The Joe Rogan Experience - #1388 - Louie Psihoyos

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Louis Psihoyos is a photographer and documentary film director known for his still photography and contributions to National Geographic. His film "The Cove" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2010.

All right, here we go. How are you? Good. Good to see you. Good to see you. How did you get involved with the Cove? What was the history behind that? I'm going to give you the long version. Sure. There's a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD.

I wanted to film. I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995, I think it came out. I was on the Information Revolution and Jim Clark was sort of the Steve Jobs of my generation, right? He didn't want to be photographed. He was just too busy. And then I started working for Fortune Magazine and he had built a boat, the world's tallest mast, I think at that point. And I went over to Amsterdam to film him. And we hit it off and, you know, he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?

And, you know, he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars. And I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer. billion dollars and i said well if you teach me how to be a billionaire i'll teach you how to be a great photographer and um then we would travel all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years and uh we did mostly underwater photography he built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude it was just a piece of work as jim doesn't do anything half-ass 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. In fact, he took me to a place in Papua New Guinea.

He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen. It's in Papua New Guinea. We flew over there all day to get there, a day and a half to sail. We dive on the GPS coordinates, and it's rubble. It's completely gone. And this would happen not all the time, but a lot. We don't know what the, you know, the insults were. It could have been dynamite fishing, could have been,

it could have been anything who knows what it was. But the, I think it was the third time that we were in the Galapagos. Jim turned to me and said something like, you know, somebody should do something about this. We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary. And sort of empowered by the success that he's had in business and seeing how he could change the world and his businesses, I said, how about you and I? He said, what do you mean? I said, we'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films.

And the first, well, then I, you know, so I'm jumping careers at this stage. I'm going from being a fairly successful still photographer, really busy, to a career where I had really no business doing it. I'd never really made a film before, not even really a short film. And so I'm nervous. I'm feeling sort of full of myself, like I'm going to start this great career. We're down in the Caribbean on a boat. And my kid starts with Jim on vacation with our families. And my kid starts playing on the beach with another kid. It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid.

So Steven comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. He made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, Silicon Graphics. And after I had Steven alone for a few seconds, I said, do you have any advice for a first time filmmaker? And he said, he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals. Oh, great. And of course the first film we did was the Cove. But at least these are, you're not, you don't have actors and special effects and boats and animals. It's just a part of the the story it's not like you're like with him i think what he's meaning like jaws exactly yeah because you know you have to match shots and all that but it has its own set of you know trying to keep a the horizon level on a boat you don't want

to give the audience seasickness and but um you know i would add to that like don't do a movie where people want to kill you because when we did the cove it was you know it was uh exciting but dangerous work yes yeah um look that movie changed a lot of people's minds and opened up a lot of people's eyes to the the horrors of the way dolphins are slaughtered and and what 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 don't understand any of it yeah i mean we could peck out patterns i mean the scientists have i mean you know um i'm sure you're aware of john lilly's work sure john lilly i mean for years and and did it in like really weird, unconventional ways. He tried to take acid and communicate with dolphins. And it's one of the reasons why he created the sensory deprivation tank. We actually have one of those over here. And Lilly, they were forever trying to figure out some way to figure out some method of communication

where they were trying to get the dolphins to talk like people and we would try to make their noises and to no avail. Yeah, I mean, they're obviously extremely complex animals. And if you judge them by our value, like people say, oh, they didn't invent the car and use computers. But intelligence can be seen as your ability to, you know, to live, exist in your environment. Yes. And by that standard, you know, I mean, put us in the water. Right.

You know, and, you know, have a go at it and see how we do. They don't need anything in that world. They travel through three-dimensional space. I mean, it's incredible what they can do. Yeah. And, you know, like, well like well you know it's not just dolphins do it's i mean you look at you know butterflies monarch butterflies they they it takes three generations for them to go to to migrate from canada down to a six hectare area in northern

mexico and they do that somehow they find it you know every every year and like you know i couldn't find the studio without an iphone right you know so i mean what's what what's going we don't even have a clue on how most the world works and you know we're you know the second film i worked on erasing extinction you know that's about we're going through a mass extinction right now we're exterminating this stuff these animals before we have a chance to even know how they operate how the the ecosystem how it even works right a friend of mine said it's like you know we're burning down the library of congress before we have a chance to even know how they operate, how the ecosystem, how it even works. Right. A friend of mine said it's like, you know, we're burning down the library of Congress before we have a chance to know

what the books read, 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. But what I, 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 try 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, and I think that was the shock of the cove, that you see our counterparts in the ocean being treated like that.

And I think, you know, when you look at the way we made that film, it was, you know, we pretty much told the story of what's going on in the oceans by looking at that cove. And, you know, William Blake said to see the world in a grain of sand. But we could look at, you know, in that film we talk about overfishing and, you know, listen, the reason that they shouldn't be eaten besides that they're sentient and intelligent is also that they're toxic. You know, their meat is now, their flesh is now some of the most toxic, you know, waste in the world when you bury them. There's, I think, 6,000 times more PCBs than the background in the ocean. All the flesh that's been tested in Japan in the last 20 years has between 5,000 and 5,000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese law if it was a fish, but it's a mammal, of course. It's insane.

Just hearing that is insane. I'll tell you an interesting story. When we were making that film, there was a point where we went down to the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in Chile, and we were trying to get a 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're just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the international whaling commission and um it was

i think it was going from houston to santiago the plane was full i couldn't even sit next to the you know my my partners on the my buddies in the on the film. I couldn't even sit next to my partners and my buddies on the film crew. There's one empty seat next to me. And they're waiting for somebody else to come from another flight. And right before the plane door closes, in comes Akira Nakamai. He's the head of overseas fishing for Japan. The head, Bull Goose Looney. And he sits down right next to me. I'm looking at my buddies, you know, uh, on the plane and think, oh my God, if there is a God, you know, he has a good sense of humor. So he says, sit down next to me and I didn't want, you know, him to like find out

who I was and then move. So I waited till dinner was served like an hour or two later. And I said, do you have any idea who I am? He said, no. I said, I know who you are. I want to show you a film. I said, do you have any idea who I am? He said, no. I said, I know who you are. I want to show you a film. Yeah. So we had a condensed version of it, probably about 12 or 15 minutes of it at that point, and I showed it to him.

And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their flesh is poisoned. And there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this flesh on the Japanese Ministry of Health site. And he said, I'm not in charge of food safety. I'm in charge of food security. In other words, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences. His job is just to provide enough meat on the plate for the Japanese people. And it gives you an insight of how he's thinking. He's in charge of, I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California. And he says 17% of the land area in Japan is only good enough for growing crops on or living on.

We have to turn to the sea for food. And at that point, they were also caught skimming, stealing about 200,000 tons of endangered bluefin tuna. This is over about a 20-year period. Now, when you start talking about big numbers like that, I can't imagine. It's hard to imagine it. But imagine like— How are they stealing this tuna? Well, they have quotas.

And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries. Right. So it's not just like- Every country has their allotment. And once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home. But the Japanese kept on getting more. So the Australians actually caught them. They figured out over this 20-year period that they through the books and and saw what they reported and was actually

sold at the skeezy market found out they had skimmed 200 000 tons 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 it's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna's endangered you know you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store like tuna tuna's a weird one right because it's such a common food it's in cans you 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 tuna's endangered, most people are like, is tuna endangered? They're hearing this going, is tuna endangered? But when you talk to people that work at the fish market, they'll very clearly tell you that there's a radical difference between the amount of tuna that was available 30, 40 years ago versus now.

10 years ago. I mean, we're down to bluefin tuna in particular is down to about 90. It's down to 4% of their historical levels. That's incredible. Yeah. And there's no way to stop this. There's no, I mean, it seems like everyone's waiting for someone else to do something and during the meantime, everyone's just trying to make money.

A lot of money. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's sort of what happens with endangered species. The more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes. And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing. But this is happening with all the fish stocks. I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society, and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet.

This is a Monterey seafood watch. It's like, what fish are sustainable? And I've seen them go through the fish stocks. So less and less, we start at the big animals and we start to slowly go through all the fish stocks until like McDonald's used to do halibut. Now it's pollock, which is a very small white fish from Alaska. And now that's been hunted to extinction. So we're going through these fish stocks.

That's shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one. That's what's going on. So I just stopped handing out seafood guides, and now I'm trying to sort of preempt it. So I don't think – the big question is there's 7 a half billion of us on this planet, soon to be 10. Is there enough wild animals to feed us all? There isn't.

You know, you look at the biomass of mammals on the planet, you know, between livestock and humans, we occupy 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. 4% are wild mammals. And then, you know, so we can't all be eating wild fish. And think about that. You never go out and say, let's get some land food. You say, we've commodified sea animals. That is interesting, right? You don't say land food.

That's a really good point. They did at the turn of the century. I mean, during the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting in North America. A lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather. They were hunting, and they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to, like, incredibly low numbers. You know, elk to this day, I think, are only in 10 of their original range that that they were at in the 1700s and that was all from market hunting from people just going out buying you know

meat from these market hunters that have shot these things and they didn't really have refrigeration back then so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it and 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 the areas where they're extirpated and now you see historic levels of especially white-tailed deer. There's more white-tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed. Wow. But that's been successful. But it's also – that's a weird one too because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands.

Like they literally exist in fields and a lot of them live off of gmo crops so it's very strange so like i have a buddy of mine my friend uh doug doug duran who has this uh huge uh piece of land in wisconsin and he's like the deer in my area are essentially eating these gmo corn they're eating monsanto corn like this is so weird like yeah they're wild 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 and no predators yeah i mean the only predators they have there i mean they have some wolves now very few and some some parts of the driftless area in wisconsin i think they have they have some bears

too and coyotes a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns i lived in boulder colorado for a while and we had a lot of bears and mountain lions come through our our yard because we were right at the base of the foothills of the rockies and a neighbor i woke up one morning the neighbor was like looking at his minivan and There's a big dent in the side. He's trying to figure out how to get a dent because it was parked here all night. He found an antler in the bushes. Then the question is, how does a deer run into it? 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 uh american eskimo part pomeranian mountain lion got it the mountain lion i think got our cat yeah they'll get everything up there man if it's not them it's a fox you know there's a lot of foxes up there to get things but god it's beautiful boulder's incredible incredible place and you'll be driving down the road and you see it's weird like the deer in boulder know that they're safe

so like we were we were uh looking at this house in in boulder and we opened up the door to the backyard and there was this enormous deer just standing there staring at us. And my wife thought it was fake. I go, no, that's a real deer. She's like, what? And then it just turns its head and starts moving around because it wasn't even remotely freaked out that there were people, a stone's throw away from it.

