This is Conservation and Science podcast, where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation and human wildlife interactions.
I'm telling me, Serafinski and I always try to bring you diverse perspectives of an environmental story that I cover.
And that means that sometimes you might hear voices or that are opposing ends of environmental debate,
and that is fine, because what we need, we need more dialog and understanding and less fighting and division, in other words.
I want you to listen to people you may have not listened to otherwise.
And today our guest is scientist, adventure enterpreneur.
And all those things is one man: Bert terHart. Bert, welcome to the show. It's great to be here.
I'm really excited to speak with you.
We've, I remember answering one of the questions and one of the questions you originally put to me
say, I'm not exactly sure how all this AI and science or business stuff translates.
And it's like, okay, well, I've done some other things, so that was pretty cool. I had fun writing that. So this is going to be great.
Excellent.
Listen, you are you are you, you must say like you wear many hats.
You're a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, explorer in residence for the BC Historical Society.
You're a trained research scientist.
You are CEO and lead brain dot AI.
You founder of a Canadian interactive waterway inter initiative.
Like, how do you think about yourself?
How do you like you think about yourself as an adventurer, as an entrepreneur, as a scientist?
Like what?
How do you think about yourself? Well, if I had to if I had to say when I think about myself, I think about this.
I think primarily about the thing I'm most passionate about, and that is science.
So my perspective on everything is, is, scientific perspective.
I'm I'm formally trained as a scientist. I have probably went to many degrees,
but you know, that that said, everything I've ever done, including all the all
that the crazy stuff for the ArcGIS or the BC Historical Society has always been with other, an historical context that relates to,
how the place that we live has come to be, or it's from a scientific perspective, which is what kind of ecosystem am I?
Am I traveling through and and what can I do
to contribute to the global knowledge base, as it pertains to, to my passions as I move through that ecosystem?
So that's paddling across Canada, sailing across an ocean, going out to Aleutian Islands, going into the Bering Sea.
So there's always an opportunity for me to do, to do some kind of formal science as, as, as a citizen.
So if you ask me what I am, I'm a I'm a science guy, like Bill Nye the Science guy.
So how about that. So that exit that's that's clarified that clarifies that thing.
And so that was my,
my like thing that I was wondering, like you circumnavigate the globe and and the solo on the, on the sailing yacht, which is like wow man.
I remember when I was a kid, I was, reading a book about a Polish explorer who to circumnavigate the globe solo.
And yes, cool. I think Henrik Pascua was his name.
And and I was just like, man, this is like so I have like, I read that book, like, what is happening on the boat, like what can happen now?
Tell me like, and you can, you know, I'm always ask you this open question.
So you may say, like how what motivated you to do this?
But, what I'm particularly curious is like, have you like,
while you're doing this, you then kind of your sciencey brain kicked in and you were connecting those things,
or was it on the from the very get go that this is going to be like a some sort of like a scientific endeavor?
Yeah.
Well, as soon as I decided I was going to make that, I was going to do the, the
this trip around the world, I went to some of my old, science contacts, some of the, you know, some people on my PhD committee,
some other scientists I knew I knew who were that I had followed by by following their, their, their research,
doing things that I was interested in.
And then I, I did some things that were that was well outside my, my normal, I guess, training.
So, I went to the instead of ocean sciences here in British Columbia.
I went to the University of Hawaii and then I went to another, another university where I got hold of someone who was doing micro
microplastics, in the ocean.
So with the interest of ocean sciences, they have a very large program that, that that involves GPS tracked current drugs.
So you throw in these, you throw these current drugs into the ocean, they're tracked by GPS.
And we have they had very good resolution in the North Pacific, but virtually none in the Southern Ocean.
So I took a bunch of these current drugs with the when I so I contacted the guy who's in charge of that study
who happened to be on my old committee, and I said, hey, this is what I'm doing,
and how would I put some of these current drugs in a place that you would never, ever, ever be able to get them in?
Because it's very science is unbelievably expensive.
You have to put people, equipment, resources, time and energy into places that are typically very far away.
So if you're going to the you know, for me it's going into the Arctic or the Aleutian Islands or going,
you know, all the way in the Southern Ocean.
So I said, give me some of these drugs and I'll happily plop them in the ocean as I go around, you know, five great capes.
So that was that was that.
And I contacted a guy, out of the University of Hawaii who was doing micro and macro plastic surveys.
And I said, look, I'm going around the world and I'm willing to spend an hour a day
looking out, out on the boat for microplastics, things that you can actually see with the naked eye.
So he said, sure. So that's what I did. I spent it when it was possible.
I spent an hour outside the boat looking for, chunks of plastic floating in the ocean.
And of course, no one throws over microplastics.
They throw over microplastics, you know, a bottle or something like that, or a or a fish crate, and then it degrades, of course.
So, and if you stare out at the same piece of thing, whether it's water or grass or forest,
pretty soon you have a very, very good idea of what doesn't belong there.
So you get very good at at identifying things at that, that are floating. Obviously that shouldn't be there.
And then I, I contacted another scientist who was doing microplastics, and that meant doing plankton trawls behind the boat and then basically,
isolating those samples, ensuring that they were stable and, and, and carrying them with me around the world until I got back.
Well, that that that proved to be too difficult.
And that proved to be too hard because I had lots of other things to do on the boat, like, you know, beyond just staying alive.
So yes, sailing actually, so that that proved to be a bit too much.
But the other thing I did was, I tried to, do bird counts of albatross.
Albatross?
In the Southern Ocean, there's the population is basically,
at at the near catastrophic levels because of the overfishing of their primary food source, which is squid.
And they were live in the Southern Ocean.
And that part of the world is virtually unpublished because no one gets there.
So if you happen to be sailing around there and you're actually out there counting birds, that's incredibly valuable.
So so that's that was, I as soon as I decided I was going to sail around the world, I decided I was going to do it first.
I was going to engage in things that I'm passionate about.
This is this is fantastic, story.
And this is fantastic that you were willing to do that, to do those things.
And, look, we're going to come back to many things that you already mentioned.
But I just want to say, like right on the get go, you know what you're we're looking at, you know, how the things supposed to look like
I'm curious like in general like how they were looking like, so what what were the changes that you seen?
What was the, you know, like a out of place or alarming things that you saw?
Well, I guess the first thing that I would say that that was, that was most alarming was running into the
to the Chinese industrialized fishing fleet.
Offshore.
And I was, as I went by the Falkland Islands, which is, you know, between Cape Horn, in between South America and South Africa.
I was warned by the, by the, by the people who can, by Falklands people and Falklands that and the British who,
who actually managed that, that particular part of the world in terms of the in terms of fisheries and their coastal fisheries
up to 200 miles offshore, they said you have to watch out for the Chinese industrialized commercial fishing fleet.
They're fishing illegally. They're not supposed they're fishing in a place where where they're not supposed to be.
They have everything turned off, all the AIS, everything. They're basically black.
And if you run into them and they they'll well, basically, if they run you over, they couldn't care less.
So I ran into them twice. It was probably I mean, you don't see very many ships at all.
And, suddenly as I'm sailing in the middle of the night, I get this warning on AIS,
the automatic identification system that every then I had on board just to just to keep me from doing that sort of thing.
