Joe Rogan Experience #1388 — Louie Psihoyos Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, here we go. How are you? I wanted to film. I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995, I think it came out. I was on the Information Revolution And, you know, he made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars. He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen. it could have been anything who knows what it was.

2:19 And the first, well, then I, you know, so I'm jumping careers at this stage. I'm going from being a fairly successful still photographer, really busy, to a career where I had really no business doing it. So Steven comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. to give the audience seasickness and but um you know i would add to that like don't do a movie

4:26 larger than a human beings they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even where they were trying to get the dolphins to talk like people You know, and, you know, have a go at it and see how we do. mexico and they do that somehow they find it you know every every year and like you know i couldn't what the books read, you know? reason universally have accepted up until really recently because of your film and because of

7:37 And I think, you know, when you look at the way we made that film, it was, you know, we pretty much told the story of what's going on in the oceans by looking at that cove. Just hearing that is insane. i think it was going from houston to santiago the plane was full i couldn't even sit next to the you who I was and then move. So I waited till dinner was served like an hour or two later. And I said,

10:11 And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their flesh is poisoned. And there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this flesh on the Japanese Ministry of Health site. We have to turn to the sea for food. And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries.

11:28 sold at the skeezy market found out they had skimmed 200 000 tons that's five big train cars 10 years ago. A lot of money. This is a Monterey seafood watch. That's shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation You know, you look at the biomass of mammals on the planet, you know, between livestock and humans, we occupy 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet.

14:16 That's a really good point. meat from these market hunters that have shot these things and they didn't really have refrigeration Like they literally exist in fields and a lot of them live off of gmo crops so it's very strange too and coyotes a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns i lived in boulder colorado for This is in the winter holding

17:38 so like we were we were uh looking at this house in in boulder and we opened up the door to the They're just so used to being around people. Because you can't regulate it the way you can wild animals because in wild animals, if they have a particular area, you could make it so people can't go in that area. No. and pretty much exterminate everything on it

19:39 So the ocean, you would have to literally make half the ocean where people couldn't How do they do that, though? position yeah i mean i don't envy it at all um but you know what what do you do you don't slaughter And then those fish get wild. And when I went there, they were shoveling. to make a pound of tuna? But if you look at what are they feeding, you know, a lot of these fish?

23:14 I think that's a big part of the problem. You don't see much yeah there was a my god she thinks that that's beautiful and it is it's just you know the single fish but unbelievable stunning amounts of wildlife. So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from, you know, Iowa or Wisconsin or Boulder, that looks pretty good.

25:47 it's bleaching. these, it's going to come back. In Hawaii it would or the Caribbean. years ago and when you make you know there's more carbonic acid in the water is now about 30% more acidic than it was, you know, 50 years ago. And they have like semi-treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that they can swim through. Well, that's what they reported. So it smells like sewage what do you mean by that um well that's that's what they reported so it's it

28:45 And I think they closed the beaches down We can make arguments about whether or not you should go to Florida all day long, know it jesus christ yeah i mean you know we'd be out when we were at one outfall that's what Money. Well, you know, that's a good question. Jamie's got something here. Look at that. It could be the color under the water, too. Look at that. Fuck. What is that?

31:34 To catch fish that are eating shit? to get somebody to talk on the record about this is really difficult is there any other part of were killing about 23 000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption. They'd say, well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens? that has the most deleterious That film is so disturbing, man. I mean, you were saying that the complexity of their brains is.

35:32 A male orca will spend most of its life, not more than a body length away from its mother the entire time until it goes away to do what it does. actually, you know, there's more patterns in there than we can sense. And it was through the work with the Navy, that there's something called the deep ocean channel. So it's bouncing up. pearl hydrophones that the Navy uses called SOSIS

38:20 I don't know what's being said, but that feels pretty special. when he could just, you know, you imagine one guy in a boat out there trying to listen. So we just know there's something, right? these other researchers I know, because they have these huge databases. I mean, Roger Payne, you know, when, Do you want Jamie to pull up songs of the humpback whale?

41:10 Yeah, it's actually been sold, so it's a copy written. some stuff that you can play with that's not copyrighted excuse me i think it's oh look it's Chinook. It was about 87, roughly, belugas and about 11 orcas illegally for the Chinese market. So there, I think there's 25 new dolphin parks opening up in China alone this year. They were feeding the animals.

