Julie Packard: Ocean Lover, Philanthropist, and Conservationist

This week's Remarkable People podcast features a woman who fell in love with the Monterey Bay while studying science at UC Santa Cruz. On many dark, dank and cold mornings, Julie Packard waded through the icy waters of the intertidal zone to study the plants and animals. She did this as research about the impact of humans on the Central California coast. In the late 70s, David Packard, half of the founding team of Hewlett Packard, challenged his children to come up with a big project that would make a difference in the world. Julie's sister Nancy, Nancy's husband and a couple of friends came up with the concept of an aquarium. Eventually, this led to her father and mother investing $55 million to fund what is now the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Initial studies projected 350,000 visitors a year. Year one drew 2.4 million people. Since its opening day on October 20, 1984, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has introduced over 60 million people to the incredible sea life off the Central California coast as well as the vast ocean beyond. Julie is the Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and an international leader in the field of ocean conservation. She is also a leading voice for science based policy reform in support of a healthy ocean. Can you guess what sea animal she'd like to come back as? Stay tuned and you'll soon find out. Her philosophy is to learn something every day, work with great people and motivate them to make the world a better place. This is Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People podcast.

And now here's Julie Packard. For me and I think many people, 367addison is the center of the universe. It's like where time began. And you didn't live there.

No. I'm so sorry to stay. That is Mecca. A shrine to the tech community for sure. But my three older siblings were born there. But by the time I came around, my dad had decided he wanted to move up into the hills. So he was born in Pueblo, Colorado in a really rural. I don't know if any of the listeners have been to Pueblo, but there's not a whole lot going on. It's right at the edge of the prairie in Colorado. And he was just super outdoorsy and secretly wanted to be a farmer, rancher I think, before he, you know, became an engineering genius. And so they moved from Palo Alto up to Los Altos hills in the 50s and then where I was born. So no, sadly I didn't live at Addison. I don't have any stories. You'd have to interview my older siblings.

But still, you did grow up in the Family that arguably started Silicon Valley. So what was that like?

Things were very different back then. First of all, just setting the scene. We moved up in the hills in Los Altos Hills, kind of above what's now Foothill College. And back then it was just apricot orchards and oak forests. And you look out over the valley. There was, of course, hardly any urbanization at all. And so it was very r and a lot quieter back then, of course. And growing up, probably like most kids in the 50s, my dad worked all the time, no surprise. And my mother was very traditional and there were four of us in the family. And for her it was about being, being supportive, raising your kids with manners and good values. But we had a great place to grow up. My dad bought this apricot orchard, and we spent our summers in the orchard cutting the apricots to make dried apricots. So my dad, as I said, loved vegetable gardening and growing stuff. He was a huge nature lover, but it had to be functional. Hunting, fishing, growing things, cattle ranching. He loved driving tractors. He'd get out in the tractor and dis the orchard every spring and drive the tractor around. And in the summer, apricots would be harvested and we'd sell them to the canneries. Back then, Santa Clara Valley, they were all the apricot and prune and cherry orchards. So there were canneries down there. You'd sell the fresh fruit. Then over time, of course, it was all urbanized, but we still continued to cut dried apricots. Sun dried dried apricots, Blenheims, the best. You can get them at the farmer's market. Now that is an insider tip to everyone in California. Look for the Blenheim apricots. They're the best.

This is the farmer's market on Sunday?

Yeah, just any farmer's market in the Bay Area you can find them. They're the old school kind that we used to grow in the Valley of the Heart's Delight, which is what they called Santa Clara Valley because grapefruit growing. So my dad worked a lot and he was very imposing. He needed to maintain a low profile at the dinner table. And he'd always win every argument. I mean, many of us, I'm sure, grew up in families like that. He just had such huge curiosity and just seemed to know everything about everything. And what he didn't know, he would read. He just had an incredible library of just the biggest array of subject matter, from calculating plumbing pipes for his irrigation system to the future of the defense industry in Russia.

Did he Come home and say, oh, today we got an order for 10,000 oscilloscopes from Disney. And nothing like that. We just invented reverse polish notation calculators.

Nothing like that. He would tell us about all those things and we thought they were very exciting and remarkable. We knew all those things were a very big deal, for sure. For me personally, though, you have to understand, I came of age in the 60s and that was a time when there was just a lot of unrest, a lot of protesting about the military industrial complex and HP was a big defense contractor. And so I personally always tried to maintain a really low profile about kind of, at the time, my dad's company, because of the political times, you know, there was controversy around it. Now tech is sort of just revered as everyone's in love with it, but not so much.

