 If we don't have water, we can live without chocolate and diamonds and Bitcoin and gold. We can live without all of that, the caviar, we don't need any of those things. But the one thing we all need, everyone, everywhere, all the time, is access to water. A couple of days, we dyes individuals as families, as communities, as nation states. And we're seeing it already. We are seeing water wars. We're seeing major cities that can no longer provide fresh water to the population. We've seen, and this has all been exacerbated by climate. It's not going to get any better. And so weather pattern changes, drought, extreme weather, rain, flood, erosion. And then add on top of that a kind of history of corruption and political and financial gain that has been accumulated by a few. And you have essentially a mandatory set of circumstances through which you are going to have to respond and adapt immediately to survive. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with an old friend, Peter Neal. Today's session is just about work that I think is so important to the future of this planet and to the lives of our children. Peter, thank you for joining me. My great pleasure, Rob. Good to see you again in a while. Great to see you. How, I guess I'd like to start, is understanding how this World Ocean Observatory came to be. What did you see? What inspired you? And what have you built? Well, I've been in the maritime preservation business for some time. It was sort of a second career. My first career was as a novelist. I published a bunch of novels in the 70s. But one day I was in Cambridge. It was sleety and rainy, and I ducked into a used bookstore to get out of the weather. Went to the dollar bin, and I found a book called The Ocean Our Future, which was a report by an independent commission on the future of the oceans, the world oceans. It had been gathered together of experts from around the world by Mario Schwarz, who was the former president of Portugal. And I sat down and read through it, and it was if my whole life changed, because it's the most prescient report still. And its final recommendation was that there be an online place of exchange for information and educational services about the ocean. Key, key point, defined as an integrated global social system. So it transcends the conventional focus on species and habitat to connect the ocean to climate, freshwater, food, energy, health, trade, transportation, science, technology, policy, governance, international finance, and cultural traditions, community development. Almost, well, everything in our lives are connected by the ocean, and it has been exaggerated even still or amplified by globalization. The first person who stepped off a beach onto a small boat and pushed out into the unknown ocean, that was the beginning of globalization through exploration and knowledge and all the rest. So I did some due diligence about this idea. I went to see some people at the UN and asked permission. They said, well, we don't know who's going to do it. If you'd like to try, why not? And that was about 16, 17 years ago. And so after I left South Street, I took that with me here in Downey's Main and have built a platform that advocates through communication and connection toward building a community of citizens of the ocean worldwide, which is an informed body sort of created from the bottom up as a exercise in understanding preservation and political will. One of the great problems we have in all these transformational ideas is political will. And so if we're expecting that necessarily to come from the top down, we already know that that's a limited opportunity. The way it does happen, though, is from the bottom up. And if that's going to happen successfully, it needs an educated public. So we have these communication platforms. We have audio features, podcasts, aggregated video channel. We have online exhibits, profiles, educational curriculum. We have a digital magazine. We're developing a virtual aquarium. I'll talk about that maybe later. And all of these things, which are vehicles by which we can focus on solutions and information, responsible science information solutions, the idea of being to become a force in ocean literacy. We are irresponsibly negligent in our understanding of the ocean. And science is hard at work. Data, we are learning enormous amounts every day, more and more and more. There's an old adage that we know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the ocean that represents 70% of our planet. Nonetheless, that's not the entire answer. As in all cases, data is enormously useful. There's never enough. Scientists always want more. And the idea now, though, is we need to turn that data into action. One of the ways we do that is to aggregate the good work of others, celebrate the work of others, bring it all together into one place where people can go and interact. And the website now is almost 3 million people a year. And all of these other things, Facebook following is 950,000. These are all sort of numbers that matter if you're actually going to try to reach people outside of the conventional circles and silos. As in all cases, we limit ourselves, we talk to ourselves, we have conferences where we all come together and say, report of the incremental advance that we've made since the last conference. These frustrate me terribly. But so the World Ocean Observatory can now claim, I think, responsibly, legitimately, that we're reaching millions of people worldwide with this message for ocean preservation and sustainability. I think it's fascinating, just many of the different aspects and dilemmas that you brought up. As you know, in what you might call post-Trump era, the notion of expertise, hierarchy, and representation is in tatters. I don't mean they are wrong. I mean the confidence in those things has been beaten up. So at some level, you