 It became clear to me that, you know, in a lot of developing countries in particular fish is the main protein, one of the main livelihoods. And of course, you know, we've heard over the last two decades nothing but kind of dire stories about overfishing and depletion of the resource so I really was trying to figure out where are the fish going to come from to feed a growing world. And, and as I got into it, I realized that a lot of the perceptions that people have about the state of fisheries are based on things that were happening in the 1990s. Nicholas P. Sullivan is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 media innovators magazine and sponsored by the Lohas Regenerative Foundation. Nicholas is a writer and editor focusing on the impact of business and technology on international development. The New Revolution, his fourth book, what we're here to talk about today. I'm sorry I don't have a physical copy to hold up it's fresh and hot off the press, just barely has been released by island press. It follows money real quick Kenya's disruptive mobile money innovation. You can hear Nicholas speak about how micro loans and cell phones are connecting the world's poor to the global economy. And computer power for small business. He has been a co director of the Fletcher School of Leadership Program for financial inclusions, tough by Tufts University, a consultant to central banks and developing countries and a visiting scholar at MIT's Lecatum Center for international development. In the publishing world, he, he was a publisher of innovations technology governance globalization MIT press editor in chief of Inc.com and editor in chief of home office computing. Nicholas is currently a senior fellow at the Fletcher Schools Council on emerging market enterprise and senior research fellow at its maritime studies program. Nicholas has twice been a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center resident fellow, a graduate of Harvard University, and the Fletcher School of Law and diplomacy. Nicholas is in Dartmouth, Massachusetts welcome to the podcast Nicholas is so nice to have you I'm sure I could go on on and on on your biography you you've been around the block, and seen quite a bit. Yeah, that's quite a mouthful and thank you for that. And thank you for inviting me on your illustrious podcast. Thank you very much I'm so glad it worked out there was some struggles originally with my, my traveling in that we were able to coordinate it and really make it work. I deal a lot with with food with food systems and global things and the thing that has always been lacking over the years is really that knowledge about what's going on in the seas you know and even in even in the environmental circles. We usually talk about airplanes and we talk about what's going on on the land but there's not a lot of discussion in depth that comes out what's happening on on the seas and fisheries and and the whole industry and you know, I really loved your book I. I didn't get a physical copy because I'm in Hamburg Germany but I read the digital copy twice and I want you to know just to thank you it's fabulous it's it's right in the direction that that I love to read about one and I get to the question soon but because you are really taking kind of a new angle or twist then than most other books around seafood or fisheries and and what's going on. It's really about this almost a digital transformation data and the revolution and what new technologies and what innovations and from your past of writing and things there's a lot of innovation there as well so it doesn't surprise me. But I'm a sustainable development go advocate and and most people don't know six of the major things that we need to do transformations transitions in order to achieve them and the Paris agreement. There are really key factors to get us there and one of them is this digital transformation this information age and and and how we understand that and we use it properly. And that's really what the heart of your book addresses so much so I want to start out slow and kind of get everybody up to speed and then get into more depth and substance as we go along in our conversation. What led you to to address these and to dive into this type of a publication. Well, I am, you know, as you noted my bio most of my recent work has been on international development in financial inclusion. I was working with the spread of cell phones through South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and then which morphed in for people who never had phones were now able to conduct business by phone, and then that morphed into mobile money people who never had phones through bank accounts for sending money, but with over their phones. And so that led to, you know, consulting work with central banks and other groups, trying to get more people into the banking system. And a lot of the work that I was doing I was through us a ID agency for international development. In any place you would go they would always have, you know, they will be working on food security issues as well as finance and economic issues. So, it became clear to me that, you know, in a lot of developing countries in particular fish is the main protein, one of the main livelihoods. We've heard over the last two decades nothing but kind of dire stories about overfishing and depletion of the resource so I really was trying to figure out where the fish going to come from to feed a growing world. And, and as I got into it, I realized that a lot of the perceptions that people have about the state of fisheries are based on things that were happening in the 1990s, the incredible overfishing and the depletion of some kind of iconic stocks like the Atlantic cod and the Norwegian salmon farming which had all kinds of negative environmental effects. But in the last 20 years or so there's been really a major shift, a behavioral shift policy shift toward more sustainable restorative, you know, wild capture and farming techniques. So, I was trying to tell that story and of course I had done you know through ink magazine and you know, working on entrepreneurship a lot of written about the impact of technology on society and business and individuals. And of course I could see some of that stuff happening in fishing as well that technology seeping into the industry a little bit later than some of the other industries like you know, say car manufacturing has been kind of automated for quite a while and service industries, highly automated for you know, digitized. But fishing was always a throwback industry, and that is now really beginning to change. So that's kind of the origin of the story. I love it and I think it's, it's, it's really vital. So the, the full title of the book is the blue revolution hunting harvesting and farming seafood and the information agent so you know, a lot of people tend to judge books by the cover so they're like, you know, oh okay this all about, you know, these things but it's really some of the things that are emerging and and why they're emerging is because of some illegal and crazy things going on on in our oceans and our waterways that are that are pretty eye opening and you tell a few of those stories in the book I just for a full open transparency I I'm on the sustainable advisory of a new kind of a blockchain based company that has a big contract with one of Germany's largest seafood companies to try to get that traceability and they're through distributed ledger technology the blockchain, the smart contracts, where they actually do some catch to the freezer is kind of their motto is cash to the freezer the company's called our ours, and it's just very interesting to see how necessary that is and how vital some, some of these things are this open and transparency you know is this sustainably harvest or sustainably caught seafood isn't really what the package says it is and things that and those are some, some really important things and so every chapter there's 13 chapters in your book broken up into three parts. It's really kind of the not only a nice journey but these nice stories of different areas of what's going on and I love the fact that you, you, you, you break it down into these stories and one of the ones that really caught my eye was about some, some the illegal thing I get I think we called them the godfather. Oh, the cod father, the cod father father in New Bedford. Yes. Yeah, the cod father in New Bedford. And if you if you don't mind I'd just love to hear in your own voice if you if you tell us a little bit about you know some of those illegal things and, and why that almost kind of pushes into why we need some new systems and new models and in the industry to kind of avoid that. Well, yeah, the cod father, his name is Carlos Rafael, who was a Portuguese immigrant, very successful Fisher owned more than 40 boats and what he was doing and eventually kind of entrapped by FBI undercover investigators was, you know, misreporting his catch, mislabeling his