Bats, Bugs, Space Exploration & Hazardous History with Dan Riskin

Jann Arden  0:05  
Dan, hello, and welcome to the Jann Arden podcast. What an exciting day! I am in Toronto. Caitlin is in Toronto. Sarah's in Toronto. Our wonderful guest is also in Toronto, and let me tell you who he is. He's a friend of this show. We are thrilled once again to have our friend Dan Riskin back. He's a biologist. Our IMDbs read so similar, so when you hear me introduce him, you're going to be like, "Oh my god, Jan, that is so.. it's exactly like yours. He's a biologist, a science journalist. Everybody knows that about me, Dan, an author, sort of, kind of a face you've likely seen on TV, I'm talking about me, not you. He's of course busy working on season two of Hazardous History. If you haven't seen this show, it is.. it's jump scares.. it's.. I need Xanax to watch this show. We're going to ask him about it. He also puts out a fantastic newsletter called The Bat Signal, where he rounds up five of the most interesting science stories of the week, but most importantly, he makes us feel smarter, like he just makes us people, us simple folk, feel like, oh, I understand, which we really appreciate. Please welcome back Dan Riskin. Yay,

Dan Riskin  1:20  
thanks. Yeah, I think my secret to that is that I am also one of the simple folk, and so I have to get it into a frame where I can understand it, and then by the time I do that, it's understandable to anyone, because if I can get my head around it, we're good, we're good.

Jann Arden  1:33  
How are you enjoying the horrific history, the hazardous history, the hazardous, horrific, horrendous, all those things.

Dan Riskin  1:41  
Yeah. No, it's good. So, Henry Winkler is the star of the show, and he comes on and introduces these crazy ideas, and it's just like a flashback to the things like people joke about the 80s, like they just let kids go rogue, and like they just, oh, you're on a two wheeler, the city's yours, go nuts, oh, you're gonna go in the ravine all night, sure, why not, you know? Like, they just let things happen, and I kind of remember my childhood in the 80s and 90s that way, but this is like, you know, all the different things, mostly like products that were available that were just very dangerous, like there's a doll that if you gave it a bottle, so I think if you gave it a bottle, it would move its jaw in, or if you gave it like food, it would move its jaw to good food, and so girls would get these things, would get their hair, and it would just keep chewing, and it would just keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and like moving closer and closer to their head, and then it would like rip their hair out of their head, and so this is like before they did safety testing, apparently, or something, I don't know, but it's just stories like that over and over and over, and they're so fun, and the producers have done such a good job finding these, and they're so fun to talk about.

Jann Arden  2:44  
It's like a scarf on an escalator, you know. It's just like a.. there's just so many things. Caitlin, I'm going right over to you, because I know we have questions. We have so many questions in front of us right now. Dan, you might be here for four hours.

Dan Riskin  2:58  
Right on.

Caitlin Green  2:59  
He's undersold himself at the start of the show as being smart, because it's like I was recently on vacation in Mexico, and it's very few people you come across in media where they've not only been to the exact place you're going, which was Cabo, but then can send you a photo of them holding like a rare bat when they were in Cabo at that moment. I was like, this isn't a normal exchange, this isn't, you're like trying to say you're the proletariat, like us, and I don't think that's true,

Dan Riskin  3:23  
but I don't know, it's.. I guess what is what is smart, I guess is an interesting question. I'm enthusiastic for sure, and I wasn't like top of the class all the way through school or anything like that, but when it comes to bats, I'm obsessed, and I just love them, and so this last summer I turned 50 years old, and my wife, Kayla, you've met my wife, she's lovely. She said, "Okay, you're turning 50, what do you really want to do on your birthday? And I said, "I really want to see a bat I've never seen before. And she said, "Go for it. And so I reached out to a bunch of my bat biologist friends, and I said, "Is anybody doing that work? Yeah, I know there's a whole.. there's a whole constellation of us, and many of them are much smarter than me, and so I reached out to all of my friends, and I said, "Does anybody have bat work planned for July in the southwestern US, because there's a whole bunch of species there that I haven't seen that I would like to see. Sorry, I do it every time you're here, Dan. Well, but anyway, my friend responded, "She's like, I'm going to my field site in Baja California, Mexico, why don't you come down? And so I was like, "Sure. So I emailed my PhD advisor, who I used to work with, and he brought his son, so it was the four of us, and she just took us around to these different holes in the ground, like all these mines - they're like old silver mines - and we just went in there and caught bats, and we saw a bunch of different species, and one of them was this California leaf nose bat, which I have wanted to see for decades. It's just got the

Jann Arden  4:43  
little, it's got that little pointy nose, doesn't he?

Dan Riskin  4:46  
Yeah, yeah, it's got, yeah, it's got the pointy nose, it's got these big ears, and it's famous in the book, in the literature that I've read, because it can't walk at all. And I studied how vampire bats walk for my PhD, and the whole time I was writing that, I was like, there are examples of bats. Cannot walk at all. One of them is a California leaf nose bat, but I'd never seen one, and so to meet this thing was like, you know, if you've obsessively seen all the movies with some actor in them, and then you meet that actor, that's what it was like for me. Like, I knew this character, and so to catch one and to look at her, and then she had a baby, and I saw the cute little baby, and then I let her go, and she flew back with her baby to her little cave, she was adorable. I don't know, it just filled my heart with joy, and it was like the perfect birthday. So, when Caitlin, you said you were in Baja, I was like, I bet you're not having the exact same experience as me in Baja, but I do love Baja.

Caitlin Green  5:32  
So, like, the members of the proletariat, like myself, I'm like drunk on a beach or by, like, a pool, like, and having my third pina colada. He sends me, and if you're watching us on YouTube, I'm going to show you. Oh, look at how cute this leaf nose bat

Dan Riskin  5:46  
is, isn't that? And it's

Caitlin Green  5:46  
just, here's Dan. This is how I want to spend my 50th birthday, holding it up, and I'm like, I am too intoxicated to take in this information right now, and that's why I

Dan Riskin  5:56  
be fair. I was next to a pool, that's where we caught the.. there's another bat there called a pallid bat that eats scorpions, and so we caught those, and then as soon as we had one, we were like, well, we got to get, we got to get feed this thing a scorpion. So then everybody runs out looking for scorpions, and there's a trick for looking for scorpions. I should have told you this before you went to Cabo. There's, if you have a floor, there's a

Jann Arden  6:16  
trick to looking for scorpions. Folk, please tune in. If you're going on vacation, you're gonna want to know how to catch one,

Dan Riskin  6:22  
so you say that was sarcasm, but I did. You should pack a UV light if you're going anywhere with scorpions, and here's why. If you shine an ultraviolet light on a scorpion, it fluoresces, and fluorescing means that you hit it with light at one wavelength and it sends light back at a different, like a

Jann Arden  6:40  
safety vest,

Dan Riskin  6:41  
yeah, it's like a safety vest, like if you ever go into a nightclub and they have black lights and you have fluorescent clothes on, you know how they light up like crazy,

Jann Arden  6:47  
yeah.

Dan Riskin  6:47  
Well, if they have scorpions, you'll be able to see them, because also scorpions light up like that. Now, they look normal colored in their normal light, but under UV light, scorpions light up. Nobody can figure out exactly why they have this property in their exoskeletons, but it is a scorpion thing, and so, as a result, if you're running around with a big purple flashlight that with a UV light, you can find them, because they're like literally fluorescent, like they're so easy to find, there's hiding behind a thing, and you're like, "Oh, there you are. And so we caught one, obviously, and then we brought it over, and we fed it to this bat right by the pool. So I would encourage

Jann Arden  7:18  
people to touch these, correct? I mean, you could get stung, right?

Dan Riskin  7:22  
You could get stung, use tweezers, but also,

Jann Arden  7:25  
okay,

Dan Riskin  7:26  
this bat eats them and it gets stung, and it's like just really hardcore and can handle it, and it's like that. Yeah, dating is like

Caitlin Green  7:33  
that's so cool. This is why everyone needs someone with a PhD in science in their life, or at least in their phone, because, like, that's not the response I got when I texted anyone else while I was on vacation, so I really appreciate this. You also said that when you were there, you discovered an owl that lives in the cactuses.

Dan Riskin  7:49  
Oh yeah, so I don't remember what the.. I think it's called a pygmy owl or something, I think that's the name of it. But bird person's listening to this and getting mad at me and throwing and shaking their fist in the air, but it's the smallest owl in the world, lives in Mexico, and oh my gosh, so of course we're by the pool feeding scorpions to the pallid bat, and there's a bunch of local Mexican biologists who were there with us to learn about bats. That's the fun thing with nerdy biologists, is like they're here to learn about bats, but then while they're there, they're like, oh, do you hear that, that's the call of a really rare small owl, I'll see if I can find it, and so he disappears and goes off, and just, and then he comes back and say, I found it, and so we all ran over to where it was, and we were all sort of hiding in the bushes, and you can hear this like chirping noise coming from this cactus, and then we turn on the light, and we all had our binoculars on the point, and there's this hole in the cactus with the cutest owl you've ever seen, I mean, it's almost as cute as the bat already that you saw the pictures of, but it was pretty adorable, and that's that's the fun of, I mean, that's what makes nature fun, right? Is that you never know what you're gonna see, like it's always there's always the possibility you're gonna see something you've never seen before, or see something you have seen in a new way.

Jann Arden  8:57  
Children are not exposed to nature the way they should be.

