Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is Constructive Voices. Constructive Voices, the podcast for the construction people with news, views and expert interviews. Good afternoon, good morning wherever you are. This is Jackie Deberka for Constructive Voices. And I am very excited to have a guest today that's like a follow up interview because I was introduced to this man by Rutger de Graf, who was an amazing guest. You can listen to his episode that went out in April of 2020, all about floating futures. An amazing guest with lots of information and yes, something that leads you to think, I wouldn't mind living in a floating urbanization myself. And today we have somebody who is very much one of the top authorities in the world on the floating economy.
And this is Peter Robbins. Peter, you're really welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Jackie, thank you so much for having me today. I am a little bit at a loss for words because he is actually a true expert all things floating solutions, whereas I come at it more from a business monetization, economic side. I'm not actually building these floating solutions. I just happen to talk about them and connect people together with experts such as Rutger and his business in order to build those out. So I would say as a brief introduction to myself and the floating economy, we are specifically positioned as the authority on all things as they relate to nearshore industry.
And we're kind of looking at it from the perspective of innovation specifically and how that ties into monetization, business strategy, business modeling and economics. And it's a little bit different than what you would find say in the ocean economy or in the blue economy.
There's a lot of parallels and overlapping in some places. But you know, both of those are initiatives put out by the UN about 15 years ago, specifically focused around sustainability and ESG and climate change.
And there's a lot of opportunity within that. However it comes at it from a policy and regulation standpoint more so than actually building businesses to address these challenges. And so that's kind of where we're at today is becoming a big bringing in this other angle where we're actually able to help businesses build and target these challenges.
And as far as me personally, how I got into this, I will. I'm actually going to take you way back to when I was a kid growing up in Florida.
I always grew up about five minutes away from the ocean there in Central Florida on the Space Coast. And I've always been surrounded by engineers because again, I was on the Space coast right next to NASA and the Kennedy Space center, and family always worked there. All of My neighbors and friends, families always were engineers who worked there and around there. And so I always had that very future oriented mindset around the possibilities that exist. The space economy was not really a thing when I was growing up, but it's become more and more.
And in parallel with that, you know, I'm only 36 years old. Well, guess what? Over the last 36 years and really over the last 20 years, there's been such a big push into the floating solutions and actually how that ties into the space industry overall is quite interesting. But anyway, so I grew up around the water and businesses so many around the water that I was always exposed to and I've always been working in and around the water.
And so I actually, you know, my professional background was actually in the Air Force, which it does not really sound water related, but it is interesting because I was actually in Air Force intelligence. And a lot of what I focused on was finding Navy architecture around the globe and also finding pirates in different areas around the globe and being able to help with some of those operations. So I've always been exposed even in professional, the early professional stage of my career around the water.
And so after I did that, I kind of got into building training and operation systems for Fortune 500 and then I got into startups doing the same thing. And then I eventually I moved into the government side with Homeland Security and then most recently with the South Korean government, where I've taken them through these thought exercises around the shoreline and what, what you can actually build in support of your local economies around the shoreline. A lot of this was actually in preparation for Busan, the city of Busan's bid to host the World Expo in 2030.
And so a lot of things were taking place at that time. They were using Oceanics, the floating city, as a concept to be launched out of Busan. And everything was so exciting and very much revolving around water.
And so it was kind of a perfect opportunity to present the use case to the government leaders. Okay, so what can you actually do to build on the shoreline and off the shoreline? What are these different industries and sectors that you can focus on?
And so as I dug into that research present to the government, I realized something very important and that is the Blue Economy, the ocean economy, again, very focused policy, regulation as it pertains to the science and the challenges that exist around sustainability, ESG and climate change.
