← Rewilding Earth Podcast
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We envision that this is about 100 countries and territories with coral reefs. They sustain 25% of marine life and a billion people's livelihoods. They generate trillions of dollars annually through tourism, through coastal protection, through fisheries. There are medicines on the market fighting cancer, arthritis, viral infections that come from coral reef organisms. So again, it's incredible nature, there's biodiversity worth protecting the ocean, but we're also ultimately talking about protecting ourselves. Humanity relies on nature much more than nature relies on us. But we're also the ones who have the most impact on it. So, you know, I envision that we can catalyze this restoration economy that is funding the protection, preservation, restoration of nature. Hopefully not just for coral reefs, but for mangrove forests and seagrass meadows and terrestrial ecosystems. Foreign.
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You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
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I'm your host, Jack Humphrey.
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Beneath the turquoise surface of our oceans, a silent catastrophe is unfolding. We've already lost half of the world's coral reefs, and if we stay on our current trajectory, 90% could be gone by the time we reach mid century. This isn't just a loss of biodiversity. It's a socioeconomic collapse in the making. While they cover less than 1% of the seafloor, coral reefs sustain 25% of all marine life and the livelihoods of over a billion people across a hundred countries. They're the backbone of a $2.7 trillion economy, providing everything from coastal protection against storm surges to medical breakthroughs in the fight against cancer and arthritis. My guest today is a man who decided that watching it happen wasn't an option. Sam Teicher is the co founder and Chief reef officer of Coralvita, a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur and winner of Prince William's inaugural Earthshot Prize. Sam has traded the halls of climate policy at the White House for the front lines of the restoration economy. Coral Vita isn't your typical conservation play. They operate the world's first commercial land based coral farms, using breakthrough science to grow resilient corals up to 50 times faster than in the wild. By treating restoration as a service, Sam is proving that we can and must align economic interests with the survival of the natural world.
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Sam, welcome to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
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Well, thanks again for having me. And to everyone who's listening, I hope we can have a fun time sharing the good word about why coral reefs matter, what's happened to them, and what we can do to protect and preserve them. I was born and raised in the famous coral reef area of Washington D.C. the Potomac river does not have too much in terms of marine habitat there. But I've always had a lifelong love for nature. I grew up rolling over logs in my parents backyard and looking at bugs, hiking in the Shenandoah, going fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. And as soon as I was old enough at 13, my parents got my brother and I both scuba certification. And so when we were lucky enough to go on a family trip somewhere and we could dive, I sort of fell in love with our underwater world. The best analogy I really can give is that the closest many of us will get to be an astronaut and sort of experience zero G and alien life is really just right offshore. There is such amazing stuff underwater and you could see nothing and still be floating and breathing underwater. Or you can also see some of the most spectacular, mesmerizing, colorful things on this planet and they really do feel like they're not from this planet. So that's always been a big part of me and thread in my life. I did not grow up thinking I was going to be a coral farmer or an entrepreneur for that matter. I always had an inkling towards sort of fixing problems. I went to D.C. public Schools. I was interested in education reform. My dad worked in peacemaking and national security. I was interested in how we can foster peace in places around the world. In college I studied political science. So also I'll go on the record and say I'm not a scientist, a different kind of scientist if you sort of count poli science in that field. But with that I was really drawn towards the environment, towards climate change. And I remember there was this archeology class I took and we learned about this settlement in ancient Syria that faced a multi year drought and the villagers had the choice of adapting, moving or dying out and they stayed put, they failed to adapt and the settlement collapsed. And it was sort of this aha moment for me of we got one planet. I'm all for space exploration, but we're not as a civilization moving anywhere anytime soon. And we've got to figure out how to deal with what we're facing or suffer the consequences. And that's not