#1388 - Louie Psihoyos

[0] All right, here we go.

[1] How are you?

[2] Good.

[3] Good to see you.

[4] Good to see you.

[5] How did you get involved with the Cove?

[6] What was the history behind that?

[7] I might give you the long version.

[8] Sure.

[9] There's a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD.

[10] I wanted a film.

[11] I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995.

[12] I think it came out.

[13] I was on the Information Revolution.

[14] And Jim Clark was sort of the, you know, the, Steve Jobs of my generation, right?

[15] And he, he don't want to be photographed.

[16] He was just too busy.

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

[18] And I went over to Amsterdam to film him.

[19] And we hit it off.

[20] And, you know, he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?

[21] And, you know, he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars.

[22] And I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer.

[23] And then we would travel all over the world, taking pictures for about the next 10 years.

[24] And we did mostly underwater photography.

[25] He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude.

[26] It was just a piece of work because Jim doesn't do anything half -ass.

[27] And every time we would go to a dive site and come back to it, you see this shifting baseline where there's less fish, there's less coral.

[28] In fact, he took me to the place in Papua New Guinea.

[29] to take it to the best place I've ever seen.

[30] It's in Papua New Guinea.

[31] We flew over there all day to get there, a day and a half to sail.

[32] We dive on the GPS coordinates, and it's rubble.

[33] It's completely gone.

[34] And this would happen not all the time, but a lot.

[35] We don't know what the insults were.

[36] It could have been dynamite fishing.

[37] Could have been anything.

[38] Who knows what it was.

[39] 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.

[40] We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary and sort of empowered by the success that he's had in business and seeing how he could change the world in his businesses.

[41] I said, how about you and I?

[42] He said, what do you mean?

[43] I said, we'll use your money in my eye and we'll make films.

[44] And the first, well, then I, you know, so I'm jumping careers at this stage.

[45] I'm going from being a fairly successful, you know, still photographer, really busy to a career where I had really no business doing it.

[46] I'd never really made a film before, not even really a short film.

[47] And so I'm, you know, nervous.

[48] I'm feeling sort of full of myself like, I'm going to start this great career.

[49] We're down to the Caribbean on a boat.

[50] And my kid starts with Jim on vacation with our families.

[51] And my kid starts playing on the beach with another kid.

[52] It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid.

[53] So Stephen comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. He made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, Silicon Graphics.

[54] And after I had Stephen alone for a few seconds, I said, do you have any advice for a first -time filmmaker?

[55] And he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals.

[56] Oh, great.

[57] And, you know, of course, the first film we did was the Cove.

[58] But at least these are, you're not, you don't have actors and special effects and boats and animals.

[59] It's just a part of the story.

[60] It's not like you're like with him, I think, what he's meaning like jaws.

[61] Exactly.

[62] Yeah, because, you know, you have to match shots and all that.

[63] It has its own set of, you know, trying to keep the horizon level on a boat.

[64] You don't want to give the audience seasickness.

[65] But, you know, I would add to that, like, don't do a movie where people want to kill you.

[66] Because when we did the Cove, it was, you know, it was exciting but dangerous work.

[67] Yes.

[68] Yeah.

[69] 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.

[70] and you know we were just talking about this before the podcast I think they are as intelligent as human beings I just think the difference is they can't change their environment they don't affect their environment the way we do they don't build houses they don't have cars they don't send emails so we don't appreciate what they are but when we look at the complexity of their brains the fact that their cerebral cortex is 40 % larger than a human beings they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even really totally understand we can peck out.

[71] I don't understand any of it.

[72] Yeah, I mean, we can peck out patterns.

[73] I mean, the scientists of, I mean, you know, I'm sure you're aware of John Lilly's work.

[74] Sure.

[75] John Lilly, I mean, for years, and did it in like really weird, unconventional ways.

[76] You try to take acid and communicate with dolphins.

[77] And it's one of the reasons why he created the sensory deprivation tank.

[78] We actually have one of those over here.

[79] And Lily, they were forever trying to figure out some way to figure out.

[80] 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.

[81] Yeah, I mean, they're obviously extremely complex, you know, animals.

[82] And if you, you know, judge them by our value, like people say, oh, they, you know, they didn't invent, you know, the car and they can't use computers.

[83] But, you know, intelligence can be seen as your ability to, you know, to live, exist in your environment.

[84] Yes.

[85] 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.

[86] They don't need anything in that world.

[87] They travel through three -dimensional space.

[88] I mean, it's incredible what they can do.

[89] Yeah.

[90] And, you know, like, well, you know, it's not just dolphins do it.

[91] I mean, look at, you know, butterflies, monarch butterflies.

[92] It takes three generations for them to go to, to migrate from Canada down to a six hectare area in northern Mexico.

[93] And they do that.

[94] somehow they find it, you know, every, every year.

[95] And, like, you know, I couldn't find the studio without an iPhone.

[96] Right.

[97] You know, so, I mean, what's going, we don't even have a clue on how most the world works.

[98] And, you know, we're, you know, the second film I worked on, a racing extinction, you know, that's about, we're going through a mass extinction right now.

[99] We're exterminating this stuff.

[100] These animals before we have a chance to even know how they operate, how, the ecosystem, how it even works.

[101] Right.

[102] A friend of mine said it's like, you know, we're burning down the life.

[103] Library of Congress before we have a chance to know what the books read you know yeah well that's what they did with the Library of Alexandria that's why we don't really totally understand how they built the pyramids um but what what disturbs me is this egocentric approach that we have towards towards marine life in particular because of the most intelligent versions of life that we we know other than ourselves that we for some reason universally have accepted up until really recently because of your film and because of blackfish and you know more awareness and sea shepherd and all these different organizations that are trying to let people know like you 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 like what's basically like water people they're like some form of super intelligent life that some cultures have just decided are just competitors in the fishing market yeah well i can't agree with you more i mean i think it's uh and i think that was the shock of the cove that you see our counterparts in the ocean and being treated like that and i think you know when you look at the way we we made that film it was you know we pretty much told the story what's going on in the oceans by looking at that cove and you know William blake said to see the world in a grain of sand but we could look at in that film we talk about overfishing and you know listen to the reason reason that they shouldn't be eaten besides that they're sentient and intelligent is also that they're toxic you know their meat is now their flesh is now some of the most toxic you know waste in the world when you bury them you know there's i think six six thousand times more PCBs than you know than the background in the ocean there is uh you know all the flesh that's been tested in in japan in the last 20 years has between five and five thousand times more mercury than allowed by japanese law if it was a fish but as a mammal of course so um it's insane just hearing that it's insane i tell you an interesting story i was when we were making that film there was a point where we went down to the iwc the international whaling commission meeting down in uh in in chili and we were trying to get an interview with some of the top people there from that run the the organization because you know whales dolphins are killing them in mass and we had the footage at that point and we were just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the International Wailant Commission and I think it was going from Houston to Santiago the plane was full I couldn't even sit next to the you know my partners on the my buddies and the on the film crew there's one empty seat next to me and you know they're waiting for somebody else to come from another flight and right before the the plane door closes in comes a Kura Nakamai he's the head of overseas fishing for Japan the head bull goose Lynn Looney and he sits down right next to me I'm looking at my buddies, you know, on the plane, I think, my God, if there is a God, you know, he has a good sense of humor.

[104] So he sits down next to me and I didn't want, you know, him to, like, find out who I was and then move.

[105] So I waited until dinner was served like an hour or two later.

[106] And I said, do you have any idea of who I am?

[107] He said, no. I said, I know who you are.

[108] I want to show you a film.

[109] Yeah.

[110] So we had a condensed version of it, you know, probably about 12 or 15 minutes of it at that point.

[111] And I showed it to him.

[112] And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals?

[113] When you know that their flesh is poisoned, you know, and there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this, you know, this flesh, you know, on the Japanese Ministry of Health Site.

[114] And he said, I'm not in charge of food safety.

[115] I'm in charge of food security.

[116] In other words, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences.

[117] All he has to, his job is just to provide enough.

[118] meat on the plate for the for Japanese people and it gives you an insight of how he's thinking you know he's in charge of I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California and he says 17 % of of the land area in Japan is only you know good enough for growing crops on or living on where we have to you know turn to the sea for food and at that point they were also caught skimming stealing about 200 ,000 times.

[119] tons of endangered bluefin tuna.

[120] This is over about a 20 -year period.

[121] Now, when you start talking about big numbers like that, I can't imagine.

[122] You know, it's hard to imagine it.

[123] But imagine, like...

[124] How are they stealing this tuna?

[125] Well, they have quotas, and they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries.

[126] Right.

[127] So it's not just like, everybody, every country has their allotment, and once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home.

[128] But the Japanese kept on getting more, so the Australians actually caught them, you 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 Skiji Market found out they had skimmed 200 ,000 tons.

[129] That's five big train cars, like trains full of, you know, endangered tuna, like not cars, but the whole trains, like 110 car trains, five of them full of.

[130] It's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna's endangered.

[131] You know, you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store.

[132] like tuna tuna is a weird one right because it's such a common food it's in cans you you see it at the sushi place you know what I'm saying like to hear that tuna's endangered most people like is tuna endangered like they're hearing this going is tuna endangered but when you talk to people that work at the fish market they'll very clearly tell you that there's a radical difference between the amount of tuna that was available 30 40 years ago versus now 10 years ago I mean we're down to blue thin tuna's particular There's down to about 90s, it's down to 4 % of their historical levels.

[133] That's incredible.

[134] Yeah.

[135] And there's no way to stop this.

[136] There's no, I mean, it seems like it's, everyone's waiting for someone else to do something, and during the meantime, everyone's just trying to make money.

[137] A lot of money.

[138] Unfortunately, it's sort of what happens with endangered species, the more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes.

[139] And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing.

[140] and you know but this is happening with all the fish docks I mean I probably gave our my I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet this is a Monterey seafood you know watches like like what what fish are sustainable and I've seen them you know go through the fish stocks so less and less you know we start at the big animals and we start to you know slowly go through all the fish stocks until like we're you know like McDonald's used to do halibut.

[141] Now it's Pollock, which is a very small, you know, white fish from Alaska.

[142] And now that's being, you know, hunted to extinction.

[143] So we're going through these fish stocks.

[144] It's, you know, that's shifting baseline where you're seeing, you know, each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one.

[145] That's what's going on.

[146] So I just stopped, you know, handing out seafood guys.

[147] And now I'm trying to sort of preempt it.

[148] So I don't think, you know, the big question is, there's seven and a half billion of us on this planet, soon to be 10, is there enough wild animals to feed us all?

[149] There isn't.

[150] You know, you look at the biomass of mammals on the planet, you know, between livestock and humans, we, we occupied 96 % of the biomass of mammals on the planet.

[151] Four percent are wild mammals.

[152] And then, you know, so we can't all be eating wild fish.

[153] You know, we, and think about that, you know, you never go out and say, look, let's get some land food.

[154] You say, you know, we've commodified, you know, sea animals.

[155] That is interesting, right?

[156] You don't say land food.

[157] That's That's a really good point.

[158] You know, they did at the turn of the century.

[159] I mean, during the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting in North America.

[160] A lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather.

[161] They were hunting, and they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to, like, incredibly low numbers.

[162] You know, elk to this day, I think, are only in 10 % of their original range that they were at.

[163] in the 1700s and that was all from market hunting from people just going out buying you know meat from these market hunters that have shot these things and they didn't really have refrigeration back then so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it and uh they got down to these incredibly low levels until teddy roosevelt and a lot of other people that were conservation minded realized like what was happening here and they put a stop to it all and then started uh enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the areas where they're extirpated.

[164] And now you see historic levels of, especially white -tailed deer.

[165] There's more white -tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed.

[166] Wow.

[167] So, but that's been successful.

[168] But it's also, that's a weird one too, because white -tail deer are almost a farm animal.

[169] Because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands.

[170] Like, they literally exist in fields and a lot of them live off of GMO crops.

[171] So it's very strange.

[172] So, like, I have a buddy mine, my friend, Doug, Doug Duren, who has this huge piece of land in Wisconsin.

[173] And he's like, the deer in my area are essentially eating these GMO corn.

[174] They're eating Monsanto corn.

[175] Like, this is so weird.

[176] Like, yeah, they're wild.

[177] But they're also kind of farm animals, you know, because they, and they exist in record numbers because they've got so much food to eat.

[178] And no predators.

[179] Yeah, I mean, the only predators they have there I mean, they have some wolves now, very few and some parts of the Driffless area in Wisconsin.

[180] I think they have some bears too and coyotes, a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns.

[181] 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.

[182] And a neighbor, I woke up one morning, the neighbor was like looking at this minivan and there's a big dent in the side and he's trying to figure out like how to get a dent because it was parked here all night and he found an antler in the bushes and he thought well what the how do how to how to and then the question is how does a deer run into it and then in the paper the next day there was a picture of a mountain lion on a house down the block sitting on a hot tub cover this is in the winter holding a deer with one you know in his mouth with one antler oh so it attacked it and slammed it into oh Jesus Christ I lost a dog in Boulder to mountain lion wow yeah I had a little dog who's part American Eskimo and part Pomeranian mountain line got it.

[183] The mountain line, I think, got our cat.

[184] Yeah, they'll get everything up there, man. If it's not them, it's a fox.

[185] You know, there's a lot of foxes up there to get things.

[186] But, God, it's beautiful.

[187] Boulder's incredible, incredible place.

[188] And you'll be driving down the road, and you see it's weird.

[189] Like, the deer in Boulder know that they're safe.

[190] So, like, we were looking at this house in Boulder, and we opened up the door to the backyard.

[191] And there was this enormous deer.

