In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with filmmaker and friend of mine, Peter Diamantopoulos, to talk about how he got started in his career as a filmmaker, and how he became one of the most influential people in the world in the marine industry. We also talk about his new movie, The Cove, and why he decided to make a movie about the disappearance of the Galapagos Islands, and the impact it has had on our understanding of the world's oceans and marine life. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. Peter is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and screenwriter who has worked with some of the biggest names in the film industry, including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg. He's also the co-creator of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, and is the producer of the new movie 'Jurassic park' and 'Jelly Donut' and Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, which is out in theaters this weekend. I really enjoyed this episode and really hope you do too! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about this episode on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your news and tips and tricks about how to make the most of your day to day life on the high seas. I'll be looking out for you in the next episode of The Cove. Timestamps! Thank you so much for listening and supporting The Cove! -Jon Sorrentino and The Cove -Pete Diamentos Jon Sorrenta and the team at thank you for your support and support The Cove Project for making this podcast as well as all the work you've done so far. Thank you for all the support and all the love and support you've shown so far, thank you to all the people who've given us a chance to make this podcast to make it a great show, we're looking forward to making a bigger and better one in the future. -ROBERT MCCARTO - Jon Taffer . Jon and Jon talks about The Cove and his new film, "The Cove" and his journey so far! Jon talks all the way through this podcast, and we hope you all have a great time making it better than the rest of his life, so please don't forget to check it out!
00:00:40.000And then I started working for Fortune magazine, and he had built a boat, the world's tallest mast, I think, at that point.
00:00:45.000And I went over to Amsterdam to film him.
00:00:50.000And we hit it off and he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?
00:00:56.000And he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars.
00:01:00.000And I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer.
00:01:05.000And then we traveled all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years.
00:01:10.000And we did mostly underwater photography.
00:01:14.000He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude.
00:01:18.000It was just a piece of work because Jim doesn't do anything half-ass.
00:01:22.000And 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.
00:01:30.000In fact, he took me to a place in Papua New Guinea.
00:01:32.000He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen.
00:01:56.000But 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.
00:02:02.000We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary.
00:02:06.000And 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?
00:02:16.000I said, we'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films.
00:03:38.000But, 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.
00:04:20.000But 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.
00:04:40.000John Lilly, I mean, for years, and did it in, like, really weird, unconventional ways.
00:04:46.000He tried to take acid and communicate with dolphins, and it's one of the reasons why he...
00:04:50.000He created the sensory deprivation tank.
00:04:53.000We actually have one of those over here.
00:04:55.000And 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.
00:05:09.000Yeah, I mean, they're obviously extremely complex, you know, animals.
00:05:13.000And if you, you know, judge them by our value, like people say, oh, you know, they didn't invent, you know, the car and computers.
00:05:19.000But, you know, intelligence can be seen as your ability to, you know, to live, exist in your environment.
00:05:29.000And by that standard, you know, I mean, put us in the water, you know, and, you know, have a go at it and see how we do.
00:06:04.000I mean, we don't even have a clue on how most of the world works.
00:06:10.000And, you know, the second film I worked on, The Racing Extinction, you know, that's about, we're going through a mass extinction right now.
00:06:32.000Well, that's what they did with the Library of Alexandria.
00:06:34.000That's why we don't really totally understand how they built the pyramids.
00:06:38.000But 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,
00:06:58.000you know, More awareness and Sea Shepherd and all these different organizations are trying to let people know.
00:07:05.000You'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.
00:07:19.000They're like some form of super intelligent life that some cultures have just decided are just competitors in the fishing market.
00:07:29.000Yeah, well, I can't agree with you more.
00:07:31.000I 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.
00:07:38.000And 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.
00:07:46.000And, you know, William Blake said, to see the world in a grain of sand.
00:07:49.000But 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.
00:07:58.000You know, their meat is now, their flesh is now some of the most toxic, you know, waste in the world when you bury them.
00:08:06.000You know, there's, I think, 6,000 times more PCBs than, you know, than the background in the ocean.
00:08:14.000There 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.
00:08:33.000When we were making that film, there was a point where we went down to the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in Georgia.
00:08:43.000And 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.
00:11:07.000And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries.
00:11:12.000So it's not just like – every country has their allotment and once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home.
00:11:18.000But the Japanese kept on getting more.