And the thing just lights up and I.
And there's nothing on the horizon.
There's no lights at all outside. Which is strange because this is AIS is line of sight.
And, suddenly as I'm looking out on the horizon, I see that the light of
of basically 1000ft, packer, which is the thing that stays at sea 365 days a year.
All it does is process the the catch of all these other sort of,
satellite vessels, these other boats that are going out and fishing, and they come back to this giant thing like an aircraft carrier.
It's huge processes of fish. And then these other boats come and take it back to market and take it away.
So this giant thing lights up and I get on the radio and say, you know what's going on? Who are you?
You know, which which way should I go? Because, a vessel at sea that's fishing has the right of way.
So I don't have the right away. I have to get out of this guy's way. And there's the. The English is.
Well, there's no reason to expect that the people are speaking English.
But it was the English was was almost incomprehensible.
And it was just it was just go behind, go behind.
And then suddenly in front of me, there's like a chain of boats every all the lights turn on at once, and I see the big one,
and I'm supposed to go behind this thing, and then all the lights turn off again.
So it's it, it's it contravenes everything that's supposed to happen at sea.
So, and I was warned about it because if you these guys are, if you run into them, then you'll never be seen again.
Let's go to bit the boats. I might as a small boat. They would hit me and I would I be the only person that knew.
And, what they're fishing for primarily is,
Well, there's fishing for all kinds of things, but they fish for squid, and squid is what albatross eat, and they're just.
They're just raping it.
I mean, it's it's shocking.
It's shocking how much, how much that they, they can that they can process.
So actually, you know, when I was a graduate student, this is a long time ago now, this was like the late 80s.
There was a not there was enough fishing net in the water to go from Vancouver to Tokyo.
That's how much that's how much gillnet was in the water at any at any day, any any given day of the, of the, of the week, month or year.
And of course, they're fishing for a particular fish, but the bycatch is everything else.
It's dolphin and it's, it's, it's whales and it's, it's sharks and it's turtles, you know, and it's salmon.
Because we were concerned about salmon fishing at the time, there was return migration routes of sockeye salmon and it's it really is.
It is absolutely. It's worse than you think.
And, there's no real incentive to do anything about it because, these are peat that they're fishing in, in international waters,
but they're fishing illegally, which, which might be bycatch or maybe not,
or or maybe they're fishing very close to, to say, the Falkland Islands with other fishing very close to any place that there's banks.
So, and the banks are typically near, near continental coasts. So it's
yeah, that's, it's way worse than you think.
So it's fishing.
So it's fishing once again, I don't want to sound like a guy
who's picking out picking on the fishing or fishing industry once again, but they they're probably the worst.
Yeah, they're the worst moments.
I mean, if you think of if you think everyone, I think it knows the a bit of the saga that that had to go on with whaling.
But there was, you know, whaling was outlawed. And then there's, there's people still fish.
There was people still fishing illegally for whales for a very long time.
And the, you know,
the international community has to wield a very large club before it, before those particular countries who are doing those things stop.
And most of you know, the 80% number is huge because,
firstly, we don't eat that much fish compared to other countries who who eat an enormous amount of fish.
Like there's some shocking statistic. So I was in the Aleutian Islands, for example, on Kodiak.
I was actually at the time doing
helping UBC Forestry University, British Columbia Forestry, doing genetic distribution of Sitka spruce, which is really cool.
Sitka spruce is is an invasive species. Actually.
It travels from California all the way up,
you know, through the northwest and then down in the Alaskan panhandle and ends at the first of the Aleutian Islands.
So there is a couple PhD students and a technician who were who were doing trickery.
They were coring to, to, to test, you know, where do these trees come from?
How did they jump? Basically from the mainland to Kodiak. It was very cool. It was very fun.
But we ended up in Kodiak Island, you know, getting science, getting scientific stuff on board equipment and whatnot and people.
And there's, there's a fish processing plant there that processes 3 million pounds of sockeye, natural sockeye a year.
It runs on the fish oil that it produces is completely self-sustaining, which sounds wonderful, except all that fish goes to dog food.
Well, this.
So there's no winning, right?
There just seems to be no winning.
Exactly. You just shake your head. Oh, they're finally doing something good.
But then it's like, you're kidding me, right? Dog food. Is that right? Is that what we're doing?
Is that why we're going to burn through, you know, 3 million pounds?
So there's but okay, so that's that's kind of the that the dark side that let me give you a brighter story.
So there is a very yeah, there is there is a very good young scientist who had a very good idea.
And in the Southern Ocean albatross,
these were the great albatross, the 12ft wingspan, you know, these birds that flap their wings literally once every half hour spend.
They're almost there.
And while they spend it, they spend two years at sea and then go back to the place that they were, that they were hatched and then mate.
And then they go back to sea. So they travel enormous distances and cover enormous,
areas.
So what this guy did was he strapped a magnetometer and a GPS tracker to an albatross,
and, they captured like a they captured, I think, something like 160 albatross.
And they, they put this equipment on them, and then they turned them loose.
And every time the magnetometer goes off, it has to be near a ship.
And albatross love finding ships because there's, you know, there's usually something good to eat.
And if there's not something good to eat, they, they're just they're just tremendous company
because, every time I stopped in the Southern Ocean when I was becalmed,
I was just surrounded by these albatross, which is which is how I was able to count.
But, so with this, I figured that if there's if the magnetometer goes off, it's a ship, and if it's a ship, it has to have an air signal.
And if there's no AI signal, they're there illegally and therefore probably fishing.
So, these albatross over the course of a year, covers something like 46,000,000mi² of the Southern Ocean flying everywhere.
And the data he got was, was a part of this study that that says 80% of the fishing catches illegal was part of that study.
A small part, but it was, it was science on a shoestring at its best.
And the data that that they got was invaluable because it's otherwise there's no way to know.
And you, you can't just say, well, we're going to do it remotely because that costs an incredible pile of money to get satellite
time to go back and, you know, stare at the Southern Ocean where there's nothing but nothing but nothing.
But to get albatross to do it was brilliant.
And, the data they got about, you know, where boats should be and shouldn't be, the people that were there, that should be
and shouldn't be, and what they were doing if it was illegal or illegal was, was was again, like I say, very valuable.
So there's, there's lots of room.
There's lots of
room for, for people who, who like to do science at a shoestring and come up with a good idea because there's lots of data.
If everybody needs data and, the places where data is, is needed is everywhere that you can imagine
because the ecosystem is, as I'm sure you, you would agree, is under attack just about everywhere, everywhere we step.
Yes. That's that's that's it. Unfortunate. True.
Whether whether the whether the attack is, you know, intentional or unintentional, it's it's under pressure one way or another.
This is fantastic story I love it.
The albatross who are just like, know it, unknowingly snooping on the on the illegal fishing.
This is this is absolutely brilliant. But I just want to quickly touch on one other thing that you mentioned.
You mentioned microplastic.
Yeah, we hear about microplastic everywhere.
Like everybody knows about microplastic. It's everywhere.
But it probably is the first time I heard about microplastic.