catch, not accounting or for the money he was making. And all of which was illegal because you're supposed to obviously adhere to certain quotas for each stock and label the fish for what they are and report the landings and so forth but he, he had not only his own boats but his own processing facility so he's able to go, he was able to kind of sidestep a lot of the oversight. And so he was, you know, trapped by these, you know, undercover investigators who, you know, the truth came out and then he was, you know, tried and convicted, did four years in jail and is now out. But so I use him as he's a colorful figure obviously and but I use him as kind of a pivot point of the, the end of one era, or the old era, the old cowboy of the sea era and fishing, at least in New England where I'm focusing with a book or lots of, you know, lots of the parts of the world with this. And so he is giving way to a kind of a new breed and new behavior, a new way of thinking about behavior and policy. And of course, you know, fishermen are not, you know, like anyone is going to, they're going to get away with whatever they can get away with. But there are more and more, you know, constraints and oversight and regulations that are helping manage the fish. And of course, I say a couple of times that the last 20 years have been better for the fish than for the fisherman, because the new policies and regulations and catch quotas which have been in the US, at least in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia and even South America, New Zealand, Australia have been very well managed. It's resulted in a kind of consolidation of the industry. There are fewer boats far fewer boats. The boat's more expensive. It's much harder for younger people to get into the business and so forth. So it's been pretty rough on fishermen. But it's been pretty good for the resource because a lot of stocks have been rebuilt and in the US 45 stocks that were overfished in 2000 have now been rebuilt. And there are others that are in the rebuilding phase, but so all that has been a positive. And, you know, it clearly is not happening everywhere in the world and there's a lot of illegal fishing on the high seas and but even that is getting more becoming more transparent with satellite data and there's this group called global fishing watch. I don't know if you know them that shows satellite maps of all the boats on the sea and, you know, real time basically you can tell who's fishing where and so forth and that has led to a lot of apprehension and arrest of illegal fishermen on the high sea. It's a super project and I love I love that there's a couple sites like that as well not just on fishing but also on ship movement in general, and just unidentified ships, you know, they do they sort them by colors and they also look at the types and how much has moved on the seas is, it's really interesting to see it's almost like, you know, this, this unbelievable map of who's got a license who's unknown who's really illegal who's in areas of water that are off limits and what are they doing there in real time it's unbelievable. Yeah, and you know that obviously the problem with policing the ocean is that it's, you know, 70% of the planet and you know their interpol the international, you know police that I don't know how many boats they have but it's not that many see shepherd and some other NGO type organizations again. But I think you know you had mentioned earlier we're talking about the regional kind of maritime organizations that are kind of bonding to, you know, there's this couple on both. I think one on the East Coast and West Coast of Africa there's one I think in the East Coast of South America, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina have bonded together. There's one in the Western Pacific of, you know, small nations that are really kind of bonding together to police their own ocean. I love, I love that fact. That we do have that policing, but it would be nice if we could get some technology and systems in place that fishermen and industrial scale fish fisheries or fish mongering and all of that the catch industry would use different practices and so it's really in the in the same chapter the chapter we're talking about as chapter three. The cowboys on the high sea almost you know this is a possible to fish at an industrial scale in a post industrial mode you know. So there's blue harvest fisheries out there and some other pulse industrial fleets but is it possible. Well I think one of the things that makes it you know I do say that it's shifting from industrial to post industrial. And what I mean by industrial is that basically there's no regard for anything except maximizing the catch maximizing the profit and so forth so there's no regard for any external negative negative impact on you know the resource of the habitat. And so, yeah, it is possible. I mean one one way is just to avoid, you know, unwanted bycatch if you just trawling, you know, randomly and pulling up everything. A lot of the fish you're not going to want it's not going to be high value. It's going to get tossed overboard. And so that has basically been stopped in the last 20 years. With, you know, not totally stopped but so I think that that makes a big difference because it's nice just not you're not just catching everything in your net and keeping only the value stuff you're targeting the value species that you're after. And, you know, working within limits and, you know, reporting the catch to the regulators when you're still at sea before you land. And then there are, you know, people on the docks, you know, environmental police fishing regulators, you know, checking the catch and the load to see if it conforms to the stated catch that you phoned in. So, yeah, I do think it's, I do think it's possible. And, you know, they're, they're, they're better, you know, freezing and chilling systems on boats now which is obviously expensive investment, but it means that the catch is better handled and arrives on shore in better shape. So, again, it's kind of respecting the resource and increasing the value of the catch. I have a bunch of questions so I'm glad you brought up by bycatch and I want to, I want to go a little bit more into that and I matter of fact I was just looking here. I have a bycatch device that I want to show you that it's really fabulous. Shoot I don't have it right in front of me but it's a it's a device that is based on lighting there was a old 1913 paper written by a professor who did some research that all fish types species see a different light spectrum. And that was an old paper that some new innovators and some new people who are trying to solve some challenges around our oceans, read and said how could we use this to reduce bycatch. They came up with this lighting system that is integrated in the nets that have lights for escape holes for certain size of fish that they don't want to catch. And that it doesn't attract those that they do want to keep in the net. And just this this cool lighting system and it's really a great thing that's reduced bycatch down to 1% so of unwanted product, because I assume so the the industrial agriculture is not on land the monoculture is not working for us anymore but how does the bycatch where we're just grabbing anything that gets into the net, and then I know in Europe there are some laws and regulations that it, whatever they cast they can't throw the rest back overboard that they have to somehow keep it or use it that that that release there's some laws and regulations about that. So what I like in the US and how complicated is that that entire system, not only with what they're doing with the nets but how can they really control all that bycatch that they get in there and is bycatch another word for waste food waste or how does that work can you it has been another, it has been wasted food really because it's by and typically been thrown overboard and you know some of them survive and, but most of them I think don't. But you know to your point about the lights, I was unaware of that but there's certainly all kinds of new nets that are designed to let certain species escape the trawl net, you know and certain fish swim up when they hit a net and other fish swim certain fish fit through certain ring size so you can, they are making adjustments in the in the in the gear to allow fish to escape. There's been experiments with you know you talk about the lights underwater but the cameras underwater that are sending images up to the to the pilots. Computer. With machine learning so you can tell, you know, what kind of fish are going into the net. What's what size what species and so forth. And so it gives you more kind of a sense of what's going on underneath the ocean underneath the surface of the water and allows you to adjust on the fly. So, you know, a lot of this stuff is, you know, being newly introduced and obviously, you know it's an expense to change gear to add gear to, you know, design new