Dan Riskin  9:01  
Yeah, it depends on what. What do you think? I

Jann Arden  9:04  
just feel like I was privy to this conversation that I dropped in on in Bellwood Trinity Park yesterday, when I was walking around, and it was a five year old pointing at a squirrel, asking his mom, you know, what was that, and and it was just like they'd never seen one in their lives, but I kind of just felt like, is that sort of going to be the experience, like I just don't feel like kids, I mean, we were booted out of our house, Caitlin, Sarah, you were two year at an age where it's like you're going to go out and play outside and do your thing, and I'm not saying that we ran into water buffalo or snakes all the time, but I think we were outside more than kids are now. I feel like a lot of maybe Caitlin can speak to this more than I can, but our city kids being exposed to trees and grass and bugs and birds and the way. This, they should be, and here's me speaking with no children.

Caitlin Green  10:04  
Well, Dan, you have kids, you're like in the East End of Toronto, similar to myself, and I feel like that we do, at least in Toronto, we have an abundance of parks, so like, yeah, you are in the city, and as opposed to like living in the country, where, like, my dad grew up, like, you know, in the literal woods behind his house all day building forests. My mom was an orienteer, for crying out loud, like, they like, oh, wow, yeah, so they, yeah, very cool stuff, right? Like, she had a pet crow, I could go on, anyways. So they all, like, they had a very much more outdoorsy life than me, but for, like, a city slicker, I do still feel like I went outside enough. Will is certainly more interested in the out in the outdoors than I was as a child. I love that

Jann Arden  10:41  
about him.

Caitlin Green  10:42  
Yeah, and he experiences no fear, like he'll touch a bug, and I do, even though I'm like shaking inside, I'll save bugs in front of him to try to like model the behavior that I actually am lying about having. So I think there it is better, but I see your point too, Jan, like the scrolling screens, the video games, like of it all is removing kids from some of the magic of the outdoors, so I do feel like you have to make a concerted effort to like encourage that.

Sarah Burke  11:05  
On the weekend, just at the dollar store, they have these bug catcher things with screens, you probably have one for Will. Yeah, I do. So my guy and I got them for his daughters, and it was a full day activity. I love this.

Jann Arden  11:21  
I love hearing this.

Sarah Burke  11:22  
Yeah, catching the little bugs and putting them in, but always returning them, like to make a point to be kind to the bugs. And yeah, like it blew my mind. How, although they are still reaching for the iPad and asking for the iPad constantly on that day, it wasn't a thing. Yeah,

Dan Riskin  11:37  
yeah. I mean, listen, my wife's a biologist, I'm a biologist. We're obsessed with this stuff, and so I mean, what we try to do is first of all, role model, like you were saying, Caitlin, like role model the curiosity and not be the expert on everything. And so what's the most exciting thing is when a kid finds something and then you just be like, what did you find? Show me. Oh my gosh, you're so good at finding things, will you pick it up, you know? And then they're the one who holds it, they're the one who shows it to people. You take a picture, you take a picture of them holding it. My, my son, we nicknamed him Salamaster when he was younger, because he was really good at catching salamanders. And so we go for a hike, and I'd say, okay, let's see what the Salamaster can do, and it would just like put it in. He was the star of the show, you know, and then he'd go out there and try to do his thing, so I mean, but on the other hand, I'm humbled by the differences in personality among my three kids. All three of my kids are pretty into the outdoors, but they're very different from each other, and so when Caitlin, you talk about how Will to the stack comes out of him, like he's just in, he's fearless, and he likes being outdoors, like to a certain extent. There's only so much you can do to like try to cultivate that. Some kids are just not going to be interested, and you're kind of stuck. But where there is a little bit of an interest, I find just the curiosity is much more important than the knowledge. Like, it's much more fun to be like, 'Oh, I want to see, I want to see, than to be like, 'Let me tell you about what you're looking at right now, because I think it's important for you to just understand, like, then you're just a boring idiot. Yeah,

Jann Arden  13:06  
no, there's.. there's.. you don't have to know all the facts. I think just wanting to experience things and wanting to be outside, that was certainly what I was up to as a kid, you know, growing up in the late 60s and 70s. We were just outside. I am amazed we're live. We used to play in this ravine, about a kilometer from from the house. We lived out of town, so we were in a rural setting, but this, these people literally took money from the municipality to let people dump, rebar old pieces of steel, cars, concrete chunks, pieces of cul-de-sac things, meridians, medians. Sorry, I don't even know what I'm talking about, but it was literally a minefield of sharp edges.

Dan Riskin  13:53  
Yeah,

Jann Arden  13:54  
and we were constantly just hurting ourselves and playing in that. How, how protective of you of your children having those kinds of adventures? I know it's a lot different. You can't just unleash a five year old out into the unknown, but are you cautious? Are you one of those parents that's just like, don't let him do that, don't let him do that, get off the monkey bars, could break his arm. Like, how do you, how do you navigate that as a parent?

