Dave Ebert: The Insider's Guide to Sharks

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today we are diving into the subject of sharks with one of the world's leading experts in the field, Dave Ebert. Dave has studied sharks for decades. He earned his Bachelor of Zoology from Humboldt State University and Master of Marine Biology from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. He also has a PhD from Rhodes University in South Africa. Dave has discovered over 50 types of sharks. He is director of the Pacific Shark Research center, president of the American elasmobrand Society, and an honorary associate at the California Academy of Sciences. He has written 30 books about sharks. NBC News, Good Morning America and the Today show have featured his work. He leads Shark Week expeditions to find the rarest and most elusive sharks. He has appeared in advised BBC Shark and Blue Planet 2 and National Geographics When Sharks Attack. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Dave Ebert. You sent me a copy of Sharks of the world. It's 600 pages, color, thousands of illustrations and photos, and it's only $55. I don't understand. Why is that book so cheap?

You would have to ask the publisher, Princeton University Press. They, they set the price and everything. It's a great deal. When you look at how much books cost. Yeah, for 50, 55 bucks, it's a great deal. And there's literally a ton of information in there on Sharks of the World.

That is not exaggeration. There is literally tons of information. I write business books and there are 200 pages, black and white, no illustrations, no color, no photography, no nothing. And they're $26.95. Let me tell you something. If those books are $26.95, your book should be 250. But I digress.

Yeah, I'm glad it's a relatively cheap book because things are so expensive. A lot of people, 50, $60, you think, oh, I could get a book like, that's 600 and some pages. Whereas a Lot of smaller books they want $90 or $100 for. And people got to think, I don't want to spend that much for a book. But, yeah, for 50, $60, you can literally get a book that has all the sharks of the world in it, at least up the last year.

I'm just curious, one more question about this book. How do you write and produce a book like this that is so long and has so much information, and there's pages and pages of. This is the kind of teeth that sharks have. How do you even write a book like that?

It started probably about, oh, almost 40 years ago for me when I first started studying sharks as a young grad student. And I just, in my case, I just had a wealth of information just from working in the field from. For so many years and decades. The illustrations that Mark Dando does, that's the key to books like this. You need to work with an outstanding illustrator because people will read the text, but your eyes immediately go to the illustrations, and that's what everyone's going to look at first. And then they'll get onto the text and realize, wow, there's a lot of information about that shark. So the kind of. The key for this kind of book is to have an outstanding illustrator, as I did with Mark, and then also had another colleague of mine, Sarah Fowler, who's also another conservationist. And she's been around for. I don't want to embarrass her, but she's been around for a number of years as well. And so it's a just a really good collaboration with the three of us on that. And it's a lot of work.

I swear. This is my last question about this book. Okay, but so let's say you decide to write this book. And at the time, I don't know, maybe there's 400 species of sharks, not the 600 that there are today. So you tell your illustrator, okay, guys, start drawing 400 sharks. How long does it take to have that 400 illustrations?

It was years. It was years. The recent one is an updated edition. The original edition came out in 2013, and then this was an updated one. So we had a number of illustrations done, quite a few done already, but Mark updated as we get more information, you think, oh, once you draw something, that's it. But you realize on some of the rare species, you get more information, something as simple as the coloration. Often you'll see, like, a dead specimen or something in a museum that's kind of gray or brown. Then you see it in the wild alive. And you're like wow, this thing's really a pretty shark. We just didn't know that. In Mark's case he updates these illustrations. That takes a lot of extra work. But the meticulous part is doing things like the teeth, just to get the teeth in there. Because sharks are usually identifiable by their teeth if you know what you're looking for in the teeth. So each one is unique. Each tooth on the whatever I think it was 545 species of sharks in there. Each jaws from each shark is unique. So you think about that. You could draw each shark, you gotta draw the teeth for em, because they're unique. And then other little thing characteristics like you see that there'll be a ventral image of like the snout, the mouth and the, and the nostrils. And a lot of the times that could be very distinctive for some of the shark species. So we try to put in as many of the characters as we can and then just hit on the main things to try to get people to look the characters that people would look for. And again, because I'm a scientist, I want to write this to the average person, someone like yourself who might be kind of interested in it, but it's not an expert or anything. So you can look at that, understand like hey, here's some characteristics how I can tell this is this particular species of shark. And so I try to write that for the average person. I'm not writing this for technical people like myself. I want the average person to be able to pick up this book and to be able to find a shark maybe washed up in a beach or something they see on TV and they can try to identify it.

Let me give my audience a plug for your book. So if you are at all interested in sharks or fishing or the ocean, I cannot conceive of a more impressive book to buy than this book. For a mere 55 bucks. Eat out one less time and go buy this book, man, it's magnificent.

