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Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's your weird lady uncle who sometimes finds
Speaker 3: Rhese's pieces in the pockets of blazers she hasn't worn
Speaker 3: in weeks and eats some Allie board. Now I'm kind
Speaker 3: of excited for you. You get to listen to this
Speaker 3: episode for the first time. It's all a bout to happen.
Speaker 3: Now I've already heard the conversation twice maybe three times
Speaker 3: now and edits but you haven't even heard it once,
Speaker 3: and it's amazing. So it's about the earth and also
Speaker 3: saving it. Now, in the coming weeks, we have episodes
Speaker 3: about ants and Egyptian mummies and crime and crow funerals
Speaker 3: and breast health. But last week's episode was on oceanology,
Speaker 3: and we really got a glimpse of how sick we've
Speaker 3: made the seas, and I heard from a lot of
Speaker 3: you that it was inspiring and informative, so I thought
Speaker 3: that could be the one punch, and this is the
Speaker 3: two punch. So this week we're following up with another
Speaker 3: eco episode that's really really colorful and adventurous and inspiring,
Speaker 3: and its gadget driven and it will restore your faith
Speaker 3: in the future even more, I think, so, I hope.
Speaker 3: So this one is such a weird ology because it
Speaker 3: might be one of the newest ologies out there, but
Speaker 3: it's also at the intersection of nature and the future
Speaker 3: and machines and animals and brainiac do goodery, all kind
Speaker 3: of suspended in an atmosphere of adventure. So this dude
Speaker 3: has good intentions a truly boggling capacity with technology and
Speaker 3: some stories. Dude has stories. But first, you know, I
Speaker 3: do a little effusive thinking up top, and I just
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Speaker 3: It adds up and keeps it going. For the last year,
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Speaker 3: sound cards, things like that. Speaking of buying ologies, meerch
Speaker 3: dot com has all new back to school items like
Speaker 3: backpacks printed with sharp and coffee mugs about trains, and
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Speaker 3: minutes and it just feels like a good deed. It
Speaker 3: doesn't cost a time. Also, I lurk around the Apple
Speaker 3: podcast reviews and yeah, I take a peek and each
Speaker 3: week I read a fresh one just to prove it.
Speaker 3: And this week I want to thank de Hepting for
Speaker 3: saying I'm wicked stoked about this podcast. Y'all. It's every
Speaker 3: NERD's dream come true. The podcast is essential because it
Speaker 3: makes science fun. You'll even pick up useful phrases. I
Speaker 3: recently worked a boy Howdie into a presentation. I gave
Speaker 3: it work last week, So thank you de Hepting for
Speaker 3: your wicked good boy Howdy slip, keep doing it, Okay,
Speaker 3: Conservation technology ward, what is this all about? What kind
Speaker 3: of word sandwich is this? Oh, it's a good one.
Speaker 3: It's a real fluff or nutter of anology, you guys.
Speaker 3: So conservation in this sense refers to that of the
Speaker 3: earth or plants or animals, and techne comes from the
Speaker 3: Greek for art or craft, so it's the art of
Speaker 3: saving the world, no biggie. Now. This conservation technologist was
Speaker 3: recommended by our lepidopterologist Phil Torres aka Philly t Exoskeleators,
Speaker 3: and it turns out he also knows last week's oceanologist,
Speaker 3: doctor Ayana Johnson, so he runs in some great nerd circles.
Speaker 3: He started the nonprofit Conservatify, which makes open source technology
Speaker 3: to very broadly help save the planet. He's also a
Speaker 3: fellow at the National Geographic Society. He's been on expeditions
Speaker 3: all over the world, and in this episode we talk
Speaker 3: about tracking gorillas in the Congo, taking the pulse of
Speaker 3: Canadian glaciers, working with indigenous communities in the Amazon to
Speaker 3: monitor logging, some shark tech, and also fishing vests and
Speaker 3: hippo butts. To score this interview, I trecked all the
Speaker 3: way to the remote reaches of downtown Los Angeles to
Speaker 3: see his really cool lab slash office, and I made
Speaker 3: him give me a tour first, which really consisted of
Speaker 3: me like just pointing at objects and asking him what
Speaker 3: they were. So please shore up your hip waiters and
Speaker 3: roll up your sleeves to dig into a really wonderful
Speaker 3: chat with conservation technologist Shaw Selby. Okay, so you're gonna
Speaker 3: give me a tour of your lab. I walked by
Speaker 3: and I just saw that there's a whiteboard and all
Speaker 3: it says on it just suns like, okay, give me
Speaker 3: the tour.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So yeah, so this is you know, this
Speaker 4: is our lab. It's kind of in between like a
Speaker 4: maker space or a hacker space.
Speaker 3: And now you also have a gurgling, algae filled ter areum.
Speaker 4: Let's go look at it. Yeah, so this is it's
Speaker 4: just a regular fish tank, but we've kind of allowed
Speaker 4: it to grow into this ecosystem in and of itself.
Speaker 4: But we wanted to do that because we build these
Speaker 4: sensors that can test water quality in different parts of
Speaker 4: the world, and if we were just using a regular
Speaker 4: fish tank, the data would be boring, so we allow
Speaker 4: it to kind of grow and get all this weird stuff.
Speaker 3: So for visual reference, imagine a small, gurgling aquarium, thick
Speaker 3: with algae strands, kind of like if Beetlejuice dropped his
Speaker 3: wig into a fish tank, but more vibrant and alive
Speaker 3: and with electronics submerged.
Speaker 4: And you can see there's a whole bunch of sensors
Speaker 4: that are sitting in there now, and we have some
Speaker 4: of them connected to some of our electronics monitoring it.
Speaker 4: And this is the sort of setup that we end
Speaker 4: up taking and deploying in places like Botswana or the
Speaker 4: Amazon rainforest or some of the other places that we work.
Speaker 3: And you're testing it in a fish tank in your
Speaker 3: office in Onetown, Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's I like to call it our ecosystem.
Speaker 3: Pardon, pardon, fishank, I'm an ecosystem? How dare I? And
Speaker 3: then you have let's see, I'm just going to start
Speaker 3: naming things off. It appears you have mallets, hammers, soldering equipment. Yeah, correct, yeah,
Speaker 3: more microscopes. What are you doing with all this? Are
Speaker 3: you tinkering with technology to make it work better for you?
Speaker 4: You know? We use this setup to build the technology
Speaker 4: that we take out on expedition. It's it's actually a
Speaker 4: lot of the same gear that you would find in
Speaker 4: like your local maker space, because we use a lot
Speaker 4: of the same methods that that makers use when they're
Speaker 4: building their projects. But we do all the building and
Speaker 4: the testing and everything here before we take it out
Speaker 4: on expedition.
Speaker 3: Do you three D print things?
Speaker 4: We do? We have two three D printers, we have
Speaker 4: laser cutter. It's a lot of fun stuff.
Speaker 3: Dang, this is awesome. Okay, let's sit down. Okay, okay,
Speaker 3: let's get to the interview. What's Shaw's job?
Speaker 4: So I'm a conservation technologist, which it's actually a title
Speaker 4: that didn't really exist before I sort of made it up,
Speaker 4: and fortunately now other people are calling themselves conservation technologists.
Speaker 4: So it's become more of a thing. The work that
Speaker 4: I do came from stuff that I was doing when
Speaker 4: I was going to grad school at Stanford. I studied
Speaker 4: engineering in university. I always only wanted to be an engineer,
Speaker 4: That's all I wanted to do. But I always also
Speaker 4: felt that engineering kind of had this great role that
Speaker 4: it could do some amazing things in the world, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, it helps us, you know, protect people, solve diseases,
Speaker 4: build this, you know, these cities and everything that we
Speaker 4: live in. And so I thought that there was like
Speaker 4: a kind of more profound work that I could do
Speaker 4: with engineering. So I was always searching a.
Speaker 3: Bit so little aside. Shaw got his bachelor's at UC
Speaker 3: Riverside in chemical engineering and his master's at USC in
Speaker 3: systems architecture, and he also studied engineering at Stanford. Now
Speaker 3: in grad school, he started working with an environmental nonprofit
Speaker 3: using technology to address illegal fishing, and he was like, ooh,
Speaker 3: will I can use gadgetry to help address the Earth's
Speaker 3: this is a thing.
Speaker 4: And from then on everything just kind of took off.
Speaker 4: And so I was looking at ways that we could
Speaker 4: use new technologies. You know, like mobile technologies and drones
Speaker 4: and satellites and all sorts of stuff like that to
Speaker 4: help to find people who are fishing in places that
Speaker 4: they shouldn't be fishing.
Speaker 3: And then it kind of expanded to doing work in
Speaker 3: a lot of different areas in terms of like conservation
Speaker 3: and ecology and saving the general planet from just just
Speaker 3: current fuckedness that's happening, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, totally. And so a lot of those technologies
Speaker 4: that I was looking at for that one very specific
Speaker 4: problem could be applied to other problems as well, And
Speaker 4: so I started branching out more and more and reaching
Speaker 4: out to beyond just ocean conservation stuff and to terrestrial stuff.
Speaker 4: And so now the work that we do is kind
Speaker 4: of a mix of both.
Speaker 3: Take me back to your childhood. At what point did
Speaker 3: you know you were good at engineering or mechanics or
Speaker 3: had a passion for environmental things. Did you take like
Speaker 3: toasters apart?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Actually, you know, I was that kid that would
Speaker 4: take things apart. I was very curious about what was
Speaker 4: inside of you know, it actually turns out that I
Speaker 4: was very curious about what was inside of my dad's
Speaker 4: expensive audio equipment, Like, uh, why did we have this try,
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, but like, you know, credit to my dad,
Speaker 4: instead of getting angry at me, he would teach me
Speaker 4: how to put it back together. And I feel like
Speaker 4: that put that little engineering bug in me at an
Speaker 4: early age.
Speaker 3: Oh what a good dude, Yeah, what kind of I
Speaker 3: love that you went for the expensive audio quiber like
Speaker 3: not a Walkman from like nineteen eighty six, but you're like, oh,
Speaker 3: the new surround sound. What did you take apart?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean it was his amplifier and like who his
Speaker 4: whole setup that I ended up kind of taking it
Speaker 4: apart initially, and then we would we would just start
Speaker 4: to take other things apart and learn about how they worked.
Speaker 4: My dad wasn't even an engineer, but he he was
Speaker 4: very caurious about that stuff all the time. So we'd
Speaker 4: explore it together. And I knew from then on that
Speaker 4: I wanted to, you know, be somehow involved in technology
Speaker 4: and making things like that.
Speaker 3: And then when you were deciding what your major was
Speaker 3: in college or deciding what your path was, I understand,
Speaker 3: and it seems to be well known that you were
Speaker 3: just like a casual rocket scientist professionally for a number
Speaker 3: of years. Like how did you go from you know,
Speaker 3: being a curious kid who took apart amplifiers and probably
Speaker 3: like made them even hell a sweeter before putting them
Speaker 3: back together. To being a rocket scientist.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I did that for I worked as a
Speaker 4: rocket scient I don't like saying rocket science it sounds
Speaker 4: but okay, So my official title was I was a
Speaker 4: spacecraft propulsion engineer, so I would work on all the
Speaker 4: rocket engines and tanks and everything that would move around
Speaker 4: satellites when they're in space. And I did that at
Speaker 4: Boeing for ten years, and so I ended up going
Speaker 4: to school for chemical engineering, and coming out of school,
Speaker 4: I was looking around at the kinds of jobs that
Speaker 4: a chemical engineer could get, and the only thing that
Speaker 4: could find at that moment was working in waste treatment plants,
Speaker 4: which is a very important role. But it didn't I
Speaker 4: didn't feel very inspired by working in waste treatment at
Speaker 4: that moment.
