Can Fungi Fix the Climate Crisis? Colin Averill and Funga Are Working on it

Colin Averill: [00:00:00] Actually a big motivation here too, is that we're coming to appreciate that all that biodiversity and soil has actually also under threat. And so one of the mission to this company is to actually diversify soil. And actually make sure, you know, both in restoration, we're rebuilding the biodiversity that was lost through intensive agriculture, but also in managed landscapes like forestry, you know, can we make our managed landscapes reservoirs rather biodiversity.

Paul Shapiro: Welcome to the business for podcast to show where we spotlight companies, making money by making the world a better place. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro. And if you share a passion for using commerce to solve many of the world's most pressing problems, then. Is the show for you?

Welcome to the 95th. Yes. 95th episode of the business for good podcast. Heard from several listeners that after listening to episode 94, with zero acre farms that they have ordered new fermentation drived oil from the company and are enjoying [00:01:00] using that microbially produced oil. Which is very cool. As I mentioned in the episode, my wife, Tony and I have been using it too, and finding it to perform pretty well.

Of course, I am not really the best judge since I'm not exactly known for being a Arian hummus raps are among my favorite dinners. But given that Tony is a professional cookbook author, her opinion is actually relevant. And guess what? She really likes it. So last episode we were talking about tiny little microbe.

In other past episodes, we've talked about the power of plants or flora in some, we've talked about our relationship with animals or fauna. So you already know about flora and fauna, but have you heard of fun? That is the relatively new way to describe this third kingdom of life on earth. The vast number of species of fungi, which aren't plants, they're not animals, but are a different branch together on the tree of life.

And it turns out that fungi are a lot more important than many in the past have realized. In fact, they seem to play a major role in just how much carbon the soil. Is sequestering. [00:02:00] Certain fungi, seams are particularly effective at storing carbon than others. And in making trees grow a lot faster. Some even say that a 1% increase in soil based carbon could be sufficient to stop an increase in CO2 in our atmosphere.

And. Enter my and entrepreneur, Colin AAL and his new startup fungo, having just raised a million dollars of seed venture capital, or maybe spore venture capital. He is seeking to start reinforcing depleted land and converting it into biodiverse carbon sinks, much faster than would otherwise occur on their own.

Think of it kind of like a fecal transplant. Yep. You heard that right. A fecal transplant, but instead it's more like a fungal transplant stay with me. It may sound disgusting, but we now know that you can take feces from a healthy person, inoculate a sick person with them and yes. By saying inoculate, you know what I mean?

Insert it into a sick person and the good microbes populate the colon of the sick person, turning that person. Well, similarly, you can take the [00:03:00] rich biodiverse soil from a healthy, old growth forest and inoculate agriculturally depleted land with it. And biodiverse life returns causing trees to grow up to three times faster than they normally would.

So how do you make a business out of reforesting ex agricultural land? Let Cowan give you the scoop of soil on how heat and fungo are going to monetize this type of carbon capture. Colin. Welcome to the business for good podcast.

Colin Averill: Hi, Paul, how you doing? Thanks for having me.

Paul Shapiro: I am doing just great. I am a fungi fanatic like you, I also like to perceive myself as a fun guy.

And I presume that you do too.

Colin Averill: always, always, man.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, there's too many fungi related puns that I will try to spare us during this interview from, from too many of them. But I'm really psyched to be talking to somebody who's devoting your life to fungi. And so. You know, most of the time people don't really think much about the fungal world, but you do.

And lemme just ask you first common. Why? Like how'd you get even into thinking about [00:04:00] fungi in the first.

Colin Averill: Yeah, totally. So my interest in fungi goes back a long time. I was an undergrad who got really interested in climate change in the two thousands. And as I started that journey, I learned some of the biggest uncertainties in climate science, where actually what's happening in soils and how those affect how the earth.

And a big part of that was, you know, no one really had any conceptualization of the, all the life and biodiversity in soils. None of that actually made it into the carbon cycle science models. And so. You know, I began learning about fungi and particularly microrisal fungi, fungi that formed a symbiosis or a partnership with the roots of most plants on earth.

And I thought, this is obviously massively important. Why is this not being included? And I learned through my time that, you know, there was just this massive ripped between the people who Studi. Fungal biology and microbiology and the people who built the terrestrial [00:05:00] ecosystem models that went into the climate science models.