Dan Riskin  14:22  
I don't know, Caitlin. What do you do? What's the.. I

Caitlin Green  14:26  
am a little cautious. Our son is incredibly sturdy, so like I have friends who, who have like toddlers, and they're like delicate Victorian dolls, and as a result, they've had like they've run into things, and like they bonked a tooth, and like they've had genuine.. they've had things happen where I can see that it's changed them as a parent, and now they're more cautious. We have like a very dense, heavy, sturdy child, and so he is more inclined. He's like a

Jann Arden  14:52  
cute,

Caitlin Green  14:53  
he is very cute, he's like a wrecking ball, like I can't believe he's the same size as like he made a bet, like he made a best friend when we were on vacation recently. This kid was like five and a half, will dwarf him, like he was like so much bigger than him, so or the reverse of that. So, anyways, he's.. I don't worry about him like as much, but I think I am still.. I'm certainly cautious around.. I'm actually more cautious around people than I think I am around like play structures or being outside, because we're sort of always, you know, we're always, we're always close at hand. It's like people freak me out more than, like, you know, bugs and stuff.

Dan Riskin  15:25  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear that. Did you grow up in Calgary?

Jann Arden  15:29  
Just west, it was called Rocky View County, or Spring Bank. Okay, so it was a.. when I.. when we first moved there, it was nothingness. Farmers, literally cattle farmers, chicken farmers, people kept, you know, hundreds of pigs in sheds and things like that. Now it's rich, rich hockey players, and

Dan Riskin  15:46  
right,

Jann Arden  15:47  
you know, those little communities that have 10,000 square foot homes, and there's four of them plunked onto 50 acres, and that's what it looks like now. But back in the day, it was so fun. I mean,

Dan Riskin  15:57  
yeah,

Jann Arden  15:57  
we would, we would just go ride horses without bridles and saddles would literally help each other get up on a horse, these old lazy farting horses, and you'd get up on them and hang on to their manes, and you'd, you, they would just saunter and eat grass, and you'd,

Dan Riskin  16:14  
who's whose horse, like, do you, the parkers up

Jann Arden  16:16  
the road had a horse named Snoopy, and we very, very rarely had a bridle on him or anything, and the three of us would get on there. Snoopy had places he would go, and we would literally - we looked like Pippi Longstocking, you know? This horse was so fat, you'd literally be doing the splits, the Russian splits, and he would just walk down to the river, and we'd slide off of him, and then get back on and we'd help each other up, and it was very ideal. I think about it now, and it feels like a combination of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons.

Dan Riskin  16:52  
Yeah, so there's a Disney connection to the Bow River from, like, oh, do tell 50s. 50s, there's this story that people tell about lemmings, so up in the north there are these creatures, these rodents called lemmings, and they're they reproduce like crazy, they're like the triples from Star Trek, they're just, they have babies and babies and babies and babies, and tons of them, and they are their food for things like great gray owls, and so great gray owls, you know, when the lemmings have a lot of, like, a human, a huge population boom, the great gray owls flourish, and you get lots of owls, and then there will be this population crash of the lemmings, and then the owls crash, and so there's, you know, they're really, really important in terms of the whole ecosystem, and so Disney, back in the day, made one of the first nature documentaries where they talked about what life was like up in the North, and they focused on these lemmings, and one of the things that happens in this Disney documentary is that the population of lemmings gets so high that they just all jump off a cliff and die, it makes no sense.

Sarah Burke  18:03  
Tell me, you've played the Lemmings game on MS-DOS. This is exactly you're picturing them walking off the cliff.

Dan Riskin  18:07  
Well, that's what it comes from. It's like it's like a known trope that lemmings, when the population gets too big, they self-sacrifice because they're like, "Well, there's too many of us. Well, I might as well kill myself. But that makes no sense in an evolutionary context, because you, I mean, it's just like us in the world today. You wouldn't be like, "Oh, there's a lot of humans, I better get out of the way so somebody else can have a good life. No, you're like, "I wish

