Ric O'Barry details Vladimir the beluga whale's escape from the Russian Navy and his current hunt by polar bears in Norway, while exposing the $20–$22 million cost of Keiko's failed release versus cheaper alternatives. He condemns SeaWorld for suppressing trainer injury lawsuits, critiques government agencies under the Department of Commerce for prioritizing commerce over protection, and denounces dolphin-assisted therapy as profit-driven fraud. O'Barry argues that consumer boycotts are the only solution to end the global captivity trade driven by shows rather than meat consumption. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Russian Spy Whale00:07:57
Hello, everybody.
If you don't know who Rick O'Berry is, he is a legendary dolphin activist who's known for the documentary The Cove that won the Academy Award as well as every other award a documentary could possibly win.
It's all about the dolphin trafficking and the dolphin slaughter that goes on in Taiji, Japan.
He went down there to expose the secret slaughter that goes on every year and the billions of dollars that's made from it.
We also get into his friend, John Lilly.
And his NASA funded research on non human intelligence involving dolphins back in the day when he was working on Flipper and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
This episode's packed with gems, and I know you guys are going to love it.
So please hammer that subscribe button below the video if you haven't already and enjoy the show.
All right, Rick, thank you so much for coming, man.
It's an honor to have you on here.
I've been trying to get you on the show for years.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I would have showed up earlier.
I didn't know you were in St. Pete.
Last time I heard, you were in Indonesia, then you were in Denmark, and then you were in Tahiti.
You're still trotting the world.
I am.
You're in your early 80s.
Is that right?
84, yeah.
84.
Yeah.
That's incredible that you're still moving around like that.
Yeah, when I came here a year ago, I didn't expect to I was hoping to stay on the beach for a little while, but I've been in Portugal and Japan, Denmark, Norway.
Sweden chasing a whale up the coast, a beluga whale.
I haven't been here very much, actually.
But you got a nice place here.
Thanks.
I appreciate it.
I haven't seen much of it yet.
There's not much to see except for this room and the room you were just in.
But you said you were chasing a beluga whale?
A beluga whale by the name of Vladimir, yeah, escaped from the Russian Navy.
It's believed.
Nobody knows for sure.
There are several people who work in Russia with the Russian dolphins that have worked with these beluga whales who confirmed that he was a Russian spy whale.
So we don't have any data, like a birth certificate.
It's important because dolphins that are born in captivity are very different from dolphins that are Born in the wild, they're a completely different animal.
Many of these dolphins right here, in fact, Clearwater probably and SeaWorld and these places around here, all over Europe and places, especially northern Europe, where the climate is cold, they suffer from the cold weather, I believe, because all of the dolphins, every one of them in Europe, for example, originally were captured.
in Florida, near here, near Pine Island, Florida, or Cuba.
So they are indeed subtropical creatures.
Nobody ever thinks about that.
I think about it when I'm standing outside the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany with snow up to my knees and the wind's blowing and it's freezing cold and I'm out there protesting and nobody thinks when they buy a ticket they're going to go inside this building, you know, they're going to see dolphins that were captured in Florida that shouldn't be here in the first place.
So we try to expose all of these things, hoping that people will think twice before they buy a ticket for a dolphin show.
That's what we do.
So going back to the Russian spy whale.
Yeah, Vladimir.
I'll go back there.
I'm just waiting right now for the ice to melt because the ice on the roads, we have a home in Denmark, and my wife Helena and I will put the car.
What we do is put the car in the ferryboat, and we go to Sweden, drive off, and then we have people on the ground who know where Valdemir is, and we're in touch with him and we'll drive there.
We follow him all the way up the coast from Sweden to Norway last time we were there.
But now it's really frozen and dangerous to drive for me, especially because it's ice and snow and I'm not used to it.
So do you think they have him retrofitted with some sort of radio transmitters or some cameras and stuff?
Yeah, he showed up with cameras, GoPros.
He's wearing a harness.
What?
Canvas harness.
Is there photos of this?
Yeah.
You can Google it in, Valdimir.
Valdimir the spyware.
So this is not live, is it?
No, it's not live.
Okay.
No, we were just going to say that.
Because you can insert a voiceover.
I'll tell you where that footage is.
I'll send you some, actually.
Steve, actually, he's on the computer.
He can actually Google stuff as we're talking, and he can pull it up and show it to us.
So it's H-V-A-L-D-I-M-I-R, Valdimir.
He was featured in the New York Times cover of the New York Times Magazine. about two weeks ago.
It's a big four or five page story, photographs.
Good images.
This guy.
See, there's the hardest there.
Wow.
Oh, no way.
Yeah, he's very underweight here.
You can't tell, but I can.
Right on the lower left, he's really, yeah, he's in bad shape there.
Wow.
That's when he left the Arctic Circle and started traveling towards Sweden and Denmark.
That's when I left here and got out of the first plane.
try to interrupt him, turn him around, because he will not find another beluga whale once he leaves the Arctic Circle and starts heading in that direction.
He's going in the wrong direction.
That's so sad, man.
Yeah, and he is the friendliest of all the dolphins I've worked with, and I've worked with a lot of dolphins and whales in the last, you know, before Flipper, 60-something years.
He is by far the friendliest.
And he just goes right up to people like if he could hug them he would, and my fear is he's going to be transferred to the, an area in the north of uh, Norway where there are about 300 hungry polar bears and uh, so that's, polar bears will get him.
I don't know, I mean, nobody knows, you would never be able to monitor him there.
But the nor This whale swam into the largest whaling nation on planet Earth.
Right?
Right.
So the government, what we've been trying to do, the Dolphin Project at least, we've been trying to get the government to step up and take responsibility to actually make him a citizen and assign a cadre of five or six, could be Coast Guard or Forest Rangers or somebody to be there with him.
And there are some civilians to see in that photograph.
They're doing that.
But the government should do that.
Do that.
The government just wants to get rid of him.
He's an embarrassment.
Really?
Yeah, if they protect him, well, how about the other whales you're killing?
Killing Whales for Salmon00:02:38
You're killing more whales than anybody on the planet.
Russia?
No, this is Norway.
Oh, Norway.
Okay.
Russia did.
They stopped, but now it's Norway, Iceland, Japan.
So Norway is killing more whales than Japan?
Yeah.
Wow.
Since when?
Yeah.
in the last year or two.
That's crazy.
Norway is like they've now become the largest in numbers.
How many whales they kill, that's based on how many they kill.
So he swam into, you know, and I'd like for him to stay right there and bring as much media attention as he can to the fact that Norway is killing whales unnecessarily.
They don't have to do this.
So there are fish farms.
That's what these guys here you're looking at on this photograph work at the fish farm.
These are salmon farms.
Norway is a very, very rich country, and they make their money on oil and salmon.
Almost all salmon you eat now worldwide is from Norway.
Interesting.
Don't eat it.
It's well, it was exposed on Sea Spiracy.
There's a movie on Netflix everybody should see.
If you are still eating salmon, go to Netflix and look at sea Spiracy.
Why?
What's wrong with the salmon?
It's disgusting what they it's just I, I don't want to.
People are eating when they're watching this show.
That's okay, we can, it doesn't matter, we can, we can make them throw up it.
It's disgusting.
They only are what you.
They shovel in there to them and so, like you mean like they're raised on farms right, they're farm salmon they're fed uh, In these very large circular sea pens that are used.
They call that the farm.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
It's dangerous.
Don't eat it.
If you have to eat salmon, look for salmon from, sometimes you can find it at Whole Foods.
It's from Alaska.
Wild caught from Alaska doesn't have mercury and all the problems that you find in all the other salmon.
Even the color of this beautiful salmon color when you go to the sushi place, that's fake.
If you saw the color of it, you wouldn't even buy it in the first place.
Gray is actually gray.
Guns and Knives in Japan00:14:50
It's that color.
It's that color.
Really?
Yeah.
Because of what they feed it.
They feed it garbage.
Wow.
And so people dress it up in the sushi market.
It looks wonderful, but it's all fake.
So for people that don't know, you have one of the most famous and legendary documentaries that have come out in the last couple decades is The Cove, which won an Academy Award, won an ungodly amount of awards.
With all of them.
Won every single award.
One of the most famous wildlife documentaries that has ever been known.
When they were making that documentary, is it something you were a part of from the start?
Or did these guys just sort of discover you and decide to make a documentary about you?
Well, there is no these guys.
It's like everything else, like this podcast.
This is your baby.
So there is somebody there who, and that would be Louis Sahoyas.
That was his project.
And how it started, it was a phone call from San Diego.
I was in Coconut Grove.
He calls and introduced himself and said, I just saw your I didn't make The Cove, by the way.
I'm not a filmmaker.
But I did make a short film video with Diane Thader, who is a what would you call her?
She's an artist, a video artist.
And she cinematographer?
Video artist.
Okay, that works.
I don't know.
It's different than what you do in documentaries.
Okay.
They show but she did a proper doc.
And it's not something you would put on television because it's so graphic.
It's really meant for a journalist.
If a journalist calls me and says, what's this all about?
I can show them.
I can't explain it.
It's so over the top, what happens at the cove.
in Tai Chi.
If I had to explain it to you, I wouldn't be able to.
Well, you've seen it, so you know.
But if I show you something, you might get interested and get involved.
There's no words.
So we made this one, and Louis Sohoyas was in San Diego at a marine mammal conference.
I was scheduled as the keynote speaker, and I was going to show my 15-minute film.
At the last minute, SeaWorld said, we're scrapping that.
O'Barry can't speak.
And that piqued Louis' curiosity.
Why can't he speak?
because he's speaking about dolphins in captivity, dolphins being captured at the cove in Tai Chi.
The capture of the dolphins and the sale of those dolphins is indeed the economic underpinning of the slaughter.
It's not about meat.
It's about live dolphins for dolphin shows.
So Louis said, So he said, can I, I saw that, I saw that, I saw that video you made, although SeaWorld wouldn't show it, somebody showed it to me, and I'm wondering if I could follow you around with my camera.
I said, well, what is it you're doing?
He said, we're doing a oh, that's your phone.
Is that mine?
Yeah, I should have shut that off.
That's okay.
You can answer it if you have to.
That's a good question.
Let's link it real quick.
Yeah, no, no worries.
Hello?
Yeah.
I should.
And they have told the April 22nd to vacate the premises.
Can you repeat that, please?
I'm doing the interview right now, and Danny's here in front of me, and he and the photographer can hear what's up, Lincoln.
Repeat.
He said, the city of Miami-Dade just terminated the Aquarium's lease.
Are you rolling?
Aquarium's lease.
Well, that's wonderful.
They terminated the lease for who?
It's Miami Sea Aquarium.
Miami Sea Aquarium.
It's over.
We won.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
I'm going to hold you the phone up to the microphone.
Repeat that one more time, please.
The Miami Dade County and the mayor's office just issued a letter of termination for the lease for the Miami Sea Aquarium for the Dolphin Company.
The Dolphin Company has until April 22nd.
April 21st to vacate the premises.
No, what a beautiful thing.
I've been trying to do that since 1970.
Really?
Yeah.
Today, it happened on your show live.
Okay, Lincoln, thanks.
I got to get back to work.
Thanks, Lincoln.
Look at that.
What are the chances that you just got the news right now?
That's amazing.
You guys have been trying to do that since the 70s?
Since 1970.
When Hugo and the Lolita arrived at the Miami Seaquarium, I quit.
I went up in front of the Seaquarium.
I was the head trader.
Get a little bit closer.
I lived there at the Seaquarium in the house that was the flipper set.
Right.
And I.
And when the orcas arrived and I left the Miami Sea Aquarium, now I'm standing outside the gate.
Not allowed inside.
Even though I had the keys to the place in my pocket still because I lived there, right?
And I started protesting.
And I'm standing out in front of the Sea Aquarium with a sign, I don't know what it said, cars going by honk if you're, and nobody would honk, of course.
People were going like this and people were laughing at me.
Even people in the animal welfare industry, these big groups, I was trying to get them come and join us.
They would laugh at me.
Really?
What are you talking about?
Dolphin captivity, that's not an issue.
That's not a real issue.
And they would laugh at it.
Today, it's a mainstream issue.
And all those big groups who would not get involved now have sort of taken over this issue.
So, going back real quick, I want to get to the.
I want to jump back to the early days of Flipper and everything after we get finished what we're talking about with the.
When you first went to San Diego to do the conference and SeaWorld banned you from the conference.
I didn't go to the conference.
I wasn't allowed.
They were showing the film and Louie was there.
I know I'm not going to be allowed to get into SeaWorld.
If you talk to any SeaWorld trainer, I talked to one yesterday.
When you go to buy a ticket, all of those ticket booths have my photograph there.
If I show up, they have instructions to call the police.
That's not only the SeaWorld, that's the aquarium, Marineland, all these places.
So I wasn't there, but the film was going to be shown finally.
But it didn't.
So Louis said, can I go with you and I'll film it.
I said, well, what is it you're doing?
We're doing a television series like the old Jacques Cousteau series.
You remember that?
Yes.
He's asking me that.
And I said, sure, I remember.
Everybody.
Well, we want to feature you in the first episode.
I said, well, I'm here.
Bring the cameras.
You were here, meaning Taiji?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going the next day.
I said, I'll be there tomorrow.
I'm going right now.
And how often did you go there leading up to this?
Five or six times a year.
When did you start going there?
2003, I believe.
Okay.
And so Louie, I said, he said, can I photograph you?
I said, sure.
He hung up the telephone and went out and took a three-day crash course on how to make a movie.
He never made a movie.
And I thought, oh, boy.
So he's telling this story.
We're in Paris.
He and I and Luc Besson, the French filmmaker, he was the distributor for the COVID.
So the three of us are sitting at this press conference, and Louis is telling this story.
He said, so I told Rick, I'll meet him in Taiji.
And I hung up the phone and went out and took a three-day course on how to make a movie.
Here's a guy who never made a movie before.
His first movie wins Academy Award and every award that.
Jesus Christ.
So I like telling filmmakers.
I told my son this story.
And I was just in Portugal recently at a film school telling all of the students, trying to encourage them to go out and do what Louis did.
Anybody can do it.
And everybody should do it.
So Lincoln did that.
And he went out and made a three-part television series for Discovery Channel.
Blood Dolphin.
Blood Dolphins.
Now he's doing a feature film for dog Wolf, I think it's called.
Dog Wolf?
Dog Wolf.
They do documentaries.
Okay.
Oh, it's a company.
Okay, got it.
Yeah, in London.
They did the documentary that won the Academy Award this year.
It's called Navalny.
Navalny.
Okay.
That's their film.
Right.
It's a profile piece.
Now they're doing another profile piece on what we're doing.
So that's exciting.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Lincoln couldn't win an Academy Award.
So you guys met up.
This is not in the shot, is it?
No, no, no.
And you said, I'm going to Taiji the next day.
They said, we'll meet you there.
And so he shows up, got one little camera by himself.
And we're at a restaurant.
I took a picture of a restaurant that night, a Japanese restaurant.
And he leans across the table and he says, so what's this movie about?
I thought, God, this is so encouraging.
Because I have been doing interviews literally since before Flipper, hundreds of them.
And I wrote a couple of books and my writing partner was a journalist for so many years, 30 years.
And he told me one time, he said, journalists aren't looking for the truth.
They're looking for a story.
That stuck with me because that's what I experienced all of these years.
I put that together.
They're looking for a story.
And usually they know what that story is before they even interview me.
And here's a guy, once in a while, you'll get a investigative journalist who has a blank mind and they're going to document what it is.
Yes.
So that's why I was excited.
Right.
You haven't already made up your mind what this is.
Just follow me around.
You'll see.
It is what it is.
Right.
And that's how the code was made.
What was the response from the people?
Because, I mean, watching that documentary, it is quite literally, Astonishing how many people are aware of you who are tailing you every day, getting in your face, trying to intimidate you.
Like it's a very, very high level operation those fishermen have going there, and you are the bane of their existence.
I can't imagine the reaction you got after this documentary not only dropped but won an Academy Award.
What was the reaction from those guys and from not just Taiji but Japan?
Anger.
They don't want to be exposed like that.
And they know that it's all true.
So they have to do damage control now and pretend that we're making all this stuff up.
And anger.
Anger is what just made them angrier.
That's all that happened.
How long after the film came out and won the Academy Award did you go back to Taiji or did you go back?
I never actually left.
I was there almost all the time.
Oh, wow.
It goes on six months a year.
When it starts, it doesn't stop for six months every day.
Right.
From September to March.
Yeah, I'm constantly going back and forth.
I was doing a lot of hiding in those days because they're angry fishermen.
They're not the real threat, though.
The real threat is the the Yakuza wannabe, the young guy who wants to be the Yakuza is very involved in fisheries in Japan and these live dolphin sales.
And anywhere there's money, the Yakuza is in that neighborhood.
For people listening who don't know, can you explain what the Yakuza is?
The Yakuza is a Japanese mafia.
They're everywhere.
They're ubiquitous in Japan.
They are in government.
They run the government.
They're everywhere.
And so the guy I'm afraid of is the young guy who's had too much to drink.
makes a bad decision and something happens.
And that happens in Japan.
Not so much with guns, with knives.
Guns are outlawed, but you have to constantly look over your shoulder.
Guns are outlawed there?
I think they're outlawed, banned.
You don't find guns like you do here.
That's a good thing, too, because they get very angry when you expose them like that.
It's something you just don't do in Japan.
Japanese people would never do that to one another.
Their culture is very, very different.
And you don't take sides with Westerners.
So it's a very, very difficult, very difficult campaign.
Lawsuits Against Fishermen00:02:11
And we've been on it since 2003.
And we're still on it.
And we're not having any results.
So we've tried something new.
Sue the bastards.
We've had very good success with suing them.
I've been arrested twice on false charges and deported, went to prison.
I took them to court and sued them.
Who specifically?
The government.
Oh, the Japanese government.
Yeah.
And I won.
That's never happened before.
When I was in Japan in September, Lincoln and I were there filming.
We went to the lawyer's office, this law firm, and he said, this is congratulations.
This is the first case ever in Japanese history where somebody was deported, sued the government, went all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
So I'm back whenever I want to go back.
That makes them just angrier.
So our strategy now is to sue them.
Sea Shepherd was there also, another environmental group.
A couple of their guys got arrested.
They also sued using the same law firm, Japanese law firm.
They won.
So we have a good track record with this law firm and the Supreme Court, the higher courts are much more fair than the lower courts.
So we're going to keep the lawsuit going.
And yeah, that's our new strategy.
Have you ever sat down with one of these fishermen and had us a direct face-to-face conversation?
I've had many.
I've gone into like a cordial conversation?
Yeah.
And recorded it.
I would sometimes record them with a button cam or something like that.
And yeah, we've done that.
And what about that?
Roan Clothing Strategy00:02:09
What is it you want to know about that?
What came out of that?
What was your sense?
Which one?
I've been there since 2000.
All of them together.
The thing I've taken away from it is that they admitted they will stop.
If it's illegal, as long as it's legal, we're going to do this.
You kill cows, we kill these.
You know, beef.
Put it on a table, cut it up.
You can't even tell the difference.
So, of course, they're right about that.
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Now back to the show.
Live Streaming the Kill00:15:24
And um, it's the way they kill them, the way they're doing this and other improprieties, illegalities are being recorded.
So when you and we live stream, when we're there, we're live streaming everything.
We have drones, very small drones, and we're looking for, we're looking for illegalities And we funnel all of that to the law firm.
And our next assault will be a legal one in the courts.
There's so many questions regarding the ethics of what it is.
In the documentary, they're always coming up with different arguments to back up what they're doing slaughtering these dolphins.
And one of them was it's pest control because they're eating too much fish.
Another one was.
You know, like what you said earlier, you guys slaughter cows, or there's a guy in people in Australia, they slaughter kangaroos.
So, why can't we slaughter our own dolphins?
Yeah, they're right, too.
Excuse me for a minute.
Is there any sort of legal loophole there that you can get around or that you can sort of lobby for to not ethics, no.
Ethics, no.
It has to be something.
There's nothing based on the intelligence of an animal, whether you can kill or not.
Well, you can go to court and fight that for years, and two sides are debating what intelligence is.
What is intelligence?
Right, right.
No, you will never shut it down based on intelligence.
They will argue about that.
And intelligence, some anthropologists might tell you, is the ability to adapt to your environment and survive.
That would make a cockroach more intelligent than us.
They could survive a nuclear holocaust.
So that ain't it.
Well, what is it?
And so you go down that road.
Now, it's got to be something breaking the laws of Japan.
You know, very black and white.
And I can't, and we have a lot of evidence of that.
And we're building more.
I can't tell you publicly what that is because it's tipping off the who are going to watch your broadcast.
They monitor me all the time.
As does the captivity industry, who should be fighting this battle, not me.
That's their industry that they are not policing.
Right.
Or the animal welfare industry, since the captivity industry is not going to do it.
That's a multi-billion dollar industry that could end that dolphin slaughter anytime they want to.
Now, in 2009, I think you said that the industry was responsible for like $2 billion in revenue a year for captive dolphins.
That industry, SeaWorld alone makes a billion and a half a year.
Still, to this day.
That's just one company.
You're not talking about the industry, the Alliance of Marine Parks and Aquariums.
All over the world.
It's massive.
Yeah, they could end it whenever they want to.
They don't want to.
They don't want to get involved.
They only get involved in things that make money, not negative cash flow, positive cash flow.
But these guys, people like these groups in Taiji, Japan, who are rounding up the dolphin and capturing them and selling them for 100 grand a pop, haven't there been offers that you guys have made to basically subsidize what they're making?
Like, hey, we'll figure out a way to reimburse you for all the money you're losing for selling these dolphins.
And.
That would be a fair compromise.
And they basically said no.
We've had meetings with the mayor, the city council, the police, the Coast Guard, all of them at a table like this, a huge table in the city hall.
My wife, Helena and I, long before the film The Cove was made and anybody cared about this issue, we're in there asking them if they would agree to take a year off.
We'll pay.
They had 13 boats that were hunting dolphins.
We will pay.
I didn't have any money.
I couldn't even pay for lunch.
But I'm bluffing.
Sometimes it works.
I'll find the money later.
So we told him we would, we'll subsidize the boats.
You guys stay in them for one year and don't hunt any dolphins.
Continue doing whatever else you do, but leave the dolphins.
We'll give you the same amount of money.
And that was translated around the room.
And then it comes around again.
The answer was it's not about money.
It's about pest control.
In other words, the dolphins are eating too much fish.
Right.
And so let's kill all the dolphins.
Yeah.
That was the answer.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know.
It's just one person at that table's two cents they're putting in.
But they didn't go for the subsidized thing, no.
Yeah.
It seems like that's just an excuse for something else, whether it be like that.
The fishing has been their lives for so long.
It's a lifestyle for them.
It's a culture for them.
Oh, it's not.
It gives them meaning.
No, it's not cultural.
They say that over and over again.
And in some warped way, it's become the truth.
The truth is it's never been, ever been their culture.
Commercial factory whaling has never been their culture.
You can see the boats.
They still have these antique canoes where the whole tribe would go out and they would hunt one whale and bring it into Tai Chi.
And they would live off that whale for a long time.
They never hunted dolphins for it.
dolphin shows.
All of that is a lie.
Yeah, so they make up.
But you have to understand, when I say they, I'm talking about a very small minority of men in a very remote village in Taiji.
There's a hundred.
Audience, pay attention.
There's 127 million people in Japan who don't harm dolphins.
Right.
And they don't even know about this stuff.
No, not really.
It's a small island, actually, relative.
To California.
It's the same, has a about the same size.
Actually that's California, but it's got uh, 127 million people all crammed together living there and uh, and they do it pretty well actually.
Um, but those people don't really eat whale meat anymore.
The the, the younger people kind of laugh at it.
It's a much older people, people my age, i'm 84.
They would continue eating whale meat because that's what they grew up on during the Second World War.
After the war, all of the cattle had been bombed.
There wasn't any protein that they were eating.
It was General MacArthur who told them, go out and kill whales.
Really?
We, the Americans, gave them the ships they still have to go out and hunt whales because we bombed all the cattle and they were starving.
And so they did.
There's no need to do that today.
There's plenty of, you go into the supermarket in Taiji and Katsura and these places, plenty of food.
They're doing it to sell, to dolphin shows, not even about meat.
That's the big lie.
Right.
If they had to depend only on the meat, they would have gone out of business.
The meat's just a distraction.
20 years ago or something like that.
Are they still funneling all that meat into the school system?
No, that ended.
That ended.
By exposing it, sometimes exposing it is, you know, the way to go.
So we keep doing that.
We keep doing that and try to keep from getting arrested on false charges.
Yeah, that was bizarre.
Some of the stories about the history of mercury poisoning in Japan, like from the Chiso factory and children being born deaf and blind, and from the pregnant mothers being exposed to this mercury.
And I think even in the documentary, you guys took a hair sample from one of the Japanese guys and you found out the mercury level in his body was like 200 times the acceptable level or something like that.
Yeah, it's a big problem.
Yeah.
You guys are going back there still every year, right?
right?
Yeah, we do.
Not as much.
We're trying to get our Japanese colleagues to be the face of it and step up.
Not you guys, right?
Yeah, and replace so we can step down.
It's really, it's up to the Japanese people to do this.
Our work is about facilitating that, helping them do that.
How many operations around the world do you think are similar to what's going on in Taiji?
With this, like, as far as, like, like using those big metal rods to round up the dolphin with the sound wall and then bring them into the cove and slaughter them like that.
Solomon Islands.
In Indonesia.
No, that's in, oh, in Indonesia?
There's a few places that that happens.
Isn't the Solomon Islands near Indonesia?
No.
No.
Okay.
No, it's near Australia.
Oh, it's Australia.
Yeah.
Lincoln's got a place there.
We, and one of our board members, Dr. Sarah Meltzoff, lived with that tribe for many years.
Still goes there.
That is really traditional.
They've been doing that for hundreds of years.
Really?
Yeah.
The same way it's been done in Tai Chi.
The one in Tai Chi has only been going on since the 50s.
They lie about that when they say it's our tradition, our culture.
It is not their culture.
It's not their tradition.
It is in the Solomon Islands, but not in Tai Chi.
Yeah, hunting whales in a canoe, that is traditional.
They don't do that anymore.
So they just lie about what they do, cover it up.
So how do you approach the people in Indonesia that have been doing this for a very long time?
In Indonesia, I don't approach them at all.
We don't do we don't we have our colleagues who are Indonesian deal with that.
Westerners going into places and telling people what to do is not a good idea, really.
Yeah, we don't have a good track record.
So it's not like we sit at the right-hand side of God and we have to, you know, the well, we think we do sometimes.
I don't.
I sympathize with it.
We try to get the Japanese people to take ownership of this.
That's what it's about.
It's hard for them to do that because you don't take sides with Westerners.
You don't do that.
You don't criticize the government.
That's something you just don't do in Japanese culture.
If you get arrested, and I was told, I have friends in Japan who I've known for 40, 50 years.
That's how long I've been involved in the Japanese thing.
And they told me early on, if I get arrested, they are breaking all contact with me.
And that's what they do.
If you get arrested, even if it's for the right reason, And by the way, I have been arrested many times.
How many?
I couldn't count it, but every time is by my design.
Right.
Every time.
Right.
Except when I was in prison.
It was never an accident.
Well, in Japan, it was deliberate.
I mean, it wasn't by my design.
They arrested me on false charges.
I had no control over them.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
But I took them to court and won.
So they don't do that anymore.
What was the false charge?
Let's see.
Well, the first time I was arrested, I had just arrived in Tai Chi.
I was jet-lagged.
I arrived in Tokyo, got on the train.
By the time you get to Taiji, you're exhausted.
And I got to Taiji, got off the train, walked to a restaurant.
And it was opening day of the dolphin hunt, September 1st.
So a lot of Japanese journalists are there.
These journalists are all, we call them the mayor's pet journalists.
He brings them in to write the story he wants written.
And so they plotted against me.
Propaganda.
Well, yeah, they told, they saw me drinking a beer in the restaurant.
I had a half a glass of it.
I don't really drink, but I had a half a glass.
And then I left, got in the car, and I was driving to the hotel, which is like five minutes away.
Could almost throw a rock to it.
A couple of cop cars were parked waiting for me.
They pulled me over, gave me a breathalyzer test, and I passed.
Now there's dozens of people and all the photographers, all of the media, Japanese media were there.
They're the ones who called the police on me.
But it's a very serious crime in Japan, drinking and driving.
They do not tolerate it.
One strike and you are out.
Oh, wow.
And so I passed the test.
I'm fine.
And they said, let's see your driver's license.
No, my passport.
I couldn't find my passport.
I said, it's in the hotel.
We're parked in the parking lot of the hotel.
I said, I'll go up there and get it for you.
No, you're under arrest for not carrying your passport.
And so I went to jail that night.
And they found my passport.
It was actually in the glove compartment of the car I was in.
They had to let me go.
That was the first arrest.
The second one was I was going through September 1st again.
Season's just starting.
And whenever I go through immigration, As soon as they put my passport in the computer, the red light goes off and the bells.
Every time.
Yeah.
And people behind me are getting out of line going, okay.
And it happens every time.
And they take me to the back room, which I'm very familiar with.
I lay down on the bench and usually try to sleep because they tie me up for hours doing this.
They tie you.
Passport Arrests Begin00:05:28
Oh, yeah.
Not literally.
Not literally.
They want me to miss my baggage and all that stuff.
Right, right.
So you just get comfortable because you're used to it?
Yeah, I usually fall asleep and they always let me go.
This time they did.
This time they put me in a cell down in the basement with several other people trying to get in the country.
Wow, a fishing community, a small group of fish.
This is in Tokyo.
This is in Tokyo.
But still, this all stems from this small fishing village.
It goes so far up the chain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they really care about this in Japan.
It's up in the higher levels of the government.
If we can shut this down, they're thinking, this little thing, this little co, we could probably shut down Whaley.
Maybe that's what they're thinking.
I don't know what they're thinking for all the same reasons.
I don't know what you're thinking.
But I assume that's why they're spending so much money and time and energy on making sure that they can continue doing this.
And they're winning so far.
It takes money to stop it.
You cannot.
This is a war.
This is a full-blown war.
Yeah.
You cannot fight a war without ammunition.
But I've been doing that.
The Dolphin Project has been doing that since 2003.
If I had a fraction of the money that the cost to make the McCove movie, I could end this thing.
If I had a fraction of the money that comes in, you go to the 10 top animal.
Well, go ahead.
Sorry.
No, no, I was going to say, you said fraction of the money.
How?
Okay.
Like what we're doing.
We're hiring lawyers.
Right.
Looking for illegalities.
Taking out full-page advertisement in educational material.
magazines, billboards.
There's a lot of things you can do if you have money.
I never had that.
I wasn't working for the Dolphin Project because I had to leave and go get a paying job somewhere.
I went to work for Earth Island Institute, environmental group.
And I ended up resigning because they were totally ineffective.
And like most of these big groups, what they're looking for is issues like this that they can attach themselves to.
ask for donations.
And those donations, you could see them.
If you go to the 10 top groups, animal welfare groups, they have to publish their taxes.
We publish ours.
Right.
The first, the biggest one, they have $300 million sitting in a thing called reserve.
In other words, they have enough money to do everything they're doing, plus their retirement, but they just have this extra.
And there's 10 or 20 groups like this.
There's hundreds of millions.
They have 300 million in reserve.
Why am I there doing this when they could be doing it?
I don't have the money to fight this war.
We didn't even have a budget.
I had a credit card from Earth Island.
I could buy airplane tickets and food and hotels, but no money to fight the fucking war.
I resigned.
And I know they have it.
You can see their tax records, $30 million or something.
So I've become very disgusted and disillusioned with the animal welfare industry and the environmental industry, all these big groups.
I realized if we cannot fix that problem, that cove isn't much bigger than the orange bowl, than a football field.
If we can't fix that, and they're working on these big projects to save the world, to save the ocean, save it.
If you can't fix that, how are you going to fix the big things?
And they can't fix it because they don't even try.
It's very depressing and it will lead you to a place that you don't want to go.
And that's where I have been on this dolphin trail having to fight this war with no ammunition, realizing ammunition's there.
It's kind of like in Gaza.
The food is sitting right outside the gate, but they won't let the food in.
It's one of those.
There's money to fix that problem in Taiji.
It's not that big, but nobody works on it.
Nobody does anything about it except sign this petition and send us money.
That's the problem.
We don't have the money to fight this war.
And the people who have it are out looking for other opportunities.
They're not actually spending the money on the war.
Everybody is missing in action.
So I've never said these things.
I've stayed away from these podcasts and stuff like that.
But I think this will be in Lincoln's movie, The Truth, about what is going on.
Who are the biggest customers for the Japanese fishermen in Taiji?
Money vs Animal Release00:05:46
What countries, what organizations are still going there?
Atlantis.
You know Atlantis in Bahamas?
Well, they have one in Dubai that's even bigger than that.
And they have, yeah, when they opened up, they had celebrities flown in from all over the world.
Everybody who was, and those dolphins came from Taiji.
So what's going on here?
I thought we were all against this.
What about SeaWorld?
Or they came from – those came from Solomon Islands.
Same thing, another drive.
So about what?
So SeaWorld is still purchasing dolphins from the Solomon Islands?
No, they're not coming into the United States anymore.
We've stopped that.
None of them are coming into the United States.
No, they're not – they're having to do with captive breeding.
So they have – this is true in Europe also.
Most of the captive dolphins are actually oh, thanks, Steve, for giving me a geography lesson.
But it's close to Indo.
Kind of.
Same part of the world.
Yeah, this is the largest, Indonesia, largest archipelago of islands in the world.
And that's where Lincoln lives now.
Yeah, we have a sanctuary there now.
It's the only one in the world.
Yeah, how do you confiscate a dolphin?
What is the process of confiscating a dolphin?
In Indonesia, it's very different than it is in America and Europe.
In America and Europe, you have the – well, in America, we have the National Marine Fisheries Service.
They're in charge of all things dolphin, whale, and you need their permission to do whatever you're doing.
And in Indonesia, it's the Forest Department.
The Forest Department is in charge.
They own, literally own, all wildlife.
so they can march in and take them away if they want to.
You can't do that at SeaWorld.
That's somebody's property.
You'll get sued any more than they can come in here and take your camera away.
So it's your property.
But in Indonesia, it's very different.
That's why we're having success over there.
The minister is also the minister of fisheries.
She's the minister of fisheries and forest department.
So we also rescue.
Turtles and monkeys and you know, in between all the other stuff we're doing, mm-hmm.
So when they confiscate something, they give them to us.
They call us and ask us to help them and we have to pay for it.
They have no, they have no money, no budget right now.
If there's a dolphin in captivity, how do you reacclimate it or reconnect it back to the environment?
Is it, isn't that?
Isn't that?
Is that process always successful?
No, I've written protocol and I'll send it to you so you can put it on your thing and people can read it.
It's several pages long.
We're still writing it after 30 years because we're still learning how to do this.
This is pioneer work and we don't have all the answers and you only learn from your mistakes, not from your successes.
So we've learned a lot because we've had mistakes also in the last 40, 50 years.
What was your original question?
How do you do it?
I was basically like asking, like, does it fail sometimes?
What happens if you have a dolphin who's been in captivity for 10 years and you rescue it?
You bring it to your sea pen, try to reacclimate it to the wild.
Freewillies is a good example.
Yes.
Keiko.
That was a brilliant rescue.
They rescued Keiko from a swimming pool in Mexico.
This particular animal should never have been put in a subtropical climate like that.
Same is true with the orcas at SeaWorld and the Miami Sea Aquarium and these places.
These are cold water animals.
They don't care about that.
Tropical animals.
The Dolphin Research Center down in the Florida, he captured dolphins in Pine Island, Florida, sent them to Finland where it's freezing cold and to Canary Islands where it's tropical at least.
But yeah, sending them to so here was an orca by the name of Keiko in a swimming pool in Mexico.
And I was working for Earth Island Institute at the time.
They rescued Keiko from the swimming pool, built a tank on the west coast, and got rid of the papilloma virus that you see on his skin.
And then moved him from there to Iceland, where he came from, to a fjord.
I think they had about $20 million to work with.
Wow.
Yeah, $21 or $22 million.
It's a lot of money for one animal to be released.
Yeah, why so much money?
What do you spend $20 million on?
Salaries, six-figure salaries.
Supporting Bubs Collagen00:03:13
Yeah, right, exactly.
It's like the homeless problem in LA.
Excuse me.
When we do this rescue work, we try to make sure, and I've done this in Guatemala, same thing they did here in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, South Korea, and Indonesia.
And I always try to keep it down to $30,000 trying to prove it is more cost effective to rehabilitate them and let them go than to keep them and warehouse them for the rest of their life.
But when you hire these guys from SeaWorld, for example, the last two dolphins they released in Turkey for the Born Free Foundation, that cost almost a million dollars for two dolphins.
Jesus.
Sometimes when we do it, it doesn't cost.
The first ones we did cost $600 from Mashsa Island on Kibis Gain.
We flew them to the Bahamas to exactly 2505 north, 7640 west.
There was a group of dolphins we could see from the chalk seaplane that we landed on the water and let them go there.
That cost us $600, not $200 million or not $800,000.
You just landed the seaplane right on a school of dolphins and you let them free right there.
Well, not on the school.
Not on top of them, but I mean like right next to them.
Yeah.
And does that work?
Do the dolphins let them in?
Is it not immediately?
And they may not.
So there are some unknowns.
They can be accepted.
Sometimes they don't want to be, like Valdemir.
There are many dolphins that are, they call friendlies.
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The Cost of Rescue00:15:39
Now back to the show.
They chose to be alone.
They're comfortable being alone.
I'm kind of like that myself, actually, so I can relate.
Um, Yeah, what were we talking about?
Talking about the money it costs to free these animals back into the wild.
Yeah, it depends on who you hire to do it.
If you hire a bunch of these SeaWorld people, they'll stretch it out as long as they can and make as much money.
So that's what happened.
After several years trying to free Willie, the $20 million ran out and they all left.
Where did they go?
They went to Panama.
Now, you would think the dolphin trainers who worked on the Free Willy project would be so proud of this.
Play that.
And they know now that captivity is wrong.
These are all orca trainers from SeaWorld, right?
That have left the industry, and now they've got this project to Free Willy under their belt.
And you'd think they would be the new guys who take over this captivity issue.
And run with it, but instead they ran to Panama.
They bought more land than Seaworld has in Orlando and they were going to outdo Seaworld by building a new one in Panama.
They applied for a permit to capture, I don't know, 20 dolphins, something like that.
Soon as we heard about it, we went there and organized protests and these were huge protests.
The Panamanians were outraged, you're trying to capture our dolphins, all you guys from Free Willy.
And the protests were very successful and they we actually ran them out of town.
Where did they go?
These trainers from Free Willie.
Yeah.
They went to the Solomon Islands.
Stop.
And they're trafficking dolphins from Solomon Islands to Mexico, to Singapore, to the Philippines, and other places.
People don't know these things.
They only know what, you know, I start to question about history.
I see how history is rewritten all the time.
And I start to question what's real and what isn't.
Right.
I know what you mean.
So Keiko.
Why is there finally, finally, it was very obvious at some point, if you ever worked with an orca in captivity, and I did, and so did these guys, if you've ever done that, you know that Keiko, at some point, after the 20 million was gone and they were gone, that.
This animal is not a candidate to be released.
But since they were all gone, now the money's gone.
Nobody's on the payroll except HSUS and Earth Island Institute.
That's basically two people.
Two people are making the decision, and their decision is freedom at all costs.
Although he's not a candidate.
I was watching this.
It was more about optics.
And he died.
Right.
We will never know why he died, what kind of shape he was in, because they buried him in a secret location as quickly as possible with no necropsy.
When I heard they didn't do a necropsy, the captivity industry, they do that only because they don't want you to know why they died.
As soon as they did this, I went right to the guy and I asked him, how come you didn't do a necropsy?
See, they're spinning the story now, and everybody who donated 20 million bucks believing a bunch of bullshit.
They can spin it any way they want.
Right.
Why is the dorsal fin curved over like that?
There are theories.
Mine is that it has to do with gravity.
In the wild, they will spend 80% of their time underwater where there is no gravity.
In captivity, they're always looking for food, looking for a handout.
And gravity, I believe, has a lot to do with that.
Okay.
Yeah, that white, the white stuff all over her skin.
That was the papilloma.
That's from being in a cold water animal in Mexico.
God, man.
Come on.
Keiko dies.
Why did he die?
Now they'll have some vet, prostitute vet come out there and give you some f***ing story that's not true.
And I get in trouble with all of these people because I out them.
What is your.
What is your theory or what do you believe about why a couple of those trainers were killed by the orcas, like dragged down and drowned by the orcas?
Why do you think that that anger?
Anger.
Frustration.
Really?
Anger.
No question about it.
One day I got a call from a guy.
I forget his name.
He's the president of the California Trial Lawyers Association.
He's representing a SeaWorld trainer by the name of John Sillick, who was riding on the back of an orca on the surface of the water during a show.
He's actually riding backwards.
He's facing backwards on them.
So he's showing you the video.
Another orca leaps up and deliberately lands right on it, breaking most of the bones of her body and really oh my God.
So this guy flew me out to California and showed me this and wanted me to be well, I was.
Oh, there's video of it?
Yeah, that's it right there.
Play that.
You see?
He's facing backwards.
Okay, I see.
This is deliberate.
Does that not work, Steve?
Oh.
So he needs an eyewitness video who actually trained orcas to say that because there are millions.
So he could sue SeaWorld.
No, they're going to sue SeaWorld.
That's a done deal.
Okay.
How much is this?
How much, right.
100 million bucks or what?
This is another lady.
Her name was so anyhow, let me go back to they're going to show the video of this guy getting slammed.
I think.
Oh, wow.
Oh, here it comes.
He's riding on the dorsal fin going backwards.
And he deliberately did that.
See that?
Oh, my Lord.
So this guy said, will you testify that in court?
I said, yeah, I will if you agree to go to court.
Because historically, this is not the first time.
There are many of these.
And they always settle out of court.
Right, right.
Kept quiet.
And that's why this guy got hurt because the last lawyer didn't take it to court, didn't make it public, kept quiet.
Take it to trial.
Don't take the settlement.
And he said, I promise you, I'm not taking the settlement.
We don't want to see this to happen.
And he was lying to me.
Of course he took the settlement.
He settled and for a lot of money, John Sillick bought a nightclub in San Diego.
This guy did?
Yeah.
He survived.
God.
But the next accident, there was another one, Doug Bradshaw after that, because he didn't take it to court.
Right.
And there was a woman right before that.
She was in Vancouver.
And Orca pulled her in the water and killed her.
Kelty Brid is her name.
She would be alive today if that guy didn't lie to me and said, let's go to court.
That's what they do.
And SeaWorld pays them because they have, they make them.
What do they care about 100?
February 2024 and February 2010, Tillicom killed Don Bradshaw, a 40-year-old SeaWorld trainer.
Bradshaw was killed following a dine with Shan Moo World.
The veteran trainer was rubbing Tillicom as part of the post-show routine when the orca grabbed her by her ponytail and pulled her in the water.
What ever happened with Tillicom after that?
Well, that's a lie right there.
You're reading early stuff that it's Wikipedia.
It turns out that SeaWorld spun it.
That's her fault.
She should never have the ponytail.
We tell people don't do it.
It's just spin.
That's not true.
Right.
So what happened with Tillicom after that happened?
Did they decommission her?
They put him in isolation in a small tank until he died.
Really tiny little tank.
They punished him.
How long did it take him to die?
I don't know.
I'd have to go back and research that.
Right.
So, so now to what you were saying earlier is because they were the U.S. no longer imports whales or dolphins, right?
From anywhere around the world.
And is it no, no, they can import them.
They can import them.
They can't.
I don't have the laws here in front of me.
There's lots of different laws, but they can get them if they want them.
They can't capture them.
They just do it secretly, probably.
Like it's frowned upon.
So they just try to keep it out of the limelight.
They have they have loopholes like breeding alone.
It's a breeding loan.
Like, like.
Canary Islands, all of the orcas there, they're actually owned by SeaWorld.
They're not owned by Canary Islands.
What is it called?
Laura Park in the Canary Islands.
My wife goes there quite a bit monitoring those whales, but they're actually from SeaWorld.
They call it a breeding loan, but they never come back.
So they get the sperm delivered every month.
They masturbate them, take the sperm, and captive breeding.
Now, the thing is, these animals, you asked about SeaWorld or the one here, what is it called?
Clearwater Marine?
Yeah, the Clearwater Marine.
The law reads, really, you're not supposed to have dolphins in captivity unless it's an educational experience.
Right.
So that's the loophole.
They pretend this is, and it is an educational experience, but it is a negative educational experience.
It's a form of bad education.
So they just take advantage of the fact that our system, the way it's set up, the lobbyists lead and the politicians follow.
And they get whatever they want.
They have carte blanche because the system doesn't work.
You take the National Marine Fisheries and APHIS, these agencies that are protecting all dolphins are under their care.
But who is above them?
They're a branch of the Department of Commerce.
Look at that word, commerce.
Right.
They don't protect them at all.
That's not their job.
Their job is to regulate.
In other words, if you want to send dolphins to Europe and capture them at Pine Island, Florida.
They were rubber stamping them.
98.4% of all permits to capture dolphins and exploit them any way you want to was approved by the Commerce Department.
Right.
And all these agencies weren't blown up.
The whole thing is about money.
And the agencies, the government, how do they profit from it?
It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
They pay taxes just like you and me.
Where does that money go?
It goes to the government.
The reason I learned about you was in, it was, I think, around 2009, 2010.
I was working on that dolphin tail movie that was filmed at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.
And that's where I met Pete Zuccherini, who is the underwater legendary, amazing underwater cinematographer who filmed all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and he helped Lincoln film the Blood Dolphin show.
He told me all about this story.
And Lincoln, you know, I came to understand that's when I first discovered the polarization in this world.
And there's a lot of people, like I think Jack Hanna is one of the people you debated about this on TV a long time ago, that say if you take a place like the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, who has dolphins like Winter, who was caught up in a crab trap and the rope basically mangled her tail, they had to amputate her tail, they kept her alive.
Is there anything to say about aquariums like that that are keeping animals that are injured that need to be rehabilitated who would have died the other way?
Or like if they would have been, if they would have stayed in the wild, they would have died.
Yeah.
And what they're telling you about them rescuing that animal and doing whatever they did, they were absolutely correct.
That's good work.
They do that better than anybody else in the world because these are dolphin traffickers.
They know how to.
transport them and move them around and have the veterinarians and people who are trained in marine mammal husbandry.
And whenever I'm debating with them, maybe you've seen some of them, they bring that up immediately and say, this is what we do.
That's not what they do.
That's what they do 5% of the time, and they do it better than anybody.
And that's what Clearwater should be, that a rescue center outdoors where the dolphins can Experience the natural rhythms of the sea and the tide and the current, see the sky.
All of these elements are very important in the healing process.
You can't do that inside of a building.
The reason they're in the building, and that's what I'm upset about, spending $40 million for another tank and building instead of revolutionizing the concept.
And by the way, that's what we're trying to do.
We're not trying to abolish that industry.
We're trying to revolutionize it.
Make the 5% the 95% and forget about the 5%, which is just stupid dolphin tricks.
Yeah, I guess the question is, where does all the money go, right?
Spent all that money to rebuild that aquarium and build those giant tanks.
They got rid of those round wastewater tanks and they built really big tanks for those things.
And they obviously.
They're show tanks.
They're show tanks, right?
Yeah, for shows.
Revolutionizing Dolphin Shows00:11:19
And obviously, the movie was a huge marketing tool for that aquarium.
Really, it drew people from all over the world to come visit Clearwater to come see that aquarium.
And that didn't just benefit the aquarium, that benefited the city of Clearwater.
It benefited all the tourism around here, which, you know, a majority of the economy around here is based on tourism.
Yeah.
So, you know, what's to say that money can't go towards revolutionizing this and building more awareness towards these dolphins and their intelligence and helping and using that money to rescue more animals, rehabilitate more animals, whether they can be released.
Because I don't know.
I think they do release some animals that they catch.
Oh, they do.
They do work in that rescue and release.
But they'll tell you themselves the ones that they want to keep, they do.
Manatees.
The manatees they have don't have scars.
They're looking for dolphins without scars and and they'll go into their collection because they'll make sure this authorities understand they can't be released.
I mean so how, how did the the whole Flipper tv series come about?
What were you doing, how old were you, where were you living and how were you approached to be a part of this, the Flipper movie uh, which eventually became a series?
Well, my first.
Okay, a little, scoot in a little bit.
Yeah.
My first encounter with that whole thing, I guess, would be on Christmas Day, 1955.
I had just come home from a 14-day leave from the Navy.
I'd just gotten through boot camp.
And when you get out of Navy boot camp before you get shipped out to sea, you have a 14-day leave.
So I was home on that 14-day leave.
Miami Sea Aquarium just opened.
I went there with my family.
I'm in uniform.
I'm standing there in front of this big glass window looking into this half a million gallon tank.
And by the way, this was the third dolphinarium in the world at this point in 1955.
It was not a multi-billion dollar industry.
It's only the third one in the world.
First one opened in St. Augustine, 19.
And then in Los Angeles, Palos Verdes, California, it opened up in 1954, something like that.
So this one just opened.
And I stood there at the window, the glass window, looking in, and it just blew me away.
There were sharks.
There were 500-pound grouper, turtles the size of this table, slithering along the bottom.
There'd be big giant sawfish slithering around, more A-eels.
And now here comes a guy walking across the tank, just jumping over the rocks and stuff.
He's got a canvas suit on, spun copper Miller Dunn helmet, and air flowing out of the helmet to the surface.
And I can see that light coming through the water, and there's a hose going up to the surface.
The dolphins and everything is surrounding this guy who's passing out fish to everybody, and I thought man, when I get out of the NAVY, i'm going to come back here and get that guy's job.
Five years later I did.
That's how I started.
Wow, I applied for a job as a diver.
I graduated from Divers Training Academy and the first class deep sea diver and uh, I was.
I've been diving all over the Mediterranean Caribbean.
What were you doing for in the NAVY like?
What kind of?
What missions were you on?
Or what kind of?
I was on an anti-submarine hunter-killer group for the last two years on a destroyer in the Mediterranean.
We'd go to Gitmo Bay for a gunnery practice every year.
We'd go to North Sea, play war games with submarines.
We'd be anchored in Monaco, for example.
We'd have three submarines and we'd all swing on the same anchor.
I wanted to continue diving.
So when I got out of the Navy, I went to work for Arthur McKee, who was a treasure diver.
He was the world's foremost treasure diver, a family friend.
I did that for a couple of years, and it was the hardest work I ever did in my life.
And I never found the gold bars that I fantasized.
I was about to get married, or I thought I was going to, and I told Captain McKee, I've got to get a real job.
He took me to this aquarium to his friend.
Captain Bill Gray, who was in charge of everything.
He's the guy who started this whole industry, actually.
He hired me on the spot.
And I'm doing that job that I explained to you, the feeding the fish.
And you get promoted as you spend your time there.
I was promoted to doing the top deck show.
I wasn't actually a dolphin trainer, but my pay grade and my my job description was dolphin trainer, although I never trained a dolphin.
Anybody could actually step out there at showtime.
The dolphins know three times a day they're doing this routine.
And you could put a mannequin out there passing out fish.
And they would do the so it looked like I was a dolphin trainer, but I really had never trained a dolphin.
I went there to be a diver.
That's what I wanted to do.
By the way, my first day on the job, I was assigned the divers. diving job on the capture boat.
And we were capturing dolphins at that time every day for, I don't know, a few months for the World's Fair in New York, for new dolphinariums that were opening up in Europe.
We were selling them.
I remember loading a dolphin.
You could buy a dolphin from the boat, from the seaquarium boat for $300 or $350 if you wanted a particular sex, size and sex, they called it.
If you wanted a female six feet long, that was $350.
In the 50s.
50s.
And I remember loading a dolphin into the station wagon of a guy who drove here to St. Pete Beach to give it to his girlfriend for her birthday.
There were no laws protecting dolphins.
And finally, there was a 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which they could have called Marine Mammal Park Protection Act because that's who they protect, the corporations, not the animals.
But wow, that just, that reminds me, I don't know if you're aware of it, there used to be a A bar, a little shitty dive bar, literally like two miles from here, that's been shut down for a year, probably 10 years now.
It was called the Porpoise Pub.
It was a bar, and in the middle of the bar, in the middle, like it was a big circular bar, and in the middle, there was a big round fish tank, and they had dolphins in there.
People would go and buy shots and drink beers and watch the dolphins swim around in this little tank.
I may have captured those dolphins.
You could buy them then for $350, $350.
But to answer your question, That's how I started.
And then the Flipper movie was made, the very first movie with Chuck Connors and Luke Halpin.
And it was very, very successful.
Some scenes were shot at the Sea Aquarium with sharks, and I was involved in shark wrangling and all of that for that first movie.
Then they came back and made a deal with the Sea Aquarium to do a TV series.
They had the green light to do a series.
It's going to start off with a pilot feature first called Flipper's New Adventure.
The deal was the Sequarium would supply the dolphins and a trainer.
And we're going to be training underwater.
It's never been done before.
Historically, dolphins are trained topside.
You come in, buy a ticket, you sit down, and they're doing tricks on the surface of the water.
So this was all new.
I was chosen as that diver, trainer, trainer.
I was a trainer.
I was making $85 a week as a diver.
And when I got promoted to trainer, I was making $95.
And then Flipper came along.
In a short period of time, I'm the highest paid admirable trainer in the world.
I'm buying a new Porsche every year.
And Rico, the director, would say, don't buy anything you can't pay for in 13 weeks.
He had been down this road before, you know.
So the Sequorium had a supply.
A dolphin and five dolphins, actually.
And we decided on females.
They decided on females.
I wasn't really in the decision-making role at that point.
We'll get five, they decided, because we don't know what we're doing.
This has never been done before.
We don't know how many we're going to need.
And you captured them in Biscayne Bay?
I had already captured them in Biscayne Bay when I was on the boat.
So they were already on the grounds in holding tanks somewhere on the grounds.
We didn't have to go get them.
We had them ready for whoever wanted to buy them.
Or in this case, they were given to them.
So that was the deal.
They were going to and I'm just thinking back here.
What's your original question?
Am I drifting too far?
No, no, no, no.
We're just going through the linear story of how the Flipper show came about.
Okay, so I was, there was a guy when I was doing the show, I'm remembering these things, so I'm not giving you the chronology exactly, but when I was doing the show and I was promoted to trainer and I'm all over the grounds, you know, walking around, and there was one guy working with a dolphin back there, it was Rico Browning, and I would go help him.
Verso Fasting Benefits00:02:45
Rico was the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Right.
The guy who directed most of the underwater for Sea Hunt, Malibu Run, The Aquanauts, all those 50s black and white shows.
Right.
And he became my best friend.
He was a diver, stuntman, took me under his wing, and he was my mentor.
He wanted to be a director.
At that point, he was just putting this show together.
He was the creator of Flipper.
He had written a book, he and his brother in law, Jack Houghton, called Flipper.
And he told me it was on his refrigerator for about 10 years.
They finally gave it to Ivan Tours, who said, Yeah, let's do this.
And they did.
It was a huge success all over the world.
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Brain Evolution Theories00:14:04
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It's linked below.
Now back to the show.
So I found myself living with these flipper dolphins seven days a week, 24 hours a day for seven years or something like that.
And when you do that, it's very different than the job I had before where you go in in the morning, you do three shows, you've got the weekends off, and it's like an eight to five job for most dolphin trainers.
They don't really live with the dolphins.
If they did, they would probably be doing what I'm doing.
Because that's when you really get to know them.
When you're living with them like that.
How so?
It's like, do you have any pets at home?
I have a dog.
I've had a dog for the last 14 years.
He actually just died two days ago.
Okay.
It's right there.
What's the dog's name?
My friend Julian got me this cool little crystal, Julian Dory.
Shout out to him.
He got me this 3D crystal of my dog.
Oh, wow.
It looks like a fox.
Teacup Yorkie.
Yeah, he looks like a little fox.
Yorkie.
Yeah, his name is Dunk.
So if you were to, what's his name is Dunk?
Dunk.
If you had interacted with Dunk a few times a day, you know, five days a week or something, it's not the same relationship.
When you're living with him, you can anticipate when he gets up and walks across the room, what he's going to do after 14, right?
Right.
That's what I'm talking about.
I don't know how to express that, but you get to know them like that.
Okay.
Whereas dolphin trainers never really get to, they have a utilitarian relationship with the animals.
They don't really get to know them.
Right.
So that's, I don't know where to go from there.
That's where it all began.
So you lived literally right next to the lake where they filmed, right?
Like you lived in the house.
That was my house.
I also had a house trailer.
So there is a fenced-in area there.
Public's not allowed.
Police.
I would lock it.
I was back there with Miss B and the Dolphins for years.
I became very reclusive.
I'm still very reclusive.
It was during a time when there was a lot of turmoil.
The Vietnam War was raging.
America was divided, not as much as we are today, but divided because of that war.
protesting, going on all over the place.
I became one of those people who started doing a lot of soul searching back there and questioning what I'm doing.
It was a very strange duality I was living.
My work, my job, and my life, but what I'm doing there is trying to get the trust.
I'm trying to get their trust.
And I accomplished that, of course.
I sleep on the dock with them.
I mean, I'm really I call it dolphin time.
Did you have any sort of, was there a special way you could communicate with the dolphins?
It was all in silence.
It's all in silence.
At that time, I was actually being silent for, I was studying it with an Indian guru who was silent for, I think, 26 years.
And I was doing this.
I was living in a world of silence with them.
A lot of the time.
I didn't have to interact with anybody.
I would drive.
I portioned the back and locked the gate and they stayed away from me.
The trucks would come to film.
Once in a blue moon, after the first couple years, they had so much stock footage, they left me.
I was there alone all this time.
Right.
With my surfboard, my little boat, the dolphins, and my friends.
I was living in Coconut Grove, and, you know, it was during a time when Coconut Grove was an art colony.
And some of the John Sebastian, who you just saw, remember a band called The Lovin' Spoonful?
You don't remember that word?
God, I'm getting old.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons.
Everybody in the world knew that.
Before my time, Rick.
Do you believe in me?
Oh, of course, yes.
That's John.
Okay.
When you see the poster for Woodstock, there's a guy, you see the audience, you see a guy wearing tie-tie clothes.
That's John.
Oh, okay.
So these, him and all his friends, Fred Neal, who wrote Everybody's Talking, Did That Cowboy, won the Academy Award.
He was my best friend, actually.
He and I started doing musical experiments back there because nobody was there and we could do this communication.
Okay, let's, that's a language too.
And we're back there, go with our guitars and sometimes Cass Elliott would come.
You remember them, the mamas and papas?
You'd have to sing a song for me.
I don't remember my name, but I probably heard their music.
Oh, you have.
California Dreaming.
Oh, of course, yes.
Yeah, so sometimes Cass and Denny were there.
Crosby was always there.
David Crosby, Stephen Stills actually put the first money into it.
Uh, Joni Mitchell, Joni and And And Crosby lived in the garage next door to me.
I lived in one house.
They were there.
John lived in another one.
Tennessee Williams lived at the end of the street.
So all these celebrities started coming out at night and we're doing, Timothy Leary, Jack Elliott, Timothy Leary, Timothy Leary uh, so lsd.
Sorry, you guys were taking Lsd.
Well no, I wouldn't.
Well, are you asking me if Timothy Leary was taking LSD.
I'm saying, were you guys all taking LSD and hanging out and making music with the dolphins?
No, and I'm trying to be real careful not to create that image in your mind.
In those days, I did myself.
I never gave it to the dolphins, but I did experiment with it.
It was perfectly legal at the time.
Even if it wasn't, I still would have experimented.
But I want to give you an idea of what the rest of the world was thinking about LSD.
They weren't thinking about it.
Nobody even knew what it was.
No one cared.
But Tim came to coconut Grove once, but he had a cardboard box full of LSD 25, he called it, from the Sandoz Laboratory in Switzerland.
Perfectly legal.
Nobody knew what this was.
It was just a new thing, right?
And John Lilly, do you know who he is?
Of course.
Yeah, so John had his, he lived across the street from me.
No way.
Lincoln just filmed all of this.
I've explained it to you in Coconut Grove.
So pull up John Lilly's bio on there.
So gentlemen Let me see So yeah, to answer your question.
No, nobody Yeah, there's John right there Yeah, he he invented yeah, he's the guy who invented the isolation tank the sense the sensory deprivation tank and I use that one in his his house in Malibu.
He was living in Malibu when I stayed there.
I would stay in that room that had the Isolation tank.
And he was obsessed with communicating with dolphins.
Obsessed.
he had a grant from NASA to try to communicate with a non-human intelligence because they were going to the moon.
They were sure at some point we're going to run into some non-human intelligence and we need a code to communicate.
John got a grant from them.
I probably captured those dolphins as well because we were selling them to whoever at the Seaquarium.
He was in Coconut Grove in the old bank building.
The early bank building had three or four of these portable swimming pools you see in people's backyards.
They were inside the bank.
The bank had been closed for years.
And he had dolphins in there.
And yeah, he was trying to, no, not with the music.
He was taking their skull cap off and putting wires into their brains and doing all of this kind of very, very intrusive.
And most of them were dying.
At that point, when he was doing that, Nobody knew that dolphins were automatic, that they were not automatic air breathers like us.
If you give me a sedative, I will go to sleep.
Now, keep breathing.
If you do that with the dolphin, they die.
Every breath is a conscious effort.
How do they sleep?
They don't, like we do.
They rest.
They switch different hemispheres of the brain back and forth and rest.
But they don't sleep.
Every breath is a conscious effort.
They're never fully unconscious.
No, not really.
I don't believe so.
Nobody would be able to know that, but I don't think they I think they're always awake.
Whoa.
So he had written two or three books that I was reading back there, and I was taking sides with him.
He was saying dolphins are more intelligent than humans.
It shocked the scientific community for a brain surgeon to be saying this.
In what way were they more intelligent?
Well, that's the thing.
He's saying they're more intelligent because, well, first of all, just evolution.
They have been here 65 million years.
Let's just say as a graph, it's the size of this table in length.
This is 65 million years.
We have been here about on the two inch line.
Right.
So if you assume A blip, a blip on the timeline.
If you assume that the brain is more than excess baggage we're carrying on this trip through time and space, The porch light is on and somebody is home.
And that's not only dolphins.
Look at the sperm whale.
One third of its body is its head.
It's the largest brain on the planet.
How big is a sperm whale's brain?
On average.
Do you know like the weight or the dimensions of it?
The size of this table.
Wow.
Well, you can see that.
There's a good picture.
Yeah, it's a third of his body.
Yeah.
It's like the first time I read Charles Darwin, it was a voyage of the Beagle.
He had gone from England to the Galapagos Islands.
And he wrote, it creates a sense of wonder that so much beauty was so evidently created for so little purpose.
It's kind of like that with this brain.
Why does this, how did this evolve after 65 million years to, for no, so little purpose?
Right.
It has a purpose.
We just don't know what it is.
They can't manipulate this environment like we can.
Going back to your question, What makes them more intelligent?
This is what John was, his hypothesis.
All of the senses are better.
Hmm.
So I started reading as much as I could and exploring, and I'm back there living with them, and I started to go up a little bit?
What is that giant yellow thing in the front of his face?
Maybe it's some sensory organ.
Is that a sensory organ?
Yeah.
That big yellow thing?
Experimental.
It's the largest brain of all living organisms.
Holy crap.
That's wild.
Well, dolphin brains are like the same size, if not bigger than ours, just regular dolphins.
They're bigger than ours, right?
Bigger, yeah.
So these are the things, and I'm starting to believe this.
And at the same time, I'm being paid by the Sea Aquarium.
I'm part of this fucking circus going on.
And I started rebelling against it.
But now my friends are coming out.
Turn that thing a little bit towards you.
At night, and we're doing music and trying to experiment with it.
And it looked pretty weird to the Sea Aquarium.
Because there were no long haired people at those days, except my friends coming in at night.
And, you know, so.
Yeah, it's interesting that these animals have been around for so long 65 million years and we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years.
But we are so intelligent.
I mean, maybe they're more intelligent, but it's really close.
And there's a lot.
Are you aware of the.
The stoned ape hypothesis, how like there, well, there's multiple different theories on how we, our brains evolved, right?
Because there's an aquatic ape, there's nothing like us on earth.
There's nothing, there's a massive gap between us and the next primate, right?
It's like, yeah, there's why is there such a big gap, the evolutionary gap between us, you know what I mean?
And how did we come up, how did we just pop up out of nowhere, this intelligent animal that can manipulate its environment and build all these crazy things and create artificial intelligence?
Have you been watching uh ancient aliens?
I have not watched ancient animals.
You have to watch that.
Everybody has to watch that because they're actually showing you the answer to your question.
Non-Human Intelligence00:15:01
They talk about.
I know there's like a bunch of ideas.
One of them is panspermia, too.
How, you know, there's rocks that hit that come from other solar systems and they hit our earth.
They hit the earth and they contain microorganisms from other galaxies or whatever.
And that could have somehow fueled our evolution or like changed something within us and made us possible.
That's where we came from.
That's what their hypothesis is.
Yes, yes.
They're saying we are actually an experiment.
Yes, that's one of the ideas.
And the other one is a monkey ate a mushroom and then our brains jumped 10 times the size.
So who knows?
But the dolphins.
So John Lilly, his experiment cutting the skull caps off the dolphins and putting electrodes in their brains.
What did he say the results of those experiments were?
He got off track.
He got off track with drugs.
Last time I saw John, I was staying at his house in Malibu.
He was so far, I don't want to say gone.
Maybe he's the only one who's, but he's communicating with aliens at this point.
Oh, really?
It's not about do they exist.
He's actually in touch with them.
Oh, that's what he said to you?
He doesn't say it to me.
He just does it.
I couldn't understand him.
When I first met him in Coconut Grove and he came out to the sea quarry, he was very straight.
I'll use that word.
A white doctor coat with a tie, short haircut, and scientist, scientist.
After Tim Leary left, he was a different person altogether.
Now he's freeing the dolphins from the Coconut Grove Bank and putting them in Biscayne Bay, letting them go.
The last dolphin he had, two of them, their names are Joe and Rosie, named after Joseph E. Levine and his wife Rosalie.
who made the movie Day of the Dolphin.
He made a lot of movies, Josephine Levine.
But John agreed that when they were captured, when he's through doing his human-dolphin communications work, he would set them free.
And they were stuck at the Dolphin Research Center down in the Florida Keys for about four or five years.
The promise just went undone.
And a group of people got together.
They hired me.
We moved dolphins by helicopter Lincoln was with us, he was about three feet tall flew up to Georgia, to the National Geographic documented this in it.
Um, I think it was the very first Explorer series, but they, they.
We rehabilitated the dolphins and set them free.
Wow, and that's the last, uh he did with dolphins before he died.
Have you?
There's this?
Uh, we were just talking about this on a podcast The other day, there is a new artificial intelligence company or an organization that's developing.
It's called Inner Species IO, and they're using artificial intelligence to communicate with dolphins and to other species.
So, what they're doing is they're using artificial intelligence to record, like, you record the sounds these animals make, and it's supposed to be able to decipher it so we can understand what they're saying.
So essentially, using AI to communicate with animals and understand and communicate, possibly communicate back with them.
It's bizarre.
Yeah, this is it right here.
It's a think tank, an artificial intelligence think tank, and it goes back to um what uh, John Lilly was doing?
You know that's it's.
It's all about understanding non-human intelligence um anyway, so okay so um, you guys were spending time trying to, you know, you were Playing music, you were communicating with the animals, you were spending a lot of time with the animals, and this sort of catapulted your, this sort of like sent you for a loop and it changed you and made you.
At what point was it during Flipper?
Or what, maybe, maybe it was after Flipper that you.
Oh, it was before.
It was before it ended.
Long before, like the second year.
I knew, I mean, it's real obvious dolphins do not belong in captivity.
It's very black and white when you're living with them like this.
But I didn't do anything about it.
Was it the death of Catherine?
That was it.
Yeah.
So it was an act of passion that forced that it was an automatic organic reaction to her suicide.
You mentioned earlier they are self-aware.
Yes.
That every breath is a conscious effort.
And that's what she died from self-induced asphyxiation.
Not every breath they take is a conscious effort.
Right.
Right.
If you don't take the next breath, you're going to that self-induced asphyxiation.
And that's what I witnessed.
And I have seen that over and over again at the cove in Tai Chi where they're driven in.
If you don't know how to read their body language, you wouldn't see what I see.
When I go to a place where dolphins are, I see I don't see the same thing.
I see.
What's really going on, and I see dolphins being driven in visually.
You're only seeing them on the surface, but i've spent so much time with them underwater, I know what's going on underwater.
When they're being driven in, when they're being driven into the cove, the boats are banging on these poles and they're panicking.
There's the old.
I'm imagining all this, but I know what's going on.
The old are left behind because they can't keep up.
Uh, There are pregnant females who are aborting.
They're panic-stricken.
And so I experience all this with them.
And they're driven into the cove.
It's sealed.
And a lot of them, I'm watching them on the service.
They take that last breath, young ones, and the mother, you can watch them getting together, and they sink, and they don't come back up again.
That's what I'm talking about, because nobody can see that but me.
That is self-induced asphyxiation.
They're committing suicide.
So it's not uncommon.
When life becomes that unbearable, if I were anatomically equipped like they are, I probably would have done the same thing in that Japanese prison and a few other places I've been, just not taking that next breath.
Are there also in the Cove documentary, you mentioned there's another town in Japan that no longer has any dolphins there.
That would be Ito.
Yeah.
Iki or Ito or something?
Iki Island, excuse me.
Iki Island.
Iki Island.
Iki Island, yeah.
Because there's two types of dolphins, right?
It's the same with orcas.
I had this guy, Forrest Galante, on the show a couple months ago, and he was explaining to me how there's transient orcas that basically just roam, they don't stop, and they eat anything.
Their diet is very, they have a wide palate, right?
And then there's other ones that kind of stay centralized into one specific area.
Is that the case in Iki Island?
Were they just like one localized group of dolphins that they were all killed?
Now there's none there?
Yeah.
And they were doing the same thing they were doing in Taiji?
No, in Taiji, those are all transient.
Those ones are all transient.
But they were doing the same slaughter in Iki Island.
Yeah, same thing.
And now they're very upset because they can't sell the dolphins for, you know, they were selling the meat.
And that you could buy the size of this, like the size of a soap.
Bar soap.
Probably $5.
selling that dolphin alive to Dubai, a couple hundred thousand dollars probably.
So it's really about live dolphin shows.
That's one of the problems with these dolphin shows is the copycat syndrome when people come through SeaWorld or wherever, Clearwater, and they watch these dolphin shows.
They go, oh, wow, I can.
And people swim me with it.
You can charge a hundred bucks.
What you can.
Dolphins will heal us.
We can charge them $8,000, and they do.
These places charge $8,000, $10,000.
insurance companies pay for it, and it's all fake.
It's all phony.
Dolphins cannot heal us.
They can't heal themselves.
The dolphins that we have in sanctuary in Bali all came from dolphins, dolphin, what are they called, assisted therapy.
And these are all Russian tourists who are coming to Bali to be healed by the dolphins.
And my heart goes out to that poor mother.
I still get calls from Germany, a lot from Germany, Switzerland.
My child's got autism.
I was calling you.
I hope it's okay to call you at home.
I'm going to take my daughter to the Dolphin Research Center.
They have a program there.
What do you think about that?
This woman's being ripped off.
Fault hope.
Dolphin can't heal her.
The Alliance of Marine Parks, they know about all this and they allow it, this fraud and this, because Disney does it and, you know, all of these dolphin swim programs, Dolphin Research Center.
Dolphins plus.
Who came up with the idea that dolphins can heal us?
When I worked at the Sea Aquarium, people would pay $5.
They'd buy a ticket.
They would sit in their seat, and I would put on a show for them.
They were playing basketball, and they're jumping and blah, blah, blah.
They would applaud, and they would leave.
Some accountant probably in the front office went, wait a minute.
Let's let them in the water with the dolphins.
We can charge $100 instead of $5.
It's now $20.
And so that became this swim with dolphins craze.
Then let's tell them they can heal us, autistic children.
You got people like Dave Psychologist.
One of those guys calls himself doctor.
He's got a degree in psychology.
And he started this craze with dolphin assistant therapy.
Does he own dolphins?
No.
He came to this aquarium first.
He came over to my house.
He wanted me to be partners with him.
And I listened to him and I could tell he's just exploiting him.
He just wants money.
And I just wouldn't talk to him anymore.
And he just sort of labeled me as being antisocial because I had never come to the meetings and discussed, this is what they're doing, this dolphin assisted therapy.
It's fraud, full-blown fraud.
But he's retired now.
These people are looking at dolphins like like a real estate investor looks at an old dilapidated apartment building.
They see, you know, they can fill up X amount of units and rent and get X amount of rent every single month.
And it has a lifespan.
That's exactly how they're looking at it.
You're just paying for your kid's happiness.
This kid's autistic here.
Yeah.
I can tell that's what they're doing here.
Now, the kid is actually getting something out of it.
No, let me show you something.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
What's the, yeah.
This is a very, this is the first trick, or they call it a behavior.
It's called targeting.
Targeting.
This is targeting.
This is targeting.
What?
This is targeting.
What happens is the first thing you train a dolphin to do is to touch your hand.
Oh, okay.
Target.
Touch it.
Blow the whistle.
That's the bridge.
That means, yeah, you did it right.
I'm going to give you a fish.
Uh-huh.
If you don't touch my hand, you're not going to get a fish.
They catch on real quick.
Okay, bab.
Now, you can replace that once they get that down.
Might take a few months, might take a week, might take a year.
Depends on how long it takes you as the trainer to get the idea across.
They're ready immediately.
They're smarter than we are.
That's targeting right here.
Right.
You can replace that now with your foot.
Okay.
Okay, they got that.
Now, when you see the show, you see the trainer being pushed through the water.
It's the same targeting trick.
With the foot.
With the foot.
Now, you could take something this size, like a cone, like a glass that goes on the dolphin's snout.
These are dolphins of war in the Navy program.
For the swimmer nullification system.
At the end of this device, you know what a bang stick is underwater?
Yeah.
Shark stick?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like a spearhead tip with a shotgun shell at the end of it.
Yeah.
So this thing is equipped with the swimmer and allocation system that you put on their snout.
And they'll go over and simply target the target diver in their training.
Dolphin has no idea there's a .45 caliber bullet in there.
And they wouldn't put that bullet in unless it was a combat situation.
But they're trained every day without the bullet.
The bullet's been replaced, actually, with a well, I think it's a shotgun shell.
Shark Stick Training00:16:11
I actually blew my thumb off with one of them.
What?
And so how did that happen?
We were working on a movie called I was doing a lot of stunt work in those days.
Yeah.
Thunderball.
Well, it wasn't Thunderball.
We did Thunderball, but there was another one like Thunderball called Never Say Never Again.
James Bond movie.
And it was like we were just starting.
I think it was the second day we were there.
And the diving barge was in Lake Verkee and maybe a mile out.
And we have a sea pen in Nassau we use to film Flipper.
That's where the dolphins were.
So 7 o'clock in the morning, Luke Halpin, the kid who was starting in the Flipper show, he's now a grown 40 years old or whatever it was.
He's one of the stunts.
He and I were in the Boston Whaler, 13-foot Boston Whaler.
We go over to pick up one of the sharks, 13-foot shark, much bigger than this table, and bring it out to where we're going to film it.
And I loaded the bank stick with a 12-gauge shotgun shell, put the safety in, and then a swell came and lifted the boat up like this.
And I lost my balance, and I went to grab the gunnel of the boat, and I grabbed the bank stick, and it went up.
My whole day blew your thumb off yeah yeah, that's a.
That's not a good day.
So I went out to the barge.
I wrapped my hand in a towel, got out to the barge, Rico was there and he he didn't know what was what happened, but he could see the blood and stuff and uh yeah, it was one of those.
Yeah, and these are outlawed now because I got those taken off the market, which those things, these things, will fly right out.
That that's the safety doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
I had them taken off the market.
You had them taken off the market?
How'd you do that?
I sued them.
Decor dive company.
I sued them.
Took them to court.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, it just pops right out.
See, that's the only thing that's separating the firing pin from the shell is this pin right here.
Oh, okay.
And because this is like a spring, it just pops out.
And that's what happened.
It popped out.
Kaboom.
We jump into a car and go to, I told before I passed out.
I said, do not take me to Princess Margaret Hospital because i've been in there before and they would have just amputated away up here somewhere.
Right, get me to Miami right, right?
So there was a plane landing, a little Piper Cup or something, and I, we just ran out to the thing and I, the guy was getting out of the back seat and I just got him out of the way, I got in the back seat and I passed out.
I wake up.
We're in Miami.
I'm in Mercy Hospital in Miami waiting for the doctor, still in my wetsuit full of blood, Got the towel around my, and I'm looking in the, it's not a mirror, it's a stainless steel towel rack, and I could see my face.
And the thumb that was missing was all over my face.
Oh my gosh.
That's when I really got scared because it told me that that shotgun shell was so close to me, it could have blown my head off, you know?
Wow, man.
That's fucking terrifying, man.
Yeah, it was.
And it put me out of work for a couple of years because I was trying to do push-ups.
I was trying to become left-handed.
I was doing push-ups and stuff like that, and I pinched the nerve in my neck.
Anyhow, I hadn't worked in a long time.
Finally, I get a call to go do a job here in St. Pete Beach at the Don Cesar Hotel.
What kind of job?
It's a job in a Barry Gibb music video.
And I have to rappel from the top of the building in a tuxedo with a rose between my teeth.
So I go to Miami Beach and I'm talking to these guys, you know, they're interviewing me.
He said, have you ever done this before?
I said, what?
Mean repel?
Yeah.
I was repelling out of helicopters in rice paddies while people were shooting at me.
You got the job.
I went home and I called my buddy Hank, who actually was in Vietnam and was repelling out of.
I had never done it before, but I knew I could.
Of course.
So he had a two-story house.
We got up on the roof and he showed me how to do it like in 10 minutes or something.
Next day, Lincoln and I get in the car.
Lincoln's only like third grade or something.
And we go into the Don Cesar Hotel.
I've never been here before.
And they take me up to my, the penthouse.
There's two penthouses.
Here's your room.
The room next to me had a sign on the door that said, do not disturb underscored three times with exclamation points.
I figured that's probably Mary's room.
Who's Barry Gibb?
Oh Barry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
It's his movie.
You're right next to him.
Oh my god.
I never saw him though.
So next morning I go down to do the job and I was scared shitless and And so I look over the edge I can see Lincoln down in the pool is like the size of an ant with Barry Gibb's kids.
They're all playing in the pool and And so I did it three or four times And the guy didn't like it.
It's the only time I have ever been fired.
Well, I wasn't fired.
He just didn't like it.
The director.
I said, okay.
And he didn't want to pay me.
I went back up and I knocked on that sign that said, do not disturb.
And Barry opens the door and lets me in.
And I explained what happened.
He was very cordial, very nice about it.
Had somebody come up, paid me off in $100 bills.
Off I went.
I'll show you.
I have that video.
So whenever I'm here in St. Pete Beach, where I now live, And I have meetings with people who come over and do interviews and stuff.
I always have them meet me there so I can show them the video.
At the dawn.
Yeah.
That's great.
Leilani Muser, her husband, came down for a visit once and I was telling him this story.
And we're at the pool at the Don Cesar having lunch.
And she said, what's the name of it?
I said, I don't know.
I never saw it before.
I've never seen it.
It was like 20 years earlier, you know.
Somehow she found it.
It's called night is for lovers, or something like that.
Uh huh.
And it's a music video.
I didn't understand it, but why am I telling you about this?
I don't know.
It's funny.
It's interesting, man.
It's entertaining.
You were saying before we started that you still have people from SeaWorld who spy on you.
Oh, yeah, of course.
Why wouldn't they?
They want to know what I'm doing.
People come to my office.
They make it obvious?
If I watch them, yeah, they make it real obvious.
Steve McCulloch was one of them.
I'll give you an example.
He came into my office.
Do you know who he is?
No.
He was one of the dolphin wranglers.
Anyhow, oh, yeah, I want to help.
So he went and bought his own camera, video camera, and went to SeaWorld, Ohio and made a very damaging video at the petting pool, which is a very abusive, most abusive pool in tank in the SeaWorld.
That's where everybody gropes the dolphins and teases them with food and all.
So he shot this.
powerful video.
It was so powerful.
We held a press conference in San Diego where SeaWorld was headquartered.
And Steve calls me just before the press conference and says, I don't know what happened.
Somebody must have broken my room last night and stole the video.
I don't have it.
We had to cancel out the press conference.
In reality, he gave it to Brad Andrews, who was the president of, who was there in town at the press conference.
He gave it to him.
And he works very closely with him even to this day.
So that's the kind of, you know, of course they want to know what we're doing.
Right.
Anybody can volunteer.
Same is true with the Japanese police.
Why would they not volunteer and help us join us in Tai Chi?
It's easy to do.
You're looking for volunteers.
They say we don't have any secrets.
We don't have any lies, any secrets.
Everything's an open book, and we don't care if you are part of it.
Is this an everyday thing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't come in contact with people that much anymore every day.
Right.
It's pretty clear.
What are you and Lincoln doing right now in Bali and Indonesia?
Like what's going on there.
I remember during or in the film the Blood Dolphin film uh, there was a guy named Chris Porter some wacko, yeah who was from Canada, who had a uh, who had a bunch of dolphinariums out there what's dolphin dealer?
He was a dolphin dealer yeah, and so he, uh he was.
He was uh selling dolphins to the dolphinariums in Mexico okay Dubai, excuse me um, and uh, the dolphin trainers who worked on the Free Willy movie worked with him after that movie.
In other words, those guys really weren't against captivity at all.
Right, they're in it for the six-figure job they're going to get until the 20 million is gone.
Then they're going to go back to.
Did you I, did you guys?
Is that guy still a dolphin, an active dolphin dealer?
Or did you guys put the kibosh on him?
Oh no, he wouldn't be dealing.
Nobody would he's.
He's been outed.
There's no way he could uh traffic in dolphins anymore.
I don't know what he's doing, But he's out of business there.
So what's next for you guys?
Obviously, Lincoln's got his documentary coming up that you guys are working on.
He's working on it.
I don't even think about it.
I don't even know what exactly.
It's his thing.
And you said obviously you guys have some stuff in the works as far as lawsuits in Japan.
But what other big issues are you trying to tackle at the moment?
It's the captivity issue.
It could change.
at any moment with another phone call or email or while I was sitting here with you, this aquarium closed.
I've been trying to do that since 1970.
That's what I'm talking about.
So what am I going to do about that?
I don't know.
I've got to get out of here and go there and find out.
That's how it works.
It's very organic.
No matter what you plant, I'm planning.
I want to go see my wife and daughter.
That's what I would like to do.
They're in Denmark.
In Denmark.
And we connect up in different parts of the world.
When I somebody wants to interview me, they'll fly me into Paris or something, and that's when I get to see my family, or they'll come here and what's next for me is, I mean, like so I mean, it seems like you are just this, you're sort of a vigilante that goes after these dolphin, air, these captive dolphins, and you try to count, you take them and you you rescue them, and it seems like you take, kind of take it one piece at a time right like, are there, are there any?
I mean, I don't know if you want to give stuff up in public, but like, are there any certain parts of the world that you are more focused on than the other?
Other than Norway, Japan?
Indonesia.
Indonesia, right?
Indonesia, Japan.
That's the big one.
The two big ones right now.
But it seems like the Indonesian government's working with you.
Yeah.
They're working with the minister for the environment and the minister for fisheries.
She works with us.
We want to build a really big one in Portugal.
Portugal's on our radar right now.
They have 35 dolphins in Portugal.
All of them were born in captivity except for two that were captured in Pine Island, Florida that are too old to come back to Pine Island, Florida.
So they're going to need a sanctuary, a big, big sanctuary somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Portugal.
We're working on that.
When I leave here, yeah, I'll go.
Pick up my wife.
We'll put the car on the ferry boat and go to Norway and check on the whale.
And then go to Portugal and get back to work on that.
