It Can Be Done Live: The Future of Our Seas

[Music] hi everyone we are so pleased to welcome you to it can be done live my name is nate kasmerick i am vice president and director of the regulatory transparency project for the federal society this special virtual panel is the first in a four part series of movie premiere panels for the great new film they say it can't be done i hope you've all had a chance to watch the movie you've liked it and you've recommended it to your family and friends of these movie premiere panels tonight and the next three thursdays are co-sponsored by rtp and the creators of the movie just add firewater tonight we're excited to be talking about the future of our seas we've gathered a great group to discuss important topics raised by the film and explore many aspects of safety innovation and policy around the future of our oceans please introduce tonight our moderator her name is kim hermann kim is general counsel for southeastern legal foundation an atlanta-based constitutional public interest law firm and policy center slf advocates for individual liberty rule of law and government accountability in the court of law and public opinion kim earned her bs and masters in accounting with wake forest university and her jd from georgia state college of law i'm also happy to say that kim is very involved in rj's state and local working group and we're grateful for all that she does for us in a moment i'll turn it over to kim who will introduce our speakers and guide this program once our panel has had ample time for discussion we'll go to audience q a so please think of the questions you'd like to ask and send them along by the chat function on your screen with that kim everyone thank you very much i'll turn it over to you thanks nate um what we're going to do tonight is first i'm going to go ahead and introduce our panel we've got an amazing uh lineup here tonight and then i'm going to give them a chance just to kind of give you each an introduction to themselves and their involvement in the film i hope you've all had a chance to watch it and um if so you're familiar with all of their their faces um and their work on on the film so let's kick it off right now um first we've got scotty schmidt he is the co-founder and ceo of primary ocean providers uh he is featured in the film as is primary ocean it is a public benefit corporation that is working to reverse climate change through seaweed cultivation and commercialization primary ocean is farming the oceans for seaweed and taking seaweed to farm to draw down co2 regenerate eroded soils and increase food crop production scottie graduated from texas a m and he has extensive startup operating financial and managerial experience he has also helped to found numerous other companies in a range of industries next up we've got julie friedman steel she is the ceo and board chair of the world future society it is an organization recognized as the largest most influential and longest-running community of future thinkers in the world with a background in education artificial intelligence and technology entertainment science and child advocacy julie is working to realize the vision that utilizing a futurist mindset in education will change the world she studied at boston university berkeley college of music and stanford university next up we will have professor tom bell tom is a professor a consultant a scholar and a processing attorney told you our lineup is pretty amazing he joined the faculty of fowler law school at chapman university in 1998 where he specializes in high-tech legal issues and has written a variety of works on intellectual property and internet law he is also the academic director of the institute for competitive governance and works to promote a better way to government he received his jaden from the university of chicago law school and after he practiced law in silicon valley in washington dc as well as serving as policy director at the cato institute finally not least we have patrick reason over he is with just add firewater films and he is the lead producer on they say it can't be done he graduated from emory university here in atlanta where i am broadcasting live from and he um has been developing film and television projects and writing he's produced more than 300 live-action documentary and animated content for corporations industry and non-profits over the last 10 years so with that i am going to go ahead and pass it over to scotty if he wants to give a little bit more of an introduction and his initial take on the film sure thank you kim and thank you to the firewater team and federalist society and all the panelists tonight and everybody who's uh joining us out in cyberspace um before i introduce myself further in our company um and get into the big question of the night what's the future of our season oceans i thought i'd take the time to actually introduce our global ocean um i thought it might be a good foundational starting point for our conversation to uh you know take a look at the ocean as an entity itself and what is it what does it mean to us and the ocean essentially it's our planet or 70 percent of it anyway uh including 90 percent of all the planets have habitable spit habitable space it's our it's our lungs the ocean generates 50 percent of our oxygen on the planet it's our thermostat and our climate regulator the ocean absorbs 30 percent of all human caused co2 and 90 of the heat from the sun it's our food source it supplies more than 25 of the world's protein it's our commerce highway 95 of global trade is in shipping lanes and ocean lanes as well as e-commerce as we've got thousands and tens of thousands of miles of of internet cables uh below it it's a global economy if the ocean were an economy itself it'd be the seventh largest economy in the world it's our frontier only five to ten percent of the ocean has been explored and of two million estimated species in the oceans only ten percent of those have been scientifically identified so we don't know what kind of pharmaceutical compounds metals or other discoveries are waiting out there for us unfortunately it's also our dump the ocean as i mentioned absorbs 30 of our anthropogenic co2 our agrochemicals fertilizers pesticides end up in the oceans and 8 million tons of our plastics end up in the oceans so it's our friend we haven't treated it well but you know i think here tonight we're here to talk about solutions and what is the future of our ocean and for me i think the future is adaptive resource and environmental management and that's where primary ocean comes in um primary ocean is a member of the macro systems us department of energy team researching offshore seaweed cultivation systems for biofuels our specific role is technology to market contractor uh we're looking for the most viable markets economically and environmentally for our seaweed resource um at the moment we're working as kim mentioned on agricultural inputs converting our seaweed into fertilizers to stop the ills of agrochemicals but the use cases go on and on and we'll save some of that for the discussion later great thanks scotty uh next i'm gonna go ahead and pass it on over to julie if you want to give us a little bit more on your role in the film and what it is that you do exactly yeah you know the the this was a very interesting film to work on because i got to work with uh said firewater in the beginning when they were doing their research and talking to them about the future of whatever it may be as it relates to innovation versus regulation and we were what we were seeing was such a fast pace an innovation and a lag of regulation and i remember talking to them in the very beginning about what this would be like and how this would look and and and what are the things to take a look at and i really enjoyed uh the entire just ed firewater team and i was really you know kind of taken aback by the federalist society you know not really knowing a ton about them but then really realizing oh wow you know they're really thinking big here and this is this is really important and the fact that they underwrote this was a huge deal because it wasn't something that i would have expected and uh the freedom that i gave to just said fire water to create a film such as this one and if you watch the film and i hope everybody has seen the film and if not i hope you watch it tonight after this uh crowdcast or at whatever convenient time it is for you to watch it was it was one of the most well done films as it relates to all of these different innovations and regulations i'm excited to uh be a part of the ocean conversation because i completely agree with scotty on everything you said as it relates to what role this ocean plays in our world and a lot of times we don't think about it when you think about the blue planet what is the blue planet it's because you see the ocean not because you see land you see an ocean and that's why the earth is called the blue planet and so when we think of what is the ocean capable of and what is it turning into and how can we utilize it and what is it going to become i mean these are all unbelievable questions that are happening right now and so you know there's a couple of things that i'm you know more passionate about than others but there's nothing that i'm not passionate about i mean if there's something to do with the ocean or there's something to do with the future of humanity i'm a part of it you know i'm super interested in what we become and how we're going to utilize this based on the facts and you know the no knowns and the known unknowns as it relates to the future of humanity and so there's a couple of things that i think are really interesting one is that the movie covered which was agriculture in the uh in the ocean and and looking at agriculture as not only something that feeds humans but also creates additional oxygen and takes out carbon dioxide and so i thought that was extremely interesting that the film covered as it relates to food sources and uh you know in terms of what's occurring on land as food sources we have uh you know unbelievable factory farms that are cruel beyond on you know beyond belief and that is what we're having uh issues with as it relates to pandemics and jumping in terms of zoonotic diseases on land uh not so much if we're looking at kelp as kelp as as a food source uh you know if you look at fishing and fisheries and netting uh you know that's a very different form of using the ocean and depleting it of all of its resources the other area that you know the other two areas that i think are really interesting