Jann Arden  18:27  
would walk. Sure, sure,

Dan Riskin  18:29  
sure, there'll be other lemmings you push, but yeah. So, but it turns out that Disney sort of, that doesn't happen, obviously it shouldn't, and obviously it doesn't, and people have checked, and lemmings do not voluntarily jump off cliffs when things get bad, but yet this Disney footage, like in this documentary, shows all these lemmings just rolling down a cliff, like dozens of them just falling down a cliff, these nice tight shots of the cliff with like these lemmings rolling through the shot and landing in the water down below. Turns out that they just, they needed the footage, and they'd written the story, and so some filmmakers from Calgary worked on it, took two buckets of these lemmings down to the river valley, and then just like filmed rolling, throwing them off a cliff. They were just throwing them into the river. This is how that was done back in the day. They were just like murdering these poor lemmings, and then sacrificing them, and, like, there they go, killing themselves, because they, I think, they thought that it really happens, but they didn't know how they were going to get footage of it, and that's me being kind. They thought maybe it happens in life, and so they just thought they'd get footage back in Calgary, where it was easier to have equipment, or whatever. Yeah, it's so interesting to me. So, that first of all, the lemming thing comes from that, then now the video game. Second of all, how interesting that Disney had that shot in Canada. That's so weird. Although I guess if they were shooting up north, maybe there were a whole bunch of Canadian affiliations, you know, attached to it. But third, it's just really.. it's fun that it's the Bow River, because you're like, oh yeah, I know that river, that's the one that goes through, uh, goes through Calgary, and now it's famous. This is

Jann Arden  19:55  
heartbreaking day. This is..

Dan Riskin  19:57  
sorry, well, it's the way it used to be, you know. Things are better now. Now, they like the BBC Natural History Unit. The people that like go out with David Attenborough, they have like strict rules that they are not allowed to cause the death of an animal. So, even if it would make for great footage, and even if that lion would probably eat a zebra anyway, they can't cause the zebra to get picked off. They can't set things up to hurt the zebra. They can only film what's already happening, and so, as a result,

Jann Arden  20:21  
supposed to intervene either, and sometimes that's heartbreaking.

Dan Riskin  20:25  
Yeah, totally. I know,

Jann Arden  20:26  
I know that that cardinal rule has been broken over the years. I just saw it's an older clip, it's probably five or six years old. They were in the Antarctica, and it was for documentary filmmakers, and the group of penguins were literally perishing. They had somehow got themselves in this ravine. They couldn't get up the hill. You might have seen it. It's easy to find, actually, on social media, if you just put in trapped penguins, get help or something. But these guys were crying, these grown men were crying, and so they got shovels out. They watched it for days, and they're not supposed to intervene, and the guy just was like, "Fuck it, you guys, I'll take the shit, I'm not doing it. He got out there and he shoveled a path, they came in right behind him and started walking up and out of this ravine, and he just said, "Don't give a fuck if I'm interfering or intervening, but I'm not doing this, but to watch them walk out was the most special, and their gratitude, they kept looking back at these guys like thank you, thank you, and they would waddle back and flap their little arms, and then walk on, it is go search for it, if I do find the clip, I'll make sure that Sarah puts it in the show notes. It

Dan Riskin  21:41  
can be really hard to know what the best thing to do is. There's this really great case study of California condors. So, California condors are these big, beautiful vulture kind of looking birds that live on the west, and they're because people put out poison to kill coyotes, I think it was the vultures would eat it, and then their numbers plummeted, and so there were almost none left, like I think the population in the world was down to 88 or some small number like that. And so then they started this recovery program, where they captured every single California condor from the wild, and they brought them into captivity, and they started looking after them to help them start making babies, and now it's been really successful, and they've let them back out into the wild, but when they brought them in, one of the things they did was to get all the lice out of their feathers, like any kind of parasite that might cause them to have issues, they wanted out of there, and so they, they killed them, these parasites, and in doing so, they eradicated a species of parasite that is only found on that one kind of bird in the whole world, and so they caused the extinction of a parasitic mite, and now you get into an interesting question. Should they have done that? Should they not have done that? And if not, then what should they have done? Like, what if, if those parasites are hurting the California condors and causing them to have a hard time? Like, maybe we lose California condors as a result of the parasite. Should we get rid of the parasite to save the condors? And why is one more valuable than another? Just because, presumably, because we think one is cuter than the other. Although vultures aren't the cutest thing in the world, but they are cuter than a mite that lives in the feathers of a bird. It brings up really interesting questions. It's hard sometimes to know what the gentlest thing to do is, and you know, you could release all those penguins, but then they go and eat up a whole bunch of fish that die as a result of that guy's choice, then you just don't see that happen.

Jann Arden  23:22  
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of culling anything. I mean, for years I was involved with the wild horses of southern Alberta. They were on the eastern slopes, and the miners didn't want them, the farmers didn't want them, the ranchers didn't want them, forestry didn't want them. They thought they were a nuisance, but they also thought that they were ruining the environment, which is fucking laughable when you think about the Amazon forest being eaten up by hundreds of 1000s of millions of acres year after year to graze cattle. The oil industry, well, no one needs to talk about that, but anyway, they were culling these horses, they were luring them into these pens and killing them all, and they didn't realize what an important and valued part of the ecosystem they were, because of how they eat grass and how they cut grass off with their teeth, and what they leave behind them, like all the important grass would come back with these horses, and the stuff that you know that just got gnarled away from cattle. It was not great how a cattle grazes, as opposed to how a horse does it. I don't know. You probably know more about plants

Dan Riskin  24:30  
in a different place. Yeah,

Jann Arden  24:31  
yeah, but the whole idea of human intervention, I guess that was the lengthy question. Like, what do we do, and do we call cull 1000s of horses every year? Does that make a difference, and are they an important part of what's happening out there? And do we just get rid of things because they're a nuisance to people, which begs to, you know, the whole idea of poisoning coyotes, that's got to be part of really important system with mice, with small rodents, I mean, keeping those population. Options down, I just makes me mad.

