March 27, 2025 • 37 mins
E450 Meghan Cleary – I met Meghan at a party and she was introduced to me as a journalist who’s an expert in shoes, vaginas, and sea lions. I exclaimed, “Sea lions!” and here we are. Meghan’s a thought leader, best-selling author, spokesperson and TV personality. We chat about her experience with a particular Santa […]
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 450,
and my guest is Megan Cleary. I met
Megan at a party, and she was introduced
to me as a journalist who's an expert
in shoes, vaginas, and sea lions.
(00:30):
I exclaimed,
sea lions?
And here we are. Megan's a thought leader,
best selling author, spokesperson,
and TV personality. We chatted about her experiences
with a particular Santa Barbara sea lion
and the domoic
acid levels from harmful algae blooms that threaten
(00:51):
the sea lions, and eventually us if things
aren't taken care of. We do mention shoes
a little bit, but mostly it's sea lions.
I had a blast talking with Megan. She's
delightful
and
brilliant,
and I'm really excited for you to hear
this episode.
Check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show, and there'll be a
(01:13):
link for donating to sea lions, of of
course, on there. Hey Human podcast is on
YouTube under official Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon.
All my social medias
are Susan Ruth ism.
Check out susan ruth dot com to learn
about me and my other artistic endeavors, and
find my albums on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon
Music, or wherever
(01:34):
you get your music. I just found out
I'm going to be in the Chicago Horror
Film Festival, May
fifteenth through eighteenth with my short,
The First. So if you're in Chicago and
you wanna see the film,
now is your chance. I've got some other
announcements to make about the film festivals as
well, but mom's award until a particular date,
(01:54):
so can't can't let you know yet. Oh,
although if you're in Kassel,
Germany,
K A S S E L, I'm not
sure how to pronounce that, Germany, the film
will be in the Der Fantastique
in May as well. So that's pretty cool.
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human podcast
on Apple, iHeart, Spotify,
wherever you get your podcasts, and thank you
(02:16):
for listening.
Be well,
be kind,
be loved.
Here we go.
Megan Clary, welcome to Hey Human.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm
so thrilled to be here.
We met at
a we went in an interesting way. We
met at a birthday party for Charles Yes.
But through Vanessa
(02:37):
Yes. Technically.
Technically.
Yeah. And Vanessa has been on the show.
Yes. Vanessa's
an amazing, gifted, and creative writer and a
good All sorts of things. She does she
does it she does it all. I know
now. She's into ceramic,
so watch out, world. What intrigued me about
speaking with you
(02:57):
is
the fact that you know a lot about
sea lions. Yes. I do.
Let me know, firstly,
where are you from? How were you raised
up? How was I raised up? Oh my
gosh. It's such a Christatipic question. I was
raised up outside Detroit in Michigan. I had,
like, a
massive
extended family, so tons of grandmas and grandpas
(03:19):
and aunts and cousins and uncles and
just a big old Irish Catholic
tribe.
Lots of grandmas and grandpas. Did you have
divorces or deaths in the family? I had
an addition.
I had my
my aunt, who's also my godmother,
married a man whose
parents then also became de facto grandparents
(03:41):
to me, my brother. Yeah.
Yeah. We just you know, we added.
Did you grow up with steeped in the
religion,
or was it lapsing just for the holidays?
Yeah. I did go to a Catholic school.
So
that was, yeah,
intense. Although, I loved my I went to
all girls Catholic high school, and I loved
(04:03):
my high school because it was just
it was great because you didn't have to
worry about guys. Like,
you just could, like,
not shave your legs and,
you know, not wear makeup and hang around
with your besties
and then, like,
go out on the weekend.
So you get an amazing, arts
(04:24):
curriculum and creative writing and all that. How'd
you get into sea lions of all things?
I
am a person who has just
sort of
followed what I'm curious about
life and let that be my
guiding
beacon. And it's taken me down a lot
(04:45):
of
a lot of roads, and I'm also a
freelance writer.
So I don't know if you ever meet
a freelance writer, but they always know a
lot of things about a lot of different
things because they've
covered a lot of different things, and they
you have to do research every time you
write something, which keeps life endlessly
(05:07):
fascinating. So for a long time, I wrote
about shoes. I wrote about shoes, but mostly
shoes, what they say about you.
So your, yeah, your identity
as it pertained to shoes.
And I also I wrote poetry and ran
a poetry reading series.
And yeah. And then I started writing about
(05:27):
women's health, and then I started writing about
sea lions.
And so I just whatever grabbed my attention,
I wrote about women's health because I had
had endometriosis
and fibroids and came up against a lot
of really
strange things in the medical system.
And then I wrote about sea lions because
(05:48):
I met a sea lion in the summer
of the late summer of nineteen of nineteen.
Nineteen '20 '2
of '20 '20 '2. Oh my goodness. You
met a sea lion, like, on Tinder? Or
On Tinder. I swiped right,
and
she was there. And we
we our first date was dinner. No. I
(06:10):
met her on the beach in Santa Barbara.
I went there during I don't know if
you remember, there was a crazy heat dome
in LA. I went up there. A lot
of people fled the city, and where I
was staying had no air conditioning. So I
was like, I gotta get out of here.
So
I went up to SB, which is one
of my all time
favorite places in the world, and I went
(06:30):
to Henry's Beach, which is one of my
all time favorite beaches also in the world.
Yeah. There was this gal who was
having a hard time hanging out on the
beach, and
I was
like, what's going on? So sea lions,
they do kind of three things, which is
one, they fish and eat all day, and
(06:52):
then they do this thing, and they play.
They do a lot of playing and, like,
frolicking in the waves and stuff. And then
they do this thing called hauling out, which
is they haul themselves out of the sea
and they lay around.
So My kind of life.
How can we
replicate that
that cycle? That would be the perfect the
(07:14):
perfect life. And when they haul out, they
puppy pile. They like to, like, pile on
top of each other in, like, clumps.
And so, anyway, this gal was laying on
the beach. I'll give you, like, the truncated
story. It was a very long day, but
she was laying on the beach and she's
obviously not doing well. And I was kinda
like,
you know, k pass. Like, what is what's
(07:36):
going on? If this is a tangent, have
you ever seen the BBC show Gavin and
Stacy?
I have not. Well, they have a great
line where they always walk in the room
and they go, what's a curtain?
And I it always cracks me up because
you're like, what's a curtain? And that's kinda
what was going through my mind is, what
is occurring?
So there was this sign up that said,
(07:57):
there's a domoic acid surge in the ocean
and, which acts as a neurotoxin
on sea lions and sometimes some other mammals,
sometimes dolphins,
depending on where it hits in the food
chain.
And they were like,
this
sea lion is having
seizure seizures.
It sometimes it passes. Hold up.
(08:20):
Sea lions
suffering seizures at the seashore?
Sea lions suffering seizures at the seashore.
Say it's not true. Or say it five
times fast.
Sea lion suffering seizures at the seashore.
That's good. That's some good alliteration.
