Why a shrimp company got me interested in education
22 July 2026
In mid 2024 I spent a few months building scenarios for what the world eats in 2050.
Twenty-five years out. Which sounds like a long time, and reads like somebody else’s problem, right up until you turn it around. Twenty-five years back is Y2K. Most people my age can tell you where they were that night.
It does not feel long ago at all.
That is the horizon. It is not a distant one.
The work itself is on the SHRMP archive if you want the detail — climate, population, trade, nutrition, four extreme corners built deliberately so you can see where the boundaries sit. We came out of it believing high-tech onshore aquaculture is one of the most overlooked technologies available today. I still think that.
And then it stopped me in my tracks, and changed everything else.
Seafood is one small problem. One. Sitting inside a stack of them — food, water, land, energy, migration, work — all moving on the same clock, most of them locked into each other. And I was about to spend a decade on a slice of one of them.
What that much change asks of a person is not technical. It asks for a serious sense of humour. And staying flexible in the head — able to adjust when things move, without falling apart every single time they do.
We are about to hand that world to a society that has a meltdown when it cannot get tickets to see Taylor Swift.
At which point this stopped being about my work.
Our daughter is growing up in an environment that we are truly fortunate to be able to live in. Both life and education are excellent. What she is not getting is much exposure to what the world looks like outside this bubble. And what she is not getting at all is the thing every single adult around her says they want her and her peers to have.
Resilience.
Everybody talks about resilience. Almost nobody permits the conditions that build it. Because building it requires providing the space and opportunities to trigger thinking for yourself, owning the consequences of your own decisions, and experiencing risk, failure, and — occasionally, mildly — getting hurt. And ideally all of this, while the people around you are still there. Parents, family, friends, coaches, mentors, close enough to help you through it, unconditionally.
That is the environment that’s needed, but I think the current design has all of it inverted. The support system is meant to be support. Not a management layer that plans, schedules and adjudicates every hour of a childhood, personal conflicts included.
I see the results at university. I see them in workplaces.
Our kids are screwed if we do not do something about this.
That is why I spent two months building a one-hour introduction for my students that has nothing to do with the project, but all about how to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, and why I am now turning it into a book for fourteen-year-olds. That is why I got fully certified as a Scout leader. That is why we want to launch a next-generation programme for the Port Explorers at Port Melbourne Yacht Club next season, and maybe even a bit more than that through Aurora Sailing.
None of which “Biotech Gregor” ever pictured himself doing. None of it was on the SHRMP.bio roadmap either.
The need may be in ten or twenty years. But my only chance to do anything about it is today.