The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos

00:00:03.000 Alright, here we go.

00:00:04.000 How are you?

00:00:04.000 Good.

00:00:05.000 Good to see you.

00:00:06.000 How did you get involved with the Cove?

00:00:08.000 What was the history behind that?

00:00:11.000 I'm going to give you the long version.

00:00:12.000 Sure.

00:00:15.000 There's a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD.

00:00:20.000 I wanted to film.

00:00:21.000 I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995, I think it came out.

00:00:26.000 I was on the Information Revolution, and Jim Clark was sort of the You know, the Steve Jobs of my generation, right?

00:00:35.000 And he didn't want to be photographed.

00:00:38.000 He was just too busy.

00:00:40.000 And then I started working for Fortune magazine, and he had built a boat, the world's tallest mast, I think, at that point.

00:00:45.000 And I went over to Amsterdam to film him.

00:00:50.000 And we hit it off and he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?

00:00:56.000 And he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars.

00:01:00.000 And I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer.

00:01:05.000 And then we traveled all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years.

00:01:10.000 And we did mostly underwater photography.

00:01:14.000 He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude.

00:01:18.000 It was just a piece of work because Jim doesn't do anything half-ass.

00:01:22.000 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.

00:01:30.000 In fact, he took me to a place in Papua New Guinea.

00:01:32.000 He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen.

00:01:35.000 It's in Papua New Guinea.

00:01:36.000 We flew over there all day to get there, a day and a half to sail.

00:01:40.000 We dive on the GPS coordinates and it's rubble.

00:01:44.000 It's completely gone.

00:01:45.000 And this is what happened, not all the time, but a lot.

00:01:47.000 We don't know what the insults were.

00:01:49.000 It could have been dynamite fishing.

00:01:51.000 It could have been anything.

00:01:54.000 Who knows what it was?

00:01:56.000 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.

00:02:02.000 We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary.

00:02:06.000 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?

00:02:16.000 I said, we'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films.

00:02:21.000 So I'm jumping careers at this stage.

00:02:24.000 I'm going from being a fairly successful still photographer, really busy, To a career where I had really no business doing it.

00:02:33.000 I'd never really made a film before, not even really a short film.

00:02:37.000 And so I'm, you know, nervous.

00:02:40.000 I'm feeling sort of full of myself, like I'm going to start this great career.

00:02:43.000 We're down in the Caribbean on a boat.

00:02:45.000 And my kid starts with Jim on vacation with our families.

00:02:48.000 And my kid starts playing on the beach with another kid.

00:02:52.000 It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid.

00:02:54.000 So Stephen comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. He made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, Silicon Graphics.

00:03:01.000 And after I had Stephen alone for a few seconds, I said, do you have any advice for a first-time filmmaker?

00:03:07.000 And he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals.

00:03:12.000 Oh, great.

00:03:13.000 And, you know, of course the first film we did was The Cove.

00:03:16.000 But at least these are, you don't have actors and special effects and boats and animals.

00:03:22.000 It's just a part of the story.

00:03:24.000 It's not like you're, like, with him, I think, what he's meaning, like, jaws.

00:03:27.000 Exactly.

00:03:28.000 Yeah, because, you know, you have to match shots and all that.

00:03:31.000 But it has its own set of, you know, trying to keep the horizon level on a boat.

00:03:36.000 You don't want to give the audience seasickness.

00:03:38.000 Yeah.

00:03:38.000 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.

00:03:48.000 Yes.

00:03:49.000 Yeah.

00:03:50.000 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.

00:04:01.000 And, you know, we were just talking about this before the podcast.

00:04:06.000 I think they are as intelligent as human beings.

00:04:10.000 I just think the difference is they can't change their environment.

00:04:13.000 They don't affect their environment the way we do.

00:04:15.000 They don't build houses.

00:04:15.000 They don't have cars.

00:04:17.000 They don't send emails.

00:04:18.000 So we don't appreciate what they are.

00:04:20.000 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.

00:04:31.000 We can peck out.

00:04:32.000 I don't understand any of it.

00:04:33.000 Yeah, I mean, we could pack out patterns.

00:04:35.000 I mean, the scientists have...

00:04:36.000 I mean, you know, I'm sure you're aware of John Lilly's work.

00:04:40.000 Sure.

00:04:40.000 John Lilly, I mean, for years, and did it in, like, really weird, unconventional ways.

00:04:46.000 He tried to take acid and communicate with dolphins, and it's one of the reasons why he...

00:04:50.000 He created the sensory deprivation tank.

00:04:53.000 We actually have one of those over here.

00:04:55.000 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.

00:05:09.000 Yeah, I mean, they're obviously extremely complex, you know, animals.

00:05:13.000 And 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.

00:05:19.000 But, you know, intelligence can be seen as your ability to, you know, to live, exist in your environment.

00:05:29.000 And 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.

00:05:36.000 Yeah.

00:05:36.000 They don't need anything in that world.

00:05:37.000 They travel through three-dimensional space.

00:05:39.000 I mean, it's incredible what they can do.

00:05:43.000 It's not just dolphins, too.

00:05:45.000 I mean, look at butterflies, monarch butterflies.

00:05:49.000 It takes three generations for them to go to migrate from Canada down to a six-hectare area in northern Mexico.

00:05:57.000 And they do that.

00:05:58.000 Somehow they find it every year.

00:06:01.000 I couldn't find a studio without an iPhone.

00:06:03.000 Right.

00:06:04.000 I mean, we don't even have a clue on how most of the world works.

00:06:10.000 And, 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.

00:06:18.000 We're exterminating this stuff.

00:06:20.000 These animals, before we have a chance to even know how they operate, the ecosystem, how it even works.

00:06:26.000 A friend of mine said it's like, you know, we're burning down the Library of Congress before we have a chance to know what the books read.

00:06:31.000 Yeah.

00:06:32.000 Well, that's what they did with the Library of Alexandria.

00:06:34.000 That's why we don't really totally understand how they built the pyramids.

00:06:38.000 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,

00:06:58.000 you know, More awareness and Sea Shepherd and all these different organizations are trying to let people know.

00:07:05.000 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. 0.96

00:07:19.000 They're like some form of super intelligent life that some cultures have just decided are just competitors in the fishing market.

00:07:29.000 Yeah, well, I can't agree with you more.

00:07:31.000 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.

00:07:38.000 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.

00:07:46.000 And, you know, William Blake said, to see the world in a grain of sand.

00:07:49.000 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.

00:07:58.000 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.

00:08:06.000 You know, there's, I think, 6,000 times more PCBs than, you know, than the background in the ocean.

00:08:14.000 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.

00:08:28.000 It's insane.

00:08:29.000 Just hearing that is insane.

00:08:31.000 I'll tell you an interesting story.

00:08:33.000 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.

00:08:43.000 In Chile.

00:08:43.000 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.

00:08:51.000 And we had the footage at that point.

00:08:53.000 And we were just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the International Whaling Commission.

00:08:57.000 And I think it was going from Houston to Santiago.

00:09:01.000 The plane was full.

00:09:02.000 I couldn't even sit next to my partners and my buddies on the film crew.

00:09:07.000 There was one empty seat next to me.

00:09:10.000 And, you know, they were waiting for somebody else to come from another flight.

00:09:13.000 And right before the plane door closes, in comes Akira Nakamai.

00:09:18.000 He's the head of overseas fishing for Japan.

00:09:20.000 The head bull, goose, loony.

00:09:22.000 And he sits down right next to me.

00:09:24.000 I'm looking at my buddies on the plane thinking, my God, if there is a God, he has a good sense of humor.

00:09:31.000 So he sits down next to me.

00:09:32.000 I didn't want him to find out who I was.

00:09:36.000 And then move.

00:09:37.000 So I waited until dinner was served like an hour or two later.

00:09:39.000 And I said, do you have any idea who I am?

00:09:42.000 He said, no.

00:09:42.000 I said, I know who you are.

00:09:43.000 I want to show you a film.

00:09:46.000 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.

00:09:53.000 And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their flesh is poisoned?

00:10:03.000 And there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this You know, this flesh, you know, on the Japanese Ministry of Health site.

00:10:12.000 And he said, I'm not in charge of food safety.

00:10:16.000 I'm in charge of food security.

00:10:18.000 In other words, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences.

00:10:21.000 His job is just to provide enough meat on the plate for the Japanese people. 0.99

00:10:27.000 And it gives you an insight of how he's thinking.

00:10:30.000 He's in charge of, I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California.

00:10:37.000 He says 17% of the land area in Japan is only good enough for growing crops on or living on.

00:10:45.000 We have to turn to the sea for food.

00:10:48.000 And at that point, they were also caught...

00:10:51.000 Skimming, stealing about 200,000 tons of endangered bluefin tuna.

00:10:57.000 This is over about a 20-year period.

00:10:59.000 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...

00:11:04.000 How are they stealing this tuna?

00:11:06.000 Well, they have quotas.

00:11:07.000 And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries.

00:11:12.000 So it's not just like – every country has their allotment and once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home.

00:11:18.000 But the Japanese kept on getting more. 1.00

00:11:20.000 So the Australians actually caught them. 0.53

00:11:22.000 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.

00:11:32.000 That's five big train cars, like trains full of endangered tuna.

00:11:38.000 Like, not cars, but the whole trains, like 110 car trains, five of them full of...

00:11:42.000 It's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna's endangered.

00:11:46.000 You know, you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store.

00:11:50.000 Like, tuna...

00:11:52.000 Tuna's a weird one, right?

00:11:54.000 Because it's such a common food.

00:11:55.000 It's in cans.

00:11:56.000 You see it at the sushi place.

00:11:59.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:12:00.000 To hear that tuna's endangered, most people are like, is tuna endangered?

00:12:04.000 They're hearing this going, is tuna endangered?

00:12:06.000 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.

00:12:18.000 Bluefin tunas in particular is down to 4% of their historical levels.

00:12:24.000 That's incredible.

00:12:26.000 And there's no way to stop this.

00:12:29.000 It seems like everyone's waiting for someone else to do something and during the meantime everyone's just trying to make money.

00:12:36.000 A lot of money.

00:12:38.000 Unfortunately, it's sort of what happens with endangered species.

00:12:41.000 The more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes.

00:12:44.000 And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing.

00:12:49.000 But this is happening with all the fish stocks.

00:12:51.000 I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society, and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet.

00:12:59.000 This is the Monterey Seafood Watches.

00:13:02.000 What fish are sustainable?

00:13:05.000 And I've seen them You know, go through the fish stocks.

00:13:08.000 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.

00:13:18.000 Now it's pollock, which is a very small, you know, white fish from Alaska.

00:13:24.000 And now that's being hunted to extinction.

00:13:26.000 So we're going through these fish stocks.

00:13:28.000 That's shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one.

00:13:35.000 That's what's going on.

00:13:36.000 So I just stopped handing out seafood guides, and now I'm trying to sort of preempt it.

00:13:40.000 So I don't think...

00:13:41.000 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?

00:13:50.000 There isn't.

00:13:51.000 You look at the biomass of mammals on the planet.

00:13:54.000 Between livestock and humans, we occupy 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet.

00:14:00.000 4% are wild animals.

00:14:01.000 Mammals.

00:14:02.000 So we can't all be eating wild fish.

00:14:06.000 And think about that.

00:14:07.000 You never go out and say, let's get some land food.

00:14:10.000 We've commodified sea animals.

00:14:14.000 That is interesting, right?

00:14:15.000 You don't say land food.

00:14:16.000 That's a really good point.

00:14:18.000 You know, they did at the turn of the century.

00:14:20.000 I mean, during the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting.

00:14:25.000 In North America, a lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather.

00:14:30.000 They were hunting, and they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to incredibly low numbers.

00:14:41.000 Elk to this day, I think, are only in 10% of their original range that they were at in the 1700s.

00:14:48.000 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.

00:14:57.000 And they didn't really have refrigeration back then, so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it.

00:15:02.000 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.

00:15:12.000 And they put a stop to it all and then started...

00:15:14.000 Enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the areas where they're extirpated.

00:15:19.000 And now you see historic levels, especially white-tailed deer.

00:15:23.000 There's more white-tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed.

00:15:28.000 But that's a weird one, too, because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal.

00:15:34.000 Because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands.

00:15:40.000 Like, they literally exist in fields, and a lot of them live off of GMO crops.

00:15:46.000 So it's very strange.

00:15:48.000 I have a buddy of mine, my friend Doug Duren, who has this huge piece of land in Wisconsin.

00:15:56.000 And he's like, the deer in my area are essentially eating GMO corn.

00:16:02.000 They're eating Monsanto corn.

00:16:03.000 This is so weird.

00:16:05.000 Yeah, they're wild, but they're also kind of farm animals.

00:16:10.000 You know, because they exist in record numbers because they've got so much food to eat.

00:16:15.000 And no predators.

00:16:16.000 Yeah, 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.

00:16:23.000 I think they have some bears, too, and coyotes, a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns.

00:16:30.000 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.

00:16:39.000 I woke up one morning and the neighbor was looking at his minivan and there's a big dent in the side.

00:16:46.000 He's trying to figure out how to get a dent because it was parked here all night.

00:16:50.000 And he found an antler in the bushes.

00:16:53.000 And then the question is, how does a deer run into it?

00:16:57.000 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.

00:17:08.000 Oh, so it attacked it and slammed it into it.

00:17:10.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:17:11.000 I lost a dog in Boulder to a mountain lion.

00:17:14.000 Wow.

00:17:15.000 Yeah.

00:17:16.000 I had a little dog who's part American Eskimo and part Pomeranian.

00:17:21.000 The mountain lion got it.

00:17:22.000 The mountain lion, I think, got our cat.

00:17:24.000 Yeah, they get everything up there, man.

00:17:26.000 If it's not them, it's a fox.

00:17:27.000 You know, there's a lot of foxes up there that get things.

00:17:29.000 But God, it's beautiful.

00:17:30.000 Boulder's just incredible, incredible place.

00:17:33.000 And you'll be driving down the road and you see, it's weird, like the deer in Boulder know that they're safe.

00:17:38.000 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.

00:17:47.000 And my wife thought it was fake.

00:17:48.000 I go, no, that's a real deer.

00:17:50.000 She's like, what?

00:17:51.000 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.

00:17:58.000 They're just so used to being around people.

00:18:01.000 It's weird.

00:18:01.000 I remember a neighbor of ours planting rose bushes on the front of their property and all proud.

00:18:07.000 And then I remember driving home later on that day and there's a deer coming and snipping the tops of the roses.

00:18:12.000 Oh, they love it.

00:18:13.000 Like a salad bar.

00:18:14.000 Yeah.

00:18:14.000 Many people have turned on deer because of the loss of their gardens, the roses especially.

00:18:19.000 They love roses.

00:18:22.000 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?

00:18:30.000 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.

00:18:39.000 But the ocean is so enormous.

00:18:42.000 Has anybody come up with some sort of a repopulation plan?

00:18:46.000 Sure, sure.

00:18:48.000 E.L. Wilson, I'm on the advisory board of his group.

00:18:52.000 It's called the Half-Life Project.

00:18:55.000 You know who E.L. Wilson is?

00:18:57.000 No.

00:18:57.000 Okay.

00:18:58.000 E.L. Wilson is a Harvard professor.

