Transcript of #244 Victor Vescovo – Solo Dive to the Titanic, Cloning Humans & Reviving Extinct Animals

Victor Vascovo. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

Man, I'm looking forward to this. You've done so much in life, especially with exploring the Earth and even outside of the Earth. It's going to be a fascinating interview, so I really appreciate you coming.

Thank you for the invitation. It's quite a privilege.

Thank you. All right, we're going to get right into it. I'm going to do a little bit of a life story on you. Then towards the end, I just want to talk about all the amazing adventures that you've been on. But we always start off with an introduction here. Here we go. Okay. Victor Vascovo, private investor with over 30 years in complex business deals, co founder of Insight Equity, where he raised over 1. 5 billion. Now running Kaladin Capital, focused on defense startups, high tech hardware, and life sciences. Retired US Navy Reserve Commander with 20 years of service as an intelligence officer, an extreme explorer who completed the Explorer's Grand Slam by submitting the highest peaks on all seven continents, including Everest, and skiing to both holes. Plus, you're the first person to dive to the deepest points in all five oceans. You hold the Guinness Book World Records, The Most Dives to Challenger Deep 15 times, discovering the deepest shipwrecks and achieving the extreme trifecta by going to Everest, the Ocean's Bottom, and to space on Blue Origin. That's insane. Member of the Ocean elders, where you're an outspoken advocate against deep sea mining.

You have a ship named after you, a naval ship, the USNAS Victor Vascovo, T-A-G-O-S-26, a Navy Ocean surveillance ship. You push the boundaries by mitigating risk with preparation in life, in finance, and on your adventures. Quite the introduction there. I'm probably missing some stuff, but wow. But right off the bat, sometimes we do an EDC pocket dump in here, but I think this is going to be a long one, so we're not. But Jeremy had told me about your timepiece.

Yes.

And so me and my viewers are big, big fans. We're just always interested in what people are wearing. So you have a one of a kind.

Yeah, it's a rather unique timepiece. I'm a brand ambassador for Omega. And before even that, I really admired their timepieces, and I needed a precision waterproof timepiece to wear on all my dives to the five oceans. It had to be a chronometer. So I picked up a titanium Seamaster, and this timepiece has now been with me on every dive I've ever made. It's been to 17 deep ocean trenches. It made all 15 dives to Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean. I also took it into space with me. And so it's been my trusted companion on a lot of my different adventures.

Man, that has been through a lot.

It has indeed. Wow. A few emergencies deep in the water. And not many people know it, but during the Apollo 13 disaster, they relied on their Omegas to do the timed burn on their way back to Earth that allowed them to do a proper re-entry. So it's actually a piece of safety equipment for a submersible that you need an analog time time instrument in case everything else fails, which is what happened on Apollo 13. And so when you're in a submersible, if there's a big emergency and all your electronics go down, you can keep precise time. In fact, one key feature of that, if you're in a submersible and you're stranded on the bottom, every 15 or 30 minutes, exactly, you would actually wrap on the outside of the submersible with something metal, because nature would never do that. A precise signal at an exact time frame with Morse code SOS or something like that. So the timepiece is a critical survival piece of equipment, even deep in the ocean.

Man, that is cool. I look... You wear the shit out of this thing, too. I love it. I love it.

And I love the fact that the submersible that I dove so much in was also made of titanium. So there was a nice symmetry there.

Very cool. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. Of course.

And I have a gift for you. May I?

Oh, yes. I love gifts.

So this is something that I only minted about 50 challenge coins, a very military thing. And this was part of the series that I took down to the very bottom of the ocean. And this particular one was down with me when I took down the first woman to the bottom of the ocean, Dr. Cathy Sullivan, who is the first person, male or female, to go to the bottom of the ocean and to go into space. And this is a certificate of authenticity, but that's a point for you.

Oh, man. Thank you.

The bottom of the ocean. And those are stars for all the different trenches that we dove on that particular expedition.

Very cool. Thank you. Of course. Man, that's awesome. That's going to go great here in the studio.

So thank you. Of course.

Well, we got a couple of things to knock out, too. I have a small gift for you as well. Uh-oh.

What is this?

This is Vigilance League Gummy Bear's Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states. There's no funny business.

It's good because I got to fly later.

Then on top of that, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription network, and we've turned it into quite the community. They've been here with me since the beginning, and They're the reasons that I get to do this and talk to very interesting folks like yourself. One of the things I offer them is to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Michael King. You have accomplished so many daring and life-threatening accomplishments. Has your personal family life suffered as a consequence of your pursuit of so many expeditions?

Yes, because there are only so many hours in the day, and family are, of course, extremely important. I think I've made a conscious decision where I prioritize for most of my life, my career, my military service, and exploring. To be quite frank, something has to give. So, yes, that certainly has been a drawback. I bet.

How often are you active on these expeditions?

Well, it tends to come and go in waves. When I was diving intensively between 2018 and 2022, I would be off for weeks, even months at a time, come back to recharge in my home in Texas, and then go back out on an expedition. So it was a very intense four years, like being on deployment in the teams or something like that. But now I'm more focused on developing technology, potentially to go back into the hopefully in two, three or four years, and restart the cycle.

Wow. Man. Very interesting life.

Yes. It's been amazing. I feel incredibly privileged to live in a country and in a society that allows for people to come from modest upbringing to achieve extraordinary things. If you have the imagination and you're willing to work very, very hard.

Yeah. I mean, one, That's one reason why you're here. I just think that in this country, victimization has become a thing. One of the things I like to do on the show is especially a story like yours, modest upbringing and going through your life's trajectory to show that the American dream is still very much alive and well. If you want, and you're going to put the work in, you have the drive and the ambition Anything's possible.

Yeah. My ancestors came here at the turn of the century from Italy, and they settled here in Tennessee. They settled outside of Memphis. They had an ice cream factory. They had farms. They worked hard. They brought their other family members across, and they were reasonably successful. I just stood on the shoulders of my ancestors who worked hard, played by the rules, and allowed me to achieve the things that I did.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Born and raised Texan, even though I don't have the accent. When I was three years old, my family lived in Connecticut, so I learned how to talk there. But I'm a true-blood Texan.

What were you into as a kid?

I was a quiet kid. I loved to read. In fact, the first book I ever checked out of a library was a military history book. God help me. I've always had a fascination with history and military affairs. But also, I think the most dangerous thing my parents ever did was they gave me a bicycle when I was seven, and they didn't see me for a while. I just loved going way, way out to explore my world and come back at night to their horror. So, yeah, I was quiet. I had a very small circle of dedicated friends, played Dungeons & Dragons in high school, big nerd, focused a lot on math and science, the typical story. But it set me up for a lot of success later in life.

I mean, would you consider yourself an explorer as a child? Where did the fascination come in?

It's genetic. I think that it's become more commonly known that so many things follow on a normal Histogram distribution. Some people love their homes. They very rarely leave. They do their thing. Other people have this compulsion to explore new places, new things. I think it's genetic-based. Society needs that 2 or 3% of the people that really want to go see what's on the other side of that hill, even if it kills them because they just can't help it. But they also need the other 2 or 3% that maintain the home and the hearth. You need that balance in society. I definitely think that genetically and by the very permissive parents that I had who were great, that I fostered that desire and love of exploration. I couldn't not explore. It's like a compulsion. If I do not get out and explore new things, I get very anxious.

So your lineage, everybody was an more if it's genetic, right?

That's right. We come from a long line of people that push the boundaries.

Let's hear about it. Well, no.

I mean, just think about it evolutionarily. If you had a species that never took any risks whatsoever, they would be outcompeted by those other species or other parts of your own species that would outcompet you for food and for resources. Just like the beginning of the wonderful movie 2001, a Space Odyssey, where that first brilliant scene with the apes, it was the tribe that learned how to use the first tool that actually started gaining ascendence. If everyone was incredibly exploration-focused and always seeking new things, it'd be chaotic. You can't have everyone like that. It is dangerous, and some of us don't come back. But you need that element in society to keep pushing you forward. That's why I do venture capital now. It's an exploration in a different way. We're deploying capital, our own know-how to try and push the boundaries even further. You've had a guest on this show, Matt Gilek of Astrophorge. I've invested in his company. He and I are good friends. I've invested in Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to de-extinct dinosaurs and other animals. It's part of overall exploration, not just physical exploration like I've done, but also financial, economic, and societal.

What do you... A couple of questions that just came out of that. One, de-extinction of dinosaurs. But before we get there, what do you notice? What are the similarities? You are an explorer that takes it to beyond human capabilities, almost.

Yeah, it's the fun place to be.

And so that takes a lot of courage. But there's a few other people that try to do this. Do you find any commonalities?

Oh, absolutely. There's a group in New called the Explorers Club that was established around the turn of the century. And that's where all these island of misfit toys people collaborate and get together and talk about what they're working on, whether it's to explore the rainforest or it's to go to the bottom of caves, or it's to trek across Antarctica. We get together and share our experiences and enjoy each other's company because there aren't many people like us, it seems.

The Deextinction of dinosaurs. We have to hit this right now. What do you think about that? How's it going to end up?

Well, many people focus, of course, on what we call the marquee element of that, which is de-extincting the wooly mammoth. We're not going to de-extinct Dinosaurs. The DNA is too fractured. It's too old. The real value in a company like Colossal Biosciences are the tools that they're developing in order to manipulate things at the genetic level. That company is developing tools that will allow to do large edits on DNA of mamillion species, but also others. It's those tools that are extremely valuable. It will allow us to conserve animals that are critically in danger. It's a heck of a lot easier to preserve an existing species than to bring one back that's already extinct. So animals where there are only a handful left, we can preserve their DNA and potentially in the future, synthetically create healthy populations, which would make extinction, hopefully a thing of the past when we fully develop the tools. So Colossal really is a technology company. It's just that all the attention is placed on the dire wolves or the dodo bird or the physical manifestations of these incredible tools they're developing. But as a venture capitalist, I'm most interested in the tools.

