The Rich Roll Podcast - Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos On Creating Weapons of Mass Instruction To Thrill—And Forge Positive Change

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

The James Bond of filmmaking, Louie Psihoyos is an Academy Award winning documentarian with a track record of putting his life at risk to create weapons of mass instruction designed to thrill—and forge positive change. One of the most interesting people I have ever met, Louie took home the Oscar for The Cove, an Ocean's 11-esque thriller that powerfully exposed the gruesome underbelly of the Japanese dolphin trade. Louie also documented the rise of the plant-based athlete in the James Cameron produced Netflix hit, The Gamechangers and powerfully drew attention to mass species extinction in 2015's Racing Extinction. Today he shares his remarkable story. Why he puts his life on the line for causes most urgent. And what he hopes to achieve as a result. This is a conversation about harnessing the power of story to spark action, ignite social change, and challenge cultural norms. It's an honor to share Louie's powerful perspective with you today—may it incite you to action. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: AG1: drinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Peak Design: peakdesign.com/RICHROLL LMNT: drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL Indeed: indeed.com/RICHROLL Whoop: whoop.com/RICHROLL Birch: birchliving.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: squarespace.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

The more I dive into your life, you're quickly becoming the most interesting man alive. When they wouldn't talk to me, I was like, they must be hiding something. There's a story there that might be worth telling. Your lives are at stake, you are doing illegal things, and you have to develop gadgetry and special cameras, etc. to pull off what's sort of an Ocean's Eleven type heist. Social change happens when you have 10% of the population 100% committed to the truth. When you combine the right words, the right moving pictures, with the right music and

the right story, you have a recipe for being able to get into a person's brain and change not just the way they think, but the way they act. not just the way they think, but the way they act. If you're a fan of great documentaries and have enjoyed films like The Game Changers, The Cove, or Racing Extinction, then this episode is your jam because my guest today is the multi-talented director behind those powerful projects, Louis Sohoyos. Prior to taking home an Academy Award for The Cove, Louis was one of the top still photographers in the world working for National Geographic, and he's currently serving as the executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society. In addition to discussing his remarkable

career, as well as his courageous filmmaking style that often places his life and that of his crew in mortal peril. This conversation covers his work as an ardent activist and environmentalist. It's about conservation. It's about sparking change, challenging societal norms, and the power of storytelling as this lever for awareness, for positive change and environmental preservation. Louis is truly the James Bond of filmmaking. It's an honor to know him, and it's a double honor to share his story and powerful perspective with you today.

I mean, first of all, thank you for doing this. You know, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You're a hard man to pin down. You're constantly traveling. You've got a slate of projects that you're always immersed in. And so I'm grateful to be able to grab your attention for a little bit here. How do you define for yourself what it is that you do? Well, I guess the most simplistic terms, I'm a photographer slash filmmaker slash writer, I'm a photographer slash filmmaker slash writer.

But I'm really interested in using art, media to scale social change. That's what I'm all about. In this business, we're outside of Hollywood now. Most people, most producers, directors, it's about $10 and a box of popcorn. It's about butts in seats and how much money can you get from the consumer. And I've always looked at the audience's minds in seats. How do you change your mind? Because the world's a screwed up place.

It always has been to me. And this is my way to try to make it just incrementally a little bit better place. I look at like what I do is it's like I'm a first mate with a drunken captain and occasionally I get the controls and while he's down sleeping it off, I can go nudge it on a different course. And that's by hijacking the public's imagination for something positive, to make positive changes that are scalable.

And I've been fortunate to be able to do this with National Geographic. Later on, when I got into films, a fairly successful documentary career doing the same thing, but ramping it up. And people always come to us after they see our films and say, that film changed my life. And it's, well, it's not by accident. I think about that, what we do,

and how can you make almost every second up there count on the screen? Because you have a moment in silence to communicate much like this with your audience. And they're focused. They're not distracted usually by their phones. They're watching your film. And if you do a great job, they're not thinking about anything else.

If you're doing your job, the whole world disappears for them, and they're focused in on your story. And so we're doing, you know, Mark Twain once said, the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. And you're a writer. You understand you're you're sitting there in the the darkness of your soul hunting for that word that sentence and it all comes together you go this is it this is exactly what i want to say and that gets communicated with people

same thing happens with photography you're trying to find a visual language that is relatable and you know because i'm working with geographic through you know people that speak a lot of different languages so when you combine the right words the right pictures the right moving pictures with the right music and the right story you have a recipe for being able to get into a person's brain and change, not just the way they think, but the way they act. And that's, you know, there's a term for it that the neurologists call it. I'll think of it in a minute, but it's like-

Neuroplasticity. Thank you. Yes. And, you know, they say too, it only takes about 90 minutes to change the way, not just the way people think, but the way they act. And that's about what our documentaries are. That's just by coincidence.

It's not that we try to make it just that point, but that's usually the point where you run out of steam with a documentary. The bridge from changing how somebody thinks to changing how they act, like that's the real trick to unlock, right? You might be able to shift their perspective momentarily, but short of some real

neuroplastic changes, you're going to snap back into whatever's convenient or some behavior pattern that you're just inured to over time. There is a lot of thought that goes, well, first of all, there's different kinds of changes, right? There's like scientific changes, you know, Tony Saba, you know, the futurist. He shows a wonderful photograph. I think it's on the Easter parade of 1900 in New York City looking down Broadway. And it's all horses except for one car. And I had a great grandmother on my wife's side that lived in New York.

She was born in the 1880s. She lived to 104. And she talked about New York being a really unpleasant place to live with all those horses. You imagine 300,000 horses, 20,000 tons of manure dumped evenly over the streets every day, goes onto your shoes, it gets into your house, into the sidewalks, there's flies everywhere,

sailors could smell it six miles away in New York City. And so when this one car, you can imagine all those people in that photograph that were riding the horses looking over at that crazy guy with the car thinking, well, who would be caught dead doing that? And the Easter parade of 1913 when Tony Saber does his talk, it's completely reversed. It's all cars, a single horse. And that kind of transformation happens in about 10 year increments. And he said, well, you think that was like a bet when he gave that talk

that when I first heard it in about 2010, there was an environmentalist, he was talking to a bunch of environmentalists and I was one of them. And I was like, why don't people, why doesn't the world understand the genius of an electric car? At that point, I had one of the first three electric cars in all of Colorado. I was powered by 114 solar panels. It was a fully electric Toyota. It wasn't a Land Cruiser. Like the RAV4? Yeah, the RAV4. And my license plate said VUS. It was the opposite of SUV.

It stood for Vehicle Using Sun. Yeah. Did you hang on to that plate? You still have that? I don't. I sold it. But I remember when Tony gave that talk, he was saying the same thing was happening.

He said, people aren't programmed for these big changes that are coming. They happen really quick. You look back at the pundits and they're all saying like, it's not scalable, it's not gonna happen. And when I added this Toyota RAV, it was a 2002 Toyota RAV.

So I was a real early adopter. And I remember thinking like, why don't people get it? And Tony said, well, it happens very quickly. Most people can't see it coming. And we got a standing ovation. And I just ran into Tony a couple months ago. And he said, the same thing's happening with plant-based diets.

There's a, you know, people say it's not scalable. It is. It's totally there. You know, the whole agriculture industry runs on just a few percentage points of profitability. You take away their subsidies or their profitability, this new thing takes over. And all of a sudden sudden the world's changed. And another example he gave us, remember, this is a 2010 talk that he did, and he's talking about the cell phones, which were just a few years old at that point. He said, remember, just a few years ago, 2007, we were hitting the number two key six times on our flip phone to text to capital C. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago.

But I think it's also a function of other elements lining up. There's a timing aspect to it too. And I think the electric car is a perfect example of the point I'd like to illustrate, which is there's a difference between what the right thing to do is, the altruistic thing, the thing that is in everybody's best interest. But it's another thing altogether when that product is packaged in a very aspirational way. And so when Elon Musk comes around and he creates this product that suddenly everybody desires because it's better, it looks better, it performs better, it's cool. There's a brand element that gets baked into it.

That changes the public's perception of this thing that they had always looked at as kind of this weird outlier thing that only strange people would have in their driveway. Exactly. The economics of it, right? As well as the marketing and the kind of mindset around it. Yeah.

I mean, I know Lalani has been on your- Sure. I know to the race car drivers on, you know, you've been on this podcast and she's now on my board. And I picked up, we had a, we did a film called Racing Extinction. We had a, we bought a, I can't remember what it was. I think it was a 2015. Oh, man. It was a Model S. It was a, I think it was a it was a model s it was a i think it was the

one of the original model right one of the original models and it's the first model s to have a vegan you know leather seats anyway it would yeah to be way before 2015 because in 2012 we were going to be interviewing elon musk in october and i remember he him giving me a call and saying can we make it for uh december instead and at that point i was like you know a little bit you know let down that you know we're not gonna do the interview when i thought we were gonna he said i said sure but why he said well i could go bankrupt now 10 years later yeah he's the richest guy in the world you know so i'm hoping that there's there's changes coming and there's changes coming quick. And there's a process to it. You're doing it for the right reasons. And then when society

gets to about 30% of adoption, then other people are doing it just because other people are doing it. So 70% of the population is really their followers which is fine but they're they're not doing it for all the same reasons they're just doing it because it's cool but lalani muter when she we drove that car off the tesla lot you know this is remember this is a woman who is comfortable driving you know gasoline-powered cars at 200 miles an hour at you know daytona and talladega racetracks and we weren't a mile outside the the lot and she goes or the thea and Talladega racetracks. And we weren't a mile outside the lot and she goes or the factory and she turns to me and said, every other car on the road just became a relic.

And it's taken a good 10 years for it to happen. But those are the same increments that Tony Sable was talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, I wanna talk about the changes that are happening and the changes that are needed, but I wanna stick to this idea that you're introducing around the power of storytelling

to provoke change at scale. And I think you represent an interesting creator in the space of documentary filmmaking. And when I think about the history of documentaries, it also wasn't that long ago that documentaries were sort of considered an art form in which an objective person would tell a story from different points of view. And there seemed to be a premium or an expectation on this idea of objectivity, right? And it wasn't until, and maybe that's not true.

Maybe that's just apocryphal because everybody's subjective and everybody who would be interested enough in a subject matter to make a documentary about it probably has a point of view that they're trying to express. But in popular culture, it wasn't really until Michael Moore came around

and started making these mainstream documentaries where he had a very strong point of view that that kind of shifted the fulcrum of what a documentary could be. And you're somebody who goes into these subject matters and these terrains very intentional about what you want to say and the story that you want to tell to provoke a certain type of reaction in the audience. Yeah. I mean, I went to journalism school and that was the goal back then, right? You tell both sides of the story,

like there's only two sides to a story. But certainly all the writers I was interested in, the photographers I was interested in, all those authors of those original content had an opinion. It's like, you know, they said something, they had something to say. It wasn like, you know, they said something, they had something to say. It wasn't, you know, the facts.

It's like, you know, you can go get the facts. I want to know what you're thinking, right? That's the cool part. Not just tell me about like, who are the players? What are their interests? What are, you know, what are their goals? What are they trying to do? And then they have somebody with an opinion.

It's like, okay, then I can still take an another the opposite opinion but i want to know what they think and that's quite different than being you know an objective truth seeker right and what i'm trying to do is yeah i i gotta say when we did you know the first one i worked on was called the cove and i i went out with that intention like their side of the story when i i went to taiji Japan, where they were killing more dolphins than any other place on the planet, I was there with the intention of not showing what goes on in the cove.

I went to the mayor of the town and the city council, sat with them for five hours the first day, seven hours the second day with the Dolphin Hunting Union, because I just wanted to get one person to come on camera and just talk about what they do.

And I was going to do this bigger story about ocean health. I wasn't interested in that. But when they wouldn't talk to me, you know, after investing all that time of like, you know, why won't you talk to us? I was like, they must be hiding something. There's a story there that might be worth telling. And I remember sitting above this park. It's called Tsunami Park above the cove and looking down on it

and thinking like, what goes on in there would be really interesting. And then I had this like, I can remember this feeling, this light bulb moment, like if we can sneak in there and show it, that would be exciting. And I just, I remember that all became very, everything came into focus to me.

