Louie Psihoyos Details the Devastating Effects of Overfishing | Joe Rogan

I'll tell you an interesting story. I was, when we were making that film, there was a point where we went down to the IWC, the International Whaling Commission meeting down in Chile, and we were trying to get an interview with some of the top people there that run the organization because, you know, whales, dolphins are killing them in mass. And we had the footage at that point, and we were just hoping to get an interview with somebody that worked for the International Whaling Commission. I think it was going from Houston to Santiago. The plane was full. I couldn't even sit next to my partners and my buddies on the film crew. There was one empty seat next to me, and they were waiting for somebody else to come from another flight. And right before the plane door closes, in comes Akira Nakamai. He's the head of overseas fishing for Japan. The head, Bull Goose Looney, and he sits down right next to me. I'm looking at my buddies on the plane thinking, my God, if there's a God, he has a good sense of humor. So he sits down next to me. I didn't want him to find out who I was and then move, so I waited until dinner was served like an hour or two later. And I said, do you have an idea who I am? He said, no. I said, I know who you are. I want to show you a film. And so we had a condensed version of it, probably about 12 or 15 minutes of it at that point. I showed it to him. And I said, how do you reconcile killing these sentient, intelligent animals when you know that their flesh is poisoned? And there's recommendations for pregnant women to eat this flesh on the Japanese Ministry of Health site. And he said, I'm not in charge of food safety. I'm in charge of food security. In other words, he doesn't have to worry about the health consequences. His job is just to provide enough meat on the plate for the Japanese people. And it gives you an insight of how he's thinking. He's in charge of, I think there's 145 million people in Japan in an area about the size of our California. And he said 17% of the land area in Japan is only good enough for growing crops on or living on. We have to turn to the sea for food. And at that point, they were also caught skimming, stealing about 200,000 tons of endangered bluefin tuna. This is over about a 20-year period. When you start talking about big numbers like that, I can't imagine, it's hard to imagine it. But imagine like... How are they stealing this tuna? Well, they have quotas. And they're exceeding their quotas every year, which means that they're taken away from other countries. So it's not just like everybody, every country has their allotment. And once you reach that, you're supposed to go home. But the Japanese kept on getting more. So the Australians actually caught them. They figured out over this 20-year period that they went through the books and saw what they reported and was actually sold at the Tsukiji market, found out they had skimmed 200,000 tons. That's five big train cars, like trains full of endangered tuna. Like not cars, but the whole trains, like 110 car trains, five of them full of... It's weird to just reconcile the idea that tuna is endangered. You think of tuna as being something that you just get at the store. Like tuna. Tuna is a weird one, right? Because it's such a common food. It's in cans. You see it at the sushi place. You know what I'm saying? Like to hear that tuna is endangered, most people are like, is tuna endangered? Like they're hearing this going, is tuna endangered? But when you talk to people that work at the fish market, they'll very clearly tell you that there's a radical difference between the amount of tuna that was available 30, 40 years ago versus now. 10 years ago. I mean, we're down to... Bluefin tuna in particular is down to about 90... It's down to 4% of their historical levels. That's incredible. Yeah. And... And there's no way to stop this. There's no... I mean, it seems like everyone's waiting for someone else to do something and during the meantime everyone's just trying to make money. A lot of money. Yeah. And certainly it's sort of what happens with endangered species, the more rare it becomes, more valuable it becomes. And so there's very little incentive to do the right thing. And you know, but this is happening with all the fish docks. I mean, I probably gave... I run a little organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society and I probably gave out more seafood guides than anybody on the planet. This is a Monterey seafood, you know, got watches. Like what fish are sustainable? And I've seen them, you know, go through the fish docks. So less and less... We started at the big animals and we start to slowly go through all the fish docks until like we're... Like McDonald's used to do halibut. Now it's pollock, which is a very small white fish from Alaska. And now that's being... You know, had a distinction. So we're going through these fish docks. It's that shifting baseline where you're seeing each successive generation adapts to the diminishment of the previous one. That's what's going on. I just stopped handing out seafood guides and now I'm trying to sort of preempt it. So I don't think... The big question is, there's seven and a half billion of us on this planet, soon to be 10. Is there enough wild animals to feed us all? There isn't. You look at the biomass of mammals on the planet. Between livestock and humans, we occupy 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. Four percent are wild mammals. So we can't all be eating wild fish. And think about that. You never go out and say, look, let's get some land food. You