Julian Dorey Podcast - 😮 [VIDEO] - Rebel Billionaire is Creating X-Men of Environmental Revolution | Dax DaSilva • #156

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

- Julian Dorey Podcast MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured - Support Our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Dax DaSilva is a billionaire tech entrepreneur & global conservation leader. In 2005, Dax founded Lightspeed, a commerce platform that he later took public. After transitioning from CEO to Executive Chairman of Lightspeed in 2019, Dax founded “Age of Union” –– a non-profit environmental alliance that funds organizations around the world protecting endangered species and ecosystems. These organizations include Paul Rosolie’s JungleKeepers & Sea Shepherd. Dax’s Book, “Age of Union”: https://rb.gy/33wa9  Age of Union Organization: https://ageofunion.com/  Dax IG: https://www.instagram.com/daxdasilva/  Whales Video referenced in Episode: ​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9J6_HkN9S8&t=1s  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Dax is the Dr. X of Conservation 6:01 - How Dax met Paul Rosolie; Putting $40 million up 10:20 - You can’t be a Savior 15:04 - Dax’s upcoming film on the Congo Rainforest; Gold Mining Mercury Poisoning 20:15 - Ryan Tate & VETPAW protecting endangered species in Africa 25:22 - How does Dax vet organizations? 28:58 - Sea Shepherd & Captain Paul Watson; Changing Dolphin Laws in France 34:11 - How the High Seas work; The difficulty of protecting Mediterranean Dolphins 40:57 - Russia and China don’t care 45:37 - Corporate America ruining it for everybody 51:54 - What needs to be conserved 56:26 - How Captain Paul Watson saved whales globally; Whale Hunting 1:02:24 - Parallels between whaling & Elephan Poaching 1:05:40 - The 6th Extinction 1:10:28 - Karma 1:17:16 - Organized Religion 1:20:09 - How Dax started Lightspeed; Dax’s health problems 1:28:05 - The Mind & The Body; Dax’s secret 1:32:05 - What makes a changemaker 1:35:24 - Dax’s first trip to the Amazon w/ Paul Rosolie 1:40:35 - Undiscovered Species in the Amazon; Trophy Hunting 1:45:24 - Governments and environmental protection 1:51:41 - Steve Donziger’s War w/ Chevron 1:58:44 - The scourge of Cattle Ranching 2:01:15 - Intentional Division around the world; Veganism religion 2:06:38 - Fish & Mercury; Plastics 2:12:19 - WW2 Lights along the coastline; Collectivism in the modern age 2:19:19 - Paul Rosolie & Dax’s trip to the UN 2:23:31 - Invitations in the Amazon Rainforest 2:25:21 - What indigenous communities think of our actions re: the planet 2:31:30 - Communicating the global conservation message; The power of listening 2:37:03 - Paul Watson’s banning from Canada; What sells a journalist’s story 2:41:21 - Why so many people don’t trust the media these days 2:47:30 - The power of documentary films for environmental change 2:52:59 - Dax explains a recent Doc he sold 2:56:41 - The Canadian Forest Fires; Dax working with Leonardo DiCaprio; Boreal Forests at risk 3:02:14 - Being positive about what we can do re: conservation ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 156 - Dax DaSilva Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, if you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. The first time he looked into the eye of a whale, it's a crazy story. He felt that the whale could see exactly through him. It was a moment where whales were being chased by an Icelandic or a Norwegian whaler, and they shot the mother so that the bulls would come to her rescue. And that bull, as it was going to be chased, looked into Paul and his crew on a small zodiac it knew the difference between the whalers and Paul and it looked with its one eye into Paul with complete pity what are you what are you doing what is your species doing Dax, Paul Rosalie told me last year that you are the Dr. X of the X-Men of conservation around the world.

And that is one hell of a title for somebody. How did you become the Dr. X? Conservation is something that's, I think it's super underfunded. It's super urgent. This is the decade of action is me Paul others and I think everyone in the world is realizing uh so you got to step up I mean I think that everybody in their own capacity whatever resources whatever experience knowledge uh and if it's Dr. X for me I mean I'll take the nomination I'll I'll try to fulfill it you know? Yeah, but you're also somebody who's, like,

spending their life paying it forward. I love guys like you because we'll get into your background and everything, but you built this unbelievable company, public company, worked your ass off for basically, like, 20 years. Yeah. And then stepped on to, is it executive chairman? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you're no longer CEO,

but in the past few years, you started Age of Union to fund the things that you've been passionate about with wildlife and conservation and nature related causes around the world. But what was your first like exposure as a kid? I'm guessing that they got you into things like that. So I grew up in, in richmond bc it's a beautiful natural setting my parents are refugees from africa uh they came over in the 70s and uh i was born in the in this in this place that just had so much natural beauty uh and of course being refugees we did the the camping the you know the outdoor sort of inexpensive kind of activities uh and i know, you grew up in a place like that and you become a naturalist. As I became a teenager, there was something that was in the news called the War in the Woods.

There was massive clear cutting of old growth forest. I'd grown up being one of these kids that read all about animals, about forests around the world, about all sorts of nature, watched all those shows. It was horrifying to me to see something in my own backyard, to see thousand-year-old trees being just, you know, clear-cut for miles. And so I joined the protest at age 17. Me and my stepbrother took our Mustang and we drove to the far reach of Vancouver Island and joined the protest. And we won the pro like this protest won, uh, the preservation of this huge area. And it's now a national park. And I returned to it and, uh, realized what we were able to accomplish as, uh, as this

ragtag group of protesters from all over the country and all over the world. It became an international outcry. How many people showed up for it? I would say several tens of thousands eventually. Oh, wow. But also hundreds were arrested. Zipporah Berman, who led it, she was only 23. She got thrown into it as the leaders who started it were arrested.

She became this international figure. We're actually going to be launching a project with her to protect the remaining old growth in BC. We'll be announcing it soon. So I actually got to meet her this year. But what turned me into a conservationist was that drive in that dirty Mustang from my home in Richmond to Clackwood Sound. I drove through hours and hours of clear-cut moonscape.

And to see what we're capable of on such a massive industrial scale in a first-world country like Canada, it just never leaves you to see that kind of abject, that kind of just utter destruction. I had a friend that just came back from Borneo that visited one of our projects, Callowate, which we might talk about later in the conversation. And she saw the same thing. Where's Callowate?

Callowate is in Borneo in Indonesia. And our Dulan Forest... You've got unlimited access to music, time now that's limited the pc insiders world's elite mastercard gets you unlimited pc optima points free grocery delivery and time back for what matters save time and earn eleven hundred dollars in average value each year the pc insiders world's elite mastercard the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Value is for illustrative purposes only.

It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Preserve is an island surrounded by palm plantations and all these kinds of plantations that are extincting orangutans and other species. But when you see that, when you see just habitats destroyed

for miles and miles and miles, it affects you. Yes. And I knew that I'd started computers as a sort of a nerdy teen at 13. I knew I was going to have a career there, but I knew I'd come back to conservation. I knew that that was something deep in me that when I had the resources, when I had the money, when I had the knowledge and the experience

and maybe the wisdom, that that would be something that would become a big part of what I wanted to do with my life. Well, it's great you did come back around to that but it's also like kind of paradoxical in a way too sometimes when you think of the stereotype because it's like you're working with computers you're inside all the time you're behind the screen you're like new tech all that stuff but you were so interested in the nature and you were affected by seeing what we're capable of doing to it what's this guy doing in the outdoors which is probably what paul rosely's reaction was to me when i probably when we got to the amazon he's probably

all right who the fuck is this guy that poor dude he tortured me i gotta i gotta tell you though i really appreciate you partnering up with paul and and helping give him the the light that that he deserves after doing this for so many years, man. Because when I first met him last year... On the outskirts of Manu National Park, this guy, local guy, started going into the jungle and leaving them piles of bananas. Because they're hunter-gatherers.

They don't have metal. They missed out on the wheel. They've never held a spoon. These are people that are out there. And so he'd leave them a machete and some bananas and they'd come take it. And then after like a year, he would start being there when they came to take it. And then after some time, he was actually able to interact with them. And he

couldn't, he could only speak a few words of their language. What do they speak? They're called the Mashkupiro tribe. And so they speak some sort of some dialect of the Yine language. But this guy who was interacting with them, one day they found him. They call it porcupined. Arrows sticking up out of his body, like several arrows. We don't know why they killed him. I was telling you a bit off camera, but, you know, he just looked exhausted. Not exhausted like, oh, I can't do this anymore. Exhausted from just like, how many times am I going to tell people in America and other countries around the world what's happening down here, why it's important, and how many times are they going to go, oh, that's terrible, and then not do fuck all about it. So it's nice to see that you got your hands dirty, too, and went down there and actually started doing something about that, which not to jump around, but how did you meet Paul?

Like, how did you come across him? Well, Paul's got a very alluring Instagram to women. So one of my early team members at Age of Union found his Instagram. And we were, Age of Union started as a book in 2019. And that became a conservation project as I transitioned from CEO to executive chairman and I could do full-time conservation. And so what we were doing is with the book, we wanted to do an e-book and a free audio book.

And to promote that during COVID, we wanted to have on change makers in conservation. And I didn't know it at the time, but those, those people that we had on that, that those Instagram lives became our initial project. So with age of union, I put $40 million into the fund, um, from my own money and found 10 projects around the world that were on the ground change makers that would inspire everybody to sh to see regular people say, I'm not going to let this forest go down on my watch, or I'm not going to let this species go

extinct. And it's really their stories that for us, the work is important. The, the, the, the forests are important. The species are important, but it's,. But it's those human stories that I think will ignite something in other people. Paul is one of those people that you realize, I can be a changemaker in my own way. The way that he is. Maybe I'm not going to do it the same way Mr. Tarzan is doing it. But I'm going to do it with my talents and my set of abilities and my social reach and my experience. So that's what I think we want out of those projects. And I realize that it's these on the ground, very locally led.

Most of them are indigenous led or locally led. They're the ones that are actually doing the work that matters. It's not these international nonprofits that are fundraising machines and know how to throw a gala. It's these organizations that have no budget because they're often locally registered in the country. And so if I'm a U.S. or Canadian citizen, I don't get a tax receipt from investing in Paul's organization. Well, now they're a bit more set up.

So we had to do all these extra steps that nobody's usually willing to do. And then the other thing that I thought was really important because me coming from a software background or computer background, I don't know anything, fuck all about conservation. I felt it was really important to go there

myself. So of the eight, of the 10 projects I've been to eight, you know, and so it's really important to see, even though I've been to Congo, which is a tropical rainforest, just like the Peruvian Amazon where Paul is the social economic, political situations are completely different. The threats are different.

The timelines are different. What, what will connect with the, with like what the local strategy is is completely different so you don't really know that from our proposal can you actually explain that if you don't mind you're just bringing up so many things i'm interested in here so if we're jumping i'm sorry but like what do you mean you know we tend to have this american-centric kind of thought or even first world centric thought where yeah everything is either a clusterfuck or it's first world, right? But when you're talking about some places like deep in the Amazon where it's

literally like no laws, and then you're talking about the Congo, which I'm not sure how similar it is in that respect, but you're talking about places that have a lot of poverty and that where you have multinationals coming in and knocking shit down and taking away these people's lands like how what makes them so different as you just described it so what's similar about them is the the importance of those of those big tropical blocks of of rainforest right so there's the there's the three big ones right the the first is the amazon that's the first lung of the planet then there's the the congo basin uh india mostly in drc the first lung of the planet. Then there's the Congo Basin, mostly in DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo.

And then the third one is Indonesia. And these are highly under threat. The fourth one's Madagascar. That's almost been cleared. There's remnants left of that one. So it's really important for those to have focus. What you see in these is these are countries, there's a lot of fast development happening in these countries.

There's lots of opportunity in terms of the mineral wealth, in terms of the timber, in terms of extraction. And that's the challenge is a lot of these governments want to lift their people out of poverty. Um, but the shortcut ways to do that, uh, where you can do it only once by, uh, extracting the, extracting everything out of the force of destroying nature is not going to benefit people long-term. So how do we propose other ways or, or how do local initiatives that, that know how to do something in a different way, how do those get more, how do those beat the extractive forces to the punch? And how do they do that?

The only way to protect any of these places, there's the way that has been done in the past. It's often called fortress conservation. So that's when Westerners come in and, you know, put a big wall around, uh, an area of a forest, you know, people often think, oh, I'm just going to buy some of the Amazon and protect it. It doesn't work like that. That's, that's one of the first things you learn

when you, when you go down to these places, you can't just come in as a savior and just buy something and then put a wall around it. That's what the Belgians did in Congo. when you go down to these places. You can't just come in as a savior and just buy something and then put a wall around it. That's what the Belgians did in Congo. And it was sort of, at times it's been important when a species is on its last legs, like the gorilla were in Congo.

But how you have conservation be a long-term success is make sure that it's a benefit to everybody that depends on the area. So that looks different in Congo than it does in the Peruvian Amazon. the dynamics in terms of how politically the government regards these efforts, it's as different as Africa is from South America. And is that because, I'm just trying to picture it from my seat here, from the little bit I know, is that because in the Amazon, you literally have them, you have indigenous people out in the middle, and even if it's within country borders throughout it like they can't even get to a lot of these places whereas in the congo the

government's more involved in the entire place or is that also not very reachable certain aspects of their rainforest yeah a lot of it's a lot of it's remote so in in the in the congo there's not much mechanized anything in terms of extraction so there's a lot of opportunity to protect things in the Congo. Also, the attitude towards the nature, the natural bounty of the country, especially DRC, there's a real reverence towards the animals, towards the forest. There's a real willingness to integrate the long term future of the forest and its species with

their future. So we have like a film coming out this fall called The Corridor. So of our 10 projects, we're doing films on a lot of them just to tell the stories. And so there's a really interesting locally led project that we're documenting called Strong Roots Congo.

This man, Dominic Bikaba and his amazing team, mostly of women. And what their strategy is, is all of these community projects, a lot of them focused around women, because they're sort of the heart of what happens in terms of the villages. So by uplifting them and giving them economic opportunities, like replanting trees in areas that have been cut,

giving them, because the men get all the choice jobs, right? So what do they have to bring money into their family and to economically progress them? A tree can grow in seven years in Congo. That's how nutrient rich and how great of an environment it is to grow something. So you see things popping up because of the efforts of Strong Roots Congo and because of the opportunities that have been given in different ways, microcredits and all of these different ways to interact. And then what happens is because as these villages are going to grow from, you know, 100 million to 170 million over the next decade,

it's a huge increase. If we can have these villages be self-sufficient, they will not have to go into the protected areas to cut wood and impact the gorillas. Wait, a hundred million to 170 million? Yeah. It's, it's some crazy number, uh, that, that. You're talking people? Yeah. Right on the border.

And a lot of these, these areas of growth are right on the border of where Kuhuzi-Biega and other national parks in Congo are. These are the last refuge of some of these species. So if you give them economic opportunity and have them be self-sufficient in their areas, and that's what the programs are designed to do, then, then they, then they, they're happy to, uh, to leave the nature reserves in, in, in place because they'll get overrun. Um, that's one of the main challenges in these developing nations is as more wealth comes into the country, the population's exploding. Uh, there's more, there's more demands on the land. Uh, yeah.

So that, that's, that's the land. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the real challenge. I think in the Amazon, there's much more impact from North America, from underground and illegal forces. Illegal gold mining is something that's just a horrific first way to come in and destroy. And then once that, people think it's being logged and deforested, it's first being poisoned with legal mining.

You know, a factory boat, and actually not just one, like 10 will go down the river. What they'll do is they'll scoop up river sediment, suck it in, mix it with mercury to find the gold and then dump it back into the river. So everything behind the boats just dies. And then after that happens and everybody locally is poisoned with mercury and the fish is all

poisoned with mercury, then the loggers come in because everybody's gone. And then, you know, the poaching, so all of that. So that's a different situation than the Congo. There's different realities. There's just different threats, you know? That's... And so what, what, what projects like jungle keeps are doing.

So you, I told you a little bit about what stronger it's Congo is doing. They're doing microcredit loans are doing projects for, for different members of the community to make sure that they've got, they've got employment, that they're productive jungle keepers, which is our, which is our reserve that Paul Rosely, uh, founded in the Peruvian Amazon.

They've got a couple of, of sustainable kinds of crops that you can grow in the forest. It's called agroforestry where you can, they have Brazil nuts, a Brazil nut tree can't grow without the surrounding forest. It requires animals to, to make sure that things are being seeded and pollinated. And then you've got ranger programs.