00:19:00.000 He has two Pulitzer's for his work in biology.

00:19:05.000 He wrote the book on biodiversity.

00:19:07.000 He's considered the father of modern biodiversity.

00:19:10.000 He's about getting right around 90 years old now.

00:19:14.000 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?

00:19:26.000 And he's figured out that to save 85% of the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it.

00:19:36.000 Half of the planet.

00:19:38.000 Half the planet.

00:19:39.000 So the ocean, you would have to literally make half the ocean where people couldn't travel in it?

00:19:44.000 Not travel, and just not exploit it.

00:19:47.000 No fishing.

00:19:48.000 Yeah, no fishing.

00:19:49.000 And so Sylvia Earle is working on hotspots. 1.00

00:19:54.000 They're called, I think, what she calls this, like blue zones where you have a lot of biodiversity.

00:20:03.000 Try to keep those away from fishing exploitation.

00:20:08.000 How do they do that, though?

00:20:09.000 I mean, you would have to get everybody on board, right?

00:20:13.000 Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right?

00:20:17.000 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.

00:20:31.000 The attitude that he has, that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population, you almost can sympathize with him, right?

00:20:39.000 I mean, a hundred plus million people in this tiny place the size of California and just pulling mostly fish out of the ocean.

00:20:51.000 I mean, it's a crazy place to be in terms of his position, right?

00:20:57.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't envy it at all.

00:20:59.000 But, you know, what do you do?

00:21:02.000 You don't slaughter dolphins.

00:21:04.000 That's what you do.

00:21:05.000 Yeah, well, we're endangered species.

00:21:08.000 I mean, I don't know what's sustainable anymore.

00:21:12.000 Is it possible?

00:21:14.000 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.

00:21:25.000 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.

00:21:36.000 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.

00:21:46.000 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.

00:21:54.000 These were, they're making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs.

00:21:59.000 And really hard to do, really skittish.

00:22:01.000 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.

00:22:12.000 They were shoveling it to the tuna.

00:22:14.000 And I said, hold on a minute, like how many, how many, how much...

00:22:18.000 How much mackerel does it take to make a pound of tuna?

00:22:21.000 They said about seven, up until about 150 pounds.

00:22:24.000 And after that, it takes 14 pounds.

00:22:26.000 So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm-raised fish.

00:22:30.000 I mean, this is like going to the bank because you want a crisp $5 bill and say, here's a couple 20s.

00:22:39.000 Wow.

00:22:40.000 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.

00:22:50.000 Wow. 0.99

00:22:51.000 And I was just reading this morning a Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish are fucked. 0.97

00:22:59.000 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. 0.94

00:23:10.000 I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a...

00:23:13.000 They're stationary.

00:23:14.000 I think that's a big part of the problem.

00:23:16.000 Yeah, apparently they don't taste as well.

00:23:19.000 When we were in Hawaii recently, we went scuba diving and snorkeling.

00:23:25.000 So you jump off the boat and you're swimming around.

00:23:27.000 And you know what's really fucking weird about that is how few fish there are.

00:23:34.000 You expect you're going to dunk your head underwater with those goggles on.

00:23:38.000 You're going to see all this wildlife, all these fish swimming around us.

00:23:42.000 No, it's not much.

00:23:44.000 You don't see much.

00:23:46.000 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...

00:23:54.000 I didn't know it at the time, but it was her first time snorkeling.

00:23:57.000 And we were in an area that I'd been to about 20 years before, and there was nothing.

00:24:02.000 There was nothing there.

00:24:03.000 It was just like...

00:24:04.000 A desert.

00:24:05.000 And then I heard her screaming through her snorkel, and I thought, what's wrong?

00:24:08.000 And she was screaming because she saw a single orange tang.

00:24:12.000 That was the only life form we saw there.

00:24:13.000 I used to see clouds of schools of these orange and blue tang.

00:24:18.000 Now there was nothing.

00:24:19.000 And I thought, my God, she thinks that that's beautiful.

00:24:23.000 And it is.

00:24:24.000 It's just, you know, the single fish.

00:24:25.000 But, you know, again, a shifting baseline.

00:24:28.000 The generation before when I was there, it probably looked like the land before time. 0.61

00:24:32.000 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.

00:24:42.000 And Rajanpat, you'd see 300. And it was just miraculous.

00:24:47.000 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.

00:24:53.000 So it's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we've, you know, we lit like jewel boxes.

00:25:00.000 I think?

00:25:26.000 So, 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.

00:25:35.000 But if you knew what came before that, you're seeing this assault against nature going on.

00:25:41.000 What is taking out the Great Barrier Reef?

00:25:44.000 We're heating the planet.

00:25:46.000 We're heating the water.

00:25:46.000 It's bleaching.

00:25:48.000 So there's a couple things.

00:25:50.000 There's multiple insults.

00:25:52.000 You have runoff from fertilizer and pesticides from agriculture.

00:25:55.000 You have the heating of the water, these events.

00:25:58.000 When I say it's dying, it's dying.

00:26:01.000 It's not like, oh, it's going to come back.

00:26:03.000 Once the coral is dead, that's it.

00:26:05.000 It's not going to come back.

00:26:07.000 Does sunscreen play a part in that as well?

00:26:09.000 Probably not there.

00:26:10.000 It's fairly remote.

00:26:12.000 In Hawaii, it would, or the Caribbean. 0.80

00:26:16.000 But it's pretty remote.

00:26:17.000 You have to get out several miles at the Great Barrier Reef.

00:26:20.000 The further north you go, the more isolated it is.

00:26:23.000 We went the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef, and it didn't look.

00:26:26.000 It got slightly better as you got north.

00:26:28.000 But there's only a couple boats there.

00:26:30.000 It's not like you have thousands and hundreds of thousands of tourists out on the beach.

00:26:35.000 And the other thing is acidification.

00:26:37.000 The burning of fossil fuels is acidifying the oceans.

00:26:40.000 It's now about 30% more acidic than it was 50 years ago.

00:26:45.000 And when you make, you know, there's more carbonic acid in the water, it makes it harder for the corals to survive.

00:26:51.000 And basically you have these multiple insults going on at the same time.

00:26:54.000 It's probably not just one thing.

00:26:57.000 But there was a massive bleaching event two years in a row in the Great Barrier Reef.

00:27:01.000 And so it's disappearing in our lifetime.

00:27:04.000 But if you look at, we have the last coral berry reef in America is down in Florida.

00:27:10.000 And they have...

00:27:11.000 Semi-treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that they could swim through.

00:27:15.000 I've been out there on these beaches.

00:27:17.000 You could literally talk to somebody on the beach or scream to them on the beach.

00:27:21.000 And they have this green water coming out of sewer pipes 200 meters away, 300 meters away.

00:27:28.000 And so they're dumping semi-treated sewage on the last reef in America.

00:27:34.000 This is going on all around the world.

00:27:37.000 And, you know...

00:27:41.000 What we do?

00:27:42.000 I don't know.

00:27:42.000 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.

00:27:50.000 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.

00:27:59.000 Now, when you say semi-treated sewage, what do you mean by that?

00:28:03.000 Well, that's what they reported.

00:28:05.000 So it smells like sewage. 1.00

00:28:06.000 It smells like crap. 0.98

00:28:08.000 But if you go to the website, it says it's just semi-treated. 0.99

00:28:11.000 I don't know.

00:28:11.000 They're not putting it through the aerators.

00:28:14.000 They're not going through the whole system. 1.00

00:28:15.000 But it smells like shit to me. 1.00

00:28:18.000 You come out of the water and it's like, you know, we all stink. 1.00

00:28:22.000 You smell like shit. 1.00

00:28:23.000 By the way, this is on the Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale border. 1.00

00:28:27.000 How is that legal?

00:28:29.000 I mean, this is not a third world country.

00:28:31.000 How is the United States allowing them to pump semi-treated sewage?

00:28:36.000 It's a very good question.

00:28:37.000 You know, there's so many things to work on.

00:28:39.000 I know the activists down there are working on this.

00:28:42.000 They're just trying to get people to see it, to know that this is going on.

00:28:45.000 And, you know, I think they close the beaches down when, you know, when the wind shifts and it starts to push it on shore.

00:28:53.000 But, 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.

00:28:58.000 You wouldn't be going to Florida if you knew what was going on on that beach.

00:29:03.000 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.

00:29:11.000 I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi-treat it?

00:29:15.000 How much more would it cost to not do what they're doing?

00:29:19.000 I don't have an answer to that question.

00:29:19.000 That's a good question.

00:29:20.000 It's fucking insane. 0.97

00:29:21.000 And then that they close the beach when the water shifts, and the wind shifts and heads towards the shore? 0.99

00:29:27.000 And people get sick, and they probably don't even know it.

00:29:29.000 Jesus Christ.

00:29:31.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, when we were at one outfall, that's what they call an outfall, it's basically a sewer pipe.

00:29:36.000 You know, nothing's happening, and all of a sudden you can start to hear this rumble, and then you see this green...

00:29:42.000 Oh, God!

00:29:43.000 And we're not talking like a little drain pipe, too.

00:29:46.000 Like, literally, you could swim through it.

00:29:47.000 Not stand in it, but it's big, like four feet, five feet tall.

00:29:51.000 Now, why are they allowing?

00:29:53.000 Does anybody have an argument for why that's money?

00:29:56.000 Money.

00:29:57.000 Because it costs money to treat sewage.

00:30:00.000 Jesus Christ, though.

00:30:01.000 That's insane.

00:30:03.000 Well, there's a lot of things like that going on right now.

00:30:05.000 But it seems like someone should be held accountable for that.

00:30:08.000 Like whatever cost benefit that they've decided is worth polluting the ocean by pumping sewage into it.

00:30:18.000 It's a good question.

00:30:19.000 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.

00:30:33.000 Is there video of it?

00:30:34.000 Can we show video?

00:30:35.000 You got something?

00:30:37.000 Jamie's got something here.

00:30:38.000 I need to see this.

00:30:40.000 It's in Racing Extinction, the second film I did.

00:30:44.000 This says it was impossible.

00:30:45.000 Oh, look at this!

00:30:47.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:47.000 Look at that!

00:30:48.000 There we go. 0.97

00:30:49.000 Oh, that's so disgusting!

00:30:51.000 Four months ago, maybe?

00:30:53.000 Wow! 1.00

00:30:54.000 It is just a gigantic pipe pumping green shit into the ocean. 1.00

00:31:02.000 Why is it green, by the way? 1.00

00:31:03.000 It's a picture.

00:31:04.000 It could be the color under the water, too.

00:31:06.000 But you said it was green when you saw it as well, right?

00:31:08.000 Yeah.

00:31:11.000 Yeah.

00:31:11.000 That's the treated.

00:31:12.000 It's treated.

00:31:13.000 It's much better that way.

00:31:14.000 Well, everything in the spectrum down there is a little bit blue or green.

00:31:19.000 It's probably food coloring.

00:31:20.000 Look at that. 1.00

00:31:21.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:31:21.000 What is that, fish? 1.00

00:31:22.000 Yeah, fish love it.

00:31:23.000 Chewing on the sewage?

00:31:24.000 They can eat crab.

00:31:27.000 Oh, Christ.

00:31:28.000 Yeah.

00:31:29.000 And then the fishermen fish on it, too, when the outfall is going.

00:31:33.000 Oh, Jesus Christ. 0.99

00:31:34.000 To catch fish that are eating shit? 0.99

00:31:37.000 Look at that. 1.00

00:31:38.000 That is insane.

00:31:41.000 We're looking at this pipe, and it looks like a cloud of poison is being jettisoned out of this pipe and into the ocean.

00:31:51.000 And the important part is if you came up, you would see people on the beach.

00:31:55.000 Oh, God.

00:31:56.000 I mean, we're not talking about, like, you know, miles out at sea.

00:31:59.000 We're talking about...

00:32:00.000 How in America, I mean, I know Florida's barely America, but how in America is that possible?

00:32:07.000 It's a really good question.

00:32:08.000 We try to explore some of these issues, but trying to get somebody to talk on the record about this is really difficult.

00:32:14.000 Is there any other part of the country that has something like that?

00:32:18.000 Not that I know of. 1.00

00:32:19.000 Fucking Florida. 0.99

00:32:21.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

00:32:22.000 I mean, of course it's Florida.

00:32:25.000 I mean, is there a place that is so worthy of all the stereotypes like Florida is?

00:32:32.000 It seems like every time you think you've had enough... 1.00

00:32:35.000 Look at all these fish just swimming into the shit. 0.99

00:32:37.000 That surface looks like it's boiling when all the water comes in. 0.99

00:32:40.000 Oh, God. 1.00

00:32:41.000 Shit boil. 1.00

00:32:43.000 Shit boil in Florida. 1.00

00:32:44.000 And look at the ground. 1.00

00:32:45.000 It's all just covered with algae.

00:32:47.000 Well, that's kind of the point.

00:32:48.000 What I'm saying is, you know...

00:32:50.000 We always think somebody else should be doing something about this.

00:32:54.000 And, you know, that's why we do films.

00:32:57.000 It's not just to create the awareness and, you know, to try to get something done about it.

00:33:02.000 You know, when we did The Cove, they were killing about 23,000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption.

00:33:08.000 And I think the last time, I think 2017 was the last reports of how many they killed.

00:33:13.000 I think it was 1,610 total.

00:33:15.000 So it was like a 93% drop.

00:33:18.000 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.

00:33:31.000 If you talk to the Japanese, the people from the IWC, of course, they're out of that now.

00:33:37.000 They've quit the IWC. They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens?

00:33:42.000 They're pretty sentient, intelligent, too.

00:33:44.000 And we say, well, but the Mercury.

00:33:46.000 Now, how many people are eating dolphin meat?

00:33:50.000 Less.

00:33:51.000 I think less because of the film.

00:33:53.000 When we were there, they were...

00:34:01.000 We're good to go.

00:34:27.000 So, I mean, films can be really powerful.

00:34:30.000 Yeah, that's amazing.

00:34:33.000 That film is so disturbing, man.

00:34:36.000 Well, you know, it is.

00:34:38.000 And, you know, when Mark Monroe, the writer, he came up with the name The Cove, I said, it sounds like a horror film.

00:34:45.000 He goes, well, it is.

00:34:47.000 I mean, look, if we write, and these are water people, I mean, essentially, as intelligent, if not more.

00:34:54.000 I mean, you were saying that the complexity of their brains is...

00:34:59.000 They have more density for neurons, like the folds of the brains.

00:35:04.000 If you did a slice of a brain, it looks like a fjord, right?

00:35:09.000 And there's more convolutions with a dolphin.

00:35:12.000 There's more surface area for neurons.

00:35:14.000 And of course, the more neurons you have, the more connections you're making.

00:35:17.000 And they actually have a...

00:35:19.000 God, there's a...

00:35:23.000 Spindle neurons that they have for developing complex emotions.

00:35:27.000 If you look at orcas, they're really tight-knit communities.

00:35:32.000 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.

00:35:43.000 These animals are really social, and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we don't even know what they're saying.

00:35:50.000 The average person can hear from 50 hertz to 20,000 kilohertz, and I think they can communicate up to 200,000.

00:35:59.000 So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with.

00:36:04.000 And we hear like a little squeak, like...

00:36:06.000 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.

00:36:13.000 What's interesting about whales, blue whales, blue whales are really solitary creatures.