Astrophorge is the same way, where they're trying to mine asteroids in space. But the real value of Astrophorge, yes, they'll potentially get money back from bringing platinum group metals back to Earth. But if you can go to an asteroid, land on it, and scrape it for some metals, project that 20 or 30 or 40 years in the future. The technology tools you're developing to do that have immense applications for space exploration, space colonization, any number of other things. It's the tools that are valuable.

With the wooly mammoth, I mean, so would that be... When that comes back, and I don't know, I have no idea how far I'm on.

2028, I think is the current projected timeline.

2028? Yeah. So is this a legitimate wooly mammoth or is it edited DNA?

That's a very good debate. There are some in the scientific community that say, no, you're just making what's called a chimera. You're taking an existing species and injecting some genetics that make it look like a wooly mammoth. It's not a real wooly mammoth or a real dire wolf because it doesn't have the identical or very close to identical DNA of the original. I think that one could argue that they have a point, but it goes back to the old saw, right? If something looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, eats like a duck. I think it's a duck. What is important is that we are able to create species that can fill a niche like the Tasmanian tiger that was eliminated by mankind. It was exterminated, and it unbalanced the ecosystem in Tasmania. If we can bring back an animal that functions like the Tasmanian tiger did in the ecosystem, I think that's a big win, even if at a purely scientific level, it doesn't have exactly the same DNA as the one that was exterminated. Generated. There is value in to what they're doing, I think.

I mean, so with the dire wolf, I mean, where is that wolf now?

Where are they dealing with it? I can't say. It's in the United States.

It's in the United States.

It's a carefully guarded preserve in the United States. I think there's good reason is that they want to keep the animals isolated so they can study them. No one's ever brought back an animal like this before. I think there's a lot of curiosity about how will they act purely out of their own genetics.

See, that's where I was going is what is the species instinct? We don't know.

There's so much in terms of animal husbandry of those animals that we simply don't know. Will they know how to be a dire wolf? How will they hunt? Will they hunt like a gray wolf, or will they hunt differently than a gray wolf where they're descended from? We don't know. That's why, in many respects, it's a great science experiment. There's a little joke that Colossal really isn't in the business of producing dire wolves. It's in the production of PhDs because there's so many new things happening that they're doing that have never been done before.

Yeah. I mean, is there any info on how it's going? I mean, do we know... I guess what I'm trying to ask is, do we know how the dire wolves behavior was before we... Do we have any idea of what their behavior was as an an extinct animal? Will we be able to observe some of those commonalities?

Yeah, I'm speaking way out of my expertise level. I'm not an animal expert or any expert on dire wolves. Obviously, we've never seen one in the wild. They died 10,000 plus years ago. All we have is the fossil record from the Brea Tar Pits and other places like that. But we know what they look like. We know probably what they hunted based on what was inside of them. I'm not sure exactly what we're going to be able to learn, but I guarantee you it'll be new. I do know that they want to build a few more to have a functioning pack. The only other thing I've heard is that they're getting quite big. Yeah, I bet. More than a few people have said, So, Victor, you're an investor in Colossular. Are you going to get to have a dire wolf? And I said, Yeah, right. I want a 120-pound killing machine in my backyard. I don't think so.

Man, I can't wait to hear about that wooly bammut. That's going to be... Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, hopefully that It works well, and it could be delayed. You never know. This is genetics. It's not easy. And they take a year to gestate. It's an elephant, but that would be a big event. I'm looking forward to the dodo bird.

When's that?

That, hopefully, well, I don't know exactly when. I can't say. But it's maybe on similar timeline for the wooly mammoth, I hope. Right on. But a beautiful animal, obviously extincted by mankind unnaturally. It's just a cute bird.

Are there any animals that have gone extinct in recent history that we have dead on, we have their behavior on that they'll be able to bring back?

Well, the Tasmanian tiger was close. I think it went extinct in the 1920s. So we actually had really good DNA from them because they had preserved their remains. And it was in a zoo in Tasmania, so we did see how they acted. And there may even still be people alive that saw them in the wild, so we're not sure. So that's probably the closest.

Wow, that'll be interesting. Is that on the agenda?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We're working closely with the Australian government because they wanted brought back and reintroduced because it unbalanced the ecosystem in Tasmania.

How did it unbalance it?

Well, they put a bounty out on them because they thought that they were a pest. So, yeah, they shot them all to death. And then when you lose the apex predator in an ecosystem, you end up getting overpopulation of what they were predating on, what they were eating. And that can lead to overgrazing. When you overgraze, you're reducing the amount of attention in the soil caused by the root system of the shrubs that they're eating, which causes rivers to literally change course. There's a wonderful documentary on YouTube that shows what happened when they reintroduced gray wolves into Yellowstone. I suggest anybody watching it because it shows how transformational just adding a few apex predators were to that ecosystem. It literally changed the course of rivers as they brought down the population of the the elk and caribou that they were eating, and there was not as much overgrazing. So more foliage came back, more species came back, beavers came back. They started damning the rivers and things started changing that made a more healthy environment.

Wow. No kidding. Yeah.

That's incredible. That's what we're hoping can happen with the wooly mammoth, with the Tasmanian tiger, with a lot of these other de-extinted species.

Do you think they'll just be reintroduced into the wild?

Carefully, yes. We'll You have to be extremely careful about that. But there are so many bioethicists and brilliant people on the board of Colossal that are doing this. And a lot of people said, We shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be playing with genetics at that level, de-extinking species. If we don't do it here in the United States, actually in my hometown of Dallas, other countries will do it first. It's like, in some respects, some of the greatest advances in human history. They can be dangerous and they can be incredibly beneficial. I trust our culture, and I trust our people to do it well.

Yeah, that's an interesting argument. We shouldn't be playing with genetics, but we probably shouldn't be extincting animals either.

It's a tool that humankind needs in its toolbox. If we extinct a species, deliberately or by accident, that's a good tool to have in our toolbox to be able to bring it back. What if we find out that we've extincted a species that we really need for the health of the planet to support 8 billion people on the planet? We look in the toolbox and there's nothing that can undo it. That would not be a good day.

What do you think about the fears of, I mean, probably already doing it, but cloning human beings.

Wow. Let's just say there's nothing that makes it impossible. We've cloned other mammalspecies, so one just has to wonder, has it already been done yet in certain countries? But will it happen one day? I can't imagine it won't.

Yeah, I'm sure it will, if it hasn't already. Correct. I am very interested to see the instinct if those come back with these animals, that would be... It makes you just wonder, how much do they learn through adolescence from- Nature, nurture. Biological parents. Which is it? That's It's going to be a fascinating discussion when we get there.

Oh, here's another element that isn't widely discussed, but another key technology that Colossal is trying to develop is artificial womb for mammals. Artificial what? Wombs. So you can grow the animals, not in a surrogate animal. The dire wolves that were birth were brought into being using a canine species. But Colossal understands to get more scale, to get more animals, you would actually have to build artificial womb. This is out of brave new world. If you can do it for a mammal, we're mammals, too. There are a lot of next steps that come after that with human infertility and other things that I think would be societally profound. I'll just leave it at that.

Right on, right on. All right, back to childhood.

Oh, gosh.

So we were talking about how you became an explorer, and you're into reading, and you're an adventurer. But then When you went to school, correct? You went to school first.

I went to school a lot.

I saw that. I mean, Stanford University, MIT, and Harvard Business School, all Is this back to back?

No, there were intervals to do some work, get some life experience. I test well.

Obviously. Yeah. What were you doing on... So where did you go first?

I went to Stanford University as an undergraduate. Go, Cardinal. I started as an engineer, and I was an okay engineer, but I wasn't great. So I started experimenting around, and then I found out I really loved and was better at economics and political science. Then from there, I went into the business world for a year or so, and then I got a scholarship to MIT. There, I was in an unusual program. It was called the Defense and Arms Control program, where we actually studied at a mathematical level Human conflict, nuclear strategy, conventional warfare, very academic. Modeling and simulation of warfare appealed to my academic nature. But I left the PhD program. I just took a master's there. Then from there, I went to Wall Street, which sounds like a strange progression, but it's still just numbers. You're just using them in a different way. I went hardcore in finance for two years. I worked for about over a year in Saudi Arabia as a civilian working for the Saudi government on financial analysis. I had to learn Arabic when I was there. Then when I was done with that assignment, I was fortunate to get admitted into Harvard Business School, and I went there for two years.

In the first year at Harvard Business School, I got a strange call from our friends, the US Navy. They said, Yeah, we've noticed you have some interesting background. You have a couple of languages. I speak French and German a little bit. You've done this stuff at MIT with military simulations and math. You've lived in the Middle East. Yeah, we have a special program for guys like you. And so they offered me a direct commission into naval intelligence as an ensen in my first year of business school in 1993.

How did you like that?

The security review took over a year, and eventually they let me in, but it was fascinating. It was perfectly suited to my personality, intelligence analysis. I was originally trained as a targeting officer because I knew enough about business. I'm also I was a pilot since I was 18, so I could easily interface with the pilot community on how things look from the air, how flight operations work. But I also knew if you need to take out an oil refinery, where the critical nodes probably are, what the dangers are, those types of things. For about 10 years, I was a targeting officer. I was involved in the Kosovo conflict. I was on the targeting staff in Naples, Italy, when we were bombing Serbia, directly involved in those operations and battle damage assessment. Then 9/11 happened, and I was mobilized and cross-trained into counterterrorism. So I became a targeting officer, but for organizations and individuals, not bombing targets. I was deployed to Pearl Harbor for about a year and a half and was involved with some of the communities, and policy to rescue in the Philippines and other things.

Which Hostage Rescue in the Philippines?

