are getting less. They know their corals are dying. Right. And they know what that stuff means to them. Um, so we'll be able to work with those guys better. And the other thing, and we talked about this ad nauseam last time, this sort of transition we need to do on our side to detrust a little bit that the processes are going to fix things and put in focus on outcomes again.

It's going to be so much easier to work with these guys to actually manage in the future because they're going to know very well, like what sort of the interest of the reef demands from all stakeholders down the road, because now they know like what it's look, what it looks like to kind of face the barrel of, when we lose this stuff, we're going to lose.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. The collapse is coming. Right. Well, let me, let me kind of just make sure and recapture what I, what I think you've just shared. Cause you share a lot of information

there that I'm excited about. don't know if I'm one of those smart people that are getting amped up about what you just shared, but I'm excited about it. Nevertheless, but before we get into kind of the, the, the construction part of it, the details of how do we actually do rebuild some of these reefs? ⁓ some of the things that I'm excited about hearing, certainly this incorporating economics into habitat value. think that is⁓ almost like the search for the Holy Grail. ⁓ It is such a thing that needs to happen and I'm excited to hear about the progress that you're making and the circles that you're in, the progress that's being made with the smart scientists and computer scientists that you're.

Fritz 
It is.

Steven Schauer 
⁓ collaborating with and aware of. Just going back to my experience in riverine restoration work, ⁓ for example, the US Army

Corps of Engineers is involved in a lot of these projects, at least historically, because of waters of the US here, whether it's a river system or a coastal system, you're going to likely have to engage the Army Corps of Engineers. That might be shifting under the world we're

Fritz 
you ⁓

Steven Schauer 
transitioning into now, but historically the Corps of Engineers has a big hand, a regulatory hand in some of these projects. they're, a challenge we've always had with them in restoration projects that I've worked on is how they do their valuation. If they're gonna see a federal interest in a project and therefore be willing to try to seek federal funding to help a project, they're...

Fritz 
you

Steven Schauer 
The way they monetize it is around ⁓ flood risk. Basically, if we build this project, how much value of land, property, homes, businesses are we protecting versus if we don't build this project? It's a pretty simple monetary then system. Does the cost benefit of the protection outweigh the cost benefit of doing nothing and allowing this area just to get flooded?

Fritz 
Yeah.

Yep.

Steven Schauer 
and, know, certainly in higher value

areas, that cost benefit makes a whole lot more sense as opposed to in, ⁓ lower socioeconomic neighborhoods. It's hard to make those numbers work out sometimes. So there's definitely some inherent problems with the funding system when you're just looking at a dollar value of a house versus the ecosystem that might also benefit. ⁓

Fritz 
Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
You know, we struggled for years trying to find ways to value

the trees that are coming back and the birds that'll come back and the fish that'll come back. ⁓ and the Corps of Engineers, don't really care about that. ⁓ because we also couldn't put a, ⁓ mon, an actual monetary value to it. It's more of an intrinsic value that we've been trying to sell for decades of, but there's value in having this stuff. And I'm so excited about hearing the direction you're going in and,

Fritz 
Okay.

Steven Schauer 
And that hopefully the world is starting to go in where we can use, I imagine AI technology to help us with these complexities. Cause as you pointed out, like how do we, how do we put a monetary value to a coral reef or a wetland, ⁓ to the fish and the birds? It's a difficult proposition to answer, but the, the, you know, brilliant speed that AI can help us figure out some of these complex.

Fritz
Okay.

Yeah. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
⁓ issues is what I think I'm hearing you saying that's the direction we're moving in so that there can be a monetary value ⁓ put to these things that we've historically just said there's an intrinsic value to but now we can get into the economics of it which will then drive people either willing to invest in it or you know the insurance companies willing to support or bonding all the different you know financing tools that you talked about they're looking for return right so

If we can value these

things, ⁓ that gets us into markets that nature technically hasn't really been into before. So am I capturing that correctly? I hearing that story correctly?

Fritz 
Yeah. Well, ⁓

you set us up for at least another 30 minutes there. No, there's a lot of, because you touched on a lot of core aspects of it. So let me try to go at them the way I just heard them from you. So the first part is an inevitability, right?

For starters now, let's make this general, right? ⁓ What you said is an uncomfortable truth, right? Like where there's the most human leverage, there's the most leverage. That's the simple thing, right? That's where you get feedback. Now the Army Corps of Engineers, right? And DARPA as well, right? Responsible for a lot of these developments. ⁓ And I'm gonna precursor all of this that's coming now with something I think we touched on, but ⁓ as an architect, right?

Steven Schauer 
Mm-hmm. All right.

Fritz 
we have a very peculiar relationship with engineers. When you go through university and architecture, there's this little, ah, those guys over there, those guys with the colored pencils in the shirt pocket, right? And then the art engineers make fun of the architects, the guys who can't put a column over another, and it falls apart.

Steven Schauer 
you

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been the

policy guy in the middle trying to help the architects and engineers come together.

Fritz 
Right, so let's go back to my roots and, you know, sort of building philosophy, art, like all that kind of stuff. Maybe, you know, we have this great German word, I don't know if I mentioned it last time, Baukunst, which is building art, right, which means that the building and the art need to go hand in hand and enhance each other in order for something to be meaningful. Or, you know, we can have a whole session on this, the difference between...

Form follows function, function follows form, and what really matters to people. The truth is that what really matters to people, like the difference between a valuable ⁓ real estate development and a non-valuable is not how dry you sleep. So engineering alone does not make a difference for humans. It's the base, and really simple, when you mess up engineering, everything else is meaningless. But the meaning is actually built on top of engineering. To give you this funny little thing again.

Steven Schauer 
Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Fritz 
When you want to build a park as a community you call a landscape architect to govern that intervention. When you want to restore your shoreline, the only person you can call is a coastal engineer. Coastal architecture doesn't exist, right? So that's something that's coming. Now, the unfortunate part again is we're going to start all this stuff where there's high leverage. And this has sort of ⁓ a thing that many people don't like, which is, okay, we are...

the big industrialized companies are responsible for the whole climate change thing and now the other ones are going to spend the money to adapt. And so they are going to be okay and everybody else is going to be screwed around, right? And so that's a reality we can't fully walk away from yet. there...

