Coral Vita – Mission-based, For-profit Coral Reef Restoration on a Global Scale

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello everyone, and welcome back for another episode of the Outdoor Adventure Series. Sam Teicher is our guest today. Sam is the co-founder and chief reef officer of Coral Feedoff, a US-based not-for-profit enterprise that restores degraded coral reefs using scalable, land-based coral farming and climate-resilient propagation techniques and really some state-of-the-art technology. Sam, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Harry. Excellent. So, first off, I have a photo behind me of a of a reef in the Bahamas. I did this, did that. You don't look like you're anywhere near someplace with water, or at least in the Bahamas.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Not tropical water, no. The Bahamas was home for six years for me. Freeport Grand Bahamas, where Coral Vita started our first coral farm. My co-founder, Gator, still lives down there, as do all the members of our local team. I'm in the tropical wonderland of Brooklyn, New York.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Brooklyn. Oh, you've got good deli there. Oh, or and good bagels. That's true. I've got better bagels here than in the Bahamas. I I love that. I have to own I can only live in somewhere that has decent bagels, which actually Las Vegas does. So I have a question. I remember going on a cruise years ago with one of those three-day carnival cruises, and we actually went to the Grand Bahamas or the Bahamas. How long? And I I I definitely don't remember you guys way back then, but how long has Coral Vita been around?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

So we've existed as a company since 2015. That's what Gator and I officially incorporated it as an idea, sort of 2014. My personal coral farming experience goes back to 2012 when I was living in the island nation of Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean.

unknown 2:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

But as far as operations in Freeport, Grand Bahama, officially in May 2019.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Okay. Now, Mauritius, I have heard of it. It's right out in the water. How did you end up getting into this profession of one? It's it's environmentalism, it's conservation, it's her restoration. But what was the kind of the the ignition to take you off into this career space?

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah, MERS has played a role in that. So for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a tropical island nation, sort of southeast of Madagascar. That's where the dodo bird is from. That's one of its many claims to fame. Okay. I did not grow up in Washington, D.C., imagining I was going to be a coral farmer because who would? I've always had a lifelong connection to nature and to the outdoors. I would roll over logs in my parents' backyard and look at bugs, which wasn't my mom's favorite activity, but I had a great time in DC actually got pretty good nature for a city, both Rock Creek Park in the middle of town, the Potomac River. You go upstream to Great Falls, and then in a few hours you could be to the Chesapeake Bay or Shenandoah's, and we'd go camping and hiking all the time. And the first time I saw a coral reef, I was six in Hawaii on a family trip, and that's stayed with me my whole life. And I got scuba certification as soon as I was old enough, around 13. So I I've always had this connection both to nature, the outdoors, and to the ocean and coral reefs. Is the best way I can describe it. I went to DC Public Schools. I was interested in education reform. My dad worked on trying to make peace of the Middle East, and I was interested in international diplomacy and security. And in college, I ended up focusing on climate change and sustainability as this thing that again connected to personal loves of mine with nature as well as this issue that affects all people everywhere and affects education, affects, security affects, the economy affects, all these different things. And more sort of the policy track or working for NGOs, just like the NGO I worked for in Morivicious when I was out there between college and grad school. I had opportunities to intern at the White House on climate change adaptation policy work, as well as for this coalition of island nation governments and partners called the Global Island Partnership. And had and still have a belief in the importance of those fields. But together with my now co-founder and at the time a grad school classmate, Gator Halpern, he was coming more from academia, environmental science. He likes to say he felt he was writing the obituary for the planet. I was frustrated 2012 with bureaucratic inertia, let alone today, or the handicaps and philanthropy and NGOs that exist. And we thought, what if a business could solve for some of these environmental challenges more effectively and rapidly than those sort of more traditional conservation fields? And you put aside the magic and the wonder of coral reefs, which again, since I was six, I've loved them. You don't need to sell me anymore on that. That argument obviously, unfortunately, does not win the day for everyone. They are incredibly valuable. There are trillions of dollars generated by coral reefs every year because they act like seawalls and protect coastlines from storms. They power tourism economies for the people who want to go snorkeling and diving and put their toes in white sandy beaches. They sustain fisheries, their medicines on the market fighting everything from cancer to viral infections, to arthritis that have compounds coming from coral reef organisms. So if they die, it's as much an ecological tragedy as a socioeconomic catastrophe. Because then there's also a billion people in a quarter of marine life that depends on this one ecosystem. So we had this kernel of an idea from also derived from my experience in Mauritius, where I dig traditional NGO grant-based coral farming, UN funding, low-tech underwater gardens, amazing impact, but clear that that model isn't going to cut it. So we're like, what if a business could make a bigger difference? We have a thousand dollar grant from our university. Uh that was in 2014, and and we've gone on quite the journey since then.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Okay. And I'm like stumped, like, where to start? There's so many places to go. And the this idea of bringing the business model and eventually technology to a process that was very labor intensive that you experienced in Mauritius. How did you begin to decide or scale up of where are we going to put this operation? And did did do you have to uh pitch this idea to the like Mauritius or the Bahamas? And I mean, who did you pitch this to who said we want to do this? This is this is the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