They're just so used to being around people. It's weird. Yeah, I remember a neighbor of ours planting 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 salad bar yeah many people have turned on deer because of the loss of their gardens the roses especially they love roses yeah it's um i don't is there anybody that has ever come up with any sort of a plan to do what they did for wild animals in North America?

Because you can't regulate it the way you can wild animals because in wild animals, if they have a particular area, you could make it so people can't go in that area. But the ocean is so enormous. Like how – has anybody come up with some sort of a repopulation plan? Sure, sure. There's E.O. Wilson. I'm on the board of, the advisory board of his group. It's called the Half-Life Project. You know who E.O. Wilson is?

No. Okay. E.O. Wilson is a Harvard professor. He has two Pulitzers for his work in biology. He wrote the book on biodiversity. He's considered the father of modern biodiversity. He's about getting right around 90 years old now. But looking at, he would do things like go to an island

and pretty much exterminate everything on it and then try to figure out, well, at what rate do the animals come back and what's sustainable? And he's figured out that to save 85% of the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it 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? Not travel in it, just not exploit it. No fishing. Yeah, no fishing. And so Sylvia Earle is working on hotspots. You know, these, they're called, I think, what she calls, it's like blue zones where, you know, you have a lot of biodiversity. You know, try to keep those away from fishing exploitation.

How do they do that, though? Like how, I mean, you would have to get everybody on board, right? Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right? The Japanese were fishing in an international marine sanctuary for decades. you know in an international marine sanctuary for decades you know so you have to you know this really tough when you have um organizations that really don't have any teeth to it it's that the attitude that he has that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population you almost can sympathize with him right i mean a hundred plus million people in this tiny place the size of california and just pulling mostly fish out of the ocean i mean it's uh it's a crazy place to be in terms of his his

position yeah i mean i don't envy it at all um but you know what what do you do you don't slaughter dolphins that's what you do yeah well we're endangered species or you do? You don't slaughter dolphins. That's what you do. Yeah. Well, we're an endangered species. I mean, I don't know what's sustainable anymore. Is it possible? I mean, I know they've done this in some places outside of Hawaii where they've bred animals, fish rather, like sushi fish, like hamachi. And they've had these pens set up. And then a lot of times a storm will come by, like a huge storm, and they break these pens.

And then those fish get wild. Then people start catching them. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, like salmon. Well, you know, they were trying to, in Japan, when we were doing the cove, we went to a university where they were breeding the first bluefin tuna. These are from eggs. So this is what they do at some places where they catch them, and then they put them in these pens, and they fatten them up. These were making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs. And really hard to do, really skittish.

And when I went there, they were shoveling. This is back when I ate fish. They were shoveling, this is back when I ate fish, they were shoveling these mackerels, like what I would feed my family with, like a family of four, they were shoveling it to the tuna. And I said, hold on a minute, like how much mackerel does it take

to make a pound of tuna? They said, oh, about seven, up until about 150 pounds. And after that, it takes 14 pounds. So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm-raised fish. I mean, this is like going to the bank because you want a crisp $5 bill and say, here's a couple 20s. Wow.

But if you look at what are they feeding, you know, a lot of these fish? They're feeding them, you know, parts of farm animals and fish, wild fish. Wow. And I was just reading this morning a Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish are fucked. And it has, and it talks about like the fish that are raised and I don't know the data behind it, but they have eight times more pollutants in it than wild fish. Right. I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a— They're stationary.

I think that's a big part of the problem. Yeah, and apparently they don't taste as well. When we were in Hawaii recently, we went scuba diving and snorkeling. So you jump off the boat and you're swimming around. And you know what's really fucking weird about that is how few fish there are. Like when you're under there, you expect 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. No, it's not much.

You don't see much yeah there was a about 10 years ago i was down in the caribbean a friend was getting married and i took his daughter out to i didn't know it at the time but it was her first time snorkeling and we were in an area i'd been to about 20 years before and there was nothing there was nothing there it was just like a desert yeah and then i heard her screaming through a snorkel and i thought what's wrong and she was screaming because she saw a single orange tang that was the only life form we saw there where i used to see clouds of schools of these you know orange and blue tang now there was nothing and i thought

my god she thinks that that's beautiful and it is it's just you know the single fish but you know again a shifting baseline the generation before when i was there it was probably look like the land before time right these places i went to with with clark you know rajah on pot where you'd see you know if you go to the caribbean you might see 30 fish on a different species of fish on a dive and rajah you can see 300 and it was just miraculous and when you're taking pictures you actually see more detail with the picture than you can with your your eye can't comprehend it all so it's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we you know we lit like jewel boxes you see how much life that there is there but there was just

unbelievable stunning amounts of wildlife. But that's going on all over the world. In the Great Barrier Reef, we lost over half the Great Barrier Reef in the last two years. It was never that good anyway. Fifteen years ago, after being to some of the best preserved places in the world that I've been to with Clark, we looked at the Great Barrier Reef and we'd be like, oh my God, this is not that great. Then they've lost half again.

So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from, you know, Iowa or Wisconsin or Boulder, that looks pretty good. But if you knew what came before that, you're seeing this, you know, assault against, you know, nature going on. What is taking out the Great Barrier Reef? We're heating the planet. We're heating the water. It's, uh, it's,

it's bleaching. So there's, there's a couple of things. There's multiple insults. You have runoff from fertilizer and pesticides from agriculture. You have, uh, the heating of the water,

these, these events. And when I say it, it, it's dying, it's dying. It's not like, oh,

it's going to come back. Once, once the coral is dead, that's it. It's, it's, it's not going to come back. Once the coral is dead, that's it. It's not going to come back. Does sunscreen play a part in that as well? Probably not there. It's fairly remote.

In Hawaii it would or the Caribbean. But it's pretty remote. You have to get out several miles at the Great Barrier Reef. And the further north you go, the more isolated it is. And we went the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef reef and it didn't look it got slightly better as you got north but there's only a couple boats there it's not like you have you know thousands and hundreds of thousands of tourists out on the beach and the other thing is acidification the burning of fossil fuels is acidifying the oceans is now about 30 percent more acidic than it was you know 50

years ago and when you make you know there's more carbonic acid in the water is now about 30% more acidic than it was, you know, 50 years ago. And when you make, you know, there's more carbonic acid in the water, it makes it harder for the corals to survive. And it's basically you have these multiple insults going on at the same time. It's probably not just one thing, but there was a massive bleaching event two years in a row in the Great Barrier Reef. And so it's disappearing in our lifetime. That's, you know, but if you look at, we have the last coral barrier reef in America is down in Florida.

And they have like semi-treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that they can swim through. These, you know, I've been out there, you know, on these beaches. You could literally talk to somebody on the beach or scream to them on the beach. And they have this green water coming out of sewer pipes 200 meters away 300 meters away and so they're dumping you know semi-treated sewage on the last reef in america this is going on all around the world and i 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. And that's what I'm trying to do is try to not just create the awareness that something's going on, that we have to do something, but try to create action. Now, when you say semi-treated sewage, what do you mean by that?

Well, that's what they reported. So it smells like sewage what do you mean by that um 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 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 the 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 it's a very good question you know there's so many things to work on i know the activists down there working on this they're just trying to get people to see it, to know that this is going on.

And I think they closed the beaches down when the wind shifts and it starts to push it on shore. Jesus Christ. 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. You wouldn't be going to Florida if you knew what was going on on that beach.

We can make arguments about whether or not you should go to Florida all day long, and I'm with you 100%, but I just can't imagine that they would allow this. I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi-treat it? How much more would it cost to not do what they're doing? That's a good question. It's fucking insane. And then that they close the beach when the water shifts and the wind shifts and heads towards the shore and people get sick and they probably don't even

know it jesus christ yeah i mean you know we'd be out when we were at one outfall that's what they call an outfall it's basically a sewer pipe you know nothing's happening then all of a sudden you can start to hear this rumble and then you see this this green oh god and it's and we're not talking like a little drain pipe, too. Like, literally, you could swim through it. Not stand in it, but it's big, like four feet, five feet tall. Now, why are they allowing it? I mean, does anybody have an argument for why that's money?

Money. Because it costs less. It costs money to treat sewage. Jesus Christ, though. That's insane. Well, there's a lot of things like that going on right now. But it seems like someone should be held accountable for that. Like whatever cost benefit that they've decided is worth polluting the ocean by pumping sewage into it.

Well, you know, that's a good question. Now that I recall, this is like five years ago. We tried to get an interview with the key people down there. But try to, like if you're going to talk to somebody about this, nobody wants to go on record to talk about it because it's really bad for tourism. And it's not good for their political record. Is there a video of it? Can we show video? You got something?

Jamie's got something here. I need to see this. It's in Racing Extinction. The second film I did. Florida. This is as important as the beach. Oh, look at this. Oh, film I did. Florida. This is impossible. Oh, look at this. Oh, yeah.

Look at that. There we go. Oh, that's so disgusting. Four months ago, maybe. Wow. It is just a gigantic pipe pumping green shit into the ocean. Why is it green, by the way? Oh, it's a good question.

It could be the color under the water, too. But you said it was green when you saw it as well, right? Yeah. That's the treated. It's treated. It's much better that way. Well, everything in the spectrum down there is a little bit blue or green. It's probably food coloring.

Look at that. Fuck. What is that? Fish? Yeah, fish love it. Chewing on the sewage? They can eat crab. Oh, Christ. Yeah. Oh, and then the fishermen fish on it, too, when the outfall is going. Oh, Jesus Christ.