gear. But it's, you know, it's all part of the kind of more of a post industrial mode where we're not going to just suck everything up. And of course you know in the high seas are all these UN regulations on against drift nets that capture everything when turtles sharks puffin and you know albatross everything and this awful or long lines to go from miles and miles and miles that hook everything. And that's a different story than the fishing on the continental shelf. So the continental shelf is where most fish are found. But of course some of the high value fish the tune of the sharks or the migratory species that are out in the high seas and so stopping the bycatch on the high seas is a little still kind of a wild west with the long lines and the drift nets and and so forth. I appreciate you going in and sorry I didn't mean to be rude but I usually have that device right next to me and I wanted to show it to you because it was actually I worked with a foundation for a long time that invested in innovations for purpose that solved some form of a global grand challenge and one of them was this bycatch and and I actually have a working model that they gave me because we would talk about it a lot. And so I wanted to show it to you I wrote a book as well called the beauty of impact health and they they were in that book as well and there are a lot of more than you know, in the last 10 15 years that have really emerged on the scene to help to reduce bycast because it's the it's the waste of the sea and you know what even if they're throwing it back in the oceans or whatever the regulations are in the spots where they're in the ocean. Most of that that that bycast that's then thrown back is dead anyway and it's just a horrible thing for the ecosystem of our oceans and creates it creates a huge number of problems. There are some other methods if they do get it on board how how do they report it properly how do they label it and divide it so that nothing's wasted so that it's kept in and sold off to eat or use in some way if we are going to kill these animals or these fish. I mean that that for me is really, really a big aspect of it. There, there is another thing that you know, in that same discussion is not only is there various monitoring systems to monitor the catch quotas and effectiveness, but there's also, you know, sometimes the difference between what's caught on the open scene what's then reported or unloaded at the docks and how how does that happen it's just another illegal portion of what's what's going on is that is that how I understand it because there's not enough traceability. Well, you know, one thing they're starting to use now is electronic monitoring so that you can, you have electronic monitors on the boat so you can rather than having human observers on the boats you can see from the shore what is really being caught. Yeah, I think you know it depends where you what part of the world you're in you know, you know, and a lot of the stuff that I think you're talking about is from the you know the legal un reported fishing and you know where that where that fish is landed is unknown I think ports in Asia maybe in China and there's probably less restrictions there than there are in some other more developed fishing nations. So it really I think it's kind of a tale of two cities really, and you know, and how Fisher handled and treated. But I think you know that the basic trend is positive, and it's also true for the farm fish you know I mean in it used to be this kind of saying that friends don't need. Don't let friends eat farm fish because it's bad and, but I heard someone from the Nature Conservancy head of aquaculture the other day. Which is focusing on you know shellfish and kelp, which is quite restorative to waters doesn't use food and so forth. And he said that 70% of the marine aquaculture or Mariculture now is shellfish and kelp, which is you know very healthy for the oceans. So, and as far as the near shore farming that was going on in Norway in the 90s. That has kind of shifted into either land based farming of finfish or offshore farming in colder deeper waters with swifter currents so there's less of the, you know, degradation of the shore of buildup of sea lice and all those issues that were prevalent in the 90s. And, and of course the other big issue that environmentalists and biologists rightly complained about in the early days of, you know, industrial was the use of forage fish, like you know herring, manhaden, shad, Kaplan and so forth to for a fish meal and fish oil to feed farm fish. So people say why are you robbing the ocean of these forage fish that, you know, wild fish eat to, to, you know, feed farm fish. Of course now, you know, so the ratio of wild feed to farm fish used to be like five to one. It's now more one to one. And there are other, you know, alternatives. There is a soil alternatives there are single cell protein alternatives. So, there's less and less of the forage fish being used for that. So that's another kind of major shift in, you know, global farming practices. I mean, how would you there's and I want to talk about more on this chapter as well. But there there is this you know big green revolution but how does that compare to the blue revolution, you know, and, and there's also this controversy between the actual farmers or in the oceans and the science behind it what the scientists are saying and how do those two worlds are they merging together how are they playing together and what do you see emerging. Well, I think, again, it depends where you are in the world I mean, in, you know, places like China they've been farming for centuries and the still that by far the, I think it's 60% of the world's aquaculture is from China. And most of it actually is fresh water not salt water. And I've looked just at salt water. You know, the, you know, the green revolution, you know, in the 60s and 70s started in Mexico and then India and parts of Asia was, you know, just increased wheat and rice yields by two or three times through irrigation and fertilizers and so forth but they kept, you know, ended up degrading the soil, despite the increase because they use they planted the same crops in the same places year after year after year. And then the blue revolution which started in India in the 80s and in other parts of Asia was an aquaculture revolution. And again it the idea there was just increased production, keep increasing the yield and it to made some of the same mistakes as the green revolution in terms of, you know, ripping out mangrove swamps to farm shrimp and overcrowding, you know, freshwater ponds and lakes. Excuse me. I use the term blue revolution, little more broadly so it started as an aquaculture thing in Asia but I say it's kind of shifted to the west and other parts of the world and it's includes including both the wild capture and the farmed fish because some of the technology some of the, you know, behavioral shifts are similar. Anyway, what what the that with the nature Conservancy would say about the blue revolution is that and they of course refer to it as a farming term as well is that farming should be either near shore shellfish and kelp off shore finfish or land based, you know, water tanks. All the new finfish farms in the US now basically are these land based recirculating aquaculture systems, which are basically huge tanks of water that is kind of 95% of which is purified and recirculated and so the jury is still a little bit out on the economics of those systems but it does remove a lot of the issues of the environmental issues from the ocean, and, you know, in a much more controlled environment on land. So they're very high tech kind of wastewater systems or life support systems of highly automated with machine learning and sensors and automatic feeding and so there's probably more you know technology going into the farming than there is into the wild capture at the moment. And you mentioned the scientists and I think that, you know, by and large the people doing the farming. It's very different. They're very different people than the fishermen who are hunters basically, and the farmers are more likely to be entrepreneurs or and or scientists and and younger and any more women I mean obviously in the wild capture hunting the very few women, except in you know artisanal Pacific African fisheries you know near shore, a lot of women but so they're again two very different stories the wild capture and the farm. What do you really see emerging do you see a local blended mix or is it really all all those things need to occur at the same time. Well I mean what are you seeing because we tend to get in the siloed so we find something that works we extract it until it's dead or gone and then we move to the next silo. Do you see that shifting kind of more into ecosystems or into the way we we change not only how we farm but also how how we eat which influences that as well. Yeah well I do think that you know I mentioned earlier that