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, those social justice issues, environmental

justice issues are real systemic issues that need to be addressed as well. But yeah, I think reality is you're right. Yeah. ⁓

Fritz 
No, but so we're going to start

in the places where an idealist would say, that's not fair. You want to start with poor people and build their respect. But we're going to start where we're going to have the financial leverage to build these things. Because there's a really important thing to map out here, which is the general thing that's what we call the cost of technology. Right now, this stuff's still expensive. But the more we build of it, the less it's going to cost.

Steven Schauer 
That's, yep.

Fritz 
The more we adapt technology, this other simple thing that's true is like when you're in the West, you're going to build things that have a high degree of automation that reduce manual labor, right? If you build them for, let's say Madagascar, they're going to be built differently because whether we like it or not, manual labor is something else in Bangladesh or in low labor, low wage countries than it is in Florida where a dive hour can cost you whatever, 280 bucks an hour, right?

The good thing is that scale will change the solutions, right? And invention and the first stuff's gonna come where it might feel counterintuitive for somebody who wants to go. Yeah, but it's also just, we're just embracing economic reality. And I don't see anything wrong. I literally have, you know, there's no shame here. I wish it were different, but that's the way the world is now. Going back to intrinsic value. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
has the resources to do it.

Right, right.

Fritz 
So that's this interesting thing when we say, you know, we have rich oceans, we get rich culture and rich economies. Like there's a part of us on the left that says, you know, this thing, life is beautiful in and of itself, these ecosystems, the fish deserve to have personality rights and we see the world in that kind of a sold way and everything. I'm one of those people, right? At the same time, they tend to be well off, highly educated, and you know, we tend to be rather privileged. It's easy to be an idealist if you don't have to worry about.

in space, space land realities. so looking at as the ocean, as a resource, you know, we're moving on, like making sure we see that as an equivalent value and we get ourselves out of the ivory tower. And at the same time, everybody kind of feels an intrinsic value for life, right? Like that's why we do get a lot of people to idea on, I agree on the place that, you know, the fishermen as well, right? They'll like an ocean better when it's full of fish than when it's dead, not just because it gives them a better catch, but because it feels better.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz 
and it may give you this assurance that you're gonna be able to pass something on to your kids. So we all feel intrinsic value, so it's not like it's meaningless, but, no, I'm gonna say and, not to be contrarian. In the way that our world runs on economic system, right, like when it comes to paying up, when it comes to getting past, if the only thing you're bringing, or the more you're bringing emotions and it's intrinsic stuff,

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, I like that.

Fritz 
The more, and I'm not this now, we have philanthropy, all sorts of markets to do that, but the more often you're run into the scenario that you're bringing a spoon to a gunfight, because you're bringing emotions against dollars, right? And you've gotta be really good and really lucky to make that work. Now, the good news is that, A, you know, what means something to people, even if it's emotional, we know that's valuable and we, you know, we're getting better at tracking it from health data to people care to, you know, we now live in a world where attention is one of the most valuable currencies.

Right? Interesting. Right? So what people care about does have a value that we're getting better and better at translating into our economic system. And we're also getting better at understanding how valuable ecosystems are. So if we just take the, you know, let's make these sort of into image analogies. On one side, we're talking about the most expensive condos in the world and they're threatened by flooding. And we're talking about a $14 billion economy that's built on being having a lot of fish in the

That's one easy to understand. The other one is like you move around. So you move around on the other side of Florida, you've got all these wonderful ecosystems that are just there and they're protected and they're super valuable. Like ecosystem restoration, know, Catskills in New York gives you clean water, right? These ecosystem services are not sort of, they're not just for the postcard, right? Where also, you the more we come under pressure, the more we understand that

Steven Schauer 
having a lot of freedom and privilege to go do that.

Fritz 
This nature thing is really valuable in many, many different ways, right? And the more we're able to handle complexity, the more we're able to track data, the more we're able to put it together, the better we get at translating this, we call, you would call intrinsic value into actual service value, right? Sounds unromantic, is highly practical, right? So, you know, and literally, I wasn't really aware of this discussion until some of the people we worked with, no, we were doing protection.

things to protect wetlands behind it because the community knows how important the wetland is to create clean water for them at no cost, right? Like building machines to take that service would be trillion-dollar investments. So that aspect exists as well. It's easier when it's in the poignant, let's say, extreme examples, it's easy to see how these things work.

Because the other one we just talked about it's really easy to say hey build a reef change the way of energy add some Seagrasses change the way of any add some mangroves all of a sudden whatever 98 % of your flood damage is gone very different insurance scenario We'll have to change the postcard of what it means to have like a beach view because all of a sudden you're Have mangroves there again, right? That's a cultural thing. We'll have to work on but without it We're not gonna be able to ensure your houses So that's probably what's gonna happen right good news is if you pair those three ecosystems you also get a ton of life

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
So all of a sudden, wow, fisheries are back. that quick example is something where we're going from intrinsic. I still see it, I love the visual of it. Here's a coral reef and being able to put the coral reef in, just like nature allows us to create a low energy zone behind it, because that's what happened over there. And that's where seagrass is located. If you then put some mangroves or a wetland in, you've got a two-way filter between the land and the sea, because from the land you have runoff that kills the coral reefs in the flood. It's the opposite, you've got damage.

Great, know, so wow, we can build stuff that provides these services. But right now, yep, sorry, go ahead. No, please, talked, go, go. No, no, right, you know, and maybe just to put this marker here.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. What you're just. Go ahead. No, no, no. Finish your thought.

Fritz 
That, like, we're moving into a time where this is now possible, right? Where we're gonna be able to design and build and model these kind of interventions on infrastructure scale. Right, that's, we're working on this now. This is not sort of pipings. We're building these things, you you touched on it. Maybe you go first before we go into quantum and how these things bite in there, and I'm happy to talk about 3D printing and those other things as well, and like, just a fun part of technology that's...