Other than Facebook, not so much.

But I mean, generally speaking, you know, those were very, very unsettled. Very unsettled. Interesting times. But yeah, my dad would share all those things and would they just blow us away? They were like, so cool.

Did it ever come to a point where you were philosophically opposed saying, dad, how can your company empower the military industrial complex?

Me personally? Well, absolutely. I was the youngest in the family and definitely a bit of the black sheep and how would I say it between the times and being the youngest, I think, and just being very independent, sure, I had those thoughts. But you didn't take my dad on about things. There was no, nothing, no good could come of it. Let's just say that.

What do you have any particular lessons? You look back, I can tell you what I learned from my father, the three or four most important things. You have a small number of things you can say. My father, really?

Yeah, absolutely. My dad was incredibly humble. I mean, arrogance was considered in our family the absolute worst quality. So we always were taught and he modeled that we were very fortunate and we needed to be humble about that and, you know, not ever be arrogant in any way. Not just having to do with money, but just in general. The privileges that we had, of course, which he created for the family, that was a big family value, giving back. Certainly because my parents established their family foundation early on. It was in the 60s, mid-1965. The Packard foundation is now 50 years old. And so early on, they established a family foundation and began supporting at first community projects. And the company was always very, very supportive and giving back to the community. In fact, my dad was an early supporter of the whole idea of corporate philanthropy, which in my opinion still has a long way to Go. If he were alive, he'd still be out there proselytizing about that, that companies need to reinvest in their communities. And so he believed that. And my mother actually ran the foundation early on as a volunteer and was very involved as a community volunteer. So that was modeled for us majorly the idea of giving back and engaging in your community. I thought she had a full time job growing up, honestly, and she didn't. She was a full time volunteer, but she was always gone all day or I'd be in the parking lot, in the car while she was volunteering on some board for the children's hospital or something like this.

So what did you learn from her?

Well, very similar values to my dad really. She was quite proper. She was a city girl. She wasn't an outdoorsy nature lover like my dad. She grew up in San Francisco and went to Catholic school and was very refined. And we needed to reflect well on our father at all times and have good manners and be presentable like any mother. I mean, I don't know, that's kind of mother job description 101, isn't it? So those were two things, I think, the humility and giving back. The final thing I'd say about my dad, he would listen to anyone. I mean his HP's management by wandering around that he wrote about in his book, the HP Way, of course, is an epic philosophy and management literature and creating. His door was truly always open and he liked talking to an employee at the lowest level in the company as much as, or even actually more than at a higher level, to be honest. He just loved getting in and talking to the team about what project they were working on. And he really did the whole idea of investing in people and giving them reign to do their best work, which was an HP philosophy. It's also a philosophy of our family foundation is invest in people and their ideas. And he really modeled that.

Now let's talk about the genesis of the aquarium. How did that come to be?