[192] just standing there staring at us and my wife thought it was fake i go no that's a real deer she's like what and then it just turns his head and starts moving around because it wasn't even remotely freaked out that there were people a stones throw away from it they're just so used to being around people it's weird yeah the neighbor i remember the neighbor where i was planning rose bushes on the front of their property and you know all proud and then i remember i was driving home like later on that day and there's such a deer coming to the snipping the tops of the roses oh they love it salad bar yeah many of people People have turned on deer because of the loss of their gardens, the roses especially.

[193] They love roses.

[194] Yeah, it's, um, 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?

[195] Because it, but I see, 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.

[196] But the ocean is so enormous.

[197] Like, how, has anybody come up with some sort of a repop?

[198] population plan?

[199] Sure.

[200] Sure.

[201] There's E .O. Wilson, I'm on the board of, the advisory board of his group.

[202] It's called the, you know, the half -life project.

[203] You know who E .L. Wilson is?

[204] No. Okay.

[205] E .O. Wilson is a Harvard professor.

[206] He has two pillars for his work in biology.

[207] He's wrote the book on biodiversity.

[208] He's considered the father of modern biodiversity.

[209] He's about getting right around 90 years old now.

[210] But looking at He would do things like go to an island And then pretty much exterminate everything on it And then try to figure out well At what rate do the animals come back And what's sustainable And he's figured out That to save 85 % of the wild animals in the planet You have to put aside half of it For them Half of the planet Half the planet Yeah So the ocean you would have to literally make half the ocean where people couldn't travel in it?

[211] Not travel and it just not exploit it.

[212] No fishing.

[213] Yeah, no fishing.

[214] And so Sylvia Earle is working on hot spots.

[215] You know, these they're called I think what she calls it's like a blue zones where you have a lot of biodiversity, you know, try to keep those away from fishing to exploitation.

[216] How do they do that though?

[217] Like how, I mean, it's You would have to get everybody on board, right?

[218] Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right?

[219] Yeah.

[220] Although the Japanese were fishing in an international marine sanctuary for decades, you know.

[221] So you have to, you know, it's really tough when you have organizations that really don't have any teeth to it.

[222] It's that the attitude that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population, you almost can sympathize with him, right?

[223] I mean, 100 plus million people in this tiny place, the size of California, and just pulling mostly fish out of the ocean.

[224] I mean, it's a crazy place to be in terms of his position.

[225] Yeah, I mean, I don't envy it at all.

[226] But, you know, what do you do?

[227] You don't slaughter dolphins.

[228] That's what you do.

[229] Yeah, well, we're endangered species.

[230] or, I mean, I don't know what's, you know, what's sustainable anymore.

[231] Is it possible to me?

[232] I know they've done this in some places outside of Hawaii where they've bred animals, fish rather, like sushi fish, like Hamachi.

[233] And they've had these pens set up.

[234] And then a lot of times a storm will come by, like a huge storm, and they break these pens.

[235] And then those fish get wild.

[236] Then people start catching them.

[237] 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.

[238] These are from eggs, you know, so this is when, like what they do at some places where they, they catch them, and then they put them in these pens, and they fatten them up.

[239] These were, they're making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs, and really hard to do, really skittish.

[240] And when I went there, they were shoveling, this is back when I ate fish.

[241] they were shoveling these macrills, like what I would feed my family with, like a family of four, they were shoveling it to the tuna.

[242] And I said, hold on a minute.

[243] Like, how many, how much, you know, mackerel does it take to make a pound of tuna?

[244] They said, oh, about seven, up until about 150 pounds.

[245] And after that, it takes 14 pounds.

[246] So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm -raised fish.

[247] I mean, this is like going to the bank and, you know, because you want a crisp $5 bill and say, Give me a, you know, here's a couple 20s.

[248] Wow.

[249] But that's, you know, if you look at, you know, what are they feeding, you know, a lot of these fish?

[250] They're feeding them, you know, parts of farm animals and fish, wild fish.

[251] Wow.

[252] And I was just reading this morning of Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish are fucked.

[253] And it has a, and it talks about like the fish that are raised and I don't know the data behind us.

[254] But they have eight times more pollutants in it than wild fish.

[255] Right.

[256] I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a...

[257] They're stationary.

[258] I think that's a big part of the problem.

[259] Yeah, apparently they don't taste as well.

[260] When we were in Hawaii recently, we went scuba diving and, you know, snorkeling.

[261] So you jump off the boat, you're swimming around.

[262] And you know what's really fucking weird about that is how few fish there are?

[263] Like when you're under there, you're like, you expect.

[264] you're going to dunk your head underwater with those goggles on you're going to see all this wildlife all these fish swimming around us no it's not much yeah you don't see much yeah there was a about 10 years ago i was down in the curvy and a friend was getting married and i took his daughter out to you know it at the time but it was her first time snorkeling and we were in an area i'd been to about 20 years before and there was nothing there was nothing there was just like a desert yeah and then i I heard her screaming through a snorkel, and I thought, what, what's wrong?

[265] And she was screaming because she saw a single orange tang.

[266] That was the only life form we saw there.

[267] Where I used to see clouds of schools of these orange and blue tang.

[268] Now there was nothing.

[269] And I thought, my God, she thinks that that's beautiful.

[270] And it is.

[271] It's just, you know, the single fish.

[272] But, you know, again, the shifting baseline, the generation before when I was there, it was probably looked like the land before time.

[273] These places I went to with Clark, you know, Raj.

[274] Raja 'an pot where you'd see, you know, if you go to the Caribbean, you might see 30 fish on a different species of fish in a dive, and Rajanpite, you can see 300.

[275] And it was just miraculous.

[276] And when you're taking pictures, you actually see more detail with the picture than you can with your eye can't comprehend it also.

[277] It's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we, you know, we lit like jewel boxes.

[278] You see how much life that there is there.

[279] But there was just unbelievable, stunning amounts of wildlife.

[280] but that's going on all over the world.

[281] And the Great Barrier Reef, you know, we lost over half the Great Barrier Reef in the last two years.

[282] It was never that good anyway, you know, 15 years ago, you know, after being to some of the best preserved places in the world that I've been to with Clark, we looked at the Great Barrier Reef and we'd be like, oh, my God, this is not that great.

[283] And now they've already, then they've lost half again.

[284] So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from, you know, Iowa, Wisconsin, or Boulder, that looks pretty good.

[285] But if you knew what came before that, you're seeing this, this, you know, salt against, you know, nature going on.

[286] What is taking out the Great Barrier Reef?

[287] We're heating the planet.

[288] We're heating the water.

[289] It's bleaching.

[290] So there's a couple things.

[291] There's multiple insults.

[292] You have runoff from fertilizer and pesticides from agriculture.

[293] You have the heating of the water, these events.

[294] When I say it's dying, it's dying, it's not like, oh, it's going to come back.

[295] Once the coral is dead, that's it.

[296] It's not going to come back.

[297] Does sunscreen play a part in that as well?

[298] Probably not there.

[299] It's fairly remote.

[300] Like in Hawaii it would or the Caribbean.

[301] But it's pretty remote.

[302] You have to get out several miles at the Great Barrier Reef.

[303] And the further north you go, the more isolated it is.

[304] And we went the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef, and it didn't look.

[305] It got slightly better as you got north.

[306] But there's only a couple boats there.

[307] It's not like you have, you know, a thousand.

[308] and hundreds of thousands of tourists out on the beach.

[309] And the other thing is acidification.

[310] The burning of fossil fuels is acidifying the oceans.

[311] It's now about 30 % more acidic than it was, you know, 50 years ago.

[312] And when you make, you know, there's more carbonic acid in the water.

[313] It makes it harder for the corals to survive.

[314] And it's basically you have these multiple insults going on at the same time.

[315] It's probably not just one thing.

[316] But there was a massive bleaching event two years in a row in the Great Barrier Reef.

[317] And so it's disappearing in our lifetime.

[318] That's, you know, but if you look at, we have a, we have a, uh, the last coral berry reef in America is down in Florida.

[319] And they have like semi -treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that lake you can swim through these, you know, I've been out there, you know, on these beaches.

[320] You could literally talk to somebody on the beach or scream to them on the beach.

[321] And they have this green water coming out of sewer pipes, uh, 200 meters away, 300 meters away.

[322] And so they're dumping, you know, semi -treated.

[323] sewage on the last reef in America.

[324] This is going on all around the world.

[325] And, you know, what we do, I don't know, but we, we, we, this is the last generation that we have that can actually do something about it because we're seeing it disappear in our watch.

[326] And that's what I'm trying to do is try to tell, not just create the awareness that something's going on, that we have to do something, but try to create action.

[327] Now, when you say semi -treated sewage, what do you mean by that?

[328] well that's that's what they reported so it's it it smells like sewage it smells like crap but if you if you go to the website it says it's just semi -treated i don't know they're not you know putting it through the aerators they're not going through the whole system but it smells like shit to me you know you can you come out of the water and it's like you know we all stink you smell like shit yeah this is this is at the by way this is on the hollywood uh fort lauderdale border this is not like legal i mean this is not a third world country like How is the United States allowing them to pump semi -treated sewage?

[329] It's a very good question.

[330] You know, there's so many things to work on.

[331] I know the activists down there working on this.

[332] They're just trying to get people to see it, to know that this is going on.

[333] And if, you know, I think they close the beaches down when, you know, when the wind shifts and it starts to push it on shore.

[334] 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.

[335] You wouldn't be going to Florida if you knew what was going on on that beach.

[336] We can make arguments about whether or not you should go to Florida all day long, and I'm with you 100%.

[337] But I just can't imagine that they would allow this.

[338] And that, I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi -treated?

[339] How much more would it cost to not do what they're doing?

[340] It's a good question.

[341] It's fucking insane.

[342] And then that they close the beach when the water shifts and the wind shifts and heads towards the shore?

[343] And people get sick, and they probably don't even know it.

[344] Jesus Christ.

[345] Yeah, I mean, you know, we'd be out there when we were at one outfall, that's what they call an outfall is basically a sewer pipe.

[346] You know, nothing's happening.

[347] Then all of a sudden you can start to hear this rumble, and then you see this green.

[348] Oh, God.

[349] And we're not talking like a little drain pipe, too.

[350] Like literally, you could swim through it, not stand in it, but it's big, like four feet, five feet tall.

[351] Now, why, I mean, why are they allowing?

[352] I mean, does anybody have an argument for why that's money?

[353] Money.

[354] Money.

[355] Because it costs money.

[356] It costs money to treat sewage.

[357] Jesus Christ, though.

[358] That's insane.

[359] Well, there's a lot of things like that going on right now.

[360] But it seems like someone should be held accountable for that.

[361] Like whatever cost benefit that they've decided is worth polluting the ocean by pumping sewage into it.

[362] Well, you know, it's a good question.

[363] 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.

[364] But try to, like, if you're going to talk to somebody about this, nobody wants to.

[365] to go on record to talk about it because it's really bad for tourism and it's not good for their political record.

[366] Is there video of it?

[367] Can we show video?

[368] You got something?

[369] Well, Jamie's got something here.

[370] I need to see it.

[371] It's in racing extinction.

[372] James was making sure this film I did.

[373] This is it was impossible beach.

[374] Oh, look at this.

[375] Oh, yeah.

[376] Look at that.

[377] There we go.

[378] Oh, that's so disgusting.

[379] Four months ago maybe.

[380] Wow.

[381] It is just a a gigantic pipe pumping green shit into the ocean.

[382] Why is it green, by the way?

[383] That's a good question.

[384] It could be the color under the water, too.

[385] But you said it was green when you saw it as well, right?

[386] Yeah.

[387] That's treated.

[388] That's it's treated.

[389] It's much better that way.

[390] Well, everything in the spectrum down there is a little bit blue or green.

[391] It's probably food coloring.

[392] Look at that.

[393] Fuck.

[394] What is that fish?

[395] Yeah, fish love it.

[396] Chewing on the sewage.

[397] They can, uh, They can eat crab.

[398] Oh, Christ.

[399] Yeah.

[400] And then the fishermen fish on it, too, when the outfall is going.

[401] Oh, Jesus Christ.

[402] To catch fish that are eating shit.

[403] Look at that.

[404] That is insane.

[405] Well, looking at this pipe, and it looks like a cloud of poison is being jettisoned out of this pipe and into the ocean.

[406] And the important part is if you came up, you would see people on the beach.

[407] Oh, God.

[408] I mean, we're not talking about, like, you know, miles out at sea.

[409] We're talking about.

[410] How in America?

[411] I mean, I know Florida's barely America.

[412] But how in America is that possible?

[413] It's a really good question.

[414] We try to, you know, we try to explore some of these issues, but trying to get somebody to talk on the record about this is really difficult.

[415] Is there any other part of the country that has something like that?

[416] Not that I know.

[417] Fucking Florida.

[418] Jesus Christ.

[419] I mean, of course it's Florida.

[420] I mean, is there a place that is so worthy of all the stereotypes like Florida is?

[421] It seems like every time you think you've had enough.

[422] Look at all these fish just swimming into the shit.

[423] That surface looks like it's boiling when all the water comes out.

[424] Oh, God, shit boil.

[425] Shit boil in Florida.

[426] And look at the ground.

[427] It's all just covered with algae.

[428] Well, that's kind of funny.

[429] What I'm saying is like, you know, we always think somebody else should be doing something about this.

[430] And, you know, that's why we do films.

[431] It's not just to create the awareness and, you know, to try to get something done about it.

[432] When we, you know, when we did the Cove, they were killing about 23 ,000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption.

[433] And I think the last time, I think 2017 was the last reports of how many they killed.