only something that impacts education and security and prosperity and people's livelihoods, but also nature and the things that I love. So I threw myself into that space. Still was more in the policy and NGO world. I had an opportunity to intern at the Obama White House doing climate adaptation policy as well as work for a coalition of island nation governments on sustainable development. Actually was invited to help co author the Ocean SDG I lived for a Year in Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean. My friend and classmate was Mauritian, had an NGO that was doing education work for at risk kids and he wanted me to set up the environmental branch for his organization. I was taking a gap year between college and grad school, was looking at sort of the desk jobs in DC. It was like tropical island at 22 on the other side of the world. Sounds pretty good. I'll see you later, mom and dad. And one of the projects I helped going amongst environmental education and mangrove reforestation was a United nations funded coral farming project. And for those who aren't aware, we'll get into greater detail on it. Reefs are struggling right now. We've lost half of the world's reefs since the 1970s and we're on track to lose over 90% by 2050. So really a single human lifespan, we could see one of the most incredible and important ecosystems disappear. Best thing to do for reefs is to stop killing them, solve for climate change, pollution, overfishing, destructive practices, and that's not happening fast enough. So coral farming over the past several decades has emerged as a way to revitalize reef health. The simplest analogy is instead of planting trees for reforestation, you're growing and planting corals for reef restoration. So got a grant from the UN for this organization. I was working at ELI Africa. We worked with the Mauritius Oceanography Institute, saw reef come back to life, and then also saw that the traditional NGO model isn't good enough, isn't scalable enough, has funding restraints, ecological limitations, you name it, at least in the context of coral restoration, for the scope of the challenge we're facing and together with my appreciation for it, but also personal frustrations with bureaucratic inertia. And this was over a decade ago, well before the times we're in now, together with my co founder and classmate at the Yale School of the Environment, Gator Halpern's background in academia and environmental science, he likes to say he felt he was writing the obituary for the planet. We were thinking about what if a business could solve for some of these environmental challenges better than NGOs? Policy, science, the sort of traditional approaches for dealing with environmental issues. And together with our love for the ocean, our recognition of how valuable coral reefs are, we thought what if we can create a mission based for profit for restoration. We got a thousand dollar grant from school over a decade ago and we've taken that for quite a ride.
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C
Yeah, it's amazing what you've been able to do with $1,000. You've gotten a Little more attention financially than that since then. And that's where I want to kind of go is like, all right, well, pretty much everybody who pays attention to any kind of conservation news knows what you would expect them to know about reefs and the plight. But you're here to tell us about another thing, a reaction to that, a solution to that. And I'm so curious because if you look through our podcast episodes, I could be classified as a landlubber. And we don't have enough content like this, which is another reason I wanted you to be here, because the oceans are. They're kind of important and. But I really don't know how you guys do what you do. So the process and everything. I would just love to hear you talk about that.
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Absolutely. It's one of the most fun elements of the job. We've got an amazing team at Coral Vita. Scientists, engineers, practitioners, local community members who are all sort of making this happen and doing the science and the coral growing. So really most credit goes to them for that kind of work. But to help people understand, start with a key part of this, which I think a lot of people don't also appreciate. Corals are animals. They're animals that have plants living inside of them that make rock for their skeleton. It's a pretty cool three for one, in my opinion. They're ancient, distant cousins of jellyfish. They just decided to stay put, and that's going to play a role as I sort of talk about how we grow the coral. So there's two main ways that corals naturally grow and that also get harnessed by people. In the coral restoration space. There's asexual and sexual growth, fragmentation and spawning. So just like you could take a cutting from a flower or a tree and graft it and grow corals naturally in the wild, you know, storm comes through and pieces break off, or a parrot fish nibbles too hard and another piece breaks. Those fragments can reattach to the reef and become a new coral colony. We can take cuttings from living corals from the reefs in the