It's like us getting in to photograph that would be so exciting. If you could transfer the excitement that I was feeling to the audience, now that's a story. Right. No matter what happens in there. And you certainly accomplished that.

I mean, it has this narrative three-act structure and it operates, you've said this before, people have described it as sort of Jason Bourne meets Flipper. And it does function like a thriller where your lives are at stake, you are doing illegal things. There is a very real threat hanging over you at all times. And you have to develop gadgetry and special cameras,

et cetera, to pull off what's sort of an Ocean's 11 type heist to get this footage to document the atrocities that are happening in that cove. So maybe explain a little bit about Taiji and what was going on there and what it was that you were kind of pulling covers on. Yeah, well, I mean, it all started, I was, I mean, if we can go back,

I mean, the origin story of OPS, my organization, and I'll try to get quickly to Rickleberry and the Cove is my best- You don't have to go quickly. Okay, cool. Okay, well- Because the story is, the more I dive into your life, you're quickly becoming the most interesting man alive. And in case I forget,

I wanna talk about your photography career later because I don't feel like people appreciate that chapter of your career because it's been so overshadowed by what you do now, but there's some really amazing stuff there too. Yeah. I mean, I was a good photographer. I mean, I was the first new photographer National Geographic hired in more than a decade. This is back in 1980. And, you know, the first, 1980. And, you know, the first, I've been a champion of lost causes even before that. Well, you were, you were winning photography awards when you were like 14 and 15. Right. You started working, you know, in that field and you got a scholarship to University of Missouri and there was a sponsor to your scholarship.

Oh, Goldfinger? Yeah, the real life Goldfinger. So like the whole Ian Fleming thing that becomes kind of a recurring motif in your films, that seed was planted when you were very young, which I find fascinating. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's been an interesting trajectory. I mean, I don't know how far you wanna go back,

but that was like when I was a kid, just delivering newspapers as a 12-year-old with wagons, 75 Sunday newspapers up hills. And you're waiting as a kid at four in the morning on a Sunday morning for the news, your papers to come off, your batch of papers to come off the press. So you smell the ink, you see the news coming coming and you're part of that delivery system albeit just a you know like a newspaper boy but you still feel part of that system out of that the very very lowest ranks so delivering the papers gave me like a really interesting background in that little town newspaper in Dubuque Iowa they had a really cracked team of photographers that were winning national contests. And I thought, the first thing you do is you see the front page and you have a bigger picture. It was like the photo staff was run by a manager

that used to be a photographer. So it got prominence. And so that played into that whole childhood thing. So I started working for that newspaper when i was 14 that was my first internship with them i did that for a couple years and then um but then yeah i mean at geographic there was a famous it was a famous director of photography bob gilka actually named my son after him he was like a father figure to him to me and i wrote him a you know back then they took two internships by portfolio where you

gave him you know sample your work and one by winning college photographer for the year so a junior year in college I sent a portfolio and he wrote me a nice a really nice handwritten letter back saying uh you know kid you know internships for are for kids that aren't you know good enough to work you're good enough to get in the you know in the industry good luck and I thought oh god I always wanted to work for National Geographic my entire life like you know not good enough to work, you're good enough to get in the industry, good luck. And I thought, oh God, I always wanted to work for National Geographic my entire life. Like, you know, that was my one shot. And then, so I realized there was the one shot I had left was to win college photographer of the year.

And so I just applied myself. I was actually working here in town at the LA Times as an intern. And it just like, you know, it was just, you know, 24 seven. That's all I wanted to do, like news and sports. And that wasn't ego so much, maybe mostly when I was a kid, but I'd like, I just love to shoot, you know? And when you're working for a newspaper,

you can do everything. And, you know, as a 20 year old kid with, or I don't know, maybe an 18 year old kid with all that energy, you just like, you know, the staffers were like, hey kid, you gotta take time off. It's like, you're making us all look bad. But I- You can get away with it.

You got the energy. But I won that contest. I won like every category that there was in the College of Guitar of the Year. So, Gilka had to hire me for the summer. And I ended up doing a black and white story on the Potter River Basin, which was an energy part of the developing energy coal town area you know the potter river basin and then um that was being you know it was formal ranch land but now it's like you know coal property and i you know that was rated the best story of the issue

i um and i was that was the that was My internship was going to be over. And there's this friend of mine who was laying out the magazine, Bill Dothit. And he's a little bit older than me. And he had a wicked sense of humor. And back then, Geographic had,

1980, had this relentlessly optimistic viewpoint about everything. They could make Uganda look like back then with the Civil War going on, look like a great place to live. And we'd make fun of the magazine. Like they do a story on like a couple walks across America

to find the real America. Yeah, I know the son of those people. I know that issue, go ahead. And we do like bulldozer across America. And we think of all the pictures that you would do. The counter narrative. Yeah, exactly. And he came up with a story like our

friend the maggot life goes on inside a corpse you get the idea and one day we were watching towards the end of my internship we were watching uh uh this person you know haul the trash across the lunchroom and he said oh we should do a story about you know garbage you know and i and there could be like somebody looking you be somebody looking at modern garbage. And I said, oh, no, this guy Bill Ratchett. I just read about him. He was a garbologist. He was a Mayan archaeologist.

And he looks at modern garbage to see what people throw away and study it. And he said, well, we could do something on, there's a guy, Fred Ward, who did commodity stories for the magazine. He did gold, silver, platinum, you know. And so we could do garbage. And it was like a Fred Ward style where you'd always have like art that was done. Right. And then, you know, he said, we could do like garbage art.

And I said, oh, I just remember reading about this colony of like artists up in Northern California that were taking art from garbage and making it into, you know, sellable art. And so we proposed the story and, you know, Geographic took it and then they hired me. But, but back then, and, and, you know, the idea wasn't just to do a story is like in 1980, there wasn't any mandatory recycling program in all of America. There's one, there's one in, I think in Mountain View, California. And to me, that was insane that we're throwing away aluminum and paper and glass and not even a hope of recycling

when the rest of the world, they are recycling, they're doing, I called the story urban ore. And so the idea is how do you take something that people aren't thinking about and make it interesting? And that story became the most popular story of that year. And so the Geographic ended up hiring me

after it got published. Well, you know, to not after it got published, but you know, to do that story. And then I just kept on doing stories that, you know, had this sort of lost. Right. Well, you were, so you were the youngest ever full-time photographer

hired by Nat Geo. And also they hadn't hired a photographer in like 10 years, right? Right. So it's not a small thing. And there was some quote about like, well, if this kid can make garbage look beautiful, like we need to tie him up.

He's got to work here. But that idea of taking something that people don't think about and making't think about and making them think about it or turning it into something beautiful. I mean, that is also a recurring kind of motif in the films. Like this sensibility was there from the get-go.

Yeah, and I can remember thinking like, all my friends were, my colleagues at that time were thinking, they were taking something that would be intrinsically interesting you know like animals like and i was my mindset back then was how easy is that you know to just to photograph something that everybody wants to see the trick to me was like how do you take something that nobody wants to look at and do the reverse of it make it interesting because they need to you know we, we need to look at it. And it just changed the mindset. Now, of course, I know there's a, there's a huge amount of talent and research that goes into making anything looks, look amazing. But back then,

like, you know, I wasn't trying to do stories on Paris or, you know, these, you know, beautiful places on the planet. I was looking at the worst places and try to make it look interesting or try to find something in it that made us think about ourselves. But at some point you pivot into portraiture of like all these high net worth tech people, right? Like part of this information revolution

and you start working for Fortune and other publications. 1997 i i basically uh called it quits with national geographic for a lot of different reasons you can google it but no it was okay it was it was all right it was we parted on a good company but anyway i made this transition to to work in you know shooting covers for fortune magazine which was you know it might seem like a downgrade after National Geographic, but I've always been interested in innovators, and I was meeting some of the most interesting people on the planet, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove. At one point, I photographed seven of the top ten richest people in the world,

and it's not just that they're rich. It's just that all those people are doing something interesting for culture. And they've got this other kind of drive and other kind of mindset. But the person I wanted to meet most back then, well, actually when I started working for Geographic, I did a story on the information revolution. I started researching in 1993. I started researching in 1993, and Jim Clark was kind of a combination of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. He was the only person at that point that had taken three industries from scratch and made them all worth over a billion dollars. Silicon Graphics was the first 3D graphics engine, the way that you could create on a computer in real time in 3D.

Changed Hollywood, changed a lot of industries. It allowed you to model your designs. Right. Gaming could be done in real time. The day he quit that,

he started Netscape, the first commercial internet browser. And then he started WebMD, which is a way that revolutionized the healthcare industry by digitizing it.

Because most, about 75% of the transactions you do are actually involved in just the clerical work of like, you know, taking those forms and making them digital. He said, well, you just do a digital in the first place and doctors can, you know, find out the latest research. And he did all that. So Fortune, I couldn't photograph him for National Geographic. He was just way too busy. And then I don't know, fast forward like five or six years

when I'm working for Fortune, they said, do you want to go photograph Jim Clark? He's built this new boat over in Amsterdam. I said, God, I wanted to meet this guy forever. And so I went over there, and Jim had just built this boat that, you know, everything could be controlled by the computer. It was like the world's largest, you know, mast at that point.

Beautiful sailing boat, you know. He had like a Picasso from the mast at that point, beautiful sailing boat. He had like a Picasso from the blue period in the living room. He had a Rodin sculptures. A Hyperion, right? Is that like the mast was like 200 feet tall or something like that? Yeah, like it was 192 or something like that.

Michael Lewis did a book on it called the new new thing. I was on that voyage from Africa to Antigua. But the point is like, oh, when i went to go meet jim he was starting a fourth company called shutterfly the way you can take digital prints and make analog you know prints out of them and he wanted to become a good photographer so lou would you teach me how to be a good photographer and i said jim i'll teach you how to be a great one if you teach me how to be a billionaire and he would literally pick me up on his plane and we'd fly all over the world and take pictures mostly underwater and at that point he was digital and i was like one of the last people to you know not do code

because that was the best film out there and i was like why would you do a 7 or 12 megapixel camera when you can shoot still with it wasn't that i was a snob about it. It's just it wasn't as good. Tech wasn't there yet. And there was a medium format technology. So you have 35 millimeter, which is kind of like what we used at Geographic, what an amateur would use, a professional amateur would use it too, a 35 millimeter film. But medium format sensor is better, right? The bigger, the better. And the same has always been true with film as well.

Four by five negative, it was better than a 35 millimeter negative four by five inch and jim said why doesn't somebody build a camera like a good camera for medium format for underwater i said well it's too expensive well anyway jim built one for me he built like the world's best underwater camera it's still the best underwater camera ever made and we'd go around the world and film with it and that was our job you know that was like i was hanging out with him going around the world shooting mostly underwaters and every time that we went to a new location i remember he said i'm gonna take you to the best ice i'd ever been to it was in off papua new guinea we fly there his boat's waiting for us we sail for about a day and a half I wake up in the morning and there's these

kids looking through the porthole window. They were in these little dugout canoes. We're in the middle of nowhere. This is like an alien spaceship had just come. And I remember we went out in the dinghies and Jim said, I'll go down first to make sure we're in the right spot. He dove on the GPS coordinates and he comes back up and he's like in tears. I said, what's up? He said, it's gone. It, you know, probably dynamite fishing or a bleaching event,

but it was completely gone. And everywhere we had, you know, we remember we did this for about almost 10 years, nine years diving around the world. And every time you go back to a place, you can see this degradation go on.