So she
was was there, and I was kind of
(08:43):
like, this is really
strange.
And and the the sign said that she
was under observation, but, like,
I didn't see anyone
observing. I I was like, what is what's
happening? So I
I was quite agitated
because she was obviously not well. And it
was sea lions, they're big. They're big, big
(09:06):
animals, and she was probably like
two or three. She was a female, so
she was probably like, I'm gonna say at
least two hundred pounds.
And the really big sea lions, like the
males with the big chest that are so
cute, they're they can be like eight hundred
pounds.
So
Yeah. So I was
(09:27):
kind of in awe and also it was
like, do not touch her, do not go
near her, you know, etcetera.
And
so
I went back to get some lunch,
went back down the beach, and I started
googling,
and
I fell into the world of stranded marine
(09:49):
mammals,
of which there are many. So there's
four or five organizations
along the coast of California
that are all private. There's no publicly funded,
marine mammal rescue organizations,
which is bananas to me because
(10:10):
the 1971
act of marine mammal, protection
is a federal it's a federal act. NOAA,
which is the National Oceanic,
which is currently
being dismantled, they give very, very small grants
to some of these organizations, but it's all
private money. It's all
so there's three or four of them. So,
(10:32):
of course, they're understaffed.
They're not you know what I mean? They're
not huge, like, research centers or anything. They're
just
literally in Santa Barbara, the people that run,
Simway,
which is responsible for all of Santa Barbara
and the Channel Islands, which gets the biggest
amount of sea lions every year because they
all go there to give birth in June.
(10:53):
Everyone's a Gemini.
All sea lions are Geminis.
That's tricky. It's tricky.
So, anyway, I started dialing up and down
the coast, and I ended up talking to
this woman in the marine mammal care center
up in San Francisco.
And they run they're very well funded, and
they run a 247
(11:14):
hotline. Someone answering the phone. And she was
like, yeah. We're having a huge
domoic acid surge.
There's hundreds and hundreds of stranded sea lions.
We can't get to all of them,
etcetera.
And
you have the wrong number, you need to
call the people down in Santa Barbara. We
only go down to, like, SLO or something.
(11:35):
Is this something that they ingest and then
it it hits their brain or Desmoyic acid
is a naturally
occurring harmful algae bloom.
It's called an HAB,
and these happen all over the world. They
happen in freshwater. They happen in in saltwater,
and they are
(11:55):
becoming more and more common because of warming.
What happens is in the ocean, the ocean
is is kinda like a broth. It's it's
less about, like, water. It's more like a
little brothy
stew. So it has all these different levels
of nutrients, nitrogen, potassium, sodium, all this stuff.
(12:16):
There's a bunch of things that that happens.
They're they're called cold water upwelling. There's nitrogen
runoff from the agricultural
in in California.
It disrupts the balance and this algae that
just normally hangs and is like, hey, I'm
an algae,
goes
bananas and proliferates
everywhere.
And all the little little baby fish
(12:38):
eat it, and then all the sea lions
eat a ton of the baby fish.
So it's kind of this weird Rubik's cube
of like,
where it hits in the food chain, who
eats it, you know, a mom is gonna
eat more
more fish because she's nursing.
In sea lions, but not so much in
(13:00):
other animals, it's a neurotoxin.
It's also in shellfish
and seafood, So that's why we have in
California very robust
monitoring
of, like,
you know, donate
donate shrimp. Like, they have, you know, fishing
calls off where you can't fish
and harvest
(13:21):
if there's a Des Moines gas balloon, just
so that it doesn't get into the human
population.
Also, we don't like it either. It's just
a big Rubik's cube of of all these
different elements that come together, and then ocean
warming kinda supercharges it. It's really more about
the balance of the ocean
habitat
(13:41):
more than more than anything else. And the
other really big problem is nitrogen runoff, because
in California, we have tons and tons of
agriculture.
So nitrogen is a fertilizer
that everyone uses on their crops, and then
you have rain, and then that all washes
down to the ocean. So we're having a
domoic acid surge right now. I'm curious on
the neurotoxin.
(14:02):
Does it
is it
a aspiration that could happen? Or is it
You can't, like, swim in it and I'm
sure it's not amazing for you, but, like,
you can't swim in it and get it.
It's because No. What I'm saying is the
sea lions,
do does it stop their their breathing? Does
it stop their
motor skills? What does it do? Basically gives
(14:25):
them brain seizures. So just imagine. So they're
having strokes,
mini strokes,
seizures.
They become super agitated,
which is why, like, they'll be, like, stay
away from them. They're not really dangerous animals
at all.
But if, you know, if you were having
a stroke and you were super agitated, you
(14:45):
wouldn't really be aware of, like,
your you know? So it's a very
slow and painful
death, unfortunately.
And then they get malnourished and dehydrated and
Why don't they put them down, poor things,
if they get it? They literally can't get
to all of them. When there's a surge
(15:05):
when I was there in 2022,
they were on every beach washing up, dying,
and dead. It's actually extremely heartbreaking.
And the year that I was there, it
coincided with birthing season, which is June.
And so there were a lot of mommies
washing up and, unfortunately,
giving spontaneous
(15:26):
birth to not formed. And it was it
was really Yeah. It sounds like a horror
movie. It's a little what what is strange
is how people just walk by in the
beach.
That's the strangest
part of all of it. So for her,
so I ended up in this
marine mammal. So I called the
(15:47):
place in Santa Barbara, but they were overwhelmed.
They had their voicemail on.
Then I went back.
And I hung out with her for
I said, I will be with you here
till the sun goes down.
And just
hung out with her and
sang to her and
(16:08):
talked to her. And
I would say about 99%
of the people who are walking on the
beach just walked by and didn't even notice.
And
then there was a handful of people. There
was a woman who came and sat with
me,
and I think she was from The Philippines
originally. She sang these beautiful songs to her.
(16:33):
And
we just sat there because there was nothing
I could do. I had I had called
all the hotlines.
I had
there was there was nothing to do. So
I just, yeah, I just sat with her.
I played her some songs
on my phone. She really loved, Take Me
Home Country Road.
Who doesn't? Who doesn't? Who doesn't? Now were
(16:55):
there other sea lions on the beach at
this time as well? There were, but they
were further down. They were, yeah, kind of
up and down.
What in yourself
were you drawn to her? How what part
of you was being
serviced and served and healed by being there
for her in these moments?
That's a really good question that no one's
(17:16):
asked me, so hang on.
This might get emotional.
I just saw how magnificent she was
and how hard she was fighting,
And that just
spoke to something in me. It was just
(17:36):
and and the third thing was is that
how far apart are
was was she and I? We we aren't
that far apart.
She's a mammal.
We come from the same, like,
cell lines. There's a similar I did all
this research about that. And, you know, they
(17:57):
walk on all fours.
You know, they have fingers
in their little flippers, and it just
I don't know. It just really broke open
something in me, and
I
just was very
taken in by by her.
And
(18:17):
even though we were only together for these
four hours, I felt like we had a
relationship
and a pretty
deep one.
I was sobbing
a lot of the time.
So
but yeah. Do you feel like she understood
why you were there?
(18:38):
My guess is that she probably had not
had interaction
with a human
before
up close.
And
I
I don't know if she knew that's why
I was there. I think she probably did
get it on some level
just because,
(18:59):
I
I mean, I stated it verbally, but I
just think the act of
sitting
and just being like, I'm gonna be here.
I think I think beings I think all
beings can sense that.
But more and more, science is proving that
animals are,
highly emotionally intelligent way more than we've ever
(19:21):
given them credit for.
Well, animals, yeah, they're sentient.
And
they
I've also
this brings up another aspect of my life,
which is
I've taken a lot of animal communication
classes.
There's a telepathy
(19:41):
that's been scientifically
there's a lot of there's a lot of
evidence based research on it. And in fact,
interspecies
communication is becoming a field of study at,
universities.
So I actually attended an interspecies
communication conference put on by the University of
Saskatchewan.
(20:02):
God bless the Canadians.
God bless the Canadians.
Oh my goodness. A million ways. Listen, my
dog and I were so we were so
connected. There I there's no doubt in my
mind that we understood each other on some
level that went far beyond
a verbal communication.
Absolutely. And I think,
(20:24):
you know, you see it with humans
as well. You can sense
when someone's upset. You can sense when someone's
happy, and they're in the room next to
you, or you know what I mean? So
I don't think it's that far of a
reach, especially with a mammal
that is
as large or larger than you, there's so
(20:44):
much
in common
that
it's
I just in my mind when it was
happening, I just felt like,
would you walk by a person on the
beach who was dying of a neurotoxin?
I just couldn't imagine, like, if it was
a member of your family, would you just,
(21:04):
like, walk by? People walk by humans suffering
every single day.
Of course. Of course. We all we all
do. But it just broke something open in
me.
I
became kind of fascinated
with her and with the whole interplay
of
the ocean and the algae and
(21:27):
and
my own humanity
and
her sentience
and
yeah.
What how did you leave it? Well, I
told her I was I was, like, I
was very agitated
because I'm, like, a doer. Like, I'm, like,
let's get you some fluids.
(21:48):
I just wanna, like,
you know, help help get her better. I
mean, she's really just coming up on the
beach and she's a symptom of a massive
thing that's happening in the ocean. You know
what I mean?
Which is just an allegory for
so many things happening right now. Right?
But I'm like I go into, like, you
know, nurse mode of, like, let's
(22:11):
let's get you, you know, well, and I
realized there was there was nothing I could
do. And so I
was, like, in my mind, I was like,
can I stay overnight on the beach?
How safe would that be? Like, I was
having doing all these, like, mental calculations,
and it was far enough away from
(22:32):
any people or
lifeguard, and also when the tide comes in,
it comes right up to the rocks. So,
I was like,
probably not the best idea
for me to, like,
stay out camp here overnight.
So I knew, I just said, when the
sun goes down, I'm gonna go home. And
I told her that, and I left. And
then that night, I became very, very,
(22:54):
very agitated,
and I started researching more and finding out
about, like,
the organizations.
I called and left a million voice mails.
I was, like, that annoying person.
And the next morning, I woke up, and
I was so still so agitated, and I
had a weird intuition. I went down to
this other beach that I never go to.
(23:15):
There was a park ranger there, and I
was like,
yeah. There was a sea lion up on
Hendry's, and he's like, oh, yeah. They picked
her up this morning. So they got to
her. The rescue people got to her,
but she did not make it, unfortunately.
Yeah. And then they were, of course,
super annoyed with me because I was like,
can you just tell me the status of
(23:36):
a lion?
And they were like, we're dealing with, like,
800 requests a day, and we have, like,
two people
here. You know, like, this so they eventually
let me know, like, a couple days later
that she had passed away. How did you
process that grief? I processed it with my
therapist.
I think my biggest
I don't know. I cry I cried.
(23:58):
I also
felt
like I wanted to make meaning out of
it, and that was a really important
thing for me. Like, I I wanted to
discover, like, why
this whole experience
happened, which,
I mean,
(24:19):
sometimes it you know, I'd you know, the
the simple answer is I decided to go
up to Santa Barbara, and this was happening
at the same time, and it happened upon
this person because I was walking on the
beach or this lion. Oh my god. I
called her a person. I know. Yeah. Thank
you. A lot going on here.
A lot going on. This is why I
wondered if maybe somebody in your life previously
(24:39):
had passed and you felt helpless about it
and that maybe she is the representative
of of that helplessness and that lack of
control. I mean,
granted,
we are in a world now where
it it is hard to ignore a feeling
of hopelessness.
And the important thing is, of course, to
(25:00):
not give up hope, that that to do
the thing, to make the calls, to
be there and hold the
flipper,
the hand of the person that's going through
the stuff. You know, that that we
are a community, that we are integral to
each other. And I think that's definitely lost
when we get caught up in
(25:22):
what feels like an insurmountable
mountain of hell.
Right?
Yes. It's a lot of a lot of
words in there, but you know what I'm
saying. So I it did make me wonder
the way you're impassioned about it.
I think having a deep empathy for animals
is a great and wonderful thing, and
(25:43):
a lot of us carry that in us
to some degree or another. Yeah. But for
you,
this became
much bigger. Then you're running around like Cassandra,
and everyone's going, well, you know, it is
what it is.
Right.
Yeah. It I mean, I think it mirrored
(26:03):
my my mom was in the hospital
at the time.
So I think my
and in
in Michigan, so I was not able to
be there at that time. And
I think that was part of it. And
I think also
realizing,
you know, I struggle in the world sometimes.
(26:26):
I
can't do anything about things,
or I
I try like, I also saw her trying.
I think that was the thing. She was
really trying to
get up on her flippers and get back
in the ocean.
She was like, you know, she would
and interestingly enough, when I would play her
(26:46):
the song, she would kinda get some she
would kinda get up.
She would start moving again, and then she
would have, you know, another seizure.
And
and
so I think it was the trying
also that I saw, and I saw how
I try, I think,
sometimes to be in this
(27:08):
in this soup,
in the in the broth. But, you might
wanna consider a therapy as another field for
you.
It's striking at the heart of these
of these essential questions.
Look,
every
that is such an incredible gift that she
gave you. Did you name her by any
(27:30):
chance? Yeah. Oana. Yeah. Oana.
It's an incredible gift that she gave you,
and especially because
dealing with something that you have no control
of with your mom,
she was the avatar, the surrogate.
And what a what a beautiful kind gesture
on her part.
(27:51):
And what a beautiful kind gesture on your
part
to be there for her.
And I cannot imagine what it felt like
to learn of her passing.
That's
awful.
I knew that she had passed.
Is your mom okay?
Yeah. She's fine. Great.
(28:13):
We are all connected.
There is no doubt in my mind.
And if you wanna go into some sort
of a deep metaphysical
or
philosophical
conundrum about it, it might be that as
your mother is getting stronger and the sea
lion is getting weaker,
that they too are connected
(28:34):
Mhmm. On some level,
somewhere, some way.
Yeah. I I
I agree that we are all connected, and
I think that
I think that animals
can open
places in us because they're so
wild.
(28:54):
They're so
feral and of the world, and they just
do what they do. Like, she's not thinking
about
sea lions don't think about, like, and then
I play from eight to twelve, and then
I eat, and then I
call out, like, they don't have you know
what I mean? They they might have a
(29:15):
rhythm, but they don't have a schedule.
I don't know what what I felt what
I think what anyone can feel open up
inside themselves when they're dealing with animals
is just
that
really primal,
like,
love
being present in the moment,
(29:38):
all the things that
make
animals tap into all of that for us.
Animals have a way to break you open.
Absolutely.
Where do you go from there? So now
you are you, or do you volunteer for
the sea lions? Do you write about them
more?
What is your
how what's your takeaway?
(29:59):
I came back the next summer.
I
work with a writing teacher who is up
in Topanga. Her name is Dina Metzger.
Highly recommend anyone listening to look up her
work. She's
been she's in her eighties, and she lives
on the tippy top of Topanga.
You are an illiterate beast, I have to
(30:19):
say.
The tippy top of Topanga.
Tippy top. I've been working her with her
for a while, and I do a writing
retreat with her every year. And I had
in 2023,
I did it, and I was up in
Mendocino. And I was like, I wanna write
about this, but I don't know how. It
seems so, like, large, and I don't know
what.
(30:40):
And so I just had this intuition my
friend said to me. She said, I think
you just need to, like, follow your intuition
on this one, which is so hard for
me because I'm so, like, I need a
practical blend. And so I went down to
Santa Barbara and walked into
the worst stenoic acid acid surge that had
happened in thirty years. So and there was
not a lot of coverage of it. I
(31:00):
had gone down and I was like, I
I'm just gonna go down. I'm gonna, like,
research and just, like, hang out with the
lions and all that stuff.
I got a message from a friend of
mine in a writing group. It's like, you
need to write about this. She's like, I'm
a volunteer. I'm in Malibu. I'm on the
front lines, and it's a freaking
like, it's so bad.
(31:21):
She's like, you've gotta write for it. So
I sent out a pitch, and The Guardian
wanted to write about it. And then I,
yeah, I wrote
I wrote I think they gave me, like,
700 words, and I wrote, like, 1,800
words or something. I don't know. But I
ended up interviewing, like,
the world expert on sea lions
(31:41):
and some people at US,
UCSD,
on, you know, ocean climate. There's a woman
who has just studied dewmic acid for thirty
years. She's sort of like a legend
and ended up talking to all these people
and
writing an article about it. And the coverage
at the time I was, it's really interesting
(32:01):
because
the coverage at the time was very perfunctory.
Like, it was like, there's a domoic acid
surge.
This is happening. There was no,
like, context given or, you know,
anything like that. So
I just, like, worked day and night on
that article, and then it came out, and
(32:23):
it actually ranked, like, number two in The
US
that week and, like, number four worldwide.
So a lot of people saw it, and
I heard from a lot of people that
they were like, that came up in my
Apple News or that came up yeah. So
that's that's what I did. And then
there may be
(32:44):
more more in the future. And then I
actually went out, and I
went with the volunteer organization,
in Santa Barbara, and I went out on
a rescue.
So I shadowed,
a couple of the volunteers. They had some
people down from San Francisco because it was
just I mean, they were just
so overwhelmed.
(33:04):
And, usually, they have, like, four to six
people for a rescue, and it was
the guy from the volunteer organization, another woman
who was from up north who, like,
they do their rescues completely different than the
people in Santa Barbara. It was hilarious.
And me.
And so the guy was like, we usually
have four to six people about here, so
you're gonna be helping now. And I was
(33:26):
like, okay. Like, I was like, what's going
on? So
there was this, sea lion. It was a
baby. She's, like, one or two, and she
was not having a good time. So we
we went out, and we,
attempted to get her into the crate. And
she she saw us coming, and she was
like, see you. And she took off running.
(33:48):
She was like, see you later. She went
from,
like, totally catatonic to, like, running. They can
run up to, like, I think, like, 30
miles an hour or something if they really
get going. So
then
it was like a Laurel and Hardy skit.
There's a giant net.
So it was like, get the net.
You gotta get the get the net. There's
(34:09):
this giant net
that she ran right into,
and we put her in the,
in the, crate or whatever. And those people
are just amazing. The volunteer staff they have
are phenomenal,
and the people who run it are phenomenal.
They're just
they, you know, they love what they do.
(34:31):
But it's kind of like,
you know, I mean, they're and they're all
underfunded and
What's the BBC Lion's name? So, because it
was my first rescue,
I got to name
the
name.
We thought it was a him, so I
named him Thomas.
(34:51):
And we found out later it was a
girl, but then we'd still just call her
Thomas.
I love that. Why are sea lions important?
Sea lions are important because they're called a
sentinel
mammal. So they're a sentinel species. So if
something happens to them
downstream,
including humans,
(35:13):
it's not great.
They're our first warning sign then. They're our
warning. They're our warning sign. Yeah. They're sentinel.
Sentinel creature.
Yeah. So I don't know. It's TBD. This
just all just happened, like, quite recently. So
She,
I suppose,
is the martyr for the species so that
you would get involved and be a part
(35:33):
of it. Sorry for all the outside noise.
I have not yet seen I can't hear
it. Oh, good. The new space, I had
I haven't built myself a little
cave to dwell in for these podcasts, so
it's a bit noisy.
So apologies to those listening as well. Tell
people how they might find you. My website
is just it's meganwcleary.com.
I spell Meghan with an h, m e
(35:55):
g h a n w cleary dot com.
And I wrote I ended up writing a
follow on feature article for the Montecito journal,
which is a,
a public a local hyperlocal publication
up in Santa Barbara County.
And you can donate
to SimWi, which is a great organization in
Santa Barbara. If you really wanna make a
difference, their your dollar will go right to
(36:18):
a fish in a sea lion's mouth.
So and their website is cimwi.com.
Simway.
Stay tuned, everybody.
Stay tuned, everybody. Thank you so much for
your time today. It's really interesting. I mean,
I feel like we could talk about shoes,
but it would take away We could talk
about shoes. From the sea lion story. So
(36:40):
maybe in the future, you'll come on and
talk about shoes. Like shoes? We could talk
about vaginas.
We could talk about all different things. You
know? But they're all connected.
So
somehow.
Somehow.
Thank you so much. Well, I have to
thank you for your insight
and your
(37:01):
questions.
And I think I probably was holding back
a little bit because I didn't wanna
just start weeping. Your questions really touched me
and and helped illuminate a lot of great
things.
I appreciate that. Thank you. And it's okay
to cry. Thank you for listening, everybody. Oh,
my gosh. Thank you so much.
(37:21):
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast
on Apple, iHeart, and Spotify, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Thanks. Bye.
Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 450,
and my guest is Megan Cleary. I met
Megan at a party, and she was introduced
to me as a journalist who's an expert
in shoes, vaginas, and sea lions.
(00:30):
I exclaimed,
sea lions?
And here we are. Megan's a thought leader,
best selling author, spokesperson,
and TV personality. We chatted about her experiences
with a particular Santa Barbara sea lion
and the domoic
acid levels from harmful algae blooms that threaten
(00:51):
the sea lions, and eventually us if things
aren't taken care of. We do mention shoes
a little bit, but mostly it's sea lions.
I had a blast talking with Megan. She's
delightful
and
brilliant,
and I'm really excited for you to hear
this episode.
Check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show, and there'll be a
(01:13):
link for donating to sea lions, of of
course, on there. Hey Human podcast is on
YouTube under official Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon.
All my social medias
are Susan Ruth ism.
Check out susan ruth dot com to learn
about me and my other artistic endeavors, and
find my albums on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon
Music, or wherever
(01:34):
you get your music. I just found out
I'm going to be in the Chicago Horror
Film Festival, May
fifteenth through eighteenth with my short,
The First. So if you're in Chicago and
you wanna see the film,
now is your chance. I've got some other
announcements to make about the film festivals as
well, but mom's award until a particular date,
(01:54):
so can't can't let you know yet. Oh,
although if you're in Kassel,
Germany,
K A S S E L, I'm not
sure how to pronounce that, Germany, the film
will be in the Der Fantastique
in May as well. So that's pretty cool.
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human podcast
on Apple, iHeart, Spotify,
wherever you get your podcasts, and thank you
(02:16):
for listening.
Be well,
be kind,
be loved.
Here we go.
Megan Clary, welcome to Hey Human.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm
so thrilled to be here.
We met at
a we went in an interesting way. We
met at a birthday party for Charles Yes.
But through Vanessa
(02:37):
Yes. Technically.
Technically.
Yeah. And Vanessa has been on the show.
Yes. Vanessa's
an amazing, gifted, and creative writer and a
good All sorts of things. She does she
does it she does it all. I know
now. She's into ceramic,
so watch out, world. What intrigued me about
speaking with you
(02:57):
is
the fact that you know a lot about
sea lions. Yes. I do.
Let me know, firstly,
where are you from? How were you raised
up? How was I raised up? Oh my
gosh. It's such a Christatipic question. I was
raised up outside Detroit in Michigan. I had,
like, a
massive
extended family, so tons of grandmas and grandpas
(03:19):
and aunts and cousins and uncles and
just a big old Irish Catholic
tribe.
Lots of grandmas and grandpas. Did you have
divorces or deaths in the family? I had
an addition.
I had my
my aunt, who's also my godmother,
married a man whose
parents then also became de facto grandparents
(03:41):
to me, my brother. Yeah.
Yeah. We just you know, we added.
Did you grow up with steeped in the
religion,
or was it lapsing just for the holidays?
Yeah. I did go to a Catholic school.
So
that was, yeah,
intense. Although, I loved my I went to
all girls Catholic high school, and I loved
(04:03):
my high school because it was just
it was great because you didn't have to
worry about guys. Like,
you just could, like,
not shave your legs and,
you know, not wear makeup and hang around
with your besties
and then, like,
go out on the weekend.
So you get an amazing, arts
(04:24):
curriculum and creative writing and all that. How'd
you get into sea lions of all things?
I
am a person who has just
sort of
followed what I'm curious about
life and let that be my
guiding
beacon. And it's taken me down a lot
(04:45):
of
a lot of roads, and I'm also a
freelance writer.
So I don't know if you ever meet
a freelance writer, but they always know a
lot of things about a lot of different
things because they've
covered a lot of different things, and they
you have to do research every time you
write something, which keeps life endlessly
(05:07):
fascinating. So for a long time, I wrote
about shoes. I wrote about shoes, but mostly
shoes, what they say about you.
So your, yeah, your identity
as it pertained to shoes.
And I also I wrote poetry and ran
a poetry reading series.
And yeah. And then I started writing about
(05:27):
women's health, and then I started writing about
sea lions.
And so I just whatever grabbed my attention,
I wrote about women's health because I had
had endometriosis
and fibroids and came up against a lot
of really
strange things in the medical system.
And then I wrote about sea lions because
(05:48):
I met a sea lion in the summer
of the late summer of nineteen of nineteen.
Nineteen '20 '2
of '20 '20 '2. Oh my goodness. You
met a sea lion, like, on Tinder? Or
On Tinder. I swiped right,
and
she was there. And we
we our first date was dinner. No. I
(06:10):
met her on the beach in Santa Barbara.
I went there during I don't know if
you remember, there was a crazy heat dome
in LA. I went up there. A lot
of people fled the city, and where I
was staying had no air conditioning. So I
was like, I gotta get out of here.
So
I went up to SB, which is one
of my all time
favorite places in the world, and I went
(06:30):
to Henry's Beach, which is one of my
all time favorite beaches also in the world.
Yeah. There was this gal who was
having a hard time hanging out on the
beach, and
I was
like, what's going on? So sea lions,
they do kind of three things, which is
one, they fish and eat all day, and
(06:52):
then they do this thing, and they play.
They do a lot of playing and, like,
frolicking in the waves and stuff. And then
they do this thing called hauling out, which
is they haul themselves out of the sea
and they lay around.
So My kind of life.
How can we
replicate that
that cycle? That would be the perfect the
(07:14):
perfect life. And when they haul out, they
puppy pile. They like to, like, pile on
top of each other in, like, clumps.
And so, anyway, this gal was laying on
the beach. I'll give you, like, the truncated
story. It was a very long day, but
she was laying on the beach and she's
obviously not doing well. And I was kinda
like,
you know, k pass. Like, what is what's
(07:36):
going on? If this is a tangent, have
you ever seen the BBC show Gavin and
Stacy?
I have not. Well, they have a great
line where they always walk in the room
and they go, what's a curtain?
And I it always cracks me up because
you're like, what's a curtain? And that's kinda
what was going through my mind is, what
is occurring?
So there was this sign up that said,
(07:57):
there's a domoic acid surge in the ocean
and, which acts as a neurotoxin
on sea lions and sometimes some other mammals,
sometimes dolphins,
depending on where it hits in the food
chain.
And they were like,
this
sea lion is having
seizure seizures.
It sometimes it passes. Hold up.
(08:20):
Sea lions
suffering seizures at the seashore?
Sea lions suffering seizures at the seashore.
Say it's not true. Or say it five
times fast.
Sea lion suffering seizures at the seashore.
That's good. That's some good alliteration.
So she
was was there, and I was kind of
(08:43):
like, this is really
strange.
And and the the sign said that she
was under observation, but, like,
I didn't see anyone
observing. I I was like, what is what's
happening? So I
I was quite agitated
because she was obviously not well. And it
was sea lions, they're big. They're big, big
(09:06):
animals, and she was probably like
two or three. She was a female, so
she was probably like, I'm gonna say at
least two hundred pounds.
And the really big sea lions, like the
males with the big chest that are so
cute, they're they can be like eight hundred
pounds.
So
Yeah. So I was
(09:27):
kind of in awe and also it was
like, do not touch her, do not go
near her, you know, etcetera.
And
so
I went back to get some lunch,
went back down the beach, and I started
googling,
and
I fell into the world of stranded marine
(09:49):
mammals,
of which there are many. So there's
four or five organizations
along the coast of California
that are all private. There's no publicly funded,
marine mammal rescue organizations,
which is bananas to me because
(10:10):
the 1971
act of marine mammal, protection
is a federal it's a federal act. NOAA,
which is the National Oceanic,
which is currently
being dismantled, they give very, very small grants
to some of these organizations, but it's all
private money. It's all
so there's three or four of them. So,
(10:32):
of course, they're understaffed.
They're not you know what I mean? They're
not huge, like, research centers or anything. They're
just
literally in Santa Barbara, the people that run,
Simway,
which is responsible for all of Santa Barbara
and the Channel Islands, which gets the biggest
amount of sea lions every year because they
all go there to give birth in June.
(10:53):
Everyone's a Gemini.
All sea lions are Geminis.
That's tricky. It's tricky.
So, anyway, I started dialing up and down
the coast, and I ended up talking to
this woman in the marine mammal care center
up in San Francisco.
And they run they're very well funded, and
they run a 247
(11:14):
hotline. Someone answering the phone. And she was
like, yeah. We're having a huge
domoic acid surge.
There's hundreds and hundreds of stranded sea lions.
We can't get to all of them,
etcetera.
And
you have the wrong number, you need to
call the people down in Santa Barbara. We
only go down to, like, SLO or something.
(11:35):
Is this something that they ingest and then
it it hits their brain or Desmoyic acid
is a naturally
occurring harmful algae bloom.
It's called an HAB,
and these happen all over the world. They
happen in freshwater. They happen in in saltwater,
and they are
(11:55):
becoming more and more common because of warming.
What happens is in the ocean, the ocean
is is kinda like a broth. It's it's
less about, like, water. It's more like a
little brothy
stew. So it has all these different levels
of nutrients, nitrogen, potassium, sodium, all this stuff.
(12:16):
There's a bunch of things that that happens.
They're they're called cold water upwelling. There's nitrogen
runoff from the agricultural
in in California.
It disrupts the balance and this algae that
just normally hangs and is like, hey, I'm
an algae,
goes
bananas and proliferates
everywhere.
And all the little little baby fish
(12:38):
eat it, and then all the sea lions
eat a ton of the baby fish.
So it's kind of this weird Rubik's cube
of like,
where it hits in the food chain, who
eats it, you know, a mom is gonna
eat more
more fish because she's nursing.
In sea lions, but not so much in
(13:00):
other animals, it's a neurotoxin.
It's also in shellfish
and seafood, So that's why we have in
California very robust
monitoring
of, like,
you know, donate
donate shrimp. Like, they have, you know, fishing
calls off where you can't fish
and harvest
(13:21):
if there's a Des Moines gas balloon, just
so that it doesn't get into the human
population.
Also, we don't like it either. It's just
a big Rubik's cube of of all these
different elements that come together, and then ocean
warming kinda supercharges it. It's really more about
the balance of the ocean
habitat
(13:41):
more than more than anything else. And the
other really big problem is nitrogen runoff, because
in California, we have tons and tons of
agriculture.
So nitrogen is a fertilizer
that everyone uses on their crops, and then
you have rain, and then that all washes
down to the ocean. So we're having a
domoic acid surge right now. I'm curious on
the neurotoxin.
(14:02):
Does it
is it
a aspiration that could happen? Or is it
You can't, like, swim in it and I'm
sure it's not amazing for you, but, like,
you can't swim in it and get it.
It's because No. What I'm saying is the
sea lions,
do does it stop their their breathing? Does
it stop their
motor skills? What does it do? Basically gives
(14:25):
them brain seizures. So just imagine. So they're
having strokes,
mini strokes,
seizures.
They become super agitated,
which is why, like, they'll be, like, stay
away from them. They're not really dangerous animals
at all.
But if, you know, if you were having
a stroke and you were super agitated, you
(14:45):
wouldn't really be aware of, like,
your you know? So it's a very
slow and painful
death, unfortunately.
And then they get malnourished and dehydrated and
Why don't they put them down, poor things,
if they get it? They literally can't get
to all of them. When there's a surge
(15:05):
when I was there in 2022,
they were on every beach washing up, dying,
and dead. It's actually extremely heartbreaking.
And the year that I was there, it
coincided with birthing season, which is June.
And so there were a lot of mommies
washing up and, unfortunately,
giving spontaneous
(15:26):
birth to not formed. And it was it
was really Yeah. It sounds like a horror
movie. It's a little what what is strange
is how people just walk by in the
beach.
That's the strangest
part of all of it. So for her,
so I ended up in this
marine mammal. So I called the
(15:47):
place in Santa Barbara, but they were overwhelmed.
They had their voicemail on.
Then I went back.
And I hung out with her for
I said, I will be with you here
till the sun goes down.
And just
hung out with her and
sang to her and
(16:08):
talked to her. And
I would say about 99%
of the people who are walking on the
beach just walked by and didn't even notice.
And
then there was a handful of people. There
was a woman who came and sat with
me,
and I think she was from The Philippines
originally. She sang these beautiful songs to her.
(16:33):
And
we just sat there because there was nothing
I could do. I had I had called
all the hotlines.
I had
there was there was nothing to do. So
I just, yeah, I just sat with her.
I played her some songs
on my phone. She really loved, Take Me
Home Country Road.
Who doesn't? Who doesn't? Who doesn't? Now were
(16:55):
there other sea lions on the beach at
this time as well? There were, but they
were further down. They were, yeah, kind of
up and down.
What in yourself
were you drawn to her? How what part
of you was being
serviced and served and healed by being there
for her in these moments?
That's a really good question that no one's
(17:16):
asked me, so hang on.
This might get emotional.
I just saw how magnificent she was
and how hard she was fighting,
And that just
spoke to something in me. It was just
(17:36):
and and the third thing was is that
how far apart are
was was she and I? We we aren't
that far apart.
She's a mammal.
We come from the same, like,
cell lines. There's a similar I did all
this research about that. And, you know, they
(17:57):
walk on all fours.
You know, they have fingers
in their little flippers, and it just
I don't know. It just really broke open
something in me, and
I
just was very
taken in by by her.
And
(18:17):
even though we were only together for these
four hours, I felt like we had a
relationship
and a pretty
deep one.
I was sobbing
a lot of the time.
So
but yeah. Do you feel like she understood
why you were there?
(18:38):
My guess is that she probably had not
had interaction
with a human
before
up close.
And
I
I don't know if she knew that's why
I was there. I think she probably did
get it on some level
just because,
(18:59):
I
I mean, I stated it verbally, but I
just think the act of
sitting
and just being like, I'm gonna be here.
I think I think beings I think all
beings can sense that.
But more and more, science is proving that
animals are,
highly emotionally intelligent way more than we've ever
(19:21):
given them credit for.
Well, animals, yeah, they're sentient.
And
they
I've also
this brings up another aspect of my life,
which is
I've taken a lot of animal communication
classes.
There's a telepathy
(19:41):
that's been scientifically
there's a lot of there's a lot of
evidence based research on it. And in fact,
interspecies
communication is becoming a field of study at,
universities.
So I actually attended an interspecies
communication conference put on by the University of
Saskatchewan.
(20:02):
God bless the Canadians.
God bless the Canadians.
Oh my goodness. A million ways. Listen, my
dog and I were so we were so
connected. There I there's no doubt in my
mind that we understood each other on some
level that went far beyond
a verbal communication.
Absolutely. And I think,
(20:24):
you know, you see it with humans
as well. You can sense
when someone's upset. You can sense when someone's
happy, and they're in the room next to
you, or you know what I mean? So
I don't think it's that far of a
reach, especially with a mammal
that is
as large or larger than you, there's so
(20:44):
much
in common
that
it's
I just in my mind when it was
happening, I just felt like,
would you walk by a person on the
beach who was dying of a neurotoxin?
I just couldn't imagine, like, if it was
a member of your family, would you just,
(21:04):
like, walk by? People walk by humans suffering
every single day.
Of course. Of course. We all we all
do. But it just broke something open in
me.
I
became kind of fascinated
with her and with the whole interplay
of
the ocean and the algae and
(21:27):
and
my own humanity
and
her sentience
and
yeah.
What how did you leave it? Well, I
told her I was I was, like, I
was very agitated
because I'm, like, a doer. Like, I'm, like,
let's get you some fluids.
(21:48):
I just wanna, like,
you know, help help get her better. I
mean, she's really just coming up on the
beach and she's a symptom of a massive
thing that's happening in the ocean. You know
what I mean?
Which is just an allegory for
so many things happening right now. Right?
But I'm like I go into, like, you
know, nurse mode of, like, let's
(22:11):
let's get you, you know, well, and I
realized there was there was nothing I could
do. And so I
was, like, in my mind, I was like,
can I stay overnight on the beach?
How safe would that be? Like, I was
having doing all these, like, mental calculations,
and it was far enough away from
(22:32):
any people or
lifeguard, and also when the tide comes in,
it comes right up to the rocks. So,
I was like,
probably not the best idea
for me to, like,
stay out camp here overnight.
So I knew, I just said, when the
sun goes down, I'm gonna go home. And
I told her that, and I left. And
then that night, I became very, very,
(22:54):
very agitated,
and I started researching more and finding out
about, like,
the organizations.
I called and left a million voice mails.
I was, like, that annoying person.
And the next morning, I woke up, and
I was so still so agitated, and I
had a weird intuition. I went down to
this other beach that I never go to.
(23:15):
There was a park ranger there, and I
was like,
yeah. There was a sea lion up on
Hendry's, and he's like, oh, yeah. They picked
her up this morning. So they got to
her. The rescue people got to her,
but she did not make it, unfortunately.
Yeah. And then they were, of course,
super annoyed with me because I was like,
can you just tell me the status of
(23:36):
a lion?
And they were like, we're dealing with, like,
800 requests a day, and we have, like,
two people
here. You know, like, this so they eventually
let me know, like, a couple days later
that she had passed away. How did you
process that grief? I processed it with my
therapist.
I think my biggest
I don't know. I cry I cried.
(23:58):
I also
felt
like I wanted to make meaning out of
it, and that was a really important
thing for me. Like, I I wanted to
discover, like, why
this whole experience
happened, which,
I mean,
(24:19):
sometimes it you know, I'd you know, the
the simple answer is I decided to go
up to Santa Barbara, and this was happening
at the same time, and it happened upon
this person because I was walking on the
beach or this lion. Oh my god. I
called her a person. I know. Yeah. Thank
you. A lot going on here.
A lot going on. This is why I
wondered if maybe somebody in your life previously
(24:39):
had passed and you felt helpless about it
and that maybe she is the representative
of of that helplessness and that lack of
control. I mean,
granted,
we are in a world now where
it it is hard to ignore a feeling
of hopelessness.
And the important thing is, of course, to
(25:00):
not give up hope, that that to do
the thing, to make the calls, to
be there and hold the
flipper,
the hand of the person that's going through
the stuff. You know, that that we
are a community, that we are integral to
each other. And I think that's definitely lost
when we get caught up in
(25:22):
what feels like an insurmountable
mountain of hell.
Right?
Yes. It's a lot of a lot of
words in there, but you know what I'm
saying. So I it did make me wonder
the way you're impassioned about it.
I think having a deep empathy for animals
is a great and wonderful thing, and
(25:43):
a lot of us carry that in us
to some degree or another. Yeah. But for
you,
this became
much bigger. Then you're running around like Cassandra,
and everyone's going, well, you know, it is
what it is.
Right.
Yeah. It I mean, I think it mirrored
(26:03):
my my mom was in the hospital
at the time.
So I think my
and in
in Michigan, so I was not able to
be there at that time. And
I think that was part of it. And
I think also
realizing,
you know, I struggle in the world sometimes.
(26:26):
I
can't do anything about things,
or I
I try like, I also saw her trying.
I think that was the thing. She was
really trying to
get up on her flippers and get back
in the ocean.
She was like, you know, she would
and interestingly enough, when I would play her
(26:46):
the song, she would kinda get some she
would kinda get up.
She would start moving again, and then she
would have, you know, another seizure.
And
and
so I think it was the trying
also that I saw, and I saw how
I try, I think,
sometimes to be in this
(27:08):
in this soup,
in the in the broth. But, you might
wanna consider a therapy as another field for
you.
It's striking at the heart of these
of these essential questions.
Look,
every
that is such an incredible gift that she
gave you. Did you name her by any
(27:30):
chance? Yeah. Oana. Yeah. Oana.
It's an incredible gift that she gave you,
and especially because
dealing with something that you have no control
of with your mom,
she was the avatar, the surrogate.
And what a what a beautiful kind gesture
on her part.
(27:51):
And what a beautiful kind gesture on your
part
to be there for her.
And I cannot imagine what it felt like
to learn of her passing.
That's
awful.
I knew that she had passed.
Is your mom okay?
Yeah. She's fine. Great.
(28:13):
We are all connected.
There is no doubt in my mind.
And if you wanna go into some sort
of a deep metaphysical
or
philosophical
conundrum about it, it might be that as
your mother is getting stronger and the sea
lion is getting weaker,
that they too are connected
(28:34):
Mhmm. On some level,
somewhere, some way.