[434] I think it was 1610 total so, total so is like a 93 % drop since we did that film.

[435] Because every time that Rick O 'Berry, he's the guy that captured and trained the five female dolphins, collectively played the part of Flipper.

[436] Every time that we talked in the Japanese press, we try to use the word mercury because that's their Achilles heel.

[437] You know, we can say, you know, if you talk to the, yeah, if you talk to the Japanese, the people from the IWC, of course, they're out of that now.

[438] They've quit the IWC.

[439] They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens?

[440] You know, they're pretty sensual intelligent too.

[441] And we say, well, but the mercury.

[442] Now, how many people are eating dolphin meat?

[443] Less, you know, I think less because of the film.

[444] When we were there, they were feeding it to school kids.

[445] And the school children, it's the young mind, like infants or, you know, prenatal that has the most deleterious effects of mercury, you know, because your neurons are just developing.

[446] And they had hatched a scheme to have for school lunch programs all over America.

[447] And in Japan, unlike in America, you have to eat everything on your plate.

[448] So it's almost like you were force -fed to poison.

[449] Because of the film, that's stopped.

[450] So, I mean, films can be really powerful, you know, to...

[451] Yeah, that's amazing.

[452] That film is so disturbing, man. Well, you know, it is.

[453] And, you know, it's a...

[454] When Mark Monroe, the writer, he came up with the name of the co -ve, I said, it sounds like a horror film.

[455] He goes, well, it is.

[456] I mean, look, if we write, and these are water people, I mean, essentially, as intelligent, if not more?

[457] I mean, you were saying that the complexity of their brains is...

[458] They have more, you know, more density for neurons, like the folds of the brains.

[459] If you look at, if you did a slice of a brain, it looks like a fjord, right?

[460] And there's more convolutions with a dolphin.

[461] There's more surface area for neurons.

[462] And, of course, the more neurons you have, the more connections you're making.

[463] And what they're actually have a...

[464] God, there's a spindle neurons that they have for, that are for developing complex emotions.

[465] You know, if you look at orcas, you know, they're really tight -knit communities.

[466] A male orca won't, you know, 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.

[467] These animals are really social and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we don't even know what they're saying.

[468] The average person can hear from, you know, 50 hertz to 20 ,000 kilohertz, and they can hear, I think they can communicate up to 200 ,000.

[469] So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude, more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with.

[470] And we hear like a little squeak, like, ooh, 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.

[471] It was interesting about whales, blue whales.

[472] Blue whales are really solitary creatures.

[473] They're not gregarious like dolphins.

[474] They don't usually hang out in big groups.

[475] But down in the Southern Ocean, it was confounding people.

[476] Like, how do they find the krill bloom that happens in a different area, hundreds or thousands of miles apart?

[477] How do they, you know, they all find it?

[478] And one of the researchers, Roger Payne, came up with this idea and it was through the work with the Navy that there's something called the deep ocean channel and it's basically between the surface of the water and the thermal layer that fluctuates depending on where you're at in the column let's say 500 feet they basically use their voice which is one of the loudest voices in the animal kingdom it's so loud but it's infrasound you can't hear it and they'll use it it almost gets propagated like the internet through that layer 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.

[479] And so it's called reciprocal altruism is the theory is that when one finds it, they start singing and that notifies the rest of the group that this is where the quill bloom is and then they can all survive.

[480] Holy shit.

[481] There's a friend of mine, Chris Clark, Dr. Chris Clark from over in Cornell University.

[482] he was a he was um there's a there's a string of pearl hydrophones that the navy uses called sosis in the mid -atlantic ridge and it was a you know it was designed to listen for russian submarines back in the cold war but they opened it up to some researchers and Chris was one of the first ones to you know if you're a researcher listening to whales you go out in your little boat and you drop a hydrophone in and you can usually think oh that's amazing look you can hear sounds everywhere and you know Everything is basically singing down there from crackling shrimp up to blue whales.

[483] And so you have this impression that, man, I just, you know, dropped in on this conversation.

[484] I don't know what's being said, but like that's, it feels pretty special.

[485] Now he goes to Sosis and they have like a, back then it was like an underground bunker full of like people with three screens back before anybody had three screens and everybody's listening to, you know, for the, for submarines.

[486] and he can, he sees that on a board is lit up in the whole world.

[487] He's seeing wherever the blue whales are singing or the, you know, all these whales, it's lit up like a Christmas tree.

[488] And they're trying to, what the Navy was trying to do is to filter through the voices of what they call the biologicals to pinpoint the submarines.

[489] 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.

[490] When he could just, you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen.

[491] Now he can all of a sudden has all this incredible data.

[492] And he could track animals, these animals, like blue whales, they'll ping, and they can basically send out a wave and they can see thousands of miles away, you know, with their extra senses.

[493] Wow.

[494] Jesus.

[495] That's incredible.

[496] And we just imagine.

[497] that ability to pick up all those extra patterns that we don't even hear.

[498] So we don't even understand exactly what kind of data they're getting from each other.

[499] And we don't know what it means either.

[500] So we just know there's something, right?

[501] Yeah, there's a friend of mine.

[502] I don't even know if you want to talk.

[503] His name's Selvitelli.

[504] He's working with this, another friend of his AISA, to try to use AI to figure out what animals are saying.

[505] I know he's talked about it before, so I think it's with the press, so I think it's okay if I mention it, but I've been sending them into people like Roger Payne and Chris Clark, these other researchers I know, because they have these huge databases.

[506] And he's trying to use AI to see if they can figure out, you know, using computers what these animals are saying.

[507] And I think that's the holy grail for getting us, for letting us care about these animals.

[508] If we can, if we know what they're saying, I think that changes the game.

[509] Yes.

[510] I mean, Roger Payne, you know, when, it's in the code, but when, you know, he's the guy that, well, he and his wife found out that these animals are determined that these, the animals, like humpback whales are singing, you know, these strange, beautiful sounds.

[511] I don't know, do you want to Jamie pull up like songs of the humpback whale?

[512] Yeah, we'll find something to play.

[513] That these animals were actually singing.

[514] You know, it was actually his wife, Katie Payne, that figured it out and he wrote up the paper with another guy.

[515] but like joyously singing yeah like you know she what a one a humpback whales we have an issue with planet yeah yeah it's actually been sold so it's a copywritten yeah yeah a lot of times if we do that we'll get pulled off of youtube oh okay yeah because somebody owns that which is hilarious right they own the sound of nature which is like what you can probably you know if you go on to the website of um the cornell ornithology lab I think there probably have some stuff that you can play with that's not copyrighted.

[516] Excuse me. Oh, look, it's tough.

[517] It's going to be real tough, though, because somebody may own it that may not know that somebody else owns it.

[518] An agent for the whale.

[519] They're out there protecting it and trying to get money for the wheel.

[520] Some CAA guy.

[521] I'll take a peek on.

[522] Hey, we want to get paid, you fucks.

[523] Are you aware of what's going on with the resident Orca Pod outside of Seattle?

[524] Yeah.

[525] Yeah, which, it's a, this very strange situation where the salmon have dwindled radically and um this resident pod only eats salmon they only what is it Chinook so they only eat Chinook salmon and so these the ones that migrate the migratory orcas are fine because they eat marine mammals they eat mostly seals and 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 yeah no i was uh working on that story uh for the last year or so um on a different aspect of it that was a i was co -directing a film i was doing the russia portion there was the russians had illegally caught 101 cetaceans it was about 87 roughly um belugas and about 11 orcas illegally for the chinese market i was covering that part of that was that the chinese market of uh marine shows yeah yeah there's you know while You know, the Cove and Blackfish in particular have been really effective about shutting down, you know, in a massive way, the amount of people going to.

[526] Thank God.

[527] But in China, they haven't got the message.

[528] So there are, I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year.

[529] You know, so it's, you know, it's like whack -a -mole and the Russians were providing.

[530] No, that, in that story, when I was in Russia, this is like one of those amazing situations.

[531] Putin, on a state of the union addressed, announced that they're going to release the whales back from the whale jail that were caught over in eastern Russia.

[532] So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story.

[533] 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 farm -raised salmon.

[534] They were feeding the animals.

[535] But that's, you can't, that's not sustainable because they move around.

[536] Yeah.

[537] You can't find them sometimes.

[538] But the solution seems to be to get rid of a lot of the dams.

[539] Yes.

[540] It's kind of an unpopular position with some people, but they're not efficient anymore.

[541] They're holding up, you know, the whole ecosystems are being degraded because of that.

[542] Well, you know, one of them that they initially, when they set it up, they didn't even realize what they were doing.

[543] This was in like the 1930s or something like that where they, you know, they had hundreds of thousands.

[544] of salmon just coming to this wall and not understanding what the fuck's going on and dying there.

[545] There's a friend of mine I'm a co -directoring a film about plastics with Josh Murphy did a film called Artificial and it's about just this the craziness of raising salmon for fishermen to fish you know and it gets really expensive when you start looking at like what that you think is a wild salmon you know what it actually cost to it sometimes it's like thousands of dollars per fish you know because there's so few of them actually come through and then you know get back but uh what is this jeremy this is pattern radio so this is a i i'll reset the website but it says that you can explore yourself to find humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries so use ai to explore thousands of hours of humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries so they'll play some of it yeah there's a lot to dig through here but it's a really cool look at sight if anybody that wants to go check it out what's that heavy -duty pattern over to the left jamie this thing no to the left out here yeah what about those long bars right next to it yeah no over to the right no no the long ones the long ones like just to the right of that image yeah if you if that was coming out of space you'd be like what yeah we'd be like we have to go immediately I've often said that about Bigfoot that we everyone care you shut it off people are so interested in finding Bigfoot but if you found Bigfoot what would it be it would be basically a big chimpanzee or something right another big primate we already know about primates they're amazing we know about them though 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.

[546] It lives in the ocean, but it breathes air, and it swims around these incredible pods, and they have really tight communities, they communicate with each other with this language that we have had our best linguists try to decipher.

[547] We have no idea what the fuck they're saying.

[548] You know, you'd be like, what kind of animal is that?

[549] It would be a crazy mythical creature, you know, like the creature from the Black Lagoon or the, you know, lock nest monster or something.

[550] It would be like some incredible thing.

[551] If you ever found one, people would be freaking out.

[552] But we get so used to things being real.

[553] And I think we're just used to them.

[554] And unfortunately, because of things like, you know, free willy and, you know, going to see sea world shows where they're doing flips for fish and everybody's clapping, people have got it in her head that this is just the thing.

[555] It's a normal thing.

[556] But what they are is like one of the most fantastic creatures that the world has ever known And all of the billions of years of life on this planet, there's two things that are mind blowers in terms of like their intelligence.

[557] One of them is us.

[558] The other one is them.

[559] All the marine mammals, whether it's whales, dolphin.

[560] I mean, whales are amazing because of their size, but whales, dolphins, and and, and, and, and, obviously, orcas are cousins of whales.

[561] But they're, those things are, they're, they're some of the most spectacular creatures.

[562] that the, that the biodiversity of the earth has ever created.

[563] I agree.

[564] I mean, you know, when you're watching a dolphin show, you're watching a spectacle of dominance.

[565] You're watching slaves.

[566] Yeah.

[567] I mean, listen, I mean, if this is a nice room, you know, we have plenty of water, but, you know, if we needed food and we had to do backflips for it after a couple weeks, you and I would be doing it.

[568] Exactly.

[569] Exactly.

[570] And that's what it is.

[571] Yeah.

[572] Exactly.

[573] Oh, we, you know, on this film I was working on, we uncovered some, some information between, at SeaWorld.

[574] And this is the trainers talking to management about, you know, an animal that's not performing well.

[575] And then they get the vets involved.

[576] And the vets say, have you tried caloric deprivation?

[577] You know, so it was actually emails.

[578] And they'll never tell you that they're starving an animal.

[579] to get it to do tricks but there's email there's emails now that well the vet the doctor imagine that if you went to you know a university and like his grades are down what should we do starve them you imagine if that was your kid you dad they don't want to give me any food because I'm doing well poorly in history like what yeah or you know to perform better with the sports I guess would be a better analogy yeah Jesus Christ I mean, that's essentially what they do with the Cuban Olympic wrestling program.

[580] 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.

[581] Wow.

[582] Yeah, and they set up this insane competition so that they're hunted, so that the elite athletes are hunted by the guys coming up.

[583] They want to make sure that, you know, they only develop the best.

[584] best of the best you know and his he has this crazy Cuban accent with his broken English he's like he turned you into a machine that's that's how he talks you know and he's an unbelievable freak athlete and part of why he's so spectacular is because he came up through this ruthless program wow yeah it's horrible but the results are pretty spectacular it's you know it's just to me I mean I have a very close relationship with the guy named Phil Demers, who has been involved in a decades -long lawsuit with Marineland in Canada.

[585] He was a walrus trainer.

[586] I think I know the story.

[587] Yes.

[588] And he, they, the walrus bond with humans when they're babies.

[589] And he bonded with this walrus named Smushy.

[590] And I believe she's the only one that's alive.

[591] Marine land has a horrible record of animal rights i mean it's it's a he mean the way phil puts it he goes it makes sea world look like paradise for for for dolphins and orcas and he was an orca trainer there too and a dolphin trainer and you know he worked with these 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 collapses and atrophies i mean it's it's it's so crazy that it's still legal like that after blackfish sea world didn't just shut get shut down by the government and that people didn't just boycott them in mass yeah their stock In a TED talk I have, I showed the stock price of, one thing, I was at Sundance for the premiere of Blackfish.

[592] And I went down and talked to the people that made the film afterwards.

[593] And I said, we're going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.

[594] Because at that point, I think we had like 650 ,000 followers.