Yeah, we can go into some examples and then I think it won't be that hard to understand how these things are seeable.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, well, let me just kind of put a bow maybe on this conversation, then we can transition into again, some more of the what, you know, between the AI and the 3D printing. ⁓ But what I hear you describing, ⁓ at least how I'm interpreting it, is truly this, you know, a real definition of the triple bottom line about sustainability. It's people, planet, and profit. And it's, you know, these circles of influence, you know,

Fritz 
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schauer 
what's important for people, what's important for the planet, what's in the profit component, which I would venture to say some on the romantic left side of the spectrum sometimes forgets about that profit circle. ⁓ What you're really describing is what we're trying to accomplish in sustainability, is bringing those three circles closer together. So that Venn diagram of what are we

Fritz 
Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
actually trying to accomplish is where people, planet and profit all overlap. ⁓ And it's exciting to hear that those circles are starting to overlap more and we're having more opportunity. It's not ⁓ the planet versus the profit. Like we're starting to overlap these areas. And again, therefore you can talk to the fishermen that might be right leaning to talk about the profit of their, you know,

Fritz
Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
the ⁓

people that they take out fishing and that's their business and they want to make sure the fish are there for their profit. ⁓ Or the scuba diver that wants to go out because they just want to enjoy the intrinsic beauty of it. Or the developer or the city manager that wants to protect the coastline for their community. All of these things are starting to overlap in very real ways as opposed to just ⁓ on a Venn diagram on a piece of paper. that's what's...

Fritz 
Yep.

Steven Schauer 
exciting to me in this

conversation is that it's not just a vision of sustainability. It's, no, we're actually doing it. It's, and it's capable and we can do more of it.

Fritz 
Yes

Exactly like wave the insurance guy around again, right? Because that's the one thing everybody can relate to in our current news clamp, right? And again that guy and Las Vegas they have the best data They have more they have more they have better data than all of our scientists combined on that specific kind of element Like what does risk exposure mean? you know, what can be done with certain kind of interventions?

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Right. Right.

Yeah, so let's bring them to the discussion,

exactly.

Fritz 
So let me give you just a realistic timeline, right? If you can say, hey, you know, if we can be at a place where we can calculate these things properly, right? Where it's like, okay, what's the flood damage with a reef? What's the flood damage to the reef with seagrasses and mangroves? And what's the flood damage without it? Right? All of a sudden, these kinds of things become, very quickly become clear investment cases, right? The other aspect you want to get to, ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, yeah.

Fritz 
I don't want admit this at all. I think it's a really important point and we touched on it just a second ago. So in real estate, again, go back to napkin mathematics, right? What does it cost me to build a square foot? What's the square foot going to get me? Everything else is important, but it's kind of follows after that and it's mechanics, securing permissions, plots, like all sorts of everything. All the complications come after we figured all those things out, but that's what it starts with. So

Number one is figuring out how to quantify better, specify, and create the economic impact outcomes from a certain intervention. Flood modeling, fishery increase, hotel sales, boat trips, nights sold, people happy, jobless with better health, whatever it is that we can find, that we can relate into a value stream, this is all output related. The other thing that needs a boatload of work,

is how much does it cost to build, right? And... ⁓

Right, so we're not there yet by a long shot where you could look at these kinds of things from a professional lens and say, we're efficient, right? We're not. And so again, with no discredit, a lot of this has to do with the fact that much of this whole field of economy has been run by nonprofits, administrators, scientists, great people with great hearts, but they're not builders, developers.

Or they don't, you know, it's literally a world that doesn't run under the system we talked before, where the value proposition has to be right. The project pitch to the client has to sit and you have to deliver with loads of accountability and take on that kind of entrepreneurial risk as well. Right. So all of that said, right, we're, we're, not there and it's going to take a while, but we know, like, if we just extrapolate everything else in technology, if you look at how this stuff, what it costs now already seems to work.

when you look at the mechanics of financing, just because in Miami-Dade and those three adjacent countries, the numbers are astronomical. It's like 300 million a year in damages or something. And so if you take 300 million a year, even if you took it as a building budget, you can build a lot of reef and coastal resilience infrastructure with that. Now, where we think that there's a real interesting role for many of the funds we've been using so far,

Steven Schauer 
Right, right.

Fritz 
is to bridge that gap where in certain cases now the economics might not work yet because of the simple fact that on both scales we're not good enough yet at mapping the value streams and our technology is at the moment still in its infancy in terms of where it can be in efficiency compared to what you can do on land right now. At the same time, know, everybody's seen the videos of robots putting drywall together. Like we know where automation and robotics is going to take us and our ability to build is going to speed things up a lot.

And we'll have very, very similar things in our ability to plant seagrass beds. And, what we're working on a lot is like, you know, we're going into a new age of what core restoration means, right? So we know the live part is going to be very difficult, but I'm just going to say in a core reef building, I'm not going to call it core restoration, right? Like that's what we're working on our 3D printing, you know, being able to, to like plan reef scapes on infrastructure level, look at them like urban development projects, you know,

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, yeah.

Fritz 
Make sure they're designed properly for all the fish you want to be there. Build it, drop it in the water, put the fish in. That sounds a little weird because right now we're using metal grids. We're looking at sort of using old structures that we're populating with live coral and it's very difficult. Right. ⁓ What we work on a lot is building these things. It's really fun, right? Like 3D puzzle pieces that will weigh 200 tons and they'll come in containers and be assemblable, right? Those kinds of things that like that's a...

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

That's awesome.

That's exciting. Yeah.

Fritz 
That's a reality, right? We work on

this every day. That's coming in. This is coming in the next, you're probably going to see the first live project in the next couple of months of that kind of stuff. And that at least changes one timeline, which is right now we're putting, you know, coral holding elements on old dying reefs. And then we say within a couple of years, it'll be back. Right. And sort of that timeline is right now in years and decades. And again, somebody coming from architecture, the big city in a private sector, that doesn't sound good enough.

So we'll be able to change that. We can go from a sandy bottom to here's a whole reef city that we designed. And there's another interesting aspect of it. ⁓ If we take sort of this climate change, temperature warming scenario seriously, we know that what was in one place now over thousands of years is gonna have to move. So we were looking literally at the, we could go from the technology we have now, not in efficiency, not quickly.

Steven Schauer 
It's going to migrate. It's going to be somewhere else, right?