And if you check around too, even better this occasionally they'll have some special offers. We got things like this summer will have Shark Week, Shark Fest stuff coming up and they'll sometimes give a 30% discount on the $55. So if you check back or follow me on social media, I'll post it. Like when they come up and there's a discount, I'll post it. And so you can even get that book for less than $50 at times.

All right, so now take us back to 40 years ago or whenever. And you're a grad Student. And at what point do you say, okay, I'm gonna dedicate the rest of my life to sharks? Like, how did that go down?

Oh, I can take you back further than that. When I was about five years old, my parents gave me a book on sharks. And we still. I still have it, too. And I just thought these were, like, the coolest things I'd ever seen. I just thought, man, these are, like, really cool now, you know when you're five years old, sharks, whales, dinosaurs are cool, and most kids grow out of that. But when I was about 10 years old, I told my parents, I said, I want to travel the world and study sharks, and I want to figure out a way to get paid for that. I was 10 years old. My parents were like, man, don't worry. He'll grow out of that. I'm sure it's some phase. And just from there on, just went on through my life. And even when I was a senior in high school, you go to your guidance counselor, wants to talk to you about what you're going to do. And I still remember seeing my guidance counselor my senior year in high school. And he said, what are you going to do? I'm going to go to college and I'm going to travel the world and study sharks. And he was like, huh? Oh, that's great. He goes, that's good. He goes, do you have a plan B at all? And I was like, no, not really. I'm going to travel and study sharks. And he was like, okay, good luck on that shark thing. But he wasn't discouraging. He didn't discourage me at all. And that counselor, about 10 years after I left high school, I saw him and I was talking with him and I said, so what'd you think about the fact that at this point, I'd already had a master's degree from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and I was actually just getting ready to leave for South Africa to start my PhD and I asked him, I said, what do you think about. Do you remember that conversation we had? And what'd you think about me when I mentioned the shark thing? He goes, well, he says, you know, I see a lot of kids. And he goes, honestly, I didn't think the shark thing was going to really work out for you, but the fact that you had a direction and a passion, I didn't want to, like, burst your bubble. He goes, I see kids all the time. They have no idea what they're going to do, but you had a direction. So I was, like, going to let you Pursue it. I didn't ever thought you'd actually be doing sharks 10 years later. And I've turned that passion just into a lifelong journey, really, at this point, and just taken me all over the world. Just some amazing experiences with it. So, yeah, it started when I was young.

We have interviewed 200 remarkable people, and this kind of early discovery of your passion is rare. In fact, Madison, you chime in, but I think it's only Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jane Goodall, and Dave Ebert.

That's good company.

That is good company.

Yeah. You know, Guy, if I could just punctuate the thing here. When I had this passion, this started before the movie Jaws came out in 75. And the field of shark research really started in the late 70s, early 80s, and I was in high school, like a sophomore. So when the movie came out and I already had this direction that I was going to travel the world and I was going to study sharks, and there really was no field of shark research at the time. So thanks to Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg for a great book and an awesome movie. This whole field started. And it was because people were interested in sharks. Like, well, how many shark species are there? How old do they get? Where do they live? All these kind of questions. And so a lot of the university programs started asking these questions. And I was in that early young group of grad students, I always refer to, where I was part of the Jaws generation of grad students that we just caught that wave, literally in the early 80s. And there's a whole group of us. And the cool thing about it is we started, like when I started my masters, you know, like, I'd asked the professor, like, well, what should I do? He goes, I don't know. It's your masters. You figure it out. This is the best part. This is like being an explorer. There was no roadmap there. It was just like, if you could think about it in your mind, you could go pursue that direction. And some stuff turned out to be like, well, it was a little crazy, but we tried it. But you found your footing. It was just such a golden age to study sharks because there was really nobody in front of us. And we just went ahead to go basically blaze our own trail, our own path. And it was. It was. It was fabulous. I look back on it now and I almost get goosebumps. I'm so excited that, God, it was just so great. And I had professors that were just like, hey, if you can think about it, go do it. No one was saying, like, here's what you have to do, you gotta do A, B, C. It was just like, go figure it out. There's no map here. It was awesome. And a side story is, if you watch the original Jaws movie that came out in 75, at the very end of the movie when they're rolling the credits, the last credit that comes up is a guy named Leonard Compagno who was at Stanford University at the time. And I don't know if you knew this or not, guy, but Stanford used to have one of the preeminent ichthyology programs in the world for close to a hundred years, and they closed down in the 70s. But anyway, this guy who I mentioned there, who actually designed the mechanical shark, Bruce, and worked with Spielberg on the movie, turned out that he was my main professor advisor for my PhD. Wow. Like, 12 years later, after the movie came out, I started a PhD and at the time, he lived in the Bay Area up in Tiburon where he was working. And I got to know him because people ask me, like, they'll say, like, well, how'd you. You know, how'd you do this whole traveling thing? And I was working, like, did a lot of research in Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay, Humboldt Bay. And I got to know this guy, Leonard Capano, and he took a job in South Africa. Now, this is about 1985, 86. And those of us that are certain age, you know, South Africa probably wasn't the main place people were looking to go to at that particular time, but he had taken a job there. And I went up to say goodbye, and I was just. I was just finishing my master's degree. And as he was leaving, I said, hey, you know, if you need anybody to carry your bags or something, South Africa let me know. And it was literally almost like a throwaway statement. And eight months later, I got a phone call from him, and he says, hey, Dave, I have a PhD position here. Do you want it, like, in a nanosecond? I was like, hell, yeah, I'm going. And basically, here I was, like, 26 years old, and I'm taking off to go travel the world and study sharks. I was going to get paid to do it. It was this dream I'd had since I was 10 years old, was all falling together at this time.