To catch fish that are eating shit? Look at that. That is insane. We're looking at this pipe, and it looks like like a cloud of poison is is being jettisoned out of this pipe and into the ocean and the important part is if you came up you would see people on the beach oh god i mean we're not talking about like you know miles out at sea we're talking about how in america i mean i know florida's barely america but how in america is that possible it's a really good question 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 is there any other part of the country that has something like that not that i know fucking florida jesus christ i mean of course it's florida i mean if is there a place that is so worthy of all the stereotypes like florida is it seems like every time you think you've had enough look at all these fish just swimming into the shit that surface looks like it's boiling when all the water comes oh god shit boil shit boil in florida look at the ground it's all just covered with algae well that's kind of funny like what i'm saying is like you know we always think somebody else should be doing something about this and you know that's why we do films is not just to create the awareness and you know to try to get something done about it when we you know when we did the cove they

were killing about 23 000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption. I think the last time, I think 2017 was the last reports of how many they killed. I think it was 1,610 total. Total, so it was like a 93% drop since we did that film. Because every time that Rick O'Berry, he's the guy that captured and trained the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper. Every time that we talked in the Japanese press, we try to use the word mercury because that's their Achilles heel. You know, we can say, you know, if you talk to the Japanese, the people from the IWC, of course, they're out of that now. They've quit the IWC.

They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens? You know, they're pretty sensual and intelligent too. And we say, well, but the mercury. Now, and chickens? They're pretty sensual and intelligent too. And we say, well, but the mercury. Now, how many people are eating dolphin meat? Less. I think less because of the film. When we were there, they were feeding it to school kids. And the school children, it's the young mind, like infants or prenatal,

that has the most deleterious effects of mercury, because your neurons are just developing. And they had hatched a scheme for school lunch programs all over America. And in Japan, unlike in America, you have to eat everything on your plate. So it's almost like you were force-fed to poison. Because of the film, that stopped. So, I mean, films can be really powerful, you know, to... Yeah, that's amazing.

That film is so disturbing, man. Well, you know, it is. And, you know, when Mark Monroe, the writer, he came up with the name The Cove, I said, it sounds like a horror film. He goes, well, it is. It is. I mean, look, if we write and these are water people, I mean, essentially as intelligent, if not more.

I mean, you were saying that the complexity of their brains is. They have more, you know, more density for neurons, like the folds of the brains. If you look at, if you did a slice of a brain, it looks like a fjord, right? And there's more convolutions with a dolphin. There's more surface area for neurons. And, of course, the more neurons you have, the more connections you're making. And they actually have, oh, God, there's spindle neurons that they have that are developing complex emotions. If you look at orcas, they're really tight-knit communities.

A male orca will spend most of its life, not more than a body length away from its mother the entire time until it goes away to do what it does. These animals are really social, and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we don't even know what they're saying. Like the average person can hear from 50 hertz to 20,000 kilohertz, and they can hear, I think they can communicate up to 200,000. So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with. And we hear like a little squeak, like, but if you slow it down and break it down, there's

actually, you know, there's more patterns in there than we can sense. And what's interesting about whales, blue whales, blue whales are really solitary creatures. They're, you know, they're not gregarious like dolphins. They don't usually hang out in big groups. But down in the Southern Ocean, it was confounding people. Like, how do they find the krill bloom that happens in a different area hundreds or thousands of miles apart? How do they all find it? And one of the researchers, Roger Payne, came up with this idea.

And it was through the work with the Navy, that there's something called the deep ocean channel. And it's basically between the surface of the water and the thermal layer that fluctuates depending on where you are 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 that 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. And so it's called reciprocal altruism is the theory, is that they when 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 holy there's a there's a friend of mine chris clark dr chris clark from over in cornell university he was uh he was um there's a there's a string of

pearl hydrophones that the Navy uses called SOSIS in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was designed to listen for Russian submarines back in the Cold War. But they opened it up to some researchers and Chris was one of the first ones to, you know, if you're a researcher listening to whales, you go out in your little boat and you drop a hydrophone in and you can usually think, oh, that's amazing. Look, you can hear sounds everywhere. Everything is basically singing down there from crackling shrimp up to blue whales. So you have this impression that, man, I just dropped in on this conversation.

I don't know what's being said, but that feels pretty special. I don't know what's being said, but that feels pretty special. Now he goes to Sosis, and they have like a, back then it was like an underground bunker full of people with three screens back before anybody had three screens and everybody's listening for submarines. And he sees that on a board that's lit up in the whole world. He's seeing wherever the blue whales are singing or all these whales, it's lit up like a Christmas tree. And 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. But he was like, oh my God, this is like the holy grail for listening to whales because they have, they can tell what's going on on an ocean ecosystem level

when he could just, you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen. Now he can, all of a sudden he has all this incredible data. And he could track animals, these animals like blue whales, they'll ping and they can basically send out a wave and they can see thousands of miles away, you know, with their extra senses wow jesus that's incredible and we just imagine that ability to to pick up all those extra patterns that we don't even hear so we don't even understand exactly what kind of data they're getting from each other and we don't know what it means either.

So we just know there's something, right? Yeah, there's a friend of mine. I don't even know if you want to talk. His name is Brett Salvatale. He's working with another friend of his, Aza, to try to use AI to figure out what animals are saying. I know he's talked about it before with the press, so I think it's okay if I mention it. But I've been sending it to people like Roger Payne and Chris Clark,

these other researchers I know, because they have these huge databases. And they're trying to use AI to see if they can figure out, using computers, what these animals are saying. And I think that's the holy grail for getting us, for letting us care about these animals. If we know what they're saying, I think that changes the game. Yes.

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 animals, like humpback whales, are singing, you know humpback whales are singing. You know, these strange, beautiful sounds. I don't know.

Do you want Jamie to pull up songs of the humpback whale? Yeah, we'll find something to play. That these animals were actually singing. You know, it was actually his wife, Katie Payne, that figured it out. And he wrote up the paper with another guy. Like joyously singing. Yeah. Like, you know, she, when a humpback whales. We have an issue with playing it?

Yeah, it's actually been sold, so it's a copy written. 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? 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 i think there probably

some stuff that you can play with that's not copyrighted excuse me i think it's oh look it's tough it's gonna be real tough though because somebody may own it that may not know that somebody else owns it an agent for the whale protecting it and trying to get an agent for the whale yeah that's some caa guy hey we want to get paid you fucks um are you aware what's going on with the resident uh orca pod um in um outside of seattle yeah yeah which uh it's a this very strange situation where the salmon have dwindled radically. And this resident pod only eats salmon. They only, what is it, Chinook?

Chinook. So they only eat Chinook salmon. And so 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. The Russians had illegally caught 101 cetaceans.

It was about 87, roughly, belugas and about 11 orcas illegally for the Chinese market. I was covering that part of it. Was that the Chinese market of marine shows? Yeah. Yeah. There's, 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 shows. Thank God. But in China, they haven't got the message.

So there, I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year. You know, so it's, you know, it's like whack-a-mole. And the Russians were providing. No, in that story, when I was in Russia, this is like one of those amazing situations. Putin, on a State of the Union address, announced that they were going to release the whales back from the whale jail that were caught over in eastern Russia. So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story. So we ran over to Vladivostok and covered that portion of the story. But to answer your question, there's another co-director that was working on the Northwest, and the Lummi Indians were going out to feed from their stock of farm-raised salmon.

They were feeding the animals. But that's not sustainable because they move around. Yeah, you can't find them sometimes. The solution seems to be to get rid of a lot of the dams. Yes. It's kind of an unpopular position with some people, but they're not efficient anymore. They're holding up, you know, the whole ecosystems are being degraded because of that.

Well, you know, one of them that they initially, when they set it up, they didn't even realize what they were doing. This was in like the 1930s or something like that, where they had hundreds of thousands of salmon just coming to this wall and not understanding what the fuck's going on and dying there. There's a friend of mine, I'm a co-director in a film about plastics with Josh Murphy, did a film called Artificial, and it's about just this, 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 know, what you think is a wild salmon, you know, what it actually costs to raise it, sometimes it's like thousands of dollars per fish. You know, because so few of them actually come through and then get back. What is this, Jeremy? This is Pattern Radio. So this is an AI I'll reset the website but it says that you can explore yourself

to find humpback whale songs and make your own discoveries. 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-looking site.

If anybody 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. Whoa. 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. Yeah. Wow.

If that was coming out of space,'d be like what yeah we would be like we have to go immediately i've often said that about bigfoot that we everyone cares 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 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, it lives in the ocean, but it breathes air, and it swims around in these incredible pods, and they have really tight communities, they

communicate with each other with this language, that we have had our best linguists try to decipher. We have no idea what the fuck they're saying. You'd be like, what kind of animal is that? It would be a crazy mythical creature, like the creature from the Black Lagoon or the Loch Ness Monster or something. It would be like some incredible thing. If you ever found one, people would be freaking out. But we get so used to things being real and i think we're just used to them and unfortunately because of things like you know free willy and

you know and going to see sea world shows where they're doing flips for fish and everybody's clapping people have got it in their head that this is just the thing it's a normal thing but what they are is like one of the most fantastic creatures that the world has ever known. In all of the billions of years of life on this planet, there's two things that are mind blowers in terms of like their intelligence. One of them is us. The other one is them. All the marine mammals, whether it's whales, dolphins. I mean, whales are amazing because of their size, but whales, dolphins, and orcas. And obviously, orcas are cousins of whales.

But those things are, they're some of the most spectacular creatures that the biodiversity of the earth has ever created. I agree. I mean, when you're watching a dolphin show you're watching a spectacle of dominance you're watching slaves yeah i mean listen i mean if this is a nice room you know we have plenty of water and but you know if we needed food and we had to do backflips for it after a couple weeks they'd you and i would be doing it Exactly. And that's what it is. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, we, you know, on this film I was working on, we uncovered some information at SeaWorld.

And this is the trainers talking to management about, you know, an animal that's not performing well. And then they get the vets involved. And the vets say, have you tried uh caloric deprivation wow you know so it's actually emails and they'll never tell you that they're starving an animal to get it to to do tricks but there's there's emails now 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 your dad they don't they don't want to give me any food because i'm doing well poorly in history like what yeah or you know uh to perform

better with sports i guess it'd be a better analogy. Yeah, Jesus Christ. I mean, that's essentially what they do with the Cuban Olympic wrestling program. Yoel Romero, who was one of the top UFC fighters, came out of that Cuban wrestling program, and he said that the elite athletes get to eat three times a day, but the people that are under them get to eat twice a day. Wow. 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. They want to make sure that they only develop the best of the best. And he has this crazy Cuban accent with his broken English. He's like, he turned you into a machine. That's how he talks. And he's just 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 a guy named Phil Demers who has been involved in a decades-long lawsuit with Marineland in Canada. He was a walrus trainer. I think I know his story. Yes. And he, walrus bond with humans when they're babies. And he bonded with this walrus named smooshy

and i i believe she's the only one that's alive 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 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 now here they are you know 15 years old stuck in a swimming pool developing ulcers their their dorsal fin collapsing collapses and atrophies i mean it 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 en masse. Yeah, there's stock. In a TED Talk I have, I showed the stock price of one thing. I was at Sundance for the premiere of Blackfish, and I went down and talked to the people that made the film afterwards, and I said, we're going to be the best thing that ever happened to you because at that point I think we had like 650,000 followers.