the old saying was that friends don't let friends eat farm fish. I think now, you know and increasingly fish are seen as fish whether they're farmed or wild, and obviously some people still have their biases and their emotional reaction to either or both, but the big shift is getting coastal communities to accept both because in coastal communities that are fishing, you know communities. It's very hard to accept the idea of farm fish coming in. Even if it's not competing directly with the fish that they're catching, but it's like. It's seen as undercutting their territory. I think that there's certainly a lot of that going on in Maine now in the US, which has got, you know, you know, a long history of, you know, lobster and climbing and ground fishing and now the farms are coming in. And so there's a battle for the, you know, spatial planning on the water. There's a battle for the water. There's a battle on land because you know, people don't want it in their backyards so but it's being worked out and I think that it's basically, I think a good thing because for coastal communities, I mean, it's an economic revitalization to have, you know, a new form of science based technology based farming come into, you know, communities as many of which have lost a lot of fishing boats over the last two decades. You know, it would be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of decades but and the other thing about the, the farming it doesn't even have to be on the coast with the recirculating aquaculture systems there's a big salmon farm in Wisconsin one in Indiana, they can be anywhere there's fresh, you know, fresh water, you know, aquaculture. Yeah, I'm saying a lot of that as well and you talk in your in the book as well about rats and some other on shore fish farms basically. There there I want I want to stick with the ecosystem a little bit for for just one more second so in chapter four you talk about eating with the ecosystem you know that there there are abundant and sustainable species. I've been learning more and more or hearing more and more I don't know if I'm, I'm learning I haven't really seen all the numbers and been been able to be but that some people say only sustainable fish to eat as a carp, you know, and things like that and I've heard, I've heard absolutely crazy things. And so sometimes really hard, hard to believe and you've even had some some models you know assume that it's illegal or it's bad, and then prove it wrong that that it is and the end. So what are, are we taking these local cats CSF and, and also both the fishermen into the sustainable fish movement and does it really exist is it not just specific spots of the world but is it emerging all over as well. Well, the, you know it definitely lags behind the foodie local or a movement in the community supported aqua agriculture but it is growing really fast I think now in the US or 500 or more local catch, just, you know drop points and you know as you say that there is more and more emphasis on and demand for fish that is local and fresh, even if that fish is flash frozen and shipped and still considered kind of local and fresh. But that is not kind of your iconic cod shrimp or salmon, but you know, redfish or Pollock or hate or fluke or monkfish or skate. There are all these other species that are very plentiful now, because they've not been sought after by they haven't been high value fish. Their value is increasing now as some of the other fish are declining. And there's certainly a lot of, you know, effort, you know most fish in many, probably in Europe in the US not so much in Africa and Asia but most fish is eaten in restaurants and not cooked at home. So it's a big movement to teach people how to cook these unknown unloved species. And so that movement is definitely, definitely growing and there's more, you know, producers fishermen selling direct to consumers. And of course not everyone is going to want to do that because it's like a different business almost requires. You know, setting up a new system. But that's also another very positive thing because, you know, it connects people to the product and to the person catching or producing their product as opposed to just this global commodity that has traveled the world. So five, 10,000 miles. I mean there's some fish that is, you know, caught in the US frozen shipped overseas for processing refrozen ship back ends up in the supermarket and, you know, it's probably not the best tasting piece of fish and you can find it so I think that's part of the reason. And you talk about the traceability that you're involved with and that was where their fish was coming from. If they could see that traceability blockchain on the packaging, they would, they would think twice they would go down to their local or they'd order even if they lived, you know, that 1000 miles from the ocean they'd order frozen fish, which is interesting thing that you really can't do with vegetables right you can't really freeze and ship vegetables you've got to be on the spot. But the, you know, the fish, you know, the Alaska shipping fish all over the world now and it's, you know, yeah, they are. I remember 20 years ago you know it'd be really exclusive people would take trips up to Alaska to go fishing and bring stuff back and ship it back it's really become a crazy thing now you don't even need to go up there to do it anymore they just you just order it online and they ship it down and and it's just, you know, big other thing that we deal with in our food systems is we're shipping things, exorbitant miles across the world and it's just, just not the best best method that the other thing is is we're shipping stuff that's local elsewhere, thousands of miles just to be processed or refrozen or, you know, and then to just be shipped right back and in regular agriculture, you know, we have commodity crops and things that that you know they'll sell this many potatoes to Russia, and then that many potatoes they'll buy from somewhere else to bring in and it's just not this local food web anymore anymore and it's it's really not I wouldn't say a scandalous but if you cheapen food and you you start out in tons of miles on it is just your cheapening life. I really, you know, and then in this eating, eating like your ecosystem like the fish would eat that I think is is a pretty good model. Have you seen really positive things come out of that I mean they're throughout your book I think there's four or more different just examples of how it's positive. Well, yeah, I mean, you know really changed during the pandemic to I think because, you know, fishermen did not have you know restaurants were closed and that's was kind of where their product went. And they're really kind of interesting and encouraging experimentation going on with selling direct selling right on the docks people coming down to buy right off the boat, or, or, you know, freezing and shipping, selling through local farmers markets which is you know mostly vegetables and other things but fish going into the farmers markets. And often, you know, unusual fish, not, not, you know, so I don't know, you know, Americans are so most of what they eat is some farmed shrimp and salmon from around the world and tuna from around the world. So, that's going to change somehow. Absolutely. Yeah, I live in Hamburg, Germany, which is a harbor town and so there's a lot of, you know, fresh fish markets so every morning, you know, real early I think it starts something like 435 and morning. So, the fish markets open every day and people usually, especially on the weekends they go party and then just party through and then get a you know just go right down to the, to the docks to the fish market and buy, you know, freshly caught fish, but there's a lot of fish markets around here where you can pick out your, your fish is that is that always the freshest when you're, when you're going to these fish. What do they call this fish market I guess is what you call it. Is that the best bit best way to do it. Can we go to a local fish market. Yeah. Yeah, I mean again. It depends on how long the fish has been. How long ago the fish was caught and how well it was handled. I mean, that's the other thing that is really I think changing a bit is people are experimenting with ways to increase, improve the handling of the fish so that it maintains, you know, it's firmness and its taste for longer and that it becomes a higher value product that you can charge more for. So that's the other kind of movement that is, you know, in the post industrial sphere is to increase the value, rather than the volume. Increasing the value of the product, you know, lessens the fishing pressure because you don't have to catch as many fish and it increases the value to the consumer. And of course, that connection is very important. It improves the connection and actually sometimes creates the connection, because people say this is really, you know, high value. In certain places now they're using this