Houston, We Have An Overfishing Problem

Quinn: [00:00:00] How do we stop overfishing if we don't know who's doing the fishing? That's today's big question, and my guest is Jennifer Raynor. Jennifer is an assistant professor of natural resource economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Before entering academia, she conducted policy relevant economic research for the U.S. federal government for nearly a decade, most recently at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries. Jennifer's research focuses on improving the efficiency and sustainability of fisheries and wildlife management, primarily using methods from economics, data science, and remote sensing.

She strives to inform the legislative decision making process and works closely with state and federal resource managers to design and evaluate conservation policies. She serves on the board of trustees for Global [00:01:00] Fishing Watch, and her research has appeared in top journals such as Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jennifer's work has also been featured in major national news outlets such as The Atlantic, The AP, Washington Post, The Economist, National Geographic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and more. Look, I read about Jennifer's research, and so much of it clicked for me, because over the past few years, cheaper, more powerful, and more plentiful satellites, algorithms and compute, have enabled us to track everything in the real world from deforestation to methane leaks, things that we need to do something about.

Jennifer and her team decided to tackle, among their other projects, the other 70 percent of our planet. The ocean. And what they discovered about who's trawling our oceans and where could honestly set in motion policy the world over [00:02:00] to make fishing drastically more sustainable and safe for everyone on every front.

Welcome to Important, Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with someone like Jennifer, an incredible human, who's working very much on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone.

So our mission is to understand and unfuck the future. Our goal here is to help you answer the question, What can I do?

Jennifer Raynor am I pronouncing that correctly? I should have asked. I apologize. Perfect. Well, great. Well, then welcome to the show. Thank you for coming.

Jennifer Raynor:Thanks for having me.

Quinn: Absolutely. I don't remember when I first ran across your work and your research. I don't remember if it was the wolves or the fishing boats, both of which we'll get to. And I know there's been a plethora of other work along the way, obviously. But again, like I kind of mentioned [00:03:00] offline, I love this idea of folks who are like, Hmm, what can I do with this new cool thing?

Because I grew up on like 1990s TNT movies, where the idea of someone having any sort of access to a satellite was probably like a Jack Ryan type problem. You don't want that to happen. And now apparently you can just do whatever you want with them. I even have a background on my computer. It's this app called, it's actually from Mac, it's called Downlink.

And you can pick any part of the world and it'll just show you every 20 minutes like an updated satellite photo. And I'm like, that feels, that doesn't, I don't think it's real.

Jennifer Raynor: It's pretty amazing. We're living in an amazing time for technology and innovation and answering new, exciting questions with these new tools.

It's a very fun time to be doing research.

Quinn: I love it. That's awesome. Well, we're going to get into quite a bit of that today, but Jennifer, I do like to start the show and, you know, it's both like a, I'm sorry and you're welcome sort of thing. I've asked this question a hundred and eighty times, something like that.

And I could have, [00:04:00] I could probably have stopped a while ago, but it's just too late. So instead of, tell us your whole life story, I like to ask, Why are you vital to the survival of the species? And I encourage you to be bold and honest and all of those things.

Jennifer Raynor: Well, I don't know that I as an individual am vital to the survival of the species, but certainly my work is focused on things that I think are important.

You know, the ocean is incredibly important for a lot of reasons. You know, more than a billion people depend on the ocean as their primary source of food. Hundreds of millions of people are employed in global marine fisheries. You know, goods are shipped over the ocean. Oil and energy from wind and other things are produced in the ocean.

So it's incredibly important. And on the other hand, on my other side of my work around wildlife, these are species that are beautiful. They create all sorts of ecological benefits that are important for the world that we live in. They also [00:05:00] create economic benefits that sometimes are surprising.

And so to the extent that my work helps us think about how to manage these wonderful natural resources better, then at least I can feel proud of the work I'm doing.

Quinn: I love that. That's so eloquent and wonderful. It's funny, it's such a ridiculous, ridiculous question, but I really do get some, eventually, hey now, some pretty profound responses from folks and, and it's usually, it's like laughing at me or scoffing and then like, I'm clearly not, but you are doing important work and I appreciate it.

Jennifer Raynor: Well, thank you.

Quinn:100%. So, before we get into, we'll probably do the ocean stuff first, obviously, that is kind of the more recent research, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong there. It's amazing how, with all this new technology and things like that, and we all go through our world, so much of this job has been, as a liberal arts major from Colgate who didn't do well at flashcards and things like that, really trying to barely understand the tip of the iceberg of how complicated our systems [00:06:00] are in this world and how much we rely on them and how interconnected they all are in the weak points and the strong points and who has control and who doesn't and all these different things That you never really would think, oh how would we track all the fishing boats in the world? So before we get into what your work discovered, could you help us build a quick technical understanding of, in 2024, which also sounds fake, how are most boats identified and tracked today?

Jennifer Raynor: Sure. Well, historically, it was really hard to track boats.

I mean, you'd be literally looking for them with binoculars or you would be placing, federal governments would place observers, they call them on boats, which are people who literally stand there and watch what you're doing and record everything you're doing. It's very expensive, it's very time consuming, and very difficult to try to monitor the tens of thousands of [00:07:00] industrial fishing boats on the planet this way.

So in around 2017, this nonprofit called Global Fishing Watch made like a revolutionary step in releasing a new way to think about how we can track boats in the ocean. And this is through a system called automatic identification systems. This is basically a little GPS transponder that is on almost every ship, large ship.

Quinn: Mm hmm.

Jennifer Raynor: And this little transponder provides just like your phone or your GPS in your car. It tells everyone around you, your location, latitude and longitude, it tells them your identity, what you're doing, how fast you're moving, which direction you're going. And it does this automatically like every two to 30 seconds.

So this thing is just pinging all the time. Many boats carry this historically so that they can sort of see other vessels and avoid collisions at sea. So it tells you who's around you, how fast they're moving, which way they're going to try to avoid crashes. [00:08:00] And Global Fishing Watch. congregated this data from satellite providers, and they published it on this map.

And so for the first time, we could see a huge majority of very large boats all over the world in near real time.

Quinn: That's incredible. Again, it seems like the thing we should be doing, but at the same time, getting everybody to get the same transponder and turn it on, like, is also quite the lift, but imagine what we can do with it.

It's like, you know, what we have with ocean buoys and all that incredible stuff. It's amazing. Okay. So now I, again, before we get to sort of these amazing numbers and what the implications are of those are. When I first encountered your work on this, I thought about one of my very first guests was one of America's most prominent marine biologists Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. And her mantra has kind of always been, but especially at the time was, how can we [00:09:00] use the ocean without using it up? And it seems like every year, right? Some archaeologists and anthropologists discover just how long, like you were saying, we have relied on the ocean, certainly not at this scale, but yes, we can't drink from it, not directly at least, but we've been traversing it and fishing from it for thousands of years.

So in your new study, your team, and as you mentioned, Global Fish Watch processed, millions of gigabytes of satellite images. Is that right?

Jennifer Raynor: Yes, about two million gigabytes.

Quinn: I go through pictures of my kids and it feels like too much. And that was from what I understand, fishing vessels, non fishing vessels, which I guess is mostly shipping and fixed infrastructure.

So oil rigs, more and more wind turbines, I guess. And you discovered that a percentage of the world's industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked. What was that percentage?

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, so the percentage depends on which kind of vessel we're talking [00:10:00] about. For industrial fishing vessels, we found that about 75 percent or three quarters are not using this GPS transponder that publicly reveals their location.

And for non fishing vessels, these, as you said, are mostly kind of cargo ships or energy related vessels. It's about one quarter are not using these transponders.

Quinn: Wow. So again, a couple clarifications for everybody. And by everybody, I mean me. What is a large fishing vessel? You've used the term large and industrial a couple of times.

I assume that's bigger than like my buddy's 20 foot thing we sink every summer.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. So what our methods mainly capture are boats that are at least about 15 meters in length or about roughly 50 feet long.

Quinn: Okay.

Jennifer Raynor: So these are large industrial vessels that are, you know, fishing for very large quantities of, of whatever they're targeting, as opposed to what we would refer to as small-scale vessels or artisinal [00:11:00] fleets, which are kind of the the smaller, sometimes more traditional boats that are usually catching smaller quantities of fish, but potentially in much larger numbers of participants.

We can't see those small boats with this particular satellite technology, but Global Fishing Watch is actually working right now on using additional satellite technologies that can pick up those smaller boats as well.

Quinn: That's incredible. I can't wait to tell my office mate that he’s part of an artisanal fleet of one.

So this is all amazing. And we were talking offline about using these brand new tools. And from what I understand, you use these satellites and environmental data sets and signals like sea surface temperatures I believe, and chlorophyll to infer where vessels are fishing. So that's all amazing.

And I want to talk about it, but I guess to dive right in, what are you instinctually? And I guess empirically. What does this mean vis a vis Ayana's clarion call to use the ocean [00:12:00] without using it up? What do we understand now after you've done this work about where we are on overfishing and things like that?

Jennifer Raynor: The biggest sort of overarching point is sort of the motto of Global Fishing Watch. which is we cannot manage what we cannot see. And so, if these vessels are completely invisible to managers, to scientists, to people making decisions, it's very hard to make appropriate, sustainable, and even economically beneficial decisions.

We really need to have good data to understand what's happening. Even before we did this study, we know that more than a third of major commercial fish species are overfished, which means we're taking out more fish than is biologically sustainable. One third to half of critical marine habitats have been lost from human industrialization.

There's a lot of big impacts that we're having on the ocean. Even though we could see a huge number of vessels before this [00:13:00] study, like about 70 to 80 thousand industrial size fishing vessels were on this previous map. We know that that was nowhere near actually the total amount. And it's, it's quite a lot bigger than we thought.

So I think that we're moving towards a world where we can have better data to make better decisions, and hopefully those decisions will be more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

Quinn: Was it a case of, and this is where my work is generally like, I like to think a little more than an inch deep, but very much a mile wide.

I am the generalist here, so I can talk all day in some specifics about overfishing, but not too far. But I'm wondering, was this a case of, we seem to be really running these fish stocks way down, but we can't quite tell how that's possible if we're only seeing this number of fishing vessels and, oh, this number explains that because it turns out there's many more than we thought, or was it something [00:14:00] different?

Like, did this plug a hole for us or how did that go?

Jennifer Raynor: I think it helps us better understand where and when fishing is happening, and it can help us model whether our understanding for whether stocks are being fished too much or not enough. It can help us even improve those kinds of modeling.

So thinking about which stocks may be overfished might have a very different answer if now we know there are actually three or four times as many people fishing as we might have originally thought. I want to just be careful for a minute that our study is revealing vessels that the public couldn't see as a whole, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the governments weren't aware that those boats were out there fishing.

These boats might've been on vessel registries or had licenses or have been using some kind of proprietary vessel tracking systems. And so by and large, you know, we probably have a pretty [00:15:00] good idea of the sort of pressure that we have on fish stocks. But this is giving us a lot more detail about the sort of strategies that people are using when they're fishing, the stocks that they might be targeting, where, when, how, and to kind of help us refine what we're thinking about is what's happening out there.

Quinn: So, it would be very easy, and usually my job is to say, like, Oh, they weren't using these things because of shenanigans! Like, typical, but as you're saying, well, I mean, maybe some. We have no idea, really, way of knowing that. Because, as we know, governments only share so much data, and they only track so much data, and that's entirely dependent on country and industry and all those different things.

Does that sum it up, which is like, sort of, and proprietary and all that?

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, there's a lot of reasons why vessels might not have been publicly disclosing their locations with this GPS transponder. Some of them are shenanigans and, and really bad news. Things that are very, very [00:16:00] serious, like piracy, human trafficking, illegal fishing.

There might also be some legitimate reasons where they're perhaps trying to protect some business sort of confidential information, like here's my great spot where I go fishing and I don't want everyone to see me or even avoiding piracy. You know, if you're in places where there's a lot of piracy happening, you might not want to become a victim to that.

And really importantly, we don't have international rules that require every single vessel to use these things. So really, it's only required for very large cargo vessels and for passenger vessels like cruise ships. Internationally, and then for fishing vessels, it's really up to the country to decide whether they want to require this or not.

As an example, in the United States we have a requirement that vessels that are about 65 feet in length or longer are required to use these things. But only when they're within a certain distance of shore. And so, there's big legal [00:17:00] loopholes around this where they can turn them off if they want to.

And there's nothing constraining them from doing that in many cases.

Quinn: Right, and I guess there's shenanigans and there's Shenanigans.

Jennifer Raynor: Serious crimes.

Quinn: Right. Right. Actual crime. I think of one of my best friends, works down the hall. I've known him since, I think I have a picture of him and his brother showing up in the room I was born in.

And he was an archaeologist for a very long time and is very good at what he does. So he's also very good at finding shark teeth, because I'm calling you from above a candy shop in Colonial Williamsburg and this used to be underwater. He won't tell me where his shark tooth spot is because he was like, I'm as close to family as it gets, but much less like forget a GPS thing that he's blinking out to everybody, he won't even tell me, like, I have to go with him, probably blindfold me.

It's ridiculous. So there's that shenanigans, but I guess we could scale it up to greater business implications or things like that. And then, obviously, again, like you said, overfishing isn't the only problem on the ocean. We've got a whole sort of areas. So you've mentioned where and when a few [00:18:00] times, could you talk a little bit about if there was anywhere in the world or versions of the ocean that really stuck out in the data that really opened our eyes a bit.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. So the vessels that were not visible before, which we can now see with our new data, were largely clustered around Africa, especially Western Africa and South Asia. So just a couple of examples that I think stood out.