Wow.

And it was the best thing I ever did. And it was just this huge adventure I had.

It's becoming apparent to me that you're the Jane Goodall of sharks. How's that?

That sounds awesome. She's quite. Was quite a person. I Remember seeing her like on National Geographic stuff back when I was a kid. So that's cool to hear that I.

Think I can guess that your answer. But all things considered, is Jaws the best or worst thing that ever happened to sharks?

I saw Steven Spielberg was just on a program kind of comment on, he thought it was a negative thing. And I know Peter Benchley who I never met, I actually hadn't met Spielberg either. But Peter Benchley felt it was a bad thing for sharks. It was the best thing that ever happened to sharks was those movies. And the thing was is everyone focused on the negative. And you keep in mind like, and it's hard for younger people to understand this, but there was no field of marine conservation, certainly no conservation on sharks at the time. And again as I said when the movie came out, people got interested in it. The thing is there were already shark tournaments going on in the world. They're happening here in Elkhorn Slough in San Francisco Bay. They were just going on but nobody paid any attention to them. They would have a shark attack in Monterey, where I grew up, it make a one day news story. But after Jaws, every shark attack became an event. All these shark fishing competitions became events. It sort of brought this out of the shadows and into the public light. But again people were just kind of like more interested in sharks as they got going. And I might mention my colleague Sarah Fowler who I did the Sharks the World book with. She was actually one of the pioneers who started the entire field of shark conservation in the late 80s, early 90s. We're cohorts. I didn't know her at the time, but before she started it there was no field of shark conservation. Young people that weren't around at that time can't imagine that. But it was one of these things that nobody even thought about it. It was just like sharks are being finned, sharks are being caught, but just nobody paid any attention to it. So the movie Jaws, it changed that entire trajectory because people got interested in it and then people like myself pursued it as a career.

You could knock me over with a feather. I thought for sure you're gonna say it's such a negative thing. But okay, so while we're on the positive, negative spectrum, can you just tell us the most common misconceptions of sharks?

I think that one of the reactions I get with sharks is when people, we talked already about the number of shark species be, you know, I mentioned the book, there's 545. I'll ask audiences when I give talks like I'LL throw out a question. Does anybody know how many species of sharks are out there? And they're almost everybody will go, maybe 20, 30. Some people throw out how about a hundred? They have no idea that there's over 500 species of sharks. And that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions that people don't realize how diverse they are. Because most people, particularly if you watch a lot of TV shows, you got like flying white sharks. You've got tiger sharks, the big toothy ones that occasionally attack people and that's all they ever see. They don't realize there's this huge diversity out there. And when I talk with young people, I try to emphasize to them like, don't go do what everyone else is doing because there's like a thousand people out there studying white sharks. You'll just be another face in the crowd. If you want to make a name for yourself, you want to rise the top, find something that no one else is studying and go out and become an expert on that because then you're an expert and you know something and a chances are there's so many species out there, you're almost inevitable could find something that no one else is even looking at. So that's really a thing I try to emphasize to people. There's a lot of stuff out there. Another study in white sharks is, okay, get in line. There's a whole bunch of people out doing that.

What about the impression that sharks are these stone cold killers that are going to come bite you when you're swimming?

Is that I kind of like gloss over a little bit when it comes to shark attacks. Or they try to use something more friendly like oh, shark human interactions. You know, if you go walking out in the wood in Alaska or Montana, you might run into a grizzly bear. You might actually be injured or killed by it. It's a bear attack. You know, it happens. You might run into a mountain lion. You go in the ocean, you might run into a shark. The chances are it's a white shark or something that might actually hurt you is pretty remote. And oftentimes people will see sharks, you know, large, like a white sharks and stuff. Especially around Monterey Bay. It's not uncommon. And most of the time they just swim by. Might scare the hell out of you, but they just generally swim by and they don't really bother you. So people really aren't on the menu for sharks because honestly, you know, a chubby seal or harbor seal or something has a lot more protein for them than you know, than Basically, a skinny person or even a slightly overweight person, there's not gonna be enough fat content for them to really energize their body. And so they need to look for things that are high protein, like in harbor seals or sea lions. Elephant seals are great. They love those things. So, yeah. And people are not on the menu by any means.

I think I know the answer to this question, too. I'm a surfer. Madison is a surfer. I surf. I don't know if that makes me a surfer, but anyway, when I try to encourage people who don't surf to surface, and almost all of them say I'm afraid of sharks. And it seems to me that there's more danger driving over Highway 17 to get to Santa Cruz than there is being in the water and getting attacked by a shark.

Right? Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. I grew up here in the Monterey area. I started skin diving at Lovers Cove when I was about 8 years old. My dad took me out and my brother and I and just started to chose how to free dive. And so I started free diving at a very young age. I felt comfortable swimming through the kelp. And I was a free diver for about 10 years before being a scuba diver and anybody that free dives. And I was young, I teenager, I used to like to spearfish. I'd like to go out and catch, you know, get some fish for dinner or something. And so you think about, let's see, you're shooting fish or you're carrying them around on a stringer, wiggling fish, blood in the water. And I did that from time I was 8 years old for all this whole time, and I've never seen a shark while I was spearfishing. I've seen a few sharks diving, but just never was spearfishing. And you think about scuba diving, you're down the bottom, free diving, you're pretty wide open there. And especially if you go out to some of the places like along. We used to call it Flounder Flats area between the Monterey wharf and the hotel there. It's all big sandy area. It used to be a good place to go spearfishing for halibut. And of course, now I go up in the helicopter looking at sharks in Monterey Bay. And I gotta tell you, there's a hell of a lot of white sharks out there, but they don't really bother anybody. They just hang out there during the day. And I go out there where the cement boat was, Manresa, which popular surfing area and stuff. And, you know, if we see a shark, we'll call down to the lifeguards and stuff. But I think if people really realize how much is out there, they might rethink it. But, you know, it's like I said, if you're gonna go walking in the woods or something, you're gonna go in the ocean, you might see a shark. But it's pretty remote. It's really remote. Let me put it this way. Statistics I like to use. Since 1950 to the present, there's been anywhere from zero to about eight shark attacks a year off California. And the average is about maybe three or four a year. But some years there's zero, and some years there's as many as eight. And when you think about it, the average number of attacks hasn't changed in what, 73 years. But the population in California has gone from what, about 15 million to 40 million. And there's a lot more people, as you know, in the water now than there was even 30 or 40 years ago. I tell people that to put in perspective that, yeah, if you want to spend time in the water, great. Go out for it, go diving, go surfing. I did a little surfing when I was younger, but I really got into the diving, so I never really pursued the surfing as much as I probably should have grown up around here. I'll be up in the helicopter just looking for sharks. And we'll go along up there around Sea Cliff and the cement boat area and stuff. Especially in a summer day, you'll see people on the beach laying around. Their kids are playing in the surf and they don't realize there's like six white sharks about a hundred feet beyond the surf just, Just hanging out. If people saw that, they'd be like running around with their hair on fire. And the sharks are just hanging out there. Kids are playing in the surf, and usually during the day the sharks are just hanging out. They tend to get aggressive. I don't say aggressive, but more active is usually around dawn. Between dawn and dusk, that's when they're typically hunting. During the day, they're just hanging out, resting, chilling, not trying to avoid the people in the water.

So let me get this straight. So you're in a helicopter, you're near the cement boat Sea Cliff, you see sharks 100ft from swimmers. You don't dial 911 and call them up and say, hey, get those people out of the water. You just continue on business as usual.