Dan Riskin  25:02  
Sure, absolutely. I mean, people think there's a good argument that the reason we have so many ticks in the Northeast right now is because fox populations are low, and foxes normally control the mice, and the mice are a reservoir species for these ticks. The ticks get on the mice while they're between getting on deer or getting on us, and so as a result of too few foxes, we now get all these ticks, and we're all freaking out about Lyme disease.

Jann Arden  25:23  
Exactly,

Dan Riskin  25:24  
yeah, it's all connected, for sure. And actually, there's a, there's an interesting other piece of sometimes doing nothing, or just backing off, isn't, isn't the most environmentally friendly option. Sometimes you're, you're demanded to act, and so there's this thing called assisted migration, which is a big topic in conservation right now. Let's say you have a population of turtles that are perfectly adapted to their climate, and they're found on this place in California. And then we know that the climate is changing, and we can predict exactly how much it's going to change, or with an error bar, how much it's going to change over the next decade. And it's very clear that where they are now will not be their best habitat in 20 years. Their best habitat is actually 100 kilometers north. Okay, they're turtles, they'll find their way, right? Give it time. But Los Angeles is in the way, and so how do you like, do you go get those turtles and move them to the new place and release them in this new habitat to help them on their journey, and because that's what this assisted migration is called, and there are a whole bunch of examples of this, where people are like, you know, I think it's not just

Sarah Burke  26:26  
live in Costa Rica. I was in Costa Rica, there was like a little tent set up, and a bunch of guys working to like keep the turtles safe, and then there was a time every day where they would release them into the water by protecting, like, no humans could touch them. There was a path that they created. This was for

Dan Riskin  26:44  
the sea turtles.

Sarah Burke  26:45  
Sea turtles, yeah.

Dan Riskin  26:46  
Cute is the

Caitlin Green  26:46  
concern of, like, relocating the turtles, like that. If you put them in this new place, that they'll, like, eat all the vegetation there, that maybe they shouldn't, or, like, disrupt a, like, a bug species in some way. Because me, I hear all these stories, and I'm like, yeah, get rid of the mites, yeah, relocate the turtles, like I would be interfering all the time. Yeah. Well,

Dan Riskin  27:04  
and a lot of people do agree with you. I mean, sometimes you get unforeseen consequences, but you're also taking them out of the place where they were and putting them into a place where they are now. And that's not hands off, that's not like just let it be. That's very interventionist. And so it's done in the same spirit, but it's not, but I think there's just like a real difference between doing nothing and doing all the things.

Jann Arden  27:33  
I'm going to change gears a little bit, Dan, because it's something that we were so interested in over the last month, and that was Artemis two.

Dan Riskin  27:40  
Oh yeah, let's talk space

Jann Arden  27:41  
exploration, the emotional nature of the journey. I don't think people were quite prepared for the companionship and the camaraderie of our astronauts, and the messages they brought with them. You know, the loving messages of naming a crater after one of the gentleman's wives that had passed over, just their ideas, their philosophies. It wasn't so sciency for us, like we really got a glimpse of our humanity, and it united us for a second. Like, we all kind of stopped and cheered for human beings.

Dan Riskin  28:16  
Yeah, it was magic. And I think you just put it - your words just now are the words I've been looking for to try to describe what I thought happened. I don't think people were prepared, is that, is you put, you put your finger on it, and I've been saying, like, people sort of were surprised, or people, you know, didn't expect it, or people weren't paying attention, and then all of a sudden everybody was, but I don't think we were prepared for the emotional nature of it, and it snuck up on us, right? It was like, okay, people are going farther than they've gone ever in the history of human. Okay, let's tune in and see. And then we see these four people who respect each other and work well together, and, and part of that is because they've been training together for so long, but not just that they've spent time together, they've been working with psychologists to be excellent in a stressful environment, where you're in tight proximity with other people, like they've been building skills, they've been practicing in similar scenarios with each other, and they were selected for their ability to do that, and so it's not just that you know anybody would have gone up in that spacecraft and gotten along as well as they did, they were that was one of the focuses of their mission, but I don't think anybody expected, and when that, when he, oh man, when Jeremy Hansen called down to earth to say we have a suggested name for this crater, nobody couldn't cry. I cry every time I think about it. Same, I'm

Caitlin Green  29:33  
gonna cry right now. It was

Dan Riskin  29:35  
the most beautiful moment, and the way he, what was special about that was to honor their friend, who they've loved, I mean, these astronauts have been working together for a long time. So, Jeremy Hanson knew Carol, the woman who passed away, so he'd have had a connection to her as well, but also just that love for his friend, and to be reading to saying those words while he's facing the widow, widower of the of the woman I. Who passed away from cancer, saying we're going to suggest to name this crater after your, your deceased wife. Just the magic of that moment, the way they all hugged each other, just it wasn't scripted, it was just the way it went down, and it was just beautiful.