44:16 Well, you know, one of them that they initially, You know, and it gets really expensive. to find humpback whale songs If anybody wants to go check it out. No, over to the right. If that was coming out of space,'d be like what yeah we would be like we have to go immediately i've often said that about bigfoot that we everyone cares you shut it off people

47:02 communicate with each other with this language, that we have had our best linguists try to decipher. you know and going to see sea world shows where they're doing flips for fish and everybody's But those things are, And this is the trainers talking to management about, you know, an animal that's not performing well. better with sports i guess it'd be a better analogy. Yeah, Jesus Christ.

50:08 so that the elite athletes are hunted by the guys coming up. Yeah, it's horrible. and i i believe she's the only one that's alive marine land has a horrible record of animal rights it's still legal like that after blackfish sea world didn't just shut get shut down by the And then we helped organize getting musicians to stop performing there. know do what the other theme parks are doing and try to get away from that business. But it's still happening.

53:45 the fact that it's not illegal, it's just stunning. away so there's really no what do they do when they don't speak the same language do they try teeth are just sawed off because they're getting infected it's um yeah let's go on to something Because just about everything is singing. we just haven't been listening everything from a you know from a mouse up to a blue whale

55:56 Yeah, the Anthropocene. He said, oh, yeah. is being, and it was going on the Amazon as well. This has been proven? from the clouds of smoke from the burning of the Amazon, I mean, this is where a great majority of some of the greatest pharmaceutical drugs ever invented, How insane is that? Yeah. of the the forces of nature. It's about as real as it can ever get.

1:00:58 there's certain uh opinions that people adopt they adopt this conglomeration of opinions if you are in the That's actually part of it. Well, a couple degrees warmer fucks everything up. Yeah. that florida if they were just pumping that shit into west palm beach if there's just a big tube As a filmmaker, how do you make a story like that so that people actually want to see it so they don't feel like it's medicine?

1:03:57 The first line of the film was me saying, I just want to say we tried to do the story legally. Conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing. How do you define disrupting commerce? As my friend Charles Hamilton said, that became our template of where we needed to go of course yeah have you uh seen some of the sea shepherd work where they've caught these

1:05:33 And it was a huge event. And this is all sanctioned. Oh, on YouTube they speed it up? Nobody will be there in the summertime in New York. How are you selling so many tickets? Everybody's out. And then we thought, okay, that's it. understand one step at a time yeah yeah that dirty place vatican's a strange when you were trading And now, at the Gritty Palace.

1:09:06 Holy shit, four feet of water in the fucking lobby yeah holy shit four feet of water in the fucking lobby so what is causing that well it's uh well a combination of the the time this I lived at 4th and Juniper. That's how bad the flooding is. That's a restaurant. It's around the corner. gigantic boat and it's just coming in you know it's going to hit the dock and you know it's

1:11:17 That is so insane. And, you know, don't they just dump their waste right into the ocean? that we had retrofitted for uh for racing had a FLIR camera, the same camera that you use to see methane. But with this camera, you can see it. But that's one of the beautiful things about when you go to the woods. You just don't get here. We don't know what to do, though.

1:14:14 an accent and i don't you know back then i mean i'm probably i don't hold you 52 yeah so i'm like Cause I thought, yeah, you can see that from Woodland Hills from Woodland Hills on a rainy Well, it's because today's a beautiful day. It's really a hides mountains. Still? Yes. Okay. All the time. There's an area where I trail run. gotten accustomed to it yeah well i mean catalytic converters helped a lot well it also is helping a

1:16:44 it was a nice one. Yeah, the roof of my house. Oh, I didn't see that. I didn't have bills. Yeah. the model three is selling like crazy yeah and it's a fantastic car as well i mean that model anytime you want to just dump on the the accelerator just whoa it literally feels like are the two things they say because it doesn't seem like it should be able to do that like it

1:20:25 limb and making something like that you know and then porsche is uh releasing their their version Do you think that they're going to be, And I have the same sort of ickiness about going that direction, Yeah, it seems like the science, whatever it is, it's tissue. That's the real question, right? And there's one that was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse and they

1:23:50 And as it's turning around, it was turning its head, and it still held my eye. I limited myself to things that didn't walk, that didn't walk. And when we were, you know, while I was out at the lab, Then when, you know, we got his labs back, his sample back, it was eight times higher And, you know, I tried to get it massaged out. And I said, what do you eat?