00:11:20.000So the Australians actually caught them.
00:11:22.000They 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.
00:11:32.000That's five big train cars, like trains full of endangered tuna.
00:11:38.000Like, not cars, but the whole trains, like 110 car trains, five of them full of...
00:11:42.000It's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna's endangered.
00:11:46.000You know, you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store.
00:12:00.000To hear that tuna's endangered, most people are like, is tuna endangered?
00:12:04.000They're hearing this going, is tuna endangered?
00:12:06.000But 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.
00:12:18.000Bluefin tunas in particular is down to 4% of their historical levels.
00:12:38.000Unfortunately, it's sort of what happens with endangered species.
00:12:41.000The more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes.
00:12:44.000And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing.
00:12:49.000But this is happening with all the fish stocks.
00:12:51.000I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society, and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet.
00:13:05.000And I've seen them You know, go through the fish stocks.
00:13:08.000So 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.
00:13:18.000Now it's pollock, which is a very small, you know, white fish from Alaska.
00:13:24.000And now that's being hunted to extinction.
00:13:26.000So we're going through these fish stocks.
00:13:28.000That's shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one.
00:14:18.000You know, they did at the turn of the century.
00:14:20.000I mean, during the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting.
00:14:25.000In North America, a lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather.
00:14:30.000They were hunting, and they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to incredibly low numbers.
00:14:41.000Elk to this day, I think, are only in 10% of their original range that they were at in the 1700s.
00:14:48.000And that was all from market hunting, from people just going out, buying, you know, meat from these market hunters that have shot these things.
00:14:57.000And they didn't really have refrigeration back then, so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it.
00:15:02.000And 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.
00:15:12.000And they put a stop to it all and then started...
00:15:14.000Enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the areas where they're extirpated.
00:15:19.000And now you see historic levels, especially white-tailed deer.
00:15:23.000There's more white-tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed.
00:15:28.000But that's a weird one, too, because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal.
00:15:34.000Because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands.
00:15:40.000Like, they literally exist in fields, and a lot of them live off of GMO crops.
00:16:16.000Yeah, I mean, the only predators they have there, I mean, they have some wolves now, very few, in some parts of the Driftless area in Wisconsin.
00:16:23.000I think they have some bears, too, and coyotes, a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns.
00:16:30.000I 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.
00:16:39.000I woke up one morning and the neighbor was looking at his minivan and there's a big dent in the side.
00:16:46.000He's trying to figure out how to get a dent because it was parked here all night.
00:16:53.000And then the question is, how does a deer run into it?
00:16:57.000And 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.
00:17:08.000Oh, so it attacked it and slammed it into it.
00:17:30.000Boulder's just incredible, incredible place.
00:17:33.000And you'll be driving down the road and you see, it's weird, like the deer in Boulder know that they're safe.
00:17:38.000So 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.
00:17:51.000And 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.
00:17:58.000They're just so used to being around people.
00:18:22.000Yeah, 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?
00:18:30.000Because 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.
00:19:07.000He's considered the father of modern biodiversity.
00:19:10.000He's about getting right around 90 years old now.
00:19:14.000But 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?
00:19:26.000And he's figured out that to save 85% of the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it.
00:20:09.000I mean, you would have to get everybody on board, right?
00:20:13.000Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right?
00:20:17.000The 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.
00:20:31.000The attitude that he has, that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population, you almost can sympathize with him, right?
00:20:39.000I mean, a hundred plus million people in this tiny place the size of California and just pulling mostly fish out of the ocean.
00:20:51.000I mean, it's a crazy place to be in terms of his position, right?
00:21:14.000I 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.
00:21:25.000And 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.
00:21:36.000Yeah, 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.
00:21:46.000These 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.
00:21:54.000These were, they're making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs.
00:21:59.000And really hard to do, really skittish.
00:22:01.000And 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.
00:22:40.000But 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.
00:22:51.000And I was just reading this morning a Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish are fucked.
00:22:59.000And 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.
00:23:10.000I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a...
00:24:25.000But, you know, again, a shifting baseline.
00:24:28.000The generation before when I was there, it probably looked like the land before time.
00:24:32.000These 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.
00:24:42.000And Rajanpat, you'd see 300. And it was just miraculous.