00:36:20.000 They're, you know, they're not gregarious like dolphins.

00:36:22.000 They don't usually hang out in big, you know, groups.

00:36:26.000 But down in the Southern Ocean, it was confounding people.

00:36:29.000 Like, how do they find the krill bloom that happens in a different area, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles apart?

00:36:36.000 How do they, you know, they all find it?

00:36:39.000 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.

00:36:48.000 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.

00:36:57.000 They basically use their voice, which is one of the loudest voices in the animal kingdom.

00:37:03.000 It's so loud, but it's infrasound, you can't hear it.

00:37:06.000 And they'll use it.

00:37:07.000 It almost gets propagated like the internet.

00:37:10.000 Through that layer.

00:37:12.000 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.

00:37:21.000 So it's called reciprocal altruism.

00:37:23.000 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. 0.99

00:37:33.000 Holy shit. 0.97

00:37:34.000 There's a friend of mine, Chris Clark, Dr. Chris Clark from over in Cornell University. 0.99

00:37:39.000 He was...

00:37:44.000 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.

00:37:56.000 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.

00:38:06.000 Look, you can hear sounds everywhere.

00:38:09.000 Everything is basically singing down there from crackling shrimp up to blue whales.

00:38:14.000 And, you know, so you have this impression that, man, I just, you know, dropped in on this conversation.

00:38:19.000 I don't know what's being said, but like, that feels pretty special.

00:38:23.000 Now he goes to Sosis, and they have like a... 0.88

00:38:26.000 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.

00:38:36.000 And he sees that on a board it's lit up in the whole world.

00:38:41.000 He's seeing wherever the blue whales are singing or all these whales, it's lit up like a Christmas tree.

00:38:47.000 And what the Navy was trying to do is to filter through the voices of what they called the biologicals to pinpoint The submarines.

00:38:56.000 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.

00:39:06.000 When he could just – you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen.

00:39:09.000 Now he can all of a sudden has all this incredible data.

00:39:11.000 And he could track animals.

00:39:15.000 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.

00:39:27.000 Wow.

00:39:29.000 Jesus, that's incredible.

00:39:32.000 Just imagine that ability to pick up all those extra patterns that we don't even hear.

00:39:40.000 So we don't even understand exactly what kind of data they're getting from each other.

00:39:44.000 And we don't know what it means either.

00:39:46.000 So we just know there's something, right?

00:39:48.000 Yeah, there's a friend of mine.

00:39:50.000 I don't even know if you want to talk.

00:39:52.000 His name is Britt Salvatelli.

00:39:56.000 He's working with another friend of his, AZA, to try to use AI to figure out what animals are saying.

00:40:06.000 I know he's talked about it before with the press, so I think it's okay if I mention it.

00:40:12.000 I've been sending them to people like Roger Payne and Chris Clark, these other researchers I know, because they have these huge databases.

00:40:18.000 And they're trying to use AI to see if they can figure out, using computers, what these animals are saying.

00:40:24.000 And I think that's the holy grail for letting us care about these animals.

00:40:28.000 If we know what they're saying, I think that changes the game.

00:40:33.000 Roger 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.

00:40:45.000 You know, these strange, beautiful sounds.

00:40:47.000 I don't know, do you want Jamie to pull up songs of the humpback whale?

00:40:52.000 Yeah, we'll find something to play.

00:40:55.000 That these animals were actually singing.

00:40:57.000 You know, it was actually his wife, Katie Payne, that figured it out, and he wrote up the paper with another guy.

00:41:02.000 Like joyously singing.

00:41:04.000 Yeah, like, you know, she... 0.87

00:41:06.000 When a humpback wills... 1.00

00:41:08.000 We have an issue with playing it?

00:41:10.000 Yeah, it's actually been sold, so it's copywritten.

00:41:13.000 A lot of times if we do that, we'll get pulled off of YouTube.

00:41:17.000 Oh, okay.

00:41:18.000 Okay.

00:41:18.000 Yeah, because somebody owns that, which is hilarious, right?

00:41:21.000 They own the sound of nature, which is, like, what?

00:41:24.000 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.

00:41:35.000 Excuse me.

00:41:37.000 Oh, look, it's tough.

00:41:38.000 It's going to be real tough, though, because somebody may own it that may not know that somebody else owns it.

00:41:43.000 An agent for the whale.

00:41:44.000 An agent for the whale.

00:41:47.000 Some CAA guy. 1.00

00:41:49.000 Hey, we want to get paid, you fucks! 1.00

00:41:52.000 Are you aware of what's going on with the resident orca pod outside of Seattle? 0.99

00:41:59.000 Yeah.

00:41:59.000 Yeah, which is a very strange situation where the salmon have dwindled radically.

00:42:07.000 And this resident pod only eats salmon.

00:42:11.000 They only eat, what is it, Chinook?

00:42:12.000 Chinook.

00:42:13.000 So they only eat Chinook salmon.

00:42:14.000 And so the ones that migrate, the migratory orcas are fine because they eat marine mammals.

00:42:21.000 They eat mostly seals.

00:42:23.000 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.

00:42:33.000 Yeah, no, I was working on that story for the last year or so on a different aspect of it.

00:42:39.000 I was co-directing a film.

00:42:42.000 I was doing the Russia portion.

00:42:44.000 The Russians had illegally caught 101 cetaceans.

00:42:47.000 It was about 87, roughly, belugas and about 11 orcas illegally for the Chinese market.

00:42:55.000 I was covering that part of it.

00:42:57.000 Was that the Chinese market of marine shows?

00:42:59.000 Yeah.

00:43:01.000 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.

00:43:10.000 But in China they haven't got the message.

00:43:13.000 So I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year.

00:43:19.000 So it's like whack-a-mole.

00:43:22.000 And the Russians were providing... 0.98

00:43:23.000 And that story...

00:43:25.000 When I was in Russia...

00:43:27.000 This is like one of those amazing situations.

00:43:30.000 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.

00:43:40.000 So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story.

00:43:44.000 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. 0.99

00:44:02.000 You can't find them sometimes.

00:44:03.000 The solution seems to be to get rid of a lot of the dams.

00:44:07.000 It's kind of an unpopular position with some people, but they're not efficient anymore.

00:44:12.000 They're holding up, the whole ecosystems are being degraded because of that.

00:44:16.000 Well, you know, one of them that they initially, when they set it up, they didn't even realize what they were doing. 0.92

00:44:23.000 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.

00:44:33.000 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.

00:45:07.000 What is this, Jeremy?

00:45:08.000 This is Pattern Radio.

00:45:11.000 So 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.

00:45:21.000 Use AI to explore thousands of hours of humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries.

00:45:27.000 So they'll play some of it?

00:45:28.000 Yeah, there's a lot to dig through here, but it's a really cool-looking site.

00:45:31.000 Anybody that wants to go check it out?

00:45:45.000 What's that heavy-duty powering over to the left, Jamie?

00:45:48.000 This thing?

00:45:49.000 No, to the left.

00:45:50.000 Oh, here.

00:45:50.000 Yeah.

00:46:03.000 Whoa.

00:46:04.000 Really?

00:46:06.000 What about those long bars right next to it?

00:46:10.000 Yeah.

00:46:11.000 No, over to the right.

00:46:13.000 No, no.

00:46:14.000 The long ones.

00:46:15.000 The long ones.

00:46:17.000 Like, just to the right of that image.

00:46:19.000 Yeah.

00:46:24.000 Wow.

00:46:26.000 If that was coming out of space, you'd be like, what the hell?

00:46:29.000 Yeah, we'd be like, we have to go immediately.

00:46:31.000 I've often said that about Bigfoot, that everyone cares.

00:46:35.000 Shut it off.

00:46:36.000 People are so interested in finding Bigfoot, but if you found Bigfoot, what would it be?

00:46:40.000 It would be basically a big chimpanzee or something, right?

00:46:43.000 Another big primate.

00:46:44.000 We already know about primates.

00:46:45.000 They're amazing.

00:46:46.000 We know about them now.

00:46:47.000 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, 0.96

00:47:04.000 that we have had our best linguists try to decipher, we have no idea what the fuck they're saying. 0.90

00:47:09.000 You know, you'd be like, what kind of animal is that? 0.98

00:47:11.000 It would be a crazy mythical creature.

00:47:14.000 You know, like the creature from the Black Lagoon or the Loch Ness Monster or something.

00:47:18.000 It would be like some incredible thing.

00:47:20.000 If you ever found one, people would be freaking out.

00:47:22.000 But we get so used to things being real.

00:47:25.000 And I think we're just used to them.

00:47:27.000 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.

00:47:40.000 It's a normal thing.

00:47:41.000 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.

00:47:51.000 There's two things that are mind-blowers in terms of their intelligence.

00:47:56.000 One of them is us.

00:47:57.000 The other one is them.

00:47:59.000 All the marine mammals, whether it's whales, dolphins.

00:48:02.000 I mean, whales are amazing because of their size, but whales, dolphins, and orcas.

00:48:09.000 And obviously, orcas are cousins of whales.

00:48:11.000 But those things are...

00:48:14.000 They're some of the most spectacular creatures that the biodiversity of the earth has ever created.

00:48:23.000 I agree.

00:48:25.000 When you're watching a dolphin show, you're watching a spectacle of dominance.

00:48:28.000 You're watching slaves.

00:48:29.000 Listen, this is a nice room.

00:48:33.000 We have plenty of water, but if we needed food and we had to do backflips for it after a couple of weeks, you and I would be doing it.

00:48:40.000 Exactly.

00:48:41.000 And that's what it is.

00:48:42.000 Exactly.

00:48:44.000 On this film I was working on, we uncovered some...

00:48:50.000 Some information at SeaWorld, and this is the trainers talking to management about an animal that's not performing well.

00:49:00.000 And then they get the vets involved.

00:49:02.000 And the vets say, have you tried caloric deprivation?

00:49:10.000 So there's actually emails.

00:49:12.000 They'll never tell you that they're starving an animal to get it to do tricks, but there's emails now.

00:49:19.000 The vet.

00:49:19.000 The doctor.

00:49:20.000 Imagine that if you went to a university and like, his grades are down.

00:49:27.000 What should we do?

00:49:28.000 Starve him.

00:49:30.000 Can you imagine if that was your kid?

00:49:32.000 Dad, they don't want to give me any food because I'm doing poorly in history.

00:49:36.000 Like, what?

00:49:38.000 Yeah.

00:49:38.000 Or, you know, to perform better with the sports, I guess, would be a better analogy.

00:49:43.000 Yeah.

00:49:44.000 Jesus Christ.

00:49:45.000 I mean, that's essentially what they do with the Cuban Olympic wrestling program.

00:49:51.000 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.

00:50:02.000 Wow.

00:50:03.000 Yeah.

00:50:03.000 And they set up this insane competition so that they're hunted.

00:50:08.000 So that the elite athletes are hunted by the guys coming up.

00:50:11.000 They want to make sure that, you know, they only develop the best of the best.

00:50:16.000 You know, and he has this crazy Cuban accent with his broken English. 1.00

00:50:19.000 He's like, he turned you into a machine!

00:50:23.000 That's how he talks.

00:50:24.000 And he's just an unbelievable freak athlete.

00:50:28.000 And part of why he's so spectacular is because he came up through this ruthless program.

00:50:34.000 Wow.

00:50:35.000 Yeah, it's horrible.

00:50:37.000 But the results are pretty spectacular.

00:50:40.000 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.

00:50:52.000 He was a walrus trainer.

00:50:55.000 I think I know his story.

00:50:57.000 Yes.

00:50:57.000 And he, they, walrus bond was, With humans when they're babies, and he bonded with this walrus named Smooshy.

00:51:07.000 And I believe she's the only one that's alive.

00:51:11.000 Marineland has a horrible record of animal rights.

00:51:15.000 I mean, the way Phil puts it, he goes, it makes SeaWorld look like paradise for dolphins and orcas.

00:51:24.000 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

00:51:56.000 so crazy that it's still legal.

00:51:58.000 Like that after Blackfish, SeaWorld didn't just get shut down by the government.

00:52:03.000 And that people didn't just boycott them en masse.

00:52:06.000 In a TED talk I have, I show the stock price of...

00:52:11.000 I was at Sundance for the premiere of Blackfish.

00:52:18.000 And 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.

00:52:24.000 Because at that point, I think we had like 650,000 followers.

00:52:28.000 And then we helped organize, like getting musicians to stop performing there.

00:52:34.000 And 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.

00:52:45.000 Everybody that sat on the board got a copy of that film.

00:52:53.000 I can't remember.

00:52:54.000 I guess it was their earnings came out that quarter.

00:52:58.000 Their stock value just fell down from 32 to 16. They lost a billion dollars in value almost overnight.

00:53:08.000 But now it's back up.

00:53:09.000 It's back up in the 20s, I think.

00:53:11.000 Really?

00:53:12.000 So, you know, they're doing other things, too.

00:53:14.000 They're trying to, you know, do rides and, you know, do what the other theme parks are doing and try to get away from that business.

00:53:24.000 But it's still happening.

00:53:26.000 It should be illegal.

00:53:27.000 I mean, it's really simple.

00:53:30.000 It should be illegal.

00:53:32.000 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...

00:53:38.000 From their families and would they understand the close-knit or the nature of these orcopods the fact that it's not illegal.

00:53:46.000 It's just it's stunning Yeah, well, they've bred a lot of theirs now in captivity. 0.99

00:53:52.000 Which is even more fucked up. 0.99

00:53:54.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:53:55.000 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.

00:54:11.000 They don't speak the same language.

00:54:13.000 And then you pull the mothers away, so there's really no – What do they do when they don't speak the same language?

00:54:21.000 Do they try to communicate and just run into it?

00:54:24.000 They beat up each other.

00:54:25.000 There's all sorts of evidence that we have had people go in there.

00:54:30.000 Because there's a lawsuit going on right now.

00:54:33.000 And so we've gone in and photographed for the people with the lawsuit.

00:54:37.000 And you look and they're raked.

00:54:40.000 The dolphins chew on the iron bars on the side or on the sides of the pool.

00:54:44.000 A lot of their teeth are just sawed off because they're getting infected.

00:54:50.000 Let's go on to something else.

00:54:52.000 What can you go on to?

00:54:54.000 I really think it's like a human rights issue.

00:55:00.000 But it's a human rights issue for water people.

00:55:03.000 If we could really, like you said, if we could decipher what they were saying and then break it down to a very clear language.

00:55:11.000 That would certainly help with everything.

00:55:15.000 Yeah.

00:55:16.000 If we knew what was being said.

00:55:18.000 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.

00:55:25.000 We just haven't been listening.

00:55:26.000 Everything from a mouse up to a blue whale has a song.

00:55:31.000 I mean, technically it's a song.

00:55:33.000 But we don't see it as that.

00:55:35.000 We're looking at it only through our own eyes.

00:55:39.000 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.

00:55:45.000 They're disappearing before we have a chance to even know what they're up to.

00:55:49.000 And we're the last generation that can fix it.

00:55:52.000 So, you know, we're going through a mass extinction right now.

00:55:56.000 The sixth.

00:55:57.000 Yeah, the Anthropocene.

00:55:59.000 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.

00:56:07.000 A lot of friends of mine were paleontologists.

00:56:09.000 And Michael Novacek, the head provost of the American Museum of Natural History.