Age of Union is funding a ranger program so that local and indigenous people from the area are being employed to protect the area. And there's former loggers and former poachers that are now in that ranger program. The kids of those loggers and poachers want to be a ranger when they grow up because those activities don't really economically benefit the local people they end up with broken bodies as paul has probably

shared with you it's not a long-term way to live uh and so there's we got it you got to illustrate new ways uh and these highways that they bring into the amazon where and paul's probably talked about this too and a highway comes through and then you see all of these extraction activities happen that's something that we haven't you haven't seen as much in uh in the congo but it's it's a way for it's a way for it just to be a highway of things coming out you know huge logs you know animals it's just it's it's sad i'll put some of those videos in the corner i know paul actually recently on his i think on his subscribers channel has posted some content that some of it might have been public on his public instagram as well but you know he talks a lot about that choice

you bring up like what choice do some people have and part of what jungle keepers does is they come in and say well yeah here's some economic incentive to have a choice and now you also are enlisting people to be guardians of their own homeland yeah you know i ryan tate paul's buddy talks a ton about that he had an amazing video a couple no this was probably like five, six years ago where they had arrested some poachers in Africa and they brought him into the room and it was actually when some documentary accounts were following them around so you can see the video. creatures that make their ecosystem incredible and and drive tourists and people to want to come here to see the beauty of what africa has to offer if they kill that their kids are gonna have nothing because they're like you think it's bad right now like well your kids are gonna have nothing to sell here either it's gonna be a barren wasteland yeah and you can see like one of those guys ended up processing that whole thing and became a park ranger yeah as it turned out after you know being on the other side of it and to me likeanger yeah as it turned out after you know being

on the other side of it and to me like i have a lot of empathy for you know when people are they're just kind of stuck and trying to put food on their table yeah but if you can i feel like not enough effort has been made to to go in and say okay well i'm an american maybe and i care a lot about this or you're a canadian you care a lot about this let's go in there and let's actually show them that we'll put our money where our mouth is we care about this every bit as much as they do and then the you know it's kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy no yeah it's weird to say that in for a forest force to last it needs to be productive from our perspective from a from a local perspective for the local people,

because a forest is ultra productive, especially in these places. It's mega, they call it mega diverse, right? But it has to be economically important to the local people so that that area votes its interest to the government. If those people are happy with how the model works, and if there's a model that protects the local environment, that's what the government will do

for that area. And the models might end up being different because of the situation in these different places. But that's why these local grassroots projects that we've been searching for around the world are the answer, because they map out the models that can be replicated everywhere. We're not going to save the Amazon just with Jungle

Keepers and with the Strong Roots project. But if everybody's copying it, and that's happening in the Congo, when there's this forest land title designation that Strong Roots has kind of invented with the government that in a government framework that lets everybody sort of apply for this kind of forest land title. So it's mixed. So there's village, but there's also forest corridor for animals. So now everybody wants this title. And if everybody gets this title in the surrounding area, that's really going to

protect the ability for animals to move and for forest to be there long-term. And why do they want this title? Because when illegal miners come in from foreign countries, they can kick them out and they have a, they have a land title. So that's a model with all of the other supporting things that Strong Roots is putting in place.

That's a model that everybody wants to copy. Then you don't have to do any work. Everybody is trying to get in on it. When we were doing the forest land title mapping on a floor in a town hall in a village in DRC, there was chieftains and local kings and queens coming and we're asking, can we be next? That's the kind of leadership that Dominic and his team, and that's the heart of the movie that we're putting out this fall, The Corridor. It's not your typical movie about the environment,

which is what will happen next? This is a success story. They have a model that should inspire people to create models like this elsewhere. Whoever thought DRC, with all its political instability and wars, there's a war breaking out while we were there, actually, between DRC and Rwanda.

Whoever thought that a model like this would come out of DRC? It's innovation around a sustainable solution that they could borrow in the Amazon, they could borrow in Indonesia. And so by being on the ground, and I'll admit, I didn't understand the project of Congo. I was like, I know they're doing good stuff. University of Toronto is supporting it. Dr. Kerry Bowman, the professor that asked me to start supporting it is incredible so i just we put money towards it but when i was on the ground it really came into focus what was

actually happening there and how special it was so it has to be economically the area has to be economically important to people has to be productive in from a human context or it's never going to it's never going to be saved what is i mean you talked a little bit there about getting the recommendation from a professor that that you respect but i would imagine a guy like you has all kinds of organizations around the world hitting you up asking you to come in and save the day and even with someone with all your money you gotta you gotta pick the you gotta pick the horses you're gonna ride like what what are you looking for when different organizations come to you or you identify some organizations that you like like why what makes them stand apart yeah so it's definitely

that there's that change maker uh protagonist that person that that that is gonna it's going to light something, going to light that spark in people when they hear the story. That's, I think, really important. It could be even just a biologist, or it could be somebody that fist-fought poachers on the beach like Suzanne Lacan-Baptiste did

when people were poaching, men were poaching leatherback turtle mothers coming up to nest. She did that 30 years ago. And 30 years later, those young men are on her team. They're on her ranger team now. And she would not let that butchering and massacre happen every nesting season.

She just grew up in Matura Beach in Trinidad and was like, no. Actually, our team just came back from Trinidad. We're doing a short film on that as well. You do a lot of films. We have a ton. So that's the story that needs to get out there. So that's the storytelling potential.

Obviously, the work is important. We've tried to pick our first 10 to represent the three big forests. So there's Jungle Keepers in the Proven Amazon. There's Callowate in the Indonesian Dulan Forest. And then there's strong roots in Congo and DRC. Then we've got, we're from Canada. So two in Quebec, there's the St. Lawrence River, which there's lots to say about how important that ecosystem is, huge ecosystem. So there's that. And then there's another big reserve in Quebec called Canuck, which is a former

King's domain from France. So that's why it's a huge protected zone. Two in BC where I was born. I live in Montreal now and in Quebec, so that's important to me. But BC has some of the most wild nature. I went from that Congo shoot all the way to BC. It couldn't be more different. But I was like, wow, our BC nature is just so

world-class. I was up in the glacial rivers in the Pitt River where we're channeling water back into streams that animals are still trying to use, but that have been just kind of decimated by the logging that's happened around it. But we can channel the water back and that whole ecosystem will come back to life.

There's another one that we're working on in BC, which is an eagle sanctuary, which is all subdivisions all around, but tens of thousands of eagles come through there every year and it's a stop. And if we just make another development, that's it for their migration route. So it was super critical. And then of course, there's, in the Caribbean, there's one in Haiti, which is a bit humanitarian because, but also reforestation. And then there's the, the leatherback turtle one in Trinidad. And then finally the ship we have a sea shepherd, which is, which is incredible that, that the age of union ship is one of my favorites because it shows what has to happen on the ocean. We can just talk about forests and and uh and protect and

and sort of turtles and and uh eagles we've got to look at what's happening to the the our ocean it's it's crazy what happens when it's out of sight out of mind yes and you actually so with sea shepherd captain paul watson yeah the legendary greenpeace activist and everything, had been in charge of that until recently. Now he has his own organization. Right. We support both. Yes. So you maintain a friendship with both.

But you guys had made a documentary. What was it called? Caught? Yeah. Last year, was that? 2022? That's our most recent short doc, yeah. Yeah. Last year was that? 2022? That's our most recent short doc, yeah. Yeah, so this documentary was basically like a lot of it,

an undercover investigation shoot out in the Mediterranean where you guys... The coast of France, yeah. Yeah, where you successfully got the law changed because of what they were doing to dolphin. So yeah, it's crazy what's been happening. So 10,000 dolphins are ending up in the French fishing nets every year. I mean, at that rate, you're going to have an extinction of dolphins in that area. There's no doubt.

When you say fishing net, just to be clear. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Clear right now. Obviously, everyone knows what a fishing net is, but I think right away, like a cynic who's not aware of the situation goes, well, what are fishermen supposed to do

and why is it their problem that dolphins are getting in there? So can you explain that whole ecosystem? So there's, it's sort of, what's happening out in the Atlantic in that area is sort of multifaceted. So I'll take you through it really quickly. Huge trawlers are coming through the area. It's not all France's fault. So huge trawlers are coming through the area from other European nations like the Netherlands.

There's huge Dutch trawlers all over the place. Massive trawlers coming in from Asia, China and other nations. And what they'll do is they'll have miles and miles long drift nets and they'll scoop everything out of the sea. So what do the dolphins do? The dolphins come closer to the French coast than they ever had to because there's no fish

out there. And so when they, now when they reach the French coast, the artisanal local fishermen that also have drift nets, but not as massive as a trawler, they also have drift nets. And when they pull up the fish, now the dolphins and the French fishermen are now competing for the same fish. Right. So that's the challenge. And now they're colliding.

And so the French fishermen were never catching dolphin before this was all happening with what's happening in the high seas. Cause there's less and less fish overall. So these, these trawlers are coming anywhere in the high seas that you can. And the high seas for people that don't know it is everything beyond 15 kilometers off a coast is basically the high seas, which is open to everyone. And it's just a wild, it's a wild west of, of, uh, of crimes against nature, essentially.

So now the dolphins are colliding with the French fishing fleet. And they're being pulled up. And what happens is they call it the agony of the deep. Basically, as they're being pulled up, their lungs explode because they can't get out of the net. And the air and everything, it just, they die, right? And they die in the most horrible way in these nets. And because they're mammals, they end up

floating. So all the rest of it that gets thrown back or doesn't end up being taken or is killed, a lot of seabirds die in these nets as well. A lot of that just falls to the ocean floor, but the dolphins wash up. And so there was one, the head of Sea Shepherd France, incredible woman named Lamia Esamlali, she said, and a real protege of Captain Paul,

she said, I'm not letting this happen. You know, just like a lot of the other activists we've talked about, I'm not letting this happen on my watch. I know that the French people don't even know there's dolphins off our coast. They don't. So she took the dead dolphins, as difficult as

that is, to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, to the front of the National Assembly. And that's what we captured in our film. She would do night raids on the, on Zodiacs with, with her team to see these dolphins being pulled up. And they would go for, our team went on one of her night raids.

You're, imagine being on a zodiac for, from about like for 10 hours with your camera on a, on a, on a, on a, fixed on a boat for that one moment. And you might not get a dolphin every time in a net. And when you do see the dolphin, it's a horrible situation. So you're just sitting there waiting for something bad to happen to capture it on film so you can show people.

Yeah. You know, it's, but that's the kind of dedication that that, that those folks have, you know? And so that we want to document their fight. So their campaign plus our film, seven months later, the French court ordered the French government to change the law. So what can be done? You can put cameras on those fishing boats,

on the worst offending fishing boats to monitor so that they don't, they're putting nets down when they see dolphins. You know, like they don't need to be doing that. If there's dolphin in the area because they're chasing the same fish, don't put your nets down because the camera's watching. So there's measures you can take so that there's less dolphin catch and they're the recommendations of Sea Shepherd. There's a number of them but if it's you were saying the 15 kilometers offshore at the high seas and i'm i'm forgetting now like how some of the international waters work but how do they if i'll put a a map of france in the corner of the screen right now for people to see like of europe where you can see the coast of france and in between africa and everything like, if you put your finger in the dead center.

Yeah. Like, do they have any control over that? No. Or it's only the stuff closer to their shore? Listen, this stuff happens all over the place in terms of bycatch. Bycatch is, I don't think people realize that when, when the drift net comes out of the water,

90% of that gets thrown away or, or mashed into meal. It's just crazy, right? That's what happens in the high sea. One of the important discussions that's happening right now is a high seas treaty. Because what happens close to the shore, what happens close to the shore in terms of

biodiversity, that has a shorter life cycle. That, that, those fish have a shorter life cycle that, that, uh, those fish have a shorter life cycle. What's in the high seas takes a long time to grow. It should be almost, there should be no fishing in the high seas. If you're going to fish and there's almost no sustainable way to fish, but if people are going to fish, it should be artisanal local fishing,

uh, of the, of the, of the, of the stock that exists closer to the shore. What the Age of Union ship is doing right now, now that it's done in France, is it's helping West African nations with this trawler situation. So Sea Shepherd knows how to, because of all of its years of disrupting whaling hunts, which they won that fight. So this is the hope, right? Because of what a small

team did with Captain Paul and his team did over the course of 50 years they stopped whaling one person and his crew stopped whaling which is a 400 year death March for whales to near extinction can we can we put a bookmark I want to come back to that for sure so we can go details but I just don't want you off the dolphin thing. Yeah. So, so, so yeah, so the dolphin thing, that's, that,

that's sort of the, the end of that story in terms of we're, we're now waiting to see how the government does interpret those, those, those laws. But yeah, and what I was saying is on the West coast of Africa, we're working that what the ship is doing now is it's helping dispel trawlers so that the local, because the

local people that are, that live in these African nations, they have nothing to eat. So it's easy for the government to support Sea Shepherd's work to dispel these trawlers and, and, and for the local coast, because Sea Shepherd can't carry guns. So the local Liberian Coast Guard or Gambian Coast Guard works with Sea Shepherd to repel these pirates and and trawlers

and so that the local people have a chance and they don't fish on the same industrial level as as the uh as some of these larger vessels but also and i i'm just circling back around to it because i'm trying to picture it all myself too but like when you were talking about the difference between with the france example with with the but when you were talking about the difference between, with the France example with the dolphins, when you're talking about the difference between the high sea, deep sea trawlers, and then the fact that that was them pushing the dolphins inland where they get caught by the French fishermen, the laws that you're changing essentially then affect those,

the way I understand it, it affects those French fishermen not being able to put their nets as far but oh no it really affects what they do inside the 15 kilometers yes exactly so it doesn't affect the high seas and so this unfortunately so now not that that's not helping a lot because it is but i'm putting myself in the shoes of a french fisherman now yeah who's frustrated that these dolphins are here in the first place right and they're trying to make a living. Now they're banned from doing that and we still have the problem out in the high seas. So maybe now the dolphins are gonna be there and more of them will survive and that's why it's good because they're not gonna get caught in the nets inland.

But it's kinda like the locals are getting fucked and the international people from wherever the hell are, they can still do what they want. Yes, you're right. How do we stop that? I think that the high seas treaty is important. I think that the Marine – so there's an important directive got – UN directive got approved by 196 nations this spring. It's called 30 by 30. 30% of the world's land, but important to this discussion is 30% of the world's oceans should be in marine protected areas

by the year 2030. And so you've seen a lot of countries start to already deliver on their commitment. So you're seeing marine protected areas. And we were talking earlier off camera about marine protected areas, one off the coast of Santa Cruz. When you have a marine protected area that doesn't allow fishing, you have regeneration of fish stocks. You have, but they aren't necessarily well patrolled yet. And the world has to get good at this. So another effort of the Age of Union has been Israel just designated the

Pomeranian slide, which I visited with them with our ship. And that is a marine protected area in the Mediterranean where tuna has been 98% wiped out. And this Pomeranian slide has the tuna, like the nesting grounds, as well as some deep sea shark nesting grounds. Sharks have also been almost wiped out. And so it's important to have these specially designated, highly biodiverse MPAs, as they're called.

And that can make a big difference. You know, when you look at the West, when you, when you look at the West coast of Africa, when you look at the West coast of Latin America, that's like the Amazon and the Congo of the ocean. So if some of that can be, that's not all the same, right? The high seas is not all full of fish.

It's a lot more along the coasts. And that's why it's actually easier to put a high seas treaty in because you have to expend a lot of fuel to cover and catch very little out in the high seas. It's a lot more along the coast. So if we can have the high seas be a safe zone for, for fish to regenerate and then have

marine protected areas closer to shore, I think we've got a framework that the, the world has to agree on it. That's why this 30 by 30 is a big source of hope. Because if the world agrees to it, no country wants to do this on their own nobody else has then yeah you've got all the fish that everybody else is going to come in and take like what's happening to france and what's happening to the african nations that's the really tough thing and it's not just in the battle you're fighting this is in a lot of different things we talk about around the world where you can have all

these nations with the best intentions yeah you get 27 to 30 to agree but three don't right it's like oh well i guess they're going to keep doing that it's so difficult and you know not to go with the same the same people every time but you look at the russias you look at the chinas and stuff right it's kind of par for the course when you look at bigger countries like that who don't really give a about certain rights of yeah certain environments or people or whatever it is they're gonna keep doing it and i just can't imagine like it's frustrating for me being some dude you know in an armchair here in a podcast talking with people like you about it or just talking with regular people about it just saying like how do we fix this but i can't imagine being

in the middle of it because you're forced to play this kind of political dance if you will with all these different places and just get people to say yes regardless of where they're from or what they're about and all it takes is like one or two people suddenly say no and you know get off the musical chairs and it can screw up everything you're working for absolutely absolutely and i think that's why i don't want to get too much the climate change because it's a whole other discussion but we can go there but that's that's why nobody wants to do anything because nobody's doing anything. And it's hard to track who hasn't done enough, you know. So I think it's actually really important to start with nature and to start with conservation.

And one of the things I'd really like Age of Union to get out there in terms of thinking is conservation is the frontline fight against climate change. And it's the one thing that we can actually show people a success. It's very hard to make climate change a not abstract thing for people. It's too abstract. People feel very powerless. It's about emissions levels. And, you know, like we don't see enough electric cars on the street to really ever have any much hope about that.

But, but nature-based solutions, conservation plus climate smart grazing, plus climate smart forestry, eight different categories of doing things differently just on land is 25 gigatons over the next decade. That, if we- What do you mean 25 gigatons? Gigatons of carbon. Okay, got it.

And a lot of countries, I know Canada is starting to actually really focus on this because it will buy us time to electrify, to do some of the other kinds of strategies. If we do the nature-based easy stuff and relatively inexpensive stuff, and the conservation zones and the marine protected zones are a key part of that, which is why I'm happy that 30 by 30 has come in, because it's got all these countries hopefully rushing to protect 30% of land and marine by 2030. That buys us a lot of time on the climate challenge. Maybe we'll have carbon sequestration machines or we'll have more agreement on emissions reductions.

But we need, obviously, behind on all of that. Yeah. On the tech and on the agreement. So let's agree on the nature because the biodiversity is at risk. We're losing nature. I like this approach. I do too. And it's something I can show somebody something

very real with Paul at Jungle Keepers or with Dominic at, at, at, in the Congo or Susan in Trinidad. I can show people something they care about and can care about. And they can say say conservation is the frontline fight against climate change let's protect the planet and species because that's what we're losing rapidly and that we know is that frontline barrier yeah it's this is another one

that just frustrates the hell out of me because like everything else we politicize so many things and yet so many people across the political spectrum live in parts of the world where they're in nature all the time it's something a lot of us care about regardless of where people stand but then yeah you know the terms come on to it and it's natural like it's not anyone's fault but you know the climate change the climate crisis global warming we all say them we've all been around this it creates like this officey feel to it sure so what you're talking about is also it's less it's more it's it's very similar to how paul talks about this i really like paul's approach because it's kind of the same thing but it's like let's let's not talk about the alarms of like scientific numbers and stuff

so much as let's talk about the little things we can do in teams to fix things because yeah the main thing i'm getting at here that's kind of the 500 pound elephant in the room is that a lot of these issues get rated by i'll just even say like corporate America, but corporate internationally, where, you know, suddenly you get businesses who decide they can monetize these types of movements and they end up kind of doing the opposite. I mean, people could point to specific examples with like some of the ESG stuff and everything. And what ends up happening is once some of that gets exposed that like all these, these kind of, I mean, frankly, you were from the corporate world, you know how some

of these people are they're not like you and in many cases many are but many aren't you know these guys will then hijack something and then once like the general public finds out like oh wait no that's bullshit they're just trying to make money or something guess what now they shut off their mind to all of it yeah so if you come in with a different way like you're doing and you're saying hey here's like just to use your example here's 10 different things in different spots in the world that are within our nature that are kind of like these small little pieces of the fight that you can get involved and by the way these are living things you can kind of relate to it in a way you can see that well that that's something that more people could be like yeah i fuck with that i'll get

behind that you know and if we could if we all got behind it, we could do a thousand projects next year. We could do 10,000 projects the year after. Then we have models being copied and replicated everywhere. And we've got a real solution. Yeah. 10 projects is not going to make a difference. It's more of an example with, with real benefits in areas. I mean, Paul's reserve is 250 square kilometers.

I know we're in miles here, but. Yeah, you're in america i mean but yeah no it's it's important and i think it's important because it's material and i think it's also important because there's real people behind it and that's what makes something relatable it's the opposite of the climate discussion which is so abstract you know that is i think hard for people to to get their head around for sure yeah it's it's not you know it's one of those things we kind of got to reset yeah and you know look you are working against time with certain things like we look at the rainforest example which is one

we've talked about a bunch today through through paul but you know one of the numbers he will talk about is how it's estimated that around 20% of the world's oxygen comes from the rainforest. So if we are going to get to a point of no return like that quote-unquote extinction level below which you can't get back above, you're going to start to deoxify the atmosphere around the world, not just there in the Amazon. So when you can kind of pull people in America or in other places around the world and say, look, the Amazon. So when you can kind of, you know, pull people in America or in other places around the world and say, look, this is going to affect you too. And it's not just like, oh, here's a doomsday clock. It's more like, hey, here's three, four things we can do, then you can change the narrative. Doom and gloom does not engage people. It just doesn't. That's why we won't ever talk in those terms. You know, I've had the privilege of spending time with some of my heroes lately, David Suzuki,

Jane Goodall, Captain Paul Watson. Wow. And they're a generation that's got a level of respect where they do talk about the macro and they do need to scare our politicians and our world leaders. But when I speak to audiences and I talk to them about wins on the ground, I see

the light come on in people's face. It doesn't come on when people talk about doom and gloom. Yes. It doesn't. And I think that the other thing, and you talk about politicization because it's a sad, it's unfortunate that climate change is kind of associated with Al Gore because people that, people that don't support the Democrat or the Liberal, they don't feel like it's their fight too. But do people on the other side of that spectrum realize that

most of the national parks are created by Republican presidents? Do they realize that most of the conservation has been done by people on their side of the spectrum. And sometimes it's the terms, you know, should we be talking about climate change and carbon, or should we be talking about pollution? You know, a governor, former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said something brilliant the other day about, he's like, why aren't we talking about pollution, pollution by carbon? Something that's not on the spectrum, you know?

And respect people that live close to nature, that they know something about it. Engage them in conservation. Make sure this is everybody's fight. Fight on the social issues. But not about the baseline planet. Agreed. It's just not any, it's everybody's problem and everybody's solution. And it's something that actually could be a unifier in some ways.

It's sort of, it is the most urgent issue of the day. It's not got an endless clock on it. It's the decade of action. It's really, really something we got to rally around. We're not treating it like the World War II, like not that any of us remember that, but I just spoke to a climate activist the other day. He showed me what Canada did for World War II in terms of war measures in a real emergency. What did they do? It did what every other country that was in nato did you know

they built factories they they created all sorts of cores of people to do all kinds of rally the whole country to build a force to fight uh nazi germany and the and the axis we did that similar kind of emergency measures for covet different nations but we won't do it for the climate crisis, even though we have extreme weather and we have wildfires everywhere. We have major, we're kind of in that period before all of the countries got serious about World War II, where they're seeing all these tragedies happen

in Europe, but nobody's really doing anything in North America. Hopefully we're in that phase, the world's in that phase right now regarding climate change and that everybody will at some point be like, okay, enough's enough. Everybody's on fire and everybody's flooding and we've got to do a war measures act across the planet.

And hopefully the first part of that is conservation. It's getting that 30 by 30 done. And maybe it's not, maybe 30 is not enough in some places. And hopefully the first part of that is conservation. It's getting that 30 by 30 done. And maybe it's not, maybe 30 is not enough in some places. In biodiverse areas like the Amazon and the Congo and the really rich parts of the ocean, it should be 80, 90%. And then other places. 90% conserved.

Yeah, because those are mega diverse. They're literally, they literally should be subsidized by the rest of the world. Would you, just from a, I guess like a first step perspective though, I understand where you're coming from with that, but if there's some people right there who go, okay, well that seems insurmountable. Would you start with 30 in a lot of these places and say we're going to get somewhere from that?

What I love is that some of these places are doing, let's get 25 by the year 2025. Let's get the low hanging fruit because once you put a process in and you've got a flow and you've got a pipeline going, it's easy then to get to 30 by 30. If you, if you get to 25 by 25 and so, you know,

for example, in British Columbia, they're really gunning for it. Same with, uh, there's some provinces in, in Canada that are really going for this because they've got large tracts of, of land and, and big areas that they can protect. So they're going to knock off the things that are, that are the easiest and start, you know, working with indigenous people for some of their territories to include them in the area if their plans are to protect those areas, which is usually what their plan is. So I think it's incremental, like let's do small things let's do small things i think another

thing that we don't consider enough is the thing that's right in front of us and it applies to everything but let's apply it to the example with you know climate and nature like we're talking right now and that is what the internet has done to society you know an example i've given in the past is that when i go to the wawa i'll see the girl in green hair hold the door for the guy with the with the 82nd airborne hat you know who's 75 years old and they smile say thank you there's no worries and yet some of those same two types of people are screaming at each other online like they're not people. I know this very well. People will not – when people gather, they don't do what they do online.

Exactly. So if you walk up – and I hope you don't walk up to something like this. But if you walked up to some big fire or something and the firemen weren't there yet. I guarantee you there's some people running up into that building. I guarantee you everyone's crowding around and they're all, even if there's people who aren't going to physically go do something about it right now, they're all, some of them are calling 911. What is it in Canada? Yeah, it's awesome.

Okay, make it sure. But like, you know, they're calling 911. They're talking with each other. They're taking video of it so they can get the word out. Whatever it is. All these different people, they go into problem-solving mode. When you go online about these things, people have more of a separation from it and the ability to process and say, what am I going to say that's now public that appeals to whatever my worldview appeals to because those are the people that are going to judge me on this. And now you – you see what I i'm saying you change the impetus i guarantee you not that this is

possible let's be real but i guarantee if you could just pick up everyone on a plane and go take them to see paul or something oh they'd all be behind it sure you know but yeah you're doing i think the next best thing by focusing on the art of it and trying to bring documentaries home and show people that you and I talked on the phone even about like artists going to some of these places, photographers going to some of these places and giving beautiful things for people to see like, hey, let's protect this in a positive way. Well, we have a center. So we built the Age of Union Center in Montreal. It's 12,000 square feet of basically being immersed in our conservation

projects. And we've got these digital immersive meditation rooms, the earth room, the moon room, the sun room, the lava cave, the glacier cave. We're building more. These are immersive rooms that sort of bring you into some of these environments where you've got exhibitions about our different projects.

And I think it's a prototype for what I would like to do in Los Angeles and other cities so that people can have an area to gather and talk about, talk about these issues because I agree, agree. It's people when they're, when they're gathered, behave differently and are much more collaborative and bridges, bridges are possible, you know, to be built. I think it's so important and i don't think we're going to solve this by shooting at each other on twitter or threads you know so it's yeah god damn there's always a new one that's the problem then you got to keep up with i mean

you're helping me keep up with them over here leslie so i got you at least but yeah i mean you know you keep talking about some of these people though like we we did bring up paul watson yeah i didn't want to bury that lead so i had already mentioned that he was a long time greenpeace guy i've been at this for 50 years but you were starting to explain a little bit ago about his battle against whaling and how he essentially like saved whales can you explain when this started and what was going on? So this is my book, Age of Uniting the Changemaker. The Changemaker is... Link in description. Sorry?

Link in description for you. The Changemaker is so important to this because people need to understand the power of the individual. Individuals are capable of doing incredible things and then building around them. And, and, and Paul Watson, you might create great things in tech, you know, like people might create great technology. There's lots of things that get celebrated, but one day I think the world will properly celebrate a person that set, that saved every species of whale it doesn't get appreciated in this world but i that's a huge huge gift that he gave to this planet that

our great great great great grandchildren will be like that's that was a hero for for this planet how did he do it so how did he do it So 400 years of whaling driven the most intelligent animals on this planet to extinction, we don't understand anything about whales. Their brains are, are massive. They, they communicate in ways that, uh, that we don't understand. Their eyes see spectrums and possibly even dimensions that we do, like elements that we don't even perceive. And there's some interesting stories that

Paul has told me about looking into the eye of a whale. Whale, he, he, he, the first time he looked into the eye of a whale, it's a crazy story. He felt that the whale could see exactly through him. It was a, it was a moment where whales were being chased by an Icelandic or a Norwegian

whaler and they shot the mother so that the bulls would come to her rescue. And that bull, as it was going to be chased, looked into Paul and his crew on a small zodiac. It knew the difference between the whalers and Paul, and it looked with its one eye into Paul and with complete pity. What are you doing? What is your species doing? And Paul said, that was his first encounter with a whale. That was like the very beginning. What kind of whale was it?

It was a sperm whale. And it felt like it was just x-rays, you know, just going through him and just scanning everything about him and about emotionally. What were all the different reasons over those 400 years that people were whaling? So I think that what people don't really know is before there was black gold, we hunted whales for oil. We hunted whales to light lamps to... Oh shit. Yeah, that's right. So we hunted the most intelligent animal

for some of, as a basic commodity, like we hunted millions of elephants for a raw, for ivory, as if it was wood. So that is like the tragedy of what, and the reason why the right, the, that one whale is called the right whale, the Northern right whale, which is pretty much almost extinct is because it would, it was such a blubber, uh, rich whale that it was such easy pickings on, on the, on the ocean. It would, it would float after you harpooned it. It was just, it's just, it's such a huge crime that we've committed against against this species so

so here's one person that's he was one of the founders of greenpeace but he said with green the early greenpeace was very activist but he was like we're not gonna we're not gonna be able to save whales at the pace they're going was not enough for for for captain paul so he started sea shepherd and for the next 50 years him and his crews put their ships their bodies between the icelandic or norwegian or japanese whalers and pods of whales and peacefully non-violently um disrupted whale hunts and had collisions with those boats, had major showdowns, had major chases. One team that was doing this. Multiple teams, a handful of boats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible. I mean, it's well-documented in there. They've had a number of shows, Whale Wars, some great, great movies. There's one called Watson that's on Paul. But I think the day that he gets really recognized for what he did is, is to come.

But I think for me, that's the big inspiration. It's like, what is that one person able to do with his ability to communicate, to get the media message out? Because it's an incredible accomplishment. How many, you may not know this offhand, I can look it up, but how many, like when we're talking about whales, what were the main species that were under attack? Sperm whales, blue whales, what else? Whales, right whales, missing.

Killer whales? Not orcas. No, that wouldn't be a really a whaling species it's it's the big baleen whales the largely and not as much for me yeah maybe sperm whales but that's not a baleen well it's a toothed whale but it's mostly the large the large whales for for oil so how many did we when this was at the peak millions there were millions millions but how many were we down to oh when he was like oh my god i gotta stop this i i don't know the exact number we're probably hundreds of thousands it's kind of like the situation we are with elephants well today we were thank god we were people like ryan tate right we were

millions and millions of elephants and now we're a few hundred thousand elephants but right on your theme though of like let's talk about the good things with people yeah ryan and his team and vet paul go in there in 2013 build it up the rhinos let's even with rhinos before we get the elephants they were down to 15 000 white rhinos 2013. They're now up to like almost 30,000 10 years later because those guys at VetPol have never lost an animal and so many other people have come in to help out. But it seems like it's the guys like the Paul Roselies, the Paul Watsons, the Ryan Tates who have to go in.

And it sounds so wild, but you have one person and then their team around them protecting entire species for the whole world. For the whole world. And no one sees it. Nobody sees it. And now you have, what greater reward could there be for your life's work? You could have material or business success, but to see a thousand fin whales gather in the Southern ocean, which people haven't seen for, for centuries. A thousand.

A thousand gathering. It's, it's, and it's happened in the last couple of years because of the space that we've given whales to regenerate. That is, that's a legacy. They've come back like that. And that you see blue whales in places that we didn't see them for a lot of years, that we see

certain, we see humpback whales thriving. There's certain species that are struggling to recover, but others are, have had the space because of that person, one change maker and those teams. And so it's, it shows you it's possible. And as you say with the vet pod story, they've turned the numbers around.

Nature is resilient. Give it some advocates and give it some space. It is not the time to give up. Especially not when we have a partner in nature that will bring it back. Yeah, I have the video playing behind you, by the way, of the whales gathering. It's a beautiful thing. Incredible.

Out in the middle of the ocean. I'll put that in the corner of the screen if it's copyright okay. I'll have to check that. But I'll definitely put the link to this in the description. It's some Disney Plus on YouTube. I'm sure that's cool. Yeah, I'm sure they're fine with that. But, you know i i just

you know i i'm a dude from jersey i'm not spending my time in the middle of the amazon in the middle of of africa you're not coming or something well i haven't yet i'm definitely coming like that's the thing we keep talking about this i'm like i have to fucking go now i've been working on this podcast so i can have time to do that but you know it is unfathomable to me completely unfathomable maybe not just because of the size of the animal but looking at some of these creatures which i would call majestic like a whale right like an elephant like a rhino like the idea of me shoot i don't care if they're like charging i mean i'll go fucking run up in a tree or something what right do we have shooting that it's just what right do we have fucking crazy man what's dark what's what is that darkness in our our hearts

that lets us think that we can do that i just don't understand it either you know well what you know what though what what do you because you get to see the best and worst yeah right you get to go to these places and we keep talking about some of these people who are on the ground and you talk about the indigenous people. Yeah. And I think about how beautiful it is that they're a little disconnected from all the bullshit we talk about here and they can appreciate the nature around them and that's what they think about. They think about that land but you come to visit these people and you come from city

centers like Montreal and LA and people, you know, like me are in the club having a good time and not giving a shit about what's going on. Well, yeah. Well, let's talk about disconnection. They're disconnected from bullshit, but we're disconnected from nature. Absolutely. We are so disconnected.