[595] And then we helped organize, like, you know, getting musicians to, you know, to stop performing there.

[596] And we sent a copy of Blackfish and the code.

[597] to all the 10 major, everybody that sat at the board of directors that backed SeaWorld.

[598] So everybody that sat on the board got a copy of that film.

[599] And then when they're, I can't remember, I guess it was their earnings came out that quarter, their stock value just fell down from 32 to like 16.

[600] They lost like a billion dollars in value almost overnight.

[601] and you know but now it's back up it's back up in like the 20s I think really yeah so you know they're doing other things too they're trying to you know to you know do rides and you know do what the other theme parks are doing and try to get away from that business but it's still happening it should be illegal I mean it's it's it's really simple it should be illegal it's if once you look at the data what we understand about their intelligence, what we understand about the way they've captured these things and taken them from their families and would understand the close -knit or the, just the nature of these orcopods, the fact that it's not illegal.

[602] It's just, it's stunning.

[603] Yeah, well, they've, you know, a lot of other, you know, they've bred a lot of theirs now in captivity.

[604] Which is even more fucked up.

[605] Yeah.

[606] I mean, they're not even from the, you know, the, if you know, like how they learn.

[607] And now they're suddenly thrown into these disparate groups where, you know, you have.

[608] Some that are wild, some come from different, you know, imagine these populations of the transients and the residents, they don't speak the same language.

[609] Now, and then you pull the mothers away, so there's really no learning.

[610] What do they do when they don't speak the same language?

[611] Do they try to communicate and just run into it?

[612] They beat up each other.

[613] There's, you know, all sorts of, you know, evidence that we have had people go in there.

[614] And because there's a lawsuit going on right now with, and so we've gone in.

[615] and photographed for the people with the lawsuit and you look in that they're they're raked you know they the dolphins chew on the iron bars on the side or on the sides of the pool there's a lot of their teeth are just sawed off because they're getting infected it's um yeah it's it's gone to something else what can you go on to i mean it's one of the i really think it's i mean it's like a human rights issue but it's a human rights issue for water people you know and we just 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.

[616] Yeah, that would certainly help with everything.

[617] Yeah.

[618] If we knew what was being said.

[619] 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.

[620] We just haven't been listening.

[621] Everything from a, you know, from a mouse up to a blue whale has a song.

[622] I mean, technically it's a song.

[623] But we don't see it as that.

[624] We're looking at it only through our own eyes.

[625] And, you know, that was part of the objective of that film was to try to get people to understand like, hey, there's these other life forms out there.

[626] They're disappearing before we have a chance to even know what they're up to.

[627] And we're the last generation that can fix it.

[628] So, you know, we're going through a mass extinction right now.

[629] The sixth, yeah, the Anthropocene.

[630] 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.

[631] A lot of friends of mine were paleontologists.

[632] And Michael Novichek, the head provost of the American Museum of Natural History, I was in the Gobi Desert with him.

[633] And, 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.

[634] Like they almost got exterminated by something in one go.

[635] and he had told me that well we're going through a mass extinction right now and I was like what?

[636] He said oh yeah mankind is responsible for the six mass extinction that's the first time I heard about it about 15 years ago and you know I said what are the issues he said well the drivers are habitat destruction for agriculture pollution and invasive species and overconsumption but the biggest one by far is habitat destruction and the raising of crops for animals that we in turn eat.

[637] So, you know, if you look at what's going on in Africa, you know, poaching is a big, huge problem.

[638] But a bigger problem is there, you know, a lot of that land now is being, and it's going on in the Amazon as well.

[639] It's being torn up for getting feed for cattle for.

[640] Did they find out what was causing those fires in the Amazon?

[641] Like, what, were those, were they set?

[642] Do they know?

[643] Yeah, those are all illegal fires.

[644] for illegal crops for, you know, soybean corn to feed cattle.

[645] So they burn down the jungle so that they could wipe everything out.

[646] This has been proven?

[647] Oh, yeah.

[648] Oh, yeah.

[649] And they'll do it the same thing in Indonesia, but for palm oil.

[650] And the thing about Brazil is Bolsonaro apparently has approved this kind of behavior, right?

[651] Is that what's going on down now?

[652] To prop up business.

[653] Right.

[654] There was an image in the New York Times.

[655] times of Sao Paulo and people walking through during the day and the sky was like like it was dark out just from the clouds of smoke from the burning of the Amazon from the millions of acres yeah and these are one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet and we're we're burning him down for well not only that not just biodiverse but so unknown there I mean this is where a great majority of some of the greatest pharmaceutical drugs ever invented, their origins have come from the rainforest.

[656] People have found various compounds and things inside the rainforest that have been used for a variety of different methods.

[657] There's all sorts of bugs in there that we don't understand.

[658] Look at that.

[659] There's the image.

[660] How insane is that?

[661] I mean, if you've never been to South Paulo, South Paulo was a huge city.

[662] I mean, your rivals like New York City.

[663] It's massive.

[664] and the sky was literally black with smoke.

[665] That's daytime?

[666] Yep.

[667] Wow.

[668] Yeah.

[669] Insane.

[670] Well, have you ever experienced wildfires out here in California?

[671] Oh, yeah.

[672] Yeah.

[673] Boy, I mean.

[674] Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

[675] Yeah, for the last four or five days.

[676] Well, what was the last month?

[677] Do you live over here?

[678] Do you live in Salisito.

[679] Oh, okay.

[680] Just north of the bridge.

[681] Oh, okay.

[682] Well, then you guys, the northern California won, that one, what was that, what was the area that got hit?

[683] Oh, the Kincaid fire just recently.

[684] That was enormous, yes.

[685] And then there was the one...

[686] Paradise Fire.

[687] The Paradise Fire.

[688] That was the one that was thinking was the largest, I think, in California history.

[689] I mean, these goddamn fires, when they happen, it's a very stunning and sobering reminder of the forces of nature.

[690] And when, you know, you're in the situation like we're in right now, where you have all this dry ground and all these dry leaves and one thing catches.

[691] and then the wind brings it down.

[692] So it's terrifying.

[693] But my point was that I've been very, very close to some of these fires.

[694] You know, we've been evacuated a few times.

[695] And when it's hitting and the sky is like just gray with smoke and the hills are on fire, it's a very strange, strange feeling.

[696] Yeah, like climate change is real and it's happening now and it's close.

[697] It's about as real as it can ever get.

[698] I mean, the people are in denial of it at this point.

[699] I mean, how much longer can you hold this opinion?

[700] And what's, what is keeping you?

[701] What is keeping you on this?

[702] It's a hoax track.

[703] You know, I travel all over the world.

[704] We're the only country that doesn't get it.

[705] You know, we might have the illusion that it's half the world that doesn't get it.

[706] But I mean, over in Europe and Asia, they all understand it.

[707] It's not a mystery over there.

[708] It's only here.

[709] I think, you know, it's self -interest, greed.

[710] Yeah.

[711] You know, I think people are, you know.

[712] There's also a right -wing ideology.

[713] There's something that happens.

[714] You know, there's certain opinions that people adopt.

[715] They adopt this conglomeration of opinions if you are in the right or if you're in the left.

[716] And one of them in the right is to deny the impact of certain environmental factors and climate change and things along those lines.

[717] And it's just, it's like to join this.

[718] group you have to subscribe to a certain platform or a certain system of ideas and that's one of them one of them is that climate change is no big deal it's just a hoax or uh people are making out like i mean i mean i see it on twitter all the time where will someone to point something out yeah how's that climate change working out for you just because like it's really cold in someplace one day like you know you don't you i don't think you understand what this is like that's actually part of it like have it being extraordinarily cold and the whole thing's in chaos like all the systems are out of whack yeah no whole ecosystems I mean like I went out to the beach this morning and I probably looked the way it did 50 ,000 years ago out there but you go into the water it's a whole different story yeah well a couple degrees warmer fucks everything up yeah that's all you need really hard for us to understand 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 there's variability but you don't look at overall mean if you look at the overall mean you see that rise just a couple degrees of temperature could change everything yeah so i mean this is what keeps me up at night it's like you know if you know this is going on what do you do about it 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 well the fish one's a huge one right and the ocean the pollution of the ocean is a huge one because it seems like it's nobody's right it seems like it's everybody's but it's nobody's whereas like the land if someone is doing something on the like could you imagine that florida if they were just pumping that shit into west palm beach there's just a big tube that goes into the sky and it just sprays all over west palm beach people would be like what the fuck is this and then they would have to act they would have to say you can't do that but because it's getting pumped into the ocean it seems like it's okay it's not ours it's just the ocean well it's unfortunately we got to do i got to go to work man I don't have time for this.

[719] Like, I'm behind on my car payments.

[720] I'm doing overtime tonight.

[721] You know, most people are concerned with so many different things that they don't have time to think about the, the massive overfishing and pollution of the ocean.

[722] Well, you know, that's the trick.

[723] You know, like, as a filmmaker, how do you make a story like that so that people actually want to see it?

[724] So they don't feel like it's medicine.

[725] They don't feel like, okay, I got to go watch.

[726] Right.

[727] That's a good way of putting it.

[728] Yeah.

[729] And, you know, the cove, for instance, I mean, that was a, it feels like a thriller.

[730] doesn't feel like a lecture on, you know, what we're doing to dolphins.

[731] It's sort of a set up like a mystery.

[732] The first line of the film was me saying, I just want to say we try to do the story legally.

[733] I still can't go back to Japan, but, you know.

[734] Really?

[735] What happens if you go back?

[736] Won't come back out.

[737] They'll arrest you?

[738] I'm told that there's arrest warrants out for me. For what?

[739] Conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing.

[740] Wow.

[741] Filming police.

[742] Disrupt commerce.

[743] All that dolphin commerce.

[744] Fuck you.

[745] holy shit conspiracy to disrupt commerce how do you define disrupting commerce however they want i guess did you have parameters that you were supposed to operate under when you were over there and you went outside of them yeah they gave us a map it's in the film um they gave us a map and they told us this is where we're not supposed to go and you know as my friend charles hamilton said that became our template of where we needed to go.

[746] Of course.

[747] Yeah.

[748] Have you seen some of the Sea Shepherd work where they've caught these Japanese scientific research boats that are really just killing whales?

[749] Oh, yeah.

[750] And they're out of the Southern Ocean.

[751] Now this is last year they announced that they were going to get out of there.

[752] Now they're only killing whales around their own territorial waters.

[753] So in a way, it's a big victory.

[754] You know, Paul's a good friend, Paul Watson.

[755] He just wrote me right just a couple hours before I came here.

[756] yeah he wanted like a big projector we did it did you never saw a racing extinction no we did you know to alert the world that we needed a you know to get on this we we lit up the empire state building with endangered species and um it was like a huge event we had like i think 939 million media views in four days top trending story on facebook and twitter for like four days worldwide just to get you know we did do something really strange like that how'd you do that with a projector With 50 projectors, 50, like, IMAX -sized projectors, all mounted on the building that was on, like, 31st Street.

[757] And this is all sanctioned.

[758] We spent four years getting permission to do it.

[759] And we finally did it.

[760] And, you know, I remember...

[761] There is right here.

[762] Jamie's got a video of it.

[763] Oh, you got to slow that down, though.

[764] Oh, well, it's just what's on YouTube.

[765] Oh.

[766] Oh, on YouTube, they speed it up.

[767] How long did this last for?

[768] Oh, we did it for three hours, but there's like two, 10 -minute shows, 15 -minute shows.

[769] Was there a crowd of people that watched it?

[770] My God, it was like a, it was like the, it was like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

[771] What was funny is like the, the producer and the distributors said, oh, it's going to be too expensive.

[772] Nobody will, you know, nobody will be there in the summertime in New York.

[773] They always say that.

[774] There's fucking 100 million people in New York.

[775] I go there in the summertime, it's packed with people.

[776] You're like, just nothing happens in the summer in New York.

[777] Like, I was doing a show down there.

[778] Like, well, this is really good.

[779] I mean, it's a summer in New York.

[780] How are you selling so many tickets?

[781] I'm like, have you looked around?

[782] They have this weird attitude that nothing happens in New York in the summer.

[783] I think it's like carried over from the 30s when there was no air conditioning.

[784] Yeah, so we had, you know, we thought we couldn't get any more attention on that.

[785] How crazy is that, though?

[786] The summer in New York, everybody's out.

[787] Why wouldn't they see it?

[788] But they said, well, the important people, they said, are going to be at the Hamptons or they're going to be over?

[789] Oh, God.

[790] Or overseas.

[791] Oh, my God.

[792] The important people.

[793] really say that to you?

[794] They said that.

[795] And they also said that the press wouldn't show up because at 9 .30 at night nobody could afford overtime.

[796] Oh.

[797] But, you know, it looked like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

[798] Yeah.

[799] Everybody was wrong.

[800] Yeah.

[801] And then we thought, okay, that's it.

[802] We can't, you know, get any more attention than that than the Pope called.

[803] The Pope wanted us to project on the Vatican during COP 21.

[804] Whoa.

[805] And then we had, I think, four and a half billion media views.

[806] You should have taken all of the extinct animal footage and replaced it with child abuse footage imagine that all of the cases of all the pedophile priests of all i mean well there's a lot of issues i'm more oh yeah there is i'm concerned with the with the ecosystems i understand i understand one step at a time yeah yeah that dirty place vatican's a strange place like you walk around there you go where did you get all this money like what did you guys you guys don't even sell anything 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?

[807] It's an amazing place to visit Just historically just to see what it's like And in Venice right now If you go like the Doge Palace If you look at the columns on that Those are all different You know, what they did is a pilfered Persia for that And so it was, you know You had to bring it back when you were trading the 17, 1600s, you had to bring back.