00:56:13.000 I was in the Gobi Desert with him.

00:56:15.000 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.

00:56:26.000 Like they almost got exterminated by something in one go.

00:56:31.000 And he had told me that, well, we're going through a mass extinction right now.

00:56:35.000 And I was like, what?

00:56:38.000 He said, oh yeah, mankind is responsible for the sixth mass extinction.

00:56:42.000 That's the first time I heard about it about 15 years ago.

00:56:45.000 And I said, what are the issues?

00:56:48.000 He said, well, the drivers are habitat destruction for agriculture.

00:56:53.000 Pollution, invasive species, and overconsumption.

00:56:56.000 But the biggest one by far is habitat destruction, the raising of crops for animals that we in turn eat.

00:57:04.000 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.

00:57:20.000 Did they find out what was causing those fires in the Amazon?

00:57:24.000 Were they set?

00:57:26.000 Do they know?

00:57:27.000 Yeah, those are all illegal fires for illegal crops, for soybean corn to feed cattle.

00:57:35.000 So they burned down the jungle so that they could wipe everything out. 0.54

00:57:41.000 This has been proven?

00:57:42.000 Oh yeah.

00:57:44.000 They do the same thing in Indonesia, but for palm oil.

00:57:47.000 And the thing about Brazil is Bolsonaro apparently has approved this kind of behavior, right?

00:57:53.000 Is that what's going on down there?

00:57:55.000 To prop up business.

00:57:57.000 There was an image in the New York Times of Sao Paulo and people walking through during the day and the sky was like it was dark out.

00:58:11.000 Just from the clouds of smoke, from the burning of the Amazon, from the millions of acres.

00:58:17.000 Yeah, and these are one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet, and we're burning them down for...

00:58:22.000 Well, not only that, not just biodiverse, but so unknown.

00:58:25.000 I mean, this is where...

00:58:27.000 A great majority of some of the greatest pharmaceutical drugs ever invented, their origins have come from the rainforest.

00:58:34.000 People have found various compounds and things inside the rainforest that have been used for a variety of different methods.

00:58:42.000 There's all sorts of bugs in there that we don't understand.

00:58:44.000 Look at that.

00:58:45.000 There's the image.

00:58:47.000 How insane is that?

00:58:49.000 I mean, if you've never been to Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo was a huge city.

00:58:53.000 I mean, it rivals like New York City.

00:58:54.000 It's massive.

00:58:56.000 And the sky was literally black with smoke.

00:58:59.000 That's daytime?

00:59:00.000 Yep.

00:59:01.000 Wow.

00:59:02.000 Yeah, insane.

00:59:04.000 Well, have you ever experienced wildfires out here in California?

00:59:07.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

00:59:09.000 Boy, I mean...

00:59:11.000 Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

00:59:12.000 The last four or five, well, what was the last month?

00:59:14.000 Do you live over here?

00:59:15.000 I live in Sausalito, just north of the bridge.

00:59:18.000 Oh, okay.

00:59:19.000 Well, then you guys, the Northern California one, that one, what was that, what was the area that got hit last year?

00:59:25.000 Oh, the Kincaid Fire, just recently.

00:59:28.000 Yes.

00:59:28.000 That was enormous.

00:59:29.000 Yes.

00:59:29.000 And then there was the one- Paradise Fire.

00:59:31.000 The Paradise Fire.

00:59:32.000 That was the one I was thinking was the largest, I think, in California history. 1.00

00:59:36.000 I mean, these goddamn fires. 0.99

00:59:39.000 When they happen, it's a very stunning and sobering reminder of the forces of nature. 0.99

00:59:46.000 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.

00:59:57.000 It's terrifying.

00:59:58.000 But my point was that I've been very, very close to some of these fires.

01:00:02.000 We've been evacuated a few times.

01:00:04.000 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.

01:00:12.000 Yeah, like climate change is real and it's happening now and it's close.

01:00:16.000 It's about as real as it can ever get.

01:00:18.000 I mean, the people who are in denial of it at this point, I mean, how much longer can you hold this opinion?

01:00:26.000 And what is keeping you?

01:00:28.000 What is keeping you on this?

01:00:30.000 It's a hoax track.

01:00:32.000 You know, I travel all over the world.

01:00:34.000 We're the only country that doesn't get it.

01:00:36.000 You know, we might have the illusion that it's half the world that doesn't get it, but over in Europe and Asia, they all understand it.

01:00:44.000 It's not a mystery over there.

01:00:46.000 It's only here.

01:00:47.000 And I think, you know, it's self-interest, greed.

01:00:51.000 You know, I think people are, you know...

01:00:54.000 There's also a right-wing ideology.

01:00:56.000 There's something that happens.

01:00:58.000 There's certain opinions that people adopt.

01:01:02.000 They adopt this conglomeration of opinions if you are in the right or if you're in the left.

01:01:08.000 And one of them in the right is to deny the impact of certain environmental factors and climate change and things along those lines.

01:01:16.000 And it's like to join this group, you have to subscribe to a certain platform or a certain system of ideas.

01:01:27.000 And that's one of them.

01:01:28.000 One of them is that climate change is no big deal.

01:01:30.000 It's just a hoax.

01:01:32.000 Or people are making out...

01:01:33.000 I 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?

01:01:39.000 Just because, like, it's really cold in some place one day.

01:01:44.000 I don't think you understand what this is.

01:01:46.000 That's actually part of it.

01:01:48.000 Have it being extraordinarily cold.

01:01:51.000 The whole thing's in chaos.

01:01:53.000 All the systems are out of whack.

01:01:55.000 Yeah, no, whole ecosystems.

01:01:57.000 I went out to the beach this morning and it probably looked the way it did 50,000 years ago out there.

01:02:02.000 But you go into the water, it's a whole different story.

01:02:05.000 Yeah.

01:02:06.000 Well, a couple degrees warmer fucks everything up.

01:02:09.000 Yeah, that's all you need.

01:02:10.000 That's really hard for us to understand.

01:02:12.000 Because some days it's 76, and the other days it's 52. And the next day it's 80. It seems normal for us.

01:02:17.000 There's variability.

01:02:19.000 But you don't look at the overall mean.

01:02:22.000 If you look at the overall mean, you see that rise.

01:02:24.000 Just a couple degrees of temperature could change everything.

01:02:27.000 Yeah, so I mean, this is what keeps me up at night.

01:02:30.000 It's like, you know, if you know this is going on, what do you do about it?

01:02:34.000 So 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.

01:02:42.000 Well, the fish one's a huge one, right?

01:02:44.000 And the ocean, the pollution of the ocean is a huge one because it seems like it's nobody's, right?

01:02:50.000 It seems like it's everybody's, but it's nobody's.

01:02:52.000 Whereas, like, the land, if someone is doing something on the land... 0.99

01:02:56.000 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? 0.99

01:03:08.000 And then they would have to act. 0.99

01:03:10.000 They have to say, you can't do that.

01:03:12.000 But because it's getting pumped into the ocean, it seems like it's okay.

01:03:16.000 It's not ours.

01:03:17.000 It's just the ocean.

01:03:18.000 Well, it's unfortunate.

01:03:20.000 I've got to go to work, man.

01:03:21.000 I don't have time for this.

01:03:22.000 I'm behind on my car payments.

01:03:24.000 I'm doing overtime tonight.

01:03:25.000 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.

01:03:34.000 Well, that's the trick.

01:03:36.000 As a filmmaker, how do you make a story like that so that people actually want to see it?

01:03:41.000 So they don't feel like it's medicine.

01:03:42.000 They don't feel like, okay, I've got to go watch this.

01:03:45.000 Right, medicine.

01:03:45.000 That's a good way of putting it.

01:03:47.000 And The Cove, for instance, it feels like a thriller.

01:03:51.000 It doesn't feel like a lecture on what we're doing to dolphins.

01:03:55.000 It's sort of set up like a mystery.

01:03:57.000 The first line of the film was me saying, I just want to say we try to do the story legally.

01:04:01.000 I still can't go back to Japan.

01:04:03.000 Really?

01:04:04.000 What happens if you go back?

01:04:05.000 I won't come back out.

01:04:07.000 They'll arrest you?

01:04:08.000 I'm told that there's arrest warrants out for me.

01:04:11.000 For what?

01:04:12.000 Conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing.

01:04:14.000 Wow.

01:04:15.000 Disrupt commerce.

01:04:17.000 All that dolphin commerce. 1.00

01:04:18.000 Fuck you. 1.00

01:04:20.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:04:22.000 Conspiracy to disrupt commerce. 1.00

01:04:25.000 How do you define disrupting commerce?

01:04:28.000 However they want, I guess.

01:04:31.000 Did you have parameters that you were supposed to operate under while you were over there and you went outside of them?

01:04:38.000 Yeah.

01:04:39.000 They gave us a map.

01:04:40.000 It's in the film.

01:04:41.000 They gave us a map and they told us this is where we're not supposed to go.

01:04:45.000 As my friend Charles Hamilton said, that became our template of where we needed to go.

01:04:50.000 Of course.

01:04:50.000 Yeah.

01:04:51.000 Have you seen some of the Sea Shepherd work where they've caught these Japanese scientific research boats that are really just killing whales? 0.50

01:05:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:05:01.000 And they're out of the Southern Ocean now.

01:05:03.000 This 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.

01:05:08.000 So, in a way, it's a big victory.

01:05:10.000 You know, Paul's a good friend, Paul Watson.

01:05:13.000 He just wrote me a couple hours before I came here.

01:05:20.000 Yeah, he wanted like a big projector.

01:05:22.000 You ever saw a racing extinction?

01:05:24.000 No.

01:05:25.000 We did, you know, to alert the world that we needed to get on this, we lit up the Empire State Building with endangered species.

01:05:33.000 And it was like a huge event.

01:05:35.000 We had like, I think, 939 million media views in four days.

01:05:39.000 Top trending story on Facebook and Twitter for like four days worldwide.

01:05:42.000 Just to get, you know, we did something really strange like that.

01:05:45.000 How'd you do that?

01:05:46.000 With a projector?

01:05:47.000 With 50 projectors, 50 IMAX-sized projectors all mounted on the building that was on 31st Street.

01:05:53.000 And this is all sanctioned.

01:05:55.000 We spent four years getting permission to do it.

01:05:58.000 And we finally did it.

01:06:00.000 Here it is right here.

01:06:01.000 Jamie's got a video of it.

01:06:03.000 Oh, you've got to slow that down, though.

01:06:04.000 Oh, it's just what's on YouTube.

01:06:06.000 Oh, on YouTube, they speed it up?

01:06:09.000 How long did this last for?

01:06:11.000 Oh, we did it for three hours, but there's like two 10-minute shows, 15-minute shows.

01:06:16.000 Was there a crowd of people that watched it?

01:06:17.000 Oh, my God.

01:06:18.000 It was like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

01:06:22.000 What was funny is like the producer and the distributor said, oh, it's going to be too expensive.

01:06:26.000 Nobody will be there in the summertime in New York.

01:06:30.000 They always say that. 0.99

01:06:32.000 There's fucking 100 million people in New York. 0.99

01:06:35.000 I go there in the summertime, it's packed with people. 0.99

01:06:37.000 Nothing happens in the summer in New York.

01:06:39.000 I was doing a show down there, and I'm like, wow, this is really good.

01:06:43.000 I mean, it's the summer in New York.

01:06:44.000 How are you selling so many tickets?

01:06:45.000 I'm like, have you looked around?

01:06:47.000 They have this weird attitude that nothing happens in New York in the summer.

01:06:51.000 I think it's like carried over from the 30s when there was no air conditioning.

01:06:55.000 Yeah, so we had, you know, we thought we couldn't get any more attention on that subject.

01:07:00.000 How crazy is that though?

01:07:01.000 The summer in New York.

01:07:02.000 Everybody's out.

01:07:03.000 Why wouldn't they see it?

01:07:04.000 They said, well, the important people, they said, are going to be at the Hamptons or they're going to be overseas.

01:07:10.000 Oh, God.

01:07:12.000 Or overseas.

01:07:14.000 Oh, my God.

01:07:16.000 The important people.

01:07:17.000 Did they really say that to you?

01:07:18.000 They said that.

01:07:19.000 And they also said the press wouldn't show up because at 930 at night, nobody could afford overtime.

01:07:23.000 Oh.

01:07:24.000 But, you know, it looked like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

01:07:27.000 Yeah, everybody was wrong.

01:07:28.000 Yeah.

01:07:28.000 And then we thought, okay, that's it.

01:07:30.000 We can't get any more attention than that than the Pope called.

01:07:34.000 The Pope wanted us to project on the Vatican during COP21. Whoa.

01:07:38.000 And then we had, I think, four and a half billion media views.

01:07:40.000 You should have taken all of the extinct animal footage and replaced it with child abuse footage.

01:07:49.000 Imagine that.

01:07:50.000 All of the cases of all the pedophile priests of all, I mean...

01:07:55.000 Well, there's a lot of issues.

01:07:56.000 Oh, yeah, there is.

01:07:58.000 I'm concerned with the ecosystems.

01:08:01.000 I understand.

01:08:02.000 One step at a time.

01:08:03.000 Yeah.

01:08:04.000 Yeah. 0.75

01:08:05.000 That dirty place. 0.99

01:08:07.000 Vatican's a strange place. 0.97

01:08:09.000 Like, you walk around there, you go, where did you get all this money?

01:08:13.000 Like, what did you guys, you guys don't even sell anything. 0.61

01:08:15.000 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?

01:08:26.000 It's an amazing place to visit, just historically, just to see what it's like. 0.90

01:08:31.000 And in Venice right now, if you go to the Doge Palace, if you look at the columns on that, those are all different.

01:08:38.000 What they did is they pilfered Persia for that. 0.88

01:08:43.000 You had to bring it back when you were trading the 1700s, 1600s.

01:08:47.000 You had to bring back Stuff you stole.

01:08:49.000 Yeah.

01:08:50.000 I was just there.

01:08:51.000 I was just in Venice.

01:08:52.000 And now, do you know what's going on right now?

01:08:54.000 They have the worst flooding they've had in 50 years.

01:08:56.000 Yeah, I saw the Gritty Palace.

01:08:57.000 I stayed there at the Gritty Palace.

01:08:58.000 Oh, that's where we were.

01:09:01.000 The lobby had like four feet of water in the lobby.

01:09:04.000 Really?

01:09:04.000 Yeah.

01:09:05.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:09:06.000 Four feet of water in the fucking lobby? 1.00

01:09:07.000 Mm-hmm. 1.00

01:09:08.000 So what is causing that?

01:09:10.000 Well, it's a combination of this time of year, the tides and the storms, but also, you know, the seas are raising.

01:09:18.000 You know, you have just a couple inches of ocean raising.

01:09:23.000 You can imagine there's more water out there, and it gets pushed to shore.

01:09:26.000 So how do you stay in the Gritty Palace when the floor is water?

01:09:30.000 Yeah.

01:09:30.000 I don't think you do stay.

01:09:31.000 I think that's the least of their problems right now.

01:09:35.000 When I lived in Boulder, I wasn't in a flood zone.

01:09:38.000 I lived at 4th and Juniper.

01:09:42.000 Like I said, right against the foothills.

01:09:44.000 It wasn't on a flood map, but we had a 2,000-year flood, and there was furniture floating.