The Burnims. They were two Christian missionaries that were being held by Abu Syyaf, the Al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines. Our job was to try and track them down and help get them out. And it's documented now in novels and other things, but we were with the other members of the community, three letter agencies, who they are. We were able to locate them, and we desperately wanted CL6 to go in and get them out of where they were in the Philippines. But the Filipinos are quite strict that US combat forces are not allowed to conduct operations on their soil. From what I understand, this went all the way up to the White House, and it was denied. They gave the mission over to the Filipino Rangers. In the rescue operation, they came over the hill where the hostages were. They had undisciplined fire control. They killed one of the two American hostages by accident, and they shot Gratia Burnham, the wife, in the leg. They evacuated her, and then I was fortunate enough to do the debrief of her for about three days after that.

Wow, man.

But we learned an immense amount from her in the debrief about their operations, who they were, all that.

Do you want to talk about that at all?

Not a lot, but I will just say that, yes, it can be very valuable to learn what people see and heard. Hostages often know a heck of a lot more than they think they do if you debrief them properly. Then that information would go right back to the community, which was therefore very useful in the subsequent years as other teams continued, shall we say, to prosecute them. Very effectively, actually.

Let's go back to the MIT war game. Sure. Can you go into a little more detail on what that is? A lot of people don't understand what war game simulation is.

Sure. Unfortunately, it sounds reductionist, and it doesn't sound very kind, but war is a process like any other, like business, like a football game or baseball. It can be reduced in some respects to mathematics. A larger force will almost certainly defeat a much smaller one. It's a matter of time. Well, what about different quality? Okay, that would be a factor you'd put into a mathematical equation. In fact, some people tried to reduce warfare to mathematical equations, especially after World War I, when it was very mathematical. How much artillery do you put on a target to destroy it? Then you can do this and this. And some of them are called Lanchestrian equations and others. And they're not exactly right, but they do rhyme a a lot with the real world. And that was one thing that I was researching a lot, was particularly in conventional warfare, could you actually model certain aspects of combat to predict their outcomes? But more importantly than predicting the outcome, what are the most important variables that determine the outcome of a conflict? My master's thesis at MIT was figuring out what would have happened if there had been a major war in Central Europe during the 1990s.

Who would have won in the air? I focused on the air element of a war in Central Europe. No one had really done it before. So I built a mathematical model in simulation that simulated the forces fighting each other over several months, and coming up with a conclusion of, yes, of who would win under what conditions, but also what the key variable was. What was fascinating after doing all this research and talking to all these experts, the number one determinant of who would win in aerial warfare, and this applies to any scenario, of pilots. Pilot, Pilot quality and training. That's why the Israelis are so incredibly good. Their training is incredible. They fly all the time. They have great systems. It's less about the hardware than about the pilots. Most people don't realize, 80% of the time when someone is shot down, they have no idea who shot them down. It comes out of nowhere. The aces are very rare. They're less than 5% or less of pilots in wartime. Usually, pilots are either hawks or they're pigeons, as they're called, and therefore, really air warfare is determined by the pilots.

Interesting. What about all of warfare? What would you say the single most important aspect is? Is it logistics?

Oh, good for you. As Napoleon said, Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. You can have the best troops in the world, but if they don't have beans and bullets, you're going to lose. But that also gets into a completely separate discussion, which I know you and many of your former guests have spoken about, which is counterinsurgency. I've been fascinated by at the academic level and the practical level of how to win a counterinsurgency, and it's really, really hard. I fear that the United States just still doesn't get it of how you actually have to win a guerrilla war based on history.

How do you win it?

There are four conditions, and they're hard. Winning a counterinsurgency is one of the most difficult things you can do in warfare. Amphibius operations are right up there, but counterinsurgency is one. Number one, you have to isolate the battlefield. If you do not restrict the ability of guerrillas to go and rest, resupply and come back, You're almost never going to win. Every successful major counterinsurgency has done that. We did not do it in Vietnam, Ho Chi Muntreil. We did not do it in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. We did not do it in Afghanistan, Pakistan. How can you hope to win? We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. We never sealed the border, so they were constantly able to rejuvenate. Regeneration is the dirty secret of counterinsurgencies that I'm sure you know. You can kill and kill and kill your adversaries, but they're going to keep regenerating if you don't cut them off from their basis supply. Number two, you have to isolate the population. We started doing that in the latter stages of Vietnam, and it was somewhat successful, but the British did it ruthlessly and very effectively during the Boar War. The British won the counterinsurgency known as the Boar War in the early 1900s.

They put the population in camps where they could not support and interact with the guerrillas. Number three, you do have to have hunt and seek and destroy missions. You do have to hunt down the bad guys and keep them on the run and exhaust them just like a wolf going after a Buffalo. Run and run until they're exhausted, and then you can take care of them. If they can't then regenerate, you're winning. Then number four, very importantly, you have to have institutions in place that can take over when you leave. Solid institutions. Americans, wonderful as we are, we think democracy is the answer to everything. I love democracy, but we have to acknowledge that there are some cultures and places in the world that don't have institutions or cultures strong enough to handle the rough and tumble of democratic institutions that can be easily corrupted. You need enduring situations. The United States has won a guerrilla war. We've actually won two in our history. We won it against the Indigenous peoples of this continent, and it was ruthless. We isolated them from the battlefield. We basically put the population on reservations. The cavalry hunted down the warriors.

We had an institution, the United States government, that could take over and endure. Those are the conditions you need. If you look back at the counterinsurgencies you fought in, your friends fought in, the political and high-level leadership of this country did not accept what I believe are the four critical conditions to win a counterinsurgency. And we will continue to lose unless we do.

Yeah, I'm 100% with you on that one. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. But yeah, it's Just thinking about Afghanistan is frustrating.

I did it from the intel side. We were tracking HVTs, high-value targets. And just like you guys in the field, I know I was a real echelon jerk, but we could see it from a higher level saying, What are you guys doing? These guys are risking their lives, getting up at dawn to go take down hard targets. They're just going to regenerate. How are we solving the root cause of this problem? And by the way, if we ever leave, it'll collapse in weeks because these institutions are nonexistent. We all saw it at the middle level, but no one paid attention. Everybody was just, go along to get along. Let me get my next promotion. Let me get out of this billet. And it just continued and continued and continued. There was never any strategy to either win the war But we're not going to deploy the resources to do that. We were not going to deploy 200,000 US troops to seal the border with Pakistan. So you have to accept reality and say, we're not really good at nation building our counterinsurgency as a culture. We're not ruthless enough. How did the Romans deal with counterinsurgency?

They would eliminate a third of the population. We're not going to do that. But that's what it takes sometimes to win against determined adversaries in a guerrilla situation.

Yeah, it got to the point where I think a lot of people just... They were on the ground over there. They just... I mean, we're like, What the hell are we doing over here? This isn't working. Yeah. It's almost like they wanted to prolong it. I have thoughts on that, but it's a big money-making machine.

Yeah. I also think that hope springs eternal. You get deployed to Afghanistan, you want to make a difference, especially mid-level or even the brass. And they think, no, we'll win hearts and minds. We'll kill just enough of the most important people. We'll just get through. We'll do it different this time. This time it's different, some of those dangerous words in the English language. So it's not pure capitalistic motivation. I think people truly do want to succeed. The military has a real can-do spirit. They don't want to admit, no, sir, we probably can't do that. We probably can't win that conflict. They don't want to be that guy going to the oval office making that statement.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about, we already talked about some of them, but your investments.

Sure.

And your firm. Yeah. What are excited about. We already talked about Colossal.

Right. Well, those are my more recent ones. For 20 years, I did industrial private equity. I was a hard core capitalist. I mean, I was investing in metal fabrication business. I even had a metal recycling company in Ohio that did copper and zinc. We invested in an eyeglass manufacturing plant. These were hard core, and we were really trying to bring industry back into the United States. I think we were a little bit ahead of the curve. We were trying to bring stuff back. Very difficult because things are expensive in the US compared to other parts of the country. But lately, as I've gotten older in life, I think it's much more exciting to invest in breakthrough technologies and try and move the needle for the human experience. What can we do that actually will change people's lives significantly, but also have profit potential? But in some respects, I think there's almost a responsibility for people that have some degree of means that when they do invest, they should invest such that, yes, you want a reasonable chance of making a decent return, if not a great one. But even if you fail, you want to have moved the needle forward in human progress.

If Astrophorge doesn't work out, and we don't mine steroids, I guarantee you the money I put into that business will have advanced the technology for deep space exploration, and I will be happy. I think if more people did that on the high networth aspect, that we could move us forward faster as a species season as a country.

Astroforge is an awesome company. Well, that's how we connected with Matt. Yeah, right. That's great. I can't remember the I can't remember the year off the top of my head that they're hoping to land on one. Do you remember? Next year.

Next year. We're sending the vestry probe.

Man, that's awesome. Yeah.

We'll see. It's a high-risk venture. We all agree that it is, but it is a lot of math. And It's been done before. We have landed on comets or asteroids and brought material back. That was done by NASA and the Japanese. We're just trying to do it commercially. It's been done three times. No kidding. Very small amounts.

How recent?

Last several years, I should know the date, but yeah, they did. They brought it back in a hard re-entry. They landed on a comet, they got some material, and they brought it back to Earth, and it screamed in and impacted, and they retrieved the material.

What did we learn?

Don't know yet.

Right on.

Hasn't killed us yet. I don't know.

What are some of the other ones that you're excited about?