Yeah. I I
I agree that we are all connected, and
I think that
I think that animals
can open
places in us because they're so
wild.
(28:54):
They're so
feral and of the world, and they just
do what they do. Like, she's not thinking
about
sea lions don't think about, like, and then
I play from eight to twelve, and then
I eat, and then I
call out, like, they don't have you know
what I mean? They they might have a
(29:15):
rhythm, but they don't have a schedule.
I don't know what what I felt what
I think what anyone can feel open up
inside themselves when they're dealing with animals
is just
that
really primal,
like,
love
being present in the moment,
(29:38):
all the things that
make
animals tap into all of that for us.
Animals have a way to break you open.
Absolutely.
Where do you go from there? So now
you are you, or do you volunteer for
the sea lions? Do you write about them
more?
What is your
how what's your takeaway?
(29:59):
I came back the next summer.
I
work with a writing teacher who is up
in Topanga. Her name is Dina Metzger.
Highly recommend anyone listening to look up her
work. She's
been she's in her eighties, and she lives
on the tippy top of Topanga.
You are an illiterate beast, I have to
(30:19):
say.
The tippy top of Topanga.
Tippy top. I've been working her with her
for a while, and I do a writing
retreat with her every year. And I had
in 2023,
I did it, and I was up in
Mendocino. And I was like, I wanna write
about this, but I don't know how. It
seems so, like, large, and I don't know
what.
(30:40):
And so I just had this intuition my
friend said to me. She said, I think
you just need to, like, follow your intuition
on this one, which is so hard for
me because I'm so, like, I need a
practical blend. And so I went down to
Santa Barbara and walked into
the worst stenoic acid acid surge that had
happened in thirty years. So and there was
not a lot of coverage of it. I
(31:00):
had gone down and I was like, I
I'm just gonna go down. I'm gonna, like,
research and just, like, hang out with the
lions and all that stuff.
I got a message from a friend of
mine in a writing group. It's like, you
need to write about this. She's like, I'm
a volunteer. I'm in Malibu. I'm on the
front lines, and it's a freaking
like, it's so bad.
(31:21):
She's like, you've gotta write for it. So
I sent out a pitch, and The Guardian
wanted to write about it. And then I,
yeah, I wrote
I wrote I think they gave me, like,
700 words, and I wrote, like, 1,800
words or something. I don't know. But I
ended up interviewing, like,
the world expert on sea lions
(31:41):
and some people at US,
UCSD,
on, you know, ocean climate. There's a woman
who has just studied dewmic acid for thirty
years. She's sort of like a legend
and ended up talking to all these people
and
writing an article about it. And the coverage
at the time I was, it's really interesting
(32:01):
because
the coverage at the time was very perfunctory.
Like, it was like, there's a domoic acid
surge.
This is happening. There was no,
like, context given or, you know,
anything like that. So
I just, like, worked day and night on
that article, and then it came out, and
(32:23):
it actually ranked, like, number two in The
US
that week and, like, number four worldwide.
So a lot of people saw it, and
I heard from a lot of people that
they were like, that came up in my
Apple News or that came up yeah. So
that's that's what I did. And then
there may be
(32:44):
more more in the future. And then I
actually went out, and I
went with the volunteer organization,
in Santa Barbara, and I went out on
a rescue.
So I shadowed,
a couple of the volunteers. They had some
people down from San Francisco because it was
just I mean, they were just
so overwhelmed.
(33:04):
And, usually, they have, like, four to six
people for a rescue, and it was
the guy from the volunteer organization, another woman
who was from up north who, like,
they do their rescues completely different than the
people in Santa Barbara. It was hilarious.
And me.
And so the guy was like, we usually
have four to six people about here, so
you're gonna be helping now. And I was
(33:26):
like, okay. Like, I was like, what's going
on? So
there was this, sea lion. It was a
baby. She's, like, one or two, and she
was not having a good time. So we
we went out, and we,
attempted to get her into the crate. And
she she saw us coming, and she was
like, see you. And she took off running.
(33:48):
She was like, see you later. She went
from,
like, totally catatonic to, like, running. They can
run up to, like, I think, like, 30
miles an hour or something if they really
get going. So
then
it was like a Laurel and Hardy skit.
There's a giant net.
So it was like, get the net.
You gotta get the get the net. There's
(34:09):
this giant net
that she ran right into,
and we put her in the,
in the, crate or whatever. And those people
are just amazing. The volunteer staff they have
are phenomenal,
and the people who run it are phenomenal.
They're just
they, you know, they love what they do.
(34:31):
But it's kind of like,
you know, I mean, they're and they're all
underfunded and
What's the BBC Lion's name? So, because it
was my first rescue,
I got to name
the
name.
We thought it was a him, so I
named him Thomas.
(34:51):
And we found out later it was a
girl, but then we'd still just call her
Thomas.
I love that. Why are sea lions important?
Sea lions are important because they're called a
sentinel
mammal. So they're a sentinel species. So if
something happens to them
downstream,
including humans,
(35:13):
it's not great.
They're our first warning sign then. They're our
warning. They're our warning sign. Yeah. They're sentinel.
Sentinel creature.
Yeah. So I don't know. It's TBD. This
just all just happened, like, quite recently. So
She,
I suppose,
is the martyr for the species so that
you would get involved and be a part
(35:33):
of it. Sorry for all the outside noise.
I have not yet seen I can't hear
it. Oh, good. The new space, I had
I haven't built myself a little
cave to dwell in for these podcasts, so
it's a bit noisy.
So apologies to those listening as well. Tell
people how they might find you. My website
is just it's meganwcleary.com.
I spell Meghan with an h, m e
(35:55):
g h a n w cleary dot com.
And I wrote I ended up writing a
follow on feature article for the Montecito journal,
which is a,
a public a local hyperlocal publication
up in Santa Barbara County.
And you can donate
to SimWi, which is a great organization in
Santa Barbara. If you really wanna make a
difference, their your dollar will go right to
(36:18):
a fish in a sea lion's mouth.
So and their website is cimwi.com.
Simway.
Stay tuned, everybody.
Stay tuned, everybody. Thank you so much for
your time today. It's really interesting. I mean,
I feel like we could talk about shoes,
but it would take away We could talk
about shoes. From the sea lion story. So
(36:40):
maybe in the future, you'll come on and
talk about shoes. Like shoes? We could talk
about vaginas.
We could talk about all different things. You
know? But they're all connected.
So
somehow.
Somehow.
Thank you so much. Well, I have to
thank you for your insight
and your
(37:01):
questions.
And I think I probably was holding back
a little bit because I didn't wanna
just start weeping. Your questions really touched me
and and helped illuminate a lot of great
things.
I appreciate that. Thank you. And it's okay
to cry. Thank you for listening, everybody. Oh,
my gosh. Thank you so much.
(37:21):
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast
on Apple, iHeart, and Spotify, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Thanks. Bye.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.