as it relates to the ocean is base metals we think about uh you know every electronic we have the fact that you are even tuned in today is because you are using base metals and that is because of mining and mining is extremely interesting as we strip mined a lot of our planet so we look at like well what do we do next how do we address this issue well the ocean happens to have a floor of base metals that is unbelievably rich and this is a hot topic as it relates to is this okay to go and get the metals is it okay to mine the ocean for metals and who's in charge of it we don't know is it is it the u.n is it each nation is it nations together when there's no regulatory aspect to the ocean floor uh this is a huge deal and the batteries of all you know big electric car news all the time well where are those where's those base metals coming from in electric cars and that is going to be the ocean otherwise you're looking at strip mining the planet again or you're going to asteroids and i gotta say i don't know how easy it's going to be to go to an asteroid get the metals off of it and bring it back to the planet you know that's not the lowest hanging fruit i think the ocean is the lowest hanging fruit of what's next and it provides a huge opportunity for us i want to say we have this issue as it relates to sea level rise it's affecting many millions of people today and it's happening in amsterdam and the amsterdam knows it's occurring they've got sinkholes all over the place and they just do this this thing like oh well hopefully it'll be okay there's no future proofing if you look at miami we know that's that not working we have new orleans it's below sea level like really are we really going to build this again no you can't build this again the land is gone there's there's no shortage of history that shows us the erosion of our lands and so what are we gonna do and i think that there's a significant amount of how are we going to live when our land disappears and how do we use the ocean as a place to build up habitable environments and not just think about it as boating you know this is a whole nother land in which we are doing this again i see mary a great comment on on houston is a swamp and uh and and when we see a storm surge we're like 30 miles in on storm surge oh my god that's like all these i can't tell you how many people that millions and millions of people without their homes because of sea level rise and so the ocean is only growing in this extent and i think that you know what we're looking at is so many different aspects that the sea can not only destroy but also provide and it's both both are true and i'd like to look at both of them as it relates to all aspects of the future of humanity and utilizing our oceans to advance ourselves versus destroy ourselves great um that was i gives us a lot a lot of information to talk about and i think we're going to touch on a lot of those topics julie so i'm glad that you've introduced them thank you you did a lot of my work for me um as we get into the discussion so that was great i got your back thank you um i'll leave leave it to the experts um speaking of let me pass it on over um to tom and he was also in the movie and so um your take on being involved in the movie and um whatever introduction you'd like to give our watchers today thank you kim i i want to follow scotty's lead and in saying thank you to the federalist society and i'm really happy to see my old friend patrick he's an old buddy working with my new friend nathan at federal society it's just great to see uh just add firewater and the federal society to great organizations doing doing great work so if you haven't seen the film go watch the film uh the thing i'm happy about personally is a lot of the time when i'm talking they're doing these really cool cartoony things it's kind of like stop motion photography kind of like claymation it's just really fun and i don't usually with academic stuff you know get to have cartoons so it's a fun film very well done and daniel wow it's uh artistic and technically very well done so go see it and i want to share with you some thoughts that i had um about the film both in the production and then afterwards watching it and then talking with my my colleagues here first is i want you to understand uh that although the film has a critical take on the effects of regulation on innovation at sea and elsewhere it really kind of it doesn't end happily i think the ultimate ending will be happy but the film because it has to work with government time can't end happily in the story about people trying to innovate it at sea to create new foodstuffs and better protections for the environment all the stuff that my colleagues have been talking about here and the government you know the people here aren't evil and they're not really dumb but it's like a like a big robot that is viewing the world through you know tubes and has these big clumsy fingers and that's what the government is like when it gets into these areas where you got to be nimble you got to be creative red tape and creativity don't mix so the lesson is not government bad unless it's kind of you know government unintentionally is kind of like not well fitted not well sized for the problems that innovators face and they have a lot of problems technical problems sure but you know just all over the place they got to get financing for example it's hard to get financing when you're an innovator people kind of say that's a new thing i don't don't want to bet on that all kinds of problems they don't need red tape too so what can we do the film offers some ideas in that area one thing certainly is we got to be more creative generally in governance right we got to be able to try new things i want to say something a film doesn't really doesn't get into but hopefully gets you interested in these topics and that that is to say in a lot of these cases property rights will work property rights will make things better one of the reasons i think innovators in california off our coast i'm looking at the ocean right now i heard all these this praise about how much we love the ocean okay i don't mean to go you one better but i love the ocean okay i love the ocean in fact i got a thing i don't know if you saw the guitars i take my guitar down to the ocean if it's a nice day and the sun is setting it's not raining and i play on the beach trail as the sun is setting and i'm looking at the ocean ah so i love the ocean and i'm not afraid of innovators screwing it up if i'm not saying what they do should be unregulated but if they're free to innovate within parameters so the film doesn't get into solutions it says oh man regulation doesn't work well innovators are suffering let's talk a little bit a little bit about what might be done so one of my kind of uh second jobs is working on special jurisdictions and i talk about it in this book and in fact i am also the legal a legal advisor i think i'm the only one they talk too much because i hear from a lot too the sea setting institute the sea setting institute's california uh organization that seeks to to get people living on the ocean and i've worked with my friend there that president joe quirk we've been to french polynesia been there a couple times uh more recently panama and things are working in panama and so one thing we can do to increase innovation is create new legal and regulatory environments that will allow innovators the freedom they need and i'll tell you i i know more actually probably about aquatic uh innovation in panama because of my visits there than i do off our california coast because i've been to the site in panama on the north coast of uh ocean blue which runs the largest open water fish farms big big floating subsea cages literally cages they have to be because they come up and they sharks will gnaw on them i've seen what the sharks can do they had some out in the work area and they put cobia in there and how can they do that why aren't they here panama said to them you know here's a concession area the panamanian government was willing to invite in this innovation and yes there are parameters they got to work within but they didn't just come out of the gate saying prove to us that you know you have a good idea that it won't do anything wrong then uh you know okay you should have some tests i don't know where good luck it's just not easy to work through this government and last thing i'll say is um that uh we can do more of that at home so so i want you to understand i think the message of the film is we can do better it's mostly about america we can do better here in america we should do better here in america it's a little sad that the best story i have for you about innovation at sea comes from another country so i think we can end this with you know what more can we do i say i think we could learn from places like panama or other places i've worked in the book you know i talk about in the book oh by the way it's a new audio version coming out like tomorrow as soon as they approve the new art and the audio version has updates about the panamanian panamanian situation and also in honduras so i think special jurisdictions abroad are going to create competition for americans at home and that will make our government step up its game not regulate innovators out of existence thank you kim there we go okay thank you so much for that uh patrick let me pass it over to you um sorry uh well thanks guys and it's wonderful to hear everybody's thoughts uh it was i all uh oh it's horrible to see all of you because i remember when we had those first calls describing what we were trying to do and uh you know julie tom scotty were all very you know involved in you know helping us even figure out the direction for how we should attack something that is so big as you know this tension between innovation and regulation and the stakes which are the future where this is going to take place so um like the other panelists i just want to start by thanking everyone in the audience who is watching this and also who has taken the time to watch our movie it's incredibly gratifying as a filmmaker it's the most gratifying thing in fact when someone is willing to give of their time and watch something that you created so on behalf of everybody uh who was behind the camera whose faces that you wouldn't have seen uh i wanna i to say thank you and also thank you to uh those to everyone who was uh behind the camera on the film uh you know director michael osias producer andrea fuller victoria hill ben gaskell uh there were just a bunch of people who work to make this happen and