There's less fish. We came up from a dive in the Galapagos and a marine sanctuary and we're surrounded by illegal fishing boats and i remember he said something to me like you know somebody should do something about this i said well how about you and i so what do you mean i said well use your money in my eye and we'll make films because we had talked about you know you must have had been thinking about that prior to him raising it though yeah and he was he was thinking about it too. He was looking at the photographs we were doing

and I would take a little video camera down and as a kind of a thank you to him, I'd make these little five minute shorts of our trip and they were pretty good. I've really put some time into them and made them feel like- This was your film school. That was my film school. Well well actually the film school came with

so he decides to bankroll me right uh you know in this this non-profit venture right you know this is his idea of making me a billionaire he's gonna put me in a non-profit business and we'll do films he is he living up to his side of the bargain on this i don't know well you know i gotta say i do feel like the richest guy in the world right now because you know we can talk about that later but there's nothing there's nothing quite like being able to do what you want to do which he's allowed me to do which is try to you know do what i'm trying to do to change the world at scale and he allowed me he greased the way to make that happen. Now remember that,

like I'm a, you know, pretender syndrome or imposter syndrome, right? I'm like, I'm never made a film before, you know, beyond a five minute little, you know, family short, you know, family film. And I'm thinking, God, what am I gonna take my buddy's money?

And you see, when you're in that world, you start to see friends come and go because they have a new business prospect. They don't live up to it. And so I'm thinking, oh God, I could be one of those jerks that gets money out of the rich friend and then doesn't deliver. I remember we were on a new boat that he did.

It was the world's largest private sailboat. It was called Athena. We're down in the Caribbean with our families on the boat. And my kid must've been about, I don't know, nine years old at that point. My son, Sam, he's playing on the beach

with another kid. Happens to be Steven Spielberg's kids, one of his kids. And Steven comes over to Jim's boat. And he did Jurassic, Steven did Jurassic Park with, you know, the Silicon Graphics.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, he used, yeah, he used Jim's equipment to make his big movies. Right, which was the first breakthrough movie, right? So they were already buddies then, I would imagine. No, they never met each other, which is they knew of each other, but- You just think people at that, you know,

who are orbiting at that altitude kind of all know each other. Yeah, well, but for the next week we were hanging out together, right? It was, you know, Spielberg's family would come over to the boat and I was always trying to craft a way like to get him alone for a second

so I could tell you like, do you have any advice for a first time filmmaker? And when I did, he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals. And I'm starting the Oceanic Preservation Society and you know, everything. Nothing but that. Yeah, and of course then we, you know,

the first film we do is The Cove and it's about dolphin hunting. And like, how are you going to make that into a film? And the film that Jim and I, you know, we set off to make was actually the second film, Racing Extinction. And the dolphin hunting was going to be just part of it. It wasn't going to be, you know, a whole movie in itself. It was only after we started doing this undercover footage in Taiji, Japan, that we realized that there was a way to talk about what was going on in that film and talk about the oceans, this bigger story. And that was kind of the aha moment. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem,

a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself,

exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. It's really smart because by limiting your focus or narrowing your focus on one specific situation or event that allows you to talk about the broader issues at play, creates a situation in which you can drive that level of emotional engagement and get people to really care when it's difficult to do that when you're at 10,000 feet and you're shooting statistics at them and you're kind of toggling back and forth from all different places all over the world.

It's that idea of like the world stops when, there's one girl at the bottom of a well somewhere in, I don't know, some remote village, but we are challenged to even blink when we see a headline about a genocide somewhere that's far away from where we live. Yeah, Christoph, you know, from the writer for the New York Times,

he said that like, you know, if you could, you know, get the audience to care about one person, then at the end of it, you know, he's always saying, but there's 3 million just like her. You know, that's the key, isn't it? To find that emotional hook.

And then you're still bringing in those big picture, you know, 10,000 foot views, you know 10 000 foot views you know as the stakes you know in the cove you know it's about what they're doing which is horrible but it's also in that film we talk about overfishing because the fishermen in taiji they rationalize that they're killing the dolphins because they're eating all their fish what it's not you know the dolphins eating the fish it's right you's the 145 million people in Japan that eat almost nothing but, and all the Americans. And you know, the eight billion people on the planet now,

a lot of them are pescetarians. And you know, these are wild animals. I believe those fishermen did believe that though. I do too, I think, but- Or they had to believe it in order to actually perpetrate those atrocities yeah yeah i mean we all do that right we all rationalize a lot of our um bad behavior because of whatever i need to make a living you know the social good i remember this

is a funny story like we were making the cove and i was going down to the iwc the international whaling commission meeting down in chile and i wanted to interview the director of the iwc for japan and his name was akira nakamai and this is why i know that if there is a god he has a This is why I know that if there is a God, he, she, they have a good sense of humor. So I'm on a flight from Dallas down to Chile. And they're holding the plane. And the plane is completely filled up. I can't even sit with my crew.

But there's one seat empty next to me. And the last person to exit the door, we've been waiting for him to get on our plane, is Akira Nakamai. And he comes down. He sits down right next to me. And I'm looking at my crew like, do you have any, like, we're looking at like, oh my God, like of all the, you know, all the gin joints in all the world, you know. And I waited till the plane took off because I didn't want him to be able to switch with maybe somebody that, you know, from his own team was on the plane. And then when we had dinner served, I turned to him and I said, do you have any idea who I am? He goes, no.

He says, I know who you are. I want to show you a film. And we had like a 17 minute cut of the cove that was like a sizzle reel. And this goes back to, okay, here's the guy that's responsible for dolphin quotas and whale quotas in Japan. About a week or two before,

they were just caught illegally fishing bluefin to the tune of hundreds of tons of illegally caught bluefin tuna. And so I had this opportunity to ask him, anything I wanted to ask him, he's right there. Where's he gonna go? He's a captive audience. I'm gonna say, you're the guy that's...

Now back then, remember this, if you haven't seen the cove, part of the premise is that dolphin meat is all toxic. That's where we win. It's not just a matter of, there's our beautiful sentient animals. Well, what are you doing killing them? Their meat's toxic.

And they were force feeding it to school kids in Japan. By force feeding, you had to eat everything on your plate when you were a kid. You couldn't bring in your own lunch. They make you clean your plate and you couldn't bring your own lunch, right? Like you had to eat the mandated lunch. Yeah, it was poison.

I mean, literally it was poison. It had anywhere from five to 5,000 times more mercury if it was a fish, because it's a mammal. So they got by with this loophole. And I said to Akira Nakamai, I said, you're the guy that's responsible for, they had a plan to put dolphin meat on school lunch programs all over Japan

right before this happened. And I said, you're giving dolphin meat laced with mercury. That's extremely deleterious effects to especially young kids. I said, how do you reconcile with what you're doing? It's the prime charge of food security, not food safety. Going back to your thing, like we all make rationalizations. The cognitive dissonance that you have to engage with to just get up in the morning and do your job. But that's the, is that the same guy in the COVID like the grayish longer hair? No, that was his boss.

No, the show sheet that was worked underneath Akira. Yeah. And that was it, end of discussion with that? Yeah, I mean, he agreed once we got to, well... And his argument would be food security is an important issue in Japan because it's an island nation. They don't have grazing pasture lands like we have, et cetera.

And it is a challenge to make sure that however many hundred million plus people that live in Japan have adequate access to food. Yeah, you could have written his playbook. That's exactly what he told me. He said, we have 145 million people in Japan, about the same size as your California. Only 17% of our land is habitable

to put our homes and businesses. We have to look to the sea for our food. That's why we're illegally fishing tuna. That's why we're looking to eat whales when the rest of the world is- And just brazen with the fact that they're transgressing all of these laws. Yeah, yeah.

So that's, there was a rationale for everything. It is so challenging. I rewatched the Cve last night to watch those scenes where you get these cameras into this cove, which is really, you know, basically they corral these dolphins for people who haven't seen the movie into this particular cove. They do that by banging on pipes

and dolphins being very sensitive to sound out of fear, they sort of push them into this cove and then they rope it off with nets and then they just slaughter most of them and they pick out a few that they then sell to the sort of marine entertainment complex, correct? And those animals fetch a pretty price and the rest are used for food.

Exactly. And they make most, I think a dead dolphin, on the meat counter sells for about $600 or used to $600 a piece. And a trained dolphin can sell for 150,000, maybe a quarter of a million now. And so that's the economics of it. And it's a very small town and that really plays into, you know, it makes a lot of money for that industry, for that town, you know, by serving that industry.

So those dolphins will go to the Middle East mostly and China and Japan. I think Japan had at that time over 50 dolphinariums. In Japan, I think Japan had at that time over 50 dolphinariums. The film ends up getting criticized for kind of taking shots at like their culture, right? Like this is our culture, how dare you, you slaughter pigs and cows, et cetera. Also this food security issue sort of is used

or deployed as a counterpoint to the issues that you're raising. But what's interesting is what you realize is that most people in Japan don't know this is going on. People in Taiji don't even know what's going on. And Taiji is this town that's like draped in all this iconography around whales and dolphins. Like they're celebrating these beautiful animals, but right underneath their feet. Yeah, like they're celebrating these beautiful animals, but right underneath their feet. Yeah, like this is what's actually happening. So Japan itself, the normal citizen in Japan

appeared to be just as surprised as any audience member who would watch your film. Yeah, I mean, we got that early on, like culinary imperialism, they call it. And there's a certain amount of truth to that. But if your kids were being force fed toxic meat or toxic vegetables at your school, wouldn't you be thrilled that anybody from any country

would come in and tell you what's what when your country is covering it up? Yeah, that's why the mercury argument is the strongest one in terms of you know kind of overriding everything else yeah rick and i rick rickleberry is the you know the protagonist of the film he's the guy who captioned train the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of flipper for the flipper tv series we had a you know kind of a running thing between us. Whenever we talked to the Japanese media, we tried to use the word mercury in every sentence

so they couldn't cut it out. They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens? I'd say, well, our chickens had that much mercury. We'd always try to, our creative way to try to bring it back to mercury because that was their Achilles heel. You couldn't argue mercury is good for kids you know they had yeah that you know the first big industrial accident in the world that was announced was you know minimata bay you know

minimata disease it's not a disease they weren't this company called chisa minimata was intentionally dumping mercury into the bay and infecting tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people and that got discovered in the 1950s and you know so mercury poison they were found to be guilty and there are all these birth defects pregnant women ingesting this and yeah i remember I remember there was a researcher, I think from America that had studied mercury poisoning here in America. And he went over to Japan, remember this is post World War II.

And that part of Japan, you couldn't easily get to, I don't think there was roads back then. So he got there by boat and he got to this bay and everybody looked like they had mercury poisoning. It's like, you can imagine, it really looks like you're deformed, you know, all sorts of birth defects. So it hits the older people too,

but the kids have the most deleterious effect. And so that's how it was discovered. The government was helping this company try to cover it up. They were found guilty. So mercury is a trigger word. Right, so in Japan, everybody knows about this. Yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah, and they're sensitive to it.

And then on a personal level, I mean, this is part of your own kind of awakening, your own mercury poisoning. Yeah, well, I interviewed the doctor who developed a test to find out how much damages the people that were affected are due. And he developed something called a two point nodal test which is like a protractor with two points on it and depending on the distance

you can feel the two points on a fingertip he could pretty accurately tell you how much mercury poison you had then he showed me the corollary of what that would, because he had the brains of people after they died, they would take their brains out and they had brain slices and it looked like Swiss cheese. It would literally dole up holes in your brain. And I remember asking him, what's that mean to have this disease? And he slowly, he said,

it slowly erases what it means to be human. It takes away your senses, it takes away your memory, your sense of touch, your sense of hearing, you know, all your senses start to go. And then when, you know, so this is in my mind. Now, at that time, I was a pescatarian. I ate fish and I was delighted to be in Japan because I could eat fish, you know,

breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I wasn't like, you know, when I was working for Fortune Magazine, I did a story on the biggest independently owned slaughterhouses in America. And one was in Oklahoma and it was so big, they had their own slaughterhouse, like 500 cows a day would go through there. And I spent several hours there.

And one of these cows, if you ever know about the process, there's a reason why they say if slaughterhouses had glass walls, maybe it'd be- Hence the gag laws. Yeah. And they put what's called a captive bolt to the head of a cow and that's supposed to kill them instantly. I remember this one cow was,

they chain him up by his back heels and they rip off the hide and then they start to slowly, as it goes around through these, it's like the reverse of a car manufacturing plant. They're deassembling the cow at stations instead of putting it together. And remember this cow comes by at the first turn

and it's turning its head as looking at me, hanging upside down and realized it was still conscious. It was still- Skinned alive and still alive. Yeah, it must have missed. With a bolt in its head, but not dead. Like a old country, no country for old and still alive. Yeah, it must have missed. With a bolt in its head, but not dead. No. Like a old country, no country for old men.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was horrifying. And I thought, I can't be party to this industry, but I ate fish. I thought, well, I'll have to eat, you have to eat fish to be human. You have to have animal products.

