Perseverance, Storytelling, and the Book of Extinction with Lucas Zellers

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick!

On today’s episode, we talk with Lucas Zellers, a multidisciplinary author, podcaster, and marketing professional about Perseverance, Storytelling and the Book of Extinction.  Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes:
1:30  Nic & Sam discuss Dungeons & Dragons
5:29  Interview with Lucas Zellers starts
11:05  Storytelling
17:41  Perseverance
26:01  Field Notes
33:15  The Book of Extinction

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Lucas Zellers at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-zellers/

Guest Bio:
Lucas Zellers is a multidisciplinary author, podcaster, and marketing professional working at the intersection of conservation science and game design. He created Book of Extinction, a monster manual telling the real-life stories of animal extinctions and re-imagining those animals as fantastic monsters fit for tabletop roleplaying games.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Nic  
Oh welcome to EPR if your favorite environmental enthusiast Nick Anwar, on today's episode, we discuss Dungeons and Dragons. We also talked to Lucas Zellers, about perseverance, storytelling, and the book of extinction. A Dungeons and Dragons monster manual telling the real life stories of animal extinctions, and reimagining those animals as fantastic monsters. Very, very cool. And finally,

here are some fun facts about the dragons of Dungeons and Dragons. According to their Wikipedia, there are 10 types of dragons that are either chromatic or metallic. Chromatic dragons include white, blue, green, black, and red and metallic dragons include bronze, brass, copper, silver, and gold. Chromatic are generally evil and metallic are genuinely good. Another fun fact is that dragons have four legs, whereas wider ones have two and their wings serve as their arms about that. It

that music

We're excited to announce that EPR is hosting a second AMA on Wednesday, March 27 at 6pm Eastern. This ama will feature past guests from backgrounds and academia to target our students and career seeking listeners that will be held on YouTube Live and you can head over to environmental professionals YouTube page right now and subscribe for notifications. Let's get to our segment that

Sam Bartleson  
was really cool, by the way. Super cool mentioned when his book was coming

Nic  
out at all. Yeah, he said it was gonna come out in October and say you are the perfect person to have this segment be about d&d and how he's using that

Sam Bartleson  
was so cool. Yeah.

Nic  
100% agree that it was absolutely wild. And yeah, I loved he was talking about it, you know, the games become more accessible. And, you know, we're seeing it lots of different ways. Like there's a video game that's super popular right now in folders. Game three, that is a game pretty much the amount of possibilities somebody told me there's something like 17,000 endings or something like that to that game. That somebody that permutations that people have to to to get through all that it's quite wild. And you know, like, I love that Lucas was sold on him about creating his own universe. A real world application, which was pretty cool. So me Yeah, I don't know are you big d&d player. If you don't I

Sam Bartleson  
would love to like, I was invited to do a group of it, but it was just a bunch of dudes. So I'm like, No, I'm gonna do that. And so it just never came up again. But it seems really fun. Yeah. What's your alignment? Your personality alignment?

Nic  
chaotic. Good.

Sam Bartleson  
Nice.

Nic  
That's always a

Sam Bartleson  
good. I want to be chaotic evil. I think so fun.

Nic  
Yeah, yeah. Chaotic is a lot more fun than everything. And it's like, you know, my true personality. I don't know. That's what I ended up being is chaotic. Maybe that's just who I am. But, you know, it's a lot of fun. I haven't played a ton like I have a friend of mine who's a she's a great dungeon master so to speak. And she's awesome. She's she creates her own things I mentioned in the interview actually creates her own worlds. And she actually is an artist, and she designs some of her characters and she has a 3d printer, and she can actually print those out. It's she's the coolest person I know.

Sam Bartleson  
Wow. Well, yeah, I feel like that's half the battle. Just find yourself a good game master.

Nic  
Yeah, it really is such a master and like I'll even share a great story about that right because we had somebody who like doesn't want to play it doesn't like playing isn't interested in it right? But is part of a friend group and so like they brought the dungeon masters like oh, well then I will make a character specifically for you where all you have to do is good words of wisdom, but they're all based on your favorite bands lyrics. And so that's and then like, there was a moment where like, the character was a raven, right? And someone opened a window and the Raven flows and flies away and never to be seen again. So that was like her way of saying you can go now you're good. You don't have to stay if you don't want to. And it was like perfect, you know, and that's like a good dungeon master. That's like, what yeah, what makes a good one. And it's not even like, remotely. I don't know. I've never played I haven't played a few times, but it's like that kind of care that goes into it. It's pretty cool. It's really neat to see people do this world building. And it's very, very fun. Yeah, and I have been barred a lot and I ended up being you're wondering Yeah, cuz I love to sing. So that makes a lot of sense. Right. And so

Sam Bartleson  
yeah, how about for our next Dawson Summit? We have like a d&d thing.