say, we've commodified sea animals. That is interesting, right? You don't say land food. That's a really good point. They did at the turn of the century. During the late 1800s, rather, there was market hunting in North America. A lot of the soldiers were done with the Civil War, rather. They were hunting. They hunted all the deer, the bear, the antelope, the buffalo. They got down to incredibly low numbers. Elk to this day, I think, are only in 10% of their original range that they were at in the 1700s. That was all from market hunting. From people just going out and buying meat from these market hunters that have shot these things. They didn't really have refrigeration back then. So it wasn't like they could freeze it and store it. They got down to these incredibly low levels until Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of other people that were conservation minded realized what was happening here. They put a stop to it all and then started enacting programs to reintroduce these animals to the areas where they're extirpated. Now you see historic levels, especially white-tailed deer. There's more white-tailed deer in America now than when Columbus landed. Spins except, but it's also, that's a weird one too because white-tailed deer are almost a farm animal because there's so many of them that exist in Iowa and Kansas and around farm lands. They literally exist in fields and a lot of them live off of GMO crops. It's very strange. I have a buddy of mine, my friend Doug Duran, who has this huge piece of land in Wisconsin. The deer in my area are essentially eating these GMO corn. They're eating Monsanto corn. This is so weird. Yeah, they're wild, but they're also kind of farm animals and they exist in record numbers because they've got so much food to eat. And no predators. Yeah, the only predators they have there, they have some wolves now, very few, and some parts of the driftless area in Wisconsin. I think they have some bears too and coyotes, a lot of coyotes that will kill a lot of the fawns. I lived in Boulder, Colorado for a while and we had a lot of bears and mountain lions come through our yard because we were right at the base of the foothills of the Rockies. And a neighbor, I woke up one morning and the neighbor was looking at his minivan and there's a big dent in the side. And he was trying to figure out how to get a dent because it was parked here all night. And he found an antler in the bushes. And we thought, well, how do, and then the question is how does a deer run into it? And then in the paper the next day, there was a picture of a mountain lion out of a house down the block sitting on a hot tub cover. This is in the winter, holding a deer with one, you know, in his mouth with one antler. Oh, so it attacked it and slammed it into, oh Jesus Christ. I lost a dog in Boulder to a mountain lion. Wow. Yeah. I had a little dog who was part American Eskimo and part Pomeranian, a mountain lion got it. The mountain lion, I think, got our cat. Yeah, they'll get everything up there, man. If it's not them, it's a fox. You know, there's a lot of foxes up there to get things, but God, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's gorgeous. Boulder's incredible, incredible place. And you'll be driving down the road and you see it's weird. Like the deer in Boulder know that they're safe. So like we were, we were looking at this house in Boulder and we opened up the door to the backyard and there was this enormous deer just standing there staring at us. And my wife thought it was fake. I go, no, that's a real deer. She's like, what? And then it just turns its head and starts moving around because it wasn't even remotely freaked out that there were people, a stone's throw away from it. They're just so used to being around people. It's weird. Yeah, the neighbor, I remember the neighbor, where I was planting rose bushes on the front of their property and all proud. And then I remember I was driving home like later on that day and there's a deer coming through the, snipping the tops of the roses. Oh, they love it. It's going like a salad bar. Yeah. Many people have turned on deer because of the loss of their gardens. The roses especially, they love roses. Wow. Is there anybody that has ever come up with any sort of a plan to do what they did for wild animals in North America? You can't regulate it the way you can wild animals because in wild animals, if they have a particular area, you could make it so people can't go in that area. But the ocean is so enormous. Has anybody come up with some sort of a repopulation plan? Sure. Sure. E.O. Wilson, I'm on the advisory board of his group. It's called the Half Life Project. You know who E.O. Wilson is? No. Okay. E.O. Wilson is a Harvard professor, has two pillars for his work in biology. He wrote the book on biodiversity. He's considered the father of modern biodiversity. He's about getting right around 90 years old now. But looking at, he would do things like go to an island and pretty much exterminate everything on it and then try to figure out, well, you know, at what rate do the animals come back and what's sustainable? And he's figured out that to save 85% of the wild animals on the planet, you have to put aside half of it for them. Half of the planet. Half the planet. Yeah. So the ocean, you would have to literally make half the ocean where people couldn't travel in it? Not travel in it, just not exploit it. No fishing. Yeah, no fishing. And so Sylvia Earle is working on hot spots. You know, these, they're called, I think, what she calls it, it's like blue zones where you have a lot of biodiversity, you know, try to keep those away from fishing exploitation. How do they do that though? Like how, I mean, you would have to get everybody on board, right? Yeah, well, the high seas are, you know, that's tough, right? Although the Japanese were fishing in a, you know, in an international marine sanctuary for decades, you know, so you have to, you know, it's really tough when you have organizations that really don't have any teeth to it. The attitude that he has, that pragmatic attitude about feeding the population, you almost can sympathize with him, right? 