If we use these GPS transponders to try to infer how much fishing is happening in different places those transponders would tell us that Asia and Europe have a similar amount of fishing happening in them. But actually Asia has seven times as much fishing based on our data. Another example is if we look at the Mediterranean and on the northern side is Europe and on the southern side is Africa.

If we look at the GPS transponders, the original data it looked like there was 10 times more fishing on the [00:19:00] European side than the African side. But with our data, it's actually about equal. And so, these are some really large magnitudes where we kind of thought what we were seeing was complete or at least representative.

Maybe there's a scale factor where we only see half of boats everywhere or something. But clearly that's not the case. And we knew this wasn't the case for certain reasons, differences around legal requirements to use these things. Like I mentioned, we knew certain places don't require them. And we also know in South and Southeast Asia, the satellite systems have a hard time picking up these GPS transponders. And so even if you're using it, it might not be detected.

Quinn: What is the reason? Sorry to interrupt. What is the reason there? And again, I couldn't tell you how a satellite works, but I like them.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. I'm not sure about all the technical reasons for that, but I know one of them can be overcrowding.

So if there's just tons and tons of vessels in an area, all these signals are going up at the same [00:20:00] time and they're sort of crowding each other out. I'm guessing there are other reasons that are sort of beyond my technical capacity, but that's one of them.

Quinn: We'll take it. We'll take it. But it does sound like there is actually, I don't want to say overcrowding, but a great many more vessels than anticipated.

So maybe that's part of the problem, but at the same time, my daughter's really into math. She's going to be in fourth grade soon, but we try to talk about scale and things like that, especially, how things can scale linearly or other ways, you know, trying to impress upon her something like this, which is, Oh you know, you thought there was 10 times as much European fishing as African fishing.

If you had only discovered there was only five times as much, that's still a significant result. You're going like, Oh, wow, that's interesting. And that's, what's great about science, obviously, is you're just trying to prove yourself wrong. But it turns out it's equal, almost equal. And that's wild.

Like that is actually a huge result for the Mediterranean. It's large, but you know, compared [00:21:00] to the Pacific, it's not. Like that's, there's a lot more concentration there than anticipated.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, it is quite dramatic. And it also revealed places where there was almost nothing from these GPS transponders.

Like it was a blank spot on the map and now you look at it and it's like one of the most densely fished places in the world. And so this is kind of the point that I was making about now we understand better where, like here's a blank spot on a map from the old data and now there's, you know, dozens and dozens of vessels here are really high vessel concentrations that tells us something different about what might be happening to those ecosystems, how many fish might be being caught, and it helps us build better models for whether the pressure there is maybe different than we thought it was before.

Quinn: Sure. And now, again, before we get into, like, country specific regulations and all things like that, I mean, you can only do so much in producing this data, right, and talking about [00:22:00] it, obviously. You can't go shake your ream of papers at people and go, look at all the vessels, get them transponders. It doesn't even work here, really, usually.

But it's interesting how analogous this is, and again, this is my version of apples to apples, but another thing we've been doing with satellites the past few years, which has been actually really instrumental is tracking methane leaks throughout the natural gas infrastructure.

And that's really important because there has been a little bit of a, and all my atmospheric scientists friends are going to yell at me here, but a bit of a hole into like, Yes, we're following the trajectory throughout, but it is going pretty quick. And you know, CO2 only accounts for some of this until you start discovering, Oh shit, there's methane leaks everywhere.

And some of these are enormous. The problem is you can't see it, right? But these pipelines and everything have huge leaks, but now we can literally see those things live. And we've actually started to hold them, those producers [00:23:00] accountable in a lot of ways, not everywhere by any stretch. This is all very new, but the ability to do that is a revelation.

Is there any version of this becoming a sort of more live map that we can do in real time and that policymakers can handle in real time or the UN or whoever it might be to look and say like, look, this is the problem. This is the thing, like at least let it be tracked within, you know, some sort of anonymized method. Is it making any sense?

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that's exactly what Global Fishing Watch is doing, actually. So, their original map, these GPS transponders was on like a 72 hour delay, I think. So a little time so that you're not seeing live where people are fishing, but you know, live enough that you can make good decisions.

They're doing a similar thing with this satellite based vessel detection. They're basically putting this into their production streams so that they're always getting this satellite data, processing it, and putting it up on their [00:24:00] website. And so people can actually go to their website now, globalfishingwatch.org, and you can see these vessels that we found from our historical period, which was 2017 through 2021 in this paper. And now they are kind of filling in the current gap and putting this on more of a live kind of production cycle. They're also working on, like I briefly mentioned, using some more satellites to try to fill in even more gaps over time.

Quinn: How many satellites are we working with here? How many do you personally, can you push the buttons for? This is very exciting to me.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, so this project uses the Sentinel 1 constellation of satellites. It uses a sensor called, it's a radar sensor, basically. And this is how we see the vessels.

We basically see a bright spot on the radar detection. These are going around the earth all the time. They're basically capable, I'll say, of revisiting the same place every six days. [00:25:00] And it varies. So Europe gets a lot more coverage than other places. But we have like this constellation up there.

There's just tons and tons of satellites that can be drawn on. The Sentinel 2 class of satellites has a different kind of sensor on it. This is called an optical sensor. It's just like the, it's not just like, but you could think about it like taking a picture from your iPhone.

Quinn: Thank you for dumbing that down for me.

I appreciate it.

Jennifer Raynor: Just a regular optical, you know, red, green, blue photograph. This has like a better, more refined picture. It's sort of like what you see on Google Earth. You know, you can zoom around and see stuff like with your human eye. This would be the kind of next big thing or next set of satellites that we can use to look at vessels.

There's also a whole suite of very, very frequent overpasses and very, very fine scale geographically, like you could look at it with your eyes and see that's a boat. There's just tons of stuff out there. Me [00:26:00] personally, we're only really constrained in science based by what you can afford to buy and process from a computational perspective.

And the really amazing thing about the time we're living in is we can process 2 million gigabytes of satellite data in a way that's actually feasible. I mean, I can't imagine 10 years ago, even thinking about doing such a thing. So it's incredible. Yeah.

Quinn: So that actually brings me to my next point.

If you could, can you share sort of what the costs of this project were and sort of how they broke down and then just, like you were saying, yes, we live in a whole new world, but there are still costs. And as we know, part of the problem in the US is like three quarters of your job is writing grants. How do you go about getting ongoing funding?

Does it seem like now after the project, there's a better case for it that you can make and that you've successfully made. Talk to me about the money side.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. So the money side is a little difficult for me right now to put a [00:27:00] specific number on in part because this work was led by Global Fishing Watch again.

They have great partnerships with satellite data providers. So the European Space Agency actually provided the images. Google provided in kind support for a lot of the computing. We had funding from OceanKind, Bloomberg Philanthropies, National Geographic's Pristine Seas program. And so there were a lot of large organizations who were very motivated to support this work and made it possible essentially through these both in kind and financial contributions.