Nic  
Like, uh, oh, yeah.

Sam Bartleson  
I can't say oh, we do.

Nic  
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just it would be it would literally take the entire time. The entire time. So yeah, just just games. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, well definitely

Sam Bartleson  
do. Yes. Cool. Nothing else. I'll let everyone know.

Nic  
On that note, let's get to Lucas. Cool.

Oh, welcome back to EPR. Today we have Lucas Zellers, author, podcaster and marketing professional working at the intersection of conservation science and game design. On the show. Welcome, Lucas.

Lucas Zellers  
Hi, Nick. Great to be here. Glad to be asked. Hello.

Nic  
Oh my gosh. So the intersection of conservation science and game design. I mean, I could just can we just talk about this the whole time? What does that what does that mean to you?

Lucas Zellers  
Man, okay, so let me set the scene for you. I came to conservation advocacy and science communication, and I do think of myself as a science communicator. But I don't work for an environmental organization and my background isn't in biology or field work. My background is in writing and communications and in about 2018. I started writing in about 2015. Back when the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons was first released, someone finally invited me to the game I sort of, you know, broke into it and discovered that it was something that I was that I really loved. And then about three years later, I started writing for the game as a third party publisher. And about two or three years after that I had an idea for the most ambitious project that had ever, which was a monster manual based on animals that had gone extinct. And that's been what I've been doing ever since. And the the genesis of that idea was that the Pokedex and the monster manual and autobahns illustrated field guide are this same book. Same thing right come to the same place, they have the same function. And so it was like, Well, why don't we just point ourselves right at that and that Krux the way that that turns out to be a portal to all of this, you know, decades or centuries of Natural History, the way that humans have related to the world, the way we have made monsters out of the things that we don't understand. And that has been like this infinite bottomless wealth of really great conversations and really great stories that people can tell using the mechanics of tabletop role playing games in a really incredible and powerful way.

Nic  
So that is really great to hear. And I already have like 1000 questions. When you say like, Okay, you have it using real world examples. Do you have like a favorite or is it cruel to say a favorite really, but like, is there something like that really stuck out to you that kind of sparked the whole thing?

Lucas Zellers  
That's a tough one. The project we called Book of extinction, because I just wanted to be the guy who wrote the book of extinction. We had to think an awful lot about what made it into the book and the ones that I knew there were some that I knew I had to include, right, like we have if you're going to talk about extinction, you have to talk about the dodo and you have to talk about the Thylacine. If you're an American like I am, you have to talk about the passenger pigeon and so you know, there were some that were like, mandatory and then there were some that I discovered as we went along, and some that just sort of turned out to be kind of the most important so let me pick an example here. I think so one of the ones that ended up getting a lot of art for the book was the Japanese Wolf. Oh, interesting. And I didn't know when I started looking at this story that it would be so emblematic and typical of what we were doing with book of extinction, but I should have because for a very long time, our attitudes about wolves have been the same as our attitude about wild things in wild places. You know, I'm reading a book by Farley Mowat called never cry wolf. He was a Canadian surveyor, and he was one of the first people to like, study Arctic wolves. And he had like a huge crisis of faith after the second or third time he had an encounter with a wolf that clearly could have killed him, and did not. Up until that point, it was assumed that they were sort of bloodthirsty carnivores that would take every opportunity to eat any kind of living meat they could find. And he was one of the first people to sort of discover that they had kind of a society and a language and a way of moving through the world and shepherding caribou herds in the way in the same way that Inuit peoples might have. So there's all of that and that was really like, that kind of spirit of what a wolf is and that that conflict was cranked to 11 for Japan. They had their own native Wolf. Linnaeus would have called it Canis lupus, Hoda feel X although trying to figure out which wolf was which at the time was really complicated. There were any one of a number of like native candidates that could have been what that was or what Linnaeus was attempting to describe. And the Japanese names for it encompass religion and folklore as well as the actual creature that's kind of the way they related to it. And for Japan, the wolf was a benefactor because they mostly planted rice and grains. So the wolf was the creature that kept the deer and the boar at bay that kept your crop safe rather than the other way around that it would have been for Montana ranchers. Right. So around the time of the Meiji Restoration, when Japan was bringing all of these new Western ideas and trying to build this, you know, sort of modern Western culture. They brought in people from America, you know, agricultural managers from America who had their own attitudes about the wolf, and within just a few years, you know, for centuries, farmers had prayed to the wolf to protect their crops from deer, and then suddenly they began to view it as a threat. And within like, about 30 years, they went from Rare to completely extinct.

