Jolyon Collier – Counting Coral

SPEAKERS

Matt Waters, Jolyon Collier

Matt Waters  00:09

Hey there dive buddies and welcome to the 50th episode of the Scuba GOAT podcast. This marks over two years of the show, and it’s superb content from a vast array of ocean lovers. Today I am joined by a man who through his own successes, has managed to retire long before his own 50th and redirect to that determination to succeed on coral conservation. A successful businessman, surfer diver and artists now turned conservationist, Julian Collier founded the not for profit organisation, counting coral a little over two years ago, utilising his skills from the construction industry. Jolyon said about designing a sculptural coral bank, with several goals in mind. The main goal, of course, a platform for coral propagation, with the additional intentions of attracting stakeholders in the projects from corporations, resorts, tourists, and locals alike. By creating an environment that appeals to the masses, Julian and his team also teach the stakeholders about their reefs and raise awareness of the importance of the coral in our world. And indeed, the Earth’s lifecycle. Julian, welcome to the show, buddy.

Jolyon Collier  01:20

Hey, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. Really love your show.

Matt Waters  01:25

Good on you Jolyon. Yeah, I did have a sneaky peek into the background. You know, when we we got put in touch by, what’s her name? Katherine, and have a sneaky peek to see what hear what you’re doing. And I see that you’ve had a few chats yourself. And one of my good buddies there, Cristina Zenato.

Jolyon Collier  01:42

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we love Christina. She’s awesome. big advocate for the sharks and the ocean. And we’re hoping to actually work with her in the future. So we’ll see how that goes.

Matt Waters  01:52

Oh, that’d be good. Yeah. Have you got an opportunity to get over there and diver there at some point?

Jolyon Collier  02:00

No, not yet. We’ve been so focused on Fiji for the last couple years that we’re just keeping all our attention on that on those reefs, and being in that region of the world for right now. But we are expanding pretty soon within the next year and a half. So we hope to kind of just, you know, reach out and start those dialogues, because what we do is an incredibly clot complex and long process, that we go down these roads and then all of a sudden we hit a brick wall and we can’t get past that brick wall and we just wasted months. So we’re very, very cautious about the directions that we go with our organisation because it’s very, very complicated.

Matt Waters  02:41

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what, before we get into the complexities of counting coral.Let’s back it right the way back up and just find out. Where did your your link with the ocean first evolve?

Jolyon Collier  02:59

Well, so I grew up in England. So it’s an island, we’re fully surrounded by water. But I was very fortunate as a young kid grew up in talkies, we’re kind of close to what they consider the English Riviera, even though that’s a very large stretch to even call it a Riviera. But you know, the ocean was there. We used to go cliff jumping as youngsters, you know, we didn’t have the rules that the youngsters have these days, we jump off 100 foot cliff and miss the rock barely and you know, survive and laugh about it and have fun and started snorkelling at a very young age, actually on tour Abbey sands. And that’s where it all kicked it off for me. And then I was lucky to fast forward like to be able to come to Malibu, California, when I was a young kid because my dad moved out here and I used to visit him on summer holidays, got into surfing, got into boogie boarding and got into diving, then went to Fiji on a trip when I was in my early 20s. And soon as I saw those coral reefs, those oceans those waves, I was like madly hooked for videography work so I bought a camera, but I housing went to Fiji every year for 13 years film on the surface. I was one of the first people who actually stuck as one of the first people actually start filming and sell deep selling DVDs back in the day. Most people were doing images and I was working from the mainland resorts not the CEO of Taverner motors which cost you an absolute arm and a leg and this super restrictive back in those days when you could surf on like you know cloud breaks and now moved to his left and breaks like that. So I would surf all the I would film all the other stuff that you just your average surfer could get in the lineup on and you know, smash it every year Salonen, the DVDs have enough money to travel the islands and I felt I found myself filming a lot of reefs while I was waiting for the surface to drop in on a 15 foot wave, just absolutely bricking it because they’re not used to that size of wave. It’s kind of cool in that respect. So that’s how I’ve kind of fell in the love of Oceans and coral reef. From being a kid to then travelling the world and then finding Fiji. Awesome, awesome. And obviously, that was in your 20s. But back in you permanently moved to California by this time. Yeah, I’d actually made the leap at 19 to move out here, okay. That’s where my diving career kind of kicked off because we’re right here next to the beach. And our good buddy of mine, actually, I was doing a job for him. And, you know, climbing the construction industry. So he was kind of like, a really cool landscaper guy. He used to be a commercial abalone diver and sea urchin diver off the coast here when it was fruitful times for abalone. And I saw an old dive kit in his garage when we work. And I was like, what’s that man? He’s like, you know, it’s a tank. And I’m like, when we’re talking tank. I’m talking a tank with a plastic board with a canvas straps. No, I’m not joking. This is something from Jacques Cousteau days. And he’s like, Oh, no, it’s 100%. Like 1970s, something like that. And because those boys back in those days didn’t care. They’re abalone guys, right? They chuck on their gear drop down, just go nuts, getting abalone and come back up. So he goes, you want to have a go at it. I was like, yeah, so he chucked me in the pool. And I was breathing and bubbling away. And I think I was like 20 Maybe 20 At that time, maybe 21. And I jumped to the pool. I said, Dude, this is awesome. How do I get in the ocean is I will just go to the beach next week. I was like, Alright, sweet. So we went down to down to the beach. And for anyone who’s listening is a diver. This is a big no no or want to be a diver. If you’re not if you’re a diver you already noticed. But he basically gave me a weight belt and this canvas strap regulator and you know, pressure gauge and sent me off on my own goes just go out there and you know, go down, whatever you do, don’t hold your breath on the way. So I believed him that this was normal. Just swam out. Drop down, went through the kelp beds, obviously super dangerous, went through all the kelp beds had a good time came up came back. And that was it. I was totally hooked on diving. And it’s been a relentless pursuit of diving ever since and videography work and surfing and everything else to do with the ocean.

Matt Waters  07:17

But yeah, 35 years later, you did your open water. Yeah, pretty much.

Jolyon Collier  07:25

Because I’m old, no one asked for my card anymore. I could have been uncertified this whole time

Matt Waters  07:34

did you? Was it that point there where you started to

Jolyon Collier  07:39

move into getting your own gear and maybe getting certified and taking a camera down with you to get better angles or something for the surfers? Or was it more for the reefs, ah, it was pretty much immediate soon as I come out with that tank on my back like dragging, dragging myself up on the shore because obviously I’m exhausted never done that before I immediately went to a place called sports sports chalet, which is a sports centre took the course straight away with my buddy. And then we just started getting good community of friends join in the crew. And then back in those days like sports chalet had had instructors, but the instructors would do these dive trips. And the Sport Chalet didn’t care if they did these trips with all the students, it was like, Hey, if you’re certified, and you want to go on a trip, that’s our business. So we would go you know, Mexico, Hawaii, all these places and just travel with these guys. And we’re talking mental mental cases, slightly unhinged, not right in the head, doing like, you know, drinking till four o’clock in the morning every night and then diving all day long. I mean, relentlessly crazy party people. I wasn’t quite in that wheelhouse for me. So I’d kind of like creep off the bed at like 10 at night because I don’t want to drive dive while I’ve been drinking. It doesn’t feel good. I’m already sick on a boat anyway. But it was just like this passion for you. You know what it’s like, once you’re hooked on diving, you can’t really stop in my opinion anyway. So that was just a relentless pursuit of just enjoying life. You know what I mean? And having that adventure of the unknown, I mean, back in those days, I mean, there was still places you could explore in those days. I’m not that old. I’m only 50. Right. But back 30 years ago, you can still travel the world and go to places where there’s no one been, you can still dive spots that were pretty hard to get to. You know, I’ve been to Tonga and remote islands, diving with you know, humpback whales. I mean, you don’t get to do that stuff these days with regulations and stuff. So it was really a cool time to explore the oceans. And you know, once once I went to Fiji on my round the world tour and I was surfing. I realised it was a big market for videographer work, because, like I say, anyone who was doing shooting back in those days, were only shooting the big boy resorts which cost five I’ve $6,000 a week and yet 21 People book yet to book out the whole island with your crew, you couldn’t just tag along. So they were exclusive. But for your average surfer, no one was doing anything. So as soon as I jumped into the water, started filming, we’d go back to the resort the bar and I’d edit the bar. And then I’d put it up on the big screen and all the lads like, oh my god, yeah, oh, can I book you for tomorrow and I’d start booking three, four guys at $150 a DVD, and, you know, doing $500 A day of just chilling out and Fiji surfing, filming for a few hours. So that was my vacation money. So I was super stoked with that, you know, and that’s where the reef kicked in really heavily for me, because I would spend so much time with the camera in the water, filming reefs. And then it was like, I’m there to film surfers, but I’m filming the reef and then all of a sudden, they’re dropping in on the wave and I lift the camera up and go, Thank God I got that shot, because he just paid me 150 bucks. But I’d be filming the sharks and the turtles and all that going through the lineup of the surf because when the surf would peel up, but like a 15 foot wave, when it peels up, you can see the sharks swimming in the backside of it. And you had a really different perspective of coral reefs and the life when those waves pick up so I just thought it was like a cool lens that you can look through the wave and see the wildlife you know, seeing big schools of fish cruising past like a TV screen, because there’s a wall of water in front of you is super interesting and fun for me.

