Ο σκηνοθέτης, φωτογράφος και βραβευμένος με Όσκαρ για το ντοκιμαντέρ του "The Cove" Louie Psihoyos, μιλάει στο TEDxAthens για την πανδημία, τα ζώα, τη κλιματική αλλαγή και την plant-based διαφτροφή και πώς όλα αυτά συνδέονται μεταξύ τους. Μιλάμε επίσης για το "Game Changers" στο Netflix, τα Projection Events (και σε παγκόσμια αποκλειστικότητα μια είδηση που δεν μοιράστηκε ούτε στο podcast του Joe Rogan) και για την επόμενη ταινία του, "Act Like a Holy Man", με τον Δαλάι Λάμα και τον Desmond Tutu. Ο Louie μας εμπνέει να προβληματιστούμε για το μέλλον του πλανήτη μας μέσα από τις ταινίες του και να σκεφτούμε λίγο διαφορετικά.
Βρείτε τον Louie και στηρίξτε το έργο του στο OPSociety.org
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Produced & Hosted by: TEDxAthens
Track Title: Time Again
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[Tina] Louie, I would like to welcome you to our podcast, we were very excited the whole week
[Dena] We are excited. We were really stressed and excited
[Tina] and on behalf of the entire TEDxAthens team, and we are a lot of people, we would like to thank you for this honor.
[Louie] Oh, thank you for letting me join you.
[Dena] And just like you showed us, right now, you’re live from Sausalito, California. Being from Sacramento, I really miss the Bay Area. So I'm really jealous you're there and we're all jealous here.
[Louie] Ah, well I’m jealous you're there!
[Dena] Well, before we dive into your work and go deeper into everything that you're doing right now, we would like to ask you, how are you during this pandemic? How has 2020 impacted you? And are there any insights that you'd like to share?
[Louie] Oh, boy. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the pandemic has actually been in some ways I think it's been really helpful to the entire world to realize that we're all connected, we're all together, you know, I think if you're at a certain amount of wealth, if you're in a certain region, you could always say, well, it's, you know, sad about them, but I'm OK. Now we realize that we're all connected. And that's one of the messages we've been trying to do with our films for, you know, for the past 15 years is to show that there's a connection to everything.
You can’t, you know, you can't have, everything that we do has an impact. And this is, you know, one thing that we're trying to do with another, we can talk about it later but with our with a couple of films that where we're going to have to show the relationship with the pandemic, the current pandemic to animals. You know, it's the animal production for human consumption is responsible for 75 percent of these zoonotic diseases, you know, like, you know, the Spanish flu, the swine flu, the bird flu, the coronavirus, you know, back in oh, God you know, when we did a film called Racing Extinction, we went to Gwangju where the first SARS epidemic came out and, you know, there's the scene of that movie where we're going through the market. These are wildlife markets. It's you know, from a westerner's point of view, it's well, any point of view really is pretty horrendous. They have animals from you know, they're selling dogs, cats, pigs, bats, rats.
You know, everything you can imagine under the sun is for sale there. And of course, that's what gets us into trouble when we take an animal out of the wild like a bat and consume it. You're bringing with it a whole host of what they call, you know, these zoonotic diseases where they have a chance to spill over the virus to other animals that are in the market because you have them bleeding and defecating and urinating to cages on top of each other. I've seen this and it's it's profoundly just from a humanitarian standpoint, it's gut wrenching. But now we see the ramifications of that. You know, we can we can get right into this. You know, there's a there's something in Chinese culture now. This is not Chinese bashing, as you'll see, as you know, in another minute, there's something in Chinese culture called ZHEGNBO. And it's essentially it means that when you eat an animal, you're taking from it the spirit of that animal or the qualities that that animal has. So the reason that bats are in the market and Wuhan or other places like that is because there's a belief in Chinese culture that you're getting the qualities of that animal. So a bat is being consumed or the bat feces, you can Google it there, actually eat bat shit. You see right here in California, you can go to a Chinese traditional market, you know, for medicine and buy bat dung, bat poop.
And you consume it like in a tea and it could be full of the virus. I've actually done it myself. I've not eaten it, but I've actually bought it just to prove that it can be done. So right here in the Bay Area of San Francisco, you can go because there's this batshit belief that if you literally eat the quality of that animal. So the reason that the the bats are in the markets in China is because there's a belief that if a human eats them or their bat poop, it's going to give you the qualities of a bat so you can see at night or if you have glaucoma, so animals, have bats have this extraordinary vision, so there's a belief that you'll have that. Oh, that sounds crazy, right? But I mean, if you look at our work, there's also this, I think, a batshit belief that we need any animal to be strong and healthy.
You know, like I said, the eating of animals across the board has, you know, the the bird flu that was, you know, caused by the Spanish flu and the, you know, the early part of the last century, you know, a million people died from a swine flu, just a decade back.
I mean, the list is long and this one is just a little bit more frightening. It's been a little bit more pervasive. But you know these pandemics are not unusual, and I've been talking to epidemiologists, they said this is just the beginning. You know, they've been you know, our President Trump said nobody could see this coming. And it's like, well, everybody I've been talking to, they could see it coming! They’re out there right now tamping down these diseases that are coming out of the slaughterhouses or the so for so-called CFOs, the confined feeding operations, they're all there, you know, all around, I'm sure they're all over Greece, they’re all over Europe. They're certainly all over America. And these are places I've been to. I'm there where you can find tens of thousands of birds like, you know, turkeys or ducks or chickens in one big long room, and you go into these rooms and the smell is like it's overwhelming the smell of the ammonia from the urine. And these animals live like that. And they have to give them, you know, all sorts of, you know, drugs to keep them from, you know, having this mass killing and occasionally one gets away. You know, you have one reason that they're in these confined feeding operations as they you know, they can't be in the wild because if they go out to like, say, a pond, they're going to mix with ducks and ducks, carry the flu it's the bird flu.
And so you have this this awful Catch 22 situation where we think we need animals to eat and if we raise them in a humane way, it's not economic. And then when you do raise them the way that, you know, it becomes industrial and cost effective, you create these diseases. It's just, it's just math. It's just physics. And you can see that what we're seeing now, like with the virus, where it just keeps on mutating and spreading, that, you know, this is the nature of nature is that is just tries to live like the rest of us, except that you have something that's detrimental to human existence or animal welfare. It starts to impact everybody. And so that's, you know, I guess to bring it around to that what you were just talking about it's been it's been good because without it, we don't sound so crazy anymore because, you know, we could talk about the eventuality where, you know, climate change is going to affect us or, you know, there could be a pandemic that will affect everybody. And that’s, you sound like a crazy person until it actually happens.
[Tina] Yeah, so we exploit nature, we farm animals, we pollute the oceans, we have lost our connection with planet Earth, is it possible to gain it back before it's too late, you think?
[Louie] I think so. I mean, and the one thing that gives me hope is, is film. You know, film is the most powerful weapon in the world that we have for social change. You know, when we first did The Cove, you know, if a lot of people probably haven't seen it, the Cold War was the first documentary that we did. It was a film about, on the surface, it looks like it's about dolphin hunting in Japan at the time, they're killing about 23.000 dolphins and porpoises every year for human consumption, even though dolphins have some of the highest levels of mercury.
Well, they do have the highest levels of mercury of any animal in the world, even higher than, you know, the highest fish. But and in Japan, they're allowed to sell them because they're not fish. There's really strict rules on how much mercury can be in a fish. But, of course, the dolphin and of course, this is not a fish, it's a mammal. So it squeaks by. A dolphin can have anywhere from five to 5000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese law if it was a fish. But it's not so but when we did that film, like I said, 23000 dolphins and porpoises are killed every year in Japan for human consumption. But most of them, a lot of them being given away to schoolchildren's for school lunch programs were in Japan you have to eat everything on the plate. So they were being force fed poison. Now, that stopped because the film has stopped. And I think last one of the like two years ago, they killed only six hundred and ten, still a lot, but still like over a 93 percent drop and in dolphin deaths because of the activism around that film. So films are powerful. And you know what we did our second film, Racing Extinction.
You know, that film is about species extinction, you know, trying to alert the world that there's something, a disaster going on right now, a human caused disaster called the Anthropocene, the age of man where we're on track to lose. You know, some people say a million species by the end of the century or some people say half of all species by the end of the century. And that's the spike and the biggest cause of that is the eating of animals for human consumption, the sort of crazy Jinboo that we have in all over the world that we need to eat animals. And of course, you know what? You know, we did a film called Game Changers that we could also talk about. But it's a you know, because that tells about plant based superathletes. And we wanted to prove that. Listen, you know, one of the world's strongest man, Patrick, Baboumian carried more weight than anybody in human history is plant based. You know, Scott Djuric, the most accomplished ultra runner in the world, you know, runs and wins races over 100 miles.
He ran 165 miles in a single day. I think the only person to beat him that ran more was a Greek. Anyway, that's another that's another story.
[Dena] Not surprising.
[Louie] So, I mean, and we followed Scott Jurek when he was running the Appalachian Trail, about a 2200 mile trail in America basically goes from, you know, the north, the northeast of America to the, you know, the southeast. And he did it in 46 days. It was a world record at the time. It was 46 days. And he did it like two marathons a day with over 11000 feet of. You know, elevation gain and descent every day, so it's almost going up to miles and down two miles every day and doing two marathons a day on a plant based diet. So one of the strongest guys in the world, plant based, one of the most enduring athletes, Scott Gerke, on a plant based diet. And of course, there's a scene in the Game Changers where, you know, guys are thinking, well if want to be having a lot of sex I need to be eating meat. And we proved, well we didn’t prove that, we did an experiment where we we showed there's this device that you can put on the male genitalia and it's basically measures nocturnal erections. How many basically hard on a a guy can have during the night and the size and duration of those erections. And this device was designed, it's called a “rigiscan”, and it was designed for men that have erectile dysfunction and which is really a big problem in America.
