 Thank you so much for being here. I know it's the last day, and we always save the best for last. Really honored to have this group of people here. This is a really special mix of talent, it's a real pleasure, and so I want to take the moment to share a little bit about the background of each of our panelists today. Even though I know them at one level from chatting, I want to give the formal backgrounds because it's so impressive. You know, Carl is trained as a scientist, and here he is, a writer and a storyteller and a creative genius sharing what he knows with the world. I want us to have a chance to understand how that came to be and why that's so powerful in the space. And Maria, who's been such an ally to Socap and to the Ocean's Track, is a former fisher person and a writer and a chef and a change agent and really a local hero in the space. And so we've got a unique opportunity to hear about some upcoming things and also about a really awesome new book that's just coming out on TED Books. And Steve is doing some remarkable work at the local government level, which I can tell you from spending 20 years in local government is not easy. And he's really making a difference at the behavior level. And so how to create narratives that go beyond being communication tools, how to fashion narratives that inspire change in behavior and inform thoughts and actions by influencers, by policy makers, as well as by the general population. It's a really important role that you're playing, Steve, so it's an honor to have you here. Let me share more formally about the bios. So I'll start with Carl. Carl Safina is the author of six books and many other writings about how the ocean is changing, including the award-winning book entitled Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as The Eye of the Albatross. Carl's work reveals how the future of living nature and the durability of human dignity are increasingly intertwined, probing the science as well as the ethics of our moment with nature. Carl has a PhD from Rutgers and hosts a program entitled Saving the Ocean on PBS Television. Welcome, Carl. Thank you. Maria. Maria Finn is a writer based in Sausalito. Her most recent book is entitled The Whole Fish, How Adventurous Eating of Seafood Will Make You Healthier, Sexier, and – is it happier? No, and Help Save the Ocean. Sorry. Could be happier. It will make you healthier, sexier, and help save the ocean. It's a TED book, 2012. Maria has written for so many different publications, Sunset Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Chronicle, et cetera, Wine Spectator. She's received an important grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists to write about the SF Bay Herring, and that is going to be something that I hope Maria talks to us about today because there's a lot going on. She has just traveled to Costa Rica recently to write about the Hammerhead Sharks for the Food and Environmental Reporting Network, and – yeah, you've just been everywhere, the Cal Academy, South by Southwest. It's just a real pleasure to have you, Maria, and I hope you have a chance to talk about your book and what's going on. Okay, so, Steve, as the Director of Fisheries Marketing at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Steve works with commercial watermen to promote Maryland's sustainable fisheries and to build economic viability for local fishers. He's worked for the past decade to bolster conservation and education within the seafood industry. Super interesting projects and initiatives as I've been learning from talking to Steve, so real pleasure to have you here. Let's dive right in. What we'll do is we'll have some questions, and then we'll have some interaction on the panel, and then we'll have a chance to take some questions from the audience. There's a lot of talent in the audience. I recognize a lot of the people. Some real top-level experts, and some also sort of long-term veterans of the SoCAP community, so we want to make sure you have a chance to get a shot at these brilliant presenters. I guess an opening for me that I'd like to throw out for everybody would just be the broad question of how you use storytelling to affect behavior, if you do. And if you don't, you can reframe that question, but let's just start with that, and maybe we'll start with Carl, and just go right down if that's okay, and then we'll get more specifically into what each of you are doing, but at the broader level, how do you talk about the use of storytelling in the way that you do it? Well, I'm not sure I think of it quite as using storytelling to affect behavior, because it's not clear to me how my work will affect other people's behavior. So what I'm trying to do is move people and make them want to engage, but not direct how they engage. And a difference is when I worked a lot in policy, you wanted people to do very specific things. You wanted people to contact their representatives to tell them to vote for a bill, or you would draft a bill that you wanted enacted, and you would try to lobby to get the bill enacted. So that's where you really wanted to change behavior in a specific way. But when I wrote my first book, after my first book was published, I realized that stories have their own lives in the world, analogous to children. You can't always direct how they're going to function and what they're going to do. And the way I realized that was people started to respond to the book in different ways, and I would get some fan mail and messages. And one person said, I read your book. Well, my book was called Song for the Blue Ocean, and it was about fish and fisheries. And somebody said, I read your book and we're not getting a Christmas tree this year. And I thought, wow, why was that the response? So I read farther down in the message, and they explained that in talking about the salmon of the Pacific Northwest and describing the salmon, what I call the salmon forests, and the Douglas fir trees, which are a big component of the forest in the Northwest, they realized that the Christmas trees that they used to get were usually little Douglas firs. And they decided that they just didn't want to have anything to do with that anymore. I had nothing like that in mind, but that was the way that they engaged with it. So I would say I am trying to emotionally engage people, and the reason I'm trying to emotionally engage people is that I realized very early in my attempt to improve policy that information, which should be what we base our decisions on, was not engaging people sufficiently to give us good policies. So it seemed like people tend to do what they feel emotional about, and so I guess I'm trying to emotionally engage people. And the information is what I would really like them to have, but to activate the information you have to emotionally engage people. We don't hear that that often from a scientist, so I want to probe more on that later. I don't know if this is working. Maria? Oh, with storytelling. So when I was very young, a teenager probably, I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to change the world. And I'm not sure from what to what as a teenager, you know, but then as I got older, it became less black and white, more gray, and I think that's where storytelling really comes in, is we can develop compassion and learn about other people and maybe know about worlds we wouldn't have been able to access before. And then as time went on, so I write kind of literature and then I also write