And then we helped organize getting musicians to stop performing there. And we sent a copy of Blackfish in the Cove to all the ten major, everybody that sat at the board of directors that backed SeaWorld. So everybody that sat on the board of directors that backed sea world you know so we you know everybody that sat on the board got a copy of that that uh that film and then when they're um there's i can't remember i guess it was their earnings came out that that quarter it just their stock value just fell down from 32 to like 16 they lost like a you know a billion dollars in value almost overnight and um 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 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 really simple. It should be illegal. 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 what they understand, the close-knit, the nature of these orca pods,

the fact that it's not illegal, it's just stunning. Yeah, well, they've bred a lot of theirs now in captivity. Which is even more fucked up. Yeah. I mean, they're not even from the, you know, if you know how they learn, and now they're suddenly thrown into these disparate groups where you have some that are wild some come from different you know imagine these these populations of the transients and the residents they don't speak the same language now and then you pull the mothers

away so there's really no what do they do when they don't speak the same language do they try to communicate they just run into it? They beat up each other. There's all sorts of evidence that we have had people go in there. Because there's a lawsuit going on right now. And so we've gone in and photographed for the people with the lawsuit. And you look and they're raked. The dolphins chew on the iron bars on the side or on the sides of the pool. A lot of their

teeth are just sawed off because they're getting infected it's um yeah let's go on to something else what can you go on to i mean it's one of the i i really think it's i mean it 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 said, if we could decipher what they were saying and then break it down to a very clear language. Yeah, that would certainly help with everything. Yeah. If we knew what was being said. Because we did this film called Racing Extinction. And the working title was called The Singing Planet.

Because just about everything is singing. we just haven't been listening everything from a you know from a mouse up to a blue whale has a song I mean technically it's a song and but we don't see it as that we're we're looking at it only through our own eyes and you know that was part of the objective of that film was to try to get people to understand like hey there's all these other life forms out there. They're disappearing before we have a chance to even know what they're up to. And we're the last generation that can fix it. So we're going through a mass extinction right now. The sixth.

Yeah, the Anthropocene. And when I started, I did four stories for National Geographic on dinosaurs, on the Mesozoic, the midlife of the planet. A lot of friends of mine were paleontologists. And Michael Novacek, the head provost of the American Museum of Natural History, I was in the Gobi Desert with him. And you go around to these beautiful landscapes where you see dinosaurs laid out basically from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail like you don't see anywhere else in the world. Like they almost got exterminated by something in one go. And he had told me that, well, we're going through a mass extinction right now. And I was like, what?

He said, oh, yeah. You know, mankind is responsible for the sixth mass extinction. That's the first time I heard about it about 15 years ago. And, you know, I said, well said what you know what are the issues what are you so well the drivers are habitat destruction for agriculture um pollution invasive species invasive species and overconsumption but the but the biggest one by far is habitat destruction the raising of of crops for animals that we in turn eat so you So if you look at what's going on in Africa, poaching is a big, huge problem. But a bigger problem is a lot of that land now

is being, and it was going on the Amazon as well. It's being torn up for getting feed for cattle. Did they find out what was causing those fires in the Amazon? Were they set? Do they know? Yeah, those are all illegal fires for illegal crops, for soybean, corn to feed cattle. So they burned down the jungle so that they could wipe everything out.

This has been proven? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And they do the same thing in indonesia but for palm oil and the thing about uh brazil is bolsonaro apparently has approved this kind of behavior right is that what's going on down there yeah to prop up business right there was an image in the new york times of sao paulo and people walking through during the day and the sky was like, like it was dark out just from the,

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 them down for, not only that, not just biodiverse, but so unknown.

I mean, this is where a great majority of some of the greatest pharmaceutical drugs ever invented, their origins have come from the rainforest. People have found various compounds and things inside the rainforest that have been used for a variety of different methods. There's all sorts of bugs in there that we don't understand. Look at that. There's the sorts of bugs in there that we don't understand. Look at that. There's the image.

How insane is that? I mean, if you've never been to Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo is a huge city. I mean, it rivals like New York City. It's massive. And the sky was literally black with smoke. That's daytime? Yep. Wow.

Yeah. Insane. Well, have you ever experienced wildfires out here in california oh yeah yeah yeah um boy i mean that's pretty crazy yeah last four or five well what was the last month we do you live over here do you live in sausalito okay just north of the bridge oh okay well then you guys the northern california one that one what was that uh what was the area that got hit oh the kincade fire just recently yeah that was enormous yes and then there was the one paradise the paradise fire that was the one i was thinking was the largest i think in california history i mean these goddamn fires when they happen it's it's a very stunning and sobering reminder

of the the forces of nature. And when 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 and then the wind brings it down, it's terrifying. But my point was that I've been very, very close to some of these fires. We've been evacuated a few times. very, very close to some of these fires. You know, we've been evacuated a few times. 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. Yeah, like climate change is real and it's happening now and it's close.

It's about as real as it can ever get. I mean, the people who are in denial of it at this point, I mean, how much longer can you hold this opinion and what's what is keeping you what is keeping you on this it's a hoax trap track you know i travel all over the world we're the only country that doesn't get it you know we might have the illusion that it's half the world that doesn't get it but we're i mean over in europe and asia they all understand it it's not not a mystery over there it's only here and i think you know it's self-interest greed yeah i think people are you know there's also a right-wing ideology there's there's something that happens you know

there's certain uh opinions that people adopt they adopt this conglomeration of opinions if you are in the right or if you're in the left. And one of them in the right is to deny the impact of certain environmental factors and climate change and things along those lines. And it's just, it's like to join this 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 appoint something out yeah how's that climate change working out for you but just because like it's really cold in some place one day like you know you one day. I don't think you understand what this is.

That's actually part of it. Have it being extraordinarily cold. The whole thing's in chaos. All the systems are out of whack. Yeah, no, whole ecosystems. I went out to the beach this morning, and it probably looked the way it did 50,000 years ago out there. But you go under the water, it's a whole different story.

Well, a couple degrees warmer fucks everything up. Yeah, that's all you need. That's 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, the variability. But you don't look at the 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 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 if there's just a big tube that goes into the sky and just sprays all over west palm beach people be like what the fuck is this and then they would have they would have to act they'd have to say you can't do that but because it's getting pumped into the ocean it seems like it's okay it's not ours it's just the ocean well it's unfortunate we gotta do i gotta go to work man i don't have time for this like i'm behind on my car payments i'm doing overtime tonight you know most people are concerned with so many different man. I don't have time for this. I'm behind on my car payments. I'm doing overtime tonight. Most people are concerned with so many different things that they don't have time to think about the massive overfishing and pollution of the ocean. Well, that's the trick.

As a filmmaker, how do you make a story like that so that people actually want to see it so they don't feel like it's medicine? They don't feel like, okay, I got to go watch this. Right, medicine. That's a good way to see it. So they don't feel like it's medicine. They don't feel like, okay, I got to go watch this. Right, medicine. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. And, you know, The Cove, for instance, I mean, that was, it feels like a thriller. It doesn't feel like a lecture on, you know, what we're doing to dolphins. It's sort of set up like a mystery.

The first line of the film was me saying, I just want to say we tried to do the story legally. I still can't go back to Japan. Really? What happens if you go back? Won't come back out. They'll arrest you? I'm told that there's arrest warrants out for me. For what?

Conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing. Wow. Filming police. Disrupt commerce. All that dolphin commerce. Fuck you. 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 while you were over there and you went outside of them? Yeah. They gave us a map. It's in the film. They gave us a map and told us this is where we're not supposed to go.

As my friend Charles Hamilton said, that became our template of where we needed to go of course yeah have you uh seen some of the sea shepherd work where they've caught these uh japanese uh scientific research boats that are really just killing whales oh yeah yeah and they're out of the southern ocean now this is last year they announced that they were going to get out of there now they're only killing whales around their own territorial waters so in a way it's a big victory you know paul's a good friend paul watson um he just wrote me right just a couple hours before i i came here um yeah he wanted a like a big projector we did it you just You never saw a racing extinction. No. To alert the world that we needed to get on this, we lit up the Empire State Building with endangered species.

And it was a huge event. We had, I think, 939 million media views in four days, top trending story on Facebook and Twitter for four days worldwide. We did do something really strange like that. How'd you do that? With a projector? With 50 projectors, 50 like IMAX size projectors all mounted on the building that was on like 31st Street.

And this is all sanctioned. We had, we spent four years getting permission to do it. And we finally did it. And, you know, I remember. Here it is right here. Jamie's got a video of it. Oh, you got to slow that down though. Oh, well, it's just what's on YouTube.

Oh, on YouTube they speed it up? How long did this last for? Oh, we did it for three hours, but there's like two 10-minute shows, 15-minute shows. Was there a crowd of people that watched it? Oh, my God. It was like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue. What was funny is the producer and the distributor said, Oh, it's going to be too expensive.

Nobody will be there in the summertime in New York. They always say that. There's fucking 100 million people in New York. I go there in the summertime, it's packed with people. Be like, nothing happens in the summer in New York. Like I was doing a show down there. Like, wow, this is really good. I mean, it's the summer in New York.

How are you selling so many tickets? Like, have you looked around? They have this weird attitude that nothing happens in New York in the summer. I think it's like carried over from the 30s when there was no air conditioning. Yeah. So we had, you know, we thought we couldn't get any more attention on that. How crazy is that, though? The summer in New York.

Everybody's out. Why wouldn't they see it? But they said, well, the important people, they they said are going to be at the hamptons or they're going to be over oh god or overseas oh my god the important people they really say that to you they said that and they also said the press wouldn't show up because at 9 30 at night nobody could afford overtime oh but you know it looked like the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue. Everybody was wrong. Yeah.

And then we thought, okay, that's it. We can't get any more attention than that than the Pope called. The Pope wanted us to project on the Vatican during COP 21. Whoa. And then we had, I think, four and a half billion media views. 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 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 like what you know they have fucking billions of dollars in art and spectacular architecture and everywhere you go the spoils of riches and you're like what is where you get this from it's 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 they pilfered um persia for that and so it was you know you had to bring it back when you were trading, you know, you had to bring it back

when you were trading in the 17, 1600s. You had to bring back stuff you stole. Yeah. I was just there. I was just in Venice.