I'm also involved in a company that's trying to do industrial automation of ship building, like the current administration, but also the ones before it. We all know that we have 1% of the capacity that China has to build ships, and we're not going to solve it by throwing labor at the problem. We don't have enough, and it's too expensive. We have to utilize higher technology solutions. A company I'm involved in is trying to to develop the robots, the visual systems, the tracking, to be able to fabricate pieces for naval vessels much more cheaply, effectively, and reliably, not using as much human labor. It's difficult, but we're hoping that we're going to make some progress there. There's that. I'm CEO of a life sciences company that I am personally funding that we're trying to solve for curing some incurable diseases that reside in the human nervous system. Can't talk too much about that. We're hopefully going to go to the FDA within the next one to two years for safety testing. That would be some breakthrough technology. It uses artificial viruses to deliver genetically modified material to hunt down and kill rogue disease DNA in our systems.

No kidding. Yeah. Can you name any of the diseases? No. No. Damn it.

Sorry. We're keeping under wraps for now. I don't like advertising too much what I do, whether an exploration or technology. I like to do things first and then talk about them because I also don't like the time pressure or expectation building that comes with, oh, look at what we're doing. I like to be able to do things deliberately and patiently and keep my team insulated from pressure.

It's worked so far. Yeah, makes a hell of a lot of sense.

You guys didn't go advertise your missions before you went on them, right?

No.

Same principle.

At least we weren't supposed to. Yeah, fair enough. And then you took up an interest in flying as well.

Yeah, I wanted to be a military pilot when I was a young boy. I wanted to be an astronaut and wanted to fly F-15s or F-18s, but my eyesight was very poor. So they said, Oh, we're going to put you in a missile silo in Dakota. I went, No, and I don't think so. That's not going to happen. And so first thing I did when I got to college and away from home, I paid for my own flying lessons, learned how to fly. And I've been flying ever since five. If it's got a stick in an engine, I've probably been in it. Helicopters, gliders, seaplanes, I love them all. I flew here today.

Right on. And then one company that I did want to ask you about is Stratosphere Airship. Yeah. Cy, is that how you say it? Scy. Scy. Scy.

It's Founded and run by a very well-off Danish businessman who invented the LifeStraw. Actually, that's where he- A ton of those. Yeah. He actually developed the technology for those. That's how he made his fortune. And now he's investing his fortune, which I greatly respect, into a stratosphoric airship that will float above the Earth in relatively calm air and act as a relay for cell phone signals, but also for staring reconnaissance, for environmental monitoring, but also potential offshore monitoring of our oceans, as well as military applications, et cetera. It fills that middle ground between satellites in low Earth orbit that are zipping by, that only have specific dwell times. And cell phone towers, they can only go so high. And so they are building and testing an airship in New Mexico. It's going very well. And we already, I believe, have some initial clients in areas that have mountainous terrain where cell phone towers have very poor coverage and satellites are zipping along too fast to have good reliable coverage. So we'll see. That's another game-changing technology that hopefully works.

Very interesting. How do you come and in contact with all these interesting folks.

Well, I met Mikkel, the CEO at the Explorers Club. It's all these people that have very ambitious ideas. They tend to operate at the edge of risk, and yet they're very methodical about how they do things.

What is the Explorers Club?

The Explorers Club is a very old institution. Again, I believe it was founded back to the turn of the century, based in New York. It's an offshoot from the Royal Geographic Society in Britain. I think us Americans said, Well, that's a pretty cool thing. We want our own. And so we started the Explorers Club. Some of the first members and honorees were Lindbergh, Amundson, some of the great explorers, Bird, the people that found the poles, all these other things. And it's just continued to the present day. It just is a congregation of people that meet once a year in New York, but also other times as well. We celebrate different successes, try and push each other, continuing to push the boundaries and exploration.

How many people are a part of that?

Gosh, Oh, easily above a thousand, but not more than several thousand. It's semi-exclusive. You have to be out there doing things. It's not a membership club or a debate club. I bet. You've got to be, in a way, you've got to be an operator.

I bet that is some fascinating conversation going there. Yeah. So you guys meet once a year?

Yeah, in New York. It's a lot of fun.

I bet. I bet you hear some wild stuff.

Yeah. I mean, you have the greatest mountain climbers in the world, the greatest ocean explorers, the the greatest botanists, the greatest volcanists, people that go into volcanoes. I mean, it's just nuts.

Damn. I would love to be a part of that. That's awesome.

If you'd like an invitation, I can get you to the next one in April. It'd be an honor to have you at my table. Absolutely. Oh, you'd meet some interesting people.

That would be incredible. I mean, people going into volcano. I mean, it's just everything, right?

Oh, I took A volcanist who had studied underwater volcanoes for her whole career. She was from Germany. She had never even seen one or been one up close. I got to take her down in my submersible into a submerged volcano in the Red Sea. It was so fun. That was really cool. One thing that was great about being able to build my submersible and take it all over the world, I was able to share the experience with people that had never been able to experience these things. They had dedicated their lives to studying deep ocean trenches, underwater volcanoes, the abyssal planes, and providing a tool for the first time that could allow them to go anywhere on the sea floor repeatedly and safely. That was one of the biggest achievements I'm happy I was able to do in my life was help make that technology available.

How long have you had this submersible?

I don't have it anymore. I built it and operated it for about six years, dove it for four of them, and then I sold it to a marine research I sold it to Inkfish, which is founded by Gabe Newell, the American billionaire who founded the steam game network. He's done amazing things with the submersible. He bought the whole system, employed my whole team because they knew what they were doing. They're out in the Pacific continuing to do amazing scientific work in the deep ocean trenches. They went and explored the volcano that exploded off Tonga. They wanted to see what changed environmentally and underneath the ocean in terms of the plate tectonics and things like that. Things. It's all one small but highly effective community. We all try and work together for the health of the oceans.

I love that. I read that I just interviewed the gentleman that is the CEO of the metals company. Yes, Mr. Beller. He seemed like a conservationalist to me, but it sounds like you are totally against the collection of those nodules at the bottom of the ocean floor.

Yes. We have a very strong difference of opinion. He is the CEO of a company that is dedicated to retrieving polymetallic nodules from the sea floor. That's his job. He gets paid a great deal of money to do that. He has investors that he has spent over $700 million of their money to pursue that. I think it's important that he has to have that perspective, that it is going to be transformational, that it is amazingly effective, et cetera. I strongly disagree. As someone who has directly operated heavy equipment below 4,000 and 5,000 meters. But there are so many issues that I have with deep sea mining. Most criticism of deep sea mining has come from the environmental aspect. And I think that, yes, it will destroy everything on the sea floor. I think there's very little doubt about that. Even I think he admits that it's better to mine where there's less life than more life, like in the rainforest of Indonesia. I think that's a false equivalence because you can also get these metals from Australia, the desert outback, from the Tundra of Canada. It's a way of marketing, of putting the worst possible comparison and saying, well, of course we wouldn't do that.

We'd do this other thing. But the major point is, environmentalism is one element of it. I think technically it's going to be far more difficult than they realize to operate these multi-ton machines at depths greater than the Titanic, operating 24/7, pulling up 4 tons per minute in freezing cold water, 5,000 pounds per square inch on every portion of these vehicles, trying to lift heavy rocks 4,000 meters up. It is not a simple operation. It's not as simple as I think they make it out to be. It's nothing like oil drilling. It's nothing like laying pipes or cables on the bottom. This is hardcore industrial operation on the sea floor with no human supervision. That's just the technical aspect. But more importantly, we're getting into it on deep sea mining, but there are only four metals that you can get from polymetallic nodules. He correctly outlined them: copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. Copper and manganese are quite common from terrestrial mines. In fact, at maximum production rate, according to the metals company's own financials that they have published, at maximum rate, they would produce less than 0. 3% of world copper production when they get going.

It's just not a lot. The terrestrial mining industry is enormous. So there's a question of relevance. You don't need the copper from the sea floor. It's less than 0. 3% of what they would bring up. Manganese, that is primarily produced by South Africa and Gabon. Last I heard, they were reasonable allies of the United It's not dominated by China, and it doesn't come from rainforests. The real metals that matter for deep sea mining are cobalt and nickel. The reason they got so much traction in the early 2020s was because electrical vehicles burst onto the stage. And most electric vehicle batteries at that time used nickel and cobalt. Cobalt went up to $70,000 a ton at one point. Nickel went up to $60,000 a ton at one point. $30,000, excuse me. However, capitalism does what capitalism does. Those metals are expensive, and now there's been significant technological change in the chemistry of the batteries. Most batteries for electric vehicles now produced in the world use no nickel and no cobalt. That was not the case five years ago. The prices of those metals have gone down precipitously. Cobalt is now down to $30,000 a time That's only because there was such an oversupply of cobalt in the last year that the main exporter, the Democratic Republic of Congo, halted exports of it.

The price of nickel has come down to $15,000 a ton from $70,000 a ton. It's on the downslope. If you look at the financial projections of Mr. Barron's company, they are projecting prices to come back up. That stands in contrast to the technological substitution that's happening for those metals for lithium-ion phosphate batteries, and now sodium-ion batteries, which are simply batteries that use cheaper materials. They're not quite as good batteries as those that use nickel and cobalt, but they're good enough. They're good enough such that the vast majority of vehicles now produced in China with electric vehicle batteries use no nickel, no cobalt. It's all lithium, iron, phosphate. There are technological issues, there are technical ones. Then being a nerdy finance guy like myself, really digging into their financial projections and seeing how they're trying to say that they're going to make lots of money, I can go into very specific reasons why, but as a financial professional and venture capitalist, I simply don't agree with their numbers. I think they're fanciful.

Interesting perspectives.

It is. There's plenty of room for the debate, and they have very strong viewpoint, but I think they cannot deny the fact that polymetallic nodules really only yield four metals. Two of them are very common and two of them are increasingly irrelevant. Then there's the whole strategic angle with China. That's been the big pivot that the company did in the last year. Two or three years ago, they were saying, Oh, we are the source for electric vehicle batteries. Well, I think that narrative wasn't working well. They almost ran out of cash in April. They only had $4 million of cash left on their balance sheet in April. That's when they made the big pivot to the Trump administration to mine the sea floor without a permit from UN regulatory agency. Go America, go alone. We're going to break China's strategic monopoly on metals. But even Mr. Barron made a very good point. He said, The reason China dominates all of these metal supply chains, which they do, is because they dominate the processing of the metal. They don't get the ore, the rock from China. They get it from Indonesia, they get it from other locations, and then they process it, and then they export it to us and other countries.