We don't know where our food comes from. We don't know how our meat is processed. We don't know where our water comes from. Do people know where it goes? We flush it. Do we know how any of it gets treated? Do Do people know where it goes when we flush it? Do we know how any of it gets treated? Do we know anything about any of the cycles of it? They don't even teach that.

I mean, there's a lot of things that they don't teach. Like they don't even teach people how to run their own financial life, you know, in terms of like when they get out of, when they, when they, when they go to make their own life. It's just, but the nature stuff is, as we get so caught up in our phones and so on, and I'm sure you've talked a lot about this on your show, we're more and more disconnected from nature. And when you talk about nature, and for me, there's,

for me, nature and spirituality are the same thing, right? And so we have a lack of both of those things in our society. The reason why we can do things like slaughter whales and elephants and destroy ecosystems is because of a complete void of a connection to nature and a connection to spirituality. What is spirituality? Spirituality is a connection to the larger than you. It's a connection to the bigger than what's good for my pocketbook, what's good for my greed situation, what's good for my own little unit, my family, my comfort. What is good for the oneness of everything?

What's good for the greater union? That's spirituality. It's not a religion. It's actually how nature works. It's that larger thing that we're connected to. So that is something I feel like we need to come back to as a part of this journey in nature. It's the same journey. You know, we kind of were, if we talk about it in biblical terms, which we don't need to, but I mean, we got kicked out of the garden to learn about ourselves, but at some point we got to come back and be in union and in harmony with that garden. That's the whole prophecy of the Bible is to that one day we'll deserve to be back there. But right now, obviously we're not, we live completely in disharmony with everything, but one day we will,

we are supposed to reconnect with, with that and be the better version of ourselves because not, you know, we probably, some people, if they're tuned in as environmentalists here that we're in the sixth extinction, we're in the midst of it.

Do people know about the five that came before it no i don't know shit about so the five extinctions that came before the current the current ones obviously caused by us right oh oh i'm sorry i misunderstood you keep going though yeah so there's there's been six extinctions on this planet yes we're in the midst of the sixth the human caused one, which is horrific. But there has been extinctions on this planet that wiped up 98% of life on this planet. Yeah. And it came back from 98% dead to the next balance of life. And then a comet came or a very similar

situation to what climate change is happening, but more rapid. Well, actually what we're doing is more rapid because comet hits and it takes a thousand years for, for the comet to blanket the planet and so on, but very similar outcomes. So if we wipe out life on this planet from our activities, the sixth extinction, it'll

just come back without us in a hundred million years. But are we that incapable of a species that we don't know any better? That we can't come back into harmony with this? Like are we, is the promise, is our own human promise that far gone that we don't have the capability to bring ourselves back into unity with nature at some point with our level of intelligence. I mean, it's up for grabs. I mean, I'm hopeful that in the next,

that we make a good start in this decade towards turning the trajectory and showing people that it can be done. And then the next decades have to be in that direction. Do you believe in karma define define it how you how you understand it in the simplest possible terms the idea that what you do comes back around to you good and bad um i'm not i'm not sure that i believe that exactly, but I think that, that in this case, when it comes to nature, yes.

Yeah. I do feel that what we're doing to it is, is definitely going to affect us badly. I guess that I believe in karma, but the cycles of karma, like if somebody, if somebody does something in this this lifetime will they necessarily feel that in this lifetime i think it does operate on a larger like on larger cycles well sometimes and karma can work in strange ways right the rich guy can step on everyone to become a billionaire and look like he has everything 10 houses whatever chick he wants all that stuff but he dies miserable and that's a form of karma because you know but they don't all die miserable they don't all that's it sure sure so then does karma work in that case does it do his kids have to be miserable for it to but like interesting but yeah

but you know like this does karma work on the grand grander scale that because there's billionaires and because there's mass collections of wealth everybody suffers yes right so because we've allowed this to happen we all suffer because there's such a wealth gap so i believe on that scale of in karma but do i believe that somebody will get it coming to them in their lifetime in an equal measure that they will they will be miserable i don't know that i see that all right how about this let me amend the question a little bit across wide populations on average yeah do you think there's more likely for something like that yes okay yeah because I don't know I think about this in in the real micro sometimes yeah and like I'm a little OCD for sure so this probably helps with it but as an example

i see a quest bar right here right yeah i eat a lot of quest bars they're wrapped in plastic and which it doesn't have to be plastic be anything else whatever it is it's something that would be trash right sure and there are plenty of times where i will go because the rapper like kind of crumples up or whatever when i'm out in public and i will go dump it in in a trash can maybe on a city street on my way walking usually i'm on the phone or something and the wrapper will go in but a very small piece of it will go on the ground and when i see that out of the corner of my eye i'm now i'm always a little delayed but i'm still walking yeah and i will literally stop in my tracks yeah and just be like no a someone else is gonna have to pick that up for me and b if they don't it's going in the goddamn ocean and

i will go back and i will pick it up and i will put it in and it's almost like i feel like i'm being watched at all times and like don't fuck this up julian and i you know i wonder if i've only ever lived in my head but it seems like a lot of people don't have that type of feeling and in a way it's like that's society like you're trying to take it it's not just for you you're trying to take care of all the people around you and what about the other species that like inhabit this because that's why you because because you care about the greater good yes exactly um and and that extends i think levels of spirituality for people are, it develops as it extends to greater and greater things. Like, you know,

it could start with caring about somebody other than you, your family, but at some point you care about your community or you care about your, your, your, your, your state or your, your country,

or you care about other species or you care about other ecosystems. That's a, that for me, that's a spiritual evolution of, of caring about the greater good and in larger and larger capacities, or your heart is compassionate to the degree that you, you have a bit, you have a, you have a greater and greater concern for more and it's less about you. And I think it's, I think that's one of the things that, that as you, as you do get older, early in life, you build a foundation for yourself. I write about this in Age of Union. There's different stages because I know a lot of young people feel like I want to be giving a lot, doing impact now.

But I think that it's, it's important to build your foundation of being able to have resources, kind of like I did when I started Lightspeed. And then as you grow, hopefully what happens as you develop is you start to have a greater span of what you care about and what you include in that circle of compassion. And for you, it includes species. It includes what happens to the ocean and i think that that's where human where humanity has to get to is how every if everybody cared if everybody if we had eight billion change makers instead of eight billion individualists wouldn't have these problems sure i think the the cynical argument to some of that would be that of these eight billion people in the world how many of them are extremely successful guys like dax da silva who control their own destiny sure right away i don't think that like i think different people can affect things in very different ways though you don't have to be you know you're fortunate enough to have worked hard

and got to where you are to be able to pay it forward which is a beautiful thing but like you don't have to be you know the billionaire guy funding everything just to make a difference it can be something as simple as making sure you pick up that second part of the wrapper and just make the world a little better just through doing that you know well i that's what i that's it's those daily things it's the it's it's the doing the the everyday thing with intention that is important yeah it's we are so on autopilot in our day-to-day actions when we when we get off autopilot and we start to be intentional about the things that we choose to do in terms of like what what am i eating what what how am i transporting myself what What are the, what came, what went into this meal?

What are the impacts of all kinds of consumer decisions? That's when the ordinary becomes elevated. You know, that's from Judaism, it's called the mitzvah. You do something, do something very ordinary, but you elevate it spiritually by having an intent behind it. And if we got out of autopilot and more and more of the things that we did, maybe you start with a couple of things, but more and more of the things that you did throughout the day were intentional

and had, had meaning and were, and considered the greater, whether it's people or animals or ecosystems or all of it, that's where we have meaning and purpose in our in our day-to-day and i think people are complaining about lacking that yes it's it's probably to me the biggest underlying problem that humanity has i mean i'm always very respectful of organized religion i think the majority of people involved with organized religion use it for beautiful things, and I think that's awesome. I'm not, through my own experience, I'm not the biggest fan of some of it for myself, but I do, even if I have that bias, it is very hard to ignore

the correlation over the last 15, 20 years of, you know, a lot of people moving away from religion and finding meaning in like bullshit, like politics or stuff like that, where I then empathize with them because I'm like, oh, that is all they're looking for. They're looking for their reason to exist or whatever, because as humans, we like to go towards teams. But you know, if the backstop isn't like religion or something like that there's got to be better ways for people to use their outlets and maybe that's why when you make the tie between like spirituality and nature yeah can we all be team nature for a minute

that's what i'm saying like that's something people can be like religious not religious you can get behind that you know well and in this moment of disconnection from nature, we should all just try to get out in nature. You know, that's something I've tried to do. I think it started a lot with, obviously I've been doing this since I was a kid, but I started doing a lot more of it when Age of Union started.

Also, you know, I just have this new place in LA, but just spending my time in California, in the surrounding areas where we will feel more connected, not just to nature, but, but ourselves to develop our, people are always asking, how do I develop that spiritual instrument? Start with nature, start with nature. You know, that's, and I think that if we, if we think about, um, spirituality, an interesting way to think about it is think about yourself as an instrument. You're a body, you're a soul, you're a mind, have all of those things work to make the world better. But you're just an instrument.

You know, you're a conduit. And the more that instrument's attuned to doing good for the greater, the more positive impact that you have. That's my daily prayer is just make me a better instrument. What can this instrument do? That's why I work on my body. That's why I work on my mind. That's why I build my soul. That's why I spend time in nature so i can be a better instrument um and i'm a flawed

instrument you know but that's that's the that's the hope and and i think that you can you can do more and your your impact can get can get yeah developed and you develop your talents everybody's got those unique abilities, right? Did you develop a lot of, because it sounds like you're very, very interested in the power of the mind and everything. Did you develop a lot of that in your career? Or is that something you were interested in as a young kid? I think that just the whole CEO experience for 17 years, I was an introvert, you know, and I think deep down had no real innate leadership capability until I was thrown into having to lead a team. I was a software developer starting at 13 and started the company at 28, but I'd done just software on my own for a good, what is that,

15 years. Can we talk about that company? Yeah yeah sure just yeah for a little background for people right so started lightspeed when i was 28 in 2005 and uh that's it's a tech company that is now public in in the toronto stock exchange we took it public in in 2019 and then a year later listed it in the new york stock exchange so there's so you can you can see lspd uh see our stocks doing bye bye bye bye not as not as good as it was doing in 2021 when the tech market was booming. But it's doing good. It's doing good. But yeah, so I started that in 2005. I built retail software.

I worked for a lot of Apple dealerships all through my teens and 20s. I was a real Mac nerd when Apple was on its last legs. And Steve Jobs hadn't even come back to the company yet. Then it had its huge resurgence. And because I was building Mac software, I rode that wave. And when everybody wanted to have a Mac in their store and restaurant, that's what Lightspeed did. And so we basically were hugely successful from the very beginning. So you did a lot more than like credit card processing.

You were a whole back end. It was mostly not credit card processing. That was not something we even had as a part of our software for i would say the first decade it was mostly running the back end of a retail store so our original customers were apple dealerships before there's apple stores apple apple dealerships it was kind of like a like you have a toyota dealership then apple wiped them all out by opening its own store. So real gratitude. But Steve Jobs didn't feel like those dealerships were up to his standards in terms of aesthetics.

They definitely were not. As someone who loves Steve Jobs and studies everything he does, he had a very specific way things needed to be done. He did. And those were lots of our friends and helped Lightspeed in the early days. But yeah, so that was sort of our early customers. So hundreds of thousands of SKUs in the inventory, parts and accessories and all that kind of thing. That's a lot, like suppliers and different currencies and different countries and very complex, multiple locations these retail stores had. And then we brought that sort of complexity management, back-end management to hospitality.

So we occupy a certain segment of the market that's too small for an enterprise custom system, but too big for like a Shopify or a Square or a Clover, which is mostly for the outfits that don't have the complexity. So we operate in that. And I guess the first 10 years were just, no, first seven years was bootstrapping. That was me not knowing anything about business,

but having a good sense of the market and software and kind of managing the cash on my own. We were profitable. It was a little profitable years, actually, when I didn't know what i was doing uh funny how that works it's funny how that works then the vcs come in and then the market comes in then you were always losing money right so the first seven years are incredible actually i built bought was able to buy real estate with all our profits and that's that's how the age of union

center exists today is because that was the last big building we bought before we got invested in by venture capital oh that's cool yeah the next seven years was about 300 million in vc money from silicon valley uh from a bunch of canadian funds and then that got us to the point where we then took it public but we were talking a little bit offline it was a roller coaster ride there was one point where you know so many things happened concurrently. They were just like very, very difficult. One investor wanted their money out. There was a huge HR issue in the company. A friend of mine who was an alcoholic was struggling and I, you know, brought him in from Mexico after he had a knife fight on the beach.

And all these things simultaneously. And I'm working on my online magazine for the new gallery I opened, and I felt my face paralyze. This is a couple years before the IPO. When you say paralyze, like a stroke almost? Well, I didn't know what it was. And I went to the doctor with my French tutor, and she's like, your face isn't moving. We're going to the, to the doctor with my French tutor and she's like, your face isn't moving. We're going,

we're going to the emergency. And it was Bell's palsy. And so it was just, I think, I thought it was Superman at this point, you know, cause with all of those things happening and all of this, this pressure to grow and all of this,

I could deal with it mentally. I could deal with it spiritually cause I had invested, you know, so much in, in those things and in my body too, but the body cracks when it's, that's the one thing that I don't think, I think we know the least about. I think we know how it works, but I've never felt so helpless. The next, I think the same day I day, I had a lunch with investors, the Canadian investors that were trying to help me buy out the American investors.

And I had soup falling out of my mouth. And I was like, the last thing I wanted to do was give up because it's not in my nature. And I said said you guys have to we have to we have to get we have to i can't lead this we need to do what these investors want just sell it off and that was that was sort of a low point you know you didn't end up doing that but we didn't so in the end uh in in the end a lot of that was resolved. My friend lost his battle with alcoholism, unfortunately. Sorry to hear that. And passed.

But we did find a win-win-win for our original believers, our original investors that did need money back out for their fund from Silicon Valley. The Canadians came in and bought them out. Then they took it public and looked like geniuses but after doing that we got to keep growing the company did you take some time away for that though because I mean your face looks great now so obviously like you healed but that that sounds nasty I mean I thank God for

non-traditional medicine you know like acupuncture which I heard it randomly through somebody was the only thing that was able to bring back my face. So they were acupuncture in your face? Yeah, for about two months. And it brought enough blood back that it restored. But it's when you're physically, for many of you that have had an injury, you know what it's like. You feel almost, your body's almost a theory

until something happens to it. Especially when you're a young man or young to it like you're especially when you're a young man or young woman and just like you're just such a machine and such a superhuman until something changes your perspective and you realize your flesh and bone you know yeah and then that's like we're talking about it how when you're building as an entrepreneur you can have a strong mind you know everybody in the company looked to me for strength because i was somebody who would always stay calm no matter what happened um but but the body's something you got to take care of it's just it's just one of those things that you can't you you can't just do a meditation or uh read a book and bring it back you know it's yeah it's a precious part of the

instrument yeah and it's you were talking with me about about this in the car a little bit but like the top-down mechanism of it you know you can have real underlying health problems that are you know internal issues and they're just exacerbated by the environment by stress exactly yeah that you subject that to and it's like you had another line in the car where you were like we we're starting to under i may get this wrong so if i fuck it up correct me but like we're starting to understand the body very well but we still or no we're starting to understand the mind pretty well but we still don't understand the body yeah we we because we're spending so much time trying to

psychoanalyze every last thing you know i think I think we're, we do understand a little bit more. We, I mean, we understand zero about the subconscious. Don't even really know how dreams work. We don't really know how, actually we don't know much. So, but we know even less about some of the really mysterious things about how the body reacts to things or why it, why it does the things that it does. If we understood those things, we would be able to solve

widespread problems like diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And, and, uh, or maybe we just don't want to do the, the, the solutions to those because we like to eat what we eat. We like to live the way that we live for the most part, but yeah, the body I think is one of those things where it needs to be treated with a lot more care

than I think that we generally do. And I think there's a reverence because it's that part of the instrument that only when you lose it do you realize how important it is. When I lost that part of my face, I realized that all that tools to be able to convince people, to charm people, to bring them, to, to bring people together, all that confidence was gone, was gone. And I knew, and there's a real possibility of Bell's palsy that it doesn't

come back. I was terrified. Yeah. That's, I mean, losing control is the ultimate, you know, I was telling you, I had another thing where I was dealing with it. I'm still dealing with it. But the first time it came up, I don't know if I told you this, but I had to go to the ER because I thought I was having a heart attack. Right. And then I was hoping afterwards it was like a panic attack, which was wishful thinking it wasn't. But like, obviously, like, I'm fine. But when you start to feel that, I don't, I can't even imagine what it feels like on my face.

