58. The man Who builds museums under the sea, jason decaires taylor.
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Breathing Like Fish
What the Next 50 Years Could Look Like If Humans Close the Gap With the Ocean
Imagine owning a house with a huge basement you have never opened. You walk over it every day. You know it is full of things. Sometimes you hear noises down there. But the door is heavy, the light switch is broken, and honestly, you are a little scared of what is behind it.
That basement is the ocean. It covers most of the planet, and we mostly look at it from the balcony.
Jason deCaires Taylor has spent almost twenty years opening that door. The British sculptor and marine conservationist sinks human-scale sculptures to the sea floor, walks away, and lets coral, sponges and fish finish the work. On Episode 58, Mizter Rad asked him a bigger question: what happens in the next fifty years if humans finally close the gap with the ocean? Jason's answer pointed somewhere unexpected. Not to a city. Not to a robot. To the heavy metal tank on every diver's back.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Luck
The first problem is not technology. It is attention. Coral reefs are dying, and most people never see it happen. Jason explains it with a simple comparison:
"If we walked past this tropical rainforest every day and we saw the bulldozers coming in and cutting down all the trees and killing all the animals, we wouldn't stand for it. But because it's in this hidden world, it's out of sight, then we tend to ignore the reality of it when in fact it's exactly the same picture."
He has watched it with his own eyes over four decades of diving. "It's always the same story, you know, everybody who I meet in these places says, you know, you should have come here 20 years ago and it was paradise."
And there is a second wall, deeper than indifference: fear. "I think humans are pre-designed to fear the unknown, and the sea is the ultimate unknown," Jason says. Ask people for the scariest film ever made and many will say Jaws. Ask them for the worst way to die and many will say drowning. Mizter Rad admitted he is in that group too.
So if humanity wants a future with the ocean, it first needs a reason to go down the basement stairs.
Art as the First Bridge
Jason's reason is art. His sculptures are built from pH-neutral, inert materials, anchored to the seabed, and designed to withstand a category five hurricane. Then nature takes over fast.
"Within a couple of days, it will start to turn green and yellow from algae deposits. Fish will then start to eat that algae, so it'll have teeth marks where the herbivorous fish graze on the algae."
It is not only a tropical story. In the cold fjords of Oslo, one of his projects started with a few worms and shrimps. "So it went from a tiny worm to a seal within the space of like a year and a half, I think."
The whole thing started almost by accident, in Grenada, after a hurricane left only a couple of healthy reefs and every tourist was crowding them. Jason built a sculpture park in a sandy bay to pull people away. "I think almost 50, 60% of the tourists that used to go to those areas now went to this new area, which was in the middle of a sandy bay and didn't cause any negative impact." Today that area is a marine protected area.
But for Jason, the sculptures are really an invitation. "Because if you've got any hope of protecting the marine life, you know, people have to know about it, they've got to be connected to it, they've got to feel empathy for it."
The 60-Year-Old Bottleneck on Your Back
Here is where the conversation turned toward the future. Mizter Rad mentioned how much he would love to explore the sea in a small submarine he could drive around. Jason took it one step further, to the most basic problem of all: breathing.
"The actual scuba equipment hasn't changed for about 50 years, 60 years. It's still the same kind of heavy tank on your back with compressed air in it that you breathe. And that has a lot of limitations, you know, it's heavy. You've got time constraints. It's uncomfortable."
Think about that. In sixty years, phones went from rotary dials to pocket supercomputers. Cars learned to drive themselves. And diving still looks like carrying a gas cylinder to a party. Jason has a clear wish for inventors: "I was always optimistic that one day someone's going to invent a regulator that can extract oxygen from water."
For him, this is the key that unlocks everything else. "If you crack that first, then it would open the floodgates to all the other inventions that could follow. That I feel is the block at the moment."
Mizter Rad compared it to virtual reality. Early headsets were heavy goggles that only enthusiasts wanted to strap to their faces. With investment, they are shrinking toward something that looks like normal glasses. It is the same journey we explored with Jussi Mäkinen of Distance Technologies, who is working to make mixed reality disappear into everyday surfaces like car windshields. If headsets can become glasses, why can't the scuba tank become something you barely notice?
Three Ways We Might Breathe Underwater by 2076
So what could replace the tank? Here are three directions Mizter Rad imagines, from the most discreet to the most spacious.
1. Nostril micro-gills. The dream version. A tiny mechanism sitting in or near your nose, filtering oxygen straight out of the water, like a fish gill shrunk to the size of a nose clip. It is also the hardest version, because water carries only a small fraction of the oxygen that air does. Fish solve this by pushing a lot of water across very large, very thin surfaces. Squeezing that into something the size of your nostril would need huge leaps in membranes and materials science. Hard? Yes. Impossible in fifty years? Nobody on this show is willing to say that anymore.
2. Astronaut-style helmets. A clear bubble around your head, like the helmets we saw on the Moon, but built for the sea. Oxygen could come from the surface or be generated on the spot, and you would not need to learn to breathe through a mouthpiece at all. Pair this with Jason's own idea of seabed walkways: "It would be quite nice if you could just walk along the seabed, so that you view it from a different perspective, and then you just walk from land into the sea and then walk out another part, you know?" Imagine a Sunday walk that starts on the beach and ends at a reef, with no swimming lessons required.
3. Personal mini-submarines. The scooter of the ocean. Small, electric, easy to drive, a bubble of normal air around you. For the people who do not want to get wet at all, this is the door. And for those who just want to get to work, Jason imagines something even simpler: "If you imagine there were glass tunnels that went underwater through rivers or through bays, where you could see the marine life, you know, as you walk to work in the morning..."
A Timeline for the Blue Decades
2026 to 2036: the invitation. Sculpture parks, marine protected areas and the first permanent habitats. Companies like DEEP in the UK are building what they call an underwater International Space Station. Ocean Builders is floating homes off Maldives and Panama, where Mizter Rad spent two nights in a SeaPod waking up to turtles swimming past the window. Jason's newest works already carry sensors that record temperature and salinity and send the data back to land.