Fritz 
But from the stuff we have on the table now, this could be next year we can do this, where we can go and see which reef patches here, which figurations work really well for you. We can lighter scan them, run them through programming, cut them into pieces, and build them literally one to one somewhere else within a couple of months. And that scales again. This is going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars, but it's not crazy trillions stuff. And it doesn't mean it's full of life yet. We're still going to have to figure out how to grow corals that will survive.

but we can optimize it for attaching them. We can build cavities in there for certain kind of life forms. We can drop the fish in the moment you drop the reef in, right? So those things are possible now, right? ⁓ And that's sort of the tech part, I think the real building, the engineering. I work on this every day, right? I'm so excited. ⁓ And we work on like, what does it look like to have a nail gun to shoot little ⁓ plastic seedlets ⁓ into the sea floor ⁓ to get seagrass restoration going?

you know, molded in plastic made out of seaweed. this stuff again, it's gonna take time to get it done right. It's gonna certainly take time to make it economically feasible, but those things are not far away. maybe that's the one really big relation. Like we all see how fast our capacities are changing, right? We all see how much chat GPT can do on your regular lives once you start using it properly, right? We see, you know, there's concerts where

like Michael Jackson's hologram is dancing on stage. the general power of image creation, design creation, handling of complexity, and I'll just throw these in one talk, like a pot, AI and quantum. So quantum just basically really changes the ability to do complexity. You can now look at an infinite number of possibilities at the same time. Now that sounds really big and gooey, but for simple things like form finding of a reef, for example.

it's now feasible to go like, okay, we'll scan the whole reef segment and we'll go to the next one, say these are the outcomes we create, and then AI assisted design form finding can get you somewhere in minutes where like, wow, here's something that would have taken us ages to manually design. And the next part out of it, specifically in ecosystem services is relevant. ⁓ It's gonna take us a long time to be able to say what does a reef have to look like in order to create the most

fish production, that's going to take a bitch. But in terms of wave modeling, like that's nothing else but sort of fluid dynamics calculations on a really high complex level. And they're doing stuff that's like, I don't get it, but they're let, know, basically they're modeling grains of sand and particles of water. So same thing, you know, economic feasibility aside, because this stuff all costs a ton of money on compute as well. But we know how quickly that cost core goes down over time.

we're looking at a world that's not far away where it's completely feasible to say, here's this coast we need to protect against the flooding changes. Here's the prognosis what that flooding chain is gonna do over the next 20 years. And now here's the optimal intervention for the budget you have available to get you the most flood protection possible. And in that shape, probably the best kind of thing we can do to get you your fish back, right? And now that gets us a lot closer to real estate. Because if I can take that to a client and the client is a...

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
the county and whoever else, you know, we're looking at a financial discussion that is very different from what we're doing now. And it creates a much bigger framework of saying, here's what we deliver, deliver it how, and it's going to give us enough fidelity to say, we'll absorb some of the risk, we'll deliver this with the price we tell you it's going to cost now. Right. And that all of these processes are just examples of how we professionalize this kind of approach to get closer to how the traditional world of real estate in this kind of stuff works.

And now we can layer on all the good stuff, right? As we get there, we're have to bridge a lot of gaps. The first projects are gonna be hard to make economically feasible, right? Which is, that's a great place for philanthropy, for example, to kick in and come and say, hey, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna co-anchor some mixed funding for the beginning, right? Because you don't want venture capital too much in this kind of stuff to not corrupt it. Like those are some great bridges to gap. ⁓

And we need to create sort financial bonding structures to say, if this is built, we'll mitigate some of the risks. We'll figure out how to do maintenance contracts. And we'll say, yeah, if this is built, we will lower the insurance rates, which means you can finance the process there. Yeah, so there's a lot of the tools we're using now that we can use to bridge the gap to when we're more efficient and financially viable on our own feet. But again,

Steven Schauer 
Right, that's you get into a financing tool, bonding, right?

Fritz 
to repeat myself here with full confidence on the stuff we're working on, that world is not far away. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
That's so exciting.

you just described, you know, in a way it's the world that I live in right now with riverine, you know, flood mitigation, restoration projects, how we fund those is really more on the hard dollar side of showing what kind of benefit you're gonna get from protecting a community from flood mitigation, right? So protecting our coastlines from, you know, the...

Fritz 
Yep.

Steven Schauer 
rising seas that are predicted to come and the bigger storms that are going to be more damaging using that same model. And then the same thing that we try to do here in the Pacific Northwest, right? We're building a flood mitigation project. We're going to try to restore some of the salmon habitat. So, and

Fritz 
Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
then we can then go to the voters and ⁓ community taxpayers and say, is the benefit you're going to get for funding this and paying this. And to be able to do that at scale.

⁓ for our coastlines around the world is so exciting, know, because it's the mechanisms are there now that you're putting all the financial pieces together and showing these benefits and then again For the folks who are who just want there to be fish and coral reefs and mango trees mangrove trees Great, they get what they want for the insurance agents and for the you developers and the folks that want to that are looking at it more economically they get what they want and

Fritz 
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schauer 
you know, bringing people together to support these projects as opposed to the way we've kind of done it where one side is right and the other side is wrong and we have to fight over it. Like, no, we're, we're all trying to get to the same place. I love that about your message that you're really trying to, not demonize one side or the other. Like everybody's, everybody wants the same thing, just maybe for a slightly different reason. So

Fritz 
Yep.

Steven Schauer 
let's all work together and get there.

And I'm excited about the fact that you're getting it done. Yeah.

Fritz 
Now let me,

let's, I have a whole, I have a whole other chapter now for you. And I'll go back to the Army, the core of engineering, right? So I'm really glad we came into this from the economical side, right? Which is based on function and engineering and calculation, right? And let's say, you know, back to building art.

Right? So the art is built on the function. If you can't get the engineering right, if you can't get the numbers right, the project's a failure no matter what your artistic. We have some acceptances, know, not always, unfortunately that's not always true, but so that's the school I come from. think that's what the world runs on in the majority. The great thing is the art is valuable too. Right? And these places are not just about engineering. Right? And so there's other stuff that I talk about.

Steven Schauer 
Mm-hmm.

Generally, yep. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Fritz 
all the time here with our team and that we're building these tools from and that's one of those things I mentioned earlier is like in real estate, we know all this, we visualize the future, right? Before a building is sold, you sell the apartments on visuals, right? And those visuals are not about how dry you're gonna sleep. They're gonna be about how that thing, it's gonna feel to be there. That's what you sell real estate. And so the cool thing is about many of these coasts, ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, what's gonna, the space you're gonna be living in,

Fritz 
We talk about fishery, economics, talk about coastal protection. What they actually are are places people care about a lot, right? And so ⁓ what they care about a lot as well is how they're gonna feel. And in a similar way, it's how they're gonna look, right? And so we have this line we often talk about when you look at the engineering solutions, know, like the, I'm not gonna mention any of these products because I don't wanna get in trouble, but.