One really exciting thing is that Global Fishing Watch was awarded a very large grant, a 60 million dollar grant, through the TED Audacious Project. The Audacious Project is trying to find organizations that are changing the world and making the world better. And Global Fishing Watch was selected [00:28:00] under this program this year.

You can see the CEO had a great talk, kind of talking about what this project is. And the goal of this project is to reveal all human industrial activity at sea. And so they're going to have this really substantial pool of money to do amazing work over the next five or so years and kind of draw on all those satellites that I mentioned are flying up there just waiting to be tapped.

Quinn: Sure. That's incredible. That's really cool. I mean, and, and again, like, we're, I guess we've got some inflation we're still dealing with, but that should, as the costs of compute come down, and obviously everyone's looking for compute these days for more reasons than ever, but at the same time, the technologies and the scale are just growing while that 60 million can be put to use.

And obviously the data is growing as well, because like you said, some of these babies are going over every six days. That's just an enormous amount of data to play with. Right.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, it is. It's exciting. And I think, you know, maybe it's the sort of [00:29:00] idealistic scientist in me, but I don't think producing data is sufficient.

It's not the only thing we need, but it's a necessary thing. So we have to have better data to make better decisions. And there's a step in the middle that has to happen too, where we need capacity to interpret data. We need to have sort of interests in making better decisions and where our incentives lie.

And we need some good international agreements that sort of lay the groundwork to give people the right incentives to make good decisions. And so one thing that would be an amazing international priority is to have a UN or some kind of intergovernmental resolution that recognizes the importance of transparency in the ocean, knowing what people are doing, who vessels are, what they're authorized to do, where they're operating, those kinds of things, and requiring them to use some kind of tracking device so [00:30:00] that there aren't all these loopholes that say, well, most people don't really need to use this. We hope you do, but you don't have to. It's fine.

Quinn: Yeah. Good luck. And of course, and again, not to pooh the idealist science side of it, but that is important to have, just as it is important to have the pessimist of like, you'll never track it all.

It doesn't matter. The ocean's too big. Great. That's not super helpful either. In the middle, and we do try to engage with here, you know, politics does matter. And there's so much more petty and complicated and experience matters as much as like a young idealist coming in of whatever flavor and technical background.

Right? But at the same time, it's hard. We have examples of, you know, in the U.S. we have in Louisiana, parts of Texas, Cancer Alley, where we know and they're, you know, these people are a very specific subset of people, by the way, who do not want to leave their homes and who have lived there for a very long time.

Historically marginalized and poisoned people [00:31:00] are we've got data. You can put a Purple Air monitor down there. There's all kinds of tests we can do and all these things. And yet we still have not stopped fossil fuel refineries from parking in the backyard, right? You know, we continue to explore natural gas export facilities and things like that.

So just because we can measure it does not mean we will necessarily immediately go, Holy shit, we got to do something about this, right? But, like you said we can't do anything until we start measuring it. And you guys have taken up an enormous question here. But it really matters. We have been fishing for a very, very long time but not at this scale, right?

We have been using computers, but not at this scale. We have had misinformation since we were telling each other, you know, which was the safe cave and which was not, but not at this scale. So it does help to really step back, get our arms around and go like, Okay. We think we have a better idea now, and we're going to keep having a better idea.

What can each of us do with this? Because just by the way, have the technology of AIS to use is great. Cause sometimes it goes, [00:32:00] okay, but how would we start doing it? And you're like, here they are. They're available and it's proven, right?

Jennifer Raynor: You know, I'm actually an economist by training and economics is all about incentives.

It's about human behavior and how we react to incentives and do what we do. And so what I'm really interested in my broader work, I would say, is not just creating these incredible data sets with my great partners at Global Fishing Watch and, and other places. But really thinking about what does that tell us?

So now we know where the vessels are, what does that tell us about the incentive to fish illegally inside marine protected areas? What does it tell us about how much sanction busting trade might be happening and where and when and why? Can we think about policies that might change those economic incentives to make it mutually compatible, I would say, for people to [00:33:00] do the things that we hope they are doing. And so I think between the data and sort of outcomes, again, we need this really clear and really effective policy landscape to create those right incentives that will help steer people. And also, we need the kinds of enforcement that will ensure people are following those rules.

The really cool thing about this data is it makes enforcement much easier. So, if you can see, you know, here's where all the boats are, they're not supposed to be, we can do something about it. And there was a really cool case study, again, led by Global Fishing Watch where they used these satellites to find illegal fishing in North Korea.

There was these sort of stories of small fishing boats washing up in Russia with crews missing or dead, North Korean crews. And there's also some observation of large industrial fishing vessels heading from China to North Korea. And so this team [00:34:00] used these satellite technologies that we used in our paper to kind of observe these Chinese fishing vessels moving from China to North Korea. They found 900 Chinese fishing vessels that were fishing in North Korea. This was kind of pushing out the local fishermen who were being kind of pushed out to Russia out to sea and starving and dying in bad weather and so on.

And there's also UN sanctions right now against North Korea where they're not supposed to be licensing fishing in their waters or exporting fish because of their sort of nuclear testing. This was the biggest ever discovery of illegal fishing by a single fleet. And this technology is what specifically enabled that discovery since this paper was published and since COVID closures happened, they both kind of happened at the same time. There was like a 90 percent reduction in these boats moving into North Korea. So I think it's a cool case study that shows that it's not just like a [00:35:00] technical question, like, can we find the boats?

Sure. But that, like, we can use these data to draw some insights that are important that are affecting real people on the ground and that can help us think about how to maybe enforce or target efforts to change behavior in a way that's really meaningful.

Quinn: I love that. And I appreciate both the pragmatic optimism that you can learn from a specific case study like that, but obviously also with your economics background, it's a very complicated time, especially from the U.S., a global Northwestern country to talk about incentives and punishments and enforcements if a lot of these boats are found in the Global South or places like that, where we are constantly, we at least should be asking, and we're doing a so so job of it, [00:36:00] how can we actually help those situations as opposed to just punishing them.

What are the incentives? Just like with the methane leaks, you know, yes, look, you gotta, you know, I understand this is your business, but how do we both walk the line of carrots and sticks of please plug that leak? It's really bad for everybody. But at the same time, we know that this is your business, you know?

And yes, you need to feed people. But between human trafficking and piracy and overfishing, which is a real issue, especially for big fish which are very sexy in a lot of places and feed a lot of people. We do need to help in some way. We don't, as usual, kind of like with coal, we don't get to get away with overfishing for the past couple of hundred years and then just punish everyone.

So we have the technology and the resources to do this, but hopefully we can and it's different in every country, obviously, incentivize folks to do it in a more sustainable way.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. And I think there's also some distributional consequences here that you were kind of alluding to in terms of who wins and who loses.