And now, do you know that what's going on right now? They have the worst flooding they've had in 50 years. Yeah, I saw the Gritty Palace. I stayed there

at the Gritty Palace. Oh, that's where we were. The lobby had like four feet of water in the lobby. Really? Yeah.

Holy shit, four feet of water in the fucking lobby yeah holy shit four feet of water in the fucking lobby so what is causing that well it's uh well a combination of the the time this time of year the tides and 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 ashore. So how do you stay in the Gritty Palace when the floor is water? I don't think you do stay in it. I think that's the least of their problems right now. Wow. When I lived in Boulder, I wasn't in a flood zone.

I lived at 4th and Juniper. Like I said, right against the foothills. It wasn't on a flood map, but we had a 2,000-year flood, and there was furniture floating. I had furniture floating up against the ceiling of my place. I got brought out by climate change. Look at that. Wow.

That's how bad the flooding is. Yeah, that's where we stayed over the summer. Yeah. It's gorgeous, but weird. It's like a really beautiful prostitute. You're like, do you have to do this? Because like, look at all that shit floating by. That's crazy how high the water level is.

That's a restaurant. Yeah. Wow, it's all underwater. Is that outside the Gritty Palace? It's around the corner. That's what it looks like. Yeah. Is that outside the Gritty Palace?

It's around the corner. That's what it looks like. Yeah. The cruise ships would pull up, and then you would see the amount of people that get out, and then the streets would be flooded. And all the people that lived there would be like, this all just started happening like a decade ago, or the cruise ships were allowed to pull right up. And the week they were there, they said they had two accidents with cruise ships 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 floating a floating mountain that has no ability to maneuver correctly look at the size of that goddamn thing. I mean, that is so much bigger than any of the buildings there. And that thing's floating in and banging into the walls. And look at the size of that. Look at the size of that.

That is so insane. And we wonder why we're screwed. That thing has nine floors. That is so crazy. Look at that. Yeah, there's probably several thousand people, right? Oh, for sure. For many thousand.

And, you know, don't they just dump their waste right into the ocean? They did in the past. I don't know if they do it now. What do they do now? Put it in a baggie? Well, that's one of the things they found in la i'm sure you're aware of this they did a um uh satellite uh overview like an image of methane they're trying to find out where is the uh greenhouse gases where's the biggest you know polluters it turns out it was landfills oh landfills a huge issue you know this idea that there is that the greenhouse gas thing the methane leak right this idea that you're going to just put it in the ground hey that doesn't work it comes out of the ground yeah i told you we had a a tesla

that we had retrofitted for uh for racing had a FLIR camera, the same camera that you use to see methane. It sees a spectrum. It's not heat, but it can see methane. You can put another filter in it so you can see carbon dioxide. And so we went on the streets of L.A. and we got onto the tarmac. And carbon dioxide is a little bit of the boogeyman. You can't see it.

But with this camera, you can see it. And it's pretty astounding when you can, you know, just, you know, right now if you put it on us, you'd look like we're smoking. But when you show it on the streets of L.A., it's like everything's disgorging. Right. Yeah. And there's not enough plants to absorb it. Yeah. You can't absorb it that quickly.

But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods. There's something about when you're in nature and you're in the forest where, you know, specifically like the Pacific Northwest, which has these incredibly dense forests, the air just has a different quality to it. I mean, it's just this rich, oxygenated air because, you know, you're just around all these trees and plants. There's a different feel to it.

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. Yeah. I think you can only stay here a little while longer 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 la 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 backed up yeah yeah without

an accent and i don't you know back then i mean i'm probably i don't hold you 52 yeah so i'm like i got a little bit more than 10 years on you. But I remember that this valley was always, for the first month I worked at the LA Times, the valley was just, you couldn't see anything. And then one day it cleared up. And in a rear view mirror, I was living north of town in Glendale. And in a rear view mirror, I saw White Cat Mountains. And I thought, where the hell did they come from? Right. Oh, that scared me because I thought. Yeah the hell did they come from? Right. Oh, that scared me.

Cause 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? There's mountains right there. Like you don't see literally the, the pollution so dense, it hides mountains. Still? Yes. Okay.

Well, it's because today's a beautiful day. It's really a hides mountains. Still? Yes. Okay. All the time. Because today is a beautiful day. It's really clear. It's a beautiful day. You get lucky. What really helps us is when the wind blows. When the wind blows, it clears everything out. And you can get to a high peak.

There's an area where I trail run. You get to this really high peak and you can look out at the top and pause. And some days you don't see jack shit. You just see gray. And then some days after it rains it rains you're like there's fucking mountains out here like you don't like i want to take a picture of this stark contrast you know matter of fact i'm gonna run not tomorrow but the next day when i get up there i'm gonna take a photo and i'm gonna 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 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 converters helped a lot well it also is helping a lot is this conversion to electric cars and i really hope people continue down that path um you know 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 they're better to drive i mean we were talking about teslas i mean i i have that model s i love that thing i mean it's amazing it's an 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 i've ever driven yeah no i mean i had one too for a while but it uh i told you i had the electro-luminescent paint job and the projector yeah it was a like um yeah so it's a

it was a nice one. But I had one of the first electric cars in Colorado back in like 2007. I only knew of like two other ones. And I had 120 solar panels on my roof. So I didn't pay for electricity. Really? Yeah. So the roof of your house.

Yeah, the roof of my house. Did you see that documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? Yeah. Chris Payne. He's a good friend. Very interesting, right? Yeah. And Revenge of the Electric Car? Yeah, Chris Payne. He's a good friend. Very interesting, right? Yeah, and Revenge of the Electric Car. It was his follow-up to it.

Oh, I didn't see that. Yeah, it's a good one. I think it's better than the first one, actually. But I would tell my neighbors, like, hey, I don't pay for electricity. My license plate said VUS. It stood for Vehicle Using Sun. It was the opposite of an SUV. I mean, I got checks from the electric company.

I didn't have bills. I had checks. Because you were contributing to the grid. Yeah. So we had net metering. And I thought I just discovered something. It was just incredible. But everybody said, I was doing it just to prove that you could do it back then.

Yeah. And neighbors would say, but how much does it cost? 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. So I was an early adopter. 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. It's a little bit better and it's cheaper. saying they're not going to switch over until it's cheaper it's a little bit better and it's cheaper and you know elon i think he's got the the right idea make it a little make it a lot better and eventually it's going to be cheaper i mean the the model s is uh is a great car but the

the model three is selling like crazy yeah and it's a fantastic car as well i mean that model three is it's preposterous you know i have a porsche 911 gt3 and it's a pretty fast car this guy uh humiliated me the other day i wasn't trying to race him but i think he was trying to prove a point we're at a red light and the light turned green and he shot ahead of me and got onto the highway so fast i was like laughing i was like look i wasn't trying to race the guy but if i was it would have been a bloodbath you said yeah you keep yours on ludicrous mode all the time oh mine yeah my model s yeah i do i keep it on ludicrous mode but you don't have to drive it ludicrous that's on ludicrous mode you could drive it normal but

anytime you want to just dump on the the accelerator just whoa 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 before i can change lanes with that thing it's just you just go and people that have never been in one before i take them for a drive in the tesla and they they grip the seat and like what the fuck everybody says the same thing like what the or holy shit those

are the two things they say because it doesn't seem like it should be able to do that like it looks like a sedan it's like it's like a regular car and i talk you know i've i've got like a old muscle car got a couple cars that look fast i'm like that car that regular sedan looking car five times faster than anything here yeah and zero emissions but you know we're in this transitionary period and i think uh the future is pretty bright for that stuff mustang uh just ford just released uh the concept of this new vehicle that they're releasing very soon it's like a mustang crossover e-car it's it's beautiful it's really cool looking it looks like like a larger mustang like a taller mustang but it's all electric and elon praised it today that ford is going out on a

limb and making something like that you know and then porsche is uh releasing their their version it's called a tycan and that's i think that's how you say it but it's a beautiful looking sleek looking electric car so we're moving in that direction yeah i mean there's a there's a great tony save of the futurist he shows a picture of the 1900 Easter Parade in New York City. And it's all horses looking down from a building. I don't know if you find it, Jamie, 1905 or 1900 Easter Parade. And it's like, there's one car. And then 13 years later, it's like, find the horse. Wow. And these transitions, they take about 10, 12 years. 12 years ago, we were punching the number two key on our flip phone six times to text a capital C. And I think we're going to be doing the same thing with the transition with food. I think it's going to be going that way.

Do you think that they're going to be, do you have hope for all this lab-created meat? What do you think about, I mean, I know there's some process that I don't totally understand where they're able to make actual biological, like, bison meat, cow meat. I'm doing a film series right now called Food 2.0, and I had dinner on Saturday night two nights ago with Uma, the guy that founded Memphis Meats.

And I have the same sort of ickiness about going that direction, but he showed me these pictures on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making. And I stopped eating meat about 10 years ago but i thought it didn't look bad you know it looked he had like it it chopped you know so that it was grilled and it thought you know i have this sort of revulsion against it myself because i've um you know got myself off of it but i looked i looked at that and i thought, you know what? That looks really edible. It looks good. Somebody that could eat meat, that would be appetizing.

Yeah, it seems like the science, whatever it is, it's tissue. And whatever that tissue is, it's composed of a bunch of different natural ingredients, whatever creates a turkey breast. It seems like it's just a matter of innovation and technology improving to the point where they can recreate that. Yeah. No, the question is, you know, is that better for you than, you know, the whole foods plant-based diet?

That's the real question, right? Because that's where things get convoluted. What is healthy versus what is ethical versus what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing morally? Yeah. The way I stopped eating meat about 1986, I was doing a story for Fortune magazine on the biggest independently owned cattle ranches in America.

And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse and they supposed to, you know, they're, they kill the animal with this captive bolt to the brain and it's supposed to happen instantly. But there was one animal that came around and it was still alive. And it was at that point, it was hanging upside down and it's flesh and it's hide was stripped off and it's looking at me with its eye, and it's following my eye. Its hide was stripped off, and it was still alive? Yeah.