technique called Ichigime, the Japanese technique of spinal, you know, tapping to kill quickly so that there's no fight in the fish and it creates a much, you know, better tasting, longer lasting fish. And Iceland is doing something very interesting that is spreading around the world the beginning to is this 100% utilization of fish because, you know, we talked about the waste from bycatch but there's also waste from a, a prize fish, even a codfish, 40% of it is just, you know, you know, innards and bones and head and stuff that is often just thrown away and Iceland is doing an incredible job of developing businesses to use all parts of the fish. And again, that's increasing the value to the fishermen, which reduces the pressure of fishing pressure on the catch. So, is that part of the Iceland Ocean cluster that you talked about in the book? Yes, started by Thor Sigfusson Iceland Ocean cluster. There's now in New England alone there's three ocean clusters that are spin offs of the Iceland one. And I love that. Yeah. In fact, there was a new bill just introduced in Congress a couple of weeks ago, requiring that Department of Commerce to develop ocean clusters in every region of the country. So, I don't know if that bill will pass but it's clearly an idea that is gaining currency. Yeah, it's also, what's, it's kind of this localization idea is the fish available, is it fresh, it's these local, this, it's almost like local economies around, around fish and fishing, which I really like. And just about 20 years ago I used to live in, or maybe even more than 20 years ago in Beverly, Massachusetts the same thing, get a lot of lobster and fresh fish there. And one thing my family used to like easy salmon burgers and they were, you know, they were mixed of obviously salmon and for like salmon, I'm like, yes, I don't know some kind of salmon. And they, but they only had them certain amount of times and you really had to go down and it was you just knew okay well if I get there soon enough or if I call on the phone and say save me some, you're going to have them, but it wasn't always available it wasn't, you know, it wasn't saying that you could just say nope I'm always going to have it available and you also back then paid a premium for it and I like these, these ocean waters and that you say okay well no it's not always going to be available and it depends on where you live and where you're at in the world. And I think that will also allow the time for the industry and our oceans to kind of regenerate and recoup and kind of restore some of these where we're having bycatch problem or overfishing and where it's creating a lot of a lot of problems around the world so I love that. So there are us clusters ocean clusters kind of emerging what you what you're saying, but there's another kind of thing that you go into in chapter one where you talk about this cod survey technique and which has also been derived from the scallop survey technique. And so it's such a complex system with specific on the type of seafood or, or shellfish that you're talking about on what you what you use that are emerging that you use. You almost have to be a scientist to understand it all what what. And I guess you specifically spoke about Kevin Stokesby. So, how is that technology or the technique emerging and is, you know, that's that's this. You also talked about the Japanese way of killing and handling fish that how do we find out about these besides reading your book how does just the regular consumer know where the sustainable fisheries and sources and clusters are Well, you know, a lot of people have relied on the Monterey Bay Aquarium they've got a little. I think I've got one of my wall out a little cheat sheet on which fish are sustainable so the Kevin Stokesbury who is a scientist that you mass school for marine science and technology started out in, you know, in the late 90s when the scallop grounds were basically closed. Dragging underwater cameras at the bottom of the sea floor to take pictures and to show the clusters of scallops developing and it allowed the, the, the regulators to say okay. And they work, he worked with Noah and the regulators on this and they had different survey techniques, but allowed them to open up the beds and to see, you know, the scallops were of, you know, mature adult size and could be taken versus the small or where they were proliferating or not and but it's obviously easier with scallops which don't really move you just drag a camera on the bottom you can see them and you You know, it's much more difficult with, you know, fin fish that are swimming. So what he's done there is a similar technique but he's got a troll net that is open ended on both ends. So you're not capturing the fish the fish is swimming through the net and their cameras in the net. You record the fish going through and this is what I was referring to earlier, then there's a machine learning algorithm that, you know, identifies the species and the size and so forth. And so it's another way of surveying the stock without doing the deep water troll or without dragging up the fish. And the hope there is, and they're now, you know, say 350 boats into Bedford harbour and a lot of them have got sensors on them to detect, you know, the salinity at the oxygen level, the acidity of the ocean and connect that to where they're finding the fish. And so the combination of that and the, the camera technique I just described, you know, eventually they're hoping that is just would be a way for people to as they're fishing to see what is coming into the net. Connect it to the ocean, you know, characteristics of that spot, which will help them target, you know, the fish they're looking for, rather than just fishing randomly and filling their nets with. So that will help the bycatch that will put the target on on the on the right species and will also give people better it will be a more efficient way to fish the fishermen will have more data, you know, that that really gets us into a couple other things so we're we're we're moving to or what what has emerged farmed. Fish, sailfish, sea greens aquaculture is really one of the fastest growing forms of food production in the world right now and it's just everybody's got it on their tongue and really talking about it. Also Atlantic salmon farming is big in this race that we've kind of tickled upon and that can you help us understand that I mean people people hear about it we hear. You know that that they're doing it I've been involved in some of them as well but most people are just kind of they don't know about it they don't know that there's these other types and and is it controversial as we hear. The rest is not. I don't think it's that controversial. There have been some communities that don't want, you know, plants built in their neighborhoods but that's a different people don't like change in their neighborhoods. No matter what it is. It's not as controversial as the original salmon farming in Norway which had all kinds of problems. The RAS actually solves a lot of the problems that takes it out of the ocean. There's no chance of escapement you know there was all that always that fear that farm fish would escape and then breed or introgress with wild fish and reduce their survival skills and so it solves all those problems and I think the real issue is just the economics of it there it's a lot can go wrong with these systems right there huge life support systems and you know the salmon take two or three years to grow out. You got to keep them alive for a long time. And you've got you know you start them in freshwater which salmon spawn in and then they go into salt water so you've got two different systems there. It's really the economics for the, you know, for the for the for the operator, you know, it's uses a lot of electricity a lot of water. And if something goes wrong, you can lose a lot of fish fast. So, I think I love that you bring that up so I do a lot with vertical farming or what we call controlled environmental agriculture is very, it's very similar. I also do a lot with cellular agriculture which is kind of lab grown lab based meat. So I love the concept of brass recirculating fish and and having these fisheries that in theory are kind of a controlled environment of growing fish. And the things that you just said are spot on high energy costs, high operation costs because the system has to be pretty robust as a freshwater tank and salt water tank. How do you feed them, then there's also different in controlled environment or agriculture that pathogens that come in they could have pests that come in they could have mold come in the system well the same thing can happen in the system as well. The thing that I really like that I'm not seeing emerging in these new innovations and technologies like grass or like controlled environmental agriculture vertical farming is that no one is really doing it 100% the right way, which, I mean, I believe strongly, if we use renewable energy, we