[808] Stuff you stole.

[809] Yeah.

[810] I was just there.

[811] I was just in Venice.

[812] And now do you know that what's going on right now?

[813] They have the worst flooding they've had in 50 years.

[814] Yeah, I saw the Gritty Palace.

[815] I stayed there at the Gritty Palace.

[816] Oh, that's where we were.

[817] The lobby had like four feet of water in the lobby.

[818] Really?

[819] Yeah.

[820] Holy shit.

[821] Four feet of water in the fucking lobby.

[822] So what is causing that?

[823] Well, it's a combination of the, this time of year, the tides.

[824] the storms but also you know the seas are raising you know you have just a couple inches of of ocean raising you can imagine there's more water out there and it gets pushed to so how do you stay in the greedy palace when the floor is water i don't think you do stay in i think that's the least of their problems right now wow we had you know we had a uh when i lived in boulder you know i wasn't in a flood zone i lived at you know fourth and and juniper this is like i said right against the foothills It wasn't, you know, on a flood map, but we had a 2 ,000 -year flood, and there was furniture floating, you know, I had furniture floating up against the ceiling of my place.

[825] I got, you know, brought out of climate change.

[826] Look at that.

[827] Wow.

[828] That's how bad the flooding is.

[829] Yeah, that's where we stayed over the summer.

[830] Yeah.

[831] It's gorgeous.

[832] But weird.

[833] But it's like a really beautiful prostitute.

[834] You're like, do you have to do this?

[835] Because like, look at all that shit floating by.

[836] That's crazy how high the water level is.

[837] That's a restaurant.

[838] Yeah.

[839] Wow.

[840] It's all underwater.

[841] Is that outside the Gritty Palace?

[842] It's around the corner.

[843] That's what it looks like.

[844] The cruise ships would pull up and then you would see the amount of people to get out and then the streets would be flooded.

[845] 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.

[846] and during the week they were there they said they had two accidents with cruise ships like hitting docks and we played a video of one of them it's fucking crazy you see this gigantic boat and it's just coming in you know it's going to hit the dock and you know it's going to hit this boat in front of it and everybody's running to get out of the way and you see this like that's a mountain it's a mountain that's a mountain that's floating a floating mountain that has no ability maneuver correctly look at the size of that goddamn thing I mean that is so much bigger than any of the buildings there and that thing's floating in And banging into the walls.

[847] And look at the size of that.

[848] Look at the size of that.

[849] That is so insane.

[850] And we wonder why we're screwed.

[851] That thing has nine floors.

[852] That is so crazy.

[853] Look at that.

[854] Yeah, there's probably several thousand people, right?

[855] Oh, for sure.

[856] For many thousand.

[857] And, you know, don't they just dump their waste right into the ocean?

[858] They did in the past.

[859] I don't know if they do it now.

[860] What do they do now?

[861] Put it in a baggie.

[862] Well, that's one of the things they found in L .A. I'm sure you're aware of this.

[863] They did a satellite overview, like an image of methane.

[864] They're trying to find out where's the greenhouse gases.

[865] Where's the biggest, you know, polluters?

[866] It turns out it was landfills.

[867] Landfills is a huge issue.

[868] You know, this idea that there, is that the greenhouse gas thing, the methane leak?

[869] This idea that you're going to just put it in the ground.

[870] Hey, that doesn't work.

[871] It comes out of the ground.

[872] I told you we had a Tesla that we had retrofitted for a racing extinction.

[873] It had a flare camera, the same camera that you used to see methane.

[874] It sees a spectrum.

[875] It's not heat, but it can see methane.

[876] You can put another filter in it so you can see carbon dioxide.

[877] And so we went around the streets of L .A., and we got onto the tarmac.

[878] And, you know, the carbon dioxide is a little bit of the boogeyman.

[879] You can't see it.

[880] But with this camera, you can see it.

[881] And it's pretty astounding when you can, you know, just, you know, right now if you put it on us, you look like we're smoking.

[882] But when you show it on the streets of L .A., it's like everything's disgorging.

[883] Right.

[884] Yeah.

[885] And there's not enough plants to absorb it.

[886] Yeah, you can't absorb it that quickly.

[887] But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods.

[888] there's something about when you're in nature and you're in the forest where you know you're like specifically like the Pacific Northwest which has these incredibly dense forest the air just has a different quality to it and it's just this rich oxygenated air because you know you're just around all these trees and plants it is a different feel to it that you just don't get here yeah no LA I was here last week it's rough bro it is it's rough Jamie and I have been planning our escape we don't know what to do though we're trying to figure it out somewhere with the i think you can only stay here a little while longer i i i came here in 1994 and um there was maybe 30 % of the traffic that there is now and i'm not exaggerating maybe 40 % let's get crazy um but this like now it can be i'll i can come home from the comedy store at 11 o 'clock at night and be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic just bumper to bumper i worked for the only times back in 1970s And I remember at three in the morning, there'd be, like, without an accident on the road, there could be traffic backed up.

[889] Backed up.

[890] Yeah.

[891] Yeah, without an accident.

[892] And I don't, you know, back then, I mean, I'm probably, I don't know.

[893] Holder you?

[894] 52.

[895] Yeah.

[896] So I'm like, I got a little bit more than 10 years on you.

[897] But I remember that this valley was always, for the first month I worked at the L .A. Times, the valley was just, you couldn't see anything.

[898] And then one day it cleared up.

[899] And in a review mirror, I was living north of town.

[900] in North the town in Glendale And in the review mirror I saw White Cat Mountains And I thought Where the hell do they come from?

[901] Right Oh, that scared me Because I thought Yeah, you can see that from Woodland Hills From Woodland Hills on a rainy day When the rain comes in and washes it all away Like what the fuck is this?

[902] There's mountains right there Like you don't see literally The pollution's so dense It hides mountains.

[903] Still?

[904] Yes.

[905] All the time.

[906] Because today is a beautiful day.

[907] It's really clear.

[908] It's a beautiful day.

[909] You get lucky.

[910] What really helps us is when the wind blows.

[911] When the wind blows, it clears everything out.

[912] And, like, you can get to a high peak.

[913] Like, there's an area where a trail run.

[914] And you get to this really high peak, and you can look out at the top and pause.

[915] And some days, you don't see jack shit.

[916] You just see gray.

[917] And then some days, after it rains, you're like, there's fucking mountains out here.

[918] Like, you don't, like, I want to take a picture of the stark contrast.

[919] You know, matter of fact, I'm going to run.

[920] not tomorrow but the next day when i get up there i'm going to take a photo and i'm going to try to take a few photos and try to catch it when it rains because it's supposed to rain sometime this week and so get a difference between what it is normally versus what it is when it rains because the difference is it's stunning and it's all being hid by pollution and we just have gotten accustomed to it yeah well i mean catalytic converter has helped a lot well also is helping a lot is this conversion to electric cars and i really hope people continue down that path especially I mean it's they're getting better at figuring out how to charge them and better at battery capacity and better and they're better to drive I mean we were talking about Tesla's I mean I have that Model S I love that thing I mean it's amazing it's just an amazing car it's not you don't lose and I'm an automobile enthusiast I love cars you don't lose anything with that I mean it's more fun than any other automatic car were driven.

[921] Yeah, no. I mean, I had one too for a while, but it, uh, I told you I had the electro -luminous paint job and the projector.

[922] Yeah.

[923] It was a like, um, yeah, it's a, it's a, it was a nice one.

[924] But I had the, I had one of the first electric cars in Colorado back in like 2007.

[925] I only knew of like two other ones.

[926] And I had 120 solar panels on my, my roof.

[927] So I didn't pay for electricity.

[928] Really?

[929] So the, oh, roof of your house.

[930] Yeah, roof of your house.

[931] Yeah.

[932] Um, did you see that documentary who killed the electric car?

[933] Yeah, Chris Payne, he's a good friend.

[934] Very interesting, right?

[935] Yeah, and revenge of the electric car.

[936] It was his follow -up to it.

[937] Oh, I didn't see that.

[938] Yeah, it's a good one.

[939] Yeah, I think it's better than the first one, actually.

[940] But, you know, I would tell my neighbors, like, hey, I don't pay for electricity.

[941] Right.

[942] My license plate said V -U -S, it stood for a vehicle using Sun.

[943] It was the opposite of an SUV.

[944] And, I mean, I got checks from the electric company.

[945] I didn't have bills.

[946] I had checks.

[947] Because you're contributing to the grid.

[948] Yeah, so we had net metering.

[949] And I thought I just discovered something.

[950] It was just incredible.

[951] But, you know, everybody said, you know, I was doing it just to prove that I could, you know, you could do it back then.

[952] Yeah.

[953] And, you know, neighbors would just say, but how much does it cost?

[954] And it's like, well, it's, you know, we should all be, you know, you have to be, people have to be early adopters before you can get it to scale.

[955] So I was an early adopter.

[956] But I think even with everything that we know what's going on, that people, are still saying they're not going to switch over until it's cheaper.

[957] It's a little bit better and it's cheaper.

[958] And, you know, Elon, I think he's got the right idea, make it a lot better, and eventually it's going to be cheaper.

[959] I mean, the Model S is a great car, but the Model 3 is selling like crazy.

[960] Yeah, and it's a fantastic car as well.

[961] I mean, that Model 3 is, it's preposterous.

[962] You know, I have a Porsche 9 -11 GT3, and it's a pretty fast car.

[963] This guy humiliated me the other day.

[964] I wasn't trying to race him, but I think he was trying to prove a point.

[965] We're at a red light, and the light turned green, and he shot ahead of me and got onto the highway so fast.

[966] I was, like, laughing.

[967] I was like, I wasn't trying to race the guy, but if I was, it would have been a blood bath.

[968] You said, yeah, you keep yours on ludicrous mode all the time.

[969] Oh, mine, yeah, my Model S?

[970] Yeah, I do.

[971] I keep it on ludicrous mode.

[972] It's on ludicrous mode.

[973] You could drive it normal, but anytime you want to just dump on the accelerator, just whew!

[974] it literally feels like it's violating some sort of laws of physics like it just it does something with time you know like you're not supposed to be able to get there that quick because you have a you have a thing in your mind when you're driving a car well if I want to get in front of that car it's going to take X amount of seconds even if I really accelerate it'll take some time for and get up for I can change lanes with that thing it's just you just go and people that have never been in one before.

[975] I take him for a drive in the Tesla, and they grip the seat and they're like, what the fuck?

[976] Everybody says the same thing.

[977] Like, what the?

[978] Or holy shit, those are the two things they say.

[979] Because it doesn't seem like it should be able to do that.

[980] It looks like a sedan.

[981] It's like a regular car.

[982] And I talk, you know, I've got like an old muscle car.

[983] I've got a couple old cars that look fast.

[984] I'm like, that car, that regular sedan looking car, five times faster than anything here.

[985] Yeah.

[986] And zero emissions.

[987] But, you know, we're in this transitionary period, and I think the future is pretty bright for that stuff.

[988] Mustang, Ford just released the concept of this new vehicle that they're releasing very soon.

[989] It's like a Mustang crossover e -car.

[990] It's beautiful.

[991] It's really cool looking.

[992] It looks like a larger Mustang, like a taller Mustang, but it's all electric.

[993] And Elon praised it today.

[994] that Ford is going out on a limb and making something like that.

[995] Oh, cool.

[996] You know, and then Porsche is releasing their version.

[997] It's called a Ticcan.

[998] And that's, I think that's how you say it.

[999] It's a beautiful looking, sleek -looking electric car.

[1000] So we're moving in that direction.

[1001] Yeah.

[1002] I mean, there's a great Tony Saba, the futurist.

[1003] He shows a picture of the 1900 Easter parade in New York City.

[1004] And it's all horses looking down from a building.

[1005] I don't know if you find.

[1006] at Jamie 1905 or 1900 Easter Parade and it's like there's one car and then 13 years later it's like find the horse and that these transitions they take you know about 10 12 years you know 12 years ago we were punching the number two key on our flip phones six times to text to capital C and I think we're you know we're gonna be doing the same thing with you know with the transition with food.

[1007] I think it's going to be going that way.

[1008] Do you think that they're going to be do you have hope for all this lab created meat?

[1009] What do you think about?

[1010] 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, cow meat.

[1011] 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.

[1012] And, you know, I have the same sort of ickiness about, you know, going that direction.

[1013] But he showed me these pictures on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making.

[1014] And, you know, I stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, but I thought it didn't look bad.

[1015] You know, it looked, he had like, it chopped, you know, so that it was grilled.

[1016] And it thought, you know, I have this sort of revulsion against it myself because I've, you know, got myself off.

[1017] it but I looked at that and I thought you know what that that looks really edible it looks good somebody that could eat meat you know that that would be appetizing yeah it seems like the science it once whatever it is right it's tissue and whatever that tissue is it's composed of a bunch of different natural ingredients right whatever whatever creates a turkey breast it seems like it's just a matter of innovation and technology improving to the point where they could recreate that yeah no the question is you know is that you know is that better for you than you know the whole food's plant -based diet or that's the real question right because that's where things get convoluted like what what is healthy versus what is ethical versus what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing morally yeah you know the way you know i stopped eating you know meat About in 1986, I went to a, I was doing a story for Fortune magazine on the biggest independently owned cattle ranches in America.

[1018] And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma.

[1019] They had their own slaughterhouse.

[1020] And they're supposed to, you know, they kill the animal with this captive bolt to the brain.

[1021] It's supposed to happen instantly.

[1022] But there was one animal that came around and it was still alive.

[1023] And it was at that point, it was hanging upside down.

[1024] And its hide was stripped off.