have something that is bottom up organic, what you might call, full of the people on the outside. And I heard you say that you weren't in a place where you felt like you could essentially just go to the inside or committee meetings that will be taken care of. And I guess there are two questions that come to mind. One is sometimes there's something which economists call the public good. And in a market-based system and whatever, it's not that we don't care about. Nobody's responsible, so it falls between the cracks. The public good is not taken care of. Other times there's what you might call vested interests with fierce opposition to the repairs that are necessary for the public good because it creates private loss. You see a lot of this now with fossil fuel companies or nations that have huge endowments of fossil fuels, like Russia, seemingly resisting the notion of climate change or the repair of our energy production systems. What do you see when it comes to the sea? Are there organized interests trying to thwart the work that you think needs to be done, number one, or is it just a neglect and fall in between the cracks or a little of both? Well, it's a little of both, neglect or a difference or just a kind of an assumption that it's out there. You go to the beach, it seems infinite. You don't really see the tomos, the systems that are inherent in that nature. You take it for granted, you walk down a Walmart corridor and ask somebody where all this stuff come from. They have no idea that it's come from some place else across the sea. They don't understand the interconnection of shipping or, for example, the exchange of data or financial transactions that take place by undersea cables. People just don't understand that this ocean atmosphere, this ocean environment is essential to almost everything that happens to our world now. Climate is one part of it. The effect of emissions from CO2 conditions, the acidification of the ocean, all of these things are invisible. And for the most part, people don't understand them. Asida stands up and says, well, this and that and percentages and parts per whatever. And it's very hard for people to wrap their minds around it until you can try to make it relevant to their lives specifically. Now, the vested interest thing, I mean, it's a fact of life. Yes, there's self-interest. There's also a kind of underlying psychological fear of change. It's a natural phenomenon. Nobody really wants to disrupt their lives in some way. Nobody in the end believes that they will give up something essential for someone else. There's a kind of innate human self-absorption and selfishness that's part of the issue. I don't think I can ever solve that problem. The problem is how can you make people understand that that fear is groundless and actually that the thing that they should be afraid of is the status quo. And it's perfect in fossil fuels. I mean, if the smart money didn't get out of fossil fuels 10 years ago, it's not smart money. And they've ridden fossil fuels down in the name of dividend and convention. And that has been further subverted by fracking, which was, of course, a terrible destructive extension of trying to get the last drop of oil out of the gas out of the ground that had its own social ramifications. I mean, it disrupted farming. People's lands were polluted. They had to move away. There's an enormous waste problem from fracking. Waste, fracking waste is being hidden, dumped into waterways, abandoned in places where people don't think they can see it. I mean, a horrible short-term attempt by the industry rather than to go full in to alternatives to include wind and solar, geothermal, and all the rest of it. So there's that part of it. The other part of it, though, is the idea of understanding the commons. We've gone through a, you know, quite a long period of time where the idea of shared resources has been subverted by individual gain, unlimited growth, essentially based on consumption, enabled by fossil fuels. That was the paradigm of the 19th and 20th centuries. I think it's a dying paradigm, but the fact is it was there. It had formed many, many people's lives. It's true that many people's lives were improved by that until the point where the positive consequences were overcome by the negative impacts. And so it began then to dilute and for people to understand that there is this thing called the Nature's Trust Doctrine, for example, which says that the natural resources of a nation belong to its people, actually. This is in, I think, Roman law, English common law. I think it's actually mentioned in the Constitution that natural resources are an inalienable right of the people who live in the country. And it is up to government to, it can license that, it can develop that, but it can only do it in the context of sustainability so that the supply is never exhausted for the ensuing generations. And of course, we have done exactly the opposite. We have gotten past peak oil to the point where now we're exhausting it to almost nothing. We're desperately trying to eat out just a little bit more. And we're doing the same thing with water, with fresh water. We're draining the aquifers. We're polluting the water. We're doing all this kind of predictable historical behavior using structures that are like dinosaurs. They really are outmoded, outdated, and they're sinking into the mud. And we, maybe some future generation will discover them and burn them. But the fact is, it's a paradigm that is bankrupt. So we have, there is a kind of returning to the idea of the commons, particularly in terms of shared natural resources. And the biggest single system out there, left, unpolluted, uncorrupted, is the ocean. So I advocate personally and through one of my books, The Once in Future Ocean, subtitled Notes Toward a New Hydraulic Society, which is basically an outcome of a new