Nic  
Oh my gosh, so we imported or exported the Big Bad Wolf, is what you're telling me? Exactly. Yeah. Wow. That's tough. Like, how do you because you're writing this you're reading these stories, like how was that writing process? Is it because like, you know, it's kind of, you know, heartbreaking to hear of course, and it's, you know, there's too late to do anything about it. So, was it more challenging to read these kinds of stories? Did you have to take breaks and be like, you know, I need a moment. I'm gonna go watch something super happy for like 10 minutes like, Yeah, that might.

Lucas Zellers  
I mean, I think I went through all five stages of grief in the course of writing this book, and I think that's one of the things that I want the book to do for people is to kind of help them guide help guide them through that process. I've told these stories a lot on podcasts and conventions, and whenever I can, there's a few responses that I tend to hear more and more often. The most common is man, humans suck. And that is 100%. Not the point.

Nic  
Exactly. I mean, you're gonna say that

Lucas Zellers  
that's just what people say to me like I've, I think a part of the the gift of writing this book was taking about two years to really dig into these stories, one by one, feel, what they make you feel and then kind of looking at them from a top down perspective or from a 10,000 foot view. And I think what I got out of the Japanese wolf story, especially was that we made our choices on this and we knew better and we could have made different ones. So this book isn't as much as this book is about tragedy is this book is about the audacity of hope. The idea that things could have been different and would have been different and will be different in the future if we are able to learn from the past.

Nic  
And that's really well said and it's, it's kind of cool. So that's, gosh, when you have like something like that, and you have that reaction, you know, the people say because when people say that it's almost like they're just missing the value of the book, right? Like you kind of, you know, wow, that's too bad. I guess there's nothing we can do about it. Right? So how do you change the mindset of folks who'd be like, Hey, I noticed what your first reaction, what's your second? Like? How do you get them there? That's

Lucas Zellers  
a tough question. There's two answers to that. One is the answer that I can give, you know, from having conversations about this. And often it's just showing the next step or showing another example. Or really kind of pointing at the other part of the story like the point of decision. In the case of the Japanese Wolf. There's like one actual factual bad guy, his name was Edwin Dunn. He was an Ohio rancher that the mighty government appointed to manage this kind of process, and he brought over like, bounties for wolf pelts and strychnine poisoning for traps and like, so in those cases, I'm able to say like, a human suck, or as a species, we're not lost or inherently cruel. We just made the wrong decisions. We had a science consultant on this project and we'd love to tell you about her a bit more, but the way she talks about it all the time is inertia. So often what leads to these kinds of situations is the weight of past decisions or the inertia of solutions that we've inherited. So this but you know, the second thing, the second reaction is pointing to the choices that we made before and really identifying the things that we would have to change so that this doesn't happen again. And often those solutions are far more simple than people think, far more straightforward and far easier. Now than they would have been at the time.

Nic  
Yeah, it's funny, he kind of reminds me one of the things that Florida Did you know, over time as he took all the water from the interior as opposed to for the coasts and all the freshwater right. And when they did that to change the way the water cycle in the state works and so what ended up happening is all the crap that used to go to the middle and I mean that literally, the the waste from the entire environment into the middle now goes to the coast and like, oh, that's bad, you should fix that. And so that's one of those things that ends up happening is we have to learn from the mistakes of our past by putting things back to the way they were sometimes it's really hard. But I love that I love that you guys are doing that. And so you've had the science consultant, what was their role in the book? How did you use their experience?