Oh, they'll easily, you know, call down. They'll let the lifeguards know, and they'll usually put up some kind of notice, just that there's sharks around. The interesting thing around here in Monterey, which has been interesting, is that the sharks we see up around the cement boat tend to be the little. Okay, let me qualify the little white sharks, which are the young of the year and they're between 6 and 8ft long. My personal thing, if the sharks as big as me, I'm six foot. If the sharks as big as me or bigger, like I'm going to get out of the water probably, but depending on the species, but I'm going to get out of the water. But the big ones, I know you're a surfer and any surfers would know this. If you go down towards Manresa, that's where you see sort of the larger sharks, the ones that are over 12ft or so, the bigger ones. And they think about white sharks because really in California if there's a shark incident, that's the problem. White sharks generally eat fish and fish and other sharks actually, until they're about, they get to be about 10 to 12ft. Their teeth when they're smaller, are very narrow. When they get about 10ft, the jaws become much larger and triangular. Which is what people, when they think of like Jaws, like the movie, these large triangular teeth, they don't get that way until they're about 10 to 12ft. What happens is at that size, they switch from feeding just on bony fishes and other sharks to starting to feed on marine mammals, harbor seals, elephant seals, those types of things. So when I talk about these, these ones like, like at Sea Cliff, the cement boat, most those are small white sharks, like 6 to 8 foot. And some days I'll go up there and I'll literally count 40 white sharks along a two to three mile stretch of beach. I just get tired of counting them. There's so many of them around there at this time. And that's actually. I got to put in a plug in for this. That's actually a good thing in a way because to me it speaks to the health of the bay. Because you know when you see that many sharks out there. Up until 2014, it was only the larger sharks you would see. We never saw the small white sharks. They were always in Southern California, which is their main sort of nursery ground. And what we think's gone on is because the population is so healthy, part of it is due to the Marine Mammal Protection Act. There's a lot more marine mammals out there. The population's expanded and their nursery area has now expanded up to Monterey Bay. And so that's why we're seeing these Little ones up here, you know, since about 2014, whereas we, we really didn't used to see them before that. So that to me always talks about. And I think it's. I really want to say about the, the health of bay is I think in, in like in conservation, marine conservation, you hear so many like just negative stories one after another and you kind of eyes kind of gloss over like, God, aren't we doing anything right? And here you were doing something right. I think people should, you know, stand up and you know, pat themselves in the back. Hey, we did something right here with, with this whole project. And you know, we had. In 1994, California passed a. Was a third. Well the first state in the US was only a third location to pass a prohibition. Prohibition on catch, on catching and targeting white sharks. If you catch them accidentally, that's one thing, but you can't target them since 1994, which probably helped. I think it was more the Marine Mammal Protection act from the 70s, but was interesting is the first country to ever develop white shark protection was in South Africa. And I fortunately happened to be involved with that back in 1990 and they passed the white shark protecting white sharks. Then it was Australia in 1993 and then after that it was California. So it was neat to see some of these. You know, all this kind of came about much after, you know, this whole conservation thing started to get going in the early 90s.

Okay, two more questions about surfers and sharks. Okay, so far away in the very unlikely chance that Madison and I are in the water and we see a white shark, what should we do?

I would be safe and just like probably get out of the water. I mean some people stay in the water. If I'm diving and I knock on wood. I've never seen a white shark diving. I've seen plenty from the boat. But you know, if I, if I'm in the water and there's a large toothy shark, white shark, tiger shark, I just try to get out of the water. And just to be on the safe side, I mean the. I see on social media you'll see people post these pictures of divers swimming up to tiger sharks and patting them on the nose or free diving with white sharks. And I think that's not a good thing because I think it sends the wrong message to people that don't know that they're gonna think, okay, I can swim up to this like, you know, 12 foot long white shark and swim with it or whatever. And you don't know, think about as a wild animal Again, you might see a mountain lion or a bear in the woods and may not probably want to attack you, but you don't want to go poke the bear, so to speak and you know, create a situation where you could get hurt. Same with white sharks or any large sharks like that. You just don't want to take a chance.

You see all these videos from Yellowstone where the tourist is going up to the buffalo, right. And the buffalo charges them and yeah, you cannot fix stupid. But anyway, yeah, so now Madison and I are in the water, we see a white shark 12 to 20ft. So in our brains we're thinking, get out of the water. Now I want to know how to get out of the water. Do we like turn and burn and paddle as fast and furiously or do we try to gently like sneak out of the water? How do we get out of the water?

I would try to like just try to. Okay, and I'm saying this is, we're sitting here not in the water right now, but as calm as you can. Try to like paddle the shore without getting too. Because sharks can pick up on stuff when there's a change in behavior and that's what you don't want to do. So just as calmly as you can. And again, it's qualified because you see a large shark there, your adrenaline is going to go up and stuff and everything. And sharks will cue off that they pick up on that type of stuff. So as calmly as you can, paddle to shore as quickly as you can.

Okay, but I would suppose that the old joke is I don't have to paddle faster than the shark, I just have to paddle faster than Madison. And if I were the shark, well, if I were the shark, I said, okay, I can bite Madison or I can bite this old stringy Asian. Guess what? I would pick if I were the shark. But anyway, let's take an apocalyptic scenario where for some reason all sharks disappeared over fished some virus, you know, whatever, all the sharks, California disappeared. What would happen to the ocean environment if all sharks went away?