paradigm which says managed growth, because we're going to have to grow to meet the needs of a growing population. But based on sustainability and enabled by the freshwater ocean continuum, which is the last place we can go to get the kind of energy, food, fresh water, medicines, and spiritual solace that have been taken away from us by bankrupt activity on land. So the idea that one would transfer, transform or transition into this new paradigm, based on this hydraulic concept, is imperative. Frankly, I don't see any alternative because if we don't have water, we can live without chocolate and diamonds and Bitcoin and gold. We can live without all of that, caveat. We don't need any of those things, but the one thing we all need everyone, everywhere, all the time is access to water. A couple of days, we dyes individuals as families, as communities, as nation states. And we're seeing it already. We are seeing water wars. We're seeing major cities that can no longer provide fresh water to the population. We've seen, and this has all been exacerbated by climate. It's not going to get any better. And so weather pattern changes, droughts, extreme weather, rain, flood, erosion. And then add on top of that, a kind of history of corruption and political and financial gain that has been accumulated by a few. And you have essentially a mandatory set of circumstances in which you are going to have to respond and adapt immediately to survive. There's no time. We have lost the, I'm amazed by the lack of urgency. There is no time in terms of, even as we set goals for being fossil fuel free by 2050, 2050, 2030, that's not enough. That's too much time. It's too much time. It's a function of reluctant transition. And then what we do is we're cleaving to short-term solutions. For example, the electric car. I despair, and maybe you can help me on this because to me it's a supply and demand situation. It's a fundamental economic formula that is not being talked about, which is, which is in order to meet the anticipated demand for electric cars and all the other tools that we propose to run off batteries, we need the rare metals to essentially build the batteries to store the power, to store the energy. And there is nowhere enough of those metals available now or in the future on the land to meet the demand. And no one seems to be talking about this. And the only place that you can go where you can expand the geological opportunity is the ocean floor. And mining in deep sea is already underway, people are trying to do it, people are fighting it. And the reason for it is that these rare metals are all located in the areas of like hydrothermal vents and where intense biodiversity remains, which would be destroyed by this process. So all this is, is essentially taking a new technology based on extraction, wrapping it in a new kind of concept, and seeing it as an ultimate solution, which I personally believe it is not. And so we are already seeing theft of old devices and catalytic converters in cars so people can get the little bits of lithium and whatever it is that they can need because there's a market demand for them, that's pathetic. And so in order to get these things, we're going to have to mine, mining is extraction, extraction is destructive, we've been through it all before. So why are we wasting the time on this and not looking and inventing our way out of this, not just sliding ourselves in, using the old tools, wrapping the old behaviors in new clothes, and inventing our way and starting to look at serious alternatives that are out there, that young scientists and others are working on with some success and that's where the investment should be going. Those places are the ones where the smart money ought to be now. So in order to pull this off, right, you know, let's just- You made it in order to sustain life on earth. Oh yeah, one thing is simple as that. Let's take a look at the idea, the nature, the definition of capital because that's what it all revolves around, it's capital. And we've always separated capital, capitalism, sort of independently of understanding the true value of natural capital. And natural capital, which are is, the gathering together of all the value of all these resources on earth has been utilized, but we haven't accounted for it correctly. And so I'd like to talk a little bit about that because I'm not an economist. I just look at this stuff from a kind of logical, sort of uninformed point of view, but I do- You mean you're not intoxicated by the mythologies of economics? Is that what you're saying? Wow, no, I'm not. It's not you, that's your job. That's right, that's right. You're drunk the Kool-Aid. Detox, detox, that's right. But so if you're gonna pull off this hydraulic society and all the rest of it, that's fine, but what you really need to understand, and there's a phrase that describes this, which is ecosystem service analysis, where you actually have to understand the examine and monetize all aspects of production, manufacture, but which includes the costs of water, waste, reparation, health effects. All of those numbers are left out of the evaluation today. We never do that. When you walk down a corridor in a supermarket and you don't hear the wasting water, you don't hear the water that was used in the packaging, the harvesting, the delivery. None of that is there, and I've advocated for a labeling, water labeling. Everything on earth is labeled on a package except the fact that the most important thing that was used in its manufacture is not left out. We know about MSG or vitamin C, but we don't know about water. Everything we produce has a water cost and it should be labeled. We should know it. Does it take a million gallons of water to build a Volkswagen? Yes, it does. Yes. And much of that water, by the way, is not priced and is sometimes free. So the manufacturer has essentially