Right. And we can kind of think about this [00:37:00] data set in other ways as well. It's not just like punish the bad people fishing, right? Like fishing is extremely important. There's like 260 million people employed in global marine fisheries. This industry, not just fishing, but trade and oil production and all these things generates 1.5 to 2. 5 trillion dollars in economic value every year. This so-called blue economy is just so important and it's a resource that we need to protect, not necessarily to set aside and say no one can use this anymore, but to say these uses are really important. The people who rely on these things in many cases are very reliant on them.

And the better decision making we can have to reduce exploitation, to reduce sort of damaging activities, we're actually creating benefits. We're not [00:38:00] only punishing some people, we're actually, for example, protecting these small scale fleets, like traditional fishing, that the fish stay in the local community.

They often have these sort of carve out areas, like they are only the ones who are allowed to fish in this one place. And these industrial boats aren't supposed to go there. Well, we can use these kinds of satellites to see, are they actually going there. These, you know, are the boats kind of encroaching in on these local fishing fleets that are really important for the local community.

You know, we can kind of monitor those kinds of interactions. So it's not just about punishing people for doing things we don't want because we're like, we want conservation or something. It's more about getting the most we can from the resource that we have to benefit the most people and to also think about who is benefiting.

Right? Like, we don't actually know a lot of times. One really challenging thing with these industrial fishing fleets is we don't know who the beneficial owners are a lot of times. There's shell companies on top of shell [00:39:00] companies and you don't actually know where these profits are going. And so, it's a very complicated industry, a very important one.

And I think the more we can unravel about what's happening, the more we can ensure that everybody's benefiting, not just certain groups who, again, we don't always even know who they are.

Quinn: And it really, you know, it can seem like you know, we're using this as a scapegoat to say like, Oh, perfect is the enemy of good, but we can do reasonable math now to balance out, okay, T-shirts shouldn't be made of fossil fuels anymore and they should be made by people who are being paid a living wage and not by kids.

And yes, that can make it frustrating to consumers in some way because they're more expensive or they're harder to find and the supply chains aren't there. But it is the right thing to do, and hopefully if we support that more, it'll be better. And yes, I support, obviously, setting aside a lot of land for rewilding and parts of the [00:40:00] ocean with the 30 30 30 stuff.

That's all really important, because we've made some real mistakes. But again, we need to find ways to use it without using it up, because people do need you know, to be able to fish locally. We do need, we do need industry, right? We do need more wind turbines in more places pretty quickly.

And doing the reasonable math on that to say like, who's benefiting and who gets to decide who's benefiting, what are the incentives? What are the costs, that matters. Because we're already learning our lesson on land with subsistence farmers in Northern India, with coffee crops around the world where all these small holder farmers are unable to do it anymore, you know.

And so they'll just lease their land to miners because they can't grow coffee there anymore. And then they have to move. And now we deal with migration and Europe spent the weekend electing people on the far right. So there's math to be done and I think we can do hopefully a better job having this sort of information.

So I want to tell you a quick story relevant [00:41:00] to your second big piece of research I wanted to talk about today. I have a very good friend and he's going to know who he is and people who are listening, who know him, will know who it is. And he has always wanted, it sounds ridiculous, but he's always wanted a wolf.

And we're like, bud, you can't just get a wolf. I understand that you think that would be great. You can't, now thank God, he's got like three little kids and his wife would murder him. You can't just get a wolf. However, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like your research says everybody should have a wolf, right?

Jennifer Raynor: I don't think so.

Quinn: And we can reduce all traffic deaths, right? Isn't it that simple? No, I thought this was really, really, really cool. I loved reading about Ed Yong, one of my, the greatest writers of all time, Pulitzer Prize winner. Covered your work and the subtitle of his work was try wolves.

So talk to me about this because I just think it's so cool. Tell me what a landscape of fear is and [00:42:00] how this has so many other economic benefits.

Jennifer Raynor: Sure. Well so my other area of research focuses on wolves and the economic impacts of wolves returning to the United States. So just very brief history for people who might not be that familiar with the history of wolves here.

Wolves once ranged over most of the lower 48 states. Then when sort of European settlement started happening during the colonial period, we European settlers were killing tons and tons of animals with fur for the fur trade. This really caused wolf natural prey to plummet. And they started increasingly targeting livestock from the settlers.

So this started to create this landscape of conflict between wolves and European settlers. And the result was bounty programs where we paid people to kill wolves, professional trade in wolfskins and a federal agency that was focused on eliminating wolves from the Western landscape. These programs were super, super [00:43:00], incredibly effective and essentially wiped wolves out from the lower 48 states. Not a single wolf left except for a very small population in Northeastern Minnesota and on Isle Royal, Michigan. So we were in a world like starting around 1960 where there were no wolves left in this country at all.

Quinn:That's really how far it went?

Jennifer Raynor: Literally how far it went. Like, we went out and got every single last wolf across almost the entire landscape. And so with the environmental movement of the 60s and 70s, greater understanding of ecosystems and the importance of predators, we started to see a bit of a shift in how we think about managing predators on the landscape.

And so what ended up happening was wolves were one of the first species to be protected under the United States Endangered Species Act. This basically prevented any more federal killing of wolves and it also prevented private people from killing wolves. So we saw some natural return [00:44:00] of wolves in the Great Lakes states.

So Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Wolves came back naturally from Canada. And then we also, in the mid 1990s, had a program where the federal government took Canadian wolves and dropped them into Yellowstone National Park. So this was a planned reintroduction. The wolves were brought back and shipped in and then left to do what they want to do. And so we have these two big populations now that have kind of spread really dramatically over since about the 19, around 1978 in Wisconsin. And that program in Yellowstone was 1995. And so we saw a lot of ecological shifts in Yellowstone after wolves came back. It's hard to disentangle the point you made earlier.

Ecosystems are complicated, right? Like, we know wolves came back and a lot of stuff changed. Like, we saw fewer things that wolves eat, like elk. We saw them perhaps eating in different patterns. So this [00:45:00] landscape of fear that you mentioned is this idea that when a predator comes back, their prey will be more cautious, spend more time, you know, with their heads up looking around instead of just, you know, eating everything, you know, like a lawnmower, and that those kind of behavioral changes can cascade through the ecosystem through like regeneration of certain kinds of trees and and those types of things.

So that's all really interesting ecology background, but I'm an economist and my question was, What impact does that have on people? So, sort of, so what, right? Like, we know that Yellowstone is one of the most amazing places on the planet. I've been there many times and, of course, the tourism generates money, but can we think about something a little more close to home, right?

Like a thing that affects us on a day to day basis. The thought I had was, what about vehicle collisions with deer? So in my class, I actually, when I teach this paper, I say, how many of you have hit a deer in your car? Raise your hand. And in Wisconsin, it's almost everyone. Like there's [00:46:00] 20, 000 collisions with deer on our roads in the state every year.

In the country as a whole, it's millions, probably one to two million. And people are killed, they're injured, your car is wrecked. And so my question was, if wolves come back, can we maybe reduce some of those collisions with deer? And we found the answer was yes. So when wolves came back to Wisconsin, they reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter.