We had a number of different target audiences. There's the sort of governments from a regulator perspective or potential partners, potential business owners or landowners for where a farm can be located, investors for who could give us the initial capital to get this business going, customers to pay for restoration. So I guess to take a couple steps back, again, just to give people more context. So the closest analogy that most people probably are familiar with is a reforestation for reef restoration. Instead of taking cuttings off of trees or flowers that you can graft and grow, you take cuttings from living corals, grow them for a certain time period, and then outplant them back out under the reefs. And this is a field that's existed for several decades. There are amazing NGOs, scientists, community groups that have been doing and continue doing this work. And most of those projects, again, like what I did in Mauritius, you have these sort of low-tech rope or plastic PVC pipe nurseries. It's a really nice day at the office, you snorkel or dive down to them. But if you want to set up and maintain one of those nurseries at every reef that needs to be restored, that's not really practical. We were funded by a UN grant for$50,000. It was a very cumbersome process to get that small amount of funding that ran out and therefore the project ended. There are limits in terms of species diversity. Some corals go really slow. There's limits in terms of resiliency because there's a spike in temperatures, or a fisherman drops their anchor, there's a storm, the whole project could be at risk. So we were thinking about how, from all those perspectives, scaling, funding, holistic impact, what could be done differently. And that was where this sort of idea of taking existing science. Some of our original advisors were leaders in the coral science and restoration space, like Dr. Ruth Gates. She helped pioneer assist evolution, which is this ongoing field of strengthening corals' resilience to warming and acidifying oceans, which is such an important thing that my dog Panda decided to jump up on the bed behind me in case people were wondering what that brown blur was.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

It's a tough feature.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

It's a feature. Then also microfragmenting, Dr. David Vaughn, who'll pioneer that space for accelerating coral growth rates. Land-based farming, as opposed to the ocean-based nurseries, again, have been done by a lot of marine research institutes, but for research. So our thought was what if we take that concept? Oh, basically have almost a coral factory approach, together with, instead of a granted donation-based model, an actual business to pay for large-scale impact and projects. And that concept, we initially took to investors. We took to people who are putting capital into startups, into businesses, and saying, look, this isn't going to be the next hockey stick style Silicon Valley massive growth opportunity. But we think that we actually can actually have a successful business from that perspective. But by doing so, we will generate the revenue required to fund much bigger projects instead of the grants and donations to do more large-scale, resilient, coral-enabled project, develop technologies that can improve the processes even more. So we hit the pavement. This was 2015, going fundraising. Our first investor came on board February 2016, just about almost a year after Gator and I had graduated from our master's program. And then after we had raised enough capital to get things going, it was also at the same time looking at where could this first farm be? And we looked at a few different nations, particularly in the Caribbean. Ultimately, we were connected with Rupert Hayward from the Grand Bahama Port Authority, together with support from the Bahamian government, to establish our first farm in Freeport, Grand Bahama. We were sort of given a great deal on access to land, an expedited permitting process in order to do the work, connections to right leaders in the local community. And so then Gator and I moved down in 2018 to set up the farm, which then opened its doors in 2019, and we got to work after a lot of years of talking about doing the work. I love it. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

