Joe Rogan Experience #1770 - Valentine Thomas
Joe Rogan (host), Narrator, Valentine Thomas (guest), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator, Narrator, Narrator, Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Narrator, Joe Rogan Experience #1770 - Valentine Thomas explores ex-lawyer turned spearfisher on risk, hunting ethics, and reinvention Joe Rogan talks with spearfisher and former lawyer Valentine Thomas about leaving a conventional legal career in Montreal to build a life around freediving, spearfishing, and hunting. They dig into sustainability in seafood, debunking popular ocean documentaries, and the ethics of killing and eating animals versus industrial food systems. The conversation ranges from shark-safe wetsuits and deep-sea creatures to bowhunting, jiu-jitsu, self-defense, and the mental health benefits of hard physical skills. They close on social media toxicity, COVID policy in Canada, and Valentine’s new breathwork business for stress, sleep, and focus.
Ex-lawyer turned spearfisher on risk, hunting ethics, and reinvention
Joe Rogan talks with spearfisher and former lawyer Valentine Thomas about leaving a conventional legal career in Montreal to build a life around freediving, spearfishing, and hunting. They dig into sustainability in seafood, debunking popular ocean documentaries, and the ethics of killing and eating animals versus industrial food systems. The conversation ranges from shark-safe wetsuits and deep-sea creatures to bowhunting, jiu-jitsu, self-defense, and the mental health benefits of hard physical skills. They close on social media toxicity, COVID policy in Canada, and Valentine’s new breathwork business for stress, sleep, and focus.
Key Takeaways
Reinventing your life is possible even after starting a conventional career.
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.
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Spearfishing is closer to hunting than to rod-and-reel fishing.
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.
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Sustainability in seafood is nuanced, and not all fisheries are destructive.
Valentine notes that roughly 80% of global seafood and about 99% of U. ...
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Killing your own food profoundly changes how you view meat.
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.
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Physical disciplines like jiu-jitsu, MMA, and archery double as mental health tools.
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.
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Online bullying and image pressure are especially damaging for girls.
Drawing on her own severe bullying experience, Valentine worries that adding 24/7 social media harassment and filtered beauty standards to normal teenage insecurity drastically increases risks of self-harm and suicide.
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Breathwork is a practical lever for anxiety, sleep, and performance.
Valentine credits structured breathing with overcoming long-term anxiety and launches a breathwork company offering protocols for calm, sleep, focus, and breath-hold capacity, emphasizing non-mystical, science-based techniques.
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Notable Quotes
“Tell me what you believe in, and I’ll tell you what you eat.”
— Valentine Thomas
“Everything worth doing is hard.”
— Joe Rogan
“I don’t buy meat in a grocery store anymore. I just don’t.”
— Valentine Thomas
“Looking stupid is good for you. You have to look stupid.”
— Joe Rogan
“If I had a serious disease and my life was in danger, I would leave [Canada].”
— Valentine Thomas
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should ordinary consumers realistically evaluate whether the seafood they buy is sustainable and ethically produced?
Joe Rogan talks with spearfisher and former lawyer Valentine Thomas about leaving a conventional legal career in Montreal to build a life around freediving, spearfishing, and hunting. ...
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What emotional or psychological shifts typically occur in people after they kill and eat an animal they hunted themselves for the first time?
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Where is the line between necessary risk and recklessness in activities like spearfishing with sharks or bowhunting in grizzly country?
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How can parents and educators better protect teenagers—especially girls—from the mental health damage of social media without isolating them socially?
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In a world of climate concerns and industrial food systems, what mix of wild meat, farmed meat, and plant-based foods makes the most ethical and health-conscious diet?
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Transcript Preview
(drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) Cheers.
Cheers.
Hey. Must be Canadian week, two Canadians in a row.
(laughs)
Salud, my friend.
Who was the other one? Oh, yeah. The guy that was on yesterday.
Jordan Peterson.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jordan was on yesterday. Um, your country's in revolt. Do you know about this? Well, uh, show this video. Look at this video that I sent Jamie.
This is huge. Look at they go forever. This is by Action Centre outside of Edmonton heading into Calgary, January 23rd, 2022. 1000 trucks, 1000 miles-
It's a giant convoy of trucks that's apparently some insane amount of people, like 50,000 trucks that are headed to Ottawa to protest the vaccine mandates by Trudeau. (protestors chanting)
Whoo!
And, and they're all coming from Canada because they're not allowed to come in.
They're all in Canada. They're all in Canada.
That's crazy.
It's all Canadian truckers. Because apparently they're, they're all being mandated that they have to get vaccinated, and they're like, "Hey, we don't even contact anybody. We're in our truck."
Yeah, that's true.
Like, "We, we just drive."
(laughs)
And, you know. Okay, there's another one that I sent Jamie.
(laughs)
Watch this one. This girl is, like, uh, at a bar, and she, uh, I don't know if she's a stripper or what, but this is this guy's birthday. Don't you hear it?
(hip hop music)
Where's the volume? Here we go. So watch this.
(hip hop music) (crowd yelling)
Sh- she pours water on him, and then check this out.
(hip hop music) (crowd yelling) (crowd clapping)
All fun and games, right? It's all fun, right?
I hope he feeling is getting as bad as her.
She tases him.
(hip hop music) (crowd yelling)
Oh, my god. Get it off.
Not good.
(laughs)
Yeah.
Okay.
Fucking tased him and lit him on fire.
I saw that video today, Joe.
You saw it too?
Yeah, yeah.
Whoops?
Yeah.
First of all, what, who gets tased at their birthday party?
Good point.
(laughs) That seems-
It's a lot.
What kind of friends-
They're just sitting at the bar, they're just, uh-
Yeah.
... stun gun ready to go.
(laughs)
I mean, when you get that burnt, like how, uh, how long was that? 10 seconds he was on fire for? Five seconds maybe?
Yeah, he could probably recover from that, like Stevo does wild shit like that.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
But he, uh, he had to get, like, serious-
No.
... skin transplants.
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