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Vibes Drop In
"Drop In" is where the Santa Cruz Vibes team slows it down and leans into real conversation. Around here, we believe stories have the power to connect us — to each other, to our community, and to the place we call home. This isn’t about quick soundbites or surface-level chatter. It’s about intimate, thoughtful exchanges that dive into what matters: creativity, culture, resilience, and the people shaping life on the coast.
True to the Vibes ethos, we’re creating space that blends storytelling with community impact. Just like in our magazine, on SCVM TV, and across our platforms, 20% of what we do is always dedicated to uplifting local nonprofits and causes. On this podcast, that spirit carries through. You’ll hear voices that inspire, challenge, and remind us why Santa Cruz is more than just a backdrop — it’s a living, breathing community worth celebrating and investing in.
"Drop In" is your invitation to join us in the lineup of conversation — honest, local, and grounded in the belief that when we share our stories, we build something bigger together.
Vibes Drop In
Episode 3: Patrick Webster
Dive into the extraordinary life of underwater photographer Patrick "Pat" Webster as he speaks to us from the remote coast of Greenland while on assignment for National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions. This captivating conversation takes us from his childhood as a missionary kid in Europe to his profound spiritual awakening in the kelp forests of Monterey Bay.
Pat shares how a five-year-old's fascination with sea otters eventually led him to UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and ultimately to becoming a cold-water diving specialist documenting marine life in Earth's most extreme environments. Now diving at 79 degrees north and preparing for an Antarctic expedition, he offers a unique perspective on our changing planet through his intimate connection with underwater ecosystems.
The conversation deepens as Pat explores the transformative power of nature immersion in our increasingly artificial world. "My first time ever going to church was going into a kelp forest," he reveals, describing moments where he feels "nothing and everything all at once" beneath the waves. These experiences have shaped his understanding of humanity's place in Earth's history and informed his approach to environmental communication.
What makes this episode particularly compelling is Pat's ability to weave together scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and philosophical insight. He introduces us to the "cryosphere" – Earth's ice realms – explaining how they function as planetary thermostats now changing faster than anywhere else. Through his encounters with Inuit communities and gelatinous creatures he calls "water getting to know itself," Pat offers a holistic view of our interconnected world.
Perhaps most valuable is Pat's perspective on resilience in the face of environmental change. Drawing from Steinbeck, Ricketts, and his own global experiences, he emphasizes the crucial importance of community connections and local knowledge. "The only thing that gets us through the hardest times is resilient communities," he reminds us, encouraging listeners to "tend to your garden" by focusing on what they can directly influence.
Connect with Pat's underwater adventures on Instagram @UnderwaterPat or explore his photography at divemola.com. Join us for this deep dive into what it means to find your purpose, build meaningful connections, and stay grounded in reality during uncertain times.
Here we are vibes drop in Patrick Webster underwater, pat, off the coast of somewhere. This is amazing. We're talking. This is technology, pat, and I think I'm going to read exactly what you said is sorry I'm late. The boat is doing what the boat's doing, or some loose translation of that. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. I'm catching just a few pixelated words coming in from you, but what an amazing technological world we live in. Now, where I'm doing well, I am here currently at work for National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions and I am off of the far northwest coast of Greenland. We were just over in Khanak, which is the northernmost settlement there in Greenland, visiting the town, taking a look at some of the local history, enjoying some presentations from the local Inuit that are living there in Khanak as traditionally as they can, hunting via kayaks and living the life that they've been living for thousands of years up there. And my job with this expedition is to take photos and videos of what's underwater and share that with the guests. And I just gave a presentation today from a dive in a fjord off in the middle of absolutely nowhere that was covered with millions of sea cucumbers, barnacles and helps and so on. So, yeah, we're out, finding new things and sharing it with the world where we can.
Speaker 1:That's incredible, and I'll kind of speak slowly so hopefully it catches up and I'll kind of try to make my questions short and give you the run of the roost here. But let's do this If this is coming through. There you are working for National Geographic in the water wrote a little article on you, so I know some of the story, but the listeners on this won't so much. Just go ahead and take us all the way back a little bit. Give us a little like you know, childhood Pat, moving forward, how do you get a camera in your hand? And I guess the fun part of this question is let's end in Greenland working for National Geographic in your passion protecting our environment, but kind of wind us back to like where you grew up and how you got your first camera in your hand, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much, and I'll. I'll try to keep things brief on my end as well, cause I'd much rather talk about jellyfish and krill than than myself, or at least my therapist says, I should probably focus on that.
Speaker 2:But I'm a. I'm a middle child, a pastor's kid, a missionary kid. I grew up in France and in Sweden with my parents' work, but ever since I was five years old, when I saw the sea otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I wanted to be a marine biologist and work there. And so I grew up in the foothills of the French Alps, outside of Stockholm, and every time it would get around to me what do you want to be when you grow up? I would say marine biologist, monterey Bay Aquarium. Can we speed this algebra up?
Speaker 2:I got places to be and ultimately I had no idea what marine biology meant. My parents had a connection to Santa Cruz via Scotts Valley and Mission Springs up there and I went to UC Santa Cruz enrolled in marine biology. They were willing to take a chance on somebody who had very terrible SAT scores, because I didn't know what the SATs were until about two weeks before I had to take them. So I did very poorly. Apparently, I thought my essay was brilliant but maybe not quite what they were looking for, and so I enrolled into marine biology and I didn't know what that was, and I would later find out through the amazing program at the then Long Marine Lab, through working as a volunteer and then as a docent trainer over at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. I later learned that marine biology is a thousand different avenues, a hundred different fields, so many different jobs that you can do. And one of the things that I realized was that even though I tried to enjoy being in the lab, I would much rather crack jokes and make silly puns and try to get people connected at the touch pools at the Seymour Center.
Speaker 2:And then I started scuba diving through the scientific diving program over at UCSC, one of the foremost scientific diving outfits along the whole West Coast, and I discovered my love of underwater photo videography. And in particular, it was my first time ever going to church, was going into a kelp forest. I grew up all around people worshiping, connecting to the larger world, but I didn't realize what it actually meant, what everybody was feeling around me growing up and in my missionary crash out, missionary kid, crash out. I ended up finding my way into surfing, kelp forests, diving and really being in the ocean. And I know that there's a lot of people responsible for my growth in the Santa Cruz water world From my friend Tim Erickson he's the one who introduced me to surfing in Santa Cruz and had me try to paddle out on an overhead day over at Pleasure Point, and I realized the power of the ocean in that first day. Here's the 9'6 single fin. Go and enjoy yourself, kid and you know, never made it out beyond the whitewater.
Speaker 2:So then I worked for the Monterey Bay Aquarium for 11 years. I graduated from UCSC, went directly over to the aquarium and started a 10-year career working there in the public communications, but then the social media there for seven years. And that was all about translating what I had learned on campus, what I was learning in the water, what I was seeing underwater, and translating that into something that the everyday person who wants to know, but maybe doesn't know the question to ask or has never felt welcomed into a scientific concept. Maybe they weren't so good at the numbers or maybe they were told that they shouldn't focus on the sciences. And it turns out that marine biology I mean this jellyfish behind me off of Sissomutes in Greenland it's universal and there's a language that can be translated. And that's what I've been working at is trying to translate and make accessible some of these ocean things.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I got my first camera it was a GoPro to film myself surfing. And then those GoPros escalated into being GoPros with housings, then with camera lights, and then I won a video contest in 2015 that gave me $2,000 as a cash prize, which allowed me to go $6,000 into debt to get my first underwater camera. And from there all of my other hobbies had to fade away. I stopped climbing, I stopped skateboarding, I stopped surfing, I stopped pretty much all those things, just to have enough credit lines to be able to afford new camera gear.