By then, maybe we will have to return to Indonesia if we have the five dolphins.
We get a phone call that, you know, come on back.
We're gone.
It happens very quickly.
Things happen very quickly.
What do you think there's any one end all be all solution to all of this?
Like, if the president of the United States said, Rick, we're going to make you in charge, we're going to put you in charge of all this, you're going to be able to make the final decision on all dolphin captivity.
Obviously, we can't control the entire world, but we kind of do.
What do you think a diplomatic end all be all solution would be?
solution would be to this problem.
Well, let's just look at the are you talking about the industry in the United States or the industry all over the world?
Because it's everywhere.
But if you want to let's start with the United States.
Okay.
Let's focus on just Seaquarium.
What do you do about Seaquarium?
Now it's closed.
All those animals are lives hang in the balance.
They need a sanctuary somewhere.
They can't be released back into the wild.
Many of them don't even know what that is.
They've never seen the wild.
I think the majority of captive dolphins, older ones, are psychotic.
Right.
What do you do with them?
Sanctuary.
A place where they can experience the natural rhythms of the sea, the tide and the current, the rain, the sunshine.
These simple natural elements have healing properties.
When they're inside of a tank, They, it's dead.
There's nothing moving.
There's nothing alive there.
It's not organic.
There's just a wall.
Sometimes there'll be a, like in a sink or a toilet bowl, you see the water going down the drain.
They'll just be looking at that because there's nothing else inside of this barren tank to look at.
I have spent years underwater in these tanks with them.
The tourists, the management, the authorities haven't.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't realize how cruel that is.
It's kind of like if you were in this room for the rest of your life.
Keiko Becomes Wild00:02:52
Let's get rid of all this stuff that you can look at and interact with.
And there's nothing in this room.
How long would your mind be healthy?
Right, not very long.
Well, that's what they do until they go crazy.
So if you put them as soon as you, as soon as you move them like when we take them out of the hotel swimming pool in Bali, Get them in stretchers.
Lincoln will give you this footage.
You can do it voiceover.
And we take them to a truck.
There's a box waiting.
Box is about the size of this table, only longer.
And it has some water in it, maybe a foot.
It's got big, thick foam rubber, soft padding in it, so that when you place the dolphin stretcher inside the box, his stomach, you know, all of the weight of their weight, 350 pounds, is on their internal organs.
So you've got to compensate for that.
As soon as we get them to the sanctuary and place them into.
The sea pen.
They're, for the first time since they were captured, experiencing the sounds of the sea.
There's a lot of sounds that they're hearing for the first time.
And what we want, we want them to remember who they were before they were captured.
We don't teach them, we don't train them to be wild again.
You can't train a dolphin to become wild again.
They didn't train Keiko to become a wild orca again.
The training itself is the problem.
Training it to do more is not going to solve the problem.
Nature heals them.
The salt water has iodine, has healing elements in it, catching their own fish.
In captivity, they're simply opening their mouth and somebody is dumping a dead fish in their mouth.
Living is actually chasing that fish, the hunt.
The hunt itself is living.
And that was all taken away from them.
So you have to get them in a place where you have to give them back all the things we took away from them when they were captured.
And that's what heals them.
They heal themselves.
Some of them cannot be free during the whole process.
You can watch what they do and how they act.
Example, one of them was banging his head against the dock constantly.
We knew there's something wrong with this guy.
We're not freeing him.
Stop Buying Dolphin Tickets00:04:33
So you have to watch them every single day, all day long and all night.
And you're playing God because you are going to figure out whether they're going to be free or they're going to be in here the rest of their life, whatever happens to them.
It's a huge responsibility.
I take it very serious, too.
But looking at it from a numb capitalist perspective, how do you incentivize corporations to walk away from billions of dollars and put money into something like this that doesn't generate any sort of profit?
I don't.
I would be a waste of time.
They're not going to.
I don't have any expectations of the government fixing it.
I don't deal with them.
I don't listen to them.
I don't pay any attention to them.
The customer, well, not the customers.
The only hope, and I've thought about this, sounds awfully simplistic, but the only solution is for people to stop buying tickets.
There is no other solution.
They're never going to stop.
It's not going to happen.
You can waste your time doing that if you want to.
Right.
But it's based on supply and demand like any other product.
You stop buying this Bud Light or whatever it is, they're in trouble.
It's up to the consumer.
So our work is really about educating the consumer.
So when we're doing a release, that's why these dolphin releases or sanctuaries are so important because for the first time, the audience, same people who are buying tickets, are seeing this process and learning for themselves.
Oh, yeah, I get it now.
I get it.
They're not going to get it from the propaganda that the owner is telling everybody on the chain all the way down to the trainers because I was.
I was the head trainer at the Seaquarium.
I know how it works.
In order to be successful, that trainer has to become a professional liar.
You have to lie to the customers every day when they ask you questions.
You have to lie to the media.
And worst of all, you have to lie to yourself every day.
What do you lie about?
Three things.
Education, research, and conservation.
That's what we're doing here.
Right.
Well, they are 5%.
Yeah.
In those rescues and stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
Great work.
Exit the Dolphins.
Nobody does it better.
Yeah, that's 5%, though.
Right.
And all of the dolphins, everything you see in Tai Chi, that massacre is a direct, you could directly connect it to those people who are selling tickets to their dolphin area because it's the copycat syndrome over here that keeps the fueling them.
And they don't police their own industry.
So fuck those people.
I don't deal with them.
Right.
They don't like me.
I don't have a pathological need to be liked.
So I'm okay with that.
Do you maintain any relationships with any former dolphin trainers that you used to work with or that are currently involved in any of these operations?
Do you ever talk to them or do you ever have interventions?
No.
I've been in touch with a couple, but they've left recently.
And there'll be more at the Seaquarium now.
I just can't fathom house a person who would want to dedicate their career to spending time with these animals.
You have to be passionate about this topic.
And if you're a trainer, don't you make some sort of a connection with these animals?
And how could you, if you are that person?
It's not real.
It's not real.
It's the same duality I live with with the Flipper Dolphins.
Yeah.
You walk away, you go home, and you live your life.
Yeah.
You were trying to get them to be your friend.
And it's a Stockholm syndrome at best.
Right.
At best.
I was going through the Stockholm syndrome in reverse, where I wouldn't even let people come around the dolphins.
I became one of them, one of the dolphins, and I was rebelling the same way they were because I could see how wrong this whole thing is.
Now, if I wanted to at that point, SeaWorld hadn't been built yet.
I had a reputation as the highest paid dolphin trainer in the world.
I could have been running SeaWorld.
Stockholm Syndrome Reversed00:03:43
I could do that when I leave here.
I could go down to the Bahamas, start a dolphin swim program with two or three dolphins and be making three or four million dollars a year But I wouldn't be able to sleep at night Right Instead I go to Taiji where I can't sleep at night How long till you go back to Taiji you're gonna go back this with this summer the only reason I'm not there now is we want to go with you we well We don't have enough money to go back.
I should be there right now all the time.
I shouldn't leave there because there are no six months I could be putting events together in Tokyo.
We did one with Matt Sorum, who's also not just a drummer.
He's a really good singer, songwriter.
And so he could entertain the whole.
And we invited all the Japanese activists to this vegan club.
And they all came.
And it was so successful.
So they became all the Japanese protesters.
Oh, really?
Yeah, they're the ones who are there now.
The problem is in Tai Chi, but the solution is in Tokyo.
And getting them to step up and take ownership of this.
But to do that requires money.
For me to go to Japan, I have to fly business class now at 84 because I can't sit in the chair that long.
The last time I did it packed in like a sardine.
The last time I did it was about six or seven years ago, I remember getting up from the seat.
The light came off and I said, you can walk around the plane.
I was going to the bathroom.
I remember opening the door to the bathroom.
And the next thing I know, I'm lying in a pool of blood.
Oh, God.
And I'm hearing on their loudspeaker if there's a doctor on the plane.
And I'm thinking, I think they're talking about me.
And there's a woman in my face, very lovely black doctor.
Yeah.
She said, we have to turn the plane around and go back.
You have a large gash.
What happened was I passed out and I fell backwards and hit my head and so forth.
And it was the, I tell you how long ago it was.
It was, I had to be there for the world premiere of the Cove, the premiere in Japan at the 400km tournament.
Oh, it's a big, yeah.
I said, don't turn this plane around.
I have to be there.
She said, I said, please listen to me.
Just put some ice on it.
When I get to the place, I'll, uh, Tokyo, I'll get stitches and blah, blah, blah.
But trust me, I'll be okay.
They didn't really want to turn around anyhow.
So they didn't.
When I get to Tokyo, the wheelchair comes in.
They take me down.
And the guy says, it's too late.
You can't sew it up now.
You waited too long.
They let me go.
Now I'm going.
But they shaved half of my head to look at it.
Now I'm going to the premiere.
I think I wore a hat or something.
Yeah, whatever happened.
So what happened was, it's just exhausting.
And I don't fly.
Unless I I get on the plane now and I lay down right, i've lost two friends on airplanes.
Uh, Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, died on a plane like that how, and Fred Neal's manager also.
I don't know how.
Maybe you're you're supposed to not circulating or something, I don't know, but people do die on airplanes.
Those who are laying down, I think, are.
So I lay down, take a sleeping pill and I wake up.
I'm in Tokyo or wherever i'm going.
That's how I do it.
Adopting Dolphins in Japan00:04:00
Whatever happened with the people.
But it's expensive, you know, it's like 8 000 bucks or something.
To fly first class to Japan yeah no, it's business class.
Oh, business class yeah, that's guess.
It's not first class, but it's, it's still expensive.
You fly from La right.
It pays for where I am usually through.
Why for no?
From Denmark?
Oh, from Denmark.
I've been living in Denmark before I came here, right.
So whatever happened with the people who were involved with uh, purchasing the documentary in Japan?
Wasn't there a group that purchased the rights in Japan for the documentary And somehow the Yakuza stopped the distribution of the documentary in Japan, like in theaters?
That went on for a long time.
Yeah.
Time yeah, and they would actually go into the distributor's house, the Yakuza um.
They have these black trucks with big megaphones on them and they, on saturdays and sundays, they go to the homes of uh Koreans, Chinese people.
They don't like they're racist, they're like the cooks, kkk.
Really, oh yeah, there's a lot of racism.
You don't in Japan.
Yeah, people don't.
There are places they have this sign that says Japanese only.
And so they did this at the Taiji Whale Museum, which is actually a dolphinarium.
And they're the number one distributor of dolphins.
So we go in there and we monitor them closely.
One day we go in there and they had to sign up.
Can't buy a ticket.
Japanese only.
We took them to court, sued them, and won.
And they had to take that down.
It's racism.
Wow.
So I think lawsuits is the way to stop this thing, because the courts seem to be fair with you.
They're right right yeah well, that's that's hopeful yeah, that the court the Supreme Court System in Japan is is uh, working with you and you're being successful.
Um, where so?
Where can people that are listening to this, where can they get in contact with you?
Where can they do anything to help the Dolphin project and what you and Lincoln are doing?
Go to Dolphinproject.com and take action.
What's take action mean well people, They can donate.
They can come with us to Japan if they want to or volunteer to do different things.
Maybe it's their shop.
Buy a t-shirt.
Support it.
Take action.
Adopt a dolphin.
People in this area are getting involved in that campaign.
The Disney dolphins.
Their what?
Walt Disney World has a lot of dolphins.
Oh, Disney World has a lot of dolphins.
Their Living Seas exhibit.
Used to have 100% mortality rate.
Yeah.
Wow.
So you can adopt a dolphin.
So you can basically pay to have a dolphin rescued.
Is that what that means?
When we rescue them, we have to feed them.
It's very expensive.
Right.
People adopt it.
That helps offset our bills.
Oh, that's incredible.
We are not part of the animal welfare industry.
That's a big, big industry that I want nothing to do with.
We're outside of that.
We're grassroots and we're going to stay that way.
We've got to get you on more podcasts.
Why don't you do more podcasts?
I know I just did this because Lincoln kept pestering me.
I don't like doing them, frankly.
We got to make this.
We got to make you ubiquitous, man.
That's the only way to let the people know not to buy tickets to these places.
Yeah, I know.
I've done it for so long.
I'm just tired of it now after 70 years of it's, you know, it's basically the same interview.