wild, bring them to our farms and grow them there. Corals also reproduce. So again, my plant analogy here is instead of pollination, it's actually pretty weird and wild and remarkable Safe for work videos. If you watch Coral Spawning, I highly recommend it because most corals will only spawn once a year, typically after a full moon in a 45 to 90 minute window. And there are corals of the same species that could be hundreds of miles apart and they will still spawn at exact same time. It's really stunning. And so corals release eggs and sperm, they'll mix in the water column. For about every million eggs, one new one will become a coral. And that's how corals also reproduce and recolonize in the wild. So there are also methods people are using to spawn. Corals either capture egg and sperm in the wild or create conditions in laboratories on land to create these events that cause the corals to spawn. The bulk of coral vita's focus is on the fragmentation. We do do spawning work as well, but if you can imagine, we'll go and collect these corals from the reef. Our coral farms are on land. So traditionally, in addition to being often run by NGOs or researchers or community groups, most coral nurseries are out in the ocean underwater. That's what I did when I lived in Mauritius. The bulk of our focus is setting up these high tech land based aquaculture perks. So we've got tanks, call it like the size of a bathtub and we'll have dozens of them or the potential for even more. We're pumping seawater that we control through those tanks. Fragments go in there and the short version is six to 12 months later, after we grow them, they go back out into the reefs. Now in those six to 12 months, a lot of really exciting and cool things happen. There's two main scientific methods we use that are open source science to grow the corals in months and years instead of decades and centuries, while strengthening their resilience to threats like warming oceans. We've also got our own proprietary technology for collecting data and lowering the cost and all sorts of cool stuff like that. But to stay in the science, this method of micro fragmenting was discovered years and years ago. And sort of pioneer of the space, Dr. David Vaughn, was one of our original advisors. If you think about the corals as an animal, it's a colonial organism. One coral, when you look at it, is actually comprised of hundreds, if not tens of thousands of clones of these polyps. And if you take one colony and you cut it up into these tiny pieces, these tiny micro fragments and you put them near each other, it triggers a natural healing process, almost like scar tissue. And the corals will put all their energy into fusing back together instead of growing the limestone rock skeleton. And what that means is we can grow corals the size of a dinner plate in 6, 12, 24 months instead of 20, 50, 100 years. And unlike the ocean based nurseries, where you can only grow the fast growing branching species, we can now do Much more holistic restoration. We can grow all the different types of corals that exist at the same time. Because we control the conditions in our tanks. We can kind of give corals to spot treatment, we can take them to the gym. So again, this field of assisted evolution practitioners all around the world are looking at a lot of different things. What we're focusing on is thermal stress, hardening the corals, raising the temperatures, bringing them back down, identifying which corals and genotypes are naturally more resilient, breeding those together, boosting the resilience so that the corals we outplant on the reefs can better survive. And talking to you this week, we're, we're, you know, December 2025, we recently completed a pilot project in Dubai. The Arabian Gulf is pretty hot to begin with. They've experienced a lot of coral degradation where there is near record temperature highs this summer. And yesterday and the day before, our teams did surveys and you know, asked me in two, five years, but we had, it looks like 98, 99% coral survivorship, which is better than I expected, to be honest. I mean, it was really incredible at knowing that while we still have to fix the problems that are causing coral reefs to die, we can take these steps to ensure that they better survive until, you know, our leaders step up to solve for those problems is really encouraging. So that was a very long way of explaining we are growing more diverse and resilient corals and using this really awesome science to make it happen.
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C
I'm surprised to hear that that the type of, of coral farming that's going on outside of what you're doing is, is on that long of a ramp. I mean, we just don't have that.
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A
We don't.
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C
Why isn't everybody doing this? Is there something new that you guys. I'm sure there's lots of things new that you guys have developed because everybody was doing offshore instead of on land. But are more people picking up on that? Are you guys like Tesla and you're sharing your technology with people? How's, how's all of that work?
