Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos

1. 0:03 – 2:44

   From underwater photography to founding an activist film mission

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:03

      All right, here we go. How are you?

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos0:04

      Good.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:04

      What's happening? Good to see you.

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos0:06

      Good to see you.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Hey, how'd you get involved with The Cove? What was the, the history behind that?

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos0:11

      I'm gonna give you the long version.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      Sure.

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos0:13

      Um, there's a, a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD. I wanted to film... I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995, I think it came out. Uh, it was on the information revolution and Jim Clark was sort of the, (sighs) y- you know, the Steve Jobs of my generation, right? And he, uh, h- he didn't wanna be photographed. He was just too busy. And then I started working for Fortune Magazine and he had built a boat, had the world's tallest mast I think at that point, and I was... went over to Amsterdam to film him. And, uh, we hit it off and, y- you know, he said, "Would you teach me how to be a, a good photographer?" And, you know, he'd made three companies from scratch b- worth over a billion dollars and I said, "Well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer." (laughs) And, um, then we would travel all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years, and, uh, we did mostly underwater photography. He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude. It was just a, a piece of work, 'cause Jim doesn't do anything half-ass, and every time we would go to a dive site and come back to it, he would see this shifting baseline where there's less fish, there's less coral. In fact, he, he took me to this place in Papua New Guinea, he said, "Louie, I'm gonna take you to the best place I've ever seen. It's in, in, in Papua New Guinea." We flew over there, all day to get there, a day and a half to sail. We'd dive on the GPS coordinates and it's rubble, it's completely gone. And this would happen, not all the time, but a lot. We don't know what the, you know, the insults were. It could have been dynamite fishing, could have been, uh, it, it could have been anything. Who knows what it was? But the... I think it was the third time that we were in the Galapagos, Jim turned to me and said something like, you know, "Somebody should do something about this." We saw a fisherman illegally f- fishing in a marine sanctuary. And sort of empowered by the success that he's had in business and seeing how he could change the world and his businesses, uh, I said, "How about you and I?" He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "We'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films." And the first... well, (laughs) then I, you know... So I'm jumping careers at this stage. I'm going from, uh, being a fairly successful, you know, s- still photographer, really busy, to, uh, a career where I had really no business doing it. I'd never really made a film before, not even, really, a short film. And, uh, and so I'm, you know, nervous, I'm feeling sort of full of myself like I'm gonna start this great career, and we're down in the Caribbean

2. 2:44 – 3:48

   Spielberg’s warning, and why making The Cove became dangerous

   1. LPLouie Psihoyos2:44

      on a, on a boat and my kid starts... with Jim, on vacation with our families, and my kid starts playing on the beach with, uh, another kid. It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid. So Steven comes over onto the boat to meet Jim and I. He, he made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, Silicon Graphics, and after I had Steven alone for a few seconds, I said, "Do you have any advice for a first-time filmmaker?"

   2. JRJoe Rogan3:06

      (laughs)

   3. LPLouie Psihoyos3:07

      And he s- he said, he said, "Yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals."

   4. JRJoe Rogan3:12

      Oh, great. (laughs)

   5. LPLouie Psihoyos3:14

      And, you know, of course, the first film we did was The Cove, and-

   6. JRJoe Rogan3:16

      But at least these are...

   7. NANarrator3:18

      (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan3:18

      Y- you're not... You don't have actors and special effects and boats and animals. It's just a part of the story. It's not like you're... Like, with him, I think what he's meaning, like Jaws.

   9. LPLouie Psihoyos3:27

      E- exactly.

   10. JRJoe Rogan3:28

       Yeah.

   11. LPLouie Psihoyos3:28

       You know, 'cause, you know, you have to match shots and-

   12. JRJoe Rogan3:30

       Special effects.

   13. LPLouie Psihoyos3:30

       ... and all that, but it has its own set of, you know, t- trying to keep a, the horizon level on a boat. You don't wanna give the audience seasickness and...

   14. JRJoe Rogan3:38

       Mm.

   15. LPLouie Psihoyos3:38

       But, um, you know, I would add to that, like, don't do a movie (laughs) where people wanna kill you 'cause when we did The Cove, it was, you know, it was, uh, exciting but dangerous work.

3. 3:48 – 7:29

   Dolphin intelligence, communication limits, and redefining ‘smart’

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:48

      Yes. Yeah. Um, look, that movie changed a lot of people's minds and opened up a lot of people's eyes to the, the horrors of the way dolphins are slaughtered and, uh, and w- you know, we were just talking about this before the podcast, I think they are as intell- intelligent as human beings. I just think the difference is they can't change their environment. They don't affect their environment the way we do. They don't build houses. They don't have cars. They don't send emails. So we don't appreciate what they are, but when we look at the complexity of their brains, the fact that their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's, they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even really totally understand. We can peck out-

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos4:32

      Don't understand any of it. (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:33

      Yeah, I mean, we can peck out patterns. I mean, the scientists have... I mean, you know, um, I'm sure you're aware of John Lilly's work.

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos4:40

      Sure.