So could you like, explain it laid out to our listeners, the issue of microplastic,
what what part of the whole plastic pollution it is and whether, you know, what are the science related to microplastic?
Well, there's there's two sources of, of of microplastic in the oceans.
There's there's microplastic that ends up in the ocean as a result of river runoff.
So, and river runoff, you can assume, is coming from industrialized areas because most of the coast is is
industrialized in most of the world, and all the microplastic is not coming from places like, you know, places like the Antarctic
where there's no industrialization, there's no runoff, and there's and there's and there's no big plastics to turn into little plastics.
So obviously, microplastics are plastics at one time that were large, that are now small.
So there's one source which is river runoff.
The other source is people throw stuff into the ocean. Plastics and it degrades.
It degrades as a result of UV radiation. And of course, it's constantly being washed by the ocean.
So the ocean is basically it's, it's salty.
So, and it's water.
So it's, it's a very good asset, actually.
It's very it's very good bleach, which is why wood gets bleach, which is, you know,
you throw something in the, in salt water and ends up getting bleach.
So there's the fact that the, the, whatever you put into the ocean is, is attacked chemically.
And then and then it's, it's a, it's attacked, radiological by UV radiation.
So the source of the source of microplastic that comes in the ocean beyond river runoff is from ships,
ships at sea or, or industrialization where people are throwing big chunks of plastic into the ocean.
And it's a massive problem because at any one time there's 60,000 container ships at sea, 60,000, and they're concentrated on the,
on the on the shipping routes, the ship, they're not spread out over the oceans equally, they're spread out over the shipping routes.
So on the shipping routes or shipping lanes, there's at least 60,000 container ships. There's the cruise ships.
Then there's everything,
and there's all the fishermen who are fishing, not necessarily in the shipping routes, but in their own specific areas.
So and the places in those places that are shipping routes or people are fishing,
there's large ships throwing over large chunks of plastic and there's there's certainly isn't.
There's international law about what you shouldn't, but you shouldn't, should not throw over the side.
But there's virtually no there's regulation, but there's no enforcement.
So of course, the tendency is for these ships to throw stuff over the side.
And the amount of stuff that gets thrown over the side of ships would would shock you.
There's places like, for example, up in Haida Gwaii.
I'm not sure if you know where that is, but it's a World Heritage Site that Unesco World Heritage Site off the coast of British Columbia,
and there's no industrialization there at all.
It's all been turned off, and the only place that it ends up there is plastic that washes up on the beaches
between is exposed to the North Pacific.
So, as a volunteer, we would go there or I would go there whenever I was in Haida Gwaii, and we would pick plastics up
off the beach as, as part of a Canadian government. Paid for initiative.
And every year we could take we could take anywhere from 2000 to 4000 pounds of plastic off the beach in this one little tiny island group.
And it's all it's giant jugs of what used to be oil people, fishermen changing oil at sea.
There's there's fish crates. There's there's there's net that goes on for miles and there's tons of it.
There's absolutely tons of it. And if it doesn't end up on the beach, it just continually circulating around the world.
And, and, you know, the, the oceanic gyres like the Gulf Stream or the curiosity or the or the goolies or the South Pole,
whatever, there's all these, these currents, and they just sit there and,
you know, rotate around the world's oceans and they turn big plastics through sunlight and chemical reaction in the ocean into little plastic.
So there's these two sources, runoff and then big plastics turning into little plastics by, by people throwing things off ships.
And it's a problem.
It's it's tons and tons and tons, thousands and thousands and thousands of metric tons of plastic being tossed off ships every year.
What's your what's your take on the this initiative or this is a company, ocean cleanup because,
some, some even in the scientific circles are, criticizing them, some other people thinking this is the best thing ever.
What's your take on ocean cleanup? Well, I think the balance is somewhere in between the two.
I think the the the this notion that there's a giant sea of, of plastic floating in the ocean the size of Texas is a fallacy.
It doesn't exist.
So if you if you if you create a problem, if you create a solution to fix up the giant, you know, floating island of plastic,
then the problem doesn't exist. I'm not exactly sure what you're fixing.
So, so, but, but, but the idea that there has to be some way for us to, Well, I hate to use the word vacuum because that
that would then imply that there's, there's a concentration of it, but there has to be, some way for us to deal with the plastics.
That's that's,
that gets tossed over the side.
And, and sadly, even though there's a tremendous, there's, there's, there's thousands of metric tons of plastic being tossed over the side.
The oceans are very, very, very large, large beyond imagining.
So even if you only see, let's say that you see, you know, one chunk of plastic every half a square mile or half a square mile,
if you imagine, you know, you're sitting in a place that's that's 500km or 500m by 500m or, well, half a mile.
Yeah. It sorry, 1.6 or say 800m. Right.
And there's one piece of plastic in this 800m by 800m square.
That's you'd be it almost never see that.
But the ocean is gazillions. Well, that's an exaggeration.
But you can imagine the ocean is is way larger than, you know, one chunk.
That's that's it's millions and millions of square miles.
So there's one piece of plastic in an 800 meter square ends up being a mountain of plastic.
So the problem the problem is that how do you actually, you know, use ocean cleanup to go around and find all those, those pieces.
It's pretty hard. I think that's I think that's that's part of the problem.
I think the problem I think the solution, well, we don't know everything that there is to know about microplate six.
There's you know, I've heard there's some other research that says that would say that though, the maybe the problem is as bad as it it is
or we think it is. I'm not sure I'm convinced by that. At all.
But I think I think the future is, is getting up, you know, using some sort of material that's plastic esque
that doesn't that that degrades or becomes completely soluble in ways that, that don't harm the environment.
I mean, that's that's a big ask.
I wouldn't know where to start with that problem, but, it's way easier to
I would think you're not going to convince people to stop throwing stuff over the side.
I don't I think that's just going to be too hard, especially without advancement.
Yeah, without I mean, that's that's the problem, right? Yeah.
Every time we speak, every time we speak about the laws and this and that, any environmental
like whether it's like Europe here locally, Ireland or in the US or in Canada is always the same thing.
Like we have plenty of laws, we don't need more law, we just need the enforcement of existing law.
And I guess that's the that's the problem that everyone comes in is like, oh, we need a new law.
It's like, no, like it's not needed. You just need to enforce what's already there, right?
Yeah, yeah. You need you need enforcement.
And enforcement implies incentive, which is well, basically a disincentive.
So you need a better incentive structure to actually get people to change behaviors.
And, that the incentive and I think this is a behavior that because people have been throwing stuff away for,
for tens of thousands of years, I live on a small island.
First Nations people have been here for maybe two, 3000, maybe five, who knows?
Probably more closer to 5000 years.
And they've been throwing stuff away for, for for very long, for a very long time.
Everywhere you look basically it's a midden amidships.
Where I live, a midden is nothing more than a that then an old garbage heap.
But what they threw away were, were seashells, you know, crushed seashells.
So that doesn't hurt the environment at all. But it's still people throwing stuff away.
So I think to to get people to change that behavior would be very hard.
I think you need I think you need to incentivize that by getting them
to incentivize that, by coming up with it with a plastic that's that's slightly different than what we're using right now.
We don't need to have I don't need to have a plastic bottle that lasts, you know, for 200 years.