I'm curious from the perspective of the Bahamas and the government and the local leaders, what was their uh position of what you were doing that that yes, we're gonna make it easier for you to get the land, we're gonna help you get the land, facilitate that, facilitate the permits. What was their return on the investment? What are the what what were they looking for? I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Yeah, it's a great, great question. Again, if you think about why coral reefs matter, I talked about some of those economic values before. There's also in many countries, particularly island, coastal nations, a cultural heritage component. So, as an example, in Hawaii, in the Hawaiian people's origin story, that's this creation chant. All life, you, me, dogs, plants, everything comes from the coral polyp. So that's a pretty profound recognition of this one creature playing such an important role in all of our lives. And in the Bahamas, again, from a tourism perspective, that's one of the main industries in the country, as is fishing, both of which have a direct tie to the health of coral reefs. Because even if you don't want to go snarbling or dive and you want to just put your toes in that white sand, often white sand in tropical islands only exist because of coral reefs. Not to mention when those hurricanes come through as sea levels rise and there's more erosion, the reefs, as mangrove forests and other ecosystems play, are these barriers, are these natural seawalls. It's almost like ecological infrastructure. So to come in and say we're gonna restore these reefs at scale while also employing a community-based approach that's a big part of our model. So we hire local as much as possible. The farms, as they grow corals and fulfill restoration contracts, are tourism attractions in their own rights. People like coming to pay to visit an aquarium. So that's a marketable destination. And we've worked with the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism and received several awards from them to be one of the premier destinations, not only on the island of Grand Bahama, but in the country. And then also an education center for local communities, for students, for fishers, for ministers, whoever it might be, paid internships, only available to Bahamians, a lot of jobs also, again, created in this community, partnerships with local NGOs. And then by planting the corals, ensuring that the values that they provide to the fishers, to the tourism community, to the government through the growth of the economy, it's sort of this win-win-win across the board of how we can benefit not only the Bahamas, but a lot of these countries that we either already operate in or plan to as we scale and grow. Because we are now working in, we've done projects in six or seven countries or nations around the world at this point. So having that as a way to say we want to work with you. We also need to work with you. Again, one, I'm not I'm not from the Bahamas, so ensuring that the work benefits these communities the most. But governments, in many ways, they sort of represent three potential pathways for collaboration. There's regulator, so they're going to issue permits, there's partners, as I kind of described, and also as customers. And in fact, we executed a contract with the Bahamian government to do restoration work and in the past. So it's a great way to sort of work alongside these decision makers.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

I love it. As you laid the the groundwork for the farm in the Bahamas, when what's the the timeline of we set up the shop? Simplifying that, I'm I I'm sure. But we so we set up the operation, we start to do the work that we have been we have developed, the processes, the the the the farming techniques, the growing, going out into the water with your your these pieces of the reef, which you're going to show us when we go to your website in a second. When do you begin to see that the fruits of all of this effort and labor and commitment are starting to make a difference?