00:24:47.000And when you're taking pictures, you actually see more detail with the picture than you can with your eye can't comprehend it all.
00:24:53.000So it's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we've, you know, we lit like jewel boxes.
00:25:26.000So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from Iowa or Wisconsin or Boulder, that looks pretty good.
00:25:35.000But if you knew what came before that, you're seeing this assault against nature going on.
00:25:41.000What is taking out the Great Barrier Reef?
00:27:42.000But this is the last generation that we have that can actually do something about it because we're seeing it disappear in our watch.
00:27:50.000And 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.
00:27:59.000Now, when you say semi-treated sewage, what do you mean by that?
00:28:37.000You know, there's so many things to work on.
00:28:39.000I know the activists down there are working on this.
00:28:42.000They're just trying to get people to see it, to know that this is going on.
00:28:45.000And, you know, I think they close the beaches down when, you know, when the wind shifts and it starts to push it on shore.
00:28:53.000But, I mean, if you saw, if you were on the beach and you saw what was going on there, you wouldn't be sending your kids there.
00:28:58.000You wouldn't be going to Florida if you knew what was going on on that beach.
00:29:03.000We 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.
00:29:11.000I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi-treat it?
00:29:15.000How much more would it cost to not do what they're doing?
00:29:19.000I don't have an answer to that question.
00:30:19.000When 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.
00:33:18.000Since 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.
00:33:31.000If you talk to the Japanese, the people from the IWC, of course, they're out of that now.
00:33:37.000They've quit the IWC. They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens?
00:35:23.000Spindle neurons that they have for developing complex emotions.
00:35:27.000If you look at orcas, they're really tight-knit communities.
00:35:32.000A 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.
00:35:43.000These animals are really social, and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we don't even know what they're saying.
00:35:50.000The average person can hear from 50 hertz to 20,000 kilohertz, and I think they can communicate up to 200,000.
00:35:59.000So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with.
00:36:04.000And we hear like a little squeak, like...
00:36:06.000But if you slow it down and break it down, there's actually, you know, there's more patterns in there than we can sense.
00:36:13.000What's interesting about whales, blue whales, blue whales are really solitary creatures.
00:36:20.000They're, you know, they're not gregarious like dolphins.
00:36:22.000They don't usually hang out in big, you know, groups.
00:36:26.000But down in the Southern Ocean, it was confounding people.
00:36:29.000Like, how do they find the krill bloom that happens in a different area, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles apart?
00:36:36.000How do they, you know, they all find it?
00:36:39.000And 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.
00:36:48.000And 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.
00:36:57.000They basically use their voice, which is one of the loudest voices in the animal kingdom.
00:37:03.000It's so loud, but it's infrasound, you can't hear it.
00:37:12.000So 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.
00:37:23.000The 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.
00:37:44.000It 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.
00:37:56.000But 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.
00:38:09.000Everything is basically singing down there from crackling shrimp up to blue whales.
00:38:14.000And, you know, so you have this impression that, man, I just, you know, dropped in on this conversation.
00:38:19.000I don't know what's being said, but like, that feels pretty special.
00:38:23.000Now he goes to Sosis, and they have like a...
00:38:26.000Back 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.
00:38:36.000And he sees that on a board it's lit up in the whole world.
00:38:41.000He's seeing wherever the blue whales are singing or all these whales, it's lit up like a Christmas tree.
00:38:47.000And what the Navy was trying to do is to filter through the voices of what they called the biologicals to pinpoint The submarines.
00:38:56.000But 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.
00:39:06.000When he could just – you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen.
00:39:09.000Now he can all of a sudden has all this incredible data.
00:39:15.000These 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.
00:39:56.000He's working with another friend of his, AZA, to try to use AI to figure out what animals are saying.
00:40:06.000I know he's talked about it before with the press, so I think it's okay if I mention it.
00:40:12.000I've been sending them to people like Roger Payne and Chris Clark, these other researchers I know, because they have these huge databases.
00:40:18.000And they're trying to use AI to see if they can figure out, using computers, what these animals are saying.
00:40:24.000And I think that's the holy grail for letting us care about these animals.
00:40:28.000If we know what they're saying, I think that changes the game.
00:40:33.000Roger Payne, it's in the code, but he's the guy that Well, he and his wife found out that these animals, like humpback whales, are singing.