I need a plastic bottle that lasts for two hours. Right.
I'm going to drink it and then and then do something else with it.
So. And I have the you know, speaking about sailing is the same problem because we people started making, fiberglass sailboats
with no idea how long a fiberglass sailboat would last.
And it turns out that a fiberglass sailboat, the hull of it is going to last for 300 years, of course,
but the rest of it is no longer functioning because everything else is, you know, the the hull remains, but everything else is gone.
But what do you do with it?
What do you do with these fiberglass hulls built in the 60s, late 60s and early 70s that nobody wants anymore
and are just now floating and clogging up, you know, harbors and anchorages everywhere,
and they're taking them when they can, turning them into smaller bits of plastic and putting them into a landfill.
But it's a problem.
And no one building sailboats, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago was thinking that
that the boat that they built, the only way to get rid of it is to turn it into smaller chunks of sailboat and put them in a landfill.
So we, you know, so we need, we need, we need to deal with, with the fact that plastics are basically these forever
and not just forever chemicals.
They're forever bits, you know, big things turning into smaller things so that that that's to me that's
I it's a problem that's I don't have any chemical, engineering, expertise at all.
But we're going to have to fix that problem.
We're going to have to fix it really quick
because as the third World, I hate to use the world third world, but as other countries industrialize and become,
become more like us in the, in, in, in terms of, you know, how we, how we consume things in the West, the problem is going to explode.
It's bad enough as it is now, but it's going to explode. That's a that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. Right?
And we're not going to get into this, but I, you know, you know, like
then because then those people who are rightfully so say, yeah, oh, you already done all that and now you're telling us we can.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. So like this is like material for another for another podcast.
But I just on the plastic, I just want to stay on the plastic for a second because here
it is, is very interesting and something that I hear a lot. And surely our listeners will be interested.
Is that something that you can confirm that the majority
of the plastic out there in the sea are actually fishing gear, like a ghost nets or some abandoned fishing gear?
Well, I wouldn't say the majority of it, but I would say certainly a very, very large piece of it, because nets are, you know, nets.
What do you do with that?
What do you do with, you know, with, with, with with a gill net that gets destroyed when a whale gets in it or whatever
the case might be, it's way easier to cut it off and and let it go away than it is to fix it.
And and of course, the financial incentive to fixing it is very, very low because firstly, it's expensive.
It would take forever and then the boat isn't fishing.
So the incentive to just to get to use something new right off the bat
is, is out of this world for those countries and those people in those companies that are, that are fishing
where whether a boat at sea is very, very expensive to run it, it costs an enormous amount of money.
And of course, these boats aren't going to be out there unless they're making money.
So the incentive to to just to not repair anything, but just to fix it, just to get a part replace it is really, really
the incentive for that is really strong.
Like think of your own car.
No one fixes a car anymore. They replace parts so what do you do with the old part?
You just throw it away like it back in the day, like when my grandfather was at sea.
He was a ship's engineer. They made everything. They had a machine shop on board.
When something broke, they made a new one. They made it from a chunk of metal.
And if they couldn't fix the new one by replacing bearings or re boring, whatever the case may be, they just made one on the spot.
Well we don't, we don't fix things like that anymore. Cars are basically throwaway things for us.
They get recycled, which means they're turned into, you know, they're flattened somewhere and they end up.
I would think of tires like, we have a huge problem because we just throw stuff away.
And of course that happens at sea.
And it's they just they just throw everything away and replace it.
The problem you're touching on this, it's huge because like what I heard, like it's maybe not totally related to
the subject of the podcast.
What I heard is like, some had an idea that they can reuse, recycle the old, tires.
And that's what they, making this, this ground in the kindergarten.
So it's kind of like a soft and and then kids when they throw and then it turns out like, oh, there's a small problem,
but there is like a good, good peer reviewed size that that might cause cancer in kids because it's like,
like it's it's just like it's like we creating the mass mass of this toxic waste. It's like, where are you?
Where do you go from there? It's it's just, it's just sort of desperate.
But tell me when you were out of the sea, have you noticed it a lot?
Because you said, like, oh, you would notice this, this plastic.
But I remember a couple of years ago, I was, watching, Volvo Ocean Race.
And they had also this program, kind of like a raising awareness of people because obviously there's like a lot of eyes on the on the event.
And I remember this footage, people, you know, they're they're showing from the bowl.
They were like literally sailing through plastic in some places.
So where was that like that most of the time for you
or was it like that in certain areas like what's your what's your assessment based on being out there?
I never saw any of that ever.
And I sailed through those areas where those were where they're supposed where it was, where that was alleged to be.
But the Volvo Ocean Race, it's a stage race.
So they go they go in stages from one, from one basically continent and place to another.
So they're they're approaching very large cities like Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne.
So as you approach those places where there's a lot of ships and like a lot of commercial ship traffic, a lot of fishing traffic,
because they're there.
All the fish are concentrated on coastlines along the continental shelf, primarily.
Well, I shouldn't say that primarily, but certainly the fishing is, is is more most productive,
anywhere on the continental shelf in the continental break.
But I was never I was not I was not near anywhere. Those places I crossed shipping lanes.
And when I crossed shipping lanes, then there would be an, an increase in microplastics.
I could actually see some and start counting.
But it was always where there was, where there like, for example, there one of the ships I saw was, was a fishing was a fishing boat.
They were fishing for black marlin out of Spain, actually fishing out of Mexico
because they had out fish, the Atlantic Ocean.
And we're now in the Pacific.
They actually have to go that far to, you know, to to continue to catch, to make it profitable, to catch black marlin.
Don't leave it, don't even start started.
So yeah, I, so, so as I, I see the I see this boats fishing properly.
I call them on the radio because I like some of that talk to.
I talk to them and sure enough, sure enough I come across a piece of plastic.
It I forget what, what exactly it was.
It was a water bottle or something, but it was something thrown overboard by that ship because I was in that immediate vicinity.
So that's one ship in one place. So imagine a bunch of ships are going into the same place.
You find that stuff, it's like it's like sailing in to Ketchikan in Alaska.
Ketchikan is where you have to clear the customs.
In Alaska, if you go from Canada going north, and at any one time during the summer, there'll be this will be
I shouldn't say that, but there can be up to five of these 1000 or 1200 foot cruise ships in this little tiny harbor,
and they have to go in and come out in the same place.
And there's laws, of course, but what you can't or cannot do in coastal waters.
But as soon as you get three miles away from those places,
then suddenly the rules change and you can tell that you're suddenly in that place where the rules are changing.
So the if for the Volvo Ocean Race, they would have been going through areas
where there would be a concentration of ships and a concentration of people, so they would see something like that.
But I never saw something like that just because I wasn't in those places.
But it I mean, I know that I follow the race, I know that I think I have a think I remember as well the footage
because it was very interesting to me, not just the sailing, but what they were doing in terms of science.
And that's a really good example of citizen science. Like anyone can do that.
Anyone that's passionate about something,
there's there's a scientist who spent their lifetime who has spent his or her life studying that thing that you're interested in as well.
But they've done it professionally.
And so they the example I use are is surfers are surfers everywhere.