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A
Was definitely a team effort to take care of the reefs. There's a global community of practitioners who are doing this work and a lot of credit goes to many of them for pioneering this making part. We didn't come up with the idea for land based farming. People have been doing that for a long time, particularly a lot of universities. We partnered with many of them to sort of get things going and continue to collaborate with others. I'm on the advisory board of A group called the Coral Restoration Consortium, which is this global body of practitioners or knowledge sharing and you know, uplifting and supporting one another and advancing the science and all sorts of good stuff. I mean the real biggest innovation we brought initially because again we have developed some really cool technology. We have this tech suite called Brain Coral which I can describe more in detail later if you want. But it was actually just named one of Time magazine's best inventions of the year. So we've done some really cool new stuff, but really the biggest innovation and why the sort of ocean based versus land based thing is much more in the ocean based campus, no one really done this as a for profit with a land based farming component. Almost everyone in the space, as I said before, is an NGO research group. They're one or two for profits, but they also typically do ocean based nurseries. And the reason why is because ultimately it's much cheaper. All you need is PVC pipe or some ropes and snorkel masks, not even scuba tanks sometimes and you can start doing this work. A land based farm while at scale actually becomes much more cost effective in addition to more holistic restoration, in addition to boosting resilience and all these other things. You need land, you need electrical systems, you need aquaculture equipment, you need all of these things that are often cost prohibitive if you are an NGO. That project I did in Mauritius, the UN grant we got was for $50,000. He let us grow 5,000 corals in an ocean based nursery once and then the grant didn't get renewed and that was the end of the project. So there's a whole what's the financial sustainability of doing that kind of work? Because Mauritius needs 5 million corals a year, not 5,000 corals once. So grants and donations alone are going to cut it. And then $50,000 wouldn't have been anywhere close to enough to set up a land based farm. So we had this idea that we could do for profit, for nature, for good and that by generating revenue we could actually scale meaningful impact. That was our sort of core thesis when we were in grad school and where we sort driven forward ever since. So we still have our own ocean based nurseries to augment our work. I think you're going to see more and more coming into play. There's actually the biggest coral farm in the world is being built by Saudi Arabia's leading university. They brought together coral practitioners from around the world. We were actually helped design the farm and now we have a team of 10 growing corals at it. So we're seeing changes happen, we're seeing more finance come into the space, but ultimately the ocean based nurseries alone. It's a wonderful day at the office, but you can only grow really the branching corals in a meaningful way. If you've been there when there's a storm on the ocean or if a fisherman drops their anchor or there's a spike in temperatures, the whole project is at risk. It's not feasible to set up and maintain an underwater garden at every reef that needs to be restored and then the granted donations come into play and so on their own. Ocean based nurseries can't cope with what we're facing, which is why we thought high tech, scalable land based farms together with revenue generation to then work collaboratively with people around the world to really keep reefs alive for the future.
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C
Where's your main operation?
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Freeport, Grand Bahama. That's where we launched.
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C
That's a terrible place. I'm so sorry you have to work there.
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A
You know, I'll shoulder the burden for everyone. Although I'm actually talking to you from Brooklyn, New York, so not really more, more o oyster reefs than coral reefs. There's a Long island in the Bahamas. It's very different than the Long island up here in New York. I, I lived in Grand Bahama for six years. Gator and I moved down there to set up farm number one. He's still down there and we've got a team of, you know, 15 or so staff, the majority of whom are are Bahamian. That's a big part of our model is how do we have a community based approach for what we do. So workforce development, education, you can walk right up to the tanks, you don't even know how to scuba diver swim. So increasing the accessibility to people to the reefs. So our team in the Bahamas is doing amazing stuff down there since launching that farm in 2019. We opened it three months before Hurricane Dorian hit the island, which having been there for a cat 5, I don't recommend staying. Did humanitarian and rescue and relief work for a few months and then reopened the farm in March 2020 just in time for Covid. So we had a nice series of roller coaster moments to ride. We've been going strong ever since. And now we just did a pilot project as I mentioned before in Dubai, working with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Just completed another project in Ceiba in the Dutch Caribbean. We're going to be opening up a farm in Florida next year in partnership with Florida Atlantic University. So we've had a sort of slow burn initially a few years only in the Bahamas, but we're now working globally and yeah, helping take care of reefs all around the world.
- [20:31]
C
I wonder if you could talk a little bit in terms of what is the big goal? What are your visions when you're having a drink on a Friday and really thinking about the future of what this really could be and what it could mean to coral reefs all over the world?