journalism, I found that I'm back to wanting to change the world, especially in the ocean space. And one thing I found is you can write an article and then provide a recipe. So that sort of, so you help people kind of engage in that way. Beautiful. Okay, we're going to probe that. Steve? I spent about ten years in the wholesale SEPA business before I came over to work and did what I do now. And I found that there was a huge disconnect between the chefs and the fishermen. Chefs often had no idea where their products came from. They simply had a price list and they looked at it and they'd place an order and the next day would magically show up at their back door all flayed and ready to go. I'm working to reconnect the fishermen and the chefs and provide value for them at the same time. Getting the story of the fishermen, how the product was caught where it's caught, the troubles that the fishermen goes through in order to get that product to their table. Just working to show the chefs that path it took to get that fish there and it provides value and it isn't so much about a price anymore, it's more about the story. I mean let's jump off right into that. I know when we talked once I think you were able to reframe something as Biloxi bacon we were talking about that. And I remember you saying that you've literally helped people to basically reframe the way that they understand the story of a fish and I know that this goes right down the line with all the other presenters that working with chefs to reintroduce fish in new ways can really engage the consumer and kind of change some kind of perceptive mechanism in the brain and all of a sudden unlock this real passion for connecting to fish that are more sustainable in terms of where they are on the supply chain and on the food chain. Maybe talk a little bit about your initiatives in Maryland and how you see that working. One of the biggest things is I come from the Washington DC Maryland area and every single chef restaurant has Maryland crab cakes on the menu. It's a staple. You have to have it if you don't you're going out of business. But the dirty little secret of the restaurant industry in our area is actually nobody uses Maryland crab meat. They use Chinese crab meat, Indonesian crab meat, Venezuelan crab meat, pretty much anything but our local crab meat. And it's simply due to a price point. What I've done is working with the chefs is to get them out in the water, get them physically harvesting crabs, physically bringing these crabs to the processor and seeing that there's a whole line of people, lots of jobs that rely on this product, getting this product out of the water. One of the, you know, we're talking about storytelling. We're getting the chefs out there and we went out there for eight hours and we harvested 900 crab traps and we had these two chefs working all day pulling in crab traps and calling the crabs and we brought it back to the picking house and we had 10 bushels of crabs for eight hours of work. And we went to the picking house and they processed them and we ended up with 25 pounds of crab meat. And the chef turned to me and he goes, I'll use that in a lunch shift. They had no idea that crabs were picked by hand and how they were harvested. And there's an instant aha moment there for them and they realized that this is hard work and I shouldn't be relying on just a fax to give me all my information. I should be getting out there and understanding it. And so, I mean, what elements of, let's say, the, they call it the storied fish when it comes in with a provenance and a background, what do you think is happening there when someone connects with that level of story in terms of specifically, you know, the Maryland initiatives that you've been fashioning? It's going back to, there's histories and traditions in the Chesapeake Bay. You know, this is, again, it's a storied industry in the Chesapeake. You know, there's still these skipjacks sailing around the bay, sail-powered sailboats. You know, this is a long-lived industry in the area. To get a, to get a pound of crab meat in their back door doesn't mean anything to them, unless they know how it was caught, where it was caught, and it's coming right from their back door. They drive over the Bay Bridge every day, going out to the beach. You know, they understand that this is the area and they can see those crabbers down there, but not knowing how it goes from there to their back door, it breaks the value, I think. So I'm sensing some intersection with what Carl's talking about, this emotional level, which is very difficult, different, different than the practical level of just eating for fuel. There's a whole another level, and we're getting deeply into Maria's secret space here. It's kind of your sweet spot, really. You've been telling so many amazing stories, and I kind of like Carl was saying, they don't feel like they're intended to accomplish a specific thing, but they, but they, yet they move people and they engage them in these different ways. And, you know, just, just what you're doing with the herring work. I mean, you were telling me a story recently. Love for you to go into it. Oh, yes. My first herring experience was in Alaska a long time ago. I was a fisherwoman up there, and springtime was herring run. And on fishing boats, you spend a lot of time waiting for the fish to arrive. So we had one spring, we're waiting in Prince William Sound, it's March. And waiting on fishing boats usually means you drink rum, play Texas hold them, tell stories. And I was on a boat a little bit away from the main fleet, the Sacra fleet. The Sacra fleet waits for the herring, and they say in them by the metric ton. What I was doing was herring pounding or kelp on row, which is more like farming. We hang lots of kelp in the water. When the herring arrive, we kind of put them on the kelp, and they spawn on the kelp, and the kelp's brined and sent to Japan. Everything we caught is sent to Japan. So I'm waiting and waiting, and one morning I go outside to kind of dump the coffee grinds or something. And I see on the shore hundreds of bald eagles, hundreds of seagulls, and sea lions are popping up all around the boat. And then in just seconds, the birds all go into the air and start hitting the water. And they're coming up with herring and their talons. And the herring are wriggling, and they're dropping eggs from the sky, and they start spawning all along the coastline. And the sea lions are roaring even more. And I saw this big patch of bloods kind of spreading on the coast line. And then a killer whale kind of came by, you can see his fins come up like a knife sheath. And he slowly went back out to Prince William Sound. And I was standing there in this amazing kind of food cycle, food chain, and I felt very blessed to be there. But I also felt like this kind of shadow of the industrial world. Because these herring are some of the healthiest food you can eat. They're just incredibly rich in omega-3s or pure protein. These animals need them for migration, for mating, for to have their young to feed their young. And we did not eat them. We didn't eat one of them. They're being made into fertilizer, into pet food. We're putting them on our lawns. They're being made into pellets for industrial farms. And it just was this disconnect, you know, this disconnect we had from nature to sort of be standing there, but not a part of it. So when you're at South by Southwest Eco or Cal Academy, and you're bringing along