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:40

      Uh, yeah, John Lilly, I mean, for years... I m- and did it in, like, really weird, unconventional ways. He tried to take acid and communicate with dolphins, and it's one of the reasons why he cre- he created the sensory deprivation tank. We h- we actually have one of those over here.

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos4:55

      Right.

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:55

      And Lilly, uh, forev- they were forever trying to figure out some way to figure out some method of communication where they were trying to get the dolphins to talk like people and we would try to make their noises and to no avail, you know.

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos5:10

      Yeah, I mean, they're obviously extremely complex p- you know, animals. If you, you know, judge 'em by our value, like people say, "Oh, they, you know, they didn't invent, you know, the car."

   9. JRJoe Rogan5:18

      Right, right, right.

   10. LPLouie Psihoyos5:19

       "And they can't use computers." But, you know, it... Intelligence can be seen as your ability to w- you know, to live, e- exist in your environment.

   11. JRJoe Rogan5:29

       Yes.

   12. LPLouie Psihoyos5:30

       And by that standard, you know, I mean, put us in the water-

   13. JRJoe Rogan5:33

       Right.

   14. LPLouie Psihoyos5:33

       ... you know, and, you know, have a go at it-

   15. JRJoe Rogan5:35

       Yeah.

   16. LPLouie Psihoyos5:35

       ... and see how we do. You know-

   17. JRJoe Rogan5:36

       They don't need anything in that world. They travel through three-dimensional space.

   18. LPLouie Psihoyos5:39

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan5:39

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

   20. LPLouie Psihoyos5:42

       Yeah. And, you know, like, well, but e- you know, it's not just dolphins too. I mean, look at, you know, butterflies, monarch butterflies, they, they... it takes three generations for them to go to, to migrate from Canada down to a six hectare area in Northern Mexico, and they do that. Somehow they find it, you know, every-

   21. JRJoe Rogan6:00

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LPLouie Psihoyos6:00

       ... every year and like, you know, I couldn't find the studio without an iPhone.

   23. JRJoe Rogan6:03

       Right.

   24. LPLouie Psihoyos6:03

       You know, so, I mean, what's, what, what's going... We, we don't even...... have a clue on how most the world works. And, you know, we're ... You know, the second film I worked on, Erasing Extinction, you know, that's about wh- we're going through a mass extinction right now. We're exterminating this stuff, these animals before we have a chance to even know how they operate, how, what, the, the ecosystem, how it even works.

   25. JRJoe Rogan6:26

       Right.

   26. LPLouie Psihoyos6:26

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

   27. JRJoe Rogan6:31

       Yeah. Well, that's what they did with the Library of Alexandria. That's why we don't really totally understand how they built the pyramids. Um, but what I, what disturbs me is this egocentric approach that we have towards, th- towards marine life in particular, because they're the most intelligent versions of life that we, we know of other than ourselves, that we, for some reason, universally-

   28. LPLouie Psihoyos6:54

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan6:54

       ... have accepted, up until really recently, because of your film and because of Blackfish and, uh, you know, more awareness, and Sea Shepherd, and all these different organizations that trying to l- let people know, like, you gotta pay attention to what this is. Because I think history, I think when all- all said and done, we're gonna look at this as some insane slaughter of, like, what's basically, like, water people. They're like some form of super intelligent life that some cultures have just decided are just competitors in, in the fishing market.

4. 7:29 – 11:04

   The Cove’s hidden driver: toxicity, mercury, and ‘food security’ rationalizations

   1. LPLouie Psihoyos7:29

      Yeah. Well, I c- can't agree with you more. I mean, I think it's, uh ... And I think that was the shock of The Cove that you see our counterparts in the ocean being treated like that. And I think, you know, when you look at the way we, we made that film, it was ... You know, we pretty much told the story of what's going on in the oceans by looking at that cove. And, you know, William Blake said to see the world in a grain of sand, but we could look at ... You know, in that film, we talk a- about overfishing and, you know, listen to the re- reason that they shouldn't be eaten besides that they're sentient and intelligent is, is also that they're toxic.

   2. JRJoe Rogan7:58

      Yeah.

   3. LPLouie Psihoyos7:58

      You know, you know? Their meat is now ... Their, their flesh is now the, some of the most toxic, uh, you know, waste in the world when you bury 'em. You know, there's, I think six- 6,000 times more, uh, PCBs than, you know, in the background in the ocean. There's, uh, you know, all, all the, the flesh that's been tested in, in Japan in the last 20 years has between 5 and 5,000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese law if it was a fish. But it's a mammal, of course. So, um, I'll tell you-

   4. JRJoe Rogan8:28

      It's insane.

   5. LPLouie Psihoyos8:29

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan8:29

      Just hearing that is insane.

   7. LPLouie Psihoyos8:31

      I, I'll tell you an interesting story. It w- I was ... When we were making that film, there was, um, a point where we went down to the, the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in, uh, in, in Chile, and we were trying to get a- an interview with some of the top people there from, that run the, the organization because, you know, whales, dolphins, they're killing 'em en masse. And we had the footage at that point, and we were just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the International Whaling Commission. And, um, it was, I think it was going from Houston to San- Santiago. The plane was full. I couldn't even sit next to the, you know, my, my partners on the, my buddies on the, on the film crew. There's one empty seat next to me and, you know, they're waiting for somebody else to come from another flight. And right before the, the plane door closes, in comes Akira Nakamai. He's the head of overseas fishing for Japan, the, the head bull goose loon- looney, and he sits down right next to me. I'm looking at my buddies, you know, uh, on the plane thinking, "Oh my God. If there is a God," you know, "he has a good sense of humor." So he sat- sits down next to me and s- be ... I didn't want, you know, him to, like, find out who I was and then move, so I waited till dinner was served, like an hour or two later, and, and I said, "Do you have any idea of who I am?" He said, "No." I said, "I know who you are. I wanna show you a film."

   8. JRJoe Rogan9:45

      Hey.

   9. LPLouie Psihoyos9:46

      Yeah. (laughs) And so we had a, we had a condensed version of it, you know, probably about 12 or 15 minutes of it at that point, and I showed it to him. And I said, "How do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their, their, their flesh is poisoned, you know? And you're ... There's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this, you know, this, this flesh, uh, you know, on, on the Jans- uh, the Japanese Ministry of Health site." And he said, "I'm not in ch- charge of, uh, food safety. I'm in ch- charge of food security." In other words, he's, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences. Alls he has to ... Uh, his job is just to provide enough meat on the plate for the, for the Japanese people. And it gives you an insight of how he's thinking. You know, he's in charge of ... I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California. He says 17% of, of the, the land area in Japan is only, you know, uh, good enough for growing crops on or living on. We're, we have to l- you know, turn to the sea for food. And at that point, they were also caught skimming, stealing about 200,000 tons of endangered bluefin tuna. This is over about a 20-year period. Now, at th- uh, when you start talking about big numbers like that, I can't imagine. You know, it's hard to imagine it. But imagine like-

5. 11:04 – 18:21

   Bluefin tuna collapse and the economics of extinction

   1. JRJoe Rogan11:04

      How are they stealing this tuna?

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos11:06

      Well, they're, they, they have quotas.

   3. JRJoe Rogan11:07

      Oh.

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos11:08

      And they're exceeding their quotas every year and wh- which means that they're taking away from other countries.

   5. JRJoe Rogan11:12

      Right.

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos11:12

      So it's not just like w- the, the ... Everybody, every country has their allotment and once you've reached it, you're supposed to go home. But the Japanese kept on getting more so the, the Australians actually caught them s- You know, they figured out over a tw- this 20-year period that they went through the books and, and saw what they reported and was actually sold at the Tsukiji Market, found out they s- they had skimmed 200,000 tons. That's five big train cars, like trains full of, you know, endangered tuna. Like, not cars but the whole trains, like 110-car trains, five of them full of-

   7. JRJoe Rogan11:42

      It's weird to r- just reconcile the idea that tuna is endangered. You know, you think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store. Like, tuna ...

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos11:52

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan11:52

      Tu- tuna's a weird one, right? Because it's such a common food. It's in cans. You, you see it at the sushi place.You know what I'm saying? Like, to-to-

   10. LPLouie Psihoyos12:01

       I, I-

   11. JRJoe Rogan12:01

       ... to hear that tuna's endangered, most people are like, "Is tuna endangered?" Like, they're hearing this going, "Is tuna endangered?" But when you talk to people that work at the fish market, they, they'll v- very clearly tell you that there's a radical difference between the amount of tuna that was available 30, 40 years ago versus now.

   12. LPLouie Psihoyos12:16

       T- uh, 10 years ago. I mean, we're down to... Bluefin tuna in particular is down to about 90 s- uh, it's, it's down to 4% of their historical levels.

   13. JRJoe Rogan12:24

       That's incredible.

   14. LPLouie Psihoyos12:25

       Yeah. And-

   15. JRJoe Rogan12:27

       And there's no way to stop this. There's no... I mean, it seems like-

   16. LPLouie Psihoyos12:31

       It's-

   17. JRJoe Rogan12:32

       ... everyone's waiting for someone else to do something, and during the meantime, everyone's just trying to make money.

   18. LPLouie Psihoyos12:37

       A lot of money. Yeah, un- unfortunately, it's sort of the, what happens with endangered species. The, the more rare it becomes, the more valuable it becomes. And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing. And, you know, but this is happening with all the fish stocks. I mean, I-

   19. JRJoe Rogan12:51

       Yeah.