And so I, I decided I wanted to spend my time studying, you know, being that interface, being able to speak to both of these communities, learned their languages and do the science that really needed to be done to actually bridge those really, really different

Paul Shapiro: scales. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. So, you know, just for a way of definitions here for people who aren't familiar with Mirial, so Miko just means fungi and RAL means roots.

So there's these connections between the roots of plants and fungi, which we can talk all about. But before we do, I wanna ask you, so I'm saying fungi, you're saying fungi. Do you think that one is correct or incorrect or is it more like, just for whatever floats your.

Colin Averill: There is consensus in the, the fungal biology field that you could say it whichever way you want, whatever makes it happen.

Some of my colleagues say fungi, which sounds terrible to me, but I don't stop. 'em

Paul Shapiro: I, I have heard Europeans say fungi. That, that to me is pretty unattractive at the same time. I, I will say like, you know, we call 'em [00:06:00] fungus Fung goal. So why fungi? Like I agree. I I've heard that it is equally acceptable, but if it's fungus and fun goal, how do you get to fungi rather than just fun?

Colin Averill: I Paul, I actually could not tell you

Paul Shapiro: okay. All right. Well, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna go on a crusade. I think, just to tilt the power tilt the balance of power here to fungi because it also fungi doesn't lend itself to as many jokes as fungi. But so, so you got into, you got into this and let's just talk about this briefly before we talk about your company here, because you've really devoted your academic research to studying.

The role that fungi play in the forest. And so a lot of the times people were just saying like, yo, let's plant a bunch of trees. But you're saying planting trees isn't enough. Why?

Colin Averill: Yeah. So. When we think about a forest, we think about what we can see what's above ground. And that absolutely makes sense, you know, above grounds where photosynthesis happens.

That's how, you know, carbon and energy enters terrestrial [00:07:00] ecosystems. But it's what you see above ground is really only half. Of what's there, you know, in many ecosystems, there actually can be as much or more biomass below ground in root structures, above in stem and, and start to architecture. Just the patterns roots are you see massively intertwined and overlapping so different, different trees are just all.

You know, built up within each other. So it becomes really clear that there's this enormous potential for really important ecology to be going on below ground. But when you look closely at these roots and I mean very closely, like you need a microscope closely, you realize they aren't really just roots at all.

They're also fungi, right? Like, so all trees on earth, nearly all trees on earth form this symbiosis with microrisal fungi. This symbiosis is essential to basically how all trees access these critically limiting soil resources, like water and nutrients. And so they [00:08:00] allocate a ton of resources down there.

There's estimates that the amount of sort of just, you know, sugars and energy, a tree allocates to these microrisal fungal networks can rival. Seed the amount of, you know, resources and energy they put into the foliage or the leaves of the tree. That's how important these organisms are. And yet you just really don't see them.

So when we think about restoration, for example, we're gonna go plant some trees in a place that's having a really challenging time recovering on its own. You know, we don't think to plant the below ground microbiology, but really we know in ex agricultural landscapes where more, most restoration happens.

The fungal communities that are living there, look nothing like the ones in intact forests. And so a big part of our research right now is trying to understand, can we actually, when we restore forests, what if we restored the below ground microbiology and the fungal biology, could we enable restoration of difficult to restore places?

Could we accelerate restoration by doing so accelerate carbon [00:09:00] capture

Paul Shapiro: and climate? So basically your current column is that if you restore that fungal microbiology in the soil or what you refer to as the forest microbiome, that you can get trees to grow a lot faster and therefore capture a lot more carbon more quickly.

Is that right? Is that an accurate summation of your view?

Colin Averill: Yeah, exactly. That's, that's exactly it.

Paul Shapiro: So, so let's talk about the microbiome. Was it normally, you know, to the extent that people have even heard of a microbiome, they think about it within themselves, right? Like in your intestines, you have this microbiome and we know that basically the more biodiversity your microbiome is generally speaking the better off you are.

In fact you know, some studies even show that your microbiome can control how happy you. You know, we think that things, you know, like money or status or whatever is gonna bring us happiness and turns out actually our microbiota may, may be playing a even bigger role as to how happy we are. But it's not just in our intestines that there is a microbiome.

You're saying that in the soil, there is also a microbiome and that planting trees [00:10:00] in soil that is pretty lacking in biodiversity is just not gonna cut it. Right.

