Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos
Uploaded: 2019-11-20T20:00:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1388 - Louie Psihoyos

all right here we go how are you good good to see you good to see you how did
you get involved with
the cove what was the the history behind that i'm gonna give you the long
version sure um
there's 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 i was on the
information revolution and jim clark was sort of the you know the steve jobs of
my generation right
and he uh he he don't want to be photographed he's just too busy and then i
started working
for fortune magazine and he had built a boat you know 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 you know
he said would you teach
me how to be a good photographer and you know he made three companies from
scratch 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 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 piece of work because jim doesn't do anything
half-ass and
every time we would go to a dive site and come back to it you see this shifting
baseline where
there's less fish there's less coral in fact he took me to the place in papa
new guinea he said
louie i'm gonna take you to the best place i've ever seen it's in in papa new
guinea we flew over
there all day to get there a day and a half to sail we dive on the gps
coordinates and it's rubble
is completely gone and this would happen not all the time but a lot we don't
know what the you know
the insults were could have been dynamite fishing could have been uh 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
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 i said how about you and i he
said what do you mean
i said we'll use your money in my eye and we'll make films and the first well
then i you know so i'm
jumping careers at this stage i'm going from a being a fairly successful you
know still photographer
really busy to 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 so i'm you know nervous i'm feeling
sort of full of myself
like i'm gonna start this great career we're down the caribbean on 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 and he said he said yeah
never make a movie
involving boats or animals oh great and you know of course the first film we
did was the cove but at
least these are 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 exactly
yeah because you know you have to match shots and all that but it has its own
set of you know trying
to keep a the horizon level on a boat you don't want to give the audience seasickness
and but um you
know i would add to that like don't do a movie where people want to kill you
because when we did the
cove it was you know it was uh exciting but dangerous work 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 and what you know we were just talking about this before
the podcast
i think they are as 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
beings they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even really
totally understand
we can peck out don't understand any of it yeah i mean we could pack out
patterns i mean the
scientists have i mean you know um i'm sure you're aware of john lilly's work
sure john lilly i mean
for years and 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 he created the
sensory deprivation tank we
actually have one of those over here right and lilly uh for 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 yeah i mean they're
obviously extremely
complex you know animals and if you you know judge them by our value like
people say oh they you know
they didn't invent you know the car and use computers but you know intelligence
can be seen as your
ability to you know to live exist in your environment yes and by that standard
you know i mean put us in
the water right now and you know have a go at it and see how we do they don't
need anything in that
world they travel through three-dimensional space i mean it's it's incredible
what they can do yeah and
you know like well you know it's not just dolphins do it's i mean you 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 every year and
like you know i couldn't find the studio without an iphone right you know so i
mean what's what what's
going 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 a racing extinction you know that's about where 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 right 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 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 towards marine life in particular because of the most
intelligent versions of life that we
we know other than ourselves that we for some reason universally have accepted
up until really recently
because of your film and because of blackfish and you know more awareness and
sea shepherd and all
these different organizations that trying to let people know like you got to
pay attention to what
this is because i think history i think when all said and done we're going to
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 yeah well
i 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 and 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 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 about overfishing and you know listen the
reason reason
that they shouldn't be eaten besides that they're essentially intelligent is
also that they're toxic
yeah 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 them you know there's i think six six
thousand times more
pcbs than you know than the background in the ocean there is uh you know all
all the flesh that's been
tested in in japan in the last 20 years has between five and five thousand
times more mercury than
allowed by japanese law if it was a fish but it's a mammal of course so um it's
insane just hearing
that is insane i'll tell you an interesting story i was when we were making
that film there was um
a point we went down to the the iwc the international whaling commission
meeting down
in uh and 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 are killing them
in mass and we had the
footage at that point and we're 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 santiago the plane
was full i couldn't even sit next to the you know my my partners on the my
buddies in 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 head bull goose looney and he sits down right
next to me i'm looking at my
buddies you know uh on the plane thinking my god if there is a god you know he
has a good sense of humor so
he sits down next to me and 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 i said do you have
any idea who i am he
said no i said i know who you are i want to show you a film yeah 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 i
showed it to him
and i said how do you reconcile killing these sentient intelligent animals when
you know that they're
their their flesh is poisoned you know and you're there's recommendations for
pregnant women to eat
this you know this this flesh you know on on the genus the japanese ministry of
health site
and he said i'm not in charge of uh food safety i'm in charge of food security
in other words he's
he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences all he has to his job is
just to provide enough
meat on the plate for the for 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 said 17 of of the the land area in japan is only you know uh good enough for
growing crops on
or living on where we have to live 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 when you start talking about big numbers like that i can't
imagine you know it's
hard to imagine it but imagine like how are they stealing this tuna well they're
they have quotas
and they're exceeding their quotas every year which means that they're taken
away from other countries
right so it's not just like 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 that the
australians actually caught
them you know they figured out over this 20-year period that they went through
the books and and
saw what they reported and was actually sold at the ski g market found out they
had skim 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 ca