But there was not really much out there in the way of business research and actually being able to build up businesses in these industries along the coastline. And so that kind of presented a golden opportunity for me and my two partners. And so we actually took a lot of that research and we were able to help build out a business in West Florida there in Tampa Bay, around nearshore logistics jet skis as delivery drivers and connect them into boaters, private boaters out on the water who are looking for food, like fresh hot food, drinks, alcohol and supplies, whatever. And we're able to take them from marinas where we had food trucks parked and carry the supplies back and forth from the boaters on the water to the marinas. It was like, oh my God, we've just unlocked something major here around coastal economies, right, where you're actually able to do commerce near shore on the water that never really been done before.
And we realized, as awesome as that was, it's just a small part of something much larger, this thing that we've been looking at and calling a megatrend. That is the floating economy, something I coined back about five years ago.
And we realized we actually need to focus on building a project around this concept of the floating economy and try to address the things that are missing in the focus of the blue economy and the ocean economy.
And so we did that Starting almost exactly 12 months ago today, building out this project around the floating economy, trying to understand what is it, what does it actually mean and how can we actually monetize this idea and how can we actually help companies and businesses become established and actually fulfill their purpose and their missions sustainably.
And you know, one of the things that we uncovered is so many of the organizations that are out on the water addressing the challenges around sustainability and ESG and climate change, mainly government funded. And so a lot of their money comes through nonprofit organizations, NGOs, government entities, and it's not really sustainable business in the long run.
So let's see if we can help businesses by launching business models and helping them understand markets and economics and business strategy and sales and business development. Traditionally, the engineers of the world just do not have a lot of exposure to. And so they actually need a lot of help in being able to build businesses.
So that's why we ended up launching the floating economy as a concept and then back in December of last year, so just five months ago now, I went public on LinkedIn with a three week test of content just to gauge whether or not there's any type of public interest in what we're doing around the floating economy.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: And how did that go?
[00:08:48] Speaker B: It was crazy.
The response was absolutely immediate.
So the very first post I put out on the first day I have to tell you, we started with a baseline of zero. We didn't have any followers, we didn't have anybody who knew what we were doing because we had built this in private.
But as soon as we went public, that very first day, actually in the first hour, we started reaching thousands of people across the globe. And it was mind blowing because it was like, oh my God, people see this. And then people started engaging.
So the number of likes and the number of comments and then the number of messages, everything just kind of BW up from zero to almost 100,000 people across the globe over a span of three weeks.
And we're like, oh my God, we have something.
And you know, my messenger on LinkedIn was backed up over a thousand people long. And this was like, oh my God. And it's just, it's the kind of the same, same messages.
Everybody wanting to know, what is this floating economy you guys are talking about?
Is there something there? Because we see this, we've been talking about this amongst ourselves, but there has never been any type of public conversation around all these things until you guys just did it.
So it's been a lot of fun being able to connect with them, build these relationships and connections, and actually being able to help these businesses in many cases build up their operations and expand into new regions. So that kind of leads me where I am to today, but I should say so. Three weeks of content, and then I had to stop because I didn't realize that the response would be so overwhelming. Like, that I actually spent January through March not doing any content, just catching up on all of these conversations that people had started with me around the floating economy and building out those relationships and connections around the globe. We realized, you know, there's three main audiences here. So you have the entrepreneurs of the world who are building or trying to build their businesses around these spaces. And then you have investor groups who are actually looking for opportunities to invest, and then you have these government entities who are actually looking for businesses and investment to build out projects along their national shorelines. And so we're like, okay, well, this is very interesting. And it's such a great opportunity to bring it all together to be able to help people in finding projects and finding investment and finding partners in order to do all this.
And so keep in mind, we're literally three months in to being public about this concept. And it's like, we're really playing catch up here at the moment. You know, we're in May now, so we're, we're at five months in at this point of trying to put all these things together and it's just been, it's been mind blowing. Amazing. The response has been some so cool. Like the people that we talk to are just so open, so collaborative. They're so welcoming to what we're doing. It's just been really amazing overall.
And so we're just right now in the process of trying to put it all together and help as much as we can.