Colin Averill: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the, the work on the human microbiome done by, you know, medical microbiologists is truly inspiring. It's just, there's so many things your gut microbiome does for you.

And that is only more true outside in the forest. So we know soils are the most microbially biodiverse habitats on the planet, a handful of soil. Easily contains over a thousand coexisting, fungal and bacterial organisms. So these are incredibly complex systems and it's likely that, you know, plants actually depend even more on their microbial communities than people do.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. So if plants are depending on it more so then that, that really begs the question then. Colin. So how do they lose the MI the microbiome in the first place? Like how does soil go from being [00:11:00] rich in biodiversity to being poor in it? Yeah. So

Colin Averill: I think it's, it's useful to draw an analogy again, back to the human microbiome.

So one thing that can really wreck your human, your gut microbiome is if you get hit with a really hard dose of antibiotics, and maybe you really need that to treat a disease, I'm not saying don't take antibiotics but that can havoc on all the beneficial microbes in your body. And actually that people also hit you with antibiotics to if they wanna reintroduce beneficial microbes into your.

We do things to the land that are essentially equivalent to hitting it with a gnarly dose of antibiotics. So a lot of forests in the world are cut down. For the purposes of agriculture. So we might cut down a forest burn, it practice intensive agriculture for years and years with chemical inputs, things like nitrogen fertilizers that we know annihilate, the Sy Symbio and many of the forest symb that we're talking about.

So that the fungal [00:12:00] buds that only form a partnership with the roots, they just can't survive. If the tree is not. So after, you know, five, 10, a hundred years of intensive agriculture, that soil is devoid of those fungal symb. They're really, really difficult to find. And so that is one way you actually lose all that beneficial, fungal biodiversity.

And so if you go and planet tree out there, I mean, often it can be successful and there are things that will blow in. They just don't happen to be the ones that have the potential to be the most beneficial to these trees.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. And since we're talking about deforestation here, I, I do think it's helpful.

You know, you mentioned co that it is for agricultural purposes, but just to give a little bit more color you know, it's not just agriculture, I mean, really it's meat. So there's a recent Vox story on deforestation and I'm just, quoing from it here. And they say, you. Deforestation is not for toilet paper or hardwood floors, or even Palm oil, it's beef.

And they go on, they say, queering trees for cattle is [00:13:00] the weeding driver of deforestation by a long shot. It causes more than double the deforestation that is linked to soy Palm oil, wood products, all combined according to the world wildlife fund. So basically we are deforesting our. To produce meat and that is causing enormous amounts of climate changing emissions that are going into the atmosphere and a whole host of other biodiversity problems, just destroying wildlife habitat and so on.

But you're saying that you can actually accelerate the process of reforesting these areas. And to me it seemed like almost like or have you I, I can't imagine you're not giving what you're doing Cohen, but are you familiar with like the fecal transplant stuff that people were doing?

Colin Averill: Absolutely.

Yes.

Paul Shapiro: Right. All right. So like, you know, people who have sick, if they're sick, they have like ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease or other like intestinal ailments and their microbiome is all screwed up. And then they go and they take feces from a healthy person. And this is actually a medical procedure.

It's not like people are doing this in alleyways here, [00:14:00] then actual medical procedure. And they do like a fecal transplant from the healthy person into the unhealthy person and that new the new microbes basically. And out compete the old microbes and the person becomes healthy again, which is pretty insane.

But to me, that sounded like the most similar thing to what you are suggesting here. So tell us, tell me, am I correct in analogizing these two? And if so, what is the equivalent of the fecal transplant in your world column?

Colin Averill: Yeah, Paul, no, that's a great analogy. And we use it all the time. We've taken a lot of inspiration from that work.

So yeah, we, you know, the question really then becomes, you know, what's, it's forced microbiome.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. The, the fecal fungi connection is just it's always ubiquitous some people's tongues apparently.

Colin Averill: Yeah. It just rolls right off the time. Yeah, we, you know, so we can do that because, you know, medical microbiologists sequence, the stomachs of thousands of people.

They discovered certain microbes and certain bacteria were indicative of health and disease. And then they basically, once they [00:15:00] understood that they could start taking feces that contain the beneficial microbes from the healthy people and use those as a transplant or an inoculation into a sick person.

And so when we go to the forest, the question then becomes what is a healthy forest microbiome to do that? My research team has been sequencing hundreds of forests across Europe over the past three years where foresters have been documenting forest health for decades. And we particularly hone in on tree growth and carbon capture is the health.