I can only speak to this experience. But when you start to feel that, like there's a reason they call it a heart attack or a heart attack symptom where your own body is just working against itself. You know, everything that seems to be a problem or was a problem right before that suddenly does not fucking matter. And you're like, I can't do shit about this. It's a really awful feeling. But to be running, you know, to be building anything, but to be running a company in the middle of that and still like getting shit done is wild. And, you know, by the way, how old are you? I'm 47.

Yeah. Can you look in that camera and say that? You're 47 years old. I mean, I was looking at it. I need like, do you have the elixir of life or something? You look like you're like 35. Well, thank you. I don't. From everything I've been through, I should look 60. That at, I need like, do you have the elixir of life or something? You look like you're like 35. Well, thank you. I don't, from everything I've been through, I should look 60.

That's what I'm saying. Like you're talking about all these struggles, 17 years building a business, coding since you were 13, trying to fight off all the people around the world with conservation and you look like this. That's why I don't tell people that I was CEO for 17 years when I retired because they're like, how old are you? You got like a good skincare routine or something? mean no no nothing basic basic but i mean you're in shape you obviously work out a lot how old are you guys i'm not 47 i'll tell you that

christ i mean but you seem like a guy who works out a lot no yeah i think it's always been something that's that's uh that's super important to me I think from my teens I was a tiny kid so I think it was just I guess in security Joe Joe me from being 140 pound kind of you know teenager to you know somebody that was bigger but now I've like you know I got really big in my teeth my 20s ands, and now I kind of like a little bit more of the – it's not as fashionable to be massive. I just look stupid. Who cares? Who cares?

Everyone judges everything these days. I think it all looks good. If people are healthy, that's what matters. For sure. Different strokes, different folks on how to do it but you you spend 17 years with that and we had talked about this at the very beginning of the conversation but you move on from ceo to executive chairman to start working on these causes around the world was there like a like i had asked you earlier like what had gotten you into it and you mentioned when you were nine 19 going out in that protest but was there something other than just i was tired of being the ceo and

now this was my interest so i'm going to go to this or was there like a like a spark thing that happened where you're like oh it's time that i start really putting my money where my mouth is with this so i i believe i believe very much in there's a bigger plan than I did. I never a master. I don't have a master plan. You know, there's a bigger master plan that's at work and I just have to become a better listener for it and do the things that I feel called to do. So one of those things was the book. Right. one of those things was the book, right? And I think that the books, and I would totally write

this book totally differently because now that I've talked about it for so many years, uh, it's all there, but now that I've discussed it with so many people, um, I feel like I almost have a vernacular version of it, but it does have the core things that are a part of the, of, of the, of the project. And it evolved into the project supernaturally uh so there's leadership these are the for me there's a recipe for being a change maker there's leadership which for me was lightspeed that game taught me how to be a leader uh whether i wanted to or not i can tell you a bit of the story the early days of that mess. And then there's, so leadership, culture. Culture is very, very, a very human thing.

It's the, it's what's beautiful about humanity. Whenever people say that humans are the parasite, and we very much are, but what's beautiful about humanity is the culture, right? The art, the food, the music, the architecture. Those are the beautiful things we bring into, into the planet. They're also our behaviors. So it's the way that we operate in the world

and those things can be, those things can evolve. So there's so much promise in culture and so much beauty that we bring there. And that's a big part of, uh, of storytelling and communications. It's like how we're getting this, the word out about this right now. So leadership, culture, spirituality, which is a concern for the, for the bit,

for the greater good, uh, which we've lost a connection to, and then finally nature. Right. If we can get the first three and nature's our foundation, that's how we can, we can become change makers for nature. And the book ended up being about, about nature. So that book, when COVID hit, I was like i was like okay well let's get the book out there as an e-book and as a and as a podcast i think i told you the story earlier that's how we met paul and how we met paul watts and how we got these folks and and dr kerry and and others how we got those folks uh doing

early instagram lives and how when i created Age of Union as an organization, they were the first ones to fund. And they knew other people on the ground that were doing incredible things. They were like, this is our chance to maybe get the best projects that exemplify what we should be doing everywhere, how we can get them funded. And that's sort of how it all came together. But I think for me being on the ground with those projects,

there's a, there's a short film called Heart of Emission, which is me meeting our first project, which is Paul's project. It's a six minute film on, on, um, uh, on YouTube. Meeting those first projects is, it was hugely transformational. Going into the Amazon the first time, from this one gate to Paul's project should take an hour and a half of driving and then down the river. It took us seven hours because it was a tropical rainstorm.

It took us two additional days of this rainstorm. We had to push our van out of mud. We had to clear a boa constructor out of the way. We had to hack through. Paul's team over there said that was the worst entry to the Amazon I've ever seen. And that's the one we had. We were on the river at night because we missed Paul's boat pickup. And we were with some of the Peruvians

that are part of that team. We're on this stolen boat in the middle of the Las Piedras River and with a flashlight. The guy at the front was like flashing his flashlight so that we didn't hit a log because we go into the river and the guy at the back is like moving the boat out of the way of the logs and along the sides of the river are eyes of caimans everywhere.

And Paul's got no guns. Fucking guy goes in there completely unarmed, but that's besides the point. We meet Paul. He shows us to our room. We shine our flashlight, and there's bats all across the top of this lodge, and we have to throw things at them so they don't shit directly on us at night. Then we have to go to bed. Oh my God.

Every, every couple hours we're rescuing a snake and putting, putting a snake into a, into a bag and taking it with us. I was like, I experienced that on the way into the Amazon because in these areas where there's loggers and, and people that have come from the Andes, ex-cocaine farmers that are doing these extraction jobs

in the Amazon, they see a snake. They're not native. These people don't know the Amazon. They don't know the creatures. They'll just slice it in half. So we would grab and rescue snakes from these areas where they were sort of vulnerable, bring them to the reserve, to the sanctuary,

and release them. So I got very used to and fell in love with snakes on that trip. But it's being in these places and being with these animals where you realize that mother tarantula that's on that mound and is surrounded by all her babies, that's her home. You know, you can move a snake into the reserve,

but that snake is so used to the smells of where it came from that it has like a 10% chance of surviving because all the other animals in that area know it better than that snake. So you might think you're doing a great thing, and you've got to give it that 10% chance, but the animals have homes. It comes so clear to you when you're in these places that we don't protect these places. They don't have one. They don't have a home. That's the thing you can't really fuck with nature you know me no

there's a reason that things are what they are and where they are and why they are and yeah like I get so stressed out like thinking about evolutionary biology and how many millions of years this took and yeah why this bird ends up with that beak and that one ends up with that beak and this one lives there and that one lives there. But you're a hundred percent right. It's, it's not just like, like as human beings, we have, you know, those main things that can make us technically able and culture and civilizations, the biggest part of it that can let us drop into other places and survive. But like in, in the wild West that is nature, I mean,

these, these fucking animals have to kill dinner. You know, there's no, it's like the real old, old days for humanity where you couldn't just drop in somewhere. So it's, it's fascinating to hear you put it that way.

But what's the, you know, when you went into the Amazon for the first time, you know, cause we have the video playing behind you right here. I can put some of that in the corner of the screen. I've just been watching it while you're talking,

but here's the, the snake we're going to put back on the tree. Well, that's like, is that Paul? No, Paul. Yeah. Well, Paul made me climb that tree, which was, I came back from there like with a huge bruise because I pull, I was just a mess.

Paul made me do all these things that when I came back, I went and came back, I was covered in bites. He made me do all these things that when I came, when I came back, I went and came back, I was covered in bites. He made me do all the things I wasn't supposed to do. Yeah. Jump in the river, um, where I was, for the most of the trip, I was, I had like long sleeve,

all the stuff you're supposed to do, long sleeve pants. You know, uh, Paul's out there. He's like, oh, you gotta, you gotta have your shower in the river. Two days later, oh, you gotta, you gotta have your shower in the river. Two days later, I'm just covered, covered in bites. I don't know, he's immune to it at this point.

So he doesn't get bitten. Yeah. But me, I'm suffering that climbing that tree. I had, I pulled my triceps. So all of this is black when I come back. I thought I had a spider bite. I went to, I was almost going to the emergency. They were like, no, that's a bruise from.

Was there even an emergency room anywhere around? No, no got back to Miami I was in Miami so it's just yeah you're out in the middle of nowhere there I mean I love reading about the things in the Amazon because they still haven't even discovered like I forget the number but some ridiculous percentage of species in there there's a bug that just bites people on the lips you don't know it's coming it's this little fucking thing and if it bites you it kills you over a 20 year period i mean there is so much you're literally seeing something new all the time yeah it's it's quite different from the area that we went to in the congo which is quite sad they what is it called um not silent forest but something like that because of the that a lot of these forests have

been hunted out. You don't hear anything, you know, silent spring. All the way hunted out? Yeah. So there's gorillas. So you'll find gorillas and they're, and they're eating cause they're protected and they're eating the bamboo, but you don't hear birds.

You don't hear anything. And it's, I'm sure it's not like that all throughout Cozy, Biega, but there's parts of those, those, uh, those, those places are so hunted out. That hasn't happened in, in those, in the parts that we were, uh, in, in the Amazon. But, uh, that's one of the, that's one of the real challenges in Africa, um, compared to, uh, or the parts of Africa we went to compared to here.

And that's really, really sad sad to see because you think you're in a protected area but you don't hear anything anymore you know yeah i mean and there look and this is another thing i think paul has an amazing viewpoint on and ryan tate as well like you know their hunters are a part of the ecosystem and there's great hunting i don't know if that's how you want to describe it but like there's very important hunting that happens you know you have to you can't just have the planet overrun with species human beings have been here we have hunted to kill food over years and years and years but it's a matter of like what are we doing and what are we doing it for yeah you know you talked earlier about the trawlers in the sea and it's just overfishing so okay you need to fish this is

crazy though too much but you know you look at like game hunting and stuff you know i'm sure we have fans out there who are hunters and are into some of that but like i'd much rather hear about someone going like elk hunting or something where they're going to go feed people you know when when we start talking especially like some of the prize hunting like that happens in africa to me it's just like what are you doing like you you're gonna put a head on a fucking wall. That's not a sport. It's not,

it's not. I don't know what, what, what, what is derived from that for people? I just don't know. Is it, is it a power that you have over the life of something else?

That's sick. In some ways, in my, in my opinion, I mean, lots of people see it a different way, but I just, I have a hard time understanding it.

I think that might be spot on like there's something there's something innate like there's a different feeling of power when you can provide dinner for your family that's different that's so totally different but like the idea of just killing because you can or killing because like for example they want to stick a rhino horn on a table at a business meeting or something like that. So let's hack a fucking rhino to death. Not even to death.

Leave it there to die. That doesn't process for me. It's crazy. I did suggest to some hunters that, because there are traditions of business people, especially in Canada, that do these hunting trips, that do salmon fishing, or fishing trips of big game in the sea or in the forest.

Wouldn't your kids be more impressed if you, because obviously these people bring these trophies back home and their kids are horrified, their family's not very proud of them. Would it be better if you maybe took some videographers obviously these people bring these trophies back home and the kids are, their kids are horrified. Their family's not very proud of them. Would it be better if you maybe took some videographers out with you and you, and you, your hunting trip with your buddies,

you can still get drunk and bond, but you brought back some incredible footage of, of the animals that you saw, which would your, and your kids could like use it on Tik TOK or use it, you know, wouldn't that be a better thing to bring home? Like change up hunting, you know, like bring it,

make it a, make it something that's, and then as part of it, you know, donate something to that area to protect it for a legacy. Yeah. One of the things with nature and protecting nature is that's one thing you can do. There's very few things that are for forever. You know, my company will disappear at some point. Will it last a hundred years? Who knows? and protecting nature is that's one thing you can do. There's very few things that are for forever. My company will disappear at some point.

Will it last 100 years? Who knows? But if we protect nature, of course, everything can change a little bit, if governments change things. But nature, if you protect nature, that could be a forever legacy. That's a huge thing that you can involve yourself with that's uh that's that i think that these folks with with money like if they are doing these

hunting trips or they they are doing some of this um these other kinds of investments like i think everybody should start to think that way yeah we talked a little bit earlier about the difficulty of you know getting all 30 on board or stuff like that with things through the un and yeah this is on a similar wavelength but like when you talk about making change it does involve governments as messy as they are and it's different all over the world everyone's got different needs there's all kinds of power mongering and stuff like that but you know it does constantly feel like you know one step forward is some other step backward and as an example there is a law in new jersey and i

think it's in new york too but it's here in new jersey where when we go to the store we now have to like bring bags they don't give us plastic bags okay great on the surface i'm like great then you go into the store my mom pointed this out yesterday and she's 100 right about this she's like okay so they stop us from using plastic bags which is the one thing that is like the most convenience that like actually like probably the most needed for people to like generally be able to go to the store without thinking about it get what they need provide for their family but when you go through the entire aisle every thing there is packed in plastic yeah it's packed in all the that they're not letting the end consumer use at all right and so to me that's just a perfect example of like you know someone in

government somewhere wanted to do a good thing and then everyone else says fine do that but we're all gonna do this over here because our donors are these guys and we need to take care of them but fuck these people yeah like why have why has why have the uh bottlers like the people that make all our plastic water or our like soda like how come they've never ever had any pressure to come up with alternatives? Yes. You know, the minute the government said you can't do that anymore, they'd come up with it. They build it into the price. Yeah.

If it was more expensive and it probably isn't. There's no pressure put on any of them, you know? So what about takeout? You know, if it was mandated that everybody had to use reusable, i've seen i see this starting to happen in some cities there's a standardized takeout container that everybody has to use just let's start being brave you know let's start mandating some of these things and the market will respond it'll adapt create some constraints around companies why why are they allowed to do things without any why are they allowed to do things without any, why are they allowed to put things into the

environment with no responsibility to have to take them out? Why are they, and why are they like, when it comes to things like extraction, why are they allowed to log or do those kinds of things and not have to have any obligation to restore or mine? It just, it's kind of crazy that, that

governments sort of roll over for companies without giving them any responsibility when the responsibilities that they have could actually create jobs for local people. If there was a restoration step, that creates employment. Why do we not think about some of these things?

I think it's, if the people care, government cares. Government's not going to make something a priority that isn't a priority for, for people. And so that's why I think it's important for people to get more conscious, to reward governments that do these kinds of things and to support them when they want to do something

brave, because they're not going to risk their, they're not going to put themselves at risk for something that people don't care about or don't really support. Yes. You know, governments have like a top three and they'll kind of act on those things. And if they're healthcare and, um, and jobs and one other thing in the, in the environments down here, a lot of government, a lot of people go into government for

very good reasons they want to protect nature they want to do good things for their kids and grandkids and their in their own health but if the donors come in but if it's down the list and and other and it's not popular with people or their donors then they'll it'll get deprioritized and that's the problem you know all these, they don't really have power. Right. I mean, you know this world well. Like, they're controlled by money. Like, you're using your money for great things, but there's a lot of people using their money in D.C. and in the different capitals around the world not for great things. Yeah. content and beauty to people like what you're trying to do is really good right because it's digestible it's something enjoyable people can kind of relax late at night and watch it on their off time because I also remember or at least try to remind myself I should say that you know people the average person has has a life they have kids they have responsibilities. They're trying to pay the bills they have the same 24 hours in the day you and I do and

You know not everyone like there's other things to get prioritized and that means they're not there's not like a fault for them being Like oh fuck the environment. It's not like that. No, it's just that people need to be they need to feel inspired rather than forced You know, so when you start with the plastic bags thing when they walk through the aisles and see everything plastic they feel forced right right but if but if they were like oh shit wow every time like you know those um those water fountains now where you go and you put the you put you can refill your bottle underneath it and it shows you the number that have been saved by you doing this love that yeah awesome yeah that i i go like it and it shows you the number that have been saved by you doing this love that yeah awesome yeah that i i go like it then it gamifies i drink more water i'm like oh

let's go up let's save a few more yeah you know like that is so much better of a type of system but i feel like a lot of times like corporations and governments like you can pick your poison here like they end up getting in the way for different reasons yeah Yeah. I think it's, like I said, governments will respond to when people care. There could be donors, but then it's voters at the end of the day that will keep them in power or not. It is a different situation in Canada

because you can't have as much campaign money involved. There's a real cap. But if the people care government cares and I think we have to remind ourselves that we are in charge of the priorities well we are but also you know that the donor class problem is real I mean I are you familiar with the story of Steve Donziger no okay so this is a guy who hopefully in the fall I'm gonna be bringing on the podcast but he is a lawyer in New York who since 1993 has been at war with Chevron okay so without going all the way into the details that I don't fuck something up here essentially chevron was dumping waste right into into ecuador and into

the environment there donziger figured it out went down there started fighting them like crazy now chevron's this huge multinational oil company they have influence absolutely everywhere and i'm going to really truncate this story there's's a lot more detail, but he ends up helping make documentaries through it, constantly him, outspend him, outspend him so that he goes away. Doesn't go away. And so the Chevron lawyers say to the New York courts, all right, we'll do it in Ecuador and we will accept whatever the Ecuadorian court says. So they go down to Ecuador, the very first hearing in Ecuador, they send in 10 new lawyers and they try to say, no, no, we're not going to do it here. So again, trying to outspend them case goes through in ecuador ecuadorian court awards the victims billions of dollars wow chevron immediately has to leave ecuador right so what do they do they find a way to get a battle back into new york courts they own all the all the

media as well because they're funding through all their advertisements and stuff so they push down the story they end up getting some sort of judgment like against the cause yeah and so then donziger they try to like blackmail him they they try to get his cell phone records and everything he doesn't hand him over he ends up in prison wow for like six months and then a year on house arrest for contempt of court and i forget what it was but the judge in the case had ties back to chevron and so he is now you know the guy's amazing and like he's so i don't want to use this word but like i don't blame him like he's clearly very like jaded by the whole thing and i don't blame him one bit and he went he went up

against the machine and the machine was massive. And he got killed. Yeah. And the point is the machine was the government, but not really. It was the government owned by the companies. And so I see this cycle because, you know, you have people like libertarians and socialists, I guess, like opposites fight. Like, okay, leave it in the private. Okay, put it all government.