1:26:06 Because it has a half-life in your body of 70 to 90 days. All big fish is poison for sure. When I was in Japan, I went to Minamata where they had the – they call it Minamata disease, but it's not a disease. That's because they had the felt from 100 years, 150 years ago. minimata disease he was the guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people.

1:28:11 So I had to get off fish and become a vegan, not for ethical reasons, but because of I just couldn't eat it, just for health reasons. It's worse, yeah. They don't really move. Mollusks are an incredibly ancient life form. oysters that they get you know put through for pearls and they they don't they just eat the I don't. I mean, is there any talk of doing things like that, or is it even impossible?

1:31:44 It's not sustainable. towards people want to eat healthier, that's really primitive in a, in a, in a really genuine way that makes us feel good about who we now where we have to figure out how do you feed a planet that's the real problem right and not just So what are we going to eat? regions of the planet where people live longer and without chronic disease than

1:34:34 They're going to have it. And you go to the grocery store, they don't sell meat. But they're living about 10 years longer than everybody. And it's really stark. day adventist diet which is vegetarian yeah and but what you're talking about san bernardino is Everything, yeah. agriculture when you're growing crops. that get rid of it yeah i mean yeah i mean you've seen king corn right yeah that's that's pretty

1:39:06 extracted from corn well let me ask you how do you think that you know if we have to feed 10 15 there's a guy named Joel Salatin who has this, this thing called polyface farms where he, I mean, whether chickens raising chickens like that or cows that, or cows like that, or pigs like that. it's not necessary that's nuts it's just they're doing that for profit,

1:41:39 But going back to it, though, so how do you – When he was walking down the beach with that thing, like, wow, that guy's a baller. Four grand. This is like real beef. don't want to learn how to do that they don't have it in them they don't want it it's not interesting and i can eat you probably better than me but i can i can eat how i want to eat but doesn't that

1:44:51 Nice little cozy man den you have down here. One of my best friends is vegan, Ian Edwards. grass no one would give a shit right right it's when you take the video and the cows are just wandering around eating grass. No one would give a shit. he's from iowa or at least he was i'm not sure if he's still even in power there. but every time I drink a glass of milk, I always feel gross.

1:47:34 was lactose intolerant i mean really i mean i thought you know i should have figured it out I don't think we're supposed to be boiling that stuff. And look, if you want to serve milk to 300 million people, that's how you have to do it. last time i had raw milk i was like this had it in years. But the last time I had raw milk, I was like, this tastes better.

1:49:54 Yeah. Just have a glass of water or drink some juice or something. it's just not milk man almonds don't have tits like what are you doing to that water you know or should we get spring water i think filtered we get filtered water or should we get spring water? We're working on a film on plastic pollution right now. where I work but here's the issue

1:52:01 How in the river? I see what you're saying. It's biodegradable and it comes from this plant. I mean, you can make hempcrete out of it, which is far better than any building material we currently use. It doesn't seem real. used to use for fucking for heating lamps you can cook your food in it it i mean there's so many different became outlawed and so

1:55:46 taking this new drug called marijuana marijuana wasn't even a term for cannabis marijuana was a saying that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug. I think he got to Joe Biden. that's not poisonous. Abuse is a gateway to drugs. maybe maybe there was some truth to it no it's hunter thompson for sheriff but there's nothing today marijuana is not for everybody and i think it should be used carefully because look i've said

1:59:31 of the things that that paranoia is is just an overall expanding of your awareness of your this really is. people. And to me, I've gotten a a fantastic education from it to being able to talk So it's very satisfying that people like it. When I do a film, it's so targeted that I'm needing them to fill in a blank. on edibles. having fun with us and then i started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication

2:04:13 Well, I appreciate it. And they could only do it for so long. And so they can only be entertained so long. Wow. do drone footage off of the coast of malibu and you see like a great white swimming around there He wasn't scared. And then there was one in Santa Barbara that happened about four years ago, four or five years ago. But. 50 yards away and I thought I just don't want to be part of it.

2:07:38 I died with a rebreather. But then one of the guys that we had brought over a tuna head and lured him away. Just thunderous explosion of long the only the only time like if you don't feed them, they're usually fairly, if you're feeding them or if you're spear hunting, then they'll come near you. We can actually see them now, I think. Boy, that's a good question.

2:10:12 Yep. Thank you.