We're interested in. And then basically what we have started doing is saying, okay, we've discovered that certain fungi, particularly these symbiotic fungi. Are indicative about threefold variation in tree growth in carbon capture. So if you had two pine forests sitting side by side, experiencing the same weather and climate growing the same soils, if one had the right fungal microbiology, these analyses would suggest it could grow three times as fast capture three times as much carbon as one with the wrong fire, fungal [00:16:00] microbiology sitting right next to it.

And

Paul Shapiro: so what would same, same tree, same tree, but three times more carbon capture.

Colin Averill: Exactly. And so continuing with your fecal transplant analogy, you know, the next thing we do is we're like, let's go source fungi from these systems, but instead of taking, you know, feces, we go to the forest gut, which is the soil.

We take the soil that is filled with all these potentially beneficial fungi and bacteria and other organisms. And we use that as our transplant material in these lowest tech studies. And so that's actually how we begin sort of manipulating the microbiology

Paul Shapiro: in these systems. Wow. That's really amazing.

So you can take soil from a healthy forest and bring it to an area that has been depleted through agriculture or some other means, and essentially create the conditions where you can have trees that capture a lot more carbon, which is really impressive. It's very impressive. And in fact, you know, we did a past episode Cohen on this show with global thermostat with GRA Chi oinky.

Do, are you familiar [00:17:00] with global ther. I'm, it's a pretty interesting startup. They're doing direct carbon capture from the air. And so of course that's what tree, that's what trees do obviously, but they're trying to you know, spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build facilities that will suck carbon outta the atmosphere.

But it sounds to me like, and there's, you know, there's huge amounts of money going into direct carbon capture from the air. But it sounds to me like maybe this is a more cost effective thing to do than just sucking CO2 straight of the air. What do you think.

Colin Averill: Yeah, absolutely. Right. We have two sort of climate solutions that are fingertips right now.

You know, one is these engineered solutions like direct our capture. Like you're describing they're incredibly promising, but they they're incredibly expensive right now. And it's not clear when, or if they're gonna come to scale, it's likely gonna be decades. And right now a ton of carbon removal with the direct to air capture machine usually costs in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars a ton.

If we wait the 10 or 20 years, [00:18:00] it needs to scale up that tech we're, we're gonna miss. We're gonna miss our window on climate E you know, we need to stop emitting carbon, but we also need to remove a lot. And that's not an opinion. That's consensus science from the I P C C. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and the tech that is ready to scale today is biology.

It's forest it's trees. And so these sorts of approaches need to. You know, put into action now, and they're a lot cheaper. We think we can do these things for things like prices like 50 to a hundred dollars at Tom. So 10 to 20 X cheaper than what direct air capture costs now.

Paul Shapiro: So let me ask you then co like you've started a business, the BI in, in, I believe in like the last year or so.

Is that right? That's correct. Yeah. So you started this company called funk and for those of you not familiar. So if you think about fauna and flora, like the animal kingdom and the point kingdom funk is the relatively recent term to describe the fungal kingdom. So there's flora fun flora, fauna, and funk.

Your company is collar [00:19:00] funk. So I understand Kawan what you're saying, that you can grow trees faster and that you can reforce and capture carbon, but where is there money in this? Like, how are you going to actually make money as a.

Colin Averill: Yeah. So there's an emerging demand for that carbon removal, you know, as we wake up to the risks of climate change, there's all of a sudden a voluntary market for carbon removal has popped up.

So there's been some particularly progressive companies like Microsoft is a great example. Who've committed to both, you know, hitting net zero. So zeroing out their own emissions by 2030, but also remov. All of their emissions since they became a company back in the seventies. Right? So you can't, you know, avoid the emissions that you've already put in the atmosphere.

You need to remove them. And so more and more, we're seeing more and more pledges to actually do carbon removal at scale. Most recently the frontier. Climate organization is an advanced market commitment. So this an advanced market commitment is basically how they started to get [00:20:00] drug companies to produce vaccines that might not have a market in the future.

They said, no, we're gonna put up the money now because we want you to build this technology. So the frontier climate initiative is a group of corporations. Let's put down a billion dollars. That is just for carbon removal. And these sorts of proof points are really stimulating everybody's sector wide, you know, across industries to say, you know, we wanna have net zero commitments.