Jann Arden  30:13  
Well, they made so many comments about looking at a planet without borders, looking at a planet without colors separating us or cultures separating us, that you know, the in the connection is undeniable. It's there, the waters that flow in and out doesn't matter about the fucking border, the ocean, if it's, if it's polluted in the coast of Somalia, is going to make its way to Canada, like all these currents and everything, and I, but I, you know, I was cynical at first, Dan. I was like, Jesus, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and you know, everyone's starving, and there's fucking wars going on, and, and instantly, as soon as I saw the rocket take off,

Dan Riskin  30:55  
oh yeah,

Jann Arden  30:56  
I was scared, I'm just like, just get them out of space, get them out of space, get the get that rocket's coming off, the rocket's coming off. Just let the rocket come off, don't let, don't, don't, the just get them out of here. And then I was just relief, I'm like, I feel physically sick,

Dan Riskin  31:11  
yeah,

Jann Arden  31:11  
from watching this thing, but I think the, the combined, when they showed pictures of children in Gaza, God, watching this TV screen that somewhere in a cafe, watching this rocket go up, and they were cheering, and I thought, oh, fuck, fuck, I just took my breath away. I don't know, I can't even express the emotions that I was feeling. I can't articulate it, Dan, but it was just seeing children in rags, you know, with shitty shoes and Nike fucking written across a T-shirt, and with no food cheering this rocket on going up, and I thought, what, what can we do differently? Like, this is the juxtaposition was too much to process.

Dan Riskin  31:59  
Yeah, you know, it's, it's so interesting. I mean, the juxtaposition does hit home, and I have to choose my words carefully, but I think there's something about that mission that feels accessible and feels different from seeing a super yacht go by with a billionaire on it. It was just, it was very much a shared experience, and I know that, like, that kid who's watching it on the TV screen in a war-torn country is not going to be able to go on the next flight up, but it's not so impossible that they will go on a flight someday, you know, like we do hope that we live in a world where those things can can get better, and that they are part of that better world that we're trying to build, and that this sort of is part of that, and I think you have to have these great big shining moments that we coalesce around, instead of just taking care of all the other things. I mean, to be clear, I'm also against spending money on wars, I don't like it very much at all, and I would like for money to be distributed in a way that brings more people up from the bottom, but I also think it's a worthwhile investment to pay for these rocket rides that everybody gets so excited about, because it does galvanize us and it does unite us in a way, like, like you said,

Caitlin Green  33:13  
yeah. And I also felt like I watched them re-enter, like, Earth successfully landed the Pacific Ocean, and I happened to be at a random bar, shout out to the dog and bear in Collingwood, and it's usually a sports bar, so there's like, you know, screens everywhere. When I say that this absolutely packed the gills, sports bar, every single person was focused on the TV, talking to each other, other people who had experienced other, you know, moon landings in their lifetime, or comparing notes. It was the whole, and everyone erupted into applause, like people were so excited that they had safely made it back to Earth. Everyone's tuned in, people are high fiving, and I think also because, like, you know, there was a Canadian on board, it felt like really special for Canadians too. But I was in that moment, I looked around and I was like, number one, humans are great, this is cool, I want to sign up for more space interest, like I want to get more kids interested in space, like this is so amazing, but also I just was like, God damn, we're starved for good news, we are so starved for good news right now, to Jan's point about like all the things that are justifiably going on in the world all the time, and it overwhelms you when you just scroll past like a get ready with me for Coachella, and then a super yacht, and then, like, you know, war-torn everything, and Ukraine, whatever. And so I just saw this was a really tangible thing that everyone could get behind, like you said. And also made me feel like, yeah, space is really cool, but we have one livable spot in the universe right now. We got one spot with water, we have one spot with, like, life that we can find, and, and let's kind of take care of it, and take care of each other on it, because, yeah, we're all like weirdly connected. It turned me into like a bit of a hippie, like I was like, this is happening to me internally.