it was uh it was a fantastic experience and really proud of the movie um one of the the main thing i want to focus on here is the theme which for us really will optimism versus pessimism so they and they say it can't be done isn't a regulator or government or or a crony capitalist it's it or or us just individual consumer not in my backyard it could be anyone who is basically who is basically embracing the part of themselves because we're all optimistic we're all pessimists to a certain extent right we can be those so when you are embracing the pessimistic part of you it comes to the future uh you know there's there's dangers and there's cost to that uh and you know it can lead to inaction it can lead to setting up systems where that that becomes really locked in and they're they'll just break you know when you try to modify them not just modify and grow and so we wanted to in our whole approach to the film and our approach to this panel and working with with these guys is really focus on uh you know let's look at these problems but with then let's see like what are solutions who ha and and you know we have scotty in the film but we talked to a lot of people across all of these industries who have innovative solutions to problems that they're just not able to bring to market and part of that reason is because there's not a regulatory framework you know there isn't a property rights to the sea it's the dump it's a tragedy the commons same thing for the air uh you know many cases we're regulating things that are not leading to the outcomes that we want often regulators are you know they don't have the powers that they need because they're receiving mandates from congress that maybe you're having them focus even on the wrong things and they're not empowered to necessarily refocus um to that and so it's really i think uh you know there there is this pessimistic theme that we can be on where we look out at the problems and we think oh everything is terrible we need to stop let's just stop or we can look at innovators and people of imagination who have totally made amazing things happen in our lives that we see around us every day and think there's a problem and i bet that someone out there is working on it and maybe i can find out who they are and maybe i can help them because i'm concerned about this problem and if we empower people who are able to bring their imaginations and resources to you know the sea to health to food uh you know we can have faith that good things will happen and the problems will be solved because that is our nature as human beings and so that was something very important to us that really guided the whole framework of the movie and uh and it was just fantastic to work with so many people who are in the film like like these guys who shared that uh that vision thank you well the optimism absolutely came through um i can tell you i i litigate against administrative agencies most of the time so i'm always complaining about over-regulation and the idea and the concept of the lack of regulation and how that stifles innovation uh embarrassingly what was new to me when i got involved in um in this panel and uh through rtp and federalist society and the optimism um really did come through and so um you guys did a phenomenal job with trying to get with getting that message out um okay so now that we've kind of gotten our our introductions and our initial statements out of the way i thought we could jump into some questions that i've got and then like i said we'll um please type your questions into the chat as we're um going through this and nate will pop back on later and and read those questions and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can um so the first question and these are i would love all of you to chime in and answer these i might kind of direct them to one person initially and then please again chime in let's make this a discussion um you know so the first one is is for scotty just kind of um you know innovation and especially industry innovation it arises as we've talked about because there's a problem that needs to be fixed then it can be small it can be big sometimes it's a combination um and before watching this film i personally did not know anything about the aquaculture industry um and so a question that i have is how did you identify the problems that are out there and what is the actual problem that you all are looking to fix and to solve you mentioned a few of them in your intro but maybe you can go into them in a little bit more detail for our listeners sure yeah it's interesting the problem we initially identified um is no longer the problem we're looking to solve but it did open the doorway to this uh incredible opportunity in this rapidly growing industry but before i talk about you know how we got there i wanted to address a little bit about what patrick and tom were talking about regulation and regulation it's a it's a double-edged sword um regulation can not only stifle innovation but it also can create the frame the framework to create innovation if you don't have certain types of regulation then oftentimes there's no need to innovate because people will fall back on the status quo and oftentimes the status quo in our world may not be best processes so regulation needs to it's it's a thin line um that needs to be addressed appropriately it needs to do both it needs to not stifle innovation but also incentivize innovation on both sides so um in addition to that however tom you mentioned that uh in panama we have offshore aquaculture and aquaculture happening right before our eyes and we don't have that in our country because of onerous regulatory and honors regulatory environments um and oftentimes the regulators think that they're saving the environment or saving certain stakeholders but that's a very narrow view really what they're doing is outsourcing that innovation or that industry to another area that may not have some of the same standards that we would have in the united states and when you take the globalist view as opposed to just a localist view you start to recognize that loosening up some of the regulation and bringing some of this industry home actually is better for the environment as a whole as opposed to just locally because you're not outsourcing it to countries with no oversight it's better to have the industry here with appropriate oversight so that we have the right controls of our environmental impact versus sending it to countries that don't have those controls um i digress uh cam i think you asked about you know what is the solution that we aim to provide originally we were inspired by some research that indicated that a certain species of seaweed when fed to remnants or cattle would reduce methane emissions by up to 99 we were actually blown away by that statistic um greenhouse gases specifically methane from cattle account for nearly 20 of global warming greenhouse gases and you know my my partners and i in primary ocean thought this is a way to make real impact right away if we could feed every cattle this seaweed uh on the planet you could literally reverse the clock to pre-industrialization on greenhouse gases and that is truly saving the world and we we looked at the industry and said where can we make an impact and we realized that in order to feed every cow this seaweed you're gonna have to have a hell of a lot of seaweed uh and where we're gonna get the seaweed maybe we can grow it there's a lot of ocean out there maybe we could figure that out uh we quickly realized that we were not marine biologists or marine permaculturists or uh psychologists by any nature but um decided you know to persevere and uh started looking at the environment in the u.s of actually let's how do you get this done as entrepreneurs you know we didn't really need to focus on the science right away we need to focus on the how uh and the how led us to our first hurdle and our first challenge which was the regulatory environment we realized we came to learn very quickly that it was nearly impossible to get an aquaculture permit in the united states um at the time and this is in 2017 uh it was generally expected that it would take you three to seven years to get an aquaculture permit and as tom had mentioned as uh as a startup or as an entrepreneur looking to raise capital to have a tremendous impact nobody's going to give you money if they say oh i might be able to get this done in three to seven years so you you stop right there your your innovation or your concept is dead on arrival because the opportunity is not available we actually surveyed the culture industry we found a company catalina sea ranch who's featured in the uh documentary with primary ocean at the time they had the only existing u.s federal aquaculture permit and they were allowed to cultivate muscles and microalgae we approached that ceo and indicated our interest in growing seaweed because they were not utilizing that part of their permit they were only growing mussels and through a small equity investment acquired those seaweed rights to cultivate on their permit which we thought was very clever it accelerated our timeline to market by three to seven years um it got us involved in the industry with a partner with significant assets and experience and our journey kind of took on a new life um as we realized that the the methane mitigating species of seaweed is very difficult to grow and there are other seaweeds with that have better short-term opportunity so we have pivoted our approach from this cattle feed approach to look at what what resource we had available to us and that was macro systems peripherals giant kelp it's this really elegant ecosystem um the the kelp forest you see under the oceans it's the fastest growing seaweed on the planet and it has a lot of use cases as part of our role at the department of energy grant program we're tasked with identifying the highest and best use of our seaweed and have identified our first best use as organic fertilizers seem to be called biostimulants it turns out when you extract certain compounds from our seaweeds and you apply these in terrestrial agriculture well the the crops have a a profound growth enhancing effect our seaweed is rich in phyto hormones when you put those hormones on on these crops it increases their their health their resiliency reduces their stress ultimately providing more food from an organic solution and more profits for farmers so our solution went from saving the planet from cal burps and cow farts to generating more organic food and profits for farmers that's uh follow-up question on that i