2036 to 2056: the infrastructure. Lighter breathing gear, seabed walkways, and museums that do double duty as coastal defenses. Jason is already designing them: "I've been doing a lot of work recently designing museums that not only are about art, but also about protecting the coastlines and protecting human urban areas." This is also the window where the ocean could start powering us. Jason sees huge potential in waves and tides: "If we could find a way to harness some of that energy in a sustainable way, then I think that would be really revolutionary." It connects with our conversation with Florian Hildebrandt of Greenlyte, who argued that the world is not short of clean energy, only of good ways to store and move it.
2056 to 2083: the neighborhoods. In the episode's News from the Future segment, correspondent Mara Delgado reported from 2076, from Museo Atlántico Deep off Lanzarote: research stations, a marine science school, a restaurant, and ten million visitors arriving by submersible pod. When Mizter Rad asked Jason how crazy that sounded, he did not laugh it off. "Yeah, I don't think it's completely off the charts."
Not everything in that future convinced him, though. When Mizter Rad proposed turning his museums into live data centers for lab-grown seafood, Jason pushed back: "No, I don't see that as viable." His reason is worth remembering for anyone building the blue economy: "A lot of the conservation success stories that I've seen are also just to leave nature alone to do its own thing, because it's so resilient and it always finds a way in."
We Already Know How to Float
Maybe the most surprising idea in the episode is that going underwater is not moving into something new. It is going back to something old.
"I'm a strong believer that I think we all spent the first nine months of our existence in the womb, in fluid, suspended. And although obviously we can't remember that moment, I still think we have some kind of muscle memory of that sensation of floating, of being detached from gravity and from the earth."
That is why his dream project is not a bigger museum, but a sacred space, something like a small underwater city "where nature is the main protagonist." And it comes from a bigger shift he wants to see: "For me, I think we have to evolve more and have more of this feeling that we are nature, that we are all part of the same system."
He is even optimistic that technology might push us back toward the real world. "I actually think AI might end up actually destroying our relationship to the digital world, because we won't be able to believe anything we see." When screens get boring and fake, he believes people will be "dying to have real experiences and to put our feet in the sand and to feel water on our faces."
Jason quoted Jacques Cousteau's old mantra, "that you can't protect what you don't love." The next fifty years could flip that sentence around. The more easily we can visit the ocean, the more people will love it. And the more people love it, the harder it becomes to destroy it.
Maybe the first person to live full-time on the sea floor in 2076 will not be an engineer or a billionaire. Maybe it will be someone who took a Sunday walk off the beach with a bubble on their head, looked up at the light rippling through the water, and simply decided not to go back upstairs.
Artists like Jason have already opened the basement door. Now somebody just needs to invent a way for the rest of us to breathe down there.
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This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools. The Mizter Rad Show is hosted by Mizter Rad.
Guest: Jason deCaires Taylor, Underwater Museum Builder and Pioneer.
Follow Jason on Instagram.
Listen to the full conversation on the Mizter Rad Show.
Stay curious, question everything.
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Underwater Museums: Full Transcript with Jason deCaires Taylor
The Mizter Rad Show, Episode 58: Jason deCaires Taylor
Intro (00:00.398) I think more interesting is how we can draw energy from the sea. There's obviously all this potential wave energy and currents and tidal energy, and that is a huge force that we haven't really mastered yet. We obviously have offshore wind, but you think of the force of the ocean and the incredible energy it captures, and if we could find a way to harness some of that energy in a sustainable way, then I think that would be really revolutionary.
Intro (00:43.202) Welcome to the Mizter Rad Show, where I talk to the most interesting global personalities about the future of humanity.
Mizter Rad (01:01.304) We all know the ocean. We grew up with pictures of it. Blue, endless, beautiful. We holiday next to it, we eat from it, we make documentaries about it, and yet we have better maps of Mars than we do of our own ocean floor. We've explored less than five percent of the ocean. Five percent, that's nothing. The other ninety-five percent is basically a question mark.
Or the question rather is, what's happening to the part that we've explored, those five percent? For example, the coral reefs, which are basically the rainforest of the sea, home to twenty-five percent of all marine life, are dying fast. Scientists estimate we've lost half of the world's coral reefs since the fifties. And the biggest threats? Well, water pollution and, ironically, tourism. So here's the challenge.
How do we protect an ecosystem that most people can't even access? How do we make people care about something invisible to them? One man decided the answer was art. Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, a marine conservationist, and honestly one of the most original thinkers that I've ever come across.
He doesn't build museums on land, he sinks them under the water. He places massive human-scale sculptures on the floor of the ocean. And then he steps back and lets nature take over. Coral grows on them. Fish move in. Whole ecosystems build themselves around Jason's art. He's created nine underwater museums so far, over one thousand two hundred sculptures, and generated around forty-seven million pounds in local tourism revenue. And here's the stat that blew my mind. Fish abundance around his sculptures increased by 68%. Biomass, that means the total weight of life underwater, goes up by 415%. This guy is not just making art, he's making life. And now here's where it gets really interesting for us.
For the team here at the Mizter Rad Show, and that's the reason why we invited Jason, we see trends, we see what's happening in the world, and we think we're living through a moment where the world is starting to treat the ocean not just as something to look at, but somewhere to live. Companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars building permanent human habitats on the ocean floor. Architects are designing underwater cities.
I personally spent two nights in a SeaPod, a floating pod with an underwater level, off the coast of Panama, built by a company called Ocean Builders. We actually published an episode with them not so long ago. And the cool thing, and actually the most relaxing thing, is to wake up and just look at the fish swimming by, the turtles swimming by, as soon as you wake up in the morning. And that made me think: if humans are going to start moving towards the ocean, who is already building the culture down there? Jason deCaires Taylor has. Jason, welcome to the Mizter Rad Show. This is going to be a good conversation, I hope.
Jason deCaires Taylor (04:26.134) Yeah, no, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to join you.