And it's really connected to your heart. It is one of the smallest arteries in your body, in a man's body, it goes to the the male penis. And so they would measure it's basically a device where you have a you have a ring that goes around the base of a man's penis and one at the head and it measures the circumference. And so, like I said, the duration of an erection, how hard it is. And they could determine if a man's erectile dysfunction is related to psychology, his you know, or is it physical? And it's really important because at night a man will have about six or seven nocturnal erections that are just it's not connected to wet dreams. It's not it's not connected to sexuality. Is just the body telling, you know, the brain that you need to put blood into a very important organ. So what we did was we took collegiate students and we give them a plant based meal before they went off the bed. And we put this device on. Well, they put this device on them it's computer that attaches to your leg and that these two rings, they said they go to the genitalia.
And what we found was that on average, so that within the following evening we gave them a meat based meal and did a and did the test. And on average, their erections of a plant based meal were 350 percent longer duration erection and about ten point four percent harder erection. So this myth that we have the Jinboo crazy batshit belief that we need to have animals to to be strong, have endurance and have virility is just insane. And it's getting us in this position where we have pandemics that are, you know, crushing the world's economy, putting people out in the streets that, you know, because of the economy and disrupting everything that we like about life, which is being together now. We have to be socially distanced in everything we do. It's so in a way, yes, the pandemic has been really good. It's been a really good lesson. If we could teach the world to draw the connection, you know, through documentaries, through podcasts like this, talks like this so that there's a relationship between what we're doing to the wild and what we're doing to ourselves, this is a self-inflicted pandemic.
[Dena] So I'm curious because I'm not vegan, Tina is and I'm trying to examine my internal resistance to all this information. And I'm trying to understand myself. I know the connection, right, I'm aware of the problem. I'm aware of what's happening. And I'm starting to get into this phase where I'm trying to make that jump. And, you know, I'm trying to examine why am I resisting, what's happening? Because if I'm resisting that way, there’s more people like me that are aware they're making the connection. So what's going on here? I don't know if you have any insights on that.
[Louie] We've got a lot of insights. We did a white well, we didn't do we there's a white paper that was written about this exact same problem, because we've known for decades that a whole foods plant based diet is healthier for human beings. We know that, you know, people come at this issue from different aspects. You know, probably the most vocal on the issue are are the vegans who are doing it for animal rights. You know that they're compassionate. They care about other species and those are very vocal, but, you know, most people don't operate like that, the data shows that about 93 percent of the population doesn't care. They think, because like yourself, they believe that to be big and strong, have, you know, endurance, all these things that you have to have it. And plus, it's very it's cultural. It's emotional. Your mother was giving you animals. Your grandmother was giving you animals. You have a very strong emotional connection.
I did a story back when I was a photographer. I did a story on the sense of smell, I was one of the first photographers that National Geographic hired in over a decade. And what I learned about smell, what we think about when you taste something, when you think of taste, you think, oh, you put in your mouth and that really tastes good. But it's really your nose. Your nose is the olfactory bulb is at the base of your brain is hardwired onto your brain. And so it has a very strong emotional connection So if you smell something, it instantly brings you back to your grandmother baking bread in the kitchen and those memories. So it has a very strong emotional attachment. So everything that you've been doing since you were a baby is connected to food in your heart.
You know, like that olfactory bulb. Like I said, it's hardwired into the brain. So you have to start disassociating. OK, so to your point, about seven percent of the population is willing to hear these messages about animal rights and they'll make an emotional decision based on that. And then they can’t understand why, you know, the rest of the world doesn't see that because the rest of the world isn't as connected to the empathy of other creatures.
And then a slightly about the same amount of people, seven or eight percent, will start to change for the environment. You know, like my girlfriend, she's not a you know, she's a vegan, not because she cares about animals. She does it because, like she knows it's better for the for for the environment to get to people that might be hearing this for the first time. It might be kind of strange. Why how could possibly the eating of animals affect the environment? Well, it's the the raising of animals for human consumption is the biggest cause of species extinction. Like what we're talking about losing half the species on the planet by the end of the century. We're talking about because we're raising animals, we're going into the wild and we're having to mow down, you know, rainforests and pastureland, not pastureland, but like meadows and to raise food for animals that were in turn going to eat. It's the biggest raising of animals is the biggest cause of water pollution, the biggest cause of one of the biggest things that you can. Well, fourteen and a half percent of climate change is related to, you know, animal production. You know, the list goes on and you think, well, I'm just one person. How big a deal is that? While the average person eats about 10000 animals in their lifetime in America, slightly higher in the UK, it's about 2400. It's about 400-1000 gallons more of a freshwater that need to be used if you're eating animals every year about about 9000 square feet of wild area, that needs to be turned over to raising pastureland.
So, you know, it's the biggest cause of ocean dead zones there’s 800 dead zones documented around the world. And that's because of the runoff from pasture, from fertilizers and pesticides that are, you know, killing the reefs we've lost. And again, a lot of these things I'm talking about are there's multiple it's not just one thing, but certainly, animal production is the biggest, you know, it's the biggest driver of extinction, by far the biggest driver of fresh water pollution, you know, and about 85 percent of the diseases that we have are caused by putting animals in your body. You can reverse heart disease, prostate cancer, early stage prostate cancer, early stage breast cancer.
And now it turns out that might be able to reverse Alzheimer's. When we did, the Game Changers this is a doctor, Dr. Dean Ornish, about 43 years ago, he was working with a doctor who was the really the doctor who popularized bypass surgery and Dean was an intern working for this doctor down in Texas, and they would snip off a, you know, a vein from a leg and put it in the heart, they would bypass the clot that's why it's called bypass surgery.
And that it's, you know, a year later, you know, the same patient would come back and they do another bypass, you know, so they have like quadruple bypass surgeries. So and he says they're just bypassing the problem and at the time, there were studies where they had you know, you can give by, you know, you know, giving the you know, what they call the standard American diet with the acronym SAD to an animal. You can give it you can give it heart disease. And they were proving with animal studies that you could actually reverse heart disease on an animal. And Dean was like asking the very simple question, well, why can't you do that with people? And so back then, it was the thinking was that you had to, the only way to reverse heart disease was to give people a very powerful drug. You know, the statins or or do this bypass surgery and anything else was heretical.
And so he did these, you know, clinical trials and he proved that you could reverse heart disease with a, you know, a lifestyle medicine is called. And he didn't just use, you know, whole foods plant based diet, also used exercise and social support. We're social creatures. When when you're together, when you're doing something for other people, we can talk about that later, it makes you feel good. It gives you joy because your happiness, there's really good evidence now that when you do things for others, it changes your blood, it extends your telomeres into your chromosomes, helps you live longer.
You know, Elizabeth Blackwell won the Nobel Prize for a discovery of telomerase. It's the enzyme that basically it's the the enzyme that is on the end cap of your DNA and it's been likened to the shoelaces that you have and the plastic incap start to deteriorate like telomerase. The telomeres get shorter so your life gets shorter and those get extended with the whole foods plant based diet to get repaired.
And it does the opposite when you eat animals, there's a you know, and there's the blue zones. You know, there's five known blue zones in the world, places where people live the longest without chronic disease.
And Ikaria, Greece yes. Yeah, it's it's called the, you know, the island where people forget to die. Yes. You know, and they go to these five known blue zones in the world and people are living, you know, on average 10 years longer than the rest of us. And they're healthy.
There's one blue zone in America in Loma Linda, it's about 70 miles east of L.A. and about half the population is as vegetarian because they're Seventh Day Adventists. And you know where, you know, in the Bible, in Genesis, where God is supposed to said, let the fruit of thy trees be thy meat they take it literally. And so Loma Linda, they have this is interesting, I call it the tale of Two Cities. You have Interstate 10 going from east to west in America right and it ends in Los Angeles. You know, on the on the West Coast, 70 miles east of it is Loma Linda. On the south side is Loma Linda on the north side of San Bernardino. On one side of the highway, you have one of the healthiest populations like Icaria in the world in Loma Linda, across the just across the road, you know you know, probably about 40 steps away is San Bernardino. And you have one of the unhealthiest populations in the state of California. What's the difference? Well, you have this religious cult well I don’t want to call them a cult, all these people that you know that are taking the Bible very literally and they're healthy. And what's the difference in San Bernardino, if you want to get fast food, you have to go to Santa San Bernardino. They don't have all the window. They have the equivalent of, you know, Whole Foods, the big grocery store at the store there at Loma Linda. They don't sell meat.
[Dena] You can't get meat.
[Louie] It's called the Loma Linda Market. It's like a Whole Foods.
I don't know what I can't use because we're talking to hopefully an international audience, but it's a big grocery store. The biggest grocery store in town doesn't sell meat. They sell milk. But it's like plant based milk, you know, and the cows milk is on another cooler at the bottom, you know, so it's not very popular. Now, when I was doing the Game Changers, you know, the film about a plant based diet. So we met Dean Ornish. I met Dean Ornish, who actually is right down the hill from me here in Sausalito. And this is before I was living here. And he said he told me that half his family died from Alzheimer's and he might have the Alzheimer's gene himself. Now, he could see if he could reverse Alzheimer's. You know, remember, he did it with heart disease, early stage diabetes, early stage prostate cancer. And I was going to try to do it with Alzheimer's. And I thought, that's incredible. So I've been following him for the last year and a half as he has these cohorts coming through. His office is trying to reverse Alzheimer's, and it looks I mean, I hope I'm not talking out of turn, but it looks you know, the study isn't done by a long shot.
There's only been about 15 people that have gone through the first cohorts, but that they're getting really strong results, like there's been hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent by drug companies and governments to try to reverse Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's is on track to become one of the most deadly diseases going through the population, going to, you know, another 10, 15 years. This can overtake heart disease as our primary killer, chronic of chronic disease and Alzheimer's, if people don't know is one of the most insidious diseases you can have. A heart disease is thankfully, you know, it can kill you but with Alzheimer's, you're slowly losing your brain. You're slowly what it means to be human. And about one out of three people are going to be affected by Alzheimer's. So either you’ll have it yourself. Your mates are going to have it or you'll be taking care of parents that have it. So to Dean, this was really important because, you know, his half his family died from it and he might have the gene. We tested him for the gene. I did the, you know, DNA test on him. And he does have the gene. He doesn't have Alzheimer's, but he has the gene. So reversing it's really, you know, important to him.