We wanna cut our emissions as much as possible and what we can't cut today, we're gonna have to remove, and we need to find a way to remove it. And we wanna be there to say, Hey, here is one way you can remove your carbon. And in the process, you may be able to, you know, build. Fune biodiversity back into these

Paul Shapiro: ecosystems.

That's really cool. It sounds awesome. And I know you've raised some venture capital. I, I saw some articles about your fundraising. So how much money has the company raised has fungo raised so far?

Colin Averill: We've raised about a million dollars so far mm-hmm . So just to get started in higher initial team and get our first sort of projects [00:21:00] in the ground, this.

Paul Shapiro: Great. So what is the actual business? So, I mean, you're, you're making a case co that I, you know, very much sympathize with basically taking healthy soil, transplanting it into a place where you need, where that soil was needed and then growing trees that can capture carbon a lot faster than otherwise.

But what's the proprietary nature of this. Like you're calling it tech. So what is the tech like why, why would somebody invest in your company when presumably anybody could go dig up soil from another, from a healthy forest and put it into depleted land?

Colin Averill: Yeah. So let's go back to the fecal transplant analogy.

Let's say you had colitis or, or one of the diseases you suggested would you, would you take anybody's poop?

Paul Shapiro: I don't, I've actually wondered about this. Like whether I would do this under any circumstances scientifically it makes sense, but no, I see what you're saying. You want, you want an expert, right?

And so how are you? You want the right food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how are you determining that? Like why, why, why is fungo the one to know what the right soil is?

Colin Averill: Yeah. So, so part of this is [00:22:00] because we're building really large data sets, you know, to, to, to do this. Well, you need to know what a healthy force microbiome looks like and to do that well, you need to have thousands of paired observations of forced health.

And forest soil microbiome, particularly the fungal microbiome right now, those data sets don't really exist. My lab has built the biggest paired data set ever, and it's only a few observations. And so what the company is doing is trying to accelerate that process massively. And then we also build technology to do it.

And we also. Trying to generate the information now beyond the handful full of field trials we have for my lab to show that, yeah, we can actually induce these outcomes in the field. So this isn't just a nice idea. We can actually measure how much more the trees are growing, how much more carbon is removed.

So it's those pieces all together that are really important.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. Yeah. I know you're doing some large scale trials both in Mexico and in the United Kingdom right now, which [00:23:00] should give you some sense of this. But let me ask you, you know, you mentioned a handful of soil has like thousands of species that are all coexisting in there.

How hard is it to tease out? Which ones matter? And is it one, or is it a combination of them? Like, how do you actually figure out which ones are the right ones that are gonna help the tree grow faster and capture more carbon?

Colin Averill: Yeah. One of the interesting things about the work we do is what we. We found it's actually usually never just one.

It's usually some combination of many of them. And so we've developed a lot of different approaches to abstract, you know, this incredible diversity into numbers that reflect different features of that diversity, how these different fungi engage in different nutrient foraging strategies, for example, can be really indicative of the growth outcomes.

And so doing that require. Knowing a lot about the gen, the genomes of these fungi, about how to take those genomes and, and genetically extrapolate across the tree of life and knowing a lot about the ecology of [00:24:00] fungi. So all of that use. What is a healthy force microbiome. Hmm.

Paul Shapiro: That's cool. Have you, have you considered, or would you consider also doing any bioengineering to maybe ramp up the ability to sequester carbon?

I, I know there's a, a startup called living carbon. That's actually. Bioengineering trees that apparently can grow dramatically faster than they would otherwise grow. And in the past, we actually had on a, a startup called coral veto, which was not bioengineering, but they were engaged in practices to make coral that they could graft onto dying coral reefs that would grow dramatically faster than coral grows in nature.

So is there a way to that you've considered to speed things up even further given the crisis that we're facing? Right.

Colin Averill: Yeah. So I love Mattie hall and the team at living carbon. And I think what they do is awesome for us because of the incredible biodiversity of these fungi. That's president soil. We barely scratch the surface of what's possible with [00:25:00] the variety of.

Life that exists on this planet. So for us, you know, we see a lot of opportunity in actually leaning into the biodiversity rather than trying to reduce and simplify it and then genetically modify it. So we'd like to try and go the other way. And so there's many different ways to go at this historically.