Lucas Zellers  
Yes, so her name is Tiara curry. And I don't mind calling her out by name. She so when I had the idea for the book, I knew that I was going to be doing a lot of research that I probably wasn't yet qualified for. You know, college educated. I'm a pretty good researcher. I kind of know how this is done. But you know, I wanted to make sure that coming at it from a lay perspective or from a game design perspective, that I was getting the factual stuff, right, so that we had our inspirations in order and we weren't, you know, talking about things that didn't happen or talking past our listeners or, you know, really having an expertise. So, I called around to a bunch of different organizations and the first one to really grok what we were doing and kind of see the value in it was the Center for Biological Diversity. It's an organization that does a lot of legal and media advocacy, on behalf of extinct species, most notably enforcing the Endangered Species Act. So Tierra is the director of the saving life on Earth campaign. She's at the heart of working with a lot of different actors to try and find a solution for the extinction crisis. In hurt her big hairy goal is to make sure that this like animals don't go extinct in our lifetime. So she was a every like the Japanese wolf being one and every entry that we wrote, We sent over to her to kind of read through and get her take on it. A lot of times she was able to tell me, you know, this is how the industry frames this or this is what that word kind of means in the broader context. I think you might be misusing it. Or you know, there's this, these other meanings that you have. So everything went through her and she was often able to suggest literature like she would say like there's a couple articles you need to read. And here's the link to them. So it was a really collaborative process. And we were able to give them access to this other language of advocacy and experience and storytelling that hadn't really been applied to conservation efforts before which is kind of where the game designing came in. So I was doing my best to meet her expertise where where it was and you know, represent these creatures as accurately and historically true as possible, and then take those and turn them into something that was really going to be a fit for what people want to get out of this book, which is how to use it at their table in the Dungeons and Dragons game.

Nic  
And I really do want to ask you about how you take that process and make these real life creatures have mythical versions. I want to get to that. But I gotta ask you say you don't have a background in science, your backgrounds in writing and communications. Were you afraid to take this on or were you nervous about that? It doesn't seem like you were at all you just said let's go let's do this. Where did that mentality come from? Like, is that just a part of who you are? Or did you have to kind of teach yourself to be okay with

Lucas Zellers  
yes to both and I am 100% confident so where we are in the project is we raised the funds to fund the print run back in about a year ago at this point, and we are so close. We're so close to printing the book and putting it in people's hands and I'm so thrilled for people that have to be able to hold this amount of work and really use it in a tactile way and show it to people and tell these stories, but I know I know that as soon as that happens. Someone's going to tell come to me with something that I missed or like it was something that I mishandled this story of extinct animals is often the story of indigenous peoples and that that's really difficult to write. There is no way that I got 100% of this stuff all the way accurate. So you know, we we had to rely on a couple of things one, cost effort like we did everything possible, as quick as accurate as easy as it can be our best intentions. To make it clear that we came to this with an attitude of empathy and respect. And that counts for a lot. And then three is just like the remainder which is like what are what we kind of won't be probably will have missed or the typo that will inevitably get through editing. And for all of that I'm still nervous. But what got me through all of it. And I think what will continue to get me through all of it is that there are 71 extinction stories in this book. That's 71 stories that I don't want to be repeated ever. So in really really important ways. This book isn't about me or what I like or what I wanted to see or what I thought was cool. It's about them. And that counts for a lot. I get to be sort of invisible as an author. I get to be an advocate rather than a focus or a star.

Nic  
Right. So yeah, and it's it's sharing a story more than it is telling your own kind of thing. So okay, well how do you take my real life? Ie all these extinct animals and create a mythical version of it? What is it does it you maintain the same characteristics you just like? What do you do? How does that process work?

Lucas Zellers  
Yeah, so we've been doing this as a species humans been doing this for a very, very long time. And the idea of condensing it down. Often it takes centuries to do this. I never see a monster without seeing a culture and I never in the same way that I've never seen an animal or creature without seeing a habitat, same thing. So it can be kind of daunting to sort of condense that down and sort of do it myself. But basically, there are four ways that we did it, you know, over the course of the 71 stories that we told one is sometimes the system into which we were the system in which we were retelling these stories suggested it for us so there were existing mechanics in Dungeons and Dragons that were like a perfect fit. I think my favorite example of that is the gastric brooding frog.

Nic  
Go on and go on.