00:40:45.000You know, these strange, beautiful sounds.
00:40:47.000I don't know, do you want Jamie to pull up songs of the humpback whale?
00:41:18.000Yeah, because somebody owns that, which is hilarious, right?
00:41:21.000They own the sound of nature, which is, like, what?
00:41:24.000You 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.
00:42:23.000These 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.
00:42:33.000Yeah, no, I was working on that story for the last year or so on a different aspect of it.
00:43:01.000The Cove and Blackfish in particular have been really effective about shutting down in a massive way the amount of people going to the shows.
00:43:10.000But in China they haven't got the message.
00:43:13.000So I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year.
00:43:27.000This is like one of those amazing situations.
00:43:30.000Putin, 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.
00:43:40.000So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story.
00:43:44.000But 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.
00:44:03.000The solution seems to be to get rid of a lot of the dams.
00:44:07.000It's kind of an unpopular position with some people, but they're not efficient anymore.
00:44:12.000They're holding up, the whole ecosystems are being degraded because of that.
00:44:16.000Well, you know, one of them that they initially, when they set it up, they didn't even realize what they were doing.
00:44:23.000This 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.
00:44:33.000There'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.
00:45:11.000So this is an AI. I'll reset the website, but it says that you can explore yourself to find humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries.
00:45:21.000Use AI to explore thousands of hours of humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries.
00:46:47.000But 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,
00:47:04.000that we have had our best linguists try to decipher, we have no idea what the fuck they're saying.
00:47:09.000You know, you'd be like, what kind of animal is that?
00:47:11.000It would be a crazy mythical creature.
00:47:14.000You know, like the creature from the Black Lagoon or the Loch Ness Monster or something.
00:47:18.000It would be like some incredible thing.
00:47:20.000If you ever found one, people would be freaking out.
00:47:22.000But we get so used to things being real.
00:47:27.000And 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.
00:47:41.000But 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.
00:47:51.000There's two things that are mind-blowers in terms of their intelligence.
00:49:45.000I mean, that's essentially what they do with the Cuban Olympic wrestling program.
00:49:51.000Yoel 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.
00:50:37.000But the results are pretty spectacular.
00:50:40.000It'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.
00:50:57.000And he, they, walrus bond was, With humans when they're babies, and he bonded with this walrus named Smooshy.
00:51:07.000And I believe she's the only one that's alive.
00:51:11.000Marineland has a horrible record of animal rights.
00:51:15.000I mean, the way Phil puts it, he goes, it makes SeaWorld look like paradise for dolphins and orcas.
00:51:24.000And 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
00:51:58.000Like that after Blackfish, SeaWorld didn't just get shut down by the government.
00:52:03.000And that people didn't just boycott them en masse.
00:52:06.000In a TED talk I have, I show the stock price of...
00:52:11.000I was at Sundance for the premiere of Blackfish.
00:52:18.000And I went down and talked to the people that made the film afterwards, and I said, we're going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
00:52:24.000Because at that point, I think we had like 650,000 followers.
00:52:28.000And then we helped organize, like getting musicians to stop performing there.
00:52:34.000And we sent a copy of Blackfish in the Cove to all the 10 major, everybody that sat at the board of directors that had Backed SeaWorld.
00:52:45.000Everybody that sat on the board got a copy of that film.
00:53:32.000Once 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...
00:53:38.000From their families and would they understand the close-knit or the nature of these orcopods the fact that it's not illegal.
00:53:46.000It's just it's stunning Yeah, well, they've bred a lot of theirs now in captivity.
00:53:55.000I 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.
00:55:18.000Because, you know, we did this film called Racing Extinction, and the working title was called The Singing Planet, because just about everything is singing.
00:55:35.000We're looking at it only through our own eyes.
00:55:39.000And 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.
00:55:45.000They're disappearing before we have a chance to even know what they're up to.
00:55:49.000And we're the last generation that can fix it.
00:55:52.000So, you know, we're going through a mass extinction right now.
00:55:59.000And, you know, when I started, you know, I did four stories for National Geographic on dinosaurs, on the Mesozoic, the midlife of the planet.
00:56:07.000A lot of friends of mine were paleontologists.
00:56:09.000And Michael Novacek, the head provost of the American Museum of Natural History.
00:56:15.000You 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.
00:56:26.000Like they almost got exterminated by something in one go.