Mizter Rad (04:29.516) Amazing. Jason, let's start simple. When you go diving, I know you're a good diver, you love diving. When you're underwater looking at a coral reef, what do you actually see right now in 2026 compared to when you started some years ago? What has changed?
Jason deCaires Taylor (04:49.622) Quite a bit, quite a bit. Yes, I think, you know, I'm in my 50s now. I was very fortunate when I was a kid, I used to live in Asia and visit the coral reefs at weekends. So I've had almost, you know, 40-odd years of diving and snorkeling different parts of the world. And it's always the same story, you know, everybody who I meet in these places says, you know, you should have come here 20 years ago and it was paradise. And I've seen that, you know, I've been back to places I visited, and coral reefs are such delicate ecosystems. It doesn't take a lot to just destabilize them, and so many of them are heavily bleached, covered in algae, fish populations have been decimated, and, you know, the prognosis is not very good because our planet is warming, and corals don't do so well in warmer seas. So yeah, it's certainly been a very sort of depressing picture.
Mizter Rad (05:56.234) Hm. And why should someone care? I mean, if someone lives in Madrid or in Bogotá or in Riyadh, why should they care about coral reefs dying? Why is that important?
Jason deCaires Taylor (06:10.720) I mean, they're hugely important on many different levels. They're homes to most of the marine biomass that's in the sea. They protect coastlines. They produce oxygen. They're vital for the planet's health. But because they're out of sight and out of mind... I always make the analogy with a tropical forest. If we walked past this tropical rainforest every day and we saw the bulldozers coming in and cutting down all the trees and killing all the animals, we wouldn't stand for it. But because it's in this hidden world, it's out of sight, then we tend to ignore the reality of it when in fact it's exactly the same picture. These are the rainforests of the sea and home to thousands of different creatures that are being affected. So part of the objective of all my projects is to try to reveal the sea and showcase some of its inherent beauty.
Mizter Rad (07:18.776) So is that the reason why you said, okay, we need to save the reefs, we need to reveal the sea, let me sink a concrete human figure on the floor and call the attention of people? Maybe you can walk me through that moment where you decided to sink art in the oceans.
Jason deCaires Taylor (07:48.920) Sure. I mean, to be honest, I had this idea for a very long time. My work at art college was always about art and the environment, but mostly looking at kind of land sites and urban sites. But I really started to look into it and, you know, for thousands of years, humans have been making marks on land, you know, cave paintings and lines, and we've been telling the human story for millennia this way, but no artist has ever really gone into the sea and explored the underwater world. And for most artists, it's all about exploration, exploration of ideas, of techniques, of philosophies. So for me, it just seemed like a huge part of the human story was missing, that we hadn't investigated the blue world in the same way.
And so I was instantly hooked in trying to find out more, and being a diver and understanding a little bit, I knew how light changed, how colors changed, how perspective was very different, how the evolution and textures and everything that artists love to experiment with was different underwater. It was just an incredible laboratory to explore.
And I'd been doing a lot of land works that had a process to it. They were exhibited or temporarily put in places. And I sort of felt that it was always a little bit wasteful. It needed more of a kind of reason to exist. And so when I started to explore that the artworks could be used as a form of conservation, as a way of creating a habitat for marine life, as a way of drawing visitors away from natural areas, fragile areas, a way for us to tell our human story, then it really, you know, inspired me, and that was a really strong motivating force to start sinking sculptures, as you said.
Mizter Rad (10:05.974) Okay, so when you look at artworks as a way of conservation, I find that very interesting, but I want to understand, and also want listeners to understand, what you mean exactly. What does that process look like? Maybe you can walk me through the process of building a new museum from scratch, because that's sort of your specialty. Let's say a government in Saudi, in the region of the Red Sea, or anywhere else for that matter, or also a private institution, calls you and says, "Hey, we want one of those museums you built in Mexico, or one of those installations you recently made in Japan." What happens next?
Jason deCaires Taylor (10:57.230) Well, it's very much about finding the right location. So finding the right site, which has many different criteria. Obviously, it has to have zero impact on the natural ecosystem there. So we don't want to impact any of the natural reefs or draw people to an area where they could cause problems. Also, working under the sea is very, very difficult. From an engineering point of view, there's huge forces from waves, from tropical storms, from currents, from sediment movement. So we have to look at all those factors to make sure we choose a site that is safe for people to access and also safe for the sculptures to be installed. And then of course, we want people to be able to see them clearly. So we want to put them in places where the visibility is good, where the sea conditions are safe.
And ultimately it will attract marine life, that is really its aim. Each one of the sculptures is designed with materials that will actually help foster a new coral reef, that will have homes and hiding places for different types of species. So we tailor-make some of the foundations and some of the substructures for sea urchins to live, for octopus, for different types of crustacean. And then we make other parts that are homes for juvenile fish to escape being predated on. We put other elements that are high up so they filter nutrients from the water column, so that sponges and corals and other species can get established. So it's really not just about creating a static artwork. It's about creating something that will evolve and change, and ultimately we want people to come and see it in all its glory.
Mizter Rad (12:56.870) How did you start realizing that your art could also be a home for all these marine creatures? How did you start building these tailor-made homes for these animals, for example? Did you have that in mind from the very beginning, or did you realize that this was naturally happening and adjust your way of making things to facilitate that natural process?
Jason deCaires Taylor (13:29.506) Really, I've been a diver for a long time, and as divers, we're pretty accustomed to seeing what happens to underwater objects. I love shipwrecks, so I've always gone to explore different shipwrecks, and you ask any fisherman where's the best place to fish and they'll tell you a shipwreck, because there's so much life living on it. I was always very aware of how life would concentrate around artificial structures. And so, yes, and I'd also watch things over time be colonized. You know, I'd see a handrail of a ship and it would, you know, have a filter-feeding sponge that would grow off it. And you could see where the water was drawn in and the nutrients taken from the water. So I had all these things in the back of my mind, but I still never actually intentionally designed it. And it's very site-specific. It's very different in each area you work.