used the primary resource at no cost and added all these other things with all their detrimental impact on top and we don't understand the true cost of doing that. So I would advocate first, ecosystem service analysis, you have to understand the problem across the full spectrum of its true cost, and then you have to account for it. And so why isn't their ecosystem accounting and audits? The fact is that when these companies audit their books or when they calculate their balance sheets, there's this huge piece of financial information that's not included. And if it was included at the true value, their profit would be lost. And that then would say to the investor, this is not a good strategy. We're investing in the wrong thing by not truthfully accounting for what is the cost of doing business. And we're going to, water is now an asset class. There are water funds, there are water companies, there are hedge funds looking for water. Oh my God, I mean, we just have to not let that happen again so that people either misrepresent the true cost of things, or they know and they suck out the value in the short term, and what they don't understand is that that value is irreplaceable. You may get a fancier car, but you'll never get the true value of that water loss back again. I'm curious, Oceanographic Institute, so I went to MIT. When I was young, I thought about doing graduate work at Woods Hole or Scripps or any of these places. Are they at the vanguard along with you of this kind of work, or are they somewhat, how would I say, caught in the habit structures of previous generations or challenges? Well, I want to give them more credit than that. Good, that makes me happy. These places are doing the best science. They are out there, Woods Hole is still amazing, Scripps still amazing. One of the problems is that they rely almost entirely on government grants. You also have a different kind of phenomenon where you have something like the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Wendy and Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and these are very wealthy people. They have essentially constructed a state-of-the-art Oceanographic Research Vessel, and they are subsidizing scholars to go out and do amazing work in the deep sea. This is essentially a kind of, it's not for profit, but it's a private charity in a way with this amazing intent. And so it obviates the structure that, for example, in a government grant, if it goes through university, anywhere from 20 to 50 or 60% is taken by the university's overhead. So there's this constant, you know, a million dollar grant may only put $400,000 in the water after all the other people have taken their share. So the structures do get in the way. There's no question about it inside, this will tell you that they do. In policy, it's also interesting. We use words like adapt, sea level rise is a good example. Adapt, mitigate, you know, well, adapt just says, well, it is what it is, we're gonna have to change our ways. That's one strategy. Mitigate, it basically is a hard response, an engineering response. We're going to do some kind of thing like the Thames River Barrier or the Protecting Barrier Artificial Dykes that are now protecting the coast of the Netherlands. These Venice is thinking about the same thing in order to control flooding. These are engineering solutions, it's classic, this is how we think. And very smart people are trying to deal with that. You could look at the same thing with the plastic in the ocean. Millions of dollars raised to try to go out and engineer a solution to gather it all up in some way which is really ineffective, hasn't really worked. And what we don't do is one of two things. We don't go instead of just trying to fix the problem that we try to go back and fix the cause. So the way to fix plastic in the ocean is to fix the plastic problem. A fossil fuel product, let's remember, it's a fossil fuel product, it can be recycled, but plastic recycling which had its moment now has eroded and because it was all based on the old behaviors, you either ship it to China who won't take it anymore or you don't create scale that's large enough to make it economical viable for industry to recycle that plastic, but if you recycled every bit of plastic on earth today, you'd never have to make another piece of plastic again. So it's that kind of behavior that we're not doing. The other side of that is adapt, mitigate, invent, invent. That's what we do best. This is one of the great aspects or great qualities of the human imagination. We know how to invent things. Scientists are brilliant at inventing things and we ought to be subsidizing them, for example, the way we subsidize fossil fuels. Only within the last 30 days, I believe, has there been an attempt by the US government to stop subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. So we've taken our resources that belong to the people. We've subsidized them. We've given research and develop grants. We've given them tax exemptions. We've done all these things to enable the fossil fuel industry, right? We're exhausting the supply, but what that represents is probably the largest transfer of wealth from the people to the few in human history. Think about it. Coal, oil, gas, all plastic, all of these things are based on a, have been incentivized up until this very moment, long after the oil crisis, long after the smart money left, only because of these vested interests. And you see these companies today, even still in the name of sustainability and conservation environmental and ESG standards and all the rest, look the underneath and see what actually is happening. And, you know, there's a piece that's going to- I did a podcast with a gentleman from Penn State named Michael Mann, whose book, his newest book is called The New Climate War. Yeah. And it's about the information. It's