Matt Waters  11:28

That sounds amazing. And your, your surfer that’s paying 150 bucks, you can, you know, there’s you, there’s your toe in the top left corner of those frames of five. And this is what it was like.

Jolyon Collier  11:41

You got to understand like these boys are coming from home reefs, right. So they’re like doing beach breaks or pointbreaks you come out to Fiji here in the middle of the ocean, there’s no marker points, it’s just a flat like submerged reef and that water pulls up over the reef. So you can’t have like normally as a surfer, you’re in the lineup, you’ve got a house over there. And a house over there, you can triangulate your position, you know where the waves are come in. But out on the reef, you got no idea what’s going on the waters pulling you everywhere. So it would take those boys about two hours before they drop in on the first wave. So I’ve already served a couple hours, realising they got to get their nerves out. So I’m pretty happy that I’ve got my surfing. And I go grab my camera as they start to get comfortable with the lineup and figuring out the swells and stuff. And then I’d film for maybe two hours and then surf an hour and go home to like four or five hours just to just as well. It’s warm water, right? It’s too hot, you’d be baking camera would warm up. What was the what was the first camera that you were using? It was a P 200 Sony analogue tape camera and an ocean image housing. So it was like a aluminium brick with a tiny, tiny little tape camera in the middle of it because it was the only housing camera at that time. That was just super easy. But you know, I got some good shots who wasn’t like super pro. And it didn’t have to be because I wasn’t like filming pro guys for like Roxy, or, you know, Quicksilver or anything. It was just a bunch of tourists trying to grab a good DVD of themselves because no one’s ever taken the time to film them, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What year was this again, replaces 2001 onwards. So it was it was when Matt came out with iMovie. So it’s not like I could, and I only had 100 gig hard drives at that time. So imagine I’m trying to edit all this material on 100 gig hard drive plus whatever computer space I had with a tape analogue camera using iMovie because that’s all I could get to go down there with as a portable unit that worked out really super, like easy for me. So I’ve literally looking at this computer now the only disk that I have that content is trapped in this computer because my computer hard DVD player crapped out on me and the DVD stuck in it, because I’d have to keep chucking it, I’d have to keep chucking the material away or to delete it all because I couldn’t keep enough space on 100 gig hard drive to keep that editing going for months on end, you know? So I lost a lot of footage and fortunately

Matt Waters  14:25

for me, I was starting to get a little bit bored with with teaching, and it was becoming mundane, which was moving away from the whole reason why I was doing the job. And then at some point, I didn’t have many customers and I took a camera and it was like Scuba dive and it just completely rejuvenated within my life. It was completely different type of diving. And Dara say I’m probably further down the road now have been possibly one of those annoying old fellas with a big fucking camera in his hand it just Ha, I was too much light and too much time on his hands. But yeah, it’s, for me having a camera in your hand and dive into to just, they’re just intrinsically linked and I can’t. I enjoy, I enjoy diving. But I’ve not got a camera in my hand to capture a moment or a photo or a bit of video, then it’s nowhere near as fun. And that’s, that’s just for me. And I think that’s the evolution of my progression through typing. So when you’re saying that you’ve got all this stuff that’s just a memory now and you know, lost in the lost in the ether of the tapes.

Jolyon Collier  15:38

I kind of think of how many hard drives I’ve got sitting in the cupboard here behind me, there must be five or six terabyte shyt that I’ll probably never look at, but it’s still there. I don’t think I could live without a camera or something missing when I’m when I’m when I’m in the water and I don’t have something is weird. I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Waters  16:00

Well, I had to, I also had a good buddy of mine in Sydney, he’s got a store macro mode, and he specifically does underwater photography. And he’s really, really good. And he heard I was going down at the cheaper to the GBR and said, No, you need to try this because we’re going to get the corresponding hopefully on video. It’s like, take this take this take this Take this. And it’s just as well I’ve got a really strong back because carrying a rucksack and pulling a wheelie bag and trying to pretend that there’s only seven kilos and each one was it’s a bit of a feat.

Jolyon Collier  16:39

Yeah, it’s it can be quite complicated with all the gear we just did an installation in Fiji we had 287 s Sony s three Sony cameras, two housings, five GoPros. Three drones. To mention all the dive gear. We had underwater drills grinders and those batteries are huge. They weigh an absolute tonne, some of the some of the gear is just ridiculous. And we’re pulling it all through customs hoping we’re not gonna get a hit bringing in tools and stuff like that. You know, it’s comical diving is comical. You just drag son so much stuff around with you and you can’t help it.

Matt Waters  17:19

Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, let’s, let’s introduce the listeners to actually while you’re on the show and what you’re doing. So let’s, let’s talk about cancelling coral.

Jolyon Collier  17:35

Yeah, so um, I, the president of counting coral, which is a registered 501 C three, nonprofit. And we design build, instal and donate sculptural underwater marine parks specifically designed to house coral. So in an A simple way of putting out it, it’s like a coral nursery, but very artistically designed. We plant the coral on that nursery as you would any nursery that you’re trying to grow out coral on, we just happened to make it look a little bit nicer. And when we do that, we take quite a considerable amount of boxes that other organisations aren’t really ticking in terms of what needs to happen nowadays with retention spans of people and social media and stuff like that. So we definitely took a very unusual approach to what we do in that respect.

Matt Waters  18:34

And I mean, that kind of covers my initial thoughts when Catherine got in touch and aside to have a look at what you were doing was what’s the difference between counting coral and you know, a dive shop in Thailand somewhere putting some metal frames underwater and attaching some some colour structures to assist in the growth. So having that design element behind it, I assume that is bringing a separate crowd to or a separate audience to what you’re doing, other than just Scuba divers. lipfird. So but, yeah.