Lucas Zellers  
11 I think I think you might know a little bit of this story. It was one frog Rio the track is Silas that was known from Northwest Northeastern Australia. Gosh, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember. Yeah. Yeah, it's an Australian frog that had this remarkable adaptation and there are a lot of ways in which frogs raise their young. This is the only one to ever known to have done it in this way. They're able to suppress their own stomach acid production, to incubate they're young inside their stomach. So they would swallow tadpoles and spit out. There's a lot of eggs it spit out tadpoles, so it's a frog inside of another frog. At some point in Dungeons and Dragons history. We created this item called Bag of Holding, which really exists so you don't have to keep track of how much stuff you're carrying. That's boring. It's a bag that always weighs the same no matter what's in it. It's called a bag of holding. If you play this game you have it you've had you've interacted with this, which meant the obvious choice for this. This is a frog of holding space inside of it. There's another frog in there don't get swallowed. You're gonna have to fight a frog twice. It's absolutely hilarious. Everybody, you know, everybody played this game latches onto it easily. That's awesome. That was one way that we did it was sometimes the game said, This is what that is. That's fantastic. Sometimes, kind of the second way we did it was this had already been done for us. So New Zealand was pretty big for this. It was this creature called hostile Eagle. Largest equal to have ever lived absolutely massive. This thing was called was known as the grappling hook. Byrd, Harper cornice, Moray and not Harper governess like it's referring to the heart packs, which is not just a grappling hook, like he kind of swing in throw up the you know, sort of Batman style. Now, this was what they use in naval combat to latch on to enemy ships fired with a giant crossbones, like, that's the size of the bird that we're talking about. And in New Zealand, you know, the people who had been Maori people who had been living with this creature for a long time, sort of knew of its existence they called it haka, why we had all of these stories for what it was and why it came to be. So in that case, and and a couple others, and in the case of the Japanese wolf as well, we were able to just retell existing mythos as neatly and as accurately as we could using the fifth edition for ruleset. That was pretty incredible. The third way that we did it was kind of unexpected to me. I was really hoping to focus on recent extinctions modern things, ones that had happened since about 1500. But there's a whole ancestry of storytelling and the way that we interact with these sort of monstrous creatures that has its roots in like Pleistocene megafauna. Your cave bears your saber toothed tigers,

Nic  
only runny nose and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Zellers  
So there's a couple dozen of those in there and those we didn't change at all. Our contention was those are straight monsters. Yeah, they really are. By every definition of the word that matters, that's a monster and we were we just put it in the book straight up, didn't change anything about it just gave it numbers. So you know, I loved it when we could do that sometimes. And the last way that we did, it was just out of whole cloth. Sometimes it just wasn't enough information about this creature to or it hadn't left. And we didn't know about it for long enough, or we didn't interact with it deeply enough to create a mythos around it. So we just got to we just got to kind of reimagine those and kind of look at the way this creature existed and kind of think about what other storytelling threads were already in the core system and kind of bring those together. So for example, there was a brine shrimp in Florida that was sorry, the Florida fairy shrimp discovered in 1956, due for reevaluation in 2010 and by the time they went back the pool where they'd found it had been paved over. Like it just disappeared, and I'm like, Okay, well, I know what this is. It's about an inch and a half tall. That's the size of a d&d Mini it's a fairy. It lives in the Feywild. So you know, there's a lot of things that we just got to give a whole new imagining sort of a new way for people to hang their imagination. On this creature, something else that they could encounter about it, and really learn to love that didn't fit, you know, had its ancestry in the way things actually work. So that's kind of the four ways we did it. Sometimes it was done for us by pre existing mythos. Sometimes the game told us how to do it. Sometimes we didn't have to do anything at all and sometimes you just got to have a lot of fun. Yeah,

Nic  
I mean, like, even the names of those mammals are wild, you know, it's wrong to theory em or whatever. It's like, Yeah, you don't even have to change the name. It sounds made up. It sounds wild. Yeah, yeah. 100%. So like, one of the things we love to ask is about people who have memorable stories, doing their profession working in the field, so to speak, and we'd love to hear your funny or amusing stories. So for this book, is there an experience you had that kind of really stuck out to you or something that just humorous and worth sharing with us?

