The Gruesome Experience That Made Louie Psihoyos a Vegan

Yeah, I mean there's a great Tony Sabre, the futurist, he shows a picture of the 1900 Easter Parade in New York City and it's all horses. Looking down from a building, I don't know if you find it Jamie, 1905 or 1900 Easter Parade and it's like there's one car and then 13 years later it's like find the horse. Wow. And these transitions they take, you know, about 10, 12 years, you know, 12 years ago we were punching the number two key on our flip phone six times to text to capital C. And I think we're, you know, we're going to be doing the same thing with, you know, with the transition with food. I think it's going to be going that way. Do you think that they're going to be, do you have hope for all this lab created meat? What do you think about, I mean I know there's some process that I don't totally understand where they're able to make actual biological like bison meat, cow meat. I'm doing a film series right now called Food 2.0 and I had dinner on Saturday night, two nights ago with Uma, the guy that founded Memphis Meats. And, you know, I have the same sort of ickiness about, you know, going that direction but he showed me these pictures on his flip, on his phone of this chicken breast that he's making. And, you know, I stopped eating meat about ten years ago but I thought it didn't look bad. You know, it looked, he had like, it chopped, you know, so that it was grilled and it thought, you know, I have this sort of revulsion against it myself because I've, you know, got myself off of it but I looked at that and I thought, you know what, that looks really edible. It looks good. You know, somebody that could eat meat, you know, that would be appetizing. Yeah, it seems like the science, it once, whatever it is, right, it's tissue and whatever that tissue is, it's composed of a bunch of different natural ingredients, right? Whatever creates a turkey breast. It seems like it's just a matter of innovation and technology improving to the point where they could recreate that. Yeah, no, the question is, you know, is that, you know, is that better for you than, you know, the whole foods, plant based diet or? That's the real question, right? Because that's where things get convoluted. Like, what is healthy versus what is ethical versus what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing morally? Yeah, you know, the way, you know, I stopped eating, you know, meat about 1986. I went to, I was doing a story for Fortune Magazine on the biggest independently owned cattle ranches in America and there's one that was so big in Oklahoma they had their own slaughterhouse and they supposed to, you know, they killed the animal with this captive bolt to the brain. It's supposed to happen instantly but there was one animal that came around and it was still alive and it was at that point it was hanging upside down and its flesh and its hide was stripped off and it's looking at me with its eye and it's following my eye as its head. Its hide was stripped off and it was still alive? Yeah, and it's, as it's turning around it was turning its head and it still held my eye and I thought the son of a bitch is alive and I'm part of this so I stopped eating meat shortly after that and so I thought well I have to eat something, right? I have to eat an animal product because, you know, you're going to shrivel up and die if you don't and then so I became a pescatarian and that's all I ate for animal protein. Well, you know, milk and dairy but I didn't eat anything, I limited myself to things that didn't walk, that didn't walk so fish was like fair territory for me and then when we made the cove there's a scene in it where we take a sample of hair from the deputy minister of fisheries there and we tested for mercury and when we were, you know, while I was out at the lab I thought well I'll get mine tested too because I was, I ate a lot of fish, I loved it. My son's still a professional fisherman and I had a freezer full of fish all the time stocked up of, you know, fresh ocean, well not fresh but frozen ocean fish and I had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner all the time and then when, you know, we got his labs back, his sample back it was eight times higher than was high which is like, you know, you don't want any mercury in your body, mercury is the most toxic non-radi-wac development in the world and my levels were 44 times higher. Jesus. Were you experiencing any physical effects of that? Yes, I was having trouble with my short-term memory, I had an ache in my shoulder that was there for probably decades and I, you know, I tried to get it massaged out and then if you start looking through the, you know, the problems with mercury, you notice that there's a whole litany of things that it causes depending on how bad you have it but my doctor said it's the worst he'd ever seen in Colorado so I had to get off of it and then, you know, this is, so we're