Speaker 2:And after working for the aquarium, I had been in my room online through COVID, through just it's a lot of computer work and I had this opportunity to work on the Limblad Expeditions ships, which are the National Geographic branded ships. I had the opportunity to go out there and be a cold water diver. A friend of mine, kayvon Malik from UC Santa Cruz he had been working on the ships for a while of mine, kayvon Malik from UC Santa Cruz, he had been working on the ships for a while and he said hey, they're looking for people with your skill set, who love to be cold, who love being out there and being underwater, and then fast turnarounds hour and a half from when you're in your dry suit coming out of 32 degree water into being in the lounge presenting a multimedia presentation of what's underwater. That fit my my uh fast editing fingers from the social media days. And so now here I am, uh, and I'm up.
Speaker 2:I have gone as far north diving as I likely will go, uh, in my life maybe, um, some other opportunity. But I dove at 79 degrees north, just under the eureka weather station, which is basically as far as humanity goes until you're going to the north pole, um, and in a month and a half I'm going to be in antarctica diving on the peninsula there, following these ships around from summer to summer. So it's an incredible opportunity and something that I'm doing now, uh, while I still enjoy being cold, and maybe I'll transition over into coral reef stuff at some point when I don't want to be shivering after a dive, but for right now it's working out. That's the short little history of Underwater.
Speaker 2:Pat. Then Underwater Pat is the Instagram and then I think now my name is Pat. To my mom and my friends I used to be Patrick and then now I'm Pat. So I think the alter ego is catching up to itself. So some folks may follow me. I'm underwater Pat, but there's also a lot of my photography at the Seymour Center or up at Noyo Center in Fort Bragg. I've had various kelp related exhibits and while I'm on the ships here I'm sort of the jellyfish guy, um, so I like to pick and choose the those little things.
Speaker 1:There you go. Yeah, patrick can be your. Patrick can be your uh, clark Kent persona where you can hide. You can hide as Patrick whenever you want. Underwater pats on the scene. Hey, as you had that conversation, two things I put. I put a pin in two things that make me think about it. One of them's casual and we'll jump on that. Then I'll get to the deeper one. You kind of run right by finding scuba. Scuba is intriguing for a lot of people, but it's also intimidating a little bit and there's a process there. Did you take right to it? Was it a little bit nerve wracking? Or for people? I always try to represent the people that just don't. You know, sometimes we talk about it casually, something that's not that easy, but it does unlock a universe that exists right under our feet. Can you just talk about, like that, beginning process of learning scuba?
Speaker 2:of what. What drives me in doing this work is that, um, I've realized it's quite rare to be geographically, economically and physically able to scuba dive all as a package, because you can have a really bad, a really bad sinus infection when you're a kid, and then your ears just won't be able to clear after that. Whereas I got hit on the side of the head by a wave when I was a kid, um, right outside the Santa Cruz boardwalk, and it popped my eardrum, and when my eardrum healed itself, I can now clear my ears just by blowing into my mask, and so I don't have to like with my camera, I can just clear my ears by blowing out so that, like that's my, that's my Spider-Man and the spider bite moment.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, yeah, no doubt I always had. Yeah, sorry. Uh, I always had an affinity for water. Um, always loved, uh, water. And then I was really into um skiing and skateboarding and I was doing a lot of flips and tricks and stuff into pools for a long time, so I really enjoyed my time at the pool. Uh, we had one in high school in Sweden and so that was my way of trying to make friends, was like throwing gainers off the high dive and all that.
Speaker 2:And then when I got to UC Santa Cruz, learning surfing was incredibly valuable for me to feel comfortable scuba diving, because I knew what the ocean was trying to do to me and how dangerous it could be. And I've had big hold downs. I've had, you know, those moments where everything is going wrong and really having to sort of push through mentally of you're exhausted but if you could just duck dive this next wave, then you'll finally be out and ready. And those moments of understanding where the ocean force and energy is really made things a lot easier for me going into scuba diving I'm just like having that extra level of safety and so that really the, the waterman idea, you know, watching the, the, the chargers over at Mavericks and everything that just the culture, the water culture of Santa Cruz, I would say, really got me feeling and like kind of tested by strong ocean, which now I avoid entirely. So if the waves are up I stay home and if the waves are down I go diving. But if I'm out there and it's sketchy or there's like something to do and the waves are big or the current is strong, I know what, where to be and what, what the ocean's trying to do. But then with scuba diving the thing is you just take it, you just take it slow.
Speaker 2:And I still remember the first time seeing a full scuba kit and having to put it together from the regulator to the BC, to like checking all the stuff, it being so overwhelming and just so like how am I supposed to wrap my head around this? And then now I've done so many different styles of diving, far more complex than what I'm doing now, and it just becomes more. You understand a little bit more of the theory of how it all works together and I had amazing instructors Because they know that scuba is a direct mainline to self-actualization for so many people. That's why I still love volunteering for the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a window cleaner. I scrub those windows and I see those kids on the other side of the window and I wave at them and I give them a little rock paper scissors and you can just see their eyes open and they've never seen a human do that before.
Speaker 2:And so if anybody wants to get into scuba, I'd say, if you learn how to do it in cold water, monterey Bay is incredible. Some of the best diving in the world is in Monterey. And now I can say that because I've been a lot of places around the world. I used to just say that because, like, oh yeah, backyard's way better than anywhere else. Like, why are you going to Fiji?
Speaker 2:but now that I've been a lot of places I can generally say on a good day monterey bay, monastery beach, cal forest one of the best dive sites in the world um, and you, if you learn, in cold water you can go anywhere else you can go a little bit colder, so then you're in the dry suits, then you're in the polar regions and everything, but everything that you're diving within is just that little bit more cold. That, but it's the same type of life that's in Monterey, and when you go warmer, I mean I go. I've gone to Cabo Pulmo for many years, southern tip of Baja California. Waters 83 degrees, I'm in board shorts and a rash guard and it's a whole vacation and other people are in their big suits. So Monterey has incredible diving schools. If you can learn how to dive out here and have fun, you can do it.
Speaker 2:And it's really just a matter of that first breath that you take underwater in the pool and you feel like, oh okay, I'm now floating and hovering and and feeling that for some people it's addictive. But then also, if it's not for you and you absolutely hate it, do not push it, it's not for everybody. Claustrophobia is real, everything on your face is real and that's why I feel that extra pressure, if I'm doing this line of work, that the whole point is to get what's underwater and share it with the surface, because not everybody's going to want to go there, be that cold, be that uncomfortable, or they've done something else that took them away from that potential avenue, and so we just owe it to each other to share across. Um, so, yeah, it's a very I love that. Yeah, yeah, not not taken for granted the fact that I'm not only very privileged to be in this line of work, but also that you know so many of the people.
Speaker 2:In greenland, for example, where I'm at, or over in the high arctic of canada, where we just were, a lot of the people have never seen what's underwater in that same way, because there's not a lot of infrastructure for scuba diving. It does take a lot with tanks and filling and so on. So one of my favorite things, honestly, is like going on a dive, coming out and then, aside from the guests that I'm here to serve, going the dock worker or the farmer, the person who's just there in the background, like what were you guys doing? You showed them this and that I've only ever seen that fish inside the belly of another fish, or I had no idea that was out here.
Speaker 1:I knew that was over here.
Speaker 2:And that's my favorite because it just I feel like it brings people into that community and they know who their neighbors are and it just enriches very. It's like it's the easiest thing, I think, to get excited about knowing that there's a new animal in your backyard, one that was just a few molecules under the water that you just couldn't see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. And then the other one is the deeper one. You know, really, I think in our first conversation I was pulled off the side of the road and we did the article. But you mentioned it today again, which is, I think we named the article underwater cathedrals. That might've been the name of the photo on the side of the bus too. That led to that. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:The what you said earlier was you know your background, um, and I'm you and I might be on the same path here and it's fun in a podcast cause we're not in the magazine. But I kind of feel like organized religion is a narrative that's created off natural things that are around us. Anyways, you know, like a lot of religious thought is based on normal human tendencies to be good, be kind to each other, and it's organized in a certain way. But I also think when you talk about these kind of going to I don't even know if you said going to church, but you know, when you get underneath there, the imagery is cathedral-like, it is very spiritual, it makes us feel very small. So take some time on that, I think. But not just the surface part of it, not just that the showing people fish they've never seen giving our readers access to it. I think on this question I really want to hear from you like a spiritual transformation you've had in the water and talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and thanks for the opportunity. And you know, this is it's, it's um, it's an answer and it's something that I think a lot about. But I'm always formulating slightly differently and trying to incorporate it because, um, my dad was a pastor and so I got to see him get up in front of a congregation every Sunday and read from the scripture and kind of move people through this narrative. And then there were those moments of collective effervescence, it would be called, where people are on this different wavelength and they're vibrating together and sometimes that wavelength really reaches a crescendo and that particular feeling is described very beautifully in the log from the Sea of Cortez. So, being from Monterey, monterey Bay, you know all of us here, potentially from the Salinas, watsonville area, castroville. We have that connection to Steinbeck, for better, for worse, you have to read all of those books. In high school I got out of that, but I was forced to read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and it turns out Les Miserables is just a description of who's reading the book at the time. It's quite miserable but the. So you have this, you, in the Log from CO Cortez.
Speaker 2:They mentioned that one of the most valued feelings that humans have is this religious feeling is that feeling of deeper connection to everything. It's one of the, so people will seek that out in so many different ways, as we all know, and I think for my experience, what the analogy might be is that we all have this vehicle that we've built up to get us from point A to point B in our lives. We have some wheels on it, an engine, some doors, some windows and, depending on who you are and how you're built, the culture and where you're coming from, you might have certain wheels that are running it like you're a part of a church or you're part of this family structure, you're part of this community, you have this football team logo everywhere and, depending on your life, sometimes those wheels fall off very quickly, like maybe your family isn't really loving and supportive and you have to go do your own thing, and then you have the experience of changing that tire and still moving forward. And then other people don't change that tire ever until later on in life and it's a catastrophe when that tire rolls off the car because suddenly you can't go anywhere, because you don't know how to change that tire, how to fix that one just seems impossible.
Speaker 2:And the other analogy that, like Steinbeck and Ricketts had is that you have these walls that you build up inside your mind for the house to stay safe. You have your ideas in there, your morality, your sense of self, your community, what's dangerous, what's not. And there are those moments in your life where a storm happens or somebody knocks at your door and there's this sliver in the wall that opens up and you have the opportunity and the choice of breaking through, of moving through the sliver. You can look out the other side and there's a new reality and the whole house behind you is not coming with. It might be completely destroyed. By going out through the gap, you might only be able to take certain things, not all of it. And those opportunities present themselves many different times in your life and for me.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a particular line of thinking that was at odds with the science that I was learning and I learned that it wasn't necessary, ultimately, for me to have this pillar of that house was learning and I learned that it wasn't necessary, ultimately, for me to have this pillar of that house stay intact. I was willing to cut it down, but not everybody. And destroying that house in my mind means being without community, without friendship, without family, without a sense of self. And that's asking people to do a lot of work, to look at the supporting structure, structures of your reality and be willing to shake them and see if they, if they, if they can actually withstand a thought. And so some people have had those opportunities where the engine is broken down on their car and they've had to replace it to still get going forward, and so they know that it's not that important for the engine to be one way or the other, it just needs to do this, or the window was cracked by this thing and you replace the window and you have that new reality of like. Okay, I know what it's like when this gets cracked, but I'm okay.
Speaker 2:This that was just exterior, and so for me, what I learned in my transition out of being in one way of thinking was that the what I was very angry about you know any of the listeners out there who might be pastor's, kids, missionary kids or anything there can be that moment of deep anger, and a lot of my friends went off some deeper ends to find a sense of self once their house came crashing down. I was fortunate until I wasn't, but I was fortunate to land and wrap my whole sense of self-reality around marine biology, the job that I was gonna do and everything. So that kind of kept me okay. But ultimately what I learned through the derealization and then rebuilding was an understanding and empathy towards people who don't think exactly or have the rather, people who don't have the same vocabulary that I do are saying the same thing, and not that every like there's like. Every path is the same, but there are certain expressions and feelings that are identical, just the vocabulary is slightly different. And so that was the big thing with science communication for me is that I'm learning all of these very, very complex, very specific terminologies for things that I can ultimately distill down to something very simple and an example of that idea that there's a religious feeling that we can all have, and then there's vocabularies, depending on your path, to describe that feeling, and sometimes it can be described so specifically to your situation that you can't recognize it elsewhere anymore.
Speaker 2:But I had to figure out okay, if I'm gonna leave this path and go into this one, I'm gonna need some new support beams, some new support structures. One specific example that I had at the aquarium, so I've been scuba diving for a while and go into this one. I'm going to need some new support beams, some new support structures. One specific example that I had at the aquarium so this so I've been scuba diving for a while and I had that first moment of coming into a kelp forest on a clear day, seeing the light dancing through the stained glass canopy of the kelp cathedral, as I've described it in a few Instagram posts late at night on my phone, just like what does it all mean, and seeing that vision put me at the smallest and biggest scale.
Speaker 2:That.
Speaker 2:I've ever experienced all at the same time, where suddenly I'm nothing and I'm everything all at once and that that interconnectedness of everything is the thing that I never really felt growing up around people who were seeking that. But now I understand these are adults at a congregation seeking that feeling through being in community with each other, and my community is underwater, I learned, and I wouldn't have found it if it weren't for many different things. But that same wavelength is the one that's being written there and so after I had that feeling, I softened a lot on my, on my general, just like how could this be so wrong? And I'd be lied to, or you know the feeling. It's just no, it's an earnest belief and desire for this feeling, for this, for the ramifications of, of faith and so on. Like I, I get it now.
Speaker 2:But then I had this interaction at the aquarium where I just given a talk about deep sea life. Um, it's called mysteries of the deep, all about deep sea life in the monterey submarine canyon out here and uh, from our colleagues from the aquarium over at the monterey bay aquarium research institute, amazing stuff, so many vampire squid, crazy siphonophores, just all this stuff Come up. I've come down from the talk. I'm done talking to people and this woman comes up to me and she's bawling her eyes out, she's crying.
Speaker 2:Usually when that happens, it means that maybe a kid is lost in the aquarium, or like something's happened. Oh my gosh, are you okay? And she goes. I've lived 75 years on the planet and I've never once known how beautiful the animals are in the deep ocean. This is the most incredible day of my life. Isn't God's creation beautiful? And five years prior to that conversation, if I had heard that, I might have been like well actually, and then or dismissed it in my own dismissed it in my own mind, of being like, oh, somebody else who just doesn't get it.