Jolyon Collier  19:14

So I’ll run you through pretty much how I approached what I thought to be kind of a few missing links in the whole conservation world, right. So from my perspective, conservation is, in part, mainly awareness, driving, and action steps. So if you can have an awareness driver that literally goes into an immediate action step, that to me is conservation, because you’re, you’re addressing the issue, you’re shining a light on the issue, and then you’re actually going and doing something about it, right. So if you’re that dive company in Thailand, or wherever it may be, and you got wireframes on the floor, sea floor. Well, that’s not really inspiring to tourists. And then you can’t really monetize that you can and people are doing it and they’re going, Hey, come on eco dive. You can see the nurseries and the coral and it’s all good. Come plant that coral adopter call on all the rest of it. And it works fine. It’s great, right? I mean, but it’s not for me as a diver, an artist or photographer or videographer that is not inspiring. So I wanted to tick that box. So when you do have a snorkeler or you have a diver and they’re diving on this, you know conservation effort that’s being undertaken, I want it to be inspiring, I want it to be something that you would swim down with your GoPro, take a shot of it, share it on social media, and guess what you’ve done my work for me because I don’t have to go and do that awareness driver as much anymore. I don’t have to bang on doors and go look what we’re doing. We’re doing coral reef restoration, look how cool it is, well, somebody else is doing that worldwide for us now. And we have hundreds of people doing that on a daily basis sharing on the social medias all the time, we’re seeing I’m getting tagged in our on our Instagrams and stuff like that, that they’ve visited this place, they’ve taken a picture and they’re now sharing it with their network. So we’ve ticked that awareness driver by proxy by building these cool underwater sculptures, right. And then when we do those sculptures, and we planted them with coral, we’re using that that those sculptures as a coral gene bank. And this is something that is slightly unusual, too, because a lot of coral conservation efforts, we go get, say corals of opportunity, and for those who don’t know, that, that could be called has been snapped off in a cyclone. And it’s tumbling around on the sand and you leave it there for too long, it’s gonna die. Or it could be an anchor that’s been dropped, or line has been towed over a reef and it’s just snapped a bunch of stuff. And more often than not, it’s tourism. So tourists will be standing on the reef, and we were just in Fiji going I can’t believe people are still doing this in this day and age literally standing on reef and we’re diving behind them collecting the broken coral. That’s how bad it’s getting these days. So we’ll then take just for argument’s sake, these corals of opportunity, and we’ll put them on the sculpture. But in addition to that, we’re going after rare coral species. So we were just in Fiji diving, say 1015 miles square area. And we found one coral that demonstrated a uniqueness that around all the other corals that were there, that species didn’t exist anywhere else. So for us, that’s a viable coral species that we want to propagate. So we will actually go and take a piece. So that’s not a coral of opportunity that’s actually us harvesting from that coral, because it’s demonstrating that genetic rarity. And then we’ll put that on our sculptures. And then we also go after what’s called hotspot, the coral, which is corals have demonstrated a resilience to climate change. And the ocean temperatures rising, which is one of the main causes of coral dying as the ocean temperatures are rising. And we can go through all that later. But sticking to the sculptures, we go after the hotspot coral demonstrated those resilience, we can literally see it in real time. So we have, say a patch of staghorn coral, one section is completely dead. The other section is half dead. And the other section is thriving as if nothing’s going on. So we go after that thriving coral and the coral that’s half dead. We put that onto the sculptures because it’s already demonstrating a genetic superiority over its own family member that may not have that strong relationship with the algae that resides within coral because they have a symbiotic relationship with this algae called zones of hurler. So we go after those and we plant those onto the, onto the sculptures now we have a sculptural coral gene bank, which is now being housing these rare corals, Clark cause of opportunity and resilient corals, we allow them to grow out and this is the kind of cool part about it, we allow those to grow out to suborning maturity. So we allow them to go through spawning cycles, we allow them to grow big enough ready to harvest and when you call those, the mother, mother plant or the parent plant, and we’ll take then small fragments off of those sculptural corals because now we have a controlled environment where no hot no longer having to go out into the reef, find corals of opportunity and put them on to nurseries grow them out and plant them back out into the reef. We now have a conveyor belt of coral being grown in one spot that we harvest plant onto secondary nurseries allow those secondary fragments to grow out to maybe two years, three years. Then those corals go back onto the reef and the parent plant continues a cycle of producing that rare genetic species that corals opportunity and climate resilient coral, so it’s doing the job for us. And that’s where we kind of differ from a lot of the other conservation organisations

Matt Waters  25:00

Yeah, I think the big, the big element that you’ve got there is that you’re using your areas of growth away from the reef and then reintroducing those

Jolyon Collier  25:11

corals back to its origins, that’s a, that’s a large element that a lot of locations wouldn’t be doing it which just be staying and remaining on the framework that they’ve initially put in. Yeah, it’s a lot more work what we’re doing. But for me that work is valuable, because I want a reef scape to be natural, and I want wireframes on a reef scape. That’s not what I’m in this game for, I’m there to rebuild those reefs. So they look organic and natural again, even though we’ll have to take those corals that have grown out over a two year period, and then plant them onto the reef scape. We plant them in a very unique way. And we’ve developed our own technologies for that, which we’ll probably share next year, once we’ve implemented it. Kind of similar to a lot of other people, we’re trying to do a different approach. But then then part of the other like, elements to what we do, so we do what we call a closed loop system. So we have the conservation, we have the awareness driver, and we have the gene bank, right. So conservation in the gene bank account of the same thing. We have the awareness driver that we’ve we’re demonstrating the artwork through building it showing people on Tiktok shipping it, you know, droning the boats coming up with the parts, we’re sinking into the ocean, we’re filming all this stuff, we’re showing off this art piece of planning call on it. But then we have a marketing opportunity for our partners. So we we tend to want to put our sculptures near resorts. So you can have now stakeholders in the environment. When you create a stakeholder in an environment, they tend to protect it a little bit more than they did before. So now they have a marketing opportunity for their resort to say, hey, come and dive on countering coral, sculptural art piece. It’s a conservation effort, but there’s a cool point of interest on your trip, you may want to enjoy, come stay with us. Now they’re vested, they’re involved now. So they get to tell our story by proxy, because we go back every year, hey, guess what we just planted 400 Carl’s, they get to say, Hey, we’ve been part of this planting process. We’ve partnered with Karen coral, we’ve grown this out, we’ve helped them you know, whatever the partnership details are kind of plays out for many years, they’ve got this constant story, and we’re going to give them content. So they can constantly update their websites, their marketing teams, so they now have fresh content every year to demonstrate their commitment to the environment. So stakeholders are incredibly important when it comes to protecting anything anywhere on our planet. If people don’t care, they don’t care. They’ll chop down trees, they’ll kill rhinoceroses, and they’ll just tear up reef with dynamite fishing, cyanide fishing, they don’t care, right, but you bring in new revenue streams for local organisations, local communities, because communities can now do snorkelling trips, and market themselves to be able to bring more revenues in. And then we have the last part of that closed loop system is working with the local communities is so valuable to understand that when you involve the local communities, you always win, you’ll never lose that battle, because you’re supporting them. So what we do in that respect is we’ve asked the resort that we’re currently working with, say, hey, part of these revenue streams that you’re making money from need to go back to the village. So we have a donation programme set up that revenues are going to go back to the Chiefs now the chiefs in Fiji own the reef rights, they’ve given us permission to allow to do that. So it’s only just that we give back. But in addition to that, every time we go back to Fiji, we have after school clubs, because we’ve asked the school district, if we can educate the youngsters, we’re talking kids from say 10 to 15 years old. So we do an hour every day to go in, teach them about coral, teach them about environment, teach him about fishing practices, teach them about our work. And then now wow, we’re really invested. Now the community is invested because those young people are now being educated. And you’d be surprised that in Fiji, they they’re next to the ocean, they’re dealing with reefs every day, and they’re stepping on it, breaking it ripping it up, they don’t see the value. They don’t understand the connectivity with coral fish environment, humanitarian types, it’s all connected, right? So we educate them. So that and then that’s the club’s closed loop system, where we’ve ticked all the boxes we could possibly tick in one installation. And then we do that over a course of say 10 years and we get to rebuild a reef or many reefs over 10 years. So it’s a long longer process and very complicated to it, and

Matt Waters  30:04

I just got it, you’ve got to be kind of excited. I know, it’s probably exciting and very frustrating getting, getting everything done all the time, but 567 years down the line when your installations are, you know, effectively in full bloom. And these people that are looking at ways to support conservation, to show that they’re in the Green Party or whatever, they’re going to be kicking themselves for not getting on board in the early days, because then they’re going to have to wait again for, you know, to sing the praises 567 years later down the line when they’ve got a new roof of their own out the front.