Speaker 3: By the way, I have someone on deck to do this,
Speaker 3: a shall we say, reclamation hydrologist named Lori. I mean,
Speaker 3: I want to know about waste water and what happens,
Speaker 3: where does it go, what do we do with it? It's
Speaker 3: so important. Okay, but that's anology for another time. But okay,
Speaker 3: So Shaw was less interested in underground water works and
Speaker 3: instead looked to the sky for his first post college job,
Speaker 3: and he says he sent out letters and reached out
Speaker 3: to as many people as he could, and he landed
Speaker 3: a long running and very successful gig at a little
Speaker 3: space place called Boeing, where he worked on satellites, including
Speaker 3: thirteen satellite launches. He said, twelve of which made it
Speaker 3: into space. And I was curious. I had to ask, like,
Speaker 3: how does it feel when one does not make it?
Speaker 4: And so we sat around for about an hour hour
Speaker 4: and a half, everyone knowing some thing kind of went wrong,
Speaker 4: but we didn't get the official word from them until then.
Speaker 4: So people are starting to get more and more depressed.
Speaker 4: And finally we just all ended up at a bar.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you're like hot winks anyone, Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 3: But I mean, that's part of science is failures. I mean,
Speaker 3: everything that you do that isn't a huge success out
Speaker 3: of the gate, like literally out of an out of
Speaker 3: a launch gate, you end up learning from right totally.
Speaker 4: I mean, and you know, I would say even more
Speaker 4: so now failure is part of our process. I mean
Speaker 4: we're trying to do some really hard things here at
Speaker 4: this lab where we're trying to bring technology in places
Speaker 4: where technology doesn't want to be, you know, in the
Speaker 4: middle of wetlands, at the bottom of the ocean, all
Speaker 4: sorts of places where the environment is drastic, and we're
Speaker 4: trying to do it in a way that's you know,
Speaker 4: affordable for anyone to use or for scientists that are
Speaker 4: outside of kind of the richest universities in the world
Speaker 4: to have access to. So that means sometimes things fail.
Speaker 4: You have to be okay with that.
Speaker 3: And now, when you left Boeing, what was it like
Speaker 3: to be like, I've been here for a long time.
Speaker 3: I'm good at what I do. It's time to move
Speaker 3: on to something that is maybe more like enriching on
Speaker 3: a personal level. What was that decision like? Did you
Speaker 3: just like wring your hands about it for a year
Speaker 3: or were you just like boom, I made a decision yesterday,
Speaker 3: it's happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It was a bit of a process, as these
Speaker 4: things tend to be. You know, I was kind of
Speaker 4: known at Boeing as the do good or engineer. I
Speaker 4: worked with engineers without borders for a long time, and
Speaker 4: then this stuff started happening. And towards the end of it,
Speaker 4: towards my last year at Boeing, I was going on
Speaker 4: expeditions all the time. I'd be gone for a month
Speaker 4: in Africa or something, and it just got to a
Speaker 4: point where it's like it very clearly made sense for
Speaker 4: me to move forward into this other one. The thing
Speaker 4: that kind of lit the fire underneath was I was
Speaker 4: offered a fellowship at National Geographic Society. So basically, you know,
Speaker 4: it's a very hard thing, a very prestigious thing to
Speaker 4: be able to get to be a fellow there. And
Speaker 4: so once I got it, that came with funding that
Speaker 4: allowed me to start my nonprofit and do this full time.
Speaker 4: But I had been doing this work for a decade before.
Speaker 3: What was it like when you gave your notice?
Speaker 4: It was very exciting.
Speaker 3: What did you do? Did you write it on a
Speaker 3: cake and be like, hey, guys, there's cake in the
Speaker 3: break room And it's.
Speaker 4: Like, I'm out. No, I mean, I remember I walked
Speaker 4: into my boss's office and I sat down next to
Speaker 4: her and I started to tell her, and she's just
Speaker 4: like I already knew, Yeah, I knew this was coming.
Speaker 4: This is like a surprise. So she said, this is fine.
Speaker 4: They actually, you know, Boeing really liked me being there,
Speaker 4: so they offered to put me on a extended leave
Speaker 4: of absence just to see if things worked out, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I never went back, so they worked out.
Speaker 3: So can you tell me you work on so many
Speaker 3: things in so many parts of the world, can you
Speaker 3: give me a little bit of a rundown?
Speaker 4: Sure? Yeah, So yeah we do. We do a lot
Speaker 4: of stuff and it's quite exciting. The kind of the
Speaker 4: longest running project that we've had was what has now
Speaker 4: become a major initiative national joke called the Okavangle Wilderness Project.
Speaker 4: And so that's that's the project that's in Botswana and
Speaker 4: maybe an Angola, and it's really focused around how we
Speaker 4: can better protect the Okavango Delta in Botswana, which.
Speaker 3: Is where a lot of animals live. It's very rich
Speaker 3: with wildlife.
Speaker 4: Yeah, incredibly rich with wildlife, and it's just just this
Speaker 4: beautiful wetland that it's a series of rivers that flows
Speaker 4: into the middle of the Kalahari Desert and just becomes
Speaker 4: this paradise. I mean, there's so many, so much wildlife
Speaker 4: there that some of those days I'd be in my
Speaker 4: tent I'd open up my tent, I'd walk out, and
Speaker 4: it felt like you were in the middle of a
Speaker 4: Disney movie. There's elephants hanging out with giraffes and wildebeeste
Speaker 4: and I mean zebras everything. It's just it's amazing.
Speaker 3: You know, bird lands on your shoulder, butterfly comes and
Speaker 3: offers you coffee. You're like, what's happening totally.
Speaker 4: So what we're doing with that project was it's actually
Speaker 4: pretty interesting. You know. Traditionally, when scientists want to kind
Speaker 4: of protect an area or understand an area better, they
Speaker 4: do these biodiversity assessments. So they go in these expeditions
Speaker 4: through the area and they count wildlife and they take
Speaker 4: other kinds of scientific readings. But the way that had
Speaker 4: always been done in the past was they would write
Speaker 4: their stuff down in notepads or something, and then they
Speaker 4: would come back it all go in some Excel file
Speaker 4: or something on their desktop, and then it gets locked
Speaker 4: away and eventually the scientists would want to publish it,
Speaker 4: so it'd take them a couple of years to publish
Speaker 4: the papers on it. And we thought, you know what,
Speaker 4: that whole process isn't really welcoming to anyone outside of
Speaker 4: the science field. Right there's scientists are going to these
Speaker 4: amazing places all the time and they're not really sharing
Speaker 4: what they're seeing, and we wanted to try and facilitate
Speaker 4: a better way to do that. So that's what became
Speaker 4: the Okavongo Wilderness Project. We thought, we can build these
Speaker 4: technology tools that allow the scientists who are on expedition
Speaker 4: to be able to share everything that they're seeing and
Speaker 4: all the data they're collecting absolutely live, like immediately as
Speaker 4: it's happening. And so with other partners, we built this
Speaker 4: website called into the Okavango that you would go to
Speaker 4: while we were on expedition and you would see where
Speaker 4: where we were at. You'd see the pictures were taking,
Speaker 4: you'd hear the audio of the places we were at.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you went to the website, you'd see
Speaker 4: a little bubble that had an on it, and that
Speaker 4: was me traveling down expedition as we're going.
Speaker 3: That's better than watching Coachella live on YouTube and avoiding
Speaker 3: having to wear sunblock. So for more on this, nat
Speaker 3: GEO made the Dock into the Okavango, which came out
Speaker 3: this April, and it details the challenges of doing research
Speaker 3: in the region. From dried up riverbeds to leftover land
Speaker 3: mines from ankle As Civil War. It's also a really
Speaker 3: really great portrait of the teams going out doing the
Speaker 3: work from tons of local scientists and guides and then
Speaker 3: researchers from all over the world with different specialties. And
Speaker 3: of course I started poking around the Instagram into the
Speaker 3: ogabango for visuals, and one recent post is a stunning
Speaker 3: photo of a field scientist writhing from having a tick
Speaker 3: embedded in his ear. It was clasping onto his ear drum.
Speaker 3: But mostly there's just gorgeous photos of wildlife. So in summary,
Speaker 3: it's beautiful and it's no easy work. So what was
Speaker 3: Shaw up to there?
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, it was cool, and we would gather all
Speaker 4: sorts of data because we were just curious about what
Speaker 4: would come out of gathering all this data and seeing
Speaker 4: these interesting stuff. So I built sensors that would measure
Speaker 4: water quality and weather. We took three hundred and sixty
Speaker 4: degree photos, you know, through the whole expedition, so you
Speaker 4: could put on VR goggles and see. We even took
Speaker 4: the measurements of the heartbeats of the researchers while they
Speaker 4: were on expedition. We gathered as much data as we
Speaker 4: possibly could, and we had it all streaming up live
Speaker 4: via satellite. And part of what we were trying to
Speaker 4: do with that project was was outreach, right reach out
Speaker 4: to the public. Explain to them what a wonderful place,
Speaker 4: this is why it's so special. As part of the
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen expedition, the team was in a part of
Speaker 4: Angola that was very difficult. It was like rough, you know,
Speaker 4: the rivers were windy, boats kept oncapsizing their bees everywhere.
Speaker 4: It was just a very brutal part of the expedition
Speaker 4: and you know a lot of fires and land mines
Speaker 4: and all sorts of things that you have to avoid,
Speaker 4: and so it kind of in the nature of sharing
Speaker 4: everything with the public, we complained about it on Twitter,
Speaker 4: you know, we told everyone about what a horrible time
Speaker 4: we were having at that time. Well, so one of
Speaker 4: our followers actually ended up seeing that complaint and tweeted
Speaker 4: us down this message of support, and that follower was
Speaker 4: Samantha Christoph Ferretti, who was a European Space Agency astronaut
Speaker 4: on the International Space Station and following our expedition from space.
Speaker 4: So yeah, so she took a picture of the delta
Speaker 4: and tweeted us down this message of support and good luck.
Speaker 4: And let me tell you that was like the most
Speaker 4: uplifting thing you can imagine.
Speaker 3: I look this up and yes, Astro Samantha tweeted down
Speaker 3: from freaking space a you are here kind of aerial
Speaker 3: shot of this massive, glimmering river deltsa this network of
Speaker 3: like tributaries fanning out over the wetlands. It was taken
Speaker 3: from two hundred and fifty miles above Earth and beamed
Speaker 3: down via Twitter to the scientists and guides who dragging
Speaker 3: their heavy canoes over riverbeds fighting bees. And yes, the
Speaker 3: whole thing made me cry. Someone in space is like,
Speaker 3: good luck with the bees. You're like, what is life
Speaker 3: right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah? It was unreal. It was unreal.
Speaker 3: What other parts of the world have you been to
Speaker 3: and what kind of projects have you done in them?
Speaker 3: Because I can't even imagine your passport, dude, Like it's
Speaker 3: got to be how many shots do you have to
Speaker 3: get a year? Where have you been?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I actually I've been vaccinated for everything
Speaker 4: I didn't have. I have cholera. I have a color
Speaker 4: of vaccine which most people don't have.
Speaker 3: I don't even know you to get on to that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: When I got it at the travel clinic, they were like,
Speaker 4: are you sure you need this? Because nobody ever gets this,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, yeah, I think I need it.
Speaker 3: It's take an off menu item in and out. That's
Speaker 3: like hit me with the collar. They're like, ooh, this' stup. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: where else have you been?
Speaker 4: So, I mean this year, we you know, we've done
Speaker 4: some work in the Amazon rainforest and so that's a
Speaker 4: big project that we have to It's basically around citizen
Speaker 4: science in the Amazon, and we're trying to track migratory
Speaker 4: fishes as they travel through and so Cornell's Lab of
Speaker 4: Ornithology built this app to allow them to track the fishes.
Speaker 4: And then we're building sensors that we're going to put
Speaker 4: through the Amazon, and we're trying to do it to
Speaker 4: better protect those fishes that you know, there's some fishes
Speaker 4: that start in Brazil and end up in Proue and
Speaker 4: go back to Brazil. I mean, the longest freshwater migration
Speaker 4: of any fish in the world is in the Amazon.