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A
To be honest, my ultimate vision is I'm put out of business because coral reefs are fine again. I have a job that shouldn't exist. We shouldn't have to live in a world where coral restoration is necessary, let alone that businesses need to start to solve for this problem. But also that's where we are. And again, just like we know we need to stop deforestation, but reforestation works and matters. We need to stop killing coral reefs and we need to transform how we scale restoration around the world. So stepping back from the there's no problems left on planet Earth scenario, we envision that there's about 100 countries and territories with coral reef. They sustain 25% of marine life and a billion people's livelihoods. They generate trillions of dollars annually through tourism, through coastal protection, through fisheries. There are medicines on the market fighting cancer, arthritis, viral infections that come from coral reef organisms. So again, it's incredible. Nature, there's biodiversity worth protecting the ocean. But we're also ultimately talking about protecting ourselves. Humanity relies on nature much more than nature relies on us. But we're also the ones who have the most impact on it. So I envision that we can catalyze this restoration economy that is funding the protection, preservation and restoration of nature. Hopefully not just for coral reefs, but for mangrove forests and seagrass meadows and terrestrial ecosystems that local communities are benefiting from. And that whether it's through our own coral farms, whether we own and operate them, whether they're franchises or partnerships, whether someone takes our designs and goes with them ourselves, if it's our technology powering other people's works. But every nation on earth that has coral reefs has large scale land based commercial coral farms so that we can be growing the millions and billions of corals a year. We need to ensure that future generations can enjoy them and that the ocean will continue to survive and thrive.
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C
Do we have to be near the sea? Can I help you guys in Indiana?
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Absolutely. So there's the maybe, I don't want to say boring answers because they're important, but there is the sort of, I said from the get Go stop killing reefs. So whether it's voting with your wallet or at the ballot box for supporting companies that are doing good or better for the planet, or leaders in government and industry and finance that are actually doing their job and taking care of the ecosystems to sustain us all, we'd love, obviously, for people to come visit our farms, get in the ocean, plant corals. Our farms are tourism attractions, so everyone's invited to Grand Bahama to come check it out. People can also adopt a coral or adopt a reef. You know, we did let individuals do this. You can go on our website or follow us on social media and learn more about this. It's a great holiday gift. You actually are funding the growth of coral or corals that will go back out in the ocean. They can be personalized and, and you get sort of digital updates about the whole process. We've also worked with Nature Positive Brands. We've restored a Corona Beer reef. We worked with the Brazilian shoe company Cariuma, which has had this model for years of planting trees for every pair of shoes sold. They did ocean themed shoes and money from those shoes funded restoration. So thinking about how, whether you're in, you know, Indiana or Kazakhstan, if you're someone who always goes to the beach or never goes in the water, but if you like what we're doing and you want to support, there's always a way you can do that. Coralvuti Co and at coralvita Reed. Since you gave me the plug opportunity. No.
- [24:19]
C
And everybody should know, unless you're a new listener, that rewilding.org pod is where you can find everything when you find this episode. As with every episode, we have extra credit and we're going to have a lot of extra credit for this episode, including everything that you just talked about.
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A
Thanks.
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C
We talk mostly to NGOs. A lot of the people who listen to this podcast are running or working in NGOs and, and government stuff. And you talk about mission based business solutions that can solve environmental problems better than NGOs. We talked about costs and other things that are hobbling NGOs. But what do you feel, in a broader sense about companies like yours and probably your desire to see a lot more companies like yours, not just in your sector, but where do we go from here?