100 plus million people in this tiny place the size of California and just pulling mostly fish out of the ocean. I mean, it's a crazy place to be in terms of his position. Yeah, I mean, I don't envy it at all. But you know, what do you do? You don't slaughter dolphins, that's what you do. Yeah, well, we're endangered species or, I mean, I don't know what's going on. But, you know, what's sustainable anymore? Is it possible to me, I know they've done this in some places outside of Hawaii where they've bred animals, fish rather, like sushi fish, like hamachi, and they've had these pens set up. And then a lot of times a storm will come by, like a huge storm, and they break these pens and then those fish get wild, then people start catching them. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, like salmon, like, well, you know. They were trying to, in Japan, when we were doing the cove, we went to a university where they were breeding the first bluefin tuna. These are from eggs, you know, so this is what they do at some places where they catch them and then they put them in these pens and they fatten them up. These were making bluefin from scratch, basically, from eggs. And really hard to do, really skittish. And when I went there, they were shoveling, this is back when I ate fish, they were shoveling these mackerels, like what I would feed my family with, like a family of four, they were shoveling it to the tuna. And I said, hold on a minute, like, how many, how much, you know, mackerel does it take to make a pound of tuna? They said, oh, about seven, up until about 150 pounds, and after that it takes 14 pounds. So seven pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm-raised fish. I mean, this is like going to the bank and, you know, because you want to crisp a $5 bill and say, let me, you know, give me a, you know, here's a couple, couple 20s. Wow. But that's, you know, if you look at, you know, what are they feeding, you know, a lot of these fish are feeding them, you know, lots of farm animals and fish, wild fish. And I was just reading this morning, Los Angeles magazine that, and the cover it says, you know, fish, fish are fucked. And it has a, and it talks about like the fish that are raised and I don't know the data behind it, but they're, they have eight times more pollutants in it than wild fish. I don't know if it's what they're feeding or maybe because they're sitting in a, they're stationary. I think that's a big part of the problem. Yeah. Yeah. And apparently they don't taste as well. When we were in Hawaii recently, we went scuba diving and, you know, snorkeling. So you jump off the boat and you're swimming around. And you know, what's really fucking weird about that is how few fish there are. Like when you're under there, you're like, you expect you're going to dunk your head under water with those goggles on. You're going to see all this wildlife, all these fish swimming around the snows. Not much. Yeah. You don't see much. Yeah. There was a, about 10 years ago, I was down in the Caribbean, a friend was getting married and I took his daughter out to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was her first time snorkeling. And we were in an area that I'd been to about 20 years before and there was nothing. There was nothing there. It was just like a desert. Yeah. And then I heard her screaming through a snorkel and I thought, what's wrong? And she was screaming because she saw a single orange tang. That was the only life form we saw there where I used to see clouds of schools of these, you know, orange and blue tang. Now there was nothing. And I thought, my God, she thinks that that's beautiful. And it is, it's just, you know, the single fish. But, you know, again, a shifting baseline, the generation before when I was there, it was probably looked like the land before time. These places I went to with Clark, you know, Raja Anpat where you'd see, you know, if you go to the Caribbean, you might see 30 fish on a different species of fish on a dive and Raja Anpat, you'd see 300 and it was just miraculous. And when you're taking pictures, you actually see more detail with the picture than you can with your, your, your, I can't comprehend it all. So it's only when you get back and you see these reefs that we've, you know, we lit like jewel boxes, you see how much life that there is there, but there was just unbelievable, stunning amounts of wildlife, but that's going on all over the world and the Great Barrier Reef, you know, we lost over half the Great Barrier Reef in the last two years. It was never that good anyway. You know, 15 years ago, you know, after being to these, some of the best preserved places in the world that had been to Clark, we looked at the Great Barrier Reef and we'd be like, Oh my God, this is not that great. And now they've already, then they've lost half again. So, I mean, if you're just putting your head in the water for the first time and you come from, you know, Iowa, Wisconsin, or Boulder, that looks pretty good. But if you knew what came before that, you're, you're seeing this, this, you know, assault against, you know, nature going on.