A lot of the famous projects are like, know, reef protection. I'm just going to call them whatever organisms that are designed by Apli. You could say, the Army Corps of Engineers, because they just care about the function,

I say this without being, I'm going to just be really frank here. I'm not talking about anything specific. Hopefully nobody feels mentioned here, but they'll look like shit. That's the same. They all look like shit. They shit. Right. And so, sorry for the Frank language here, but, ⁓ yeah. So in that, you know, as an architect, you can't sell something that looks like shit. You just can't, right. It's like, no, thanks. I'm moving on to the next one. And you shouldn't because it doesn't matter. So, you know, people like.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, they, they, they, yeah, yeah.

It's okay.

Fritz 
Places like beautiful special places deserve beautiful designs. Let's make it that frankly. And that's not just a romantic thing, that's a financial reality, right? Going back to this, the way you sell the most expensive apartment in the history of a city is not, it's by how that building looks and feels and how special it is. And you sell that on a piece of paper on a virtual model, right? And so we can do some of that. The first thing is we need to design these things so that they're beautiful, right?

Steven Schauer 
Absolutely, right.

Fritz 
And we can do that now because we can 3D print organic shapes. And I don't mean the layer cake stuff, I mean like the real things that look like the kind of, know, that are close to, that can get close to what you would expect. And we need to, you know, want to look at these projects, coastal projects from a, you know, like a landscape architect and not like a coastal engineer. It's not about sections that show you where things are. It's about what is this place going to look and feel like? You want to design it from a human perspective because...

You people care about the places because it gives them great experiences. So we have to design them so they deliver a great experience is after whatever our intervention is and hopefully a better experience than before. But that's also something people can care about. Right. So if we can create a beautiful virtual project and say, Hey community, this is what you can do. You can use that to do all sorts of fun things. Right. The way you build them. So the one interesting difference maybe is in architecture, we used to do this in a static way, where you build a mall. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Absolutely, yeah.

Fritz 
one like a photo, you know, ⁓ like a photo shoot. And in nature that doesn't really work because the simple before and after doesn't really give you the sensation that you know what you're looking at. Different in real estate because if you see a building, everybody kind of goes, that's fancy, right? I don't need to see it move. Even though the modern real estate people, they do that as well. They do shoot little videos where there's a virtual plant moving in the wind so you can feel more, right? ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

fully capture it. Right.

Fritz 
But in nature, we need to visualize that magical process of how life comes back. you kind of know, and you need to see a bird fly through the thing. A bird sitting on a tree is not the same as it'll be feeling that we get in nature. But once you do that, visualizing a future state like that, we can use that for a community. For example, fundraisers, right? If you can get people on board and actually sell the vision and make it beautiful, you don't only have to talk about benefits. You can actually say, we can do this if we can raise the funds for it.

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
you'll

give the community something to do that with. And, right, we're going to sort of a next generation of ⁓ technology toys that I think are really, really important. Let's not just call them tools, not toys. It almost sounds surrogatory. ⁓ We worked on those first, and I'm really happy we're in construction now, because that's the way it should be. We should be able to say, here's the project, and then here's the enhancement technology. But, you know,

Once you have something in a virtual space and you visualize it over time, we're literally talking about the Unreal Engine here. That's where the big difference between my old work is I used to design something mostly static, and now we're building it in a world like Unreal, where you can feel the weather and you can see something grow. You can see an intervention happen in a coral reef and you can see the corals grow, and the fish come back, and the stingray swim, and the seagrass is coming in, so you can kind of get that magic.

But once we have a virtual project, if it's in a real place, you can start breaking that down like a game into little hexagons and allow people to claim a part of it and contribute. you can say somebody can buy some extra fish that will get dropped in once the thing is placed. We can start creating virtual experiences that will allow you to create funding not only on a benefit argument, but on the experience, on the art, on the human piece. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Well, I'm envisioning

Fritz 
That's something super exciting for us. I that's

Steven Schauer 
that's also... Yeah.

Fritz 
why we like it. As an architect, that's what I want to see. I want to see the art. I want to see the magic for people. But back to intrinsic value, that's something that I have real faith in will be maybe not equally powerful in terms of fundraising when you're talking about Florida State, coastal protection, hundreds of millions. That's always going to be the first ticket.

But I think that has a real place to play, especially on smaller leverage communities where you can say, okay, well, we don't have enough institutional funding, but let's make a really beautiful project and try to get our community to rally around it, to fundraise it by giving them electronic tools to do that. We know that too. like, yeah, let's just imagine you have a game like a Kickstarter campaign that's based on a real world intervention, a reef and segments and fish where you can just sort of, hey, dedicate your birthday.

fundraisers for the next batch of fish or you know we need this and this much as a community you can see that coming together really

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Well, and I'm being a public policy guy, I love the idea of the private fundraising that you're talking about where, you know, an individual can, you know, go on their Facebook account and say, donate for my birthday to this cause or whatever the case may be. But what you're also describing, the virtual tool that can show, you know, the future product, ⁓ that can also be used for getting people to vote on a bond.

or to, you know, for elected officials to, you know, have the support that they need to, you know, raise their tax, property tax half a cent to, you know, pay off a bond or raise the capital to, you know, build something. So it's, I see that the policy tool.

Fritz 
⁓ I'm going to write that down. I'm going

write that down because that's a really interesting factor I haven't even looked at yet. And I'll give you two more aspects. We've talked about almost years of stuff we're going through here.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, I mean it's

Fritz 
When we're talking about fundraising, right? So I'll go back to my old life. So before I met my wife, I this great partner, Sebastian, who's now one of the most successful traditional architects, young architects in the world, probably, certainly, where he's kind of got like the, the moment I left, he went on the ideal trajectory for our old business partners. No, know, it's funny here. But, you know, was just.

Steven Schauer 
Ha

Fritz 
So his background was in theater. He's an architect, but he had this as a school, he won prizes for theater stuff. And so it was just such a great experience in terms of how you sell projects. So we work well together, but projects would always start with him finding some great reference image, some sort of reference image. And then I could create the most...

Steven Schauer 
Sure. Yeah.