have for julie actually how frequently when you're working with innovators do you see this um pivot do you see them having to pivot because of regulatory hurdles that they may be coming up against you're on mute i mean there we go all right that's it that's a you know an interesting question because what i see happening is innovators don't think about regulations until actually they get stopped and the funding stops and the ability to continue stops their vision and their dreams for what can happen isn't started with a regulatory idea usually just envisioning some possible future that i they think where is going to be uh you know an additive aspect to humanity and then all of a sudden they're hit you know they hit a brick wall of regulatory and then they're like oh good you know when i can't continue my work or i can't do this or i can't do that specifically due to regulations and so i i see you know in terms of your question uh you know what what's occurring as it relates to um ceos who are innovating and regulation is that um the innovation is just happening so fast the regulators really don't know what's going on because they have this subject matter expertise and in the futurist field um or future thinking uh anybody can be future thinking um it's not a uh you know some special ability but if you think about the future uh you know it's you may envision something that the regulators you know haven't even thought of or the ability to understand what you're thinking about and so a lot of the work uh that that i do is help with and and many of the members of the world future study help with what these ceos who are unbelievable visionaries who are coming up with these great ideas and kind of helping to communicate why this is important and why this needs to happen now and why if you wait it's going to be you know more difficult to get these things through and so what i see mostly is a difference in speed between this innovation and the regulation and what's also interesting about this is that depending on what country you're from because right now the world is made up of nation states you go up into the outer space and you look back at the planet as i said the blue planet you don't see lines you have no idea what the nation's favorites are if you were to come from some other place and see nation states we don't know what nation states are but here in this world in this time in this reality we've created imaginary borders in which those areas control something and what we've found is that we're in a globalized world so it wasn't so much a localized issue as it is a globalized issue and the global world isn't connected we don't make the decisions together we make separate decisions so you may see one nation state decide to move forward and another state nation state halt everything and so the one that moves forward did they make the right decision about moving forward and the other one make the wrong decision by halting or did the one that moved forward make the wrong decision by moving forward and the halting one was the one that was the right one because you know it would have caused you know this significant amount of damage so what i i think what we're seeing now is in a globalized world it isn't about the nation-state because the nation's it doesn't control the whole world and so now we've got all of these nation-states whether they be and as well as corporations and as well as family offices that are bigger than nation-states at the 200 billion level now uh having to make these decisions as well as the bottom up of all of the people in the world and so a decision of one nation state may affect the entire world and as a global supply chain we are seeing that one country affects another country which affects another country and you can't just be kind of on your own anymore especially as it relates to the seas you can get an agreement from the united nations to operate within the seas but that doesn't mean that the nation states actually have to agree with you they can disagree with you there's no rule and order to the sea and so a lot of times you'll see one nation states say no and another one go we're going all in on this full gas pedal no break we're in and the other one go oh wait a second we didn't realize we were going to go forward because then maybe we'd move it faster because we're not a part of this game anymore because we stopped it and so we don't really know who's actually in control when different nation states are in control of the different innovators so you know scotty is an incredible innovator but is he a part of every nation state is there another scotty in each nation state that's supporting him more than the one he's in i don't know it's possible but what i'm seeing right now is unbelievable visionary ceos from different countries as i say nation states depending on how you refer to it i'm referring to it as nation states allowing their innovators to move forward and some are holding them back and as i said that could be a great thing it could be a horrible thing uh it and i think that you know maybe another question i'd love to talk about later in the conversation is what makes something amazing and what makes something horrible and because we are a segregated world and not a unified world yet uh you know that that's something we need to become because we're all under the same uh same atmosphere and we're also on the same planet so the lines don't make sense sometimes anymore when we talk about the ocean and that's exactly what's happening to the ocean is we do not know how to regulate because we don't control it it's not the land and we've never had this before and so it's super interesting in a great space and so i do think that the innovators are moving way faster than the regulators and i do i am concerned about some of the countries nation states that do not regulate anything and are going to move forward on things that other places are being more thoughtful about so it's it's both both are true and and and that's what a future is called dialectics you could have more than one thing is true at the same time so i hope that answers uh your question kim yeah that's extremely helpful and it also leads us into another point that i wanted to to address and maybe um tom can start us off with this i'd love to hear hear all of your thoughts on it you mentioned um the ocean and how there's there's no lines and there's no property lines and in the movie tom you talked to about you know so many miles out states regulate it then federal waters then you're into the open ocean and so you know when we talk about not just um you know primary ocean and not just the aquaculture but the the other potential industries that are out there and the other potential innovation how is that going to work who's going to regulate it where did these companies even start well thanks for asking i'll uh give a shot at that it's not an easy question you remind me of a lot of my clients whom i say not only does nobody know the answer to that nobody has asked that question before so i like this kind of it depends yes the correct answer audience to every legal question is this is a this is an inside joke with lawyers is it depends and then you say a bunch of other words well i'll try to not to say too many words i will say a couple of things two big points one is i keep hearing regulation coming up i think we know what that is but i want to introduce another aspect to regulation when we think of regulation most of us i mean i do we think of the stuff that comes out of the epa or whatever the coast guard says about how many life preservers you have to have on board it's written down and somebody with a badge at the end of the day you know she might not have a badge maybe she has a clipboard and a hard hand look at the end of the day there's somebody with a badge over there that'll come and bust your chops if you don't do what they say they'll shut you down probably assess a fine you could even end up in jail you know that's that's risky but there's another kind of regulation which i characterize as distributed regulation distributed that's centralized regulation but why is it when i walk down the street i don't i don't slap people in the face did i need the epa or whoever that would be i don't know fbi or the local equivalent of the fbi to tell me not to do that there probably is a rule but i don't use the rule to know not to slap people in the face because more or less i'm civilized as are all of you i'm sure and so there's another way of regulating society that actually is um i don't want to say it's always better than centralized regulation you do want to have a rule about which side of the road to drive on maybe sure okay although i think i think that would evolve in a free society as well but the point is we can have a regular safe clean environment and society without necessarily having a regulated poor instead we have regulators plural and this is what i tried to allude to when i said a way to handle some of these regulatory problems or our innovators face is well in the first place i get you know go go back uh to what scotty said you gotta at least not shut them out the greatest virtue of the panamanian approach to aquaculture is they let you do it you know and i'm sure they don't have everything figured out but hey having a lot of the norwegian countries the scandinavian countries kind of screwed up salmon farming as well we're all learning this they gave it a try you couldn't even get a permit in the united states okay so the first thing is let people do things and the second thing is instead of telling them you got to do it this way it has to be this many fish or your fish you're too short you're too big you say here's what you can't have you can't have your excess urea content in the water exceed this level or you use it or whatever the the the turbidity of the water has to be this you use specifications and you let the innovators figure out how to solve the problem but you got to tell them what the problem is first all right last thing i'll say that's the kind of first point is about this whole thing about the ocean being unregulated no no i won't say that it is true that the claims of nation states stop more or less at about 28 nautical miles offshore it's a little more complicated it's actually kind of super complicated but the quick version is a territorial sovereign like the united states claims territorial waters up to 14 nautical miles offshore and that includes rocks that stay above the mean high tide line and the countries really milk that for as far as they can get and then another 