01:09:49.000 I had furniture floating up against the ceiling of my place.

01:09:52.000 I got brought out by climate change.

01:09:55.000 Look at that.

01:09:57.000 Wow.

01:09:58.000 That's how bad the flooding is.

01:09:59.000 Yeah, that's where we stayed over the summer.

01:10:02.000 Yeah.

01:10:02.000 It's gorgeous.

01:10:03.000 But weird. 0.98

01:10:04.000 But it's like a really beautiful prostitute. 1.00

01:10:08.000 Like, do you have to do this? 1.00

01:10:11.000 Because like, look at all that shit floating by. 0.99

01:10:14.000 That's crazy how high the water level is. 1.00

01:10:16.000 That's a restaurant.

01:10:17.000 Yeah.

01:10:18.000 Wow, it's all underwater.

01:10:19.000 Is that outside the Gritty Palace?

01:10:21.000 No.

01:10:21.000 It's around the corner.

01:10:23.000 That's what it looks like, yeah.

01:10:24.000 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.

01:10:33.000 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.

01:10:41.000 And the week they were there, they said they had two accidents.

01:10:46.000 With cruise ships hitting docks.

01:10:48.000 And we played a video of one of them. 0.99

01:10:49.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.98

01:10:50.000 You see this gigantic boat. 0.99

01:10:52.000 And it's just coming in.

01:10:53.000 You know it's going to hit the dock.

01:10:54.000 And you know it's going to hit this boat in front of it.

01:10:56.000 And everybody's running to get out of the way.

01:10:58.000 And you see this mountain.

01:10:59.000 It's a mountain that's floating.

01:11:01.000 A floating mountain that has no ability to maneuver correctly. 0.99

01:11:04.000 Look at the size of that goddamn thing. 0.98

01:11:06.000 I mean, that is so much bigger than any of the buildings there. 0.99

01:11:09.000 And that thing's floating in.

01:11:11.000 And banging into the walls.

01:11:13.000 Look at the size of that.

01:11:15.000 Look at the size of that.

01:11:17.000 That is so insane. 0.98

01:11:20.000 And we wonder why we're screwed. 0.98

01:11:24.000 That thing has nine floors. 1.00

01:11:26.000 That is so crazy.

01:11:28.000 Look at that.

01:11:30.000 Yeah, there's probably several thousand people, right?

01:11:32.000 Oh, for sure.

01:11:34.000 Many thousand.

01:11:36.000 And, you know, don't they just dump their waste right into the ocean?

01:11:41.000 They did in the past.

01:11:42.000 I don't know if they do it now.

01:11:44.000 What do they do now?

01:11:45.000 Put it in a baggie?

01:11:47.000 Well, that's one of the things they found in LA. I'm sure you're aware of this.

01:11:51.000 They did a satellite overview, like an image of methane.

01:11:56.000 They're trying to find out where's the greenhouse gases, where's the biggest polluters.

01:12:02.000 It turns out it was landfills.

01:12:05.000 Landfill is a huge issue.

01:12:08.000 Is that the greenhouse gas thing, the methane leak?

01:12:10.000 Right.

01:12:11.000 This idea that you're going to just put it in the ground.

01:12:13.000 Hey, that doesn't work.

01:12:15.000 It comes out of the ground.

01:12:16.000 Yeah.

01:12:17.000 I 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.

01:12:26.000 It sees a spectrum.

01:12:28.000 It's not heat, but it can see methane.

01:12:30.000 You can put another filter in it so you can see carbon dioxide.

01:12:33.000 Yeah.

01:12:34.000 And so we had, you know, we went around the streets of LA and we got onto the tarmac.

01:12:39.000 And, you know, the carbon dioxide is a little bit of the boogeyman.

01:12:42.000 You can't see it.

01:12:43.000 But with this camera, you can see it.

01:12:46.000 And 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.

01:12:53.000 But when you show it on the streets of LA, it's like everything's disgorging.

01:12:58.000 And there's not enough plants to absorb it.

01:13:02.000 Yeah, you can't absorb it that quickly.

01:13:05.000 But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods.

01:13:08.000 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.

01:13:17.000 The air just has a different quality to it.

01:13:20.000 I mean, it's just this rich, oxygenated air.

01:13:23.000 Because, you know, you're just around all these trees and plants.

01:13:26.000 There's a different feel to it.

01:13:28.000 You just don't get here.

01:13:29.000 Yeah.

01:13:30.000 No.

01:13:31.000 L.A. I was here last week.

01:13:34.000 It's rough, bro.

01:13:35.000 It is.

01:13:35.000 It's rough.

01:13:36.000 Jamie and I have been planning our escape.

01:13:37.000 We don't know what to do, though.

01:13:39.000 We're trying to figure it out somewhere.

01:13:42.000 I think you can only stay here a little while longer.

01:13:44.000 I came here in 1994, and there was maybe 30% of the traffic that there is now.

01:13:51.000 And I'm not exaggerating.

01:13:52.000 Maybe 40%.

01:13:53.000 Let's get crazy.

01:13:56.000 But now, I can come home from the comedy store at 11 o'clock at night and be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

01:14:03.000 Just bumper-to-bumper.

01:14:04.000 I 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.

01:14:13.000 Yeah, without an accident.

01:14:15.000 And I don't, you know, back then, I mean, I'm probably, I don't know, how old are you?

01:14:19.000 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.

01:14:30.000 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?

01:14:44.000 Right!

01:14:45.000 Oh, that scared me because I thought...

01:14:47.000 Yeah, you can see that from Woodland Hills.

01:14:49.000 From Woodland Hills on a rainy day when the rain comes in and washes it all away. 0.99

01:14:53.000 Like, what the fuck is this? 0.98

01:14:55.000 There's mountains right there? 0.99

01:14:57.000 Like, you don't see literally the pollution so dense it hides mountains.

01:15:03.000 Still?

01:15:04.000 Yes!

01:15:04.000 All the time!

01:15:06.000 Because today is a beautiful day.

01:15:07.000 It's really clear.

01:15:08.000 Today is a beautiful day.

01:15:09.000 You get lucky.

01:15:10.000 What really helps us is when the wind blows.

01:15:12.000 When the wind blows, it clears everything out.

01:15:14.000 You can get to a high peak.

01:15:16.000 There's an area where I trail run.

01:15:18.000 You get to this really high peak and you can look out at the top and pause. 0.99

01:15:22.000 And some days you don't see jack shit. 0.97

01:15:25.000 You just see gray. 0.99

01:15:26.000 And then some days after it rains, you're like, there's fucking mountains out here. 0.98

01:15:30.000 I want to take a picture of this stark contrast. 0.97

01:15:33.000 You know, matter of fact, I'm going to run not tomorrow but the next day.

01:15:37.000 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.

01:15:48.000 Because the difference is it's stunning and it's all being hid by pollution and we just have gotten accustomed to it.

01:15:55.000 Yeah, well, I mean, catalytic converters helped a lot.

01:15:59.000 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.

01:16:14.000 And they're better to drive.

01:16:16.000 I mean, we were talking about Teslas.

01:16:18.000 I mean, I have that Model S. I love that thing.

01:16:21.000 I mean, it's amazing.

01:16:23.000 It's just an amazing car.

01:16:25.000 And I'm an automobile enthusiast.

01:16:28.000 I love cars.

01:16:29.000 You don't lose anything with that.

01:16:30.000 I mean, it's more fun than any other automatic car I've ever driven.

01:16:34.000 Yeah, no.

01:16:35.000 I mean, I had one too for a while, but I told you I had the electroluminescent paint job and the projector.

01:16:41.000 It was a nice one.

01:16:45.000 But I had one of the first electric cars in Colorado back in like 2007. I only knew of like two other ones.

01:16:52.000 And I had 120 solar panels on my roof, so I didn't pay for electricity.

01:16:57.000 Really?

01:16:57.000 Oh, the roof of your house.

01:16:58.000 Yeah, the roof of my house.

01:17:00.000 Did you see that documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

01:17:02.000 Yeah, Chris Payne.

01:17:03.000 He's a good friend.

01:17:04.000 Very interesting, right?

01:17:05.000 Yeah, and Revenge of the Electric Car.

01:17:07.000 It was his follow-up to it.

01:17:09.000 Oh, I didn't see that.

01:17:10.000 Yeah, it's a good one.

01:17:11.000 I think it's better than the first one, actually.

01:17:14.000 But, you know, I would tell my neighbors, like, hey, I don't pay for electricity.

01:17:18.000 My license plate said VUS. It stood for Vehicle Using Sun.

01:17:23.000 It was the opposite of an SUV. Yeah.

01:17:26.000 I mean, I got checks from the electric company.

01:17:29.000 I didn't have bills.

01:17:31.000 I had checks.

01:17:32.000 Because you were contributing to the grid.

01:17:33.000 Yeah, so we had net metering.

01:17:36.000 And I thought I just discovered something.

01:17:38.000 It was just incredible.

01:17:39.000 But everybody said...

01:17:40.000 I was doing it just to prove that you could do it back then.

01:17:45.000 And neighbors would say, but how much does it cost?

01:17:48.000 And it's like, well, we should all be...

01:17:50.000 You have to be...

01:17:51.000 People have to be early adopters before you can get it to scale.

01:17:55.000 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.

01:18:03.000 It's a little bit better and it's cheaper.

01:18:05.000 And Elon, I think he's got the right idea to make it a lot better and eventually it's going to be cheaper.

01:18:12.000 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.

01:18:20.000 That Model 3 is preposterous.

01:18:22.000 I have a Porsche 911 GT3, and it's a pretty fast car.

01:18:26.000 This guy humiliated me the other day.

01:18:29.000 I wasn't trying to race him, but I think he was trying to prove a point.

01:18:32.000 We were at a red light, and the light turned green, and he shot ahead of me and got onto the highway so fast, I was laughing.

01:18:38.000 I was like, look, I wasn't trying to race the guy, but if I was, it would have been a bloodbath.

01:18:44.000 You said you keep yours on ludicrous mode all the time.

01:18:47.000 Oh, mine?

01:18:48.000 Yeah, my Model S? Yeah, I do.

01:18:49.000 I keep it on ludicrous mode.

01:18:51.000 But you don't have to drive it ludicrous. 0.77

01:18:53.000 It's on ludicrous mode.

01:18:54.000 You could drive it normal, but anytime you want it, just dump on the...

01:18:57.000 We're good to go.

01:19:19.000 It'll take some time before I can get up before I can change lanes.

01:19:22.000 With that thing, it's just...

01:19:24.000 You just go. 0.99

01:19:26.000 And 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? 0.98

01:19:34.000 Everybody says the same thing. 0.98

01:19:35.000 Like, what the... 0.99

01:19:35.000 Or holy shit. 0.99

01:19:36.000 Those are the two things they say. 0.98

01:19:38.000 Because it doesn't seem like it should be able to do that.

01:19:41.000 It looks like a sedan.

01:19:42.000 It's like a regular car.

01:19:45.000 I've got an old muscle car.

01:19:48.000 I've got a couple old cars that look fast.

01:19:50.000 I'm like, that car, that regular sedan-looking car, five times faster than anything here.

01:19:56.000 And zero emissions.

01:19:58.000 But, you know, we're in this transitionary period, and I think the future is pretty bright for that stuff.

01:20:04.000 Mustang, Ford just released a concept of this new vehicle that they're releasing very soon.

01:20:11.000 It's like a Mustang crossover e-car.

01:20:14.000 It's beautiful.

01:20:15.000 It's really cool looking.

01:20:17.000 It looks like a larger Mustang, like a taller Mustang, but it's all electric.

01:20:22.000 And Elon praised it today that Ford is going out on a limb and making something like that.

01:20:27.000 Oh, cool.

01:20:27.000 You know, and then Porsche is releasing their version.

01:20:31.000 It's called a Taycan.

01:20:32.000 And that's, I think that's how you say it.

01:20:34.000 It's a beautiful looking, sleek looking electric car.

01:20:38.000 So, we're moving in that direction.

01:20:40.000 Yeah.

01:20:40.000 I mean, there's a great, Tony Saba, the futurist, he shows a picture of the 1900 Easter parade in New York City.

01:20:49.000 And it's all horses.

01:20:51.000 Looking down from a building.

01:20:53.000 I don't know if you find it, Jamie.

01:20:54.000 1905 or 1900 Easter Parade.

01:20:57.000 And it's like, there's one car.

01:20:59.000 And then 13 years later, it's like, find the horse.

01:21:04.000 And these transitions, they take about 10, 12 years.

01:21:09.000 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...

01:21:21.000 You know, with the transition with food.

01:21:24.000 I think it's going to be going that way.

01:21:27.000 Do you think that they're going to be – do you have hope for all this lab-created meat?

01:21:32.000 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.

01:21:43.000 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.

01:21:53.000 And I have the same sort of ickiness about going that direction.

01:21:58.000 But he showed me these pictures on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making.

01:22:05.000 And, you know, I stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, but I thought it didn't look bad.

01:22:11.000 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.

01:22:24.000 But I looked at that and I thought, you know what, that looks really edible.

01:22:27.000 It looks good.

01:22:27.000 Somebody that could eat meat You know, that would be appetizing.

01:22:32.000 Yeah, it seems like the science...

01:22:34.000 Whatever it is, right?

01:22:37.000 It's tissue.

01:22:38.000 And whatever that tissue is, it's composed of a bunch of different natural ingredients, right?

01:22:44.000 Whatever creates a turkey breast. 1.00

01:22:46.000 It seems like it's just a matter of innovation and technology improving to the point where they can recreate that.

01:22:53.000 Yeah, no, the question is, you know, is that...

01:22:58.000 Is that better for you than the whole foods, plant-based diet?

01:23:03.000 That's the real question, right?

01:23:05.000 Because that's where things get convoluted.

01:23:07.000 What is healthy versus what is ethical versus what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing morally?

01:23:14.000 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.

01:23:26.000 And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse.

01:23:31.000 They kill the animal with this captive bolt to the brain.

01:23:34.000 It's supposed to happen instantly, but there was one animal that came around, and it was still alive.

01:23:39.000 At that point, it was hanging upside down, and its hide was stripped off.

01:23:43.000 It's looking at me with its eye, and it's following my eye.

01:23:47.000 Its hide was stripped off, and it was still alive?

01:23:50.000 And as it's turning around, it was turning its head and it still held my eye. 1.00

01:23:55.000 And I thought, the son of a bitch is alive and I'm part of this. 0.99

01:23:59.000 So I stopped eating meat shortly after that. 1.00

01:24:02.000 And so I thought, well, I have to eat something, right?

01:24:04.000 I have to eat an animal product because, you know, you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't.

01:24:09.000 And then, so I became a pescatarian.

01:24:11.000 That's all I ate for animal protein.

01:24:13.000 Well, you know, I did milk and dairy, but I didn't eat anything.

01:24:17.000 I limited myself to things that didn't walk.

01:24:22.000 So fish was like fair territory for me.

01:24:25.000 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.

01:24:34.000 And while I was out at the lab, I thought, well, I'll get mine tested, too, because I ate a lot of fish.

01:24:41.000 I loved it.

01:24:41.000 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.

01:24:51.000 And I had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the time.

01:24:55.000 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.

01:25:03.000 Mercury is the most toxic non-radioactive element in the world.