Lucas Zellers  
Yeah, I think that one of the things that really surprised me about starting this project was how welcoming and encouraging people in the conservation and environmental advocacy space are. I called a lot of people and I said, Hey, can I interview you about the ivory billed woodpecker? Or you know, the giant beaver or have you done any work on this or what can you tell me and they really rolled out the red carpet. I think the best time that I had to doing one of those was I went to the Joseph Moore Museum in Richmond, Indiana, found out that like there's a huge amount of natural history in Ohio and Indiana. It's just like there and you never I'd never would have known. And it's you know, that's one of the things that I would love for people to learn is like this stuff happened like in your backyard. It's just they're gonna look for it. So I call them up. I found that they have the world's most complete fossil giant fever, about 85% of the skeleton was actual skeleton. And it was like, I would love to talk to you about this. It's kind of crazy story. There was a fire the museum that survived. I think it's going to be great. So I showed up at the Joseph Ford museum, and I met Dr. Heather Lerner who's the curator, and she rolled out the red carpet. She was like Alright, here's how we're going to do this. I'm gonna take you back in the stacks. I'm going to show you modern Beaver and show you how we did this and some of the skeleton and some of the casts that we've made. We're going to work our way through the whole museum. It was my first time kind of seeing a museum, not from the perspective of a visitor like I saw the stuff that was in the back most of the museum it. Yeah. All of it. It took hours. She gave me a whole afternoon. Yeah. And she had this whole planned journey like going from modern back to prehistoric and it was absolutely incredible. I had a fantastic time. She did not have to do that. But she did. Because she got it. She understood kind of the value of of giving that experience and letting people kind of walk through and taste touch smell, feel what this was like. And yeah, that that's when I knew I was onto something. I mean, I kind of knew before that but that was one of the experiences that really proved to me that I had something of value here and it's all down to just like the people who are doing this their commitment to bringing people into the space. This is true of everything like anybody coming into any profession if you have an earnest interest and a way that people can help you. They absolutely will never be need to be afraid to ask because sometimes you just have not because you ask them and that certainly was true of the giant fever. I got to like I got a fantastic VIP experience from Dr. Lerner and that Joseph Moore Museum

Nic  
and you're sharing it here but you know so yeah. Know more about

Lucas Zellers  
the book. There's way too much information about beaver

Nic  
so awesome. So yeah, I mean, I love that too. And I love that the point you made too. I think a lot of times people think oh you know that's a very important person or they're very busy person. I won't bother them. And you know, you kind of have to let go of that sometimes if you need information about a giant Beaver, you might as well ask an expert and hopefully you'll get one and somebody will say yes, right they have. They're curious they want to know why.

Lucas Zellers  
A lot of nose before I found the Center for Biological Diversity, but after that I got an awful lot of yeses. Which is weird. Like, I'm used to cold calling people I'm used to sending an email out of the blue, which by the way, may be the single most important skill I've brought to this Yeah, that's what happens when you do that eventually.
________________________
Lucas Zellers  
and a lot more than you might think. People say yes. And it's fantastic.

Nic  
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when you do you have advice for somebody who's because I hear that all the time we talk to a lot of different people on the show. It's just like, don't be afraid to do to reach out. But, you know, it still doesn't happen. You know, sometimes people still, it's still like, they put up a wall. And so like, is there advice you would give somebody to kind of let that go? Because I mean, you're, you're not going to get what you want, if you don't, but what's kind of helped you be like, You know what, I'm just gonna send a bunch of emails. I know, it's weird and awkward. And we don't know each other. But

Lucas Zellers  
yeah, yeah, there's a couple of really key things that can make that kind of process of outreach work a lot better. And this is something that like I was, was trained for, you know, this is where my degree really came in handy. So, okay, rule number one. Be concise. Be very quick about it. A few sentences, a few paragraphs you don't have to tell your whole life story or sell people on the big thing yet, just trying to get you're just trying to make a connection. So be concise Rule number two, be quick, or rather, be specific, have a precise way in which people can help you when it came to Dr. Lerner. It was please tell me about the giant deeper when I came to the Center for Biological Diversity it was Do you have someone who works on this already could be willing to kind of consult with me on this like I had a plan for what that was going to look like. I called the museum in Massachusetts since back in the during the pandemic and said Do you have audio that I can use for the companion podcast and they did? Often when you come with that kind of specific plan if you it makes it really easy to say yes, like yes, I can do this for you, or no I can't I but I know someone who can and it's not like it doesn't put the mental load on them to figure out how they can help you you already know. So be concise, be specific. And finally, be ambitious. I think one of the things that really caused people to lock in was the idea of adding a new language to conservation science and science, communication and environmental advocacy. No one had really done this yet. And since a lot of people have started to do it. But that idea of breaking into this new system and adding a new audience to this was really attractive. It had never been done before and it made people feel special. It made people feel like they were doing something new and unique and valuable for the things that they already cared about. So yeah, you're going to be calling a lot of people. You're going to be emailing a lot of people but it doesn't have to be a long thing. It doesn't have to be confusing. Be concise, be specific and be ambitious and it makes it really really easy for people to say yes.