00:56:31.000And he had told me that, well, we're going through a mass extinction right now.
00:56:48.000He said, well, the drivers are habitat destruction for agriculture.
00:56:53.000Pollution, invasive species, and overconsumption.
00:56:56.000But the biggest one by far is habitat destruction, the raising of crops for animals that we in turn eat.
00:57:04.000So, 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.
00:57:20.000Did they find out what was causing those fires in the Amazon?
00:59:39.000When they happen, it's a very stunning and sobering reminder of the forces of nature.
00:59:46.000And 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.
01:01:33.000I mean, I see it on Twitter all the time, where someone will point something out, like, yeah, how's that climate change working out for you?
01:01:39.000Just because, like, it's really cold in some place one day.
01:01:44.000I don't think you understand what this is.
01:02:19.000But you don't look at the overall mean.
01:02:22.000If you look at the overall mean, you see that rise.
01:02:24.000Just a couple degrees of temperature could change everything.
01:02:27.000Yeah, so I mean, this is what keeps me up at night.
01:02:30.000It's like, you know, if you know this is going on, what do you do about it?
01:02:34.000So that, you know, you can look at yourself when you're on your deathbed and say, I did everything I could to make a difference.
01:02:42.000Well, the fish one's a huge one, right?
01:02:44.000And the ocean, the pollution of the ocean is a huge one because it seems like it's nobody's, right?
01:02:50.000It seems like it's everybody's, but it's nobody's.
01:02:52.000Whereas, like, the land, if someone is doing something on the land...
01:02:56.000Could 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?
01:03:25.000Most 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.
01:04:51.000Have you seen some of the Sea Shepherd work where they've caught these Japanese scientific research boats that are really just killing whales?
01:05:01.000And they're out of the Southern Ocean now.
01:05:03.000This is last year they announced that they were going to get out of there and now they're only killing whales around their own territorial waters.
01:08:09.000Like, you walk around there, you go, where did you get all this money?
01:08:13.000Like, what did you guys, you guys don't even sell anything.
01:08:15.000You 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?
01:08:26.000It's an amazing place to visit, just historically, just to see what it's like.
01:08:31.000And in Venice right now, if you go to the Doge Palace, if you look at the columns on that, those are all different.
01:08:38.000What they did is they pilfered Persia for that.
01:08:43.000You had to bring it back when you were trading the 1700s, 1600s.
01:08:47.000You had to bring back Stuff you stole.
01:10:24.000The cruise ships would pull up, and then you would see the amount of people that get out, and then the streets would be flooded.
01:10:33.000And 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.
01:10:41.000And the week they were there, they said they had two accidents.
01:12:17.000I told you we had a Tesla that we had retrofitted for racing extinction that had a FLIR camera, the same camera that you use to see methane.
01:12:46.000And it's pretty astounding when you can, you know, just, you know, right now if you put it on us, you'd look like we're smoking.
01:12:53.000But when you show it on the streets of LA, it's like everything's disgorging.
01:12:58.000And there's not enough plants to absorb it.
01:13:02.000Yeah, you can't absorb it that quickly.
01:13:05.000But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods.
01:13:08.000There'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.
01:13:17.000The air just has a different quality to it.
01:13:20.000I mean, it's just this rich, oxygenated air.
01:13:23.000Because, you know, you're just around all these trees and plants.
01:14:04.000I worked for the LA Times back in the 1970s, and I remember at 3 in the morning, without an accident on the road, there could be traffic backed up.
01:14:15.000And I don't, you know, back then, I mean, I'm probably, I don't know, how old are you?
01:14:19.00052. 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.
01:14:30.000And 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?
01:15:26.000And then some days after it rains, you're like, there's fucking mountains out here.
01:15:30.000I want to take a picture of this stark contrast.
01:15:33.000You know, matter of fact, I'm going to run not tomorrow but the next day.
01:15:37.000When 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.
01:15:48.000Because the difference is it's stunning and it's all being hid by pollution and we just have gotten accustomed to it.
01:15:55.000Yeah, well, I mean, catalytic converters helped a lot.
01:15:59.000What 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.
01:17:51.000People have to be early adopters before you can get it to scale.
01:17:55.000So 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.
01:18:03.000It's a little bit better and it's cheaper.