   20. LPLouie Psihoyos12:52

       ... I probably gave... I r- my, my w- I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society, and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet. This is a Monterey C- Seafood, you know, G- Watches. Like, like-

   21. JRJoe Rogan13:02

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LPLouie Psihoyos13:03

       ... wha- what f- what fish are sustainable, and I've seen them, you know, go through the fish stocks l- so less and less. You know, we, we start at the big animals and we start to, you know, slowly go through all the fish stocks until, like, we're, you know... Like, McDonald's used to do halibut. Now it's pollock, which is a very small, you know, uh, white fish from Alaska. And now that's being, you know, headed to extinction. So we're going through these fish stocks. It's, you know, that shifting baseline where you're seeing, you know, each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the, the previous one. That's what, that's what's going on. So I just stopped, you know, handing out seafood guides, and, uh, now I'm trying to sort of preempt it. So I don't think... You know, the big question is there's 7 1/2 billion of us on this planet, soon to be 10, is there enough wild animals to, to feed us all? There isn't. You know, you look at the biomass of mammals on the planet, you know, between livestock and humans, we, w- we're, we occupy 90%, 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. 4% are wild mammals. T- then, you know, so we can't all be eating wild fish. You know, we... And think about that. You know, you never go out and say, "Let's get some land food."

   23. JRJoe Rogan14:10

       Mm-hmm. Right, seafood.

   24. LPLouie Psihoyos14:10

       You say, you know, "We, we-" We've commodified, you know, sea animals.

   25. JRJoe Rogan14:14

       That is interesting. Right? You don't say, "Land food."

   26. LPLouie Psihoyos14:16

       Yeah. (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan14:16

       That's a really good point. You know, they did at the turn of the century, I mean, uh, d- during the, uh, late 1800s rather, there was market hunting in North America, and a lot of the soldiers were done with World, with, um, the Civil War, rather. They were hunting and they, they hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo, and they got down to, like, incredibly low numbers. You know, elk to this day, I think, are only in 10% of their original range th- that, that they were at in the 1700s. And that was all from market hunting, from people just going out and buying, you know, meat from these, uh, market hunters that have shot these things, and they didn't really have refrigeration back then, so it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it. And, uh, they got down to these incredibly low levels until Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of other people that were conservation minded realized, like, what was happening here, and they put a stop to it all and then started, uh, enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the, the areas where they're extirpated. And now you see historic levels of, uh, especially white-tailed deer. There's more white-tailed deer in America now than were when Columbus landed.

   28. LPLouie Psihoyos15:27

       Wow.

   29. JRJoe Rogan15:28

       So, it's, uh... But there's, that's been succe- but it's also, that's a weird one too, because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal, because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farmlands. Like, they literally exist in fields, and a lot of them live off of GMO crops. That's very strange. So, like, I have a buddy of mine, my friend, uh, Doug, Doug Duren, who has this, uh, huge, uh, piece of land in Wisconsin, and he's like, "The deer in my area are essentially eating these GMO corn." They're eating Monsanto corn. Like, this is so weird. Like, they... Yeah, they're wild, but they're also kind of farm animals. You know, because they, and they exist in record numbers because they've got so much food to eat.

   30. LPLouie Psihoyos16:15

       And no predators.
6. 18:21 – 21:13

   Can the ocean be ‘repopulated’? Half-Earth and the enforcement problem

   1. JRJoe Rogan18:21

      Yeah, it's, um, a d- is there anybody that has ever come up with any sort of a plan to do what they did for wild animals in North America? Because it b- well, I see, you can't regulate it the way you can wild animals 'cause in wild animals, if they have a particular area, you could make it so people can't go in that area. But the ocean is so enormous. Like, how ... Ha- has anybody come up with some sort of a, a re-population plan?

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos18:46

      Sure, sure. There's a, uh, E. O. Wilson, I'm on the board of, uh, the advisory board of his, his group. It's called the, th- you know, the half- The Half-Life Project. Um, you know who E. O. Wilson is?

   3. JRJoe Rogan18:57

      No.

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos18:57

      Okay. E. O. Wilson is a Harvard professor, um, that has two Pulitzers for his work on, in biology. He's a, um ... Wrote the book on biodiversity. He's considered the father of modern, um, biodiversity. He's about, um, gettin' right around 90 years old now. But, uh, looking at ... Uh, he, he would do things like g- go to an island and then pretty much exterminate everything on it and then try to figure out, well, w- w- you know, "At what rate do the animals come back and what's, what's sustainable?" And he's figured out that to save 85% of the, th- the, uh, the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it for them. You know, that's what it's called.

   5. JRJoe Rogan19:37

      Half of the planet?

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos19:38

      Half the planet. Yeah. And it-

   7. JRJoe Rogan19:40

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

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos19:44

      Uh, not travel in it, just not exploit it, you know, through-

   9. JRJoe Rogan19:47

      No fishing.

   10. LPLouie Psihoyos19:48

       Yeah, no fishing.

   11. JRJoe Rogan19:49

       Yeah.

   12. LPLouie Psihoyos19:49

       And s- so Sylvia Earle is working on hotspots, you know, these, uh, s- um, they're, they're called, um, I think f- what'd she, what'd she call this? Like a, like a, like, bl- blue zones where, um, you know, w- you have a lot of biodiversity ki- you know, try to keep those, uh, away from fishing, uh, exp- exploitation.

   13. JRJoe Rogan20:08

       How do they do that though? Like, how ... I mean, it's a ... You would have to get everybody on board, right?

   14. LPLouie Psihoyos20:13

       Yeah, well, uh, th- the high seas are, you know, that's, that's tough, right?

   15. JRJoe Rogan20:17

       Yeah.