Speaker 4: What that It's thousands of kilometers. Yeah, And the amazing
Speaker 4: thing about it is, you know, right now they can
Speaker 4: do that, and that fish is important to every single
Speaker 4: indigenous community along the way. But there's a lot of
Speaker 4: plans to put things like dams in the Amazon, and
Speaker 4: if you were to dam up a lot of those rivers,
Speaker 4: it ends up stopping those migratory fishes from getting through,
Speaker 4: and so we're trying to document things now before they
Speaker 4: start to change. Another trip that I recently did, I
Speaker 4: went to the Republic of Congo and so we went
Speaker 4: to Odzala National Park, which is very close to Gubbon,
Speaker 4: and the work we were doing there was with one
Speaker 4: of the world's leading researchers on Westland Lowland guerrillas, Oh
Speaker 4: my god, which was pretty amazing stuff. So I came
Speaker 4: in to use drones to help to map out those
Speaker 4: sorts of areas. The reason why, you know, the these
Speaker 4: gorillas have this very interesting behavior around certain types of
Speaker 4: trees where they like to dig up parts of the
Speaker 4: route and eat them, and we wanted to find out
Speaker 4: where all those trees are so we could try and
Speaker 4: see where all the gorillas are. And that's a very
Speaker 4: difficult thing to do if you're just hiking through rainforest, right,
Speaker 4: not a land, a lot of trees exactly very dense,
Speaker 4: hard to see. Yeah, I mean it's it's just very difficult.
Speaker 4: But with a tool like a drone, you could fly
Speaker 4: over the whole area and you can map out that
Speaker 4: area and then you can like either individually go in
Speaker 4: the in the model or the picture and identify those trees.
Speaker 4: Or we can even build like artificial intelligence that will
Speaker 4: kind of go through all the data for us and
Speaker 4: pull out the stuff that we need to do for it.
Speaker 3: So Shaw is using technology to preserve areas from technology,
Speaker 3: it's kind of like an inoculation, like a little bit
Speaker 3: of the virus in a vaccine. Maybe I don't know,
Speaker 3: as perhaps the first ever conservation technologist on the planet,
Speaker 3: does this intersection ever befuddle people? How misunderstood is your
Speaker 3: field where you're using technology to help the planet when
Speaker 3: technology is kind of to blame for the problems of
Speaker 3: the planet. Like, do you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, I mean I think so. You know. The
Speaker 4: crazy thing about it was when I first started working
Speaker 4: on this stuff, I know a lot of people didn't
Speaker 4: get it right. I mean, some people got it, But
Speaker 4: when I was in a room of conservationists, they were
Speaker 4: all saying, you know, we don't need technology. We could
Speaker 4: do this the old fashioned way. When I was talking
Speaker 4: to technologists, they were like, how are you going to
Speaker 4: make any money off of that? That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 4: You know, nobody really got what we're trying to do.
Speaker 4: But now it's really changed. Now it's to a point
Speaker 4: where every single major environmental NGO out there has technology programs. Now,
Speaker 4: technology in the science and conservation space is not entirely new.
Speaker 4: You know that it has been used there in the past,
Speaker 4: but the way it's been used has either been one
Speaker 4: of two ways. One is, you know, you have a
Speaker 4: PhD student that needs to measure something weird, and as
Speaker 4: part of their PhD they develop some technology, but usually
Speaker 4: you know, it's developed by a biologist. It's not necessarily
Speaker 4: optimizer using the newest kind of technological approaches, so as
Speaker 4: a results, it's expensive. The other way is you would
Speaker 4: buy it from one of the very few companies out
Speaker 4: there making this sort of thing. And then again it's
Speaker 4: expensive because these companies are only selling it to a
Speaker 4: handful of people.
Speaker 3: So side note. Computers, of course, get better and better
Speaker 3: every year with According to a one figure, I saw
Speaker 3: a one trillionfold increase in computing power from nineteen fifty
Speaker 3: six to twenty fifteen and then upwards from there.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: Shaw says every year he sees a rise in the
Speaker 3: availability of tech to help out with nature. I mean, like,
Speaker 3: remember when our tiny purse computers aka phones couldn't even
Speaker 3: do portrait mode, and we didn't even have a robot
Speaker 3: with a microphone in our living room so we could shout,
Speaker 3: please play me some solid nineties jams. I'm sad today
Speaker 3: just every year keeps getting better.
Speaker 4: So now we're in this like really amazing time with
Speaker 4: like things like you know, smartphones and the maker movement
Speaker 4: and all this where the price of developing technology is
Speaker 4: just dropped to the floor. It's become incredibly cheap to
Speaker 4: do that sort of stuff. We end up leveraging a
Speaker 4: lot of that maker technology, a lot of the open
Speaker 4: source technologies to go into these places and implement solutions
Speaker 4: and also work with the communities there and allow those
Speaker 4: solutions to become the community solutions and not you know,
Speaker 4: some random guy from the US that's flying in and
Speaker 4: saying you should do this better, right, it like help
Speaker 4: to build capacity in those areas overall, And do you feel.
Speaker 3: Like conservation technology the main thing that it can do
Speaker 3: is gather informations that we can better protect the environment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean for the most part now it is right,
Speaker 4: and it's starting to transition a little bit. But the
Speaker 4: biggest threats that we had to the planet, well, the
Speaker 4: biggest start to the planet is humans and the impact
Speaker 4: that we have. But the threat behind that related to
Speaker 4: conservation is the fact that we hadn't ever ever been
Speaker 4: able to quantify it very well. Right, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of parts of this world where anybody who wants to
Speaker 4: do anything that's bad, like poaching or anything illegal, nobody's
Speaker 4: ever going to know about it. Right. It's just if
Speaker 4: you go out to the middle of the high seas,
Speaker 4: it's like the wild West. People are just doing whatever
Speaker 4: they want out there, you know, because they could always
Speaker 4: get away from it. And so now you know, the
Speaker 4: first part of conservation technology is how can we start
Speaker 4: to document what's actually happening in this planet and gather
Speaker 4: this data and then also create a baseline so we
Speaker 4: can see how things are changing over time.
Speaker 3: So by gathering data and monitoring, scientists can catch things
Speaker 3: like heavy metals in a river when it's still early
Speaker 3: instead of just seeing the effects of say, crocodiles dying off,
Speaker 3: and I know some of you are like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not super concerned about saving a crocodile because they
Speaker 3: would literally eat my butt off my body if given
Speaker 3: the chance. But they are part of the ecosystem, and
Speaker 3: they do have birthdays and feelings, and if their tiny
Speaker 3: claw hands could hold pencils, they would probably arnal. Also,
Speaker 3: isn't it weird that every crocodile has a birthday and
Speaker 3: thus an astrological sign. Okay, I'm sorry, but I had
Speaker 3: to figure this out. So in the Southern Hemisphere, crocodile
Speaker 3: mating season is between November and March. They're out wild
Speaker 3: and for a considerable time, and eggs take three months
Speaker 3: to hatch, so I think, by my calculations, most crocodiles
Speaker 3: are probably geminised. I mean, anyway, what about rivers without crocodiles?
Speaker 3: Do places like the US do they have those kinds
Speaker 3: of sensors in our rivers? And like, how well monitored
Speaker 3: is it in different countries?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean not really. You would think that the
Speaker 4: US would have a lot of them, but because of
Speaker 4: the regulations and the strength of the industrial sector here,
Speaker 4: a lot of those places are not monitored, and so
Speaker 4: that's where why we see things. You know, bad things happen,
Speaker 4: environmental issues happen in this country from time to time.
Speaker 4: In other parts of the world, it's not monitored at all.
Speaker 4: And it's a lot easier for us to go in
Speaker 4: and kind of install all these sensors because the communities
Speaker 4: where we're installing them, they'd love to have this sort
Speaker 4: of stuff. But you know, when I was just in
Speaker 4: the Amazon, we were talking to a lot of the
Speaker 4: indigenous communities there, people who are our partners in implementing
Speaker 4: some of these ideas, and they were so frustrated because
Speaker 4: of the oil spills and the other kind of chemical
Speaker 4: spills that happen in that Amazon, and the fact that
Speaker 4: they have absolutely no way to prove that it's happening.
Speaker 4: You know, when it happens, the government says, no, that's
Speaker 4: actually not that. Nothing happened there, right they and they
Speaker 4: brush over it. And so these these communities feel marginalized
Speaker 4: like they can't do anything about it. We want to
Speaker 4: build sensors to give to them, to allow to say, hey, no,
Speaker 4: actually this is actually happening. And right when that starts
Speaker 4: to happen, it automatically posts to the Internet, so there's
Speaker 4: no like take that information, give it to someone and
Speaker 4: then it gets swept under the rug somewhere, right, that
Speaker 4: information goes straight to the world to see what's actually
Speaker 4: happening there. So it's quite a powerful thing.
Speaker 3: And what other kinds of technology are you using? We
Speaker 3: already know drones, gorillas, sensors, fish, Like, what else is
Speaker 3: what else are you using to help what?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so we're using sensors in other ways
Speaker 4: as well, so we're like one example is a project
Speaker 4: that we had in Canada and Banff National Park. This
Speaker 4: project was a partnership with the City of Calgary and
Speaker 4: Parks Canada, and basically what we were doing was monitoring
Speaker 4: a glacier that was melting. But instead of using kind
Speaker 4: of the big expensive equipment that's used in other parts
Speaker 4: of the world to do that, we built low cost sensors.
Speaker 4: It was pretty much the same sensors that you find
Speaker 4: in your cell phone that can tell when you turn
Speaker 4: your cell phone and move it. So we would put
Speaker 4: those around the glacier and we could be able to
Speaker 4: tell in a three dimensional perspective how the glacier's melting
Speaker 4: over time.
Speaker 5: Whoa.
Speaker 3: So you're like, oh, it's shifting to the north, which
Speaker 3: means that this space of the glacier.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, yeah, yeah, whoa. And the cool thing about
Speaker 4: that project is that, you know, all of that data
Speaker 4: is streamed back live. So we built this little observatory
Speaker 4: on the glacier that collects that data and it sends
Speaker 4: it back to a lodge, and that lodge it posts
Speaker 4: it on the Internet and then so we have it
Speaker 4: and we're giving it to glaciologists to do their research
Speaker 4: on it. But they're also going to take that data
Speaker 4: and they're going to stream it to this installation in Calgary.
Speaker 4: And so in downtown Calgary, they're building a park that
Speaker 4: looks like the glacier that we're protecting, and all the
Speaker 4: movement and melting and everything is translated to lights and
Speaker 4: sounds to that park. So people will end up seeing
Speaker 4: that that glacier is melting over time. And the reason
Speaker 4: why the people of Calgary care is because that glacier
Speaker 4: is named the Bow Glacier. The Bow Glacier feeds the
Speaker 4: Bow River, which ultimately flows right through Calgary. So once
Speaker 4: that glacier melts, it's going to impact the people there
Speaker 4: because they're going to have a dry river. Now it's
Speaker 4: not going to flow anymore.
Speaker 3: So imagine a sleek, modern building in downtown Calgary. A
Speaker 3: series of vertical light tubes display almost like an ekg
Speaker 3: of glacier shifts and cracks and pops and movement, while
Speaker 3: all these ambient sounds play in a line of speakers nearby.
Speaker 3: Without contact. You just like walk through and be like,
Speaker 3: oh cool, this is trippy with context knowing that this
Speaker 3: glacier is melting in real time at an alarming rate,
Speaker 3: You're like one sec while I sink to my knees
Speaker 3: and hoarsely cry into my scarf as one does. So
Speaker 3: what happens when people see, oh shit, are glacier's melting? Like,
Speaker 3: does that mean that different legislation gets put in place?
Speaker 3: Does that mean like what practical things do they do
Speaker 3: to be like, uh, we got to save this glacier.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean part of what we like to do.