scrambling what you might call the signal to noise ratio to sow the seeds of doubt that we need to change or that there is any urgency in that need to change. Naomi Oreskes, who I've not met, wrote a wonderful book called The Merchants of Doubt showing the analog between how the tobacco industry deflected attention away from the harm of cigarettes and how that's been adapted to the fossil fuel industry. Do you yourself experience, which you might call vibrance opposition in the world of ideas from the things that you put on the book? Well, it may be that my voice is so tiny. They haven't heard it yet. They haven't heard it yet. But- We'll work on that together. We'll work on that. But I think that the other thing to think about is, so if we're in our inventive mode, and if we do acknowledge that the old way of accounting for things is a way to show on a corporate or an individual investor balance sheet that we're all engaged in a kind of false economy. And if you then look at this new paradigm and you say, OK, if you're going to organize the world around the most valuable resource on earth, which is the ocean freshwater continuum, then you have to start inventing ways to use that appropriately, not to corrupt it, not to pollute it, not to exhaust it. And if you do that, then other things start to happen that are inevitable. There are kinds of these additional transformational outcomes. And so if you take that as the premise, then suddenly the policies and the laws and the enforcement of those laws changes because you want to protect this new approach. You start addressing problematic forms of governance because you start thinking about upstream and downstream effect. We have independent municipalities along a river. Somebody up here can put a chemical plant in and throw their waste in the water. Nobody can stop them. However, it has terrible downstream impact on the community all the way down to the coastal resources where that river has become polluted. So in order to combat that under this new system, you move away from independent municipalities to regionalism and regional management, watershed management. And if you start doing that, you start making changes to the infrastructure based on the commonality of interest and the understanding that these things speak directly to meaningful work and public health and equity and social justice. All of these things that we talk about as problems we need to face in our society today actually could be addressed in a more creative way if we were to invent another way of sort of organizing ourselves into new structures based on new behaviors that is all essentially gathered together in a strategy, the only strategy for the survival of civilization. So if you want to look at how we're going to do that and you look at the ocean, you see that it is a climate regulator. You see that it is a heat pump. It is a massive storage of energy that can be released in many different ways. It is a huge source of biodiversity and food to feed the world. It is where we will find the cures to cancer and all diseases, even diseases we don't even know exist. Because in that biodiversity, we are already essentially building cancer cures on either direct use or synthesis of ocean processes. So if you really want to embrace a solution that could work, that would work, you need to say and you need to understand it urgently that nothing else matters. And that the United States really doesn't even have a national ocean policy. We say we do and the Biden administration has put forth some interesting things and they put some great people into the national ocean and the atmospheric administration. But ocean policy extends beyond NOAA. It expands to land use, environmental protections, legal protections, health issues, social justice, problems of equity and access. Give you a perfect example of that, Flint, Michigan. Close to my home. A short opportunistic political decision made by some politician basically destroys a community and it is still not recovered. So suddenly the water comes back. It's sourced to pollution. There's immediate data that shows that children health is affected. There's a human cry. When they restore it to the pure supply, the only reason they really did it was because there was a GM factory, there in Flint, that suddenly was complaining about corrosion in the parts. That the water they were using in the manufacturer was corroding the parts almost immediately. And so then they had to restore it back to the pure thing based on basically a political decision in response to a corporate interest. Not to the fact that the children of Flint were all or that the property values in that city, heavily minority populated, were destroyed. And they still haven't replaced the letters and pipes. They still haven't addressed the problems with any degree of compensation or regress. I mean, restoration. You're winding me up, man. You're winding me up because I, as you know, I grew up in Detroit and I was there, involved in some consultations around the Detroit bankruptcy as the Flint water crisis became known and understood. Being around the Great Lakes in a water crisis spun my head in terms of the relationship between values and value, like you can hardly imagine. But you can imagine. I know. People need to understand that the ocean begins at the mountaintop, and it descends to the Abyssal plain. So every drop of water that evaporates from the ocean and goes into the water cycle, the one scientific principle that almost everybody learns in grammar school, right? It evaporates it up. It goes up into the clouds, into the weather. It falls down as rain or snow. And then it comes right back down through the watersheds all the way to the ocean and recycles again. It's an absolutely glorious global system. And for example, you can look at the Himalayas and see, which is now called the third