   16. LPLouie Psihoyos20:17

       Although, th- you know, the Japanese were fishing in a, you know, in an international marine sanctuary for decades-

   17. JRJoe Rogan20:24

       (sighs)

   18. LPLouie Psihoyos20:24

       ... you know? So you have to ... Y- you know, it's just really tough when you have, um, organizations that really don't have any teeth to it, you know?

   19. JRJoe Rogan20:31

       It's th- that ... Th- the attitude that he has, that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population, you almost can sympathize with him, right? I mean, uh, uh, 100-plus million people in this tiny place the size of California, and just pulling mostly fish outta the ocean. I mean, it's a, it's a crazy place to be in terms of his, his position.

   20. LPLouie Psihoyos20:57

       Yeah. I mean, uh, I, I don't envy it at all. Um, but, you know, wh- what, what do you do? Some, some-

   21. JRJoe Rogan21:02

       You don't slaughter dolphins, that's what you do.

   22. LPLouie Psihoyos21:05

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan21:06

       Yeah.

   24. LPLouie Psihoyos21:06

       Well, or endangered species, or-

   25. JRJoe Rogan21:08

       Yeah.

   26. LPLouie Psihoyos21:08

       I mean, I, I don't know what's, um, you know, what's sustainable anymore. I mean-

7. 21:13 – 25:41

   Fish farming tradeoffs: feeding fish to make fish, pollution, and empty reefs

   1. JRJoe Rogan21:13

      Is it possible to ... I mean, I know they've done this in, in some places outside of Hawaii where they've, uh, they've bred animals, uh, fish rather, like sushi fish, like hamachi, and they've had these pens set up and then a lotta times, uh, a storm will come by, like, a huge storm, and they break these pens and then those fish get wild and then people start catching 'em.

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos21:36

      Yeah, well, that's ... I mean, like, for the ... like salmon, like ... Well, you know, uh-

   3. JRJoe Rogan21:39

      Yeah.

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos21:39

      ... I went ... They were trying to ... In Japan when we were doing The Cove, we were, went to a, a university where they were breeding the first bluefin tuna. These are from eggs, you know, so the, this is when, like, c- like, what they do at some places where they, they f- they catch 'em and then they put 'em in these pens and they fatten 'em up. These were ... They're, they're make- making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs.

   5. JRJoe Rogan21:58

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos21:59

      And really hard to do, really skittish. And when I went there, they were shoveling ... This, uh, this is back when I ate fish. Um, they were shoveling f- these mackerels, like, what I would feed my family with, like, a family of four, they were shoveling it to the tuna. And I said, "H- hold on a minute. Like, how many, uh, how many, how much, you know, mackerel does it take to make a pound of tuna?" They said, "Oh, about seven for ... up until about 150 pounds, and after that it takes 14 pounds." So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm-raised fish. I mean, this is like going to the bank-

   7. JRJoe Rogan22:32

      Whoa.

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos22:32

      ... and, you know, you know, 'cause you want a crisp $5 bill and say, "L- you know, give me a s- uh, you know, here's a couple s- a couple 20s."

   9. JRJoe Rogan22:39

      Wow.

   10. LPLouie Psihoyos22:40

       But that's g- ... You know, if you look at, you know, what are they feeding, you know, a lotta these fish? They're feeding 'em, you know-

   11. JRJoe Rogan22:47

       Fish.

   12. LPLouie Psihoyos22:47

       ... parts of farm animals and fish.

   13. JRJoe Rogan22:49

       Yeah.

   14. LPLouie Psihoyos22:49

       Wild fish.

   15. JRJoe Rogan22:51

       Wow.

   16. LPLouie Psihoyos22:51

       And I was just reading this morning, uh, uh, El- Los Angeles Magazine that, um ... (laughs) and the cover it says, you know, "Fish, fish are fucked." And it has a ... And it, it talks about, like, the fish that are raised in ... I, I don't know the data behind it, but they're, they have eight times more pollutants in it than wild fish.

   17. JRJoe Rogan23:10

       Right.

   18. LPLouie Psihoyos23:10

       Um, I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe 'cause they're sitting in a-

   19. JRJoe Rogan23:13

       They're stationary.

   20. LPLouie Psihoyos23:14

       You know? Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan23:14

       I think that's p- big part of the problem.

   22. LPLouie Psihoyos23:16

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan23:16

       Yeah.

   24. LPLouie Psihoyos23:17

       Yeah, and the- apparen- apparently they, they don't taste as well, but ...

   25. JRJoe Rogan23:19

       When we were, um, in Hawaii recently, um, we went scuba diving and, uh, you know, snorkeling, so you jump off the boat and you're swimming around and you know what's really fucking weird about that, is how few fish there are. Like, when you're under the- you're- like, you expect you're gonna dunk your head underwater with those goggles on and you're gonna see all this wildlife, all these fish swimming around us. No, there's not much.

   26. LPLouie Psihoyos23:44

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan23:44

       You don't, you don't see much.