This was worth about 11 million dollars per year statewide in terms of benefits from not fixing your car, not getting injured or killed, and this was through those two channels. One is partially reducing the deer population, which is not surprising. Less deer are less likely to hit them. But also the effect was bigger than we could explain by just reducing the deer population.

We think is related to deer moving around differently than they otherwise would have this, this sort of idea of a landscape of fear.

Quinn: Mm hmm. [00:47:00] This is very exciting. I loved in, again, in Ed's piece Dr Leanna Zanette, I believe said, wasn't involved in the study. She said, the icing on the cake is that wolves do this work all year long at their own expense.

I mean, how many economic benefits do we get like that? We can argue about the Child Tax Credit all day. Even though that's something we should do, but it still costs something. Fly in the wolves. This is great. There's fewer, like you said, fewer people are hurt, fewer cars to you know, get mangled, fewer roads that are stopped up from that, and again, like you said, not just in these magical protected places like Yellowstone, like you said, closer to home.

I mean, I lived in Los Angeles where coyotes just roamed everywhere because, we've built on all of their habitats. So what does this mean policy wise? How has anything been affected since then in Wisconsin, in other states where wolve populations have been growing or where we have the opportunity, I guess, in a [00:48:00] rewilding sort of sense to bring in more wolves. Cause look, I love roundabouts. They're way better than traffic lights. But if the answer is like a thousand times more wolves, let's do that, more wolves.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. I mean, it's, I think what to me was interesting about this particular question of the vehicle collisions is the benefits that wolves create through this channel are largely going to be in mostly rural areas where people are hitting deer in their car. And this is also where wolves are causing costs, right? So wolves are not only creating benefits. They also do kill some livestock. You know, people are worried about their, you know, just being afraid has some kind of economic impact.

And those things are also happening in rural areas. So what we've seen historically is when we're talking about comparing those costs to livestock predation, it's often compared to like conservationists [00:49:00] happiness that they know wolves are out there somewhere. So like I'm willing to pay to know that wolves are in Yellowstone and in Montana just because I like the idea that they're out there.

And so we kind of have this urban-rural divide thing where environmentalists and conservationists in the big cities are like, yeah, we want wolves in Montana. We'll pay for that. And people in Montana are like, well, that's cool. But they're also causing some trouble for us. Right. And so it kind of gets back to the fisheries question, which is like, who wins and who loses, right?

There's someone winning and there's someone losing and like, are they the same people? And the way we have historically measured this, they're different people. And that makes policy really, really challenging. You have to pick a side, right? But I think the cool thing about our study is that it's the very same people, right?

It's benefits that are happening in rural places kind of compared to costs that are happening in rural places. And there's some offsetting effect there. Which I think is one nice policy implication, [00:50:00] it's like we now can measure some sorts of benefits to the very people who were previously suffering.

And it also gives us a mechanism to think about how to deal with those trade offs. Like we could put, you could imagine a surcharge or something on like registering your vehicle that says, Hey, you know, wolves are here. You're benefiting through not crashing your car. We're going to have this money go into a pool that helps prevent livestock predation or something. And so once we have measured these impacts, who wins, who loses, we can start to think about some kind of transfer program that helps kind of offset these relative impacts. And that's fundamentally an economics question. We can think about what kind of policy would be the best way to get some sort of efficient and equitable outcome in terms of the winners and losers.

And this is actually something I'm working on and ongoing work is thinking about, what kinds of policies might help us think [00:51:00] a little more holistically about how many wolves is the right number? Like we've been fighting about what's the right number of wolves for decades now. How do we sort of measure these offsetting costs and benefits, in informing how many wolves we should have on the landscape and how we should have some transfer programs to think about kind of compensating the losers by the winners.

Quinn: I mean, I appreciate all of that. A lot of our work, especially, and it took me a while and a road to get there because of extremely negligent, narrow point of understanding and perspective, but people come to us and we're going to get to this point in a second, but mostly it turns out to help them answer the question, What can I do? And a lot of the times, it turns out the most impactful, efficient economic use of your time or money, or both is to support frontline groups that are already doing the work because they [00:52:00] are going to be the most knowledgeable about what they are experiencing and what works and what doesn't in the local politics and things like that.

And so, yes, it's easy to hold a fundraiser in Los Angeles titled, like, Maximum Wolves or something, but there's going to be folks in Montana that are like, hold on a minute, how many wolves can a Montana take? And the answer is somewhere in there. And look, we've been arguing about people numbers forever too.

It's not simple, right? But doing the math for those people so that we can both listen to them but also help them understand the benefits to themselves so their car doesn't get wrecked, right? But that some pigs are going to be eaten because they are wolves. I mean, you know, I like to tell my, I guess there's two sides of it.

It's funny. I was reading this and thinking of one of my wife and our best friends woman actress and director Liz Banks directed the Cocaine Bear movie. And I was like, okay, so we're not dealing with cocaine, but we don't want cocaine bears. Like that was funny and fun. We just, we just want wolves, right?

Who are rewilded in a place that's habitable [00:53:00] to them. But I also tell our kids about our dogs, right? In the end, like, yes, they're trained. They're golden doodles. They're great. But, they're going to see that squirrel and they're going to go because they are dogs. And so these wolves are going to come after livestock if they don't have other prey to eat because they haven't been around for a few hundred years.

And the ecosystems are all off. It's going to take some adjusting, but if we can really show that this could benefit a local economy, like that's something that matters, especially in rural parts of the U.S. today, where those economies are starved for any sort of support. Right.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. And even better yet, if we can create some programs where people in Los Angeles who want to pay to maximize wolves can actually provide financial support to places that do have wolves to help build fencing, hire range riders, you know, do whatever it is you need to do to help minimize the impacts on the people who are being harmed.

That's actually more economically efficient. It's like the people who are benefiting now, right, are, are currently getting the benefits [00:54:00] for free, right? Like they're not paying anything for these sort of psychic satisfaction that, you know, wolves are somewhere else. We need to try to develop some mechanisms that help us properly account for all the range of impacts of predators, not just wolves.

And to not have people sort of free riding on those benefits and just saying, yeah, I love them being somewhere else. I don't have to deal with it. It's great. And so I personally think it's wonderful. Like my personal view is it's wonderful to have predators coming back to the landscape.

It's ecologically important. It's economically important. And it's really special l to be able to see a wolf out there and know that they've sort of come back from the brink here. But I also do really fully recognize that it's complicated. That the managers who are making decisions about this are in a position where they're balancing the LA Maximize Wolves program with the, you know, we're struggling [00:55:00] right here right now with living with these animals.

And so I think, the cool thing, like I already said about our study, is that it helps us think about what are some of these really tangible impacts that wolves are having locally so that you can kind of think about, it's not just the LA Maximize the wolves, right? It's like people who are actually living with them are also getting some benefits that are really quite significant.

Like I said, in Wisconsin, 11 million a year in benefits we're getting from this vehicle collision channel. And like, what do we do with that money? How do we, how do we get it? And how do we do something that's productive? I think is the question.