And it's like, you're going gonna get fucked some way or another and the cynic in me and i hate to say that in conversations like this because i feel like we're doing so much good to inspire change but the cynic in me says how's how's this system gonna change when you have this groupthink mechanism that's been in place over and over again and swallows up the people like the don like the dancing ears of the world. Mm-hmm. That's a tough one, because the machine we've got, we are in the peak of capitalism right now. But remember, capitalism is our tool. It's neither good nor bad. Same as the internet, same with social media.

I'm not sure about Twitter. Threads is obviously good. But these are things that, think about capitalism, right? I'll give you one small example. If we, let's say there was a new recyclable, sorry, a new type of packaging for plastic water, for plastic water, for water, and the market, everybody bought it, right? Because maybe it's five cents more, but everybody is more conscious we're going to spend the extra five cents. Capitalism creates the supply and demand to make that the dominant thing

and it changes everything, right? It changes all of the dynamics. So even though it's brought all this negative into the world because of the proliferation of negative things, it can also bring the rapid proliferation of the right things. So it's ultimately our tool.

It's ultimately our leadership of these companies, ultimately our oversight, it's shareholders, it's, we have to care. People are behind these things. People have to care. People have to not give up and put these things into check because ultimately these are all human inventions and these are our tools. And anything we've created that's destructive, we can reposition that thing to not be destructive. Maybe it's a long-term thing.

Maybe it's a 100 or 200 year journey of capitalism. You know, because it's taken us thousands of years to get here. You know, we're in a very destructive period. The amount of destruction that we've done from the 70s until now to the world's forests and to nature never happened

on this planet, even with the rapid extinctions. They happened over hundreds of thousands of years, not like this. But the promise that we can do something very quickly is because capitalism actually works quite fast. You can change, if behavior changes or consumer preference changes and there are alternatives to

things, it can change quickly, right? So that's like, it's the negative, but it's also the possibility. Yeah. I always always i've said this probably 50 60 times on this podcast but like capitalism has some serious flaws but yeah i mean i think it's it's the best system and how do we like you're saying like i put that like it's still somewhat of a new invention in the context of human history how do we keep perfecting it to try to work out those flaws in the example you give or you gave at the very beginning of that though with like okay here's a better example x thing and it's five cents more what we got to figure out is how to make that five cents less with capitalism because at the end of the day across a group people are going to

spend on it they're going to get the quality for the best price right right so you know and that presents an issue because and i do want to talk about this put a put a uh a button in it with you know some of the deforestation that's happened specifically since the 70s but like you know you can get past the point right of no return on the way there so how do we how do we fix that well it's not past the point yet right so it's not past the point yet so that that's why i think we've got to really create a sense of urgency around what can be done in this decade i really feel like we need to just feel like we've turned a corner and at least understanding um the deforestation i want to come back to there was one thing that I had a

discussion with about somebody, let me just look it up. So I'd never heard this term because I've heard about cell-based meats, but precision fermentation is something that people are exploring. It's another meat alternative. I don't think that people realize how much forest and Amazon currently, but most of the lower 48, all of that nature has been lost to cattle ranching. Oh, let's talk about that. Cattle ranching is the, ask Paul what the threat to the Amazon is, ask what, and the

Brazilians, for example, they say, and there's a huge cowboy culture being created there. They're like, well, you did it to all your forests. So you mow down everything and you have ranches and you like beef. How come we can't do it? Don't be like us, do differently. Right. It's a hard message. And so it's our thirst and it's our love of beef that's actually caused all of the forest, most of the forest cover to go.

Of course, it's a different situation in Indonesia with palm oil and all that. But for the Americas, it's mostly, it's a story about beef. Huge percentage of the United States is ranch. And what is at risk in the Amazon long-term is ranching. So if there were alternatives, and I know that there's been a couple of attempts, but if there was alternatives that didn't require, that was, that, you know, like that didn't

require the ranch land or the crops, and even if it just meant that people reduced, that can make a huge, huge difference. But is that a cultural change that is possible for every country? Is it one that will take, will we be able to make a transition? Will people even accept that that's something that they want to actually change? Or will it take something like an alternative, which is literally almost the same that people feel less and less squeamish about, which is cell-based or the fermentation? Will those be things that people will accept for the planet? I feel like this is another one of those.

Or are we too addicted to hamburger? Maybe. That's real. But are we okay with the cost well the other problem is the messaging that happens around it i feel like i feel like our world is filled with a lot of intentional division from right more elite communities if you know i don't love that word because it's kind of overused but you know you hear the joke from like the wef you'll

have nothing and be happy and they're the same people telling you to eat bugs it then it's the same kind of thing it turns everyone off to and they're like fuck that i'm gonna eat beef sure you know there's got to be some sort of middle ground but also what's the what are the means that get to the end because i mean you talk about cattle ranching i do want to talk about that if we get to it in the in the amazon because that's something i thought is the main problem yeah so that's one end of it but then if you're talking about maybe a more what's the term efficient way of going about getting beef well that's a really ugly end too because then you get factory farming right and then i mean if you ever watch these videos and what they i mean it's horrible what they do to to these creatures and everything it's like well what right do we have to do any of that

we don't i i think it's i think it's crazy and like people laugh at i'll admit like some of these protesters around the world are out of their minds but so a few of the things that they are drawing attention to i wish they would do it in a lot better not dumb ways but like yeah it's fair like you you watch a video of like whatever that is a cattle factory like yeah you don't unsee that it's horrible so like you know how do we get people to do that without it becoming some sort of political football that elites use to divide us yeah and how do we do it in a way that incentivizes people to want to be a part of something when when you tell them to eat bugs they're going to be like fuck that when you tell them like oh take this

what's that uh what's that company the possible burger maybe maybe that's one what's the other one beyond beyond yeah beyond meat or what it's like well the intentions there are probably great but then before they even get to the public, people are just like, oh, they're just trying to stop us from having our freedom to eat what we want. It's like, god damn, like how do we just enjoy a burger once in a while? Like you had given a good example earlier, like maybe, you know, you're not a vegan, but you eat a vegan meal once in a while. You know, just put a little bit, take a little bit of the percentage off the table. I mean, yeah, I could see that. Listen, it would make a huge difference. We've gone from our grandparents probably eating meat once or a couple times a week and fish maybe once a week on Friday to us now eating meat three times a day. And we have major health problems as a result of that. And the earth is sick because

of that, you know? So can we go back to where our grandparents were in terms of meat consumption, where they didn't have an epidemic of diabetes and cancer and all those things and we should enjoy those cultural enjoy those moments where where where the animal that give give their life is important and you enjoy those enjoy that you know and and but there's got to be there's got to be some sacrifice involved or a reduction if you want to put it in terms of sacrifice there's got to be some change you know either either there is alternatives that people aren't aren't um aren't uncomfortable with at some point or we've got to get uncomfortable with them or there's got to be some kind of and there's got to be simultaneous reduction or we'll end up with the same outcome right well this goes into the doom and gloom versus

positivity battle too it's like how do we message that and i also agree with you on the politicization like vegan's another one of those things that people are like are like that's my religion now you know i'm gonna annoy everybody with it and it turns every does it has it ever converted anybody you know no when i when i went completely plant-based for a couple of years, I never used the term vegan. I was like, you know, I've incorporated more plant-based, felt healthier, and I'm not entirely plant-based now, but I incorporated it into most of my meals. I try to. And actually going that way for a year taught me a lot about how I think about what a meal

looks like. But there's- What do you mean by that? Like, you know, I had, I had a friend that was very, very sort of vegan in terms of like, and they composed meals completely differently in terms of how they got their proteins, how they, so I, I sort of stopped thinking about, you know, a meal being as a meat centric thing with a couple of sides that to, you know, there's a meal can be composed of all sorts of different kinds of proteins that, that come from like beans

or they look like salads or didn't, you know? So that was sort of a further understanding of food. Yeah. But I just think that the politicization of it is not helpful. The environment shouldn't be politicized or put on a spectrum. Neither should food. I don't think, I don just think that the politicization of it is not helpful. The environment shouldn't be politicized or put on a spectrum. Neither should food. I don't think people should feel like their freedom's being taken away. It should feel like they have more choices, and some of the choices are intentional. I'm going to put intention. I have intention to enjoy some of the foods that I've always loved,

but I have intention to also do something that I know a reduction will help. There's so much of this conversation that keeps coming full circle on stuff we're talking about. I love when that happens. Cause that tells me where we're getting. Can I say something about fish? Please. Fish. Because of what I've seen in Sea Shepherd and people at Sea Shepherd and

Seasparacy. And because of the amount of mercury in the ocean mercury once it's in your body you cannot take it out and it's something that people there's so many people that i've heard of that went on a fish based diet and they got really sick permanently from mercury you can't get it i don't know once mercury is in your body and there's and the mercury in the ocean is concentrated in fish you it will never be removed you'll have mercury poisoning for forever there's if there's one thing that you could actually just cut that would help the ocean it would be fish like maybe there's stuff that's like locally caught like in our rivers and our

lakes or or but that that fit the fish that's out there is not good for us. And it's the, it's the only wild animal that we're catching with huge drift nets that if that was done on land, we'd never get away with it. Like, can you imagine taking a net and catching everything over this, over square kilometers and just killing everything?

It's crazy. We'd never get away with it. So that is, I think something where the ocean does need to recover and of course we're doing a bad job of land management with all the cattle and stuff can we take a sidebar on this actually how does this happen so you know i i feel like a lot of people know the buzzword like oh there's mercury in the fish or whatever yeah what are we doing to like you had talked about the gold miners example earlier that's a separate thing yeah with the oceans like what are we doing that's causing the fish to have all this mercury i don't know the answer to that maybe that maybe that's a google thing but i think there is naturally

mercury in the ocean um and maybe it's maybe it's added to by some of our industrial processes um i don't think you find mercury in in uh in like our rivers and lakes to the degree you have it in the ocean so i think it has something to do with the composition of the ocean yeah i just pulled this up from the scientific american right behind us human industrial activities such as coal-fired electricity generation smelting and the incineration of waste ratchets up the amount of airborne mercury which eventually finds its ways into lakes so it is our fault where which where it's gobbled up by unsuspecting fish and other marine life naturally the ocean is the biggest one where we get the most stuff so that's where we're going to see the most effects of it but yeah i mean some of that i guess is like

like you can't stop everything but you know how do you reduce a little bit? How do you also, you know, then parlay something like this into the whole, well, why are we just dropping a net and catching everything all at once? You know, why is there not some sort of process with this? Yeah. There is a lot of fronts here. We've covered so many things, but like our conversation I think has been for the most part solutions oriented or, or, or what can we do? You know, I think the small things do matter. If, if, if we did things in front of our friends,

had like a couple of things that we did that were, you know, we're, we're influential on each other. You know, I think that's, that's something that we can each do as, as change makers. I just feel like the, the, at feel like if we're at the point where we don't do anything because it's not worth it, like let's not even bring the plastic bag. So there's plastic on the shelves. So let's not bother.

That's when I think we get into a real danger zone of everybody saying we're fucked and, and there's no reason to, to try to protect anything, no reason to try to reduce anything. That's when capitalism's like, nobody cares. We can do whatever we want. And government feels the same. And that's when the future is already pre-written.

Now, like if Paul Watson said, this is the curve for, for, for Wales. This is, they're going extinct. That's the curve. If he accepted that, that's where we'd be. But then he said, no, no you know it's like this yes nothing has to be the on the the trend that is it it's on nothing does and it's amazing how in our examples today we've gone through a lot of times it's that small group of people like we were saying right you know so imagine what a large group of people could do right but it's also or somebody comes up with a cool company that changes the way

we do packaging for one thing. Yes. And that person makes so much money and does well, as they should. And then everybody copies them. So now we've got tons of recycled packaging. And I think the next companies should be innovating in that direction, the ones that are.

And that's happening. That's happening in fashion. Maybe it isn't happening fast enough, but I think the young entrepreneurs that are out there that are building businesses around sustainable or green or whatever, and eventually won't have to even call it those things. They won't even be categorized.

It'll just be a part of our values because that's the kind of world that we want. And I think that's sort of where we want to get to. Yeah. I mean, I had my friend Eric Olson in here for episode 119, and he's an interesting case because he started off his career in big oil. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then like very quickly moved over to the sustainability side working with plastics and so if i go on the nitty-gritty of what he does like he explained it very well on the third probably understands it

he does because he's working with a product that we villainize like plastics and he's like hey there's ways to actually say okay we can't fix all like the whole just remove plastics or something right now it's not realistic but there's ways we can make this better. And so I'm like, damn, if we can even work with some things that are like the quote unquote villains and improve them, that's a good spot to start because then the innovation overall will come up with something better than plastics down the line. And we kind of buy time doing that. But, you know, we keep coming around to how do we get people on board? How do we get people on board?

How do we get people on board? How do we get people on board? How do we get people motivated? You know, you had mentioned something earlier. I think it was about Canada with World War II. Yeah. And about how you had been talking with someone, how they, how they had been telling you about how they had, you know, all worked together to get this whole machine going. Well, obviously we did something like that here in the United States. And I had heard a story a while back about how in New Jersey, for example, and I think some other states. And the gentleman was Seth Klein. If you want to look up his book, it's called. Oh, he has a book on it.

Yeah, it's called the, well, we can look it up. It has the word war in it. And it's about the climate emergency and compares it to World War II. His group is called, I think, the Climate Emergency Unit. Got it. Okay, so I'll check that out. Yeah. world war ii his group is called i think the climate the climate emergency unit got it okay so i'll check that out yeah but if you if you look at like that's interesting because if if you look at like what they did on even just an every night thing on the eastern seaboard right we had all these u-boats out there these german u-boats that were on the coast and so people pre-internet era

banding together like we were talking about if everyone were standing around a fire what they would all do you know not fighting about on the internet people shut out all their lights at eight o'clock at night right and so that the boats couldn't see on the shore people work together everyone started working in the factories and the hospitals and stuff like that or going out into the field obviously fighting the war and what strikes me is you tie it all together it's like for some reason human beings have this need to have a cause that sometimes ends in some sort of destruction hopefully because they're ending some sort of evil that you wish never happened in the first place but like nazi germany did yeah you know they get

behind a cause and then and then suddenly everything goes away and they feel the desperation. And you look at society now, yeah, we've had these endless wars in this country, for example, over the past 80 years, but we stopped the draft after Vietnam. They're over there. They're not here. We, as the American empire, have never felt threatened or something. And so in a lot of ways, it's coalescing with this time where people are also losing spirituality they're lacking meaning and they don't have like a survival instinct right the the battles in the community or a collective instinct yes so there i think there's two interesting ways to look at the american dream and i'm speaking as a canadian because we share the same ether we share that that that dream in a way, that opportunity dream.

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In the American dream, like you're an individual, you're a cowboy, you're an entrepreneur, you're going to like, you know, everybody can make it to the top, but look at the greatest things that this country has ever done. Like the moon landing, or if you believe that happened, or like, I wasn't going to say it. I wasn't going to say it. Or just like all like, you know, like all the great, the great things that have happened that you happened that that you look back and you

you looked at times the country rallied whether it was a war or whether it was uh you know a hoover dam or or just these are collective efforts where the country came together and they were not operating as individualist influencers trying to get the follower count up they were they were working uh they were like schooled in sciences they were like you know it was a country of engineers and and and people that were building together not not yeah of course they were capitalists and they were like people that made tons of money at the rockefellers but for the most part the the government was actually good participant in this too you know and so um let's look at that aspect of of the American dream that's been a little bit forgotten in this very cowboy – it's almost too extreme cowboy and forgotten.