here in LA for the Academy Awards and I met my first vegan and I said, what do you eat? And she goes, everything else, you know, all protein originates with plants and that was how I got started and it took, you know, I thought, okay, well, mercury has a half-life in your body of about 70 to 90 days and so it took me about two years to get it down and I thought, well, I'll just try a little. Two years to get it down? Why did it take so long? Because it has a half-life in your body of 70 to 90 days so 44 goes to 22. Oh, 90 to 180 so. Yeah, so I thought, okay, then I'll start eating a little bit of fish and then I had a tester right away and I jacked back up and I thought, okay, I can't be testing. So all fish is poison? All big fish is poison for sure. Big fish like tuna. Yeah, tuna, swordfish, marlin. So what is the recommendations? They tell you you're not supposed to eat it more than a couple times a week or something like that but it seems like if it's got a half-life of a. I don't trust any of that. I mean, like, I mean, I can't mess with it. I mean, if you, when I was in Japan, I went to Minamata where they had the, they call it Minamata disease but it's not a disease. It's poison. There was a company that was intentionally polluting the bay where there's a lot of fishermen and the kids of course got, well, the cats got affected first because people give the fish to the cats and the cats would have, they're called dancing cat disease. You know, you heard the expression, mad as a hatter. That's because they had the felts from 100 years, 150 years ago, they used to cure the felt, the beaver felt on top hats but they would use the mercury and the hatters would go mad. In Minamata, the cats got affected and the kids and then, you know, the people, a couple hundred thousand people got affected and at least remember this is 1950s, remote villages and an American researcher went there and saw that everybody looked weird and said something's going on here and he found out that they're dumping, you know, mercury into the bay. And I saw, I visited a doctor there that studied Minamata disease. He was the guy that was in charge of figuring out compensation for what they owe people and he showed me these brains of, you know, they sliced open and it looked like Swiss cheese, we're talking about the convolutions of the brain and how dolphins have more of them, same thing with people but, you know, and the ones, the slices, they look like Swiss cheese with the holes that the mercury is eating up in the brain. And so you don't want, you know, once you see that, you don't want that in your body. So I had to get off fish and become a vegan, not by for ethical reasons, but because of, I just couldn't eat it, just for health reasons. But I'm doing just fine. How fucking crazy is that, that most fish is poison. Like that is, that is such a crazy thing to think that the ocean is so fucked up that most of the food you pull out of the ocean is a mess. Well, I mean, most of the fish that we're eating, I think 54% is farm raised. Again, I just read it this morning in Los Angeles magazine. But that's worse, right? It's worse, yeah. And, you know, the ecological damage it's doing is crazy, the health consequences is crazy. So the question is then, what do we eat? What about mollusks? So one of the things that someone told me that was, actually someone who was a vegan told me about mollusks, they said you can make an ethical argument that mollusks are actually less complicated life forms than even plants. They don't have the same nerve endings, they don't really move, they open and shut, and they're a viable form of animal protein that is just so primitive. I heard that too. Yeah. They're just not, we think of them as life forms, but so is broccoli, that's a life form as well. But there's actually more evidence that plants are intelligent than there is that mollusks are, mollusks are an incredibly ancient life form. But then again, don't you get some sort of mercury poisoning from them as well? Well, they're on the bottom, right, usually, and they're filtering, so you're getting whatever poison, whatever toxins there are. I'm not going to say that mollusks are poison, I just wouldn't eat it. I'm going a completely different direction, but I've heard that before, that mollusks are- You can farm them too, right? Mm-hmm, you can. Yeah. I mean, if we really can break down that they're even more primitive, but yet more nutritious. God, you know, I did a story in Polynesia on oysters, and they have the big oysters that they get put through for pearls. And they just eat the muscle that holds all the organs and stuff on, you know, when I said, oh, in America, we eat the whole oyster, they're like, what? Because the muscle tastes like fish flesh. It's actually pretty good. But the idea that we're eating all those other filtered organs and stuff, I just don't know. I don't- But you don't know, you don't know. I don't know. You don't know.