Yeah. We've, we've picked high performing species and strains. It's spread them, genetically modified them, but. You know, there's a lot of value in actually building and, and taking advantage and using that complexity in biodiversity, because we know that can actually view other features to the ecosystem, particularly stability.

So for the same reason you might diversify your stock portfolio, you might wanna diversify an ecological community.

Paul Shapiro: Ha got it. Well, speaking of diversifying your stock portfolio, so presuming there are investors who are listening and want to add some of fungus's stock in the private market to their own portfolio.

What do you plan on doing? So you've raised a million dollars. You're doing these field tests. You haven't actually started reforesting yet. So what are the opportunities [00:26:00] going forward? How much money do you think that you'll need to succeed? Like what is this company looking like in a few years from.

Colin Averill: Yeah. So right now we've taken some money to make sure we hit our winter planting targets. So our first projects are focused in the Southeastern Loblaw pine footprint, which is one of America's biggest forestry markets. In the next six to eight months, we will kick fundraising on again, and we'll be looking to raise about 4 million to go from there.

And the, the point of that fundraising is so we can expand our F. In these areas to build bigger data sets and to begin operating on much larger footprints of land talking, we're talking like thousands and thousands of acres. So we can actually have the, the reach we need to create meaningful climate

Paul Shapiro: impact.

So if you're doing thousands of acres, like how much soil is that? Like, can do you know, like how much new soil per acre that you need to add in order to increase the biodiversity that's needed?

Colin Averill: [00:27:00] Yeah. So, so that's one of the things. It doesn't work. If you keep digging out soil, you run outta soil.

Eventually once you hit the scales, you actually need to hit. So a big part of what we've been doing is actually developing new approaches that are proprietary. Not just dig soil outta the ground. Like that is our lowest tech fecal transplant way that allows us to get started. But we're piloting lots of new approaches now to scale it up without digging up the entire forest.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. So how, how much change in the soil is needed? Like, I, I was reading that it could be even as little. 1% increase in soil based carbon sequestration that could be sufficient to stop an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Is that your impression that as little as getting the soil to sequester 1% more carbon could have that type of an impact.

Colin Averill: I mean, it globally, if you, if you increase soil carbon pools, about 1% you get 20 gigatons. I don't think that would be enough, but I think what they actually mean is increase. So we, we [00:28:00] measure solar organic carbon as a percentage. So normally like. A really depleted soil would have less than 1% carbon and a really healthy soil would have like five or 6% carbon.

So if you brought all the half a percent to one and half percent, that's where you'd have huge impact. And yeah, that, that would be very meaningful. And so we're building carbon and soils. We're also building carbon in wood as well above ground. One of the things we're really excited about is. While we know we're building soil carbon.

We don't have to rely on it yet because we also create outcomes above ground in the wood. And wood is a lot easier to measure than all the stuff.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, for sure. And, and it also has the benefit of creating habitat for more wildlife biodiversity too. So in all these agricultural lands, we've basically gone from biodiverse sets of nature to mono cropped land for agriculture, primarily for raising crops to feed, to farm animals so that we can eat meat.

And one of the things I really [00:29:00] like about this is, you know, with direct carbon capture it, it's obviously very promising, but it doesn't have any side benefits. Of course you could argue, well, you know, sparing us from the. Climate disaster scenarios is doesn't really need any side benefits considering how good that would be.

But we need more forests to give non-humans a place to exist. You know, like humans control and dominate nearly all of the land mass of the earth right now. And it would be nice to give more wildlife, a chance to exist. And I think creating faster reforestation efforts would, would help toward that end.

Is that part of your thinking on this as well?

Colin Averill: Absolutely. You know, we're facing tandem climate crisis, an biodiversity crisis. We're, we're living at the beginning of a six mass extinction event and actually a big motivation here too, is that we're coming to appreciate that all that biodiversity and soil has actually also under threat.

And so one of the missions of this company is to actually diversify. And actually make sure, you know, both in restoration, we're rebuilding the [00:30:00] biodiversity that was lost through intensive agriculture, but also in manage landscapes like forestry, you know, can we make our managed landscapes reservoirs rather than deserts of biodiversity below ground that they're today and by doing so, can we create positive outcomes for wood production for our forest farmers?

Can we create positive outcomes for carbon?

Paul Shapiro: mm-hmm yeah, let's certainly hope so. Well, it, it's a really cool idea for for a company co I'm glad that you are converting your academic pursuits into a for-profit business. That hopefully we can work with the Microsoft and others of the world to try to refor this planet that we have.