If by the time all the sharks disappeared, we'd probably be screwed. To make it short, and this is actually a great question because when I talk to general audiences a lot of times I try to talk like when you see things like white sharks disappearing, it's probably pretty late because they're a very high level predator and when you start to see those things disappear, you've got some problems further down the food chain. And again I look for these called the lost sharks. A lot of them are lower level predators, but if you start seeing those things disappear, you've got a problem. And that's when you should be addressing it, because probably, and I say there's a problem because probably their food's gone along, which could be smaller fishes, it could be crabs, crustaceans, things that they're lower down the food chain. So by the time you get to where all the sharks are gone, you've probably got a huge problem and we're probably screwed at that point because there's been a whole cascading effect of things that have gone on below that's caused them to disappear. Actually, an example going on now, there's a bit of a debate you may have heard of, like in South Africa, that a couple of orcas have started feeding on white sharks down there. And I don't know if you've heard of that. It's been in the news a bit and you'll see these articles about these two orcas wiping out the white shark population in South Africa. And it's like, no, the white shark population was pretty healthy. Talking to people there that I know that have been studying this thing, what it looks like is that a lot of the white sharks would feed on and a lot of the bony fishes that these other sharks would feed on have been overfished. And basically, if you remove the foundation of a building, your building is going to collapse. If you think about the top of that building, or pyramid, whatever I always think of a building because you have your foundation, you build up the top of that, your roof's going to be like the white shark and you've got all this stuff below it. You take out the foundation of all these lower level, you know, trophic level predators, these other sharks that are food for the white sharks, you get rid of those, the white sharks, they're around, but they're just going to move to a different area where there's food. And the ones that are left are being taken out by these orcas in South Africa. As they say, by the time you get to the sharks, you've, you better be looking at, paying attention. A lot of other things going on at a lower level.

Okay, and is there any part of sharks that really has these magical medicinal properties like shark teeth prevents cancer or shark fin prevents cancer? All this mysticism about eating parts of sharks, is that all bullshit?

The short answer is yes. We don't know right now. We don't know. And I don't want to quite say BS because sometimes you might find find something later on. But I know people have studied this whole thing about sharks and cancer and other medicinal uses. One of the ones is the squalene from the shark liver oil for treating certain things. And a lot of these go back to a lot of the Asian markets there. And I know people have actually studied that and they just have never found anything that they could say, yeah, if you take this cartilage extract, this will prevent cancer, or if you take this squalene, this will help with some other medicinal use. There's just been nothing proved by. But again, people will swear by it. It's like a lot of nutritional supplements people take. Some people swear by them and other people think they're just hocus pocus. Up next on Remarkable People, a few things I always encourage people like, you want to have a positive attitude. You want to have a drive, a focus, you want to be persistent and a passion. If you got those five things, they'll carry you far in life with whatever you want to do.

Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. I guess I had heard about it before, but this practice of finning, where you cut the fin off a shark that's still alive and you put the shark back in the water, is that the definition of cruelty?

You just open up a big can of worms there on that. But this is actually a good example. Shark fins and shark finning has been going on for well over a hundred years, probably a couple hundred years. And a lot of it goes back to a lot of Chinese. And a lot of the Asian were finning sharks for years. If you went to San Francisco's Chinatown before the movie Jaws came out in the 70s, you could find shark bins in the markets there. Nobody paid any attention to them. And even after the movie Jaws came out, people got a little more interested in sharks and they're focused on shark attacks. But nobody really got too interested in fins until in the late 80s when I was doing a lot of my research. I'd lived in Taiwan, I was living in South Africa, and I was seeing these buyers, primarily Chinese buyers, going around to, like, villages in Africa and stuff and buying shark fins. And I at the time, again, it's a different mindset than today. It's kind of curious, you know, whether using them for different soups and stuff. I've had shark fin soup before. I. It's okay. I don't really get what the big attraction is, but I know from living in Asia, they'll say, oh, it's like having chicken noodle soup. I don't know. But anyway, and so my professor, and this is again a great example of what a great time it was, the late 80s, in the 80s and 90s, was that this was my first, actually my first book. We were writing up this thing, we started talking about this whole shark finning thing and we actually wrote a section in our first book I ever did on this sort of shadowy industry of this shark finning going on. At that time in 1989, nobody was even talking about shark fins. Are you kidding? And then also at that time, we also estimated that there was probably somewhere between about 25 and 65 million sharks. Sharks a year were killed as bycatch. Again, nobody was even thinking about this at that time. And of course, nowadays shark finning is a huge issue. But this, again, I'll trace this back to the movie Jaws. People got interested in sharks because of that movie and now pay attention to like, they look at fins and yeah, you talk about the cruelty of shark finning and stuff. And again, I know they probably do this on the high seas. A lot more things like blue sharks, the meat's not very good. So I know they a lot of times take the fins off and keep the fins. But I can tell you from my own experiences having lived in Asia and stuff, a lot of these areas, these villages, they don't send any protein back. You know, same in Africa. Protein's protein for the village or the small community. And so, yeah, the fins are an added bonus to it. But the meat will get consumed as well when you're on the high seas and they catch things like blue sharks, which are kind of like bunny rabbits of the high seas. They breed, they're so prolific, people will remove the fins and I understand they'll keep the fins and remove the carcass, which, yeah, I mean, it's. There's no doubts that it's. You can make a case for it being a very cruel behavior and stuff like that.