Jolyon Collier  30:42

Yeah, you know, I want the clock to move forward. But also slightly terrifying, because the future for coral reefs is pretty dismal. But, you know, we’re just trying to put our best foot forward in a very small ecosystem that we think we could help. And, you know, it’s also the outplanting process has to be very specific. So you can’t plant coral in three feet of water anymore. And expect in five years, it’s gonna survive, because it’s toast. There’s a lot of reefs that we visited in Fiji that are just absolutely dead gone. While we were there resorts and their managers were coming over to us asking if we could help because no one’s up there doing this work, right. So you have countless reef systems that are just in complete collapse. And it’s sad to see because we literally have to tell them, there’s no hope. And we’re not even going to put our time into it. We’re really, really sorry, but we cannot help you. This is too far gone to down the road, we’re going to have to focus on coral reefs that are say 70% and decline because at least there’s hope that we can bring it to maybe 50% of its coverage, because right now most reefs are about 30% Coral coverage, maybe 50. If you’re lucky, up in that region, we were hoping to push it to 70, maybe 80% Coral coverage in the next 10 years. These are large systems, you know, this is not like a small area where we’re doing eight different reefs, we have a very interesting way of approaching what we do too. So each one of our sculptures has its own. We do different very, very different sculptures on different areas. But this one particular had eight limbs to it, much like a starfish was a centrepiece and eight, eight legs, so you could use them say, and each leg houses a specific reef of coral. So we go to that reef, we harvest that we put it onto that leg, we label it, we know that leg is this reef. So when we go into the production line of all that coral, it all goes back to that original reef. So we have eight reefs in total that we’ll be restoring over the next 10 to 1520 years. So we know that coral gene is going back to its home origins. And then we plant it at, say 10 feet, 10 feet to 15 feet. So we know at least got a hope. So there’ll be a little band of coral on that elevation. And we’ll see how it goes over 10 years with the ocean temperatures rising. And if we need to shift them down a little lower into cooler waters, and, you know, we’ve got that genetic stock still being produced that we can do that with.

Matt Waters  33:15

And how do you got some sort of like, science geeks assisting you? Because I can imagine that over a period of time that? Is there a possibility of stronger corals within your installation, being able to dominate the weaker corals and effectively obliterate them?

Jolyon Collier  33:38

Yeah, so we work with marine scientists all over the world. We got three marine biologists in our team, we have our Director of Science we’ve gotten we’re basically covered in that respect. And we’re not sure we’re not sure of marine biologists because you know, you come out of school and you want to be a marine biologist, and yet you’ve got no hours under your belt, you got to prove yourself so there’s a lot of people running around going and we get tapped up all the time. Can we come help? Can we volunteer our time and blah, blah, blah and yeah, it’s wonderful. We appreciate people reaching out to us, but you know, it’s not something we take lightly so we want experienced people and fortunately we’ve built a pretty good team of experienced people and they’re teaching me I’m I’m a construction guy. I got a passion for the ocean I’m a citizen scientists it’s all pretty common sense shit when you actually put your mind to it, but it takes a lot of put in your mind to get in behind all this stuff right so then I’m sitting there being educated by one of our guys he’s like, this is a such and such as such and such quarrel I’m like, excuse me Could you repeat that again? Because that is a foreign language you’re talking to me I understand like staghorn you know, plate coral, all of that when you go into those scientific names, you lose me but you know, I’m capable of doing what we need to do to build a really comprehensive team that know knows what they’re doing and don’t mess up. But listen, everybody’s gonna mess up in this game, right? This is all new territory for so many people. I mean, they’re only just understanding that that relationship, that coral house with the zone zone follow is the key to coral survival. So now they’re looking at the genetics of this algae that how do they propagate that algae that’s now heat resistant, or climate resistant. So it’s not so much about the coral anymore. It’s now about this host, plant, essentially, that’s living in this animal, they need to focus on to see how we can get those strains of algae to remain in the coral during a heat event, you know, so it’s complex, it’s complicated, and it’s a moving target. But from my perspective, it’s too late to be messing about, you’ve got to put your hands in and get dirty and go for it. And if you make mistakes, and so bear, you correct those mistakes, and you keep moving forward. Otherwise, you just wouldn’t make the decision to do anything. You just spin your heels. That’s right. Yeah. I’m a big advocate of fucking up. If you if you if you mess up and you’ve you’ve made errors, then you learn from it. And that’s the only way you’re going to learn. You know, if you stay safe and within your theory box, then nothing’s gonna get done really, is it? Nothing changes 100%. I’m in the I’m in the construction industry. If I sat around and questioned how to do certain things, I’d be without a job. People say to me, can you do this? I say I say yes. And I don’t know how to do it. But I figure it out. And I pull it off. But I make those mistakes that I learned for the future. And it’ll cost me I do jobs for free sometimes, because I didn’t do it in the timeframe I didn’t do on budget, and I’ll suck that up. Because the value is the learning experience, in my opinion. So if I don’t make money on a certain job, but I’ve learned that value, and that value proposition translates to another job because now someone’s referring me, I’ve won. You know what I mean? So that’s my perspective has never stopped keep moving forward. Otherwise, you’re just procrastination is death sentence to like, the productive people, you know?

Matt Waters  37:01

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You should. You should get your marine biologists have a quick teetotaler, Jen Matthews at UTS. She was on the show. Not too long back. And we’ve heard that Thailand she’s, yeah, she’s She makes me I made myself look stupid. But she makes me really stupid.

Jolyon Collier  37:23

Yeah, listen to your podcast. That was great.

Matt Waters  37:26

Yeah, she’s, she’s something else. But yeah, all of the all of the stuff that we’re trying to protect with coral, and what they’re doing there at the university is just simply fantastic. And it’s only a hop across the water to Fiji. Really, you know, it’s all very close. And I used to work up in Papua New Guinea and see the GBR last week

Jolyon Collier  37:50

on the outer reefs, and the, the reef structures and species are so similar. You could you could lift them and put them in PNG, and you wouldn’t know the difference. I was one of those cool things. So we’re, when are we going after this coral, right. So one of our marine biologists, we pull up a piece of coal that have been pretty much half killed by a crown of thorns. And you know, it’s this beautiful, massive coral. And half of it was just laid on the ground bleaching, you know, because I mean, not bleaching, but it was in that death cycle, essentially, because it had been eaten heavy and lots of it fell over. We brought it up. And we’re looking at it and it’s got all this polyp structure on it that he had never seen before. So we sent it off to one of our marine scientists, friends took a picture of it. And they said, Hey, you better think of a name. You may have found another sub species of coral that was not been documented in Fiji. And we’re like, You’re joking, right? And he’s like, No, he said, because nothing has been documented in Fiji. They just say whatever’s in Australia is in Fiji. But that’s not the case. And we’re hoping we found a new subspecies. We get to name it. So unfortunately, Fiji doesn’t let us send the DNA out of the country just yet. We have to get special permission for it. But it’s on our sculptures growing out. So we’re like super excited that we may have found something new.

Matt Waters  39:12

Believe it yeah, maybe we’ll see. What’s it what’s the Latin name? You’re gonna put it like jelly on us? Collier. Yes. So yeah.

Jolyon Collier  39:23

Counting Carla’s.

Matt Waters  39:25

Yes.

Jolyon Collier  39:28

So

Matt Waters  39:30

where you’ve got the structure at the moment, is it just the one structure the one location that you’re focusing on?