use battery backups, we, we harvest our own rainwater or an ambient water for the fresh water, we get some salt water, and do the things in a controlled environment, like grass or vertical farming or controlled environment or agriculture to keep the pathogens out to maintain that they're not overcrowded that they're not getting these things that that occur. It's actually a better business model, because you don't have that high overhead you're not paying high, high prices for your water for your energy for your storage because it's a closed system, and it's generating which reduces your costs of goods sold, so that you can be competitive at a market. I know a lot of razz operations that are charging a pretty premium price for their products because of that high setup that high initial costs and there's a sweet spot of scale on on some of these operations and a high turnout requirements so that they can recoup that initial setup that process but if they chose a different model I think it would be a different system and so I love that you bring that up but have you seen any any transitions in this area where with those who say hey, you know it's an it's an all it's a resilient way to do it on land to not mess with with our oceans, but there are some better models of doing it more effectively. Well, I mean they're all talking about, you know, using solar panels and biofuels to run their plants, because they realize the electricity is a huge, huge issue. Another thing that's really encouraging I think is, you know, the beginning of hydroponics, you know, using some of the fish water, then to go into the greenhouses to grow vegetables, which is they're doing in Wisconsin, huge, you know leafy green greenhouses with. Yeah, they call that aquaponics systems that I love hydroponics yeah the aquaponics aquaponics right. Yes, and there's one in the steelhead farm in New York State that is growing hemp that way, which is a higher value crop than a leafy green vegetable. But so I in that also, you know improves the economics of the systems, and you know, you know from a food perspective, it's great because you know in fact the guy in John Eng in Hudson Valley Farms in New York State says that you know what he's doing he could do anywhere he could basically do it in a desert. Because once you only need a certain amount of water and once you've got that you can just keep reusing it, and you can you can grow all kinds of stuff you can grow the fish and all kinds of other vegetables or hemp or anything. And so that's kind of a, you know, a brave new world a brave new idea I mean you know I think Israel is probably doing things like that in their desert. Absolutely. Yeah. You have a chapter that's after one of the old books of that's close to my heart fish for a small planet. Yeah, you know, Francis more lapis she's also been on the podcast. She wrote the book diet for a small planet and I think it's, it's so true fish for a small small planet how do we do it different how do we use RAS how do we use other other opportunities that are more regenerative more sustainable and you know the reason I use that title for that chapter is because Josh Goldman who started the first RAS in the US to grow Barry Mundy in the early 90s was a head read diet for a small planet in high school. He had that kind of mindset. And then he was working with this group called, or he was influenced by this group called bio shelters, which again is kind of like the holistic closed system that you're talking about. But he was doing it as a college student he was doing it in this greenhouse he was growing tilapia, I think to begin with, and then he. He ended up he's in Vietnam now he's and he's kind of gone from the RAS which is still in operation in Massachusetts. He's also doing Barry Mundy in the ocean, it off Vietnam. So, he's had quite a interesting aquaculture, aquaculture career. And do you would you call that more of like a movement into a more regenerative or permaculture type of practice but on the seas I mean where he's now doing it in a different way or is that just far. The farm fishing in in the seas are off the coast where they quarantine off these. Yeah, well he does. He does the spawning on land and tanks, and you know getting fish up to certain size or age, then puts them in net pens in the ocean. And I think, you know, you know the high cost that we're just talking about. It's one of the issues and one of the reasons he made the switch is because you know, obviously in the ocean you don't have those high costs of electricity. You have other issues you have to be able to monitor it and get to it and so forth but so I think part of it was just the business model. He felt to scale the way he wanted to scale. It would be more efficient to farm in the ocean rather than on land. Yeah, he asked him about that, but I think that was his rationale. I love that. Yeah. There may be kind of think about another another kind of not innovation but another great organization the crab bank in Thailand. Have you heard about any of those that have these great crab banks in Thailand they were losing all their crabs and blue crabs and it was just bad and it was also affecting tiger sharks and kind of having a ripple effect in their local fishing areas and their biodiversity, which is kind of like a real intricate web. What they would do is whenever the fisherman and the crab catchers would go out and catch a crab that had obviously was very visible that they had a bunch of eggs they would bring them to the crab bank and they had all these paint buckets that with bubbling water and they would keep them in there until they're ready to hatch. And then as they're ready to hatch they kind of go out to a protected area and they release you know millions of millions of eggs at a time, and it's really brought back the entire ecosystem of that area in Thailand because it's off of I think it's Chantaburi or yeah it's the name of the place Chantaburi in Thailand is the location but it's a fabulous project and it's really just done a lot for the locals for the whole community to have projects like that so I really love that. We you touch upon it a little bit but not not quite a bit. A lot of our problems are created now with plastics pure ocean water phytoplankton being being an issue, but also how much algae and kelp and and muscles and oysters can really clean up our not only our air and our oceans and do a lot of good and create other project products that that's all kind of emerging out and you talk about scallops and all all sorts of scallops, muscles, oysters, clams and other things. And that's a whole nother web that's that's opening up and so I want to go into that but I kind of want to caveat at first with a question. You did a lot for MIT and MIT back in 1972 came out with the books, the limits to growth, and Donella Meadows Dennis Meadows who lives kind of close to Hampton, New Hampshire is close to Boston Massachusetts. Your granders and Steve parents who worked at MIT on the world model three which is a systems model thing and the systems thinking concept and and the webs and later created a lot of dynamic models on fisheries on seafood webs and how the inputs the stock takes in those was any that since you did some work at MIT or any of that was that kind of an influence for you to see this bigger web of things going on in your work in that. Well, no, not really. But I did start thinking about, you know, fishing in general as a very complex system itself, you know, much more complex than the average person thinks it is because they just react to overfishing or bad but it's a very complex system and once you begin to tweak one part of it. You inevitably affect other parts of it. So the MIT work I've heard of that I've never studied that or read that, but I did start to think of fishing in both farmed and wild as very complex systems that could to have, you know, unintended consequences. And you know one being in I mentioned earlier just the consolidation, you know the regulations and the quotas that have been good for the fish in terms of protecting the resource have been bad for the fishermen, and because it's, they're losing boats, they, they, they don't get quota they can't afford the permits and so. That's an example of, you know, making a change to a system that affects, you know, the people in the system. Yeah, so the. Yeah, the shellfish and the kelp that you mentioned as you know I mentioned the nature conservancy said that 70% of the marine or the mariculture is by valves and kelp and it's very restorative. You know, it cleans up near shore waters that excess nitrogen and kelp is a buffer against CO2 and absorb CO2. And there've been in, you know, main muscle farmers will tell you that growing kelp and muscles together or in close proximity, the muscle shells are much stronger because they grow faster, because they're not getting this, the acidity is being absorbed by the kelp. And it means the meats grow plumper and faster, because the