Now, I will say this. We've unlocked a few different challenges that exist in this economy and that is mainly there's no workforce in all these countries around the globe to support all of this build out. And the reason for that is really because there's only a few education programs and universities that support this type of work. Whether it's in aquatech, ocean tech, blue tech, et cetera, or whether it's in floating solutions or even in floating energy or any of these things. There's not much out there in university level. At the same time you have established industries like we'll take maritime as an industry, for example, thousands of years old.
But where is the workforce in support of the maritime industry?
Well, the problem that has been brought up by all these different countries I've talked to is that there's no awareness in younger students. So from elementary through high school around the opportunities that exist on the water, even in maritime.
And unless you happen to be living right next to a port or right next to a marina, you just, you're not ever thinking about these things. And so nobody grows up to say, oh, I want to be a sailor when I grow up. Nobody does that. It's just not a thing. Well, we realize the awareness is such a huge gap that needs to be filled. And so we're actually working on an initiative right now, specifically out of the US since that's where we're launching our nonprofit out of to address this initiative pushed out by President Trump in the White House around shipbuilding and maritime specifically.
There's no workforce in America right now that can actually handle any of this. There's almost nothing in the way university programs and almost really nothing in the way of education programs in primary school.
So that presents a huge challenge and a huge opportunity at the same time.
And so starting in the United States, because that's again where we're actually based out of global phenomena, is not just United States that has this issue.
So doing pilot programs around education, specifically targeting university, and then working our way back into high school where they can actually do competitions and projects, working our way out into middle school where they can actually start learning about how to do these projects around blue tech or floating solutions, et cetera. And then into elementary school where you start to really build the foundation of awareness around doing anything job related on the water.
And one of the things I have to address is the fact that non degree jobs in trade specifically have such an amazing unique opportunity that exists for in the United States right now, but also in many countries around the globe. Not everybody has to go to university and get a degree in something and then get a 9 to 5 job after that. It's not for everybody and you don't need that in order to get a good job. So if we can also direct a lot of attention toward these trades around the maritime industry, around shipbuilding, around blue tech and aquatech and engineering, and just these different pipelines into these different trades and industries, that is really going to help build that foundation for the future that we're looking at. I know we've spoken a little bit in the past about where we see the future in 2050, so in 30 years from now.
30 years sounds like a long time, but in reality it's quite a short time. In that amount of time we see a way to build all of these elementary students, middle school students, high school students and university into the workforce of the future that is focused specifically around water.
That has never really been done before in recent history.
And we see it as really a way of unlocking a lot of the potential, a lot of the growth into the floating economy.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Wow. So it's just so immense, isn't it Just so immense, Peter? I mean, obviously from what you're saying, you know, it's obvious, it's. This is not just about ports, you know, it's about floating, floating infrastructure, boat base, you know, logistics, retail, tourism and so much more. Can you give, I mean, apart from breaking it down as to how the, the younger people of now and the future are going to be more job ready for this particular floating economy and the opportunities that it brings with us. Can you give us some real world examples that illustrate the breadth? Yeah, maybe some pilots or whatever.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. So as you're aware, I'm actually based here in South Korea where my, whereas my partners are in the United States.
One of the things that is a major challenge actually around South Korea is the population crisis that exists.
So I don't know if you or the listeners are really aware of what's happening in Korea, but it's got the lowest birth rate in the world with a 0.7 replacement rate. So that means the population is at 55 million, but by 2050, it's going to be at 30 million.
That's almost half of where it's at today. And that is a huge, huge challenge and a huge issue that needs to be addressed.
And traditionally, you know, it's been addressed through policy and regulation, through the government. And it's been a problem for a couple of decades, not necessarily something that's propped up today. And they've been addressing it with the same exact style, policy, regulation, and it hasn't worked. At the same time, you have Busan, the fifth largest port city in the world, that has had a massive drain of its young talent over the last decade, essentially going out of Busan into Seoul, which is the capital city, in search of better jobs.
Because what's ended up happening is Korea as a whole has experienced a lot of growth in the technology industry, but not necessarily growth in salaries.