Fritz 
Stringent and beautiful floor plans and designs the numbers could work perfectly It could be the perfect project and every one of its sort of ding ding ding kind of things didn't matter the only thing that matters is like the moment the visual goes up and this awesome theater picture of And that that's the cool thing when I learned it's not about what it's gonna look like. It's what it's gonna feel like that's what That's what gets you the sale, right? And then I you know

Steven Schauer 
gonna feel like it's the emotion right yeah absolutely

Fritz 
I would always just smile, because whatever I could, and then all the stuff afterwards justifies, oh, it's a great floor plan, it fits you right, and the numbers are all perfect. The thing that you see at the split seconds, the client is like, whoa, that's it, we're good. The rest is just going through motions. Turn that around. It's super hard to sell an environmental project off of engineering plans, calculations, because you won't catch any emotions.

Steven Schauer 
Right, right, right.

Right.

Yeah.

Fritz 
And so the moment that's why literally like we're visualizing videos of what does it feel like when this stuff comes back and the corals grows so you can get that magic across in terms of what is this gonna feel like? So that you can get people excited behind it. That's one aspect and I'll add the other one that's so important when you talk about not even just on an individual basis sort of there's two really great little word exercises and I don't know I mean everybody that knows me has been bored to smithereens by having heard this so many times.

But if you have kids, you know this, right? There's no bigger difference in language, thinking, human life than you can do with one simple letter, where if you go from a reef or like a child to my child. There's no bigger difference between a child and my child, right? And I think that works for these things just as well. There's a huge difference between a reef that our county is being paying, and my reef, our reef.

Steven Schauer 
my roof, yeah, or I have

some ownership in it.

Fritz 
that we participated,

we crowdfunded it. We got excited about why it was being built. We were there when the elements of our reef came in the containers and they got assembled on our dock and then they got poured together and the whole thing got lifted and we got to attach our corals and it would drop in the water and all of a sudden we dropped our fish right. That's our reef now. Because we didn't just come, it wasn't just there. We funded it, we built it, we felt the experience. Like that's a different relationship for a community with their asset going forward.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

Fritz 
not just talking about all the fun and the opportunities you'll have in terms of making it an engaging thing and being able to crowdfund and fundraise for it. My favorite analogy for all of this is you Americans are so good with this, barn raising. What happens when a community comes together? Look, I literally have barn raising images in these decks when we communicate this kind of stuff, what that technology wants to deliver. It's that, what's a reef raising if we give you the technology to get people excited about it? And so...

We work on that, you know, we work on it. built this stuff out of our own thinking that that's what's necessary. That was my biggest belief as an architect. We can't sell these projects without giving people access to the emotions because of what I mentioned earlier. It's the gap, right? When I say core reef restoration, I see this stuff on my inner eye, but you don't. And most others in the room don't. So I can't, we can't get this across. We literally can't sell it not in a functional way, but in a soulful way. can't get you there so you, you can want it.

Right? And so, like, we worked on those visualizations and they work the moments we've been in there. And now we literally work with organizations to do that so that they can get their projects across to the community. And there's a little side thing that is important about it. If you visualize it properly, right, it can't look like shit because then the community will you, like, hey, it'll look worse than before. What do you mean? We're going to spend 10 million and you're going to ruin my place, right?

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Fritz 
Because a lot of these engineering projects have that inherent problem because they're built with engineering stuff and they kind of get moved along and then it's done and everybody's like, okay, it might protect our shoreline, but my beach is dead, right? And so it has this funny little side benefit that you actually visualize it. You can't sell crap anymore. But yeah, I'm happy now because we got into a lot of the specifics of technology and why I think it's important and what it can deliver.

Steven Schauer 
you

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fritz 
And I think this is the answer to your question with the intrinsic value. We know a lot of these mechanisms. We know their work on land. We know their work in other industries, right? And the fact that people care matters immensely. ⁓ yeah, great. So I brought in Sebastian. Sebastian Treese, T-R-E-E-S-E.E., by the way, you want. His wife's teaching at Yale now, so this is legit sort of legit stuff. They sold the most, as I understand, the most important.

the most expensive apartment in the history of Berlin for like 26 million bucks, which can't impress anybody in New York, but for Berlin back then it was a big ticket. ⁓ And it's because of that, because those images are magic, right? And then he works with the developer where people know what's on the image is actually gonna end up on land. And boom, there you go, sold off a piece of paper, right? And it's because you get the magic across and you can believe in the fact that what's on the image is gonna be delivered, people will put their money down for that.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
And it's not because of the square footage and because the elevator works well. It's because of the magic. Amen.

Steven Schauer 
Right. Yeah, it's the emotional

connection to it.

Fritz 
That's a value. It's a value that is immensely powerful economy. If you can get it harnessed and communicated and get leverage on it, you can get cash for it and build.

Steven Schauer 
It absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, Fritz, we could keep talking to you all day because I just, so yeah. no, no. no, no, it's been great. You've given a lot of great information that I've asked for and I've appreciated. And I'm sure the audience does too. Is there, in just a couple of minutes, is there anything?

Fritz 
I'm tired. talked too much. so sorry. This is lesson. It's not a car. It's not a free flowing conversations monologue here.

Steven Schauer 
that's super important that we haven't touched on. I know, I think we talked offline about ⁓ your relaunching the website for Oceans 2050. Is there any information that's coming that you want people to know about that we haven't talked about or how they can support you with all of this?

Fritz
Well, yeah, yeah, okay.

Well, I mean, supporting, you know, well, again, I think we'll get to a point where the work will drive itself, which is the good part. But we do, of course, we have a foundation. And like I said, there's a lot of bridges to gap a lot of technology to build that can A get us ahead and B serve common good. So we're happy about any, any contribution on any kind and you know,

Steven Schauer 
Great. Yeah.

Fritz 
Partnerships are good. Like if your hotel, let's talk if you have beachfront property, let's talk and if there's something there Always interested in any of that Yeah, so the you know, we're literally now in the process of forming like oceans 2050 studio So as the place that does the complimentary work to the nonprofit? as a business, right so Yeah, that's me. You know, it's clear like, you know, let's let's call it we're not that's not gonna be the official thing but

Steven Schauer 
as business, right?

Fritz 
back to the reference of coastal engineering, like what does coastal architecture look like and how does it work with real estate development and those kinds of logics and just a tinker shop for all the different technology, right? Because a couple of things we didn't touch on, know, how AI can count fish and start tracking your reef health and your fishery abundance, like those kinds of things, you know, those are really gnarly, but they're not shocking. mean, I think people have seen this kind of stuff, right? Like you can run...

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
Lego bricks through a camera and then they'll tell you how many 20,000 different things you can build within the next four years. So we know AI is capable of these kind of tracking technologies and that's going to be important again for ⁓ something like fishery abundance to translate that into metrics. Like which fish are where, when and how, when you do what, right? Those are the keys for getting to ⁓ confidence in these predictions for what your return on investment is and then

Yeah, there's something concrete. You know, looks like our Blue Cities Alliance is launching next week. So we're going to do some interesting stuff in Athens. We'll see how that goes, fingers crossed. But there's an interesting, you know, I wanted to mention that I wrote it down earlier when you were talking about on those both sides, right? So just as a simple representation of many of the things we're talking about, like the first phase of this Blue Cities Alliance is going to be sort of the program for the city. The second phase is then the Blue Cities Alliance. So how do many, you know, many cities globally

you know, form a community that benefits everyone. when you start at the portfolio of a single city, like the way we're designing these first days now is to cover that spectrum, right? So you kind of start with the stuff that gets a city excited, which is events and movie showings at the beach and sports and culture and art and cooking, right? All these things that are culturally relevant that we feel like, you know, they go back to your intrinsic value package. They're kind of soft. But on the same day, we're going to sit down with the insurance people.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Fritz 
And sort of the threat connectors that are good at turning those kinds of things into, into dollars because, know, you know, while we do all the beautiful connecting heart stuff, we want to help cities understand the values and economic terms of their blue natural capital and how to develop the mechanisms to finance it. So, ⁓ that, that principle sort of can get translated into many different aspects of this kind of work. And I think it's, it's going to be where a lot of the fun stuff's going to happen.

Steven Schauer 
Right.

Yeah, both value, right?

Yeah.

Fritz 
in our sector. Yeah.

Steven Schauer 
I'm going to have to have you back on the show then in six months or so to talk about the

studio and how the Blue Cities Alliance, because it sounds like you got more to share. Maybe a few months we can get you back on to see how these things are progressing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Fritz 
Well, hopefully a few months. You never know, right? And it's not like the world's going in a linear fashion at the moment, so... I'm gonna take it day

by day.

Steven Schauer 
Well, let me kind of wrap this up here. And last time, you know, we ended the show talking about hope and we did that last time. So I'm going to ask you just one new question this time, not about hope, but something tangential, still important to me anyway. I think it's a human superpower that we have and it's gratitude. So it's a simple question. What are you grateful for these days?

Fritz 
Yeah.

Hmm

It's so funny you asked this so ⁓ I'm gonna make this a little long-winded because it's I mean, guess it's right so I You know I'm German right? So we're kind of dry and we get uncomfortable when we talk about what do you Feelings But no, said I've had so many so much great process on on On that front and literally the last week. I don't know why it sort of just popped up

But who knows, maybe it's because things are a little...

turbulent at the moment and some of these aspects are really frightening. And then, I don't know, whatever it is, sometimes when shit around you happens that's bad, you kind of realize how good you have it, right? So I've been talking about this all the time. The last weeks I've been telling my wife how grateful I am to have her. I've been telling my kids all the time how great it is to have them. And then, despite all their chitteries, how great, you know, how marvelous little people they are to have around. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
Yeah. Yeah.

you

Fritz 
I've been telling the people I work with, you know, Matt, my principal partner and all, couple of those billion guys that I get to work with every week and every day, ⁓ how grateful I am for that, because it's just like, it's, yeah, let's go back. I mean, this is a big thing. And then, you know, just copying a lot of things you hear. ⁓ But one of the best things you get to do is when you get to wake up and you want to get to work, right? And when,

when your decision in the morning is like how much time I'm gonna spend with my work and how much time I'm gonna spend with my people, not because the work has to get done because I just wanna do it. That's so good. And then the other thing that I never had before is I've got so many things on my calendar during the week. I'm like, great, call with these guys. ⁓ And this is strange in this, you know, again, this strange time where there's a lot to be concerned about.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

I just enjoy doing it, yeah.

Fritz 
We talked about history, Germans and like where we're going and man, is there a lot on like a global perspective that one can get concerned about at the moment and are lots of sort of uncertainties and threats out. And there's a lot of heartbreaking stuff going on around much more than they used to be. But at the same time, there's something I saw on LinkedIn yesterday about what your life looked like if you were born in Europe and like.

1998, what you went through by the time you were 60 or something, or even in the US, like the worst. So, you we have it, we have it rather well from that perspective. Um, so, you know, as long as you wake up healthy in the morning and you've got your loved ones around, I think you could, you know, you want to be good in general, but, um, the more you get to sort of sorting out, spending time privately or work with people you don't want to

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Yeah?

Fritz 
hang out with and the more you get to work with people and talk with people you just like being with, man can you be grateful for stuff. And like I'll finish with the fun one. Last year, sort of, you know, France hosted the Olympics, right? And so the 10 year, 12 year program, that's why they're so broke now and debt because they spent so much money for the Olympics. But one of the things they did is all the villages got to choose if they're a flower village or a sports village, especially around here.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah.

Fritz 
And we're sort of the smallest scale of the ones that got something from the pot. So we were the last ones and literally like our, our, our village decided to be a sports village. The other ones are, you know, flower was super cute. You drive through and then they, know, the French love the roundabouts and everything's full of flowers. It's gorgeous. But the sports villages get these, like we were a tiny place here. We're outside of a city, we're a tiny place and we have this completely disproportionate sports facility that just got finished like in.

I don't know when it was right before, like we were literally last ones, two weeks before the Olympus, they finally put the basketball court up. But it's gorgeous. I've got this half court, beautiful colors, beautiful backboard, perfect rim. They changed the nets whenever they break. It's next to a sheep pasture, right? So I literally get to get booed by the sheep when I go out there. But four minutes away from me, I've got what looks like sort of a, I generated what's the greatest peaceful basketball court you you can make.

And I get to go, know, when I get, you know, order and discipline, can go out there and put up my shots in the morning and at night. And this displays that it's just, I text all the people that I know that care about basketball. Like, look where I am again. So, you can find a lot of great stuff. Yeah, you can find a lot of great stuff. again, the more you can fix your inner attitude for appreciating the stuff you have, and the more you can filter out.

Steven Schauer 
definitely something to be grateful for.