I started almost 20 years ago building some small structures, experimenting with materials, trying different heights in the water column, near to reefs or away from reefs. I just tried lots of different things, and I was very fortunate. I worked in two places. I worked in the Caribbean and also worked in Mexico. And in both those areas, the governments were very supportive and they allowed me to, you know, create my own designs and experiment with different things. And it's transformative, you know, I was really fortunate. I got to see all of it in real time, you know, what was happening. Each design always adapted from the last. You know, this time I'd see a coral that had been ripped off the reef by a storm, and so I'd take that coral and replant it onto a new structure and clamp it on, so that when the next storm came along, it would be more resilient. It's just been evolving. It started off with just a few single sculptures. Now it's full underwater museums where I make underwater buildings, where we make huge underwater structures that can weigh hundreds of tons and can attract thousands and thousands of tourists. So, yeah, it's certainly evolved over time.
Mizter Rad (15:58.294) Where do you actually build those sculptures or those structures? Do you build them in your studio in the UK, or do you also do some work on site?
Jason deCaires Taylor (16:07.744) It's usually a bit of a mix. Certainly the extremely engineered foundations, they can be hundreds of tons, so they're always developed on site.
Mizter Rad (16:20.728) So these are foundations that go under the seabed to hold the actual sculpture.
Jason deCaires Taylor (16:28.620) Yes, yes. I mean, a lot of the time I work in tropical areas, and tropical areas are often subject to typhoons, cyclones, hurricanes and big weather events. And you always have to design for the worst-case scenario. So we're always designing for it to withstand a category five hurricane, for example.
Mizter Rad (16:51.200) Okay. Wow. I also heard that you do something called lifecasting. What is that?
Jason deCaires Taylor (16:58.210) Lifecasting is a very traditional process, which is covering humans in plaster or a gel and taking an exact form of their bodies and faces. Civilizations have used it for many, many years to cast bodies. I think it originally started with making death masks of people that were deceased, taking a cast of them. But now obviously it's evolved, and they use special dental materials that are skin-safe and take an exact replica. So I try, in each one of the projects, to connect the local communities with their local underwater world. So a lot of the sculptures are based on local groups and people, and they're all lifecasts.
Mizter Rad (17:52.184) It doesn't have to be a person, right? It could also be an object. Have you seen how Arabs have this long-spouted coffee pot, it's called a dallah, and they serve the qahwa, the coffee, from it? Is this something that you could build as well, or are you mainly focused on human figures?
Jason deCaires Taylor (18:18.934) No, we do all sorts of different things. Yeah, I've done buildings, abstract sculptures. It really depends on the location. All of the works have to be culturally sensitive. They have to be relevant to the place they're put. So it depends, yeah. I mean, I've also done a lot with modern techniques now, which is three-dimensional scanning. So I have an extremely expensive 3D scanner. From that I scan textures, shapes, forms. I do a lot of natural elements, different rock formations, sand textures, tree formations, even corals. I've scanned a lot of different types of coral. From those I can then make three-dimensional works and incorporate that actual exact form.
Mizter Rad (19:20.162) When you place those sculptures under the water, they change over time, right? You mentioned in some of your previous interviews that nature actually takes part in the creation of the sculpture or the piece. How does that actually work? Give me an example.
Jason deCaires Taylor (19:40.874) I mean, it happens instantly. You know, it really is a fast process underwater, much faster than what would happen on land. So, you know, we will sink a sculpture, which generally has a very gray, inert surface to it. Within a couple of days, it will start to turn green and yellow from algae deposits. Fish will then start to eat that algae, so it'll have teeth marks where the herbivorous fish graze on the algae. Then you'll start to get these little white calcareous worms that will make skeletons on top. Then you'll get coralline algae, so you'll get these purple patches and pink patches of texture. And then you start to get all sorts of creatures take over. You'll get sea urchins that come and eat the algae. You'll get lots of hermit crabs and crustaceans that will look for little places to hide, fish will start to move in. And then obviously, depending on the conditions, the temperatures, the nutrients, the exact sort of microhabitat, it will start to dramatically change. And the more juvenile species it attracts, the more predators come along.
And I sound like I'm only doing tropical reefs, but it's not. I've worked in colder places, I've worked in Europe quite a bit, in the Mediterranean, in the British Isles, and in Oslo in the fjords. And even in places like that, where you think it's not as diverse as a tropical reef system, there actually is a lot of life, and again, it happens very quickly. I did a project in Oslo that started off with, you know, just a few little calcareous worms and some shrimps. But it developed so much life so quickly that the apex predator, which is a fur seal, started to swim around it and look for the cod that were living in and around it. So it went from a tiny worm to a seal within the space of like a year and a half, I think.
Mizter Rad (21:58.884) That's cool. Sorry to jump in, but I'm very curious. What happens with those sculptures that get transformed? Do you normally take them out and exhibit them somewhere, or try to monetize them, sell them, show them around? Because not a lot of people get the chance to go under the water to see that sort of fantastic, magical transformation.
Jason deCaires Taylor (22:22.862) Yeah, no, sure, sure. I mean, they never get taken out of the water. It's really important. They are part of the marine life. As soon as I install them, that's it. They're in the sea forever and they will become habitats for marine life. I do make replicas of them quite a lot. And on those, I can mimic the marine life and make casts and molds and do land exhibitions where we emulate what's made in the sea. In fact, I actually have tanks in the studio where we electrify the sculptures so that they grow a metal coral in the tank. And so they look very similar to the underwater world, but we don't use anything organic or anything natural that will perish. It's actually a copper that forms crystals that look like coral.
But I mean, really the point of all of it is to get people to go into the sea. A lot of the places I work, people fear the sea or they're scared of it. They're not very good swimmers. They're intimidated to go and look beneath the surface. And so I really try to make the works very accessible, so they're in very shallow areas, very safe areas. And I also encourage people who are not divers to see them. You know, I want people who have never considered the underwater world as a place to visit, I want them to be the ones that come along. Because if you've got any hope of protecting the marine life, you know, people have to know about it, they've got to be connected to it, they've got to feel empathy for it.