And there's been a lot of growth in real estate pricing, but not much growth, again, in the way of jobs or job security. And what's ended up happening is the young workforce force has gotten completely priced out of getting married, priced out of having kids, priced out of buying houses.
And so you suddenly have a major problem on your hand. Nobody's buying houses, nobody's getting married, nobody's having kids. What do you do?
It stems from a root cause, and that's around the salaries and the jobs that are being offered.
So you have this amazing port city of Busan.
It's the fifth largest in the world. There's so much potential there. At the same time, you have the political situation, there's always some on both ends between China and the United States. With a tariff war, this suddenly locks China out of the United States, but it presents this great opportunity for South Korea specifically to pick up the slack. South Korea is the second largest shipbuilding nation in the world behind China.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Nope, I have to say I didn't.
This is what I love about doing. Constructive voices, always learning.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: That's right. It's so cool. And you have this amazing opportunity again for South Korea to be able to support the United States in this endeavor of doing shipbuilding and maritime program.
You've actually seen certain companies, such as Hanwha, one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the world, move into the United States to set up shop and build out programs around shipbuilding in the United States.
Well, again, looking at the workforce, there's not one in the United States, there is one in Korea. However, it's rapidly being depleted because of this issue around the salaries and trying to go to Seoul for better inland jobs.
So what I'm thinking and what I propose, and I actually sat down with the Vice Prime Minister of Korea a couple weeks back to present this idea to him.
What if you reposition Busan in South Korea as the ocean city of the future and you start building out infrastructure in support of this and you start targeting high net worth tourists. Because traditionally Korea has been a very tourism heavy country, but usually I would say 90% of the case has actually been around people who don't actually spend money.
And that's kind of an issue I discovered, is that Seoul, the city of Seoul and the city of Busan collectively lose billions of dollars a year on tourism.
And it's like, okay, so how can we take all these different challenges and all these different opportunities together and apply it to the floating economy?
Well, it's quite simple. You build in Busan, so bringing in nearshore logistics, aquatech, bluetech, floating solutions.
Start focusing on mega yachts and super yachts, because currently there's no infrastructure in place in Korea to support these. Build that out and start enticing people with money to come to the country. You can start enticing people with jobs to support that and you can start having people build businesses around that. You start focusing on making the port more modern and you can build businesses around that and you focus again on, on all these different pieces along the shoreline.
Use Busan as a case example where it's lost its young workforce. Entice that young workforce back by providing actual jobs and training into these new industries that they were not in before and build out that workforce at the same time.
Entice them to get married and have families and have kids.
And the big problem there is it's expensive for daycare and kindergarten, et cetera. So put in place these programs for grandparents to be able to help support them with their grandkids.
It's something that has been talked about but never implemented. Actually, as soon as you can address all of these different systemic challenges, and there's quite a few of them, but if you can put it all together and address them all, there's such a huge opportunity there. So now you're solving workforce problems, you're solving training problems, you're solving population problems, you're solving so many things in just one city.
But guess what? It's not just a one city problem. This is happening all over the globe.
How do you address it? Well, you have to start somewhere.
I know that's what we're doing, right? So we're focused around the United States with the training and education initiatives, also focusing in South Korea, since that's where I am at around building up the workforce and solving the population crisis at the exact same time.
And so I think those are two really great use cases.
There's another third one that probably makes more sense to a lot of the listeners and that's going to be in Australia. The city of Brisbane is actually going to be hosting the 2030 Summer Olympics. Now, if you knew this, but there's a major river that runs through the middle of Brisbane. And so what you're going to see is you have the Olympics being held on both sides of this river. And there needs to be transportation in place to go back and forth. And guess what? It's going to be water transportation. So great opportunities there. But also there has to be accommodation for all the people. As of today, Brisbane does not have accommodations to hold all the tourists who are going to be coming. And that presents a huge opportunity. But the problem is you can't build these accommodations on land. There's not enough land available.
So what do you do? You have to build on the water.
So now you start getting to things like floating hotels, floating housing, and not necessarily cruise ships, but hotel ships, which are a smaller version of these cruise ships. And you start to see all these opportunities arise. And so now you're also looking again at the workforce which needs to be built up. So again you're looking at training and education.
And so it all kind of stems back. If you look, you know, you have the past, you have the present, you have the future. If you look toward the future and we'll say to 2050, there's a lot of work that has to be done today, but it's not built on nothing. You know, there's actually precedents here.
Floating infrastructure and floating economies have been around literally for thousands of years, but nobody talks about it. So if you think about all the commerce that has ever happened, say on the Nile river in Egypt, it's all about the water. If you look at what's happened in Thailand and Vietnam over the last thousands of years with their floating markets, it's all on the water. If you look even in Korea, in Jeju island with the famous mermaids who are going out and collecting all of the sea life and bringing it back to shore again, it's all about the water.
Fishing, this is millennia old industry. It's all about the, all these things. It's always transportation, always about the water. And so I keep coming back to this.
There's a reason why? The floating economy sounds cool, it sounds futuristic, it sounds new, but in reality, it's actually thousands of years old.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense because in fact, if you look at Roman, the Roman times, and here in Europe, you know, where they went to this city and conquered that city and all of the rest of it, you know, it was always done strategically with a port in mind and then spread out from that, you know, so it's not something new, Peter, but we're looking to expand what we call the built environment and the interrelated possibilities that go with that into a water setting. Obviously, one of the things that popped into my mind when you were speaking about South Korea is there's a lot of problems being solved, theoretically, at least at the moment in what you've spoken about.
What about the residents?
Would there be floating residents to deal with? The.
The price, you know, the prices that are too high for those young people at the moment?
[00:26:49] Speaker B: It's actually a great question. And there are two components here. So you have Seoul, which is the major city where 90% of the population of Korea is located. And then you have Busan, which is the second largest city and holds a good portion of the rest of Korea's residents.
Now, Busan in and of itself is actually a coastal city. And so you have the sea right there. And so it's quite a bit rough outside of the bay area.
Seoul, on the other hand, they have the Han river, which is fresh water and much more stable in terms of being able to handle floating housing projects that you're speaking about in both cases, yes, it's absolutely possible.
It's easier. It's always easier to build on fresh water than it is on seawater. This is actually already happening today.
A lot of floating infrastructure on the Han river is going to get built out. And so I've actually sat down with a lot of different companies in Korea who are working right now on this, building up floating hotels, floating marinas, floating. Floating infrastructure. And a lot of that is actually going to be focused around the housing part.
On the other hand, Busan is a coastal city with the sea. It's a bit more rough and quite a bit more challenging. However, you have these initiatives, such as Oceanics, which is a floating city, solve some of those issues.
It may not be what we think of as a grand, standalone city city out on the sea, but I think what you are going to see is actually an extension of Busan going out onto the water and developing offshore, but it's all going to be connected to the shoreline so it's like a continuation of the existing city, more so than standalone projects out to sea.
[00:28:38] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. And that will, as you said, depend on a case by case basis, of course, depending on what, what, you know, what is the existing situation, how the water is there, all of that type of stuff. So it makes perfect sense to adapt it according to the geography of the local place.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: So now it's such a huge topic when we start to delve into everything, isn't it? You've written that land is constrained, Peter, and shorelines are becoming launchpads, not limits.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: What are the signals telling you this shift is already underway at the moment?
[00:29:13] Speaker B: Well, reality is telling me that. So if you look at, say we'll use the Netherlands as a great example here, and looking specifically at the city of Rotterdam, you have one of the largest port cities in Europe and you have a lot of construction that is being constrained because of flooding issues. Right.
So it's very difficult to continue building on the land itself. And it's actually expensive when you start looking at flood mitigation and things like that.
It's actually quite cheaper to build floating solutions and housing on top of those floating solutions than it is to solve all the engineering problems and build your typical construction developments on land.