And as it's turning around, it was turning its head, and it still held my eye. And I thought, this son of a bitch is alive, and I'm part of this. So I stopped eating meat shortly after that. And so I thought, well, I have to eat something, right? I have to eat an animal product because you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't. And then so I became a pescatarian. That's all I ate for animal protein. Well, you know, I did milk and dairy, but I didn't eat anything.

I limited myself to things that didn't walk, that didn't walk. So fish was like fair territory for me. that didn't walk. They were the ones that didn't walk. So fish was like fair territory for me. And then when we made the cove, there's a scene in it where we take a sample of hair from the deputy minister of fisheries there, and we test it for mercury.

And when we were, you know, while I was out at the lab, I thought, well, I'll get mine tested too, because I was, I ate a lot of fish. I loved it. My son's still a professional fisherman, and I had a freezer full of fish all the time, stocked up of, you know, fresh ocean, whether or not fresh, but frozen 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 is the most toxic non-radioactive element in the world. And 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 probably decades.

And, you know, I tried to get it massaged out. for probably decades, and I'd try to get it massaged out. And if you start looking through the problems with mercury, you notice that there's a whole litany of things that it causes, depending on how bad you have it. But my doctor said it's the worst he'd ever seen in Colorado, so I had to get off of it. So we're here in L.A. for the Academy Awards, and I met my first vegan.

And I said, what do you eat? And she goes, everything else. You know, all protein originates with plants. And that was how I got started. And it took, 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. Two years to get it down? Why did it take so long I'll just try a little. Two years to get it down? Why did it take so long?

Because it has a half-life in your body of 70 to 90 days. So 44 goes to 22. Oh, 90 to 180. So, okay. Yeah, so I thought, okay, then I'll start eating a little bit of fish. And then I had to test it right away, and it jacked back up. And I thought, okay, I can't be tested. So all fish is poison.

All big fish is poison for sure. Big fish, like tuna. Tuna, swordfish, marlin. So what are the recommendations? 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 – I don't trust any of that. I mean, I can't mess with it.

When I was in Japan, I went to Minamata where they had the – they call it Minamata disease, but it's not a disease. It's poison. This was a company that was intentionally polluting the bay where there's a lot of fishermen. And the kids, of course, got – well, the cats got affected first because people give the fish to the cats. And the cats would have called dancing cat disease. You know, you heard the expression mad as a hatter. The cats would have called dancing cat disease. You know, you heard the expression mad as a hatter.

That's because they had the felt from 100 years, 150 years ago. They used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats. But they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad. In Minamata, the cats got affected and the kids. And then, you know, the people people a couple hundred thousand people got affected and these were remember this is 1950s remote remote villages and an american researcher went there and saw that everybody looked weird and said something's going on here and he found out that they're dumping you know mercury into the bay and i saw i visited a doctor there that studied

minimata disease he was the guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people. And he showed me these brains of, you know, they sliced open. And it looked like Swiss cheese. We're talking about the convolutions of the brain and how dolphins have more of them. Same thing with people. And the slices, they look like Swiss cheese. There's holes that Mercury's eating up in the brain. And so you don't want, you know, once you see that, you don't want that in your body.

So I had to get off fish and become a vegan, not for ethical reasons, but because of I just couldn't eat it, just for health reasons. But I'm doing just fine. How fucking crazy is that, that most fish is poison? Like that is such a crazy thing to think that the ocean is so fucked up that most of the food you pull out of the ocean is a mess. Well, I mean, most of the fish that we're eating, I think 54% is farm-raised. Again, I just read it this morning in Los Angeles Magazine. But that's worse, right?

It's worse, yeah. And the ecological damage it's doing is crazy. The health consequences is crazy. So the question is then, what do we eat? What about mollusks? So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks. So one of the things that someone told me that was actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks. They said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms than even plants. They don't have the same nerve endings.

They don't really move. They open and shut. And they're a viable form of animal protein that is just so primitive. I heard that too. They're just not. We think of them as life forms, but so is broccoli. That's a life form as well. But there's actually more evidence that plants are intelligent than there is that mollusks are.

Mollusks are an incredibly ancient life form. But then again, don't you get some sort of mercury poisoning from them as well well they're they're on the bottom right usually and they're they're filtering so you're you're getting whatever poison whatever toxins are i'm not going to say that you know mollusks are poison i just wouldn't eat it i'm going a completely different direction but i've heard that before that mollusks are you can farm them too right you can i mean if we really can break down that they're even more primitive but yet more nutritious god you know that's like you know i did a story in polynesia on on oysters and they have the big

oysters that they get you know put through for pearls and they they don't they just eat the muscle that holds all the the organs and stuff on you know when i for pearls. And 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, they're like, what? Because the muscle tastes like fish flesh. It's actually pretty good. But, you know, the idea that we're eating all those other filtered organs and stuff, I just don't know.

I don't. But you don't know. I don't know. You don't know i don't uh but you don't know you know i don't know you don't know um has anybody come up with any sort of comprehensive plan or anything that makes sense where they can viably repopulate the ocean i mean the idea of stopping and slowing down fishing would be wonderful but it's i mean if we 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? I think it's impossible, the scale of what's going on right now. 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. Now it's, 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. Now it's, you know, eight days. 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, it's. And everybody's just going gangbusters. And we have, we're using military gear to, you know, sonar to catch things at this unprecedented rate.

It's not sustainable. I personally don't believe that fishing, to feeding this planet currently, you can do it with fish. I don't think you can do it with, you know, and we know what's, you know, that the unethical side of raising, you know, farm animals for this is, it's just, I think we have to transition to another form. I think it's going to be 10 or 12 years, but I think we're headed that direction. I think what you're seeing now is that there's a direction

towards people want to eat healthier, they want to eat sustainable. I know you're a hunter. I was a hunter too. I hunted fish. I understand. 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 know, there's something you tap in

that's really primitive in a, in a, in a really genuine way that makes us feel good about who we are, that you're providing. And I know that that happened when I was, when I was a fisherman, you know, you go hunt a fish with your friends and there's a group thing going on and you, who we are, that you're providing. And I know that that happened when I was a fisherman. You go hunt a fish with your friends, and there's a group thing going on, and everybody's there, they're enjoying themselves, and it feels wonderful. But we can't do it with wild fish. With 4% of the biomass being wild animals now and the rest of it being, it's not sustainable. being it's not sustainable and i wish it was because that that there's something we lost with that but we have to transition we're at that period right

now where we have to figure out how do you feed a planet that's the real problem right and not just how do you feed a planet how do you feed a planet that may double its population in the next 50 years? Yeah, well, they're talking 10 billion by 2050, and we're already at a point where we're at the… Yeah, so 20 years past that, it might really be double. It might be 15 million or, excuse me, billion people. That's crazy. So you can't have 18.5 million people in the greater Los Angeles area going out and hunting for their food or fishing.

So what are we going to eat? I think the way to do it is drifting more towards plants. Last week I was in Loma Linda, California. You know where that's at. You've heard about one of the blue zones? California. You know where that's at. You've heard about one of the blue zones. Yeah. And, you know, so it's for the people out there that don't, might not know about it. It's Dan Buettner, geographic fellow popularized the idea that there's these five geographic

regions of the planet where people live longer and without chronic disease than any other place on the planet. So I was out there last week at the brain health and Alzheimer clinic. And there's two researchers that started one. There wasn't one for miles around. And they opened it. One out of three people in America in the next 10 years are going to be affected by Alzheimer's.

They're going to have it. Their mate's going to have it. They're going to be taking care of somebody that has it, their parents. So it's going to overtake heart disease as our number one disease that we have. They opened up the Brain Health Clinic there, an Alzheimer's clinic, and nobody came. Now, about half the population is Seventh-day Adventists. They're vegetarians by religion.

And you go to the grocery store, they don't sell meat. They have milk, they have cow's milk, but it's on the bottom shelf. They just have a few things of it. And to find people, initially, they had to go to San Bernardino across the highway. There's nothing different, geologically different between San Bernardino and Loma Linda. They're drinking the same water, breathing the same air, but they have a different diet.

But they're living about 10 years longer than everybody. San Bernardino is one of the unhealthiest populations in America. And on the other side of Highway 10, you have one of the healthiest populations in the entire world. And they're living about 10 years on average longer. They're doing other things too. It's not just diet. Well, it's a of the biggest factors where they've determined that the less sleep you have, the higher likelihood you have of Alzheimer's disease.

And it's really stark. The numbers are pretty undisputable. Yeah, well, I agree. They have four principles, the Shurzais, Dean and Aisha Shurzai. Sleep is one of them, whole foods, plant-based diet, support, community support, only 13 of them are vegetarians and three vegans. So, I mean, you look at, you know, if you look at, if you break it down, the population, like how many of the 24,000 people there that are vegetarians, about 15%, you'd expect, you know, several hundred of them to be, you know, with Alzheimer's to be vegetarians, but they're not there. So, so many of them are following that uh seventh

day adventist diet which is vegetarian yeah and but what you're talking about san bernardino is a very poor community unfortunately and i think you know as well as i do a lot of people in poor communities eat terrible it's true you know and you're eating junk food and sugar and all that crap i mean that that's one of the primary factors when it comes to poor health and education is related definitely to brain health unfortunately and it has nothing to do that they're they're stupid it's just that they're you're right they're not they're not eating as well they have to you know the first mcdonald's was in san bernardino you know was it really yeah it was we went to the museum there at mcdonald's museum they have a m's Museum? Yeah. Do they have all the Ronald McDonald's from the beginning to the end?

