Joe Rogan Experience #1770 - Valentine Thomas

Valentine walked away from a law track in Montreal to build a spearfishing-based livelihood, leveraging social media, partnerships, and niche expertise—showing that nontraditional careers can become sustainable with focus and creativity.

It demands freediving skill, stealth, close-range decision-making, and direct responsibility for the animal you kill, making it an intimate, high-risk, high-awareness way to obtain food.

Valentine notes that roughly 80% of global seafood and about 99% of U.S.-sourced seafood is considered sustainable under current science, and she critiques sensational documentaries that ignore this while also acknowledging real abuses like forced labor and poor regulations in some regions.

Both describe the emotional weight of their first kills, the importance of making clean shots and doing their own processing, and how eating animals they harvested themselves feels radically different—and often leads to rejecting anonymous supermarket meat.

Valentine uses combat sports for self-defense and confidence as a solo female traveler, while Joe emphasizes the meditative focus of archery and the intellectual challenge of jiu-jitsu as ways to reduce stress and build resilience.