Well, it turns out that in the first cohorts, about 68 percent of early stage Alzheimer's patients are getting better on cognitive tests. So he's doing what no drug has been shown to do and it's slowly get better. Now, I went to Loma Linda and I was photographing two people that opened up an Alzheimer's and brain health clinic at the Loma Linda Hospital there. And theyopened up the doors and nobody came. They had to go to San Bernardino and recruiting areas to get people because remember, the whole town is like most of the town is a plant base. And so they've had 5000 about 5000 patients come through there.
They're only 13 of them are vegetarian in a town that were about, you know, 40 percent of the population is vegan. So it just shows you that if you want it and you go to the parks and you see like 80 and 90 year olds like, you know, exercise and you go to the gym, the local gym there, there's 300 people that are, you know, that have memberships that are 80 years and older. And they're not just like, you know, doing little, you know, tiny weights and stuff.
Like one guy who was in his 70s and he's you know, he's on a on the parallel bars swinging around like an athlete. You go to their church and you see 90 year old skipping down the sidewalk to church, holding hands like they're like out of kindergarten.
I mean, so I mean, you know, we did the Game Changers with the idea that, OK, you know, it's mainly for, I'd say, a younger audience to prove that, hey, listen, to have all these attributes that we hold dear, you know, strength, virility, endurance, that it's a myth. But, you know, for somebody like me, I'm interested, I'm 63 years old, I'm interested in living long without, without chronic disease. So if you just look at the data, you know, 95 percent of the calories in the blue zones come from a whole foods plant based diet.
So to answer your question, you know, it depends where people are coming or coming from. Like, you know when I talk to people and I mentioned that you can reverse diabetes, you see some perk up and you realize that they're taking medication, you know, so you have to find people where they're at. You know, I want to reach more than seven percent of the population. I do care about animal rights. I do care that we’re, you know, I care about a lot of things. I care about people. I care about people near me living longer and healthier. You know, part of this list, you know, I don't want to take care of, you know my brothers and my sisters and my friends, when they get sick, and if I can tell them about the virtues of, you know, a whole foods plant based diet and being healthier and, you know, live by example, then it's a plus not just for them, but for me, too, because I get to be around them healthier, I don't want to go to, you know, a family reunion and talk about everybody's problems…
[Dena] what medication they're taking.
[Tina] Yeah, sorry about the game changers that I have watched of course, there is a nice point there by Arnold Schwarzenegger that he points out that he’s plant based since some years. I don't know how many, but it points out that eating meat is not about being masculine, it's about marketing. And this is a very interesting point. Showing us like San Bernardino, that we have done it all wrong.
[Louie] Yeah, exactly. You know, it's marketing and you've been marketed to Dena it's like you you know, you have even marketed to by our society, you’ve been marketed to by the marketers. You know, there's a lot of people that stand to gain. And, you know, financially, you know, there's a whole horrible industry, you know, that's complicit in this. And I don't think it's people knowingly, you know, feeding us unhealthy items, I think it's part of the dogma and listen,
I mean, OK. I know it sounds crazy that you know, that a lot of people listening to this program probably think, OK, that's nuts, you know, that that, you know, animals could be happy to be having that effect on the environment, on human health. Well, let me just tell you, like, I've been involved in on movements for a fairly long time. You know, back when I did my first story for National, the first story I did for National Geographic was on garbage and recycling. And back then and this is 1980, that I proposed the story to National Geographic, there’s only one there's only one mandatory recycling program in all of America. We did that story it became a cover story about 35 pictures on the inside and recycling started to take off, not just because of the article, because we became part of this this groundswell. Now we have, you know, recycling in my kitchen. There's recycling at the hotels, there's recycling everywhere. It's just recycling not saying it's a panacea, but that was nuts back then to think that people are going to be sorting out their garbage, but we're doing it OK.
When I had one of the first electric cars in Colorado it was a 2002 Toyota Rav fully electric. I sold I powered it with 120 solar panels on my roof and I was nuts. I was like all my neighbours, like, what the hell you got on your roof? Like with that car, that’s a strange looking car. What's what's up with that? And and I said, this is amazing. Listen, I had a thousand dollar electric bill because I was running my organization, the Oceanic Preservation Society, out of the backyard in my studio and my house is a thousand dollars a month for my electric bill and, you know, a dozen people working there. And once I put the solar panels on, the electric bills went away and I got electric checks when I went to the mailbox because I got paid for overconsumption, you know, I was producing more electricity than I was using and so I would get, you know, instead of this kind of dread like, oh, is it going to be, you know, twelve hundred dollars this month or six hundred, whatever, I would be like, you know you're jumping up and down and you see the electric check come because it's like, oh look at six hundred dollars. We had had a lot of sun and I thought I was like. You know, first of all, I was on the vanguard of this movement and everybody around me was crazy when you happened to an electric car, you know, listen, you don't know what the excitement is about unless you happen to electric car, because all of a sudden it's like you get back in the seat, you know, that you feel that torque, you know. So it's like it can be like an amusement park ride and then when you're when you never have to go to a gas station again.
[Dena] And pump your own gas!
[Louie] Yeah. I mean I was, you know, my license plate said the VUS, you know for vehicles using sun it’s the opposite of an SUV. And so anyway I was a lunatic for you know, until, you know, several years later, one thing we did in Racing Extinction is we took a Tesla and made it into a bond car. And, you know, and we had the first car in the world to have an electric electro luminescent paint job. We had this kind of if you see the film, it'll make a lot more sense as we kind of used it. It's like a reverse camouflage because we shot in New York and we project is a 20000 lumen projected that came out of the back of the robotic arm and we can project images of carbon dioxide that which we could see because we had a fleer camera, forward looking infrared camera that came out of the front. You know, where the engine would normally be on on a vehicle, an internal combustion engine car. We'd have a fleer camera so you could see carbon dioxide or methane. And we can project those images on skyscrapers and then we could, you know, we'd have the car start to glow and people would like call the cops and say, oh, we got this crazy car they tried to describe it. They sound like a lunatic.
We turn off the lights, illuminating paint job, we zip off into the night and we look like a normal car. And we had a disappearing license plates. We had this amazing car. So we took a Tesla S and now Elon Musk, we went to go visit him because we wanted to go get one of the first, you know, Model S to come out. And back then, when we interviewed him, I think it must have been like October, I wrote him and he said, yeah, come on down and then he wrote back a little while later and said, “hey, can we put this off until next quarter? I could go bankrupt.”
You know, he had hit his numbers, otherwise he thought, you know, he could, you know, could go under. Now, that was 2012.
The whole point is to talk about movements and how craziness becomes mainstream, is that now Elon Musk is the the richest man in the world, you know, toggles between, you know, Jeff Bezos and him, but that's not what motivates Elon. He's doing it because he wants to save the world. He knows that we need to motivate the rest of the planet to get onto electrification.
Otherwise, we're never going to solve the carbon dioxide problem, the greenhouse gas problem. Now, that sounds insane. Back in 2012 and now, you know, last week, General Motors, one of the biggest car companies in America before Tesla just announced that all their cars are going to become electric. He's inspired the entire, you know, automotive market to go electric now. The reason I'm telling you this is because the same thing is going to happen with a plant based diet, once people start to understand the virtues, the win win win it is across the environment for people, for animals, for for planet. It's obvious, just like electric cars are obvious. It's like, you know, I feel like the whole damn world is living in a fog. And our job is to light it up a little bit and lift that veil so they can start to see what's right before the people that understand these issues.
You know, and you think, well, can films do that? Well, it's not just films. It's like, you know, we do projection events. You know, back when we were doing, there's some really good data that shows to change the world, you don't need 51 percent of the planet. You just need 10 percent of the planet. There's an article about the science of social change and they showed that it's not seven percent or six percent, it's 10 percent. And I called up the lead author and he sent me back. Then you had to you know, you had to buy that paper. So I called up the lead author, basically, he sent it to me and there's like three pages of math, a lot of algorithms and math was not my favorite subject. And I called him back and said, can you explain it to me in lay language? You know, just tell me like a like a school child why the science is why what?
[Tina] Ten percent is the number and not the seven or 50.
[Louie] Yeah. And he said, well, it's like if you're trying to make steam, you'll never be able to do it. The water, you know, the water just be like warm water until you get to the boiling point hundred degrees centigrade, 212 degrees Fahrenheit and he said.
10 percent of the population, 100 percent committed to an idea, is the tipping point for social change. It's the boiling point and so now when you're looking at things like, you know, when the plant based movement is stuck at seven percent because it's mostly vegans that are worried about animal rights, well, we just have to, you know, convert a small percentage of those people from the the environmental movement.
And then something interesting happened then that's unstoppable. The water keeps on boiling and it just it it becomes, you know, this boiling pot until it's mainstream. And that's what's happening with electric cars. That's what's going to happen with the plant based movement. And people are starting to see, you know, McDonald's and Burger King and, you know, Chipotle. I don't know what there is in Greece, but there's like the fast food restaurants that are taking over. And it's the hottest sectors of the fastest growing sector of food production right now. There's a friend of mine that Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk to two guys that started a company called Just. And they just you know, they know that it's going to be difficult to get everybody to switch over from meat so that they find a better way to do it.
They have what they call cellular agriculture, a cultured meat. They actually manufacture it and they they take a single cell of an animal and not kill it.
It you can take the cell from a feather of a jungle fowl, which is the original chicken that now we have full of all sorts of hormones and antibiotics. But they can basically incubate the sale. This cell the same way that you would make, you know, yeast or, you know, anything that's fermented and they can scale it up. And there are doubts just in December, they're starting to sell chicken meat that looks and tastes like chicken in Singapore, the first country to do it. So, I mean, you know, I love animals. I mean, I don't have them anymore because I just start realizing, well, you have a cat, you know, God, it's like, you know, you want to say, consider myself something that's you know, working on animal rights and then you have a cat that's definitely a carnivore and you're feeding it cows, chickens and pigs and turkeys. It's like it feels really hypocritical. But I can imagine that if you were, you know, eating cellular meat, you're giving it cellular meat, I mean, it would be, you know, be fine, right? Because it's no animal was killed just to keep your cat like your cat, you know.