Dan Riskin  34:53  
Yeah, I mean, it was emotional, and people felt big things, and that's so cool. I had not heard yet that bars were tuned into. It at least one in Collingwood, which is more than zero. It was fun to watch that, and I think it had a lot in common with sports, because you didn't know how you didn't know for sure it was going to end well, right? And so you were like, please be okay, just like Jann said, like you know you're worried about it, and you know that heat shield we were nervous about, right? So I don't know how I was all over this, so forgive me if there's a little bit inside baseball, but when they did Artemis One, and they sent the unoccupied spacecraft around the moon, and it came back, it re-entered, and everything looked good, but when they checked the bottom of it, it was completely destroyed. It had almost just, it had almost come apart during re-entry, and so they were like, "Oh, we don't have time to make a new one for Artemis two people

Jann Arden  35:41  
are going to be cooked in there. Yeah,

Dan Riskin  35:43  
seriously, yeah, you need it to work. So, for Artemis two, they didn't change the heat shield, it was the same design as Artemis one, but they changed the re-entry so that it went faster and didn't spend as long at 5000 degrees temperature was, and so they were trying a new trajectory that they had not tested, and so there were a lot of unknowns about that re-entry that made it more dicey. Glad

Jann Arden  36:04  
I didn't fucking know that.

Dan Riskin  36:06  
Yeah, well, I'm glad

Jann Arden  36:08  
Dan Riskin wasn't saying, yeah, they've never done Jan, watch this, they've never done this before news

Dan Riskin  36:14  
channel, I was on CTV News Channel, literally saying those things, because I wanted people to know the significance of it, and the engineers had done all the calculations and said it was going to be fine, but after it re-entered and landed in the water, and everybody's like, "Oh, thank goodness, you know what's the bottom look like? Did it survive? And so that's been the kind of follow-up, and so that's the sort of nerdy stuff that I get to put into my newsletter, where I'm like, "Okay, hot news, like I just sent out a newsletter today as we tape this. Yes, and it did update on the Artemis two heat shield, and it did hold up very nicely, as far as they can tell. They're going to do a more thorough analysis, but they nailed it. And what's so interesting about the whole mission is that it kind of looked easy, because the launch went well, the trip went well. At one point, a fire alarm went off, but it was a false alarm. The toilet was not great at sending stuff into space, but you can still pee and poop into it, so like they didn't have a very bad time, and then it came back, and the heat shield worked, and everything was good, and so it looks like it wasn't that hard, because everything worked, but they've been working on this for like decades, trying to figure out how to make this happen, and lots of things haven't worked along the way, and it's just really cool that everybody was there for the victory lap, and listen, no shade on people who jumped on at the last minute, just got excited about it, but hey, I didn't

Jann Arden  37:25  
jump on the Blue Jays until game seven, okay? So, okay, okay, there you go, okay, so you got a

Dan Riskin  37:29  
track record, but may this may this unite people, may it continue to make people feel good about the world and people that live in it.

Jann Arden  37:36  
60 seconds left before we drag you over to Patreon and talk about some stuff, leave me, leave us with one good thing that you have gleaned on to, whether it's natural, whether it's in the news, whether it's something, something on your mind, one good thing, and then we're gonna, we're gonna say goodbye here and drag you over to Patreon.

Dan Riskin  37:53  
There's a new study that shows that spending time alone in nature is an effective way to treat loneliness, people that are feeling lonely, if they go into nature by themselves, not with other people, and just feel a connection to the place they're in, and feel a sense that they are with nature, that is, that that lowers their loneliness, and so being connected to Mother Nature is tickle or scratches some of the same itches as feeling alone, or does spending time with people, so it's like Mother Nature's a person.

Jann Arden  38:25  
You heard it here from Dan Riskin, and it is. It's so important to learn how to be alone, and standing in trees and doing that is superb and wonderful. And trees know you're there, there's a little sidebar, the trees know you're there, the ground knows you're there. There is a consciousness with living things. Dan Riskin, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, and this is very inspiring, very uplifting today. And I'm glad that your 50th birthday wish came true. That is a cute little bat, and who doesn't want to see small things? It was like seeing a minion in a tree, I bet that little owl, like a little tiny minion with big eyes, and that's something to cheer about Caitlin, you should

Sarah Burke  39:01  
post that on our social, so our people can see as a teaser for Dan coming back on the show. Amazing, yeah, done

Caitlin Green  39:08  
deal.

Jann Arden  39:09  
We'll hope you, we hope that you will come back. Continued success with your television series, which I believe is called Haunted, no horrific history, horrendous history, hazardous history, but they all work, don't they? They all work. It could be titled all those things. Season two, Dan Riskin. Thank you so much for being on the Jenard Podcast. Come season Patreon, we've got all kinds of things we want to talk about. Yeah, let's do it. One of those things being body weight and meal time, I mean, that's going to be interesting. We also want to talk about, can we cure frequent childhood nightmares, you know. Maybe Dan can weigh in about that. We will see you soon. Thanks for listening. You can stream us anywhere you stream your favorite podcasts. We'll see you next time, Caitlin, Sarah, Dan, and me. Too, we do.