Speaker 2:But I finally realized in that conversation she's weeping, she's moved, it's exactly how I feel looking at those animals, 100% the same. And she's on that wavelength and I'm there too, and that was my first time that I had said to myself and to her absolutely isn't it. And I might not have that same vocabulary anymore, but I agree, yes, 100%, that's exactly. That's exactly how I feel. So that concept of breaking, that concept of breaking through, seeing you, once you, you get out through that crack really fades away and you, you get to, you get to start over and you have to start over and the to be able to rebuild the house that I live inside of now, with all of the outlets for information pointing outward instead of inward, so that new information isn't scary anymore, so that new ways of thinking can just get plugged in and I can have my own little space of like okay, I'm still in here, and if I ever get lost as to where I'm at, I can just look up and see the kelp forest and be like, okay, that's, that's my paradigm, that's one of my pillars, and and I think Steinbeck and Ricketts, joseph Campbell, robert Louis Stevenson so many different people from the area have written a lot in these sort of big ways. And there's something about being in Monterey, around the Monterey Bay, santa Cruz, just it's a powerful place from the mountains to the ocean, powerful place from the mountains to the ocean, and it gives people the opportunity to be sort of challenged of what they might think the world is, but then also be able to be welcomed into these various amphitheaters from the redwoods to the kelp forests, the curling waves, so it's a very. There's a wavelength to the area. So, growing up overseas but feeling really at home in Pacific Grove, like I'm a monarch butterfly, it's like a very, without getting too foofy about it, it just feels right and so I just love.
Speaker 2:I love the idea that the magazine is called you know Vibes, because it is like there is that wavelength and now that I'm traveling the world and seeing all these various nature places, there's certain people, like here in Greenland people are on a similar, really down for jellyfish vibe that I really get just from like a historical standpoint, so like the Greenlandic word for a jellyfish, without wanting to butcher the pronunciation, but means booger being, and that's something that I've written for years is like a mucus animal. So, depending on where you are in the world, I mean, I just learned, for example, that the meteorites that Inuit used to carve iron off of for millennia that they were called starshits, if we're allowed to swear on the podcast. But so instead of a shooting star, it was a shitting star, because they get to see late at night when they're dog mushing. There's the shooting stars going up above and then the dogs in front of them are pooping and they're like oh cool, just like. So it's like the translation is like starshit or a meteorite, and I'm like, okay, that's a wavelength of humanity that I recognize.
Speaker 2:That's awesome Way to go. Thule culture, no doubt. Anyway, yeah, so yeah, does that?
Speaker 1:answer your question.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit. There were multiple analogies and there are multiple different things, but yeah, it does, pat, it really did and I think it was.
Speaker 1:It's perfect, it's perfect. And it created two more small pins for me. You know, within that conversation and the one that connected with me was you had mentioned that feeling of sort of everything and nothing. You know, that feeling of smallness at the same time, kind of like seeing the entire universe, and those are moments that I think present themselves to us in different, you know, could be a sensory deprivation tank, could be a sunset, could be a particular moment for you it's underwater. But I think those passing moments sometimes I'm fascinated by them, because I'm fascinated by the human emotion in that moment, because there's sometimes where you can have that feeling, and it can be terrifying but also euphoric, it can be the saddest moment and the happiest moment. But for me, when those moments happen, it's only you know, it's handfuls of time. You have those moments, but what are your predominant emotions when you're underwater and you have that kind of pinpointing down to what you said, the everything and nothing kind of moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great it's. There's so much, I guess, the the answer to that for me is that we're living in the most artificial time that any human has experienced in terms of who we are, what we are as a biological entity, like what we need to just function, like, as I'm learning that if I get a certain number of hours of sleep, I'm going to be this person the next day. If I drink this much water, I'll be this person the next day. If I have fresh air, if I have sunlight, I'll be this person, and just without it again being on it like over, over, over the top. Okay, I have to manage all of those things down to the second, but just being able to recognize, like, why am I so grumpy right now? Well, because I only got two hours of sleep, because there was a time change that, like those things are.
Speaker 2:We're designed as organisms to ignore the problem and just get on with it. I think that's especially in so many different places of of where humans have made their way through. We just have mechanisms within our brains, within our bodies, to just push through this, that or the other to get to the next thing, because, fundamentally, being a naked ape walking around can be rather uncomfortable, especially in places like up here where it's negative 40 for most of the year. But you kind of figure it out and you get on. But there's those moments where I think you can get those barriers down and you accept things more.
Speaker 2:And there's so much in terms of the mindfulness and meditation and and uh and therapy.
Speaker 2:But then how, for certain people myself I know for sure I can't reach that point unless I'm doing something physically active.
Speaker 2:So I need to be, I need to be out of breath on a, on a mountain bike ride, I need to be, I need to be scratching for the horizon with the next set wave coming, to get those moments.
Speaker 2:And so when I was rock climbing a lot the idea of the moving meditation where you have to be very present because every move is potentially with severe consequence, and how we don't get that in our everyday lives, that the term it was. Like that distilled life is a lot sweeter, where you can only focus on a few things and in this artificial moment of reality where we have all the information in the world at our fingertips, everybody's opinions at our fingertips, so many screens, so much artificial lights, grocery stores, so we're not foraging. There's all these conveniences, but the baseline self of humanity. I see it with the guests on these ships where we're going out into nature, where there's that moment of just going somewhere and then just being quiet for five minutes, where people realize that they've never gone five minutes without any other input unless they were asleep for decades.
Speaker 2:And that's you know we're listening to podcasts, we're watching. I will admit that I have a content addiction. I'm watching YouTube videos all day, every day. When I'm at home with better internet, they're just on in the background and, yes, I'm learning some things, but then I'm not as present in chopping the onion as I used to be, because I've got this comedian telling me this funny joke about whatever, all at the same time.
Speaker 2:So these artificial moments, and then with AI, with social media, it's been talked about ad nauseum, but we are creating the most disconnected connections that have ever happened in humanity, simply because some of it's new technology and growing pains, and then some of it because it's actively, our attention is being mined, uh, for a good, a good penny. And in all of that, those nature moments, it grounds the thing that we are back into a reality. And, uh, a friend of mine came over the slogan maybe we'll make sure it's just like. I just freaking love reality, just being cold, uncomfortable, yeah, um, wind blown, sun burnt, uh, knee scrapes. Those are the days where I come back and it used to just be like, oh, I, I had a great day out there, like, don't I feel great. But then also, those are some of the moments now where I just, I feel real for the first time in maybe a few days, totally. And it's all because these proprioceptors, this amygdala like the whole system is meant to, yes, accept this amygdala, like the whole system is meant to, yes, accept all this incredible human information. But in the Log from CF Bortez I'll just keep going back to it it said that you know, humanity is in the state of becoming.
Speaker 2:We don't really know how to deal with consciousness. We seem to reward all of the antithetical moral paradigms of consciousness, like empathy and caring and compassion and intelligence and all of these things that we would be like put that up on a pedestal with our big brain. Here we are as this paradigm shift for the whole planet as far as an ecological factor of a species, we can manufacture the world that we want and we will put those up on a high moral threshold. Then all of the others greed, envy, violence, lecherousness, like all of those things that we would put on a lower moral spectrum in the Logophimsy of Cortez and maybe we can see reflected all around the world all the time, depending on where you're looking. But those low moral components are at the tippy top of the power structure and those high moral components are usually suppressed down to the lower of the power structure Because, in a dualistic sense of humanity which Steinbeck gets really into, you have this consciousness that gives us so many things, but we don't quite know what to do with it.