Mizter Rad (24:15.768) Why do you think that we're so afraid of the seas, of the underwater world, actually?
Jason deCaires Taylor (24:21.984) I mean, for many different reasons. I think historically, you know, so many people have died at sea. The way mythology and history talks about the sea, it's not really a sense of utopia, it's more a sense of fear. I think humans are pre-designed to fear the unknown, and the sea is the ultimate unknown. You can ask anybody what's their most scary film, and a lot of people say Jaws. It really worked well on that sense of the unknown, that sense of something that's uncontrollable.
Mizter Rad (25:18.508) Yeah. Something mystical and something very unknown that scares off a lot of people. I mean, if you ask someone what would be the worst way of dying, they'll probably say drowning. Not being able to escape, not being able to breathe. I think that's very terrifying for a lot of us. I include myself, actually.
Jason deCaires Taylor (25:41.006) And of course, I want to be realistic that water can be extremely dangerous. You know, the sea can be very dangerous. In fact, people always worry about the creatures that are in the sea, when actually it's the sea itself, its currents and its temperature and its waves, that are the most dangerous. I think you have to be very cautious and respectful to the sea, but that doesn't mean it can't be explored in a safe way.
Mizter Rad (26:17.974) Hm. So tell me something. When you arrive at a new community, let's say a fishing village in Mexico or a coastal town on the Red Sea, how do you bring the local people in? Because I imagine not everyone says, "Hey, great, Jason, come and put some concrete things in our sea and let's see how it works." How do you approach that?
Jason deCaires Taylor (26:44.686) So, I mean, mostly I don't just turn up myself. I'm usually always invited by local groups to come and do a survey, give a talk, introduce my work. So it's always generated from its origin. I'd never want to impose my ideas or do an intervention in a place where it wasn't welcome. But actually what's interesting is the sea is different to working in a public space, where there's all these different interests. You know, if you do a sculpture in a town center, you've got all these different opposing commercial interests, you've got all these political interests, you've got all these different community groups and faiths, and it becomes a very, very complicated picture. Whereas actually in the sea, people don't have a lot of those concerns. If they feel that it's helpful for the environment, then they're often very receptive. And I think I've been quite fortunate over the years with all of my projects. I think if I tried to make any of them on land, I would have got a lot of grey hairs in the process.
Mizter Rad (28:14.402) Right. Going back to those materials, because I feel like it's important to understand what kind of materials you're using. Some of the people listening to the show would say, "Okay, but you're actually putting a lot of concrete and stuff that is not natural, quote unquote, into the ocean," and maybe claim that this is not good for underwater life. But I understand that the materials are very well curated on your side, and that your experience shows that the way you do things actually regenerates oceans and brings back life that was not there anymore. So can you tell us a bit more about those materials?
Jason deCaires Taylor (29:05.582) Sure. I mean, mostly, I think less than 1% of the seabed is actually structurally stable. So most of the seabed is sediment. And the way a lot of species reproduce underwater is by releasing embryonic material into the water. And so that all just floats around like a snow, like a drift of eggs and embryos waiting to attach to anything. They can't live on things that are unstable. And so all this snow is falling down, and if it just lands on sand, it dies or gets eaten or gets washed away. Whereas if it lands on something like a rock or a sculpture or a shipwreck, then it has a chance of starting to grow.
By putting a structure, you're instantly creating a place for life to start to form. If you make it from a material that is inert, that doesn't pollute in any way... So when a ship sinks, environmentally it's also very bad. It has oil in the engines, it has toxic paint on it, it's made from steel that corrodes, that collapses. It is a reef as such for a certain length of time, but ultimately it will be consumed by the sea and cause a lot of pollution and damage at the same time. Whereas the structures I make are all inert. They're all made from materials that have a surface area that's pH neutral. There's no chemicals that go into the sea, and it's all designed to be there for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and they're all fixed to the sea floor. So there is quite a bit of research that goes into that. It's not just concrete, although it does have a cement inside it. And it often uses very local rocks and aggregates inside it to minimize some of the carbon footprint of producing it as well.
Mizter Rad (31:30.798) How fixed is it to the floor? Is it a hundred percent fixed, or is there some room for movement?
Jason deCaires Taylor (31:39.342) No, they're pretty fixed. It will be a very, very heavy concrete foundation, and then those will be actually screwed into the seabed with a special type of sand anchor, or drilled in if it's on a rock substrate. It's extremely fixed. It's very important that the sculptures don't move or slide or damage anything around them. I have made some kinetic sculptures. They're fixed to the sea floor, but they have buoyancy in them, so they float and they sway with the current and they move with waves, but they don't move across the sea floor.
Mizter Rad (32:22.462) I've seen some sculptures that you made that look like trees, and they seem to have some sort of leaves. Is that whole sculpture also fixed, or do those leaves move a bit with the waves, with the current?
Jason deCaires Taylor (32:39.574) Yes, yes. So those ones have a very strong, big concrete foundation, but the leaves move. They have a buoyancy. And those leaves are made in a type of stainless steel that also doesn't corrode, but it allows me to make a thinner, more delicate design, a lighter design.
Mizter Rad (33:04.980) Okay. So I hate to take you off track here, but I need to ask you this directly. What you're doing, is it conservation work, or is it tourism infrastructure dressed up as conservation? Because I've seen some numbers around your work: more than nine hundred million people in media reach from some of your museums, which is the equivalent of around seventy million euros in campaign value. It's incredible. And those are, of course, marketing numbers that work very well for a museum as such. So I guess the question is, who benefits the most? Is it the reef itself, or is it the local tourism economy, or both?
Jason deCaires Taylor (34:01.014) I mean, what interests me the most, I think it works on many different levels. Ultimately, our seas are facing a crisis on many different fronts. Obviously, like we talked about earlier, with global warming. There's also overfishing, there's also acidification of the water column, there's pollution that's coming off the surface area. There's so many different factors, and certainly making sculptures and putting them on the sea floor is not solving any of those problems. But what it is useful for is it helps people to think differently about the sea. And it also, in some of the cases, has helped the governments create marine protected areas. And I think that's one of the ultimate goals, with an extreme level of conservation value: to make more of the coastlines MPAs, which have proven to be extremely effective at saving some of the ecology of the region.
And so the sculptures all sort of build towards this. They have these ecological benefits, but then they also help draw tourists away from fragile areas. And that's also really critical, depending on the destination. It's obviously very different in each place. But in a lot of the places, there's too much tourism and it's putting too much pressure on the existing reefs, because everybody wants to go and see their local coral reefs. So by drawing people away to these sculptural areas, they minimize that impact.
And that was actually how I first started altogether. I was on an island in the Caribbean, Grenada, and there was a hurricane that had damaged some of the existing reefs and only left one or two really pristine areas, and all the tourists were heading to those pristine areas and damaging them, basically. They just couldn't cope with that number of people. And so I made this sculpture park as a way of diverting those people away. And it was super effective. I think almost 50, 60% of the tourists that used to go to those areas now went to this new area, which was in the middle of a sandy bay and didn't cause any negative impact. And that was what really inspired me to start on this journey.
Mizter Rad (36:29.450) Interesting. So in that case of Grenada, the original reef became an MPA.
Jason deCaires Taylor (36:36.792) So, I mean, yes, that initial project wasn't an MPA when I first started, but it is now. And I wouldn't say that's ultimately just down to the sculpture park. There's many different factors. But I think it certainly contributed to it. And I think it helped the government really realize how important it was to protect its coastlines and how important the blue economy was to its future. And yeah, it really put it at the forefront of its agenda.
Mizter Rad (37:15.032) Very interesting. Jason, look, before we go into more futuristic topics, I really want to pause here for a second, because on this show we have a tradition. We call it the News from the Future. It's a short segment where we flash forward forty, fifty, sixty years from now and we imagine what the world looks like based on everything that we've been talking about, but also based on what this show has been talking about for the last two years. So bear with me for about ninety seconds, and then I'm going to come back to you and ask you how close we are to this future.
News from the Future
Mara Delgado (37:58.766) Good evening from the Atlantic. This is Mara Delgado, Ocean Correspondent, broadcasting from Museo Atlántico Deep, the first permanent research and cultural station in the Atlantic Ocean, anchored at 40 meters below the surface, 15 kilometers off the coast of Lanzarote. It is the year 2076. Today marks the 60th anniversary of the first sculpture placed on this site: a figure of a man reading a book, now so encrusted with coral and sea fans that scientists estimate it contains over 200 distinct marine species. The original artist, a sculptor named Jason deCaires Taylor.
What began as an underwater art installation now serves as the central hub of the Atlantic Blue Quarter, a network of 14 research stations, educational modules, and sustainable aquaculture pods, stretching across three kilometers of ocean floor. This week, researchers at the station announced a milestone. For the first time, the reef biomass surrounding the original sculptures has fully regenerated to pre-industrial levels. Lead marine biologist Dr. Amara Diallo called it, and I quote, "proof that humans can build with nature, not just on top of it."
In other news, the station's sensor network, which monitors water temperature, salinity, pH, and species activity in real time, delivered its annual data report to seven biotech companies this quarter. Those companies use the reef's own blueprint, the exact biological conditions that make this underwater ecosystem thrive, to grow sustainable seafood in labs on the surface without touching the ocean. The museum feeds the data. The lab feeds the world.
In tourism, Museo Atlántico Deep welcomed its 10 millionth visitor this quarter, arriving not by boat, but via the new submersible pod service from Lisbon. Visitors spend an average of three days in the underwater cultural district, which now includes galleries, a marine science school, and a restaurant serving cultivated bluefin tuna, grown using the reef's own data.
And finally, ministers from 23 coastal nations are gathering in Lanzarote this week for the Blue Sovereignty Summit, debating legal frameworks for underwater communities. Delegates will spend one evening at the museum, the neighborhood that started it all.
The ocean covers 71% of our planet. For most of human history, we sailed on top of it. Sixty years ago, one man decided to put art inside it instead. The rest, as they say, is natural history. This is Mara Delgado, Ocean Correspondent. Stay curious. Stay deep. Back to you, Mizter Rad.
Mizter Rad (40:21.122) Thank you, Mara. Great reporting from the future. Jason, okay, be honest with me. How crazy is that? How much of what Mara Delgado just described is actually already in the works?
Jason deCaires Taylor (40:42.190) Yeah, I don't think it's completely off the charts. But yeah, it's difficult to say. I do think we're looking at a radically different future in many different ways.
Mizter Rad (40:59.660) Right. It feels like we're far from it. It is an interesting thought, or an interesting homework, to actually dig deeper into what's happening in the world and understand that there's a lot of companies and investors actually putting money into developing underwater or above-water communities, and understanding better how we can conserve the oceans, how we can preserve marine life, how we can have brighter decades to come when it comes to living off the oceans, for example.
I want you to tell me more about that dream museum that you have in mind, the one you haven't been able to build yet, not only because of money or funding, but also because of the technology that maybe didn't exist when you started. What's possible today that wasn't possible when you started? And what would that dream museum underwater that you envision look like?
Jason deCaires Taylor (42:16.780) Well, I mean, the first thing I can say is, although I've witnessed lots of depressing sights with natural environments being impacted, I've also seen some incredibly optimistic things. And what's always mind-blowing every time I see the sculptures is how they change, how they are just engulfed with life, constantly evolving and changing, and all these expected outcomes that I thought would happen, they never seem to transpire. It's always better than I thought. And it's just the resilience of nature to recover, to rebuild. Life always finds a way in some way.
And for me, I think the biggest change I want to see is this idea... The narratives have always been about humans versus nature, humans against nature, conquering nature, conquering these different environments. For me, I think we have to evolve more and have more of this feeling that we are nature, that we are all part of the same system.