14 nautical miles it's just like another margin and yes there's complications in places where two countries are on the edge of a gulf let's not get into that this is the general approach it depends another 14 miles is the contiguous zone and there a nation state can police the area to prevent people from escaping from the territorial waters if they did something naughty there they're smuggling running drugs illegal fishing or they can go out there and stop somebody from coming in not really it's not their territory but especially if you're the united states you act like it is in fact the united states basically acts like the whole world's oceans is its territory but that's another story now we're 28 nautical miles out i'm almost i'm really almost i'm almost done 28 nautical miles out and let's not again let's not get into the exclusive economic zone which goes up to 200 nautical miles on some continental shelves under water maybe we don't need to get into that but 28 nautical miles out is the open ocean open ocean does not mean it's not regulated there is no one sovereign setting aside the united states and it's really kind of awesome coast guard and navy it's really kind of impressive but that doesn't really give them the right to do what they do really any nation state is given access but as my seasteading friends off the coast of thailand discovered go to the sea setting institute's website and you can click through that or go on youtube and search for the seasteaders the first sea setters the story put together by my friend joe quirk um and it tells a story about my friends who went offshore off of thailand and created a seastead and they were in it but they didn't get a flag from a terrestrial sovereign they didn't talk to me first actually kind of did but not everybody listens but point is they didn't have a flag so here's the way they regulate the open ocean you gotta have a flag if you don't have a flag the us coast guard or the coast guard panama or any sovereign nation will come up and say what the heck is this piece of junk floating around out here and once you get a flag you get other obligations it varies from country to country from flag to flag but i will not agree that the open oceans are lawless or anarchical i think they're actually regulated but in a kind of a distributed way and it more or less works there are problems but don't tell me there aren't problems with centralized regulation right there are cities in america burning right now because the central authorities can't figure out how to not have things be burnt up i'll stop there thank you kevin no that that thank you for giving us that that framework there um [Music] am i echoing i don't know what happened there um okay let me go to my next question then i'll get my audio figured out here i apologize um patrick one question that i have for you i'm jumping into kind of the movie creation piece here in one of the q a's um you mentioned that even though you don't want to pick one of your babies in one of the industries um the aquaculture uh portion of the movie really spoke to you and it really captured you as a filmmaker can you give us a little more context as to why that is and how that um integrates into kind of some of the the lack of regulation or over-regulation that we've talked about sure thank you for that question um and i'd also love to hear what uh the other guys think about you know these you know scottie being here aside your favorite you know story uh i find one of the things that we found that was really fascinating just in terms of like storytelling is you know definitely you know we're sort of put on to by julie is what does this future look like you know like how incredible visually is it so if companies like just uh inc who uh we featured in the film who created cell cultured lab grown meat where they take a single cell from any animal and grow it in a lab without antibiotics and they can make meat that is exactly like me it's just it is not like meat it is meat it is literally chicken uh that you're eating and steak or whatever uh then suddenly think of the change that is when two-thirds of arable land i believe is used to feed these animals you know you think of the pollution there and then you think of the labor all the people who spend their time around the globe doing this and could be doing something else and get and then and yet they have the protein that they would need um so that vision of almost like the buffalo coming back down the great plains you know uh or with with scotty the vision of you know these oasis is out in the pacific where yes there's life out there but it's you know there's life in the sahara desert but to the extent where you can have these kelp farms or even living communities surrounding kelp farms in the open sea uh with you know whales and animal life sharks all going below that wouldn't have been there but now there is a primary food source you know kind of rainforest if you will and so it creates this place for there to be more life and so just as a filmmaker visually for um speaking for myself though i think probably a lot of folks on the team would have agreed like that just that kind of thing where you're like julie was saying you're looking down on the planet and maybe we just start we just start seeing cities or vast green farms on our blue ocean incredible an incredible thing an incredible thing and the amount of problems that can be solved with you know that scotty was referencing earlier pulling co2 you know sequestering healing the ocean creating more life feeding our population it's just it's incredible the idea is it was amazing incredible incredible to visualize and that's what attracted me to it so much anyone else want to chime in on that and i'd love to hear your your um julie and tom obviously scotty of course we we know you're very interested in this but i'd love to hear your um you know maybe why you're so passionate about about this issue um i think you know i'm going to scotty i'm going to i'm going to go first and then i'll let you take over as a subject matter expert in the uh in the field that you're in but this is a macro level at a civilization scale on the future of humanity scale is what is it that we're trying to do what is it that we're trying to become what is it that we're trying to create you know these are questions that kind of we didn't have to deal with in in a single lifetime now all of us are in a single lifetime having to grapple with issues that are at an existential threat issue and i notice in our in our side convo uh existential threats being brought up and that you know the first one uh being nuclear proliferation and just saying okay we created something now that we can actually kill ourselves with and now we have more and more and more and more of those so it's like okay well let's future proof against those uh okay so then we got climate change we got this one we got this one we got this one okay well that's not a life worth living all we do is prevent ourselves from dying i mean how fun is that i mean that's scary every kid has to be born to know that you're just gonna like work to prevent your own extinction i mean what else is there so i think we're coming to a point in humanity in which we're trying to re-look at what is human purpose and what are we trying to do and what is worth it and what is a part of it and it's i think this it couldn't be more of an exciting time certainly there's a there's a lot of people who are scared of innovation and of new technologies and of new ideas and of new things that are different you know we have religion that is about the majority of them based on an agricultural time then we have governments that are based on an education which are based on an industrial time and now we're in a new time but we haven't caught up to the new time and so it's like well what are we going to do with this new time and so i think part of the issue isn't just about did i create a company that's going to be you know successful financially for my investors or did i create something that uh approved by regulation but what is it that humans want to create what is it that the world is going to become what is it that we want to co-create and do as a collective journey into the future because that is always missing you always hear this kind of term from these companies that are in the visionary space that we want to create a better world and i always hold them accountable and i say what is a definition of better world i want to know what better world is because no one is brave enough to state the better world i would like to hear what better world looks like and let's co-create that but i need to know and i think that i think that i couldn't and i'm going to read your book time but yes got the answer all of these ideas and we're co-creating this world and is it government is it corporation is it non-profit is it uh families is it like what is it who is it is it all of us who gets to play the part in architecting the future and there is no better time to architect the future than right now and it's i think this takes advanced collaboration and advanced relationships because we as a species don't do well in relating to each other we fight we argue we get we can barely relate to our friends or our spouse or whatever it may be we need to advance and i think you know if we look at gene roddenberry's star trek and i don't mean to sound like a truckee for a second but june roddenberry did come up with a lot of his ideas through the world future society and you look at star trek next generation and you see these characters who are advanced humans who want to do better who say that our goal is humanity is to advance ourselves and the rest of us it's not to who gets the bigger piece of the pie or what is it you know a zero-sum game and i think right now we're living in a zero-sum game mentality that is going to kill us and we have to come up with a better idea here and you know that there is a new you know i get asked a lot by new sci-fi movies to comment or question on their technology and i said look your technology is great your vision of technology is great however the humanity did not evolve we devolved we're still punching each other in the face with advanced technology what's wrong with us like do we have the ability to advance relationally and the ability to have self-awarenesses to ourselves and what are we going to become because without that it doesn't matter what technology you have and it doesn't matter what regulation you have we cannot advance ourselves all we're going to do is police the people that can't