Quinn: Is there another living or historic predator you would like to reintroduce that you think, without doing the research, would provide an economic benefit, even though there might be some trade offs?

Jennifer Raynor: What I think would be great is for [00:56:00] animals that are still alive. We see all these crazy programs now, speaking of technology getting so advanced to like bring back the woolly mammoth, right? Like splice it with some modern elephant or something. I'm not looking for that kind of rewilding, but I think returning ecosystems to as healthy of a state as we can is a really important way to be responsible stewards of our planet, right?

We now understand that predators are very, very important in ecosystems. They're critical and as are many other species. And so I think I would hesitate to pick a specific predator to put in places, I would say we should be focused on ecosystem restoration. In much of the American West, this is basically mountain lions, wolves, grizzly bears.

They're sort of the apex predators, there's many places that have suitable habitat left for these species where they could kind of continue a natural range expansion. And I personally think that would [00:57:00] be a great thing, assuming we have all the right policies in place to keep it productive for people.

But I think from an ecological perspective, those are kind of the species that I'm interested in. Those are our sort of historic and present carnivores, you know, of North America that are so important. And I'm very excited to kind of be doing more work on them as time goes on.

Quinn: That was an extremely thoughtful reply and I hesitate to ask like, but if you had to choose between pterodactyl and like megalodon, which one would you choose?

I understand if professionally you don't want to go there, but I would encourage you to have some fun with it.

Jennifer Raynor: I think I'd have to go with like a saber tooth lion or something.

Quinn: Landscape of fear, right?

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah. Yeah. Right. I'm a sucker for the big predators personally. So I'm not really the TRex type.

That's maybe a little too, too classic for my taste. I'd rather go a little out there.

Quinn: No, I like the saber tooth. There's this Reddit, which I know is a ridiculous way [00:58:00] to start a sentence, but I can't remember what it's called. I'll send it to you. But it's essentially like pictures of nature where the predator is hiding and you have to like find it.

And it's like a spider or a snake.

Jennifer Raynor: It's like the Where's Waldo for animals.

Quinn: For animals that can just tear you to pieces. And there was one that was like, find the big cat. It's so upsetting how long it took to find. And the answer is by the time you find it, he's standing behind you, right? But it's so close.

And you're like, Oh, we are so lucky to be quote-unquote on top of this food chain because the second again, you go too deep in the ocean, which doesn't give a shit about you, or the second you go into the jungle, like that's it, like game's over. So yeah, more saber tooth that you can kind of see and you know is out there, but I don't know, maybe don't do it.

That would be great.

Jennifer Raynor: These stealth predators are incredible. Like even mountain lions. You know, if you're hiking in the Mountain West, you've probably never seen one, but they've seen you almost definitely.

Quinn: We, yeah, again, we were in Los Angeles for a long time and we had this hike right next to us, this beautiful [00:59:00] little sort of state park.

And there was a mountain lion that lived there and I would run every morning at 5 a.m. with my little headlamp and flashlights in my hands and my wife just most mornings assumed that wasn't coming back because she was like if it's one on one like he's toast. It's not even close like the mountain lion's gotta eat.

Jennifer Raynor: I mean, there's this is kind of an interesting thing because like for wolves for example, the big bad wolf right like, it's like the classic scary predator that we historically just hate in this country, you know, Europeans and sort of European history around hating wolves is very deep and long.

And it's interesting because in the United States and North America, there has like never been a person killed by wolves. I think there was maybe one exception that I read about and that it was a little bit of a murky situation there, but like wolves don't kill people. They don't. I mean, I challenge your listeners to [01:00:00] find a case in the United States where wolves are killing humans.

It just does not happen. Mountain lions, sure, they do kill people. Occasionally, they do. Grizzly bears occasionally do, but wolves really don't. And so it's kind of interesting to me that so much of our animus and hatred is placed on wolves. I think, apart from these sort of storybook origins of our childhood, like the scary, scary wolf, you know it's kind of an interesting thing to me.

You're not going to go jogging and get taken down by a pack of wolves. That will, that will never happen.

Quinn: No, but by the way, if you're going to go, like, what an incredible story for people to tell. But also, like you're saying, I mean, we have, it is such a fascinating thing to have othered them considering, like you were saying, and I'm going to make up a number, there were a hundred left in northern Minnesota as of like 50 years ago.

That's really, like, we made a whole Liam Neeson movie about it, and I'll watch a guy do whatever, you know, it's taken with wolves, but [01:01:00] it's completely out of the realm of actual probability, much less probability, reality because they don't exist to us. Basically. That's so like Little Red Riding Hood, you know, is probably a Grimm Brothers or something like that originally, but like you said, the European history, it's fascinating because we've done everything we can to wipe them out.

So I don't know. It's almost like the T-rex thing. You're like, yeah, it'd be scary, but we don't really know.

Jennifer Raynor: Yeah, but we do know, the difference with wolves we do know that we've lived with them for a long time. And that essentially no one's being killed, both in the United States and Canada where there's a lot of wolves.

So I think that we have a very clear picture that the risk posed to people by wolves is quite small. Now if we're talking about pets or hunting dogs or like you got some sheep on your property or something, you know, I'm not going to say that they never kill those animals. They clearly do. But as far as like worrying that you're going to get taken down out on a jog or a hike or something, it's just not plausible.[01:02:00]

Quinn: It's too bad we can't get pterodactyls and just train them to, like, circle over, like, Moms for Liberty meetings or something like that. Again, just a landscape of fear. Just to kind of keep everybody on their toes.

Jennifer Raynor: Just looking for a real feasible solution there, are you?

Quinn: A hundred percent? Yeah. Pterodactyls. Yep. You got to go out on a limb a little bit. Okay. So, the big question is how can we help? How can folks with their voice, their dollar, their time, whatever it might be, support your work, emulate their work, learn from your work. But in an analogous sense, or just flat out be inspired from it.

Give us some specifics.

Jennifer Raynor: Well, I think on the ocean side, people who are seafood wholesalers, retailers and consumers, like anyone who's engaged in the seafood sector, I think has some stake in trying to improve transparency around fishing practices. And I think one thing that can be done is to call for governments to basically get behind transparency [01:03:00] around fishing.

Two things that are really important are transparency around vessel information and ownership.

Jennifer Raynor: So we need registries that are easy to find, contain information about who actually owns these vessels, who's benefiting from the fish they're selling. We need retailers to map their supply chains so that we know where the fish are coming from.

And again, who benefits from this fishing. So I think pushing for understanding the sort of seafood supply chain is really important and requiring these vessel tracking systems. So we need to know the identity of boats, where they're going for the entire duration of their voyage. These two policies are things that would be amazing to have like an international resolution on.

And there's a lot of work happening to try to push for these things. And then as far as the wolves and predators go, I think that you know, there's great conservation organizations that of course take [01:04:00] donations, although I won't pitch for any particular one, but people can kind of pick their favorite.

Quinn: Please do. That's our whole business. If you want to pick, or you can tell me offline and I won't tell anybody you said it.

Jennifer Raynor: Sure, and you know, people can kind of support organizations that are doing conservation that they think are doing good work. But even just getting out there and, and seeing wildlife and experiencing nature and building this sort of love for the natural earth with children, with your friends, with your family. I think just having a cultural ethos around the fact that the planet is a beautiful, magical place with incredible resources I think is so important.

This is like the sort of nature documentary approach, right? Like get people loving nature. They're going to want to see policies in place that are going to protect it and treat it well. And then, you know, making [01:05:00] decisions the best you can to do things that are aligned with your own views around what you think is ethical.

It's very challenging and complicated around seafood, for example, it's hard to know what you're buying and where it's coming from. And in these cases, I do think that the only way forward is, is policy. Like we need to push our leaders and our representatives at the highest levels of the government to put in policies that help us know what's happening and help us make better decisions.

And there's only so much we can do with individual action, I think, on these issues. We really need some big movement on this. But to just keep getting out there and loving the world for what it is at the same time.

Quinn: I will remain for the rest of my life extremely grateful for a 20 minute phone call I had with Sesame Street producers asking about how we talk to kids about climate change and things like that.

And if that's all the work I ever did in my life, I would be thankful and call [01:06:00] it a day. But it does just come down to relationships, right, and rekindling or you know, starting anew for the first time if you're someone who's been deprived of a relationship with nature for whatever reason.

Establishing those relationships and understanding how we live in concert with those things, and they live in concert with us using the land and nature without using it up both on land and the water is instrumental, right? To understand that it is a shared place that really can go a long way.

And, yeah, it's so nice to read an article about how you used satellites and chlorophyll to find fishing boats. And on the other hand, you know, five years ago there was the report, I think it was in the LA Times, saying how 85 percent of the seafood in Los Angeles restaurants is mislabeled.

And you go, Oh, it's complicated. Got it. It's probably seems like very complicated and the incentives and the consequences are not clearly not quite fine tuned well [01:07:00] enough for us to make this work. And that is why, look, individual action does really matter. There are plenty of places you can find resources to, to buy the right seafood, to talk to your Congress people and your representatives.

Maybe you own a restaurant or you're starting one or you just work at one. And those things can snowball because like you said, the policy is what's going to really go there. A wonderful team of scientists who kind of, you know, enjoy saber toothed tigers, but are into fishing and wolves can only do so much.

Well listen, thank you so much. The last question, and I'm going to get you out of here. What is something you have read in the past year that's changed you in some way, either perspective or topic you had considered before or changed your mind on something before. And we got a whole list up in Bookshop.

And I mean, we've had everything from truly like coloring books to the Constitution to somebody's biography. You name it.

Jennifer Raynor: That's great. So I think one amazing piece that I read in the last year was not a book, but I'll get to that. There's [01:08:00] t this investigative reporter named Ian Urbina who has done a lot of amazing reporting around criminality and exploitation sort of at sea in the fishing, oil and shipping industries.

The piece that I read in the New Yorker was the Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat. And it was sort of talking about all these crazy things that are happening out at sea and this investigative reporting team going out and throwing bottles of rice and like pens onto fishing ships to try to like get messages from people about whether they're being trafficked or enslaved, essentially.

It's an incredible piece of investigative reporting that sort of builds on this longer project. So people can Google the Outlaw Ocean, which was an award winning New York Times series that is now quite old, like, 2015, I want to say, that kind of started investigating some of these big issues in the ocean.

And this turned into later a bestselling [01:09:00] book by the same name, a few years after that, which I think is worth a read. And there's a nonprofit journalism organization by the same name, the Outlaw Ocean Project that looks at human rights, labor, and sort of environmental concerns in the ocean.

So it's sort of this I would say an aggregation of really cool investigative reporting around all this sort of crazy stuff that's happening at sea. And at least helps us think about sort of what is our vision for the future? What do we want this to look like and what kind of pathway do we need to get there?

And in my opinion, sort of this transparency movement, trying to understand who, where, when, and how people are operating at sea can help us sort of address some of these terrible things that this investigative reporting has come up with. And again, sort of addressing our bigger issues we've been talking about, which is how do we responsibly use our [01:10:00] natural resources and how do we create the incentives to do that?

These cases in this book and other pieces are sort of the worst that you could imagine in terms of outcomes. But I challenge people to read these kinds of things that can be gloomy and doomy to think about what would the best look like? Like, what would we want it to be and how do we get there?

Because I think otherwise it's easy to really fall into a state of despair around nothing can be done, everything's terrible, everything's broken, why bother? And I think it's really important that we don't fall into that trap. I think there's many, many things that we can do, many things that are very feasible that we just need to sort of push our leaders to, to put them in place and help create those structures that we desperately need.

Quinn: It's amazing. I'm glad you were able to say all that because I could never have done that. And by the way, just to [01:11:00] literally come in full circle Dr. Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has a book coming out this fall called, What If We Get It Right? Basically. And we have to do that, you know, we have to take sort of this almost Churchill perspective of like, here's where we are.

Not ideal. We've come a long way, but we're kind of on this precipice, but here's where we can go. It's just gonna take a lot of work, but you have to do the imagining part, right? And you have to go out there. You have to tell people where we are so that we know how far we have to go, but holy shit, look how far we've come.

You know, people wash their hands now. We didn't do that like 200 years ago. Not to say every problem is gonna be that easy. But we can do magical things. So I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your work. I can't wait to see what your next big thing is. Remember folks, the moral is everybody gets a wolf.

Which is really great so, if you take anything away from this,

Jennifer Raynor: I'm gonna say everybody don't get a wolf. Nobody get a wolf.

Quinn: It's fine, it's fine.

Jennifer Raynor: But, we want more wolves out there for sure.

Quinn: Yeah, we [01:12:00] want more wolves. More wolves and pterodactyls and saber toothed tigers. By the way, I did at one point, I spent part of my, and I'm gonna let you go spent a long time doing screenwriting, and my wife is this very hard working, very successful screenwriter, and I wrote a sort of a pilot about the first years of, of Jamestown, the fort.

And one of the first things in the historical firsthand documents is like, day one, a colonist got eaten by a panther. And it's incredible because these were all, usually, as they called them, second sons who sailed over and they ruined everything, obviously. But they had driven out so much in nature, they had no idea that they were going to be eaten by a panther.

And I was like, what a fantastic way to start off that landscape of fear of like, maybe you just shouldn't be here. Maybe that was a bad idea. So anyways, maybe not a wolf death, but there are panthers. So be careful. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. You're wonderful and your research is incredible.

And I'm going to just ask you for some satellite time at some point. No questions, no questions. [01:13:00]

Jennifer Raynor: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's so great to talk to you and appreciate all the work you're doing to get important topics out there.

Quinn: Oh, I appreciate it.