SPEAKER_01 15:36

It's a a really interesting and cool way of putting it. Within a year or two, you can already start seeing impact. And again, there's different ways you can see impact, but sure. Let's just say we got approvals for everything, land site, all the whether it's immigration permits or business licenses, all that kind of stuff. A farm can be up and running in certainly six months, if not faster. Uh, we're actually going to be soon deploying our first deployable farm, almost like a farm in a box in a in a new country. So accelerat those timelines even faster. Then you got to just run water quality tests and all that kind of stuff before you bring the corals in. But once the corals are growing, once you've collected them from the reefs, uh, started the process to accelerate their growth rates, again, using this technique I briefly alluded to before microfragmenting, it lets us grow many more species of corals and do so much faster because some of them, the bouldering and massive encrusting species to go from the size of a coin to a dinner plate could take 20, 50, 100 years. So we now can grow those corals in months instead of decades. And that lets us do much more holistic restoration because we're not just growing the important, but sort of limited, fast-growing branching coral species. That's all to say six, twelve to twenty four months is sort of the typical range we grow the corals for before we outplant them. So yeah, once we're up and running, again, if it's six months to from breaking ground to operations and then another six to twelve months to grow the corals and then they get outplanted. And it's not gonna be a David Embro narrative documentary Nat Geo-level wonder of a coral reef instantly. But again, we are accelerating those growth rates, so it's gonna look good right away. And it is almost sort of like the plant that they will come. You sometimes can see fish show up the day you outplant the corals and have measured meaningful impact from our work pretty rapidly. Because again, there's how do you measure what we're doing? You could just pat yourself on the back and say, we planted 100,000 corals. Great. What does that actually mean? So we collect information beforehand. We do pre-restoration surveys, so we're able to track there's X amount more fish population or species diversity, or wide changes in coral cover, what's the survivorship of the corals we outplanted? And we've seen, yeah, really great impact sometimes within days, if not the first several months or or year or so of outplanting. And so being able to then translate that into a fishing community, there's gonna be more fish right after we do this work. This is something that matters. Or hotel, you're gonna be able to market to your guests that there's gonna be greater life in the ocean for people to come snorkel or die that having that as part of the impact as well as the narrative helps us generate more positive feedback for people supporting and paying for this kind of work.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Okay. I'm curious, and I I imagine it's it's huge, but the the variety of species are of the coral organ of coral. There's massive, and depending on what part of the globe you are in, are is your restoration efforts in the locations where you are operating? Is it that coral that you are working to restore? You're not bringing coral from the Bahamas to some other exotic location or coastal location. All native. All native.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Okay. There's a number of reasons for that. One ecologically, ethically, and also legally. You actually can't take corals across borders and put them in the wild, okay, which is an interesting thing considering that in places like the Caribbean, fairly large geographic area area, but actually the corals species you find in the Bahamas, you'll find in Colombia and in Mexico and in Florida, is close to 60 species. Whereas if you go to some other places like in Indonesia or the Philippines, you could go to the other side of a small island, and there could be species you don't find on the north side that you would on the south side. Or if you go to places again, like the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea, where you have Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia all, you know, right there. Corals don't have borders, but they all sort of share that same ecosystem, that same long length of coastline. So there are interesting ways to sort of deal with that. So yeah, our approach is if we work in the Bahamas, we're growing Bahamian coral. And then the ways which we grow corals, while there might be nuanced or localized adaptations for the species or the genotypes, the water quality and conditions, what is nice about our model, and again, about the science a lot of people around the world are using for coral restoration, it is fairly plug-and-play. We don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. We'll make the adaptations. But the farm in the Bahamas that we set up in 2019 actually played a big role in the design process when we were hired by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to help design their coral farm, which ultimately will be the biggest coral farm in the world. And the first phase of that is already operational. And we actually, as Coral Vita, got hired to be the people growing corals for Kaust for this university. So it was definitely a much more souped-up version in Saudi than our Bahamas farm. And then you had to make other adjustments, make it more indoors than our outdoor farm in the Bahamas because it's in the desert and whatnot. But even still, we were able to take those sort of base operational models and approach it that we used and took it to the other side of the world without really making too much of a change in our approach.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Okay. How has the technology evolved in what you're using today versus what you were using when you first launched the farm in the Bahamas? And perhaps maybe even highlight uh the uniqueness of this technology. Like what is it that allowed that has enabled you to do this work and really to make it extensible on a global scale?