01:18:05.000And Elon, I think he's got the right idea to make it a lot better and eventually it's going to be cheaper.
01:18:12.000I 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.
01:19:26.000And people that have never been in one before, I take them for a drive in the Tesla, and they grip the seat and they're like, what the fuck?
01:20:59.000And then 13 years later, it's like, find the horse.
01:21:04.000And these transitions, they take about 10, 12 years.
01:21:09.00012 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...
01:21:21.000You know, with the transition with food.
01:21:24.000I think it's going to be going that way.
01:21:27.000Do you think that they're going to be – do you have hope for all this lab-created meat?
01:21:32.000What 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.
01:21:43.000I'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.
01:21:53.000And I have the same sort of ickiness about going that direction.
01:21:58.000But he showed me these pictures on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making.
01:22:05.000And, you know, I stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, but I thought it didn't look bad.
01:22:11.000You 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.
01:22:24.000But I looked at that and I thought, you know what, that looks really edible.
01:23:05.000Because that's where things get convoluted.
01:23:07.000What is healthy versus what is ethical versus what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing morally?
01:23:14.000Yeah, 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.
01:23:26.000And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse.
01:23:31.000They kill the animal with this captive bolt to the brain.
01:23:34.000It's supposed to happen instantly, but there was one animal that came around, and it was still alive.
01:23:39.000At that point, it was hanging upside down, and its hide was stripped off.
01:23:43.000It's looking at me with its eye, and it's following my eye.
01:23:47.000Its hide was stripped off, and it was still alive?
01:23:50.000And as it's turning around, it was turning its head and it still held my eye.
01:23:55.000And I thought, the son of a bitch is alive and I'm part of this.
01:23:59.000So I stopped eating meat shortly after that.
01:24:02.000And so I thought, well, I have to eat something, right?
01:24:04.000I have to eat an animal product because, you know, you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't.
01:24:13.000Well, you know, I did milk and dairy, but I didn't eat anything.
01:24:17.000I limited myself to things that didn't walk.
01:24:22.000So fish was like fair territory for me.
01:24:25.000And 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.
01:24:34.000And while I was out at the lab, I thought, well, I'll get mine tested, too, because I ate a lot of fish.
01:24:41.000My 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.
01:24:51.000And I had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the time.
01:24:55.000Then 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.
01:25:03.000Mercury is the most toxic non-radioactive element in the world.
01:26:29.000They tell you you're not supposed to eat it more than a couple times a week or something like that, but it seems like if it's got a half-life of...
01:26:49.000There'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.
01:27:02.000You know, you heard the expression mad as a hatter.
01:27:05.000That's because they had the felt from 100 years, 150 years ago.
01:27:09.000They used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats, but they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad.
01:29:01.000So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks.
01:29:06.000They said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms than even plants.
01:29:12.000They 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.
01:30:06.000I 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.
01:30:21.000And they just eat the muscle that holds all the organs and stuff on.
01:30:26.000When I said, oh, in America, we eat the whole oyster, they're like, what?
01:30:30.000Because the muscle tastes like fish flesh.
01:30:46.000Has anybody come up with any sort of comprehensive plan or anything that makes sense where they can viably repopulate the ocean?
01:30:58.000I 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,
01:31:58.000What'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.
01:32:07.000I think it's going to be, you know, 10 or 12 years, but I think we're headed that direction.
01:32:11.000And people, I think what you're seeing now is that there's a direction towards, you know, people want to eat healthier.
01:32:32.000You 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.
01:32:42.000And I know that happened when I was a fisherman.
01:32:45.000You 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.
01:33:41.000So, 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.
01:34:04.000For 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.
01:34:18.000So I was out there last week at the Brain Health and Alzheimer Clinic.
01:34:23.000And there's two researchers that started one.
01:35:35.000I 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.
01:36:16.000But 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.
01:36:26.000So, 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,
01:36:48.000But when you're talking about San Bernardino, it's a very poor community, unfortunately.
01:36:52.000And I think you know as well as I do, a lot of people in poor communities eat terrible.
01:36:57.000You know, when you're eating junk food and sugar and all that crap, I mean, that's one of the primary factors when it comes to poor health.
01:37:05.000Education is related definitely to brain health, unfortunately, and it has nothing to do that they're stupid.
01:37:10.000It's just that you're right, they're not eating as well.