advance and i think that there is an aspect to this that is really um integral to who we are as individuals and who we are as a macro scale as a as a single organism or as a species and so those are the kinds of different things that i look at and as i i think you can feel through how i speak i am extremely passionate about because it doesn't matter if there's no vision for the future if it's just to get through the short termism who cares we're not going to make it i want to see a vision for this future and i want to hear what a better world is i'm not saying we have the answer but it's time to co-create and go on this collective journey because we have the technology and we have the ability and we can do this so it i think we're going to pull this off because and as as patrick said it's about optimism versus pessimism and the optimist aspect of this makes it fun the pessimist aspect of this makes me want to not get up in the morning i can comment to that and rather than talk about what is the better world i'd prefer to talk about how to get to a better world and how do you get to a better world i would think it's incremental improvements in various systems and hopefully some giant leaps along the way and those systems are various it's food production systems it's political systems it's energy production systems but how we get to the better world is technological innovation or conceptual innovation across these you know various systems so that's what gets me excited um kim is i think your question was what gets me excited and it's that incremental innovation in systems to get to a better world we all have our own definition of what that better world is but it's all our own responsibility to spend every day making those incremental improvements whether it's just an incremental improvement in your own life that you can control or it's an incremental improvement in your company which hasn't which has incremental improvements on a scale of its customers or its improvements in much larger organizations such as churches or state or political systems which have even more impact across larger population subsets so that's that's really what what gets us up in the morning is making these improvements um we're focused on food at the moment um we're paid by the u.s department of energy um to innovate for energy conversion uh but we believe you know our technologies have a more of an impact on on food production um the world's gonna need 70 percent more food by 2050 the oceans as i mentioned aren't going to provide that we need to we need to come up with better solutions and macro algae farming is a tremendous solution it takes a lot of the stress off of our terrestrial production systems i don't i don't remember who is talking about it but when we're talking about farming for cattle forage or energy crops we're talking about tens of millions of acres in the united states that are just for biofuels and other tens of millions of acres that are just for cattle forage if we can move that production into the oceans we don't need those 60 million acres of land we won't use trillions of gallons of water we won't pollute our riparian systems and aquifers with pesticides and fertilizers and we can now use those 60 million acres on more productive food crops help feed the world meanwhile now we're farming macro algae in the ocean we're not using the land we're not using fertilizers we're not using pesticides we're drawing down co2 on par with the production of the primary production of rain forests and back to what patrick was mentioning some of what got him excited about the ocean aquaculture we're also converting some lower product lower productive habitats you know a lot of uh phytoplankton into more productive habitats macro level habitats starting with macroalgae as the basis of that ecosystem then drawing in larger species like fish eventually mammals other things so you're creating productivity regions in ocean space where there's generally not productivity regions patrick you mentioned it's like a rain forest our great partner is ocean rainforest um and their ceo oliver gregerson also coined a term that you mentioned as an oasis and you know what we aim to build are oasis in the ocean for this macroscopic life that are very productive turning what what is a non-productive area and there's lots of it in the ocean into a productive area not only for human food but for ecosystem thriving of more wild fisheries and of course you you can stack on um energy production uh and and other um byproducts of macro algae or fish or muscle aquaculture that you're um really developing in these areas um kim i know you mentioned you wanted to be a conversation so i'm gonna i'm gonna try to step in here with just what scotty had mentioned it's just that you know there's this idea that he's mentioning as it relates to how many people on the planet we need to feed and that's a status quo linear thinking of future and i want to make sure that everybody understands the future is multiple futures it's not a single future uh so there is an aspect of this where we could have you know for four hundred dollars you can print a virus that could take out the world tomorrow so scotty's vision of the future with all these people may be gone we all know this now because we've experienced the global pandemic in our lifetimes there's many different other aspects that also change the trajectory of the future so if you want to say this is the future i say well what are the other futures that are possible let's scenario plan all of them because there's only you can't really scenario plan for a single future wow wow hold on hold on scenario plan all the futures that's just too much it'll take too much time so so before we run out of time let me just uh actually answer the question that kim asks i want to get to the questions before us tom i think we are going uh another half hour okay well yes we're gonna have to i'll give it back to you then but you want us to plan out every future i don't know how we're going to do that so the futures are like this and i want to it's just helpful it's a guiding post i'm not saying unlimited do infinity i'm saying there's the possible futures there's probable futures there's plausible futures there's preferred futures you know these are the different kind of um looks that that when you look at the future you look at so it's not you have to do every single one of them i'm just saying the status quo future of just the trajectory of a linear line is actually not how the future works so justice and so i just want to make sure that when we talk about the future we're looking at that the fact that there is more than one and that's all i'm saying you don't have to do millions and billions i'm saying what is preferred what is plausible what's probable what isn't possible at all like what would be freakish you know i didn't i didn't hear scotty saying he thought things were all planned out and it was going to go down one track i don't know maybe i misunderstood i would agree there would be a certain number of people on this planet and i'm sure they are now i hope they hang around they could disappear we all know that's possible it would be sad i don't think it's too likely actually humans are pretty tough one thing before we uh go to audience questions that just like because i like funny because when you begin with the uh roofer you get to kind of tie some of these uh threads together that's sort of our job and uh so one thing that julie said that i thought was very interesting related to the linear reverse of non-linear is this idea that we can look at time as linear and think we know what the future is going to be or it's you know it's non-linear and there's a bunch of different possibilities and in some ways the regulator is put in the position of trying to figure out a system uh you know devise that kind of like tom you do in your book or you're doing with your you know generating new like regulatory models or or legal regimes which allows for many possible futures you know it doesn't determine linearly what the future should be um it's a set of rules that nominally are they facilitate incremental change like he was talking about and they're in some ways the way i look at it anyway is we're going on a journey of discovery you know even the regulator is going on a journey of recovery sense you know like we divide a commons into the proper you know property rights how do we you know we have a system that evolves you know through time now that's not the command and control regulation like you were bringing up earlier uh tom and i think like that so that to me is where i was seeing things coalesce and at least thematically as we're bringing together in the film is this idea that if there is a better way we have to discover it and in some ways it is you know we know it will be universal when we discover it but the way we find it is through incremental attempts and mistakes and then we reflect and learn and then we carry it forward as traditions or institutions uh but i think right now one of the things that we were focused on the film is we've kind of abandoned that for this very linear you will do this you won't do that view not one that's centered around markets and innovation and believing that we don't know exactly what's going to happen we have to wait on people with imaginations to try stuff question how does that play into when we don't have regulation so when we're when we have a new industry that isn't regulated um how does that plan because what we've been talking about here is there's there are rules and you can't do this or you can do this but how is it i guess maybe tom can start this i'll start out by saying i don't think the industry is not regulated if they are say in the united states if they're in any civilized country and even if they're on the open ocean because they'll be flying the flag of a terrestrial sovereign and the law of the terrestrial sovereign applies on board and by that i mean look suppose i tomorrow came up with an innovation that was a new kind of pencil i'm holding a pencil here and the colors of the lead change as you write okay i figure out a way to do that it's kind of cool it's not going to save any lives and i put it on the market but it turns out it's poisonous i'm going to get in trouble was there a pencil a colored pencil regulation and i hope not there might actually be one but i don't think there is one so i'm not going to actually sell this i'm going to know what's in those colors and it's led's in there i'm going to say a great idea but it's not going to work so i'm