Louie Psihoyos Shares a Harrowing Tale of Swimming with Sharks

The subject of dolphins has been, I mean it was a huge bit on my 2016 Netflix special about an experience that I had when I was in Hawaii high as fuck on edibles and we ran into this patch of wild dolphins and they were playing with us. They were playing with us and we were yelling like yay and they would jump out of the water and do flips for you. They were putting on a show. And I remember having this thought like holy shit they're playing with us. These are these wild creatures and they're having fun with us and then I started doing all this research on dolphins and dolphin communication. I became obsessed with dolphins because this one, I mean I had been fascinated by them before but I became truly obsessed and this was, this experience was more than 10 years ago. Since then I've just been overwhelmed and also massively disheartened by just, you know, by films like yours and by seeing SeaWorld and by seeing what was going on in Marine Land with my friend Phil. I've had him on a bunch of times to talk about his lawsuits. I mean they have done everything they can to try to silence that guy and stop him from revealing all the horrors of that place. But slowly but surely he's had a massive impact on that place's business to the point where they're trying to just get him to shut up and he won't. He won't. I mean he was on the inside. He was a trainer. And all that stuff, so for me to be able to talk to someone like you, it's, you know, I love the fact that we can get that out there. Well I appreciate it. Yeah. I mean swimming with dolphins in the wild, there was a trigger to memory over in the Rangoros with our team and there was three groups of resident dolphins. So they're hanging out there all the time. You get to recognize them. And we were playing with them and the more you play with them, the more you can spin around, the more excited they get. Yeah. And they could only do it for so long. And I remember once that we were doing it and we finally, we had scooters and we thought, well, the more, so a dolphin looks at you and you can't. You look like you're like in a wheelchair. Not even. Yeah, right. A wheelchair can get around pretty good. But you know, in the water we just look like, you know, we're just pitiful. Yeah. And so they can only be entertained so long. But the scooters, we figured we could engage them a lot longer. And then all of a sudden this group just took off and there was sort of, you're let down because you're high from the experience of being with them in the wild. And they took off and we saw that there was about an 18 foot long hammerhead and they were taking turns ramming it away from us. Wow. Yeah. So it was like, not only were they playing with us, they were protecting us. Wow. That must have been wild though seeing an 18 foot long hammerhead. Holy shit. Yeah. Because they disappeared into the blue and then we could see them ramming the signal. The dolphins were big. I mean, they're not quite as long as this table, but they're, you know, they're probably three to 500 pounds and they're maybe seven feet long and they look tiny next to the shark. Wow. That's wild. That is wild. Yeah. Occasionally you see they'll do drone footage off of the coast of Malibu and you see like a great white swimming around there, just a few hundred yards away from surfers. Oh man, my son does that with drones. He goes out in his kayak and films them. My friend Peter, Peter Atia, he's a, he's done a bunch of like crazy endurance things. And one of the things he did, he swam, he swam to all of the islands in Hawaii and to prepare for this, he had to do a lot of swimming. He lives in San Diego and swimming in the coast out there and he was swimming literally. What was it? What do you say? Like a couple of days after that guy got bit in half. Oh my God. Yeah. I think it was just, you know, he wasn't scared. I think might've freaked out, but it was, it was within a few days of, uh, one of the guys who got bit in half down in San Diego. When did this happen? The San Diego incident. I want to say it was 10 years ago, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years ago. And then there was one in Santa Barbara that happened about four years ago or four or five years ago. You know, occasionally they slip up. Think a person's a seal or something, you know? Most of the time when I've, I've, I've dealt with a lot of sharks before that you can only, you usually only get them around you if you're feeding them and that's feels so horrible. It's just so unnatural. I won't do it anymore, but um, it's weird, right? Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's just not, I couldn't be around it. There's some friends of mine that were, were feeding it, you know, feet, they're on a feed and I was, I was about, I don't know, maybe 50 yards away. And I thought I just don't want to be part of it. And I was just filming on the reef and these silver tips came over and, um, I don't know if they're excited by it. I was, I had a camera with the strobes on it, but they just came in, they were like attacking me and I had a rebreather. I died with a rebreather so you can scream. So I started screaming as loud as I could through this thing, but I was pushing, pushing them off and they were like working together. You can see it was like pack, you know, like when we go this way, so he had to like, I had these, these lights with these like octopus with four lights on it and I could push them away. But then, uh, one of the guys that we had brought over a tuna head and lured him away, but they were just, uh, it was because they were excited by, you know, the, the feeding over there. I don't even want to be in the water these days when people are feeding sharks because it's no joke when you're under the water, it's not, you're, it's not like you just run to run up a tree. There's no place to go. There's nowhere to go. You feel helpless and that's their natural environment and that's what they're there for. They're there to clean up, you know, anything that's weak, anything that's fucked up, anything, you know, any seal that gets caught slipping. They're there for population control. I mean, there's a really powerful video off of the, um, I'm sure you've probably seen enough of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco where a bunch of tourists are there and boom, this great white snatches a seal right in front of everybody and just, just thunderous explosion of blood and foam in the water and like, whoa. Yeah, it's a couple miles from where I live. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're magic. That's a, that's a crazy beast. I'm supposed to, somebody just invited me today to go out and be with great whites, not diving, just, uh, just to watch. Just to watch. There's a crazy video from, I think it was the Cape, somewhere around the Cape Cod where there was like a 20 foot one next to a boat and, uh, these guys, uh, were, were in this boat and this, uh, this great white just swims right up next to them and they start fucking screaming and freaking out. And it's enormous. It's like 20 feet long. The only, the only time, like if you don't feed them, they're usually fairly, if you, if you have, if you're feeding them or if you're spear hunting, then they'll come near you. They're dangerous for spear hunters, right? Yeah. Record breaking year for sharks off Cape Cod. Yeah. Apparently there's a lot of them out there now. What do you think that is that because of a large number of Marine mammals or drones? We can actually see them now. I think