Jolyon Collier  39:35

No, we’re in negotiations so I’m gonna preface it all this stuff with saying this. I can scale marine park to hundreds and hundreds of sculptures. I can design whatever I want. I can ship them anywhere in the world. I can weld up 1000s of parts. I can instal it into the ocean but guess what the hardest part is making the partnerships and making the deals. We spent years doing this. I mean, I mean, it’s a shoot me now moment, right? Hey, we’re going to donate a $60,000 sculpture to you create this incredible conservation effort, do all the work for you for free, plant 1000s of corals you want in, and then they procrastinate and we don’t make the deal. certain issues come up. They’re like, is this a financial viable option for our resort? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, Are you kidding me? You don’t you’re saying no to this. So we spend years trying to get locations trying to make these deals get permissions. So Fiji happens to be one of those playgrounds I’ve played in for so many years. So I know a lot of the managers, resort owners. I know the Chiefs personally, for many, many years, because I’ve worked with them. I’ve got community members up there that still know me from 20 years ago, that still recognise me because I’ve been up there so many years, we hang out and we we have this connection. So we’re in negotiations for another resort. We’re going to do an installation, hopefully in March. And while we’re doing that installation, we’re going to build out the secondary nursery tables for the first installation. And then we have another opportunity down in the Mamanuca islands. So we’re hoping to do six installations in Fiji in the next two years. That’s our general plan. But as I said, negotiations can fall off really quickly. And that’s the most complicated, difficult part about it. And you would be surprised that you have a hard time giving this away.

Matt Waters  41:33

Yeah, yeah. Didn’t you? Did I see or hear on one of your other podcasts? This this issue that you’re talking about with partnerships, particularly focusing on Hawaii?

Jolyon Collier  41:48

Yeah, we started in Hawaii. So yeah, we started in Hawaii. But it turns out that you got to lease the sea floor. So now, so you got to go to the Division of aquatic marine resources, I think they call it dar as an acronym. And I spent five months. And we had to hire, you know, get the Army Corps of Engineers to go over our designs, we had to lease the ocean floor, it takes two years to get a permit to even plant coral on it. Once you put the sculptures in. And you’re losing, you know, I think they lost another 5% of their reefs in the last few years. So it’s like, okay, you carry on doing that, see how it works out for you? You know what I mean? Yeah, we got a friend who works for coral conservancy out there. He’s one of our team members and board members. He has his own nonprofit. It’s taken him a year just to plant corals of opportunities back on the reef. So that’s literally a fragment that’s fallen off, he just goes, picks it up and sticks it back on the roof. It took him a year to get that permit. And he’s only allowed to work in specific areas. So yeah, you’re watching your reefs go guys. And no one’s gonna be there to bail you out when you need the help. So I guess well, that’s it. I mean, once it’s gone, it’s gone, isn’t it? You can’t just can’t throw a lot of money at it and chuck a lot of coal in and hope it’s gonna grow. But I always say this to people, right? So I say, you know, people don’t understand what’s actually going on, right? So coral reefs occupy at least one to possibly 2% of equatorial ocean escapes, right? So that’s within say, a 50 foot range just to give blanket statement, right? So you got Thailand you know, endo all these places, really shallow reefs occupying a very small percentage, they supply 25% of the population with food directly, indirectly, coastal protections. I mean, the list goes on of what coral reefs are benefits from not the least, the very last thing is the medications that are coming from reefs and other supporting heart disease issues, Alzheimer’s issues, cancer researchers a lot coming out of these reefs, right? And that there’s, there’s just for argument’s sake, let’s say the Great Barrier Reef here, I think they’ve lost about 50% of their reefs, certain parts are losing upwards of 90%. You know, you can say isolated reefs, yes, great. Certain areas are doing really well. Now, you you go to a tree organisation that’s planting trees, right. I think Ethiopia beat the world record for 360 million trees planted in one day. That was over India that planted 300 million trees in a day. Now, you try and do that on a coral reef system where you gotta have at least a minimum advanced rescue diving in my opinion to dive safely. That’s gonna take you God knows how much money plus all your equipment and then you got an hour of air to go plant car on your plant, you know, 1600 miles of it a mile wide. Are you kidding me? You think this is an easy thing you’re doing? You’re out of your mind. I mean, you could go to the local you know, nursery pick up a bunch of trees in a shovel on a bucket of water and plant at least 100 trees just you and I quite easily in a few days, right? That’s easy conservation. You can sequester carbon using trees or rebuilding habitats. You try and do that in the ocean. Ain’t no way not going to happen. So what we’re looking at is gene bank, small gene banks, that we can just keep a very small stock of genetic, superior coral in the hopes that we can continually plant that out. Because as it dies, we can only protect in our organisation a very small percentage, and in the hopes that that can act as a gene bank for the future. So, I mean, that’s a loose, loosely, kind of bracketed comment as well, you know?

Matt Waters  45:30

Yeah. And it’s unfortunate, but it’s, it’s, you know, it’s how we live nowadays, everything needs funds to be able to be achievable. It’s a difficult scenario. How, what’s the what’s the long range, you know, rose tinted kind of view? Where do you want to see this in, say, 20 years?

Jolyon Collier  45:58

Well, so much like the gene bank comment. So just imagine, and this is the big, this is the big picture, right? For me, at least, we can do collectively, a lot of small gene banks. But those gene banks have the ability to produce 1000s and 1000s of corals. Now, imagine that gene bank and we’re talking like, just use your imagination. Every time I dream, dream, big stuff happens right? At the top of my game in the building industry in Malibu, I’ve created a nonprofit in two years, we’ve got our first installation, and we’re planning 1000s of pieces of coral, using a completely different technique, thinking different dreaming big, right? So imagine I go to the government of Fiji and say, hey, you’ve got some waters that are owned by the government, you give us those waters, and we create a national park. Now that National Park is managed by Rangers. So you imagine like say the Grand Canyon, right, you go to the Grand Canyon, and as a state park guy there and it charges you $25 to go into see the Grand Canyon, right? So it’s called a concession. And those concessions are owned by private entities. So you go into that park and there’s a restaurant. Well, that concession has been bid on by somebody to be able to run that restaurant. And the state gives the permission to do that because they don’t want to run a restaurant, but they need food in the park for people. So it’s very much the same thing in the ocean. We become the concessionaires for that National Park. The government pays for it but we put down say seven acres of the largest gene bank in the world for Fiji’s for Fiji’s reefs, we have hundreds and hundreds of sculptures, it becomes a very large point of interest for divers all over the world to come and dive on Cameron coral sculpture Marine Park, because it’s so intricate and nearly designed and amazing. And it’s only a small fee to come into the National Park. But we get to manage that underneath the mash National Park fees. So essentially, the fee to go into the National Park sustains nonprofit, us as a nonprofit. So now we’re not scrounging for donations. And honestly, the amount of time we put into getting donations will shock you and the amount of effort we have to put into, you just say give up now. It’s ridiculous. We’re scraping the bottom barrel. It’s not like people are just chucking millions of dollars away, right and going, Hey, you guys do your best, which we would do if we had that money, but we just don’t have revenue. So okay, we could be a self sustaining nonprofit if we run a national park because a concession will pay us to do it. So then we have this self managed ecosystem where we’re creating this gene bank, we’re supplying the entire nation with coral. And we’re being paid to do it. But we pay the government offers a percentage, so they’re getting a kickback on the entry to the park fee anyway, we’re getting a little bit to be self sustainable, and we’re doing our job the way we should do it without being hindered by fundraising every single day. So that’s the big picture, you know, national parks, marine protected areas, they’re needed, and they’re extremely valuable. And then the big picture for Fiji for us as we’ve already negotiated this deal with the chief up in the sailors. So it’s very complicated chief and family system in Fiji, you have chiefs met and galleys clans, all of this type of stuff. Well, the one guy up in Fiji, he’s the high chief of half of the island chain. He controls for chiefs, his say kind of goes against everybody’s else’s say but they’ve all got to kind of agree to do something and then it happens. So give you an example. The high chief can say I want this to be a marine protected area. And anybody in his world will not fish there. They caught it a Tambu we’re not allowed to fish. They’re not allowed to be there. But the other chiefs can come in and fish there because they weren’t part of that whole big picture deal, right? So when we did our installation, we managed to get all seven chiefs that the entire island chain, which they haven’t spoken in 27 years to actually sit down all seven of them because they’re split between the northern chain of the US ours and the southern chain. Got them all together to agree to create this one. marine protected area where our parks going. Now no one can fish that and now we’ve got a marine protected area. But in in condition to that I said, Chief, listen, do us a favour, let us map the islands. And we’ll give you a top recommendations of areas that you can create Tammuz. So in my opinion, I could create a big marine protected area. But that does nothing for the community. What I want to do is do small isolated pockets, where we know we can supply those pockets with coral, we know marine biomass will increase because no one’s fishing in that area, that biomass will then swim out into the, what we call shipping, or what I call call fishing lanes. So you have say 100, marine protected areas with under the the Fiji is a really good with understanding their environment. So we say you’re allowed to ship within these areas on fish between these areas. So then the biomass is spilling out in all these different areas and fish are going into those fishing lanes. And if everybody sticks to those rules, that’d be more fish than you can handle. Because the production of a reef once it gets real healthy is pretty astonishing. I mean, it can go up, which was a 400%. And biomass in a very small period of time, less than 10 years. So he agreed to allow us to map so while we were there, we mapped one island, when we go back, we’re gonna map another island. And we’re gonna put a suggestion for him to say, hey, let’s get all the Chiefs together again, create these marine protected areas, slash tattoos, and just be in agreement so that these are non touchable areas forever. Let the fish start living and you know, spilling out into these waterways. So that’s something we’re doing right now in the marine, then the big park is, you know, down the line, hopefully if I can get to talk to somebody of any importance of Fiji, but it takes time, you know, those chiefs will start talking, we were lucky enough to have the Ministry of Fisheries come up and officiate the marine protected area with us. We had a huge ceremony up there, it was awesome. So we do have that connection in Fiji to maybe talk about a national park in the next 10 years, we’ll see