The aquarium was the brainchild of my sister and her husband and a couple of their colleagues. So here's how the story happened. So the family foundation, the David and Lucille Packard foundation, we were founded in the mid-60s and the four of us children were asked to be on the board, instructed to be on the board when we turned 21. So the foundation was funding a lot of different programs in different areas. And my father kind of challenged the group, hey, let's think of some big projects that we can do that are really all our own, rather than just funding other people's ideas. And it was my older sister Nancy, and as I said, her husband and a couple of their friends that were involved with teaching and research down at Stanford's Marine lab, Hopkins Marine Station or Marine Laboratories in Pacific Grove. Stanford had purchased this big old cannery right next door, the Hobden Cannery, where the aquarium is now located. And they didn't really have plans for it. It was just to buffer zone for all the development in Cannery Row. And they had the idea that this would be just a super cool thing to do with this old cannery. And that in Monterey there was no place for all the tourists to learn anything about the bay. And yet that's why they came there. We're all marine biologists. The four of them were invertebrate zoologists. And I studied marine algae. So none of us were fish people or marine mammal people. But we had fallen in love with the ocean and marine biology because of Monterey Bay. And this bay was just an inspiration. It's an amazing place. It's amazing rich biodiversity. And so we put together a proposal to the foundation to do feasibility study. If an aquarium was built on this site, could it be financially self supporting based on admission fees, and would there be enough attendance to support it? And that came out with a yes. And so with that, we incorporating a new foundation, the Monterey Bay Aquarium foundation, to plan, build and operate this aquarium. My parents put up the capital, $55 million to build it. And the deal was it had to operate on its own. And we proceeded to put together a board of local community leaders and scientists from around. We have such an amazing scientific community here around the bay. Science leaders and family members and hired architects and exhibit design consultants and a crazy array of specialized consulting help that you need to put together an esoteric kind of institution like an aquarium, and set ourselves to planning this aquarium. And the concept remained the same from the start, which was to do a tour of Monterey Bay habitats and kind of have that be a theme. And a few ideas about the aquarium were different than other aquariums before. 1. First of all, most aquariums are rows and rows of fish tanks. Certainly they were at the time. And that's not what the ocean's like. Fish are just a little tiny part of what the ocean's like. And so we want to really share the whole picture. Number one, we want to share it in a way where the plants and animals are represented as they would be in nature, meaning in communities. Kelp forest or rocky reef or sandy seafloor of Course we have this amazing site with the real thing outdoors, which really no other aquarium has a site that fabulous. Most aquariums are in the dark. When you think about it, you're in the dark because that actually makes the. From an exhibit design standpoint, it makes the tanks pop. You know, they're lit, the fish look great, the tanks look great. But like, wow, we got the real thing out here, this wild ocean. So we wanted a design that really drew your attention to the real thing outdoors and get people out on the decks and then could come inside and learn about what they had seen or the other way around. And then finally we really wanted to. Well, two other things that were kind of important points about the concept. One was we didn't want people to be in a one way path. We wanted it to be free choice. You could experience it however you wanted in whatever order you wanted. And then finally we wanted to really incorporate some of the new museum interpretive techniques that were happening at the science museums like the Exploratorium and what we all know as interactive exhibits where people are engaged with the learning. And previously a lot of aquariums were really a tank with fish and a label. Here's the name, here's where it's from, here's what it eats. Maybe another little factor too. And we wanted to just make it a more interesting and engaging experience. Have some more interactive kind of hands on interpretations. So those were some of the underlying concepts. And we naively thought we could remodel that old cannery. Wow, that talks about the or shows the case level of the group. Like I said, ask us about marine algal ecology and we can nail it. Anyway, we're like, we're going to remodel this cool old building. The building was built in 1916. It was, I believe, the largest cannery in Cannery row. But those canneries were just, I mean, it was such a boom and bust thing. And they'd make it, they were just canning, harvesting and canning, just, you know, tens of millions of tons of sardines and they'd add onto their buildings. I'd have a good year. And then things would go along and I mean they were just, you can still see, sadly, not many, but you can still see some remnants in cannery row of some of those old buildings. So we wanted to, we thought we could remodel the building. Of course, we were quickly dispused of that notion by the architects and engineers, but we were really happy with the concept architects came up with, which really was preserving the facade on cannery Row of that old building. And we kept. The old boilers are still a history exhibit when you go in the aquarium. And it turns out Newt Hovden, who was the owner of the cannery, was known to be an incredible innovator. And kind of like my dad, he invented a lot of new technology for sardine canning to make it go faster and to make the product better, one of which was to. He had a seawater system, a seawater intake line that went into that building just like the aquarium does. So that was kind of a cool thing. And the idea was, instead of have all the sardine boats offload the sardines at the dock, where they start rotting and they're not fresh, and then you have this giant pile of sardines hit the cannery. And it's a big processing logistics problem. He came up with the idea of these floating giant wooden boxes they called sardine hoppers. They're offshore and connected to a seawater intake pipe. And they'd offload the sardines out there, they'd stay all fresh, and then they, like, suck them into the building as they needed them to can them. So the building actually was registered on what's called the historic American Engineering record. We had to document all of his canning technology. So that's a little backstory about the site of the aquarium, which is amazing. And so that was the. The creation story. And it was about seven years between the time of the idea and the feasibility study and then all the design. It took a really long time to get the permits. That was a lot of drama because a city limit line between Monterey and Pacific Grove runs right through the aquarium site, which, of course, just complicated matters. And we have the Coastal Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers and just a lot of agency engagement. But then we. Yeah, we opened November 20th.

Did anybody fight it?

Well, that would be a whole other long story. Yeah, we got engaged in some opposition that was really around local politics, around land use planning, decisions that were coming down at the time. They didn't have to do with the merits of the project. Everyone thought the project sounded great. What a gift to the community. Most public aquariums are on city property, or they're funded by the city, or they're partially funded by the city, or they get an operating subsidy. So we are just. Hello. We're going to pay for this site. We're going to provide the capital to build this building. We're not asking you for any operating subsidy. We're asking you for the aquarium visitors to be part of the parking district. Which is a gold mine for the city. And so, yeah, we had opposition, but that's a whole other story. It was just local politics.