Speaker 4: It's two ways. One is when we collect this sort
Speaker 4: of data, like like glacier data or other types of
Speaker 4: animal data, we always go to work with the governments
Speaker 4: who are involved with it to show them this is
Speaker 4: what's happening in real time and allow them to use
Speaker 4: that data to do something good. But we also like
Speaker 4: to just put it online for people to see because
Speaker 4: if people see this kind of information get excited about it,
Speaker 4: that can lead to additional pressure that can you know,
Speaker 4: try and force the government to do what's right when
Speaker 4: it comes to that sort of thing. And so those
Speaker 4: are like the two two pronged approach you like to take.
Speaker 3: On things, and then tell me about some other technologies.
Speaker 4: Sure, yeah, So another technology that we're we're working on
Speaker 4: right now is GPS tracking of animals. So you know
Speaker 4: a lot of scientists they like to put these tags
Speaker 4: on animals to understand where animals are going. The great
Speaker 4: thing about putting a tag like that on an animal
Speaker 4: is that you know, once the researchers leave, then the
Speaker 4: animal starts acting actually how the animal acts when people
Speaker 4: aren't around.
Speaker 3: It's like when you bid your lover adieu for the day,
Speaker 3: and then once in solitude, you can finally.
Speaker 4: Fart and we could start to learn some really interesting
Speaker 4: things about them. Researchers have been tagging animals for a
Speaker 4: very long time, but the tags that they use are
Speaker 4: made by just a handful of companies and they're very expensive.
Speaker 4: I have one over here that if you wanted to
Speaker 4: buy it would cost you five thousand dollars to bolts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, are these the radio callers like you see on
Speaker 3: pumas And they're very huge and they have like a
Speaker 3: big antenna sticking out Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the one I have is not is
Speaker 4: not very huge, it's pretty small, but it does have
Speaker 4: a big antenna sticking out of it. And yeah, that's
Speaker 4: exactly what they are. Now they're made. They cost five
Speaker 4: thousand dollars because they're just made by a handful of
Speaker 4: companies that have kind of cornered the market. But the
Speaker 4: amazing thing is we could use that same technology that
Speaker 4: we use for other reasons, you know, the smartphone technology
Speaker 4: and the maker technology, to create low cost versions of
Speaker 4: these open source versions. So we've been working with some
Speaker 4: other collaborators that are also in the conservation technology space
Speaker 4: to develop these sorts of tags.
Speaker 3: So side note, later this year, SHAW is just casually
Speaker 3: heading to Belize and Antarctica to tag sharks and sperm whales,
Speaker 3: just in case you need like a dream job for
Speaker 3: your vision board. Now, how do these aquatic tags work though?
Speaker 3: Is it like smacking a tile on one of them
Speaker 3: and being like.
Speaker 4: Bies, Yeah, well, actually the so the whale one is
Speaker 4: actually really interesting because there's a second component to this project. Traditionally,
Speaker 4: in whale tagging, for those sorts of whales, the best
Speaker 4: way to attach it to the whale is actually they
Speaker 4: essentially put harpoons on the end of it, so they
Speaker 4: end up stabbing it into the whale and as the
Speaker 4: whale dives. Well, the main part of the project is
Speaker 4: around how can we develop a mounting mechanism for this
Speaker 4: tag that is non invasive, that actually doesn't hurt the whale. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so we're trying all sorts of crazy material stuff and
Speaker 4: looking at the way geckos attached to walls and like
Speaker 4: all sorts of things. We have like a lot of
Speaker 4: crazy ideas and a lot of strange materials that we're
Speaker 4: going through now. But ultimately the idea is that this
Speaker 4: thing is going to be able to attach to a
Speaker 4: whale without actually hurting it.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you stabbed me in the butt, I
Speaker 3: would act weird for days, if not forever. Like a
Speaker 3: knife hits me in the butt and then it's like okay,
Speaker 3: go off and be yourself and you're like, no, I
Speaker 3: got to deal with this thing. Through all of this,
Speaker 3: I just can't get over thinking about this one nagging question.
Speaker 3: I'm still trying to like wrap my brain around your passport.
Speaker 3: Every time you mentioned a new country, I'm like, that's
Speaker 3: another stamp, Like is your passport? Did you have extra
Speaker 3: pages in it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I'm actually on a new passport recently, so, I mean
Speaker 4: maybe even the last year or so, but but it's
Speaker 4: filling up pretty good.
Speaker 3: How do you decide which project you're going to be
Speaker 3: working on next? Because you've worked in oceans, you've worked
Speaker 3: in delta's, you've worked in glaciers, like so many different animals.
Speaker 3: How do you know what's next? How do you decide?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, in certain times it would be an idea
Speaker 4: that we have that we want to develop, But I'd
Speaker 4: say ninety percent of the time it's someone who is
Speaker 4: working in an area that needs something and can't afford it,
Speaker 4: or or like has an idea for something new and
Speaker 4: comes to us and we helped develop it. You know,
Speaker 4: we could stay be experts in the technologies and how
Speaker 4: the technologies can help conservation, but we don't necessarily have
Speaker 4: to be experts in grulus, right, And so a lot
Speaker 4: of the projects are started by those people coming up
Speaker 4: to us and saying, Hey, I have this crazy idea.
Speaker 4: Do you think it could work? You know? And the
Speaker 4: fun thing about having a lab like this is we
Speaker 4: could take a week and we could see if it
Speaker 4: would work. You know, we have a bunch of electronics
Speaker 4: in here and three D printers and things like that,
Speaker 4: and so we'll just we'll quickly prototype something and see
Speaker 4: if it looks like there's a possibility there. If it is,
Speaker 4: then we you know, will either like go and find
Speaker 4: grant funding from a foundation or something, or will wait
Speaker 4: until an opportunity when we can actually go and deploy
Speaker 4: these things.
Speaker 3: How important is waterproofing and what you do.
Speaker 4: It's very important. So I mean, you know, we're in
Speaker 4: some of these places we're putting electronics like it just
Speaker 4: will not live there unless you very you know, waterprove
Speaker 4: it very well. I mean wetlands, rainforests, things like that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's just got to be it's got to be very
Speaker 4: well built and engineered to be able to kind of
Speaker 4: withstand that.
Speaker 3: Shaw is also always looking at how to keep costs low,
Speaker 3: and he says he wants to move beyond the days
Speaker 3: of good science just coming out of well funded universities
Speaker 3: and empower more people locally to keep collecting and sharing
Speaker 3: environmental data.
Speaker 4: The other thing we really try and do is work
Speaker 4: with scientists that are in other parts of the world.
Speaker 4: You know. Traditionally, scientists that go out into the field
Speaker 4: have gone into these countries, studied a bunch of stuff
Speaker 4: and then and then left and gone back to their universities.
Speaker 4: And a good friend of mine, she calls this parachute science,
Speaker 4: you know, because it doesn't really help the community that's involved,
Speaker 4: you know, And so we try and partner with people
Speaker 4: in the community and engineering university from that country, or
Speaker 4: scientists that are in the field that are from the
Speaker 4: country themselves.
Speaker 3: What is the craziest thing you've seen out in the field.
Speaker 3: What's the craziest moment where you're like, damn, if I
Speaker 3: ever read a biography, this is going in.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I would say one of my favorite moments
Speaker 4: is something that actually, you know, I do a lot
Speaker 4: of talking to like classrooms for STEM stuff, and this
Speaker 4: one kills with the little kids. So the work that
Speaker 4: we were doing in Botswana meant that we were always
Speaker 4: in the water, we were always in canoes, and we
Speaker 4: were always surrounded by hippos, and so I don't know
Speaker 4: how much you know about hippos, but they're like horribly,
Speaker 4: horribly mean, right, they're feisty beasts. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: super territorial. I've never seen something that go from like
Speaker 4: completely a sleep to the angriest thing you've ever seen
Speaker 4: in entire life faster than a hippo.
Speaker 3: It's insane, you know, real bitches? All right, quick, apologies
Speaker 3: to hippopotami for calling you bitches. I thought you killed
Speaker 3: more people each year than other animals, but it turns
Speaker 3: out you kill like five hundred, which is still a
Speaker 3: lot of people. But crocodiles kill double year amount. They're
Speaker 3: such geminis. Rabbit dogs kill twenty five thousand people a year,
Speaker 3: and snakes kill fifty thousand. But really, what are the
Speaker 3: animal kingdom's biggest bitches? Well, mosquitoes responsible for seven hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand deaths annually through the spread of infections.
Speaker 3: And I feel I can call mosquitoes bitches because only
Speaker 3: the females take blood meals. But really, you know what,
Speaker 3: none of these animals are bitches. They're just doing their jobs.
Speaker 3: They're living their lives. They're snacking on people or standing
Speaker 3: up for themselves. So insummation. Hippos are boss bitches.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so you know we've been charged by them,
Speaker 4: they like they've like or just water, which is like scary.
Speaker 4: I mean, when they charge you underwater, they they drop
Speaker 4: to the bottom of the river and they run and
Speaker 4: so you just see this wave coming towards you. It's
Speaker 4: super terrifying, especially when you're when you're just in a
Speaker 4: little fiberglass boat and they're doing that running towards you.
Speaker 4: But my favorite encounter was something that hippos do very rarely,
Speaker 4: but they do it when when they're very angry. It's
Speaker 4: a threat display. And this hippo was outside of the
Speaker 4: water and we're in the water in the area where
Speaker 4: that hippo considered its home. So it ran from where
Speaker 4: it is at up to the very edge of the water,
Speaker 4: and it started spinning its tail in a circle and
Speaker 4: started defecating and it starts spraying it. And the reason
Speaker 4: why kids love it when I tell the story is
Speaker 4: because I called this the poop tornado. So the hippo
Speaker 4: does this massive poop tornado and I ended up just
Speaker 4: picking up my camera and taking a picture, and I
Speaker 4: just got the perfect shot of this hippo. You see
Speaker 4: the tail and then just all these brown specs flying
Speaker 4: through the air.
Speaker 3: That is rough. That's a that's like shit hitting the fan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, And I mean
Speaker 4: it's meant as a threat threat display, and like it
Speaker 4: is a very threatening thing.
Speaker 3: Threaten a kidding.
Speaker 4: You see anything doing that with its poop, and that's
Speaker 4: a threatening thing.
Speaker 3: I just watched videos of this, and I'm so sorry,
Speaker 3: but it is very funny. It's very good. It's as
Speaker 3: super boss bitch move and I really I challenge anyone
Speaker 3: to try this manover, especially if you keep getting interrupted
Speaker 3: at meetings. Oh my god, have you ever been super
Speaker 3: afraid for your life? Have you ever been like, oh
Speaker 3: this is this is a widow maker. I don't think
Speaker 3: I've ever been truly afraid.
Speaker 1: One.
Speaker 4: There was at one time that where we were charged
Speaker 4: by an elephant, a mother elephant that was with with
Speaker 4: her child, and that was like very frightening because she
Speaker 4: got very close and I think that's the closest I
Speaker 4: felt to death. But usually, you know, when we're out
Speaker 4: in these places, where as I said, we're with experts
Speaker 4: and we've learned enough to know, like what we can
Speaker 4: and can't do. And and so I've been in the
Speaker 4: water with big sharks before, or been around lines and
Speaker 4: all sorts of stuff and never really felt felt truly scared. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Is it true that people who are explorers wear a
Speaker 3: lot of khaki vests with pockets?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean yeah, pockets are important when you're exploring
Speaker 4: what you came in.
Speaker 3: All those pockets.
Speaker 4: You got to have a lot of stuff. You have
Speaker 4: to have flashlights, okay, trail mix, yeah, you trail mixed sometimes, yeah,
Speaker 4: Like flares, yeah, compass things like that.
Speaker 3: Do you actually have a khaki vest like a fishing vest?
Speaker 3: I do have a kk Do you wear it in
Speaker 3: the field.