So I ate fish. I thought, well, they're gonna be less sentient, intelligent. And so I was a pescatarian. So this is 1986. And this is when I'm doing. I thought, well, they're going to be less sentient, intelligent. And so I was a pescatarian. So this is 1986. And this is when I'm doing the cove. It would have been like 2007 and something like that, 2008. And I remember I was eating a lot of fish back then.

I thought, well, I should have. One of the last scenes we do in the movie is we take the deputy minister of the fisheries, Hideki Mornuki, and we take a hair sample. Because you can do blood samples or you can do hair samples to figure out how much mercury somebody has. So we clipped his hair, you know, with his permission. And I sent it in. He took it into his lab. And I didn't tell him whose samples they were,

but he said Hideki's sample was like eight times higher than what's considered too high. Wow. And he said, who's this other sample? I said, it's mine. He says, well, yours is 44 times higher. Ooh. And having seen what it does to the brain

of somebody with mercury poisoning, I just, the shock went through me like. And you're in the middle of making this movie about this very subject. Yeah, and I'm thinking, and then also, what am I going to eat? Yeah. You know, because like,

I would imagine it's probably like what the Japanese would have thought. What are you going to eat if you can't eat fish? And I remember, so I remember I had to cut out, you know, eating fish

because it wasn't a joke. It wasn't just like something I do later because to me, it was real palpable to see the brain slices and say that this could be done, be going on with mine. You were asymptomatic though. I had symptoms.

I had like a short-term memory loss. I had this pain in my shoulder that was persistent, would never go away. I thought it was like from lifting cameras or something. And when I stopped eating fish, it has a half-life in your body, mercury of about 70 to 90 days. And after a couple months, it went away.

And I was like, oh, this is serious. And I was here for the Academy Awards. We were doing this run-up, all the media push. And I remember sitting with Rebecca Mink. She was a designer, a vegan clothing designer. She was like a friend of this guy that I met. And I happened to be at lunch with her. a vegan clothing designer. She was like a friend of this guy that I met. I happened to be at lunch with her and she starts ordering off the menu,

working with the waiter to try to make a dish. And I was like, are you vegetarian? She goes, no, I'm vegan. I go, what do you eat? She goes, everything else. And she explained that, where do you think the animals get their protein? Where do they get their nutrients from?

And when her dish came, it looked better than anything that we all had on our plates. And that was it. I think that- That was it? That was your lightning bolt? The aha moment, yeah, of like, okay, you don't have to do this. Interesting.

It's interesting that that happened in the wake of making that movie and not prior to it. Like you had your own journey with all of this. Too long, that's too stupid. You know, there's a line, I think it was one of the best lines in the movie from Rick O'Berry. He said, I was as ignorant as I could be

for as long as I could be. Yeah. About what he was talking about when he was training dolphins. That guy's amazing. You know, I'm old enough to remember Flipper and I loved Flipper. I had my favorite thing when I was a kid,

I had a brass belt buckle that was a dolphin. Like I was, it's still my spirit animal. Like I just love dolphins. And his story just haunts me of training those five dolphins to be flipper for that show. And believing that what he was doing was ethically sound at the time. And then when the show's over,

the dolphins get sent away to these, where they weren't going to like SeaWorld, right? But they were going to tank somewhere. Miami Seaquarium. Yeah, oh, that's where they were. And then he goes and he visits Catherine, was that the name of the main one? Cathy.

And Cathy pops up and they lock eyes. Cathy looks at him, takes a breath and goes down to the bottom of the tank and decides not to take another breath. And dolphins being animals that don't have an involuntary kind of breath impulse, it's a choice, basically commits suicide. Which is just, I can't stop thinking about that. It gives me chills still.

And whenever I see that part of the movie and it's like, it's those kind of moments, like if you're doing a big film, let's say, on ocean health, you don't have that. I mean, that feeling that you have right now that hopefully the audience feels, like this animal committing suicide, swam into his arms, looked at him in the eyes

and swam down to the bottom of the tank, committed suicide. You can imagine what it would be like to be that you know that animal you can imagine like i think everybody can imagine what it would be like to be alone without your own species in a a miserable tank you know and all you know at that moment you're with rick you'll you want him to succeed you're you know he becomes a hero right then. And those transformational moments, you just can't get when you're just doing a normal documentary, let's say in the Nova way, you know,

I don't wanna criticize Nova. I watch all those, you know, Nova's I watch, you know, the Marvel films. The Attenborough sort of style of documentary nature storytelling. Yeah, and Attenborough sort of style of documentary nature storytelling. Yeah, and Attenborough for a long time. I mean, I watched those documentaries too, but, you know, and I've been to those places

that he's talking about. And those oases, those ever diminishing oases where you can see the sardine run, you can see the migration, they're still out there, albeit now it's going through more urban areas and you can still make it, if you frame it,

you can make it look like they're still there. And to the audience, you're doing a little bit of a disservice by saying the world isn't changed. It's a bit like greenwashing because it makes us feel better about what's happening when we see that beauty and then we're less likely to take action yeah i mean that's that's my feeling i mean i i again i love watching you know all those those wildlife

documentaries i i love the the courage that it takes to be embedded with these animals and and see them on their own terms. But at the same time, in my mind, I'm going, what can I do to try to halt that change? You know, there's a word for it where you have these diminishing ecosystems that in every generation adapt to the successive demise of the one created before it, a shifting baseline.

And is it just Pollyanna to say, hey, well, this is just inevitable. We're destined as human beings to oversee the demise of the world that's just the way it is or can you be part of this mechanism that can create a change is there a scientific you know reason why everybody will eventually go vegan or um adapt to a more compassionate world and i think there And I think there is. I think there is a lot of hope.

There's a lot of signals I'm getting that we can go that way. And I think films can edge us towards that eventuality. When we did that film, they were killing 23,000 dolphins and porpoises every year in Japan for human consumption. And the last year I looked, it was like two years ago,

I think they killed 1,610. So it was like two years ago i think they killed 1610 so it's down over like 93 since we started that film so films are very very powerful weapons for for social change and that's why i do what we're doing we had you know rickle telling rickleberry story had a profound effect on that industry they're still capturing them for the entertainment industry there's still you know there's coal countries that are you know have been banning it seems to it goes you know you said it here before that it's you know progress is never a straight line so it's messy life is messy there's ups and downs but you know i i i'm hopeful enough about you know where we're going to feel like we can be part of the mechanism

that pushes us towards a better society. Yeah, I've heard your films described, I don't know whether this is your term or not, as weapons of mass instruction. Construction. Construction instruction, isn't it? Weapons of mass instruction. Yeah, well, it's a destruction construction.

Destruction, construction, which I love. It's like, how can I deploy, how can I weaponize storytelling for a specific aim and do it in a compelling way? And that's sort of your approach to these films and they are impactful. I mean, The Cove, I mean, certainly they're not serving dolphin meat for school lunch anymore in Japan.

And I know you put your life and the life of your crew in peril to make that movie. And that was not easy. And you still, you can't go back to Japan, can you? Can you go back? Have you been back? I can go back. You can go back?

I just can't go back to Japan, can you? Can you go back? Have you been back? I can go back. You can go back? I just can't go back. I just can't get back out probably. And there was a period of time where it was unclear whether the movie was even gonna screen in Japan, right? It has since. Well, what happened was, oh my God, there was a famous, I think it was one of the famous Spanish directors, I believe,

was doing the Tokyo International Film Festival. It was Iteritu, I think it was one of the famous Spanish directors, I believe was doing the Tokyo International Film Festival. It was Iteritu, I think it was. Yeah, and he said, if you don't show the cove, because they were doing a green carpet, sort of a green carpet, because they were trying to make like a green. He says, if you don't show the cove, I'm gonna quit

and there's gonna be an international protest. So I went. And so I went over to Japan our my attorney and we get off the plane and like i'm not talking about like in the terminal i'm talking about on the gangway it's like the first like when the you know that passageway from you know the plane there's presses lined there taking pictures of me getting off the plane and they're saying you know asking me questions like they're saying you know asking me questions like they're all people behind me i'm thinking like oh i am going to get arrested this

is you know this is not going to be pleasant and so we were escorted under police protection we you know i walked the red carpet but i was totally alone there wasn't a single person there nobody wanted to be anywhere near you no they cleared it out they made it so that it was going to be you know they're gonna make a point that nobody's gonna see this film if if we can help it but and i remember at the screening there was a lot of the people from the international whaling commission meeting from japan where they're the whalers the dolphin hunters were in the back of the room and we we had a night vision camera in the theater. And I remember the previous head of the IWC for Japan, I think he was educated in Yale or Oxford, you know, Western educated. And he was expert at crafting his rebuttal about the need for you know for japan to still do whaling in

you know defense of the the dwindling number of whales and i remember this when when the the killing scene starts in the cove i remember looking at this guy and he just he's looking at the film and he just goes like this in his seat he just covers his hands with his face with his hands and he's shaking it like you know the world just changed there's in his seat. He just covers his hands, but like his face with his hands and he's shaking it. Like, you know, the world just changed. There's nothing you could do. He just knew there was nothing you could say about that. It's done, that guy.

The IWC, the International Whaling Commission, these governing bodies, the MSC, what is that? The Marine Safety Council Commission, something like that are problematic. I mean, there's so much corruption. It's one thing to be boots on the ground, grassroots, activism, locality by locality, and try to coalesce a movement out of that through film and other various means of raising awareness.

But from a top-down perspective, you have these governing bodies that are just, I mean, just so patently on their face, blatantly corrupt in the scenes in the Cove where we see that Japan is literally paying these failing, small, developing, bankrupt nations to vote in lockstep with them on these measures around whaling and the dolphin trade.

It's just, it's so obvious to everybody. And yet, despite being out in the open, continues to happen. And then I think there was even more recently with the MSC and whaling in Iceland, et cetera. It's like, can't we just all get behind the fact that we shouldn't be killing whales and dolphins? I think we're heading that way.

You know, Iceland, I think they're 2025. They said it's gonna be their last year doing it. I mean, it is happening. It doesn't happen as quickly as I would want, but if they're killing one dolphin for human consumption, that's too much. as quickly as I would want, but I'm, you know, if they're killing one dolphin for human consumption, that's too much. But still, you have to, you know,

take these victories that we have and celebrate them. Because if you only focus on the negative bits, like the, you know, the three countries that are still doing it, you know. Are you able to hold on to that level of hope and optimism i mean the cove came out in 2009 it's 2023 like when you look back how much progress has been made what still you know has yet to happen that maybe you thought would have happened by now like when you look at you know that world yeah i guess the it's the captivity trade. You would think that, because that's the economic engine that drives that. They're not killing them because, you know, for $600 a dolphin, it doesn't pay for the gas. They're doing it for the captive dolphin industry.

you know, over in Asia, you know, China, Japan, Middle East, if they saw, you know, I guess we need a Blackfish, another film about, you know, sort of dolphin intelligence, dolphin rights. I don't know. I don't know how to. Because that industry is booming in China and in the Middle East as well. Yeah, the Middle East. I haven't followed it in the last couple of years. I know with the pandemic they were failing, but now maybe it's bounced back even more i mean we certainly were part of a group that

got that you know we you know we got we got things moving in the right direction on that i'm on other things right now i'm thinking like okay we can work. How do we use the same storytelling chops on these other bigger issues and scale it so that we can see serious progress on food systems, on health. And that's what I'm focusing on right now. And that sort of was like almost a trial balloon to show that it does work. You know, we have people working on that still in our business, but it's like, you know, the other side of it,

it takes a lot of money to keep these doors open. You know, we have, you know, people that need to get paid. And how do you, the movie didn't make a lot of money. You know, it's amazing. Yeah, you make this movie, The Cove, the first movie you've ever made, you win the Oscar for it and you didn't make any money. It's amazing. Yeah. You make this movie, The Cove, the first movie you've ever made, you win the Oscar for it and you didn't make any money. We made enough money to pay back some of the debts that we had to do it. But it's, you know,

I tell people that want to get involved in a documentary, the first thing I lead with is if you intend to make money off of investing in a documentary, you're better off taking your money to Vegas because your odds are better there. But if you want to change the world, there's no better place to come than us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is the most effective way to provoke change, I think. And onward to your second movie, Racing Extinction, to your second movie, Racing Extinction, which I think is a better movie. I mean, cinematically more beautiful. And obviously you learned a few things about filmmaking. Like it's very compelling,

but I don't know that it was seen as much as The Cove. Is that true? Like that just feels like it slipped under the radar a little bit more than The Cove. 38 million people saw it the first day. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a discovery, which is the biggest network in the world at that time anyway. They had access to 2.5 billion people.

They did something unprecedented in their history. They released it on every channel they had for a 24-hour period starting in New Zealand. And when the sun came up, they showed it all day long until it came up in California. And then I think 38 million people saw it those first two days. And so it had a big push, but then it fell off the radar. It's like they have 400 films or this became part of their content. We just got it back recently. And it's hard to pump it know, to pump it back.

38 million was a good number. If those were paying customers, oh my God, that would be like if we had $10 for every, you know, person that came through the door. You know, our focus has never been about making money. You know, it's like, you know, we're running a nonprofit organization, not that we're trying to lose people's money, but it was like, I don't want to walk into a convention

and have to hide my head because there's four investors that I told them that you were going to double your money or whatever. It's just not our goal. So we try to find people that are mission driven

and that we can focus on making a film. The business model for making a documentary is completely broken. Now let's say you have an average Marvel film, $100 million, probably more like $200 million. They're going to advertise it. They have to get everybody in the theater to come on those first weekend or two.

You have to spend another $100 to $200 million to get people to come to it. And how are you going to do that with a documentary? How can you compete? No, it's not worth it. It's not worth it. And I also think the streamers have shifted focus away from documentaries, particularly hot button documentaries. I've noticed Netflix being a place originally that was this incredible home for new documentaries, birthing new filmmakers and really putting that mode of filmmaking like on the radar in a very mainstream way. And we saw this great success of so many documentaries in the

early days of Netflix. But now I think the streamers are so focused on new subscribers all across the world in areas like Saudi Arabia and China, that they're much more hesitant to onboard a documentary that might cause a political headache, no matter how good or high quality the documentary is. I had Brian Fogel on who did, yeah, who did Icarus. And then when he made the dissident, nobody would touch it. He won an Oscar for Netflix and they were like,

we can't take this movie. You know, so things have changed. And so for someone like yourself, who's ruffling feathers, who's trying to say, have difficult conversations. It feels like the streaming ecosystem isn't as hospitable as it once was, which makes kind of threading the needle even more difficult.

Yeah, I'm actually doing a series for Netflix right now on food. It is a lot of heart issues and I've been finding that it is working. It's been, you know, we've had- You've been working on that for a long time. Ever since, yeah, probably since 2016, you know, it took,

I was trying to raise the money independently, went the Netflix route. And, but it's turned around in the last week and it's like, I'm really like excited and happy that they're really going for it. They're pushing it. It's not complete control, but I don't know if I'm, you know, I'm a big fan of, I don't want to be the only one a lot of control to the writers, the producers, the editors are certainly the ones driving the ship at that point. And you give notes and the notes are coming back.

Part of it, the reason I'm not confident in this process, the first time I've, it's the second time I've done a film where you never met, you never met the editors. Like last week I was up at, everybody came to the office, folks from Netflix and the editors. I'm meeting them for the first time. I've been working on this thing for them for two years and I've never met them in the flesh. And usually I'm sitting literally every day, you know, that we're editing, I'm in the editing room with an editor and now we're giving notes and come back a week later. And the editor is the final author of the whole thing. I mean, they have incredible control over actually what it's going to be.

Yeah, and they're a little bit, to be honest, they're a little bit more, you know, Netflix has Final Cut. And, you know, they're paying the bills, you know, through us, but they're paying the bills. So they're like, you know,'re allegiances to the streamer. And luckily, we have a good team at Netflix. I don't know if it did any good, but I was in Indonesia with a really limited bandwidth a couple weeks ago. And I just said, listen, this is not why I'm in this business. We have to raise the stakes every time. I gave my heart and speech as I can.

Maybe it was, I found out later that they had already implemented those changes, but I'm like in the middle of nowhere. Like literally it's like without, you know, and I'm thinking, I'm seeing this cut. And it took me probably seven hours to watch a 45 minute cut of an episode because it just wasn't the bandwidth.

I had to stay up late when nobody else is using the system because we're with a small satellite dish. And I'm like looking at this, I'm like, oh my God, this is horrible. I'll never work in this business again. But it's just, then when I saw the final one,

when I got back to stateside, it's like, I didn't have to make that talk. They already made the changes and it's back on the rails. But boy, it's like i didn't have to make that talk that talk they already they already made the changes and they're starting it's back on the rails but boy it's a different world because covid everybody's working from you know they're they get conditioned to working from home now and it's like nobody wants to go back like to sit in an office and that's to me that's where a lot of the magic happens you know it's like in the field you're that's a great creative process you have wonderful dps and people that you're you know you're you're up there doing the work and when you're not in the room with somebody it's different it's really different i can't say it's better i i

miss it i and i and who knows what there's a lot of i mean there's there's a lot of the great things that happen when you're in a room with somebody and you're just having lunch and you say, you know what about that scene? Can we just try moving this over a little bit? And then if you have to explain it to somebody or worse explain it to like, with 15 other people on a Zoom call,

it's like, it's just, it's a laborious process, but it's changed. It's the world that we're living in. Yeah, I feel like it's moving back though. I think that rubber band is snapping back a little bit. And you're right, I mean, there's nothing, there's no replacement for the energy that, I don't do Zoom.

Yeah, I am gonna shorten the table. I get a lot of criticism. We moved it long, like when COVID happened and I still wanted to do in-person conversations and it stayed that way. And people are like, I can't believe how long your table is. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. Yeah, I get it.

But I'm glad to hear that. Is Food 2.0 a series or is it just a documentary? It's a series. It's a series, right? What's the premiere window for this? The January of this coming year. Are you allowed to talk about the subject matter that you explore?

We can talk generally about food and sustainable food systems. I mean, after the game changers, a lot of people saw that film. And that film really, first of all, I gotta say, that film had an enormous boost in the community. I'm told that Merrill Lynch did a study last December,

not this, but this previous one, the one before it. And they said that 75% of the worldwide interest in plant-based diet is because of that film. It's unbelievable. And it's a credit to the entire team that made that film. And Game Changers was incredibly impactful. It was exquisitely rendered and very meaningful, not just for the movement, but for really shifting people's opinions

and perspectives around diet, particularly for a lot of men who get caught up in what they're eating and how that affects their athletic performance to show a very different reality in the most palpable way that really has made an incredible impact on culture, to your point of weapons of mass instruction. Like it was extraordinary.

I mean, it was really a phenomenon when that movie came out and I couldn't be happier that it made the impact that it has made and continues to make. I know they're, I think they just announced they're gonna, there's gonna be a second one, I guess. Right, right. And I'm not involved with it, but yeah, I'm, you know, more power to it.

But, you know, a lot of people came out of that movie and they said, they would tell me just anecdotally, like, oh, I was vegan. What about now? I said, well, I did it for about three months and fell off the wagon for whatever reason. I said, why? He said, well, I'm not an athlete. And- That's an extraordinary statement. Like suddenly now this is the diet only for athletes?

Like that's quite a shift. Even though there was a twist in that film where, you know, James's father almost dies of a heart attack. And so it does this whole other shift to like, hey, this is not only good for athletes, it's good for civilians of normal eating to eat this way. It's a good healthful way. So in response to that, I wanted to do a film that, it's called Food 2.0 now,

this working title will be changed to something else. But, I mean, the premises of it is fairly simple. I wanted to address this idea. People said, oh, I'm Northern European. I'm black. I'm this. I'm that. My genetics are such that I have to eat this way.

are such that I have to eat this way. So I thought, well, what if you gave identical twins a healthy vegan diet, a healthy omnivore diet, and then we measured everything we possibly can from the usual stuff of blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, et cetera, but get into the epigenetics, get into, you know, these new biological markers that we didn't have the tools with, you know, very well seven years ago.

Like microbiome, things like that. Yeah, and so we're working with Stanford University and we have identical twins where we had this very- Are you working with the Sonnenfelds? I am. You are, excellent. Yeah, and the Scherzais. Oh, nice. We're cognitive testing.

And to me, it was like, okay, I don't know what the results are gonna be, but in people, my plant-based friends were like, well, what if it doesn't work in your favor? It's like, well, I'm interested in the science. I wanna find out what's going on in our bodies. And so if you take identical twins, you've taken out these variables, right?

If you have, it's like almost a perfect genetic test to see about the diet. And some of it we're giving an athletic physical intervention to, so that we're testing those as well. And I mean, I can't tell the results, but it was fascinating. And some of the results, like the scientists over at Stanford, they were saying, save your money. You're not going to see anything happen in eight weeks.

It's not a long enough timeframe. And now I'm not gonna tell you the results, but they've changed their parameters for studies now based on that one study. Is Christopher Gardner involved in that? You got it. Yeah, he was here last week. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

Really? Yeah, he was just here last week. Yeah, well, I just look at your podcast and I just invited them all to be in the movie I'm glad I could help you recruit all the people for your big TV show no that's amazing I'm looking forward to that how many episodes?

four episode four one of the new cuts just dropped as I was flying in this morning so I'm really excited to see it because that's like at the end of the day i want people to to look seriously at what they're putting in their mouths there's there's no other

thing in the world that we can do to give us agency over the environment over personal health over the the welfare of other creatures than what you put in your mouth to me it's just like a it's a no-brainer but but how do you make that entertaining to people? It's like, you know, that's tough. Yeah. You know, you don't want it to look like, you know, vegan propaganda. Yeah.

But, you know, I'm thrilled with the process so far that, you know, we were really, you know, I was sweating bullets for about, you know, I'd say almost two years thinking, well, what if this doesn't look good for, you know. Because I've heard you've been talking about this for a long time and I was interested in what the status of it is. I'll tell you offline later.

Okay, yeah, good. You know, you mentioned, you know, how difficult it is to, you know, sort of craft these challenging ideas around something that's entertaining and palatable. craft these challenging ideas around something that's entertaining and palatable. And it made me think of the recent Apple TV Plus series, Extrapolations. Did you, have you watched that? I didn't see it, I don't know about it.

What is it? It's this limited series that tackles climate change by casting its gaze into the future. And every episode is like 10 years later as like, this graph of carbon emissions continues to go up and you kind of see the world the way that it would appear during that period of time. And each episode is sort of a standalone thing.

A lot of talented people worked on this show. It looks like it was very expensive and the intentions are nothing but extraordinary. But to me, it ends up not really connecting because it's trying to be this important thing. You know what I mean? And I think it is, and I've watched it and I got a lot out of it,

but I think there's a reason why, someone like yourself hasn't seen it or maybe a larger audience hasn't seen it because it's missing that piece around really connecting with an audience in a very visceral, emotional way. I tell other, you know, I'd say young directors that, you know, you have a choice.

Do you wanna be right or do you wanna be effective? Because, you know, we're all indignant about the way that we think the world should be. But is that going to connect? Is that going to work? You know, is there, what's the audience that doesn't think the way that you think going to, how are they going to connect with this? Are they going to see it as propaganda? Are they going to think of it as like, is it entertaining?