In the past we've always used religion as a way to revere different entities or to understand the world in a different way. And I kind of always wanted to create this underwater sacred space. So to make, not a cathedral, but this huge structure underwater, almost like a small city, but where nature is the main protagonist, the building blocks that shape all the forms, all the colors. So I create this structure that people can truly go inside and see all the amazing light effects that happen underwater, see how all the light ripples on the sea floor, all the incredible colors of sponges and corals, and how fish weave in and out of them. And just create this, you know, akin to being in a beautiful rainforest and looking up at the sky, trying to create that similar experience underwater. So I've spent the last 10 years working on different designs that would work in different environments with different materials.
And obviously there's a lot of technology that's also being introduced now. Some of the works I've done recently actually have sensors inside that work from a scientific perspective. They record temperatures and salinity data and metrics of the actual site that can be fed back to land. But I'm more interested, certainly from an artistic and spiritual point of view, to find somewhere where you can really go back to all our roots. I'm a strong believer that I think we all spent the first nine months of our existence in the womb, in fluid, suspended. And although obviously we can't remember that moment, I still think we have some kind of muscle memory of that sensation of floating, of being detached from gravity and from the earth. When I go back into water, and I know a lot of divers and freedivers say the same thing, when they go underwater and they feel weightless and they feel the silence and they see the light and they concentrate on their breathing, it puts them into a different state of mind. I wouldn't say meditation, but it certainly puts you into a sort of transcendental state where you're not so confined to your own bodies. It feels like you're part of something bigger.
Mizter Rad (46:47.192) That's beautiful.
Jason deCaires Taylor (46:48.514) So I want to combine that with an attraction that elicits those feelings and also showcases the natural environment.
Mizter Rad (46:58.318) Okay, that's actually a good bridge to the next point that I wanted to share with you, because I understand that you've spent your life between two worlds, the land and the ocean, between the human world and the natural world, if you could classify them like that. And one of the big questions that I always have, and that I ask a lot of my guests on this show, is the following: do you think humans are moving towards nature, becoming more connected to it, or moving away from it? Because if you look at technology and cities and screens, you kind of feel like we're moving away from nature. But at the same time, there's a lot of people, including yourself, that are looking for more connection to nature. What do you see? Do you think both worlds can live in parallel at the same time, and maybe merge further later on in the future?
Jason deCaires Taylor (48:04.146) I think when you look at the course of human history, it always seems to have these rises and falls. I think with technology, we're on the rise, where screens and algorithms and AI and data centers, everything is becoming more and more dominant. That is the trend for the short-term future. But in a way, I actually look at something like AI sometimes, and I actually think AI might end up actually destroying our relationship to the digital world, because we won't be able to believe anything we see, and it will be so homogenous and so boring and so disconnected from our feelings that I think we'll be urging, we'll be dying to have real experiences and to put our feet in the sand and to feel water on our faces and to be living in the real world again. I think it might actually end up pushing us more towards that point than just being trapped in an algorithm. So I'm actually optimistic in many senses that it could end up eating itself and freeing us at the same time.
Mizter Rad (49:46.870) Hmm, interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of trends that I see happening in the world right now, and one of them that is connected to the topic of this episode is actually building underwater or above water, expanding human life into that environment, understanding the oceans better. There's this British company called DEEP, and they're building what they literally describe as the International Space Station, but underwater. This is all early-stage stuff, but what we try to follow is where the money is flowing, where investors are putting their money, because that tells us that in the next five decades, if that trend continues to evolve, a lot of discoveries will be made and a lot of companies will start opening up in that sector.
So there's that company. Then there's a Japanese company called Shimizu, which also blueprinted, I think it's more than a twenty-billion-dollar underwater city near Tokyo for five thousand people. Like I said in the beginning, I personally slept two nights in a SeaPod off the coast of Panama. These are the guys called Ocean Builders. They're actually also building a floating city in the Maldives. So it seems like the ocean slowly, it's not so mainstream, but slowly is becoming the next frontier of human habitation. And that of course will bring a lot of threats and challenges, but also opportunities. So if that actually happens in the next fifty years and people start genuinely living on the water or under the water, I guess your museums will play some role in that world. What kind of role would you like your museums to play in that context, if it evolves like that?
Jason deCaires Taylor (52:04.110) Well, the way things are going, I mean, sea levels could rise quite significantly. I could probably make installations on the beach and they'd be underwater in a few years' time.
Mizter Rad (52:20.309) Okay. That would be easier, maybe.
Jason deCaires Taylor (52:33.770) No, I mean, a lot of the work that I've been doing recently is also making museums that are part of that infrastructure for coastal defenses, because so many cities are below sea level and will be heavily affected in the future. So I've been doing a lot of work recently designing museums that not only are about art, but also about protecting the coastlines and protecting human urban areas. But like I say, I really want us to look at the blue world from a very different perspective. It's not one of fear and trepidation. You know, I want it to be something that's precious and sacred and respected. And I think art plays a really critical role in changing that dialogue.
Mizter Rad (53:34.094) Mm. So here's an idea I want to throw at you, and maybe you tell me if it's crazy or if you've thought about it. What if the museum, whether it's an artistic museum or a slightly more scientific museum, was equipped with all those sensors that you mentioned before, throughout the whole installation, measuring, like you said, temperature, pH, etcetera, but also measuring which species are actually thriving in that exact microhabitat? Almost like a data center, in a sense that you're collecting data from this biological template or blueprint of what a healthy reef actually looks like and feels like in real time. And then biotech companies, the ones growing fish in labs right now, because they're actually doing that, like Umami Bioworks in Singapore, there's some British companies as well, I believe, and also in Saudi there's a couple of them, use that data from that real habitat in real time as the template for growing their salmon or their tuna in the lab. So basically your museum will tell them, "These are the exact conditions that make bluefin tuna thrive, now you can replicate that in the lab." Is that a real possibility? Is that something you've thought about before?