acidity is a major concern on shell building, and more so with muscles and oysters even it's a thinner shell. And, you know, there are worries that the phytoplankton, you know, they're small organic I mean micro organism, like vegetable matter at the bottom of the seafood chain of the food chain in the ocean. You know the phytoplankton are eaten by the zoa plankton are eaten by the little forage fish are eaten by the bigger fish. The phytoplankton are declining in numbers, and they have less energy than they used to, and by energy meaning energy from the sun because they use photosynthesis. They absorb carbon dioxide, and they have chlorophyll, they emit oxygen more than 50% of the world's oxygen comes from these little miniscule organisms and so there's a worry that with climate change. There's less upwelling of nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to feed the phytoplankton. There's less energy than being transferred into the forage fish less energy transferred into the larger fish. Yeah, so the whole climate change thing is, you know, is another issue that we talk about is one of the global challenges which are this kind of confounding. I mean it's challenge for all walks of life and regions but obviously big impact on the oceans to the warmer water holds less oxygen and makes it harder for large fish in particular to swim. And at a time when they need to exert more energy to get their food because it's less energy in the foods. So it's a kind of confounding cycle. I spoke to you about my book menu B and asked for your advice and thank you by the way on on on some things around fishing some some other authors and experts. One big aspect is our global food systems very has this complexity and the systems in it, but more and more it's this big web of life that's always interconnected to to many other parts of the world many other parts of the ocean and land as well and there's even so much land and desk storms and tropical storms over the Amazon that really also through diatoms feed those phytoplankton feed the oceans create the blue algae is create these blooms and the oceans that really you see this big cycle of life moving around that's not just only in the blue part of our world but also in the sand part of our world that seeds clouds causing them to rain and then drop that food and nutrients back into the oceans and into the water to feed phytoplankton and to create diatoms to create algae blooms to create the feeding frenzy for fish or to create food for fish and we sometimes don't see that big connection of these complex web systems but how much we're affecting that through the in this Anthropocene that we're in by human actions the way we we treat the world. You know some recent studies matter of fact it was just yesterday. I heard that you know every day or every week we're eating about a credit card worth of plastic every week, just in the food that we eat and that they found plastic in human blood now and things like that. We definitely know it's in our oceans and degrading turning into micro plastic and that the seafood can't distinguish it from phytoplankton for micro plankton or plastic and so somehow it's getting into our food system in that big chain of life. That is something that you know I didn't address that in the book I thought about it a couple of times but I was having enough trouble keeping up with anything else. But I know for some people they won't eat fish because they say there's micro plastics out there and I don't want to eat it. Yeah and there was a lot of talk about it at the North American seafood expo that I went to last month and yeah it's clearly a huge issue and again it's kind of like climate change. I mean how you know what has been done is going to take 50 years even if everything stopped today would be another 50 years probably at least of dealing with the kind of downstream effects. So yeah absolutely it's not just I mean don't ever want to blame it all on the fish or that because it's also the animal agriculture. And a lot of our grains and feedstock believe it or not they're taking old food waste, bread packages and many other things with the plastic still on it and they're just grinding it up and putting it into animal feed and those animals are eating that. And so there's just bad practices out there that aren't sustainable they're not regenerative they're bad farming practices they're driven by low cost of high per industrial production of food or fishing wherever it is. And I love what your book brings out is this really this shift and let's get it digitized let's get it into the information age let's have some accountability some measurability some transparency where we can see what's happening and let's let the not put the onus on the consumer, but let's have them make the choice of what they want to eat where they got want to get up which should push more value and more local profitability and profitability to those industries in that market they say no our consumers will pay more for a better product one that's not full of bad bad practices. And kind of do that reformation or change the way we do it, because in the end effect it's really about the long term sustainability or regeneration of those supply changes of those products. Keep doing this extractive and let's just over fish and and bycatch and deplete until nothing's left and nothing's left. So we've got to figure out how can we work in that ecosystem to to to make sure it's around for future generations of humanity in a good way. Because fish is when it's done right and when it's when it's not full of plastics or bad things and it's a beautiful thing to have you know so. And I love the fact that you also mentioned, let's teach people how to cat to cook and do these other species that they've probably never heard of before because they're used to fish sticks and cod or certain types of salmon or or trout but they've never tried Victoria Barsh or wrote Barsh or, you know, many, many other fabulous types of fish. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right that the, you know, the consumer. It's so easy to put the blame on the producers all the time and producers obviously don't do everything right but the consumer has a big role to play in this as well right it's it's the other side of the equation and it's the demand that drives the production and if the demand is for a different product, it will force a different type of production. And so, then it I guess is a question of education and information and you know, getting the word out and so forth but yeah, we've seen it happen in the in the in the land based agriculture so hopefully it will happen and is happening in the ocean based aquaculture as well. So you also one of your chapters the Holy Grail of farming the open seas you talk about you know what the United States is doing what kind of equipment and sensors what kind of regulations are there what federal agencies are in charge of farming and federal waters. That's complex in itself but there's this thing you talk about the seafood print metric. How does that compare to the carbon footprint metric that we've kind of heard and heard a lot about. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Well that is from Daniel Pauley and the sea around us at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver. And Daniel Pauley is you know one of the world's leading most esteemed marine biologist who always has interesting ways of looking at the world and framing the issues and So he says that basically, the seafood print is a way of measuring the amount of fish that you're if you eat a pound of the way he puts it is a pound of tilapia is very different than a pound of tuna. The pound of tuna has at the top of the food chain, the tuna has eaten so many other, you know, types of fish have gone into that pound of tuna, whereas the tilapia is like a herbivore, basically at the very close to the bottom of the food chain. So, and he's, you know, he says that Americans really are, I don't know if they're leading the world but they're close to the top of the world in the seafood print, because we like the high, the, the fish that are high in the food chain. You know, the tuna and the salmon, the real carnivores. Yeah. So that's an interesting way of looking at it. I agree. And, and I mean his, his point because he's very always very cognizant of the impact and other parts of the world and artisan artisanal Fisher, Fisher ease and Fisher people. You know, and that if, if the rich countries are sucking all this huge, you know, amount of seafood with every bite, it's just taking away from other, you know, people in other parts of the world. And so it's a, he's a very innovative thinker in that regard. And the last kind of book, you know, and some respects could be a little bit depressing question that I have for you is really, how does the level of marine extinctions compare to our terrestrial extensions to put that into perspective for our audience since we usually