regulated we are all regulated and that's a good thing but it's distributed regulation we don't have to have somebody sitting at a desk write out exactly what we can and can't do for people to be free to go out and innovate they're actually not going to kill each other that should not be the presumption or even hurt each other why because like them or not there's a ton of attorneys over there who's going to come and sue you if you hurt their clients and they're going to do it under tort law or contract law they're going to use standard warranties there's already plenty on the books that's my answer i think and thank you for that and i think that that's a great point and the one that i was hoping that you would would make um knowing your your writings and your your scholarly work so i appreciate that um i think at this point um i know we have a lot of questions that have come in i want to at least get to some of them and then i do have one or two wrap-up questions but i know we want to try to stick to our time tonight so nate do you want to maybe ask a few of the audience questions sure i've been doing my best here to listen to the conversation and also jot down the questions as they've been coming in through the chat there's been a good conversation going back back and forth through the chat uh one thing i did want to answer that a couple people have asked is if you haven't received a link to the film it's in the chat uh so you can watch the film that way the information's there and also after this we will be sending you another email with the movie in case you haven't watched the movie yet um i wanted to ask there was a question early on there was a statistic thrown out that uh how do we know that only 30 of our co2 is absorbed by the ocean and i think that was a i'm not sure if that was if anyone has the uh is the background on that or the information to back that up how's that measured and understood yeah no i can take a stab at that i don't know exactly it's tracked by several organizations noaa being one of them you can look at dissolved co2 in the ocean um and actually the oceans have surprised us recently um we've anticipated as her scientists rather have anticipated that as we continue to pump co2 in the atmosphere that the oceans would reach uh you know some absorption limits and we've been pleasantly surprised and not a good way but the oceans have continued to absorb at about the 30 percent rate um so it's doing its job as our climate regulator that co2 is uh generally cycled to the depths of the bottom ocean of the of the deep seas but it has the negative effect of ocean acidification this ocean acidification then has compounding effects across sea life it's um degenerative to calcium and meaning muscle shells which are feed source it's degenerative to coral reefs which are um a significant portion of the planet's biodiversity and a significant portion of the ecosystems uh in the ocean um so how do we know that we measured by dissolved to co2 um government agencies are uh are generally monitoring that and um you know we just continue okay very good it's collected by the government and they they keep it i i follow let me and and other agencies universities government and many excellent um so another question from the audience i think i've heard from others uh and this is true myself you know we're inspired by innovations we see going on in the in the ocean and they want to know more about where we can find out about the best projects that are going on uh besides watching the movie are there places that you all can point to that you're aware of that people can track new projects or get interested in that sort of thing so with that macarogy research in in the western hemisphere anyway europe um in 2020 started a grant program called horizon 2020 and kick-started significant macro algae cultivation research in in their region the us department of energy followed up with the mariner program which is what the program we're a part of if you go to those websites you can find those awardees participants researchers and kind of follow the the breadcrumb trail to find their specific companies and projects undercurrent news is a wonderful aquaculture news outlet that's going to talk significantly about mussel farming fish farming seaweed aquaculture around the globe the gris is a great resource for uh environmental news green news that's uh g-r-i-s-t um i would say those are the the best resources to find out you know discover new companies and technologies in in our sector great and i'm going to put it in go ahead i want to put in a plug for the sea setting institute they cover not just the specific issues of macro algae but the wider issues of getting people on the open ocean so sea setting institute i gave a link in the chat excellent thank you another question was has anyone tasted beef that came from cattle that has uh been reared on seaweed has anyone done that someone was interested in what the result is so i saw that question i'm glad you brought it back i have not tasted cattle that's been fed seaweed but cattle have been fed seaweed for thousands of years they've been eating eating washed up seaweed on the shores of ireland and the shores of nova scotia uh for a long time uh seaweed's a great dietary resource for cattle not just for its anti-methanogenic properties but also its omega-3s it meets a lot of the veterinary feed directive directives it's an it's a natural antiviral a natural antibacterial it actually helps reduce the antibiotics and antivirals that are oftentimes required or administered on farms um the the leading research for feeding macroalgae to cattle is being performed by csiro it's a australian government organization dr rob kinley kind of made the discovery of the anti-methanogenic as well as uc davis uh in california um where they've been doing you know um in vivo trials of feeding cattle certain percentages of different macro algaes and they actually have done taste tests and from what i hear it tastes like a pretty good hamburger that's good i just want to mention i just quickly put up i quickly put up a link um not i don't mean to put up a link to another documentary but it's called the game changers and i haven't eaten meat since i was 11. my daughter has never had meat there is a a huge movement towards a plant-based diet i'm sure you'll see it on menus uh you know you'll see mcdonald's has added it you'll see burger king has added it i mean this is growing so fast it's one of the fastest growing industries is the plant-based diet and so it's just something to look at as another piece of information so that you you can get all of the data and all of the signals before you make a decision on what trajectory we're going into so i wanted to just give an example of one that is is different yes is it is it um cows who've had kelp no but is it something else yeah so i just wanted to give it another option as it relates to to eating and as well as cell agriculture that is covered in the movie they say can't be done very good uh tom uh i'll throw this question from the audience to you it just came in i don't know if you saw it it's about how would you uh speak to the decision makers and agencies you know and how would you help them to set up a socially and ecologically sustainable balance between aquaculture and wild marine ecosystems so we're putting you in control how are you directing uh the regulatory authorities wow uh thanks for that vast grant of power and the big unsolvable problem that's tuned to failure sure happy happy to take that on um well seriously i would say this to my regulator friends friends actually both my father and my brother i've worked in government for many happy years happy for them i think they did good things no they did um point is i would say to my regulator friends give me specs and if you don't have specs why don't you how can you regulate if you don't have measurements isn't it kind of the idea of objective regulation you actually can see you know the needles in the wrong place because because if it's just you come out and cross your arms and say i don't like to look at this and you can't tell me what to fix that's not a good way to regulate so give me specs and then let's talk about just having you conform to the specs or even better tagging some kind of fine to where the specifications are so if i go over the limit just for a week it was new technology the gasket broke we got that fixed i just pay and you smile i smile and you don't shut me down i got too much capital invested i need to reassure my investors you're not going to walk in with the red tape machine and shut down my industry so regulators need to give specifications instead of edicts not command-to-control regulation but performance-based regulation if they have to regulate of course the first thing should be do you really need to regulate this there are torch suits out there you know but setting aside that and the second thing i'd say is and don't give hard lines because unless you know scotty might say sometimes there's a tipping point you know if there's too much phosphate boom everything you know maybe you need a hard line here and there or if you don't want to drop plutonium in the water no can't do that but for a lot of things it's a graduated curve and so if we go over the line we learn from that and we kind of wheel it back in and i pay for it and sorry so there's some ideas okay very good i'm we're moving quickly because we're running out of time let me just squeeze in one last one and see if anyone wants to take a stab at it and then i will uh hand it back to kim i'll combine two questions one was specifically about the current administration and trying you know how do we reverse the current administration's environmental regulations and i would broaden it uh since we're very fair-minded here at federal society i would say if you object to the prior administration's environmental regs how would you address it or try to work on it and if you object to the current ones how would you recommend and then combining that with it's maybe to compound the question but there was a question about uh so much of our population lives close to the ocean and how that impacts uh how we regulate uh uh the ocean so um and you know is there a difference in the way people and fly over country feel about these topics versus people who are maybe more in control on the coast i know that's combining a couple things there but i'm just trying to wrap up uh the rest of the audience questions and i would love i'll answer i'll answer specifically just to the people on the coast um and sea level