Fritz 
those things where like don't spend time with people that suck your energy out and make you angry, or just, know, better if you don't get angry. But ⁓ the more you get to practice it without having to sit and write a journal about it, because I'm still uncomfortable doing that stuff.

Steven Schauer
Yeah, that's why great gratitude for me is a superpower. I mean, if you get grateful for the things you have, your whole outlook on life starts to get a little bit better, even during the hard times, which we're in and we're going to be in and come and go because hard times, that's what hard times do, they come and go. But if you can find that gratitude for life, you can walk through those hard times with a bit of grace.

Fritz 
Amen.

Steven Schauer 
Well, Fritz, thank you so much and I will follow up with you because I do want to have you back on the show at some point to hear about the studio once that gets up and running and ⁓ learn more about the Blue Cities Alliance when that gets up and going. I think you said it in Athens is the first city. Yeah.

Fritz 
Well, again, these days, I don't know, until things are done, I'm not gonna.

But we should be going next week. see if it happens.

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, we'll, we'll figure out some, when, yeah, when,

when the appropriate time is, I'd love to have you back on and talk about those things. Cause, ⁓ super fascinating the work that you're doing. And I think it's an incredibly important work that, that you are doing. So thank you very much for your daily efforts to make the world a better place. I appreciate it. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Fritz 
Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, no, I, know, I, again, I'm grateful for what I get to do. it's been

a funky ride with ups and downs, but right now it's, it's, it's this, I know this sounds weird, but, and in this time, but there's a, it's, it's really exciting at the moment. mean, literally talking to Matt about we both like, this is the most fun and rewarding thing I've ever done. Right. There are so many unexpected things coming together and maybe that is important in this time, right. ⁓

Steven Schauer 
There's a lot of opportunity. Yeah.

Fritz 
There's so much scary stuff that you really wanna find the things that might turn out really well in this sort of the things that coming with this crazy new breakneck speed, the changes that will be imminent. ⁓ I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to sit on something where what's coming is gonna unlock all sorts of crazy cool things and break down barriers. Yeah, so the more we can find those.

⁓ the less I know the better it will look I guess you know at the moment you just look I take everything day by day at the moment

Steven Schauer 
Yeah, that's best way to do it. Actually, I do the same.

Fritz 
So happy to

come back on. hope things manifest the way they look at the moment. And then I'm going to be happy to report. Thank you for your patience and taking in all these monologues here. And man, did we cover a lot of ground.

Steven Schauer 
We got a lot

covered today. I appreciate you coming back on the show and again, look forward to seeing you at some point and staying in touch with you in the meantime. So all the best to you and everything you're trying to get done. All right.

Fritz 
Definitely.

You too. Take care. Thanks.

Bye.

Steven
Steven 
What a great conversation. I really enjoy speaking with Fritz and I'm grateful he came back on the show today. In today's conversation, we went well beyond vision and real deep into action, exploring how reef restoration can be modeled like urban design, how AI and quantum computing are revolutionizing conservation, and how blue natural capital is redefining the economics of sustainability.

Fritz showed us that we don't have to choose between protecting the planet and strengthening local economies. We can do both. We can do it now. Now, before I get into my suggested calls to action, I want to share a little small world moment I had with Fritz before we hit record for today's episode. After our first conversation a couple of months ago, I realized I'd actually met his wife and Oceans 2050 co-founder, Alexandra Cousteau. I met her more than a decade ago.

It was at the 2012 River Rally Conference in Portland, Oregon, where I was presenting on lessons learned from an ecosystem restoration project I was working on. And Alexandra was there to be one of the evening keynote speakers at the conference. I even dug up this old photo of us chatting after her talk. So it's been a real kind of full circle moment for me to now connect with Fritz and share all of this story with you as well. So, and speaking of updates, ⁓ during our interview,

Fritz mentioned that Athens was on track to become the first city to sign the Blue Cities Manifesto. I'm thrilled to share that since we recorded that episode, that historic milestone has now happened. On July 9th, Athens officially joined the Global Blue Cities Alliance, becoming the first municipality to commit to restoring ocean health and integrating marine ecosystem protection into its urban planning.

It's an inspiring example of what leadership looks like in the face of climate and ecological challenges. I want to offer my congratulations to Fritz, Alexandra, the Oceans 2050 team, and to the city of Athens for their forward thinking efforts related to ocean restoration. Getting that first is always the most difficult. Now that Athens has signed on to the Blue Cities Alliance, I'm hopeful other cities will quickly follow. And another part of this episode that really stuck with me was our discussion about AI.

I've always been fascinated by technology, but hearing how AI is being used to model complex ecosystems, optimize reef design, and even track the return of life after restoration, well, all that's really mind blowing to me. I'm actively seeking future guests who can dive deeper into how AI is being used to advance sustainability. So stay tuned. I look forward bringing some of those guests on as quickly as I can.

And of course, with every new technology comes concerns. AI, for example, has the concern of its energy consumption. So we'll have to explore those things too. So stay tuned. I hope to bring that information to you in the near future. Now, if you're feeling inspired after today's conversation, I hope you'll take some action. Now, whether that means supporting ⁓ ocean restoration efforts, volunteering at a local habitat project, reducing your plastic use.

advocating for policy change or simply starting a conversation in your community, please know that every action matters and your voice matters. So please get out there and get active and help make the world a better place. And if you'd like to support this show, please visit the support page at stories sustain us.com. You can like share and subscribe to the podcast and our social media channels, leave a comment or review.

or if you're able and so inclined, you can make a financial contribution to help offset the costs of producing this weekly program. Every bit of support, financial or otherwise, is welcomed and deeply appreciated. You're helping me reach more people, share more stories, and inspire more action. So thank you for all the support. And finally, I'd love to invite you back for the next episode coming out on July 29th. I'll be speaking with a freelance writer who has more than 35 years of experience

using the power of storytelling to advance the work of nonprofits and shed light on urgent social justice issues, including everything from sex trafficking and black market adoption to bullying, child abuse, and homelessness. It's really a heartfelt conversation about the power of a good story to move people into action. So please catch the next episode of Stories Sustain Us on July 29th at StoriesSustainUs.com, wherever you listen to podcasts and on YouTube.

And as always, thank you for being here today. Keep making the world a better place. Until next time, I'm Steven Schauer. Please take care of yourself and each other. Take care.