SPEAKER_01 21:53

So we started again in 2015, and uh most of the people doing coral restoration at that point. Were NGOs and researchers. And I think it's fair to say Coral Restor is probably one of the last fields that anyone was designing anything for. More often than not, you got some real MacGyvers in this space. You're going to your local hardware store and cobbling things together because there weren't a ton in the way of specialty tools or technologies being developed for it. Now, through Coral Vita and through others, you have robotics, artificial intelligence, lidar systems on and on underwater construction tools, all sorts of things being deployed at a much greater scale. There's now a$200 million fund called CORDAP, which the G20 actually set up that funds open source science and technology for advancing the state of coral restoration. So there's a lot more happening now. For us internally at Coral Vita, again, taking existing science and then applying the sort of unit economics-based, production-oriented, land-based farming model to it. In addition to just fine-tuning things and making it more standardized, one of the big things that we've created is this tech suite we call Brain Corp. And it's got a range of purposes, hardware, software, but effectively it's an AI-powered tool that lets us rapidly better collect and analyze key data to do a more effective job at a cheaper cost of restoring reefs together with a range of underwater and field-based tools. So if people can envision, well, actually, if if we don't let me see if I can pull this off real quick, I might even have a background setting. There we go. This is our farm in the Bahamas. I see that picture.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

So there's these tanks that we're growing the corals in. And again, people are walking right up to them. You don't need to get on a boat. And if it's a bad weather day, you can't go out, but you don't need to go out, snorkel, dive. You can really, it's much more accessible for doing this kind of work. So we have the coral growing inside these tanks. There's a lot of important data that's happening together with just maintaining their health and cleaning them and getting ready to plant them or cutting them up into the microfragments to accelerate their growth rates. So we want to be tracking the lineage of these corals. When did we collect them? From where? When did we fragment them? Okay, we're raising the temperatures in these tanks and bringing them back down. We're stress hardening the corals so they can better adapt to climate change. Which genotypes within the species are naturally more heat tolerant. Well, let's then go collect more of them or crossbreed them together when it is the time of the year for coral spawning, because corals make babies. I highly recommend safe for work videos. It happens typically by moonlight once a year around the world. Oh, but again, having all of that requires an immense amount of data collection. And traditionally, you're going around with digital cameras and clipboards and Excel spreadsheets and tracking all of that. And this farm behind me in the bomb is we have about 30 tanks. And using traditional methods, it could take weeks to really do that entire inventory process. And then again, tracking the changes over time. So with the sort of specially designed camera system, together with the algorithm that we developed with computer vision and AI, we can now basically inventory our entire farm in an hour and then have this ledger all the way out to when they get outplanted and years later in monitoring to assess everything we've done. So it just this very important and useful tool that now also we're integrating underwater GPS and all sorts of valuable things for the space. So we use Brain Forel internally, and we're also licensing it out to other practitioners in the space. In 2025, it was recognized as Time Magazine's one of its best inventions of the year. So being able to again not only do the work but invest in science, invest in tech, invest in greater impact is something we really are proud of and hope to continue contributing to this field.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Excellent. No, I appreciate that. Thank you for sharing the background. I think that's a really great segue because that's all I'm just queuing up your website, and there was the tanks. I would love if you could take us on a tour of your website because we our listeners, they're all over the world. We would love for them to get to know more about Coral Vita and the work you're doing and ways they can get involved and support your your your great mission here. So I am going to okay. I'm gonna the miracle of technology. Hopefully this works. All right. If everything went well, we are looking at your website.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Yeah, so uh this is the home page. There might be a bit of lag here. We do have some videos looping. Right. But yeah, so coral leader.co for anyone who wants to check it out. Home page right here. If you scroll down, it's again just really giving a background as to why we exist. Right. I I didn't even throw out that stat before. I think an importance of highlighting why this is so urgent is since the 1970s, half of the world's coral reefs have died. Right. We're currently on track to lose over 90% by 2050. So a billion people around the world, a hundred nations, 25% of marine life, trillions of dollars. That's a big deal. And I'll be the first one to say we're not a silver bullet. But we are an important tool in the arsenal. We have to still also stop killing coral reefs. We have to create more marine protected areas, we have to eliminate pollution, we have to solve for climate change, we have to deal with the stressors. But just like we need to stop deforestation while promoting reforestation, we need to stop killing reefs while also scaling up restoration. And that is where coral vita comes in. So this homepage again, giving backgrounds on the problem, why this is such an important issue, and really why we exist. And across the tabs at the top, you can learn about everything from our story and our team. We've got seasoned conservationalists, PhD scientists, hardware and tech experts, local staff on the ground, learn more about the different services that we offer. So whichever tab you click on, we can turn it on.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