People love to surf all around the world, and scientists are very interested in how materials are transported down coastlines.
It's called literal transport.
And, it has a it has a very it has a huge impact on how industrial waste comes out of a river
and then ends up being, you know, spread along the coast because there's there's physical processes that govern that.
And, and people spend a lifetime studying it.
But one of the, one of the things littoral transport is affected primarily by waves and beyond currents.
Currents are generally offshore, but by waves hitting the beach, which is what surfers love.
Surfers are very good at saying, you know how big the waves are, and they're there almost all the time
and there's a scientist or there's, there's, there's
there's probably a thousand scientists, at least in the world who've spent there, spent their whole career studying literal transport.
So if you go surfing, you can you can say, well, the waves today were 6ft or 8ft or, you know, breaking 100m offshore or 200m offshore.
That's incredible. That's incredibly valuable to someone who's studying lateral transport.
So there's a way to combine something you're passionate about. And surfers tend to be very passionate.
They go out and you know, the weather's horrible. They're out there all the time and they're at all times of the year.
And then that's they're just literally looking at the data that the scientists are just craving and absolutely need.
So there's two ways.
There's always a way to combine things that you're that you're crazy,
that you're crazy in love with with with a scientist who's crazy in love with the same sort of thing.
And, and listen, we're going to come back to the citizen science because, you know, we talk about this as well.
Like, for example, anglers and even like in Ireland like, you know, Fisheries Ireland, they have it like an app,
like you said, anglers that are out there, there, you know, rain or good in bad weather.
And they just data that they gather or tagging fish and so on.
It's just it's just incredible.
Listen, but I just want to switch gears for a second.
To something that is dear to my heart and which is a policymaking.
And you spoke about the policymaking, the impacts of policymaking, but of poor policymaking.
And I, I am, you know, question as I'm asking to to various guests and I'm pondering myself,
you know, how how to connect or how to make the policymakers making this making, you know, quote unquote good decision.
Right. And this is already loaded because like, what is good decision?
And this is like a story that I shared on on one of the episodes when like one of the scientific conferences, I was sitting,
next to a policymaker person who is who is a policymaker.
And, you know, after a few glasses of wine, the, you know, conversations open up.
And I was just like, My God,
right.
And and that was on the scientific conference.
So, so that person was there to listen to scientists, what they're saying. Right.
But but the takeaway was like essentially like all those scientists, they don't know how to make it odds. It's just. Right.
So so you can, you know, again, it's a very open question that no, not even say it's a question.
It's a discussion point.
But I am curious from your experience, you know, like, what are the best ways to talk to policymakers
to incentivize them to, to make it right decisions?
Or maybe it's not about policymakers, maybe it's about their, you know, their bosses, but because inside, you know, my take on this,
and you may correct me if I'm wrong, is like the policymaker that they don't care about science.
They they need to you they do the service to their boss, and their boss needs to be elected in four years.
Yeah.
And that's and just you there's it is impossible to make a good environmental policy
because like you mentioned, environmental policy in a state of affairs that we have right now,
usually not going to be popular and it's going to be it's going to be inconvenient.
And no politician wants to do inconvenient things because they know the next four years they out how to how to even approach this problem.
Well, I think that, you know, fundamentally there's I look at it very, very simply, there's two things that policy revolves around.
One is something that sounds good and one is the other is something that does good.
And they're wildly they can be wildly different things.
And it turns out that politicians are very good at in general, they they like to sound good because that's easy.
It's the easy path, but they very rarely want to do good, because doing good is hard.
It's hard to, to, to, to disincentivize, you know, behaviors that are hardwired or disincentivize behaviors that are,
that are financially rewarding.
So you have to like I it's it's my responsibility.
I view it as my responsibility to my responsibility to engage with good policy
and then, not just engage with it, but amplify those policies in any way that I can, which is to bring awareness,
bring people's awareness to things that that just don't, that aren't doing good at all.
And they're all around us like we we hear politicians or policymakers sounding good all the time, and we don't.
It's not rocket science to figure out if that's actually doing good, sounding good and doing good
like we're if if we weren't able to differentiate as a species between those two things, there would be no humans working on the planet
because we if you're embedded in nature, are truly embedded in nature, then you nature is unforgiving.
It will not. It doesn't tolerate in any way, shape or form bad policy.
I cannot decide that I'm going to go sleep naked in the forest, you know, for a week, because in two days I'll be dead, right?
That's just bad policy.
It sounds good. I'm meant to go out and hug trees for the next, you know, seven days straight, naked.
But it doesn't do any good, doesn't do me any good.
And it certainly doesn't do the tree any good and bad policy.
You can also engage with with bad policy badly, which would be, for example, throwing paint on a Van Gogh painting that it's you're
you're engaging with a bad policy in a way that doesn't make any sense, because you're not you're not bringing awareness to the policy.
You're just bringing awareness to yourself. So I don't like that kind of activism because it doesn't do any good.
It only turns people away.
It certainly turns people away who might be sitting on the fence.
And the vast majority of people are sitting on the fence because they don't exactly know.
Or maybe they're I shouldn't say they don't know. I think that's unfair.
I think that they just they just they haven't been
they haven't been given enough information to say, okay, this is sounding good, but it's not doing any good.
So when you when you find and you can't, you can't solve every problem.
But you can you can be engaged in those things that you're passionate about.
So I, I'm, I'm engaged. I love I love the water.
I've been I mean that's been my formal
that's, that's, that's consumed me formally and informally because I'm and I'm an oceanographer by training.
I, you know, paddle a canoe sailboat. I'm always on the water doing something.
So I'm, I'm constantly looking at policy that and try to engage with with policy that does good.
So as an example, this summer I'm supposed to be paddling through, a lot of Canadian wilderness with, First Nations person
and an, an actual PhD hydrologist to study the impacts of dams on, on, on downstream ecosystems.
So this first Nations guy been living he's been living there for generations.
And there's generational knowledge that he knows because he lives off the land and relies on the water
for not just transport, but for food and for everything else you can imagine.
And there's a hydrologist who actually knows, you know, something or two about dams and how they work and what they're doing,
what they're trying to achieve.
So they're paddling a great big chunk of the Canadian wilderness, taking data, you know, making observational data as citizen scientists,
one when one formally no one formally trained as a scientist or when citizen scientist to try to get an understanding of what really
of what the policy is
and the impacts of that policy by Canadian government on, you know, closing the dam and opening the dams to, to generate electricity.
So there's good and bad policy about about about how that process, about how they do that because they have to generate electricity.
Do they let and there's, there's, if you do it poorly, then you're basically just, you know, flooding,
everything downstream, you know, three times or twice a day and destroying everything.
Or you can come up with a more measured approach.
So they're engaging in something that does good
around a policy that doesn't sound good.
So it's a perfect example of of what you can do, and in a very focused way, because you can't be involved in everything.
It's just there's just too much. But there will be something that you're passionate about.
There will be policy around that, like fishing, for example, and you and or surfing or whatever the case might be.
And you can find out what the policies are surrounding that, that are,
that are affecting you personally because it's something that you're engaged in and then choose to engage, with those policies.