How do you break the Chinese dominance of the metal supply chain? I'm here to tell you it would be extremely hard and very expensive. Let's take nickel, for example. Nickel is now primarily mined in Indonesia, and it's now processed in Indonesia. And those processing facilities are heavily financed by China. That's how China secured the nickel supply chain. It owns it with Indonesia. Between Indonesia and China, those countries have five times more people than the United States. They have a very low labor cost structure. They've been processing nickel for 30 years. They know all the secrets of how to do it efficiently. And they have a government that's dedicated to dominating that market. So you can see for America to actually break that supply chain, it's not where you get the rocks. It's not whether you get them from Indonesia Asia or Australia, where you can get a lot of nickel or the sea floor. What matters is where you process them. And oh, by the way, it's extremely environmentally toxic to process these metals. So to break a metal supply chain, whether it's nickel or cobalt or many of these others, you would have to make massive multibillion dollar investments and subsidize them going forward to break that monopoly for higher cost.

Nobody wants metal processing facilities in their backyard. You'll face environmental lawsuit after environmental lawsuit, people saying, not in my backyard, and you'll be faced with an adversary that's going to fight on price. And again, it doesn't matter where you get the order. The metals company in mining the sea floor is irrelevant to that equation where you process it. But the United States, I don't think we really understand the commitment you're going to have to make to fight the deeply entrenched economic advantages that China and its allies have over the US.

That makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Trust me, I want to do it as much as anyone. I've invested in Astroforge, which is completely different. There we're going for platinum group metals. They're not even the same metals. They're completely not the same thing. But the issue is I'm an American. I've served in our military. I want us to be a dominant metal supplier. I want us to have strategic capabilities. But the issue is there are hard, realistic facts in the world. We do not have huge deposits of nickel and cobalt in the US. We do have copper, and copper we're opening up a great new mine in Arizona that will supply a lot of copper to the United States. Those are great investments. I love what the administration has done with a direct investment into a rare earth metal mining company in the US, I think that's a great move. I think that we should work much more closely with Australia, the Philippines, and New Caledonia, which have terrestrial sources of or that if we choose to make the multibillion dollar investments in processing in the US, we could do that. That's what China did. They went to Indonesia and locked up Indonesia in this partnership to produce a lot of strategic metals.

We could do the same, but they don't have to go from the sea floor. In fact, I just think it's not going to be economically valuable to do it. Use the tried and true technology and mined it in Australia or some of these other mines with our allies. That would be the way to counter their strategy. I think it's just It's a very expensive way to get metal, and there are only a couple of them that you need. And by the way, there are no rare earth metals in sea floor nodules. There are only trace amounts. And that's another dirty... People say that there are because I think it helps support the national security angle. But look at any academic paper, there are no economic quantities of rare earth metals in sea floor nodules. There just aren't.

That's interesting. So you think the answer is to partner with Australia and these other countries and have them mine and process, we buy.

I think Australia is the real key. We also have a deep military partnership now with Australia. I can't think of a better partnership than we supply them nuclear submarines, and they supply us nickel, cobalt, and all these other raw ores that we would then process in the US. Again, if we're willing to make the massive economic and environmental sacrifices to process metal in the US.

Do they have the processing plants there?

They could, but they're also a Western liberal democracy, but they are in the far Western desert, so it might be simpler for them to do it. It's possible. That gets into geopolitical negotiations, but basically replicating China's strategy for Australia, but also other countries. For manganese, South Africa, for nickel, you could also go to New Caledonia, all these other countries. There's a method to do it, but it's disconnected to needing to go to the sea floor.

Very interesting. Let's take a break. Sure. When we come back, I want to talk about all of the exploring that you've done and probably start with the Titanic. Sure. Perfect. Everybody loves to talk about Titanic. I'll bet. All right, Victor, we're back from the break. Nice shot by the way. Thank you.

Wow, you impressed me. I've worked a little bit at it. No, you're very kind.

What do you like better, the revolver or that GTO?

A GTO is pretty special.

You like that GTO?

I love revolvers. Any firearms, they all have their unique characteristics. Even guns. But yeah, that was a pretty nice experience.

Well, I decided to get you another gift. Oh, Lord. Sooh, my goodness.

Here we go. Oh, no, no, no. That is too kind, Sean. That is... Can you look? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my God. That's above and beyond, sir.

You got to pick it up. You got to pick it up. Above and beyond, sir. Yeah. The smile on your face out there shooting that damn thing. I was like, Oh, shit, he's got to have one. With the red dot. Those are brand new. So that compensator up front that helps with the recall management, that's Sig's latest, latest release in handguns. It's their first attempt at the 2011. I think they did an awesome job.

This is completely unnecessary and deeply appreciated. This is a magnificent gift. It's on par with my Kimber 1911, which was given to me by someone I used to work with who was a Marine. Oh, really?

Cayson. Damn.

So that was a special gift, but this is equally as special. I appreciate it very much.

My pleasure.

My pleasure. Outstanding. Yeah, I'm glad flying myself back. I won't have a problem with security. But...

So, yeah, you crushed it out there with that. So I thought, this guy's got to have one. Got to have one.

I'll treat it with respect. It is the episode.

But right before the break, we were talking about China's declining population. We talk about China a lot here, probably at least 50% of the episodes that gets brought up one way or another. You just had some interesting stuff to say. Could you dive into that a little bit? We were talking about before the break, we were talking about the metals company and how China has basically monopolized the nickel and- Metal supply chains. Yeah, the metal supply chain. And so you had some interesting thoughts off camera. I just thought we should revisit those.

Yeah, I just start off with the preamble that China has some extraordinary structural advantages against the United States that you just simply can't deny. It has three times our population. It's as large as the US, and they are very set on dominating certain industries, certain supply chains, et cetera, and they have the resources to deploy government funds to do that. We simply don't have some of those capabilities in the US. For every engineer we throw at a problem, they can throw three. For every laborer that we can throw at a problem, they can throw three. And with their allies, even more. They have built-in financial and cost advantages, and they don't care that much about the environment. They don't have to worry about an environmental review in the US, which is actually a really big deal to build new things in the US. They don't have a lot of the constraints we do. That doesn't mean that they're an unstable force.

Do you think their engineers are equivalent to ours?

That's a very broad general statement. In general, I would say probably not. Ours tend to have more creativity, I think, in general. They tend to be very good if they're given specific tasks, like get cost out of this part or figure out this process, and they'll just apply resources until they get it done. But it was Americans that came up with the lithium iron phosphate battery, for example, but they figured out how to make it in volume cheaply. That's a great example of that. The issue is they have some resources that we simply can't replicate and will at the government level to do things that we simply can't do in a democracy that is tough, but they do have challenges. One, they have not fought a major conflict in a very long time. They have certainly not fought a maritime conflict. When you're talking about Taiwan undertaking the most difficult military conventional operation around an amphibious invasion, they haven't done it. I don't even think they did it in the Middle Ages. That would be a completely new problem for them. Anyone that studies history knows the first time you do anything in the military sphere, it doesn't go that well.

I think they know that. They're also a very intelligent culture. They calculate odds. They're not reckless. I think that they're trying to judge the situation to their maximum benefit. I think the United States, especially Most recently, but even with the previous administration, more attempts have been made to pivot to Asia, and we are increasing the deterrent capability of the United States to say, The odds aren't for certain that you could succeed in a military intervention in Taiwan. The more we can do that and show resolve, show more systems that could complicate their war planning, the greater the chances that they would go, It's not as sure a thing as we think it is. Let's try other means. But then in the long run, I think China has crested in terms of population. With the one-child policy they had for so long, that is now coming back to harm them in a major way. Their population is going to precipitously decline over the next 40 or 50 years. They will have serious social issues with that, exacerbated by the fact that there's a severe male/female imbalance in the country. Anyone that studies history knows that declining standards of living, which go hand in hand with a declining population, combined with a male/female imbalance, often lead to severe popular instability for governments.

I think is going to have its hands full with domestic problems the next 10 years, 20 years.

What... I mean, is this already started?

Yeah, you're starting to see the edges of it.

How fast is their population declining?

Because we're at what? It's going to be below a billion by the end of the century, which is unbelievable. They're going to be, I think, people correct me in the comments, I'm sure, but around 800 million by the end of the century, which is 70 years, which is a The whole generation, the United States is going to be growing. Frankly, some of that's because of immigration, to be quite frank, but also we have a little bit more of a stable population compared to what they did with their one-child policy.

We're at a 1. 6 reproduction rate, correct?

Yeah, we're still... Well, the whole industrial centralized world is below natural replacement rate, but China is really falling off a cliff even faster. I think the world leader right now is South Korea, where they are already facing severe issues with de-population. But the The issue there is if you don't have the population, you can't build the level of military might you need to start imposing your will on other countries, and it causes social instability. If you have a mess at home, it's really hard to do too much with confidence on the international stage. I think China may have missed the best window to do something militarily with China. Best time would have been during COVID, but I think now the US is deploying enough assets to make it even more difficult for them in Taiwan as well. I think that we're certainly not out of the woods, but they are certainly not an unstoppable force. And conducting a military invasion of Taiwan would be extraordinarily difficult.

I don't think... I personally, I mean, I went to Taiwan and interviewed the vice president there. And they are very concerned about a military kinetic type operation. But just from my observations, I've talked about this a lot on the show with A lot of different people. I mean, it seems like I think that their best interests, and I think that they know this, would be the cognitive warfare, because there's a two-party system in Taiwan, and one of the parties is very pro-Chinese. And so to spread that propaganda throughout Taiwan, it could just be a political takeover that does it.