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A
Simple question. It's worth saying there needs to be many, many, many, many, many more coral leaders. And we also still need the NGOs and the researchers and the community groups and the activists. It's sort of not, not a replacement, but it's a sort of. I Think an augmentation again. I worked at an ngo. I worked in government. I have great respect and appreciation for the people in those spaces. And there's also things that don't work. And we got a whole podcast about how philanthropy and donor aid is broken. But I think one of the things that was pretty telling for me, there were so many restrictions when I got that grant from the UN about what we could spend money on. And I think one of the weird things we had. And then our first investor, I would love to be at this position once in life. He was like, I got a pocket for investments and a pocket for donations. And he donated to coral restoration organizations and he invested in us. Donors have a lot more opinions about what you can or should or should not spend your money on. And while there's obviously plenty of things that you have to sort of be mindful of how you spend money in investors, the same in person could have a completely different philosophy for a startup. And I think one of the things you kind of talked about, being emaciated and whatnot, there's this weird fascination, I feel like, with donors and NGOs struggling with, well, I don't want your money being spent on overhead or increasing salaries, and I want to see 10,000 trees planted. But if you want to see 10,000 trees planted the best way, we need to have the best people to have the best people. We need people to not be starving or struggling or working a second job, whereas investors were like, oh, you should be paying yourself a healthy salary, because then you can be fully focused on what you're doing and do a better job of it. So that was maybe a weird way to start off answering your question, but I just think that the people who are writing checks to NGOs need to face some sort of reckoning with themselves and reconsider how they are treating the people that they're supporting and hopefully for the betterment of the people so that they can go out and fulfill their missions better. I do think that we can have for profit for nature companies. I think that for better or for worse, and I know a lot of people are going to absolutely say for worse. We live in a capitalist society. And I just think, okay, well, if that's not changing, we can harness capitalism for good. And there's whole theories about social capitalism, things like that, plenty of reasons to critique ESG and the like, but it is possible, I think, to run a business that does well and does good, and that if you're the right type of people backing it and it's written into your governance documents and all that kind of stuff, you know, okay, are you going to be hockey stick style growth to the moon and have crazy returns? No. But are you still going to be a successful company and then also achieve your mission? Yes, that's a great thing to support and invest in. And again, there's this just the way the world works. If you generate revenue, one is just factually going to be more self sustainable, which then means you can do more. We can invest in R and D for AI technology to better collect and analyze data for coral growth and health. You can expand to new locations. You can have 100 tanks growing coral instead of 10 tanks. And it also tends to attract more dollars. And I'm also hopeful not only that again more companies can emerge like ours, but also there was, to be frank, tension when we first entered the space from some people were like, what's a for profit doing in the core restoration space? You're going to take all the grant dollars away from us and the like. And again, having been in the NGO space, there is often a scarcity mindset and you do have to fight and scrap for resources. Our view is that if we're successful, there's going to be more resources, more attention, more money for everyone. It's because we're not just competing for the same small pot. We're going to show that people should be putting more money into this pot and we can make the pot grow ourselves. So I think you take that again out of the environment too. Whether it's for homelessness, for education or justice, doesn't mean everything has to be a business, doesn't have to all be done by entrepreneurs. But I think there's a real opportunity to do businesses better, to see the impact we want to see in the world.
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C
Well, I like what you said earlier when you said that it's a part of an overall, you know, what you could call it like an ecosystem of getting things done. And you still need government, you need NGOs and, and all that. And I think where we were the weakest and continued to be the weakest is in your area is like there's not enough people doing what you're doing. You know, we always have to. Well, now I have one more company, I can say yours, but we always have to talk about Patagonia and I'm tired of it. I'm like, there's, there's no reason that there couldn't be. There shouldn't be thousands and thousands more companies like this.
- [29:50]
A
The other day I had A call with one of the people at NOAA who's still doing coral restoration, the guy who helped run the program for 20 years. He's now sort of independent, the head of one of the biggest coral restoration NGOs around and me and we're talking about how do we raise money collectively for every two years. This is major coral restoration conference. So again it's not like, well, I'm the entrepreneur and the for profit guy, so I'm going to go just like we're talking about a team effort to take care of these ecosystems and yeah, it's exciting. You know, I think there's also one challenge certainly, but I think fun opportunity is we're also not just entering a market and disrupting it for the sort of the common startup parlance. We're effectively creating a market that doesn't exist, which kind of feels like we're playing in a sandbox, like, oh, let's try that and let's do that because that makes sense to us and, and then there's no one to tell us no or there's no one that's tried it before and it's failed. So I think there's lots of opportunities for innovation, for inspiration, for action. We've had our share of failures. You know, we've had corals definitely not make it that we've planted even as we've seen good successes. But it's sort of like, well we, we've got to do the work because we can't, I can't imagine a world without coral reefs. So let's try something different and hopefully everyone is going to get to benefit from it.
- [31:03]
C
Yeah, I'm thinking you're very close in my mind to someone working on my celial network stuff in forests. I think it's really cool you mentioned that you get to play in your own sandbox because you're doing stuff that nobody's got all these opinions about yet or regulations around yet or you can't do this and that and there aren't local like just where you set up your, your bases. It's like you're just going to grow coral.