don't see what's underwater so Right. Well, there have been no marine extinctions in the last 50 years, scientists say, although they also say that a lot of the data is deficient because there's a lot going on in the ocean that we don't know about. The way they phrase it is that we're kind of at the stage of marine extinctions are at the stage that terrestrial extinctions were at in the Pleistocene era, I believe. You know, when, when people first really started hunting and and eradicating species. So that itself is kind of positive and if you look at the beginning of the industrial revolution, where terrestrial extinctions were really accelerated after the industrial revolution. So the fear is that, you know, if the ocean is industrialized with, you know, wind power and seabed mining and whatever else that it could create a surge of extinctions. But for the moment, it's it's positive. Yeah, it sounds very heavy out that the data is deficient and so merits. Yeah, I'm sure there's also, you know, ocean acidification and the bleaching and the, you know, the warming and things and, you know, but we we don't we don't fully know what all the effects of that could be or will be and how that will play out. But I've also seen some real positive things where they've seen some smaller local ecosystems bounce back like I was telling you with the crab bank and then some other areas. So that's nice to hear. You know, the other thing is that it fish have shown to have an incredible capacity to rebuild. There's lots of examples of it if you leave them alone and stocks will rebuild and ocean deserts will come back to life. You know, there's a capo pulmo and Panama is one example it was just kind of nothing happening and now it's like a tropical underwater jungle. And I love that in 20 years. That's positive. I think that's a big difference between ocean conservation so to say if we want to use that term and land conservation so what we've seen in holistic land management and land conservation. When we quarantine or border off an error and preserve it and that, that we, we, we need some of that movement and interaction of herds and animals to leave their dung in their manure and, and to kind of put down that to get the soil back up to health, but that's actually a positive thing that whereas we quarantine humans and animals and into these preserves that they actually don't see a huge uptake and an increase of, of land fertility or that place comes back in thrice whereas in the oceans I think it's a much different beast that there's not really like, I think that that ecosystem still preserved if we just leave it untouched for a while, probably bounce back have the ability to bounce back in some respects. I hope and that's why you know there's all these kind of ideas and initiatives to put X% of the ocean into conservation close the fishing and there's now 8% is kind of in these kind of no take reserve zones. But the hope is to get up to 30% by 2030 but that seems like a stretch. But, you know, I mean, it, and some people talk about closing off all the high seas, all the areas outside of, you know, every country is exclusive zone. Daniel Paul is one of those who would like to close off all the high seas the fishing, and he claims that it wouldn't really change the world catch by that much because. I would probably act as a refuge and give fish an opportunity to adapt to climate change among other things. If they weren't trying to escape hunters and capture, they could put their energy into adaptation. Yeah, I love that. That's nice. I have three questions left for you. This one is probably the hardest one that I give you. I'm kind of tied to the book but it's not as more your personal view. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you. Well, I mean, you know that is a tough question. Well, I think, you know, a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about before is that this connection between producers and consumers. I think that if, you know, and there was more of a two way street between the producer and the consumer, and more of an understanding of one another that things would be a lot better, you know, you can see with some companies like Patagonia and companies like that where there's, you know, the consumer and the producer are kind of on the same wavelength. And that creates a, you know, better products, more, it's more sustainable, less destructive. And so, I think that would be a starting point. Thank you. That's great. So the last three questions are our last two questions are really, you know, if there was one message that you could depart all to all my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that had the power to change our life. What would it be your message and it's okay if it's more than one message but what's kind of your takeaway and when you write these books and in the work that you do that you want to depart to people. As a sustainable takeaway that changed your life. Well, I think you know that is really to just to try to understand, you know, as you say, systems more and because I think a lot of people jump to conclusions about things in the world or the state of affairs in the world, without really knowing how things get to where they are and why they are the way they are. It just seems like that people could step back a little bit and and really try to think about, you know, the producers, the supply chain, the, the other, the other half of the equation that it would kind of illuminate their view of the world. And it's a hard thing to do right because who's who's you know in a daily busy life you're not going to try to understand large complex systems. But you can actually not take everything at face value and jump to conclusions which I think is what you know is human nature and is more often the case than not. You think you've been more at an advantage with coming kind of from the innovation side of things in some respects or at least reporting on that and also your work from MIT to kind of get a little bit more of this platforms I mean for technology or all run on platforms which is a very systemic type of a model systems type of a model. Do you think that helps you at all. Well, it probably does. I mean I guess, you know, because I've done a lot of writing about and thinking about entrepreneurship and technology and I guess if you think about, you know, the entrepreneurs who are creating great new things are really doing deep thinking about, you know, what is good and what will help the world. And so, so maybe some of that has rubbed off I don't I don't know, but I, it is a different, you know, people who are trying to create new things from scratch is very exciting right and especially if they're trying to create new things from scratch that are, you know, going to have really positive impact on, you know, large numbers of people. Yeah, I agree most of the pioneers or innovators I've seen are ones who are are solving a problem that they're struggling or suffering with as well they're like I just, it's not working for me anymore I need to, I need to fix that and create a new system. They've all been really super, super innovations that have come about that have really started to help billions of people. The last question is, what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start. Hmm. I would have liked to have you know this again is kind of gets back to what I was just saying in terms of word worldview about you know how to think about the world. I would have liked to have been more engaged with the world at large the international world. I would have liked to have been more younger age because like I like I have been the last 20 years but if you know, because it definitely gives you a different perspective on on issues and a different way of thinking about things and yes, your, your assumptions about things because you see them from another person's perspective. Love that. Nicholas, thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas it's been a shared pleasure. It's all the hard grilling questions I have for you. The blue revolution what a wonderful book, like I said I read it twice. It was really good it's an eye opener. It's also very hopeful I'm optimistic because I read it because I can see all the great things that are that are emerging and coming out there and if we just continue that ripple effect that voice that they are working they are are positive there's other different better systems out there available. It's not all doom and gloom that maybe we can spread that so that everybody is using those effective systems that they're learning there are other options and things to do that new technologies that will really put us on the right side of history when it comes to seafood our oceans and the way we do that. Thank you very much. Thank you Mark so much thank you for reading the book and I'm glad you liked it and thanks for having me on your, your podcast, your video podcast and I hope you stay in touch. Thank you so much. Bye bye.