   28. LPLouie Psihoyos23:46

       Yeah. There was a- uh, about, uh, 10 years ago I was d- down in the Caribbean. A friend was getting married and I took his daughter out to ... you know, I, I didn't know it at the time but it was her first time snorkeling. And we were in an area that I'd been to about 20 years before and there was nothing. There was nothing there. It was just like a desert.

   29. JRJoe Rogan24:05

       Yeah.

   30. LPLouie Psihoyos24:05

       And then I heard her screaming through her snorkel and I thought, "What? What's, what's wrong?" And she was screaming 'cause she saw a single orange tang. That was the only life form we saw there. Where we- I used to b- see clouds of schools of these-
8. 25:41 – 32:47

   Coral collapse, ocean warming, acidification—and Florida’s sewage outfalls

   1. JRJoe Rogan25:41

      What is taking out the Great Barrier Reef?

   2. LPLouie Psihoyos25:43

      It's, uh, we're heating the planet, we're heating the water. It's, uh, it's, it's bleaching. So there's, there's, there's a couple things. There's multiple insults. You have runoff from fertilizer and pesticides from agriculture. You have, uh, the heating of the water. These, these events. When, when I say it, it's dying, it's dying, it's not like, oh, it's gonna come back. Onc- once the coral's dead, that's it. It's, it's, it's not gonna come back. And as-

   3. JRJoe Rogan26:07

      Does sunscreen play a part in that as well?

   4. LPLouie Psihoyos26:10

      Probably not there. It's pretty, it's fairly remote. Like o- o- over in Hawaii it would, or, or the Caribbean. Um, but it's pretty remote. You have to get out several miles to at the Great Barrier Reef. And it's, if, the further north you go, the more, more isolated it is. And we went, uh, the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef and it didn't look ... It, it got slightly better as you got north, but there's only a couple boats there. It's not like you have, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands of tourists out in the, on the beach. And the o- the other thing is acidification, the burning of fossil fuels is a- is acidifying the oceans. It's now about 30% more acidic than it was, you know, 50 years ago. And when you make, you know, there's more carbonic acid in the water, it makes it harder for the, the corals to survive. And it's basically you have these multiple insults going on at the same time. It's probably not just one thing, but, uh, there was a massive bleaching event two years in a row in the Great Barrier Reef. And so it's, it's, it's disappearing in our lifetime. That's ... You know, but if you look at we have a, we have a, uh, the last coral barrier reef in America is down in Florida, and they have s- like semi-treated sewage coming out of these outfalls that, like, you could swim through. These, you know, I've been out there, you know, on these be- beaches. You could, you could literally talk to somebody on the beach or scream to 'em on the beach, and they have this green water coming out of sewer pipes, uh, 200 meters away, 300 meters away. And so they're dumping, you know, semi-treated sewage on the last reef in America. This is going on all around the world. And I, you know, (sighs) what we do, I don't know, but we, we, we, we, th- this is the last generation that we have that can actually do something about it because we're seeing it disappear on our watch. And that's what I'm trying to do is try to tell, not just create the awareness that something's going on that we have to do something, but try to create action.

   5. JRJoe Rogan27:59

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

   6. LPLouie Psihoyos28:03

      Um, well, that's, that's what they reported. So it's, it, it smells like sewage, it smells like crap, but if you, if you go to the website, it says it's just semi-treated. I don't know. They, they're not, you know, putting it through the aerators, they're not going through the whole system, but it smells like shit to me, you know?

   7. JRJoe Rogan28:18

      (laughs) So-

   8. LPLouie Psihoyos28:19

      You, you, you come out of the water and it's like, you know, we all stink.

   9. JRJoe Rogan28:22

      You smell like shit.

   10. LPLouie Psihoyos28:23

       Yeah. This is, this is at the, by, by the way, this is on the, the Hollywood, uh, Fort Lauderdale b- border. This is not like-

   11. JRJoe Rogan28:28

       How is that legal? I mean, h- and this is not a third world country. I'm like, how is the United States allowing them to pump semi-treated sewage?

   12. LPLouie Psihoyos28:36

       It's a very good question. You know, there's, there's so many things to work on. I know the, the, the activists down there working on this, they're just trying to get people to see it, to know that this is going on. And if, you know, uh, I think they close the beaches down when, uh, you know, when the wind shifts and it starts to push it on shore. But I mean-

   13. JRJoe Rogan28:53

       Jesus Christ.

   14. LPLouie Psihoyos28:53

       ... if, if, if you saw, if you were on the beach and you saw what was going on there, you wouldn't be sending your kids there.

   15. JRJoe Rogan28:58

       (laughs)

   16. LPLouie Psihoyos28:59

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

   17. JRJoe Rogan29:03

       We can make arguments about whether or not you should go to Florida-

   18. LPLouie Psihoyos29:05

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan29:05

       ... all day long, and I'm, uh, I'm with you 100%, but I just can't imagine that they would allow this and that ... I mean, how much more would it cost to treat it versus semi-treat it? How much more would it cost to-

   20. LPLouie Psihoyos29:17

       I don't have an answer to that question.

   21. JRJoe Rogan29:18

       ... to not do what they're doing?

   22. LPLouie Psihoyos29:19

       It's a good question. I don't know.

   23. JRJoe Rogan29:20

       It's fucking insane. And then they, that they close the beach when the, when the water shifts and the wind shifts and heads towards the shore.

   24. LPLouie Psihoyos29:28

       And people get sick and they probably don't even know it.

   25. JRJoe Rogan29:29

       Oh, Jesus Christ.

   26. LPLouie Psihoyos29:31

       I mean ... Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we'd be out when we were at one outfall, they, that's what they call 'em, an outfall, it's basically a sewer pipe, you know, nothing's happening, then all of a sudden you can start to hear this rumble and then you see this, this green ...

   27. JRJoe Rogan29:42

       Oh God.

   28. LPLouie Psihoyos29:43

       And it's, and it ... We're not talking like a little drain pipe too. Like, literally you could swim through it, not stand in it, but it's big, like four feet, five feet tall.

   29. JRJoe Rogan29:51

       Now why ... I mean, why are they allowing ... I mean, did, does anybody have an argument for why that's ... Money.

   30. LPLouie Psihoyos29:56

       Money.
9. 32:47 – 1:05:01

   Using film as leverage: measurable impact, SeaWorld tactics, and ‘water people’ ethics

   1. LPLouie Psihoyos32:47

      Well, that's kinda the point. Like, what I'm saying is like, you know, we always think somebody else should be doing something about this.

   2. JRJoe Rogan32:54

      Right. Right.

   3. LPLouie Psihoyos32:54

      And, you know, uh, that's why we do films. It's not just to create the awareness and-

   4. JRJoe Rogan33:00

      Yeah.

   5. LPLouie Psihoyos33:00

      ... you know, to try to get something done about it. When we, you know, when we did The Cove, they were killing about 23,000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption. And I think the last time, I think 2017 was the r- last reports of how many they killed. I think it was 1,610 so- total. So it was like a 93% drop since we did that film because every time that Ric O'Barry ... He's the guy that captured and trained the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper. Every time that we talked in the Japanese press, we'd try to use the word mercury because that's their Achilles heel.

   6. JRJoe Rogan33:30

      Mm.

   7. LPLouie Psihoyos33:30

      You know, we can s- ... You know, the-

   8. JRJoe Rogan33:31

      Talks to-

   9. LPLouie Psihoyos33:31

      If you s- ... If you, if you talk to the ... Yeah. If you talk to the Japanese, um, the people from the IWC ... Of course they're out of that now. They've, they've quit the IWC. They'd say, "Well, what about cows, pigs, and chickens? You know, they're pretty sentient intelligent too." And, and we say, "Well, but the mercury."

   10. JRJoe Rogan33:46

       Now, how many people are eating dolphin meat?

   11. LPLouie Psihoyos33:51

       Less. You know, I think less because of the film. Wh- when we were there, they were, um, feeding it to school kids. And the school children, the ... It's the young mind, uh, like infants or, you know, prenatal that, uh, has the most deleterious effects of mercury, you know, the ... 'Cause your neurons are just developing.

   12. JRJoe Rogan34:10

       Sure. Yeah.

   13. LPLouie Psihoyos34:10

       And, um, they had pl- hatched a scheme to, um, to have it for school lunch programs all over America. And in Japan, unlike in America, you have to eat everything on your plate. So it's almost like you were force-fed poison. Because of the film, that stopped. So, I mean, films can be really powerful, you know, to-

   14. JRJoe Rogan34:31

       No, that's amazing.

   15. LPLouie Psihoyos34:33

       (sighs) .

   16. JRJoe Rogan34:33

       That film is so disturbing, man. It's-

   17. LPLouie Psihoyos34:36

       Well, i- i- ... You know, the ... It, it is. And, you know, uh, it's a h- ... When Mark Monroe, the writer, he came up with the t- with the name The Cove, I said, "It sounds like a horror film." He goes, "Well, (laughs) it is." (laughs)

   18. JRJoe Rogan34:47

       It is. I mean, look, if we were right and these are water people and they're essentially as intelligent, if not more, w- I mean, you were saying that the complexity of their brains is-

   19. LPLouie Psihoyos34:59

       They have more, you know, uh, more density for neurons. Like, the, the folds of the brains ... If you look at ... If you s- did a slice of a brain, uh, it looks like a fjord, right? And there's, th- there's more convolutions with a, with a dolphin. There's more surface area for neurons. And of course, those neur- ... You know, the more neurons you have, the more connections you're making. And what they're ac- ... And they af- actually have, um ... Oh, God. There's a spindle neurons that they have for ... That are, are for developing complex emotions. You know, if you look at orcas, you know, they're, they're really tight-knit communities of ... A, a male orca won't ... You know, will spend most of its life not more than an, uh, a body length away from its mother the entire time until it goes away-

   20. JRJoe Rogan35:41

       Yeah.

   21. LPLouie Psihoyos35:41

       ... to do what it does. Um, these animals are really social and they're communicating at levels that, like you said, we, we don't even know what they're saying.

   22. JRJoe Rogan35:48

       Yeah.

   23. LPLouie Psihoyos35:49

       I mean, w- w- ... Like, the average person can hear from, you know, 50 hertz to 20,000 kilohertz. And they can hear ... I think they can communi- communicate up to 200,000. So there's a whole bandwidth, like an order of magnitude more bandwidth that they're actually communicating with. And we hear like a little squeak, like ... But if you slow it down and break it down, there's actually ... You know, there's, there's, there's more patterns in there than we can sense.

   24. JRJoe Rogan36:13

       Oh-

   25. LPLouie Psihoyos36:14

       ... and what's interesting about, uh, about whales, blue whales, blue whales are really, uh, solitary creatures. They're, you know, they're not gregarious like dolphins. They don't ha- usually han- hang out in big, you know, uh, groups. But down in the southern ocean, it was confounding people. Like how do they find the krill bloom that happens, uh, in a different area, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles apart? How do they, you know ... They, they all find it. And, uh, one of the researchers, Roger Payne, um, came up with this idea, and it was through the work with the Navy, that there's a, something called the deep ocean channel. And it's basically between the surface of the water and the thermal layer that's, uh, it fluctuates depending on where you are at in the column, let's say 500 feet. They, they basically use their voice, which is the, one of the loudest voices in the, in the animal kingdom. It's so loud, but it's infrasound. You can't hear it. And they'll use it ... Uh, it almost gets propagated like a, a, like the internet, but-

   26. JRJoe Rogan37:11

       Through that layer?

   27. LPLouie Psihoyos37:12

       ... the, so it's bouncing up, and imagine that it's bouncing up to the surface and down to this, this cold layer, and it, it can go for literally thousands of miles. And that-

   28. JRJoe Rogan37:21

       Wow.

   29. LPLouie Psihoyos37:21

       ... so they ... It's called reciprocal altruism is, is ... The theory is that they ... When, when one finds it, they start singing and that notifies the rest of the group that this is where the cr- the krill bloom is, and then they can all survive.

   30. JRJoe Rogan37:33

       Holy shit.
10. 1:05:01 – 1:11:48

    Racing Extinction: projection activism, mass extinction drivers, and climate signals

    1. LPLouie Psihoyos1:05:01

       And, and they're out of the Southern Ocean now. Just, just last year, they, they announced that they were gonna get out of there. Now they're only killing whales around their own territorial waters. So, in a way, it's a big victory. You know, P- Paul's a good friend, Paul Watson. Um, he just wrote me right, just a, a couple hours before I, I, I came here. Um, yeah, he wanted a, like, a big projector. We did... D- d- did... You does... You ever saw Racing Extinction?

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:05:24

       No.

    3. LPLouie Psihoyos1:05:25

       We, we did, uh... You know, to alert the world that we needed a, you know, to, to get on this, we, we lit up the Empire State Building with endangered species, and, um, it was, like, a, a huge event. We had, like, I think 939 million media views in four days, top trending story on Facebook and Twitter for, like, four days worldwide.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:05:42

       Mm.

    5. LPLouie Psihoyos1:05:42

       Just to get, you know... We had to do something really strange like that.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:05:45

       How'd you do that, with a projector?

    7. LPLouie Psihoyos1:05:47

       With 50 projectors, 50, like, IMAX-sized projectors all mounted on the building that was on, like, 31st Street, and this is all sanctioned. We had a... We spent four years, uh, getting permission to do it. And we finally did it. And, you know, I remember-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:06:00

       Here it is right here. Jamie's got a video of it.

    9. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:03

       Oh, you gotta slow that down, though.

    10. NANarrator1:06:04

        Oh, well, it's just what's on YouTube.

    11. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:06

        Oh.

    12. NANarrator1:06:07

        Just put that on the bottom line.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:06:07

        Oh, on YouTube-

    14. NANarrator1:06:08

        Yeah.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:06:08

        ... do they, they speed it up? How long did this last for?

    16. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:11

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

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:06:15

        Was there a crowd of people that watched it?

    18. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:17

        Oh, my God. It was-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:06:18

        Ah, that's so cool.

    20. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:18

        It was like a, it was like the, it was like the Easter parade-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:06:21

        Dude.

    22. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:21

        ... on Fifth Avenue. What was funny is, like, the, the producer and the distributor said, "Ah, it's gonna be too expensive. Nobody will, you know, nobody will be there in the s- in the summertime in New York." Um-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:06:31

        They always say that. There's fucking 100 million people in New York. What are you...

    24. NANarrator1:06:35

        Mm-hmm.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:06:35

        "I go there in the summertime, it's packed with people." People are like, "Just nothing happens in the summer in New York." I'm like, like, "I was, uh, doing a show down there." They're like, "Well, this is really good. I mean, it's the summer in New York. How are you selling so many tickets?" And I'm like, "Have you looked around?"

    26. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:47

        (laughs)

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:06:47

        Well, they have this weird attitude that nothing happens in New York in the summer.

    28. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:51

        Yeah. Well, it's-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:06:52

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

    30. LPLouie Psihoyos1:06:56

        ... yeah, so we had, uh, you know, we thought we couldn't get any more attention on that subject.

Episode duration: 2:10:37