So thoroughly deforested now. So my hat is off to you for that. Obviously you have done a. In your life from going through PhD program, to being a founder of a company and raising seven figures of, of venture capital here, have there been any resources for you, Colin that have been useful? So if somebody's looking at you and saying, man, I'm really impressed by what this Colin dude has done here.

Are there any resources that you'd say, Hey, check this out. It was helpful for me and maybe it will be for you too.

Colin Averill: [00:31:00] I think if you're really interested in fungi and you know, all the potential there is Informo biology for solving the problems of the planet. I would highly recommend the book entangled life by Merlin.

She Merlin. Did his PhD in fungal biology, but he's also happens to just be one of the most eloquent writers I've ever read. And he takes you on a journey on all we know, but also all the incredible things we're just learning and all the things we don't know about what fungi do. And it's just, you finish this book and you're inspired to like go out and do more work.

You know, I've been studying fungi and ecosystem science for 15 years and E even I was. You know, just astonished and, and re-energized by that book. So I highly recommend entangled life. And also there's so much going on in the. Sort of climate tech space and a really great resource for that is the, my climate journey podcast.

I found it invaluable. It really, it spends a [00:32:00] lot of time working at the intersection of, you know, what are the big problems here, but also what's happening on the industry and the startup and the business side to solve them. So that's been invaluable for me to get a handle

on

Paul Shapiro: the. Cool. Well, we'll definitely link to both that book and that podcast in the show notes for this episode@businessforgoodpodcast.com.

I loved entangled life. I thought it was a great book and I work in the fungi space and I learned so much from it and I've recommended it to a lot of people as well. So totally agree on that, but I haven't listened to the podcast, my client attorney. So I'll, I'll certainly be checking that out too.

Thank you for that recommendation Cohen. So finally, like obviously you've started a company you're devoting yourself. And it's something that you obviously are very passionate about, but presumably there are other ideas that you hope that somebody else maybe would've take on since you don't have the time to do it.

So are there any other company ideas that somebody's listening might take the reins on and go start themselves that you think would be good for the world?

Colin Averill: Someone needs to do the same thing in agriculture, like food, agriculture so much of what we're [00:33:00] doing in food agriculture. Again, you know, the history of agriculture is and exercise and reductionism.

We identify high performing species and strains. Genetically modify them and selectively breed. Then we plant mountain monocultures and it's made a very productive food system, but we're coming to realize it's extremely fragile, extremely sensitive to extreme events and incredibly dependent on chemical inputs that have huge externalities, you know, there's opportunity here to go the other way to start using soil biology and diversifying with soils again and leaning into the biodiversity component of.

And so we're really focused on trees and forests because I study these Symbio and, you know, they have unique biology that we feel like we know really well, but I think there's a ton of opportunity in food agriculture. The other thing is we gotta measure all this carbon and we're developing our own stuff to like get verified by all these agencies to guarantee that yes, indeed additional carbon is here [00:34:00] and we can do it and we know how to do it, but it doesn't feel like a thing that requires our expertise.

I feel like I should be able to call somebody and say, Hey, come measure my trees and, you know, confirm to the verification agency that yes, indeed. There's more

Paul Shapiro: carbon here. Yeah. I mean, it seems like trees are basically just carbon pillars, right? Like we're just, you know, they're just pillars sitting there just storing carbon and we could use a lot more of them.

Planting trees alone is, is not gonna be sufficient to stop runaway climate change. I don't think, but it is a key part of what we need to do in order to not only sequester carbon, but also give some of this planet back to the thousands of other species with whom we share it. So I really appreci. What you're doing, Colin.

I hope that you can take up a lot of room on the planet with your trees that are gonna be growing. Maybe even say, take up too mushroom or maybe not. It won't, maybe it won't be too much room we'll, we'll find out, but I really appreciate what you're doing and I will be looking forward to fungus success as you continue to[00:35:00] both measure and eventually start inoculating some land to grow more trees.

Colin Averill: Awesome. Thanks so much for the time, Paul, and thanks for all the work you do, highlighting new companies, you know,

Paul Shapiro: it's very kind. Thanks for listening, Colin. Thanks again. Use in this episode, so don't keep it to yourself. Please leave us a five star rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. And as always, we hope you will be in the business of doing good.