Matt Waters  52:06

where those with, you know, mapping the locations and given the advice to the chiefs. And I’m just thinking to forgive me if I get it wrong, it’s either Philippines or Indonesia, they do a similar kind of thing where they they’ll close off a section of the reef for a three to five year period and no one’s allowed to fish whatsoever, and then rotate it through. I’m just thinking, Well, what if we considered that kind of thing for Dan and Fiji? Because I can imagine some of the villagers might be well, if I can’t fish just off the shore of where I live, why can they fish just off the shore where they live? And I’ve got to travel down there.

Jolyon Collier  52:42

Do you have any of those kinds of issues that have been raised? They’ve been doing that for 1000 years and Fiji that’s a very common practice and I think through Indonesia and all that is a very it’s like crop rotation right on land. You know, once you implement crop rotation you end up with healthy plants and strong vitamin content in your lettuce and you’re eating healthy food right so they’ve understood this for a very long time. But the problem is so just for argument’s sake the US ours didn’t have a single resort on it and and then the last 20 years is now 40 resorts so you’ve got all these guys fishing for the resorts and then you’ve got the resorts fishing for the results themselves because this is this is kind of the you know the the big scam with results or not scam but it’s kind of a scam in my recent sense they go hey, we’re off a sports fishing, you come on the boat $500 A day we go catch a fish you don’t actually keep the fish you take a cut of the fish and that fish goes in our freezer so you’ve just packed our freezer for $500 a day and you get a small cut dinner or a couple of days worth of fish and thank you very much so there’s like the results of going out you know hooking massive fish stock in the freezers and people are paying to do that for him so my opinion it’s a bit of a scam but yeah, it is what it is business right yeah, so they my opinion if we can protect these areas and not crop rotate but keep them as consistent production areas then they will just nonstop produce they’re not going to go into a decline because now you’ve opened up the fishing rights to it and then they go and smash it because there’s a load of fish in there and it’s like oh sweet, this huge production you’re better off allowing that stuff to spill out into the fishing highways and maintain it for forever. And you know be mindful of where these guys are fishing and saying okay, well we won’t want to protect that because you are fishing here these are productive grounds but a mile up the way there we can protect that. You stick to your fishing grounds and a mile away where you don’t go particularly we’ll get that reef healthy for you and start biomass production of fishers natural cycle.

Matt Waters  54:45

Yeah, yeah. Just don’t tell the Chinese fishing fleet where you’re doing

Jolyon Collier  54:52

some big boats. Big boats in Fiji right now.

Matt Waters  54:59

Really

Jolyon Collier  55:00

Yeah, huge vessels coming in this not good, it’s not good at all.

Matt Waters  55:06

But we’re talking about stuff

55:11

that’s

Matt Waters  55:13

coming out of the fishing vessels that industrial fishing vessels clearly aren’t local, on what we’re talking about, but it’s something that everyone seems to avoid talking about. You know, the fact that the impact that these things are having, and you know, just decimating one is in the oceans, it’s just, it’s making life extremely difficult for the likes of the Fiji Islands that are living off the land and the sea. And the same for the Papua New Guineans that, you know, they don’t have KFC down the road, or McDonald’s or a supermarket, and you know, you’ve got to go into the jungle or into the ocean and get what you can to survive. I don’t know how, excuse me, I don’t know how it gets regulated, you know, with companies or individuals coming in with millions of dollars and saying, Hey, give us your fish, this is what you’ll get. And it’s, you know, it’s the top 1% that are making these decisions, and everyone else is suffering.

Jolyon Collier  56:14

Yeah, there’s backhanders going on in every country across the world to allow these fishing boats to come in and just rake the oceans. And it’s a very, very destructive practice. And I’m not a big fan of it, and I’ll advocate till the day I die not to do that ever again. In my opinion, there should be a worldwide ban on all fishing for 15 years, at least give the ocean a slight chance, you know, small vessels radio tract, that can go out into local seas, and only catch a very small percentage of fish. And just let the oceans get back to normal, in fact, takes 20 years and so be it. I don’t really care about any of the other stuff that no interest in I don’t care how much money you lose the money. The money you’re gaining now is not going to help anybody in the future for those small gains of money that you know, a few individuals are making because it’s not the fishermen particularly that are making it you know, you got you know, pirates in Thailand are kidnapping people and having, you know, basically kidnapped people on the boats working for free and then they’re offloading US Fish for peanuts. And then once it goes up to the chain, the big boys are making massive money, in my opinion, should all be shut down. Now today, if I had my choice, yeah. Yeah, I’d be I’d be a tyrannical leader. If I had my way, no one would like me, but I’d do it all for the good of greater good of humanity. I’d be a dictator who wouldn’t like me very much.

Matt Waters  57:37

Yeah, that’s a good dictatorship, though. Um, and just give other species have a chance to catch up. Bloody hell. Yeah, exactly. Could you imagine that? Imagine how much of a better world it would be if if we just completely stopped eating fish and fish.

Jolyon Collier  57:56

Yeah, I haven’t eaten fish for years. My I mean, I stopped eating fish. When I went into the oceans offer here on point Diem or went into the Marine Park and I just saw how beautiful it was, as I’m never inefficient ever again. It’s a it’s a small lie, because I do eat a little fish when I’m in Fiji, because I’m with the Fiji and they’re fishing every single day. And, you know, it is kind of like a pride for those guys to share their meals and stuff. So I do indulge in fish and it’s caught locally, it’s caught sustainably. And it’s kind of considered rude not to participate. And we’d like to be very connected to the community that we’re working with. So I do bend that rule a little bit there, but that’s the only other time I eat fish.

Matt Waters  58:40

Okay, just a couple of quickfire questions for you. Go for it. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Jolyon Collier  58:53

That would have to be work less.

Matt Waters  59:03

work less, but then working less would you have the success that you’ve got now?

