#1388 - Louie Psihoyos

Joe Rogan (0:03)

All right, here we go. Good to see you.

Louis Psihoyos (0:05)

Good to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

How did you get involved with The Cove? What was the history behind that?

Louis Psihoyos (0:10)

I'm going to give you the long version.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Sure.

Louis Psihoyos (0:15)

There's a good friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy that started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD. I wanted to film. I was doing a story for Geographic back in 1995 I think it came out. I was on the information revolution and Jim Clark was the Steve Jobs of my generation. He don't want to be photographed, he's just too busy. Then I started working for Fortune magazine and he had built a boat, the world's tallest mast, I think, at that point and went over to Amsterdam to film him.

We hit it off and he said, would you teach me how to be a good photographer?

He made three companies from scratch worth over a billion dollars. I said, well, if you teach me how to be a billionaire, I'll teach you how to be a great photographer.

Then we traveled all over the world taking pictures for about the next 10 years.

We did mostly underwater photography. He built the best underwater camera ever made by an order of magnitude. It was just a piece of work as Jim doesn't do anything half-ass.

Every time we would go to a dive site and come back to it, you see this shifting baseline where there's less fish, there's less coral. In fact, he took me to a place in Papua New Guinea. He said, Louie, I'm going to take you to the best place I've ever seen. It's in Papua New Guinea. We flew over there all day to get there, a day and a half to sail.

We dive on the GPS coordinates and it's rubble, it's completely gone. This would happen not all the time, but a lot. We don't know what the insults were. It could have been dynamite fishing, it could have been anything. Who knows what it was. But I think it was the third time that we were in the Galapagos, Jim turned to me and said something like, you know, somebody should do something about this. We saw a fisherman illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary. And sort of empowered by the success that he's had in business and seeing how he could change the world and his businesses, I said, how about you and I? He said, what do you mean? I said, we'll use your money in my eye and we'll make films. And the first, well, then I, you know, so I'm jumping careers at this stage. I'm going from being a fairly successful, you know, still photographer, really busy to a career where I had really no business doing it. I'd never really made a film before, not even really a short film. And so I'm, you know, nervous. I'm feeling sort of full of myself, like I'm going to start this great career. We're down the Caribbean on a boat. And my kid starts with Jim on vacation with our families. And my kid starts playing on the beach with another kid. It happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid. So Steven comes over onto the boat to meet Jim. And he made Jurassic Park using Jim's computers, you know, silicon graphics. And after I had Steven alone for a few seconds, I said, do you have any advice for a first time filmmaker?

And he said, yeah, never make a movie involving boats or animals.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

Oh, great.

Louis Psihoyos (3:13)

And of course, the first film we did was The Cove.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

But at least these are, you're not, you don't have actors and special effects and boats and animals. It's just a part of the story. It's not like you're like with him, I think what he's meaning like jaws.

Louis Psihoyos (3:27)

Exactly. Because, you know, you have to match shots and all of that, but it has its own set of, you know, trying to keep the horizon level on a boat. You don't want to give the audience seasickness and but, you know, I would add to that, like, don't do a movie where people want to kill you, because when we did The Cove, it was, you know, it was exciting but dangerous work.

Joe Rogan (3:48)

Yes.

Look, that movie changed a lot of people's minds and opened up a lot of people's eyes to the horrors of the way dolphins are slaughtered and, you know, we were just talking about this before the podcast.

I think they are as intelligent as human beings. I just think the difference is they can't change their environment. They don't affect their environment the way we do. They don't build houses. They don't have cars. They don't send emails. So we don't appreciate what they are, but when we look at the complexity of their brains, the fact that their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's, they have this incredibly complex language that we don't even really totally understand. We can peck out.