Nic  
Oh, yeah, those are great advice. And it's funny, you know, we talk on the show a little bit like I see resumes all the time, and even like even just sending a resume so it's kind of like a cold call. Sometimes if you don't know the person is kind of like that. And you know, the ones that you don't pay attention to there's I saw one where it was literally a full page of text, a full page of like an essay. And like, I can't read this. I don't have time to read this. This is so long. So if you see an email like that, you know, it's the same thing because people have that visceral reaction. It's like, I don't know who this is. And I have no idea how I'm gonna get through this all because I have a bunch of other things to do today. So those are all really great points. And I think that's, you know, communication comes in lots of different forms, right? You're writing a book, you also have a podcast and I need to ask you about that. You know, you've got it you've got like all these, the you know, we have new media all the time, the way we interpret it. So how do you kind of incorporate all of these different types of media? What made you decide to do this book versus doing something else? Like why the book? Yeah,

Lucas Zellers  
so the book was because that's the way in which tabletop role playing games function. That's the kind of medium that this whole hobby was built on. So if you don't know the way a tabletop role playing game works is that you all kind of get together around a table, maybe three to six of you. And for a few hours you tell a story together. And where people kind of get hung up is that whenever there's an uncertainty or whatever you're you want to acknowledge the presence of randomness in the world or chance or fate or whatever you have. You use a random number generator to kind of help you tell an interesting story. Usually, it's a 20 sided die. And that means there's a bunch of math weird words that nobody understands that a bunch of jargon is like between you and the people who enjoy the hobby like homework that you have to do in order. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I try really hard to kind of lower the barriers to that kind of thing as well, in the same way that I'm lowering the barriers to understanding natural history and conservation. But for the people who love and play these games, a book that you can hold in your hand is really useful, and a stat block a set of tables that tell you what numbers to use when you roll those dice is what they can use. So it was never like this was always going to be a monster manual. It was always going to be a list of monsters that can flip through here are the numbers here's where they're from, because that's how I discovered the game. And that's like that was the connection between Gary Gygax and the autobahn. Like that's the through line between conservation and and tabletop role playing games. So it was always going to be a book and then in the way that you know, we can spin that out into virtual tabletops and PDFs and digital things. And make it really accessible. But you know, at some point, the core of this was the backbone and it was always going to be a hardback. The companion podcast was something that I did because I could not fit all this stuff. I did that of space. Time. Every single one of these things was a was a bottomless, I don't wanna say bottomless pit. That sounds like it's not. Right, right. Right, right. It was an iceberg. It was a portal to 1000s of years of human history. So being able to go and meet someone and have a conversation with them. That was another part of like, giving them a way in which they could help me in a way in which they could benefit because I got to put a spotlight on their work and the things that they were doing, and I got a chance to really immerse myself in these stories and figure out you know, what's the maybe three to 5000 words of material that I'm going to cut down to four to 600 that we have space for in the printed version? So yeah, the companion podcast was a really great way of doing that. And then also let me like talk to people and take them through that journey of that really kind of emotional journey of the five stages of grief and reckoning with the mistakes that we've made and all that stuff that we talked about earlier in a way that they could, you know, they could hear my voice and be with me in my office and kind of understand not just what I was learning but how it made me feel and how I wanted them to navigate those feelings on their own, you know, to end up with a book that was about hope and not about tragedy or, or giving a Yeah,

Nic  
I mean, it's very well said, I think it's kind of a testament to the work that you've put in here. And so yeah, it's really cool to see I love that. You know, we talked about extinction. We're talking about human history and you're talking about a lot of you know, it's not just the history of an animal or an area, it's the history of the people as well. And I think sometimes we forget that, you know, oh, the wolves are gone, but everything else is still here. So it's fine and there's so much more involved around that. You know, so I love it. I love it. Absolutely. And but I don't know We also love to talk about our guests when we have them on we love asking them about their other hobbies, right? That the other things they do, too. I think sometimes people are afraid to talk to other people because they seem like oh, they're the expert in this. But you know what I mean? They're the most but if I also know that they garden, I have things that I can do you know, so So outside of outside of writing this incredible book and doing this podcast and many other things. What do you do for fun? What? What are your hobbies? Oh,