Yeah. The model that they would most likely do is what they did with Hong Kong, which was slowly work the geopolitical stage, the treaties, hybrid warfare, to effectively get control and then make it more and more assertive over time. I think that's what they're going to probably realize that they're going to have to try to do with Taiwan, that a pure kinetic solution is going to be too risky for them. They are risk averse. They don't roll the dice like Putin will with Ukraine. They're going to think very methodically about it, and I think they'll come to the conclusion that it's a low odds shot, so they're going to have to do other methods. I think a blockade certain situations might benefit them, and that would be tough for us to combat and could lead to a wider war. But no, I think that they are smart enough to say, let's build the forces to apply pressure. But the real avenue of success for China to regain Taiwan would, to your point, I believe, be through the political realm using the dark arts there.

Do you have any- I served the last assignment I had in the military, I was assigned to the intelligence staff of the seventh Fleet, and so we were positioned against China and Korea.

I was privy to war games and all sorts of things involving a kinetic situation with China.

Do you have any numbers as far as just how imbalanced the male to female population is in China? I do not.

I haven't looked at that closely, but we all know it's there.

Do you know how long the one-child policy was in place for?

It was for many decades.

It was for many decades? Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. So all... I mean, basically, just for the audience that doesn't know this, I mean, China had a one-child policy, and overwhelmingly, the females were aborted because everybody wanted males.

Or worse. After birth, it certainly happened. But I believe it was absolutely... It wasn't just one generation. It was multiple generations, which will have a profound effect, which if you just look, go to Google and look up population projections for China, and it does this, and it looks like a ski jump ramp going down now. They've crested.

That is the first time I've heard anybody say that the US had an upswing in population.

It's not shrinking like China is, but it's actually among the industrialized countries. I mean, it's among the healthier ones, but the bar is pretty low at this point. Yeah. A lot of our Allied countries in Europe are having much more difficult times. Italy, Japan is in a very bad situation like South Korea. It's just you have a world that we've created that's so comfortable and people are risk averse, and there are so many distractions that we have that people aren't committed to family. I mean, pot calling the kettle black, I've never been married or had kids, but I have had other endeavors that occupied my time that I prioritized. You can only do so much in life. I know My purpose has been to explore and to push different boundaries. I'm expendable, so I've accepted that. I've accepted my expendability, so I tend to push the envelope. It's nice to know one's role in life.

I'm just curious. I mean, through all the expeditions and exploring and just all of the accomplishments that you have, do you ever get lonely not having a significant other, not kids? I mean, do you think about that stuff?

Sometimes, but not to the extent that people would think. I know good friends of mine who from an early age, they really wanted to have a family, a wife and kids, that type of thing. Some People are just built for that. For me, it was always something that was not as important. I was always much more focused on my career, on the military or explorations. What I've learned in life, if you have a family, if you have a wife and kids, they have to be your first priority. Absolutely. God country as well. But yeah, career explorations, things like that, those are going to have to be secondary. I was not willing to do that. But that's why I also push the boundaries further and further than most people, I think.

Do you think that will ever change? No.

No? It's deeply hardwired.

No interest? No interest in free producing?

I'm too old to change. People don't change.

Right on. Let's move into some of the expeditions that you've done. I'm dying to hear about the Titanic.

Oh, the Titanic. Everybody loves to talk about Titanic. I guess the best way to start the story of my... I did three dives to Titanic. My team did five. We were the first crewed mission, people actually going to visit the wreck in 15 years, and we did that in 2019. It took us two tries. The first try, we got out there and there was a hurricane, and we couldn't dive the sub, but we went the following year. So on the very first dive, it was my system, my crew, I said, I want to take it down solo. No one had ever done that.

Solo?

Yeah. Now, I've been quoted as saying, and it's true, probably the most dangerous dive I ever did, including the ones to the Mariana Trench. The most dangerous one was the first dive I did at the Titanic solo. And the reason why, wrecks are very dangerous because they have cables and ropes. And the number one danger to a submersible is getting entangled, the propellers with a rope or a cable. You can't go out there and untangle it. You have to rely on a single switch to eject that part of the exterior that is entangled. And if that switch doesn't work, you're out of luck. So it's dangerous. The currents at the Titanic, especially the day I did my first dive, were very strong, about a knot, knot and a half, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's the maximum speed of the sub. So there were times when I was at maximum power and I wasn't moving, which meant that I could be thrown into the wreck with all sorts of bad consequences. Plus, it's very dark down there. Most people think if you go to the Titanic, you'll see the wreck. You don't. You see a very limited amount, like 30 or 40 meters, maximum, really only about 20 because there's so much stuff in the water.

So you're only looking at it like through a straw here and there. It's cool, don't get me wrong, but it's not like seeing the grand vista of the wreck. You're seeing it only in particles at a time. You get a better view of the Titanic on the recent special that was done by Atlantic Productions that showed a virtual creation of the wreck on the sea floor all at once. I saw that for the first time and went, wow, it's like the first time I've really seen the wreck. And I've been there three times. So first dive, I went down, and half the time I was looking inside the sub at the Sonar display, and the other half of the time I'm trying to look outside the window to see how close I am to the wreck, et cetera. That's really dangerous. What I learned on that dive, you need one person on the inside monitoring the instruments in the sonar, one person staring outside for obstructions. So that first dive was tricky. How close did you get to it? Okay, so the first time I went to Titanic, I'm solo in the sub, they drop you a couple of hundred meters away from it so you don't land on it.

That's a requirement. I get in the sub, I get to the sea floor, I'm at 4,000 meters or so, and I start creeping up to what I think is the direction of the wreck. At about 100 meters off, I get the first ping on the sonar. You it on a display. Hey, there's something out there. And then I get closer and closer, and now I'm like 40 meters away, the maximum extent of my lights. I'm looking out the window, I see nothing but black. I start inching the sub closer. Now I'm 20 meters away from what's on the sonar, this big jumbled mass of something. Okay, is that a rock? Is something wrong with the sonar? I'm looking out the window, nothing but black. So I inch the sub really close. I'm like 5 meters from this big sonar target in front of me. I'm looking out the window, nothing but black ocean. And then it hit me. I went, Oh. I slowly started to go up in the submarine. And within a second or two, I saw the first row of portals, and then the next row of portals, and then the railing. I didn't realize how big it was.

So my first experience with the Titanic was this realization of, This is a big wreck. And then, of course, when I got to the railing, the wave The current was hitting the side of the Titanic, and it pushed the sub towards the wreck right into it. And I didn't hit it. I did an emergency maneuver with the thrusters and regained control, calmed down a little bit, and then I was able to do the classic tour of the bow and get good video of it and slowly start serving the wreck. And then did that for a couple of hours. And then the front and the back of the ship, the bow and the stern, they're separated by several hundred meters. So it's cool. The way you get to the stern is you go to a point on the bow section of the rack, and you basically, you put yourself in a certain position that you get briefed on. Then you point the submersible in a certain exact direction, and then just go on that vector for about 40 minutes. Then by going on that vector, you'll go through the debris field, you'll see some cool stuff on the bottom, and then you'll come to the bottom, the Aft of the rack, which is just a shambles.

That's how you survey the Titanic. After the four hours I did doing that, I was ready to come up.

I bet. Was it eerie down there? How many people died on that?

It was. It was just me in the wreck. It was spooky. I'll bet. I will confess. In fact, at one point, the lights of my submarine were shining into the wreck through the glass portals, almost like you could see someone with a light inside. It was weird. Now, there are no bodies there. The bodies have been consumed by the ocean, and you don't really see that much in terms of personal artifacts. But it's like a big, jumbled, dark, spooky museum.

What depth is it?

3,960 meters. It's very deep. I mean, Challenger Deep is 11,000. In fact, for my submersible, the Titanic wasn't even deep enough to qualify as a deep dive.

No kidding?

In terms of the maintenance records, yeah. It was considered below 4,000 meters was not even considered a dive. It was too shallow.

What specific What specifically drew you to go into the Titanic three separate times?

Well, we were there on one expedition, so we did five dives over about a week, a week and a half. The reason we went Titanic was we were going to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. At one point, we had to go to the Arctic Ocean, and we were going through the Panama Canal. We drew a line from the Panama Canal to where we were going in the Arctic, and it was right over the Titanic. We're really going, Guys, we got a Titanic. We have to We're going right over it. So we contacted National Geographic, and they were really excited that we could do a dive there. So we filmed it, and we didn't take people down commercially. We did a film expedition for Nat Geo.

What weren't wrong with that sub, theOh, God. What happened there?

Oh, God. The Titan. Two of my friends were on it. Someone who worked for me. Yeah, Ph. Narjula and Hamish Harding, who I actually went to space with as well. He and I went to the bottom of Challenger Deep. We set a distance record at Challenger Deep, and then he really, really wanted to go to Titanic, and I wasn't doing that anymore. And I wasn't taking people down anyway. And he really wanted to see it. And the last phone conversation I had with him, I said, Do not get in that submersible. It is inherently dangerous. You're playing Russian roulette getting in that thing. And he said, Well, I think it's safe enough. I said, You're a grown man. You can take the risk. I'm telling you, don't go near it. And he died. Damn. It was structurally deficient. It was operated in an unsafe manner. This has all been well covered by the US Coast Guard report. It was a slap-dash operation. They didn't have enough funding to do it correctly or well. They had to keep going because if they ever stopped for safety, the whole show would have stopped. The owner stopped in a rush, who I knew and had conversations with to stop what he was doing.

He couldn't stop.

Damn.

Never get into a vehicle where their fear of failure is greater than their fear of dying.

Good advice. That's what they did.

You want people that are a little bit nervous. They're more careful that way. I can't tell you how many times I aborted a submersible dive because I wasn't comfortable with a piece of equipment, the environmental conditions, or any number of things. I'd say, No, not today. That's probably why I'm still here.