Speaker 4: No, I don't usually wear it in the field.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about getting one of those, just in general,
Speaker 3: for like going into airports, like yeah, or not having
Speaker 3: a purse. Why don't I just wear a fishing vest.
Speaker 3: It has just so many pockets.
Speaker 4: You should. I support this idea, Okay.
Speaker 3: I'm going to look into it. Oh man, I'm so
Speaker 3: glad I investigated this very important piece of American history. Okay. So,
Speaker 3: the modern fishing vest was conceived of and invented in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty by a man named Lee Wolf, who ran
Speaker 3: a fly fishing school on the Beaverkill River in the Catskills.
Speaker 3: Not only did he have impeccable style, he was also
Speaker 3: very active in conservation efforts. He was a key player
Speaker 3: in popularizing the catch and release method of fishing. He
Speaker 3: coined the popular motto quote game fish are too valuable
Speaker 3: to be caught only once. It's also like, well, maybe
Speaker 3: don't hook him in the mouth on the first place, Lee,
Speaker 3: But yes, I hear you. Good call anyway. Lee Wolf,
Speaker 3: inventor of the fishing vest, died in nineteen ninety one
Speaker 3: at the age of eighty six, piloting a small plane,
Speaker 3: and journalist Charles Kralt eulogized him, saying, quote, Lee Wolf
Speaker 3: was to fly fishing what Einstein was to physics. Now
Speaker 3: his personal fishing vest remains on display in a fly
Speaker 3: fishing museum in the small town of Livingston, Manor, New York.
Speaker 3: Now next time you see me, I will be wearing
Speaker 3: a khaki vest, and it will be stuffed with lipbam
Speaker 3: and phone chargers and quarters and errant Reese's pieces that
Speaker 3: I will eat upon discovery. Okay, now it is time
Speaker 3: for the wrap fire around questions courtesy of patrons who
Speaker 3: support the show for a buck or more a month.
Speaker 3: But first, super quick before the Patreon question round, I
Speaker 3: do want to give a special shout out. I'm doing
Speaker 3: a little bit of a promo swap with another really
Speaker 3: really good podcast and I'm excited to be in cahoots
Speaker 3: with and so this is just a promo. If you
Speaker 3: like this podcast, you might want to check out a
Speaker 3: podcast called flash Forward, which is hosted by Rose Eveleth
Speaker 3: and she's amazing. So the premise is that each week
Speaker 3: she takes on a possible future scenario like the existence
Speaker 3: of artificial wombs, or what would happen if space pirates
Speaker 3: dragged a second moon to Earth, like what happens if
Speaker 3: we lived under the sea, and if we could understand
Speaker 3: animals with some common language. And so each episode starts
Speaker 3: with like a little audio drama, like a radio play,
Speaker 3: and then transitions into these interviews with real experts about
Speaker 3: what would happen if that really happened. You can find
Speaker 3: out more about it at flashforwardpod dot com. And she said,
Speaker 3: guests on like Katie Mack and Jenna Wortham and Kim
Speaker 3: Stanley Robinson and Edyong and all these great people, and
Speaker 3: so people say it's like Radio Lab meets Black Mirror
Speaker 3: but with jokes, and I very much agree with that.
Speaker 3: So if you like this podcast, check out flash Forward.
Speaker 3: And now we're gonna go ahead and do the rapid
Speaker 3: fire around here we go. But before we take questions
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Speaker 3: Okay, your questions, patron questions? You ready?
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: Betsy Long wants to know why can't those of us
Speaker 3: with lots of snow send it to parts of the
Speaker 3: world suffering from droughts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, that's actually a question I've heard before.
Speaker 4: Part of the problem is that we, you know, you don't,
Speaker 4: We don't really realize how much water people use. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's a crazy amount on a daily basis, like
Speaker 4: what each household uses, how much water goes into producing
Speaker 4: different types of food, I just think logistically it would
Speaker 4: it wouldn't make sense from like a would it be
Speaker 4: financially feasible for a pipeline to be generate, you know,
Speaker 4: run from some snowy area into southern California. Just it
Speaker 4: doesn't make any sense. And so I think, like with that,
Speaker 4: the best option is trying to conserve. We have to
Speaker 4: be better about how we end up using water. Maybe
Speaker 4: we need to stop putting it in a bunch of
Speaker 4: plastic bottles and then uh, and then there's desalination technologies
Speaker 4: that people have started to use, but that's also very expensive.
Speaker 4: It can have wildlife implicates as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was the next question Christopher Rice wanted to know.
Speaker 3: I'm interested in desalinization tech. Will it ever become cost effective?
Speaker 3: Or are water wars inevitable?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean I honestly think that they probably are.
Speaker 3: You know, Oh my god, that sucks.
Speaker 4: It's going to be rough. Yeah, I mean, the way
Speaker 4: the planet's changing, we just there's nothing good about it.
Speaker 4: There's actually an area of south central part of the
Speaker 4: United States, Texas and Oklahoma and a lot of that
Speaker 4: area and they're all fed by this same aquifer, and
Speaker 4: they think that it's going to basically dry up in
Speaker 4: the next thirty years, and so we're going to see
Speaker 4: it in this country. We're to see lots of impacts
Speaker 4: when it comes to that sort of So I think, unfortunately.
Speaker 4: I think decel technology is going to become viable once
Speaker 4: things are dire enough that it has to become viable.
Speaker 4: But it's not the best option.
Speaker 3: This is a real dumb question. How come you can't
Speaker 3: just boil the water and the salt stays behind and
Speaker 3: then you gather the water.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think that's how it works.
Speaker 3: I have no idea how desalinization works. Okay, so I
Speaker 3: looked into it, and apparently there are two main ways
Speaker 3: desalinization is happening. There's multi stage flash distillation, which uses
Speaker 3: heat to evaporate water and leaves the salt behind. So
Speaker 3: this accounts for eighty four percent of desalinization, and it's
Speaker 3: what I guessed happened. So I feel very smart and
Speaker 3: important right now. There's also reverse osmosis desalination, desalinization or desalination,
Speaker 3: I don't know, say whatever you want now. Reverse osmosis
Speaker 3: takes less energy than heating all the water, but it
Speaker 3: still takes quite a bit of energy. To pump water
Speaker 3: through these filtration membranes. So some folks are working on
Speaker 3: low temperature heat desalination too, which might work with clean
Speaker 3: solar power. But for now, I guess the point is
Speaker 3: you have to burn fuels to heat the water or
Speaker 3: to pump it, so it's costly in terms of energy
Speaker 3: consumption and a car been output. But when I have
Speaker 3: a hydrologist on, we will talk all about this and
Speaker 3: also our future drinking sewer water. Catherine schab Is, Tobias Milton,
Speaker 3: olaf dash Ki, and anacomerkel Bock all asked essentially the
Speaker 3: same question, like what can I do besides just recycling?
Speaker 3: What's the simplest daily change we can make? Like, what's
Speaker 3: one thing we can all focus on? What can we do?
Speaker 4: What do we do? Yeah, I mean, so there's a
Speaker 4: ton we can do it, Okay, Like the choices that
Speaker 4: you make as a citizen and consumer have a massive
Speaker 4: impact on this sort of thing, and they can actually
Speaker 4: help to stop environmental destruction happening in other parts of
Speaker 4: the world. And so one example of that single use
Speaker 4: plastics are just generally a bad idea all the time,
Speaker 4: and things like styrofoam, things that can't be recycled. You know,
Speaker 4: by stopping doing that, by using reusable wattles, bringing your
Speaker 4: own bags, you can actually make a massive impact on
Speaker 4: that problem. Eating less red meat is always a really
Speaker 4: good thing. Red meat actually has a pretty massive impact
Speaker 4: on the environment. Being more of a vegetarian is actually
Speaker 4: very helpful to do that sort of stuff. And also
Speaker 4: like buying products that don't have palm oil in them.
Speaker 4: So if you were to look on the back of
Speaker 4: a lot of candies or other products, processed products in stores,
Speaker 4: they have palm oil in them. And palm oil largely
Speaker 4: comes from these plantations in Southeast Asia where they've basically
Speaker 4: cut down a lot of the rainforest and made these
Speaker 4: plantations and it's putting you know, orangutangs and all sorts
Speaker 4: of animals at risk as a results of the stuff
Speaker 4: that they're doing.
Speaker 3: So for more on this, you can catch ologies episode
Speaker 3: number two on Primatology.
Speaker 4: So I think, you know, just by being a smarter
Speaker 4: consumer and picking better options, there's a lot that you
Speaker 4: can end up doing and helping.
Speaker 3: Do you think we're going to look back and be like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, so much plastics, so much meat? What
Speaker 3: were we doing?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Like when you My mom told me a story once
Speaker 3: when she went to the obstetrician when she was pregnant
Speaker 3: with one of us I can't remember, and her doctor
Speaker 3: was like smoking, yeah, and we look back and we're like,
Speaker 3: that wouldn't even that would be like over the top
Speaker 3: if you saw that, like in a comedy sketch, Like,
Speaker 3: are we going to look back and be like, oh
Speaker 3: my god. We used to order things from Amazon and
Speaker 3: it would get shipped to us in a big truck
Speaker 3: billowing smoke and carbon, and then we'd open it up
Speaker 3: and then we'd throw away a bunch of plastic for
Speaker 3: like a little tiny item. Yeah, are we going to
Speaker 3: be appalled?
Speaker 4: We are one hundred percent going to be appalled. I
Speaker 4: mean I think, like, you know, future humans will look
Speaker 4: back on our generation and just say, what were they thinking?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's just absurd. I mean we're at the point
Speaker 4: now where we know better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the.
Speaker 4: Only way things are going to change is if people
Speaker 4: demand that it changes. And so that's that's why each
Speaker 4: person's opinion matters. That's why these little acts can actually
Speaker 4: make a massive impact. When the entire country is doing
Speaker 4: it right, then we can force these companies to stop
Speaker 4: you using these stupid methods to do things right.
Speaker 3: I remember when they abanned plastic bags in La Everyone
Speaker 3: knew it was coming, and it was like, oh man,
Speaker 3: you're gonna have to bring your own bags in a
Speaker 3: grocery store. And now it's so commonplace. It's like, I
Speaker 3: keep a bunch of canvas bags in my trunk because
Speaker 3: I don't want to be that asshole in the front
Speaker 3: of the line. That's like, load me up with all
Speaker 3: the plastic you've got, you know, like you just adjust.
Speaker 3: Another patron by the name of Larry Ward, himself a
Speaker 3: phishing vest aficionado, also my dad and thus your grandpod,
Speaker 3: asked about photovoltaics and hydro power and what kind of
Speaker 3: batteries need to be developed to really make the best
Speaker 3: use of those forms of renewable energy.
Speaker 4: I love solar. I think solar is fantastic, and I
Speaker 4: think the two things really holding that stuff back is,
Speaker 4: like your dad said, battery technology. Battery technology is something
Speaker 4: that we're dying for an amazing innovation to come out
Speaker 4: of that. I mean, once that comes, everything's going to change, right,
Speaker 4: And we're still kind of operating on this old tech
Speaker 4: that we've had for a long time, and they're just
Speaker 4: tweaking the chemistry just a little bit here and there
Speaker 4: to trying to get a little bit more efficiency out
Speaker 4: of it. If we can bring that up even higher,
Speaker 4: that's great, but we have to move towards renewable sources
Speaker 4: of power.
Speaker 3: On that note, Rodka Vacari wants to know how long
Speaker 3: until I can buy a solar car? Like Month states,
Speaker 3: if you could be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, could probably make up a
Speaker 4: solar car if you like, But yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 4: you know, if you did make a solar car nowadays,
Speaker 4: it'd have to be very light and basically full of batteries.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: So this just in. A Dutch company called light Year
Speaker 3: is working on a fully solar powered car and it's
Speaker 3: due out in twenty twenty. It's priced around one hundred
Speaker 3: and forty g's but it's fully solar, So Tesla watch
Speaker 3: your back. Although I feel like if you have solar
Speaker 3: panels on your roof and they juice up your Tesla,
Speaker 3: you kind of have a solar car. But that's like
Speaker 3: saying that all cars are solar because petroleum is dinosaur
Speaker 3: and they could have eaten plants. But that's bullshit. You
Speaker 3: know what I mean. Anyway, The point is all solar cars.