pole, which because of evaporation and snowfall and all the rest of it, that services, what is it? Seven Asian countries, millions and millions of people rely on that water that descends down through all the farmlands and the tea plant and all of that into the rivers and then out into the sea. And that refreshment, essentially that descent of water then to be recycled again and again and again is the essence of how we survive. We are water. Our bodies are water. And so if we can't identify with this, you're basically denying the fundamental element, physical element in your body, which in fact is that you're denying yourself, your soul, life, for you and everyone else. And it needs to be urgent enough and understood well enough for people to understand that. And one of the tools that the World Ocean Observatory is developing, with by the way the support of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, is a virtual aquarium, which will allow for anyone, any age, anywhere, at any time, at no cost to go into a virtual space that looks just like an aquarium. And they will be able not only to explore the deep sea but the coastal zone, but they will also be able to spawn the nature of ocean work and also cultural and spiritual resources. So there will be galleries within this or modules or exhibits within this virtual aquarium that demonstrates the hydraulic organization and depth of meaning and complexity and beauty of this water world. And to me, that's the most revolutionary thing we can do because there's no price barrier. I mean, I love aquariums. I love what happens in aquariums in one way because it inspires and visitors, particularly children, a sense of wonder and reverence or at least all in the face of nature. But if you follow a family of four after they've paid $120 for a two-day ticket and watch them go through, even the placement of the labels and the language in them is not really conducive because the parent needs to read it to the kid. And the parent doesn't understand it any better than the kid does. And so that the information is awkward. There's an educational program. That's great. There's a touchstone. That's great. It costs $400 million or more to build one. It costs $40 million a year to run one. And all good. I want all of that to do. I want to drive using the virtual aquarium. I want young people and old people alike to essentially then go to those aquariums and learn more and learn about their and about their. And that's true worldwide. This pathway, if you can create the virtual what I'll call Lily Pad to jump on before going to the real aquariums all over the world, that's a fantastic, fantastic package. Julie Packard, who was the founder of Monterey and as for, I don't know, 30 years, made that place magnificent, is one of the people I talked to originally about the Rollers Conservatory. And I went to see her and I said, I'm not this. I'm not that. But what do you think? She said, you should try it. The interesting thing, though, about that particular place, and I said this to them so they've heard probably the person I told it to is long gone. But the point is that when you went into those cannery buildings, where that building where that aquarium is located up in the upper corner or somewhere, there was a small exhibit on the cannery workers. And it was the only social history that was evident in the building. And when I went back the last time, it was gone. And that's part of the problem. The part of the problem is, how do you relate what you're seeing in these places? It's doing museums, too, by the way. How do you relate what you're seeing to these things outside of the conventional way of looking at it? So the fact that the aquarium is located in buildings in which workers and families grew up in California, a kind of seminal industry that was the soul of Monterey, long before the surfers and long before the second homes and long before all the tourists, that was the soul of Monterey. And suddenly that's missing. And that's part of the problem overall. It's the human dimension and relationship that you have to understand that the ocean is an enormous employer, families, trades, distribution systems. All of these things are essentially functions of work that employ people and build family histories through generations. I'm sitting at this moment out on Long Island. And I have to recommend a book which my children have heard me read passages from. And what's called East Hampton Marine Museum has done tours by Peter Mathiasen called Men's Lives. Men's Lives, great. And it's about how what you might call the New York City Resort community displaced the fishermen in order to have recreational beaches. Well, and the potato farmers, by the way, that are now all multi-million dollar building lots. But you're not necessarily going to staunch that history. But you need to remember what it stood for and what an extract from it, not just the value of the land, but the value of the intellectual property, the value of the psychological value, native peoples, indigenous peoples who were the first inhabitants of wilderness had to make that adaptation. And if you really, if you put yourself in close encounters with nature and animals like your daughters are doing, what's happening subliminally is kind of an identification with this system, this force. That is extremely powerful and extremely necessary for our solace. Why do people go to the beaches? Do they just go to hit little things back and forth over nets? No. They go there because they are face to face with raw nature. They even want to go when it's not sunny. They want to go when it's wet, when there's a storm. They want to go out and see what is one of the most dynamic, raw, rare environments left on Earth. By the way, free coasts means free access to anybody who wants to go and have that experience. And we can't deny that