You know, Michael Moore, you know, he said the first rule of filmmaking is don't be boring. And you could say, oh, well, there's nothing more important than saving the world. But like, okay, well, you know, I'm very cognizant that, you know, you work, everybody works, I'm assuming pretty hard. They're, you know, they're tired. They get back from work and there's a,

it's like, they have a choice. What do you watch on television? Do you want to watch the new Marvel Star Wars thing? Which, by the way, I watch too. But like, you know, what's going to make them click? You know, so there's a word of mouth that there's a scene in there that, you know, you got to see. You know, and that's what I think we do well. I think visually. I'm always like putting way too much energy,

but it's valuable energy into like, how do you make this scene, give them something that they haven't seen before at the Cove? We put time-lapse cameras in the market at Tsukiji. And it took us a month. We had to get permission from all five of the major brands that controlled that,

plus Mitsubishi, which oversaw everything. So there's a lot of negotiating back and forth that happened to get that one-minute scene in there. But it's still probably one of the best scenes about overfishing that I've ever seen because it shows like this. You see the gates open up, and then you see the light come in, the tuna get out there. You see the smoke rise in the tuna get out there you see the smoke rise from the the frozen fish the the buyers come in and they they take them off and put them on the trucks it goes dark it happens next day you see this wave after wave of like oh my god these are giant bluefin tuna that are now endangered and they're just it's just a commodity and you

know it's just something that's visceral. It's not, you could say that, but when you see it, it does something else. It clicks. Some writers can do that with humor. Mark Twain talked about the Philippine War back in I think the turn of his century, the 1900s. And it's all the atrocities of war that we thought about of vietnam but he's making us kind of laugh at ourselves

at our imperialistic nature easily there's a there's a way that you can communicate that where people can see themselves he did it through humor i do it through a visual language with the words and the music and you know with the obviously with a big team of very talented people more talented than me but i'm the head bullgoose looney that wrangles them all together so that we're all you know on a mission and then we get us all in the room we're we're thinking like is this i'm always thinking like do we need those two frames can we make this a little bit short i'm feeling i'm feeling like the the audience a little bit hesitating can we just make it speed up a little bit can we and if you don't have those assets in the field you're not going to create them in the editing room and our writer mark

monroe has written four of the films i've done i said i said we have the opposite problem that every other filmmaker has we have too much good stuff we have to kill a lot of our babies they say you know stuff that we love that we really worked hard to but i'd rather have gone in the field and gotten those asset assets and gotten those stories so that when we're in the editing room we're surrounded by a whole palette of beautiful scenes that we can put together to orchestrate to so we can dial in that those emotional moments so that we can find those hooks that'll get people, you know, hopefully going from one episode to the next.

And that's exciting to me. It's like, you know, but you gotta be doing it in the field. You have to be doing it from the creation. You're not gonna be like, you're not gonna find a, you know, a masterpiece, you know. In the edit if you didn't shoot it. Right. Or you didn't think about it.

Yeah. In Racing Extinction, it's getting the Tesla and kitting it out James Bond style with your team of wizards who are like this queue who are like creating all these add-ons to that car to allow you to project onto buildings and onto clouds and all the like that becomes this massive kind of inflection point for popular awareness. Yeah. And the car was like a transitional character to get us to the big projections. And let me explain that a little bit. Like, you know, if people haven't seen the film, we took a model out, one of the early editions, like you said, and made it into like a bond car for the environment. It's the first car in the world to have an electroluminescent paint job.

We could change the color of the car with the flick of a button. Never been done before. We had a forward-looking infrared camera, FLIR camera that came out of the frunk on a robotic arm so we could see the invisible world of greenhouse gases. Out of the back, out of the hatch hatch we had a 20 000 lumen imax projector so we could project those images onto skyscrapers or mountaintops we had disappearing license plates that'll hold that whole thing and it was you know it was a great hook for that but what we were interested in doing is the whole premise of that you know it started here actually in la where at the beginning of the movie, Adi Gill does these projections.

At the sushi restaurant. Yeah. So at the Oscars or the Emmys, it would be his screens that they would rent, you know, the high-end screens for the award ceremonies. And he put one of those, he had the business that rented those out to those places. So he had a screen that he put out in front of the Hump restaurant, which was illegally selling whale meat. We had busted, our team busted that restaurant essentially. You know, and this is right during the Oscars for the code too.

It was like, I remember there was a- Oh, I didn't know that those time periods overlapped like that. Oh my God, it was so funny because- I didn't even know the Hump was in LA. Oh yeah, it was at the Santa Monica airport. They were selling all kinds of endangered, illegal fish in their sushi.

Whale meat. Whale meat. Say whale, as the third largest whale in the world. So we'd heard about it. It became like this sort of urban legend. And we sent a couple of operatives into the restaurant. You know, it's two weeks. We were pretty, because the Cove was out in theaters. We hadn't yet won the Oscar.

But we were doing a lot of press around town and stuff. And, you know, so we were kind of, I wouldn't say many people would say, oh, you're the person from the movie about us. We don't want to go in the sushi restaurant. So Heather Raleigh and this other woman, Crystal Gelbroth, they went in and we gave them some of the last money that we had to order a lot of expensive sake and ingratiate yourself to the waiters and order the whale meat. And we were listening in the back of a car, these transmissions going on when they ordered it. in the back of a car, you know,

these transmissions going on when they ordered it. So when we got the story is, when we got this whale meat, we had the samples and then we went to, God, I can't remember which agency it was. It was like Fish and Wildlife. There's a couple of different agencies that were dealing with this. And we took the samples up to Monterey,

to Fish and Wildlife. I think it was Fish and Wildlife. And they said, well, that's all fine and good, but you need a chain of custody. I said, what's that? They said, well, we don't know that one of our people wasn't overseeing the sample. It's Saywell. We had to analyze the Saywell, but you could have just planted it. So it would be your word against them.

And they said, can you come with us on a bust or with us on a bust, you know, or get them to, you know, those same women. And we'd run out of money. And they went and tried to do a sting themselves, but they couldn't get the restaurant to sell them the meat. And so then when we were in LA for the Oscar roundup, we were getting an accommodation from the mayor's office, you know, some award here in town. And I remember looking at it and said like,

we got our team here. We can do this thing. This is like two days before the Oscar. There was actually a party that night at the mayor's mansion or wherever the mayor hangs out. And I remember like my wife at the time, she had like, we had, the distributor had like a limo and we're, you know, it was a big, you know, dolled up event.

Right. And I said, well, you go ahead without me. I'm going to go do this thing. And she, I remember she, I love her, but she said, why don't you grow up? And I thought, well, this is what I was meant to do. Who do you think I'm married to? Bless her heart. I can see it like it was,

this was like the one night that we could have to- Sure. You can't take a day off to go to the Oscars. Like you know, you have to go on this sting. So this is, I can't remember, the Oscars are on a Sunday night. We did this like on a Friday night or a Saturday night. And we had these three agencies,

agents at the bar, at the sushi bar. Our women went in with their, you know, the same women, two women, Heather and Crystal went in and they did the buy.

And then I remember we won the Oscar on Sunday night. On Monday morning, it's like front page news that we busted the Hump restaurant. So it all happened right at the same time. It was like this perfect story. And it wasn't just, you know, the agency. Now here's what was going on. I had a friend who was working at the U.S. IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting. And he said that at the time, this might be

complicated, but Obamaama who we all love was making a backroom deal with the japanese to give them open up um commercial whaling in order to keep the the bases open in okinawa that was the rhetoric i heard and i thought we have to press this because this deal is about to happen so i want you know if it became front page news that whale meat is being sold right here in America, we could shut down those talks. Yeah, that would become radioactive for Obama. So that's why we jumped the gun.

So like we didn't wait for the Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Customs to go through, you know, what they had to do to do a proper bust. We just announced it and that was, you know, that was it. And they were they were pissed off at us but like to me it wasn't about like them getting accolades for doing the bust it was about trying to shut down this idea of opening up commercial whaling again that was the reason for it but that all happened at the same time time on that. It's so wild to think about the fact that whaling still exists and that people are hunting and killing dolphins,

these magical, extraordinary, incredibly intelligent animals. And if there was one thing in that extrapolation series that kind of stuck with me, there is a sequence in which, you know, the oceans are completely acidified and the whales, I think there's like, you know, maybe one or two whales left,

but they have cracked the code in deciphering the language. Like they've got the technology to do that. So there's a sequence where somebody is in a, like in an underwater, there's a station and part of it's underwater and they're communicating with this whale. And it made me think about the potential with AI and how quickly it's advancing right now

in our capacity to figure out the nuances of how dolphins and whales and other of these cetaceans are communicating in a way that maybe we could figure out. Yeah, it was interesting. Like I mentioned Roger Payne, he's the guy that discovered that humpback whales were singing. So back in the, I think it was the 70s he wrote a paper and you know whales use rhyme they have meter they have they don't have what they

don't have is a start and a finish they have it's a river of song like they'll have an 18 minute song but they don't say okay and then start again start again. They'll keep on singing. So this was novel back in the 1970s. And National Geographic came out with a record called Songs of the Humpback Whale. It was still the largest single pressing of a musical recording ever done. Bigger than the Beatles, bigger than Elvis, bigger than Taylor Swift. Don't hold me to that, but it was anyway. And that is what sparked the Save the Whale movement. And that helped create the moratorium for whaling and roger just died on saturday and so he knew he was going to die

and so i called him up on thursday the last day before his full day alive on the planet and just told him what he meant to us you know how he how he moved things forward and how much i loved him when i had when i was working on the cove and jim had athena he gave me that boat to use for one of some of our first expeditions and we went down to silver banks which is where 80 of the north atlantic humpback whales come to mate and give birth and to you know socialize these five distinct pods from the northern atlantic come all down to the silver banks about 70 miles north of the dominican republic and he's jim said who do you want to invite and my first guest was roger paine a couple friends of mine have something called the earth

species project where they're using ai to try to decipher language and said you got to meet roger paine he's the guy that started it all his wife his wife, Katie Payne, was actually the one who first figured it out. And then he wrote it up and they worked it out together. But it was really Katie. And Katie, by the way, his ex-wife, is the one that discovered that not only whales are singing, she's also the one that discovered that elephants use infrasound, sound below our level of hearing to communicate. This is fascinating.

I didn't even, I didn't know that. Okay, get this. So Roger was amazing. I spent a week with him on this boat, you know, an amazing boat, but the whole, he would put these hydrophones in the water as we were eating at this really fine boat,

you know, three masted schooner out in the middle of the water. And anywhere you put, now imagine there's thousands of whales there. It's only the males that sing. And they're singing probably the same way that we sing, to find mates, to get your tribe together. And you can hear these strange ethereal songs as you're, as we're having dinner and they're, they're right below us. There's like this alien universe singing right below the boat. And, you know, he would, he would tell us about like blue whales, blue whales, you know, most of

their song happens below our level of singing. Like when I'm talking right now, if you saw it on an oscilloscope, it'd be like these little quick waves, right? My voice going up and down to each note, but the blue whales operate on a different metronome than you and I do. If you saw it on an oscilloscope, it'd be like these little quick waves, right? My voice going up and down to each note. But the blue whales operate on a different metronome than you and I do. If you saw their song through a computer screen, it looked like a straight line. But that straight line was really one of those squiggles, but it's like a kilometer long. Because their notes, one single note is like a kilometer long. Wow.

So you have to speed it up and compress it. You speed it up and it sounds like birdsong. And because it's low infrasound, they use something called the deep ocean channel where the colder water at the bottom, these waves propagate at the bottom, they bounce off the surface and they can actually go on for thousands of miles.

So these whales can communicate thousands of miles. of uh one of the the proteges of roger payne was this guy chris clark who was in racing extinction and he was brought in sosas is uh the underwater surveillance system that the navy uses to detect submarines and they they started opening it up to scientists and they brought chris in to try to figure out what this this one uh what they call biological was doing and he you know because at first they thought it was a submarine like a russian sub it would go off in one direction it was using the same frequency to ping that the submarines do and it would go it would be noisy for like six or seven minutes then it would stop and it would be in a different direction he goes well that's not a submarine that's a fin whale

and it's feeding and they they do he realized that the uh sosus is this underwater string of hydrophones that the navy strung along the mid-atlantic ridge you know roughly halfway between you know the eastern coast of America and Europe. And that's to detect boats. Every submarine and boat has a different signature. And they would put on these filters to take out the biologicals and somehow this whale had developed a song so it was singing at the same frequency as the subs were there.