Jason deCaires Taylor (55:11.022) No, I don't see that as viable. You know, I have to say, with a caveat, a lot of the conservation success stories that I've seen are also just to leave nature alone to do its own thing, because it's so resilient and it always finds a way in. And a lot of it is just trying to find ways of us not getting in its way, you know, and not messing up the already optimum conditions. I don't see it like that, but I do see it as a really educational thing.
One of the futuristic things I'd love is if some of our transportation networks could go underwater. If you imagine there were glass tunnels that went underwater through rivers or through bays, where you could see the marine life, you know, as you walk to work in the morning... A lot of it I just think is about finding ways to connect people, to feel empathy, to feel, you know, passionate about what's there. And I mean, that was Jacques Cousteau's whole mantra, that you can't protect what you don't love. And so his main goal was to encourage people to fall in love with the sea. And I think it's the same thing. You really have to just find ways for people to be there and to see its immensity.
Mizter Rad (56:50.990) To experience it, yeah. Okay. But with this idea with the biotech companies, I'm not saying to mess around with marine life or with nature. Actually, you're just leaving it alone. The only thing is that the data you get from the sensors is being shared with those companies that manufacture fish in the lab. They don't touch the ocean. They're just taking the data.
Jason deCaires Taylor (57:33.294) Yeah, I'm just not sure that the sculptures would add anything to that scientific study. I think your resources would be better spent doing that across multiple sites and areas and really studying what's happening. I think more interesting is how we can draw energy from the sea. There's obviously all this potential wave energy and currents and tidal energy, and that is a huge force that we haven't really mastered yet. You know, we obviously have offshore wind, but you think of the force of the ocean and the incredible energy that it captures. If we could find a way to harness some of that energy in a sustainable way, then I think that would be really revolutionary.
Mizter Rad (58:34.798) Have you done something around that?
Jason deCaires Taylor (58:38.206) I haven't, no. I know there are companies that are doing lots of projects, and I almost did a project once, which was building a big tidal breakwater, and that was a tidal energy project that would have actually provided electricity for, I think, a third of the UK.
Mizter Rad Wow.
Jason deCaires Taylor So yes, there are definite opportunities in that space. But it just needs a lot more research and, well, I say research, a lot more scalability.
Mizter Rad (59:16.970) Right. I definitely love the idea of being able to travel under the water and explore the ocean in a small submarine that you can drive around. Sounds very futuristic.
Jason deCaires Taylor (59:38.322) Yeah. For me, what I really want inventors and entrepreneurs to get involved with, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who are researching it, is that the actual scuba equipment hasn't changed for about 50 years, 60 years. It's still the same kind of heavy tank on your back with compressed air in it that you breathe. And that has a lot of limitations, you know, it's heavy. You've got time constraints. It's uncomfortable. It's not a nice way to explore the sea, and you need training, et cetera. So I think there's a huge opportunity for people to look at other breathing apparatus underwater that could allow you to go under for longer with less equipment, in a much easier way. There's things coming along. I mean, there's already some smaller tanks that give you three or four minutes underwater, but without all the heavy equipment. But I think there's a huge space for that. I was always optimistic that one day someone's going to invent a regulator that can extract oxygen from water.
Mizter Rad (01:01:01.378) That would be amazing. I mean, how cool would that be? Because that would break the obstacles for so many people that are either afraid or just don't want to go through the process of learning to dive with a tank. It would open up the possibilities to access this underwater world to so many people.
Jason deCaires Taylor (01:01:27.256) Definitely, definitely. That would be the key. If you crack that first, then it would open the floodgates to all the other inventions that could follow. That I feel is the block at the moment.
Mizter Rad (01:01:45.622) Mm. Interesting. I never thought about it. I mean, you could use as an analogy all this VR technology that we're seeing right now. It has early adopters, those people that don't care about wearing these super heavy goggles and moving around with this heavy artifact on their faces. But the more this industry gets investment, the more you start seeing these artifacts becoming less bulky and more integrated into, for example, glasses or something that we're more used to. I say that because it could be an inspiration: taking that example and applying it to how we make equipment, or how we enable humans to be underwater and stay longer underwater without needing to go up to the surface or carry a super heavy tank on our back, and explore more and learn more about the oceans. Because I think one of the main problems is that we haven't been able to spend much time down there.
Jason deCaires Taylor Definitely.
Mizter Rad So people don't care, you know?
Jason deCaires Taylor (01:03:17.550) No, no, definitely. I've thought about that a lot over the years, you know, and even finding a way where you could have a road or a pathway underwater with a rail that you could just walk along, and you get the air from the surface, or there's some way that just allows you to be calm and relaxed. You know, it's also the act of swimming. It would be quite nice if you could just walk along the seabed, so that you view it from a different perspective, and then you just walk from land into the sea and then walk out another part, you know?
Mizter Rad (01:04:02.882) Yeah, that would be fantastic. Well, Jason, this has been one of those conversations that I believe will stay with me for a while. It reminds me of that question that I told you about before that keeps coming back on this show. And that question is basically: is the future about humans going further into tech, smarter, faster, more engineered, more synthetic, or is it about humans going back to nature? And you have your perspective on that. It was very interesting to hear it from you. In general, I think becoming more connected to the living world around us is super important, and something that I want to encourage people to do more and more. And that's it. Is there anything else you would like to share with us, Jason?
Jason deCaires Taylor (01:04:58.766) I don't think so.
Mizter Rad (01:05:01.858) Jason deCaires Taylor, beautiful human. Go find his work, dive into it, literally go and dive into it if you can. Until next time, stay curious, question everything, and maybe, just maybe, start treating the ocean like it could be your home for the next hundred years. Thank you. Ciao ciao.
Outro (01:05:26.968) Here at the Mizter Rad Show, we provide first-hand information straight from the original source of knowledge. The personal opinions of our guests don't necessarily reflect those of Mizter Rad. This show is brought to you by The Rad House, an unbiased, transparent, agenda-less, independent media house. Our theme music is written and produced by Marco Melo.