because we are denying an essential part of ourselves to ourselves and to others. It's very nourishing. People just experience such an uplift. That's what's happening here. This is the fundamental right of life. And that is because we are working to essentially organize ourselves around the most essential natural system. And it's pervasive, again, from the mountaintop to the abyssal plain across all borders, all cultures, all classes. It affects us all the same way. And if we understand that and can work toward that in our way, using our institutions, it doesn't mean that we have to become communists. We can use our systems and do that. But we just have to understand what the goal should be. And if we understand that the goal now is survival, if people can really understand that, one of the outcomes of the pandemic is, with just how about 600,000 people dead, just here, doesn't that tell us something? Doesn't that say to us, you know, how vulnerable we are? And how did we solve the problem? We haven't fully solved it because, one, we have to find the cause. But, two, we invented a response. Now, that's great. That's what we did. We invented a response, and we saved millions of lives by doing that. That's right. And, you know, why would we doubt science when science brought us a solution to a problem that was killing our families day after day? Can we come out of that? Shouldn't we come out of that with a new perspective? Yes. And a new perspective that's... Well, I think there's two things here. I think there's two dimensions. One is the science itself, which we celebrate together. The other is how it's refracted by the commodification of intellectual property rights or distribution systems to squeeze the vulnerable. And that, how do you say, is playing out all over the world right now. It's unfortunate because it takes away from what you might call that bright light that you identified of science's ability to respond to challenge. The fact is that if we haven't figured out now how nature can essentially wipe us out in an instant by virtue of communities washed away by coastal hurricanes, communities, extreme weather patterns, essentially threatening nation states. I mean, Puerto Rico is a perfect example, still completely unrecovered without help from Hurricane. And the same thing is true in Asia. And slowly, it seems that these values are reasserting themselves, hopefully in time, so that they in fact infuse the populist who then will vote the villains out, will vote the old way out, get rid of the old man that's running our country, not literally, but to essentially, there's an old thinking that's still... The old vintage, yeah. We have to just turn it over, put it away, put it in the attic, forget about it, and invent our way forward. And my argument is there's only one path to follow. I don't want to be didactic. I just think there's an impeccable logic that goes with it that goes every place you look for a solution, you find it in this freshwater ocean continuum. You cannot find it on the land anymore, because the land has been exhausted. And we're gonna have to live there. And these systems, whether we... I mean, let's just take it the most simple thing of all is freshwater. Where is the world going to get adequate freshwater? If you look at the Middle East and you look down at Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, what are those things? What's going on? Is it just tribal warfare? If you look, this is the cradle of civilization, organized around the flow of water, from the mountains in Turkey to the ocean. And if a farmer can't have access to water because of natural or political or religious reasons, whatever it is, what do they do? They fight, they give up, or they become refugees. They try to go find a place where there is water. So refugees crossing the Mediterranean, I think are basically fleeing the consequences of inadequate water. And you can look at the source of Palestine and Israel. What happened? It's this diversion of water from the very outset, the version of water from the Jordan River that essentially was the basis for conflict that still exists in terms of what's happening in the East Bank and the West Bank and all the rest of it in terms of control of wells and access. The way I listened last night to a wonderful, wonderful lecture by a professor at Union Theological Seminary named O'Berry Henryx. And it was called the Kingdom of God and Political Economy. And it was all about Old Testament struggles over natural resources with God or His messengers continuously reminding us that we were responsible for the common good. And he was contrasting that with the kind of ethic that pervades our economic discourse today. Every religion, Rob, has water as a purification piece. If you're going to be redeemed, you're being redeemed by a water accountant. So I actually, my latest book is called Aquaterra, which says that basically one, the first thing is that, this is Earth from space. It's not green, it's blue. It's the blue planet, it's the blue marble. People use it all the time. We're misnamed first, but secondly, it's the one, again, the one thing that informs all our rituals. Every organized or disorganized religion has a water element, baptism, go down by the sea, purification, all of these things, which are there to be our functions of redemption and the affirmation of self are water driven. So why would we destroy it? And it's there for us in terms of let's just take fresh water desalination. I mean, let's face it, we are going to have to desalinate water from the ocean in order to provide adequate drinking water for public health. It's just inevitable. I want to emphasize something that is very, what I would say, magnificent about you and your website. You have a series on World Ocean Radio, of five to six minute little snippets each week. And why I think they're magnificent