Everything, yeah. Yeah, so they've been really good about keeping fast food out of Loma Linda for— Isn't there giant concerns even with large-scale agriculture? When you're talking about monocrops and growing things for 15 billion people, you're going to need gigantic swaths of land it's going to displace a lot of wildlife you're going to have a lot of different chemicals 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 anyway because you have compost and fertilizer you need fish for fertilizer or something that creates nitrogen there's a lot of issues even with large-scale

agriculture when you're growing crops. You're doing something that's wholly unnatural. If you have 1,000 acres of corn or soybeans or anything that you're growing in large scale, that's not how nature intends it. Nature intends everything to be combined together. 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 so you know well sort of a lot of it's being used to feed animals a lot of it's being used for corn syrup and a lot of different and we can agree on

that get rid of it yeah i mean yeah i mean you've seen king corn right yeah that's that's pretty fucking crazy when they check your dna and they find out how much of your DNA is corn-based. And you're like, what? Like, what is going on? Or how much of your cellular structure is corn-based? It's like, how much corn is in your diet? And then you go through the supermarket and go and pick up box after box and read how much corn is in there. Corn starch, corn syrup syrup different proteins that they've

extracted from corn well let me ask you how do you think that you know if we have to feed 10 15 billion people in the future how do you think question you know we should be feeding the population that's a good question it's a very good question i have hope for this um this fake meat shit not not um the plant-based stuff where they're using oils, but the actual physical meat that they can figure out some way to create meat without animals dying. I am not a fan of factory farming. It's the reason why I got into hunting in the first place. I saw a lot of those PETA documentaries, and I just didn't want to have any part of any of that shit. And I know there are ethical ranchers that raise their animals grass fed and they, they let them roam. And, you know,

there's a guy named Joel Salatin who has this, this thing called polyface farms where he, he teaches people regenerative farming methods and teaches people how to let animals be animals 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 crops, but it leaks into the ground. They spray the pig and shit on the crops. 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 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 that you you should these places should be transparent if there's something they're do that's abhorrent there's something they do what you you could see the lives of these animals though then they're treated in these horrific ways

it's not necessary that's nuts it's just they're doing that for profit, and this is why you can get a chicken sandwich for $1.99 or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah. I mean, that saying, if slaughterhouses had glass walls. Yes. Right. Yeah.

But going back to it, though, so how do you – so lab meat you think would be the – I think lab meat has real potential. The same way cell phones used to cost $1,000. More than that. What was one of those big Motorola bricks? Remember those things that Gordon Gekko had on Wall Street? They were really expensive.

When he was walking down 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 these people were walking around. They had very little money, but they all had phones. Cell phones have made their way throughout virtually all of the world. How much?

Four grand. Four grand? So four grand in 82 is probably what today 20 probably like 20 right sure yeah it's a lot let's just say let's just say it's a lot even if it's four grand if you imagine if a fucking iphone was four grand people be going crazy the new one's almost two grand and everybody's going crazy so that just i think that sort of technological innovation and improvement i think we were going to see that in this sort of factory-created meat because the original factory-created burger that they made, I believe it was a quarter of a million dollars that it cost to create one. And people ate it and they're like, this is beef.

This is like real beef. I think with innovation, they could figure out a way to do that so we don't ever have to have these factory farming situations i mean i think that's possible yeah no i think it is too when i i've talked to some of the people that are working on that and we need to look at how fast cells can reproduce and you know it's just a matter of scale and getting the right texture and taste yes look i'm i you know i'm under no illusion that what i do is available to everybody i go hunting in the mountains most people don't want to do that you know and i do it with a bow and arrow most people

don't want to learn how to do that they don't have it in them they don't want it it's not interesting want it it's not interesting 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 had come from these horrific environments and I ate that, I'd feel sick. And so that's why I became a hunter in the first place. Yeah. Well, that's what we concern ourselves is like wait how can like yeah you

and i can eat you probably better than me but i can i can eat how i want to eat but doesn't that sound weird you say i eat better than you no what you can afford more is what i'm saying but i'm telling you i'm getting my meat from the woods ah well i'm not i'm not saying better i'm saying that you can you can eat how you want oh you easier than me i'm just saying I'm not saying better. I'm saying that you can eat how you want. Oh, I see what you're saying. You're easier than me. I'm just saying I'm not. Financially. I've seen what you have around here.

Nice little cozy man den you have down here. But, boys, you should see what's out there. It's like the ultimate caveman. Not caveman, but man cave. Man cave. Man cave. Caveman would be a giant Neanderthal. But yeah, it's the conversation between, I mean, I have a gang of friends that are vegan and vegetarian.

One of my best friends is vegan, Ian Edwards. I love him to death. death i i don't i don't um dispute that we're in a conundrum and then we're in a a terrible situation as a civilization we've certainly overpopulated the planet in many ways and we've certainly allowed something to take root in our society that i think is disgusting that's factory farming of animals there's there's something vile about it undeniably vile and there's a reason why people are prosecuted for exposing what makes everybody sick like if they exposed it and said look i'm going to take a a picture i'm going to show you a video of how these cows are living and you take the video and the cows just wandering around eating

grass no one would give a shit right right it's when you take the video and the cows are just wandering around eating grass. No one would give a shit. Right. Right? It's when you see these people kicking these cows and when you see them alive, like kosher. The way they do that where they have to slice their throat and they have to do it with one cut. And this is why people want kosher meat, like some ancient ridiculous idea of how to dispose of a life whoo i mean all those things sicken 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

he's from iowa or at least he was i'm not sure if he's still even in power there. But, yeah, I mean, but if people saw how they got their, you know, how milk is done. I know you're a proponent of milk, but if you saw that. Not really. I don't drink it. No. If I drink four glasses of milk a year, it's a lot. Yeah, I don't think it's good for you. I think raw milk is probably better for you,

but every time I drink a glass of milk, I always feel gross. I feel like the homogenization and pasteurization of milk, you're breaking down all the enzymes and boiling it, and what you get is some weird protein that your body doesn't exactly know how to process correctly. There's a reason why so many people get horrible gas off of it. Yeah, so 65% yeah so 65 of the population of the world's lactose intolerant my nine-year-old she's lactose intolerant she can't have anything with cheese or milk or anything i didn't figure that out till i was like 50 that

was lactose intolerant i mean really i mean i thought you know i should have figured it out but i just thought it was normal 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 it never makes me feel good afterwards i always feel like like i'll have cookies and milk and then i'll be like it's just uh it's a weird it's like my body's like what is this but however i've had raw milk and i haven't had any problems with it i mean i just think it's and you know there's's a big problem with acquiring raw milk. It's very hard to get. But I think if people are going to drink milk at all, that's how we're supposed to drink it.

I don't think we're supposed to be boiling that stuff. And then, you know, it comes out, it's dead. That's why, look, you're not supposed to have anything biological that can sit in your fucking refrigerator for two weeks and not stink. Like, how is that? And you look at the date. The date is like a month. Like, how the fuck is this going to stay good for a month? Because they boil the shit out of it.

And look, if you want to serve milk to 300 million people, that's how you have to do it. 300 million people that's how you have to do it if you want to get it in containers and travel across the country in these trucks and get it to supermarkets and have it sit on the shelf and have it be financially viable for them to be able to hold on to it long enough for them to sell it and turn a profit and then have no one get sick from it because like raw milk is good for like a couple of days and that's it and it used to be the people got their milk delivered on their doorstop you know the milkman that was the thing milkman used to come to your house and you didn't even really have a lid it had like that little paper yeah a little paper thing that you'd pull off so we had as a kid it was fresh and the cream would sit on the top of it it just tasted different i've had raw milk i haven't had in years but the

last time i had raw milk i was like this had it in years. But the last time I had raw milk, I was like, this tastes better. It tastes like when you drink it, it feels like your body is like, oh, I know what this is. Whereas like a regular glass of milk, my body is like, what in the fuck? And then you got to think about how they get it, right? Like how they keep these cows pregnant and the process of acquiring billions of gallons of milk for millions and millions of people. It's kind of gross. Not even kind of. I agree.

Yeah. But however, almond milk is disgusting. You don't drink that shit, do you? Why do you say that? It's just gross. It's just not milk, man. Almonds don't have tits. What are you doing to that water?

Just have a glass of water or drink some juice or something. it's just not milk man almonds don't have tits like what are you doing to that water you know just have a glass of water or drink some juice or something i mean i mean it's just got to be some benefit of health i mean almonds are good for you right but almonds are a real problem in california ecologically because the amount of water they totally agree yeah no i'm uh i soy milk sort of my milk is choice or oat milk yeah yeah um just drink water man i agree i agree but not out of plastic okay i know we have to do something about that we've been talking forever we're gonna we're gonna develop uh some sort of a system here what do you recommend for us with water glass right but where should we get our water from should we get filtered water

or should we get spring water i think filtered we get filtered water or should we get spring water? I think filtered water is probably good. By canned or boxed water. That's a thing now. Yeah, but they use this paper. Yeah, it's a big – Yeah, you still get garbage. You can't get some jars of water. Yeah.

We're working on a film on plastic pollution right now. And we're trying to think, like, how do you – it's a big problem. Like, you look at the oceans we've had Boyan 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 I saw that yeah a couple weeks ago I think they were yeah 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 this isn't the problem. It's that you're having cheap plastic made in Saudi Arabia and America and it's being exported to – there's 10, rivers are where the majority of the plastic in the ocean are coming from. And it's not recyclable. Rivers is where the plastic is coming from? What do you mean? There's about 10 to 12 rivers over in Southeast Asia that generate a lot of – most of the plastic that you see in the ocean.

How in the river? What is – Well, people – okay. of most of the plastic that you see how in the river what is what is well people okay so like in indonesia for instance you have 17 000 islands but only 10 recycling plants right places to do it so there's you know there's no way there's nowhere to throw it so they throw it in in the you know out in the ocean oh you're saying the garbage is in these rivers i'm not saying that the creation of the plastic the creation of the plastic. The creation of the plastic comes from America and it comes from Europe and it comes from Saudi Arabia. Right, right.

I see what you're saying. Yeah, so – but the volume, most of the volume is coming from these 10 to 12 rivers in Southeast Asia. You have to make plastic cost enough so that – 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. They just do it the cheapest way possible because they know it's not coming back. Right. So you have to put a tax on virgin plastic to make it valuable for people to be able to recycle it. Otherwise. A great solution is hemp plastic.

It's biodegradable and it comes from this plant. I mean, you can make hemp plastic and we can it, and it's an easy crop to grow. Is that scalable? Yes. Hemp is so weird. It doesn't even seem like it should be real. I mean, it really doesn't. It's an insane plant.

I mean, you can make hempcrete out of it, which is far better than any building material we currently use. It's far more resistant to flame. There's just so many positive benefits of it in terms of insulation. The insulation factor is better than wood or plywood. It's really lightweight but incredibly strong. Have you ever grabbed a thick hemp stalk? Have you ever held onto one? No.