[Tina] But what was your turning point on becoming a vegan? I remember something about the slaughter house. Is that right?
[Louie] Yeah, it was. It was unfortunately, it was a slow change for me. But in September of 1986, I was I was doing a story for Fortune magazine and the biggest independently owned cattle ranchers in America. And so it's going on all around the country and one one farm ranch was so big in Oklahoma, they had their own slaughterhouse. They killed about 500 cows a day and I'd never seen a slaughterhouse. And there's that expression that, you know, if a slaughterhouse has had glass glass walls. No animals would die for humans to be fed. And you know why, too.
But when they have the cattle come into the into the the slaughterhouse, they don't want to be there. They can smell the death and they're trying to get out, but they're in a shoot where they can't go right or left. They can't turn around. I remember this one animal they put a captive bolt to the brain, it's like a pneumatic gun and it's supposed to kill the animal instantly. And the first thing that they do is they hook up these chains, the animal hanging upside down and they rip off the hide. And so these animals, their hides, their skin is off and they're coming around. It's like a.. It's like a.. It's almost like a like anautomobile assembly plant. But this is a disassembly plant. You know, people as it goes around, people are cutting off different parts of it. And I remember one guy, he was just cutting off the genitalia. And I go, you know, garbage, right? He goes, no hot dogs.
But I remember this one cow that would on the on the turn as you start to cut off pieces of it, this is cows hanging upside down. And I could see it looking at me and his eyes were following me, looking into my eyes and his head was turning as it went around the conveyor belt. I realized it was still alive. And I thought, OK, I can’t, I can't be part of this.
So I told myself, I'm never going to eat animals that walk again, because my head is like, OK, I became a pescatarian. And so I was, you know, I ate a lot of fish because I still believe, like most people, that you need to be big and strong and healthy you had to eat animals. So I was eating fish. And my son is still is a professional fisherman, and he would send me hundreds of pounds of fish and so I would have literally I'd have fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
And when we were doing “The Cove”, the first film about dolphin hunting in Japan, one of the things that we do toward the end of the movie is we take a hair sample from Hideki Moronuki, the deputy minister of fisheries in Japan. And we wanted to measure this because in hair you can measure mercury in people's blood two ways by blood or by hair. And mercury is the most toxic non-radioactive element in the world it basically destroys your synapses and, you know, destroys your brain. It slowly traces what it means to be human. And when we got the results from Hideki Moronuki, well, we sent them off to the lab and I thought, well, I've been eating a lot of fish, too, as you get my my hair samples, you know, tested. So we sent his in and we sent mine andthe scientist called me back and said, hey, your friend here has, you know, really high levels. It's like eight times more, you know, than what's considered high, like baseline high. And I think. Oh, yeah, Hideki that makes sense. You know, Japanese minister of fisheries, you know, what about mine? He says yours are really bad. So those are yours? Those are 44 times higher. OK, so mine was worse than the deputy minister of fisheries in Japan.
And it's put a shock through me because I thought, what am I going to eat? I'm gonna shrivel up and die. And when this came out, you know, I guess I was right about the time we were editing “The Cove” and I'm like, OK, I'm like eating less fish, but I don't know quite what to eat. And we're down for the Academy Awards in Los Angeles and I'm sitting across from this woman who's a vegan. I was like this is the first vegan I've ever met and I said, “What do you eat?” And she goes, "Everything else!”
She said, all protein, all protein originates from plants, you know, where do you think the animals get it from? And there's a line where Patrick, Baboumian, one of the world's strongest guys goes, you know, somebody asked him: “How do you get as strong as an ox, you know, eating plants?” And he says: “Have you ever seen an ox eating meat?”
[Tina] So let’s talk little bit about “The Cove” we’ve watched it with Dena and I was literally crying at the end. I mean, it was shocking. Apart from mercury levels and the health perspective, which were your emotions and your crew's emotions when you were there and witnessing live all of this cruelty? And of course, we would like you to tell us about all these technical difficulties that you had during filming.
[Louie] Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that film we were shooting, we started shooting at 2006. I think we released it in 2009, you know, in the theaters and it became, you know, just for the viewers that haven't seen it, it became the most award winning documentary in history.
It was the first film, the first documentary in history to sweep all the film guilds, you know, best producer, editor, writer, director, you know, one, I don't know, 75 awards plus from the Sundance to the Academy Award.
I didn't know there are so many awards. I mean, I really and that's not why we did it. You know, we did we did the film so we could create some change and it was successful, wildly successful on both accounts. But the first night now remember, this is, you know, probably I don't know, I can't remember like 2007, probably where we first went to the cove. And these were the first hard drive cameras that were made before this. All the cameras were with tape. So this is a hard drive camera. There wasn't even a way to take the bits, you know, the hard drives and put them into a film back then. So at night when we took our picture, we took our film we would have to take the hard drives out, put a new one in, and then we would hide the hard drives and the air conditioning ducts in case the police came. But the first night we I remember it was a Saturday and the dolphin hunters had caught a pot of pilot whales and pilot whales are actually dolphins they’re very large dolphins pilot whales is just their name. And we had been up for about 48 hours and the crew set the cameras over into the cove and I went around to the other side and I was in face paint, you know, black, camouflage paint, camouflage clothes.
I had taped all the shiny bits of my camera and I scaled up this hill onto like a cliff edge and it was at the tops of the trees in this forest overlooking the cove into the cove. And Rick O'Barry, the guy who's our protagonist in the film, he's he's a dolphin trainer, you know, worked for SeaWorld in Miami and he had captured and trained the five female dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper for the popular television series.
When he started to realize how sentient, intelligent they were he started to have a change of heart and the first Earth Day, he went and tried to release some of the dolphins that he had captured, It's a beautiful film. It's like a heartwarming film and it's a gut wrenching film. And it's, you know, it's an adventure film for people who think, oh, I can't watch a film like that, well, you're going to see…I met the guy who did Bourne Identity and says your films are better than mine.
You know, Rolling Stone said it's they said they said “The Cove” is like Bourne Identity meets Flipper, something like that!
So, you know, the first line of the film is me saying, “I just want to say we tried to do the story legally.” So what we did is we stuck into this cove illegally, set these cameras and my crew went back to sleep because we've been up, like I said, for 48 hours. I went around to the cove, now I'm hanging from a rope and Rick has said, you know, they caught the animals on a Saturday. It was about, in my mind, maybe a dozen to 20 pilot whales, big animals. And he said they probably won't kill them on a Sunday. They'll probably wait till Monday because they don't work on Sunday. So we thought, well, let's go into the cove, see what it's like, set the cameras. If it doesn't work, we can sneak back in and get them the next day. So my crew went off to bed and I'm hanging from this rope on this little, it's like a little table sized rock, you know, overlooking the cove.
But I had to be hanging from a rock so I wouldn't fall off this little cliff and. About 5.30 in the morning—to set this up a little bit, we had to the camera, we put cameras inside of rocks that were fake rocks that Industrial Light Magic, which is George Lucas's outfit there, were made-this is back before everything was CG, you know, computer graphics.
We had them make these fake these rocks that look like rocks from the cove and we had these first hard drive cameras that were made in there. And the batteries weren't long enough to last, like, you know, for the length of time that we needed. So we had these special batteries so we could get like four and a half hours on it because we had we had four hours and 10 minutes of drive time so that we'd sneak in at three thirty in the morning press play, and then the cameras would be rolling in the dark with nobody there. Then when the sun started to rose, if something happened, hopefully we would catch it, you know, with that last light, with the last little glimpses of battery.
And so I'm now I'm across the cove looking in and it's five thirty and morning on a Sunday when the dolphin hunters weren't supposed to be there start coming around the corner and they have flashlights and one gets off on the other side of the coast and one gets off right below me, you know, on my side of the cove. And they get out and start looking into the woods with flashlights. And I realize that they're looking for people like me. And so my heart's like jumping out of my chest because the flashlight beams are going through and then I didn't realize what had happened, but they disappeared and they went up to the park above me is called Tsunami Park.
It's a place where people of the town go if there's a tsunami because it's high and I hear a woman screaming, it looks like she's being raped. And I think what the f**k’s going on? So I'm there, you know, shaking on this ledge, and they but, you know, before that, I'm all alone in the cove and these these the pilot whales are swimming. All the males and females, the big ones are swimming around the young ones. They're like protective right off the coast, pretty big. But there's this hanging out together, swimming in circles. And every time they come up for air, you hear this “wooosh” We have a lot of relationship we're very similar to dolphins, you know, they have they have actually had bigger brains and as a pilot, will has a bigger brain than us. They have more they have more Spindel neurons, which are associated with complex emotions, and I'm thinking, oh my God, these poor creatures, they're going to get killed, if not tomorrow, the next day, and then this woman screams and then they round up these pilot whales using their boat motors to push them into the cove. They select a couple for the aquariums, for the captive dolphin trade, and then they slaughter the rest.
It was it was a beautiful blue sky day, just like it is today as you saw earlier and and the cove is silent, you know, the motorboats go home and I can't leave and face paint. I'm a I'm an illegally in a national park. And I realized I’m in a foreign land that if I get caught, you know, we go to jail, they could keep me for 28 days. We'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in lawyers fees trying to get out of jail. So I realized I got to hang from this rope for 15 and a half hours until it's dark enough for my crew to extract me.
That was that was that was day one. And we actually, you know, we cut them in the movie.
We cut it to make it look like we went in this twice, but we actually went in about seven times. And, you know, it's because we had to get different angles, different shots and, close ups and all that and you know that the film was wildly successful because it gets your heart rate up. And it was scary and there's a lot of events that happened.
Oh, so the woman that was screaming, we found out, was another activist in the park above me, but they caught her and, you know, like weeks later we found out through Rick O'Barry that they wanted to know if we would go to the police station and pick up her camera because they still had the police confiscated a camera at one point. You know, we like we did all these multiple trips to Japan and the cops would be following us every night and they stood, it wasn't like there right behind us they thought they were being sneaky. But we we discovered that they were following us so they were like a couple blocks behind us. So we we used that as a way to get past them we had two vans that were identical, one that we park outside of town and then we we took off at three thirty in the morning to do our our you know, whatever we're going to do in the night, the cops are behind us you can't do anything there so we go around the corner, all hop out of the car. The driver of our car, we keep on going the cops would follow that car, then we'd hop in the other van and then go back to the cove or do whatever we needed to do. So there's all these kinds of ways that you use from, you know, the Hollywood spy movies like The Bourne Identity.