[1025] And it's looking at me with its eye.

[1026] And it's following my eye.

[1027] It's hide was stripped off and it was still alive?

[1028] Yep.

[1029] And as it's turning around, it was turning his head and it still held my eye.

[1030] And I thought, the son of a bitch is alive and I'm part of this.

[1031] So I stopped eating meat shortly after that.

[1032] And so I thought, well, I have to eat something, right?

[1033] I have to eat an animal product because, you know, you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't.

[1034] And then so I became a pescatarian.

[1035] That's all I ate for animal protein.

[1036] Well, you know, milk and dairy, but I didn't eat any thing.

[1037] I limited myself to things that.

[1038] that didn't walk, that didn't walk.

[1039] So fish was like fair territory for me. And then when we made the code, there's a scene in it where we take a sample of hair from the deputy minister of fisheries there.

[1040] And we tested for mercury.

[1041] And when we were, you know, why it was out at the lab, I thought, well, I'll get mine tested too.

[1042] Because I was, I ate a lot of fish.

[1043] I loved it.

[1044] My son's still a professional fisherman.

[1045] And I had a freezer full of fish all the time stocked up of, you know, fresh ocean, whether or not fresh, but frozen.

[1046] ocean fish and i had it for breakfast lunch and dinner all the time then when you know we got his labs back his sample back it was eight times higher than was high which is like you know you don't want any mercury in your body mercury's most toxic non -radioactive element in the world and my my levels were 44 times higher jesus were you experiencing any physical effects of that i was having trouble with my short -term memory i had an ache in my shoulder that was there for for probably decades.

[1047] And I tried to get it massaged out.

[1048] And then if you start looking through the, you know, the problems with Mercury, you notice that there's a whole litany of things that are causes depending on how bad you have it.

[1049] But my doctor said, it's the worst he'd ever seen in Colorado.

[1050] So I had to get off of it.

[1051] And then, you know, this is, so we're here in L .A. for the Academy Awards.

[1052] And I met my first vegan.

[1053] And I said, what do you eat?

[1054] And she goes, everything else?

[1055] all protein originates with plants and that was how I got started and it took a, you know, I thought, okay, well mercury has a half -life in your body of about 70 to 90 days and so it took me about two years to get it down and I thought well, I'll just try a little.

[1056] Two years to get it down?

[1057] Why did it take so long?

[1058] Because it has a half -life in your body of 70 to 90 days so 44 goes to 22.

[1059] Oh, 90 to 180 so.

[1060] Yeah, so I thought okay, then I'll start eating a little bit of fish and then I had a tester right away and it jacked back up and I thought, okay, So all fish is poison?

[1061] Oh, big fish is poison for sure.

[1062] Big fish, like tuna.

[1063] Tuna, swordfish, marlin.

[1064] So what is the recommendations?

[1065] 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...

[1066] I don't trust any of that.

[1067] I mean, like, I mean, I can't mess with it.

[1068] I mean, if you...

[1069] When I was in Japan, I went to Minamata, where they had the...

[1070] They call it Minamata disease, but it's not a disease.

[1071] It's poison.

[1072] There was a company that was intentionally polluting the bay where there's a lot of fishermen.

[1073] And the kids, of course, well, the cats got affected first because people would give the fish to the cats.

[1074] And the cats would have called dancing cat disease.

[1075] You know, you heard the expression, mad as a hatter.

[1076] That's because they had the felt from a hundred years, 150 years ago.

[1077] They used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats.

[1078] But they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad.

[1079] in Minamada, the cats got affected than the kids, and then, you know, the people, a couple hundred thousand people got affected.

[1080] And these were, remember, this is 1950s, remote villages.

[1081] And an American researcher went there and saw that everybody looked weird and said, something's going on here, and he found out that they were dumping, you know, mercury into the bay.

[1082] And I saw, I visited a doctor there that studied Minamata disease.

[1083] He was a guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people and he showed me these brains of you know they sliced open and it looked like Swiss cheese what we're talking about the convolutions of of the brain and how dolphins have more of them same thing with people but you know and the ones with the slices that look like Swiss cheese with the holes that it's the mercury's eating up in the brain and so you don't want you know once you see that you said you don't want that your body so um I had to get all fish and become a vegan not by for ethical reasons but because of i just couldn't eat it just for health reasons um but i'm doing just fine how fucking crazy is that that most fish is poison like that is 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 well i mean most of the fish that we're eating i think 54 % is farm raised.

[1084] And what I read, again, I just read it this morning in Los Angeles magazine.

[1085] But that's worse, right?

[1086] It's worse, yeah.

[1087] And, you know, the ecological damage it's doing is crazy.

[1088] The health consequences is crazy.

[1089] So the question is, then, what do we eat?

[1090] What about mollusks?

[1091] So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollus.

[1092] They said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms and even plants.

[1093] They don't have the same nerve endings.

[1094] They don't really move.

[1095] They open and shut.

[1096] And they're a viable form of animal protein that is just so primitive.

[1097] I heard that too.

[1098] They're just not, like we think of them as life forms, but so is broccoli.

[1099] That's a life form as well.

[1100] But there's actually more evidence that plants are intelligent than there is that mollusks are.

[1101] Mollus are an incredibly ancient life form.

[1102] But then again, don't you get some sort of mercury poisoning from them as well?

[1103] Well, they're on the bottom, right, usually, and they're filtering.

[1104] So you're getting whatever toxins or, I'm not going to say that, you know, mollocks are poison.

[1105] I just wouldn't eat it.

[1106] I'm going a completely different direction, but I've heard that before, that mollus are.

[1107] You can farm them too, right?

[1108] Mm -hmm.

[1109] You can.

[1110] Yeah.

[1111] I mean, if we really can break down that they're even more primitive, but yet more nutritious.

[1112] God, you know, like, you know, I did a story in Polynesia on oysters, and they have the big oysters that they get, you know, put through for pearls.

[1113] And they, they don't, they just eat the muscle that holds all the organs and stuff on, you know, when I said, oh, in America, we eat the whole oyster.

[1114] They're like, what?

[1115] You know, because the muscle tastes like fish flesh.

[1116] It's actually pretty good.

[1117] But, you know, the idea that we're eating all those other filtered organs and stuff, I just don't know.

[1118] I don't know.

[1119] But you don't know.

[1120] I don't know.

[1121] You don't know.

[1122] Has anybody come up with any sort of comprehensive plan or anything that makes sense where they can viably repopulate the ocean?

[1123] I mean, the idea of stopping and slowing down fishing would be wonderful.

[1124] but it's, I mean, if it really gets to a point where we've got to somehow or another independently grow these fish and reintroduce them to the wild, I mean, is there any talk of doing things like that, or is it even impossible?

[1125] I think it's impossible, the scale of what's going on right now.

[1126] 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.

[1127] Now it's, you know, eight days.

[1128] Now we have to, then we have to go out 30 and we're competing with the, You know, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Taiwanese, you know, it's...

[1129] And everybody's just going gangbusters.

[1130] And we have, we're using military gear to, you know, sonar to catch things at this unprecedented rate.

[1131] It's not sustainable.

[1132] I personally don't believe that fishing, to feeding this planet currently, you can do it with fish.

[1133] I don't think you can do it with, you know, and we know what's, you know, that the unethical side of raising, you know, farm animals, this is it's just i think we have to transition to another form i think it's going to be you know 10 or 12 years but i think we're headed that direction and people i think what you're seeing now is that there's a direction towards you know people want to eat healthier they want to eat sustainable and i know i know you're a hunter i mean i was a hunter too i hunted fish and you know i understand like when you come back with the goods you come back with an animal and you're feeding your family you're feeding your friends you feel like the man you feel like you 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.

[1134] And I know that that happened when I was a fisherman.

[1135] You know, you go hunt a fish with your friends, and there's a group thing going on, and everybody's there.

[1136] They're enjoying themselves, and it feels wonderful, but we can't do it with wild fish.

[1137] And, you know, with 4 % of the biomass being wild animals now and the rest of it being, it's not sustainable.

[1138] And I wish it was because that there's something we lost with that.

[1139] But we have to transition.

[1140] We're at that period right now where we have to figure out how do you feed a planet.

[1141] That's the real problem, right?

[1142] And not just how do you feed a planet?

[1143] How do you feed a planet that may double its population in the next 50 years?

[1144] Yeah.

[1145] Well, there's talking 10 billion by 2050.

[1146] And we're already at a point where, you know, we're at the – Yeah, so 20 years.

[1147] passed out, it might really be double.

[1148] It might be 15 million or excuse me, billion people.

[1149] That's crazy.

[1150] 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 for, you know.

[1151] So what are we going to eat?

[1152] You know, I think the, you know, the way to do it is, you know, drifting more towards plants, getting, you know, I was, last week I was in Loma Linda, California.

[1153] You know where that's at.

[1154] You've heard about one of the blue zones?

[1155] Yeah.

[1156] And, you know, so it's for the people out there that might not know about it.

[1157] Dan Butner, a geographic fellow, popularized the idea that there's these five geographic regions in the planet where people live longer and without chronic disease than any other place on the planet.

[1158] So I was out there last week at the brain health and Alzheimer clinic.

[1159] And there's two researchers that started one.

[1160] There wasn't one for miles around.

[1161] And they open, one out of three people in America in the next 10 years are going to be effective.

[1162] by Alzheimer's.

[1163] They're going to have it.

[1164] Their mate's going to have it.

[1165] They're going to be taking care of somebody that has at their parents.

[1166] So it's going to overtake heart diseases or a number one disease that we have.

[1167] They open up the brain health clinic there with an Alzheimer clinic, and nobody came.

[1168] Now, about half the population is the Seventh -day Adventists.

[1169] They're vegetarians by religion.

[1170] And you go to the grocery store.

[1171] They don't sell meat.

[1172] They have milk.

[1173] They have cows milk, but it's on the bottom shelf.

[1174] They just have a few things.

[1175] of it.

[1176] And they, to find people initially, they had to go to San Bernardino across the highway.

[1177] There's nothing different, geologically different between San Bernardino's and Loma Linda.

[1178] It's the right, you know, drinking the same water, breathing the same air, but they have a different diet.

[1179] But they're living about 10 years longer than everybody.

[1180] You have on San Bernardino is one of the unhealthiest populations in America.

[1181] And on the other side of Highway 10, you have one of the healthiest populations in the entire world, and they're living about 10 years on average longer.

[1182] They're doing other things, too.

[1183] It's not just diet.

[1184] Well, it's a big factor, sleep.

[1185] 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 corollary, one of the biggest factors where they've determined that the less sleep you have, the higher likelihood you have of Alzheimer's disease.

[1186] And it's really stark.

[1187] Like the numbers are, they're pretty undisputable.

[1188] Yeah, well, I agree.

[1189] They have four principles, you know, the Shurzai's, you know, Dean and Isha Shurzai.

[1190] Sleep is one of them.

[1191] Yeah.

[1192] Whole foods, plant -based diet, support, you know, community support, and exercise.

[1193] Those are the big ones.

[1194] Yeah.

[1195] 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.

[1196] and three vegans.

[1197] 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 is about 15%.

[1198] You'd expect, you know, several hundred of them to be, you know, with Alzheimer's to be vegetarians, but they're not there.

[1199] So many of them are following that seventh -day Adventist diet, which is vegetarian.

[1200] Yeah.

[1201] And what you're talking about, San Bernardino is a very poor community, unfortunately.

[1202] And I think you know as well as I do.

[1203] a lot of people in poor communities eat terrible.

[1204] It's true.

[1205] You know, and you're eating junk food and sugar and all that crap.

[1206] I mean, that's one of the primary factors when it comes to poor health.

[1207] Education is related definitely to brain health, unfortunately, and it has to do that they're stupid.

[1208] It's just that they're right.

[1209] They're not eating as well.

[1210] They have to, you know, the first McDonald's was in San Bernardino.

[1211] Was it really?

[1212] Yeah.

[1213] We went to the museum there, McDonald's Museum.

[1214] They have a McDonald's Museum.

[1215] They have all the Ronald McDonald's.

[1216] from the beginning to the end?

[1217] Everything, yeah.

[1218] Yeah, so they've been really good about keeping fast food out of Loma Linda for...

[1219] Isn't there giant concerns even with large -scale agriculture?

[1220] When you're talking about mono crops and growing things for 15 billion people, you're going to need gigantic swast of land.

[1221] It's going to displace a lot of wildlife.

[1222] You're going to have a lot of different chemicals to get released into the ground unless you're doing regenerative farming, in which case you're going to have to use some animal products.

[1223] anyway because you have compost and fertilizer, you need fish for fertilizer or something that creates nitrogen.

[1224] There's a lot of issues even with large -scale agriculture when you're growing crops.

[1225] You're doing something that's wholly unnatural.

[1226] If you have, you know, a thousand acres of corn or soybeans or anything that you're growing in large -scale, that's not how nature intends it.

[1227] Nature intends everything to be combined together.

[1228] Right.

[1229] 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.

[1230] So, you know.

[1231] Well, sort of.

[1232] A lot of it's being used to feed animals.

[1233] A lot of it's being used for corn syrup and a lot of different.

[1234] And we can agree on that.

[1235] Get rid of it.

[1236] Yeah.

[1237] Yeah, I mean, you've seen king corn, right?

[1238] So that's pretty fucking crazy when they check your DNA and they find out how much of your DNA is corn -based.

[1239] And you're like, what?

[1240] Like, what is going?

[1241] Or how much of your cellular structure is corn -based?

[1242] It's like how much corn is in your diet?

[1243] And then you go through the supermarket and go and pick up box after box and read how much corn is in there.

[1244] Corn starch, corn syrup, different proteins that they've extracted from corn.