rise as an issue um there's a there's a company called our cup from a-r-k-u-p and they built uh something that was revolutionary as innovators and that basically and maybe it's something that seasteading institute also is familiar with but what they did was they raised basically a home above the water so you're not like a houseboat like who's nauseated all the time but one that you know pushes into the ground under the water and pushes up this home above the water and it's a really interesting idea as it relates to living above the water now in miami uh where they launched their first boat or their first uh it's not even a boat they didn't even know what to call it so they couldn't even move it because no one would let it dock anywhere because it was considered a barge and they're like well we're not a barge we're this and they couldn't figure that out either so they had to call themselves a livable yacht because they couldn't understand what they actually were because there was no word for it and so basically it was like okay well who's the audience for it they really wanted to help the city of amsterdam where one of the chief architects came from as well as the city of miami miami has no plan whatsoever to deal with sea level rise because it's too expensive if they were to deal with it now and change all the buildings i mean they're just it's just too expensive so they're gonna let it they're gonna let it go under because there isn't a plan and we met with him as well with our cup as it relates to what is the future plan for the city of miami what's the future plan for the for the city of for amsterdam and here were some options but we couldn't get anyone to understand what these innovators were building which was a way in which you could live when sea level rise came up and so they created something that was unbelievable and incredible and it made the news recently that they never got beyond their first prototype which was our cup one because nobody understood what they were trying to do and so became this livable yacht for wealthy people when really it was a big vision for solving a big humanity problem so i just use that as an example as it relates to solving okay so how many people are on the sea you know there and i i told them i gave them an idea i said let's get a warehouse and start building now because nobody's looking into the future and i promised you and you know we're going to be facing sea level rise and as soon as it's there we don't have to call the red cross to come and save us we already have it ready to go and let's do it i mean this was an idea that i gave to many investors as it relates to we know this 100 this is going to occur what is the solution let's not be so reactive but be proactive and so where all these areas are we have no proactive solution because nobody understood what the heck they were doing and had to call it a livable yacht or a barge that was not allowed to go into any docking station because it didn't need a dock anyway i thought that was interesting as it relates to innovation and nobody being able to understand what they were doing and they were super super talented and and they still may still still may succeed i'm just saying what's currently occurring i think i have to cut it a little short on that question uh because i want to squeeze in you want to squeeze in one more kim um yeah if i if i could um just one final question uh for scotty is um what's next what are we going to see next out of a primary ocean and is it is it going to be food is it going to be energy where do you think the next kind of big thing is and then i'm going to say one final question for patrick after that which is are we going to get a sequel so if we can do it in that quick order and then i'll pass it back to nate to wrap up sure quickly i'll address that previous question as well i don't know exactly the population percentage that lives on the coast uh but i did mention in my intro that over two billion people rely on the ocean for its protein resource so that's that's nearly 30 of the world that rely on the ocean to provide its protein foods so it's a big big number and we're going to have to increase the ocean production to continue to support these these people's foods needs going forward fortunately aquaculture is already producing 50 of the of the fish on the planet because our wild uh our wild stocks can't support it any longer but we need more and we need a lot more it's the it's the farming of the future uh both fish bivalves and algae what's next for primary ocean uh primary ocean along with you know most other uh entrepreneurs and companies in our microalgae space are pursuing a fractionation technology strategy whereby we want to break down our seaweed resource into multiple constituent parts there's a lot of value inside the seaweed there's there's lipids there's polysaccharides that can be used as pharmaceutical compounds there's the hormones for agriculture of course the seaweed can be used just whole as a whole food it can be used as a cattle forage it can be used for biofuels you've got to look at the value propositions from the value from the value-based pyramid what's highest on the chart and what's lowest on the chart lowest biofuels highest is going to be food as you work your way down bioplastics is somewhere in there fertilizers is somewhere in there uh the goal is to you know identify valid identify viable markets uh for us of course i mentioned that it's in uh agriculture first uh our next market is most likely in uh human health supplements um you know i i my daughter loves seaweed i'm not a huge seaweed fan i don't really see it catching on as a tremendous food source in the united states but if you can extract the valuable health compounds from it people i believe would be very happy to take it as a supplement um you've got fucoidins which are anti-cancer anti-tumor focoidin is a compound that's derived from our species of seaweed and in july it was reported that in trials against cobit 19 it was more effective 10 times more effective at blocking the cobit 19 virus than rem dev than rem deserver rem deserver for those of you who don't know it's the antiviral used for ebola it's the most powerful antiviral we have in the marketplace an organic compound from our seaweed performed 10 times better than deservier in the lab so we're looking at uh we're looking at that supplement um of course it's real relevant to our situation in today's world uh but beyond that cosmetics uh food uh and ultimately hopefully in 20 years uh we're farming enough of the ocean drying enough drawing down enough carbon and have enough seaweed that we can convert it into biofuels and further reduce our our our carbon footprint on this planet wow um i that that's absolutely amazing i mean it really is truly amazing what you guys are doing um a note on the seaweed my son's best friend seaweed is his favorite snack so um it's good brings it he brings it to school every single day and my son has yet to try it but we're working on it um a final question for patrick uh is there gonna be a sequel how can we follow uh the the four different uh i guess innovative industries that you highlight in the movie and and beyond so many i'm sure that didn't even get covered in the movie that you probably would have liked to yes so we definitely want there to be a sequel in some fashion of continuing to follow uh the entrepreneurs over time and see what happens i think that's one of the great things about the doc in some ways it's the snapshot so you know three years five years ten years in the future how did the dialogue change what's happening to the people and what do they face and that in of itself i think would be a very important tool for us to learn um because i can say uh to the earlier question that nate brought up about the regulators i did talk to obama regulators and i did talk to trump regulators and i my overall sentiments were more you're both wrong because the idea seems to be we need more command and control or we don't need to have the command and control you know and the idea that we would have you know property rights and liberty and discriminated regulation or standards your measurables uh you know i don't want to say it like talk paint with a broad brush because when we talk to uh obama administration regulations they definitely are using some of those tools so you would have thought oh well they're democrats so they don't do that but in fact they do you they did use market rules and standards and was a part of their calculate decision calculus uh so i mean i think in some ways when we hear this dialogue in the media not like we had it in our film it's just really ideologically driven and it's easy to just kind of like you're just taking the wrong approach from the get-go and so what we try to do is just set a new framework for you to look at the problem in without it being a journalistic ideological warfare so maybe we can have people who disagree collaborate together on you know what needs to be done amazing concept in today's uh society but a point very well taken and i think a great way uh to end this and so i'm gonna pass it back to nate and let him close this out but um i would just like say personally thank you for letting me be a part of this thank you for making the movie and thank you for uh for the talk today so nate i'll pass it back yes uh my hat's off to uh the just add uh firewater team uh as well to all of you kim patrick tom scotty julie we are so grateful for your participation and your insights today um and certainly to our audience we welcome your feedback anytime you can send it our way at rtp at reg regproject.org that's reg project.org you can also check out what the reg project is doing at that website regproject.org reg project.org and uh lastly i'm trying to hurry i apologize uh please tune in next week uh thursday the 17th at seven o'clock for our future of our health uh panel that that panel will feature uh uh another dynamite uh group of speakers christina sandofor from the goldwater institute julie alexander from wake forest institute who was featured in the film betsy uh mckay from the committee to reduce infectious deaths and then two former fda uh officials joshua scharfstein i'm sorry and dan troy uh anyway we're out of time thank you all have a great evening thank you you

Channel: The Federalist Society

Views: 232,549

Rating: 4.04 out of 5

Keywords: #fedsoc, federalist society, conservative, libertarian, fedsoc, federalism, fed soc

Id: jpuduEq51H4

Length: 92min 20sec (5540 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020