It doesn't seem real. It's hard like this oak, but yet it's light like balsa wood it's so strange it feels like it comes from another planet hemp is an extraordinary planet for its most extraordinary plant we have first of all it has all the essential amino acids i love hemp protein it's one of my favorite proteins for we sell it on it we sell hemp protein it's one of the very best proteins in terms of being able to mix it and like a protein shake and on the go your body digests it super easily and it's like filled with amino acids it's very easy for your body to digest and process you can make oil out of it that they

used to use for fucking for heating lamps you can cook your food in it it i mean there's so many different things you can do with hemp you can make clothing you can make far more durable cloth far more durable the paper is far superior in fact the whole reason why william randolph hearst demonized marijuana in the first place was to protect his business because he had paper mills and he was trying to protect it from hemp because on the cover of popular science magazine they had come out with a decorticator a decorticator was a way in the 1930s they devised to effectively process hemp fiber because for years they used to use slaves to process hemp then when they figured out the cotton gin cotton became easier to use and then slavery

became outlawed and so people who shied away from hemp well they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s it was on the cover of popular science magazine hemp the new billion dollar crop well william randolph hearst didn't just own hearst publications and newspapers he also are owned these huge forests that they were making paper with so he along with harry anslinger and using his newspapers demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp yes no idea he funded all those fucking crazy marijuana movies reefer madness all that shit that was all him they came up with these stories that these mexicans and black men were

taking this new drug called marijuana marijuana wasn't even a term for cannabis marijuana was a term for a wild tobacco so they came up with 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 Hearst newspapers, Hearst publications. So he just fucking out and out lied and made up these crazy stories and funded these documentaries. And then marijuana became illegal and still is to this day. And you still have knuckleheads like Joe Biden literally yesterday

saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug. We're still in this. But forget about marijuana. Imagine if it wasn't psychoactive at all. yesterday saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug we're still in this and but 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 the Earth's ever known. Okay, I'll vote for it. Dude, you should do a national documentary on that.

I think he got to Joe Biden. Ah, 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. one hour ago i put my fucking instagram post out this morning it's got 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 to to do whatever you want with your body that is especially with marijuana

that's not poisonous. No one's died of it ever. Ever. In the history of the human race, there's never been a single overdose for marijuana. And this knucklehead's saying that it's a gateway drug. No, pain is a gateway drug. Trauma is a gateway drug.

Abuse is a gateway to drugs. It's not marijuana. Marijuana is just a time-honored psychedelic substance that people have been enjoying for thousands and thousands of years you should have run for congress fuck that i'm not running for anything i'm not even running for my neighborhoods whatever the hell it is i just saw a poster over there did you run for mayor or was that a joke what poster i thought there was a poster oh it's 100 a joke look i'm not ever running for anything ever well it was it was right next to hunter thompson for mayor and i thought well

maybe maybe there was some truth to it no it's hunter thompson for sheriff but there's nothing there for me is there anything for me i don't think no it's just hunter thompson that's not me look i'm not running for anything ever i have three jobs and three kids i'm busy and i have a lot of hobbies too many hobbies i'm trying to chip away at hobbies but if i can get joe biden to shut the fuck up i'm very happy crazy asshole there's so many people that smoke pot in this country he's so crazy for him to come out against that is so goddamn dumb how do you smoke pot on the show and still hold the conversation though no see i'll smoke no no no no it's not hard because i'm a stoner i know how to do it man i've been doing it forever look i mean 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 because look i've said a lot of dumb shit when i've been high i've thought a lot of dumb shit i've been paranoid it's not for everybody i think it should be treated cautiously, but there's a lot of benefits to it. I really firmly believe that it's made me a more sensitive person. It's made me more interested in community. 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. It's made me feel better about happy communication with people. It's made me more affectionate it's made me more compassionate more kind it makes me more aware you know the feeling of paranoia one

of the things that that paranoia is is just an overall expanding of your awareness of your vulnerability of all the things you've done because you had a lot of a lot of hats in your career do you find this the most satisfying to you with the podcast uh yeah mom made this in stand-up i mean this is stand-up is more complicated right because there's got to be an end result like it has to be funny 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 Dr. Matthew Walker that we talked about earlier, were explaining sleep and how important

this really is. This isn't just something that you feel better if you get more sleep. No, it's like long-term for your life. These are all little bits of information that I think it's very difficult for people to absorb just by going out and reading studies, right? So the next best thing is reading a book. Well, the next best thing is me having a person who wrote that book on a podcast to talk about it. And maybe not even the next best thing. It might be the best, best thing because it's absorbable. It's a conversation with

people. And to me, I've gotten a 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 and just with genuine curiosity just ask them questions and you know and read their book and then try to have like 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 comp complicated for them to comprehend and it's just to me it's um it's something that was completely unexpected i didn't ever plan on doing this i just started doing it and then it just kind of became what it is now.

So it's very satisfying that people like it. You know, when I talk to people and they say, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've run into that said it's, like, changed their life. It's changed their perspective. Oh, man. So many people said, you know, once I started, I was going to be on the show. They said, oh, you've got to see this podcast. I spent two weeks just – that was my day job is like listening to interviews that you've done. 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.

When I do a film, it's so targeted that I'm needing them to fill in a blank. And it's just a a i need two or three minutes i might i might talk as long but it's it's this you know i've got this list of a shopping list of things i need to cover and here you you just have a conversation that seems like it's a lot it's a lot different and it seems like a lot more fun it's a lot more fun like when you said the beginning of this like what kind of research have you done to prepare for this? I'm like, fortunately, I get to pick who I talk to. And for you, I mean, I knew that you had directed The Cove. And the subject of dolphins has been, I mean, it was a huge bit on my 2016 Netflix special about an experience that I had when I was in Hawaii, high as fuck

on edibles. And we ran into this patch of wild dolphins and they were playing with us. They were playing with us. And we were yelling like, yay. And they would jump out of the water and do flips for you. They were putting on a show. And I remember having this thought like, holy shit, they're playing with us. These are these wild creatures and they're

having fun with us and then i started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication i became obsessed with dolphins because this one i mean i had i had been fascinated by them before but i became truly obsessed and this was this experience was more than 10 years ago. And since then, I've just been overwhelmed and also massively disheartened by films like yours. And by seeing SeaWorld and by seeing what was going on in Marineland with my friend Phil. I've had him on a bunch of times to talk about his lawsuits i mean they have done everything they can to try to silence that guy and stop him from revealing all the horrors of that place but slowly but surely he's had a massive impact on that place's business to the point where they're trying to just get him to shut up and he won't he won't i mean and he was i mean he was on the inside. He was a trainer. And all that stuff. So for me to be able to talk to someone like you, it's, you know, 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 Rangaroa. I was with our team, and there was three groups of resident dolphins. So 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 excited they get.

And they could only do it for so long. And I remember once that we were doing it. We finally, we had scooters. And we thought, well, the more, so a dolphin looks at you, and you can't. You look like you're in a wheelchair. Not even. Someone in a wheelchair can get around pretty good. But in the water, we just look like we're just pitiful.

And so they can only be entertained so long. But the scooters, we figured we could engage them a lot longer. And then all of a sudden, this group just took off. And you're let down because you're high from the experience we could engage them a lot longer. And then all of a sudden, this group just took off. And you're let down because 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 have been wild, though, seeing an 18-foot-long an 18 foot long hammerhead holy yeah because they disappeared into the blue and then we could see them uh ramming the thing the dolphins were big i mean they're you know not quite as long as this table but they're you know they're probably three to five hundred pounds and they're maybe seven feet long and they look tiny next to this shark wow that's wild that is wild yeah every occasionally you see uh 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 and my son does that with drones he goes out in his kayak and films them my friend peter peter attia he's a uh he's done a bunch of crazy endurance things. And one of the things he did, he swam to all the islands in Hawaii. And to prepare for this, he had to do a lot of swimming. He lives in San Diego and swimming in the coast out there. And he was swimming literally, what did he say, like a couple days after that guy got bit in half? Oh, my God. Yeah, I think it was just –

He wasn't scared. You know he wasn't scared. I think it might have been the next day. 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. 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. Occasionally, they slip up. Think a person's a seal or something. Most of the time, I've dove with a lot of sharks before. You usually only get them around you if you're feeding them and that feels so horrible. It's just so unnatural. 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, were feeding it, you know, feed, they're on a feed and I was, I was about, I don't know, maybe

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 I don't know if they were excited by it. I had a camera with the strobes on it. But they just came in. They were attacking me. And I had a rebreather.

I died with a rebreather. So you could scream. So I started screaming as loud as I could through this thing. But I was pushing them off. And they were working together. You could see it was packed. One would go this way. And as I could through this thing. But I was pushing them off, and they were, like, working together. You could see it was, like, packed. You know, like, one would go this way, and then one would go this way. So I had these lights with these, like, octopus with four lights on it, and I could push them away.

But then one of the guys that we had brought over a tuna head and lured him away. But they were just—it was because they were it's because they were excited by you know the the feeding over there so i just i don't even want to be in the water these days when people are feeding sharks because it's no joke when you're under the water it's not your it's not like you just run to run up a tree there's no place to go nowhere to go you feel helpless and that's their natural environment and that's what they're there for they're there to clean up you know anything that's weak anything that's fucked up, any seal that gets caught slipping, they're there for population control. I mean, there's a really powerful video off of the, I'm sure you've probably seen it, off of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco where a bunch of tourists are there. Boom, this great white snatches a seal right in front of everybody.

Just thunderous explosion of blood and foam in the water and like whoa yeah it's a couple miles from where i live yeah yeah i mean they're they're magic that's a that's a crazy beast i'm supposed to somebody just invited me today to go out and be with great white it's not diving just uh just to watch just to watch there's a crazy video from i think it was the cape somewhere around the cape cod where there's like a 20 foot one next to a boat and uh these guys uh were in this boat and this uh this great white just swims right up next to them and they start fucking screaming and freaking out and it's enormous it's like 20 feet

long the only 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. They're dangerous for spear hunters, right? Yeah. What is this? 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. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So listen, man, I want to thank you for coming here. It was a very cool conversation. Thanks for having me. And if people want to see the cove, it's available on...

Boy, that's a good question. I think you can still see it on iTunes. You can buy it. Is it on Netflix think you can still see it on iTunes. You can buy it. Is it on Netflix? Not Netflix. No, but iTunes, it's available there. Amazon, can you get it on Amazon?

Yep. Racing Extinction is a little bit harder. I'm not sure where you can get that one, but I think that's better than the Cove in a lot of ways. Okay, I'll check it out. Yeah, a lot of fun. I'll watch it. The Cove is pretty powerful, man. Yeah, well, thanks. Appreciate it.

Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for being here. Thanks for. Yeah. Well, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Bye, everybody.