So let's suppose that my listeners are now just fascinated by sharks and, well, hopefully they buy the book. But then the second thing is, where are the best places to go and see sharks?

It depends where you want to go. And I should add that too, we talk about mainly sharks, what people think of sharks. There's these other things that are called flat sharks, which are the rays. If you think about it, if you take a shark which you think of a typical shark and you flatten it down and you roll the gills from the side of the head, underneath of it, that's really a ray. So when you see skates, arrays, that's really a flat shark. So in addition to the 545 species of sharks, you have another sort of 650 species of rays out there too. And I mentioned the rays because rays tend to be a lot more gentle and you can swim with those, and they're not going to generally bite your snap at you and stuff. But if you want to go see sharks, think about, like, manta rays. People love to go to Hawaii or someplace to be able to dive with manta rays and stuff with the sharks. There's certain areas where people can go. If you wanted to see white sharks, for example, that's a really popular places. There's places you can go see, like, tiger sharks. And that really depends on what you're looking for because California, you can go out to Elkhorn Slough at times of the year and you see leopard sharks go kayaking up the slough in the springtime on a low tide. You can see lots of leopard sharks out there. You can see blue sharks out in Monterey in the summer and in the fall out here, of course, white sharks. So it depends what you want to see. Okay. And where you want.

I want to see Jaws.

You want to see Jaws?

Well, I want to see Jaws.

Why don't you go out and go surfing? Go out to Manresa, maybe take some chum with you and they're madison with you, and just go out, splash around a lot, make a lot of noise, and maybe I'll coordinate. I'll fly above in the helicopter and I'll, like, radio down like, okay, guy, we got one. They're there. You should think about too, is people tend to think of, with like, white sharks, you think of the fin at the surface. White sharks are mostly under the water. And so you could have six of them around your surfboard and you'd never know it because they're under the water. And when you're at surface level, you can't see them, but you get up a little bit and you'll see them. Great.

And do they like yellow surfboards or is that a myth?

You mean yum yum yellow?

Yeah, yeah.

There seems to be some, like, these bright colors, like bright yellow. They call it yum yum yellow or bright orange. Those bright colors, they definitely seems to be a bit of an attraction for them.

That is also good to know.

Yeah.

Okay, so what are the biggest threats to sharks?

The biggest threats are, again, I want to put in Perspective like places like in California and actually in, in the US Sharks are generally very well protected. You can make a few arguments here and there, nitpick, but generally they're the populations are pretty good. But the big thing is overfishing in a lot of areas from them, habitat degradation, a lot of species, particularly in poor countries, developing countries, the habitats a lot of the sharks, coastal sharks will use like mangroves and areas for their part of the reproductive cycle. Those things have been destroyed in a lot of areas. But overfishing is probably the number one issue and then followed by habitat destruction.

Now when you say overfishing, you mean overfishing of what sharks eat or overfishing of sharks themselves?

Overfishing the sharks themselves. Now again, as I want to qualify a little bit, but some shark species you can fish sustainably. There are a few species you can. But a lot of the species, particularly some of the larger species, coastal species, these are what are called whaler sharks that occur in coastal areas. And it's been shown time and again you can fish these things down pretty easily in some of these areas. You can go out there and you can fish, you can hit them pretty hard and they'll disappear locally, you can wipe them out. And there's documented areas where this has occurred.

So let's say someone's listening and 10 years old, it's the next Dave Ebert, right? So what's your advice to them about how to pursue your footsteps again?

You're 10 years old, you just want to stay focused on what you want to do. And it's a little different today because people want instant gratification, but you got to look at the long term. This sounds basic, but you want to do good in school because you want to get to college, but also broaden yourself. Everybody thinks like you just need to do sharks, do other stuff, have a well rounded experience. You can you learn to go diving, work on any kind of projects. Probably the one thing I tell grad students, you want to develop skills, whether it's on a computer, it's in the field, you want to develop skills. The shark stuff will come like when students come, grad students that I have come to my lab, I'll teach you about sharks. You want to learn skills, whether it's diving, whether it's boating, computer, probably the two things I would tell anybody to learn as you start from your 10 years old and going forward, learn how to write and how to speak publicly. My friends now that knew me laugh about, but I was so introverted, like even through high school and into college. And it was really a professor of mine told me, says, you know, if you want to make it in this field, you've got to learn how to speak professionally and you need to learn how to write. And I couldn't write to save my life and I couldn't speak. But what was a key thing for me on the speaking part was this professor said like, so Dave. And I was in graduate school this time, says again, okay, this is the 80s, so take into account inflation now. But he says, if somebody's going to pay you $100 to get up and speak in front of that group, would you do that? And I'm like, hell yeah, I would. For a hundred bucks, heck yeah, I'll learn to speak. And so it was that financial little thing to speak, but it really is too. Those are probably the two best skills you could learn, how to speak and how to write. It's all skills. And again, don't focus on the sharks. If you have a chance to go work on marine mammals or invertebrates or learn some other. Even if it's a lab or some field experience, take it doesn't matter. You can learn about sharks, just get the experience.

