Living under the sea, down to the maintenance bills.
Colonize The Ocean treats living under the sea as a practical question: how a habitat pays for its compressors, how saturation divers decompress, how a damaged reef gets rebuilt. Explainer episodes sit alongside host Brendan's 'Shorts' on seasteading and looser live-stream conversations about keeping a habitat clean.
PRESS PLAY
Colonize The Ocean starts from a plain ambition, living and working underwater, and spends its time on what stands in the way. Much of that turns out to be money and maintenance. The explainer 'Diving Into America's Submerged Sanctuary' describes a habitat 30 feet down in Key Largo, rebranded after Jules Verne and opened to ecotourism once pure science could no longer cover the bills. Saltwater, as the episode puts it, is a universal solvent. Galvanic corrosion eats the metal, the compressors need constant attention, and life support technicians have to be on duty around the clock. Drop-in visits from recreational divers and overnight stays by celebrities pay for that upkeep, which keeps the facility ready for university teams doing hyperbaric research. The episode's own summary is blunt: the luxury enables the science. The explainers are two-voice conversations that lean on analogy, and two of them open on the same image: coffee in hand, looking out the bedroom window at the sea itself. 'Expanding Human Presence Through Saturation Diving Training' compares a diver's body to a sponge. Once the tissues hold all the gas they can at a given depth, decompression time stops growing, whether the stay lasts a week or a year. 'Restoring Coral Reefs' sets divers hand-pressing coral fragments into epoxy putty against a mechanical device called the coral clip, then asks whether restored reefs stop being wild and become a curated garden. Brendan, the host, brings a different energy to the 'Shorts' episodes. He talks off the cuff, corrects himself mid-sentence, and explains that his 'we' is meant to take in the whole company behind the show. In 'Why Seasteading Matters' he sets aside several weeks for seasteading, describes a working relationship with that community, and notes that groups focused above the waterline are starting to talk about the underwater world too. 'Arkpad; Affordable Ocean Living' looks at a company working from the Philippines to make ocean living practical, profitable and affordable, with glamping-style rentals at its Reef Resort, and Brendan mentions that its president and creator, Mitchell Suchner, has been interviewed multiple times in past content. Then there is the live stream. 'Episode 108; Cleaning An Underwater Habitat' is chatty and practical, working through why cleaning products must be non-toxic when the runoff goes into the water or the fumes get breathed in, and why freshwater sites face worse contamination. One explainer closes with a line that could stand for the whole show: a place as hostile to human biology as space sits a short drop below the surface, and it may deserve attention before anyone looks up. To start, the saturation diving explainer lays out the mechanics most clearly, and the Arkpad short shows the business side.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants the practical side of underwater living, from decompression physics and reef repair to who pays for a habitat's upkeep. It also suits someone who likes switching between polished two-voice explainers and casual, host-led talk about seasteading.
What sets it apart: It treats the sea as a place to settle rather than just explore, and keeps coming back to money and maintenance: funding a habitat through tourism, making seasteading affordable, even choosing safe cleaning products for life inside a habitat. It spreads that across three formats, from scripted explainers and host-led shorts to a live-stream conversation.
Do you dream about living and working underwater? We do! So let's chat about it. We cover a broad range of topics; submersibles, SCUBA diving, underwater habitats and living, and more. We interview people from all spectrum of the underwater living and exploration.
Sharks pass the nightstand; your next question is who's keeping the walls intact.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
An underwater hotel becomes a clear-eyed study of pressure, maintenance, and the economics of ocean research.
Jules Undersea Lodge turns a strange hotel stay into a grounded look at pressure, corrosion, and the cost of keeping people alive beneath the Atlantic.
A clear, grounded look at how saturation diving could expand ocean discovery.
The episode begins with a sharp domestic image: a person waking up, making coffee, and looking out over a 200-meter-deep coral reef. That setup gives the subject an immediate hook, then lets saturation diving become the working idea behind a larger plan for sustained human…
A loose, grounded look at the cleaning and waste choices behind life in an underwater habitat.
Cleaning an underwater habitat turns into a practical look at systems: what products are safe to use near the surrounding water, and what those materials might mean for the people breathing them in.
A reef restoration story where one small metal clip raises a bigger question about what still counts as wild.
Coral reefs make the time gap painfully clear: corals build calcium carbonate structures molecule by molecule over thousands of years, while heat spikes, modern stress, or one ship grounding can tear through that work quickly.
A nearly $20,000 underwater hotel stay becomes a sharp look at engineering, luxury, and uneasy proximity to the ocean.
A nearly $20,000 night beneath the Indian Ocean gives the episode a clean question: what should luxury actually deliver when the room itself is the spectacle?
KBR engineers and experts unpack wind energy, Artemis imagery, and cybersecurity compliance.
Australian headlines, quickly made human.
Aruba's public square, live on mic.
Exploring the reality of Jules' Undersea Lodge as an extreme underwater habitat and its physiological demands.
Brendan introduces a series on seasteading, focusing on ARCPAD's mission to make seasteading practical and profitable.
This episode explores the engineered roadmap to establish a permanent human presence underwater, based on the Deep Institute's blueprint for saturation diving.
The hosts discuss upcoming video game Subnautica 2 and its multiplayer features, along with general underwater exploration topics.
The host introduces a new series on seasteading and its relationship to underwater colonization.
Colonize The Ocean: Restoring Coral Reefs frames coral reefs as structures that may take thousands of years to build but can be destroyed in hours by thermal spikes or a grounded ship.
Colonize The Ocean follows Trek Trendy’s stay in the Maraca, the world’s most expensive underwater suite at the Conrad Maldives, where a single night costs about $18,000.
A 2021 collision left retired Navy commander Dr.
1.
Two hosts open by calling listeners 'land chauvinists' because humans occupy only 29% of the planet's surface, then survey the companies trying to settle the other 71%.
This episode discusses the fear and reality of tidal energy, addressing concerns about marine life and the potential of underwater turbines.
This episode discusses the industrialization of the ocean floor and the development of advanced modular underwater habitats by the company Deep.
This episode discusses a new initiative called Project Vanguard by the company Deep, which aims to establish a permanent human presence underwater, comparing the challenges of deep-sea exploration to space exploration.
This episode explores the psychological and logistical challenges of a Mars mission, questioning the ideal astronaut profile for long-duration space travel.
The hosts introduce a trivia game about ocean topics with a guest host.