[1245] Well, let me ask you, how do you think the, you know, if we have to feed 10, 15 billion people in the future, how do you think?

[1246] A real question.

[1247] You know, we should be feeding the population.

[1248] That's a good question.

[1249] It's a very good question.

[1250] I have hope for this fake meat shit.

[1251] 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 die.

[1252] I am not a fan of factory farming.

[1253] It's the reason why I got into hunting in the first place.

[1254] I saw a lot of those PETA documentaries, and I just didn't want to have any part of any of that shit.

[1255] And I know there are ethical ranchers that raise their animals grass fed and they let them roam and, you know, 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 and is the polar opposite of factory farming.

[1256] When you see these, and 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.

[1257] 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 and then they spray it on the crops well i don't know if they spray that on the cross but it leads into the ground yeah they spray the piss pig and shit on the on the crop oh yeah well look all that stuff is wrong i mean all of it's wrong i mean whether chickens raising chickens like that or cows like that or pigs like that and there's a reason why they have these ag gag laws and those are another thing that are akin in my eyes to the same thing that the way we feel about dolphins in captivity in a place like seaworld those ag gag laws agricultural gag laws they keep people from divulging the horrors of these factory farms and there's there's got to be a way to stop those laws first of all you should these places should be transparent if there's something they're due that's abhorrent it's something they do you you could see see the lives of these animals and they're treated in these horrific ways it's not necessary it's not it's just they're doing that for profit and this is why you can get a chicken sandwich for a dollar 99 or whatever the fuck it is yeah i mean if like you know that's saying if slaughterhouse has had glass walls yes right yeah yeah but no going back to it though i mean so how do you so lab meat you think would be though i think lab meat has real potential the same way cell phones used to you know a thousand dollars uh what more than that like what was uh what was like one of those big molderola bricks remember those things that like uh gordon gecko had and wall street they were really expensive like when he was walking on the beach with that thing like wow that guy's a baller he's got a phone he's just walking with no cord now everyone has a phone i mean i was in brazil and um you know these people were walking around they had you know very little money but they all hot phones.

[1258] Cell phones have made their way throughout virtually all of the world.

[1259] How much?

[1260] 4 grand.

[1261] 4 grand.

[1262] 4 grand.

[1263] So 4 grand and 82 is probably what today?

[1264] 20?

[1265] Probably like 20, right?

[1266] Sure.

[1267] It's a lot.

[1268] A lot.

[1269] Let's just say it's a lot.

[1270] Even if it's 4 grand.

[1271] If you imagine if a fucking iPhone was 4 grand, people would be going crazy.

[1272] The new one's almost 2 grand and everybody's going crazy.

[1273] I think that sort of technological innovation and improvement, I think, we were going to see that in this sort of factory -created meat because the original factory -created burger that they made, I believe it was a quarter of a million dollars that it cost to create one and people ate it and they're like, this is beef.

[1274] This is like real beef.

[1275] 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.

[1276] I mean, I think that's possible.

[1277] Yeah.

[1278] No, I think it is too.

[1279] I've talked to some of the people that are working on that.

[1280] And when you look at how fast cells can reproduce, you know, it's just a matter of scale and getting the right texture and taste.

[1281] Look, I'm, you know, I'm under no illusion that what I do is available to everybody.

[1282] I go hunting in the mountains.

[1283] Most people don't want to do that, you know, and I do it with a bow and arrow.

[1284] Most people don't want to learn how to do that.

[1285] They don't have it in them.

[1286] They don't want it.

[1287] It's not interesting.

[1288] to me it is if I shoot one elk that is 400 pounds of meat one life feeds me for a year and I feed my friends I feed a lot of people I give elk meat out to a bunch of people I'm under no illusion that everyone can do that but this everyone can't do most of the things that I do I just do it because it makes me feel better than going and getting something that's factory farmed if I saw what they did to chickens and I knew that my chicken come from these horrific environments and I ate that, I feel sick.

[1289] And so that's why I became a hunter in the first place.

[1290] Yeah, well, that's, you know, what we concern ourselves is like, like, how can, you know, like, you and I can eat, you're probably better than me, but I can eat how I want to eat.

[1291] But doesn't that sound weird?

[1292] You say, I eat better than you?

[1293] No, what you can afford more is what I'm saying.

[1294] Is that what it is?

[1295] But I'm telling you, I'm getting my meat from the woods.

[1296] Oh, well, I'm not saying better.

[1297] I'm saying that you could eat how you want.

[1298] Oh, I see you easier than me. I'm just saying, I'm not financially.

[1299] I've seen what you have around here.

[1300] Nice little cozy man den you have down here.

[1301] But boys, you should see what's out there.

[1302] It's like the ultimate caveman.

[1303] Not cave man, but man cave.

[1304] Cave man would be a giant Neanderthal.

[1305] But, yeah, look, it's the conversation between, I mean, I have a gang of friends that are vegan and vegetarian.

[1306] One of my best friends is vegan.

[1307] Ian Edwards.

[1308] I love him to death.

[1309] I don't dispute that we're in a conundrum, and we're in a terrible situation as a civilization.

[1310] We've certainly overpopulated the planet in many ways.

[1311] And we've certainly allowed something to take root in our society.

[1312] that i think is disgusting that's factory farming of animals there's there's something vile about it undeniably vile and there's a reason why people are prosecuted for exposing what makes everybody sick look if they exposed it and said look i'm gonna take a uh...

[1313] a picture i'm gonna show you a video of how these cows are living and you take the video and the cows just wandered around eating grass no one would give a shit right right it's when you see these people kicking these cats and when you see them alive when like kosher the way they do that where they they 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 who I mean all those things sick in people which is the reason why they have those laws keeping people who work there from videotaping exposing it in the first place yeah I think the king amendment I believe what it is.

[1314] He's from Iowa, or at least he was.

[1315] I'm not sure if he's still even in power there.

[1316] But, yeah, I mean, but if people saw how they got their, you know, how milk is done.

[1317] I know you're a proponent of milk, but if you saw that.

[1318] Not really.

[1319] I don't drink it.

[1320] If I drink four glasses of milk a year, it's a lot.

[1321] Oh.

[1322] Yeah, I don't think it's good for you.

[1323] I think raw milk is probably better for you, but every time I drink a glass of milk, I always feel gross.

[1324] I feel like the homogenization and pasteurization of milk, you're breaking down all the enzymes and boiling it.

[1325] And what you get is some weird protein that your body doesn't exactly know how to process correctly.

[1326] There's a reason why so many people get horrible gas off of it.

[1327] Yeah.

[1328] So 65 % of the population of the world is lactose intolerant?

[1329] A nine -year -old, she's lactose intolerant.

[1330] She can't have anything with cheese or milk or anything.

[1331] I didn't figure that out until it was like 50 that was lactose intolerant.

[1332] I mean, really?

[1333] I mean, I thought, you know, I should have figured it up, but I just thought it was normal.

[1334] I think my daughter gets it from me. I've never, I mean, I can eat ice cream and I'm okay, but I always feel like shit.

[1335] It never makes me feel good afterwards.

[1336] I always feel like, like, ugh.

[1337] Like, I'll have cookies and milk, and then I'll be like, oh.

[1338] It's just a, it's a weird, it's like, my body's like, what is this?

[1339] But, however, I've had raw milk, and I haven't had any problems with it.

[1340] I mean, I just think it's, and, you know, there's a big problem with it.

[1341] acquiring raw milk It's very hard to get But I think if any If people are going to drink milk at all That's how we're supposed to drink it I don't think we're supposed to be Boiling that stuff And then you know It comes out it's dead That's why look You're not supposed to have anything Biological They can sit in your fucking refrigerator For two weeks and not stink Like how is that And you look at the date The date is like a month Like how the fuck is this going to stay good for a month Because they boil the shit out of it And look, if you want to serve milk to 300 million people, that's how you have to do it.

[1342] If you want to get it in containers and travel across the country in these trucks and get it to supermarkets and have it sit on the shelf and have it be, sit on the shelf and have it be financially viable for them to be able to hold on to it long enough for them to sell it and turn a profit and then have no one get sick from it.

[1343] Because, like, raw milk is good for like a couple of days and that's it.

[1344] And it used to be the people got their milk delivered on their doorstop.

[1345] You know, the milk man. That was the thing.

[1346] Milk man used to come to your house.

[1347] And you didn't even really have a lid.

[1348] It had like that little.

[1349] Paper.

[1350] Yeah, a little paper thing that you'd pull off.

[1351] That's what we had as a kid.

[1352] Yeah, and it was fresh.

[1353] And the cream would sit on the top of it.

[1354] It just tasted different.

[1355] I've had raw milk.

[1356] I haven't had it in years.

[1357] But the last time I had raw milk, I was like, this just tastes better.

[1358] It tastes like when you drink it, it feels like your body is like, oh, I know what this is.

[1359] Whereas like a regular glove.

[1360] glass of milk my body's like what in the fuck and then you got to think about how they get it right like how they keep these cows pregnant and the the process of acquiring billions of gallons of milk for millions and millions of people it's kind of gross yeah well not even kind of yeah i agree yeah but however almond milk's disgusting you don't drink that shit do you why do you it's just gross it's just not milk man almonds don't have tits like what are you doing to that You know, just have a glass of water, drink some juice or something.

[1361] I mean, it's just got to be some benefit of health.

[1362] I mean, almonds are good for you, right?

[1363] But almonds are a real problem in California ecologically because of the amount of water they use.

[1364] Totally agree.

[1365] Soy milk, sort of my milk is choice or oat milk.

[1366] Yeah, yeah.

[1367] Just drink water, man. I agree.

[1368] I agree, but not out of plastic.

[1369] Okay, hide this.

[1370] I know we have to do something about that.

[1371] We've been talking forever.

[1372] We're going to develop some sort of a system here.

[1373] What do you recommend for us with water?

[1374] Right.

[1375] But where should we get our water from?

[1376] Should we get filtered water?

[1377] Should we get spring water?

[1378] I think filtered water is probably good.

[1379] By canned or boxed water.

[1380] That's the thing now.

[1381] Yeah, but they use this paper.

[1382] Yeah, it just, it's a big, can't get some jars of water.

[1383] Yeah.

[1384] We're working on a film on plastic pollution right now.

[1385] And we're trying to think, like, how do you, how do you it's a big problem like you look at the oceans we've had boy on slot on and we're going to have him on again he's the guy who's created that filter system he came up to visit me too where I work he's got new ones for the rivers have you seen the new ones that he's?

[1386] I saw that yeah a couple weeks ago I think they mentioned something he's already got them working but here's the issue that I'm learning from there's this guy Andrew Forrest one of the wealthiest guys in Australia told me that it's this isn't the problem it's that you haven't cheap plastic made in you know Saudi Arabia and America and is being exported to there's 10 11 rivers are where the majority of the plastic in the ocean are coming from and they it's it's not recyclable rivers is where the plastics coming from what do you mean there's there's about 10 to 12 rivers over in southeast East Asia where that generate a lot of the, most of the plastic that you see in the ocean.

[1387] How in the river?

[1388] What is, what is?

[1389] Well, people, okay.

[1390] So like in Indonesia, for instance, you have 17 ,000 islands, but only 10 recycling plants, right, places to do it.

[1391] So there's, you know, there's no way, there's nowhere to throw it.

[1392] So they throw it in the, you know, out in the ocean.

[1393] Oh, you're saying the garbage is in these rivers.

[1394] I'm not saying the creation of the plastic.

[1395] The creation of the plastic comes from America and it comes from Europe and it comes from Saudi Arabia.

[1396] Right, right.

[1397] I see what you're saying.

[1398] Yeah.

[1399] So, and, but the volume, most of the volume is coming from these 10 to 12 rivers in Southeast Asia.

[1400] You have to make plastic cost enough so that the, first of all, that they can make it recyclable so that, you know, there's different ways to make polymers so that they can recycle it.

[1401] They just do it the cheapest way possible because they know it's not coming back.

[1402] Right.

[1403] So you have to put it either, you have to put a tax on virgin plastic to make it valuable for people to be able to recycle it.

[1404] Well, great solution is hemp plastic.

[1405] It's biodegradable.

[1406] It comes from this plant.

[1407] I mean, you can make hemp plastic.

[1408] And we can grow it, and it's an easy crop to grow.

[1409] Is that scalable?

[1410] Yes.

[1411] Hemp is so weird.

[1412] It doesn't even seem like it should be real.

[1413] I mean, it really doesn't.

[1414] It's an insane plant.

[1415] I mean, you can make hemp crete out of it, which is far better than any building material we currently use.

[1416] It's far more resistant to flame.

[1417] There's just so many positive benefits of it in terms of insulation.

[1418] The insulation factor is better than wood or plywood.

[1419] It's really lightweight but incredibly strong.

[1420] Have you ever grabbed a thick hemp stalk?

[1421] Have you ever held on to one?

[1422] No. It doesn't seem real.

[1423] It's hard like this oak, but yet it's light like balsa wood.

[1424] It's so strange.

[1425] It feels like it comes from another planet.

[1426] Hemp is an extraordinary planet.

[1427] It's the most extraordinary plant we have.

[1428] First of all, it has all the essential amino acids.

[1429] I love hemp protein.

[1430] It's one of my favorite proteins for, we sell it on it.

[1431] We sell hemp protein.

[1432] It's one of the very best proteins in terms of being able to mix it and like a protein shake.

[1433] And on the go, your body digest it super easily.

[1434] And it's like filled with amino acids.

[1435] It's very easy for your body to digest and process.

[1436] You can make oil out of it that they used to use for fucking for heating lamps.

[1437] You can cook your food in it.