01:25:06.000 And my levels were 44 times higher.

01:25:08.000 Jesus.

01:25:09.000 Were you experiencing any physical effects of that?

01:25:13.000 I was having trouble with my short-term memory.

01:25:17.000 I had an ache in my shoulder that was there for probably decades.

01:25:22.000 I tried to get it massaged out.

01:25:23.000 If you start looking through the...

01:25:26.000 You know, the problems with mercury.

01:25:30.000 You notice that there's a whole litany of things that it causes depending on how bad you have it.

01:25:34.000 But my doctor said it's the worst he'd ever seen in Colorado.

01:25:37.000 So I had to get off of it.

01:25:39.000 And then, you know, this is...

01:25:41.000 So we're here in LA for the Academy Awards and I met my first vegan.

01:25:45.000 And I said, what do you eat?

01:25:47.000 And she goes, everything else.

01:25:49.000 You know, all protein originates with plants.

01:25:51.000 And that was how I got started.

01:25:53.000 And it took a...

01:25:54.000 You know, I thought, okay, well...

01:25:56.000 Mercury has a half-life in your body of about 70 to 90 days.

01:25:59.000 And so it took me about two years to get it down.

01:26:03.000 And I thought, well, I'll just try a little.

01:26:04.000 Two years to get it down?

01:26:05.000 Why did it take so long?

01:26:06.000 Because it has a half-life in your body of 70 to 90 days.

01:26:09.000 So 44 goes to 22. Oh, 90 to 180. So I thought, okay, then I'll start eating a little bit of fish.

01:26:16.000 And then I had to test it right away and I jacked back up.

01:26:18.000 And I thought, okay, I can't be tested.

01:26:19.000 So all fish is poison.

01:26:21.000 Yeah.

01:26:21.000 Oh, big fish is poison for sure.

01:26:24.000 Big fish, like tuna.

01:26:25.000 Yeah, tuna, swordfish, marlin.

01:26:27.000 So what is the recommendations?

01:26:29.000 They 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...

01:26:35.000 I don't trust any of that.

01:26:37.000 I mean, like...

01:26:39.000 I mean, I can't mess with it.

01:26:41.000 When I was in Japan, I went to Minamata, where they had the—they call it Minamata disease, but it's not a disease.

01:26:48.000 It's poison.

01:26:49.000 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.

01:27:02.000 You know, you heard the expression mad as a hatter.

01:27:05.000 That's because they had the felt from 100 years, 150 years ago.

01:27:09.000 They used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats, but they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad.

01:27:18.000 I think?

01:27:40.000 And I saw, I visited a doctor there that studied Minamata disease.

01:27:44.000 He was the guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people.

01:27:48.000 And he showed me these brains of, you know, they sliced open.

01:27:51.000 And it looked like Swiss cheese.

01:27:53.000 We're talking about the convolutions of the brain and how dolphins have more of them.

01:27:57.000 Same thing with people, but, you know.

01:27:59.000 And the ones, the slices, they look like Swiss cheese.

01:28:03.000 There's holes that, the mercury's eating up in the brain.

01:28:07.000 And so you don't want, you know, once you see that, you don't want that in your body.

01:28:11.000 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.

01:28:21.000 But I'm doing just fine. 0.97

01:28:24.000 How fucking crazy is that, that most fish is poison? 0.99

01:28:29.000 Like that is such a crazy thing to think that the ocean is so fucked up That most of the food you pull out of the ocean is a mess. 0.99

01:28:38.000 Well, I mean, most of the fish that we're eating, I think 54% is farm-raised. 0.97

01:28:44.000 Again, I just read it this morning in Los Angeles magazine.

01:28:47.000 But that's worse, right?

01:28:49.000 It's worse, yeah.

01:28:50.000 And, you know, the ecological damage it's doing is crazy.

01:28:54.000 The health consequences is crazy.

01:28:57.000 So the question is, then, what do we eat?

01:29:00.000 What about mollusks?

01:29:01.000 So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks.

01:29:06.000 They said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms than even plants.

01:29:12.000 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.

01:29:23.000 I heard that too.

01:29:25.000 We think of them as life forms, but so is broccoli.

01:29:28.000 That's a life form as well.

01:29:29.000 But there's actually more evidence that plants are intelligent than there is that mollusks are.

01:29:38.000 Mollusks are an incredibly ancient life form.

01:29:42.000 But then again, don't you get some sort of mercury poisoning from them as well?

01:29:47.000 Well, they're on the bottom, right, usually, and they're filtering, so you're getting whatever toxins there are.

01:29:54.000 I'm not going to say that molluscs are poison.

01:29:56.000 I just wouldn't eat it.

01:29:58.000 I'm going a completely different direction, but I've heard that before, that molluscs are— You can farm them, too, right?

01:30:05.000 Mm-hmm.

01:30:05.000 You can.

01:30:06.000 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.

01:30:21.000 And they just eat the muscle that holds all the organs and stuff on.

01:30:26.000 When I said, oh, in America, we eat the whole oyster, they're like, what?

01:30:30.000 Because the muscle tastes like fish flesh.

01:30:34.000 It's actually pretty good.

01:30:36.000 But the idea that we're eating all those other filtered organs and stuff, I just don't know.

01:30:42.000 But you don't know.

01:30:44.000 I don't know.

01:30:46.000 Has anybody come up with any sort of comprehensive plan or anything that makes sense where they can viably repopulate the ocean?

01:30:58.000 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,

01:31:15.000 or is it even impossible?

01:31:16.000 I think it's impossible, the scale of what's going on right now.

01:31:20.000 You know, when I was in Japan, they were saying that, oh, we used to go out all, you know, we could fill up a boat in a day.

01:31:27.000 Now it's eight days.

01:31:29.000 Then we have to go out 30 and we're competing with the Koreans, the Chinese, the Taiwanese.

01:31:36.000 And everybody's just going gangbusters.

01:31:39.000 And we're using military gear, sonar, to catch things at this unprecedented rate.

01:31:44.000 It's not sustainable.

01:31:46.000 I personally don't believe that fishing, to feeding this planet currently, you can do it with fish.

01:31:54.000 I don't think you can do it with...

01:31:55.000 And we know...

01:31:58.000 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.

01:32:07.000 I think it's going to be, you know, 10 or 12 years, but I think we're headed that direction.

01:32:11.000 And people, I think what you're seeing now is that there's a direction towards, you know, people want to eat healthier.

01:32:17.000 They want to eat sustainable.

01:32:19.000 And I know you're a hunter.

01:32:20.000 I mean, I was a hunter, too.

01:32:21.000 I hunted fish.

01:32:22.000 And, you know, I understand, like, when you come back, You come back with the goods.

01:32:27.000 You come back with an animal and you're feeding your family, you're feeding your friends.

01:32:31.000 You feel like the man.

01:32:32.000 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.

01:32:42.000 And I know that happened when I was a fisherman.

01:32:45.000 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.

01:32:53.000 But we can't do it with wild fish.

01:32:56.000 You know, with 4% of the biomass being wild animals now, and the rest of it being...

01:33:00.000 It's not sustainable.

01:33:02.000 And I wish it was, because...

01:33:09.000 There's something we lost with that.

01:33:11.000 But we have to transition.

01:33:13.000 We're at that period right now where we have to figure out how do you feed a planet?

01:33:18.000 That's the real problem, right?

01:33:20.000 And not just how do you feed a planet.

01:33:21.000 How do you feed a planet that may double its population in the next 50 years?

01:33:26.000 Yeah, well, they're talking 10 billion by 2050, and we're already at a point where, you know, we're at the...

01:33:33.000 Yeah, so 20 years past that, it might really be double.

01:33:36.000 It might be 15 million, or excuse me, billion people.

01:33:40.000 That's crazy.

01:33:41.000 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.

01:33:48.000 So what are we going to eat?

01:33:50.000 I think the way to do it is drifting more towards plants.

01:33:57.000 Last week I was in Loma Linda, California.

01:34:00.000 You know where that's at.

01:34:01.000 You've heard about one of the blue zones?

01:34:03.000 Yeah.

01:34:04.000 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.

01:34:18.000 So I was out there last week at the Brain Health and Alzheimer Clinic.

01:34:23.000 And there's two researchers that started one.

01:34:25.000 There wasn't one for miles around.

01:34:27.000 And they opened it.

01:34:28.000 One out of three people in America in the next 10 years are going to be affected by Alzheimer's.

01:34:33.000 They're going to have it.

01:34:34.000 Their mate's going to have it. 1.00

01:34:35.000 They're going to be taking care of somebody that has it, their parents.

01:34:38.000 So it's going to overtake heart disease as our number one disease that we have.

01:34:42.000 They opened up the brain health clinic there, an Alzheimer's clinic, and nobody came.

01:34:47.000 Now, about half the population of Seventh-day Adventists are vegetarians by religion.

01:34:52.000 And you go to the grocery store, they don't sell meat.

01:34:55.000 They have milk.

01:34:56.000 They have cow's milk, but it's on the bottom shelf.

01:34:58.000 They just have a few things of it.

01:34:59.000 And to find people initially, they had to go to San Bernardino across the highway.

01:35:06.000 There's nothing geologically different between San Bernardino and Loma Linda.

01:35:13.000 They're drinking the same water, breathing the same air, but they have a different diet.

01:35:17.000 But they're living about 10 years longer than everybody else.

01:35:20.000 San Bernardino is one of the unhealthiest populations in America.

01:35:23.000 And on the other side of Highway 10, you have one of the healthiest populations in the entire world.

01:35:28.000 And they're living about 10 years on average longer.

01:35:30.000 They're doing other things too.

01:35:32.000 It's not just diet.

01:35:33.000 Well, it's a big factor, sleep.

01:35:35.000 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.

01:35:53.000 And it's really stark.

01:35:55.000 The numbers are pretty undisputable.

01:35:59.000 Yeah, well, I agree.

01:36:01.000 They have four principles, the Shurzai's, Dean and Aisha Shurzai.

01:36:06.000 Sleep is one of them, whole foods, plant-based diet, support, community support, and exercise.

01:36:14.000 Those are the big ones.

01:36:16.000 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.

01:36:26.000 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,

01:36:42.000 but they're not there.

01:36:43.000 So many of them are following that Seventh-day Adventist diet, which is vegetarian.

01:36:48.000 Yeah.

01:36:48.000 But when you're talking about San Bernardino, it's a very poor community, unfortunately.

01:36:52.000 And I think you know as well as I do, a lot of people in poor communities eat terrible. 0.93

01:36:57.000 You 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. 1.00

01:37:05.000 Education is related definitely to brain health, unfortunately, and it has nothing to do that they're stupid. 0.99

01:37:10.000 It's just that you're right, they're not eating as well. 0.99

01:37:14.000 You know, the first McDonald's was in San Bernardino.

01:37:18.000 Was it really?

01:37:18.000 Yeah.

01:37:19.000 We went to the museum there, the McDonald's Museum.

01:37:21.000 They have a McDonald's Museum?

01:37:23.000 Do they have all the Ronald McDonald's from the beginning to the end?

01:37:26.000 Everything, yeah.

01:37:28.000 Yeah, so they've been really good about keeping fast food out of Loma Linda.

01:37:35.000 Isn't there giant concerns even with large-scale agriculture?

01:37:38.000 When you're talking about monocrops and growing things for 15 billion people, you're going to need gigantic swaths of land.

01:37:45.000 It's going to displace a lot of wildlife. 0.94

01:37:46.000 You're going to have a lot of different chemicals that get released into the ground unless you're doing...

01:37:53.000 We're good to go.

01:38:21.000 Right, but if you look at the amount of crops that are out there, most land is being used to grow crops to feed animals.

01:38:30.000 Well, sort of.

01:38:31.000 A lot of it's being used to feed animals.

01:38:33.000 A lot of it's being used for corn syrup and a lot of different...

01:38:37.000 And we can agree on that.

01:38:38.000 Get rid of it.

01:38:39.000 Yeah, I mean, you've seen King Corn, right?

01:38:42.000 Yeah. 0.54

01:38:42.000 That's pretty fucking crazy when they check your DNA and they find out how much of your DNA is corn-based. 0.54

01:38:48.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:38:48.000 And you're like, what? 0.97

01:38:50.000 Like, what is going on?

01:38:51.000 Or how much of your cellular structure is corn-based?

01:38:54.000 It's like, how much corn is in your diet?

01:38:56.000 And then you go through the supermarket and go and pick up box after box and read how much corn is in there.

01:39:02.000 Corn starch, corn syrup, different proteins that they've extracted from corn.

01:39:08.000 Well, let me ask you, how do you think, you know, if we have to feed 10, 15 billion people in the future, how do you think?

01:39:14.000 Real question.

01:39:16.000 We should be feeding the population.

01:39:17.000 That's a good question.

01:39:18.000 It's a very good question. 1.00

01:39:19.000 I have hope for this fake meat shit. 0.99

01:39:22.000 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. 0.99

01:39:34.000 I am not a fan of factory farming.

01:39:36.000 It's the reason why I got into hunting in the first place.

01:39:38.000 I saw a lot of those PETA documentaries. 0.99

01:39:41.000 I just didn't want to have any part of any of that shit. 0.99

01:39:44.000 I know there are ethical ranchers that raise their animals grass-fed and they let them roam. 0.99

01:39:53.000 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.

01:40:06.000 It's the polar opposite of factory farming. 0.98

01:40:09.000 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. 0.98

01:40:31.000 And then they spray it on the crops. 0.91

01:40:32.000 Well, I don't know if they spray that on the crops, but it leaks into the ground. 0.99

01:40:36.000 They spray the pig and shit on the... 0.99

01:40:38.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

01:40:39.000 Well, look, all that stuff is wrong.

01:40:41.000 I mean, all of it's wrong.

01:40:42.000 I mean, whether chickens raising chickens like that, or cows like that, or pigs like that.

01:40:46.000 And there's a reason why they have these ag-gag laws. 0.88

01:40:49.000 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.

01:40:58.000 Those ag-gag laws, agricultural gag laws, they keep people from divulging the horrors of these factory farms. 1.00

01:41:06.000 And there's got to be a way to stop those laws, first of all.

01:41:12.000 These places should be transparent.

01:41:14.000 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.

01:41:22.000 It's not necessary. 0.99

01:41:23.000 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. 0.96

01:41:32.000 Yeah, I mean, that saying of slaughterhouses had glass walls. 0.98

01:41:37.000 Yes.

01:41:37.000 Right.

01:41:38.000 Yeah.

01:41:39.000 Yeah.

01:41:39.000 But going back to it, though, I mean, so how do you – so lab meat, you think, would be the – I think lab meat has real potential.

01:41:46.000 The same way cell phones used to cost, you know, $1,000.

01:41:52.000 Well, more than that.

01:41:53.000 Like, what was – What was one of those big Motorola bricks?

01:41:57.000 Remember those things that Gordon Gekko had on Wall Street?

01:42:01.000 They were really expensive.

01:42:03.000 When he was walking down the beach with that thing, like, wow, that guy's a baller.

01:42:06.000 He's got a phone.

01:42:06.000 He's just walking with no cord.

01:42:08.000 Now everyone has a phone.

01:42:10.000 I was in Brazil, and these people were walking around.

01:42:13.000 They had very little money, but they all had phones.