Lucas Zellers  
man, this book exists because I have this terrible tendency to monetize my hobbies. It takes a long time to play d&d had justifying that amount of time. was a huge part of what got me started in publishing for it back in 2018. But I think one of the things that makes me different in the way that I approach stuff is I'm a musician. Alright, that was one of the things that I wanted to be when I was a kid. Yeah, it's on my list. So like when I was 12. I wanted to write a book. And when I was 21 years old, I wanted to be a college professor. And I've done both of those things. So the next thing I have to do is like start an album and start a band and release an album. So yeah, I've been playing guitar since I was like eight years old. At this point, it's just kind of what I do to relax and center myself and understand the world in a different way. And it's also a great way to connect with people. And I think one of the things that was that's the part of that that's in this book still is that I got my start hanging out with people like a generation back from me so I come from a folk music tradition. And at the moment, you know, the easiest way to encounter music is in a recorded form. Like what did I like when I heard it on Spotify? And that's kind of foreign music tastes. And for me, it was most of the songs that I know I learned for the first time hearing them performed live my people in a place and then like, that what I had to learn to do as a musician was play along before the end of the song. That was that was extremely formative for me. As you know, it's just kind of trying to pick up information and synthesize it really quickly, but also to like, be in a place with people and recognize that these songs were about a moment in time, a way that people understood the world and the way that they told stories about the places that they were in and the things that happened to them and the people that they loved. And so yeah, I'm a musician from a folk music background, and I cannot help but change the way that I interact with with art and storytelling. Yeah,

Nic  
and I love the explanation too, because even every performance is a moment in time, right? So even if it's the same person, you're seeing them in a different way a different line. That Gosh, but there's some bands that I've seen, or musicians that I've seen, and you're like, oh, wow, they're worse live than they are in the recording. But I love it.

Lucas Zellers  
I love it though. The way they do on the recording. No,

Nic  
no, they really don't. And some people embrace that. And that's like, my favorite thing is when you see Yeah, like you know this rawness to performance and somebody just putting their heart and soul into it. I think like shakey Graves is the most recent example. I remember seeing performance of his and just like, holy crap, that is not I liked it. But the performance was so much more than just the music. Yeah, yeah. So I love that but yeah, I mean, let's just say we are we're coming up on the end of our time. It's been so much fun. I have to catch up because we could talk about d&d for like forever. So do you ever bored and you need to talk? You know, we could do that. I would love to. But before we let you go, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you'd like to? I

Lucas Zellers  
think this is a great time to talk about the future of the book. Because I, you know, pointing myself at the Kickstarter campaign for about two or three years and kind of getting through the editing process. We are almost done. Like we did the Kickstarter, it happened and that was a great moment in time and like gathering about 2000 people who wanted to see this made real, was incredible. And that was a goal that took so long to accomplish and then getting it into people's hands like getting through the process of actually publishing this book and shipping it out is a whole nother thing. And that's kind of a nice thing. But once it's a real thing, there's this extra life that it's going to have where we get it you know, this is why I made it in the first place is like, once this is in people's hands and once they're able to engage with these stories in this way, and once we're able to kind of build study guides around it and do this kind of thing. What's that gonna look like? Like now we get to see we get to test my theory. Yeah, this is gonna really make a difference for people. And I think I know how that's gonna go. I have some ideas for how to start it. But I think you guys are uniquely positioned to bring people together on it. So if there's anybody, I would love to talk to anybody who has a place for this kind of thing, who has like outreach programs or museums or educational opportunities, events that they'd like to do ways that they can bring people in? I would love to talk about how we can make this a part of that. What you know, sort of the unique ability of tabletop role playing games to bypass rational thought and go straight to people's emotional center. And what that's going to look like, you know, for the next couple of years of my career, I also like, if we're talking to, especially young professionals, you're never done. Like the day after you defend your doctoral thesis, you're gonna feel very similar to the way that you felt the day before and there's gonna be a next thing that you got to do. And like I'm at that moment now. And I would love to kind of walk through that moment, other people in the industry, and continue this trend of like meeting people who are really, really smart and have really great ideas for what we can add to this and what we can build on top of it. So that's my hope is that I can continue to meet those people. And if you feel like you're one of those people, let me know. We've got some stuff we could do. Yeah,

Nic  
heck yeah. So where can people reach out and if they do want to get in touch?

Lucas Zellers  
Best place to get me especially my home on the internet is Scintilla dot studio as SCINT I ll a dot studio, you'll find my email there or you can find whichever social media platform I'm using that isn't currently burning down.

Nic  
Yeah. That's awesome. Well, Lucas, thank you so much for being here. I really loved having you on.

Lucas Zellers  
Thank you for having me. I continue to be a little daunted by the prospect of becoming an environmental professional. And you've reminded me that, you know, it's not as bad as all that. But I'm really glad to count myself in those ranks. So thanks for having me. Yeah,

Nic  
absolutely. And that's our show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. See everybody

Transcribed by https://otter.ai