[1438] I mean, there's so many different things.

[1439] things you can do with hemp.

[1440] You can make clothing.

[1441] You can make far more durable cloth, far more durable.

[1442] The paper is far superior.

[1443] In fact, the whole reason why William Randolph Hurst 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.

[1444] Because on the cover of popular science magazine, they had come out with a decorticator.

[1445] A decorticator was a way in the 1930s they devised to effectively process hemp fiber.

[1446] Because for years, they used to use slaves to process hemp.

[1447] Then when they figured out the cotton gin, cotton became easier to use, and then slavery became outlawed.

[1448] And so people who shied away from hemp.

[1449] Well, they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s.

[1450] It was on the cover of Popular Science magazine, Hemp, the new billion dollar crop.

[1451] Well, William Randolph -Hurst didn't just own Hearst publications and newspapers.

[1452] He also owned these huge forests that they were making paper with.

[1453] So he, along with Harry Anslinger and using his newspapers, demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp.

[1454] Yes.

[1455] No idea.

[1456] He funded all those fucking crazy marijuana movies, Reefer Madness, all that shit.

[1457] That was all him.

[1458] They came up with these stories that these Mexicans and black men were taking this new drug called marijuana.

[1459] marijuana wasn't even a term for cannabis marijuana was a term for a wild tobacco so they came up with his new name they called it this drug everybody freaked out because they didn't have the internet back then no one had access to real information other than hurst newspapers hirst publications so he just fucking out and out lied and made up these crazy stories and funded these documentaries and then marijuana became illegal and still is to this day and you still have knuckleheads like joe biden literally yesterday saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug we're still in this and forget about marijuana imagine if it wasn't psychoactive at all the idea that hemp should be illegal until really recently in this country is a fucking travesty it's horrific it's food it's clothes it's paper it doesn't even make sense that it could be so many things it's literally like one of the most positive plants of the earth's ever known okay i'll vote for it dude you should do a next documenter on that I think he got to Joe Biden Joe fuck you too late there's a lot to talk on here where I stand oh one hour ago I put my fucking Instagram post out this morning and they did this one I was I basically had a well -worded thing saying that anyone who thinks that marijuana should be legal is basically saying you should be locked in a cage for experimenting with your consciousness and the freedom to do whatever you want with your body that is, especially with marijuana, that's not poisonous.

[1460] No one's died of it ever, ever.

[1461] In the history of the human race, there's never been a single overdose for marijuana.

[1462] And this knucklehead saying that it's a gateway drug.

[1463] No, pain is a gateway drug.

[1464] Trauma is a gateway drug.

[1465] Abuse is a gateway to drugs.

[1466] It's not marijuana.

[1467] Marijuana is just a time -honored psychedelic substance that people have been enjoying for thousands and thousands of years.

[1468] You should have run for Congress.

[1469] Fuck that.

[1470] I'm not running for anything.

[1471] I'm not even running for my neighborhoods, whatever the hell it is.

[1472] I just saw a poster over there.

[1473] Did you run for mayor?

[1474] Was that a joke?

[1475] What poster?

[1476] I thought there was a poster.

[1477] Oh, it's 100 % a joke.

[1478] Look, I'm not ever running for anything ever.

[1479] Well, it was right next to Hunter Thompson for mayor.

[1480] And I thought, well, maybe there was some truth to it.

[1481] No, it was Hunter Thompson for sheriff.

[1482] But there's nothing there for me?

[1483] Is there anything for me?

[1484] I don't think.

[1485] No, it's just Hunter Thompson.

[1486] That's not me. Look, I'm not running for anything ever.

[1487] I have three jobs and three kids.

[1488] I'm busy, and I have a lot of hobbies.

[1489] Too many hobbies.

[1490] I'm trying to chip away at hobbies.

[1491] But if I can get Joe Biden to shut the fuck up, I'm very happy.

[1492] Crazy asshole.

[1493] There's so many people that smoke pot in this country.

[1494] He's so crazy.

[1495] For him to come out against that is so goddamn dumb.

[1496] How do you smoke pot on the show and still hold a conversation, though?

[1497] No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not hard.

[1498] Because I'm a stoner.

[1499] Because I'm a stoner.

[1500] I know how to do it.

[1501] do it, man. I've been doing it forever.

[1502] 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.

[1503] Because, look, I've said a lot of dumb shit when I've been high.

[1504] I've thought a lot of dumb shit.

[1505] I've been paranoid.

[1506] It's not for everybody.

[1507] I think it should be treated cautiously.

[1508] But there's a lot of benefits to it.

[1509] I really firmly believe that it's made me a more sensitive person.

[1510] It's made me more interested in community.

[1511] 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.

[1512] It's made me feel better about happy communication with people.

[1513] It's made me more affectionate.

[1514] It's made me more compassionate, more kind.

[1515] It makes me more aware.

[1516] The feeling of paranoia, one of the things that that paranoia is is just an overall expanding of your awareness of your vulnerability.

[1517] 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?

[1518] Uh, yeah, mom, made this and stand up.

[1519] I mean, this is, stand up is more complicated, right?

[1520] Because there's got to be an end result.

[1521] Like, it has to be funny.

[1522] Whereas this, 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, um, I mean, so many different doctors and scientists and astrophysicists and, and Dr. Matthew Walker that we talked about earlier, we're explaining sleep and how important this really is.

[1523] This isn't just something that you feel.

[1524] better if you get more sleep no it's like long term for your life these are all little bits of information that I think it's very difficult for people to absorb just by going out and reading studies right so the next best thing is reading a book well the next best thing is me having a person who wrote that book on on a podcast to talk about it and maybe not even the next best thing it might be the best best thing because it's absorbable it's it's a conversation with people And it's, to me, I've gotten a fantastic education from it, to 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, you know, and read their book and then try to have, like, try to have an understanding of it, like, 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.

[1525] And it's just, to me, it's something that was completely unexpected.

[1526] I didn't ever plan on doing this.

[1527] I just started doing it, and then it just kind of became what it is now.

[1528] So it's very satisfying that people like it.

[1529] You know, when I talk to people and they say, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I run into that said it's like changed their life.

[1530] It's changed their perspective.

[1531] Oh, I mean, so many people said, you know, once I started, I was going to be on, I was going to be on the show.

[1532] They said, oh, you got to see this podcast.

[1533] I spent two weeks just, that was my day job.

[1534] It was like listening to, you know, interviews that you've done.

[1535] 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.

[1536] When I do a film, it's so targeted that I'm needing them to fill in a blank.

[1537] Yeah.

[1538] And it's just a, I need two or three minutes.

[1539] I might talk as long, but it's just, you know, I've got the.

[1540] this list of a shopping list of things I need to cover.

[1541] And here you just have a conversation.

[1542] That seems to like it's a lot different and it seems like a lot more fun.

[1543] It's a lot more fun.

[1544] Like when you said at the beginning of this, like what kind of research have you done to prepare for this?

[1545] I'm like, fortunately, I get to pick who I talk to.

[1546] And for you, I knew that you had directed the cove and that the subject of dolphins has been, I mean, it was a huge bit on my 2016 Netflix special about an experience that I had when I was in Hawaii high as fuck on edibles and we ran into this patch of wild dolphins and they were playing with us.

[1547] They were playing with us.

[1548] And we were yelling like, yay!

[1549] And they would jump out of the water and do flips for you.

[1550] They were putting on a show.

[1551] And I remember having this thought, like, holy shit, they're playing with us.

[1552] These are these wild creatures and they're having fun with us.

[1553] And then I started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication.

[1554] I became obsessed with dolphins because this one, I mean, I had been fascinated by them before, but I became truly obsessed.

[1555] And this was, this experience was more than 10 years ago.

[1556] And since then, I've just, I've been overwhelmed and, uh, and also massively disheartened by just, you know, by films like yours and by seeing see what.

[1557] world and by seeing what was going on in marine land with my friend Phil and we've had him on a bunch of times to talk about his lawsuits I mean they have done everything they can to try to silence that guy and stop him from revealing all the horrors of that place but slowly but surely he's had a massive impact on that place's business to the point where they're trying to just get him to shut up and he won't he won't I mean and he was he was on the inside he was a trainer and all that stuff so for me to be able to talk to someone like you um it's it's uh you know it's i love the fact that we can get that out there well i appreciate it yeah i mean you know swimming with dolphins in the wild there was a trigger to memory over in rangaroes with with our team and there was three groups of resident dolphins that so they're they're hanging out there all the time you get to recognize them and we were playing with them and the more you play with them the more you can spin around the more you can you know the more excited they get yeah and they can only do it for so long and I remember once that we were doing it we finally we were we had scooters and we thought well the more if so a dolphin looks at you and you can't you look like you're like in a wheelchair compared to work not even yeah right right so in the water we just look like yeah we're just pitiful yeah and so they can only be entertained so longs but the scooters we figured we could engage them a lot longer and then all of a sudden this group just took off and there's sort of like you're let down because you have this you're high from the experience of being with them in the wild 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 wow yeah so it was like not only were they playing with us they were protecting us wow that must been wild though seeing an 18 foot long hammerhead holy shit because they disappeared into the blue and then we could see them ramming the same the dolphins were big you mean they're you know not quite as long as this table but they're you know they're probably three to five 500 pounds, and they're maybe seven feet long, and they look tiny next to this shark.

[1558] Wow, that's wild.

[1559] That is wild.

[1560] 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.

[1561] Oh, man, my son does that with drones.

[1562] He goes out in his kayak and films him.

[1563] My friend Peter, Peter Atia, he's done a bunch of, like, crazy endurance things.

[1564] And one of the things he did, he swam.

[1565] He swam to all of the islands in Hawaii, and to prepare for this, he had to do a lot of swimming.

[1566] He lives in San Diego and swimming in the coast out there, and he was swimming literally, what do you say, like, a couple days after that guy got bit in half?

[1567] Oh, my God.

[1568] Yeah, I think it was just.

[1569] He wasn't scared it.

[1570] You know he wasn't scared.

[1571] I think it might be the next day.

[1572] 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.

[1573] when did this happen the San Diego incident I want to say it was 10 years ago somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years ago and then there was one in Santa Barbara that happened about four years ago four or five years ago you know occasionally they slip up think a person's a seal or something you know most of the time when I've been I've dove with a lot of sharks before it is that you can only usually only get them around you if you're feeding them and that feels so old horrible it's just so unnatural i i won't do it anymore but it's weird right yeah it's just it's just it's just not i couldn't be around it there's some friends of mine that were we're feeding it you know feet they're on a feed and i was i was about i don't know 50 yards away and i thought i just don't want to be part of it and i was just filming on the reef and these silver tips came over and um i don't know if they're excited by it i just had a camera with the strobes on it but they just came in they were like attacking me and I had a rebreather I died with a rebreather so you can scream so I started screaming as lot as I could through this thing but I was pushing them off and they were like working together you can see it was like pack you know like one would go this way and I would go this way so he had it like I had these these lights with these like octopus with four lights on it and I could push them away but then one of the the guys that we had brought over a tuna head and lured them away but they were just it was because they were excited by you know the feeding over there.

[1574] So I don't even want to be in the water these days when people are feeding sharks.

[1575] Because it's no joke.

[1576] When you're under the water, it's not you're, it's not like you can just run to run up a tree.

[1577] There's no place to go.

[1578] There's nowhere to go.

[1579] You feel helpless.

[1580] And that's their natural environment.

[1581] And that's what they're there for.

[1582] They're there to clean up.

[1583] You know, anything that's weak, anything that's fucked up, anything, you know, any seal that get caught slipping.

[1584] They're there for population control.

[1585] I mean, there's a really powerful video off of the, I'm sure you're probably seeing and off of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco where a bunch of tourists are there.

[1586] Boom, this great white snatches a seal right in front of everybody.

[1587] Just thunderous explosion of blood and foam in the water and like, whoa.

[1588] Yeah, it's a couple miles from where I live.

[1589] Yeah, I mean, they're magic.

[1590] That's a crazy beast.

[1591] I'm supposed to, somebody just invited me today to go out and be with great way.

[1592] It's not diving, just to watch.

[1593] There's a crazy video from, I think it was the Cape, somewhere around the Cape Cod where there was like a 20 foot one next to a boat.

[1594] And these guys were in this boat and this great white just swims right up next to them.

[1595] And they start fucking screaming and freaking out.

[1596] And it's enormous.

[1597] It's like 20 feet long.

[1598] The only time, like, if you don't feed them, they're usually fairly, if you're feeding them or if you're spear hunting, then they'll come near you.

[1599] They're dangerous for spear hunters, right?

[1600] Yeah.

[1601] What is this?

[1602] record breaking year for sharks off Cape Cod Yeah apparently there's a lot of them out there now What do you think that is that because of a large number of marine mammals Or drones we can actually see them now I think Oh yeah right Yeah that's true Yeah So listen man I want to thank you for coming here It was a very cool Thanks for having this conversation And if people want to see the cove it's available On Boy that's a good question now I think you can still see it on iTunes.

[1603] You can buy it.

[1604] Is it on Netflix?

[1605] Not Netflix.

[1606] No, but iTunes is available there.

[1607] Amazon?

[1608] Can you get it on Amazon?

[1609] Yep.

[1610] Racing extinction is a little bit harder.

[1611] I'm not sure where you can get that one.

[1612] But I think that's better than the Cove in a lot of ways.

[1613] Okay, I'll check it out.

[1614] I'll watch it.

[1615] The Cove is pretty powerful, man. Yeah.

[1616] Well, thanks.

[1617] Appreciate it.

[1618] Thank you.

[1619] My pleasure.

[1620] Thanks for being here.

[1621] Thanks for having me. Bye, everybody.