01:42:17.000 Cell phones have made their way throughout virtually all of the world.

01:42:21.000 How much?

01:42:22.000 Four grand.

01:42:22.000 Four grand?

01:42:24.000 So four grand in 82 is probably what today?

01:42:26.000 20?

01:42:27.000 Probably like 20, right?

01:42:28.000 Sure.

01:42:29.000 Yeah, it's a lot.

01:42:30.000 Let's just say it's a lot.

01:42:32.000 Even if it's four grand. 0.99

01:42:34.000 Imagine if a fucking iPhone was four grand, people would be going crazy. 0.99

01:42:36.000 The new one's almost two grand and everybody's going crazy. 0.98

01:42:40.000 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,

01:42:59.000 this is beef.

01:43:00.000 This is like real beef.

01:43:01.000 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.

01:43:09.000 I mean, I think that's possible.

01:43:10.000 Yeah, no, I think it is too.

01:43:12.000 I've talked to some of the people that are working on that and when you look at how fast Cells can reproduce.

01:43:20.000 It's just a matter of scale and getting the right texture and taste.

01:43:26.000 I'm under no illusion that what I do is available to everybody.

01:43:30.000 I go hunting in the mountains.

01:43:32.000 Most people don't want to do that.

01:43:34.000 And I do it with a bow and arrow.

01:43:36.000 Most people don't want to learn how to do that.

01:43:38.000 They don't have it in them.

01:43:39.000 They don't want it.

01:43:40.000 It's not interesting.

01:43:42.000 To me, if I shoot one elk, that is 400 pounds of meat.

01:43:48.000 One life feeds me for a year.

01:43:50.000 And I feed my friends.

01:43:52.000 I feed a lot of people.

01:43:53.000 I give elk meat out to a bunch of people.

01:43:56.000 I'm under no illusion that everyone can do that.

01:43:59.000 But everyone can't do most of the things that I do.

01:44:02.000 I just do it because it makes me feel better than going and getting something that's factory farmed.

01:44:07.000 If I saw what they did to chickens and I knew that my chicken had come from these horrific environments and I ate that, I'd feel sick.

01:44:16.000 And so that's why I became a hunter in the first place.

01:44:20.000 Yeah, well that's what we concern ourselves.

01:44:23.000 You and I can eat.

01:44:26.000 You're probably better than me, but I can eat how I want to eat.

01:44:30.000 But doesn't that sound weird?

01:44:31.000 You say I eat better than you?

01:44:33.000 No, you can afford more is what I'm saying.

01:44:35.000 Is that what it is?

01:44:36.000 But I'm telling you, I'm getting my meat from the woods.

01:44:39.000 Well, I'm not saying better.

01:44:42.000 I'm saying that you could eat how you want.

01:44:45.000 You easier than me.

01:44:48.000 Financially.

01:44:49.000 I've seen what you have around here.

01:44:51.000 Nice little cozy man den you have down here.

01:44:54.000 But, boys, you should see what's out there.

01:44:56.000 It's like the ultimate caveman.

01:45:00.000 Not caveman, but man cave.

01:45:03.000 Ultimate caveman would be a giant Neanderthal.

01:45:09.000 But yeah, it's the conversation between...

01:45:13.000 I mean, I have a gang of friends that are vegan and vegetarian.

01:45:16.000 One of my best friends is vegan, Ian Edwards.

01:45:19.000 I love him to death.

01:45:20.000 I don't...

01:45:22.000 I don't dispute that we're in a conundrum and we're in a terrible situation as a civilization.

01:45:30.000 We've certainly overpopulated the planet in many ways.

01:45:34.000 And we've certainly allowed something to take root in our society that I think is disgusting.

01:45:40.000 That's factory farming of animals.

01:45:42.000 There's something...

01:45:45.000 Vile about it, undeniably vile.

01:45:47.000 And there's a reason why people are prosecuted for exposing what makes everybody sick. 0.99

01:45:53.000 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. 0.99

01:46:05.000 Right. 0.99

01:46:06.000 Right?

01:46:06.000 It's when you see these people kicking these cows and when you see them alive, like, kosher.

01:46:13.000 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. 0.77

01:46:27.000 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. 0.95

01:46:36.000 Yeah, I think the King Amendment, I believe what it is, is from Iowa, or at least it was.

01:46:41.000 I'm not sure if he's still even in power there.

01:46:45.000 But...

01:46:47.000 Yeah, but if people saw how milk is done, I know you're a proponent of milk, but if you saw that...

01:46:55.000 Not really.

01:46:55.000 I don't drink it.

01:46:57.000 If I drink four glasses of milk a year, it's a lot.

01:47:02.000 Yeah, I don't think it's good for you.

01:47:03.000 I think raw milk is probably better for you, but every time I drink a glass of milk, I always feel gross.

01:47:09.000 I feel like the homogenization and pasteurization of milk, you're breaking down all the enzymes and boiling it.

01:47:15.000 What you get is some weird protein that your body doesn't exactly know how to process correctly.

01:47:20.000 There's a reason why so many people get horrible gas off of it.

01:47:24.000 Yeah, so 65% of the population of the world is lactose intolerant.

01:47:27.000 A nine-year-old, she's lactose intolerant.

01:47:29.000 She can't have anything with cheese or milk or anything.

01:47:31.000 I didn't figure that out until I was like 50 that it was lactose intolerant.

01:47:35.000 I mean, really.

01:47:36.000 I mean, I should have figured it out, but I just thought it was normal.

01:47:40.000 I think my daughter gets it from me.

01:47:41.000 I've never... 0.99

01:47:42.000 I mean, I can eat ice cream and I'm okay, but I always feel like shit. 0.87

01:47:46.000 It never makes me feel good afterwards. 0.98

01:47:48.000 I always feel like, ugh.

01:47:49.000 Like, I'll have cookies and milk, and then I'll be like, ugh.

01:47:53.000 It's just a weird...

01:47:54.000 My body's like, what is this?

01:47:57.000 However, I've had raw milk and I haven't had any problems with it.

01:48:01.000 I just think it's...

01:48:03.000 There's a big problem with acquiring raw milk.

01:48:08.000 It's very hard to get.

01:48:10.000 But I think if people are going to drink milk at all, that's how we're supposed to drink it.

01:48:14.000 I don't think we're supposed to be...

01:48:15.000 Boiling that stuff.

01:48:17.000 And then, you know, it comes out, it's dead. 0.99

01:48:20.000 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. 0.99

01:48:27.000 Like, how is that? 0.98

01:48:28.000 And you look at the date, the date is like a month. 0.97

01:48:31.000 Like, how the fuck is this going to stay good for a month? 0.99

01:48:33.000 Because they boil the shit out of it. 0.99

01:48:35.000 And look, if you want to serve milk to... 0.99

01:48:40.000 300 million people, that's how you have to do it.

01:48:43.000 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.

01:48:51.000 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

01:49:21.000 had raw milk.

01:49:23.000 I haven't had it in years.

01:49:24.000 But the last time I had raw milk, I was like, this just tastes better.

01:49:28.000 It tastes like when you drink it, it feels like your body is like, oh, I know what this is. 0.99

01:49:32.000 Whereas like a regular glass of milk, my body's like, what in the fuck? 0.99

01:49:36.000 And then you got to think about how they get it, right? 0.99

01:49:40.000 Like how they keep these cows pregnant and the process of acquiring billions of gallons of milk for millions and millions of people.

01:49:49.000 It's kind of gross.

01:49:51.000 Not even kinda.

01:49:53.000 I agree.

01:49:54.000 Yeah.

01:49:55.000 But however, almond milk's disgusting. 1.00

01:49:57.000 You don't drink that shit, do you? 1.00

01:49:58.000 Why do you say that? 1.00

01:49:58.000 It's just gross. 1.00

01:50:00.000 It's just not milk, man. 0.99

01:50:01.000 Almonds don't have tits. 1.00

01:50:03.000 Like, what are you doing to that water? 0.99

01:50:04.000 You know, just have a glass of water or drink some juice or something.

01:50:08.000 I mean, it's just got to be some benefit.

01:50:10.000 I mean, almonds are good for you, right?

01:50:12.000 But almonds are a real problem in California, ecologically, because of the amount of water they use.

01:50:16.000 I totally agree.

01:50:17.000 Yeah.

01:50:19.000 Soy milk's sort of my milk of choice, or oat milk.

01:50:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:50:23.000 Just drink water, man.

01:50:25.000 I agree.

01:50:26.000 I agree, but not out of plastic.

01:50:28.000 Okay, just hide this.

01:50:29.000 I know we have to do something about that.

01:50:31.000 We've been talking forever.

01:50:31.000 We're going to develop some sort of a system here.

01:50:36.000 What do you recommend for us?

01:50:38.000 Glass.

01:50:39.000 Right, but where should we get our water from?

01:50:41.000 Should we get filtered water or should we get spring water?

01:50:45.000 I think filtered water is probably good.

01:50:47.000 Like canned or boxed water.

01:50:49.000 That's a thing now.

01:50:50.000 Yeah, but they use this paper.

01:50:51.000 Yeah, you still get garbage.

01:50:55.000 We're working on a film on plastic pollution right now.

01:50:59.000 And we're trying to think, how do you...

01:51:03.000 It's a big problem.

01:51:04.000 Like, you look at the oceans here.

01:51:05.000 We've had Boyan Slott on, and we're going to have him on again.

01:51:08.000 He's the guy who's created that filter system.

01:51:10.000 Yeah, he came up to visit me, too, where I work.

01:51:13.000 He's got new ones for the rivers.

01:51:14.000 Have you seen the new ones that he's...

01:51:15.000 I saw that, yeah, a couple weeks ago, I think they mentioned something.

01:51:20.000 He's already got them working.

01:51:21.000 But here's the issue that I'm learning from.

01:51:26.000 There's this guy, Andrew Forrest, one of the wealthiest guys in Australia, told me that this isn't the problem.

01:51:37.000 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.

01:51:48.000 And it's not recyclable.

01:51:51.000 Rivers is where the plastic's coming from?

01:51:53.000 What do you mean?

01:51:54.000 There's about 10 to 12 rivers over in Southeast Asia that generate most of the plastic that you see.

01:52:01.000 How in the river?

01:52:04.000 In Indonesia, for instance, you have 17,000 islands, but only 10 recycling plants, right?

01:52:10.000 Places to do it.

01:52:12.000 There's nowhere to throw it, so they throw it in the...

01:52:17.000 Oh, you're saying the garbage is in these rivers.

01:52:20.000 I'm not saying the creation of the plastic.

01:52:23.000 The creation of the plastic comes from America and it comes from Europe and it comes from Saudi Arabia.

01:52:26.000 Right, right.

01:52:27.000 I see what you're saying.

01:52:30.000 But the volume, most of the volume is coming from these 10 to 12 rivers in Southeast Asia.

01:52:36.000 You have to make...

01:52:37.000 Plastic costs enough, first of all, that they can make it recyclable.

01:52:42.000 There's different ways to make polymers so that they can recycle it.

01:52:45.000 They just do it the cheapest way possible because they know it's not coming back.

01:52:48.000 So you have to put a tax on virgin plastic to make it valuable for people to be able to recycle it.

01:52:56.000 A great solution is hemp plastic.

01:52:58.000 It's biodegradable.

01:53:00.000 It comes from this plant.

01:53:02.000 I mean, you can make hemp plastic.

01:53:04.000 And we can grow it, and it's an easy crop to grow.

01:53:07.000 Is that scalable?

01:53:08.000 Yes.

01:53:08.000 Hemp is so weird, it doesn't even seem like it should be real.

01:53:12.000 I mean, it really doesn't.

01:53:13.000 It's an insane plant.

01:53:16.000 You can make hempcrete out of it, which is far better than any building material we currently use.

01:53:23.000 It's far more resistant to flame.

01:53:26.000 There's just so many positive benefits of it in terms of insulation.

01:53:30.000 The insulation factor is better than wood or plywood.

01:53:34.000 It's really lightweight but incredibly strong.

01:53:36.000 Have you ever grabbed a thick hemp stalk?

01:53:39.000 Have you ever held onto one?

01:53:40.000 No.

01:53:40.000 It doesn't seem real.

01:53:42.000 It's hard like this oak, but yet it's light like balsa wood.

01:53:46.000 It's so strange, it feels like it comes from another planet.

01:53:49.000 Wow.

01:53:49.000 Hemp is an extraordinary planet.

01:53:52.000 It's the most extraordinary plant we have.

01:53:54.000 First of all, it has all the essential amino acids.

01:53:56.000 I love hemp protein.

01:53:57.000 It's one of my favorite proteins.

01:53:59.000 We sell it on it.

01:54:00.000 We sell hemp protein.

01:54:01.000 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.

01:54:14.000 It's very easy for your body to digest and process.

01:54:17.000 You can make oil out of it that they used to use for heating lamps.

01:54:22.000 You can cook your food in it.

01:54:24.000 I mean, there's so many different things you can do with hemp.

01:54:26.000 You can make clothing.

01:54:27.000 You can make far more durable cloth.

01:54:30.000 Far more durable.

01:54:30.000 The paper is far superior.

01:54:32.000 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.

01:54:44.000 Because on the cover of Popular Science magazine, they had come out with a decorticator.

01:54:48.000 A decorticator was a way in the 1930s they devised to effectively process hemp fiber.

01:54:54.000 Because for years, they used to use slaves to process hemp.

01:54:58.000 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.

01:55:07.000 Well, they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s.

01:55:10.000 It was on the Well, William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications and newspapers.

01:55:19.000 He also owned these huge forests that they were making paper with.

01:55:23.000 So he, along with Harry Anslinger and using his newspapers, demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp.

01:55:34.000 Yes. 1.00

01:55:34.000 He funded all those fucking crazy marijuana movies, Reefer Madness, all that shit. 1.00

01:55:40.000 That was all him. 1.00

01:55:41.000 They came up with these stories that these Mexicans and black men were taking this new drug called marijuana. 0.97

01:55:50.000 Marijuana wasn't even a term for cannabis. 0.97

01:55:53.000 Marijuana was a term for a wild tobacco.

01:55:56.000 So they came up with this new name.

01:55:58.000 They called it this drug.

01:56:00.000 Everybody freaked out because they didn't have the internet back then.

01:56:02.000 No one had access to real information other than Hearst newspapers, Hearst Publications. 0.94

01:56:07.000 So he just fucking out and out lied and made up these crazy stories and funded these documentaries. 0.97

01:56:12.000 And then marijuana became illegal and still is to this day. 0.99

01:56:17.000 And you still have knuckleheads like Joe Biden literally yesterday saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug.

01:56:24.000 Forget about marijuana. 0.56

01:56:26.000 Imagine if it wasn't psychoactive at all. 1.00

01:56:28.000 The idea that hemp should be illegal until really recently in this country is a fucking travesty. 1.00

01:56:35.000 It's horrific. 0.99

01:56:36.000 It's food, it's clothes, it's paper.

01:56:40.000 It doesn't even make sense that it could be so many things.

01:56:42.000 It's literally like one of the most positive plants the Earth's ever known.

01:56:49.000 Okay, I'll vote for it.

01:56:51.000 Dude, you should do a national documentary on that.

01:56:53.000 I think he got to Joe Biden. 1.00

01:56:54.000 Ah, Joe, fuck you! 1.00

01:56:56.000 Too late! 1.00

01:56:57.000 There's a lot to talk on here where I stand.