And if it's bad policy, all you can do is make your voice heard.
You can make you can make your voice heard like you're doing on a podcast here, like we're doing you can
you can write to people who are voting and say, oh, how unhappy you are, because that's still incredibly powerful.
There's, there's there's nothing more powerful than a politician getting a letter from a, from a constituent
who excoriates them for being a jackass
and calls them out like, you voted for this.
It's ridiculous.
Why did you do that? Like, why are you selling out?
And I mean it, that's way more effective.
And you can don't just send a letter to that one person, you send it to everybody on that list of, you know, the person up and down the chain,
and then people become accountable for what comes out of their mouth and what they're doing.
And that's the only way that I know that I know of to, to engage, you know, formally as a citizen scientists
and then formally as a constituent and then inform me, like, like we're doing here around policies that that, that you disagree with.
That's a good point to engage in a positive way.
And, and we said it many times on the, on this podcast, like write to your politicians,
you know, you send a letter or send an email like just do something but just, you know, like, excuse me.
My word.
Bitching on social media doesn't cut it.
It's it's it's it's you used to be to take it one step further.
But listen, I have a question for you. You're an entrepreneur as well.
Lead brain, don't I, tell me,
how do you navigate,
the the the complex landscape between, you know, being under preneur and and doing business and using technology.
And on the other hand, we all heard about, like, how the all those technologies are affecting their environment.
And, you know, especially with, I know, massive data centers, there's a water park cooling the power for powering all that think
tell me like what's your what's your take.
Because, you know, it's a little bit counterintuitive if you're coming from this environmental angle.
And, and here's you're you're doing like a business here, which is obviously like everybody needs to live and do their business.
So that's a genuine question.
How you navigate that landscape both in a, in a, you know, practical matters and also in your, in your mind.
Well, I think,
let me take one step backwards.
And we're talking about AI, but it takes 5000l of water to make a pair of jeans.
Think about that.
I mean, in, in Canada we have some of that.
We have the largest, probably the largest reserve of freshwater.
But first, lots of First Nations people live in this country without without access to,
to clean potable water, as you and I would have access to it.
Sure, they can drink water out of the lake
or the river, but most neither you nor I would generally, you know, go down to the lake and get a bucket of water.
So this, this, this idea of, of, of extraordinary resource usage is, is all around us.
It's not just in AI, it's literally in the pants that you wear, like 5000l of water to make a pair of jeans seems seems excessive.
Not to mention the fact that ships
are traveling around the world because a pair of jeans is assembled in one place, but all the bits and pieces come from everywhere else.
And then it comes on on a giant ship fueled by some of the worst diesel fuel for steel.
You know, fuel you can imagine.
So I, I heard I heard that the some, some of the factories are not built in
certain areas because water is too bad and that water is a drinking water.
But the industrial factories and stuff need the better, better quality of the water.
The other one was the to make like a, like a chips, the amount of like,
thousands upon tens of thousands of cubic liters of water every second using those things.
It's just madness. It's, it's it's crazy. Like it's crazy talk like the the cloud.
The cloud.
This is about a year and a half ago now, the cloud at that time, you used more electricity than Japan.
So, so, so how do you square those kinds of things?
We have enormous problems and large language models, speaking specifically of AI are able to solve very, very complex problems.
So if you think of the think of a protein and think of think of the drugs.
Drugs are very expensive to make there.
And and it it involves an incredible expenditure of time, energy and money and time.
Energy and money translates into enormous resource usage.
Like I'm talking about electricity and heating and all those kinds of things.
But but proteins are very complicated.
And there's about a billion different ways, at least for, for a protein to, to wrap itself into a shape and it's basically a key.
And a drug basically is a mat is, is is a synthetic. It's a synthetic.
So think of the protein natural as a lock.
And a drug basically is a key to the lock. So they have to match perfectly.
And that's that's very simplistically, sort of how, how that works.
But it's almost impossible for a human to come up with the billions and billions of combinations to that particular lock.
I does it in an hour.
So we will see advances in, in, in technologies that have to deal with chronic degenerative diseases
like cancer, like Alzheimer's, that are drug related, that we would have taken basically decades, if not centuries to solve that.
I can do, in, in, in an unbelievably short amount of time because it can just, you know, create all these, these, these combinations.
It basically in a heartbeat. So there's tremendous upside.
And if you look at, okay, you have to have a huge data center to read it.
But imagine it takes you ten years of, of of a 500 people in a, in a, in a building that have to live, work, feed to do the whole thing.
Think of the cost of that to, to to come up with one drug as opposed to an hour of AI doing it to come up with the combination.
And I'm sort of just scrubbing off all the other bits and pieces that go into getting a drug into market,
but just discovering what might work, you know, you think of them, think of the poor white mice you have to kill in the lab.
Right.
So there's that's the other side of the coin, right? There's this tremendous amount of energy we're using.
But then if you spread that out over, say, 5 or 10 years, what it would take to make a drug,
then suddenly the equation seems to be a little bit more balanced.
So in terms of for me how I so that's one way I look at it.
Basically resource usage across on, on a big scale.
Because if I'm going to talk about how much it costs to run a data center, then I'm going to then okay, let's talk about
let's talk about producing, you know, 500,000 pairs of jeans in a month, how much, you know, what kind of energy goes into that.
But we wear jeans all the time and don't think anything of it.
So I look at it from that's from firstly from that scale, but on a smaller scale as it pertains to me.
My father was a small businessman. He and I grew up in a small town.
Small businesses, really hard.
Small business lies at the heart of basically innovation.
It lies at the heart of people being employed. It lies at the heart of of every economy.
Because without small business, like 90% of businesses, basically.
Well, I shouldn't say 90%, but certainly the majority of business is small business
and they struggle with basically the same thing.
And what I have been able to do is relieve some of those problems,
like for example, when when you buy something today, you go online and ask the question, you know, who should I give my money to?
We used to go into, you know, the hardware store and ask a guy, you know, what kind of washing machine should I buy?
But we don't do that anymore.
That happens online,
and it happens in the context of a small A because most most businesses, small business, it happens in the context of small business.
So if you can if I can in some way, shape or form help those small business people or small business persons
get in the conversation when their customers are saying, who do I buy from? Then I think I've done something good.
So and I use and we can use AI to, to make sure that, the footprint of that business is large enough
that they can be found online because it's a, it's a the playing field is not level.
You don't
you can be really, really good at what you do, but you could
that doesn't mean that necessarily you're going to be found on YouTube where you're going to be found on Instagram
or LinkedIn or Google or whatever search engine, you know, whatever search algorithm you have to be engaged with.
So being good at being good at your job and actually being found online are two different things, but all your customers are online.
So you've got to square those two things. And AI is a is a really, really good way to do it.
You spoke with entrepreneurs. That was you're in there. Partner yourself.
Like in your experience what is their most convinced?
Like what is the way to convince
decision makers in the
businesses to make like environmentally conscious decisions?
What is like, but you know, how to talk to them?
Well, I think the most important thing is like every business person is concerned with culture.
So if you have a culture in your business that's dysfunctional, the business itself is dysfunctional.
And if the business is is dysfunctional, you never going to make it.