And so what they've done is they've started a lot of this floating development. And I think what you'll find is that so much of the expertise around the globe is actually centered out of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Specifically they built these floating offices, these floating towns. What they found as they've done that is it's absolutely feasible. The costs are coming down as they continue to do more and more of it. It's happening in Finland, the United States, Australia, Africa. I keep connecting with all these different companies who are actually working on this and governments who are actively pursuing, pursuing this. Southeast Asia in particular is something that is really coming along quite nicely at the moment. I spoke earlier about high net worth tourism. One of the interesting things that's happening right now, the wealthy yacht owners out of Europe, in the Middle east are very tired of going to the same place year after year. And so they're seeking more exotic destinations.
Southeast Asia has stood up and said, okay, we are going to take advantage of this fact. You have countries like Indonesia and Vietnam and the Philippines who are actively building out floating infrastructure, floating marinas that can actually handle these super yachts and mega yachts.
And so there's so much development happening there. At the same time, I was just approached by an investment group out of Silicon Valley in California who are looking to build a mega city project in Southeast Asia connecting the different countries together and building multiple of these floating developments across these different countries.
And so there's just so much that's happening as of today that it's really started to take off.
You didn't really see this 20 years ago, you didn't see this 10 years ago. But over the last couple of years and few years it's really seen so much rapid development and interest among everybody. And so that's really what has caught my initial interest in pursuing this as the floating economy is the fact that it's moving forward and is moving forward very rapidly and there's so much potential.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: You did say though at one stage and our sort of pre interview chats, Peter, that most people aren't watching.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: So why do you think the floating economy has been overlooked for so long?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: So it's challenging, right? So you have traditionally your investor groups who are looking for very safe, stable investments. You're looking at government entities who are also looking for a very safe, stable, established means of construction.
You have your businesses, your long established businesses who have a certain way, and I'm talking about construction businesses, real estate businesses, you know, they have their established way of doing things. And it's not easy for causing change and forcing adaption to new methods.
And I realize what we're proposing is not actually new. Again we spoke about this earlier. It's thousands of years old, but the perception of it is quite new. It's something that hasn't been looked at for so long.
And so it goes back to the awareness that I was talking about earlier. There's no awareness in school systems which has affected the workforce, which has affected the jobs, which has affected the people building businesses, it's affected the governments, it's affected the investment groups, it's affected everybody in the fact that there just hasn't really been a lot of awareness built in from a young age around the opportunities.
And that is what we are seeking to change as of today.
And once you change that, I think you're going to see really sky's the limit as far as where we can go.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Definitely, definitely. That was really exciting. And how do you actually see the role of the shorelines evolving, Peter? You know, especially in the likes of flood prone coastal cities.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So you know, it's interesting if you look at Florida as a case example, it gets continuously barraged by hurricanes. Right. And so there's a lot of flooding that happens last Year there was a major hurricane, actually a couple of them, that came through St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay, which is where my two partners are based out of, and it caused such a huge amount of flooding. And what ended up happening is a lot of the houses that were built along that shoreline, we're talking million dollar houses, multi million dollar houses, were suddenly not just wiped out, but you know, think about the things inside, the furniture inside completely destroyed, all the people's belongings completely destroyed because of this issue.
Well, what happens when you suddenly start looking at, okay, you have your established very old way of doing construction and if you do it on the shoreline, there are so many challenges that you have to overcome, but you still can't completely overcome them. And so you have these challenges with the rising waters across the globe and challenges with flooding.
So what do you do? Well, you can build protection around these housing developments. That's one way, not necessarily the easiest or cheapest solution. Or you can make housing more resilient itself. And some of the ways you can do that is by introducing these floating platforms for cities overall. Once you put floating infrastructure out there, it actually works as a barrier to the sea and it kind of puts itself between the city itself and the open ocean. If you think about it, say you have these giant waves are coming at the city, well, they have to hit these floating barriers first. So it actually dissipates quite a bit of that energy.
The other piece though, it's floating.