I'm gonna reshare again. We kind of froze up there. No blue. Okay, there it goes. Maybe it was just a video just causing it a lag. All right, let's try it again. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Okay, I can see you can scroll down maybe, and we could maybe the the video is the issue. There's more static stuff down below. Now we're getting a lot of jumbledness. Okay. Tech tech is I love tech. We love tech. Well, if you go to our website, it does work, I hope. It does work.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

I was there, folks. It's how I was doing the research.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

But if it's just even if you're there we go. So again, it's people can sign up for our newsletter. We got links to our social media on this homepage. And then I uh you could click on learn at the at the top left there, Howard, and we can jump to that. Okay, let's do that. That tab. But just giving again people more of that back. Maybe they maybe you don't know. Corals are actually animals.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Uh you keep saying species, by the way. Yeah. And I was thinking plant, but little did I know. I uh if my mom was alive, may she rest in peace. I would call her today. You know what I learned?

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, they're alive. Corals are animals that have plants living inside of them that make rock for their skeletons. They're pretty from free for one. But that's some of the things I mentioned again earlier in our conversation about how they act like seawalls. It helped the reef reduces wave energy by 97%. That's much more effective than a concrete or rock seawall. Not to mention, it's also a living seawall that then draws in tourists and powers biodiversity. So, talking through our process, how we cut up the corals into these little micro fragments and by placing them together, it accelerates the growth rates of the corals. They fuse together almost like scar tissue. What is assisted evolution? How do we stress harden these corals? So, this page is giving people that again, that greater background into why we exist and also what we do. The services page is going to be more on, again, for the potential clients who would be interested in our work, but hotels, developers, insurance companies, you have bottom line interests that depend on coral reefs. You can hire us to restore them. We also relocate corals out of coastal development zones when there's going to be dredging or runoff and corals are in harm's way. We can be hired by maritime construction companies or governments. The technology that we have, they you're running your own coral restoration project. Let's talk about how we can do that. So, again, the site is designed for the general public. It's designed for potential customers. The about page is gonna tell you all about our incredible team. It is very much not just me and Gator, though we we started this company. We actually recently just promoted our CEO Austin to CEO. So again, Gator and I, first-time entrepreneurs, we've been doing this a long time now, but Austin has background in Fortune 500. He's scaled startups from 10 to 1,000 employees across multiple geographies. And then if you keep going down, whether it's Tyreek, who is my teammate on the rugby team in Freeport, who had a patch for a scuba dive and he was a roofer, but he became one of our first employees in the Bahamas, or Abby's on screen right there. The Tom Beans and Sam Bright's The World, who've got an extensive tech and operational background. Jen Moore used to be one of NOAA, the U.S. Ocean Agency's senior coral conservationist. She's now our director of conservation, or Dr. Caitlin Gould and Eleanor Ray are two of our top coral scientists. So again, go through all the way through to if you're excited about what we do and you're coming on that, whether it's a cruise or airplane or however, you're coming to Grand Bahama, our tours are available for people to visit. So you can even book a tour. And then if you're really excited about supporting our work, you can even adopt a coral for your niece's birthday, for the holidays, whatever it might be. So all sorts of great ways to to learn. And then if you want to participate or contribute, all that can be done through our website.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Excellent. I I wish again, I wish I wasn't how old I am when I was in the Bahamas, but I most certainly, if I was going to the Bahamas in the future, I would be wanting to book a tour with you guys. I think it's appreciated. I was down in Florida, Gulf Shores in Orange Beach, and we we went to a oyster hatchery and how the how they do it down there and the how important water flow, water quality is to the the health of the oysters and the farming. And then we went to a fish uh uh a hatchery, watch that, and just to s to kind of extend into this species, the coral, I just think that's a great there's only so many uh tourist stores and whatever the drink beverage of choices you can drink.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

I would rather go and learn a little bit and uh see the see those uh that's that that's the idea is we can help fund more restoration by people coming to visit the farms as we work on those contracts for the hotels or the government or whoever else. And then yeah, have fun. It's educational. You don't even need to know how to swim, let alone a snorkel or dive, you can walk right up and see us growing corals. And we do have typically some tasty beverages available if people want to do that too, and then head to the beach nearby. So just like you could visit a brewery or distillery, you could visit an aquarium, they'll really have it be fun from being four to eighty-four. Everyone and anyone is always welcome to excellent.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Yeah, if someone was going, sees your your website, watch, reads the stories, listens to this podcast, goes to the website and I guess one of my underlying goals of this podcast is uh people get interested in being in the outdoors, uh, not only in the the experience of being out there, but the conservation, the stewardship. And let's say they want uh to uh learn more and prepare perhaps to go to college and uh major in in environmental studies of some sort. What would what would your advice to them be if they came up to you and said, I love what you do, I want to do it? What would your piece of advice be to them?

SPEAKER_01 34:28

That's actually a very tough question because there's there's many pieces of advice, and in many ways it also depends on the person. I would say don't feel like you have to start up a company is one thing. Again, I would very much describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur. Um I also studied political science, so we've got some brilliant choral scientists on our team, but you don't have to be a scientist to make a difference if that's not your calling or your passion. And same goes if, well, I don't know, you're interested in AI or advanced technologies. Those also can be brought to bear in our space, like what we're doing with Brain Coral, we have people on our team who very much are sort of coming at it from that field. So, and then this goes well beyond just corals, right? And just nature in general, I think uh, well, one, it's amazing. I would my first piece of advice would just be spend as much time in nature as possible. Oh yes. And whether it's terrestrial or marine, but it's one, it's it's good for the spirit and the soul. And two, I think also we want to really dedicate ourselves to protecting, preserving these ecosystems, then it's important to connect with them. So that would be one of my core pieces of advice is don't only hang out behind the computer. I mean, ask questions, put yourself out there. I'm a big believer in the the adage, and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So whether it's cold emailing the professor whose class you're hoping to get into, or the person you're hoping will fund or invest in your company, or raising your hand in a conference and introducing yourself and asking that question, usually the worst you get is a no, which is pretty much the same thing as not asking. So go for it. It would be my, I guess, my distilled version is go for it.

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Okay. One more kind of a gotcha question. And look, you have the CEO after your name and the chief reef officer. So I know you're going to be able to handle this. If you look back on your career, you know, this the time spent with the family in Hawaii and seeing that first piece of coral, the time of Mauritius school at Yale, which by the way, I didn't realize there Yale had other professionals besides attorneys.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

But uh the environmental school, the the school of the environment, it was the first forgery school in the country. It was founded by compatriots at President Roosevelt. We it's actually got a very deep history when it comes to the environment at Yale.

SPEAKER_00 36:55

All right. I love that. Well, go Yale. And but as you look back in your career, what and I imagine there's more than one, but if you could share what I would call an aha moment where look at what we're doing here, look at the impact we're making.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

What would be that aha moment?