Are you just a great example of someone who luckily discovered their passion very early and just kept at it. Did you ever think that, that when you're 10 and you look forward, like when I'm middle aged, I'll be the shark guy? Was that the goal?

No, I never imagined I'd ever even write one book and I've written like 35 now. I just never thought about that. I just had this fascination with sharks. And I also, I like to travel. I always had this dream when I was young, I wanted to go see the world. I don't know where that came from. Somewhere in my family, I got a family of explorers that like to go out and learn new things and explore. I think that was the big thing with me. I had that explorer gene. I wanted to go learn. And the few things I always encourage people like, you want to have a positive attitude, you want to have a drive, a focus, you want to be persistent and a passion. If you got those five things, it'll carry you far in life with whatever you want to do, whether it's sharks or some other area. Those are just things you can learn and you just have to have innate and you can go really far in life. Here's something else I'll pass along to you, okay? And people don't realize this, but white sharks actually hunt in the surf. They actually like to hunt there. And the reason they do that is it puts them at an advantage over the seals, and that's the best time. Where they like to catch the seals is right when you get a nice surf break and stuff. That's oftentimes when they'll attack.

What? Wait, but doesn't a human being in a black wetsuit look like a seal could?

Yeah. And here's something else that very few people know. Another little thing I'll share with you because I actually, I was the first person actually did this back in the late 80s, early 90s. I actually, I documented that large sharks. I did this mainly around seven gill sharks, which occur in the bay, but white sharks do this too, is they'll hunt cooperatively in groups, in packs, and depending on the prey that they're taking now, they're not likely to hunt as a group on surfers, but you never know. But oftentimes, if you see one shark or white shark around, there'll be others around and sometimes larger prey that they will cooperatively hunt, depending on what they're hunting. Geez. Just something else for you to think about.

There's another parallel with you and Jane Goodall, because until Jane Goodall discovered this, everybody thought that chimps didn't have social interaction, didn't use tools, didn't use all this kind of stuff. And Jane Goodall is the one who proved that, yeah, chimps use tools and all that. So now Dave Ebert is telling us that sharks cooperate when they hunt. Good to know.

It's interesting you brought up Jane Goodall on this, because I'd seen some of this stuff when I was doing my master's degree. And again, just so people understand, it's like I spent years to get a few glimpses of this thing, and it was very opportunistic. But I was watching how these sharks were hunting just different types of sharks, and I was going like, man, they're not just randomly attacking stuff. It's a very coordinated attack, Basically, social facilitation. And I was living in Africa, and my advisor, Leonard Copano, and this is the great brilliant stuff, like I learned from him. And at that time, he says, let me give you some books and read these. And the books were on the spotted hyena and the Serengeti lion. And it talked about their feeding behavior, the foraging behavior. And I couldn't put these books down. And I was like, oh, my God, this is exactly what these sharks are doing. And if you think of some of these species, like the way lions will hunt in a pride or hyenas will hunt in a group. That's how these sharks will hunt. And if they find a good area, they like that, they're successful hunting. They'll go back there repeatedly to hunt in the same area. And I know we know this, like the fair lawns, there's certain areas where the elephant seals will come in and out of the water. And we see this at Seal island often. And these sharks will come back and they'll hunt in the same spot. And then sometimes, depending on what they're hunting, they'll hunt in a group, in a pack, basically. And it's fascinating. You gotta spend a lot of time in the field. And this is the kind of stuff I'd encourage young people to do. Just watch, just sit there and watch what's going on and try to put into context. And that was probably some of the most exciting stuff I ever did. But of course, we start thinking about these large sharks. Actual hunt in a group can be a little, I don't want to say scary, but a little, I'll say, interesting.

I hope you enjoyed learning about sharks and the life and work of Dave Ebert, a true pioneer in the field of shark research. His discoveries and explorations have shed new light on these majestic creatures and contributed to our understanding of the ocean's complex ecosystem. Don't forget to check out Dave's books and watch for his appearances on TV shows and documentaries to learn more about his fascinating work. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. My thanks to Neil Pearlberg for introducing me to Dave and making this interview possible, not to mention letting me have a few waves when we're surfing together. My thanks to Jeff C. Pegg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura and Louise McGanna, all part of the remarkable team. And last but not least is the drop in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madison Nismer. Until next week, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.