Has it evolved from an aquarium to more cause orientation?

Absolutely. We're just celebrating 35 years this year, and we've had a huge evolution in our mission, which is actually reflected in our mission statement. So when we began, the purpose statement for the Monterey Bay Aquarium was something like to expand public awareness, conduct research, and maybe had promote stewardship in there of Monterey Bay. What happened over time, as we all know, is the ocean changed. And our understanding of. Of what was happening in the ocean has undergone a transformation. Not a big enough transformation in terms of public awareness, but 30 years ago, everyone still thought the ocean was so vast that nothing could possibly affect it. And as our stories that we were telling about the bay and the ocean at large continued to evolve and stay up with the times, we. We realized that we really wanted and needed. It was really imperative for us to start talking more and more about the human impact stories of what was happening on the ocean, and not just the happy natural history stories about the cool fish and their weird habits, which is great. Obviously, that's what gets people to come in the door and fall in love with the animals and gets their attention. But we needed to, to add on a new species to the aquarium interpretation, which was humans. Because the original aquarium, we didn't really have humans so much as part of the story. So we over time, like, kind of transformed all of our interpretation to have more human impact, human stories, more conservation stories, and then eventually decided to do an exhibit called Fishing for what's the Catch? That we did in the mid-90s, right after we had opened our open sea wing and taken our story offshore to connect with the broader ocean. Fishing for solutions. We thought, okay, the situation in the ocean is getting dire. We need to do an exhibit about global fisheries and all the problems. And we did that exhibit. And in the course of it, we decided that we better get our restaurant menu seafood item list in shape or it would not look good. And from that whole effort, the Seafood Watch program was spawned, so to speak. Seafood Watch began as just a consumer guide to enable people to know the sustainability of the seafood on their plates. And around that time, then we realized this was really a big deal. It really picked up. And with that, around that time, we decided to make a commitment to grow that program and also to launch a real conservation and science work group and big effort at the aquarium. And the seafood work is at the centerpiece of that. But with that, we also changed our mission statement, which was a big milestone for us, to what it is today, which is the mission of the Monterey Bay Aquarium is to inspire conservation of the ocean. And the idea behind that being that the end game, the end goal of the whole institution and everything we do is about ocean conservation. But the word inspire in there is really important because we're a public institution and our best asset for achieving that goal in the ocean is the aquarium itself. And so our challenge and the, the beauty of what we do is that we have this amazing institution that inspires people, that can inspire people through connections with living animals and discovering the ocean, the real thing.

In a prior life, I was on the board of the Stanford Alumni association and we had many a meeting discussing the mission of the Stanford Alumni Association. It was pulling teeth. And so I'm just curious, was this something that your board, your trustees, you all got together and say, let's do this, or did you bring in McKinsey and they charge you 5 million bucks to get that sentence? So how did that go down, like.

With most things, probably is the theme in your podcast here, if you're talking to leaders, is it really came down to leadership? It came down to me. I'm like front and center, all conservation, all the time. I mean, that's what motivates me. Me, that's how I, it's my lens in life because of my life experience growing up. And so our board, when I sat in, and our team too. I mean, I think that our team was, hey, Julie, you're wanting us to do more and more of this conservation stuff. And it's getting to where we need to really make it official and do something, kind of codify it more. And also because for the team, the main activities of the aquarium, we've got the public side, the aquarium, the visitor experience, we've got all of our K12 education programs. And then we have research, which again is mainly conducted by MBAR Reed, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. But we just really needed to restate what is the priority here. And so the board got that. Some of the people were like absolute advocates helping me push that through. A couple of the more business oriented ones were a little concerned that, okay, is this going to sound like we're going to become an advocacy organization? It sound like NRDC or some super lefty conservation environmental agitators. And of course, or not, and we didn't intend to do that, but there was a little bit of concern about what does this mean, what are the optics of this? But in the end, the people around the table were, who can you kind of can't argue with? Okay, the ocean. Things are getting dire. We have this huge power to inform and engage and ignite the public. And from our team's perspective, that is the end goal. What's the outcome goal? Like everything we do, sure, we're a lot of the education programs, sure we're improving STEM education and we're concerned about, we're doing a lot of things, but we just, we needed to provide focus. One of my favorite things about the aquarium is the fact that we are viewed as non partisan. Like everyone loves bringing their kids to a zoo or an aquarium. It's a happy thing, no matter. You might be the most right wing Republican known to humanity or super lefty, but you're comfortable. We want the aquarium to be a comfortable place for everyone to come and have a great day. And so we need to continue to be that place that's open to all. And I'm most excited about reaching the people that maybe haven't thought about the ocean and the importance of engaging in the actions that we need to take to ensure that it's healthy for the future, for the benefit of humanity. The people that already are Sierra Club members, I'm kind of like, that's fine, but they're already there. My goal is to get them to realize the ocean. If you care about saving nature, you need to talk about the ocean. Because the ocean is the biggest part of nature. And that's where we being land dwelling species. The whole environmental movement is so much focused on land, as it should and as is understandable. But the ocean has got a profound influence on everything else and no one.

Has ever made the case. Well, if you're listing of the right kind of seafood and all that, you're affecting jobs and not like we need coal because there's 50,000 coal miners.

Interestingly, the Seafood Watch program, which now is a global program, it's a global fisheries and aquaculture program. We are super business friendly and we in the continuum of organizations working on this issue of overfishing, which is a serious problem and it's something that we know how to fix. I mean, that's the reason to work on it. You might think, oh, seafood, whatever. Like what about plastic and climate change and all of that? And we can talk about those things. But the thing about fishing is it's the most ancient relationship that humans have with the ocean. It's the only place where we're still extracting at least. Certainly the industrialized world is still extracting wildlife on a market basis. We think it's fine for people to be fishing. And we're here to help transform the seafood and aquaculture business enterprise to one that can be more sustainable into the future. We take heat from environmental groups and certainly, you know, and we take heat from business. We used to take mostly heat from business early on, as you said, because they're like, hey, you're saying now that the Patagonian toothfish is on the seafood watch avoid list. And we think that's unfair. The whole point is we're like, okay, well, come meet with us. If you fix these two problems next time around, you'll get a better rating. So it's been a huge driver. I mean, businesses really pay attention to it. What their rating is, it's quite fascinating and become much more powerful than we thought.

What would an environmentalist say against you?

Oh, well, that we are too friendly to fishing and that we should become. That we should all become vegans. Yeah. And we shouldn't eat any seafood.

And you don't believe that?

Well, no, I think that would be great for nature. I think it's. And I think it's not. I just tend to go for more practical solutions. And I feel like there's big money in the seafood enterprise. I mean, two points. One, it's big business. It's not going away anytime soon. So let's work to make it better. It is jobs. It's like millions of jobs, mainly in developing countries. And aquaculture is growing like gangbusters and it provides jobs. It's food security. If we can do it right, it's not going away. If we can do it right, let's go for it. Let's work to have that all happen in a better way. And as far as catching wild fish, fisheries are resilient. And as it turns out, if you lay off them when they've been overfished, they will recover. Now, in the big scheme of things, is the ocean a lot more depauperate than it was 200 years ago? Yes, it is. And so for those who say, well, in the best of all worlds, humans would quit extracting any life out of the ocean, yeah, sure, that would be wonderful. I mean, something like, I don't know, like over a billion people depend on seafood for their primary protein. There's a big food security question here and livelihoods of millions of people in coastal economies. And I guess on top of it, you have countries where people are moving up in the middle class and it is really increasing demand for beef and meat. And that's a whole other, I think, really worthy consideration to say, hey, if the world ate less animal protein, it would have really positive impacts on climate and a lot of other things. I don't argue with those points of view. I think that's all true. We're just focusing on the seafood situation and making a lot of progress. It's quite remarkable. There's a lot more to do though.

How do you audit or determine what's on that seafood watch list? Do you depend on other researchers or you do first hand research?

So seafood watch rating system is based on published available research. People get confused about it. It's not a third party certified audited program. So it's not. If you go into your Safeway and there's a piece of fish there, it's not going to say, okay, we have this fish is a piece of halibut. And we've. Well, first of all, any fish caught in the US is always a good choice these days. It didn't used to be. But if you want to really play it safe, buy something caught in a US fishery because at least we have regulations and even our fisheries that were depleted, they're recovering. In some cases it's going to take a long time. But that piece of fish in the store that you're buying that has a seafood watch reading of yellow or green, it means that we have evaluated against the set of criteria that I can talk about the sustainability of that particular fish. Like the Alaskan halibut fishery as an example. It doesn't say that we know that that piece of halibut is a piece of halibut and it doesn't say that we know that that piece of halibut came from Alaska because that would require that we are doing an audit program. Now there is a program that does that, that's called the Marine Stewardship Council, which is the next level. Seafood watch is just a set of stuff standards for businesses and fisheries to aspire to. And it's an involuntary program. We rate all these fisheries whether you want us to or not. So it's just there, transparent bunch of ratings about sustainability of these different fisheries. Marine Stewardship Council was an organization started by World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, I don't know, over 20 years ago that does provide third party certification and they have their criteria. And if you're MSC certified, it means that your fishery has met the sustainability criteria and you've been inspected to and you're reporting back and the third party certifier is saying, yeah, you are. And you have to get recertified every five years. Okay. It's complicated. All you need to know about it for the moment. But I'm always happy to talk more about. I think it's fascinating, but I'm kind of a nerd on the topic because it's making so much progress. It's really exciting. I mean, there's just a lot of good stuff, a lot of good stuff going on.