[Tina] So have you visited Japan since then?
[Louie] You know, I did once. In 2010, they had an environmental film festival and the interesting thing that it's an environmental film festival and the director of the festival, the guest director, he won the Academy Award recently and he said, “If you don't show the Cove, I'm going to step down. It'll be an international incident.”
And so they allowed me to come back to Japan, even though there's arrest warrants out for me, there's three charges, conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing and photographing undercover police without their permission. So I think I could get arrested and come back so I actually went to Japan with my lawyer. We had a Japanese lawyer waiting there in case there was trouble. And I literally we got off the plane and literally as soon as I got off the plane, like in the terminal and the jetway where you, you know, exit that little tube is like TV crews and journalists waiting for me to get off.
So I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is just going to be scary. They wouldn't let me walk the green carpet at the festival, but I saw it at the screening of The Cove there’s all the dolphin hunters there the mayor of Taiji and this is interesting. There's a gentleman who is the head of the International Whaling Commission, he wrote a book on whaling from the Japanese perspective. And it's called “On Whaling” the book. He's probably one of the most vocal and respected, you know, defenders of whale eating culture. And we had night vision cameras in the theater trained on the dolphin hunters and this guy who was the head of the IWC in Japan, and you can see him looking at the scene, you know, the scene that everybody talks about, the movie he’s looking at it and he just goes covers his eyes and just sinks his his head and starts shaking it like he just realized that, no, it's indefensible the way that what they do at the cove, it's so dark and it's so ugly and it's so indefensible that he realized that, you know, I wouldn’t say that their life is over.
But just yesterday, I just I think I just read it this morning. It was that Japan is no longer going to support the whaling ships because it costs too much money and there's reduced market for it. So, I mean, whaling is dying. But I think a lot of it has to do with the activism around, you know, not just our film, but in general, because, again, it's like you become part of that voice of people calling for a different world.
And, you know, I hope if anybody gets anything from this, you realize that change is it looks crazy, you know, electric cars and alternative energy, you know, plant based diet, eating whales, I mean, all that becomes crazy until it's not, you know, change is possible and it happens so quick sometimes that it's just I mean, the news that's coming out now about electric cars and the industry, how it's changing. I mean that was 10 years ago I was talking to Elon about that. And it's not that long. And these changes take about 10 years. You know, all these massive changes.
There's a futurist by the name of Tony Saba, I think his name is and he talks about the science of change from a from a scientific perspective. He showed us a picture of the the 1900 Easter parade in New York and this is a parade where everybody comes out and all the regalia and they they go down Broadway in their vehicles. But in 1900, it was horses. So this is a picture taken from a roof on a building on Broadway, looking down the street and you see this all horses except for one car. And then about 10 years later, 2013 Easter Parade, it's the opposite, it's like find the horse.
Remember like, you know, the iPhone came out in 2007, which meant that when we were texting, we had to punch the number two key six times on our other flip phones to text the capital C
You know, like Dena in ten years I hope you having go: “I can remember when I was eating meat. Oh, my gosh.”
[Dena] Well, you know, to be honest, this conversation has really shifted some things in the sense that it's not so narrow focused that I can pick and choose which pain point I want to go with. Like you said, you know, you got to meet people where they're at and it doesn't have to be…It's not that I don't care about animals, but being healthy makes, you know, a much deeper connection inside of me as opposed to…not that I don't care about animals, but you know what I'm saying?
Like, that makes more sense so I can connect with that. Whereas if I was shutting down because I thought I was being flooded with all of this information like compassion fatigue, like I just shut down because I could not deal with it. You know, I didn't want to think about it. So it's really interesting, though and maybe, you know, in a year, I'll tell you, I'm not eating meat, hopefully I won't have to wait 10 years. But I'm curious you know, like you said with Elon ten years ago, what qualities do you think young leaders today should cultivate in order to become better in what they're trying to do, the change that they're trying to bring in the world?
[Louie] Yeah, it’s a good question, it sounds like a cliche, but it's true stick with what you're passionate about you know, I don't have a lot of money, but like I wish, you know, I've loved Apple Computer since day one, since the time I had it, and I wish I would have invested in what my passion was because we had some Apple stock back then.
You know, you'd be a millionaire right now.
When I was young, you know, we just try to look back as an adult from the perspective of the eyes that you have now and look back at my childhood and my parents were Greek and, you know, and they struggled socioeconomically, I don't know, maybe we were lower middle class, maybe we were middle class but I know that money was always at the at the forefront of a lot of arguments around the house, these really hard, violent arguments that I struggle with now because I always thought, well my parents are struggling for her finances, if I only became rich, you know, then my problems would go away.
But after I work for National Geographic, I spent about, you know, 18 years with them and then I worked for Fortune magazine for about five years and now I'm I'm meeting some of the richest people in the world at one point, I photographed seven out of the 10 richest people in the world, people like, you know, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs.
One of the people I wanted to photograph the most when I was doing a story on the information revolution for National Geographic was this guy by the name of Jim Clark. Jim Clark was in college he helped send man to the moon. You know, when John F. Kennedy called to put an American in moon by the end of the decade, Jim said it's not going to happen so he sped up the computers. He was a college kid working for Boeing, manufacturing engineer he sped it up by twentyfold to make that happen when he was and he created the first 3D graphics engine where that could do gaming in real time and change your designs in real time, the day he quit that business he started Netscape, the first commercial Internet browser. The first way that anybody in the world got onto the Internet was through through Netscape. When I met him for Fortune magazine later on, he said he couldn’t be photographed for Geographic he was too busy, you know, couldn’t be bothered by a Geographic photographer but I was sent over and he had built this boat, had the world's tallest mast, it was called Hyperion. Had he designed all the computer systems, 7000 functions could be run by computers and I went over that the day that they're putting the stick, the mast on the boat, you know, world's tallest mast, about 200 feet.
I'm scared to death of heights my father died he was a roofer and he died from a fall. But I stood up on the top spreader and I went up the top and then slid down the forest so I could photograph them with the perspective and he was smoking a Cohiba it's in Amsterdam and it's raining a little bit and we went out to eat. Jim and I went out to eat at a restaurant that night and Amsterdam, and he was starting another company called Shutterfly. And he said, Louie, you know, I love photography would you teach me how to be a good photographer? And I said, I'll teach you how to be a great one if you teach me how to be a billionaire.
And I began this wonderful relationship where I would go out and basically teach him photography. We'd go out together and, you know, he'd pick me up on his plane and we would take his boat around the world. We did a lot of underwater photography. That was really one of our main shared passions. He was a diver and I was, too. And we were doing underwater photography together. And he was we come back up and he's like these cameras for underwater that they have are horrible wy don’t we make one better? I said, well, they're too expensive. So he made the best underwater camera ever made by like an order of magnitude.
He put a medium format camera. Twenty eight millimetre Rowden stock lens which is one of the finest medium format lenses ever made, and built a housing for it and special like he spent a half a million dollars to build this incredible camera that we're still using to this day.
Because what he wanted to do is, you know, he knew that Jim is one of these people that can look ahead to the future and figure out how to create a business for it but he was also passionate about wildlife. He's about being underwater. The best thing he's ever done, he said, is go underwater. And, you know, it's like an alien universe. You see all these incredible creatures that, you know, you don't see anywhere else. And it's amazing. He knew that we were losing it so he wanted to have like a baseline documentation of how reefs were before they got destroyed. We've lost in the last three years about half the reefs on the planet because of warming and acidification and a lot of other stresses. Again, you know, one of the big stresses for the Great Barrier Reef where a lot of this catastrophe is going on, is the runoffs from fertilizers and pesticides from animal production. So anyway, he said, Louie I want to take you to one of the best places I've ever seen, and this is over in Papua New Guinea.
So we, you know, fly there. It takes, you know, nearly a day. His boat's waiting for us. We sail for about a day and a half and he drops in on the coordinates, the GPS coordinates of where this Great Reef is and he comes back up and he's almost in tears. He says it's gone. It's destroyed, it's in rubble. And we don't know what happened to it dynamite fishing or a bleaching event, but it was gone. And every time we would go, we went to some spectacular places, the best places on the planet to dive Raja Ampat where you can see 300 species of fish in a single dive. You go to the Caribbean, you're lucky to see 30. You see 300 there just every day and we were in the Galapagos and we came up and there was fishermen illegally fishing in a marine sanctuary. And he said to me, somebody should do something about this. And I said, How about you and I? He said, What do you mean? I said, Well, we'll use your money and my eye and we'll make films so that he so he agreed to do that. And I'm and the fear comes in so now I'm changing careers. I've gone from a still photographer to be a filmmaker.
And I never made a film ever in my life. I had no right to be like thinking I could make a film and I'm scared to death, thinking I could be a you know, it could be a sham because because who am I? I could be wasting his money. I could be wasting my time. I was a successful still photographer, one of the more successful in terms of an editorial photographer. But I'm still kind of thrilled and excited and, you know, feeling like I could be a sham right. And then we're down in the Caribbean he had built by this time another boat world's longest private sailing “Athena” gorgeous boat and my family's on board the boat. Jim's family's on board the boat, and my son's playing on the beach with another kid who happens to be Steven Spielberg's kid.
Steven Spielberg did Jurassic Park on Jim's computers Jurassic Park was one of the first. I actually what I did a story on dinosaurs for National Geographic, and I had met Spielberg at that point but he did let me film behind the scenes when they were making the dinosaurs that Jurassic Park. So I had a slight connection there but, you know, I'm really the the father of his son's new friend. And so Spielberg comes over on the boat mostly to meet Jim and when I get him alone for a couple seconds, I said, “Mr. Spielberg, do you have any advice for first time filmmaker?” “Yeah. Never make a movie involving boats or animals.”
[Tina] And you didn’t listen.
[Dena] Well, how did that work out?
[Louie] I started you know, Jim, we started the Oceanic Preservation Society and our first film was “The Cove”, which involved a lot of boats and a lot of animals. But, you know, to your point is like, you know, we were passionate about doing the story.
And I realized now that, like how absurd it is for, you know, to do a film like “The Cove” and have it be that successful, cuz I think right now, knowing what I know about filming, like, when you have to like everybody says to me, oh, if you ever need a, you know, secret agent, if you needed somebody to sneak around, you know, to do this work, you know, count me in and whenever I've called people up, I said, I've got this job and I explained to them, they're like Oh, you know, could I get hurt or arrested and I go yeah and they’re like well I got I got a family you know, everybody has a job.
And it's like when the tire meets the road, you know, a lot of people get scared and it's understandable. But you have to have the passion. I'm not saying for doing dangerous stuff. I mean, sometimes it's just just silly. But I think with whatever you're doing, you know, try to figure out what's going to make you make you happy. But, you know, here's the here's the thing. And I want to bring this around like when I was hanging out at, you know, with people with too much money at Fortune magazine, you know, I just one thing I noticed that people at the very top is that they didn't seem to be that happy.
You know, all that money didn't relieve them from the pain that my my mom and dad had. You know, they have these other issues or, money is not whenever you're trying to seek happiness outside of your body, outside of yourself, and you're looking for power, money, sex, you know, the title, whatever that stuff. This is all external stuff. The only thing that makes you happy, that gives you joy, that's fulfilling is when you're helping other people. So with whatever you're doing, you know, that's why I think this work is fulfilling to me, because it's not really about me. It gives me a lot of satisfaction, believe me. But it's really that when you're in service to other people, that's what gives you joy. I'm doing a film right now. It's almost done i's with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, who are best friends. They are two Nobel laureates and our team got them together in Dharamsala and they talked to them for like four and a half days on what it means to be human.
So you have two of the greatest spiritual leaders on the planet, Desmond Tutu, for people that don’t know was the the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. You know, down in South Africa, it was systematic racism where blacks were systematically subjugated to be servants to a very small minority of white people.
And after Nelson Mandela and other activists, you know, started to rule the country, they realized that there could be a genocide unless there was some sort of reconciliation. So Desmond Tutu was put in charge of basically the mandate was if you're a perpetrator, if you committed these crimes against black people, that if you acknowledged what you did in front of your victims, you had the opportunity to escape jail or retribution, and it was a very powerful thing for those people in the rest of the world to see that forgiveness was possible, you know, as a way to go forward.
So that's and then you have the Dalai Lama who had spent, you know, fifty six years in exile, you know, with the Chinese claiming that Tibet was historically part of China, got kicked out of his country. And so you get these two great leaders in the room talking about what it means to be human. And I learned, I wish I had seen this film or read the book that came out of the film years ago, because I think it would have helped as kind of a guidepost as people are struggling to figure out, you know, what kind of job do I need that's going to give me the money so I could be happy and get me that big house and that car and this because you realize you have these these two guys, like the Dalai Lama, said the best thing in the world had ever happened to him was that the Chinese, you know, made him leave the country because he would he said it would have been like I would have been in a golden prison, a much better opportunity.
It's like reframing your reframe the situations and realize that he could never be talking to the world about compassion and these things. I probably wouldn't have been we wouldn't have been in the room with him unless we are able to talk about this, unless that had happened. So but at the core of he says that this comes from the Dalai Lama says everything that you need to do that's going to give you lasting joy comes from helping other people. And by the way, like I mentioned earlier, that helps your blood physically, helps your immunity. It increases your telomeres. It does all these wonderful things to you when you're in service to other people. So whatever you're doing, just, you know what? You could still you can still be an accountant and if you're helping other people, then it's going to make you feel you'll never have to work another day in your life because the joy that you have is going to be lasting.
[Dena] And it's also, I think they mentioned in the book I read it years ago, were hard wired for compassion, right? Like it's our natural tendency to be compassionate and to provide and care about other people before we think about anything else. So that is really hopeful in the sense that, you know, we are hard wired for this, like it comes naturally to us.
[Louie] Yeah. They've done a study with babies where like they have a puppet that's being violent, you know, to another puppet. And overwhelmingly the babies before they can speak, choose the the puppet that's been, victimized, showing that, you know, we are hardwired, you know, at our better base for goodness.
[Dena] So when is “Act like a holy man” coming out?
[Louie] we just did a second screening Wednesday. We'll have a third one in about another month. We'll be done with the film about May then. It's usually about four months later by by the end of the year, hopefully, because I wish I was out right now, because we're struggling, you know, as a culture, as we mentioned earlier, we realize that we're all on the same page. And I think we're all realizing what it does mean to be human. That we do need is like real physical human connections. And I think, you know, I want to get these films that we're doing out as fast as possible. But you want to keep you know, you need to keep the quality up to we test we do a lot of testing of our films to make sure that they work, you know, because it's not just me. I might be the director and the film, but I surround myself with really great people, really good editors, writers, producers, you know, people that are really passionate about it and we realize that when you work on a project for two or three years, you can get too close to it. So you can't see the forest for the trees. And so you need, you know, like on this last act, like a holy man, you know, like people were saying that they didn’t like the Dalai Lama as much as Desmond Tutu or really, you know, enough time and we're like, OK, why? Why is that? And then we realized that we you know, we could just add this little bit to give people a little bit of insight and then all of a sudden his score goes up seven percent, you know, so you can sort of change the you know, the way I look at it is like with a film, you have all this content.
You know, we have 15 and a half hours of footage of the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu talking, but we have to get it down to say, 90 minutes, about as much as people are going to want to watch a documentary and in that 90 minutes you have to tell their back story, you have to, you know, give some context about other people, the scientists talking about the science of compassion and so what you have distilled has to be really potent and powerful and you can you have a lot of content you can draw from. As you're getting closer to finishing these test screenings, what we find is that it's just throughout time you realize that when people say, Oh, I wish there was more of this, I wish we had more of that, then, you know, you're on the right path because, you know, it makes people curious and you can't fit everything into the film but you have you know, our responsibility is to sort of make the most powerful, potent 90 minutes that we can based on, you know, our ability.
You know, one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain, said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, now that's just with words. Now, you ad photographs. I'm primarily a visual person. Obviously, the words are important to me, too. But when you start to add the right word, with the right image, with the right story at the right time, with the right music it's a powerful, powerful mix, lightning in a bottle, and that's why I think, you know, people can see, you know, when people when we did the Game Changers, you know, one of the the markers of of what's trending is it's called Google Trends. You know, the first 30 days the game changes was on Netflix searches for a plant based diet went up 350 percent worldwide. The first nine days, the Game Changers was on iTunes. It became the most popular movie, a documentary that they've had that was downloaded nine days, you know, the films that we do or are watchable, they're fun, they're entertaining.
You know, the first rule of filmmaking is be entertaining, you know. So when you see our documentaries are not dry, like I said, first line of The Cove, me saying I just want to say we try to do the story legally. We're taking you on an adventure. We're going to the exposition is going to come along as you're learning about the subject and so it doesn't feel like, you know a dry documentary, it feels like, you know, we try to borrow some of the storytelling mechanisms of narrative films, Hollywood films, because life, when you think about your best stories, are like Hollywood films, right? Life is like a Hollywood film and it's just a matter of picking the right moments.
[Dena] So as we're flooded with, you know, fact-less movies or documentaries, actually, and all this fake media news, do you think you know, the movies that you're making and fact-based, based movies are kind of this antidote, I guess, to that?
[Louie] I would say so, yeah, I mean, I'm banking on it as we see the the data point show that it's working. You know, when we did Racing Extinction you know, we reached 30, you know, numbers don't tell the whole story, but the first day that our film was on television racing extinction, 36 million people saw it in 10 or 20 countries and territories the first day. So our films are watchable and they are, you know, they're exciting and they make a difference. The Racing Extinction led to laws being implemented in the U.S. to prevent some of the most endangered species from being tracked, you know, trafficked right here in America. You know, so we're interested in making a great film we're interested in it being entertaining and we're also interested in changing in the world.
You know, those are you know, I try not to be shy about it. So I just if I read the words coming out of my mouth right now, I'd be like, oh, my God, he's all full of himself. But it's true. I don't think you know, we don't make a documentary with the intention of making a movie. We do it with the intention of making a movement, understanding that we also have to, you know obey the laws of entertainment, not that we're, you know, we're making up stuff to put it on the screen, but you have to you know, we're always thinking like, how can you tell the story in a way that's palpable so that people are getting it viscerally, you know, that you're you're connecting with them emotionally and intellectually.
You know, I think in 90 minutes, one of the things that we found out and it's not in the film “Act like a holy man”, but there’s is a gentleman in the film, he's a scientist and the Dalai Lama is is actually very scientifically minded. For the last 30 years, he's been working with scientists like Mind and Life Institute, trying to figure out like a scientific validation that the methods that they endorse with Buddhism have I want to say the roots in science, but they have scientific results.
So Richie Davidson, a neuro researcher from University of Madison, Wisconsin, came to talk with the Dalai Lama and Richard Davidson. His whole life was about, you know, trying to figure out the dysfunctional brain, why people can't deal with, you know, the slings and arrows that life hand them. And the Dalai Lama said to them, why not use the same scientific, you know, measurements that you use to figure out kindness and compassion and what does work?
And a light bulb went off and Richard Davidson's eyes and, you know hooked up, you know, monks to EKG's in the MRI eyes and inflicts pain on them and does like, you know, like a corollary of of people that are gender matched and age matched and and finds out that these you know, that indeed people who meditate are much more resilient, you know, they're much more in touch with something deeper so that they can bear pain and not be registered the same way us mortals are. And one of the things that I'm trying to remember that there was something that you triggered that Richie Davidson had said that wasn't in the, wasn't in the film. I'll think of it. I'll think of it but but there's a lot of evidence that.