Yes. The collectivist and – because that's communism by some people's estimations. Not. That's like – that's a part of how you get great things done together. Yeah. And that's such – I'm glad you brought that up because that's such a stupid cop-out to that shit. I agree. Communism doesn't allow anyone to win.

Or even socialism. Yeah, exactly. Call it the same thing for the moment. I know it's got slight differences, but still, like the basic communism, socialism. It doesn't allow anyone to win. It doesn't give incentive. It just creates very few winners who then tell everyone, this is what you're going to do.

Go fuck yourself. When you're talking about collectivism, you are getting something out of that. You can also be like the smarter, you might be the Dax De Silva in the room who comes up with the best idea and then is rewarded for doing that and working hard and getting it through. But you're doing a good thing. Like your company, Lightspeed, behind the scenes, it helps people run their business in a great way and a simpler way with, at the time, what was burgeoning technology. Right.

That's a win for society. Yeah. There's nothing – and like you keep talking about your team and how much – like it's very clear like you had a lot of trust in them. Yeah. Like how much that meant to you being able to build something with a bunch of other people. Well, they're the ones who implemented that. So they're a part of the – that's a mini society right there. Why can't greater society be the same thing?

Yeah. I think it has to be. It can't just be – like there is ways so that there isn't – there isn't only rewards for a for, for, for a few, uh, in those situations where there are winning ideas as well. You know, the, the, that is, it shouldn't be so concentrated, you know, it should be something that, that when we create value and create, when we create wealth, everybody benefits, but then, so there is a benefit to doing things together, but then also people might do things

for the betterment of society, elevating, uplifting, you know, the way that these mega projects happened. We have some mega projects in front of us, the ones we've talked about on climate. There's other things that we could be doing for, you know, like infrastructure in both our countries. You know, there's things that could be, you know, things that could be done that are just, you know, waiting for some leadership, you know?

And I think really great leadership is a really, there's a big vacuum there. That's like, that's I think the difference when you see countries that are really thriving when there are selfless leaders that are doing, that really have the greater good in mind and the greater good of society and are thinking collectively, as opposed to countries where it's obvious that there's somebody that's doing it for it to hoard power, keep power, maintain power, and then siphon out wealth to the people

that are supporting them. You know, there's a big difference in how, when I see from a conservation perspective, operating in those different countries, one again one person one leader can make such a big difference to for their people who's the who's been a highlight of a person to work with who has serious pull in some country somewhere um i don't like how long it's taken you know what what i will say uh because i don't i don't know that leaders are doing what they need to you know in any in any country but i do see that when private citizens um when private citizens do things like big sanctuaries or ranger programs and the local people are really responding, government does come in and wants to be a part of this success.

So we did a – we committed several million dollars to protection of the saint lawrence river but then later the and i've heard the government in quebec has seen what we're doing they came in with they can come in with so much more money you know when they see the people care they came in with 80 no they came in with 880 million for for nature across the province you know so they could get a w but i mean fuck it we'll take it you know it's huge right so and and canada also for the when the 30 by 30 announcement another 700 um you know million so it's it's the government does like to be a part of these stories like whenever we make an announcement they're always there trying to be a part of the story because they see if people are responding

and people are caring they want to be a part of it. So it's almost like leaders can be formed and shaped, again, by our priorities. 100%. What were you and Paul at the UN talking about? That was what, like seven, eight months ago? Something like that? What was that all about? Yeah, so we did an initial sort of investment in Jungle Keepers. For the first couple of couple years we expanded their

reserve with an area d uh to their to to the reserve expanded to 250 square kilometers in miles i'm not sure but uh and then set up the ranger program and so on but now we have this expansion was three and a half million over the next five years for them to really go for it in terms of adding new areas um building out the ranger program, adding technology. There is an animal rescue for those animals that end up in the markets to bring them back to the reserve. There is a program to teach Amazonian culture in terms of the food,

to use culture as an education tool led by one amazing person that's part of the team named roy and then there's another project a lot of these projects these little side projects are being female led as well so there's another project for another reserve to come and be integrated so there's a couple of additional um things that we've added to the budget, but I think it gives them another five-year runway. And I think what's important in terms of what we've learned is you give somebody the ability to plan for five years and they're not in survival mode. You know, they're, you know, Paul's out there, he's fundraising so that they can go faster and protect the entire river.

You know, we can't afford to do, you know, today $20 million in additional grants just for jungle keepers to protect the entire river. We can't afford to do today $20 million in additional grants just for jungle keepers to protect the entire length of the river. We're doing well, but there is a time sensitivity. So he's out there fundraising, but he doesn't have to worry about operating jungle keepers for the next five years because we got that covered. I mean, and that's great because also you think about guys like Paul

and some of the other leaders you've talked about who Age of Union is involved with. It's like you want them where it is too. You want them having to spend as – and I know I've talked to Paul about this a bunch. But he understands how important it is to do the fundraising and be in front of people. Like it is a part of it. But you want him to be able to do that in the most efficient way so that his time is less going to that and more going to actually putting the plan into motion down there yeah and i think it's also we are learning as we go uh i know this last year he's you know tried to do a lot of to try to get into

fundraising because he's very convincing he's very charismatic yes but he does need to be in on the ground you know there's invasions happening i don't know if he talked about the invasions in his time here, but. I don't think he did, no. The very first few months where we protected that area D, there was a group of former cocaine farmers that set up a village in the middle of the new protected area. It was not news they wanted to break to us. The newly protected lands got a full setup. Don't to us. The newly protected land's got a full setup. Don't mind us. Well, what's happened is that as the government

cracks down on the coca, they blame the, the farmers get blamed, right? It's not the cartel, it's the farmers. So then they're on the run because they take all the blame and then they end up, they're like, oh, let's go hide in the jungle. Let's set up a, a, a village. Nobody will find us.

We'll do our own thing. And I'm like, that's the middle of our reserve. It's an ecologically sensitive, very, very, uh, mega diverse area. This is not a great place for your village. You know, you, but that's the challenge is that those, those people have kids, they have families.

We need to relocate them somewhere where they're going to be successful. It's obviously not in this super ecologically important spot, but now we have a responsibility to move them. So these are the kinds of things where Paul's got to be there. Dina's got to be there. Like the team's got to be on the ground. Cause these are very, these are very real things that are not, they're not easily solved yeah you know we we keep talking a little bit today like on the edges about

some of the indigenous communities who you're working with and some of these places but you know i i think it's been mentioned a touch i just wanted to go at it a little more like what because you're you're having you get the chance to to have a lot of one-on-one communication with them when you're there and obviously guys like paul are there every day but like what do they think about not just what's happening in their own environments you know what do they think or even also know about some of the consumption problems that we as humanity are causing around the world and what do they say about that right so those those societies only take what they need for their communities and so it's very different very different model than than we have which is like stockpiling commodities and

a lot of waste you know so we're we're we're in a model that they don't relate to. It's a different situation in every country, right? Because the way that Indigenous people exist in society is different. Their relationship in Canada is very different from Indigenous leadership, for example, in the Congo, where people, you know, local people, Indigenous people are one in the same, you know, it's a different story. And like, for example, in North America, in the US and Canada, there's specific indigenous First Nations, as we call in Canada, territories. And that's sort of different even by province. Like, for example, in British Columbia, they never ceded their land.

And so there's a different... They never what? They never ceded their land. There was never a fight. There was never a moment where... Oh right yeah so there's a there's a different relationship than in the east where there there were when when the colonization happened there there was a different sort of dynamic between the colonizers and the indigenous people there. So there's a different, there's different levels of disruption to indigenous societies in different

parts of the country where in the East, there's more, they're more a part of regular society and there's more intact indigenous communities in the West in terms of functioning as a nation. And they have therefore potentially more preserved traditional knowledge. And that's also the case in places like the Amazon or in DRC or in Indonesia, where traditional knowledge can still be learned from because there's more of it left intact and there's different levels of respect for Indigenous people in different countries. You know, the relationship here is difficult in the United States where, you know, where the history is not great.

And it isn't great in Canada either. So I think it's a moment where we need to learn from them more than ever. And that's like, there's so much to be learned from in that journey that we have to take back to a place of harmony with nature. Yeah. I had heard a quote that I've cited on different podcasts. That's a little bit out of context, but I'm going to bring it into context here. It was from the show Homeland. I don't know if you ever watched that, but a show about some lady in the CIA constantly did happen to make a fairly good quote that that made sense when he was talking to one of the cia guys who he had captive about you know their differences and he said america hates what it can't understand sure and i'm gonna i'm gonna edit that quote and make it

more general and say like society not even necessarily hates but doesn't care about or acknowledge what it can't understand yeah and i'll be the first to tell you i can't understand what it's like to live off the land as an indigenous person whose family was on this same land 2 000 years ago i don't understand that but what i'd like to think i have is some empathy for that. And the fact that, you know, perhaps maybe the answer isn't having multinational corporations come in and ruin the land that's already, in some cases, been taken from them. But I think a lot of people, it kind of comes back to the capitalism thing we were talking about, that isn't really a thought. The is okay we see resource resource mean money money mean good let's go get yeah and and they're they're in something that's much more circular or that's what the traditional uh way was was to have this circular relationship with with uh with with nature and we are sort of like more export extract. And that's why progress with working with these indigenous nations, when we're doing conservation, progress happens at the speed of trust.

Because they don't trust the way we go about things. And so when we come in and say, we want to help, they don't know who Age of Union is. They don't know, they don't, they don't trust the Western philosophy. So they're like, okay, well, so how do they know our intentions are really aligned with theirs? So it's, it's a slow process sometimes for us where we're so scheduled, especially me with startup DNA, you know, that's, it's, and that's what I've tried to do with Age of Union is infuse it with startup DNA, which means a fast pace, which is operating at the, for me, it's progress at the pace of urgency.

And, and because we want to ally, so, because we want to ally for all, for what we believe are the right reasons with, with local reasons with local indigenous people to create meaningful change on the ground, we have to respect that for them, progress moves at the speed of trust. Because we don't have trust. Nobody does have trust because of this was communications. And how he's talked about how that's the most critical thing to getting the word out and stuff like that. But, you know, and feel free to expand upon that as well and answer in your question here but it it does it does make me wonder from the outside you know how much of this does come back to the most simple human things in this case communication understanding having an ability to go back

and forth maybe you don't have the same idea for everything but how do you reach that common ground it seems to me like that's what that's essentially at the core of what ag union does because when as you were just explaining when you go into these places you have to understand where they're coming from and and show them why you can make sense for them so people ask me what's the what's the first what's the most important thing uh that you need to exemplify? And that's the thing you need to prioritize the most when you're a leader. And I tell them that the first thing for me is listening. And that's almost the opposite of what people think that they want,

that what a leader should do. A leader should be somebody that's saying a lot. A leader should be somebody that's projecting some type A, alpha sort of energy. A real leadership, and that's the stance we take when we are engaging in places we don't understand anything about, is listening. You know, to go to the eight of the ten projects is to go listen. Go listen to the local people, the indigenous people, folks like Paul who are allies of those people.

It's to listen and to understand. And that's how you build trust. It's not by talking a lot. And then incorporating what you've heard into the plan that everybody's going to come up with and that you can support. And hearing their plan, they understand the situation. Like I said, the social the social political economic reality of an area that's so specific can be so specific for even that part uh of the of the area and that's

that is how i think you build the trust and how you build the long-term solutions that that people buy into 100 man i had brian mcmononagle in here last year. He is one of the best defense attorneys in the country. He represented Bill Cosby. Don't hold that against him. When you operate at the level that those people operate in, failure is not an option. Losing is not an option. S*** is, I think, the greatest evidence of man's inhumanity to me. But remember this. Jurors were being asked to make a decision about whether he did it. And that case was, at least the way we tried it, the time we tried it, I thought a very defensible case on the facts.

You know, you want to kind of bring jurors to their best and make them realize that in a few short moments when the case is given to them, they're all that stands between him and a conviction for a crime he didn't commit, is the argument. The jury of 12 people there, they know this is Bill Cosby in that room. They know Bill Cosby don't have a public defender. Like you're a subtle guy, you're not like a flashy dresser, but they know that suit probably doesn't cost $2 and it's not from Joseph A. Bank.

You get up there though and you look this jury in the eyes as bill cosby's attorney and you said something to the effect of and actually quit after he got him off and then cosby got found guilty after but he also represented meek mill and got him out of that situation in philly which was really bad but you know he was brought on by michael rubin and j-Z. And I remember talking with him about some of these guys he works with, and he was raving about Jay-Z and what a genius that guy is and how incredible he is leading his various businesses. And when I asked him about that, your answer just reminded me of this, but when I asked him what separates him, he says, when you go into a meeting with that guy, he don't talk, but he's listening to every single thing that's said and processing it. He doesn't say many words, even at the end. And then he makes decisions based on all the evidence that he's been presented. And I think he literally said like, that's what makes him such a great leader. And it's so true because I think, you know, you do have to be, you got to be able to talk

to, you got to be able to, to get your points across. Synthesize what you've learned. Yes. But everybody that's been in the room with you should feel that you, that they were heard. Exactly. You don't have to, you don't have to come up with, if you're the leader and you have to make the decision, you don't have to make a decision that makes everybody happy. But if everybody feels heard, whether it's a company or it's, it's a situation on the

ground with conservation, if people can, you can, you give an opportunity for people to follow you when, when they, when they feel, when they know that they've been heard and that you've listened. And it's, it's, it's so funny that that that the people that are perceived as the strongest leaders are not the people that are you know going off and and and filling the airwave uh of a meeting with their own voice it's the obviously in this case scenario we're supposed to be talking so we're like we're talking a lot but i mean in in a meeting where you're where you're trying to bring people together and you're trying to create solutions and be the leader,

it's so interesting that it's the non-talking that actually projects that respect. Yeah. And what were some of the things, because it sounds like you talk with Captain Paul Watson about this a lot, what was he saying when he was talking about communication over the years with what he does?

Because obviously we've talked about some of the things he's been able to pull off. But it seems to me like you were more getting at the backroom type stuff dealing with politicians is what he was referring to. He doesn't. Yeah. Politicians is not necessarily his first customer in terms of communications. I don't think he gives a fuck. He does ultimately. But that's. Well, maybe he doesn't enough because he's banned in so many countries.

He's banned in his own country. He can't even come to Canada. He was born there. Wait, he's banned from Canada? Yeah. Why is he banned from Canada? The seal hunt. In fact, all the Sea Shepherd captains are

banned from Canada. Most of them are banned from Canada because of the seal hunt. Explain. Which is so funny because the seal hunt is now, the government's done a 180 on this seal hunt that was happening off Newfoundland. The Sea Shepherd captains were protecting seals,

standing in between sealers and the seals on the ice flows in Newfoundland and got criminal convictions from that. And also with the Japanese whalers made complaints to Canada about, about, uh, the Sea Shepherd vessels and, and also have, are trying to go after the captain in and have an extradition, um, have something for extradition, for extraditing

him. So there's all these, these, uh, these, these things that everybody either doesn't want them in the country or wants, if they're, if he enters the country, they want them sent over their country. I think for communications, what, what the genius has been for, for, for Sea Shepherd and for the captain and for many of the others that have been good at this, like Jane Goodall, Dave Suzukiuki is they've used the media and they've used how people consume media and they they use the the news cycle and journalists and embed journalists in their operations so that others can tell their story and and can can show what's, show the reality of what's happening because people are not there on the high seas when whales are being harpooned. And if they were brought on into that situation through the media and they were shown what's happening with dolphins, then suddenly, remember people care, then the government cares.

And that's how you create change. That's how in seven months after the release of COT, we were able to get the court to force the government to act. Because once it's exposed to people, then people want answers. And if you're good at working the media, like some of these great conservationists are, it will bother elected officials and it'll bother people because it's a thorn in their side and it degrades their public image to the point where something has to be done to get it off. Yeah. Get it off the news cycle. It's killing us, right? In their war rooms, they're like, this is killing us. We got to get rid of Captain Paul off the news, you know? So there's all these tactics that they're using in service of activism where they may have been used to publicize a product or publicize something or create a scandal. I think there's four of them and and you're like yeah those are the four things that uh that are that are essential elements of

any great story and if you can get all four of those things into uh the story then then you then the media picks it up you know like for example they have narrative purpose relatable and aha no these ones are more scandalous they were like i gonna say, it didn't sound like what you were saying. So, we'll have to get those for you. But yeah, for example, that's why they had Pamela Anderson involved with the seal hunt thing, because that was the sex, and then there was the scandal. And then there was the...