So. In this day and age, you have to be a well, I shouldn't say in this day and age it's always been that way.
If you want to attract really good people to come work with you, then you have to have a really
there has to be a reason for them to come work with you beyond just paying,
because people don't just respond to money, they respond to things that are well outside just getting paid.
Because after after our basic needs are met basically, and all are primarily in the culture that we live in, all our needs are met.
We live like kings, basically compared to the rest of the world.
Certainly in a historical context.
So it's hard to say that, you know, in general that our needs aren't, aren't being met.
But beyond that, there's other things that humans respond to.
Like, we have a people respond, to the to things, then of course, of course,
that they're passionate about, but they respond to things that they are morally that they feel morally aligned with.
So they respond to, you know, things that are pointed up as appointed as opposed to pointed down.
So if your culture in your business is pointed up, you're doing good things in the community, you're doing
good things when it comes to, stewardship in the environment, it means that you're engaged in volunteering and those kinds of things.
And that draws people beyond, beyond just the fact that you're paying them.
So for entrepreneurs, I would say focus on the culture in your business and make sure that the culture that you're that
you're what you're actually cultivating is good stewardship for the environment.
And, you know, even if you're even if you're doing something like making jeans, that doesn't mean you can't be planting trees.
That doesn't mean that you can't be, that you can't be engaged in providing clean water to to those to those communities
that don't necessarily have access to it.
That doesn't it doesn't mean that you can't be out in in your community ensuring that people have access to, to good, safe food, safe being.
It's not full of it's not laden with, you know, with, with chemicals.
And of course, that's a huge problem in the culture that we live in.
You can be in to that's that's this stewardship and the and the ecosystem that you're actually in.
You can but you can also be engaged and in volunteering like there's nothing there's nothing more powerful.
There's nothing, nothing that gets people working for you more excited than then volunteering in the community in a way that they themselves
think is important. So simply ask the people that are working for you what is it you'd like to do in the community?
What would make you feel good about about yourself today? And you'll get fantastic ideas.
And the companies that do those sorts of things are wildly successful because people want to work.
They're they're excited.
They think that they're they think they're doing something really good, not just for themselves but for other people.
And that's incredibly motivating.
So you can you can incentivize your, your workforce, not just by paying them, but by, by creating a, a culture that's engaged
with good policy that does good and that can start that can start locally, that can start exactly where you are.
And then then of course, you'll have a voice if you do that, and you can use that voice
then to, to lever the people who are supposed to be making policy decisions by writing to them as a group,
saying, okay, here, there's a letter here that's signed by everybody that works for us,
and we're unhappy about what you're doing because we think what you're doing sounds good but isn't doing any good.
And here's why. And you should probably rethink that. That's a that's a very good answer.
And that actually answered my other question that I had, because sometimes you have those, you know,
but you have those initiatives that are sounds good, like I'm going to use your words.
They sounds good, but they are not doing any good.
And, you know, like I also like I'm wondering,
like how to engage with those things because on the other hand, you know, like I my day job isn't it.
It isn't a tech.
And I, for example, listen about the authors who are just boasting where like,
oh, you know, we this many percent powered by renewable energy and we, you know, do all those things.
And this is like it sounds like it is pointing up and people say, oh, this is great, right?
But then you are approaching that from the environmental perspective. And it's like, okay, so how does it work?
Is that through subsidy companies, the subsidy companies are be buying peat bog, which is carbon sink and should be left alone.
And they're building big frickin, wind farms
on those peat bogs, and they're becoming net carbon emitters because of the service roads needed to build those things.
And so on and so forth and all that is.
So you can then say from the stage that like, oh, we like this, this many percent, you know, renewable energy.
But the damage you've done to the environment to say this. So, you know, we call it greenwashing.
And so this is one part that I'm saying.
But then there's another angle that I was like, well, they gotta start somewhere
for like for so many decades that was not even in the picture.
So now this is in the picture. Is it not good that this is in the picture because they got gotta start somewhere.
You know, I, I don't know if you have that.
I'm sure you have some comments on this, but I'm just wondering this, you know, like how to engage with this.
Like on one hand call them out on just blatant greenwashing and then on the other hand, like,
well, maybe actually the more productive approach is just as support or like engage positively with this
because this is a start with might be a start of something actually positive.
Yeah, I think that's exactly the way to look at it is still the with the ways to look at it that they're on, they're on the path.
At least they're pointed up.
So firstly they have to invest money and the infrastructure into into making a change.
And, and that's a very big deal right.
Because you know, big companies are you know, imagine Amazon has to somehow change direction. Right.
Or they think of the things that machinations of, of a company that big that has to that has to move
because the inertia behind it is, is, is, is, is enormous.
So once they start to move like that's the hard part is getting them to move then now the problem is to accelerate that.
So okay, okay.
You've, you've you've moved in in a positive direction.
But that isn't enough. Right. Because wind farms aren't the answer.
Solar isn't the answer. The energy density is just not enough to power the,
the demand that we have for for energy, the demand that we have for energy is going up exponentially.
And we need we need very, very, very we need very, very,
power dense solutions to providing the energy that we're going to that with, that we're going to need.
And, solar and wind is, is, is basically gets everybody moving in the right direction.
But it's not the solution.
There isn't, you know, the solution to power
the cloud, for example, is not to cover the a landmass the size of the United States with with windmills.
That's that's not a good solution.
It is a solution.
But it's not a good solution.
It sounds good, like you say, because it's green, but it doesn't doesn't do good, but it's moving in the right direction.
So once once the change happens and then the responsibility is to accelerate that and ask some what's next?
What's next, what's next.
Because clearly, clearly this is now taking something in your case, something that was carbon neutral, that was a carbon sink to now
that's it's not no longer carbon neutral. It's carbon positive.
It's it's emitter. It's a carbon emitter. Right.
So it's not it's not taking such scrubbing carbon.
It's actually it's like dumping it producing it.
So you need to accelerate that change because now they're moving in the right direction.
And the hard part is actually to get the moving which is why they're celebrating.
Look at us. You know, we've made this big change okay. That's great.
It isn't enough. Like you got to go just a little bit farther, but you're moving in the right direction.
They need to be celebrated in that regard for making that change.
But then they you can't take that. You can't take your foot off the gas and let them off the hook.
Well, maybe letting them off the hook is not the right way to say it, but you just can't take your foot off the gas to to to encourage them
to continue down that path in an accelerating manner, to keep up with it, with the demands that they're actually,
with the demands that their own industry, their own companies are going to be creating.
Yeah, thanks for that.
This is this is a good point.
And, you know, like we always like the message in this podcast is always, like I said
at the top of the show, just engage in the positive way and the and the and the mutual understanding, rather than, than fighting.
Are you like overall are you an optimist into, you know, like if you look at your crystal ball and you look, you know,
what's going to happen to the environment in the next ten, 20, 50, maybe 100 years.
What do you see?
Are you a do you see the good picture?
You see a bad picture? Do you think we are just as good as done or do we have a chance?
Oh, I think I'm very positive to be.
To be frank, the humans are very, very good at adapting, but we're terrible at mitigating.
So one of the ways to to differentiate good and bad policy is to is understand the difference between mitigation and adaptation.