You know what what what they're learning now is that all, you know, everything that they're that the Dalai Lama has been saying has there's a there's there's physical ramifications that it actually does change the blood. Here’s what it was that you can in just about 90 minutes, you can change physically, not just mentally but physically the way the brain operates. So what this means is that when you hear and I think about you Dena you know, like what you hear that, OK, plant based diet, you're going all haywire about like, oh, this is like counterintuitive. It's not what I'm thinking that in 90 minutes, that's all it takes to change a person's brain so that they think differently and then therefore act differently. And they can physically show that because they can know where the you know, where these behaviors reside in the brain and they could do tests, but it only takes 90 minutes to teach me so how long as a documentary? 90 minutes?
And and people come out of our films and, you know, you know, I don't know how many times. And this is all obviously all anecdotal, but, you know, come out of her how that changed my life probably more than a year later that the film changed her life. And I was always thinking, well, I always said anecdotally. You know, our films changed, you know, rewire the brain the way it thinks, and it's like, you know, I was just saying that because I've seen it or heard people say, then you have a scientists sort of validate what you've been thinking or your anecdotes. So I think that the films can change the world because I think if you give me 90 minutes. I can think we can start changing your brain. You can get anybody 90 minutes of the truth of that 10 percent. You know, here's the deal. It's like when they did those those studies about change in the world, you know, the science of social change, they did it with the suffragette movement, civil rights movement,
Arab Spring you know, that's this bouncing back the other way. It's kind of an ebb and flow, right? You know, it's like it's not just a straight line up. It's a you know, history is a jagged series of ups and downs. But, you know, Martin Luther King says that, you know, that was the arc of humanity is long, but it bends towards justice. I think that's you know, and I think films are a way to for me to level the scales of the inequities, the issues that we're facing right now, that I think if we're coming at it and doing expounding truth, and it's done in a great package, it is changing your DNA.
[Tina] This is why you referred to the audience as minds and seats?
[Louie] Yeah, there's most Hollywood producers, I shouldn’t say most a lot of people I've met in the business, they're like, you know, it's like butts and seats, you know, ten dollars in a box of popcorn. That's back when we were going to the theaters. Right. And, you know, I never looked at the audience like that, they’s minds and seats and every time, you know, you have a chance to change somebody's mind, you have a chance to change the world.
And that's you know, it's all change happens one person at a time. I like to think of scale. I'm I like to think, OK, we need to hit that 10 percent number. But I also realize that at the core of it, it has to be one person at a time. You know, we're we do these projection events. Now, if you haven't seen Racing extinction please see it. It's like we do this. We knew that it's really difficult to get, you know, that 10 percent number when you talk about the world population is, you know, eight billion people trying to get, you know, 800 million people to see a film is tough. You know, even on the Discovery Channel, the world's largest network has two and a half billion people, you know, if it was across all the channels. But the projection events that we do like at the end of Racing Extinction, we project endangered species on the Empire State Building. Something like that had never been done before and spent four years trying to do it and the distributor of Discovery said, oh, that's too much money. And I said, don't worry about money, I'll find the money to do it and he said, well, on the weekends, you know, this is the summer we wanted to protect endangered species on the Empire State Building. In the summertime, all the important people over the Hamptons would be over. And in Europe, it gets dark late at night so the press won't be able to pay overtime. So even if he could do, it'll be a non-event.
And we had 939 million media views by Thursday as the top trending story on Facebook and Twitter and Facebook worldwide and, you know, every my son came to the U.S. we had rented this bar overlooking the Empire State Building and, you know, the bar was packed. My son comes up and says, Dad, you know, there's people in the streets. And I thought people on the streets waiting to get in. He goes, No, no. We looked over the edge of the building. And, you know, it was like the Easter parade, you know, the Fifth Avenue there's people crowded out into the streets. There was there was one well, we went down to the streets of this one cab driver, like I’ll now try to set this up a little bit. So we were projecting endangered species on the south side of the Empire State Building and Fifth Avenue goes from north to south so cab drivers coming down the street are looking at people looking in the opposite direction up, you know, and so they can't see what's going on right so this cab driver stops at the light. You know, it looks you know, he gets out and he's got a fare, right he's got people in the back and he's looking at like a, you know, a giant cricket crawling up the side of the Empire State Building you know, and so he gets he gets entranced by the spectacle right. And the people behind him start to honk so he turns around. It gives the driver the finger and then the other, you know, the middle finger with his index finger he points up to the Empire State Building to say, look, then he pulled over and started, you know, he and the fair with the meter still ticking, start to watch the rest of the show.
But it was so we had an incredible, you know, response to that. And we thought, well, nine hundred, you know, million people, you know, that's getting close to, you know, over 10 percent of the population seeing something. And then we thought we couldn't get any more attention to that and then the pope called and the pope wanted to project endangered species on the Vatican during COP 21. Remember that Pope Francis is named after Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. So he wanted to he wanted to the Pope Francis wanted us to project endangered species on the Vatican. Prior to COP 21 world leaders were in France deciding, you know, referendums on climate change. And we had I think it was like 225.000 people see that live in St. Peter's Square. We have 600 media there and about four and a half billion media views in the English language alone. And, you know, and, you know, that was, what, six, seven, eight years ago? No, Jesus, I don't even remember.
Couldn’t have been that long 2015. So change is possible and we're trying to do it at scale, but, you know, that's probably the first time that a lot of people understood that there was a mass extinction event going on. And, you know, one thing I want to point out is we're a small group of people. You know, my organization, the Oceanic Preservation Society, there’s two full time people working myself and, you know, our CEO, Samarrah Stein, and we have three part time people, so we're changing the world with just a few people that the films take, you know, literally hundreds of people. And we hire those people out to, you know, as needed and we try to move the best ones on to the next film. But, you know, it's a you know, Margaret Mead said never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world, indeed is the only thing that ever has.
And you look at, you know, even like Elon Musk, he's you know, he was working, I won't say in isolation, but, you know, it's Tesla was pretty small, you know, and now, you know, most valuable car company in the world, richest guy in the world. And again, that's not the meter of success I'm using, but it's just to show that you know, the passion for a truth can really drive and accelerate these social changes that we're talking about, and I would say that the move to electric cars is not a financial motivation for Elon. It's a social you know, he realizes that if we want to save the climate, you know, we're going to need to, you know, do this conversion. So I'd say it's part of that whole thing.
I talked about Joy, where, you know, he's really doing it for the bigger picture. And people, I don't think understand that about him that he really is at. You know, it might seem like because if people are measuring wealth, they think, oh, that must be what is what motivates them. It's not, my friend Jim Clark. He wasn't motivated by money, he just you know, there's a lot of motivations and a lot of it is just that he could see an opportunity that that put these tools in the hands of ordinary people. Then you have the the power to change the world. And that's what they're interested in. You know, people see this injustice and they want to correct it.
[Tina] We definitely need the projection here in Athens, too.
[Louie] Oh, yeah, we've been talking about doing it for quite a while. We're actually doing another projection of that for the United Nations right before the next COP of October. This is going to be for three days on the east side of the building. This is facing the country state park over in Queens. So we'll be able to get millions of people over there because it's like a big empty park, beautiful. And even, you know, COVID isn't completely erased by then. You can still do socially distancing and get, you know, tons and tons of people over there. But but the U.N. has asked to do this projection on it's called the Decade of Change, because we know that we only have about 10 years to turn things around so they asked me to be the the director of this project.
And we have the projections will be three for three days over three nights, like nine hours of programming. We'll be talking about, you know, solutions to climate change, solutions to gender inequality and solutions to poverty. So it's a huge opportunity to once again use these projections that we've done and will be using social media and, you know, will be crafting ways that we can, you know, basically harness this troupe of people to see that, you know, either see it live or see it on social media to change the world at scale.
That's what's you know, that's what's really exciting me right now, is that we can use a lot of content on these films that we're doing and putting up in the building so that you have like a 38 story billboard sitting proud on the East River with the entire New York skyline behind us. It's going to be an incredible event. In fact, I don't think I've told anybody this yet except you guys.
[Dena] So how can we and the audience support and contribute to your work?
[Louie] Go to OPSociety.org and look at what we're doing. It can you know, if they want to want to at the fuel for this, for everything we do is is the financing. So, you know, if there's any high net worth individuals out there or anybody else and every nickel that we produce, you know, goes into the into what we're doing. I have not been paid by OPS personally since in 2014, everything I make I make from, you know, creating the films as a director's fee. So it all goes into these projects. So OPSociety.org
[Tina] So in each episode, we have a segment with a couple of standard questions, so I would like to ask you, what does the variable X represent to you? I mean, the X Factor, if you want to call it that way.
[Louie] What is it what is the viable X Factor, what does it do for you? Explain to me.
[Dena] Yes, so like the independent mathematical variable. So what does that stand for you?
[Louie] Well, I would think it's. X is the unknown, right? You know, I would I would say that, you know, I look at it as a positive thing. It's like the multiplication, you know, the X Factor, you know, like in science, like the X Factor is the unknown. And it's also in film. It's what it's what the audience brings to the projection. Like, you look at a film, Tina, it'll be different than what dena does. That's why they call that The X Factor. So I think it's whatever it is it's a positive thing. So I would look at it as like whatever anybody brings to the equation times a multiple that's unknown, which is positive because it's all additive, you know, because you're multiplying it. So it's it's all a very positive, you know, equation for me.
[Dena] Right, and without knowing who our next guest is going to be on this podcast, what would you like to ask them?
[Louie] Oh, that's that's a that's a tough one. I think what I'm what I'm always interested in is figure out which, you know, whether you're at a dinner party or listening to a podcast or, you know, following a character. You want to know what people's problems are. You know, what they struggled to, you know, to get through to get to where they are. Then next what what their truth is. You know what what they're trying to convince, you know, the why of it and how of it is really interesting to me. I think that's, you know, when you look at a film or any work of art, really, I think that you want to see that kind of grace and struggle. And I'm interested in people and what they're you know, what issues they've gone through to get to where they are today, you know, this it's the conflict that makes things interesting. Not that has to be the subject, but I want to know that they struggled. And because it's helpful to me, because I think everybody's everybody's struggling, you know, however they whatever you're doing, I know that there's a struggle. Nobody's ever figured everything out, but I don't know, I hope. I hope that answers that question.
[Dena] Yeah, and actually, I'm going to ask Konstantino for your help if you can ask the question that the previous guest had without knowing that it was going to be you. What was the question of our previous guest?
[Konstantinos] Sure. But before I go into that, I thought I can't help myself. I have a pop culture reference question. Did that visit on the set of Jurassic Park that you said that with Steven Spielberg, in spite of your book Hunting Dinosaurs?
[Louie] Yeah, yeah, it’s a funny story, so I had done a story for National Geographic on dinosaurs about extinction, the writer was only there for a few days of each project, and I would each segment of the story, and we're looking for the earliest known dinosaur in the Valley of the Moon down in Argentina, where I kept a journal and you know, this will hopefully be an interesting story, but like as a contract photographer for National Geographic, I own the photographs and I went back to Geographic. I said, listen I've been working on the story for a year and a half. I spent over a million dollars. You know, that's great. We have a great article. Let's make a book. And they spent about 50000 dollars in a market survey that said that dinosaurs were declining in popularity. And he said, go do a book yourself and, you know, this is in 1992-93. And I'm traveling on a plane down to South America to photograph Ivo Pitanguy the premier plastic surgeon in the world that really popularized plastic surgery and I'm sitting on a plane next to this guy and he asks what I do I told him I’m a photographer for National Geographic and he said, oh, a friend of mine is doing a film on dinosaurs, you know, and who's your friend? Steven Spielberg and so I was the only photographer, you know, popular photographer allowed to photograph behind the scenes because Spielberg liked National Geographic.
And then then, you know, I went back to Geographic and after I went to the Stan Winston studio where they were making the the physical dinosaurs for the film and saw some bits of the CG and I said, forget your market surveys this is going to be huge. And again, this is kind of a those hockey stick kind of moments, right, where you're looking at the graph where people think the surveys show that, you know, dinosaurs, a flat line, there is no future in this. And I said, you know, listen, it's going to be huge. And then so I wrote this book in isolation for like a year and a half and my I remember my wife at the time was going like you’re spending all this money should be taking pictures and I said, no, this would be huge. And then then there was a story in The New York Times that came out that said, you know, this is going to be a game changer for the movie industry.
And then all those publishers that refused to publish my, you know, and passed on that are like, hey, you know, that project you're working on is still available. So I was now in the enviable position of being a first time author with a bidding war and, yeah, so that Jurassic Park really did help inspire, you know, the publication of that book. And it's called Hunting Dinosaurs. I wish I could sell you some, but it's out of print now.
[Konstantinow] We’ll be OK with the first edition signed by you yes that would be fine. So the actual questions that came from the previous guest, which was a wellness and fitness entrepreneur, Ellie Flegga: “What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishment or achievement?”
[Louie] Oh, man, I would say I mean, you want me to answer that or you just want me to know that? Well, to be honest, it's every single person that gets changed by the films that we've collectively done. It's not about me. It's about the group and, you know, the collective effort.
So anybody who's ever seen our film, that's our biggest accomplishment, to get one person through, whether it's the door of a theater or to see the film, to click on it and look at it, that's that's kind of an achievement, because I know that somewhere down here, maybe not so deep, which we're hoping to collectively change the DNA of that one person and thereby hopefully change in the world even a little bit. So that's that's the key, you know, one person at a time.
[Tina] So speaking about the DNA, what is your relationship with Greece and your Greek roots? We know that you are from Sparta and nothing more.
[Louie] Well, my father was from Sparta. He was born in a little village called Solatia. My mother's grandparents were both from a village next to that like five kilometers away. So I wasn't born in Greece. But I've got, you know, Greek blood runs through me. You know, I still have relatives in Greece, you know, one of my biggest embarrassments is that, you know, when I went, I took six years of Greek school and as a kid, but I never really there was only a few Greek families in the town. I was born in the middle of the country in Iowa. And I I resisted, you know, learning a new language when people weren't speaking it. It was a lot of signal-to-noise like I was like, why am I doing this?
It was the the dying language of my my parents, you know, and I resisted. And I, I it's I feel embarrassed to talk to Greeks that I don't really understand the language like I should I go there. It starts to come back to me. But I love the country. I love the people here when I was growing up.
Forget the language thing, the Greeks were so warm and friendly and loving that I never I never didn't feel loved, if not by my family, but, you know, by the community. And I always felt sorry for my American friends, because they I know they didn't have that, the warmth that we have, you know, that we could easily hug each other, could easily tell each other that we loved each other, that we could, you know, having the the thinnest of a connection of blood could bond us. And I think the secret is to realize that, we can extend that to people that don't have Greek blood, we can extend that sort of love and that feeling to people of other cultures, other faiths, and because there's, you know, what we have in common. Is way stronger and more beautiful than the things that we don't have in common. You know, that world like you were saying, Dena, that you know we are connected by this common goodness in all of us, and if we could harness that and look at each other and I try to do that, I'm not always successful, but I do try to look at the good of everyone. And, you know, if you start to dig beneath the surface of anybody, you'll find a you know, somebody there like a child that was hurt or even I hate to say it, but even Trump, you know, I photographed that that man several times. And I see him as a failed human. You know, he's a product of our own culture, you know, Americanism. He thinks that a gilded building, wealth, a beautiful woman that might be only skin deep in terms of character. I don't know his wife, but, you know, he thinks that that's going to give him, stupidly, ignorantly, what's going to make them happy. And the irony is it probably has made them one of the most unhappy people because he's chasing the things that we know aren't going to give them that real joy.
You know, he can surround himself by people that, you know, as the Dalai Lama would say, foolish, selfish, you know, because that was foolish selfishness. When you're doing things for yourself, you can be wise, selfish and still try to do things for yourself, but know that it's going to be good for other people. And knowing the man how I know him or knew him or, you know, encountered him is he embodies a lot of what I think, you know, people that are enlightened are trying to resist, you know, he embodies a part of our culture that's a bit of a cancer in terms of the awareness that you don't need what he's pursuing to be be happy, you know, you don't need, wealth, fame and the power that, comes from that sort of gilded veneer of what they think it means to be a human. I understand, like, if you live in New York long enough, it's about the apartment where you live. You know how much wealth you have. There's all this sort of codes of, you know, how people kind of accept another person from their life and they know and that world, you can make yourself a king, but in reality, it makes you, kind of weak not kind of it does, because you're not pursuing the kinds of things that are going to give others real joy.
[Tina] So, as you mentioned, the drama, but what about the capital riots in D.C.? What were your own initial thoughts?
[Louie] Yeah, well, I mean, it just shows how how close we are to decay. And it's also, you know, it's also important to remember that that's a very small minority of people most Republicans I know conservatives, the vast majority, they wouldn't agree with that.
You know, that it's an outlier. You know, if I had I’m sort of catching myself here, from namedropping, but I was at Elon’s house several months back and he said, you know, there are some catastrophe going on at that time. He says, but, you know, he said he's like, you know, for every one thing you read in the paper, there's there's millions of good things you'll never, ever see about. You never hear about that. And, you know, and it's true. It's like what the newspapers are condensing the worst of it. And listen, not to diminish what happened at the capital, but it's an outlier. You know, that's not who we are. That's not what we represent. And one thing that's important is to understand, it's like, you know, democracy's still is the worst form of government except for all the rest. You know who said that? You know, it wasn't me and somebody said a couple hundred years ago.
But, I think that's kind of what, you know, why the Greeks are so proud of their cultures, because we were on the forefront of civilization and trying to take us to the next level to try to advance our civilization, to try to figure out what's the truth, what's the you know, what makes us tick? How does this all work? How do you organize a culture a society, you know, a medical industry that's based on science and not, you know, dogma. And I think we're still struggling.
We're going to you know, we're going to die. We're all going to die still trying to push that, you know, log up a hill. You know, we'll never quite be there but, you know, I think we're getting wherever we're going, we're getting towards that you know, one lifetime at a time. And, you know, it's important to remember that, you know, we're never going to change the world completely for, you know, to your your liking. But I think as long as you're pushing on that log up the hill and with other people that are trying to do it, it gives you that sense of joy and satisfaction, knowing that the next generation has the opportunity to to get to the top, whether we get there or not.
[Dena] Yeah, OK, before we we wrap it up, I would like to ask you if there's anything that you would like to mention that we didn't bring up.
[Tina] Maybe for your plans.
[Dena] What should we expect from you in the future maybe,
[Louie] Oh boy, we have a bunch of movies coming out. You know, I'm so happy with them. We've got you know, usually I've done you know, we've made one film every four to five years. Now we have 10 in the works. We have the one I mentioned, you know, “Act like a holy man” with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. You know how to find joy in a world of sorrow, one on female big wave surfers of females that have, you know, big wave surfers that got pay equity in the sport of big wave surfing. We're doing a film called “The Last Place on Earth” because it's the last place where wild tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutagns are found in the wild. And it's about the activists that are trying to get the palm oil plantations back from the corporations that have illegally commandeered them. We're doing a film on the future of food called “Food 2.0”, which is, you know, takes game changers. That film we talked about earlier to the next level. If they want to, you know, get out of, you know, you know, give me an email or, you know, go to the organization and see if they want to become an executive producer, help us on the projects. You know, we're always looking for, you know, for people to help support. You know, we're not looking for, these are not investments I tell people they want to make movie money from a movie you know, you're better off going to Vegas, you know, if it's the financial play but if you want to change the world where the place to come to.
[Dena] That's fantastic and last question, because I can't help it because I'm a meditation instructor as well as a practitioner, do you meditate?
[Louie] I don't have a practice where I do it regularly, but every minute I can like even before a meal, I'll just do a deep breath and just just you know, it's not it's not a prayer so much as it is just a thought like, thank God, if there is one that, you know, I can have a meal, I can enjoy that the company that I'm with, even if I'm with the myself, I have the the consciousness to be aware that this is an incredible gift, this life that we have.
And, you know, to use these moments to try to do good work its such a it's such a gift. It's a profound gift. And thank you for the opportunity to talk with you all. Hopefully we're you know, we're all collectively inspiring people that are out there to, be a better version of themselves because we'll get there together.