You seem excited and optimistic, whereas you read this gigantic Pacific island plastic patch. What is the greatest threat? Well, to the ocean?

Well, the greatest threat to the ocean, no surprise. Carbon pollution, climate change, climate crisis, whatever the current lingo is for it. I mean, clearly it's like the mother of all environmental issues. Like any environmental issue that you can think of. Twenty years ago, whatever we said the problem was, now like, oh, it's just like an existential threat. And when it comes to the ocean, obviously we read about sea level rise, which of course, mainly people are focusing on whether their home's going to be inundated, which is a serious problem to consider. There's a tremendous amount of coastal habitat that contains a huge amount of biodiversity that is changing, is going to continue to be altered and just affects entire ecosystems that we can't even imagine. But the big threat that people are just beginning to talk about, which is just insanely concerning, is the whole ocean acidification thing, which is, as CO2 goes in the ocean water, it makes it more acidic. And those changes are happening already. And as the water becomes more acidic, it's just going to cause. It already is causing changes from. From animals big to small that have calcium in their cell walls and their shells that can't form. But also just physiological systems that we don't even. We're just beginning to understand what those might be. So that's going to have profound effect. And then the ocean warming, which is already happening. And of course, we're experiencing that right here in our part of the world, in the central coast. Scientists have documented species shifts where we see more southerly species living up here than we did 20 years ago. Just in my lifetime, since I've been out in the tide pools doing research and collecting algae and looking at animals. So that's happening. And so that climate change is a huge deal and sort of the mother of all issues. I mean, whether it's coral bleaching or impacts of warm water, the whole ocean food web. And the one thing about it that most people don't know is the ocean is really. I've started to talk about the ocean as our best healthy ocean as our best defense against damaging climate change. And the reason is the ocean has absorbed something like 90% of the heat generated from burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. I mean, think about that. The ocean is like a giant modulator of heat in the atmosphere and the whole global system, number one, then number two, all the plant life, the little microscopic plankton plants that live in the ocean, photosynthesizing and sucking up CO2. And the ocean absorbs something like 25% of the carbon emissions. And that's huge too. And that all happens because of a living ocean. All of that CO2 uptake by those tiny plants. If the ocean's dead, that's not happening. And that's pretty much the end of life on the planet. Not to be a downer, but it's big. It's really big. Of course, also the ocean plants produce a lot of oxygen and a lot of that is consumed by life in the ocean. But it's, it is a vast part of the, of the system that makes life, life able to exist on Earth.

So if, if a random person is listening to this podcast and thinking, oh my God, I believe it, I buy it, everything you just said, what can one person do? Not in charge of a foundation.

I think, of course, I'm asked that a lot. And our over 2 million people that come to the Monterey Bay Aquarium every year, they definitely ask us that all the time. Wow. Okay. I love the ocean. I love these animals. I want my grandkids to see them. And I want us all to. I want humanity to be, to survive and thrive as long as we can on this planet. You know what, what can I do? And I answer that question in a couple of ways. I mean, first of all, just get engaged in the process of political action in your community, in your state, in your nation. People need to get out and engage and get the right people in charge of these decisions. Because our environment is a common. It's something that, that society needs to decide together for the benefit of everyone. You know, what the rules are and the way we've been operating, there's a lot of, there's just a huge amount of extracting of resources and damaging of ecosystem services that we, that we all depend on. And change happens. Start local. That's where the change begins. And in these days, certainly in the US where I know people are probably feeling rather deflated about how much leadership we can provide, and we feel like we're losing ground, which we are in terms of a lot of the excellent Environmental protections. The good news here in the US Is a lot of great stuff is happening at the state level. California, for example. The best thing anyone living in California right now can do is support our state or wherever your state is, support its leadership. Because what's happened here in California, whether it's the progressive environmental policy, I mean, we've always led the way in environmental policies here in our state. And it hasn't exactly been at the cost of our economy, by the way. I mean tourism and the tech sector, like, huge. And of course tourism depends on taking care of your environment. And all that's happened because voters care and they voted. They put the right people in office. They supported huge public funding initiatives. I mean, we've had these like $5 billion land and water protection bond initiatives in California to. We've created the first, first and only integrated network of marine protected areas in California state waters. Like that was a first in the US Anywhere. We have an incredible network of protected lands, protected coastal lands. People drive from San Francisco to LA and they're always kind of shocked. You have almost 40 million people living here in the state. And this looks so great. And Monterey Bay itself, the Central coast, is totally reviving and thriving. We had, when BBC came out or decided they were looking at doing a live broadcast about the ocean, Big Blue live, and they picked all the places in the world, they picked Monterey Bay to do this live nature broadcast, which was fantastic. I mean, we had like whales and white sharks and everything under the sun. So I say get involved in your community to support policies. And that's, that's the best thing that you can do. And of course, changes in your personal life. I would say the whole seafood movement and the improvement in sustainable seafood, US consumers making the right choice has driven a huge amount of business change. And that really makes a difference. And the same thing can happen with plastic too. I know everyone's very concerned about that. And over time, if people start showing. Okay, we really don't need so much single use plastic. Well, if.

If I were gonna go for seafood dinner, is there anything I just should not eat because I'm not checking labels as the waiter brings out whatever you should be.

You should be checking your seafood watch app. Now what you need to be looking for in the restaurant along. Oh, you go out to dinner with me, I pull out my app. Are you kidding? Oh, yeah, roll a waiter. Actually, the best thing consumers can do. We've done so much public opinion polling about this whole seafood thing. People say the public says their best source of information about sustainable seafood is their weight person or the person at the seafood counter. Well, it turns out the wait person usually doesn't know anything. And the only reason, the only way they're going to get to know something is by all of us asking questions. So that's one of the key messages on our Seafood Watch Pocket guide. Ask questions, ask questions. Ask your weight person. Where did this fish come from? Is it sustainable? And how do you know? And they'll tell you. Now, many, many restaurants these days in coastal states, certainly in the west coast states, definitely not in the inland states, and probably less so in east coast coastal states, restaurants will refer to. They'll use it as a sales point, and they'll say, our seafood is sustainable per Monterey Bay Aquarium guidelines. But you're safe with the things caught in the US Pretty much. Pretty much are. Okay. And local fish, Local US Fish, like, we've been really promoting, all of our ground fish fisheries here in California are reopened after being declared a federal disaster and being closed for over a decade. Ask what the local fish is. If you're in the US and you'll be good here, that means, like, rockfish and lingcod.

But isn't it counterintuitive? You're saying, okay, so we want to preserve the ocean, preserve wildlife. So wouldn't that say, well, don't eat from local fisheries because they're fishing right here and reducing our population right here?

Well, the important thing isn't whether it's right here. The important thing is, does it have good regulation? Okay, that's the thing. And one thing I will say, because the whole eat local movement, which we are all aware of, certainly in our part of the world here in Santa Cruz, California. Okay, here's the crazy thing. The United States imports 80% of the seafood we eat, and we export 90% of the seafood that we catch. Makes no sense. So if you go to a restaurant in the U.S. chances are the fish did not come from here. It came from another country. Because in the US The US Market, which is, we're, I think, the third biggest market for seafood in the world now. So even though you and I might think, how often do we eat seafood? Americans eat a lot of seafood, and we're a big driver in the global seafood market. Biggest thing, Americans eat shrimp farm shrimp farm salmon. And so both of those products are really bad news in terms of the environment. And our team at the aquarium is working hard to improve standards. And so that's another story, because those are both farm products. One of the things that's Been really tough on all of our local fishing communities. Along the coast of the US Is all this imported seafood because no one's buying local seafood anymore. There's not even a distribution system. To be honest, it's crazy. That's starting to change. So the more people, the eat local is a really good thing for people to ask.

And what's wrong with farmed?

Farmed can be fine. It's just the way it's happening now is bad news. And the main things are salmon farms use a lot of antibiotics. That's a huge issue. They create a lot of fish waste in a really concentrated area can be equivalent to like a raw sewage outfall of the mid sized city in one spot. And so that can create a dead zone like in the area the farmed salmon, they get diseases that people are concerned can spread to wild salmon in areas where wild salmon exist. In some areas that's not an issue. If wild salmon don't exist there and the fish can escape and breed with a wild fish and pollute the gene pool.

If there is another life, what would you want to come back as?

What?

Animal or plant or.

Yes, yes. Oh, if it includes plants, that's a problem because I'm a botanist, but I'm going to stick with animal. My favorite fish is this crazy fish. It's called mola. Mola, the Latin name. It's an ocean sunfish. People will come to the aquarium. If you go to the big open sea exhibit, you'll recognize it. It can grow to be the small size of a Volkswagen Bug. It looks like a big dinner plate with a fin sticking up off the top and the bottom. It's the world's largest bony fish. I'm a huge fan for a lot of reasons. One it is, it has no commercial value. So like no one seems to care about this poor fish. We have myriad scientific research papers on tunas and sharks. The stuff we like to eat and the scary stuff, this mola, which is like the coolest looking animal ever. Like no data whatsoever. The aquarium we're doing some tagging studies. Nothing likes to eat it. It's got really thick skin. It doesn't taste good, which is. That's what I want, who I want to be. Like, animals are gonna leave me. No one's gonna be after me If I'm a 2000 pound mola. Right. I'm pretty safe. Even though I swim really slowly, I can't keep up. I can't get out of the way. I just grow big really fast. Then the other thing is I eat jellyfish jellies. So the future ocean, a lot of the scientists are saying that one really doom and gloom scientists saying the future ocean will be a world of slime. Okay, so what that means is the oxygen, the oxygen levels in the ocean are declining over time. These layers of these oxygen minimum layers, they call them jellies, have super low metabolism and they can live in really funky conditions. So whatever happens in the ocean, you have lots to eat. I've got lots to eat and I can swim to my preferred water temperature zone if the ocean temperature changes. So I'm thinking like that's maybe the animal to be.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I am super proud of all that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has accomplished. And our team has just taken it so far beyond anything wildly imaginable. I'm just really happy that I've had the opportunity so far in continuing to open people's eyes to this, what I like to call the other part of the planet that we've just now woken up to that makes humanity able to exist here on this beautiful Earth. And if I can, if I have sparked the engagement and dedication and motivation of a few people, whether they're teachers or kids, future advocates, that will carry on, that's, that's something that I'll feel really good about.

But as I did my research on you, one of the most interesting things is you are the antithesis of a trust fund baby.

Right?

I mean, but you are the daughter of the person who created Silicon Valley, but you're not a trust fund baby. Now, how did that work out? I mean, you're the exception.

I get asked that actually by people these days who have come on to a lot of success and are raising children and they're like, wow, you actually are. What happened to you doing something productive? How did that happen? I mean, all I can say about it, it's really about how about what kind of parents we are and how it's not what we say, it's who we are and how we lead our lives. And that's the most important thing. And my parents, they were all about being productive, contributing, working hard. Even though I grew up in the 50s and at that time, the women, the girls, I have two sisters, we weren't really expected. My dad had a lot of expectations placed on my brother. Big time expectations. The girls, it was, you've got to do really well in school and work really hard and give back to society. The kind of paying job expectation was a little vague. It was important to find a good husband. Those were the times. To a good university, it was important to find a good husband. Yes. Or mother. Yes. Because those were the times. But my dad, if there was one message I got from him was, don't be a slacker, work hard all the time at what you were doing and be contributing in some way. Maybe if one of us wanted to take some time off and have children, look after the kids for a while. But even so, and all of us in the family, whether we, like, go into a job every day or whatever we're doing, everyone is doing some big projects to make the world a better place in some fashion. And that's just because that's what our parents. That's what our parents did.

If you're ever anywhere near the Monterey Bay area, you must visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It will blow your mind. And now you know about the mola mola. Specifically, that it eats jellyfish, which is likely to be in good supply. And if you are a mola mola, no one's going to want to eat you. If anyone would know what fish to be, it's Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This is Guy Kawasaki, and this was the Remarkable People podcast. Thanks to the Remarkable People podcast team of Jeff C, Peg Fitzpatrick, Marley Morgan and Neil Pearlberg. They keep my ocean blue and teeming with great content. Special thanks to Kevin Connor and Terry and Will Mayo, who made this podcast possible. Finally, special thanks to Michael and Kaitlyn T of Crate. They helped me figure out how to recover a corrupted zoom h6 file. If they hadn't done that, and if I had to tell Julie Packard that I lost the file, and if she had said tough luck, there would not be this podcast. Thank you, Michael and Kaitlyn, Jeff, Peg, Marley, Neil, Kevin, Terry and William. It takes a village to make a podcast. This is remarkable people.