So, there's all this... They create something that's got enough drama for the media to be like, can't resist it, you know? And that's how it ends up being on the news, and that's got enough drama for the media to be like can't resist it you know and that that's how it ends up being on the news and that's how it ends up being something that the media can't let go of well here's the other thing too and i can only speak from the ones who i know which in this case the conservationists who are really out there doing it who i know well outside and now knowing you are paul and ryan with jungle keepers and vet paul but i know in speaking with them in the past they're especially paul because of his experience with discovery channel what

clusterfuck that was you know they're very very careful about getting media out there that documents it yeah this is what's happening this is what it is and not taking leaps with things too because look if you're on the ground every day and you're passionate about something no shit's going down you can it's you're human you can take a leap with something and like the thing that frustrates me sometimes is that today in how ubiquitous media is there are so many narratives on so many things that it seems to me a lot of you know dated my friends that i talk to like day-to-day viewers they're suspicious of almost anything they see whether whether it's for good or bad, because they don't know what to believe. And yet, you know, at some point you have to, as a human being, accept the fact like, yeah, you can't see everything.

You're not there. You have to take it for what it is. But, you know, you also have to find the people who, in communicating the story, maintain the honesty of the arc as well. And there's a risk to that because you know there's i had a story uh and i'll leave the countries and the the specific captain out of the the story but there if you get a great journalist that's that's got real integrity and you bring them on to uh bring them into a situation with an African nation where there's really good things happening on the ship and on the vessel, and they find something

that that African government is doing that is not so great. And of course, everybody, the captain and the government want a certain story written to show all the positive things. But the great journalists also will find other things that maybe aren't so favorable to the storyline. And you might get kicked out of that nation because that journalist writes, you can't control what they want to write about. You can't order your own story the way you want it to go. So having people with integrity brought onto your ship or brought into your jungle, your forest,

it's not always in your control. And so really great people with integrity will write what they will. Yeah, and you hope that it doesn't, you know, get the flower lost among it doesn't you know get the get the flower lost among the trees you know and and that's that's interesting though because journalists look they're incentivized from a capitalism structure to tell a story that is gonna be able to sell the most as well i understand that they have a job to do but also

they're they should be incentivized to tell the truth which in this case those two things the one you're pointing out those two things can kind of meet right there which is unfortunate they can talk about the positive of what's happening but they can also talk about some corruption that they noticed and guess what we're wired towards negativity as humanity and that's maybe the story there's two stories and and that story is maybe the lead or it's the part that gets people upset, you know, that they didn't want to have written about or they felt was not what they wanted presented. So it might end up preventing some good from happening for the next little while as people heal from that. Well, that's the thing too. People want everything or nothing and we don't really live in a world like that.

It's a complex place. But I think those are the risks because the benefits are so huge that to get these stories written about places that people can't, regular people can't go and don't have access to, to sort of have the media write about that credibly. It's always worth the risk. And, and in the grand scheme of things, even that story, even though it was, even, even though it was short term harmful to the relationships involved long-term, maybe that did need to get written about in terms of, in terms of what the other things that they found were. And maybe people did know about did need to know about those things and maybe long term it did help shut down some of

those those other aspects yeah i mean we talk about these things we talk with terms like media government companies whatever and there are these ideas they're they're a thing yeah right but there's people there's people yeah yeah there's people there's relationships there's people good intentions that maybe aren't at fault for those those those those things that are that aren't going 100 for now the way they want they don't want to talk about those things until maybe they can improve them but the journalist found something that's not great yet yeah and now that relationship is damaged with that person that was a good that was a that was a good guy or a good girl you know yeah it's it's tough it's it's a tough it's a tough battle i mean i've had some journalists in here and we we talk about that you know with their sources which is exactly what you're talking about here and it's like

you know like joe b warwick did an amazing job laying out the difficulty of like dealing with intelligence when he was here because he's you know he's been the national security reporter at the washington post forever yeah and a lot of sources he deals with are from three-letter agencies and they will constantly every story come to them and say if you put this out people are going to die yeah and then you know and i know the media gets a lot of deservedly so on plenty of things but like at the core of this you you do have you know some good journalists who are going in these rooms and they have to make the decision. Are they fucking with us or what's the bigger deal here? And it gets real murky.

But that's also why you want to find – I talk about journalists or humanity being more bent towards negative stories. It's just how we're wired, you know, run from bear to cave. So we live, right, to see tomorrow. But you want to find the things where hopefully it can sell the positive message. And that's why, you know, when I – we've been talking about Paul and some of your guys today. But someone like Jane Goodall, in addition to count to paul who's been at this for so long like yes they they do have to sell the some of the dangers that we face and stuff like that no doubt but you know they're such beautiful people and they've done so much

good and they and we can by the way jane goodall making documentaries ages ago showing us on the ground what happens like we need that's what it feels like you're doing with all these documentaries across the projects that are bringing home like that you know that planet earth week on national geographic every to everyone with all these projects for sure i mean the the documentary films that's something we didn't know how to do we just started to do them we did the first one the saint lawrence river well the first one was actually the the one that you showed a little bit of heart of the mission, which is us meeting Paul's project,

Jungle Keepers, six minute film. Then we did one on the St. Lawrence River, which was 35 minutes, almost like a meditation on this river that literally goes by my house, by, by the, by the Lightspeed office in, in, in Montreal. Most of Canada grew up along this river in the early settlements.

This is like the lifeblood. It's 20%, 25% of the world's freshwater. It's got everything from whales to almost every speed. Yeah. There's blue whales in the St. Lawrence river. I don't think people realize how big the river gets at its mouth. Holy shit. Crazy amounts of ecosystems and estuaries.

And we don't even notice it. We just, it's so in the background, but it's, and you literally go an hour from Montreal, hour and 15 minutes, and it looks like the Florida Everglades and people don't even know that. We just think we almost. It looks like the Florida Everglades.

Yeah. There's like grass, tall grasses. It looks completely wild, like an hour from the city. And this is an area that floods completely after the winter melt. Whole islands disappear there's like incredible heron nests up in the trees where like of these silver maples it's just

magical actually i'm going to be going there next week we're going to do a three-day tour with nature conservancy of canada which is one of our projects to look at all the restorations that have happened over the last couple years that we've been funding so that's almost like a recap of where our money's gone. They fund about 30 to 40 smaller restorations along the river with our funds every year. A lot of them in partnership with Indigenous nations because there's many nations along the river. And so, why was I telling you this? I forget, but I was pretty entranced with that.

Oh, the films. Yeah. See, I'm starting to picture all this shit in my head. I forget where we're going. You got to see the film. It was our first real longer one. And it's a little, it doesn't have a real storyline. It's a bit of a meditation, this beautiful scenery.

It's kind of to make you fall in love with the river. And it's such a part of Quebec culture and Canadian culture that I think it really does that. I think it really makes people, and there is indigenous people in it that talk about the importance of the river and, and water and,

and women's relationship with the river in, in the, in that community. So, so we started there. We did Cot, as I told you, and we're really proud of the- And that won awards too. Yeah. It's won some awards.

Corridor about the Congo project is coming out. When does that come out? That's coming out in the fall. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. So we'll premiere it during TIFF in Toronto and hopefully we're going to be doing an LA premiere

early next year. We'll pump that here too. Yeah. I really want to, because it's, you know, because it's African in locally, a local African huge success story, or it's going to be a massive success story as it's sort of everybody gets these land titles. It's already protecting 640,000 hectares in this

plan, but now it's getting bigger and bigger. Yeah. You don't have those either? Okay. What's that? I don't have those either okay what's that i don't know convert convert convert that to a square mile in uh on google i don't know it's huge it's massive um but yeah so so there's there's that film uh and i would like to do an ellie premiere

to show that's another see this is like we're talking about like excluding people on the right end of the spectrum from the conversation. I feel like there's like who are the black people in the black community that are looked at as environmental icons? Has that community not felt like they're a part of the movement either. So to show these leaders, Dominic and Anastasia and all this team in Congo, I'd love to have at the LA premiere, a lot of the African diaspora and the black creative community is invited so that everybody feels a part. And of course, everybody, but everybody feels a part of the, of the movement, which maybe they haven't seen people that look like them in the movement as much. And then in terms of like, those are the docs, but we've been doing some long form,

but that's mostly supporting filmmakers that have been doing like three years of work. I don't know if Paul talked about Trevor and Melissa that did a film called Wildcat in the same area on the Las Piedras. In the Amazon. Yeah. In the Peruvian Amazon, same area on the las piedras and the amazon yeah in the peruvian amazon same same area and that's that was on amazon prime that that film got bought for 20 million dollars holy shit in order in order to film in order to finish the editing on their film they they helped that we we hired them to do that short six minute film uh and so that's how we got to know trevor melissa and that that was a huge success story for a nature documentary to sell for that much. But it's because of this incredible story.

So just in short, the story is the story of Harry, this young, and I talk to Harry every week, amazing, amazing young conservationist. His new thing is called Emerald Arch and he's looking to work in Ecuador that we were talking about earlier. But so this story is he's this young UK kid. Him and all his friends graduate high school. They have no plan. So they all join the army. They get shipped off to Afghanistan and he sees somebody blown up in front of him. And it's just one of those things that you go into the theater of war and you come out shattered, you know, you saw somebody literally lose their life and he goes to the Amazon basis, basically whether or not it's to sort of, you know, you know, I, I'm not sure if, if it was to necessarily kill himself, but like it was, it was, he, he was sort of despondent and wanted to escape. Uh, and, um, he didn't, he, he wanted to not have

his family see all of that pain. So he kind of escaped like many people do with pain, uh, and, and put themselves into some of these conservation, uh, projects that are disconnected from the world around them. It is a little bit of a way to heal. So what he, he meets there another young woman who, as you can see from the movie Wildcat also is struggling with some things in her past. And she's running a wildlife rescue. Because what happens is after they deforest an area or after they do hunting, there's baby animals that end up in the market and so these these animals are recovered by some of these these rescues we have one at jungle keepers there's this other one called oja nueva that's in the film and so he has a relationship with this with this uh this this young animal

rescue person um samantha and he saves two baby ocelots. And it's him sort of helping these ocelots learn how to hunt because he becomes their mother, that he really heals himself. So it's a story about PTSD. It's a story about mental health. It's a story about healing that also teaches about the situation for animals and the situation for the forest.

So that's why I love this movie and why it was so, why the response from Amazon Prime and so on was so strong is because that human story overlaid with what's happening is so brilliant. And so I'm working, I'm helping them on their next film. There's another film that we're doing that's feature length. So those are two projects to come. And then we're also like, our teams are out in the field right now.

We just came back from Trinidad doing these, hoping to launch a short film series of like seven minute films come, come this fall for our two year anniversary. Just, just to get like little, little tidbits on putting people on the front lines of our projects so that we can take them there. Kind of like Captain Paul and folks did before me, bringing people people into places they don't usually get to go yeah it's powerful

and exactly what you said right there the human element to it when you can add that touch i mean that's look you have to entertain you have to pull people in it's not a dirty thing to say you know you have to take these things that you're passionate about and bring them to people, but package it in a way that makes them relate to it immediately upon seeing it. Because we know how fast people click off stuff when they don't like it. It's got to compete with everything else that they could be entertained by. Exactly. So that's awesome, man.

And I'm really, like I said earlier, I'm really glad that you're funding a lot of this and you kind of look at it through that human lens. And what you're doing with your second act in life here, it's like it's an amazing thing. I wish there were a lot more people like you. But before we got out of here, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about something I had been texting you about last month that we've all seen here in America that I kind of on purpose have not looked up a ton because I wanted to talk to you about it. But, you know, these forest fires going on in canada i mean i'll put pictures in the corner of the screen videos in the corner screen for people who didn't see it but you know new york city philadelphia all these cities on the east coast and i heard there was shit in chicago too like they were turning orange yeah a month or two ago whatever it was and you know it was apparently because the air

was so dirty and coming down from canada like what i had heard on the news at the time was that this there are these wildfires that happen naturally in canada around this time of year but it was way exacerbated this year why why was that well certainly things are getting hotter uh and and it is it is a it is a situation that we're going to, we're unfortunately going to see more as climate gets hotter. But why is it that this is possible on this scale? And I spoke last week with the Rewild CEO,

Wes Seacrest. This is Leonardo DiCaprio's foundation. Conservation-minded, good human, you know? And his organization is very, very much like his and Wes's and Russ's organization is very much like Age of Union. We really believe on on-the-ground, locally-led projects.

I think it's the new wave of conservation is this style. That's how we relate to each other. And I always spend time with those folks. But we talked about this, this, and we just wrote an article about, about the, one of the real causes of this is because we've allowed old growth to be cut on, in our forests on the, on the, the BC

coast, that there's a huge fight over old growth that start, goes back to Clockwood Sound. When I, my protest at 17, we've, we're down to, we're down to 3% left of old growth in BC and probably even less on the East coast where we've probably cut the forest multiple times. There's almost no old growth. The old growth is what would stop these

wildfires because it's, it's got, it adds the diversity in the mature trees that this would not happen on the scale. Wildfires are natural, but they would be much, much more contained because imagine all of the old growth gone out of the forest. What are you left with is second growth that's like kindling.

So when it's so dry, the whole thing goes up like kindling. If you've got, if you've got old growth in the mix there, then that doesn't happen. So that it's a consequence of, of what we've, what we've done to these forests. And so I think that conservation has to, is, has to be looked at as part of the solution, as part of the solution to this and how we manage forests. Because we're unfortunately now, because of what we've done, we are in a position

where we now have to manage how we interact with these forests and how we support them. The boreal forest on the East coast is very, very at risk. It grows much slower, has much more cold weather to deal with. It's much more slow growth. So to remove the old growth like we have creates a situation where wildfire can happen in a region that's massive. There's a whole, there's, if you map it to how big the city of Montreal is, the Island of Montreal,

it's like this huge, huge area. So I think that we need to start to really seriously look and actually we're going to start a campaign next month. I think I mentioned on old growth in BC, but I think we need the same kind of campaign on in the east we've got to support uh the what's remaining to prevent this from from happening because people are at risk obviously animals on a huge scale go without habitat and it it does regrow but it doesn't it but it like

next spring you'll see green again but to get the size of tree, we talked about in the Congo, seven years, you'll have a full tree. It doesn't happen like that in northern Canada. Those trees are going to take time to grow. So we have to give our forests a chance by leaving some of that old growth in there and thinking about what are the steps that we take as the climate warms and we got to figure out ways to create convenient well-priced alternatives to certain products that we use that may be maybe the causers of us cutting down cutting down trees yeah because i mean we're wasteful we don't even think about it we are and in talking with paul though and we've hit on this on a few podcasts since then but like people don't realize, looking in the Amazon, they're like, oh, you cut down a tree, just plant a new one.

It'll grow back. Well, if you go to, first of all, no. It will, but. It's not the same use, though, either. No, no. I think one of his, maybe you know who it is, but one of his other main funders is is a is a architect in new york yeah and he he talks about like yeah if i use like a 20 year old tree in the amazon and i use that as the foundation of a house it's going to fall apart inside of a decade right so like

you can't just like these things have been there thousands and thousands and thousands of years you can't just cut it down and be like oh we'll plant some new ones it just doesn't work like that no no so i think we got to be we got to be conscious um of how we how we do these how we do these things because look at how look at how much those wildfires have affected health and habitat and it it's it's another outcome that we're responsible for. You know, if you, if you just take a look at, let's say we zoomed out of the planet and you're in and things were going at a speed, we're doing a playback. Our planet would look like it was on fire and full of floods with the amount of these things that are happening.

But like, like we've been saying, I think it's, it's, it's more helpful to be positive. It's let's think of nature as our frontline fight. But like we've been saying, I think it's more helpful to be positive. It's, let's think of nature as our frontline fight. Let's remember that that's the most immediate thing that we can see, the most important thing that represents 25 gigatons of carbon. That's like, that's the best thing we can do to bias time on climate. And listen, if we had a great, great strategy on oil growth, it goes to exactly what we're talking about right now with, with wildfires. It, uh, the flooding, if we left, if we left trees

in place, a lot of places that were flooding, we, we create towns and cities in floodplains. Like this is like, this is stuff that, uh, we need to start to work with nature as opposed to try to dominate it. Cause it's not's not working. 100%, man. Well, Dax, thank you so much for coming.

I was really looking forward to this one. Totally met all the expectations as well. Thank you. I look forward to seeing all the documentaries you're bringing out. We'll put your book, Age of Union, that link will be in the description. We'll also put the links to your Instagram,

at Dax De Silva and at Age of of union i think on instagram as well but people can follow along with what you're doing there and i would love to i'd love to eventually do a podcast with you and paul yeah that'd be really really cool that's great maybe next year do something like that when we're up north there but uh thank you so much for coming and uh and really enjoyed this me too all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace