Louie Psihoyos reveals how The Cove (1995) sparked his mission after Jim Clark’s alarming findings in Papua New Guinea, exposing Japan’s dolphin slaughter—dropping from 23,000 to 1,610 annually post-film. Their Racing Extinction campaign lit the Empire State Building and Vatican, reaching billions during COP21, while Psihoyos critiques factory farming’s inefficiency and mercury poisoning (e.g., Minamata disease). Rogan shares his shift from industrial meat to hunting, praising lab-grown alternatives like Memphis Meats’ cultured chicken. They debate plastic pollution—10 rivers in Asia dumping most ocean waste—and Rogan champions hemp as a solution, dismissing Biden’s outdated "gateway drug" claims. Psihoyos’ work proves activism can force legal change, but systemic exploitation persists, demanding radical ecological and ethical shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD.
I wanted to film.
I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995, I think it came out.
I was on the Information Revolution, and Jim Clark was sort of the You know, the Steve Jobs of my generation, right?
And he didn't want to be photographed.
He was just too busy.
And then I started working for Fortune magazine, and he had built a boat, the world's tallest mast, I think, at that point.
And I went over to Amsterdam to film him.
And we hit it off and he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?
And he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars.
And I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer.
And then we traveled all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years.
And we did mostly underwater photography.
He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude.
It was just a piece of work because Jim doesn't do anything half-ass.
And every time we would go to a dive site and come back to it, you'd see this shifting baseline where there's less fish, there's less coral.
In fact, he took me to a place in Papua New Guinea.
He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen.
It's in Papua New Guinea.
We flew over there all day to get there, a day and a half to sail.
We dive on the GPS coordinates and it's rubble.
It's completely gone.
And this is what happened, not all the time, but a lot.
We don't know what the insults were.
It could have been dynamite fishing.
It could have been anything.
Who knows what it was?
But I think it was the third time that we were in the Galapagos, Jim turned to me and said something like, you know, somebody should do something about this.
We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary.
And sort of empowered by the success that he's had in business and seeing how he could change the world in his businesses, I said, how about you and I? He said, what do you mean?
I said, we'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films.
So I'm jumping careers at this stage.
I'm going from being a fairly successful still photographer, really busy, To a career where I had really no business doing it.
I'd never really made a film before, not even really a short film.
And so I'm, you know, nervous.
I'm feeling sort of full of myself, like I'm going to start this great career.
We're down in the Caribbean on a boat.
And my kid starts with Jim on vacation with our families.
And my kid starts playing on the beach with another kid.
It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid.
So Stephen comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. He made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, Silicon Graphics.
And after I had Stephen alone for a few seconds, I said, do you have any advice for a first-time filmmaker?
And he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals.
Yeah, because, you know, you have to match shots and all that.
But it has its own set of, you know, trying to keep the horizon level on a boat.
You don't want to give the audience seasickness.
Yeah.
But, you know, I would add to that, like, don't do a movie where people want to kill you, because when we did The Cove, it was, you know, it was exciting but dangerous work.
Look, that movie changed a lot of people's minds and opened up a lot of people's eyes to the horrors of the way dolphins are slaughtered.
And, you know, we were just talking about this before the podcast.
I think they are as intelligent as human beings.
I just think the difference is they can't change their environment.
They don't affect their environment the way we do.
They don't build houses.
They don't have cars.
They don't send emails.
So we don't appreciate what they are.
But when we look at the complexity of their brains, the fact that their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being, they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even really totally understand.
John Lilly, I mean, for years, and did it in, like, really weird, unconventional ways.
He tried to take acid and communicate with dolphins, and it's one of the reasons why he...
He created the sensory deprivation tank.
We actually have one of those over here.
And Lily, they were forever trying to figure out some way to figure out some method of communication where they were trying to get the dolphins to talk like people and we would try to make their noises and to no avail.
Well, that's what they did with the Library of Alexandria.
That's why we don't really totally understand how they built the pyramids.
But what disturbs me is this egocentric approach that we have towards marine life in particular because they're the most intelligent versions of life that we know of other than ourselves that we, for some reason, universally have accepted up until really recently because of your film and because of Blackfish and, you know, More awareness and Sea Shepherd and all these different organizations are trying to let people know.
You've got to pay attention to what this is because I think history, I think when all said and done, we're going to look at this as some insane slaughter of what's basically like water people.
They're like some form of super intelligent life that some cultures have just decided are just competitors in the fishing market.
I mean, I think it's, and I think that was the shock of the cove, that you see our counterparts in the ocean being treated like that.
And I think, you know, when you look at the way we made that film, it was, you know, we pretty much told the story of what's going on in the oceans by looking at that cove.
And, you know, William Blake said, to see the world in a grain of sand.
But we could look at, you know, in that film, we talk about overfishing and, you know, listen, the reason that they shouldn't be eaten, besides that they're sentient and intelligent, is also that they're toxic.
You know, their meat is now, their flesh is now some of the most toxic, you know, waste in the world when you bury them.
You know, there's, I think, 6,000 times more PCBs than, you know, than the background in the ocean.
There is, you know, all the flesh that's been tested in Japan in the last 20 years has between 5,000 and 5,000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese law if it was a fish, but it's a mammal, of course.
When we were making that film, there was a point where we went down to the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in Georgia.
In Chile.
And we were trying to get an interview with some of the top people there that run the organization because, you know, whales, dolphins are killing them in mass.
And we had the footage at that point.
And we were just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the International Whaling Commission.
And I think it was going from Houston to Santiago.
The plane was full.
I couldn't even sit next to my partners and my buddies on the film crew.
There was one empty seat next to me.
And, you know, they were waiting for somebody else to come from another flight.
And right before the plane door closes, in comes Akira Nakamai.
He's the head of overseas fishing for Japan.
The head bull, goose, loony.
And he sits down right next to me.
I'm looking at my buddies on the plane thinking, my God, if there is a God, he has a good sense of humor.
So he sits down next to me.
I didn't want him to find out who I was.
And then move.
So I waited until dinner was served like an hour or two later.
And I said, do you have any idea who I am?
He said, no.
I said, I know who you are.
I want to show you a film.
So we had a condensed version of it, probably about 12 or 15 minutes of it at that point, and I showed it to him.
And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their flesh is poisoned?
And there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this You know, this flesh, you know, on the Japanese Ministry of Health site.
And he said, I'm not in charge of food safety.
I'm in charge of food security.
In other words, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences.
His job is just to provide enough meat on the plate for the Japanese people.
And it gives you an insight of how he's thinking.
He's in charge of, I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California.
He says 17% of the land area in Japan is only good enough for growing crops on or living on.
We have to turn to the sea for food.
And at that point, they were also caught...
Skimming, stealing about 200,000 tons of endangered bluefin tuna.
This is over about a 20-year period.
Now, when you start talking about big numbers like that, I can't imagine, you know, it's hard to imagine it, but imagine like...
And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries.
So it's not just like – every country has their allotment and once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home.
But the Japanese kept on getting more.
So the Australians actually caught them.
They figured out over this 20-year period that they went through the books and saw what they reported and was actually sold at the Tsukiji market and found out they had skimmed 200,000 tons.
That's five big train cars, like trains full of endangered tuna.
Like, not cars, but the whole trains, like 110 car trains, five of them full of...
It's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna's endangered.
You know, you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store.
Like, tuna...
Tuna's a weird one, right?
Because it's such a common food.
It's in cans.
You see it at the sushi place.
You know what I'm saying?
To hear that tuna's endangered, most people are like, is tuna endangered?
They're hearing this going, is tuna endangered?
But when you talk to people that work at the fish market, they'll very clearly tell you that there's a radical difference between the amount of tuna that was available 30, 40 years ago 10 years ago.
Unfortunately, it's sort of what happens with endangered species.
The more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes.
And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing.
But this is happening with all the fish stocks.
I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society, and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet.
This is the Monterey Seafood Watches.
What fish are sustainable?
And I've seen them You know, go through the fish stocks.
So less and less, you know, we start at the big animals and we start to, you know, slowly go through all the fish stocks until like we're, you know, like McDonald's used to do halibut.
Now it's pollock, which is a very small, you know, white fish from Alaska.
And now that's being hunted to extinction.
So we're going through these fish stocks.
That's shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one.
That's what's going on.
So I just stopped handing out seafood guides, and now I'm trying to sort of preempt it.
So I don't think...
The big question is, there's 7.5 billion of us on this planet, soon to be 10. Is there enough wild animals to feed us all?
There isn't.
You look at the biomass of mammals on the planet.
Between livestock and humans, we occupy 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet.
4% are wild animals.
Mammals.
So we can't all be eating wild fish.
And think about that.
You never go out and say, let's get some land food.
I mean, during the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting.
In North America, a lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather.
They were hunting, and they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to incredibly low numbers.
Elk to this day, I think, are only in 10% of their original range that they were at in the 1700s.
And that was all from market hunting, from people just going out, buying, you know, meat from these market hunters that have shot these things.
And they didn't really have refrigeration back then, so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it.
And they got down to these incredibly low levels until Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of other people that were conservation-minded realized, like, what was happening here.
And they put a stop to it all and then started...
Enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the areas where they're extirpated.
And now you see historic levels, especially white-tailed deer.
There's more white-tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed.
But that's a weird one, too, because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal.
Because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands.
Like, they literally exist in fields, and a lot of them live off of GMO crops.
So it's very strange.
I have a buddy of mine, my friend Doug Duren, who has this huge piece of land in Wisconsin.
And he's like, the deer in my area are essentially eating GMO corn.
They're eating Monsanto corn.
This is so weird.
Yeah, they're wild, but they're also kind of farm animals.
You know, because they exist in record numbers because they've got so much food to eat.
I lived in Boulder, Colorado for a while and we had a lot of bears and mountain lions come through our yard because we were right at the base of the foothills of the Rockies.
I woke up one morning and the neighbor was looking at his minivan and there's a big dent in the side.
He's trying to figure out how to get a dent because it was parked here all night.
And he found an antler in the bushes.
And then the question is, how does a deer run into it?
And then in the paper the next day, there was a picture of a mountain lion on a house down the block, sitting on a hot tub cover, this is in the winter, holding a deer in his mouth with one antler.
You know, there's a lot of foxes up there that get things.
But God, it's beautiful.
Boulder's just incredible, incredible place.
And you'll be driving down the road and you see, it's weird, like the deer in Boulder know that they're safe.
So we were looking at this house in Boulder and we opened up the door to the backyard and there was this enormous deer just standing there staring at us.
And my wife thought it was fake.
I go, no, that's a real deer.
She's like, what?
And then it just turns its head and starts moving around because it wasn't even remotely freaked out that there were people a stone's throw away from it.
Many people have turned on deer because of the loss of their gardens, the roses especially.
They love roses.
Yeah, is there anybody that has ever come up with any sort of a plan to do what they did for wild animals in North America?
Because you can't regulate it the way you can, wild animals, because in wild animals, if they have a particular area, you could make it so people can't go in that area.
But the ocean is so enormous.
Has anybody come up with some sort of a repopulation plan?
He's considered the father of modern biodiversity.
He's about getting right around 90 years old now.
But looking at, he would do things like go to an island and pretty much exterminate everything on it and then try to figure out, well, at what rate do the animals come back and what's sustainable?
And he's figured out that to save 85% of the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it.
Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right?
The Japanese were fishing in an international marine sanctuary for decades, you know, so you have to, you know, it's really tough when you have organizations that really don't have any teeth to it.
I mean, I know they've done this in some places outside of Hawaii where they've bred animals, fish rather, like sushi fish, like hamachi.
And they've had these pens set up and then a lot of times a storm will come by like a huge storm and they break these pens and then those fish get wild and people start catching them.
Yeah, well, that's, I mean, like salmon, like, well, you know, I went, they were trying to, in Japan, when we were doing the Cove, we went to a university where they were breeding the first bluefin tuna.
These are from eggs, you know, so this is when, like, what they do at some places where they catch them, then they put them in these pens, then they fatten them up.
These were, they're making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs.
And really hard to do, really skittish.
And when I went there, they were shoveling, this is back when I ate fish, They were shoveling these mackerels, like what I would feed my family with, like a family of four.
They were shoveling it to the tuna.
And I said, hold on a minute, like how many, how many, how much...
How much mackerel does it take to make a pound of tuna?
They said about seven, up until about 150 pounds.
And after that, it takes 14 pounds.
So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm-raised fish.
I mean, this is like going to the bank because you want a crisp $5 bill and say, here's a couple 20s.
But that's, you know, if you look at, you know, what are they feeding, you know, a lot of these fish are feeding them, you know, parts of farm animals and fish, wild fish.
And I was just reading this morning a Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish are fucked.
And it has, and it talks about, like, the fish that are raised, and I don't know the data behind it, but they have eight times more There's more pollutants in it than wild fish.
I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a...
Yeah, there was about 10 years ago, I was down in the Caribbean, a friend was getting married, and I took his daughter out to...
I didn't know it at the time, but it was her first time snorkeling.
And we were in an area that I'd been to about 20 years before, and there was nothing.
There was nothing there.
It was just like...
A desert.
And then I heard her screaming through her snorkel, and I thought, what's wrong?
And she was screaming because she saw a single orange tang.
That was the only life form we saw there.
I used to see clouds of schools of these orange and blue tang.
Now there was nothing.
And I thought, my God, she thinks that that's beautiful.
And it is.
It's just, you know, the single fish.
But, you know, again, a shifting baseline.
The generation before when I was there, it probably looked like the land before time.
These places I went to with Clark, you know, Rajanpat, where you'd see, you know, if you go to the Caribbean, you might see 30 fish on a different species of fish on a dive.
And Rajanpat, you'd see 300. And it was just miraculous.
And when you're taking pictures, you actually see more detail with the picture than you can with your eye can't comprehend it all.
So it's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we lit like jewel boxes, you see how much life that there is there.
But there was just unbelievable, stunning amounts of wildlife.
But that's going on all over the world.
And the Great Barrier Reef, we lost over half the Great Barrier Reef in the last two years.
It was never that good anyway.
You know, 15 years ago, after being to some of the best preserved places in the world that I've been to with Clark, we looked at the Great Barrier Reef and we'd be like, Oh my God, this is not that great.
And now they've already, then they've lost half again.
So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from, you know, Iowa or Wisconsin or Boulder, that looks pretty good.
But if you knew what came before that, you're seeing this assault against nature going on.
You have to get out several miles at the Great Barrier Reef.
The further north you go, the more isolated it is.
We went the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef, and it didn't look.
It got slightly better as you got north.
But there's only a couple boats there.
It's not like you have thousands and hundreds of thousands of tourists out on the beach.
And the other thing is acidification.
The burning of fossil fuels is acidifying the oceans.
It's now about 30% more acidic than it was 50 years ago.
And when you make, you know, there's more carbonic acid in the water, it makes it harder for the corals to survive.
And basically you have these multiple insults going on at the same time.
It's probably not just one thing.
But there was a massive bleaching event two years in a row in the Great Barrier Reef.
And so it's disappearing in our lifetime.
But if you look at, we have the last coral berry reef in America is down in Florida.
And they have...
Semi-treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that they could swim through.
I've been out there on these beaches.
You could literally talk to somebody on the beach or scream to them on the beach.
And they have this green water coming out of sewer pipes 200 meters away, 300 meters away.
And so they're dumping semi-treated sewage on the last reef in America.
This is going on all around the world.
And, you know...
What we do?
I don't know.
But this is the last generation that we have that can actually do something about it because we're seeing it disappear in our watch.
And that's what I'm trying to do is try to not just create the awareness that something's going on, that we have to do something, but try to create action.
We can make arguments about whether or not you should go to Florida all day long, and I'm with you 100%, but I just can't imagine that they would allow this.
I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi-treat it?
How much more would it cost to not do what they're doing?
When we did, now that I recall, this is like five years ago, we tried to get an interview with the key people down there, but try to, like, if you're going to talk to somebody about this, nobody wants to go on record to talk about it, because it's really bad for tourism, and it's not good for the political record.
We always think somebody else should be doing something about this.
And, you know, that's why we do films.
It's not just to create the awareness and, you know, to try to get something done about it.
You know, when we did The Cove, they were killing about 23,000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption.
And I think the last time, I think 2017 was the last reports of how many they killed.
I think it was 1,610 total.
So it was like a 93% drop.
Since we did that film, because every time that Rick O'Berry, he's the guy that captured and trained the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper, every time that we talked in the Japanese press, we try to use the word Mercury, because that's their Achilles heel.
If you talk to the Japanese, the people from the IWC, of course, they're out of that now.
They've quit the IWC. They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens?
When we were there, they were feeding it to school kids.
And the school children, it's the young mind, like infants or prenatal, that has the most deleterious effects of mercury because your neurons are just developing.
And they had hatched a scheme for school lunch programs all over America.
And in Japan, unlike in America, you have to eat everything on your plate.
So it's almost like you were force-fed to poison.
And because of the film, that stopped.
So, I mean, films can be really powerful, you know, to...
They have more density for neurons, like the folds of the brains.
If you did a slice of a brain, it looks like a fjord, right?
And there's more convolutions with a dolphin.
There's more surface area for neurons.
And of course, the more neurons you have, the more connections you're making.
And they actually have a...
God, there's a...
Spindle neurons that they have for developing complex emotions.
If you look at orcas, they're really tight-knit communities.
A male orca will spend most of its life, not more than a body length away from its mother the entire time until it goes away to do what it does.
These animals are really social, and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we don't even know what they're saying.
The average person can hear from 50 hertz to 20,000 kilohertz, and I think they can communicate up to 200,000.
So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with.
And we hear like a little squeak, like...
But if you slow it down and break it down, there's actually, you know, there's more patterns in there than we can sense.
What's interesting about whales, blue whales, blue whales are really solitary creatures.
They're, you know, they're not gregarious like dolphins.
They don't usually hang out in big, you know, groups.
But down in the Southern Ocean, it was confounding people.
Like, how do they find the krill bloom that happens in a different area, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles apart?
How do they, you know, they all find it?
And one of the researchers, Roger Payne, came up with this idea, and it was through the work with the Navy, that there's something called the Deep Ocean Channel.
And it's basically between the surface of the water and the thermal layer that fluctuates depending on where you're at in the column, let's say 500 feet.
They basically use their voice, which is one of the loudest voices in the animal kingdom.
It's so loud, but it's infrasound, you can't hear it.
So it's bouncing up, and imagine that it's bouncing up to the surface and down to this cold layer, and it can go for literally thousands of miles.
So it's called reciprocal altruism.
The theory is that when one finds it, they start singing, and it notifies the rest of the group that this is where the krill bloom is, and then they can all survive.
There's a friend of mine, Chris Clark, Dr. Chris Clark from over in Cornell University.
He was...
It was a string of pearl hydrophones that the Navy uses called Sosis in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and it was designed to listen for Russian submarines back in the Cold War.
But they opened it up to some researchers, and Chris was one of the first ones to, you know, if you're a researcher listening to whales, you go out in your little boat and you drop a hydrophone in, and you can usually think, oh, that's amazing.
Look, you can hear sounds everywhere.
Everything is basically singing down there from crackling shrimp up to blue whales.
And, you know, so you have this impression that, man, I just, you know, dropped in on this conversation.
I don't know what's being said, but like, that feels pretty special.
Now he goes to Sosis, and they have like a...
Back then it was like an underground bunker full of people with three screens back before anybody had three screens and everybody's listening for submarines.
And he sees that on a board it's lit up in the whole world.
He's seeing wherever the blue whales are singing or all these whales, it's lit up like a Christmas tree.
And what the Navy was trying to do is to filter through the voices of what they called the biologicals to pinpoint The submarines.
But he was like, oh my god, this is like the holy grail for listening to whales because they have – they can tell what's going on on an ocean ecosystem level.
When he could just – you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen.
Now he can all of a sudden has all this incredible data.
And he could track animals.
These animals, like blue whales, they'll ping, and they can basically send out a wave, and they can see thousands of miles away with their extra senses.
You can probably, you know, if you go onto the website of the Cornell Ornithology Lab, I think there probably is some stuff that you can play with that's not copyrighted.
And so the ones that migrate, the migratory orcas are fine because they eat marine mammals.
They eat mostly seals.
These poor resident ones do not want to eat anything other than salmon, and so they're literally starving to death, and they're trying to figure out ways to feed them.
The Cove and Blackfish in particular have been really effective about shutting down in a massive way the amount of people going to the shows.
But in China they haven't got the message.
So I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year.
So it's like whack-a-mole.
And the Russians were providing...
And that story...
When I was in Russia...
This is like one of those amazing situations.
Putin, on a State of the Union address, announced that they were going to release the whales from the whale jail that were caught over in eastern Russia.
So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story.
But to answer your question, there's another co-director that was working on the northwest, and the Lummi Indians were going out to feed from their stock of A farm-raised salmon, they were feeding the animals, but that's not sustainable because they move around.
Well, you know, one of them that they initially, when they set it up, they didn't even realize what they were doing.
This was in the 1930s or something like that, where they You know, they had hundreds of thousands of salmon just coming to this wall and not understanding what the fuck's going on and dying there.
There's a friend of mine, I'm a co-director in a film about plastics with Josh Murphy, did a film called Artificial, and it's about just this, you know, the craziness of We're good to go.
I've often said that about Bigfoot, that everyone cares.
Shut it off.
People are so interested in finding Bigfoot, but if you found Bigfoot, what would it be?
It would be basically a big chimpanzee or something, right?
Another big primate.
We already know about primates.
They're amazing.
We know about them now.
But if you found, if an orca wasn't real, and someone said, hey, there's this thing, it's as smart as people, maybe smarter, it lives in the ocean, but it breathes air, and it swims around in these incredible pods, and they have really tight communities, they communicate with each other with this language, that we have had our best linguists try to decipher, we have no idea what the fuck they're saying.
You know, you'd be like, what kind of animal is that?
It would be a crazy mythical creature.
You know, like the creature from the Black Lagoon or the Loch Ness Monster or something.
It would be like some incredible thing.
If you ever found one, people would be freaking out.
But we get so used to things being real.
And I think we're just used to them.
And unfortunately, because of things like Free Willy and going to see Sea World shows where they're doing flips for fish and everybody's clapping, people have got it in their head that this is just the thing.
It's a normal thing.
But what they are is one of the most fantastic creatures that the world has ever known in all of the billions of years of life on this planet.
There's two things that are mind-blowers in terms of their intelligence.
One of them is us.
The other one is them.
All the marine mammals, whether it's whales, dolphins.
I mean, whales are amazing because of their size, but whales, dolphins, and orcas.
And obviously, orcas are cousins of whales.
But those things are...
They're some of the most spectacular creatures that the biodiversity of the earth has ever created.
I mean, that's essentially what they do with the Cuban Olympic wrestling program.
Yoel Romero, who was one of the top UFC fighters, came out of that Cuban wrestling program, and he said that the elite athletes get to eat three times a day, but the people that are under them get to eat twice a day.
It's, you know, it's just, to me, I mean, I have a very close relationship with a guy named Phil Demers, who has been involved in a decades-long lawsuit with Marineland in Canada.
And he, they, walrus bond was, With humans when they're babies, and he bonded with this walrus named Smooshy.
And I believe she's the only one that's alive.
Marineland has a horrible record of animal rights.
I mean, the way Phil puts it, he goes, it makes SeaWorld look like paradise for dolphins and orcas.
And he was an orca trainer there too and a dolphin trainer and you know he worked with these people over there and just I mean horrific stories of what it's like and to see these animals just living in hell just tortured and then they have no chance to ever find their family again they were they were pulled from their mother when they're a baby and now here they are you know 15 years old stuck in a swimming pool developing ulcers their their dorsal fin collapsing collapses and atrophies I mean It's
so crazy that it's still legal.
Like that after Blackfish, SeaWorld didn't just get shut down by the government.
And that people didn't just boycott them en masse.
Once you look at the data, what we understand about their intelligence, what we understand about the way they've captured these things and taken them...
From their families and would they understand the close-knit or the nature of these orcopods the fact that it's not illegal.
I mean, they're not even from the – if you know how they learn, and now they're suddenly thrown into these disparate groups where you have some that are wild, some come from different – imagine these populations of the transients and the residents.
They don't speak the same language.
And then you pull the mothers away, so there's really no – What do they do when they don't speak the same language?
Because, you know, we did this film called Racing Extinction, and the working title was called The Singing Planet, because just about everything is singing.
We just haven't been listening.
Everything from a mouse up to a blue whale has a song.
I mean, technically it's a song.
But we don't see it as that.
We're looking at it only through our own eyes.
And that was part of the objective of that film was to try to get people to understand like, hey, there's all these other life forms out there.
They're disappearing before we have a chance to even know what they're up to.
And we're the last generation that can fix it.
So, you know, we're going through a mass extinction right now.
And, you know, when I started, you know, I did four stories for National Geographic on dinosaurs, on the Mesozoic, the midlife of the planet.
A lot of friends of mine were paleontologists.
And Michael Novacek, the head provost of the American Museum of Natural History.
I was in the Gobi Desert with him.
You know, you go around to these beautiful landscapes where you see dinosaurs laid out, you know, basically from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail like you don't see anywhere else in the world.
Like they almost got exterminated by something in one go.
And he had told me that, well, we're going through a mass extinction right now.
And I was like, what?
He said, oh yeah, mankind is responsible for the sixth mass extinction.
That's the first time I heard about it about 15 years ago.
And I said, what are the issues?
He said, well, the drivers are habitat destruction for agriculture.
Pollution, invasive species, and overconsumption.
But the biggest one by far is habitat destruction, the raising of crops for animals that we in turn eat.
So, you know, if you look at what's going on in Africa, you know, poaching's a big, huge problem, but a bigger problem is there, you know, a lot of that land now is being, and what's going on in the Amazon as well, it's being torn up for getting feed for cattle, for animals.
That was the one I was thinking was the largest, I think, in California history.
I mean, these goddamn fires.
When they happen, it's a very stunning and sobering reminder of the forces of nature.
And when you're in this situation like we're in right now, where you have all this dry ground and all these dry leaves and one thing catches and then the wind brings it down.
It's terrifying.
But my point was that I've been very, very close to some of these fires.
We've been evacuated a few times.
And when it's hitting and the sky is just gray with smoke and the hills are on fire, it's a very strange, strange feeling.
And the ocean, the pollution of the ocean is a huge one because it seems like it's nobody's, right?
It seems like it's everybody's, but it's nobody's.
Whereas, like, the land, if someone is doing something on the land...
Could you imagine that Florida, if they were just pumping that shit into West Palm Beach, if there's just a big tube that goes into the sky and just sprays all over West Palm Beach, people would be like, what the fuck is this?
And then they would have to act.
They have to say, you can't do that.
But because it's getting pumped into the ocean, it seems like it's okay.
It's not ours.
It's just the ocean.
Well, it's unfortunate.
I've got to go to work, man.
I don't have time for this.
I'm behind on my car payments.
I'm doing overtime tonight.
Most people are concerned with so many different things that they don't have time to think about the massive overfishing and pollution of the ocean.
Like, you walk around there, you go, where did you get all this money?
Like, what did you guys, you guys don't even sell anything.
You know, they have fucking billions of dollars in art and spectacular architecture and everywhere you go the spoils of riches and you're like, where do you get this from?
It's an amazing place to visit, just historically, just to see what it's like.
The cruise ships would pull up, and then you would see the amount of people that get out, and then the streets would be flooded.
And all the people that lived there would be like, this all just started happening like a decade ago, or the cruise ships were allowed to pull right up.
And the week they were there, they said they had two accidents.
With cruise ships hitting docks.
And we played a video of one of them.
It's fucking crazy.
You see this gigantic boat.
And it's just coming in.
You know it's going to hit the dock.
And you know it's going to hit this boat in front of it.
And everybody's running to get out of the way.
And you see this mountain.
It's a mountain that's floating.
A floating mountain that has no ability to maneuver correctly.
Look at the size of that goddamn thing.
I mean, that is so much bigger than any of the buildings there.
But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods.
There's something about when you're in nature and you're in the forest where, you know, you like specifically like the Pacific Northwest, which has these incredibly dense forests.
The air just has a different quality to it.
I mean, it's just this rich, oxygenated air.
Because, you know, you're just around all these trees and plants.
And I don't, you know, back then, I mean, I'm probably, I don't know, how old are you?
52. Yeah, so I'm like, I got a little bit more than 10 years on you, but I remember that this valley was always, for the first month I worked at the LA Times, the valley was just, you couldn't see anything.
And then one day it cleared up, and in the rearview mirror, I was living north of town in Glendale, and in the rearview mirror I saw Whitecap Mountains, and I thought, where the hell did they come from?
You get to this really high peak and you can look out at the top and pause.
And some days you don't see jack shit.
You just see gray.
And then some days after it rains, you're like, there's fucking mountains out here.
I want to take a picture of this stark contrast.
You know, matter of fact, I'm going to run not tomorrow but the next day.
When I get up there, I'm going to take a photo and I'm going to try to take a few photos and try to catch it when it rains because it's supposed to rain sometime this week and so get a difference between what it is normally versus what it is when it rains.
Because the difference is it's stunning and it's all being hid by pollution and we just have gotten accustomed to it.
What also is helping a lot is this conversion to electric cars and I really hope people continue down that path, you know, especially I mean, they're getting better at figuring out how to charge them and better at battery capacity.
And they're better to drive.
I mean, we were talking about Teslas.
I mean, I have that Model S. I love that thing.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's just an amazing car.
And I'm an automobile enthusiast.
I love cars.
You don't lose anything with that.
I mean, it's more fun than any other automatic car I've ever driven.
I was doing it just to prove that you could do it back then.
And neighbors would say, but how much does it cost?
And it's like, well, we should all be...
You have to be...
People have to be early adopters before you can get it to scale.
So I was an early adopter, but I think even with everything that we know is going on, that people are still saying they're not going to switch over until it's cheaper.
It's a little bit better and it's cheaper.
And Elon, I think he's got the right idea to make it a lot better and eventually it's going to be cheaper.
I mean, the Model S is a great car, but the The Model 3 is sounding like crazy, and it's a fantastic car as well.
I mean, there's a great, Tony Saba, the futurist, he shows a picture of the 1900 Easter parade in New York City.
And it's all horses.
Looking down from a building.
I don't know if you find it, Jamie.
1905 or 1900 Easter Parade.
And it's like, there's one car.
And then 13 years later, it's like, find the horse.
And these transitions, they take about 10, 12 years.
12 years ago, we were punching the number two key on our flip phone six times to text a capital C. And I think we're going to be doing the same thing with...
Do you think that they're going to be – do you have hope for all this lab-created meat?
What do you think about – I mean, I know there's some process that I don't totally understand where they're able to make actual biological, like, bison meat.
I'm doing a film series right now called Food 2.0 and I had dinner on Saturday night two nights ago with Uma, the guy that founded Memphis Meats.
And I have the same sort of ickiness about going that direction.
But he showed me these pictures on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making.
And, you know, I stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, but I thought it didn't look bad.
You know, it looked, he had like, it chopped, you know, so that it was grilled and it thought, you know, I have this sort of revulsion against it myself because I've, you know, got myself off of it.
But I looked at that and I thought, you know what, that looks really edible.
It looks good.
Somebody that could eat meat You know, that would be appetizing.
Yeah, you know, the way, you know, I stopped eating, you know, meat about 1986. I went to a, I was doing a story for Fortune magazine on the biggest independently owned cattle ranches in America.
And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse.
They kill the animal with this captive bolt to the brain.
It's supposed to happen instantly, but there was one animal that came around, and it was still alive.
At that point, it was hanging upside down, and its hide was stripped off.
It's looking at me with its eye, and it's following my eye.
And as it's turning around, it was turning its head and it still held my eye.
And I thought, the son of a bitch is alive and I'm part of this.
So I stopped eating meat shortly after that.
And so I thought, well, I have to eat something, right?
I have to eat an animal product because, you know, you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't.
And then, so I became a pescatarian.
That's all I ate for animal protein.
Well, you know, I did milk and dairy, but I didn't eat anything.
I limited myself to things that didn't walk.
So fish was like fair territory for me.
And then when we made the cove, there's a scene in it where we take a sample of hair from the deputy minister of fisheries there, and we tested for mercury.
And while I was out at the lab, I thought, well, I'll get mine tested, too, because I ate a lot of fish.
I loved it.
My son's still a professional fisherman, and I had a freezer full of fish all the time, stocked up of fresh ocean, well, not fresh, but frozen ocean fish.
And I had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the time.
Then when we got his sample back, it was eight times higher than was high, which is like you don't want any mercury in your body.
Mercury is the most toxic non-radioactive element in the world.
When I was in Japan, I went to Minamata, where they had the—they call it Minamata disease, but it's not a disease.
It's poison.
There's a company that was intentionally polluting the bay where there's a lot of fishermen, and the kids, of course, got—well, the cats got affected first because people give the— The fish to the cats and the cats would have called dancing cat disease.
You know, you heard the expression mad as a hatter.
That's because they had the felt from 100 years, 150 years ago.
They used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats.
But they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad.
In Minamata, the cats got affected and the kids.
And then, you know, the people, a couple hundred thousand people got affected.
And at least remember, this is 1950s, remote villages.
And an American researcher went there and saw that everybody looked weird and said, something's going on here.
And he found out that they were dumping mercury into the bay.
And I saw, I visited a doctor there that studied Minamata disease.
He was the guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people.
And he showed me these brains of, you know, they sliced open.
And it looked like Swiss cheese.
We're talking about the convolutions of the brain and how dolphins have more of them.
Same thing with people, but, you know.
And the ones, the slices, they look like Swiss cheese.
There's holes that, the mercury's eating up in the brain.
And so you don't want, you know, once you see that, you don't want that in your body.
So I had to get off fish and become a vegan, not for ethical reasons, but because of, I just couldn't eat it, just for health reasons.
So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks.
They said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms than even plants.
They don't have the same nerve endings, they don't really move, they open and shut, and they're a viable form of animal protein that is just so primitive.
I heard that too.
We think of them as life forms, but so is broccoli.
That's a life form as well.
But there's actually more evidence that plants are intelligent than there is that mollusks are.
Mollusks are an incredibly ancient life form.
But then again, don't you get some sort of mercury poisoning from them as well?
I mean, if we really can break down that they're even more primitive, but yet more nutritious— I did a story in Polynesia on oysters, and they have the big oysters that they get for pearls.
And they just eat the muscle that holds all the organs and stuff on.
When I said, oh, in America, we eat the whole oyster, they're like, what?
Because the muscle tastes like fish flesh.
It's actually pretty good.
But the idea that we're eating all those other filtered organs and stuff, I just don't know.
Has anybody come up with any sort of comprehensive plan or anything that makes sense where they can viably repopulate the ocean?
I mean, the idea of stopping and slowing down fishing would be wonderful, but if it really gets to a point where we've got to somehow or another independently grow these fish and reintroduce them to the wild, I mean, is there any talk of doing things like that, or is it even impossible?
And we're using military gear, sonar, to catch things at this unprecedented rate.
It's not sustainable.
I personally don't believe that fishing, to feeding this planet currently, you can do it with fish.
I don't think you can do it with...
And we know...
What's, you know, the unethical side of raising, you know, farm animals for this is it's just I think we have to transition to another form.
I think it's going to be, you know, 10 or 12 years, but I think we're headed that direction.
And people, I think what you're seeing now is that there's a direction towards, you know, people want to eat healthier.
They want to eat sustainable.
And I know you're a hunter.
I mean, I was a hunter, too.
I hunted fish.
And, you know, I understand, like, when you come back, You come back with the goods.
You come back with an animal and you're feeding your family, you're feeding your friends.
You feel like the man.
You feel like there's something you tap in that's really primitive in a really genuine way that makes us feel good about who we are, that you're providing.
And I know that happened when I was a fisherman.
You know, you go hunt a fish with your friends, and there's a group thing going on, and everybody's there, they're enjoying themselves, and it feels wonderful.
But we can't do it with wild fish.
You know, with 4% of the biomass being wild animals now, and the rest of it being...
It's not sustainable.
And I wish it was because there's something we lost with that.
But we have to transition.
We're at that period right now where we have to figure out how do you feed a planet?
So, you know, you can't have 18 and a half million people in the greater Los Angeles area going out and hunting for their food or fishing, you know.
So what are we going to eat?
I think the way to do it is drifting more towards plants.
Last week I was in Loma Linda, California.
You know where that's at.
You've heard about one of the blue zones?
Yeah.
For the people out there that might not know about it, Dan Buettner, Geographic Fellow, popularized the idea that there's these five geographic regions of the planet where people live longer and without chronic disease than any other place on the planet.
So I was out there last week at the Brain Health and Alzheimer Clinic.
And there's two researchers that started one.
There wasn't one for miles around.
And they opened it.
One out of three people in America in the next 10 years are going to be affected by Alzheimer's.
They're going to have it.
Their mate's going to have it.
They're going to be taking care of somebody that has it, their parents.
So it's going to overtake heart disease as our number one disease that we have.
They opened up the brain health clinic there, an Alzheimer's clinic, and nobody came.
Now, about half the population of Seventh-day Adventists are vegetarians by religion.
And you go to the grocery store, they don't sell meat.
They have milk.
They have cow's milk, but it's on the bottom shelf.
They just have a few things of it.
And to find people initially, they had to go to San Bernardino across the highway.
There's nothing geologically different between San Bernardino and Loma Linda.
They're drinking the same water, breathing the same air, but they have a different diet.
But they're living about 10 years longer than everybody else.
San Bernardino is one of the unhealthiest populations in America.
And on the other side of Highway 10, you have one of the healthiest populations in the entire world.
And they're living about 10 years on average longer.
I mean, Dr. Matthew Walker has been on this podcast, who's a well-renowned sleep scientist, was discussing that it's one of the biggest factors where they've determined that the less sleep you have, the higher likelihood you have of Alzheimer's disease.
They have four principles, the Shurzai's, Dean and Aisha Shurzai.
Sleep is one of them, whole foods, plant-based diet, support, community support, and exercise.
Those are the big ones.
But out of the 3,000 people that they have in the Alzheimer's clinic now, only 19 of them, or sorry, only 13 of them are vegetarians and three vegans.
So, I mean, you look at, you know, if you look at, if you break it down, the population, like how many of the 24,000 people there that are vegetarians, about 15%, you'd expect, you know, several hundred of them to be, you know, with Alzheimer's to be vegetarians, but they're not there.
Isn't there giant concerns even with large-scale agriculture?
When you're talking about monocrops and growing things for 15 billion people, you're going to need gigantic swaths of land.
It's going to displace a lot of wildlife.
You're going to have a lot of different chemicals that get released into the ground unless you're doing regenerative farming, in which case you're going to have to use some animal products anyway because you have compost and fertilizer.
You need fish for fertilizer or something that creates nitrogen.
There's a lot of issues even with large-scale agriculture when you're growing crops.
You're doing something that's wholly unnatural.
If you have 1,000 acres of corn or soybeans or anything that you're growing in large-scale, that's not how nature intends it.
Nature intends everything to be combined together.
Not the plant-based stuff where they're using oils, but the actual physical meat that they can figure out some way to create meat without animals dying.
I am not a fan of factory farming.
It's the reason why I got into hunting in the first place.
I saw a lot of those PETA documentaries.
I just didn't want to have any part of any of that shit.
I know there are ethical ranchers that raise their animals grass-fed and they let them roam.
There's a guy named Joel Salatin who has this thing called Polyface Farms where he teaches people regenerative farming methods and teaches people how to let animals be animals.
It's the polar opposite of factory farming.
When you see these I'm sure you've seen some of these disgusting videos of these pig farms where they have lakes of sewage attached to these farms where these pigs are in these warehouses stacked in one on top of the other and then all their waste goes down through the floor and into these giant huge lakes of shit and piss.
I mean, whether chickens raising chickens like that, or cows like that, or pigs like that.
And there's a reason why they have these ag-gag laws.
And those are another thing that are akin, in my eyes, to the same thing that the way we feel about dolphins in captivity in a place like SeaWorld.
Those ag-gag laws, agricultural gag laws, they keep people from divulging the horrors of these factory farms.
And there's got to be a way to stop those laws, first of all.
These places should be transparent.
If there's something they do that's abhorrent, if there's something they do, you could see the lives of these animals when they're treated in these horrific ways.
It's not necessary.
It's just they're doing that for profit, and this is why you can get a chicken sandwich for $1.99 or whatever the fuck it is.
Imagine if a fucking iPhone was four grand, people would be going crazy.
The new one's almost two grand and everybody's going crazy.
I think that sort of technological innovation and improvement I think we were going to see that in this sort of factory-created meat because the original factory-created burger that they made, I believe it was a quarter of a million dollars that it cost to create one and people ate it and they're like, this is beef.
This is like real beef.
I think with innovation, they could figure out a way to do that so we don't ever have to have these factory farming situations.
I mean, I have a gang of friends that are vegan and vegetarian.
One of my best friends is vegan, Ian Edwards.
I love him to death.
I don't...
I don't dispute that we're in a conundrum and we're in a terrible situation as a civilization.
We've certainly overpopulated the planet in many ways.
And we've certainly allowed something to take root in our society that I think is disgusting.
That's factory farming of animals.
There's something...
Vile about it, undeniably vile.
And there's a reason why people are prosecuted for exposing what makes everybody sick.
Look, if they exposed it and said, look, I'm going to take a picture, I'm going to show you a video of how these cows are living, and you take the video and the cows are just wandering around eating grass, no one would give a shit.
It's when you see these people kicking these cows and when you see them alive, like, kosher.
The way they do that, where they have to slice their throat and they have to do it with one cut, and this is why people want kosher meat, like some ancient, ridiculous idea of how to dispose of a life.
I mean, all those things sicken people, which is the reason why they have those laws, keeping people who work there from videotaping and exposing it in the first place.
I mean, I can eat ice cream and I'm okay, but I always feel like shit.
It never makes me feel good afterwards.
I always feel like, ugh.
Like, I'll have cookies and milk, and then I'll be like, ugh.
It's just a weird...
My body's like, what is this?
However, I've had raw milk and I haven't had any problems with it.
I just think it's...
There's a big problem with acquiring raw milk.
It's very hard to get.
But I think if people are going to drink milk at all, that's how we're supposed to drink it.
I don't think we're supposed to be...
Boiling that stuff.
And then, you know, it comes out, it's dead.
That's why, look, you're not supposed to have anything biological that can sit in your fucking refrigerator for two weeks and not stink.
Like, how is that?
And you look at the date, the date is like a month.
Like, how the fuck is this going to stay good for a month?
Because they boil the shit out of it.
And look, if you want to serve milk to...
300 million people, that's how you have to do it.
If you want to get it in containers and travel across the country in these trucks and get it to supermarkets and have it sit on the shelf.
and have it be financially viable for them to be able to hold on to it long enough for them to sell it and turn a profit and then have no one get sick from it because like raw milk is good for like a couple of days and that's it and it used to be the people got their milk delivered on their doorstop you know the milkman that was the thing milkman used to come to your house and you didn't even really have a lid it had like that little paper yeah a little paper thing that you'd pull off that's what we had as a kid and it was fresh and the cream would sit on the top of it it just tasted different I've
had raw milk.
I haven't had it in years.
But the last time I had raw milk, I was like, this just tastes better.
It tastes like when you drink it, it feels like your body is like, oh, I know what this is.
Whereas like a regular glass of milk, my body's like, what in the fuck?
And then you got to think about how they get it, right?