SPEAKER_01 37:15

Yeah, actually, this is gonna maybe sound un unexpected, but it was actually an archaeology class.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

So I still am a big history nerd. Yeah. And again, this was when I was I was I was interested in the environment, but I didn't think I was gonna be dedicating myself to it. And I was taking this class called Global Environmental History, still remember Professor Harvey Weiss. And this was at Yale. I was Yale undergrad and then went back to the environmental school because they had a one-year master's program for people who got into it from the from the undergrad community. And he was talking about this this place called Tel Le Lan, which is uh a Tell is like a hill, and oftentimes you dig through these hills, and people would often build on top of what had already been there. So they sort of mound over time. And it was sort of in ancient Syria, and there's this moment where they got faced with a multi-year drought, and the villagers had the choice of they could adapt to the new circumstances, they could relocate, or they could die out, and they failed to adapt, they stayed put, and the the community collapsed. And there was this sort of aha moment to very much distill things down is we have one planet, and Earth will be fine, it's gonna keep spinning, and evolution will do its course. But as far as having a stable climate with the ecosystems that exist that have allowed not only life around us, but the sort of systems that has allowed humanity to make the jump from primates to modern humans and from most importantly, hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. That gets thrown out of whack, we're gonna deal with those consequences. So we have to mitigate the threats that we're creating ourselves, adapt to what's already coming, or face the consequences. Because as much as I'm actually a believer in space exploration, we're we're not all moving to a new planet anytime soon. So that sort of choice, the settlement face in ancient Syria, I sort of saw as this reality we are facing today. And that's when I decided to dedicate myself fully to the environment and to people. Because at the end of the day, I love nature. Nature is beautiful and amazing in its own right, but humanity relies on nature a lot more than nature relies on us. So we got to take care of it to take care of ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Most definitely. On that note, Sam, it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I truly appreciate your time. Now I know we had a nice visit to the the website, coralvita.co. What if for whatever reason the technology is what it was today, but we did get some good scenes and you I appreciate all the uh the breakdown of the services and ways folks can get involved. Are there any other social sites that we would link to to get people to learn more about you and the work that Coral Vita is doing?

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Yeah, so if you go across social media, it's at Coral Vita Reefs, the website. Obviously, hopefully you can come out to the farms and visit yourselves or uh plant some corals with us. And then we've also we often partner with brands. So we've restored a Corona beer reef, and there was limited edition Coral Vita Corona bottles. And a Brazilian shoe company called Carriuma did limited edition ocean sneakers that funded restoration. So sometimes you can also find us by just looking at the different companies that you know, in many ways, often working in the outdoor space or are adjacent to them. But uh yeah, come visit us, look us online, and uh join us in helping take care of the reefs that take care of all of us.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

I love it. Well, I tell you, if I get to the Bahamas, I most certainly I am doing that. So you you can count on it. Listen, thank you again. It's been a pleasure, and we look forward to sharing this episode with our listeners. So I know you're in Brooklyn, New York. Please go have a good bagel for me. What I wouldn't give for a good bagel right now. But thank you so much for your time today. Take care. All right, listen, stay in a line. We're gonna do a very quick close, and you and I can have a final chat. All right, folks. We have just been chatting with Sam Taisher, co-founder of Coral Vita, a U.S.-based for-profit enterprise that restores really degraded coral reefs using really state-of-the-art, scalable, land-based coral farming techniques and technology. And really, now we know why he is the chief reef officer. Really, do check out the website. A lot of great information out there, very visual. And look, if you're gonna go down to the Bahamas, do check them out and also look at what they're doing globally, because they're in some gorgeous places that you know it looks good on a postcard, but underneath the water, their stressors going on and the great work they're doing to help restore not only the reefs themselves, but the ecosystem. And really, we now know the impact that those reefs have on more than just the reef itself. It's the economy, it's it's the environment, it's access to medicines, tourism, and a whole lot more. So, this is this is definitely a system working in here in this type of uh endeavor. Now, we're gonna provide backlinks to the Coral Vita website as well as to their social sites. As for this episode, you can find us on the outdoor adventure series website. We're also on LinkedIn and Facebook on our outdoor adventure series pages. The video of this episode will be up on our YouTube channel, and of course, you can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast from. Hey, if you're on a cruise or a boat going to the Bahamas, just download this episode and a whole lot others on whatever podcast platform you use. Until next time, wherever you are or whatever you're doing, go out there and have a fantastic day. And we look forward to having you join us on a future episode of the Outdoor Adventure Series Podcast. Take care now.