So anyway, he realized, Chris had realized that, you know, they had this filter on and that if they took the filter off, he could see where a song was coming from all over the Atlantic Ocean. So he asked him to turn it off. And now the way he describes it,

it was a secret bunker off Norfolk or someplace over one of these bases. And it was like a basketball court size area with people with three screens. Remember, this is like in the early 90s where nobody had more than two screens. And there's dozens of people with headphones all listening for Russian submarines. Now, Chris asked them on this big screen to turn off the filter, to filter out the biologicals. He said it lit up like a Christmas tree for a few seconds, then it blew the computers.

He said he realized that the whole ocean is full of song. That wherever he put, you go to the Arctic and everywhere you put in a hydrophone, you hear cetaceans somewhere singing close by or far away. Because actually it's oxymoronic, but animals can sound travels about four and a half to five times quicker underwater than it does on land so you know and if you use these low waves low frequency waves you can transfer you can see

you know they'll travel those great distances like thousands of miles in fact roger pain thinks that these blue whales evolve so they could actually hear themselves clear around the world in the deepest, the longest part, like the Southern Ocean where there's no land mass. They can actually hear, you know, they can ostensibly hear themselves over 9,000 miles, a blue whale. That's insane. It is. Well, anyway. That's crazy. And I mean, just to know that completely changes your lens

on like how you think of an animal like that. Oh, there's a, when we had Roger on the boat, I'm trying to remember the story. Okay, one of, there's a researcher. This is, this was, this I think would be, you know, what we're talking about is like a Rosetta Stone, right? It's like, so like AI is like a Rosetta Stone where you had like the ancient Greek and then you had the Egyptian hieroglyphs, right? I AI is like a Rosetta stone where you had like the ancient Greek

and then you had the Egyptian hieroglyphs, right? I think that, wasn't that what was going on? They had, basically it was a ledger, basically in ancient Greek and the hieroglyphs. And it was a way that they could figure out, okay, triangulate, like what does this symbol mean to this word that we do know? I see.

So that was like a key. AI says, okay, we don't need to know anything about language. We'll just use these models and somehow figure out what these animals are saying based on this very complex algorithm that we don't even know. But one of the researchers I had in the boat with Roger, he put hydrophones in the water.

This is a guy, herman herman from hawaii he was teaching dolphins tricks two pairs of dolphins tricks and you can you put your fingers together and go together and then he'd do like a a circular gesture do a flip and dolphins i'm told will readily get this they'll do that nearly instantaneously to get put fingers together you know flip your fingers in a circle and the dolphins will swim to the bottom of the tank come back up they'll do a flip and they'll get the reward and then you know they would do this so well he'd be like okay what if we said together then he put go like his hands spread apart you know like like your mind said be creative creative. So together, be creative.

He said, no, they put a hydrophone in the water, but it was only one hydrophone. So they don't know what's being said. But the dolphins instantly went down to the bottom tank, did a flip, went back in the water, then they spit out water at the same time into the face of the researcher. So, I mean-

So they hatched a plot, basically. Yeah. And they agreed upon that plan. But somewhere in there, in that language, in my mind would be like, is spit water at the researcher in his face. You know what I mean? You could have deciphered.

So I would say use AI in a situation where you know what's going on rather than- Right, to reverse engineer like what was communicated and understood. Yeah, so like what they're doing right now, these friends of mine I put in touch with Roger Payne is they're looking at, they're taking all the data from Cornell University

or I think Scripps where they have these hydrophones out in the water working right now. And they're trying to use AI to decipher what these animals are saying. But they run into what's called the cocktail problem. Like if this studio was full of dozens of people and then you're trying to isolate what people are saying, it's called the cocktail problem.

What about if you just have two animals in a room and you have a hydrophone in each one of them so you know what's being communicated? That to me is like, but that's why I'm a filmmaker and not a researcher. Right, right, right. I mean, I would imagine that at some point they're gonna figure it out.

Like these tools are so powerful. It feels like it's only a matter of time before the technology advances enough and the science progresses where they're gonna figure this out. And that could be like a watershed moment and how we relate to this underwater kingdom that is so poorly misunderstood

and we treat like the world's garbage can. Yeah, well, imagine what, if we could, well, first of all, a lot of dolphin species and whale species have bigger brains than us. And they have more- The dolphin brain is insane. Yeah. And they have more, you know, convolutions of the gray matter.

So there's more opportunities for, you know, synapses for more, you know, they have spindle neurons that are more spindle neurons that are associated with processing complex emotions. They got a lot going on up there. But, you know, we as humans, you know, we keep on changing the bar and say, well, they don't use tools. Well, you know, in fact, crows, you know, chimps and a lot of other animals do use tools. But, you know, we keep on saying, you know, but they don't have computers, but they don't have podcasts. You know, it's like we're never analyzing or evaluating an animal for how well it survives in its environment. And you look at like, okay, so we have these big brains. And sometimes you can, you know, intelligence could be how well does a species work within the confines

or the barriers of their own ecosystem? Or do they try to impinge that? You know, if you eat all, you know, if you consume all the resources, is that intelligence? I mean, you know, we're failing pretty miserably when it comes to that metric. Yeah, I think so. They're perfectly adapted to their environment. It's because they don't, unlike humans, they're not crafting their environment. They're not changing their environment.

they're not crafting their environment. They're not changing their environment. Yeah, obviously there's been a lot of development over the last four and a half billion years of human history. But I was talking to one scientist and he said, well, the earth is gonna be fine without us. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, the earth is always changing. The advent of blue-green algae created oxygen

and it gave us us. And there's a lot of winners and losers when oxygen became one of the chemicals in the atmosphere. And I said to him, but blue-green algae didn't have a choice. We're at the cusp of what they call the Anthropocene, the sixth major extinction on the planet. There's been five of them all caused by either geologic or meteorological issues, asteroids. And those are all events that one species wasn't in control of. But we have a choice, unlike a wild animal.

And that's what maybe is different about us. unlike a wild animal. And that's what maybe is different about us. And to me, the question becomes, how quick can we all figure that out so that we're making choices that are good for the environment? And so how do you think about solutions with this idea, humankind is the asteroid

in this equation, in this mass species extinction event? That's act one. And there's no, what's that? That's act one. Yeah, that's, you know, mass species extinction event. That's act one. And there's no, what's that? That's act one. Yeah, that's, okay, so we're in act one. You know, I don't wanna have to experience the bottom of act two where everything feels hopeless

and somehow at the last minute, we figure out how to solve this problem. We have solutions to pretty much all of these problems. It's the implementation of these problems. It's the implementation of these solutions. It's, you know, activating, you know, a base of enough people to be adopters of these solutions. And then it's the top down, you know,

political will conversation around getting everybody corralled into, you know, one mindset around solving this problem or these or this series of problems. There's some really good evidence in science about shows that social change happens when you have 10% of the population, 100% committed to the truth. And that's what happened with electric cars.

That's what happened with cell phones. That's what happened, the suffragette movement. That's what happened with the civil rights movement. And then, like we said earlier, that's when you get to 30%. That's when people are doing it just because it's been normalized. I think that trying to get these movements up to the 10% so that it's unstoppable is part of my job. And that's one reason, by the way, we do the projection events. You know, when, you know, films like, you know, the films that we, let's say Racing Extinction, 38 million people, the first weekend, the first night,

that's great, but that's not 700 million people, which is, you know, or 800 million people, which is 10% of the population of the planet. That's why we do the projection events. With the projection events, we found, and I knew this at the point from Lalani Munter. She's the one that showed me these first studies. And I read the study and I called up the lead researcher because there was three pages of algorithms, some math that I just didn't understand.

It was never in my strong suit. And I said to him, can you give this to me in lay language, what this means, what this paper means? Because I understand what 10% of the population means, 100%, but I don't understand the why of all this math. He said, well, it's like if you're trying to create steam, it'll never happen unless you get water up to a boiling point. He said, 10% of the population, 100% committed, is a boiling point he said 10 of the population 100

committed is the boiling point for the exchange of social ideas and that i can understand it's like okay if but how do you reach seven or eight hundred million people with the projection events we can do it when we when we did racing extinction we showed it at sundance we at that point we had only projected on the united nations and it it looked good. It looked beautiful. You know, the front of the UN, by the way, this was done with permission with the UN, with Ban Ki-moon, who was working on the 2014. This was the preamble to the Paris Accords. And it looked good.

But the New York police said they would shut us down if we had over 2,000 people attend because they were worried about 600,000 activists in town and them storming the gates, whatever fantasy they had in their heads. So it never had that kind of momentum that I wanted. What I'd always wanted to do was to project on the Empire State Building because I thought that was like, you know, to me, there's something symbolic about it. The UN's great, but without a didn't it was never going to resonate and remember discovery at that point you know they paid us all the money they're going to give us it was going to cost like you know one and a half million dollars to do a projection event and they said the film's good enough don't worry about it and i thought we need to get a lot of people to see it otherwise Otherwise, it'll just be like, it'll just be another good movie. You know, that wasn't my objective.

How do you change things? So they said, well, a projection event in August in New York. They said all the important people are going to be in the Hamptons. They're going to be over in, you know, over in Europe. It'll be a non-event.

It'll get stark late in New York. So the press won't be there. They can't afford to pay overtime. It'll be a non-event. And so we did it. I raised the money. We did the event. I remember we had rented out a bar overlooking the Empire State Building.

And my son came up for it, and he goes, Dad, there's people in the streets. And I thought he meant people in the streets waiting to get into the bar because it was packed. And he goes, No, no no look over the side of the building we looked over in like fifth avenue with all these projections going off endangered species on the empire state building it was like the new york easter parade it was just like you know packed you know like traffic was you know was halted so I went down to take a look and you know they couldn't hear the music they didn't know what was going on up there they just saw something extraordinary and they all had phones they all had you know everybody became

a photographer and um we had some media show up but like the cops said hey if this gets too crazy we're gonna have to shut it down but we it took me four years to get permission from the city to do those projections and we had 939 million media views by Thursday. It was the top trending story on Facebook and Twitter for four days worldwide. Wow. And we thought, you know, it was on the cover of like, you know, the New York Times. It was, you know, all the media,

everybody picked up on it and everybody had a cell phone and that it got shared a lot. We thought, yeah, billions and billions of eyeballs. Yeah, and then, so we thought we couldn't get any more attention to the subject than that of endangered species in the Anthropocene. And then the Pope calls. And the Pope wanted us to project on the Vatican

for his Lodato C. This was in December, while world leaders were meeting in Paris to talk about the accords. Because remember, Pope Francis is named after St. Francis, the patron saint of animals. Animals, yeah. So we did a projection event there

and it was so surreal because we're thinking, like we didn't meet with the Pope, but we met with his number two over at the Vatican of his previous, when we get the job to go do it. And he goes to me, I'm not gonna be able to repeat his accent, but he goes, if it was up to me, this wouldn't happen.

And I said, why? And he says, well, because the last artist to do anything on the Vatican was Michelangelo. And so we had, there was 600 media there. We had that whole square leading up to the, the Vatican was filled. I think 225,000 people saw it live. We had 4.4 billion media impressions

just in the english language and you know it it at least in america those projections helped create laws that prevent some of the most endangered species from being trafficked on you know through u.s ports which was there was a loophole that they were getting through so that and and to me, like, we have another projection event that we'll find out what's going to happen tomorrow. But we're working with the Empire State Building again and the city of New York who now wants us to come back. And we want it to be all about, like, three nights projection, one on food, one on solutions to climate change. And we know that we've reached nearly a billion people before with a three-night projection. We'll be able to build on that.

So for me, this is a way to scale change. Like a movie is great, it's powerful, but a projection event is a way to cut through all the media hype. You don't have to pay for this either. Instead of like, you know, getting, you know, paying for advertising, you're getting people that wanna share it.

That's kind of the... It's super powerful. And the artistry that goes into these projections, like I don't know how you find these artists to kind of craft these displays, but they're really exquisite. Oh, thanks. Thanks.