And we have, like, you know, First Nations here.
I mentioned them a couple times in this country because we live quite close
to Aboriginal peoples in terms of, proximity, but one but then in terms of temporal, temporal.
Basically you have pre-industrial age cultures, you know, clashing with industrial age cultures and that that's,
you know, whenever there's whenever there's a boundary, you obviously have friction. That's where everything happens.
So they have a this marvelous history of, that goes back 10,000 years of, of adapting.
So think of people living, the Inuit people living in Greenland or all across in the Arctic,
all the Arctic from, you know, Russia, all around Canada, you know, Denmark, Iceland, maybe.
That's certainly Iceland, I suppose.
And the people that have been living there have adapted to that environment.
It's probably one of the harshest environments in the world to live in, but they're beautifully adapted to living there.
And they did it with tools that you and I wouldn't look at a tool like a thorn.
Can you imagine sewing deer clothing with a thorn?
And you're sewing through seal hide in moose hide and al-Qaida and caribou and wolf and everything under the sun.
But their clothing is unbelievably good.
It's it's so they're they're they're really good at we're really good at adaptation. Look at the Dutch people
building, you know, building their I can there.
No one has. There's no one out there telling the North Sea to stop rising like that's happening.
They're not going to mitigate, you know, rainfall into the ocean by, by by seeding clouds or whatever the case, they are seeding clouds.
I suppose. It's such a word.
They're going it's going to build, they're going to raise the dike a little bit, which is mitigation, rising sea levels.
Who knows why we're not going to worry about that. We're going to raise the dike.
So we're good at mitigating.
So one way to to to differentiate policy is mitigation versus adaptation.
But as we go forward where our ability to mitigate improves, it improves with with with technology.
So you can feed large language models, very complex problems.
And they'll come up with really good answers in ways that, that we couldn't imagine and at a, at a pace at which we couldn't imagine.
So I think we'll see.
I solve problems that we
that we would not be able to solve ourselves in the future, not all good, of course, because there's always two sides to every coin.
But I think that our ability to mitigate is going to it's going to, it's going to outpace our,
by a very large margin, our ability to destroy things.
So so let me give you an example. Let's talk about, very briefly, industrial agriculture.
One of the ways that we're able to feed the world is because we've become very, very good
at producing, at producing on a set piece of land, at increasing production.
Now, the problem with that is that we've been using, you know, we've been using fossil based fossil, fossil based fertilizers to do that.
I can solve that problem for us.
It'll solve the problem of of us,
being able to increase industrial production, food production, which will which we'll have to do if we're going to feed the world.
But we can do that in a way that's not nearly so damaging to the environment.
One of the ways that one of the ways that happens here in Canada,
in a, in a sort of simplistic way, is that everything that's that's every every piece of farming equipment has a GPS on it.
And that G.P.S.
tracker tells that, that tells that farmer exactly how much seeds should, should be going into this part, into this part of his
part of his field, because it knows what the moisture content is, because it's being measured.
It knows that this part of the field needs a little bit more fertilizer than the the other part of the field.
It knows.
It knows historically what the yield was last year, in the year before that, in the year before that, and that likely that's going to
maybe that trend is going to continue or it's going to do something else.
So that's an incredible amount of data on a tractor.
And that tractors being every, every meter that tractor moves across that field is being tracked.
So there's a, a way to think of simplistic AI helping that farmer be far more efficient in the use of fertilizers and chemicals, be
far more efficient in the use of seeds, be far more efficient in the use of fuels, everything to increase yield, which is incredibly important.
So I think yields on in North America have increased almost tenfold over the last.
Well, I mean, ever since they've been farming industrially, which is a massive increase, like ten times the amount of
if you can produce ten times the amount of fuel over the same piece of ground, then that's a big win.
And if you can increase that again,
and there's no reason to think that that can't happen because you can be far more efficient and you can be far better at what you're doing.
So if you can increase that again but but reduce the environmental impact, that's a huge win.
And so I'm optimistic about things like that.
I'm optimistic about about using large language models to to come up with better policies around fishing.
So I'm a I love to fish, love to fly fish actually. So
and I don't think I don't remember the last time ever I've eaten a fish I've ever caught because, anyway.
But I love to fish, so I'm.
I'm always on the river, and I that one thing that drives me crazy are, is the lack of enforcement like you were describing.
For people who are fishing, there's lack of enforcement, but there's a there's a fisherman, by and large, tend to be at least there.
At least it's a vocal voice because people that like fly fishermen are they're
they're making huge strides and turning rivers into catch and release only they're making huge strides into helping, fish come back to,
fish populations to increase by encouraging governments to create waters that are controlled or classified, which which reduces impact.
And I can help with that because it can it can it can take a large amount of data and then and then feed it
into basically a global knowledge base to come up with better decisions on how best to, to manage or to classify or to control access.
So I'm, I'm optimistic almost across the scale.
But that doesn't mean that we're not going to have big problems.
We will have big problems, but we have we'll be able to wield bigger and bigger hammers, as it were, to solve those problems.
Well, thank you for that. And we need we need, positive messages, folks.
Links to birds, personal website to website describing his adventures as well as his business are in the description of this show.
So go in there and continue exploring.
Bert, would you leave us and our listeners with that final message, like how?
Like if you would like to
leave us, like with one
advice, you know, how to engage with the environment, with the policy, how to engage in a positive way
that would make that brighter future that you describe a reality.
What would that advice be?
I've never been successful at anything in my life that I didn't have to persist at.
So if you want to make if you want to be successful in business, you have to persist.
You want to climb a mountain, you have to persist. You want to sail around the world.
You got to persist, paddle across a continent. You got to persist.
You got to think of, think of the strides that people made.
Greenpeace in particular, I suppose, maybe, I mean, well, I would say Greenpeace in terms of,
killing, literally killing the international, whale fishery like, that didn't happen overnight.
There wasn't one person with a sign, you know, in front of some parliament building somewhere saying you know, stop killing whales.
That took, took, you know, at least two decades.
I'm not saying everything that you're going to do is going to take two decades.
What I'm saying is that if you find something that that you're passionate about, you will have to persist.
If you want to make a long life, think of it.
If you want to make a long term change, then you're going to then you're going to have to engage over the long term.
So we have big problems.
They're all solvable if we're willing to persist in pursuing good solutions, solutions that don't just sound weird but do good.
So when you when you I would say to those people who are listening, who are legitimately concerned and want to do something,
then understand that you're this is a long game.
This isn't this isn't nothing that nothing that we've talked about is going to change overnight.
That's not a bad thing in any way, in any way, shape or form, because we all
because we live in a pretty good space, by and large, in this country.
And those things have come about because people have been playing the long game to make things good.
And now we have to play the long things to make things better.
It's as simple as that. So simply persist. That's all it takes. You don't have to be smart. You don't get to be good.
You don't have to be rich. You just have to be willing to persist that desire.
These are words of wisdom. Thank you so much. It's been pleasure.
Yeah, it's been great timing.
I, like I said, I knew I knew we'd have fun doing it, even though maybe some of the news is not as necessarily good.
But it doesn't mean this isn't a good thing to talk about.