#4 Remember the Elephants with Lance Gould

Announcer 0:00

Looking to sound like you know what's going on in the world social strategy, comedy and other funny stuff? Well join the club and settle in for the Jeff Dwoskin show. It's not the podcast we deserve. But the podcast we all need with your host, Jeff Dwoskin.

Jeff Dwoskin 0:15

Thank you, Timothy, for that great introduction. I appreciated it. Great to be here for Episode Four of the Jeff Dwoskin. Show. So exciting. So exciting, great sponsor today, sponsored today by the dictionary. So many words, so many words, stop using the same ones. We've got a time Dictionary of right check that out, I hear good things about it. And now it's time for Twitter 101. Some tips for the newbies. All right, when you're starting out on Twitter, here's what I want you not to focus on. Don't focus on likes and retweets, they'll come over time. Three things to focus on one, tweet, great tweets, stuff that when you look at, you're like, Oh, I would totally retweet this. That's the way you want to aim for number two, Twitter is a community. So tweet on to others, like and retweet other people's tweets, if you really like, um, follow him as well. This is how you build your Twitter tribe. So like and retweet, and put out great content. third tip. third tip is do the first two things more than you probably were going to when you first heard me say it, really showing other people that you care about their stuff will get people to care about your stuff. So just keep plugging away the likes and the retweets come with time. All right. So in terms of Twitter happenings, and world happenings, World Environment Day, 2020 is coming up real soon. And we got a special guest today to talk about and he's very involved. theme of World Environment Day this year is celebrate bio diversity. With 1 million species facing extinction. There is never been more important time to focus on bio diversity. If you're like me, you're like, hey, Jeff, good thing your sponsor today was the dictionary because I don't know what biodiversity means. But great news, we can look, let me flip to that dictionary. And as we get to page 37, of the dictionary, dictionary, so many words, enjoy that. Thank you. biodiversity. So that is a noun and it is the variety of life in the world, or in a particular habitat or ecosystem. Well, I can't say even with the dictionary, I know what that means. I think I need a dictionary for the dictionary. Or we can turn to my special guests land schooled talk about some of the events he's doing to support World Environment Day and bio diversity. I think I'm not 100% sure I'm using the word right. Ladies and gentlemen, here's my interview with Lance. Hey, we are here with Lance ghoul, one of the founders of Silicon Valley story lab is dedicated to helping change the world.

Lance Gould 3:49

So great to be here. So great to see your face. Finally, after all these years,

Jeff Dwoskin 3:52

yes, we can see our faces but knowing that everyone else is just hearing audio, just take our word for it. We're just

Lance Gould 3:58

gonna magnificient face

Jeff Dwoskin 4:00

to handsome guys with, with hats, hair, yes. Perfect faces for radio. So June 5 is World Environment Day where you're very active in those social awareness days. Something very specific you're involved with that I find fascinating is elephants. I don't think most people think about the plight of elephants other than they may have taken them away from a local zoo, but they don't really know why talk to us about elephants and all the cool stuff that you've done with that

Lance Gould 4:30

was first of all, so great to be here and to be talking with you. When I was at Huffington Post, I was helping oversee the opinion section and one thing I keyed in on was the social awareness days which do really well traffic wise and they usually allow people to channel their passions into writing and those pieces can be can be really interesting. And through that world I got I became very involved with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and one of those goals goals, which is called the SDGs. One of those goals SDG. 15 is about protecting wildlife and wildlife ecosystems. And it was on SDG 15 project that I first got involved that ended up translocating 200 elephants from an ecosystem in South Africa where there was too many for one ecosystem to handle. And they were kind of destroying the ecosystem, as to many elephants in one small area will do. And that area was actually about the size of Atlanta. So it wasn't that small, but it was too small for the number of elephants that were there, and they move them they translocated them to Mozambique, Mozambique is an interesting story, because Mozambique had a tragic civil war from 77 to 92, in which 1 million people died, many of them died of famine. And I know this is a I don't want to get too dark on this show. But it was it was it was a tragic situation in which most of the animals in that country were consumed, which really left the environment and the ecosystems bereft of the value that elephants bring to those ecosystems. Because elephants are a keystone species. They have a lot of traits that actually help ecosystems thrive, their dung is very fertile, certain plants count on elephants to propagate. And so by moving 200 elephants from the one system to the other, from South Africa to Mozambique, you can actually save both ecosystems. So it was through that work that I became aware of and involved with World elephant day, which is a social awareness day like we were talking about earlier, just like World Environment Day is and world elephant day is August 12. it's it's a it's a huge day on the social media universe because it gets billions of impressions every August 12. And people love elephants, they just really identify with elephants. Elephants have very humanistic personalities. They experience pain and grief, and they have wonderful memories. So I got involved with World elephant day. And there's a number of things that are in the news right now. These are the COVID that are interesting. In terms of intersecting with elephants. One thing to note is that I think a lot of people are assuming because of COVID. The environment is repairing itself, emissions are down, greenhouse gases seem to be down and pollution is clearing up. A lot of that is somewhat true. But when it comes to elephants, elephants are in more danger than ever for a number of reasons. There's essentially two kinds of elephants. Species wise, there's African elephants and Asian elephants, African elephants, they're about 35,000 poached every year. It's a tragic situation. The elephant in terms of the extinction grading an organization called the IUCN does, African elephants are called vulnerable Asian elephants are called threatened which is even worse rating but the African elephants of 35,000 a post every year, they're mainly protected by Rangers. Now because tourism has dried up in both continents the money that would normally go from tourism in Africa to pay Rangers and the governments that would pay Rangers as dried up so poachers are more emboldened than ever. There's no one protecting. There's no tourists around for poachers to shy away from the war and poaching has increased. In Asia, elephants are mainly in captivity, there's very, very few left in the wild and they work in a lot of sanctuaries. And there are a profession called a mo hoot, which is, I believe a Thai word for you know, an elephant trainer, the hoots take care of the elephants in the sanctuaries. But because there's no tourists, there's no money coming in to feed them. So they're kind of screwed. So right now elephants are in as much danger as they've ever been. And what's interesting about that is they need us more than ever, but we need them more than ever because elephants are also climate. mitigators elephants produce, as I said before they certain tree species count on them to propagate. So a lot of these hardwood trees that store a lot of carbon are populated by elephants by elephant dung being very fertile. And so there's that elephants also protect grasslands with their work. And grasslands reflect the sun keeping that area coolers, they keep planet temperature cooler. So elephants can help us but they're there. We need them and they need us. So it's kind of a fascinating story about what's happening right now. So there's all of interest to people. June 5 is World Environment Day. And this is all kind of some of the stuff that we're working on it the world elephant day organization, which is a nonprofit. It's some fascinating stuff.

Jeff Dwoskin 9:01

I didn't know me, I didn't know at the Detroit zoo, we'd go they they did feed him a peanut, you know, they'd kind of wander around, throw some hay on top of them. And then one day, they're like elephants can't really be in zoos. We're gonna take this off in a way we got a pretty big zoo. And that's pretty much I mean, I never thought about any of those things.

Lance Gould 9:22

zoos, zoos are really, really tough for elephants, especially North American zoos, which don't have the climate that they are used to. Like there's a there's an elephant a famous elephant in Edmonton Edmonton Zoo called Lucy and we can we curse on the show? Sure. It's like fucking negative 20 degrees in Edmonton. You've got an elephant there. So it's like ridiculous. Yeah.

Jeff Dwoskin 9:45

Totally. Where's the swearing there? Thank you The

Lance Gould 9:49

I try to parcel out my curses. And for

Jeff Dwoskin 9:51

those of you playing Jeff Dwoskin show bingo at home and had elephant dung. You can cross that off twice. I said it twice the The it's a it's really fascinating. I just it makes you realize how much stuff but I don't know whether you said maybe the people listen, I do but like, I find it fast. So how can we help? what's what's a way that we can help these initiatives?

Lance Gould 10:14

Ah, that's a good question. I mean, you could certainly go to world elephant day dot.org. And check out the website and make a donation there because that money will go to help educating people around the world about the plight of elephants and the role that elephants play wild elephant. They also works with dozens of organizations around the world. In particular, there's a campaign going on right now in Canada, because Canada surprisingly, does not ban ivory. And so there is a petition that's coming out of Canada to make sure that ivory is banned. It's a little baffling that that is the case. But you know, I mean, I thought Canadians did everything better than us these days. But there's, there's one example where they don't

Jeff Dwoskin 10:53

hashtag Canada is canceled. We just uncovered one of the biggest problems in the world. And now we're going we're coming for you, Canada, coming from

Lance Gould 11:04

Manitoba lookout buddy.

Jeff Dwoskin 11:06

We're taking them we're taking them down. All right, so we can donate a world elephant day.

Lance Gould 11:10

And then just be active on social media, really, the best way to help is to help spread awareness. It doesn't take much to learn about about the role of elephants. And I was talking earlier about the UN SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals. They're all really intertwined with each other. I don't want to talk too much un Tech Talk. But we have such an interconnected world. And a lot of these social good movements are connected to each other education, health, poverty, you can see with COVID another reason to think about elephants and wildlife, it's generally is that so many zoonotic diseases are coming from animals as as humans make more incursions into the animal world, whether it's wet markets or whether it's tearing down the Amazon, whether it's, you know, making more incursions into elephant habitats in Africa or Asia. As I said, there's very few elephants left in the wild. In Asia, we don't know the kind of catalytic effect that will have once we start interacting with animals in a way could lead to zoonotic diseases to kind of jump from species to species and so it's the kind of thing we want we want to leave that that leave that stuff alone. Thanks for educating us and I'm assuming with the number of people that listen to this I can say the world

Jeff Dwoskin 12:24

it's important

Lance Gould 12:25

that the world and world elephant day my friend

Jeff Dwoskin 12:29

thank you very much Lance for joining us. Well, that is a lot of elephant information. Speaking of elephants, hot on Twitter today live from the fake facts game on hashtag are round up. Fake elephant facts. So Lance told us many many things about elephants, that I had no idea where true, but they are but here's some that are fake. Fake. Elephant facts. Did you guys know but bar was adopted? What? What? Yes, true. Thank you, Robin. Cool. Chris. wants us to believe. Elephants is where Ivory soap comes from. Oh, yes. I knew it. I knew I should switch to dove. Right. Scott wants us to know they don't work for peanuts. Everyone thinks Oh, elephants. Yeah, they'll work for peanuts. That's why they're all in the circus. No, come completely. Not true. Completely. Not true. Paul wants us to believe that an elephant's favorite rock group is the Grand Trunk railroad. Ah, Campo me, Paul. Gosh, yes. Good times. Oh, and everyone knows. Why don't elephants go on planes. Elephants hate flying because their trunks never fit in the overhead bins. Oh, God. That's so drew hits close to home. Yes, yes. Yes. So anyway, those were just some funny stuff. I just happened to find though that was relevant. Since we were talking about elephants. Go online tweet, some yourself might show up on a future episode. Well, that's it for this one. I'm gonna wrap it up. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Announcer 14:31

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Jeff Dwoskin show with your host, Jeff Dwoskin. Now go repeat everything you've heard and sound like a genius. catch us online at the Jeff Dwoskin show.com or follow us on Twitter at Jeff Dwoskin show and we'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai