Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos On Creating Weapons of Mass Instruction To Thrill—And Forge Positive Change

28:14Changed Hollywood, changed a lot of industries. It allowed you to like model your designs. Right. Yeah. And gaming could be done in real time. The day he quit that, he started Netscape, the first commercial internet browser. And then he started WebMD, which is a way that revolutionized the healthcare industry by digitizing it. Because most, about 75 % of the transactions you do were actually involved in just the clerical work of like, you know, taking those forms and making them digital. He said, well, just do a digital in the first place and doctors can, you know, find out the latest research.

28:45And he did all that. so fortune i couldn't photograph him for national geographic he was just way too busy and then i don't fast forward like five or six years when i'm working for fortune they said do you want to go photograph jim clark he's built this new boat over in amsterdam i said god i wanted to meet this guy forever and so i went over there and uh jim had just built this boat that you know everything could be controlled by the computer it was like a world's largest you know mast at that point beautiful sailing boat you know he had like a Picasso from the blue period in the living room.

29:17He had a Rodin sculpture. A Hyperion, right? Is that like the master's like 200 feet tall or something like that? Yeah, like 192 or something like that. Michael Lewis did a book on him called the new new thing. I was on that voyage from Africa to Antigua. But the point is like, when I went to go meet Jim, he was starting a fourth company called Shutterfly, the way you can take digital prints and make analog prints out of them. and he wanted to become a good photographer. He said, Lou, would you teach me how to be a good photographer? And I said, Jim, I'll teach you how to be a great one if you teach me how to be a billionaire.

29:50And he would literally pick me up on his plane and we'd fly all over the world and take pictures, mostly underwater. And at that point he was digital and I was like one of the last people to not do Kodachrome because that was the best film out there. And I was like, why would you do a seven or 12 megapixel camera when you can shoot still? It wasn't that I was a snob about it. It's just it wasn't as good. Tech wasn't there yet. And there was a medium format technology. You have 35 millimeter, which is kind of like what we used at Geographic, what an amateur would use, a professional amateur would use it too, 35 millimeter film.

30:24But medium format sensor is better, right? The bigger, the better. And the same has always been true with film as well. Four by five negative, it was better than a 35 millimeter negative, four by five inch. And Jim said, why doesn't somebody build a camera, like a good camera for medium format for underwater? I said, well, it's too expensive. Well, anyway, Jim built one for me. He built like the world's best underwater camera. It's still the best underwater camera ever made. And we'd go around the world and film with it. And that was our job. You know, that was like, I was hanging out with him, going around the world, shooting mostly underwaters.

30:59And every time that we went to a new location, I remember he said, I'm gonna take you to the best dive site I'd ever been to. It was in off Papua New Guinea. We fly there. His boat's waiting for us. We sail for about a day and a half. I wake up in the morning and there's these kids looking through the porthole window. They were in these little dugout canoes. We're in the middle of nowhere. This is like an alien spaceship had just come. And I remember we went out in the dinghies and Jim said, I'll go down first to make sure we're in the right spot. He dove on the GPS coordinates and he comes back up and he's like in tears.

31:32I said, what's up? He said, it's gone. Probably dynamite fishing or a bleaching event, but it was completely gone. and everywhere we had, you know, we remember we did this for about almost 10 years, nine years diving around the world. And every time you go back to a place, you can see this degradation go on. There's less fish. We came up from a dive in the Galapagos and a Marine sanctuary and we were surrounded by illegal fishing boats. And I remember he said something to me like, you know, somebody should do something about this. I said, well, how about you and I? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, use your money and my eye and we'll make films.

32:06Because we had talked about, you know. Yeah, you must have had been thinking about that prior to him raising it though. Yeah, and he was, you know, thinking about it too. He was looking at the photographs we were doing and I would do, you know, I'd take a little video camera down and I'd make as a kind of a thank you to him, I'd make these little five minute shorts, you know, of our trip and they were pretty good. I'd really put some time into them and made them feel like - This was your film school. That was my film school. Well, actually the film school came with, so he decides to bankroll me, right?

32:39in this nonprofit venture, right? This is his idea of making me a billionaire. He's gonna put me in a nonprofit business and we'll do films. Is he living up to his side of the bargain on this? I don't know. Well, I gotta say, I do feel like the richest guy in the world right now because we can talk about that later, but there's nothing quite like being able to do what you wanna do, which he's allowed me to do, which is try to do what I'm trying to do to change the world at scale. And he allowed me, he greased the way to make that happen. Now remember that like I'm a pretender syndrome or imposter syndrome, right?

33:18I'm like, I'm never made a film before, you know, beyond a five minute little, you know, family short, you know, family film. And I'm thinking, God, what am I gonna take my buddy's money? And you see, when you're in that world, you start to see friends come and go because they have a new business prospect and they don't live up to it. And so I'm thinking, oh God, I could be one of those jerks that gets money out of the rich friend and then doesn't deliver. I remember we were on a new boat that he did. It was the world's largest private sailboat. It was called Athena. We're down in the Caribbean with our families on the boat.

33:53And my kid must have been about, I don't know, nine years old at that point. My son, Sam, he's playing on the beach with another kid. Happens to be Steven Spielberg's kids, one of his kids. And Steven comes over to Jim's boat. to me, he did Jurassic, Steven did Jurassic Park with, you know, the Silicon graphics. Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, he used, yeah, he used Jim's equipment to make his big movies. Right, which was the first breakthrough movie, right? So they were already buddies then, I would imagine. No, they never met each other. Which is, they knew of each other, but. You just think people at that, you know, who are orbiting at that altitude kind of all know each other.

34:29Yeah, well, but for the next week we were hanging out together, right? It was, you know, Spielberg's family would come over to the boat and I was always trying to craft a way, like to get him alone for a second. So I could tell you like, do you have any advice for a first time filmmaker? And when I did, he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals. And I'm starting the Oceanic Preservation Society. And you know, everything - Nothing but that. Yeah. And of course, then we, you know, the first film we do is The Cove and it's about dolphin hunting. And like, how are you gonna make that into a film?

34:57And the film that Jim and I, you know, we set off to make was actually the second film, Racing Extinction. And the dolphin hunting was gonna be just part of it. It wasn't going to be, you know, a whole movie in itself. It was only after we started, you know, doing this undercover footage in Taiji, Japan, that we realized that there was a way to talk about what was going on in that film and talk about the oceans, this bigger story. And that was kind of the aha moment.

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40:34it's really smart because by limiting your focus or narrowing your focus on one specific situation or event that allows you to talk about the broader issues at play creates a situation in which you can you can drive that level of emotional engagement and get people to really care when it's difficult to do that when you're at 10 ,000 feet and you're you know, shooting statistics at them and you're kind of toggling back and forth from all different places all over the world. It's that idea of like the world stops when, you know, there's one girl at the bottom of a well somewhere in, you know, I don't know, some remote village.

41:17But we, you know, are challenged to even blink when we see a headline about a genocide somewhere that's far away from where we live. Yeah, Kristoff, you know, from the writer for the New York Times, he said that like you know if you could you know get the audience to care about one person then at the end of it you know he's always saying but there's three million just like her yeah you know that was that's the key isn't it to find that emotional hook and then you're still bringing in those big picture 20 you know 10 000 foot views you know as the stakes you know in the cove you know it's about what they're doing which is horrible but it's also in that film we talk about overfishing because the fishermen in Taiji, they rationalize that they're killing the dolphins because they're eating all their fish.

42:01It's not, you know, the dolphins eating all their fish. It's, you know, the 145 million people in Japan that eat almost nothing but, and all the Americans. And, you know, the eight and a half billion people on the, or eight billion people on the planet now, a lot of them are pescatarians. And, you know, these are wild animals. You know, it's like - I believe those fishermen did believe that though. I do too. I think, but... Or they had to believe it in order to actually perpetrate those atrocities. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we all do that, right? We all rationalize a lot of our bad behavior because of whatever, I need to make a living, you know, the social good.

42:39I remember, this is a funny story, like we were making the Cove and I was going down to the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in Chile. And I wanted to interview the director of the IWC for Japan. His name was Akira Nakamai. And this is why I know that if there is a God, he, she, they have a good sense of humor. So I'm on a flight from Dallas down to Chile, and they're holding the plane, and the plane is completely filled up. I can't even sit with my crew. But there's one seat empty next to me. and the last person to exit the door, we've been waiting for him to get onto our plane and it's a Kiranakamai.

43:25And he comes down, he sits down right next to me. And I'm looking at my crew like, do you have any? They're looking at like, oh my God, like of all the gin joints in all the world, and I waited till the plane took off because I didn't want him to be able to switch with maybe somebody that from his own team was on the plane. And then when we had dinner served, i turned to him i said do you have any idea who i am he goes no he says i know who you are i want to show you a film and we had like a 17 minute cut of the cove that was like a sizzle reel and this goes back to okay here's the guy that's responsible for dolphin quotas and whale quotas in japan uh about a week or two before they were just caught illegally fishing bluefin to the tune of hundreds of tons of illegally caught bluefin tuna.

44:18And so I had this opportunity to ask him, anything I wanted to ask him, he's right there, where's he gonna go? He's a captive audience. I'm gonna say, you're the guy that's, now back then, remember this, if you haven't seen the Cove, part of the premise is that dolphin meat is all toxic. That's where we win. It's not just a matter of, there's our beautiful sentient animals. Well, what are you doing killing them? their meat's toxic and they were force feeding it to school kids in Japan. By force feeding, you had to eat everything on your plate when you were a kid. You couldn't bring in your own lunch.

44:51They make you clean your plate and you couldn't bring your own lunch, right? Like you had to eat the mandated lunch. Yeah, it was dolphin meat. It was poison. I mean, literally it was poison. It had anywhere from five to 5 ,000 times more mercury if it was a fish, of course it's a mammal. So they got by with this loophole. And I said to Akira Nakamai, I said, you're the guy that's responsible for, and they had a plan to put dolphin meat on school lunch programs all over Japan right before this happened. And I said, you're giving dolphin meat laced with mercury. That's extremely deleterious effects to especially young kids.

45:33I said, how do you reconcile with what you're doing? He said, I'm charged with food security, not food safety. going back to your thing, like we all make rationalizations. The cognitive dissonance that you have to engage with to just get up in the morning and do your job. But that's the, is that the same guy in the cove with like the grayish longer hair? No, that was his boss. Shoshi, that was, worked underneath Akira. Yeah. And that was it, end of discussion with that? Yeah, I mean, he agreed to, once we got to, well. And his argument would be food security is an important issue in Japan because it's an island nation.

46:13They don't have, you know, grazing pasture lands like we have, et cetera. And it is a challenge to make sure that however many hundred million plus people that live in Japan have adequate access to food. Yeah, you could have written his playbook. That's exactly what he told me. He said, we have 145 million people in Japan, about the same size as your California. Only 17 % of our land is habitable to put our homes and businesses. We have to look to the sea for our food. That's why we're illegally fishing tuna. That's why we're looking to eat whales when the rest of the world is. And just brazen with the fact that they're transgressing all of these laws.

46:56Yeah. Yeah. So that's, there was a rationale for everything. It is so challenging. I rewatched the Cove last night to watch those scenes where you get these cameras into this Cove, which is really, basically they corral these dolphins for people who haven't seen the movie into this particular Cove. They do that by banging on pipes and dolphins being very sensitive to sound out of fear. they sort of push them into this cove and then they rope it off with nets and then they just slaughter most of them and they pick out a few that they then sell to the sort of marine entertainment complex, correct?

47:44And those animals fetch a pretty price and the rest are used for food. Exactly. And they make most of it, I think a dead dolphin on the meat counter sells for about$600 or used to$600 a piece. And a trained dolphin can sell for$150 ,000, maybe a quarter of a million now. And so that's the economics of it. And it's a very small town and that really plays into, it makes a lot of money for that industry, for that town by serving that industry. So those dolphins will go to the Middle East mostly and China and Japan. I think Japan had at that time over 50 Dolphinariums. The film ends up getting criticized for, you know, kind of taking shots at like their culture, right?

48:33Like this is our culture, how dare you? You slaughter pigs and cows, et cetera. Also this food security issue sort of is used or deployed as a, you know, counterpoint to the issues that you're raising. But what's interesting is what you realize is that most people in Japan don't know this is going on. People in Taiji don't even know what's going on. And Taiji is this town that's like draped in all this iconography around whales and dolphins. Like they're celebrating these beautiful animals, but right underneath their feet. Yeah, like this is what's actually happening. So Japan itself, the normal citizen in Japan appeared to be just as surprised as any audience member who would watch your film.

49:19Yeah, I mean, we got that early on, like culinary imperialism, they call it. And there's a certain amount of truth to that. But if your kids were being force-fed toxic meat or toxic vegetables at your school, wouldn't you be thrilled that anybody from any country would come in and tell you what's what when your country is covering it up? Yeah, that's why the mercury argument is the strongest one in terms of, you know, kind of overriding everything else. Yeah, Rick and I, Rick Rickleberry is the, you know, the protagonist of the film. He's the guy who captured and trained the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper for the Flipper TV series.

50:00We had a, you know, kind of a running thing between us. Whenever we talked to the Japanese media, we tried to use the word mercury in every sentence so they couldn't cut it out. They'd say, well, like, oh, what about cow's pigs and chickens? I said, well, our chickens had that much mercury. We'd always try to, or create a way to try to bring it back to mercury because that was their Achilles heel. You couldn't argue mercury is good for kids. They had the first big industrial accident in the world that was announced was Minamata Bay, Minamata disease. It's not a disease. They were in this company called Chisa Minamata was intentionally dumping mercury into the bay and infecting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

50:51And that got discovered in the 1950s. And so mercury, they were found to be guilty. And there were all these birth defects, pregnant women ingesting this. Yeah, I can remember there was a researcher, I think from America that had studied mercury poisoning here in America. and he went over to Japan. Remember, this is post-World War II and that part of Japan, you couldn't easily get to. I don't think there was roads back then. So he got there by boat and he got to this bay and everybody looked like they had mercury poisoning. It's like, you can imagine, it really looks like you're deformed. You know, all sorts of birth defects.

51:30So it hits the older people too, but the kids have the most deleterious effect. And so that's how it was discovered. The government was helping this company try to cover it up. They were found guilty. So mercury is a trigger word. Right, so in Japan, everybody knows about this. Yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah, and they're sensitive to it. And then on a personal level, I mean, this is part of your own kind of awakening, your own mercury poisoning. Yeah, well, I interviewed the doctor who developed a test to find out how much damages the people that were affected are due. and he developed something called a two-point nodal test, which is like a protractor with two points on it.

52:11And depending on the distance, you can feel the two points on a fingertip. He could pretty accurately tell you how much mercury poison you had. Then he showed me the corollary of what that would, because he had the brains of people after they died, they would take their brains out and he had brain slices and it looked like Swiss cheese. It would literally build up holes in your brain. And I remember asking him, what's that mean to have this disease? And he slowly erases what it means to be human. It takes away your senses. It takes away your memory, your sense of touch, your sense of hearing, all your senses start to go.

52:52And then when, so this is in my mind. Now at that time, I was a pescatarian. I ate fish and I was delighted to be in Japan because I could eat fish, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I wasn't like, you know, when I was working for Fortune magazine, I did a story on the biggest independently owned slaughterhouses in America. And one was in Oklahoma and it was so big they had their own slaughterhouse. Like 500 cows a day would go through there and I spent several hours there. And one of these cows, if you ever know about the process, you know, there's a reason why they say if slaughterhouses had glass walls.

53:28Hence the ag-gag laws. Yeah. And they put what's called a captive bolt to the head of a cow, and that's supposed to kill them instantly. I remember this one cow, they chain him up by his back heels, and they rip off the hide, and then they start to slowly, as it goes around through these, it's like the reverse of a car manufacturing plant. They're deassembling the cow at stations instead of putting it together. I remember this cow comes by at the first turn, and it's turning its head. It's looking at me hanging upside down. and I realized it was still conscious. It was still alive and still alive.

54:02Yeah, it must have missed. With a bolt in its head, but not dead. Like a old country, no country for old men. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was horrifying. And I thought, I can't be party of this industry, but I ate fish. I thought, well, I'll have to eat. You have to eat fish to be human. You have to have animal products. So I ate fish. I thought, well, they're gonna be less sentient, intelligent. And so I was a pescatarian. So this is 1986. and this is when I'm doing the cove would have been like 2007 and something like that 2008 and I remember I was eating a lot of fish back then I thought well I should have one of the last scenes we do in the movie is we take the deputy minister of fisheries Hideki Moranuki and we take a hair sample because he could he can do blood samples or you do hair samples to figure out how much mercury somebody somebody has so he clipped his hair you know with his permission and i sent it in he took it into his lab and he's i didn't tell him whose samples they were but he said he said hideki's sample was like eight times higher than what's considered too high and uh he said he said who's this other sample i said it's mine he says well yours is 44 times higher oh and having seen what it does to the brain of somebody with mercury poisoning i just the shock went through me like and you're in the middle of making this movie about this very subject.

55:22Yeah. And I'm thinking, well, and then also, what am I going to eat? You know, cause like I would imagine it's probably like what the Japanese would have thought, what are you, what are you going to eat if you can't eat fish? And I remember, so I remember we had to cut out, you know, eating fish cause it wasn't, it wasn't a joke. It wasn't just like something I do later cause to me it was real palpable to, to see the brain slices and say that this could be done, be going on with mine. You were asymptomatic though. I had symptoms. I had like a short-term memory loss. I had this pain in my shoulder that was persistent, would never go away.

55:59I thought it was like from lifting cameras or something. And when I stopped eating fish, it has a half-life in your body, mercury of about 70 to 90 days. And after a couple months, it went away. And I was like, oh, this is serious. And I was here for the Academy Awards. We were doing this run-up, all the media push. I remember sitting with Rebecca Meek. She was a designer, a vegan clothing designer. She was like a friend of this guy that I met. I happened to be at lunch with her and she starts ordering off the menu, working with the waiter to try to make a dish. And I was like, are you a vegetarian?

56:37She goes, no, I'm vegan. I go, what do you eat? She goes, everything else. And she explained that, You know, that's where do you think the animals get their protein, where do they get their nutrients from? And when her dish came, it looked better than anything that we all had on our plates. And that was it, I think. That was it, that was your lightning bolt. The aha moment, yeah, of like, okay, you don't have to do this. Interesting. It's interesting that that happened in the wake of making that movie and not prior to it. Like you had your own journey with all of this. Too long, that's too stupid.

57:12but there's a line, I think it was one of the best lines in the movie from Rick O 'Berry. He said, I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be. About what he's talking about when he was training dolphins. That guy's amazing. I'm old enough to remember Flipper and I loved Flipper. I had my favorite thing when I was a kid, I had a brass belt buckle that was a dolphin. Like I was, it's still my spirit animal. Like I just love dolphins. And his story just haunts me of training those five dolphins to be flipper for that show. And believing that he was, what he was doing was ethically sound at the time.

57:56And then when the show's over, the dolphins get sent away to these, where they weren't going to like SeaWorld, right? But they were going to tank somewhere. Miami Sequarium. Yeah, that's where they were. And then he goes and he visits Catherine, was that the name of the main one, Cathy? And Cathy pops up and they lock eyes. Cathy looks at him, takes a breath and goes down to the bottom of the tank and decides not to take another breath. And dolphins being animals that don't have an involuntary kind of breath impulse, it's a choice, basically commits suicide. which is just, I can't stop thinking about that.

58:40It gives me chills still. And whenever I see that part of the movie and it's like, it's those kinds of moments. Like if you're doing a big film with an ocean health, you don't have that. That feeling that you have right now that hopefully the audience feels like this animal committing suicide, swam into his arms, looked at him in the eyes and swam down to the bottom of the tank, committed suicide. you know you can imagine what it would be like to be that you know that animal you can imagine like i think everybody can imagine what it would be like to be alone without your own species in a miserable tank you know and all you know at that moment you're with rick you'll you want him to succeed you're you know he becomes a hero right then and those transformational moments you just can't get when you're just doing a normal documentary, let's say, in the Nova way.

59:36You know, I don't want to criticize Nova. I watch all those, you know, Novas. I watch, you know, the Marvel films. The Attenborough sort of style of documentary nature storytelling. Yeah, and Attenborough for a long time. I mean, I've watched those documentaries too, but, you know, and I've been to those places that he's talking about. And those oases, those ever-diminishing oases where you can see the sardine run, you can see the migration, they're still out there, albeit now it's going through more urban areas. And you can still make it, if you frame it, you can make it look like they're still there.

1:00:15And to the audience, you're doing a little bit of a disservice by saying the world isn't changed. It's a bit like greenwashing because it makes us feel better about what's happening when we see that beauty and then we're less likely to take action. Yeah, I mean, that's my feeling. I mean, again, I love watching, you know, all those wildlife documentaries. I love the courage that it takes to be embedded with these animals and see them on their own terms. but at the same time you know i'm in my mind i'm going what can i do to try to halt that that that change you know that's uh you know there's there's a word for it where they you know you have a these diminishing ecosystems that you know in every generation adapts to the successive of demise of the one created before it, a shifting baseline.

1:01:15And is it just Pollyanna to say, hey, well, this is just inevitable. We're destined as human beings to oversee the demise of the world. That's just the way it is. Or can you be part of this mechanism that can create a change? Is there a scientific reason why everybody will eventually go vegan or adapt to a more compassionate world. And I think there is. I think there is a lot of hope. There's a lot of signals I'm getting that we can go that way. And I think films can edge us towards that eventuality. When we did that film, they were killing 23 ,000 dolphins and porpoises every year in Japan for human consumption.

1:02:02And the last year I looked, it was like two years ago, I think they killed 1 ,610. So it was down over 93 % since we started that film. So films... are very, very powerful weapons for social change. and that's why I do what we're doing. We had, you know, telling Rickleberry's story had a profound effect on that industry. They're still capturing them for the entertainment industry. There's still, you know, there's co-countries that are, you know, have been banning it. It seems to, it goes, you know, you said it here before that it's, you know, progress is never a straight line. It's messy. Life is messy.

1:02:38There's ups and downs, but, you know, I'm hopeful enough about, you know, where we're going to feel like we can be part of the mechanism that pushes us towards a better society. Yeah, I've heard your films described, I don't know whether this is your term or not, as weapons of mass instruction. Construction. Construction, instruction, isn't it? Weapons of mass instruction. Yeah, well, it's a destruction construction. Destruction construction, which I love. It's like, how can I deploy, how can I weaponize storytelling for a specific aim and do it in a compelling way? And that's sort of your approach to these films and they are impactful.

1:03:26I mean, The Cove, I mean, certainly they're not serving dolphin meat for school lunch anymore in Japan. And I know you put your life and the life of your crew in peril to make that movie. And that was not easy. And you still can't go back to Japan, can you? Can you go back? Have you been back? I can go back. You can go back? I just can't get back out. And there was a period of time where it was unclear whether the movie was even gonna screen in Japan, right? It has since. Yeah, well, what happened was, there was a famous, I think it was one of the famous Spanish directors, I believe was doing the Tokyo Film, International Film Festival.

1:04:07I think it was. Yeah, and he said, And if you don't show the cove, because they were doing a green carpet instead of a green carpet. They were trying to make like a green. He says, if you don't show the cove, I'm going to quit and there's going to be an international protest. So I went. And so I went over to Japan with my attorney. And we get off the plane. And I'm not talking about in the terminal. I'm talking about on the gangway. It's like the first, like when the, you know, that passageway from, you know, the plane. I mean, there's presses lined there taking pictures of me getting off the plane.

1:04:43And they're asking me questions like all people behind me, I'm thinking like, oh, I am gonna get arrested. This is not gonna be pleasant. And so we were escorted under police protection. I walked the red carpet, but I was totally alone. There wasn't a single person there. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near you. No, they cleared it out. They made it so that it was gonna be, they're gonna make a point that nobody's going to see this film if we can help it. But I remember at the screening, there was a lot of the people from the International Whaling Commission meeting from Japan where the whalers, the dolphin hunters were in the back of the room.

1:05:22And we had a night vision camera in the theater. And I remember the previous head of the IWC for Japan, I think he was educated in Yale or Oxford, you know western educated and he was expert at crafting his rebuttal about the need to you know for japan to still do whaling in you know defense of the dwindling number of whales and i remember this when when the the killing scene starts in the cove i remember looking at this guy and he and he just he's looking at the film and he just goes like this in his seat he just covers his hands with his face with his hands and he's shaking it. Like, you know, the world just changed.

1:06:08There's nothing you could do. He just knew there was nothing you could say about that. It's done, that guy. The IWC, the International Whaling Commission, these governing bodies, the MSC, what is that? The Marine Safety Council Commission, something like that are problematic. I mean, there's so much corruption. It's one thing to be boots on the ground, grassroots, activism, locality by locality and try to coalesce a movement out of that through film and other various means of raising awareness. But from a top-down perspective, you have these governing bodies that are just, I mean, just so patently on their face, blatantly corrupt in the scenes in the Cove where we see that Japan is literally paying these failing small developing bankrupt nations to vote in lockstep with them on these measures around whaling and the dolphin trade.

1:07:11It's just, it's so obvious to everybody. And yet, despite being out in the open, continues to happen. And then I think there was even more recently with the MSC and whaling in Iceland, et cetera. It's like, can't we just all get behind the fact that we shouldn't be killing whales and dolphins? I think we're heading that way. You know, Iceland, I think is, I think they're 2025. They said it's going to be their last year doing it. I mean, it is happening. It doesn't happen as quickly as I would want, but I'm, you know, if they're killing one dolphin for human consumption, that's too much. But still, you have to, you know, take these victories that we have and celebrate them.

1:07:54Because if you only focus on the negative bits, like the, you know, the three countries that are still doing it, you know. Are you able to hold on to that level of hope and optimism? I mean, the Cove came out in 2009, it's 2023. Like when you look back, how much progress has been made? What still has yet to happen that maybe you thought would have happened by now? Like when you look at that world. Yeah, I guess it's the captivity trade. You would think that, because that's the economic engine that drives that. They're not killing them because for$600 a dolphin, it doesn't pay for the gas. They're doing it for the captive dolphin industry.

1:08:38And you'd think that once people over in Asia, China, Japan, Middle East, if they saw, I guess we need a blackfish, another film about dolphin intelligence, dolphin rights. I don't know. I don't know how to. Because that industry is booming in China and in the Middle East as well? Yeah, the Middle East. I haven't followed it in the last couple of years. I know with the pandemic, they were failing, but now maybe it's bounced back even more. I mean, we certainly were part of a group that got that. We got things moving in the right direction on that. I'm on other things right now. I'm thinking like, okay, this can work.

1:09:24How do we use the same storytelling chops on these other bigger issues and scale it so that, you know, we can see serious progress on, you know, food systems, on health. Right. And that's what I'm focusing in right now. And that sort of was like almost a trial balloon to show that it does work. You know, we have people working on that still in our business. but it's like, you know, the other side of it, it takes a lot of money to keep these doors open. You know, we have, you know, people that need to get paid. And how do you, the movie didn't make a lot of money. It's amazing. Yeah, you make this movie, The Cove, the first movie you've ever made, you win the Oscar for it and you didn't make any money.

1:10:09Well, you know, we made enough money to pay back some of the debts that we had to do it. But it's, you know, I tell people that wanna get involved in a documentary, the first thing I lead with is if you intend to make money off of investing in a documentary, you're better off taking your money to Vegas because your odds are better there. But if you wanna change the world, there's no better place to come than us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is the most effective way to provoke change, I think. And onward to your second movie, Racing Extinction, which I think is a better movie. I mean, cinematically more beautiful.

1:10:49And obviously you learned a few things about filmmaking. Like it's very compelling, but I don't know that it was seen as much as the Cove. Is that true? Like that just feels like it slipped under the radar a little bit more than the Cove. 38 million people saw it the first day. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was on Discovery. Discovery, which is the biggest network in the world at that time anyway, had access to two and a half million two and a half billion people they did something unprecedented in their history they they released it on every channel they had starting for a 24-hour period starting in New Zealand and you know when the sun came up they showed it all day long until it came up in California and then um I think 38 million people saw it those first few two days and you know so it had a big push but then it fell off the radar it's like they're like they have 400 films or this became part of their content.

1:11:42We just got it back recently. And it's hard to pump it back. 38 million was a good number. If those were paying customers, oh my God, that would be like if we had$10 for every person that came through the door. Our focus has never been about making money. It's like we're running a nonprofit organization, not that we're trying to lose people's money, but it was like, I don't wanna walk into a convention and have to hide my head because there's four investors that, you know, I told them that you were gonna double your money or whatever. It's just not our goal. So we try to find people that are mission driven and that, you know, we can focus on making a film.

1:12:21You know, the business model for making a documentary is completely broken. Now, let's say you have an average Marvel film, $100 million, probably more like$200 million. They're gonna advertise it. They have to get everybody in the theater to come on that, those first weekend or two. You have to spend another 100 to 200 million to get people to come to it. And how are you gonna do that with a documentary? How can you compete? No, it's not worth it. It's not worth it. And I also think the streamers have shifted focus away from documentaries, particularly hot button documentaries. I've noticed Netflix being a place originally that was this incredible home for new documentaries, birthing new filmmakers and really putting that mode of filmmaking like on the radar in a very mainstream way.

1:13:17And we saw this great success of so many documentaries in the early days of Netflix. But now I think the streamers are so focused on new subscribers all across the world in areas like Saudi Arabia and China that they're much more hesitant to onboard a documentary that might cause a political headache, no matter how good or high quality the documentary is. I had Brian Fogel on who did, yeah, who did Icarus. And then when he made the dissident, nobody would touch it. He won an Oscar for Netflix. And they were like, we can't take this movie. You know, so things have changed. And so for someone like yourself, who's ruffling feathers, who's trying to say, have difficult conversations, it feels like the streaming ecosystem isn't as hospitable as it once was, which makes kind of threading the needle even more difficult.

1:14:17Yeah, I mean, I'm actually doing a series for Netflix right now on food. It is a lot of hard issues and I've been finding that it is working. It's been, you know, we've had - You've been working on that for a long time. Ever since, yeah, probably since 2016, you know that took it was trying to raise the money independently went the netflix route and but it's turned around in the last week and it's like i'm really like excited and happy that they're really going for it they're they're pushing it it's not it's not complete control but i don't know if i'm you know i i'm i'm a big fan of i don't want to be the only one deciding what's going to be out there i'm a you know we show our like i i like to to show to audiences you know the i want a lot of control to the writers the producers the the editors are certainly you know the ones you know driving the ship at that point and you give notes and the notes are coming back part of it the reason i'm like i'm not confident in this process the first time i've it's the second time i've done a film where you never met you never met the the editors like last week i was up at everybody came to the office, folks from Netflix and the editors.

1:15:33I'm meeting them for the first time. I've been working on this thing for them for two years and I've never met them in the flesh. And usually I'm sitting literally every day, you know, that we're editing, I'm in the editing room with an editor and now we're giving notes and to come back in a week later. And, you know. And the editor is the final author of the whole thing. I mean, they have incredible control over actually what it's going to be. Yeah. And they're, you know, they're a little bit, be honest, they're a little bit more, you know, Netflix has Final Cut and, you know, they're paying the bills, you know, through us, but they're paying the bills.

1:16:04So they're like, you know, their allegiance is to the streamer. And luckily we have a good team at Netflix that's, you know, I don't know if it did any good, but I did, you know, when I was in Indonesia with a really limited, you know, bandwidth a couple of weeks ago and I just said, listen, this is not why I'm in this business. You know, we have to raise the stakes every time. I gave my, you know, as a heart and speech as I can. Maybe it was, I had found out later that they had already implemented those changes, but I'm like in the middle of nowhere. Like literally it's like without, you know, and I'm seeing this cut and it took me probably seven hours to watch a 45 minute cut of an episode because it just wasn't the bandwidth.

1:16:46I had to stay up late when nobody else is using the system because we're, with a small satellite dish and I'm like looking at this, I'm like, oh my God, this is horrible. I'll never work in this business again. But it's just, then when I saw the final one, when I got back to stateside, it's like, I didn't have to make that talk. They already made the changes and it's back on the rails. But boy, it's a different world. COVID, everybody's working from, they get conditioned to working from home now. And it's like, nobody wants to go back to sit in an office. And that's, to me, that's where a lot of the magic happens.

1:17:21You know, it's like in the field, it's a great creative process. You have wonderful DPs and people that you're, you know, you're up there doing the work. And when you're not in the room with somebody, it's different. It's really different. I can't say it's better. I miss it. And who knows what, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of the great things that happen when you're in a room with somebody and you're just having lunch and you say, you know what about that scene? Can we just try moving this over a little bit? And then if you have to explain it to somebody or worse, explain it to like, was 15 other people on a Zoom call?

1:17:54It's like, it's just, it's a laborious process, but it's changed. It's the world that we're living in. Yeah, I feel like it's moving back though. I think that rubber band is snapping back a little bit. And you're right. I mean, there's nothing, there's no replacement for the energy that got. I don't do Zoom. Yeah, I am gonna shorten the table. I get a lot of criticism. We moved it long like when COVID happened and I still wanted to do in-person conversations and it stayed that way. And people are like, I can't believe how long your table is. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. Yeah, I get it. But I'm glad to hear that.

1:18:32Is Food 2.0 a series or is it just a documentary? It's a series. It's a series, right? What's the premier window for this? It'd be January of this coming year. Are you allowed to talk about the subject matter that you explore, we can talk generally about food and sustainable food systems. I mean, after the Game Changers, a lot of people saw that film. And that film really, first of all, I gotta say, that film had an enormous boost in the community. I'm told that Merrill Lynch did a study last December, not this, but this previous one, the one before it. And they said that 75 % of the worldwide interest in plant-based diet is because of that film.

1:19:13It's unbelievable. And it's a credit to the entire team that made that film. And Game Changers was incredibly impactful. It was exquisitely rendered and very meaningful, not just for the movement, but for really shifting people's opinions and perspectives around diet, particularly for a lot of men who get caught up in what they're eating and how that affects their athletic performance to show a very different reality in the most palpable way that really has made an incredible impact on culture, to your point of weapons of mass instruction. Like it was extraordinary. I mean, it was really a phenomenon when that movie came out.

1:19:59And I couldn't be happier that it made the impact that it has made and continues to make. I think they just announced there's gonna be a second one, I guess. Right, right. And I'm not involved with it, But yeah, I'm more power to it. But a lot of people came out of that movie and they said, they would tell me just anecdotally, like, oh, I was vegan. What about now? I said, well, I did it for about three months and fell off the wagon for whatever reason. I said, why? He said, well, I'm not an athlete. That's an extraordinary statement. Like suddenly now this is the diet only for athletes? Like that's quite a shift.

1:20:36Even though there was a twist in that film where James' father almost dies of a heart attack and so it does this whole other shift to like, hey, this is not only good for athletes, it's good for civilians of normal eating to eat this way. It's a good healthful way. So in response to that, I wanted to do a film that, it's called Food 2.0 now, this working title to be changed to something else. But I mean, the premises of it is fairly simple. I wanted to address this idea. People said, oh, I'm Northern European. I'm black. I'm this, I'm that. My genetics are such that I have to eat this way. So I thought, well, what if you gave identical twins?

1:21:32want a healthy vegan diet, want a healthy omnivore diet, and then we measured everything we possibly can, you know, from the usual stuff of blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, et cetera. But like, you know, get into the epigenetics, get into, you know, these new biological markers that we didn't have the tools with, you know, very well seven years ago. Like microbiome, things like that. Yeah, and so we're working with Stanford University and we have identical twins where we had this very - Are you working with the Sonnenfelds? I am. You are, excellent. Yeah, and the Scherzeyes. Oh, nice. We're cognitive testing.

1:22:10And to me, it was like, okay, I don't know what the results are gonna be, but my plant-based friends were like, well, what if it doesn't work in your favor? It's like, well, I'm interested in the science. I wanna find out what's going on in our bodies. And so if you take identical twins, you've taken out these variables, right? If you have, it's like almost a perfect genetic test to see about the diet. And some of them were giving an athletic physical intervention too, so that we're testing those as well. And I mean, I can't tell the results, but it was fascinating. and some of the results like, the scientists over at Stanford, they were saying, save your money.

1:23:01You're not gonna see anything happen in eight weeks. It's not a long enough timeframe. And now I'm not gonna tell you the results, but they've changed their parameters for studies now based on that one study. Is Christopher Gardner involved in that? You got it. Yeah, he was here last week. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Really? Yeah, he was just here last week. Yeah, well, I just look at your podcast and I just invited them all to be in the movie. I'm glad I could help you recruit all the people for your big TV show. No, that's amazing. I'm looking forward to that. How many episodes? Four. Yeah.

1:23:35Yeah, episode four, one of the new cuts just dropped as I was flying in this morning. So I'm really excited to see it because that's like, at the end of the day, I want people to look seriously at what they're putting in their mouths. There's no other thing in the world that we can do to give us agency over the environment, over personal health, over the welfare of other creatures than what you put in your mouth. To me, it's just like a, it's a no brainer. But how do you make that entertaining to people? It's like, you know, that's tough. You know, you don't want it to look like, you know, vegan propaganda.

1:24:10But, you know, I'm thrilled with the process so far that, you know, we were really, you know, I was sweating bullets for about, I'd say almost two years thinking, well, what if this doesn't look good for, you know, our side. Yeah, because I've heard you, you've been talking about this for a long time and I was interested in what the status of it is. I'll tell you offline later. Okay, yeah, good. You know, you mentioned, you know, how difficult it is to, you know, sort of craft these challenging ideas around something that's entertaining and palatable. and it made me think of the recent Apple TV Plus series, Extrapolations.

1:24:53Did you watch that? I didn't see it, I don't know about it. What is it? It's this limited series that tackles climate change by casting its gaze into the future and every episode is like 10 years later as like this graph of carbon emissions continues to go up and you kind of see the world the way that it would appear during that period of time and each episode is sort of a standalone thing. A lot of talented people worked on this show. It looks like it was very expensive and the intentions are nothing but extraordinary. But to me, it ends up not really connecting because it's trying to be this important thing.

1:25:32You know what I mean? And I think it is, and I've watched it and I got a lot out of it, but I think there's a reason why, someone like yourself hasn't seen it or maybe a larger audience hasn't seen it because it's missing that piece around really connecting with an audience in a very visceral, emotional way. I tell other, you know, I'd say young directors that, you know, you have a choice. Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective? Because, you know, we're all indignant about the way that we think the world should be, but is that going to connect? Is that going to work? You know, is there, what's the audience that doesn't think the way that you think, how are they going to connect with this?

1:26:17Are they going to see it as propaganda? Are they going to think of it as, like, is it entertaining? You know, Michael Moore, you know, he said, the first rule of filmmaking is don't be boring. And you could say, oh, well, there's nothing more important than saving the world. But, like, okay, well, you know, I'm very cognizant that, you know, you work, everybody works, I'm assuming, pretty hard. they're you know they're they're tired they're they get back from work and there's a it's like they have a choice what do you watch on television do you want to watch the new marvel star wars thing which by the way i will watch too but like you know what's gonna what's gonna make them click you know so there's a word of mouth that there's a scene in there that um you know you gotta see you know that and and that's what i'm that's what i think we do well i think i think visually i'm I'm always like putting way too much energy, but it's valuable energy into like, how do you make this scene, give them something that they haven't seen before at the Cove?

1:27:13We put time-lapse cameras in the market at Skiji. And it took us a month. We had to get permission from all five of the major brands that controlled that, plus Mitsubishi, which oversaw everything. So there's a lot of negotiated back and forth that happened to get that one minute scene in there. but it's still probably one of the best scenes about overfishing that i've ever seen because it shows like this you see the the gates open up you know the and then you see the light come in the tuna get out there you see the smoke rise from the the frozen fish the the buyers come in and they they take them off and put them on the trucks it goes dark it happens the next day you see this wave after wave of like oh my god these are giant bluefin tuna that are now endangered and it's just a commodity.

1:28:02And it's just something that's visceral. It's not, you could say that, but when you see it, it does something else. It clicks. Some writers can do that with humor. Mark Twain talked about the Philippine War back in I think the turn of his century, the 1900s. And it's all the atrocities of war that we thought about of Vietnam, But he's making us kind of laugh at ourselves, at our imperialistic nature. There's a way that you can communicate that where people can see themselves. He did it through humor. I do it through a visual language with the words and the music. And, you know, obviously with a big team of very talented people, more talented than me.

1:28:47But I'm the head bull goose loony that wrangles them all together so that we're all, you know, on a mission. And then we get us all in the room. we're thinking like, is this, I'm always thinking like, do we need those two frames? Can we make this a little bit short? I'm feeling like the audience a little bit hesitating. Can we just make it speed up a little bit? Can we, and if you don't have those assets in the field, you're not going to create them in the editing room. And our writer, Mark Monroe has written four of the films I've done. I said, we have the opposite problem that every other filmmaker has.

1:29:21We have too much good stuff. We have to kill a lot of our babies, they say, you know, stuff that we loved that we really worked hard to but i'd rather have gone in the field and gotten those asset assets and gotten those stories so that when we're in the editing room we're surrounded by a whole palette of beautiful scenes that we can put together to orchestrate to so we can dial in that those emotional moments so that we can find those hooks that'll get people you know hopefully going from one episode to the next and that's exciting to me it's like you know So, but you gotta be doing it in the field.

1:29:55You have to be doing it from the creation. You're not gonna be like, you're not gonna find a masterpiece. In the edit if you didn't shoot it. Right. Or you didn't think about it. Yeah, in Racing Extinction, it's getting the Tesla and kitting it out, James Bond style with your team of wizards who are like this queue, who are like creating all these add-ons to that car to allow you to project onto buildings and onto clouds and all the like that becomes this massive kind of inflection point for popular awareness. Yeah, and the car was like a transitional character to get us to the big projections.

1:30:37Let me explain that a little bit. Like, you know, the people haven't seen the film, we took a model last, one of the early editions, like you said, and made it into like a bond car for the environment. It's the first car in the world to have an electroluminescent paint job. We could change the color of the car with a flick of a button, never been done before. We had a forward-looking infrared camera, a FLIR camera that came out of the frunk on a robotic arm so it could see the invisible world of greenhouse gases. Out of the back, out of the hatch, we had a 20 ,000-lumen IMAX projector so we could project those images onto skyscrapers or mountaintops.

1:31:09We had disappearing license plates, that whole thing. It was a great hook for that, but what we were interested in doing is the whole premise of that. you know it started here actually in LA where at the beginning of the movie Adi Gill does these projections you know he was at the sushi restaurant yeah yeah so at the at the you know the Oscars and the Emmys there'd be his screens that they would rent you know the like high-end screens to you know for the the award ceremonies and he put one of those he had the business that rented those out to those places so he had a screen that he put out in front of the hump restaurant, which was illegally selling whale meat.

1:31:47We had bust, our team busted that restaurant essentially. And this is right during the Oscars for the code too. It was like, I remember - Oh, I didn't know that those time periods overlap. Oh my God, it was so funny. I didn't even know the hump was in LA. Oh yeah, it was at the Santa Monica airport. They were selling all kinds of endangered, illegal fish in their sushi. Whale meat. Whale meat. Whale meat, say whales. That was the third largest whale in the world. So we had heard about it. It became like this sort of urban legend. And we sent a couple of operatives into the restaurant. You know, it's two weeks.

1:32:25We were pretty, because the Cove was out in theaters. We hadn't yet won the Oscar. But we were doing a lot of press around town and stuff. And, you know, so we were kind of, I wouldn't say many people would say, oh, you're the person from the movie. So we didn't want to go in the sushi restaurant. And so Heather Rowley and this other woman, Crystal Gelbuth, they went in and we gave them like, you know, some of the last money that we had to order a lot of expensive sake and, you know, ingratiate yourself to the waiters and order, you know, the whale meat. And we were listening in the back of a car, you know, these transmissions going on when they ordered it.

1:33:06so when we got the the story is when we we got this with this whale meat we had the samples and we went to god i can't remember which agency it was it was like fish and wildlife there's a couple different agencies that were dealing with this and we took up took the samples up to monterey to fish and i think it was fish and wildlife and they said well that's all fine and good but you need a chain of custody i said what's that they said well we don't know that you know one of our people wasn't overseeing the sample. It's say well, we had to analyze the say well, but you could have just planted it.

1:33:40So it'd be your word against them. And they said, can you do a, you know, come with us on a bust, you know, or get them to, you know, those same women. And we'd run out of money and they went and tried to do a sting themselves, but they couldn't get the restaurant to sell them the meat. And so then when we were in LA for the, for the Oscar roundup, we were getting an accommodation from the mayor's office, you know, some award here in town. And I remember looking at it and said like, we got our team here. We can do this thing. This is like two days before the Oscar. And there was actually a party that night at the mayor's mansion or wherever the mayor hangs out.

1:34:19And I remember like my wife at the time, she had like, you know, we had a, you know, the distributor had like a limo and it was a big dolled up event. And I said, well, you go ahead without me. I'm gonna go do the Sting and Shit. I remember, I love her, but she said, why don't you grow up? And I thought, well, this is what I was meant to do. Who do you think I'm married to? Bless her heart. I can see it like, this was like the one night that we could have to - You can't take a day off to go to the Oscars. Like, you know, the Sting. So this is, I can't remember, the Oscars are on a Sunday night.

1:34:58We did this like on a Friday night or a Saturday night. And we had these three agencies, agents at the bar, at the sushi bar. Our women went in with their, you know, the same women, two women, Heather and Crystal went in and they did the bye. and then um and then i remember we we won the oscar on on sunday night on monday morning it's like front page news that you know we busted the hump restaurant so it all happened right at the same time it was like this perfect and it wasn't just you know the agency now here's what was going on we had a i had a friend who was working at the uh the the u.s uh iwc the international whaling Commission meeting.

1:35:41And he said that at the time, this might be complicated, but Obama, who we all love, was making a backroom deal with the Japanese to give them open up commercial whaling in order to keep the bases open in Okinawa. That was the rhetoric I heard. And I thought, we have to press this because this deal's about to happen. So I want, you know, if it became front page news that whale meat is being sold right here in America, we could shut down those talks. Yeah, that would become radioactive for Obama. So that's why we did it. We jumped the gun. So we didn't wait for the Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Customs to go through what they had to do to do a proper bust.

1:36:22We just announced it, and that was it. And they were pissed off at us. But to me it wasn't about them getting accolades for doing the bust. It was about trying to shut down this idea of opening up commercial whaling again. And that was the reason for it. But that all happened at the same time. Yeah, that's wild, the compression of time on that. I own a bunch of spectacles. And I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-Roka pair on my indoor trainer when I was riding my bike indoors. And I got to tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my glasses back up my nose until I got so frustrated I just tossed them aside.

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1:38:17It's so wild to think about the fact that whaling still exists and that people are hunting and killing dolphins, these, you know, magical, extraordinary, incredibly, you know, intelligent animals. And if there was one thing in that extrapolation series that kind of stuck with me, there is a sequence in which, you know, the oceans are completely acidified and the whales, I think there's like, you know, maybe one or two whales left, but they have cracked the code in deciphering the language. Like they've got the technology to do that. So there's a sequence where somebody is, you know, is in a, like in an underwater, there's a station and part of it's underwater and they're, you know, communicating with this whale.

1:39:07And it made me think about the potential with AI and how quickly it's advancing right now in our capacity to figure out the nuances of how dolphins and whales, you know, and other, you know, other of these cetaceans, you know, are communicating in a way that, you know, maybe we could figure out. Yeah, it was interesting. Like I mentioned Roger Payne. He's the guy that discovered that humpback whales are singing. So back in the, I think it was the 70s, he wrote a paper and you know whales use rhyme they have meter they have they don't have a what they don't have is a start and a finish they have it's a river of song like they'll have an 18 minute song but they don't say okay and then start again they'll keep on singing so this was novel back in the 1970s and national geographic came out with a record called songs that humpback whale it's still the largest single pressing of musical recording ever done bigger than the beatles bigger than elvis is bigger than Taylor Swift.

1:40:11Don't hold me to that, but it was anyway. And that is what sparked the Save the Whale movement. And that helped create the moratorium for whaling. And Roger just died on Saturday. And so he knew he was going to die. And so I called him up on Thursday, the last day before his full day alive on the planet, and just told him what he meant to us, how he moved things forward and how much I loved him. When I was working on the cove, and Jim had Athena. He gave me that boat to use for some of our first expeditions and we went down to Silverbanks, which is where 80 % of the North Atlantic come back. Whales come to mate and give birth and to socialize.

1:40:54These five distinct pods from the Northern Atlantic come all down to the Silverbanks about 70 miles north of the Dominican Republic and Jim said, who do you want to invite? And my first guest was Roger Payne. A couple of friends of mine have something called the Earth Species Project where they're using AI to try to decipher language and said, you got to meet Roger Payne. He's the guy that started it all. And his wife, Katie Payne, was actually the one who first figured it out and then he wrote it up and they worked it out together. But it was really Katie. And Katie, by the way, his ex-wife is the one that discovered that not only whales use singing, she's also the one that discovered that elephants use infrasound, sound below our level of hearing to communicate.

1:41:43This is fascinating. I didn't know that. Okay, get this. So Roger was amazing. I spent a week with him on this boat, an amazing boat, but he would put these hydrophones in the water as we were eating at this really fine boat, three-masted schooner out in the middle of the water. And anywhere you put, now imagine there's thousands of whales there. It's only the males that sing. and they're singing, you know, to probably the same way that, you know, we sing, you know, to find mates, to, you know, get your tribe together. And you can hear these strange ethereal songs as we're having dinner and they're right below us.

1:42:20There's like this alien universe singing right below the boat. And, you know, he would tell us about like blue whales, blue whales, you know, most of their song happens below our level of singing. Like when I'm talking right now, if you saw it on an oscilloscope, So it'd be like these little quick waves, right? My voice going up and down to each note. But the blue whales operate on a different metronome than you and I do. If you saw their song through a computer screen, it looked like a straight line. But that straight line was really one of those squiggles, but it's like a kilometer long. Because their notes, one single note is like a kilometer long.

1:42:54Wow. So you have to speed it up and compress it. You speed it up and it sounds like birdsong. And because it's low infrasound, they use something called the deep ocean channel where the colder water at the bottom, these waves propagate at the bottom, they bounce off the surface and they can actually go on for thousands of miles. So these whales can communicate thousands of miles. One of the protégés of Roger Payne was this guy, Chris Clark, who was in racing extinction. And he was brought in. SOSUS is the underwater surveillance system that the Navy uses to detect submarines. And they started opening it up to scientists and they brought Chris in to try to figure out what this one, what they call biological, was doing.

1:43:43And, you know, because at first they thought it was a submarine, like a Russian sub. It would go off in one direction. It was using the same frequency to ping that the submarines do. And it would go, it'd be noisy for like six or seven minutes, then it would stop. And then it would be in a different direction. And he goes, well, that's not a submarine. That's a fin whale and it's feeding. And he realized that SOSUS is this underwater string of hydrophones that the Navy strung along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, roughly halfway between the eastern coast of America and Europe. And that's to detect boats.

1:44:21Every submarine and boat has a different signature. And they could, you know, they had somehow, they would put on these filters to take out the biologicals and somehow this whale had you know developed a song so it was singing at the same frequency as the subs were there. So anyway he realized Chris had realized that you know they had this filter on and that if they took the filter off he could see where a song was coming from all over the Atlantic Ocean. So they had him he asked him to turn it off and now the way he describes it it was a secret bunker off in Norfolk or someplace over one of these bases.

1:44:58And it was like a basketball court size area with people with three screens. Remember, this is like in the early 90s where nobody had more than two screens. And there's dozens of people with headphones all listening for Russian submarines. Now, Chris asked them on this big screen to turn off the filter to filter out the biologicals. He said it lit up like a Christmas tree for a few seconds. Then it blew the computers. He realized that the whole ocean is full of song. that, you know, wherever he put, you go to the Arctic, and everywhere you put in a hydrophone, you hear cetaceans somewhere singing close by or far away.

1:45:35Because actually, it's oxymoronic, but animals can, sound travels about four and a half to five times quicker underwater than it does on land. So, you know, and if you see these low waves, low frequency waves, you can transfer, you can see, you know. They'll travel those great distances. Like thousands of miles. In fact, Roger Payne thinks that these, that blue whales evolved so they could actually hear themselves clear around the world in the deepest, the longest part, like the Southern Ocean where there's no landmass. They can actually hear, you know, they can ostensibly hear themselves over 9 ,000 miles, a blue whale.

1:46:09That's insane. It is. Well, anyway. That's crazy. And I mean, just to know that completely changes your lens on like how you think of an animal like that. Oh, there's a, When we had Roger on the boat, I'm trying to remember the story. Okay, one of, there's a researcher. This was, this I think would be, you know, what we're talking about is like a Rosetta Stone, right? It's like AI, it's like a Rosetta Stone where you had like the ancient Greek and then you had the Egyptian hieroglyphs, right? I think that, wasn't that what was going on? They had, basically, it was a ledger, basically in ancient Greek and the hieroglyphs.

1:46:47And it was a way that they could figure out, okay, triangulate, like, what is this symbol? mean to this word that we do know i see so that's that was like a key like ai says okay we don't need to know anything about language we'll just use these models that and somehow figure out what these animals are saying based on you know this this very complex algorithm that we don't even know but this one of the researchers i had in the boat with roger he put hydrophones in the water there's a guy Lou Herman from Hawaii, he was teaching dolphins tricks, two pairs of dolphins tricks. And you can, you put your fingers together and go together.

1:47:26And then you do like a circular gesture, do a flip. And dolphins, I'm told, will readily get this. They'll do that nearly instantaneously to get, put fingers together, you know, flip your fingers in a circle. And the dolphins will swim to the bottom of the tank, come back up, they'll do a flip and they'll get the reward. And then, you know, They would do this so well, he'd be like, okay, what if we said together, then he'd go like his hands spread apart like your mind said, be creative. So together, be creative. He said, no, they put a hydrophone in the water, but there's only one hydrophone. So they don't know what's being said.

1:48:04But the dolphins instantly went down to the bottom tank, did a flip, went back in the water, then they spit out water at the same time into the face of the researcher. So, I mean - So, they hatched a plot, basically. Yeah. And they agreed upon that plan. But somewhere in there, in that language, in my mind would be like, is spit water at the researcher in his face. You know what I mean? You could have deciphered. I would say use AI in a situation where you know what's going on rather than - Right, to reverse engineer like what was communicated and understood. Yeah, so like what they're doing right now, these friends of mine I put in touch with, Roger Payne, is they're looking at, they're taking all the data from Cornell University or I think Scripps, where they have these hydrophones out in the water working right now and they're trying to use AI to decipher what these animals are saying, but they run into what's called the cocktail problem.

1:48:59Like if this studio was full of dozens of people and then you're trying to isolate what people are saying, it's called the cocktail problem. What about if you just have two animals in a room and you have a hydrophone in each one of them so you know what's being communicated? That to me is like, But that's why I'm a filmmaker, not a researcher. Right, right, right. I mean, I would imagine that at some point they're gonna figure it out. Like these tools are so powerful. It feels like it's only a matter of time before the technology advances enough and the science progresses where they're gonna figure this out.

1:49:36And that could be like a watershed moment in how we relate to this underwater kingdom that is so poorly misunderstood and we treat like the world's garbage can. Yeah, well, imagine what, you know, if we could, well, first of all, you know, a lot of dolphin species and whale species have bigger brains than us. And they have - The dolphin brain is insane. Yeah, and they have more, you know, convolutions of the gray matter. So there's more opportunities for, you know, synapses for more, you know, they have spindle neurons that are, more spindle neurons that are associated with processing complex emotions.

1:50:12They got a lot going on up there, but we as humans, we keep on changing the bar and say, well, they don't use tools. Well, in fact, crows, chimps, and a lot of other animals do use tools, but we keep on saying, but they don't have computers, but they don't have podcasts. It's like we're never analyzing or evaluating an animal for how well it survives in its environment. And you look at like, okay, so we have these big brains. And sometimes you can, you know, intelligence could be how well does a species work within the confines or the barriers of their own ecosystem? Or do they try to impinge that?

1:50:54You know, if you eat all, you know, if you consume all the resources, is that intelligence? I mean, you know, we're failing pretty miserably when it comes to that metric. Yeah, I think so. They're perfectly adapted to their environment. It's because they don't, unlike humans, they're not crafting their environment. They're not changing their environment. Yeah. Obviously, there's been a lot of development over the last four and a half billion years of human history. I was talking to one scientist and he said, well, you know, the earth is going to be fine without us. And I said, what do you mean?

1:51:30He said, well, you know, the earth is always changing. The advent of blue-green algae created oxygen and it gave us us. And there's a lot of winners and losers when oxygen became one of the chemicals in the atmosphere. And I said to him, but blue-green algae didn't have a choice. We're at the cusp of what they call the Anthropocene, the sixth major extinction on the planet. There's been five of them all caused by either geologic or meteorological issues, asteroids. And those are all events that one species wasn't in control of. But we have a choice, unlike a wild animal. And that's what maybe is different about us.

1:52:17And to me, the question becomes, how quick can we all figure that out so that we're making choices that are good for the environment? And so how do you think about solutions with this idea, you know, humankind is the asteroid in this equation, in this, you know, mass species extinction event. That's act one. And there's no, what's that? That's act one. Yeah, that's, okay, so we're in act one. You know, I don't wanna have to experience the bottom of act two where everything feels hopeless and somehow at the last minute we figure out how to solve this problem. We have solutions to pretty much all of these problems.

1:52:57It's the implementation of these solutions. It's activating a base of enough people to be adopters of these solutions. And then it's the top-down political will conversation around getting everybody corralled into one mindset around solving this problem or this series of problems. There's some really good evidence in science that shows that social change happens when you have 10 % of the population 100 % committed to the truth. And that's what happened with electric cars. That's what happened with cell phones. That's what happened with the suffragette movement. That's what happened with the civil rights movement.

1:53:40And then, like we said earlier, that's when you get to 30%. That's when people are doing it just because it's been normalized. I think that trying to get these movements up to the 10 % so that it's unstoppable is part of my job. And that's one reason, by the way, we do the projection events. You know, when, you know, films like, you know, the films that we, let's say Racing Extinction, 38 million people the first weekend, the first night, that's great, but that's not 700 million people, which is, you know, or 800 million people, which is 10 % of the population of the planet. That's why we do the projection events.

1:54:17With the projection events, we found, and I knew this at the point from Lalani Munter, she said, she's the one that, you know, showed me these first studies and i i read the study and i called up the lead researcher because there was three pages of algorithms of math that i just didn't understand i was never in my strong suit and i said to him can you give this to me in lay language what this means what this paper means because i understand what 10 of the population means 100 but i don't you know understand the why of all this math he said well it's like if you're trying to create steam it'll never happen unless you get water up to a boiling point he said 10 of the population 100 committed is the boiling point for the exchange of social ideas and that i can understand it's like okay if but how do you reach 700 or 800 million people with the projection events we can do it when we when we did racing extinction we showed it at sundance we at that point we had only projected on the united nations and it looked good it looked beautiful um you know the the front of the UN, by the way, this was done with permission with the UN, with Ban Ki-moon, who was working on the 2014, this was the preamble to the Paris Accords.

1:55:31And it looked good, but the New York police said they would shut us down if we had over 2 ,000 people attend, because they were worried about 600 ,000 activists in town and them storing the gates, whatever fantasy they had in their heads. So it never had that kind of momentum that I wanted. What I'd always wanted to do was to project on the Empire State Building. because I thought that was like, to me there's something symbolic about it. The UN's great, but without a crowd, it was never gonna resonate. And remember Discovery at that point, they paid us all the money they were gonna give us. It was gonna cost like one and a half million dollars to do a projection event.

1:56:07And they said, the film's good enough, don't worry about it. And I thought, we need to get a lot of people to see it. Otherwise it'll just be another good movie. That wasn't my objective. How do you change things? So they said, well, a projection event in August in New York, they said all the important people are going to be in the Hamptons. They're going to be over in Europe. It'll be a non-event. It'll get stark late in New York, so the press won't be there. They can't afford to pay overtime. It'll be a non-event. And so we did it. I raised the money. We did the event. I remember we had rented out a bar overlooking the Empire State Building.

1:56:49and my son came up for it and he goes dad there's people in the streets and i thought he meant people in the streets waiting to get into the the bar because it was it was packed and he goes no no look over the side of the building we looked over in like fifth avenue with all these projections going off and dangerous species on the empire state building it was like the new york easter parade it was just like you know packed you know like traffic was you know was halted so i went down to take a look and you know they they couldn't hear the music they didn't know what was going on up there they just saw something extraordinary they all had phones they all had you know everybody became a photographer and um we had some media show up but like the cops said hey if this gets too crazy we're gonna have to shut it down but we it took me four years to get permission from the city to do those projections and we had 939 million media views by thursday it was the top trending story on facebook and twitter for four days worldwide wow and we thought you know it was on the cover of like, you know, the New York Times, it was, you know, the media, everybody picked up on it and everybody had a cell phone and that it got shared.

1:57:50Sure, so yeah, billions and billions of eyeballs. Yeah, and then so we thought we couldn't get any more attention to the subject than that of endangered species, you know, in the Anthropocene. And then the Pope calls. And the Pope wanted us to project on the Vatican for his Laudato Si, this was in December, why world leaders were meeting in Paris to talk about the accords, you know, Because remember, Pope Francis is named after St. Francis, the patron saint of animals. So we did a projection event there, and it was so surreal. We didn't meet with the Pope, but we met with his number two over at the Vatican, when we get the job to go do it.

1:58:29And he goes to me, I'm not going to be able to repeat his accent, but he goes, if it was up to me, this wouldn't happen. And I said, why? And he says, well, because the last artist to do anything on the Vatican was Michelangelo.

1:58:44And so we had, there was 600 media there. We had, you know, that whole square leading up to the, you know, the Vatican was filled. I think 225 ,000 people saw it live. We had 4.4 billion media impressions just in the English language. And, you know, at least in America, those projections helped create laws that prevent some of the most endangered species from being trafficked through U.S. ports, which there was a loophole that they were getting through. And to me, we have another projection event that we'll find out what's going to happen tomorrow, but we're working with the Empire State Building again and the city of New York who now wants us to come back.

1:59:27And we want it to be all three nights projection, one on food, one on solutions to climate change. And we know that we've reached nearly a billion people before with a three-night projection. We'll be able to build on that. So for me, this is a way to scale change. Like a movie is great, it's powerful, but a projection event is a way to cut through all the media hype. You don't have to pay for this either. Instead of like, you know, getting, you know, paying for advertising, you're getting people that wanna share it. That's kind of the - It's super powerful. And the artistry that goes into these projections Like, I don't know how you find these artists to kind of craft these displays, but they're really exquisite.

2:00:08Oh, thanks. Thanks. So it is, you know, we've got a lot of colleagues. They should be going, they should be, I mean, talk about scaling social change. I mean, you could just have projection events going on all over the world all the time. That's the idea because everybody has, what we've learned about projections, like you can pull up to, I don't know, a building in LA that's kind of dark and project on it, but like, so what? You know what I mean? There has to be some sort of symbolic meeting behind it. So when you project on the United Nations, it's like, this is the one building that represents the world coming together to look at big existential problems and solutions.

2:00:48The Empire State Building represents the pinnacle of city life and progress and capitalism. And then when you put animals on it, it sort of vibrates against that, what that means. You know what I mean? You're saying this is important too. This is nature. You don't see it in the city and now you're seeing it. And the kids are like, they didn't know what these animals were. They'd never seen them before. And you forget that. If you live in a city, your exposure to nature is really limited by like what you see on TV or maybe up in the Adirondacks or something. But you don't get to see like, you know, a golden lion tamarind or, you know, any of these creatures.

2:01:26So they all look like alien creatures. So, right. I wanna talk to you a little bit about legacy, how you think about the meaning that you're leaving behind, et cetera. But I wanna do that first. I wanna preface that by asking you a little bit about this project that you did around joy with Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. I have not yet seen that film, but I did read the book and Doug Abrams is a very good friend of mine. and we went to college together and he's been on the podcast twice. So, I mean, Doug and I, I've known Doug since I was 18. Really? Yeah. So, how did you get involved with that and talk to me a little bit about that and also how it's kind of maybe changed, maybe it hasn't changed, but I would venture to imagine that it probably has kind of changed how you think about, you know, your work and your life.

2:02:22Yeah, everything really. I mean, I was at a, I was down in San Jose where Doug lives and I was at a dinner with a lot of other people and sitting in a room full of really interesting people. And then halfway through, the host said, oh, now to mix it up, switch with other people on the other side of the room, I found myself sitting next to Doug. And I said, I didn't know him. And I go to school with him. I said, what do you do? He said, well, I'm a book publisher. I said, well, anything I would have heard of. He said, well, I'm probably best known for the Book of Joy. I said, I love that book. That's amazing.

2:02:53He said, what do you do? I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. You know, what have you done? the Cove. And I don't know if he even heard of it. Then he mentioned that they had... documented that meeting between Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama and he said well we have like 18 hours of footage over a four and a half day period do you think it could be made into a film I said well let's take a look at it and so I saw it in the raw form and I found myself as I was watching it like having all these light bulb moments in my head about joy like what you know really figuring a note this podcast is full of now a lot of great people talking about what gives you joy but what really resonated for me was like yeah of course that's why I feel good when I do something that's not just for myself, when it's for others, it does feel good.

2:03:45It's what they call, you know, like a wise selfish. You know, when you're doing something good for you, it also feels good for me and that's okay. It's like fully selfish is when you're doing it only to get something out of somebody because it's a transactional or it's like a, it's one-sided and that did make me feel like, God, I wish I would have seen a film like that when I was in my 20s. And so this is before the pandemic. And I said, yeah, I think we can cut footage. We'll have to go back and re-engineer some of the stuff and film scenes with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. And then COVID hit.

2:04:28And now all of a sudden we're trying to make a film where you're afraid to go out of the country or you can't get into the country. and like i mentioned before like you know i made that film with people who i'd never even met physically i met doug because he was right down the you know down the street so to speak you know in california but that film was like uh so important to me you know in my head like you can't change society unless they you figure out a way that you can communicate with them like you You can understand people and what does give them joy. And to me, that film was like, I call it like chiropractic for the soul.

2:05:12You know, just everything snapped into place for me. Like, okay, this is, you know, how do you take, you know, one of the big takeaways from that film to me was like, you have these two spiritual leaders, two of the greatest spiritual leaders in the world, probably at that point, at this point still. How do you, you know, what do they have in common? You know, the Dalai Lama thousand room palace, with servants and could lead an army and you have Desmond Tutu born in the squalors of the slums of South Africa. But they both learned that out of this kind of grief is probably only possible to get really great joy.

2:05:52You have to take a hardship and turn it, like how can you turn this around? Where's the silver lining in it? because there's always a way to reframe it. You know, it's kind of a classic Buddhist thing is reframing, you know, instead of what was me, like, okay, how do you turn that negative bit? I mean, like, look at your own journey. You know, you took, you know, being overweight and alcoholic and doing drugs into, you know, one of the most popular podcasts in the world. You know, without that, you probably wouldn't be here. No. Yeah. No, there's no question about it. but finding that way to channel that pain to first of all, heal yourself, but then figuring out a way to give it back or to be of service and tying that somehow to things that you care about or problems that are greater than you in the world is to my mind, like the Holy Grail.

2:06:55Like if you can find something that you love that's also meaningful for other people and is solution-based for some of the problems that we face as individuals and as a collective, there's nothing more fulfilling in my life. And certainly, you're living your life in that manner. Yeah, I think, I mean, but the takeaway from all that was like, God, there's a lot of - The joy, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, that's it. that that's the joy that when you think about the moments that really give you joy that like lasting joy and they talk a lot about that in the film is like you know what kind of joy are we talking about and say no it's not like a permanent state of utopia it's just those hits that you have when you're on the right path when you are giving back when you are in service to the universe rather than just yourself um and then if you can just align yourself with this you know you know only bringing the people in that you want to talk to or just you know narrowing in on the focus of like what what we all have a limited amount of time on this planet and like how you decide to use those and who you decide to share them with is probably the biggest decision that we can make right you know and um and and making that your north star making that my north star has certainly given me the more fulfillment that I ever knew was possible.

2:08:23In fact, that's why Jim Clark, I say, has made me the richest person in the world because he did give me the opportunity to find that North Star that I don't think I would have had without him. Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, I think on top of that, the joy provides a more sustainable fuel source to kind of pursue what it is that you care about long-term. And I think what you see in the activist community in particular is a very short-term fuel source based on being upset with the state of the world and feeling like any self-care or experience of joy would be an indulgence because it's so dire and it requires all of your attention.

2:09:12And as a result, a lot of people burn out or they just can't maintain that level of intensity in the work that they're doing. But to kind of disabuse people of the idea that it's okay to experience joy in the midst of all of this. And in fact, if you can do that, it sets you up to be an even better servant in the short term and gives you the ability to serve long-term. Well said. It's hard though. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think if you're on the path though, I mean, you know when you do have, you're pointed towards that North Star and you start to veer off, you know it. Yeah. You know, you know it.

2:09:57I veer off a lot. I'm a grouchy, resentful pastor.

2:10:02I gotta let you go. But like, you have a lot of stuff you're working on, right? So you have this Food 2.0 show on Netflix that's coming up, we talked about. but you also have this She Change project with the female big wave surfers, which sounds pretty cool. It's a great one for kick-ass women's surfers. They got to pay parity in the sport of, you know, male dominated sport of big wave surfing. Yeah, that's a great film. It's hard, you know, for some reason, it's hard to get funded too. I mean, we're still struggling for that last million, but I think it's such a great film. It's not just about surfing, it's about women's.

2:10:37It's about pay equity, right? Yeah, pay equity is about women's rights. you know it's uh there's that story we're working on a film on you know um the great filter and uh the fermi paradox you know about that that's the the the fermi paradox is that the if there's aliens where are they and the great filter is maybe maybe it's the dna of life forms in the universe that they burn out of their resources before they have a chance to be able to communicate or travel great distances interesting yeah and then um doing a film on plastic pollution solutions that's come a long ways that's a great whole podcast on that yeah i saw that that was great yeah and is that all of these are in different stages of production and development yeah i'd say well we're done filming the food 2.0 the uh we're about i'd say half done with the plastics film i have a co-director of people when you're like how can you do all this it's like i have a lot of great people that i work with um she changed i'm just an executive producer you know helping put the team together and raise the money.

2:11:39I'm doing a book project still with that camera that Clark built for us. We just got back from Indonesia. We were there for about two and a half weeks. We won't have to go on a big tangent, but boy, it's like, you know, we went to the place on the planet where you can see the most fish on a single dive. You go to the Caribbean, you're lucky to see 30 fish on a dive. You can see 300 down in this place called Rajan, western Papua New Guinea, owned by Indonesia, indonesia erinjaya and it's like 76 percent of the world's corals hard corals are found there so in soft corals um it's one of one of the dive guys said when when god said let there be fishes this is where he was standing it's like it's just like the land before time it's really hard to get to and you know we dive with rebreathers so we can stay down for like two and a half three hours at a time if we need to um it's a big video production you know with lights and cameras but underwater water and then you can kind of wait for these tides to change so you have this upwelling of plankton and the soft corals bloom and the fish come out and it's really kind of amazing and with this camera you can see far more with your eye than you can with when you're actually there it's just you come back with these these images and it's just extraordinary beautiful and part of it is to get a baseline so you know even that that place is starting to get hit by bleaching and global warming.

2:13:01Just a two degree shift and an increase in temperatures and you lose the world's corals. So we're at that cusp and we wanna see a baseline of like how beautiful was it? Because the next generation might not know what they lost because we're losing it. And I wanna go to, I wanna create a big book, like a sumo-sized book on using this extraordinary camera to see something that people haven't seen before. And yeah, we have a couple of projects going on, you know but uh it's like i just love doing what we're doing because it's like i mean i kind of wish i would have been doing this when i was 20s in my 20s but then somebody said well you probably would have made shitty movies when you're in your 20s um i don't know about that i mean i think uh it's cool that i mean how old were you when you made the cove when you're 50s yeah late bloomer there's hope for all of us out there like first movie in your 50s, you win the Oscar.

2:13:58But I also think there's interesting new avenues of creation that are becoming available to help tell these stories and impact people. Like I was thinking of Michael Mueller, the photographer turned filmmaker and what he's doing with VR with sharks and, you know, being able to, you know, give a kid in a village a headset and have him feel like he's underwater swimming with the sharks, easily you could do that with the coral reefs and any number of these other kind of endangered areas that give people that real strong emotional connection. Yeah, we're working on that. We're looking at new capture techniques.

2:14:39In fact, I'm going up on Saturday to look at some people up in the, where the people think big up in Boston to work on a project that we could, To me, it's all about scale. How do you affect people quick with the amount of change that we need? And VR seems to be a good way to do it because it's more immersive. It's more emotional. Maybe you don't need 30 minutes or an hour and 30 minutes. Maybe you could do it in 20 minutes. One of the problems I have with VR is it's hard to, it's usually a one-off. It's like you need a set of goggles. You're not seeing it in a group. There's something that's transformative when you're seeing a movie with other people.

2:15:19Sure, of course. Yeah, it's still, it's not quite there yet. I get a little seasick wearing the thing and it's gonna happen at some point. Walt, I really love the work that you do. I think that you are a really important voice in this movement for so many reasons. And the movies that you've made have just been incredibly impactful to me personally and to millions of people across the world. And I can't wait to see what you create next. And I'd love to have you back when Food 2.0 comes out or the plastic, I would love to talk to you about the plastic problem. I'm afraid to even ask one question because it'll be two hours.

2:15:55But yeah, I mean, I have so much respect for what you do. And more importantly, like the way that you do it, the intentionality that you bring to your projects and just the manner in which you comport yourself as a steward of the planet and an activist and a creative voice. So thank you for sharing. Well, thanks for the accolades. But again, I got to say it's a team effort. You know, it's like everybody involved is like, you know, it's a process. It's like, you know, I get too much attention to what we do when it's really a team. But I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And I love the podcast. It's like it's my go to when I, you know, on a car, you know, it comes on automatically.

2:16:34As soon as I open the car door, you start, I start hearing your voice. All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voice of Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

2:17:26Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake.

2:18:03Portraits by Davy Greenberg Graphic and social media assets Courtesy of Daniel Solis Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting And website management And of course our theme music was created By Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt And Harry Mathis Appreciate the love, love the support See you back here soon Peace Plants Namaste

2:18:34Thank you.