01:56:59.000 Oh, one hour ago. 0.99

01:57:00.000 I put my fucking Instagram post out this morning. 0.99

01:57:03.000 And they did this one. 0.99

01:57:04.000 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.

01:57:17.000 And the freedom to...

01:57:20.000 To do whatever you want with your body that is, especially with marijuana, that's not poisonous.

01:57:26.000 No one's died of it ever.

01:57:27.000 Ever.

01:57:27.000 In the history of the human race, there's never been a single overdose from marijuana.

01:57:32.000 And this knucklehead saying that it's a gateway drug.

01:57:34.000 No, pain is a gateway drug. 0.94

01:57:37.000 Trauma is a gateway drug.

01:57:38.000 Abuse is a gateway to drugs.

01:57:41.000 It's not marijuana.

01:57:42.000 Marijuana is just a time-honored psychedelic substance that people have been enjoying for thousands and thousands of years.

01:57:50.000 They should have run for Congress. 1.00

01:57:51.000 Fuck that. 1.00

01:57:51.000 I'm not running for anything. 1.00

01:57:52.000 I'm not even running for my neighborhoods, whatever the hell it is.

01:57:56.000 I just saw a poster over there.

01:57:58.000 Did he run for mayor?

01:57:59.000 Was that a joke?

01:58:01.000 What poster?

01:58:02.000 I thought that was a poster.

01:58:03.000 Oh, it's 100% a joke.

01:58:04.000 Look, I'm not ever running for anything, ever.

01:58:06.000 Well, it was right next to Hunter Thompson for mayor, and I thought, well, maybe there was some truth to it.

01:58:11.000 No, it was Hunter Thompson for sheriff, but there was nothing there for me.

01:58:13.000 Is there anything for me?

01:58:14.000 No, it's just Hunter Thompson.

01:58:16.000 That's not me.

01:58:17.000 Look, I'm not running for anything, ever.

01:58:18.000 I have three jobs and three kids.

01:58:21.000 I'm busy, and I have a lot of hobbies.

01:58:22.000 Too many hobbies.

01:58:23.000 I'm trying to chip away at hobbies. 0.99

01:58:25.000 But if I can get Joe Biden to shut the fuck up, I'm very happy. 1.00

01:58:29.000 Crazy asshole. 1.00

01:58:30.000 There's so many people that smoke pot in this country. 1.00

01:58:32.000 He's so crazy. 1.00

01:58:33.000 For him to come out against that is so goddamn dumb. 1.00

01:58:37.000 How do you smoke pot on this show and still hold the conversation, though? 1.00

01:58:41.000 Let's see.

01:58:41.000 I'll smoke it with you right now.

01:58:42.000 No, no, no, no.

01:58:43.000 No, it's not hard.

01:58:45.000 Because I'm a stoner.

01:58:46.000 Because I'm a stoner.

01:58:48.000 I know how to do it, man.

01:58:49.000 I've been doing it forever.

01:58:50.000 Look, one of the things that I said in my Instagram post today, marijuana is not for everybody, and I think it should be used carefully. 0.99

01:58:56.000 Because, look, I've said a lot of dumb shit when I've been high. 1.00

01:58:59.000 I've thought a lot of dumb shit. 1.00

01:59:00.000 I've been paranoid. 0.99

01:59:02.000 It's not for everybody.

01:59:03.000 I think it should be treated cautiously.

01:59:05.000 But there's a lot of benefits to it.

01:59:06.000 I really firmly believe that it's made me a more sensitive person.

01:59:09.000 It's made me more...

01:59:11.000 Interested in community.

01:59:13.000 It's made me more aware of how important it is that we're all connected and that we all converse with each other in a calm way.

01:59:19.000 It's made me feel better about happy communication with people.

01:59:24.000 It's made me more affectionate.

01:59:26.000 It's made me more compassionate, more kind.

01:59:28.000 It makes me more aware.

01:59:30.000 The feeling of paranoia, one of the things that that paranoia is, is just an overall expanding of your awareness of your vulnerability.

01:59:37.000 Of all the things you've done, because you had a lot of hats in your career, do you find this the most satisfying to you with the podcast?

01:59:45.000 Yeah.

01:59:46.000 Mom made this in stand-up.

01:59:47.000 I mean, stand-up is more complicated, right?

01:59:50.000 Because there's got to be an end result.

01:59:51.000 It has to be funny.

01:59:52.000 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.

02:00:12.000 This isn't just something that you feel better if you get more sleep.

02:00:15.000 No, it's like long-term for your life.

02:00:18.000 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?

02:00:26.000 So the next best thing is reading a book.

02:00:28.000 Well, the next best thing is me having a person who wrote that book on a podcast to talk about it.

02:00:34.000 And maybe not even the next best thing.

02:00:35.000 It might be the best best thing.

02:00:36.000 Because it's absorbable.

02:00:39.000 It's a conversation with people.

02:00:40.000 And to me, I've gotten a fantastic education from it.

02:00:45.000 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...

02:01:01.000 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.

02:01:16.000 And it's just, to me, it's something that was completely unexpected.

02:01:21.000 I didn't ever plan on doing this.

02:01:23.000 I just started doing it and then it just kind of became what it is now.

02:01:27.000 So it's very satisfying that people like it.

02:01:29.000 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.

02:01:34.000 It's changed their perspective.

02:01:36.000 So many people said, you know, once I started, I was going to be on the show.

02:01:40.000 They said, oh, we got to see this podcast.

02:01:42.000 I spent two weeks.

02:01:44.000 That was my day job, listening to interviews that you've done.

02:01:49.000 I just felt totally captivated and envious of the position that you're in to be able to have people and talk about a wide range of stuff.

02:01:57.000 When I do a film, it's so targeted that I'm needing them to fill in a blank.

02:02:04.000 I need two or three minutes, and I might talk as long.

02:02:08.000 But, you know, I've got this list of, a shopping list of things I need to cover, and here you just have a conversation.

02:02:16.000 It's a lot different, and it seems like a lot more fun.

02:02:20.000 It's a lot more fun.

02:02:21.000 Like, when you said at the beginning of this, like, what kind of research have you done to prepare for this?

02:02:24.000 I'm like, fortunately, I get to pick who I talk to.

02:02:28.000 And for you, I mean, I knew that you had directed The Cove, and...

02:02:35.000 The subject of dolphins has been...

02:02:38.000 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. 0.57

02:02:52.000 They were playing with us, and we were yelling, like, yay! 0.73

02:02:54.000 And they would jump out of the water and do flips for you.

02:02:56.000 They were putting on a show, and I remember having this thought... 0.98

02:03:02.000 Like, holy shit, they're playing with us. 0.99

02:03:03.000 These are these wild creatures and they're having fun with us. 0.99

02:03:06.000 And then I started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication.

02:03:09.000 I became obsessed with dolphins because of this one...

02:03:13.000 I mean, I had been fascinated by them before, but I became truly obsessed.

02:03:17.000 And this was...

02:03:19.000 This experience was more than ten years ago.

02:03:24.000 And since then, I've just...

02:03:26.000 I've been overwhelmed and also...

02:03:31.000 Massively disheartened by films like yours and by seeing SeaWorld and by seeing what was going on in Marineland with my friend Phil.

02:03:42.000 I've had him on a bunch of times to talk about his lawsuits.

02:03:45.000 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.

02:03:52.000 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.

02:03:58.000 And he won't.

02:03:59.000 He won't.

02:04:00.000 I mean, he was on the inside.

02:04:02.000 He was a trainer.

02:04:02.000 And all that stuff.

02:04:03.000 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.

02:04:13.000 Well, I appreciate it.

02:04:15.000 Yeah.

02:04:15.000 I mean, you know, swimming with dolphins in the wild, there was a trigger to memory over in Rangaroa.

02:04:22.000 I was with our team and there was three groups of resident dolphins.

02:04:26.000 So they're hanging out there all the time.

02:04:27.000 You get to recognize them.

02:04:28.000 And we were playing with them.

02:04:29.000 And the more you play with them, the more you can spin around, the more excited they get.

02:04:35.000 Yeah.

02:04:36.000 And they could only do it for so long.

02:04:37.000 And I remember once that we were doing it, and we finally, we had scooters.

02:04:41.000 And we thought, well, the more, so a dolphin looks at you, and you can't.

02:04:46.000 You look like you're, like, in a wheelchair. 0.99

02:04:49.000 Not even.

02:04:51.000 Someone in a wheelchair can get around pretty good.

02:04:54.000 But, you know, in the water, we just look like, you know, we're just pitiful.

02:04:57.000 And so they can only be entertained so long.

02:04:59.000 But the scooters, we figured we could engage them a lot longer.

02:05:02.000 And then all of a sudden this group just took off.

02:05:04.000 And you're let down because you're high from the experience of being with them in the wild.

02:05:09.000 And they took off and we saw that there was about an 18 foot long hammerhead and they were taking turns ramming it away from us.

02:05:16.000 Wow!

02:05:17.000 Yeah, so it was like not only were they playing with us, they were protecting us.

02:05:21.000 Wow, that must have been wild, though, seeing an 18-foot-long hammerhead. 1.00

02:05:24.000 Holy shit! 0.99

02:05:25.000 Yeah, because they disappeared into the blue, and then we could see them ramming this thing. 0.99

02:05:30.000 The dolphins were big.

02:05:32.000 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.

02:05:41.000 Wow, that's wild.

02:05:44.000 That is wild.

02:05:45.000 Yeah.

02:05:46.000 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.

02:05:55.000 Oh man, my son does that with drones.

02:05:56.000 He goes out in his kayak and films them.

02:05:59.000 My friend Peter, Peter Atiyah, he's done a bunch of crazy endurance things.

02:06:04.000 And one of the things he did, he swam to all of the islands in Hawaii.

02:06:10.000 And to prepare for this, he had to do a lot of swimming.

02:06:15.000 He lives in San Diego and swimming in the coast out there.

02:06:17.000 And he was swimming literally, what did he say, like a couple days after that guy got bit in half?

02:06:23.000 Oh my god.

02:06:24.000 Yeah, I think it was just...

02:06:26.000 He wasn't scared of it.

02:06:27.000 You know, he wasn't scared of it.

02:06:28.000 I think it might have been the next day.

02:06:29.000 Well, I think he was a little freaked out, but it was within a few days of one of the guys who got bit in half down in San Diego.

02:06:38.000 When did this happen?

02:06:40.000 The San Diego incident?

02:06:42.000 I want to say it was 10 years ago.

02:06:45.000 Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years ago.

02:06:47.000 And then there was one in Santa Barbara that happened about 4 years ago, 4 or 5 years ago.

02:06:52.000 Occasionally, they slip up.

02:06:54.000 Think a person's a seal or something.

02:06:56.000 Most of the time, I've dealt with a lot of sharks before.

02:07:01.000 You usually only get them around you if you're feeding them.

02:07:05.000 And that feels so horrible.

02:07:07.000 It's just so unnatural.

02:07:08.000 I won't do it anymore.

02:07:10.000 It's weird, right?

02:07:11.000 Yeah, it's just not.

02:07:15.000 I couldn't be around it.

02:07:16.000 There's some friends of mine that were feeding it.

02:07:19.000 They're on a feed, and I was about, I don't know, maybe 50 yards away.

02:07:24.000 And I thought, I just don't want to be part of it.

02:07:26.000 And I was just filming on the reef, and these silver tips came over.

02:07:30.000 And I don't know if they were excited by it.

02:07:32.000 I had a camera with the strobes on it, but they just came in.

02:07:35.000 They were attacking me.

02:07:37.000 And I had a rebreather.

02:07:38.000 I died with a rebreather, so you could scream.

02:07:40.000 So I started screaming as loud as I could through this thing.

02:07:42.000 But I was pushing them off, and they were, like, working together.

02:07:45.000 You could see it was, like, packed.

02:07:47.000 You know, like, one would go this way, and then one would go this way.

02:07:49.000 So I had these lights with these, like, octopus with four lights on it, and I could push them away.

02:07:55.000 But then one of the guys that we had brought over a tuna head and lured them away.

02:08:00.000 But they were just...

02:08:02.000 It was because they were excited by...

02:08:05.000 You know, the feeding over there.

02:08:07.000 So I don't even want to be in the water these days when people are feeding sharks.

02:08:10.000 Because it's no joke.

02:08:11.000 When you're under the water, it's not like you can just run up a tree.

02:08:15.000 There's no place to go.

02:08:16.000 There's nowhere to go.

02:08:16.000 You feel helpless.

02:08:17.000 And that's their natural environment.

02:08:18.000 And that's what they're there for.

02:08:19.000 They're there to clean up.

02:08:21.000 Anything that's weak, anything that's fucked up, any seal that gets caught slipping, they're there for population control.

02:08:30.000 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.

02:08:39.000 Boom! 0.99

02:08:39.000 This great white snatches a seal right in front of everybody. 0.99

02:08:43.000 Just thunderous explosion of blood and foam in the water.

02:08:48.000 Wow.

02:08:48.000 Whoa!

02:08:49.000 Yeah, it's a couple miles from where I live.

02:08:51.000 Yeah, I mean, they're magic.

02:08:54.000 That's a crazy beast.

02:08:56.000 I'm supposed to, somebody just invited me today to go out and be with great weights.

02:09:01.000 Not diving, just to watch.

02:09:03.000 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.

02:09:10.000 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.

02:09:20.000 It's like 20 feet long. 0.98

02:09:24.000 If you don't feed them, they're usually fairly...

02:09:27.000 If you're feeding them or if you're spear hunting, then they'll come near you. 1.00

02:09:31.000 They're dangerous for spear hunters, right? 0.99

02:09:32.000 Yeah.

02:09:33.000 What is this?

02:09:34.000 Record-breaking year for sharks off Cape Cod.

02:09:37.000 Yeah, apparently there's a lot of them out there now.

02:09:39.000 What do you think?

02:09:40.000 Is that because of a large number of marine mammals?

02:09:44.000 Or drones.

02:09:45.000 We can actually see them now, I think.

02:09:48.000 Yeah, right.

02:09:49.000 Yeah, that's true.

02:09:51.000 Yeah.

02:09:52.000 So listen, man, I want to thank you for coming here.

02:09:54.000 It was very cool to have this conversation.

02:09:57.000 And if people want to see The Cove, it's available on...

02:10:00.000 Boy, that's a good question.

02:10:02.000 I think you can still see it on iTunes.

02:10:05.000 You can buy it.

02:10:06.000 Is it on Netflix?

02:10:08.000 Not Netflix.

02:10:09.000 No, but iTunes, it's available there.

02:10:11.000 Amazon, can you get it on Amazon?

02:10:12.000 Yep.

02:10:13.000 Racing Extinction is a little bit harder.

02:10:15.000 I'm not sure where you can get that one, but I think that's better than The Cove in a lot of ways.

02:10:19.000 Okay, I'll check it out.

02:10:20.000 I'll watch it.

02:10:20.000 The COVID's pretty powerful, man.

02:10:22.000 Yeah, well, thanks.

02:10:23.000 Appreciate it.

02:10:23.000 Thank you.

02:10:23.000 My pleasure.

02:10:24.000 Thanks for being here.

02:10:25.000 Thanks for having me.

02:10:26.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 19, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos

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