your team in there, they're actually, I imagine, serving some of these, you know, anchovies, sardines, herring in these different ways. What's happening? What's your experience? Well, you know, this, so last spring, we had our first annual herring festival in Sausalito. So that was very excited. I'd been hired by Food Environmental Reporting Network to write about herring in the San Francisco Bay. So I called up some great chefs around town to see what they were doing with herring. And they were just, you know, it just didn't used to happen here until the last year or two. But they were smoking them. They were pickling them. They were making them into sort of cream sauces. They were taking the eggs and making botarga. The chefs in the city are just fabulous. So I get this email from a woman in my community. She's a shipwright, Inka. She's from Germany. And the email is all misspelled and she's like, we're having a herring festival in two weeks. We don't know where yet. And I was like, oh God, there's going to be like 12 people there. But I was like, okay, I'm in. And if you guys met Kenny this week from Fish Restaurant, two by C, they're like, we're in. And they came and they set up this great big grill and they made this herring on a stick or stickle fish. And all the chefs from around town, my next-door neighbor has a great deli, David Jones Deli. He brought herring, all the great chefs brought herring. And it was a beautiful day and the herring boats are still fishing out on the bay. They're still going by. And they sold out of herring in an hour and a half. So people will eat it. It's just figure, it's just shifting our system, just shifting our habits. And then having the chefs, like you said, kind of lead the way, make it delicious, you know. And they had demonstrations on how to pickle it, on how to clean it. I mean, I overheard Kenny going, oh, it's perfect for children to clean these, because they're so small, you know, as a sharp knife. Fantastic. So, Carl, this is really overlapping with, I feel, a lot of what you've been writing about and about your intention of, even though you're a scientist, you've been writing, you know, from not just the perspective of science and conservation, though, that's obviously an important lens, but around engagement. And not necessarily intentionally saying you need to behave in a certain way, but it sounds like people are engaging in these different ways and then, just organically, more aligned, you know, responsible behavior seems to be born out of that level of engagement. Right. You know, I'd love to hear a little more about that and maybe, if it makes sense, also connected to the fact that you're a lover of what are we going to do about the next generation of ocean lovers and your passion for younger people and how they're coming up. Is this a part of, you know, the way to inspire and catalyze the next generation? What's your view? Yeah. Well, I think I like to think that what I do helps to support the specific efforts of all these various kinds of initiatives, you know, whether it's crabs or herring or a million other things that people are doing for good reasons. And one of the commonalities that we just heard about from both of you is that people were totally disconnected from their food, even though they were eating it. They didn't have the story of the food. They didn't know anything about where it comes from, who's involved, what other creatures in the world that we share are also involved. And once people know that, it adds so much value to their experience of being alive. And the more you understand the more you want to do things in certain ways, usually. And those ways tend to be moral decisions because you say, oh, well, it's better if I do this or I feel right about it if I do that. And so these things have to do with our valuations. If you don't know where anything comes from, you have no way of valuing it. If you know these stories and connections, then you have more orientation. And that, I think, can support the idea that you feel inspired, which means you're motivated to act in some way. And then you choose, depending on where you are and what you are capable of doing, to make some changes. But it's usually not my perceived role to dictate what those changes would be because I'm trying to make broader, more universal messages. And it's up to people who get those messages to decide how they would like to act. But it's but basically it's to help people connect back and deeper with the world that they actually live in, that they usually are sort of sleep walking through that, you know, we just take things, we have no idea where they come from or who was involved in making the chair or anything else. But something as intimately, you know, as intimate as what we eat is something that if you know the story of it, you have a different experience of it and it motivates you to want to do things differently and better, I would say. One of the things I really respect about your work, this is a personal takeaway, it's just that it seems like you don't differentiate between disciplines, like the fact that you're a scientist and a writer doesn't, you know, those reconciliators perfectly. There's this nice, you know, coexistence of the, you know, the biosciences as well as this creative expression or the emotional piece. That's because I'm not what I do. And I think we get confused. We think we are what we do. And we say in the journalism school that I'm involved in at Stony Creek University, there's a professor there who likes to play a game called the many things I am and everybody's supposed to say I am and they say I'm a husband, I'm a I'm a homemaker, I'm a lawyer, I'm a postal employee, I'm a dad, I'm a child, but that's not, that's just what we are. That's not who we are, you know, and who I am is I'm sort of a hunter. I like to seek things out. And I don't really like hunting, but I do like fishing though, which is hunting in the water, but what you know, I'm always, I like searching and I like getting deeper into things. So science does that really well, better than anything. And that's why I like being involved in science and that's why I became a scientist. And then as far as the need I see in the world to do things certain ways that we would call in an umbrella word sustainable, you know, what we know from science about the facts is not being translated into policies. And now there's a tremendous anti science movement about certain very important things like climate change. So why don't people just act on information? It's because the information doesn't connect with them. And that's that has to do with what we're calling here telling stories and narrative and values. And that's why I'm interested in those things and how to try to seek those things out and present them because I am interested in creating change and in doing that personally. But I don't see I mean, science is a different discipline than storytelling, but it's broadly overlapping because science is finding out what's going on in the world and telling people about it. And storytelling is finding out what's going on in the world and telling people about it. They're they're done somewhat differently, but they do broadly overlap. And if you don't understand that, you'll get yourself confused and you'll think, oh, science has to do this and can't do that. Stories can do this, but they can't be scientific. Art can do a certain thing, but art doesn't have to do with information. And you get yourself all splintered up and which is totally not necessary. Beautiful. So Maria, let's follow up on this. You're you're a journalist, you've been a fisher, you're a culinary connoisseur. What's going on when you set out to write a book or an article or to, you know, you really are facing to the public. You're obviously passionate about connecting with consumers and with people that are not just experts in the fish and ocean space. What's your intention? What's your passion around that? Well, I feel like as a writer, I'm not necessarily making things up. I'm just connecting dots. So there'll be all these amazing people here doing amazing things, and I can kind of meet them, learn more about what they're doing and then connect them to somebody else who might be here doing something super interesting. And I'm a huge fan of Carl's and one thing I really love about his books is that there's this human rights is a big part of environmental rights in that. And I truly believe that. And so I'm working on a new book called Eat Like an Animal that looks at everything we do is sort of these interconnected ecosystems and that we're not even aware of how interconnected they are or what they are yet. But it's this constant process of discovery and humans are very much a big part of that. So, you know, we have this tendency to say, oh, here's environmentalist and here are fishermen. And that's not true. You know, we need to look at it as healthy coastal communities and healthy ecosystems are part of the same thing. You know, and then we, you know, this year, there's tragically about they say half yearling sea lions are going to die in California because of a lack of sardines. Brown pelicans aren't reproducing because of a lack of sardines, but they're keeping the fishing quota at 15%. You know, so, so here in the Bay, they've switched us to an ecosystem based fisheries. So all the predator accounts are going to be taken in first before they allow herring fishing. So the sea lions, the birds, all of that. And so that's something that this ecosystem based fisheries, I find very exciting because it is saying, okay, here's all these systems. We have to somehow move into uncertainty, move into what we don't know and embrace it. And how do we do that? So that's kind of I'm trying to come up with this ecosystem based way of eating so that our plates actually reflect the natural world, mostly with the ocean. But even if you go into the forest, you don't see a giant piece of protein in a little bit of green, right? You know, so if we, you know, so but our plates have this giant piece of protein and a little, you know, the chugo on the side or whatever. And so, so it's something of like how can we reflect, you know, our environment and also how can we engage in it? And that's, you know, my thing for everybody is once a year go catch your own fish or go dig your own clam or go harvest seaweed or go make salt. Just take a bucket and cook it down and make your own salt. But somehow get to know your ecosystem, you know, and that way you'll kind of fall in love with it and you'll appreciate the food and the job the fishermen do and how how it's really is precious because I feel like we waste so much. But if we realize what went into all this, we'd stop doing that. So it sounds like your concern and your care about environmental rights and human rights is sort of coming through these more human personal narratives that people can connect to rather than kind of stating policy. Well, I think, yes, I think that when we talk about the ocean space, especially we can scare people with a doomsday like if we do, if we don't stop, it's going to we're all going to die, you know, and the ocean is going to be dead, right? So instead what I'm trying to do is find people who are coming up with progressive solutions and saying, OK, what should we do? You know, look at what they're doing. Isn't this amazing? And I was down in Costa Rica and there's these fishermen have organized themselves into cooperatives and they have set up their own rules for sustainability. They're doing a great job. They have health insurance. They have life insurance. And it's working. And it's a system they set up because there are fewer fish. But the problem is there are shrimp trawlers 15 meters out just fishing night and day and they're choking these guys to death. So so you can have these solutions, these problems, but then it has to be more, you know, there's these systems and ecosystems even within that. But it's trying to find the positive solutions and kind of moving people towards those and not scaring them to death and depressing them. Love it. So an important part of this dynamic when we're talking about consumers and behavior and engaging the, you know, stakeholders and the populace at an emotional level it are really the retailers. And Steve, you've got quite a bit of experience which is, you know, really going into the lion's den for a change maker and an activist and a sustainability expert. What's it been like to to engage, you know, everyone who needs to be at the table, even though a lot of times environmentalists can I think demonize people on the corporate side rather than engage them, you know, in this kind of conversation. What's the way to do, you know, what's the way to do this right? How has it been effective for you and Marilyn? Just basically it's just getting them to understand the reasons behind why we're making these selections. It's not just, you know, we have these menu cards and the menu cards are great for giving someone a great overview, but getting them to understand what it means to be a hook and line fisherman or what it means to be a trollmutter and just to have them understand the methods behind the fishing first. Once they understand that, then they can actually start making decisions based off of their beliefs and getting chefs are the best ones to do this. Chefs, once they start getting behind the sustainability movement, getting behind the local movement, the retailers follow. What we found is that most people go, 67% of the seafood in this country is consumed in restaurants. So what we do is we get the people at the, you know, at the menu level to make these decisions and they try this fish in the menu and they're like, this is fantastic. Then they go out to the retail store and then they buy it there. And if the chef has a sustainable seafood on the menu, if he has that local seafood on the menu, they're going to buy it at the retail store and then the whole supply chain is taken care of. So chefs has influencers, ambassadors. I've heard on a number of panels how sometimes in a tough spot, the bait for the day has ended up being remade into the entree. It's been your experience as well. Yeah, that's our friend Barton Sever. Oh, good Barton Sever, yeah, right. Yeah, he was one of our, one of my old customers back in the day. It's just having the chefs be flexible. Too often it's salmon, tuna, shrimp, tilapia. And that's the only choices they have. Chefs are creative. You have to get them to think outside the box. We have this fish, an invasive species in our waters called Snakehead. It's the worst sounding fish in the world. I mean, who's going to eat a fish called Snakehead? But we have a story behind it. It's an invasive species. We have to get out of the water. It's caught with bow and arrow at night. I mean, it's such a cool thing. There's a different price for headshots and body shots. You know, it's getting these guys going. And now the chefs can't get enough of it. It's the most expensive fish we have in the waters in Maryland. It's actually currently going for more than bluefin tuna. And here's this nasty-looking fish called Snakehead. That happens to be delicious. And we need to get it out of the water anyways. And as we know, humans are great at one thing. It's destroying things. So let's get the last invasive species out of our water. And at the same time, there's an added benefit. If all these guys are targeting this extremely expensive fish called Snakehead, they're leaving everything else alone and giving those species a chance to rebuild. And here we go. It sounds funny going bow and arrow hunting for fish, but it's no ecological impact. There's no bycatch unless you're a really horrible shot. And it's a win all the way around. Follow on. So when I was coming up a million years ago, there were a couple of governmental campaigns like I Love New York. I think it was in the 80s or late 70s. Don't mess with Texas around cleanup. Are you telling me that there's still space for government to mount meaningful storytelling campaigns around social issues and have it work? There definitely is. I mean, we're the ones that get the feedback from the fishermen. We're the ones that deal directly with them. We're the ones that can help them. We see what their problems are going through and we can see the restaurant world. And like I said, there's a disconnect there. We can kind of see both sides of that coin and help them develop their stories in order to tell their stories better to get better value. We did a program this year called True Blue. Like I said, most restaurants aren't using Maryland Crab Meat. So we certified which restaurants are actually using Maryland Crab Meat in our area. And it was really disappointing that we could only find five restaurants that were using it. Out of 10,000 restaurants in the Baltimore DC region that were actually using our local Crab Meat. We started this program the first year, five restaurants on it. Now we're up to about 175. And it's provided tremendous value for the industry. And it didn't cost us anything to do. It's social media pressure. Getting on Twitter and saying, hey, such and such restaurant is out there and they're using local products. All the consumers already assumed that these restaurants are using local products. Now they know which ones actually are. And that story, being able to be the guy that says, I'm supporting local watermen is it goes a long way in the area. So you're saying like not unlike Champagne in France or Napa wine there's been a brand issue around. I mean, Maryland Crab being the prestige, you know, brand around Crab story can help to work with developing brand that's sustainable. Exactly. Distinguish it from some of the misperceptions. Exactly. It's a different species. It's a different critter. It comes from different waters. It's like an oyster that comes from the Gulf of Mexico. It's not going to taste the same that comes from Prince Edward Island. It's completely different product. So, but the problem is it all got lumped. No pun intended crab meat together with species from Indonesia, species from China. So we're trying to differentiate it again and not just be crab meat. This is true Maryland crab meat. So, Carl, this is interesting to me because in the stories that you're telling, I assume you're highlighting examples of things that are interesting. You're bringing science into human clarity. What do you think isn't being done that should be done in this space and how can we as a community start to tell those stories? What are you still keeping you up at night that's not being expressed by other scientists or writers? Well, you know, what tends to work in a lot of very good ways, I think, is to more localize our lives so that we understand what's around us and we use what's around us and it strengthens our regions. It strengthens the communities and you have a more immediate feedback loop if you're doing something damaging. But the overwhelming thrust of the way that the world is going is globalization, which is the exact opposite of all of that stuff and the anonymity of everything that we do and use and the total saran wrapping of our individual lives from everything that somehow manages to get inside the saran wrap with us. So I am just trying to create these products that explain the difference and show the differences and explain that we are not in the world alone as human beings. There are lots and lots of other things out there that are also trying to survive and continue and have validity and answer a few questions, like what is our relationship with the natural world? Okay, that's the relationship. Well, then what should it be? Should it be different than that? How does our relationship with the natural world affect how we treat each other? Because it does in enormous ways. And I'm just talking about the natural world and humanity. I'm not even talking about all the other aspects of globalization and nationalism and all the completely strictly human things that have to do with the human ecology. What does it mean for us to, you know, import all the things that we eat or all the things that we wear, all the things that we make? That's a whole other gigantic, it's a similar kind of suite of mindsets. But I just am working on the part of it that has to do with the human relationship with nature and how nature affects how we are with each other. But in general, with any issue, like in music, the music changes when the rhythm changes. And in an issue, the issue changes when the story changes. If you didn't know anything about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, your opinion of fossil fuels would be different. The story of how carbon dioxide affects a lot of things and acidifies the ocean does these other things. Or how the industry acts in other countries. Knowing those stories affects how we value fossil fuels and what we think about it. So the story changes when the rhythm changes and the rhythm changes when the story changes. And that's what changes the issue. And that's what I keep in mind. Beautiful, thank you. That's something to ponder for a minute. Maria, putting you on the spot. You're a journalist. You have these fascinating folks that have gone deep in their respective ways in this space. What, you know, you're writing a piece. What's on your mind to ask them right now and engage them in terms of something that's not being talked about that you'd like to see talked about? Because I feel like with your work, that's what you're doing. You're finding people that are doing the really great work on the ground. And then you're bringing it out and putting it in terms that the rest of us can understand. What do you think of it? It's funny, as in, you know, we're talking about this in SoCAP, there's all these serious issues. But behind the ocean and seafood, I feel like there's awe and beauty and there's pleasure. And I think those are great things to embrace. You know, not just duty, not just fixing problems, not just, but we can inspire people with that. And that's what these guys are doing, right? You know, with you, that your work, there's always a sense of awe, the sense of beauty and this appreciation of it. And so I would say with readers, are they, is that somehow more than the message inspiring to them? Do you think? Oh yes, I think the message is a very simple message. And the entire thing is how you package the message and what you see as the context of the message. So I have what I call my spray can theory of storytelling. And that is that if you look at a spray can's contents, it says what the active ingredient is and then it says active ingredient is 2% and then it says propellant is 98%. And the propellant doesn't really do anything except for one really important thing, which is totally crucial. It gets the active ingredient where it needs to get to and it makes it stick and allows it to do its job. And I think in a good story, you have a tiny bit of information which is the active ingredient and then the rest of it is the propellant, which is what we think of as the story itself, the narrative, the characters, the story line. I mean, we've talked for 40 minutes about stories. We haven't told you what we each think a story is. So a story is something with an element of time and over time something changes. And if you don't know how to start a story, start with the word when and go from there. And then if you don't like how that starts, then take the word when out and change that for a sentence. So you start with a little bit of time and over time something changes and that's a story. Papers in science journals are actually written that way. The only thing they don't have is emotion. Most stories that are not science stories, they have emotion. And the extremely traditional way of thinking about it is still the story, the story structure because our brains haven't changed and that is once upon a time until one day and then and ever since that day and here's why. And that's a story. Well, and along those lines with seafood and chefs, I know chefs say, well, local seafood is really hard to source because we don't know what's coming in. We don't know how big it's gonna be. Can we run it as a special? So we can get farm salmon all day long, right? And it's consistent, there it is. So every day there's a story behind your fish that come in and it's hard. It's a moving target. It's hard for the fishermen, it's hard for the chefs. How do you convince them? How do you bring them together? Just getting the fishermen to actually talk about what they're catching. So often the fishermen catch the product, they bring it to the dock, they put the box on the dock, they take their check and they go back out fishing. And that's the end of it. Talking to people, getting out there. I'm getting chefs, I'm getting a fisherman on Twitter. Hey, I've caught 50 pounds of black bass today. I'm coming in. Just getting them to vocalize what they're catching and what they're doing is a way to get that message out there. Chefs actually really want to keep changing their menu. They get very bored cooking the same thing every day. Getting them to actually understand, like you said, what's coming in and what they have and what's available is part of the fun for them. When then how do they get their customers to trust them? Trust them enough to go, okay, I'm gonna eat some herring roe or I'm gonna, how do they earn that trust? Cooking good food. So you look at Barton Siever again, he's the one that did the bait there that day. He cooks great product and I'd go in there and I'd try things that I never would have tried before just because I know that Barton cooks great food. So if he puts some tobiko on the plate, I'm gonna try it just because he makes great food and I'm sure that whatever he puts on a plate is gonna be tasting good. Yeah, he was telling me about pink salmon the other night and he was only serving pink salmon, which is super bold, you know? But he said people couldn't believe it, they loved it. Yeah. It seems like we're talking about discovery and imagination and wonder and these are, this is in the space of younger generations. Are you finding that any of you that we're getting traction here with the younger minds around some of these issues because they're engaging with the stories that are really fun to discover? Definitely, they're helping us spread the stories. Like I said, social media is fantastic for spreading stories. Just getting out there and be able to, it's not just what's printed on the menu anymore, it's them talking about it and getting vocalizing it and putting it on their Facebook pages and doing all sorts of things. It helps to spread the story and that's the biggest part of having a story to tell is getting other people to buy into it and spread that story further. Bring up their own agency, beautiful. Well, we're really kind of evolving as a food culture too, this whole country. I mean, imagine like 10 years, it might be we're in San Francisco but you'd be at a farmer's market and some of the kids are like, oh, I love Cherokee purple and you're just like, what? Right. Exactly. How do you even know that? Hello. And so I think they're coming up and I think people are very conscious and I think that, yeah, again, we have this idea, it shouldn't just be social responsibility for what we eat or how we vacation or what we drive, it should also be pleasurable and beautiful and fun and I think it can be all those things, much more than the like boneless chicken breast, you know, on a plate. So, yeah, I think that as long as everybody kind of keeps that going too, that this is really, this is about pleasure and responsibility. Everybody's understanding of it, it has to be a story. Look at the McDonald's. Years ago is McFish sandwich and who knows what fish was in there but now they're out there saying, hey, it's MSC certified Alaskan Pollock and there's more of a story there even at McDonald's. So if we're getting the story coming across on that menu, it can come across on any menu. Fantastic. I think we're gonna take some questions from the audience and so let's see Bjorn. Great. Actually, I have to do a short announcement before we take questions. If you know that you parked your car within the roped up area here at Fort Mason, you really have to move it because it's gonna be towed in a minute, so just a friendly warning. If you're inside the barriers where the off the grid trucks are coming, that's not a good idea. Okay. Is that Pablo? I can't see out there. Yes. Please stand, yeah. Yes. Well, it's, my question would be, I think we are all related somehow to storytelling and we want people to look at these sustainability stories. In your experience, where is people going to be looking at these stories? The medium. People are reading less, people are changing their ways to look at stories. So what do you think will be the right media in the future for the public to be in contact with these stories? Good question. Anybody wanna jump in? No. I'm not sure if people are reading less. I haven't seen any statistics on that, but I hear very conflicting things. I've heard everything from people are reading less and nobody goes to libraries anymore to the libraries in New York City have had record attendance in the last two or three years. So I don't know what to make of that. But different people like stories in different ways in different amounts. Some people like fiction, some people like nonfiction, some people like to watch videos. There's YouTube, there's PBS, there's a variety of newspapers, books and all kinds of things. So people are, the problem for an individual story maker is not so much that people are consuming stories less, but that there are so many more people putting out so many more stories over such an exploding array of platforms that our market share individually is always struggling for a breath of air and survival. But not because people aren't interested in stories in my opinion, but because there are just so many more stories because the web has caused an explosion in the forms of stories and the delivery systems that are available. And also there's something that's become huge is actual real-life storytelling. So the Moth, Pop-Up Magazine, Porchlight, they sell out in minutes. And so I think people are actually hungry for stories. So it's just shifting. There might be a little more diffuse, there might be different medium, but I think storytelling, like music, I mean it was music at one time, it was poetry, it became different things. Storytelling I think is gonna be always be an integral essence of us as humans. Yeah, and again, are people reading less or are they reading in different places? It might be they're reading less books, but are they reading more magazines, are they reading more digital blogs, and things like that. So just constantly changing. I once had a boss that said, if you're doing something the way you did it last year, you're doing something wrong. So it's constantly changing and looking at different ways to put that media out there. I'm like I said, you can obviously tell them a huge proponent of social media. So we're putting out the stories on that now. People are, their attention span nowadays is 140 characters. So there we go, tell my story in 140 characters or less. I might take moderator's license and just add something to say that one of the areas that I find really exciting and that we're looking at, Kelly Pendergrass and I are looking at, at Circadian Media Lab is around engaging the media user in a more active way, which we think really contributes to the improvement of media literacy and also to creative expression. So there are a number of platforms emerging in social media and on the internet in other ways that are inviting remixing and rematching of various kinds of content. There's a lot of exciting things coming down the pike using NASA footage and footage from all the sensors that are going to be measuring things under the ocean that engage younger people using digital media and digital arts to create their own stories with their own narratives using source content that gets credited so that there isn't any necessarily stealing. There's crediting, appropriating, remixing and then sharing in a collaborative fashion. I think this is a really, really exciting possibility. There are groups out there like Mozilla has a platform called Popcorn and Ziga is another young company that's Bay Area based that is really inviting young people to remix source content to tell their own stories, which I think creates a level of ownership that really can resonate with their respective communities. Okay, another question. Oh sorry, we have a mic in the back. Hi, Sylvia Hassai with the Global Philanthropy Forum. Over the last year or so, I definitely feel like consumption is the next frontier on sustainability. It's the area where there's a huge amount of opportunity to educate people. It's come across in this conference in food, in oceans and in apparel that the price we're paying is not the true cost of what we're doing. And I think telling that story is great. I wanted to ask Steve how you are highlighting the individual watermen either on your site or with restaurants because to me that's where it gets so interesting if I'm going to a restaurant and I actually read about, I used to live in the DC Maryland area and so the Maryland water history of watermen and the industry there is very rich in like many local food industries. So I think telling that story is really key and to the point about globalization versus local, I think we have to do the same with the factory worker in Bangladesh who makes a T-shirt even if we, I think we still have to link ourselves to those people. So I wanted to ask Steve specifically about how you're telling those stories. First of all, it's finding the guys that want to be highlighted. Most of these guys are a waterman because they just want to stay off the grid and they don't want to be in the public eye. But they all have great stories and finding out that Ben Parks is a fourth generation waterman and he has his son Ben that works on his boat and his grandson Ben that also works on the same boat is a great story. People love it. So getting these guys out there, we use a website, a MarylandSeafood.org website where we put these guys out there and we highlight, we rotate it every week where it's a different waterman and just tell their story. Learning that when we're out there dredging for oysters and we're just, we're going down through this channel and Ben points out the fact that underneath the boat is the house he grew up on because the sea water level rise and the lions are sinking, they're great stories and just getting people to hear those stories, those little tidbits of information that he can put out there. People are interested in that and they're interested in that way of life. And as you know in DC, you're an hour away from an area of the world that's completely cut off so much that they have their own language almost. It's just an amazing area. So we're trying to just highlight those areas and let people know what's in their backyard. Other questions? Yes. I'm a missionary working in New York City developing people to fight sex trafficking and labor slavery. Work with about two to 3000 volunteers a year and the Bible is true. I work with a stubborn stiff neck people and it's easy for me to have conversation with college students, share stats, stories and images and create transformation to help people live log off. We call it local green, organic, fair and free. But to get their parents to do it, to get their immigrant moms and grandmoms to do it, to not be upset when they have to not eat the meat that they don't know where it comes from when they go back home. Do you have any stories of transforming allies with those old oak trees that don't necessarily want to bend? Stories that have transformed, not the cool people that are at this conference but the working mom that is time poor with her single parents mom and stuff like that. That would be just great. You're having stories about that. Well, I think I'm also a very passionate gardener and I'm into edible gardening and I think the edible garden movement across the country, they found that that it's not just getting the kids in the grade school level, they have to get their parents in there too. And the same thing, once the parents come in, once the parents sort of do the gardening and they try something new, they'll shift that a little bit. So that is the harder one. And even with the fishermen, like the fishermen in Alaska, they won't eat pinks, they won't eat herring, they won't eat this stuff. And so they're gonna be the hardest customers really to get them to shift that. Yeah, it's easy to get the San Francisco food, fish eye, I'll take that. But the fishermen are tough and the older generations. But again, I think it's engagement. It's just engagement, getting them into the garden, getting them into the fish market, having to meet the fishermen, however we can do that. And I think that a lot of these communities are not in our conversation yet about sustainable seafood and really need to be. And so that's something too. Hopefully we'll see more community sort of fisheries in underserved neighborhoods and we'll see more education in these neighborhoods because without them, without the Spanish speakers in the state, it's not gonna work. Just it isn't. There's a, it was famously said a long time ago, I think in the early 60s in a famous essay that ideas advance one funeral at a time. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that. But on the other hand, ideas also advance by being able to meet people where they are. So the same exact thing that will work for somebody who is at, you know, the beginning of adulthood is not going to necessarily engage somebody who is in their 60s. Those people who are younger or have young families may be concerned about their ability to pay their bills or they may be concerned about their children's education. People who are grandparents may have the luxury to just be concerned about what life is gonna be like for their grandchildren. And you don't talk to somebody who's 25 about their grandchildren, but you talk to somebody who's 65 about their grandchildren, more likely to get their attention. We did a film a long time ago about 15 years ago about the fisheries crisis in New England. And rather than us going around and talking to the people there, we went to the high school and we got some kids who were in theater and we had them interview and shoot their relatives talking about their role in the fishery crisis. And I think we got a much, much different film out of that because the relatives after decades of denial and being the agents of the destruction of their economy were telling their grandchildren on camera how they feel about it now and how different they feel about it now just in the last few years of their lives than they did for their whole working career. So you need to try to understand where people are and try to engage them where they are. And I think you can meet with some success that way. Hey, Cheryl Dahl from The Future Fish. So in order to be able to tell stories, all three of you to some extent have had to build platforms. And that can mean actually you becoming part of the story. So Steve, you've been chosen by Esquire Magazine as someone making a difference. You've spoken to TEDx. Maria, your published author. Carl, you're basically a celebrity environmentalist. Tell me about A, how much intention goes into building that platform? And B, how comfortable it feels for you personally to become part of the story? I think the celebrity should start. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you for giving me the platform. Because if the story is that I'm a celebrity, then I am. Well, I would say that for most of my platform-building years, I wasn't building a platform consciously at all. I was just living a certain life that gave me a certain perspective. I was being out in nature a lot because I was a researcher studying seabirds and the relationship between seabirds and fish. So I was on the water. If you're on the water for 10 years studying seabirds and fish, you have built a certain amount of cred because you are a witness. And I was also involved in some things that were sort of pre-vetted. I was a staff member of a big environmental group. I had university degrees and I had these things that made me, me, from the point of view of, I mean, a platform and the issue of having a platform is basically a way of answering the question, why are you worth anybody's time? Why is this person worth my time? I went to a thing last summer where they had like a huge plenary and then they had these sort of breakout groups and there was a National Geographic Photographer who was gonna give a presentation and they put him in the huge plenary hall and I mean hundreds of people, I don't know how many hundreds, but I mean there were probably a couple of thousand people there and I had one of the little breakout areas and far fewer people because just the fact that he had National Geographic attached to his name, which he had earned and he is excellent, but a lot of people who had never heard of him, they came because his platform was National Geographic which they knew and was vetted. So that is an important thing and I think that you make a platform by what recognized names you are attached to or what individual credibility as a witness and as a participant you build and then it's the reputation that your work gains. So somebody who is really strictly a journalist, somebody who only goes and reports stories, they don't really have a platform except who has hired them to do that and how good the reputation of their stories is. If somebody is out doing some kind of work, if you've been working in some incredible social cause for years and you've gained a perspective on that and then you switch gears, then all of your past experience helps with the credibility of your platform and helps answer the question, why is this person worth my time? Which is one reason why if you pick up a book, one of the first things you do when you pick it up, if you're not familiar with the author is you go to their picture on the back flap and you read a little bit about them because you wanna, that's how they advertise their platform and that's how you know if this person is gonna be worth your time. So it is an important question but I think you build it through authenticity, you build it through association and you build it through the ongoing quality of what you have put out there, what you're putting out there. Thank you. Yeah, I'm a little more cynical about it. I think that now a lot of times publishers, that's the first question they ask is what's your platform? That is the first question they ask and literary agents too is the first question they ask. If you have 100,000 followers on Twitter, you have a better chance of selling a book than if you don't and it doesn't matter the quality of the book. It doesn't matter at all and so you can actually create a career based on platform, not integrity, not the work you do in many ways. No, that's totally true. That's totally true. Those two things are not the same. They overlap a bit but they're not the same and you can fake a platform by spending all your time trying to just be a celebrity. I mean, we live in an age where you can be famous for being famous and was that a Woody Allen movie a couple of summers ago where just these people just got famous for no reason and then suddenly nobody cared about them anymore after. Right, right, how's that? I think a career, a real career that involves platform is about the work you do but this idea of agents and publishers saying, what's your platform? It drives me crazy because there's a lot of good writers, a lot of good work that's being overlooked because they're not savvy in social media. Along those lines. That's true and it's not always fair and it doesn't have to do entirely with quality or integrity. That's certainly true. Mine's easy. I don't have a platform. A guy sells dead fish. You know, it's just making the connections, working with the chefs, getting out there. I'm actually kind of thankful because I sold dead fish for 12 years and nobody paid any attention to me and now I start working for the government and actually I'm a voice that actually knows what he's talking about for some reason. There's your platform. There's my platform. But no, I think it's, just for me, it's just getting out there and making introductions. You're not gonna brand Biloxi bacon as your platform? No. I think we're gonna have to stop. So I just wanna say thank you so much, Carl, Maria and Steve, it's really, really an honor to be with you. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us.