Episode Transcript
Host: You're listening to the Levy Inspiration Grant Program podcast, where we share stories of business students following their entrepreneurial passions to every corner of the world. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Through the program, students at the Kellogg School of Management can travel to any country of their choosing to immerse themselves in a particular topic with an eye toward building a business around it. When they return, they sit down with me to reflect on the experience and share what they learned along the way.
[00:00:38] So many entrepreneur origin stories begin with a longstanding passion rooted in someone's childhood. For Walker Wiese, it all started with a love for the water.
[00:00:50] Walker: When I was 12, it was just, I liked being underwater and the quiet and feeling that kind of weightlessness and peace you know, even in a public pool, I'm swimming and just kind of enjoying the water and that feeling of floating.
[00:01:03] Host: Over time, his interest evolved from swimming in public pools to scuba diving in vast oceans and awe-inspiring coral reefs. After graduating high school, Walker kept going. He earned his diving instructor certification, traveled to Madagascar to work in a marine protected area, and began his career working in government and policy around marine resources.
[00:01:28] During his time at Kellogg, he wanted to investigate a burgeoning diving hub to see how they manage their ocean resources and balance the economic benefits of tourism with sustainability and protective efforts. As it turns out, the Philippines was a perfect fit for him to explore this dichotomy.
[00:01:46] According to the Philippines' Department of Tourism, international diving visitors accounted for about 17. 5 percent of the country's total tourism receipts in 2022, equating to 37 billion Philippine pesos or about 680 million U.S. dollars.
[00:02:04] For his Inspiration Grant, Walker traveled to the Philippines to see the reefs for himself and meet with researchers, dive shops, government officials, and NGOs to see how they're managing the short-term versus long-term ramifications of diving in one of the world's up-and-coming ocean destinations.
This is his Inspiration Grant story.
[00:02:24] Walker: It really started when I got into diving when I was 14 and just fell in love with the feeling of being underwater, being able to see this kind of otherworldly environment. It feels like you're kind of in an alien movie almost you're seeing a branching coral growing over a mound coral and there's hundreds of fish swimming around. It's just something that you can't really see on the land. Having been an instructor and taught about a hundred students, that's kind of what keeps driving the passion now is being able to continue to unlock that world for people.
[00:03:05] In college, I went on to work with natural resources at the Texas State Capitol. Continued diving, continued approaching natural resource management from a state and local policy side, thinking about how to take a complex resource that you as a state or you as a municipality have and think about how do we manage this effectively to create a lot of the upside that we can get from it with mitigating the downsides that might come from overuse or exploitation. What got me excited was thinking about oceans from that perspective of not a finite resource, but a resource that has that ability to get overused and then ruined. So how do you manage it effectively?
[00:03:51] I was really interested in finding the combination between some of my history of natural resource management, dive shop management, and also working with marine protected areas. I know the Philippines has some of the best coral in the world and is in the early stages of unlocking that for tourism. I thought, why not go to the Philippines and kind of go where the challenge is, I guess, growing into an area where they could make material change and see how the Philippines thinks about this short-term versus long-term.
[00:04:29] Thinking about the itinerary, probably one of the best parts of the Levy Grant was that entrepreneurial spark that it instilled in me to just send that LinkedIn email or reach out to that Kellogg contact that I had to see if they had a friend who worked in XYZ company who could connect me to someone on a warm connection. . And then once I got on the ground in the Philippines, it was, Oh, I'm actually out of town, but I can connect you to my one friend on Facebook and they'll be in town. Do you want to meet with them? Who am I to know whether that was just the Philippines or not, but it was an amazing experience in entrepreneurship to just get reminded people want to help.
[00:05:11] From a real tactical itinerary building, I knew I wanted to have conversations with government, conversations with marine protected areas and more NGO management style, and then I wanted to talk with the dive shops.
[00:05:26] It was really trying to knock down those three thinking that the government might have a perspective that would differ from the NGOs who work with the government and then the dive shops trying to make money, but also trying to exist within the bounds of this short-term, long-term resource that they have at their fingertips.
[00:05:52] Walker: I had some amazing encounters and experiences during my time in the Philippines. One that stands out in particular was a contact that I got through the DENR, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
[00:06:07] I was headed down to the Tanon Strait, which is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world and Philippines' largest marine protected area.
[00:06:20] I got there and we were about to grab coffee and I get a Facebook message from her and she's like, "I'm going to be a little late, we just had a dolphin wash up on shore two towns down the road." I messaged her back and I'm like, "Can I come along and just watch you do what you need to do to work with this dolphin that washed up on shore?" And she's just, " Yeah, hop in the car." We get there and the dolphin has passed away and it's on the beach and there's maybe 150 people around. There's Coast Guard who she works with as well. She knows the Coast Guard officers and it's just trying to figure out what happened to this dolphin. Was it human caused? Was it random? Was it a fishing incident? Was it a net issue? Watching her go through these steps and seeing the different stakeholders, and everyone's kind of conjecturing on why they thought, you know, this dolphin had passed away. it was just a great synthesis of who all was involved in this complex resource of this massive strait in the Philippines and what sort of drivers were they thinking about. A lot of that all came together in this moment where we were looking at this issue in real time, and I would say it's something that I couldn't have ever experienced from a thousand miles away.