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A
Okay, well I will say there's plenty of regulations around protecting coral. Would you need a deal with those? But as far as like innovation within the business model and the like. But that's why again, we always work hand in hand with the local communities, with the governments, bring ourselves into, into the spaces the right way. But yeah, no, you're absolutely right as far as like again, no one's thought about doing this in this way before. So let's try it.
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C
So what is the scale, then, of the specific problem you're solving in terms of. You said you need tons more of you. You need your growth to be a lot. You need a lot more companies like you doing work in this space. And all the support that you get, the people who manufacture probably the stuff you use in the labs and everything else, just needs to really, really scale, give us a sense of what that feels like, that kind of scale.
- [32:19]
A
I like to describe myself as an optimistic realist. I mentioned before my dad worked on making peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately, he was not as successful as we all would have liked. But, you know, you can't do that job and be an idealist and nothing else, because that is going to definitely blow up in your face. You have to contend with the histories, you have to contend with the cultures. You have to deal with so many tough realities. And you also can't do that job as a cynic, because how can you ever make peace if you don't believe it's possible? And so when looking at things like coral reefs and so much of the issues we're facing on the planet, we got a tough road ahead of us. And also every tenth of a degree, every acre of coral restored, every mangrove forest protected, every species saved, it adds up and makes a difference. And so taking that with the belief that, okay, let's scale it up even more. So there's hundreds of thousands of square miles of coral reef in the world, takes up less than 1% of the sea floor. But again, a billion people, trillions of dollars a year, quarter of all marine life dependent upon it. We're not going to restore all the world's roofs. It's not possible. And we can also restore enough in the right places so that even if we see a lot more corals die in front of us in our lifetimes, there'll be enough left to recover. And again, even if that's on the centuries timeline, it's sort of the analogy that you plant a tree so, you know, future generations can sort of sit in the shade. We need to be growing millions and billions of corals, the fragments, but then also, you know, spawning. And there's some really cool advances happening by scientists and practitioners and engineers around the world trying to advance it. But, like, for many years, most of the innovation in core restoration is people going to, you know, Home Depot and putting stuff together off the shelf. There isn't, like, an industry designing for us yet. There's for a while, you know, A few hotels that were paying for it, but usually you had to scrape together the funds. Now there are coral restoration insurance policies. There was a DARPA program. So the R and D arm of the US military looking at how coral and oyster restoration could be a more cost effective and just pure effective means to protect naval bases from erosion and storm surge in concrete seawalls. Thinking about blue bonds and foreign debt in island nations being forgiven if that money is spent on conservation, sustainable development. So innovation in engineering, innovation in technology, but also innovation in finance. There's now a $500 million fund called the Global Fund for Coral reefs. There's a G20 led initiative called CORDAT which is open source R and D science support for coral and other forms of ecosystem restoration. So we need to do a lot more. There's the physical scale, there's the. Instead of growing 10,000 or 100,000 corals a year, growing a million corals at each farm and farms like that around the world and each farm is few acres or something like that. But then also like how do we see all those other changes behind the scenes that can then support that work and accelerate it and scale it?
- [35:21]
C
Yeah, you probably need a lot more innovation in this space too.
- [35:25]
A
Right?
- [35:25]
C
Like more people thinking about how we could do it better. How, you know, I imagine like talking to new people who, who think like.