Speaker 2:And at our freaked out baseline selves, those components are what rise to the top and take the power when it's available. And they were riding all of that stuff in 1940. As Hitler is invading, has already gone through Poland, is invading Norway, and they're in the Sea of Cortez looking at marine invertebrates while bombs are about to fall in Paris, while Pearl Harbor is about a year away. In fact, la France Corte comes out on the same weekend as Pearl Harbor, so it doesn't sell very well Just the idea that they're down in the intertidal doing this stuff. Then I'm up here looking at these jellyfish while the world is seemingly at a similar moment of uh, of a very fraught but recognizable talking points about how, how we're meant to align ourselves. You have that duality going on. Um, I forget exactly what your original question, that that prompted that, but the idea that we're in a state of becoming is something that I'm feeling more acceptant of, in particular, as I'm a generation or two younger than many of the guests that are on these voyages, and so their life experience, their lived experience that I get to learn and download, is so much different than mine, where I grew up with the internet. I've been on my phone forever and then I've been hyper online for a very long time. So my existence, my world, everything that brings in, is so different. But that that's right.
Speaker 2:The the point, even in all this discussion, the anchoring feeling for me scuba diving being underwater, you have to be focused, you like, you have to present. You can't be distracted scuba diving or at least not for long because every breath you take affects your buoyancy. So if I breathe in, I'm going to rise up in the water. If I breathe out, I'm going to sink down in the water, and so every breath is an opportunity for me to recenter and refocus, because if I'm not paying attention, I'll just rise, and now I'm rising away, and then I got to come back down. Or if I breathe out, I'll sink down.
Speaker 2:Now I'm touching the reef, so I don't have many opportunities for distraction, but then I bring a camera into it, and so every time that I'm underwater there's these moments where, because I'm present, I start to see the images or what's happening, or I start to feel my camera moving and I've used it so much now that it's very muscle memory of this is happening. This is going on and I want to try to bring I'm seeing something that I want to paint now, and then I'll capture it underwater, however I can. Then I'll go home and I'll spend hours editing the photos, uh, dodging and burning and making them really nice, just like the old masters would do in the dark room. We get to do in the light room and I'm creating an image out of what I took that will hopefully make people feel what it was like to be there to see what I saw. Is this like?
Speaker 2:Here's what it feels like to see that? Um, so, through strobes, through lighting, through editing, through positioning, all of that. So I have this like creative meditation underwater and then a creative expression in that, in the post edit and through all of that time, that's when I can reach my flow state. That's when I can reach that like disconnection, connection. And then there's moments fleeting, but moments underwater, where I see something that I've never seen before and then I suddenly realize where I'm at and what.
Speaker 2:I'm doing and where in the universe. And then we're right back to that big, small, big moment, and I think you know the primary place where I feel that these days kelp forest for sure. But then, in these far flung places, when I'm interacting with gelatinous organisms like this that have no counterpart out in the air, like there's no organisms made of clouds that are just digesting themselves on the wind and pooping out lizard beings, you know like we just have this very specific thing of water getting to know itself in these jellies, and that's the most alien feeling Like if I'm in another world. Seeing a jellyfish reminds me that I'm the alien in that space. And then usually for the rest of the day, I have my burrito, I have my water, I go to bed and I just feel like connected and maybe a few people see it on an Instagram feed and also feel a little fun along the way.
Speaker 1:Hey, um, that was a lot. I'm so captivated by this whole conversation Sorry.
Speaker 1:No, but again, that's why I love sometimes. I love those questions where it's a simple question but clearly that's. It's either a question that needed to be asked or there was something underneath it, cause I haven't heard that before in the interviews and the stuff I read. So I enjoy that path. And then the other one I want to get to. One more little canned question that I don't think we discussed in our first one is that the nature of what you do, and whether it be you're going to have, you must have one singular story that sets out to you. I'm not talking about like the beautiful moments, I'm like what's the gnarliest encounter you've had underwater? And I think I'd want it not so much the beautiful side of it. Have you had a moment that stands out to you?
Speaker 2:that was a little bit sketch yeah, I mean I've had a few moments that were sketchy. I've never had moments that were sketchy, um, without other humans being involved. Maybe I'll put it that way is that the real X factor in scuba diving, especially as you do, your dive master, and maybe you're in charge of people that are nervous or not quite there or present, not telling you everything that maybe they should be telling you about whether or not we should go trust our trust, our lives right now to our equipment in the ocean and our preparation, everything, um. So I haven't had too many like sketchy moments. I usually feel completely baseline, at peace and totally acceptance, um.
Speaker 2:So I've had moments that I think in the background I should have felt maybe more sketched out, like diving in uh diving in in uh Cabo Pulmo with massive bull sharks that are coming right by us, and some of them acting a little bit more aggressive than others, and well, so you just see this huge shark, but then I'm staring at it.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're just a little big puppy dog, aren't you? And there's nothing I can do. I can't out swim it. There's nothing that it, there's nothing that it couldn't do. But sharks telegraph their behavior, especially underwater, when you can see them and you're not clearly the like food item on the surface. Um, and so, yeah, so, seeing the power of that animal and seeing how it's gliding above the, the sand, and then, just maybe, the fin tip cuts through the little sand ripple, I mean it's an incredible thing. Um, but I mean the.
Speaker 2:The only fish I've ever been afraid of in my life was a about five foot lingcod off of the Victoria, um, british Columbia breakwater, over at Ogden Point. And this thing, I didn't know it In Monterey, the lingcod don't get that big. This thing was a monster and it was like looking at an underwater alligator, just like staring at you with these just devilish teeth and normally a fish that I approach to take a photo. If it's a little bit weirded out by me, it'll raise its dorsal fin kind of let you know, like, hey, you're a little bit too close. Yeah, um, this thing never, never budged, just stared at me like what are you gonna?
Speaker 2:do and so I told my buddy hey, can you get closer?
Speaker 2:so I can take a photo. He's like I'm not going near that thing, like it just had this energy to it of just like, do not mess with me. And then, while while I was staring at this lingcod, apparently there was a massive stellar sea lion that went behind me. Stellar sea lions are like two, two, three times bigger than a california sea lion and those are orca food. Yeah, so you have killer whales that eat those things, that also eat that lingcod, and that lingcod is afraid of nobody and like I don't know it, just that felt like I was gonna lose whatever that was.
Speaker 2:That's a good one um, and we, I swam away like tail tail between the legs from that lingcod and it probably um. I found out later that they attack divers if you get too close to them, when they're on eggs in british columbia, which I did not know. Okay, yeah, so with lingcod, I was at monastery beach by myself one time taking some photos and I was outside of a cave and I was clicking this gauge that just wouldn't click on my deering I kept missing it. So I would click, click, click, click all these clanking. I'm like come on just and I click it one last time and I look over and there's this massive lingcod head that's coming out of the reef. Be like, sweep it down out there. It just comes out, looks at me and it freaks out and it dives back down on my butt and I so I think probably lingcod have been the fish I've been most Lingcod, yeah, freaked out about which is not of all, of all the animals, but yeah, that that would be it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I wanted to Pat, which is not of all, of all the animals, but yeah, that would be it, this will ever be on a Lindblad expedition off the coast of Greenland. Can you give us just a few minutes, like as if you just walked out of the water and I'm a guest on that ship, and just tell us some stuff about jellyfish that you either saw, or a little glimpse of your presentation, just some words. I'm not putting you on the spot, just kind of have fun with it Like we're the guests right now.
Speaker 2:A little bit, oh well, welcome everybody to this impromptu interpretation or interpretation, as I would say no, the water is people who have opened up a National Geographic magazine, scrolled through any YouTube video of wild nature, out on the edge of everything, greenland, antarctica they, to me, represent the third type of planet that we have on Earth because we have atmospheric life. We are part of that. You'll see birds and trees and flowers and bugs and we are walking around. We got our dogs and there's caterpillars and all that. That's atmospheric life. Pretty much.
Speaker 2:You go anywhere in the world. You've got some variation on that theme. Then you go underwater. You got hydrospheric life. That's where you got your crabs, you got your fish, you got your jellies, you got your seagrasses, your freshwater fish, your saltwater fish, but generally you're underwater. You're in an aquarium.
Speaker 2:You're in a separate planet hydrosphere, atmosphere, greenland and Antarctica is the cryosphere, the ice world, where everything is ice or ice mediated and is there because of the ice. Up here in Greenlands, the narwhals, the beluga, the bowhead whales, the walrus they're all here because of ice and they're here because of cold water and they live with the ice. Polar bears they're ice bears. Then in Antarctica, the penguins, the leopard seals they're the only thing that's not ice Like Antarctica is black, rock, blue and white ice and that's it. But then you get underwater in those places, in those ice worlds, and you get really colorful. Suddenly you've got these pops of oranges and reds, you've got sponges that are pinks and purples, You've got sea stars crawling everywhere, 900 plus species of amphipod, there's krill, there's ice fishes, there's all this life and it's bustling and it's colorful, and it's overwhelmingly colorful almost in places when all you've been seeing is these blacks and blues and whites, or at least that's what my eyes would see. The Inuit would see something very, very different than what I am witnessing, but in the land of avocado and your burritos it's very monochromatic. Then you get underwater and you see all this life, and then some of the life you're starting to see is stuff that you quote shouldn't be seeing because it's way too shallow Out.
Speaker 2:In my backyard in Monterey Bay maybe that animal occurs 11,000 feet deep, but it turns out that if you're that specific type of jellyfish, it doesn't really matter that there's a lot of pressure. You're mostly made of water, so we think of pressure in the deep sea as being this big thing because of scuba diving, the bends we have air pockets, pressure in your ears and all that. We think about pressure a lot, but if you're a gelatinous animal, pressure is like the last thing that you care about. Maybe what you care about is cold. You want darkness, you want slow moving water, very unchangeable conditions. Well, once you get into these fjords where all this ice is, you've got extremely cold water. I dove some water that was 29 degrees, almost 28 and a half degrees, which is where saltwater freezes. Um nine degrees, almost 28 and a half degrees, which is where saltwater freezes.
Speaker 2:And there's all these gelatinous animals that are coming up from the depth, or rather, they just live at that depth because it's so cold at the surface that that's where they live. And it's dark from the glacial silt and there's slow moving water, just the tides washing in and out, not huge swells smacking them up there, and so you have the deep sea copied and pasted to right beneath the surface when you're in these hyper cold environments, and so you realize that the deep sea is not so much about depth for some of these animals, but it's more cold, dark. This is, this is my environment and where you can recreate that, you get to see these organisms, and so if I go cold, deep and dark off of Mexico, I'll find that same animal. And if I go shallow in a fjord of Alaska, I'll see that same animal. And so you almost get to see your friends moving around the world. You get to see acquaintances of species and communities and ecosystem factions, and this predator on that predator, or this dynamic on that dynamic. Maybe we have little ox and then maybe further south we've got the penguins, but they're all in this variation on life in that third world of the cryosphere. And then you get to see the gradients on your way there and out and get to see who goes where, the humpback whales that are coming down.
Speaker 2:And so the ice world is a really special place that you can only see when there's ice and you'll only see the things that you want to see when there is ice around. And so then that ties into kind of why we're doing this. I mean, right now climate change is here. The climate has changed and everything has moved, has shifted up in these areas. The glaciers are a mile back from where they were when I was first born, or maybe they're 30 miles back. There's so much that is changing right now In humans. We grew up within an ice age. Our species only knows of ice on the poles of glaciers, being in the mountains. We don't know what life is like without them. The dinosaurs do.
Speaker 2:Two-thirds of the planet's history has no ice, but the problem with it is that the earth is mostly agnostic to the life that lives on it. We know that from walking on some rocks that were three and a half billion years old the other day, and then within there we had this Ordovician 400 million year old plane. And there's all these shelled cephalopods used to dominate the ocean. They're gone. All of these ammonites, all these stromatolites or not stromatolites yeah, stromatolites these layered organisms of cyanobacteria that have been around since the dawn of anything living, and those things aren't. They had their time, and so we have our time. We're here, we're clearly the way that the planet is getting to know itself and write itself down and maybe pass that on into posterity. Whether it's with Voyager or with our written records, these podcasts, our radio waves, it's all getting out there.
Speaker 2:At some point, someone will be able to figure out what we were all doing. But we've never known a world that doesn't really favor our existence and we're creating it. And so, being in these ice worlds, it's the thermostat of the planet. It's changing faster in Greenland and in Antarctica than anywhere else in the world, because the first thing to melt when, or the first thing to change when stuff is getting warmer, is the ice melts. And so that's actually this, this t-shirt here, um, from sissamute in greenlands. This is a leopard walrus and what it says in greenlandic is that, with climate change, stuff is going to get really weird.
Speaker 1:It is, it is, and I figured that was the science. It's great. And I think we've mentioned this podcast. You know, the I love what you just said, because this is where I'm really landing is, you know, four and a half billion years old. You just talked about it. Two thirds of the time there was. You know, this is not a norm. And this particular podcast, this particular species that's talking on a boat in Santa Cruz, we've only been kicking around for 300,000 years and of that we've only been conscious of this thing for 60 to 80.
Speaker 1:So we don't have this fundamental right to this planet. The planet's going to do what the planet's going to do. You know, and you know, and I understand, we're having our mark on this planet. We're here very temporarily right now and there are calls to actions. We have a responsibility. But I do like that perspective of you know, we are just sort of visitors in. This is our little time right now. You know, and we, we are tremendously struggling At.
Speaker 1:One of the books I want to write I always tell everybody is a book that it's an open title, called Beyond Apex, and Beyond Apex is something where we as a species is. It's interesting because it's very complicated to have consciousness. It's very complicated to be in the spot we are and I think that's why we are tortured as a species right now, unlike any other species that's ever been on this planet, because of there's been other apex predators, but they just kind of held that title and they weren't necessarily emotional or aware of themselves or they're standing on the planet as they lost that title. We've gone apex and we basically have at the same weird time we did this big left turn and we know we're here and we know we won't be here long, and I think it comes with a lot of complications, including our sensitivities. Do you have, do you think about shit like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, all the time sensitivities do you have? Do you think about shit like that? Yeah, all the time. Um, I mean the.
Speaker 2:I've often been asked like, why, why even get into conservation? Uh, and you know, ultimately, the reasons for, for the, the hardships that we find ourselves in, are found within the soul of our humanity and it's not necessarily a feature for us to exist in a way that runs ourself out of house and home, but it is very human to have conflict to over extend yourself One of the. Yeah, I think I, why do this? Why even try, like, if it's such an intractable thing? And you know just a general sense of like, being French and so on, a lot of the philosophers in there. It's good to have a hopeful pessimism where things likely won't turn out well, but you might as well try and have a good time doing it. Because if the dinosaurs have had that feeling, you know I don't know if they were very, you know, emotionally distraught at the sky turning, you know, like catching on fire, but maybe there were a few philosopher, philosopher, t-rexes out there being just like we should have had three fingers instead of two. You know, whatever they thought the solution might have been.
Speaker 2:But I think that you know, ultimately, in a million years, two billion sun blows up. In a million years, two billion sun blows up whatever. Somebody, something in the universe, eventually finds records of humanity, digs through the rubble and realizes that not only do we know what the problem was, but some of us tried to fix it, and that's a philosophical win. A lot of extinct things don't get to have Like ammonites, sorry guys. You just got cooked Like species before. Extinct things don't get to have Like ammonites, sorry guys. You just got cooked Like they're, like species before, like we. We owe it to ourselves to not get dunked on by the extinction investigators of the future who would be like that's it, man no idea and they didn't even try, like a bunch of dummies.
Speaker 2:So then, the you know, the other feeling of it all is that even the framing of us becoming an apex is that it's something I have a tattoo on my arm. It says Is Things Are. And it's a distillation of Ed Ricketts' philosophy that was given to me by the late great Mike Gardino, who's a scuba diving mentor of mine, a scuba diving mentor of mine, and His Things Are was Ed Ricketts' way of getting people to think back into the holistic nature of the more circular nature of what we're experiencing versus the linear nature of what we're experiencing, and he called that non-teleological thinking. The idea of a teleology is that one thing leads to another and that you have this sort of foregone set of conclusions. One thing's going here, and obviously in the catastrophic World War I, world War II times that Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck were interacting with each other, they had a lot of talks about like what does it all mean? Where is it all going? Like, what does Hitler want? What does Mussolini want? Like all that stuff and Ed was known to are like just stop thinking in the linear and remember to think back to the holistic and so even that paradigm, that we are the apex of the apexes and we therefore have this godlike quality unto ourselves that we get to make all of these choices and everything. That's a hubris that can motivate us to do the right thing in a certain moral paradigm or a certain framework.
Speaker 2:But then, like the Inuit framework that I'm learning and I don't wish to speak for anybody, this is my understanding is that, right from what I've been told by some of the elders, in an Inuit culture there is a very profound connection to the idea that the only way that you survive is by eating other souls, because there's no grasses, there's no like, there's, there's nothing. The inuit diet is blubber and birds and and so the way that they take care of the hunt of the prey, of what is consumed, and how it feeds into the circular nature of everything. There are many a myth within the inuit culture, many a story that's told that if you do not respect the soul that is feeding you, it will come back to get you, and there's a circular vision to that, and there's not the like. I sit at the top of the food chain, it's more. I am consuming a continuation of myself that will circle back around on me and so much of that holistic thinking of everything is circular, so much and again, long for the sea of cortez coming back in, but the idea that so many of these different philosophers or, uh, writers, like ursula le guin and a bunch of other um people out there that are that have these moments of everything comes back around on itself.
Speaker 2:The circular nature of everything, I think, is built into us from lunar cycles, tides going in and out, seasons. There's just we know that there's like a season when there's baby animals and a season when there's adult animals and there's a season when this happens. And then in our lives we know that there's that moment where you know so many of those stories. Right, there's you, you're a baby and you're helpless and you need other people, and then you become older and you need people again to support you. And this you know. You have these rides and falls. Careers take off, they start you. You know like love is found, love is lost, love is found, love is lost. So, so much of the.
Speaker 2:I feel like fundamental, deep writing and feeling that we have, and like in Santa Cruz at least, with the swell, for me you know like the winter is when the swell is gonna be here and you go through the, you know, or you're waiting for the south swell, and there's this circular feeling that if you missed it it'll come back around. Or. And that deep message of so many people is so profound because I think we feel it deep in the resonance of our soul that there is this seasonality to life, and it's so at odds with the cultural paradigm that we find ourselves in, which is that everything grows perpetually and expands forever, and and your career will always go up and your health will always be, and your and your friends will, and your love will, and it and it's all too much, because that's not how it goes is not how the ice. The ice comes in in the winter, the sun goes away, the sun comes back, the ice goes away. And so there's that I was asked recently don't you want to stop wasting your time and do something with your life? Because I'm here doing this stuff?
Speaker 2:Because, from a certain perspective, I'm not actively pursuing a specific thing, pursuing a specific thing, but what I know is that the people that have inspired me were people who found a niche and then did that and, in so doing, fed people through the energy that they were emanating back into the system because they were doing what they were doing.
Speaker 2:Everyone else could do what they were doing and, like an ecology, certain organisms have certain roles and they feed others in different times and so, at the end of the day, whatever you're producing, if it's feeding back into the web, then knowing that that has occurred is enough to know that it will come back around on itself, versus harnessing the capital, the reward of what you're doing in the moment and seeing it realized as a diamond, but being able to see that the diamond is just all the individual carbon atoms that are spread out over time. You've made the diamond, it's just you needed to see it here, and then that's maybe it, maybe that was done, and you move on, and I'm a verbal processor, processor, so, like, as you can see, I'll just like, I'll just try to talk and find my way to it, but that that idea that it's a circle.
Speaker 2:yeah, that idea that it's a circle is so known in in, uh, in, like the Buddhist tradition, in the indigenous tradition of so many places, because you have to understand that in that, in that realm, the idea of the upward trajectory is useful to get a lot of stuff done, but it's not. It can be very harmful, I think. Um, and from interacting with so many different cultures now, and especially indigenous groups from the pacific northwest to greenland, um, and then being in places where those stories are now gone, like in um, in patagonia, um, with several groups that are just not not around, um, from colonization and uh, meeting the more modern world and having that be so catastrophic, there is a way for for people to grow and thrive without it costing them the whole, the whole game. Yeah, at the end of the day, and we are currently in a, yeah, we are in a, um, what was the term? We're in it, we're in a depletion economy currently, and I truly believe that what gets us out of it is the idea that what is the most valuable thing right now in the world, from my perspective, is human attention.
Speaker 2:From media, from our phones, algorithms, apps, like everything, the most valuable thing to humans is human attention. And so if we can continue to show people who maybe are being disconnected from reality just through the momentum of their cultural moment, and get people connected back into that reality, whether through seeing the nature in person and being planted there and smelling it and feeling it, and and and, or realizing that there's real stuff out there, that is, that is a main line, into your connection center in your brain, to stay rooted on the planet, that expressing ourselves as humans that still is the currency of humanity is human expression and attention. And if it's scrolling on an app, it's one thing. Fine, I have a career thanks to Instagram, it what it be, yeah, but I'm the idea that still the most valuable thing is humans to humans, I think makes it even more worthwhile to pursue, in the moments where they're least interesting to anybody, the arts, the, the philosophies, the cultures, the conversations, the, the real feeling moments and not the like.
Speaker 2:Do this because it'll make you healthier. Do this because it'll expand you, it'll get you into. Just do things because you are a thing that can do stuff and that will ultimately, I hope, in what I'm doing with the photography, storytelling, all that stuff and even that, just those are just the words to describe the action, but just in sharing my life and what I'm seeing, that feels like that little piece of the antidote to the distraction that comes from letting all of it become artificial. And I just I've just seen it that if people have never cared about a jellyfish before, if I can take the right photo or video and show it to them, yeah, I've got people converted to the jellyfish.
Speaker 2:I've got people converted to the jellyfish cult on the ship now and they thought they were coming here to see marine mammals, so I think we're winning at least on that little.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's no doubt and maybe, maybe we'll wind this down right now and I think this has been great and I think it's optimistic. And sometimes I think in these conversations, especially in these drop ins and you know a lot of people I think you'll know that I've been interviewing Tyler Fox, ethan Estes, everything, a lot of the community, and it's not just on the environment. But there's a I'm changing right now instead of asking if they're pessimistic or optimistic, I'm kind of more pushing for what their current call to action is. You know, and I think that's a little bit more. We're here now, we're in the circumstance that we're in, and you know what's a, what's a, you know an attainable call to action. But I'll also kind of put a button on the conversation we just had. As far as my interpretation is, maybe staying on the species side of it, maybe we, as overwhelmed as we are and as you know, there's a lot of different this time, because we're the first one, arguably, to have a moral obligation to the environment and the planet To have, you know, consciousness is, like I said, possibly a burden, but it's also a very unique advantage from a problem-solving standpoint, from an ability for us to have conversations like this.
Speaker 1:Vibes is built on the same thing you talked about right now Long-form narratives, conversation, engaging people, nonprofit kind of and mostly it's just an all in kind of concept on human and interaction, engagement, empathy. But I think that's where I sort of land and I can't wait to have another conversation when you're on land and we can kind of keep going on these things. But I think Pat that's kind of where I land a little bit is feeling a little more optimistic about your you know your work you're doing right now, how you're presenting it and getting people engaged through I think you've mentioned before photographs and the what you do are a conversation. They are. They're a conversation that you're bringing to the surface, you know, literally bringing to the surface from from a small percentage of people that can bring those up. But if, to wind it down, you know you can finish with your normal kind of call outs where people can reach you, but do you have a particular call to action or what you know, focus for people to kind of um, maybe possibly begin to make a difference?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I've I've been involved in a lot of different calls to action over the over, over my time working in in conservation science, and ultimately the real call to action is that the only thing that we know gets us through the hardest times is resilient communities and coalition of people all realizing that you're not alone in thinking the way that you feel and that there's plenty of people right there in your backyard, your next door neighbor, that are in it together with you. And in this moment, with all this media, being completely disconnected from your neighbor is very normal in our day to day life, day life. But it's not in every community, within our communities, that have a stronger sense of self within a family or a stronger sense of community, just generally speaking. And these Inuit cultures that I'm interacting with here in Greenland, they have withstood countless attempts at colonization and the current colonizing powers there were not able to fully get rid of the identity of these communities that it's them versus the coldest, harshest environment on the planet, and they've thrived for thousands of years. They've been rich in ways that the Western mentality did not necessarily recognize or certainly did not recognize in that very good way. Yeah, so ultimately, having resilient community coming together and having like, having the ability to see your friends and build things together in real life, whether it's just a board game or a coffee shop art sale or a concert or a backyard reading of a particular book or scripture, wherever whatever is bringing that together, having those communities and seeing what take, what brings everybody together, because everywhere around the world we have, I think, circling background to what we started the podcast with is we're humans, which means that we have a breadth of emotion that we all can approximate in our own way or have that shared language.
Speaker 2:Or when someone else feels that and they know that somebody else felt that you feel connected. I think it was James Baldwin that said that he felt that all of his struggle paraphrasing he felt that all of his struggles were unique in the world until he started reading. And you realize that everybody has this complex. Somebody was building a temple to Aphrodite has the exact same emotional internal dialogue capacity that I have had my whole life, where I can just be sitting there wrapped up in my own brain, and somebody who was on the Silk Road having the exact same thinking. Somebody who was tracking the calendar for the Aztecs same thinking, same emotional journey capacity as humans, because we have been the same thing for so long. It connects you to that larger thing, and right now I'm not going to say something that, like you know, we got to cross the divide and all that stuff. No, it's.
Speaker 2:Voltaire said that happiness is tending to your own garden, and the garden can be small, it can be big, but the idea that you know what's going on where you are, that you know what's affecting your direct environment and knowing what you can affect in that little world, that's happiness. And being distracted by every permutation of reality far away from you is ultimately taking that time away from your reality. Your attention is being spent elsewhere, and so the Santa Cruz community, the Monterey community. I have this small group of underwater photographers that we just all vibe out on the exact same thing and we're in a Discord server and we're talking to each other and like sharing new photos. That's new for me. I've been online and all these things, but now I have a Discord server with my friends just about photography.
Speaker 2:Me, I've been online and all these things, but now I have a Discord server with my friends just about photography. Like I've been on those. I know of them in theory, it just never occurred to me. Let's do it all together and that's been major, just for me to not feel so alone when I'm in this room on a ship far from home, on a time zone that doesn't exist, because the ship wanted to have breakfast at this time and dinner at this time, and so it works out better. So you know, there's all the, there's all these tools and things, and it can be just as simple as as having a having a bake sale in the backyard or getting an email thread together and just like doing those challenges. The community is what's going to prevail. When sea level rises and washes away Pizza my Heart in Capitola, it will be the community that figures out where to put the Pizza my Heart next right. So as dumb of an analogy as I can think for the local community, but it is.
Speaker 1:No, it's so appropriate, it's totally appropriate.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so, yeah and so, then just tying it back to, like, the indigenous knowledge and everything like that is how everybody ended up ultimately living is you have these communities and groups where, if you live here, here's how we live. If you live here, here's how we live. If you and it's not peace, quiet like peace and quiet. No, these warring, we're humans, it's gonna happen. But the idea that it's like this is how we do it here. This is how we do it here and it's based off of the environment that we have. That's what ultimately builds up into a resilient group.
Speaker 2:If everything tries to get shoved into the same way square, peg, round hole it just doesn't work. And I think we've seen that from our food systems to political systems peg round hole it just doesn't work. And we I think we've seen that way from our food systems to political systems, to just it all doesn't fit everywhere and it shouldn't, because the world isn't uniform, it's complex and dynamic, and to have complex and dynamic communities within is what ultimately helps everything work. And you see that in every ecosystem on the planet and humans we are the end result of that ecosystem, at the apex, which means that we're the beginning of the recycling of the carbon back into the microbial world once it's all said and done.
Speaker 2:So I think what brings me the feeling of hope that is leading, or at least easily overshadowed by other feelings, is that humanity has been through a lot, the planet has been through a lot, and in all of it, the moment of breaking through and getting to that new paradigm might take a lot of, or will take a lot of, extremely difficult things and build something up into that future, and it's not to say to not be involved.
Speaker 2:Do what you can, but tend to your garden, and your garden might not be exactly what you think it is, but it might be way bigger than you thought, um, and I know that at some point, maybe these photos, what I'm doing with the ocean, uh, and the rest of my underwater photography friends are doing, maybe it's an 85 years, like the Western flyer, uh, being reborn from being sunk off the Sea of Cortez, because it took 85 years for that story to mean something to people again. Maybe it's a long time from now, but at least there will be records of what was here then, right, and whoever happens to show up will know what their full community is or could be.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's it, man. I love it and that's a perfect place to end and I think I just kind of, you know, checking it out, I think it's underwaterpatart for your website, is that correct? Does that sound good?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can go to divemolacom these days. Yeah, underwaterpatart is sort of the placeholder, but if you want to see some of the photos and other work, but yeah, underwaterpatart, divemolacom Get yourself a cute little mola mola sticker so that everybody wonders where you got that. And it was in Monterey Bay. If you see these on cars I make those, that's my little plug for the little brand.
Speaker 1:No, I love it, I love it. And then, of course, add Underwater Pat for all the socials. And you know, I thought we were going to talk seven minutes about jellyfish and, just like we did the first time through, we just rocked out an hour 20 minutes and I think we covered the entire expanse of our universe. Underwater, above water, what can happen?
Speaker 2:This was amazing. We didn't even talk about polychaetes.
Speaker 1:It won't be the last time we talk. I know that, I know that I guess there's so much left, but it's almost 11 o'clock in Greenland. You're 3,500 miles away. I, I appreciate this one. This is a. I don't know if we'll have it farther away. Uh, drop in, but we can try, brother.
Speaker 2:Sounds good man. Yeah, no, I mean, if you're trying to call me in the wave, it's way outside today. No, uh, thank you so much, brian for for working through my my time zone issues. Thank you to anybody out there, everybody who's been listening. My roommate is coming back in right now just in time. So it's good to wrap it up. Thanks everybody Right on. Thanks, pat, right on.