[00:07:38] To be able to be there to seize on that opportunity and learn so much about coral management and ocean management and how different people are thinking about that problem in an area where it really matters was pretty sharp realization of why it's useful to be on the ground.
[00:07:54] The main thing that I thought was going to be the issue, maybe didn't become the issue, and I think comes back to that short-term, long-term time horizon. Looking around in the Philippines and seeing, I would say, just frankly, some of the struggles that people are going through in these towns, with regards to access to clean water, access to food access to economic opportunity.
[00:08:24] It's not an academic argument of don't have a hundred divers dive on the site every day, but you look at the town and if they could have 200 divers, they would have 200 divers on the site every day, because it makes sense for them in the short term to bring in this foreign capital using a resource that they have that people want access to.
[00:08:44] That tension I think was evident, probably mostly in the contrast between two different dive sites. One was Moalboal, which is on the Southwest coast of Cebu, and then a site called Panglao Island, which is in Western Bohol, which is another island also in the Central Philippines.
[00:09:06] You could very easily tell the difference between how these two local mayors thought about this resource and how long they thought it was going to last and how much they wanted to turn it into local value and profit for their citizens. You could tell the difference in the reef quality, too.
[00:09:25] And it was, I would say, one for one, it was Moalboal, more tightly managed, far more permitted. You saw six boats, not 30 on the reef. You saw two divers, not 50. And you saw 12 dive shops, not 100. You could very easily tell that this reef is in better shape. It doesn't get dove as much. A lot of my contacts were, really frank that over-diving is one of the key components to reef degradation that they were seeing. That difference between those two dive sites was pretty clear on some of the challenges that they're having to confront every day. How tightly do I choke off this economic engine at the expense of maybe buying five years down the line in an uncertain time? You know, it makes sense to maybe get theirs as a localmunicipality trying to fight for share of the tourist dollar.
[00:10:16] When we're thinking about short, medium, and long term, and I'll inject in a medium there, coming from a more academic perspective on climate change and ocean acidification and rising sea level, the reality is those aren't and didn't seem to be In any way on anyone's radar, other than the scientific community.
[00:10:50] For some reason I was thinking that there would be maybe more kind of existential fear around what climate change is going to do to these low lying islands in the Philippines and it just, it never came up. No one, no one brought it up. It wasn't thought about, and it could have been who I, spoke with, and frankly, you know, I was looking pretty tactically at dive sites and short-term economic engines. But it didn't seem that that was how they were thinking about the ocean resource. It was more on, how do we extend a two-year timeline to a seven-year timeline? Not outside my life, 30, 40 year timeline that maybeclimate change or some of the larger issues around reef degradation might be realized.
[00:11:34] Entrepreneurially, it was great to be down here to experience what I thought was the issue. What I thought was the issue was going to be a desire for a more long term solution to reef health and reef management. And what I found was slightly different in how they were perceiving the timeline of change that needed to occur.
[00:12:09] It makes me more keen to target a solution that's not in that long-term focus, but probably more focused on a community-based solution that is short to medium term focused. A lot of what I've seen has been challenges around enforcement, permitting, and local management practices and standardizing those.
[00:12:33] And so it's something where I think the real challenge currently is streamlining the communication between dive shops, their mayor's offices, and then the community of mayors and how they collectively standardize marine protected area practices.
[00:12:51] There's certainly something there around letting those groups talk to one another in a more cohesive way that's not a bimonthly meeting where everyone forgets what they talked about.
[00:13:02] Two things that I would love for people to understand about my experience would be bring a lens of nuance to emerging markets and how they make choices and confront challenges around their own country. I think it's very easy to come from a Western perspective and think that something is so easy to implement and that there's always an easy solution.
[00:13:31] Being on the ground, I was excited by the challenges and the nuance that they'd already considered around these resources and come to different conclusions, I think, than maybe I would have come to, or maybe the scientific community might come to. And just to bring that critical lens to everyone's making hopefully rational economic decisions with the caveat of timelines are different for a lot of people.
[00:13:57] Secondarily,just getting out there and doing it. I think if you see a problem and you even think that you've got 10% of a solution, go test it. It takes not a lot of time and it's an email away. It's a friend's friend who you know, on LinkedIn, who can talk with you for 30 minutes and tell you whether this is a great idea or the worst idea they've ever heard, or become your co-founder. Probably some of the best spent time you'll have in your life is thinking about ideas, getting together in a group and really stressing and pushing the change you maybe could have on the world.
[00:14:48] Host: The Levy Inspiration Grant Program is made possible through the generous support of Larry and Carol Levy and is managed by the Entrepreneurship program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. To learn more about the Levy Inspiration Grant Program and other ways we support student entrepreneurs, visit our website at kell.gg/entrepreneurship. That's kell.gg/ entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Thanks for listening.