So it is, you know, we've got a lot of colleagues. I mean, you should be going, I mean, talk about scaling social change. I mean, you could just have projection events going on all over the world all the time. That's the idea because everybody has. What we've learned about projections, like you can pull up to, I don't know, a building in LA that's kind of dark and project on it. But like, so what? You know what I mean?

There has to be some sort of symbolic meeting meaning behind it so when you project on the united nations it's like this is the one building that represents the world coming together to look at big existential problems and solutions the empire state building represents the pinnacle of you know city life and progress and you know capitalism and then when you put animals on it it sort of vibrates against that what that means you know i mean you're saying this is important too this is nature you don't see it in the city and now you're seeing the kids are like they didn't know what these animals were they'd never seen them before and you forget that if you live in a city your exposure to nature is really limited by like what you see on TV

or maybe up in the Adirondacks or something, but you don't get to see like, you know, a golden lion tamarin or, you know, any of these creatures. So they all look like alien creatures. Right. I wanna talk to you a little bit about, you know, legacy, how you think about, you know,

the meaning that you're leaving behind, et cetera. But I wanna do that first. I wanna preface that by asking you a little bit about this project that you did around joy with Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. I have not yet seen that film, but I did read the book and Doug Abrams is a very good friend of mine.

We went to college together and he's been on the podcast twice. So I mean, Doug and I, I've known Doug since I was 18. Really? Yeah. So how did you get involved with that and talk to me a little bit about that and also how it's kind of maybe changed. Maybe it hasn't changed, but I would venture to imagine

that it probably has kind of changed how you think about your work and your life. Yeah, everything really. I mean, I was down in San Jose where Doug lives and I was at a dinner with a lot of other people and sitting in a room full of really interesting people. And then halfway through the host said, oh, now to mix it up, switch with other

people on the other side of the room. I found myself sitting next to Doug. And I said, I didn't know him. And I go to school with him. I said, what do you do? He said, well, I'm a book publisher. I said, well, anything I would have heard of. He said, well, I'm probably best known for the book of joy. I said, I love that book. That's amazing. He said, what do you do? I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. You know, what have you done the Cove and I don't know if you even heard of it and then he mentioned that they had documented that meeting between Desmond Tutu and and His Holiness the Dalai Lama and he said said well we have like a like 18 hours of footage over a four and a half day period do you think it could be made into a

film i said well let's take a look at it so i saw it in the raw form and i found myself as i was watching it like having all these light bulb moments in my head about joy like what you know really figuring i know this podcast is full of now a lot of great people talking about what gives you joy but what really resonated for me was like yeah of, of course, that's why I feel good when I do something that's not just for myself, when it's for others. It does feel good. It's what they call, you know, like a wise selfish. You know, when you're doing something good for you, it also feels good for me. And that's okay.

good for you it also feels good for me and that's okay it's like fully selfish is when you're doing it only to get something out of somebody because it's a transactional or it's like uh it's one-sided and that did make me feel like god i wish i would have seen that that a film like that like you know when i was in my 20s and so this is before the pandemic and with i said yeah i think we can you know cut footage you know we'll have to go back and you know re-engineer some of the stuff and you know film scenes with the dalai lama and desmond tutu and then the you know covet hit and now all of a sudden we're trying to make a film like where you're afraid to go out of the country or you can't get into the country and like I mentioned before like you know I made that film with people who I'd never even met physically I met Doug because he was

right down the you know down the street so to speak you know in California but that film was like so important to me you know in my head like you can't change society unless they you figure out a way that you can communicate with them like you can you can understand people and what does give them joy and to me that film was like a i call it like chiropractic for the soul you know just everything snapped into place for me like okay this is you know how do you take you know one of the big takeaways from the that film to me like, you have these two spiritual leaders, two of the greatest spiritual leaders in the world probably at that point, at this point still. How do you, you know, what do they have in common? You know, the Dalai Lama's thousand room palace, you know, with, you know, servants and, you know, could lead an army and you have Desmond Tutu born in the squalors of the slums of South Africa.

But they both learned that out of this kind of grief is probably only possible to get really great joy. You have to take a hardship and turn it, like how can you turn this around? What's the silver lining turn it like, what's, how can you turn this around? What's, what's the silver lining in it? Cause there's always a way to reframe it. You know,

it's kind of a classic Buddhist thing is reframing, you know, instead of what was me like, okay, how do you turn that negative bit? I mean, like look at what your own journey, you know,

you took, you know, being overweight and alcoholic and doing drugs into, you know, one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Without that, you probably wouldn't be here. No, no, there's no question about it. But finding that way to channel that pain,

to first of all heal yourself, but then figuring out a way to give it back or to be of service and tying that somehow to things that you care about or problems that are greater than you in the world is to my mind, like the holy grail. Like if you can find something that you love, that's also meaningful for other people and is solution-based for some of the problems

that we face as individuals and as a collective, there's nothing more fulfilling in my life. And certainly, you're living your life in that manner. Yeah, I think, I mean, but the takeaway from all that was like, your life in that manner. Yeah, I think, I mean, but the takeaway from all that was like, God, there's a lot of- The joy, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, that's it, that's the joy that,

when you think about the moments that really give you joy, that like lasting joy, and they talk a lot about that in the film is like, what kind of joy are we talking about and say no it's not like a permanent state of utopia it's just those hits that you have when you're on the right path when you are giving back when you are in service to the universe rather than just yourself um and then if you can just align yourself with this you know you know only bringing the people in that you want to talk to or just you just narrowing in on the focus of like,

we all have a limited amount of time on this planet and like how you decide to use those and who you decide to share them with is probably the biggest decision that we can make, right? You know, and making that your North Star, making that my North Star has certainly given me the more fulfillment that I ever knew was possible. In fact, that's why Jim Clark, I say,

has made me the richest person in the world because he did give me the opportunity to find that North Star that I don't think I would have had without him. Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, I think on top of that, the joy provides a more sustainable fuel source to kind of pursue what it is that you care about long-term.

And I think what you see in the activist community in particular is a very short-term fuel source based on being upset with the state of the world and feeling like any self care or experience of joy would be an indulgence because it's so dire and it requires all of your attention. And as a result, a lot of people burn out or they just can't maintain that level of intensity

in the work that they're doing. But to kind of disabuse people of the idea that it's okay to experience joy in the midst of all of this. And in fact, if you can do that, it sets you up to be an even better servant in the short term and gives you the ability to serve long-term. Well said. It's hard though.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think if you're on the path though, I mean, you know, when you can, when you do have, you're pointed towards that North Star and you start to veer off, you know it. Yeah. You know, you know. I veer off a lot. I'm a grouchy, resentful person. I gotta let you go.

But like, you have a lot of stuff you're working on, right? So you have this Food 2.0 show on Netflix that's coming up we talked about. But you also have this SheChange project with the female big wave surfers right

which sounds pretty cool it's a great one four kick ass women surfers they got a pay parity in the sport of you know male dominated sport

of big wave surfing yeah that's a great film it's hard you know for some reason it's hard to get funded too I mean we're still struggling for that

last million but I think it's such a great film it's not just about surfing it's about women's it's about pay equity right yeah surfing. It's about women's. It's about pay equity, right?

Yeah, pay equity is about women's rights. There's that story we're working on a film on the great filter and the Fermi paradox. You know about that? The Fermi paradox. Is that the- If there's aliens, where are they? And the great filter is maybe it's the DNA of life forms in the universe that they burn out of their resources before they have a chance

to be able to communicate or travel great distances. Interesting. Yeah. And then we're doing a film on plastic pollution solutions. That's come a long way. So that's a great one. I did a whole podcast on that. I saw that.

That was great. Yeah. And is that all of these are in different stages of production and development? Yeah. I'd say, well, we're done filming the Food 2.0. We're about, I'd say, half done with the plastics film. I have a co-director of people. And you're like, how can you do all this?

It's like I have a lot of great people that I work with. She changed. I'm just an executive producer, you know, helping put the team together and raise the money. I'm doing a book project still with that camera that Clark built for us. We just got back from Indonesia. We were there for about two and a half weeks. We won't have to go on a big tangent, but boy, it's like, we went to the place on the planet where you can see the most fish on a single dive.

You go to the Caribbean, you're lucky to see 30 fish on a dive. You can see 300 down in this place called Rajah, western Papua New Guinea owned by Indonesia, Erin Jaya. And it's like 76% of the world's corals, hard corals are found there, and soft corals. One of the dive guys said, when God said, let there be fishes, this is where he was standing. It's just like the land before time.

It's really hard to get to. And we dive with rebreathers so we can stay down for like two and a half, three hours at a time if we need to. It's a big video production with lights and cameras, but underwater. And then you can kind of wait for these tides to change. So you have this upwelling of plankton and the soft corals bloom and the fish come out and it's really kind of amazing and with this camera you can see far more with your eye than you can with when you're actually there it's just you come back with these these images and it's just extraordinary beautiful and part of it is to get a baseline so you know even that that place is starting to get hit by bleaching and you know

global warming you know with just a two degree shift and an increase in temperatures and you lose the world's corals yeah so we're at that cusp and you know we want to see a baseline of like how beautiful was it because you know the next generation might not know what they lost because you know we're losing it and And I want to go to, I want to create a big book, like a sumo-sized book on using this extraordinary camera to see something that people haven't seen before.

Wow. And yeah, we have a couple of projects going on, but it's like, I just love doing what we're doing because it's like, I mean, I kind of wish I would have been doing this when I was in my 20s, but then somebody said, oh, you probably would have been doing this when I was 20s in my 20s, but then somebody said,

well, you probably would have made shitty movies when you were in your 20s. I don't know about that. I mean, I think it's cool that, I mean, how old were you when you made The Cove? Were you in your 50s? Yeah, late bloomer. There's hope for all of us out there.

Like first movie in your 50s, you win the Oscar. But I also think there's interesting new avenues There's hope for all of us out there. Like first movie in your 50s, you win the Oscar. But I also think there's interesting new avenues of creation that are becoming available to help tell these stories and impact people. Like I was thinking of Michael Mueller, the photographer turned filmmaker and what he's doing with VR with sharks and being able to give a kid in a village a headset

and have him feel like he's underwater swimming with the sharks. Easily you could do that with the coral reefs and any number of these other kind of endangered areas that give people that real strong emotional connection. Yeah, we're working on that. We're looking at uh you know new capture techniques in fact i'm going up on saturday to look at some people up at you know up in the

where people think big up in boston to to work on a project that we could you know to me it's all about scale you know it's that um how do you how do you affect people quick with the amount of change that we need and vr seems to be a good way to do it because it's more immersive, it's more emotional. You maybe don't need 30 minutes or an hour and 30 minutes, maybe you could do it in 20 minutes. One of the problems I have with VR is it's hard to, it's usually a one-off, it's like,

you need a set of goggles, you're not seeing it in a group. There's something that's transformative when you're seeing a movie with other people. Sure, of course. Yeah, it's still, it's not quite there yet. I get a little seasick wearing the thing and it's gonna happen at some point. Walt, I really love the work that you do.

I think that you are a really important voice in this movement for so many reasons. And the movies that you've made have just been incredibly impactful to me personally and to millions of people across the world. And I can't wait to see what you create next. And I'd love to have you back when Food 2.0 comes out or the plastic, I would love to talk to you

about the plastic problem. I'm afraid to even ask one question because it'll be two hours. But yeah, I have so much respect for what you do. ask one question because it'll be two hours but uh yeah you're you're uh i mean you're i just i have so much respect for what you do and and more importantly like the way that you do it the intentionality that you bring to your projects and and just the manner in which you you comport yourself as a steward of the planet and an activist and uh you know a creative voice so thank you for sharing well thanks for the accolades but i again, I got to say, it's a team effort.

It's like everybody involved. It's a process. It's like I get too much attention to what we do when it's really a team. But I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And I love the podcast. It's my go-to when I'm in a car.

It comes on automatically. As soon as I open the car door, I start hearing your voice. All right, thanks, man man i appreciate that cheers that's it for today thank you for listening i truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com Thank you. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally,

for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Salis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by tyler pyatt trapper pyatt and harry

bathis appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plants Thank you.