- [35:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm our team, we're always excited about who we can partner with and collaborate with. We've done some cool stuff in the past. Again we didn't really have initially anyone doing AI on our team. So we partnered with people to get the ball rolling on our brain coral technology. And ultimately then brought in hardware engineers and software programmers to start building things and tinkering and using 3D printers and scanners and high tech equipment that had not been on our radar but was sort of suggested our way and sensors for ocean data. And there's a ton of room for innovation, particularly when you think about physically planting the corals. It's a really awesome thing to do to go out in the ocean and you basically take marine epoxy glue or concrete and you plug the fragment in, it dries and it grows and it does its own thing. One of our early investors is this guy, Tom Chi. He was a co founder of Google X. He's a really wonderful open hearted man. He started a fund exactly. To invest in nature focused companies. He's also, without being hyperbolic, one of the smarter guys on the planet. And there was this one time we were talking to him. And he calculated that to offset the current rate of coral loss using traditional methods, assuming you had this many corals, you'd need something like 720,000 divers planting 24. 7. That's. That's not going to happen. So what are the opportunities for robotics and automation and not only for, again, for growing the corals, but for planting the corals. How do you do that at a much more rapid and large scale way? It's not something we're currently focused on, but we know people that are looking at that. So, yeah, there's so much room for thought and creativity and brainstorming and ultimately also collaboration for action.
- [37:20]
C
Yeah. I wanted to give people the idea that it's not just what they see on your site. The very prominent features are people reaching in tanks and working with the coral and working underwater. That scale part of it. Just to let everybody know how serious you and other companies think about this stuff, it's a good conversation to have about the scale.
- [37:39]
A
I think another great way to sort of illustrate that. Before we started our conversation, we were talking about how there's some really cool science that's been done by others about how playing the sound of coral reefs at degraded reefs can help them recover. And again, if you think about like coral reef coming back to the speakers, man.
- [37:58]
C
Because that, what you're talking about here just tripped me out. I'm like, come on, it's wild.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah. So if you almost imagine like a coral reef is an underwater city and for those who've been snorkeling or scuba diving, you've probably experienced this. For those who haven't, a healthy reef, it's noisy. There are creatures communicating to each other. There's parrot fish munching on the rocks. There's all of these different hustle and bustle. And it's like, you know, sirens going off and people talking. And a dead or degraded reef is pretty quiet sometimes. If I'm like snorkeling, I don't see a reef and I suddenly hear noise, I will swim towards it. And more often than not, maybe I find a school fish, maybe I find a healthier reef. It's a big city versus a ghost town. And the scientists have figured out that if you play the sounds of a coral reef in underwater speakers at a degraded reef site, it causes other fish to come. And often those fish are, you know, they're grazing, they're eating algae that might be competing with the corals for space. They eat that algae. Suddenly there's room for the corals to Grow and recover, and then just the positive feedback loop can start again. So I know part of me was going to sort of envision that on my own. But that's just one example again, of, like, really cool thought and creativity that then could have huge applications. Because if you're planting the corals and playing those speakers, maybe that accelerates the process even faster than if we just planted corals on its own. Even if it was a larger amount of corals.
- [39:24]
C
Yeah. It might even be the linchpin. It could be the. I mean, the beginning of your movie, which I'm sure you've sold the rights to already. And if you haven't, somebody needs to snatch those up. Is a robot underwater doing the cement, placing the corals, and there's music being piped in by obvious speakers, and people are just immediately confused completely about what they're seeing. Like, what in the world? But I would watch that movie.
- [39:49]
A
I'd watch that movie. I'm into it, I think.
- [39:51]
C
Sam, is there anything else you want to close with? How do you like to leave people after you've given us way, way too much to think about?
- [39:58]
A
I think the best shout out I can give is I hope people just go get to enjoy nature today or soon. Obviously, if you have the opportunity to visit a coral reef, do it. It's the best. If you've been thinking about getting scuba certification, it's amazing. But even if it's just gone for a walk through your local forest or anything like that, I really think it's incredible to live on this planet and to have access to the things we have access to and then hopefully find some good inspiration for taking care of it, whether it's big or small, starting your own company or supporting good people or good businesses, doing good. So everyone's invited to the coral farm in Freeport, Grand Bahama. Come check us out. Open to the public, and hopefully you'll. You'll get the chance to come plant some corals with us, too. Yeah.
- [40:48]
C
That scuba certification is important. Somebody could start a company. Right now, we need an army of 700,000 scuba divers certified.
- [40:55]
A
So join us.
- [40:56]
C
Yes. Sam, thank you so much for the work that you do. It's really, really inspiring to talk to people like you and keep it going and keep us posted in any way that we can possibly help spread the word about the good work you're doing.
- [41:11]
B
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