01:37:14.000You know, the first McDonald's was in San Bernardino.
01:39:22.000Not 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.
01:39:36.000It's the reason why I got into hunting in the first place.
01:39:38.000I saw a lot of those PETA documentaries.
01:39:41.000I just didn't want to have any part of any of that shit.
01:39:44.000I know there are ethical ranchers that raise their animals grass-fed and they let them roam.
01:39:53.000There'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.
01:40:06.000It's the polar opposite of factory farming.
01:40:09.000When 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.
01:40:42.000I mean, whether chickens raising chickens like that, or cows like that, or pigs like that.
01:40:46.000And there's a reason why they have these ag-gag laws.
01:40:49.000And 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.
01:40:58.000Those ag-gag laws, agricultural gag laws, they keep people from divulging the horrors of these factory farms.
01:41:06.000And there's got to be a way to stop those laws, first of all.
01:41:14.000If 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.
01:42:34.000Imagine if a fucking iPhone was four grand, people would be going crazy.
01:42:36.000The new one's almost two grand and everybody's going crazy.
01:42:40.000I 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,
01:45:47.000And there's a reason why people are prosecuted for exposing what makes everybody sick.
01:45:53.000Look, 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.
01:46:06.000It's when you see these people kicking these cows and when you see them alive, like, kosher.
01:46:13.000The 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.
01:46:27.000I 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.
01:46:36.000Yeah, I think the King Amendment, I believe what it is, is from Iowa, or at least it was.
01:46:41.000I'm not sure if he's still even in power there.
01:48:35.000And look, if you want to serve milk to...
01:48:40.000300 million people, that's how you have to do it.
01:48:43.000If 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.
01:48:51.000and 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
01:51:21.000But here's the issue that I'm learning from.
01:51:26.000There's this guy, Andrew Forrest, one of the wealthiest guys in Australia, told me that this isn't the problem.
01:51:37.000It'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.
01:54:01.000It'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.
01:54:14.000It's very easy for your body to digest and process.
01:54:17.000You can make oil out of it that they used to use for heating lamps.
01:54:32.000In 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.
01:54:44.000Because on the cover of Popular Science magazine, they had come out with a decorticator.
01:54:48.000A decorticator was a way in the 1930s they devised to effectively process hemp fiber.
01:54:54.000Because for years, they used to use slaves to process hemp.
01:54:58.000Then when they figured out the cotton gin, cotton became easier to use, and then slavery became outlawed, and so people shied away from hemp.
01:55:07.000Well, they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s.
01:55:10.000It was on the Well, William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications and newspapers.
01:55:19.000He also owned these huge forests that they were making paper with.
01:55:23.000So he, along with Harry Anslinger and using his newspapers, demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp.
01:57:04.000I 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.
01:59:52.000Whereas 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.
02:00:12.000This isn't just something that you feel better if you get more sleep.
02:00:15.000No, it's like long-term for your life.
02:00:18.000These 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?
02:00:26.000So the next best thing is reading a book.
02:00:28.000Well, the next best thing is me having a person who wrote that book on a podcast to talk about it.
02:00:34.000And maybe not even the next best thing.
02:00:40.000And to me, I've gotten a fantastic education from it.
02:00:45.000Being 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...
02:01:01.000Try 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.
02:01:16.000And it's just, to me, it's something that was completely unexpected.
02:01:23.000I just started doing it and then it just kind of became what it is now.
02:01:27.000So it's very satisfying that people like it.
02:01:29.000You 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.
02:02:38.000I 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.
02:02:52.000They were playing with us, and we were yelling, like, yay!
02:02:54.000And they would jump out of the water and do flips for you.
02:02:56.000They were putting on a show, and I remember having this thought...
02:03:02.000Like, holy shit, they're playing with us.
02:03:03.000These are these wild creatures and they're having fun with us.
02:03:06.000And then I started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication.
02:03:09.000I became obsessed with dolphins because of this one...
02:03:13.000I mean, I had been fascinated by them before, but I became truly obsessed.
02:05:32.000I 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.
02:05:46.000Occasionally 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.
02:08:21.000Anything that's weak, anything that's fucked up, any seal that gets caught slipping, they're there for population control.
02:08:30.000There'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.
02:09:03.000There'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.
02:09:10.000And 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.