Jolyon Collier  59:10

Yeah, 100% I was retired like seven years ago. So I could have pushed my retirement as a four years ago and worked a little less when I was youngster I’m a lunatic you know, nothing really stops me. I’m just the action person that just try and take life by the bull by the horns and go for it. And I’ve pretty much done everything I’ve ever imagined I’d want to do travel the world dove everywhere, surf everywhere, got a family. I’m like, complete in that way. And that’s why I started the nonprofit was okay. Life without purpose isn’t worth living. So my purpose back in those days was to be the best craftsman. I could get to retirement do what I did. I’ve done that. So now I’m going to give back to the planet give back to my family. My kids work in the nonprofit so they’re educating themselves on all of this stuff that diving the world they have have been a great experience. That to me is a big win and a big tick in that box. So I’m just going into conservation, like say a life with purpose is now feeling pretty good. I am working in Malibu right now on a few projects, because I needed to position myself here for the nonprofit. And we’re looking to raise a couple 100,000 Because I’m here, because I’m around the wealthy people and engaging with a lot of people into the ocean. So that’s why I’m kind of living in Malibu out of retirement for the next few years. And then once I’m done with this project, we’ll have enough money for maybe 10 years worth of parks, so I’m hoping to those. So you can get a bit of aggressive fundraising done with the rich people get that dollar in and get the good stuff done. Yeah, that’s 100% I’m around it. The surface here. There’s a lot of people that go to Fiji, Hawaii surfers, you know, there’s a lot of guys here that, you know, I can leverage my relationships in the construction business on kind of like a bit of a mafia dude. So it was like, Dude, you want this contract? You donate to my cause? You don’t donate, you don’t get the contract. So everyone’s like, yeah, give me money. I love you. You know what I mean? Oh, thanks. I didn’t want to break. So I’m leveraging those relationships to but in a good way, you know what I mean, people are really respectful. Yeah, love what we’re doing. So they’re happy to help. I think that’s the admirable thing. You’ve come from an industry, which is, you know, it’s not focused on conservation, or let’s, let’s be fair, it’s not focused on conservation at all. It’s all about making money, making buildings moving on to the next one, and making more money, whether it’s for yourself your own business, or for the businesses that you’re contracted to, or individuals, and being able to take that success and those links that you’ve got, and now open the eyes to those individuals and say, Hey, we’re doing all this shit. But what we’re doing is missing out on all this goodness over here. So bringing those two together, and moving monies from one element into a better environment. I think I’ve got to applaud you for that. Right? Yeah. So this is the way I look at it. Right? So I was chopping a piece of wood in my 20s going, what am I doing, man, this is ridiculous. I hate this. I feel sick to my stomach. I’m chopping trees down on my part of it. Right. We’re pouring concrete all the time. So then that flicked the switch of conservation. At the same time, I kind of got into dive in. And I was really young person, right? So now every job that I do, I saw sustainable materials as much as I can I flat out don’t work with hardwoods anymore. We were working with Honduras, mahogany, maybe 20 years ago, and I went to my supplier and I said, Hey, and I want to get a few board feet. We’re building this beautiful, I don’t know, whatever the hell it was for some rich person. And they’re like, We don’t have it and like, oh, when are you gonna get it? And they said, We’re not gonna get any more they’ve stopped shipping it from Honduras, because there’s no more left on what you are. What are you talking about? What do you mean, there’s no trees left? Like, yeah, they don’t ship it anymore. So you can’t get Honduras mahogany in the US anymore. So it was like that was a big wakening call to me. So now, you know, people are saying, oh, I want an EPA deck, which is a Brazilian hardwood. I’m like, go get somebody else to do it. Dude, I’m not touching that with a 10 foot bargepole. In fact, I’m going to tax you. If you ever use that on my job or want to push me on that I’ll tax you heavily. And then you’re doing it as a carbon offset. So you know, I’m leveraging all those relationships. And I point out to people that everything in this industry is an extraction from natural resources from our planet. So imagine this ruin instance, right? That the sand that I use, for my concrete, hazard attacks on it from every single stage from the guy digging out of the pit, he pays a small tax, like we’re talking tiny tax, 0.1% tax for conservation, then it goes to the guy that bags the sound, he pays a tax, and it goes to the guy at the local hardware store, they pay a tax, then the builder pays a tax when he buys it to do on his construction guy, I pay a tax or homeowner pays a tax, everybody starts paying a tax on all these resources. Conservation wouldn’t be an issue. Everybody be doing the right thing right now, because it’d be enough money funnelled into conservation through the simple taxes conservation tax on on everybody. Because everybody has a part to play in it. It’s not the guy that selling the bag of sand. It’s the guy that dug it up and the guy that’s using it, and the guy that’s living in the house that’s benefiting from it. So in my opinion, all these resources need to be taxed. Because every single thing in your home just look around for a second. Look at the microphone, the headphones or T shirts or glass. It’s all an extraction of a natural resource, and they’re running out. So hey, put back in man don’t take that steal. I wouldn’t be putting up with it. If someone came into my house and stole something I’d be giving them a dig and saying what are you doing coming to my house and stealing? Well, we’re doing that with Mother Nature on a daily basis. So enough’s enough, it’s got to stop. We got to step we got to step. We’re all a part of it. I mean, you can’t, you cannot morally say in any good conscious, you have nothing to do with it. So everybody’s got something to do with it.

Matt Waters  1:04:58

But then how would you mind if you go That example there that ideal example of getting a tax and everyone along the stream.

Jolyon Collier  1:05:06

How do you regulate the person that’s controlling all of that tax coming in? You know? Well, hopefully you rely on an on. Yeah, hopefully you don’t rely on an honest government. So if you look at

1:05:19

you Yeah.

Jolyon Collier  1:05:22

That’s that’s the crux of the whole plan, right.

Matt Waters  1:05:27

Yeah. Yeah. As soon as politics gets involved, and politicians are involved in particular, it goes tits up.

Jolyon Collier  1:05:34

Yeah, I understand that. But some but somewhere, you can’t use all those as excuses not to try. You got to try something. Right. So you look at the tax system in the US, for instance, you know, there’s certain amount of taxes are allocated to ocean conservation. I think it’s 0.01% goes to conservation, which is, I mean, it’s a largest ecosystem on our planet, and 0.01% of the tax cuts go to Ocean or grants go to the ocean. So that can be increased by 30%. Now, yes, there’s room for corruption, but we’re talking 0.01% up to 20 or 30%. That’d be huge gains in the environment to be able to be made when you’ve got that type of resources at your fingertips. Yeah. Yeah, give it Give it to me, I’ll go do good stuff with it. No one gets paid in our organisation where we’re doing it for free. So it’s all just philanthropic. That’s why I started a nonprofit could have been for profit, I could have made money doing this. But soon as money gets involved, I’ve been in business long enough to know that I can have a business partner friend for a year, for years, all of a sudden, that goes real south and money’s involved. So I’ve never really wanted money ever involved in a nonprofit always want to keep it super clean. Now I know that everybody is interested in what we’re doing is doing it for the love of the coral love of the ocean and love of just the whole process. And money is a byproduct of what we need to do our work. And a story. Yeah, yeah. It’s unfortunate that it is that enabler that you need, isn’t it? Yeah.

Matt Waters  1:07:08

Okay. I think we’ve kind of covered this one, but you can emphasise on it? How do or how does your connection with the ocean? enrich your life?

Jolyon Collier  1:07:22

Okay, so for me experiential knowledge is the key to living. Okay, so life with purpose while saying is, you know, not really worth living? Well, in the same token, experiential knowledge for me is what I want to be thinking on my deathbed, I’m not going to be thinking about the car that I owned, or the watch I had on my risks that just cost $50,000 or, you know, the Lambo that I got in the garage. But none of that interests me. When I’m on my deathbed, I’m gonna be thinking of my family, the experiences that I’ve had. So when you look at accumulating experiential knowledge, guess what, I’m gonna be a richer human being, because I have the experience of climbing that mountain, hiking in those jungles, swimming in those oceans, surfing those waves. Those are the things that I dream about all the time. I have zero interest in these material objects, they bring me no joy, it’s temporary. But what I used when I look back and have my memories, I don’t need that content of me. Filming those surface 20 years ago, it is as clear in my mind as a day I was shooting it. None of that escapes me, you know what I mean? So accumulation of experiential knowledge. And a story lovely stuff. Right up there with you. I don’t give a shit. You can see. There’s no jewellery, no watches, no nothing.

Matt Waters  1:08:45

It’s all about it’s all about the doing and see. And

Jolyon Collier  1:08:48

yeah, so state of mind, right. So just a quick like, you know, like, add on to that. So we you know, we we have, we’ve, we’ve I’ve been retired for seven years, I have a beautiful home. Me and my wife are living in a construction trailer for two for two years. So I can work my nonprofit. She’s like, I hate this goddamn trailer, we’re talking. It’s on the job site, piles of dirt around us or scenery going all day long. And I said, Listen, you know, for me, it’s a state of mind. You know, if you’re, if you’re a happy person, nothing externally is ever going to like penetrate you. If you’re bothered by external stuff, you’re doing something wrong in your life. You know what I mean? You see all the stress that people in the US, especially in Malibu, they are super rich, and they get super stressed out about the weight and not showing up with their warm coffee or whatever. It’s like, oh my God, that’s that’s sent you over the edge and you live in in a $10 million home on the beach is like where’s your head? You know what I mean? So, if you can keep your consciousness and your mindfulness and your happiness and your core, you know, core self intact, no matter what’s going on around you. You’ve won in life already, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Waters  1:10:00

100% Okay, let’s have another one. How about this one? Now for anyone who is interested in becoming a conservationist or getting into conservation, what words of wisdom would you impart to them?

Jolyon Collier  1:10:17

Super simple. Stop talking about it. Because you’ve probably told your family members, you’ve probably been going on about it. And certainly you want to do this, you want to do that, stop talking about it and go and do something. If it’s planting trees, then go plant some trees. If it’s saving coral, do your dive party, reach out to somebody and say, and show up, knock on the doors. Just get involved. There’s no, no time wasted if you just put your self into an action position. Now, a lot of people don’t have a lot of time, right? So just pick your times pick your battles, set your schedules, go do it. Real simple, super simple stuff. It doesn’t have to be these grandiose things, right. You know, I started a nonprofit, we’re doing this huge crap all over the world is like, did I need to do that? No, probably not. But that’s what keeps me going in life. Right? You could just maybe go and support your local guys like my friend in Hawaii, the coral Conservancy, go and do swimming and planting little pieces of coral, just with a snorkel. I mean, whatever you want to do, man, it’s easy. Just go and do it. That’s the whole point.

Matt Waters  1:11:18

Yeah, I’ve got a good buddy of mine out in Texas, Justin. And he’s, we met through diving, whilst on holiday a number of years ago now. And he got back to Texas and, you know, life’s trials and tribulations were pissing him off and get him down and touch base with me and talk about Scuba diving, let’s just find someone to Scuba dive in Texas. I mean, fuck they it’s a dry state, but there’s water near it. So just get in the water and go. And he created Texas Scuba divers, which is a Facebook group. And there’s, there’s over 7000 members in there now. And he gets out there once every couple of weeks, three weeks, whatever it is, and just goes and does a beach cleanup, and the amount of shit that he’s pulling out the ocean and out off the beaches. And you know, sometimes they’ll be two or three people with them. Sometimes I’ll be 10 or 12 people with him, but the stuff that he’s doing is just it’s marvellous, and it’s it’s super enriching for him. He’s he’s a better person for it. He’s not. He’s not that that depressive young man that he was four or five years ago and pissed off. We’re not going diver and he’s got something that he’s targeting and enjoying. It’s fantastic. And, yeah, and what is a long winded way of saying I agree with you just get out. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter how big or small it is? Just do it. You know, if it makes you feel happy, and it’s something good for the world, then.

Jolyon Collier  1:12:46

Yeah, I always say stay complaining about it and go do something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. You know, like I said earlier, sort of relentless fundraising situation. So I’m going to do those shameless plugs for our organisation. We are set on track to probably be around the 200 Grand mark by probably next year, hopefully, if all goes well, with this construction work we’re doing. We do partner with a lot of great organisations. So if anybody’s listening and they got a large business or even a small business, we work with a lot of small businesses exhale, coffee, and a kiss wines, hair story, I mean, the list goes on. Think about joining the 1% for the planet. 1% The planet is an organisation that bridges businesses to nonprofits. Now, I’m not doing that just for myself. I’m just doing that from a philanthropic standpoint, is to just look at your business model and see if your business model can, you know, afford 1% And that 1% can go to a nonprofit that you allocate to and then you can bridge partners so what we do is we don’t just say hey, thanks for the donation. We bugger off and get on with our jobs. We’d like to do infographics and actually build partnerships so we’ll put you on our website will do infographics shout out on our social medias will do little videos like Amicus wines came to Fiji. One of them turned into a board member we did a whole photo shoot with their bottles of wine underwater with the coral on the sculptures. Their entire centrepiece of our artwork is laser engraved logo. And then all the end modules have the large people that donate money. So we’ve got Google, we got SIBO. We’ve got a bunch of like people that donated we laser engraved the name on a plaque. So now that laser engraved underwater for the next few 100 years, wherever long that sculpture park lasts. So we just encourage people to a just look at what’s going on in the world. If you have the ability to maybe STRETCH YOURSELF TO 1% Go join that organisation or just reach out to us directly and we’d love to work with you guys. and try and do the good work and we got a great story. So it’s great marketing, if you look at it from a marketing standpoint, you don’t get anything better than this. You get free content from us, it’s free content, we’ll go do the work, we’ll give you the content, you put it on your website, you can now shine bright, because you’re supporting something that’s super cool. And you didn’t spend a marketing dime, all you did is donated, which is a tax free write off anyway. And then the other thing is people, please try and think about this, if you’re a larger organisation, and you’ve got money, do a personal, a personal foundation, so you can have your own foundation, right, that is a personal one that’s run by your family. Now you can take up to 30% of your revenues and put that into a foundation as a tax free write off, then you can pay your children to run it. And you’re only have to allocate 7.5% of that money to a nonprofit. So you can be a self sustaining business entity that you would have given the money to the government. But instead of doing that you’ve created a foundation, near allocating funds for that foundation, and you’re paying your kids to run that or your husband or your wife or whoever it is, you have funds in there. And it’s all better than giving it to the government my opinion. So just think about ways that you can manipulate the system that is legal, completely above board, but you’ve just never thought about. And that’s all I can say is just try and do your best to step up. We need it Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be a big business, it can be small, you know, small business operation we’d love to have you out there. Yeah, that’s brilliant. And for the one person people that may be interested in the 1%, you can go to our profile and see who we’re partnered with and see what we’ve been up to. And it’s a really cool thing, you know, it’s not a lot of money either 1% Think about it. Yeah, I’d love that. And thanks for having us on, Matt is super, super grateful to be able to, you know, connect with you and connect with your audience. Because, you know, one of our big objectives is awareness drivers. So the more I get to talk, the more I get to share the stories, the more that information gets out to people. And the more we can open and expand our minds, the realities are actually coming down upon us because a lot of people are blindfolded to the situations that are going on. That could be for many different reasons, you know, bogged down with life, whatever. But these are sometimes what I like to think about is light at the end of the tunnel, if you can start to have a life with purpose, and you can see maybe a small bit of hope. And all you got to do is put a few small action steps in line for yourself, you’re going to be a joyful and more rounded full person because you’re moving forward to something positive, with an outcome that can be beneficial to everybody, no matter what that is in life. So I just I’m so happy that I get to spread this awareness and chat with people and encourage people to do good in the world, you know, so thank you Yeah, more than happy to come on over and spend some time. Definitely.

Matt Waters  1:23:16

And all of those links, all of your partners that are helping to invest in and make this work and happen. Send me the links. I’ll put it all in the show notes Well, on that note, I think I will let you get some bed rest. And I’ll go and get my morning coffee started. Jolyon, it’s been absolutely fantastic. Talking with you today, and thank you for coming on the show. And keep me abreast of everything that’s going on. And let’s get an update done in like 12 months or so see, see how much progression has occurred Happy Days thanks to you as well it’s been an absolute pleasure Jolyon, Thank you very much bye for now everybody.