is they're so informative in five minutes that people get a huge, what you might call, benefit to effort ratio. Well, thank you, the connections are so viable and so obvious. So for example, everyone hears about the Galapagos, is this biodiversity mecca. And the reason it's there is because the ocean currents essentially distributed nutrients in such a way that they aggregated there. And so it was an enormous font and safe place for biodiversity development. Well, guess what? The same systems distribute poison, pollution, and that is affecting the Galapagos today from discharge, from factories, et cetera, or from air quality or whatever it is, in places long, far away, but which through ocean circulation essentially comes and affects a place that one think was invulnerable, but it's not. That's the thrill thing here. We are all equally vulnerable, whether you're rich or poor, whether you've got a gate in front of your house, or whether you have an abandoned lot next door. And we need to understand that that vulnerability has a solution, but it has to be equitable and it has to essentially assert, apply tools and assert an outcome that is real, that is workable, and that will essentially save us from our own devices. And I don't want to beat it over the head, but there's only one place to go. And I believe that policy, governance, and all the rest of it should be complete, that there should not be a single act in Congress that isn't somehow cognizant of its implication on the ocean. I don't get what it is, that because I guarantee you, I can find a way that it connects. Somehow, somewhere it connects. Yes, and there's another, there's an analogy I often used in relation to finance. Financial economists for a long time pretended that you could see the future, that you knew where we'd be in 30 years and therefore the prices today just reflected that oracle-like awareness. There's a notion which John Maynard Keynes, a man named Frank Knight, put together or brought to the surface, it's called what people like Donald Roosevelt said, the unknowable unknowns. They call it radical uncertainty. What was interesting was in the debate for many years of de-regulating finance, the what I will call demagog-like oracle of finance could act like he could see the crystal ball of the future or she could see the crystal ball of the future. And it meant, get the regulators out of our hair. All they do is make a mess of things. And it didn't acknowledge what you might call the collective protection we needed. And the collective protection that we needed was from the kind of calamities that we experienced in 2007, eight, and nine, that were very disruptive to the core of trust in our society and governance and expertise. But what I always did was I said, you gotta understand something. You can't know everything, but you can't get so afraid you're going high doing your bunk. You've gotta continue to function. You gotta work with experienced people. You gotta learn. You gotta manage that uncertainty. You gotta manage your way through that fear. And as I'm listening to you today, I think that analogy applies to people, which you might call doing the ostrich or embracing the challenge that the World Ocean Observatory was designed to meet. How do we bring everyone out on deck in the storm under leadership like yours and other wise people from around the world and navigate so that we're back in a safe harbor? What will it take? How soon will it come? Not soon enough. I think it's going to have to be a kind of, it's not evolution. It has to be revolution. I don't think it's revolution the other way because revolution sort of implies it's still backward. I think it's invention. I think we have to take responsibility for ourselves and apply what we know, because we do know a lot, and put it to work, but put it to work in a way that essentially is based on different values that is justified and upheld by that knowledge, create the structures necessary to make it happen and based on those values, and then act. People say, well, Peter, how can you be optimistic? What can you possibly do? And my argument is pick something. Just pick one thing. It doesn't even have to be an ocean thing. Pick a land thing. Pick whatever it is that you believe in the context of this future thinking matters enough for you to invest your time and energy and wisdom into that one thing. And then I ask the next person, the next person, the next person, and by the time we all get together from the bottom up, right, we will have essentially invented something new, but we have to be informed. We have to understand the system and the whole purpose of the World Ocean Observatory is to build a populist, democratic, freely accessible platform of knowledge and experience that people can use to inform themselves to those actions. And that's the brilliance of the internet in the sense that you can actually do that. I mean, the World Ocean Observatory is two people. We're reaching millions of people. Where our budget is hardly anything. If you look at the return on investment, it's magnificent. There's no greater return on investment in terms of public of connection through something, a simple tool, but that has access worldwide to millions of people. And it can be tens of millions of people and informing them and providing them with the information that contextualizes natural systems, getting people to understand that this can be accounted for using numbers and defining value and justifying investment as good things. That's the outcome I hope for is, and it starts first inside here and then in every act that one takes and how you invest your energies. And understanding that as in all things, there is a limit to in time and space. And we're smart enough to know where we are. We're also smart enough to know what we do, what to do, but are we smart enough to do it in time?