Speaker 3: They are better. Let's have them, please, Jack kelliher wants
Speaker 3: to know solar wind water, which is the best renewable
Speaker 3: resource overall.
Speaker 4: I like solar. I like solar, and I think wind's
Speaker 4: pretty great too, if you're smart about how you put it.
Speaker 4: A lot of people like to talk about the impact
Speaker 4: that wind has on birds. Yeah, but I mean if
Speaker 4: you look at the impact that buildings have on birds,
Speaker 4: it's far more than wind turbines do.
Speaker 3: Okay, quick aside. I looked into this, and almost a
Speaker 3: billion birds a year die from windows strikes, mostly to
Speaker 3: residential and the shorter commercial buildings. But wind turbines kill
Speaker 3: about seventy five percent fewer birds than windows do. The
Speaker 3: top bird killer, though, it's kitties. Up to four billion
Speaker 3: birds are killed every year in the US at the
Speaker 3: hands or I guess, the pause of the nation's outdoor
Speaker 3: and feral kitty cats. I could not, however, find statistics
Speaker 3: on how many birds are killed by American hippos.
Speaker 4: And so I think that's just something that's like kind
Speaker 4: of drummed up by opponents to WINS technology as a
Speaker 4: means of kind of slowing it down. I think if
Speaker 4: done responsibly, it's a fantastic, fantastic resource.
Speaker 3: Those same people are probably like eating chicken parmesan as
Speaker 3: they're being like, we got it, we can't use this,
Speaker 3: we need oil because of the birds. Elliott and I
Speaker 3: wants to know what emerging technologies do you foresee having
Speaker 3: the most impact on conservation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean so that, I think that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 4: There's there's a there's three that I'm like really kind
Speaker 4: of excited about. One would be satellite satellite technologies. The
Speaker 4: amount of stuff that we can now sense this from
Speaker 4: space and do it cheaply is amazing. And so if
Speaker 4: you take a picture of the Earth every single day,
Speaker 4: then you could really start to see how fast things
Speaker 4: are changing. You can see deforestation, you can see you know,
Speaker 4: algal booms, you can see all sorts of stuff that's
Speaker 4: like really fascinating from a conservation perspective and important for
Speaker 4: us to know.
Speaker 3: It's like taking a selfie every day to see if
Speaker 3: your haircut looks stupid as it grows out.
Speaker 4: And I really like the second I would say that
Speaker 4: I'm excited about is low cost sensors. You know, because
Speaker 4: in the past, Like, we built the sensor device, and
Speaker 4: I talked to a scientist that used a similar device
Speaker 4: fifteen years ago, and that device cost him almost forty
Speaker 4: thousand dollars to buy, and then we built it for
Speaker 4: twelve hundred dollars. Oh my god. Instead of buying one
Speaker 4: of those sensors, he could have bought ten of them.
Speaker 4: Now we can start to measure more things in more
Speaker 4: areas or keep them out for even longer in ways
Speaker 4: that we just had not been able to do before.
Speaker 4: So that's super exciting. And then I would say the
Speaker 4: last technology I'm excited about is the stuff that artificial
Speaker 4: intelligence can end up doing, because you know, as we talked,
Speaker 4: you know, as conservation technology gathers more and more data
Speaker 4: about this planet and how the plan is changing, we
Speaker 4: need to build better tools to be able to go
Speaker 4: through all that data and pull meaning out of it.
Speaker 3: That's cool, You're like, computer, tell us how fucked we are?
Speaker 3: We are very You're like, thank you, that's so helpful.
Speaker 3: Katie Cop wants to know, other than what's wrong with you,
Speaker 3: what do you say to someone who feels that recycling
Speaker 3: or any other simple means of conservation individual responsibility to
Speaker 3: the environment isn't worth their time because quote, they will
Speaker 3: be dead long before it matters. What do you say
Speaker 3: to those people?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's you know, it's rough to deal with people
Speaker 4: who are just you know, cynical, just to be cynical,
Speaker 4: you know. I mean, the hardest thing is to try
Speaker 4: and get through to those people. I sometimes it just
Speaker 4: helps to tell those really sad stories about the kinds
Speaker 4: of things that you see out there. You know, I'm
Speaker 4: an optimist when it comes to conservation and for the planet,
Speaker 4: so I try not to be too much of a downer.
Speaker 4: Like I try not to talk about poaching and all
Speaker 4: these sorts of things unless I need to, unless it's
Speaker 4: relevant to the stuff that we're doing. But it's like,
Speaker 4: you know, just what was it a week ago? Or
Speaker 4: we can have ago. There was that story about that
Speaker 4: pilot whale where they found eighty pounds of plastic bags
Speaker 4: inside of its stomach, and so the poor is going
Speaker 4: around the ocean eating what it thinks are jellyfish because
Speaker 4: it eats jellyfish, but they're really just plastic bags. And
Speaker 4: I mean, you've picked up a plastic bag, you can
Speaker 4: imagine how many plastic bags it would take to get
Speaker 4: to eighty pounds of it. It's a lot. It's a lot,
Speaker 4: and that killed the whale, you know. And so your choice,
Speaker 4: the decisions you make on a daily basis about the
Speaker 4: things that you buy or the things that you take
Speaker 4: and what you throw away, actually matters, right, And I
Speaker 4: think I didn't say this earlier when you're asking what
Speaker 4: we can do, But I think the other thing is,
Speaker 4: you know, we as a society need to learn to
Speaker 4: use things longer, right, or repair things that break. Right.
Speaker 4: It's very popular now to get a new phone every
Speaker 4: time the new phone comes out, you know. I mean
Speaker 4: I've even been guilty of this as well. But each
Speaker 4: time you make something, there's an energy that goes into it.
Speaker 4: There's resources that have to be mined to be able
Speaker 4: to create these sorts of things, and then once you
Speaker 4: throw it away, it goes into landfill. It's there forever, right.
Speaker 4: And there's this great movement that's happening in certain parts
Speaker 4: of the world, this repair movement, you know, where people
Speaker 4: are trying to repair some of the things that they
Speaker 4: have instead of throwing away, to kind of give a
Speaker 4: longer life on it. And us by us doing that,
Speaker 4: by us buying better quality stuff and keeping it for longer,
Speaker 4: we lessen our impact on this planet.
Speaker 3: What is that that saying like you can buy it,
Speaker 3: buy it nice, or buy it twice.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, invest in something that's a little bit better that
Speaker 3: it'll last a long time, instead of just getting things
Speaker 3: that all you know, you'll keep throwing away and be like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'll replace it or whatever. You know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I like that.
Speaker 3: I know. I think back to, like, you know, my
Speaker 3: great grandparents had this thing that was next to their
Speaker 3: hearth that was a shoe repair iron, and they would
Speaker 3: put the shoe on it upside down and then they'd
Speaker 3: nail on another sol And I remember being a kid
Speaker 3: being like what is this And I was like, Oh,
Speaker 3: that's the thing you put your shoe on when you
Speaker 3: repair it. And I'm like, who did that right? But
Speaker 3: that's what they used to do. Now you would just
Speaker 3: throw your shoes in the garbage and be like new
Speaker 3: shoe times.
Speaker 4: You know. I was at this conference and I cannot
Speaker 4: remember the name of the individual. I think he was Austrian,
Speaker 4: but he would he did this thing where you would
Speaker 4: set up these repair shops in cities and the repair
Speaker 4: would be I will repair anything that you bring in.
Speaker 4: So it's any Yeah, you toaster, your expresso machine, your TV, whatever.
Speaker 3: You bring your boyfriend.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like can you help us, yeah exactly, So you
Speaker 4: bring it in and the one requirement was that you
Speaker 4: have to sit there with him as he repairs it
Speaker 4: and like learn how to do it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: They were saying that, Like some people would come in
Speaker 4: and they would just get furious. They'd be like, no,
Speaker 4: just fix it. I'll pay you twice the amount, just
Speaker 4: fix it, and he said no. The whole point of
Speaker 4: this is that you learn how to fix these things.
Speaker 4: You learn about the importance of repair. And it would
Speaker 4: go through and some people would come in and spend
Speaker 4: all day with them to repair an expresso machine or something,
Speaker 4: and you learn a ton out of it, and I
Speaker 4: think that's amazing.
Speaker 3: I couldn't find exactly who this gent was, but in
Speaker 3: researching I did learn that there are fix it clinics
Speaker 3: at local Goodwill stores and other places. There's even a
Speaker 3: whole organization called iFixit dot org dedicated to repairing things
Speaker 3: instead of throwing them into a chasm of trysh and
Speaker 3: replacing them. So google fix it clinic and your city,
Speaker 3: and then bring your broken hair dryer over and learn
Speaker 3: how to tinker it back to life, and then you
Speaker 3: can rightfully brag about it for several years and also
Speaker 3: teach other people how to fix their hair dryers. Also,
Speaker 3: when I went to track down who started this movement,
Speaker 3: I found some leads to something that began in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3: But in googling some keywords, something went wrong because I
Speaker 3: somehow found myself reading a news article with the headline
Speaker 3: Dutch mobile euthanasia units to make house calls, and I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, okay, that's a very different than a
Speaker 3: broken toaster. Anyway. Do you try to apply that to
Speaker 3: the technologies that you use, whether it's in the field
Speaker 3: or if you're developing technology from an old technology.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally. I mean that's why all our stuff is
Speaker 4: open source, so we can share the information and move
Speaker 4: off of it. One of our collaborators on one of
Speaker 4: the projects that we have is this individual named tofer White.
Speaker 4: He's a great guy. He started this organization called the
Speaker 4: Rainforest Connection, and they do amazing work. What they do
Speaker 4: is they take cell phones, smartphones that people don't want anymore,
Speaker 4: and they recycle them as these forest guardians. So basically
Speaker 4: what they do is they put a microphone on this smartphone,
Speaker 4: they write some software, and they put it up in
Speaker 4: the rainforce, and they put it out there to listen
Speaker 4: for legal logging happening in the rainforce. And so he
Speaker 4: just gets all these old smartphones nobody wants anymore and
Speaker 4: then ends up taking them and giving them this life
Speaker 4: as a protector of the rainforest, which is a really
Speaker 4: amazing thing to do because normally those were just gone,
Speaker 4: yeah and been thrown away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's cool that you can use technology and people
Speaker 3: who are passionate about the environment to have like an
Speaker 3: ecosnitch movement where you're like, listen, you're approaching dolphins, you're
Speaker 3: logging in areas you shouldn't.
Speaker 4: We're watching like totally yeah, And that's I mean, that's
Speaker 4: a big part of some of the stuff that we do.
Speaker 4: The technical term for that is called environmental justice.
Speaker 3: Oh so environmental justice that is a way better and
Speaker 3: more apt term than eco snitching. I'm not very good at.
Speaker 4: Marketing, basically. You know, a lot of these places, these communities,
Speaker 4: they don't really have a voice, and when they see
Speaker 4: this kind of environmental stuff happening to them, it's hard
Speaker 4: for them to find someone to tell it to. So
Speaker 4: the environmental justice movement is all about making tools and mechanisms,
Speaker 4: like legal mechanisms and stuff like that where they can
Speaker 4: kind of they have someone to go to to say, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, they cut down our forest or they've been
Speaker 4: poisoning our river that we depend on, and document the
Speaker 4: impact that this stuff is happening.
Speaker 3: Right, which is amazing because it would just go untold.
Speaker 3: Those stories would be undetected and untapl.
Speaker 4: I mean like they have been for a very long time. Right.
