The Oceans - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/10/26

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio. And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norrie with you. Captain Paul Watson back with us, co-founder of the Greenpeace Foundation and the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. We'll talk about that in a moment. Paul is currently a director for the Sea Shepherd France, where he is right now, and the Sea Shepherd Brazil. He's a writer of children books as well, poetry books, history books, and books on environment. His latest work is The Only Flag Worth Flying. Captain Paul Watson back on Coast to Coast. Paul, how are you doing out there? Oh, pretty good. Thank you. You've been in France for a couple years now, haven't you? Yes, three years now. That's good. How did you get interested in the oceans? Well, I was raised in a fishing village on the east coast of Canada, so it's something I've spent my entire life around. I ran off to sea at 17 to join the Norwegian Merchant Marine, then the Swedish Merchant Marine, then the Canadian Coast Guard, and then I was a co-founder of Greenpeace. Good for you. Good for you. Defending the oceans is admirable. Is it difficult? Oh, it's extremely difficult. We have all the rules and the regulations we need. The problem is there's a complete lack of enforcement. For instance, last year in July, the High Seas Treaty to Protect Biodiversity, beyond national jurisdiction, was ratified. And it is law, but it's a piece of paper without enforcement. So it's our job to go out there and test it, get it into court, set precedence, try and make it work. Captain, you've been doing this for more than 50 years. Have things changed since you started? Oh, a lot of good things have happened and a lot of bad things have happened. You know, we were able to shut down whaling in international waters as of 2018. No whaling has taken place in international waters. And over the last 50 years, we've managed to shut down whaling in the Soviet Union, now Russia, of course. Spain, Chile, Peru, around the world, leaving only Japan and Norway and Iceland as the remaining whaling nations in their own territorial waters. But we've managed to stop Iceland for the last three years. Is the whaling continuing secretly, do you think? No, we monitor where it's going. There's a lot of whaling off the coast of Japan and off Norway, and those are the two places. There might be illegal poaching here and there, but it's nothing significant. We're very much opposed or working against the killing of pilot whales and dolphins in the Danish Faroe Islands. And also we have a team in Japan opposing the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji in southern Japan. So those are two of the last primary projects involving cetaceans that we're working on. As of right now, Paul, what is the environmental state of our oceans? I think it's in pretty bad shape. And one of the things that people don't even know about, don't even think about, is the fact that since 1950, there's been a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton in the sea. And phytoplankton provides up to 70% of the oxygen in the air we breathe and sequesters enormous amounts of CO2. And on top of that, there's massive exploitation of krill in the Southern Ocean, which is one of our projects right now. Krill is pretty much the foundation for the food chain in the Southern Ocean, feeding the whales, the penguins, the fishes, the seabirds. And why this is taking place is that Norwegian and Chinese companies are extracting the krill 625 metric tons last year They want to take 1 million metric tons this year And it being converted into a cheap protein base for salmon on salmon farms around the world. So we're literally starving the penguins and the whales so that we can have cheap salmon. Back in 2007, a scientist by the name of Robert Lanza proposed the theory of biocentrism. What does that mean? Well, that's what I've been promoting for many, many years now. I wrote a book recently called Biocentrism. And what it means is that most of the human species has an anthropocentric outlook. It's all about us. We're number one. We're the dominant species. It was all created for us. Biocentrism is the idea that we're part of the ecosystem, not dominant, that we're equal to all other species and that we need each other. We have to live in harmony with all of these other species. It's based on the fact that there are three basic laws of ecology. The first is the law of diversity. The strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon diversity within it. The second is the law of interdependence, that all species within an ecosystem are interdependent with each other. And the third, the law of finite resources, that there's a limit to growth because there's a limit to carrying capacity. And when one species steals the carrying capacity from other species, that leads to diminishment in both diversity and interdependence, and that leads to ecological collapse. So I think if we're going to survive, we have to learn to live in harmony with all other species and understand just how valuable we are. You know, we do not live on a planet without worms and bees and trees and whales and fishes. We simply can't. And so, in fact, in many ways, they're more important than we are because they can live here without us, but we cannot live here without them. And I know you're going to want some after hearing this. This is an amazing story. We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi, who's eight, almost nine years old now, was suffering with not just one or two warts, but, I mean, a significant outbreak of warts all over his body. so significant it impacted his ability to really function. Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to write. It was Ty's book, actually, that got me thinking about it. I'm not surprised. It is an amazing immunomodulator, and so I can see that it would work. And so at what point did you see that there was actually improvement? It's really going to work. Well, look, we really started to notice it around 12 weeks. You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller, and then going down to where they're just little red marks, the whole thing's gone. And we're talking about one the size of a walnut. I thought, no way that's going to. Wow. It's just been miraculous. To see him get into a pair of shoes. Yes. How wonderful. It's great to see him so happy and confident. Absolutely wonderful. Our friends that have seen it, they're just blown away. Ty, this is awesome. Yeah, this is awesome. Another amazing story. Why? We're talking about carnivora. Call them to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now. Call 1-866-836-8735. That's 1-866-836-8735. Or visit Carnivora.com. C-A-R-N-I-V-O-R-A. Carnivora.com. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. To keep this secret, for so many years, he's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage. But it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people. Your predator might go up and good. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits He stood trial for murder and got acquitted The biggest mind game of all NLP might actually work This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are most countries, Paul, trying to protect the environment? Well, I think the problem is that governments are incapable of solving these problems. I've been to, you know, just recently in Brazil at the climate change conference. There's been 30 climate change conferences. Nothing has come out of any of them over the last three decades. And the reason for that is that it's political suicide for any world leader or politician to actually do anything because it was going to it's going to offend a lot of people. It's going to offend the corporations and the media and everything because, well, it's going to change. You know, everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change. And that's the problem. So I don't really count on any solutions coming through governments, but I am, you know, encouraged by the passion, the courage and the imagination of individuals around the world who are driving this movement and making people aware and changing laws and getting things done, especially amongst young people right now. because young people today are in the situation that us older people really haven't experienced, is that they have no idea what the future is going to be 30, 40, 50 years from now. It's so unpredictable. You know, when I was younger, we had a pretty good idea, but not anymore. So it's a scary situation for them, and it's motivating a lot of people to get involved, and they're also realizing that they're not getting any answers through governments, and therefore they have to go out there and get answers themselves. And, you know, the strength of an ecosystem is in diversity. Therefore, the strength of any movement is in diversity. And that includes education and litigation and legislation and activism. Those four things working together is what makes a movement. If the oceans die, Captain, what happens to us? Well, very simple. The oceans die, we die. You know, we can't live on this planet with a dead ocean. And with the demise of phytoplankton, if phytoplankton disappears from the ocean, then we don't survive. Phytoplankton is the foundation of life on this planet. For the most part, it's out of sight and out of mind. But why has phytoplankton been diminished 40% since 1950? And the reason for that is diminishment of whales and seals and seabirds and other marine creatures that provide the nutrient base for the phytoplankton because phytoplankton is dependent upon magnesium, nitrogen, and iron especially. And those elements are provided by the feces of all of these animals. I mean, every day, one blue whale dumps three tons of manure into the ocean, heavily with all of those three elements. And when you diminish whale populations, you diminish that nutrient supply. That's why every species is interlinked. It's interspecies connections. And so we need a healthy whale population if we're going to have a healthy phytoplankton population. We need healthy marine mammal populations if we're going to have healthy fish populations and seabirds and so on and so on because everything is interconnected. When a female whale drops a whale, how many do they normally carry? Just one? Usually just one, yes, just one. And they have a long gestation period, and it takes a few years to raise a calf before they become pregnant again. So it's a very slow reproduction. The biggest whales you've ever seen are how big? Blue whales can be up to 100 feet in length. Wow. The biggest one I've ever seen is sperm whale is 70 feet. They're big animals. Are they dangerous to people? No. Even the orcas, you know. The orca is the most powerful predator on the planet. I've swum with them. There's not a single case of an orca ever killing a human being in the world. In captivity, three people have died. But then again, I look at captive orcas as almost being psycho because they're in this confined area. and they just go crazy. But in the wild, no orca has ever attacked a human being. And the same with other whales. They don't harm people. And in fact, in 1975, one of the things that changed my life is that sperm whale spared my life. It could have killed me easily and chose not to do so. And why I say it chose not to do so, this was a wounded sperm whale that had just been harpooned by a Soviet whaling vessel. And it was thrashing about on the surface of the water and agony and I caught its eye and he dove and this time he came out of me real fast underwater I saw this trail of bloody bubbles coming towards us and he came up and out of the water at an angle so that the next movement was to fall straight down on our boat there was two of us in the boat and that would have crushed us but as his head rose up in the water I looking into this eye the size of my fist and I looking into that eye so close I could see my own reflection in that eye Oh my God That's when I saw something that changed my life because I felt understanding. The whale understood what we were trying to do because I could see the effort he made to pull himself back. His head began to slide back into the sea. His eye disappeared beneath the surface, and he died. He could have killed us, chose not to do so. There's an intelligence there, right? yes whales are extremely intelligent but the problem is is we've been conditioned to equate intelligence with a tool manipulation you know if a blob of protoplasm steps out of a spaceship with a ray gun well no argument it must be intelligent because it has technology we don't understand non-manipulative intelligences intelligent life forms that don't need tools or things like that uh the biggest brains on this planet the most complex brains on this planet are orcas and sperm whales i mean the human brain is about approximately 1700 cubic centimeters the The orca, 6,000 cubic centimeters. And the sperm whale, the largest brain, most complex brain on the planet, is 9,000 cubic centimeter brain. They're extremely intelligent, but they're not intelligent in the way that we appreciate intelligence. And we define what intelligence is. I always say to students, you know, if you're in biology 101 and they show you a rat's brain and compare it to a dog's brain and then to a chimp brain and then a human brain, The teacher will say, well, you can see by the increasing size of the brain And the convolutions on the neocortex area That people are smarter than chimps And chimps are smarter than dogs But they never, ever put an orca or sperm whale brain up there Because it makes us look really stupid And we don't like to do that, so we just admit it How would you weigh the intelligence of a dolphin? I think that they're equal intelligence to people We know they communicate Right now, we're actually doing some very exciting research on the possibility of communicating with whales and dolphins. And hopefully we'll be able to translate their language. We know it's a very complex language. And, you know, on levels higher and lower than frequencies we understand. And also that they communicate a lot of information in short sound bites. We actually found that dolphins refer to each other by names. They have names for each other, which is incredible. So there's so much we can learn. And I hope one day that we'll be able to read a book that's written by a dolphin or an orca. I think it's quite possible. I know it sounds fantastic, but I think that it could happen. And a lot of scientists are in agreement with us on that. My exposure to dolphins, of course, was Flipper. And that was one heck of a dolphin, wasn't it? Yeah, Flipper is actually a couple of dolphins. They had a few actors going on there. But Flipper actually was the animal that motivated Rick O'Berry to spend his entire life protecting dolphins. He was a trainer on the Flipper program, and ever since, he's been one of the leading advocates for the protection of dolphins. Captain, after the break, let's talk a little bit more about the oceans and these plastic islands that seem to be accumulating. How big are they? Well, they could be the size of the state of New York in some places, but they're not really islands on the surface. I mean, you don't really see them. They're sort of just under the water. You could actually sail over them and not even see them. But we're looking at literally hundreds of billions of particles that are in the ocean and floating around. And they accumulate somehow. They stick together, don't they? Yeah, they accumulate because of ocean currents, or what they call gyres. They keep them moving in a circular motion in various parts of the ocean. In the Pacific, there's two, I think, in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, different places. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern. And go to coasttocoastam.com for more. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, Listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lamumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.