So not only is it helping to dissipate, it's also quite safe at the same time because it floats above instead of being overtaken by the waves. And so there's just so much that happens there. So I think if you're focused on these coastal areas where you can build out shorelines by making them floating, if you can start changing the way that you're doing your typical construction of land based homes and focus more on resilience over the long term, I think you're going to be in a much better position overall.
But again, it comes down to awareness.
And I know I keep using that word, I keep talking about it, but it's really true.
You know, your typical land based construction company is not thinking about the ocean, it's not thinking about the possibilities that exist around, well, we'll use the term climate change or around these different flooding. It's just not really thought about. Unless you happen to be in a very low lying area in a floodplain and it's required, then it's just not something that you're really building for yeah, definitely.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: But at the same time, you have also cited, Peter, the potential of 50,000 plus floating businesses by 2050.
Now, you obviously believe in that, but how do you think, where will that growth come from? Will it be mega cities, emerging economies, coastal innovation zones? What are your thoughts?
[00:37:31] Speaker B: So it's going to be a mix of all of those. But I want to be very clear when I talk about floating economy. I'm not just talking about floating cities.
I'm not just talking about floating houses. I'm talking about all these industries that exist off the coastline. So you have everything again, from energy to tourism to hospitality to ports, marinas, cruise ships. All these different pieces make up the floating economy itself.
And to experience that growth in all these industries again, it comes back to education and training.
So how do you support that at 50,000 businesses across the globe in these different industries?
Well, I have to tell you, as of today, my list of businesses is almost at 10,000. And I know that sounds small, but it's actually a lot more than I had anticipated. This is 30 years before 2050. We're at 10,000.
And I'm discovering more by the day. And more and more people are getting so excited about the opportunities. I was actually talking about to someone who works for Carnival Cruise Lines out of Florida a couple days ago, and he's getting ready to retire. He told me, you know, I've been following your content here for a long time, and it's got really got me thinking. I want to build a business in one of these industries and I'm thinking about floating hotels.
He was like, it actually works perfectly because, you know, I built up 30 years of experience in the cruise industry, cruise line industry, and so I made all these connections in that, and I actually have good, stable foundation to build off of.
And your content has really inspired me to really take that seriously. And it's things like that that I would say are going to be pushing toward that larger workforce of the future. The larger number of businesses by 2050 is just building that awareness. If people don't know, I can't expect much. And so that's why I'm so focused on spreading the word, evangelizing this concept, working on the education and training initiatives.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: So obviously, one of the most important sectors of all of this are investors, developers, all of those kind of people who are going to see this potential and put money into it. How can those people, the developers, the investors who are traditionally completely tied to the land, how can they start thinking differently about water beaters?
[00:40:07] Speaker B: So it's interesting I would say the floating economy is really an open playing field. Anybody can participate, but it goes back to awareness. You have to be aware of the opportunities, but you also have to be driven to make an impact.
I would say that visionaries from all backgrounds have a chance to shape this.
You know, capital is going to flow, but it has to start by awareness.
So high net worth and venture capital as private investors are going to be the ones mostly leading the funding. The hope is that that funding is going to support the actual innovators and not just legacy interests. That's one of the big challenges.
So you have established companies that, you know, they're very deeply entrenched into a certain way of doing things. You can use the merits maritime industry as a huge case example. A lot of the maritime companies, very old, very well established, they have lots of investment because it's safe. It's known, it's been around forever. And so that's going to be one of the challenges, getting the investors to focus more on the actual opportunity outside of these legacy companies.
So that's kind of what I'm focusing on right now, is trying to bring this attention and awareness to these investors and help them understand the potential and the opportunities that exist there.
So there's so much to unpack there. I know, but a lot of it is also going to be reliant upon governments to build out the opportunities for these projects. Give you a case example there too. There was a representative from the country of the Maldives who reached out to me last week and he's looking for partners. He's looking for, for investors and he's looking for developers to build out this large island based floating hotel.
And he's like, where do I start? You know, as a country we're quite small, quite limited in our capacity, but we're open to actually doing this. We just need help.
And so it's countries like them.
And when I say them, I'm talking about countries who are open to the opportunities that exist, open to the ideas, open to new sources of income. Those are the ones who are really going to be helping to lead the way in that.
[00:42:29] Speaker A: Okay. I mean obviously that's a great example. This, you know, the person who's reached out from the Maldives. But in general you're networking and working with, you know, operators, builders, investments and obviously investors and even governments. What are the cross sector collaborations, Peter, that to date have been most effective that you can tell us about.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: So it is interesting. There's all kinds of different ones and different industries.
If you look as Far as government groups, we can look at ports or port authorities in particular, they're always looking for ways to improve ways around safety, ways to increase the efficiency of their operations, things like that.
They're being funded directly by the government itself, a lot of times through grants.
And they're actually able to bring in companies to work on these different projects at the same time. You have cities specifically which are looking to build out infrastructure in support of tourism or in support of their innovation zones that they have set up to bring in new business and new capital.
We'll go back to Busan. There's for a case example actually. So Busan has set up these innovation zones to target businesses to come and relocate into Busan and being able to tap into Korean wide investment groups to help them support these businesses.
The problem with Busan today, they have these innovation zones right next to their ports. But it actually has absolutely nothing to do with with the ports or with coastal economy or any of that. It's actually just normal land based business that happens to be located right next to the shoreline.
So kind of helping to change that at the moment and bring a different perspective.
And so you have these opportunities that exist and again I mentioned some of them briefly in passing around Australia, across Southeast Asia, a lot of things happening in the United States States.
It's just a matter of bringing the right people together at the right time in support of that. And so I'm actually in the process of doing that, building out my partner network that I can tap into because I hear about opportunities all the time and I hear about investors all the time who are looking for opportunities. I'm connected into entrepreneurs all the time who are looking to build something.
They just need projects.
And so I'm actively building out this list of partners that are able to tie into each other around the globe. And that's again the investors, governments and the entrepreneurs.
And so there's just so much happening. I'll leave it there because there's actually a lot to unpack, more than we have time for, but happy to dig more.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Are there any specific regions or cities apart from Rotterdam, Busan? You know, the places you've already mentioned that are particularly leading the way that you would like to mention quickly for sure.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: Helsinki in Finland is definitely doing a lot really. If you look at the major port cities across the globe, there's a lot of innovation that's actually happening. There's a lot that's happening in Singapore, there's a lot that's happening in Busan, a lot happening in Germany.
In Australia.
So much that is actively happening right now in the United States around these new initiatives. It's all over the place right now. And by the day, they're literally popping up more and more. You look into Africa over the last few weeks, I've had more and more people reach out to me from different countries in Africa, telling me about the projects that they're working on. It's like, oh my God, I haven't even thought that much about Africa.
You look into the Middle east and there's so much happening around Saudi Arabia and the uae. In Saudi Arabia specifically, they're building out Oxagon, the port city of the future. It's actually half island, half floating. You look into Dubai and into Abu Dhabi. They're actively building out these future oriented floating projects and ports and even potentially a floating city.
So this is, it's really all over the place.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: Last question for the listeners who are curious to find out more. Peter, what should they be doing to learn and to expand their knowledge on this subject?
[00:46:56] Speaker B: Go visit a marina, go visit a port, go see what's going on with all the businesses and opportunities that exist there. And if you don't have time to go do that, then I would say at the very least go to floatingeconomy.com and read through the different articles that are being put out. There's actually a floating conference that's happening in Helsinki in September.
If you really want to learn more about the opportunities that exist, all of the businesses that are building are going to be there. Definitely go and check that one out. There's also a newsletter that we put out every day, Monday through Friday around the floating economy and the opportunities that exist. That's another easy way.
And follow us on LinkedIn because that's again, just a super easy way to take advantage of the knowledge that exists out there.
[00:47:43] Speaker A: This is constructive voices.