Like how they keep these cows pregnant and the process of acquiring billions of gallons of milk for millions and millions of people.
There's this guy, Andrew Forrest, one of the wealthiest guys in Australia, told me that this isn't the problem.
It's that you're having cheap plastic made in Saudi Arabia and America and it's being exported to – there's 10, 11 rivers where the majority of the plastic in the ocean are coming from.
First of all, it has all the essential amino acids.
I love hemp protein.
It's one of my favorite proteins.
We sell it on it.
We sell hemp protein.
It's one of the very best proteins in terms of being able to mix it and like a protein shake and on the go, your body digests it super easily and it's like filled with amino acids.
It's very easy for your body to digest and process.
You can make oil out of it that they used to use for heating lamps.
You can cook your food in it.
I mean, there's so many different things you can do with hemp.
You can make clothing.
You can make far more durable cloth.
Far more durable.
The paper is far superior.
In fact, the whole reason why William Randolph Hearst demonized marijuana in the first place was to protect his business because he had paper mills and he was trying to protect it from hemp.
Because on the cover of Popular Science magazine, they had come out with a decorticator.
A decorticator was a way in the 1930s they devised to effectively process hemp fiber.
Because for years, they used to use slaves to process hemp.
Then when they figured out the cotton gin, cotton became easier to use, and then slavery became outlawed, and so people shied away from hemp.
Well, they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s.
It was on the Well, William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications and newspapers.
He also owned these huge forests that they were making paper with.
So he, along with Harry Anslinger and using his newspapers, demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp.
Yes.
He funded all those fucking crazy marijuana movies, Reefer Madness, all that shit.
That was all him.
They came up with these stories that these Mexicans and black men were taking this new drug called marijuana.
Marijuana wasn't even a term for cannabis.
Marijuana was a term for a wild tobacco.
So they came up with this new name.
They called it this drug.
Everybody freaked out because they didn't have the internet back then.
No one had access to real information other than Hearst newspapers, Hearst Publications.
So he just fucking out and out lied and made up these crazy stories and funded these documentaries.
And then marijuana became illegal and still is to this day.
And you still have knuckleheads like Joe Biden literally yesterday saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug.
Forget about marijuana.
Imagine if it wasn't psychoactive at all.
The idea that hemp should be illegal until really recently in this country is a fucking travesty.
I basically had a well-worded thing saying that anyone who thinks that marijuana should be legal is basically saying you should be locked in a cage for experimenting with your consciousness.
And the freedom to...
To do whatever you want with your body that is, especially with marijuana, that's not poisonous.
No one's died of it ever.
Ever.
In the history of the human race, there's never been a single overdose from marijuana.
And this knucklehead saying that it's a gateway drug.
No, pain is a gateway drug.
Trauma is a gateway drug.
Abuse is a gateway to drugs.
It's not marijuana.
Marijuana is just a time-honored psychedelic substance that people have been enjoying for thousands and thousands of years.
Whereas the beautiful thing about this is I've been able to expose a lot of people to things like The Cove, like you and your work, like so many different doctors and scientists and astrophysicists and Dr. Matthew Walker that we talked about earlier were explaining sleep and how important this really is.
This isn't just something that you feel better if you get more sleep.
No, it's like long-term for your life.
These are all little bits of information that I think It's very difficult for people to absorb just by going out and reading studies, right?
So the next best thing is reading a book.
Well, the next best thing is me having a person who wrote that book on a podcast to talk about it.
And maybe not even the next best thing.
It might be the best best thing.
Because it's absorbable.
It's a conversation with people.
And to me, I've gotten a fantastic education from it.
Being able to talk to thousands of brilliant people, or hundreds at least, of brilliant people and pick their brain and just, with genuine curiosity, just ask them questions and read their book and then try to have...
Try to have an understanding of it and try to, when they come on the show, try to get them to fill in my blanks and in turn educate the audience on things that may be a little bit complicated for them to comprehend.
And it's just, to me, it's something that was completely unexpected.
I didn't ever plan on doing this.
I just started doing it and then it just kind of became what it is now.
So it's very satisfying that people like it.
You know, when I talk to people and they say, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've run into that said it's like changed their life.
Like, when you said at the beginning of this, like, what kind of research have you done to prepare for this?
I'm like, fortunately, I get to pick who I talk to.
And for you, I mean, I knew that you had directed The Cove, and...
The subject of dolphins has been...
I mean, it was a huge bit on my 2016 Netflix special about an experience that I had when I was in Hawaii, high as fuck on edibles, and we ran into this patch of wild dolphins, and they were playing with us.
They were playing with us, and we were yelling, like, yay!
And they would jump out of the water and do flips for you.
They were putting on a show, and I remember having this thought...
Like, holy shit, they're playing with us.
These are these wild creatures and they're having fun with us.
And then I started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication.
I became obsessed with dolphins because of this one...
I mean, I had been fascinated by them before, but I became truly obsessed.
And this was...
This experience was more than ten years ago.
And since then, I've just...
I've been overwhelmed and also...
Massively disheartened by films like yours and by seeing SeaWorld and by seeing what was going on in Marineland with my friend Phil.
I've had him on a bunch of times to talk about his lawsuits.
I mean, they have done everything they can to try to silence that guy and stop him from revealing all the horrors of that place.
But slowly but surely, he's had a massive impact on that place's business to the point where they're trying to just get him to shut up.
And he won't.
He won't.
I mean, he was on the inside.
He was a trainer.
And all that stuff.
So for me to be able to talk to someone like you, it's, you know, I love the fact that we can get that out there.
Yeah, because they disappeared into the blue, and then we could see them ramming this thing.
The dolphins were big.
I mean, they're not quite as long as this table, but they're probably 300 to 500 pounds, and they're maybe seven feet long, and they look tiny next to this shark.
Occasionally you see, they'll do drone footage off of the coast of Malibu and you see like a great white swimming around there just a few hundred yards away from surfers.
Anything that's weak, anything that's fucked up, any seal that gets caught slipping, they're there for population control.
There's a really powerful video off of the, I'm sure you've probably seen it, off of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco where a bunch of tourists are there.
Boom!
This great white snatches a seal right in front of everybody.
Just thunderous explosion of blood and foam in the water.
There's a crazy video from, I think it was the Cape, somewhere around the Cape Cod, where there's like a 20-foot one next to a boat.
And these guys were in this boat and this great white just swims right up next to them and they start fucking screaming and freaking out and it's enormous.