Speaker 3: Speaking of legalities, Ronder Grizzel wants to know, I'd like
Speaker 3: to install a water catchment system at my house, but
Speaker 3: they're not legal in my county. So I'm not sure
Speaker 3: who to work with to get these systems added to
Speaker 3: the building code here, or what arguments to make. But
Speaker 3: I love any ideas how you can help make that happen.
Speaker 3: What do we do about rain catchment? Is that legal?
Speaker 3: What's the deal?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean some places it's not. It's really weird why
Speaker 4: it wouldn't be. I think it's a holdover of like
Speaker 4: weird regulations that came as a result of working with
Speaker 4: water groups and all sorts of stuff like that. But
Speaker 4: but but you know, I think just getting involved in
Speaker 4: in like the municipal process and trying to talk to
Speaker 4: the right folks in your local government to change that.
Speaker 4: There's really no reason that water rain water catchment should
Speaker 4: be illegal ever. You know, it's completely natural, and I
Speaker 4: guess a lot of.
Speaker 3: People do that just by having a barrel out in.
Speaker 4: The garden totally. Yeah, I mean, that's that's what a
Speaker 4: lot of people do. We when I was doing a
Speaker 4: lot of work with engineers about borders, we built a
Speaker 4: lot of them all over the world. We never built
Speaker 4: them in the US because in some parts it is illegal,
Speaker 4: but it's it's a fantastic way to get extra what
Speaker 4: even if you just use the water for irrigation, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's great.
Speaker 3: Do you have to worry about more skeeters?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean not if you engineer it right. Usually
Speaker 4: it's not just an open barrel. And then the one
Speaker 4: thing you do have to sometimes worry about is, you know,
Speaker 4: it's it's not necessarily good water to drink, so it's
Speaker 4: more like gray water.
Speaker 3: Gray water heads up is the term for relatively clean wastewater,
Speaker 3: like from sinks and appliances in the bath, anything that
Speaker 3: doesn't involve toilets if you catch my drift, so reusable,
Speaker 3: maybe not something you drink, because you.
Speaker 4: Know, if it's coming off your roof, you don't know
Speaker 4: if birds have been pooping roof or something like that,
Speaker 4: and so so it could it could be bad. So
Speaker 4: if you did want to use it for drinking, you'd
Speaker 4: have to add a filtration system and what they call
Speaker 4: a first flush device that basically takes all the first
Speaker 4: water that goes on the roof and just pours a
Speaker 4: little ground.
Speaker 3: Yeah. What kind of water filtration system do you use
Speaker 3: when you're in the bush.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I don't use
Speaker 4: anything special. I use iodine tablets and then I have
Speaker 4: one that has a little carbon filter in it. But
Speaker 4: in some parts of these places, I just I just
Speaker 4: drink the water there, you know, So.
Speaker 3: How has that worked out for you?
Speaker 4: It's fine. I mean I don't think I have any
Speaker 4: parasites living in front of me, but.
Speaker 3: Now that you none that have tried to get out
Speaker 3: explosively at least.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, I mean, you know, in the in the
Speaker 4: Okoamongo Deltsa, the water is just so amazingly clear and
Speaker 4: pristine that it just tastes wonderful, and it's fine, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, you just you don't want to drink a
Speaker 4: leach or something, but that you're fine. But other areas,
Speaker 4: in some parts, you just have to buy bottled water,
Speaker 4: which is rough, but that's the only option that they
Speaker 4: have in certain areas.
Speaker 3: Mike Manokowski, this is a great question. Are biofuels used
Speaker 3: for vehicles energy positive or do they consume more energy
Speaker 3: to produce in transport than they provide? So biofuels, what's
Speaker 3: the deal?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean so I think that's I think that's
Speaker 4: a great question. I mean, I think there's a lot
Speaker 4: of potential for biofuels, and you know, I've had friends
Speaker 4: that have converted cars to biodiesel cars and stuff like
Speaker 4: that before. But I mean, I think generally what we
Speaker 4: need to do is just try and move away from
Speaker 4: any kind of fossil fuel for that sort of stuff.
Speaker 4: If I could buy an electric car, I would, Yeah.
Speaker 3: What about veggie diesel where you just get this stuff
Speaker 3: from friars?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was so the friends of mine did convert
Speaker 4: cars from veggietice. I mean smell like Chinese food when
Speaker 4: you drive behind them.
Speaker 3: I love that how come more people aren't doing that,
Speaker 3: you think, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think that like you have to build the kind
Speaker 4: of the equipment in your garage that allows you to
Speaker 4: filter and process it in the right way, and that
Speaker 4: just seems like too much for some people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But it's like, we are a country that relies so
Speaker 3: heavily on cars and onion rings. Yeah, and chicken tenders.
Speaker 3: You think it would be a match made in heaven, right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like the one thing that we have a lot
Speaker 3: of is friar grease. Yeah, like, welcome to the United States.
Speaker 3: No shade on that. Shaw and I also talked about
Speaker 3: ocean conservation and plastics and even Baltimore's own mister trash Wheel,
Speaker 3: but I trimmed a lot of it out because we
Speaker 3: went into such detail about the same thing last week
Speaker 3: with oceanologist doctor Anna Johnson. So if you miss that,
Speaker 3: listen to it next Doctor's orders.
Speaker 4: We've pretty much ruined things when it comes to plastics
Speaker 4: in the ocean.
Speaker 3: God, that's the most depressing thing in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's also true. Oh man, how do you approach fatherhood
Speaker 3: knowing what you know about the environment.
Speaker 4: It actually so for me. It fuels my passion in
Speaker 4: the work that I do is because I want us
Speaker 4: to not be that society that you know, future humans
Speaker 4: are like what are you guys doing? Or my daughter
Speaker 4: when she's older say, oh, you know my parents' generation,
Speaker 4: we're all idiots, you know. I want us to be
Speaker 4: able to solve some of these problems before it's too
Speaker 4: late and help to bring back spaces where wildlife can
Speaker 4: grow and thrive and not go extinct. So for me
Speaker 4: being a dad, it's a big driver and every every
Speaker 4: single thing that I do, and it's really kind of
Speaker 4: changed my focus in terms of trying to solve some
Speaker 4: of these bigger problems as opposed to just like you know,
Speaker 4: tinkering around with really cool technologies in different areas, starting
Speaker 4: to think about things in a big system and how
Speaker 4: do we solve that broadly across the globe. So hopefully,
Speaker 4: hopefully I'll be successful in that so she'll live in
Speaker 4: a better world.
Speaker 3: So if nothing else, we can all feel a little
Speaker 3: better knowing that people like Ayanna from last week and
Speaker 3: Shaw are on the case. Leslie Nielsen said it best.
Speaker 4: I just want to tell you both good luck. Well
Speaker 4: kind of on you guy.
Speaker 3: R Thomas wants to know our IoT device is useful
Speaker 3: or really just make the problem worse. My question, what
Speaker 3: the hell is an IoT advice?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 4: IoT is the Internet of things?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 4: Got Yeah? So I mean when I talk about sensors,
Speaker 4: I'm I'm essentially talking about IoT devices, Okay, Because you
Speaker 4: know the sensors, we attach these small processors and we
Speaker 4: attach radios to them. So that's basically what an IoT
Speaker 4: device is. And so we've we've actually leveraged a lot
Speaker 4: of that technicology that you see in smart cities and
Speaker 4: smart homes and brought them into these sorts of places
Speaker 4: to create the same sorts of networks. Like we use
Speaker 4: similar radios that they use on IoT devices, we use
Speaker 4: similar processors that they use on IoT devices. And the
Speaker 4: project that we have that came out of the Okamongo
Speaker 4: work that we call field Kit is basically an open
Speaker 4: source IoT ecosystem to allow you to be able to
Speaker 4: put these sorts of things all over the world, and
Speaker 4: it's all free and open and available for anyone to use.
Speaker 3: How are those devices powered?
Speaker 4: So with a small battery and a solar panel typically
Speaker 4: is how we do it. Yeah, makes sense?
Speaker 3: Can you tell me in a nutshell, how screwed are
Speaker 3: we in the ocean? Global warming and water access for people.
Speaker 3: I feel like those are our big ease. Yeah they're big.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're really big. I would add one more, okay,
Speaker 4: and I would It would be extinction. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: So let me start with that one just because I
Speaker 4: mentioned it. So, you know, this planet has gone through
Speaker 4: five mass extinctions before. There's actually a fantastic book called
Speaker 4: the Sixth Mass Extinction, which is what we're going through
Speaker 4: right now. And the thing about you know, you ask
Speaker 4: any school kid about extinctions, and they've all heard of
Speaker 4: the Ice Age or dinosaurs, and they know that that
Speaker 4: sort of stuff happens. But this is the first time
Speaker 4: in history that it's all been caused by a single species,
Speaker 4: and that's you know, us, that's humans, right, And so
Speaker 4: the level of extinction that we're seeing, the biodiversity loss
Speaker 4: that we're seeing right now, is a thousand times higher
Speaker 4: than what we would consider just baseline.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: So it's incredibly bad. I mean, we're seeing things die
Speaker 4: off super fast, faster than we can even discover them
Speaker 4: or learn more about them. And so most of that
Speaker 4: comes from human impact, you know, it comes from poaching.
Speaker 4: It comes from habitat loss, It comes from things that
Speaker 4: humans are doing to this planet that's making it harder
Speaker 4: for wildlife to live. So I think I am as
Speaker 4: I said earlier, I'm optimistic about that. I think we're
Speaker 4: starting to become smarter about it, and we're doing better
Speaker 4: things with our land use and habitat protection and creating parks.
Speaker 4: What was the second one?
Speaker 3: Global warming?
Speaker 4: Global warming?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean I get very scared about global warming,
Speaker 4: just because you know, human behavior isn't necessarily one that
Speaker 4: will see a threat coming and then make the smart
Speaker 4: decision to avoid that threat. We usually wait until the
Speaker 4: threat kicks us in the face and then we're like, oh,
Speaker 4: we shouldn't do that anymore. Yeah, So I feel like,
Speaker 4: you know, with global warming, I just don't. I don't.
Speaker 4: I guess I don't have a lot of faith that
Speaker 4: we're going to do the right thing until some really
Speaker 4: bad stuff starts happening.
Speaker 3: First, how do we know that it's like definitively our
Speaker 3: fault and not just like, uh weird, did solar flares happen?
Speaker 3: And in the climate goes like can you debunk that
Speaker 3: flim flam?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: We one hundred percent. No, I mean, you know they
Speaker 4: throw this like ninety nine or ninety seven percent of
Speaker 4: scientists or whatever number. But it's global warming is caused
Speaker 4: by humans, one hundred percent. It's entirely it is caused
Speaker 4: by humans.
Speaker 3: Okay, this was just some major flim flam that I
Speaker 3: needed triple the bunked just in case anyone out there
Speaker 3: still doubted it. Like triple flim flam debunkage.
Speaker 4: There's no concern or like skepticism in the broad scientific
Speaker 4: community about that.
Speaker 3: Just check it.
Speaker 4: And I mean, if you just think about things logically,
Speaker 4: like the Earth is a closed system. We're pumping a
Speaker 4: bunch of stuff into it, it's going to change. It
Speaker 4: will change the system. So human caused global warming is
Speaker 4: a thing. It doesn't help when we have administrations like
Speaker 4: we have now in the US that kind of go
Speaker 4: back on a lot of the work that we've been
Speaker 4: doing for a number of a number of years. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm not super I'm not super optimistic about that topic
Speaker 4: with this current administration. Right, global warming stuff is really
Speaker 4: going to change when we start to see sea level
Speaker 4: rise impacting communities and weather events getting much more severe
Speaker 4: and having huge economic decisions, and we get to the
Speaker 4: point where we have to do something about it. Now.
Speaker 4: You know, some people are in favor of of geoengineering
Speaker 4: and things like that. I don't know. Maybe we'll get
Speaker 4: to the point where that's okay. I get worried about
Speaker 4: unforeseen circumstances if we start pumping. So there's a lot
Speaker 4: of ideas about how we can put different things in
Speaker 4: the atmosphere that will reflect sunlight or you know, change
Speaker 4: the chemical composition of the atmosphere and slow this climate
Speaker 4: change that's happening. There's a new technology that came out
Speaker 4: that has brought down the cost of extracting CO two
Speaker 4: from the air. I mean that's a way of slowing
Speaker 4: that is, by removing some of the greenhouse guesses the
Speaker 4: CO two. But I'm not necessarily in the camp of,
Speaker 4: you know, throwing a whole bunch of particles into the
Speaker 4: atmosphere and seeing what happens.
Speaker 3: There's plenty of conspiracy theories about chemtrails anyway. Yeah, can
Speaker 3: people plant more trees?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Planting trees is a fantastic way to help. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of drive less plant trees do a
Speaker 4: bunch of like stuff like that, and that's super.
Speaker 3: Helpful enough with the straws already plant a tree, and
Speaker 3: then a little bit about about clean water access you
Speaker 3: also work in that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's going to be
Speaker 4: a big thing. The one thing I do want to
Speaker 4: say that is, you know, these projects, when to give
Speaker 4: access to clean water to places, they have to be
Speaker 4: really thought about in a kind of a sustainable sort
Speaker 4: of a way. A lot of the work that we're
Speaker 4: doing with Engineers Without Borders was repairing the clean water
Speaker 4: projects that previous generations did. So you know, in the
Speaker 4: eighties and the nineties there's a bunch of churches and
Speaker 4: nonprofits that decided they're just going to drill a bunch
Speaker 4: of wells all over Africa, but they didn't really think
Speaker 4: about the life cycle of the well, Who's going to
Speaker 4: maintain the well, what happens when the well breaks, And
Speaker 4: so there's just a whole bunch of broken wells in
Speaker 4: a lot of these places, and so we would have
Speaker 4: to go through and try and fix them. So if
Speaker 4: you think about these kind of these sorts of projects
Speaker 4: in kind of a more sustainable or like holistic whole
Speaker 4: life cycle way, then you can really do do a
Speaker 4: lot more good work out there and not waste waste
Speaker 4: money and effort.
Speaker 3: I bet that's not as glamorous to be like we're
Speaker 3: fixing an old well. Well isn't as glamorous as we've
Speaker 3: given you a well and we're leaving now, like.
Speaker 4: You know what I mean totally yeah, yeah, but it's
Speaker 4: I mean, it's you know, they they they built these wells.
Speaker 4: They put pumps that they brought over from some company
Speaker 4: in the US. So if that pump, a piece on
Speaker 4: that pump breaks, you know, those persons people in that
Speaker 4: community can can't buy replacements, right, They can't just go
Speaker 4: to you know, the internet and order something to some
Speaker 4: random part of the community that they live in. So
Speaker 4: we have to think about the solutions that we make
Speaker 4: in ways where they're they're maintainable. They if they fail,
Speaker 4: they fail in ways that aren't catastrophic, and that they
Speaker 4: that they empower the people that they're they're looking to help.
Speaker 3: How can you convince people not to be morosely depressed
Speaker 3: about the environment and life.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think there's the planet is still an
Speaker 4: incredibly beautiful and wonderful place. There's parts of this planet
Speaker 4: you can go to that will literally there's not a
Speaker 4: single person on this planet that will not their mind
Speaker 4: won't be blown. It's just this beautiful, wonderful place, and
Speaker 4: it's incredibly resilient. I mean, this planet wants to get better,
Speaker 4: and all we have to do is just give it
Speaker 4: a little bit of room and allow it to get better.
Speaker 4: And so that's a really exciting thing. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: you know, it's been around for billions of years. It's
Speaker 4: going to be around after humans, and we just want
Speaker 4: to make sure that it's around in a way that
Speaker 4: is best best for everything that lives on this planet.
Speaker 3: Are we like bedbugs on Earth? Are we like a
Speaker 3: bed bug infestation in an apartment building?
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's definitely people out there that consider humans parasites.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like an infestation.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean I think humans are wonderful. I think
Speaker 4: we do incredible and amazing things, and we have the
Speaker 4: power to do to just inspire millions and really, you know,
Speaker 4: make this place a better place. So let's make it
Speaker 4: a better place. Let's not destroy it.
Speaker 3: What's the hardest part about your job?
Speaker 4: That's a that's a good question. I absolutely love my job,
Speaker 4: but I'd say the hardest part of my job is
Speaker 4: just being able to do as much as we want
Speaker 4: to do, it seems like there's never enough time or
Speaker 4: there's never enough money to really fix the problems at
Speaker 4: a fundamental level. Now, you know. That being said, we've
Speaker 4: also very recently, in the last couple of years, seen
Speaker 4: this amazing change in terms of people who are excited
Speaker 4: about kind of you know, funding and getting behind this
Speaker 4: sort of work. So I think, you know, now, there's
Speaker 4: never been a more exciting time in conservation or in
Speaker 4: conservation technology. So I'm super excited about it, and I
Speaker 4: think we can really we don't have to be the
Speaker 4: generation that ruined everything. We can be the generation to
Speaker 4: fixed it.
Speaker 3: You know, that's so optimistic. What's your favorite part of
Speaker 3: your job? Do you have a moment that was just like.
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, I would say, I mean, my favorite part
Speaker 4: of the job is, without question, the field. I love.
Speaker 4: Love just being in a place that is, you know,
Speaker 4: completely new to me, entirely different from my life in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles. I'm surrounded by things like wild animals and mosquitoes,
Speaker 4: and I'm trying to figure out some technological solution or
Speaker 4: how to fix some bug without you know, having any
Speaker 4: of the resources that I have here in my lab.
Speaker 4: I love that that puzzle. I love being stuck in
Speaker 4: those situations and trying to figure out a way out
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 3: That's like extreme camping is some hardcore camping. What's your
Speaker 3: next trip?
Speaker 4: We have a couple trips. We're going to Cameroon with
Speaker 4: UCLA and so we're deploying a bunch of sensors around
Speaker 4: some of the research stations that UCLA has in that
Speaker 4: part of the Congo Basin. We're also going back to
Speaker 4: the Amazon, where we're deploying sensors with the Wildlife Conservation
Speaker 4: Society across all the countries that make up the Amazon.
Speaker 4: So this is a longer project. And later on this
Speaker 4: year we'll be going to Sri Lanka where we're going
Speaker 4: to be using drones to try and monitor the very
Speaker 4: aggressive whale watching industry that's happening there, which is impacting
Speaker 4: this unique type of blue whale that only lives near
Speaker 4: Sri Lanka.
Speaker 3: So it's like they've got the paps following them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like whale watching just like super aggressive, Like what are
Speaker 3: they doing? So you have to be like, hey, leave
Speaker 3: them alone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And if we can document it, we can talk
Speaker 4: to the government about it and we can make some
Speaker 4: changes there, and then so we'll be going to Believe
Speaker 4: to tag sharks and we'll be going to Antarctica to
Speaker 4: tag whales, which will be pretty fun.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, is that all coming up this year?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's this year and to next year.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. So you've got some packing to do it, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a lot. And I've got a lot of
Speaker 4: building and testing to do too.
Speaker 3: My good. Vastly different wardrobes for those expeditions, vastly. And
Speaker 3: so now where can people find you? Where can they
Speaker 3: learn more about it? And you're a nonprofit, so conceivably
Speaker 3: people wanted to donate they could help.
Speaker 4: Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the organization is called Conservatify
Speaker 4: con se r v I f Y. You can find
Speaker 4: us on Twitter and Instagram at that and then I
Speaker 4: tweet a lot and post a lot on Instagram. My
Speaker 4: Twitter is at shaw Selby and my Instagram's at s
Speaker 4: S E l B E.
Speaker 3: So there will be links in the show notes as
Speaker 3: well as up on aliward dot com. Slash ologies because
Speaker 3: maybe you're listening to this while operating a forklift or
Speaker 3: doing kidney surgery, brushing your cat's teeth. I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's Okay, check the show notes later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you could follow the expeditions and see the sort
Speaker 4: of stuff that we're doing. And you know, if you
Speaker 4: are an engineer or if you actually you know what,
Speaker 4: if you have any kind of skill and you want
Speaker 4: to help conservation project, definitely feel free to reach out
Speaker 4: to me, because I know people who need not only
Speaker 4: engineering skills, but marketing skills and you know, design skills,
Speaker 4: all sorts of stuff that can actually help a lot
Speaker 4: of these engineering a lot of these conservation groups or
Speaker 4: you know NGOs and scientists that are out in these
Speaker 4: amazing places, amazing parts of the world. They can use
Speaker 4: all the help that they can get.
Speaker 3: What if someone's like, I'm really good to making cookies,
Speaker 3: cookies help cookies are important, So reach out if you
Speaker 3: have any skill and you want to help save the planet. Yep, okay,
Speaker 3: I don't know how you do all of the things
Speaker 3: you do.
Speaker 4: How do you do it? Not much?
Speaker 3: So while we all might lose a little sleep over
Speaker 3: the state of the Earth, no one more so than
Speaker 3: the amazing, brilliant and hard working conservationist out there. Thank
Speaker 3: you for all that you do on behalf of me
Speaker 3: and the eight billion or so of us who need
Speaker 3: this big planet to live on. So follow Shaw on
Speaker 3: social media, check out his nonprofit Conservify, and if conservation
Speaker 3: technology is something you'd like to get all up in,
Speaker 3: reach out to him. Sounds like the more the merrier.
Speaker 3: Follow Ologies on Twitter or Instagram at Ologies, I'm on
Speaker 3: both at aliboard with one L. There are tons of
Speaker 3: links for each episode up at aliyboard dot com slash Ologies.
Speaker 3: You can become a patron at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies.
Speaker 3: You can get merch at ologiesmerch dot com, including brand
Speaker 3: new designs. This week very exciting major autumnal and collegiate vibes.
Speaker 3: Thanks to Bonnie Dutch and also Shannon Feltis. Thanks to
Speaker 3: Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for admitting the great Ologies
Speaker 3: Facebook group, and I'll see y'all at campologies this weekend.
Speaker 3: Some of you. Thank you to Stephen Ray Morris for
Speaker 3: conserving my sanity technologically by editing this all together. You
Speaker 3: are a boss bitch. And to Nick Thorburn, who wrote
Speaker 3: and performed the theme music. He's in a band called Islands.
Speaker 3: You can also listen to. Speaking of listening, if you
Speaker 3: listen to the end of the episode, you know I
Speaker 3: tell a secret, and this week's secret is that I
Speaker 3: don't know if I've told the secret before. But I
Speaker 3: do have all of my books out on my bookshelves,
Speaker 3: except for all of my self help books. I keep
Speaker 3: on a shelf in a closet. That way, if anyone
Speaker 3: comes over, they can't just see this whole array of
Speaker 3: psychological topics about myself I'd like to fix. But I
Speaker 3: did realize, why don't I just go to the library
Speaker 3: and get my self help books there. It's one quick,
Speaker 3: possibly embarrassing transaction, and then once I'm done with it,
Speaker 3: I just put it in a shoot in the dead
Speaker 3: and night and I never have to hide that I
Speaker 3: have a book about like overcoming anxiety with meditation and
Speaker 3: stuffed animals or something. Anyway, that's my secret is self
Speaker 3: help books. Man get them with the library. Libraries are
Speaker 3: so great. Libraries are really wonderful. When was the last
Speaker 3: time you went to a library? Just go to the library,
Speaker 3: spent just spend an hour there, just kick it. They're
Speaker 3: so it's like my new thing. Anyway, Okay, that's it.
Speaker 5: By bye, pacadermatology, hombiology or do zoology, lithology, geology, meteorology, phology, anthology, zeriology, eeminology.
Speaker 4: Inside this a wire direct.
Speaker 3: Come right on the magic school bus.