You found two of the deepest tracks, correct?

I'm really proud of those dives. Those were the most exciting dives. We found the two deepest shipwrecks in history, the USS Johnston in 2021, and then the USS Samuel B. Roberts, the destroyer escort. Both went down during the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Laitai Gulf, specifically the battle off Samar, which was a part of the larger battle, where a small destroyer flotilla took on the cream of the Japanese Navy, including the largest battleship ever constructed, the Yamato. So few people know about this battle in 1944, where American sailors, with complete and utter disregard for their own safety, charged, in some cases without orders, directly into the teeth of Japanese battleship squadrons to protect the small escort carriers they were guarding. It was the epitome of what we hoped for in the naval service in terms of bravery and duty and all those other wonderful things. And they won. By the end of the day, they had attacked with such ferocity, including with the naval aviators that were also doing incredibly brave things. The Japanese, taking significant casualties from these tiny ships that they actually thought were cruisers, that they turned around by evening and fled the battle.

At one point, one American sailor, watching the Japanese battleships leave the battlefield, was screaming out, Wait, they're getting away. But the Johnston that fought heroically, in fact, the first medal of honor awarded to a Native American in the US Navy was the captain of that vessel, and he did not survive the battle. The destroyer escort, Samuel B. Roberts, they called it the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship. It went even deeper in the Philippine trench than the Johnston did. I was very happy to be the first person to locate the majority of those wrecks.

Wow. What are the depths of those?

6,500, 6,800 meters. That's 50% deeper than Titanic. And the wrecks were a 10th the size of Titanic. It was really hard to find them. But we had a methodology, we had a great team, and we alternated the pilot duties. And I was fortunate I was able to be the pilot when we found the two wrecks. And it's very eerie. In fact, on the same, you'll be, Roberts. I remember getting to the wreck. We were so excited. We confirmed the whole number, and I'm sweeping along the side of the wreck to get a good photo and video record of I was probably maybe just a little bit further away from the wreck than you and I are right now. Right in front of my portal, I saw a depth charge in a rack. It was probably live. It went down fighting. I really slowly backed up the sub at that point and said, We have to be really careful here because I asked an explosive ordnance disposal expert a while later, Could that still go off? He said, At that depth, after that amount of time? Who knows? And that would have been a bad day.

Did you find anything interesting down there?

Well, the cool thing about the Wrex, at that depth, there's virtually no oxygen. So they're pristine. They're not like Titanic that has stuff growing all over it. So when you're looking at the Wrex, the holes, you can see the burn marks on the paint from the battles. We could actually reconstruct parts of the battle from the shell holes after we took apart the video and basically built virtual reality replicas of the wrecks. In fact, we now know because of the dive we did, we're pretty sure that the Johnston was hit by a shell from the largest battleship ever built, the Yamato. We could It was all by the shell size because it was the biggest gun ever put on the ship. And so you're able to reconstruct history a little bit better by going down there and looking at the Wrex. Steel doesn't lie, as we say.

And so the visibility down there is just- It's better than And it is Titanic because it's so clear.

So we could see more like 40 or 50 meters down there.

Interesting. And it's just preserved like it just sank yesterday.

Out of a museum, like on the Johnston, the guns are still trained to starbird because it was still firing when it went down. And there were some emotional moments, too, because I know the history of the ships and what happened. There was this one gun on the Samuel B. Roberts, where when they abandoned ship, there was this very popular gunners mate who manned a five-inch gun on the and it took a direct hit. They went to go get him to abandon the ship. This guy, this petty officer, his whole left side was blown open. When they found him, he was still trying to ram the last shell into the a bench gun. They had to let him be. That's how he died. I was right there looking at where a petty officer car where he perished. It just still gives me chills. I mean, what those men went through on that day. Who does that? I mean, charging battleships in a destroyer escort with a couple of torpedoes thinking, at least we can slow them down. Just amazing.

It is, isn't it?

Very proud to have served in the Navy.

You've been to the deepest part of all five oceans. Yeah. Tell me about that.

Yeah. Well, Richard Branson had the idea back in the early 2000s. He called it the Five Dives Project, but he chose some technology to try and dive to the bottom. They used carbon fiber or a different submarine design, submersible design, and it didn't work. But I thought, we have the technology to be able to do that. Maybe if it was done differently, you could do it. And then I said the five most dangerous words in the English language. How hard could it be? And so I started a project to figure out how much money it would take, what experts I would need, and it was expensive but possible. I could not believe in the year 2015, when I started researching this, that human beings had not been to the bottom of four of our world's oceans. It was about time. I come from Texas, and we don't say, Oh, government should do it, or some other guys should do it. We're like, Hey, I'll do it. Why not? I can do it. It was an interesting adventure, too. It had a good technical aspect, a logistical aspect. I like problem solving, and I'm a pilot.

I said, If I build it, I'm going to pilot it. So It was risky in terms of just being able to get it done. We had no idea if it was going to work, but we put together the whole project, and I was able to build an Oceans 11 type of team to build this up, build the logistics, build the surface vessel to support it, the hydrogophers to map the ocean floor. All these pieces had to come together, and they did. I mean, what an adventure. It was great, and we did a lot of amazing science. I think we sparked at least a little bit more interest in the deep ocean, where there's now more people investing money, governments and individuals, to dive in the deep ocean and investigate it, like the people that bought my system. Sometimes, the exploration, even if it looks like it's a one-off thing or a look at me thing, I think it can actually have real contributions to science and technology.

Well, I mean, it sounds like you've discovered all kinds of new species down there, correct?

Every dive we went on, we typically found a new species, which the scientists This later said, well, it'd be surprising if we didn't because these are isolated parts of the ocean floor that have had tens of millions of years of evolution, and no one has ever been there. So, yeah, you're going to find some different species. Why wouldn't you? But That was pretty cool.

What species did you find?

Well, the deeper you go, the smaller they get. The scientists, they love their microbes, they love doing DNA analysis and all that. But there are small amphipods. They're like miniature shrimp. They're little worms. They're not something that people are going to go, oh, ah, like looking at a lion on the Serengeti. But from a biological standpoint, they can be quite distinctive and very unique. These are creatures that live in conditions of 8 tons per square inch on every surface of their body. That's like four automobiles on your fingertips. That's where they live in freezing cold water, and they never see sunlight. We saw colonies of bacteria area on the bottom of the ocean, on the rocks, that never see sunlight, and yet they're alive. Well, how can that be? There's something called chemosynthesis, where these are colonies of life that are drawing energy from methane seeping from the rocks, living off the chemical reactions in the minerals of the rocks. This is a different form of life than what we have on the surface of the Earth. In fact, if we find life outside of Earth in our solar system on Ganymede or Europa or these other moons that may have life, it'll probably look more similar to what we saw in the deep ocean trenches than what we see in the brilliantly lit shallow waters of the ocean or on land.

So the scientists have been really excited about that.

How do these organisms or these undiscovered species, how are they able to withhold eight tons per, did you say 8 tons per square inch?

8 tons per square inch. At the bottom of the marion trench, it's an incredibly harsh environment, one of the harshest on the planet, if not the harshest. That's why I had 90 millimeters of titanium protecting me in my sphere. They are designed that way. It's evolution. I'm sure the one time in their life they ever saw light was when my submarine came to visit them. I'm sure they would look at me going, How does that thing survive? What an odd alien that is. It's all a frame of reference.

Have they done any... Did you collect specimens?

Yeah, absolutely. I had robots that went down with me. We called them landers. They didn't move, but they would come down with me and land on the bottom. I had three of them. They would act as navigation beacons for me as the submersible pilot, so I'd know where I am. But they could also take film for long periods of time, and they studied everything that came up to feed on the dead fish that we'd put out for them. We also had traps. Where the animals that could move, like a mousetrap, we would have them come into these cylinders and we would capture them and then bring them all the way up. It was tricky because these creatures, as they get less and less pressure on their bodies, they start to disintegrate. Kind melt. So one of the procedures that we had to do was as soon as the landers came up onto the surface, it was a very rapid action drill to get the samples off the landers into a freezer to freeze them so we could see what they mostly look like in their ambient environment. But then we could compare what we brought up to the film and we could see what they basically had.

But really, the key is getting their DNA and looking at their DNA. I mean, For example, the scientists were fascinated to see, is the DNA from all these different trenches all over the world, is it the same or is it different? Because there are significant implications to both scenarios, and we didn't know until we went and actually did it. And it turns out a lot of it is different. But remarkably, there are trenches that are separated by thousands and thousands of miles that are basically the same creature. And yet, how were these trenches ever connected? How did they migrate? It's a mystery. We don't know. We found one creature in the Java trench off of Indonesia. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen underwater. It was about at 6,000 meters. And just recently, they saw something that looked exactly like it under Antarctica.

No kidding. What did it look like?

It looks like a jellyfish with a cable coming out the back end of it. It was bizarre. It's called the stalked decidian. It more or less looks like a jellyfish, but it didn't move like a jellyfish. It looked like a balloon, but it was moving. It came right up to the lander, did a right turn, and crossed it. It was just bizarre.

Do you see any bioluminescence?

Oh, yeah, we saw bioluminescence all the time. In fact, it's the most common form of communication on planet Earth.

What do you mean by that?

There are more organisms in the ocean than on land, and the primary form of communication for animals in the sea is light.

Interesting.

I didn't know that. It's not whales talking to each other with sonar, although they do that, but most life are small creatures, and they're bioluminescent. So at about 2,000 to 3,000 meters, when you start getting really dark, but before you get into ultimate dark, below 6,000 meters, there's no photons. There's no light. It's not possible to see light below 6000 meters because all the photons are absorbed. No, we bring lights with us on the submarine. But if you turn all the lights off on the submarine and you look out of the portal, you're seeing the blackest black that your mind can register. It was actually quite eerie. Remember Nietzsche, be careful when you look into the abyss, it's looking back into you, too. But for bioluminescence, at about 2,000 or 3,000 meters, I would turn all the lights off, and then I would turn all of them on at once, and then turn them off again like I was blinking. And sure enough, not all the time, but often, I'd start seeing flashes of light all throughout the ocean, like lightning away from the submarine, like they're talking back. It was like I was screaming in the ocean, Hey, and they're all going, What?

I have no idea what we were saying to each other. It was pretty special.

Wow, that's incredible. I mean, it's a whole different world. Did I hear something about the... I mean, they have a skeletal structure? Any of these?

Below a certain level, they can't. I can't remember the exact depth, but we found the deepest fish ever recorded in one of the Japanese trenches in 2022, our expedition did with the Japanese, who are great to work with, by the way. I can't exactly recall the exact depth of that fish, but it was predicted because after a certain pressure, vertebra can't form. And without a vertebra, you can't have a fish.

What did that fish look like?

It's very gelatinous. It's one of my favorite fishes because it has an embedded grin on it. It just looks that way, and it just does its thing. It swims at the bottom of the ocean, and it feeds off whatever drops from above. And it's ghostly white, translucent, but it looks like a pretty simple happy fish.

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Yeah. What was that like to be somewhere? Well, it was a combination. No one had ever been there. There's Deep explorer gene, I guess. You want to go someplace no one else has ever been before. But also the technical challenge. Only twice before our expedition had anyone ever been to the bottom of the ocean. In 1960, with Captain Don Walsh of the US Navy and Jacques Picard, the Swiss engineer, they went down together in 1960, and they never did it again. James Cameron, the film director, he went down in his submersible, the Deep Sea Challenger in 2012. First solo dive to the bottom of the ocean. Great respect to him, but he never dove again in that trench. Then we came along and we did five dives to the bottom of the Mariana trench in 10 days. Then we did the rest of the oceans, and then we went back and More than 20 people have been to the bottom of the ocean in the vessel that we built. And Trident Submarines, who designed and built it, were extraordinary. And so we built a tool that allowed for the first time to go anywhere on the sea floor repeatedly and safely that had not existed before.

So we made it look easy. That's the real trick, right? You want to do something where you make something extraordinary look easy.

Man. I've been to places in the world I thought, I'm probably the only American that's ever been here, and that is a weird feeling. But to be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean where you are the only human being that's ever been there, I can't imagine what that feels like.

It's a little addictive. When I did one trench, I wanted to do another one, then another one. I want to do all of them now, and I haven't. That's why I'm taking a little bit of a break working on some other venture investments. I'm working very much on building building what I hope is the most advanced and efficient deep ocean mapping vessel ever constructed. Most people don't understand that 75% of the ocean is still completely and utterly unmapped and unexplored. Given that the ocean is 70% of our planet, half of planet Earth is still completely unexplored. It's all underwater. And part of that problem is it's really expensive to map the sea floor because you can only do it with a very powerful sonar. So in the last couple of years, I've been designing and developing a ship that will be semi-autonomous, a crew of one or two, highly automated, but with a really powerful sonar. And hopefully in the next two years, I'll have it built. And I'm just going to put it out in the ocean, mapping the sea floor, and then donating the maps to the open source community because it needs to be done.

It's incredible. That's incredible. What else am I going to do? With you?

Who knows? The sky's the limit. Yeah.

I'm very dedicated to that ocean mapping vessel. And eventually, I want to design a next generation submersible that's even better than the one that I dove in in 2018 to 2022 that would incorporate all the advances that we've made since then. But that's a very expensive and very difficult endeavor, as I know, and I want to do it right. Wow.

You know, right before we started the interview, we showed you this little YouTube video that looked like... How do I say this? It looked like a body of water inside a body of water, and there was this little snake or this worm coming in and out of it. What was that? And have you ever seen anything like that before?

Yeah, they're called the Underwater Lakes, or as we saw them in the Red Sea on one of my dives, they were brine lakes. There are certain situations in the ocean where you can end up with water areas that are of significantly different densities. So they form pools or lakes underwater, and they look that way because they're of different density. In the Red Sea, it's an enclosed sea, so you get a lot of evaporation of water, but the salt stays behind, and then the salt falls to the bottom. So at the bottom of the Red Sea, 5,000 plus meters, you end up with these like the Dead Sea, but underwater. So you have these lakes of heavily saline or salty water that looks different than the water above it. And we dove in the submersible myself and the scientist, we went down, and it was like there was a shoreline, different color. It was like tan and browns. You could even see waves of the brine Lake lapping up against this shore, but were 5,000 meters underwater. No one had ever gone through into the lake because the only vehicles that ever been that deep in that area were robots.

They didn't want to lose the robots because there's a lot of heat in that salt. The heat collects at the bottom of the ocean, and so they don't want to lose it. So I figured, hey, what the hell? I'm under positive control. Let's go diving. And the scientist agreed with me, Dr. Jamieson, who's from Scotland, so he's a good risk taker. So we hover over this brine lake that looked like a film of milk. And the first time I tried to go through the barrier, I did it so slowly, the subring bounced off of it, which is a nerve. It bounced off of it. It bounced because the density of the salt was so high, it acted almost like rubber. I wasn't going to let it defeat me. So we're going to- Yeah, I got more power. I put the sub up a couple of meters higher, built up some speed, and went full power and we penetrated through the brine and it was milky milky white for about a meter or two, and then it was crystal clear. But all my temperature gages just went red-lined.

How hot was it?

You could feel it in the sub. We don't know because it was easily in excess of 120, 130, maybe higher degrees Fahrenheit. You could feel it in the sub almost immediately. It was getting warmer in the sub because also we were in a metal sphere, and so the heat conducted pretty quickly through the titanium. And after not too long, maybe not even 15 or 20 seconds, scientists and I looked at each other and said, I think we should go back up. I was worried my thrusters were going to not work, but we went in full power and penetrated back through. And yeah, when we got back to the surface, half my electronics were fried from the heat. It was worth it.

Shit, that's awesome. It's like going into a black hole.

Yeah.

Nobody knows what the hell is it.

Yeah, we didn't know what was going to be on the other side. I personally thought it was going to just be the same milky white, that we weren't going to see a darn thing. But that's what surprised me, was that it was actually consistent and therefore optically transparent. Who knew? That's why you explore. You don't know what you're going to find. People keep asking me all the time, What do you hope to find on the sea floor? Why do you explore so much? What are you looking for? I said, I don't know. That's the joy of it. I have no idea what we're going to find, but I know it'll be new. And even if it's boring, we will have discovered something.

Also earlier, you had spoken about bringing, I believe it was a woman who had studied underwater volcanoes for years, but had never seen one. You brought her down to Yeah, that was one of the really nice benefits of having my own system.

I wasn't beholden to any government, no institution. People couldn't tell me what to do. I could decide, I want to go dive that trench or I want to go dive that area and just go do it. That's why I don't really have any real sponsors except for my favorite watch brand, Omega. And I do that because I like them. But I don't know how to have any other sponsors because once you take money from people, they can tell you what to do. I don't like being told what to do. And that allowed me to invite scientists who had unique specialties who had never been in a deep diving submersible for the first and probably only time in their life to investigate areas that they had spent their whole lives researching. That was pretty cool. Like I took a local Hawaiian PhD in marine biology. We went down to the very bottom of Mauna Kea, which technically is the tallest mountain in the world. It's just that half of it is underwater. We got in the submersible, and Dr. Cliff Capono and I, of Hawaii, we went down to the base of Mauna Kea in the ocean.

We floated to the top. We then kayaked 21 miles to shore. Yeah, did some seal stuff. Biked and then hiked up Mauna Kea. It was the first time anyone had ever done the full distance of Mauna Kea, but I got to do it with a local from Hawaii who was a marine biologist who is describing what it was like as a scientist to do that experience. Yeah, it was a bit of a stunt. I'm a mountaineer and I like doing it. But there are also other Look, people always complain that scientific activities don't get enough money. They don't get enough research money from the government. They don't get enough support. Well, part of it is marketing. You need to make things interesting to the lay person or even exciting for heaven forbid. I go back to the golden age of exploration with Ammonst and Scott, the Race for the Polls. That captured the imagination of all the people all over the world, and they were excited about science. And they funded it. That's what a lot of us are trying to do at the Explorers Club, and people like me, we're trying to make people excited about exploration and investing their time and their attention to it in an attention-deprived world.

Any aspirations to find Atlantis?

Of course. Yeah, Atlantis is a tricky subject in marine research. A lot of people pooh-pooh the idea. They think it was just an invention. Maybe it was part of Spain, maybe it was something else. I I do get approached by people that say, No, I'm pretty sure I know where it is. Can you get me down there? Well, I can't anymore because I sold my system. But I could have capabilities in the next few years to do research. But then if you do find something, are you sure? What is Atlantis?

What do you think?

I personally think Atlantis was a collection of small towns and cities in the West, maybe in Spain, maybe even in the English aisles. I don't think there was a continent in the middle of the Atlantic that had this advanced civilization partially taught by aliens. No, I don't go that far. I've seen enough history and been part of enough actual historical events to see how things can get distorted really quickly, really easily. People tell tall tales. I think that there were some people out West from Greece that maybe had some cool technology, and it became the legend of Atlantis. Then maybe one day there was a natural disaster, a tornado combined with a flood, something awful that was very local. But of course, that became a big story. What I've learned about history is the old saying, history is a pack of lies that we all agree on. It's never 100% accurate.

I'm taking that quote. I love that quote.

I'm paraphrasing someone more famous than I've seen.

You said history as a pack of lies.

History as a pack of lies, mutually agreed upon.

I love that quote.

It's very accurate from my direct experience. Even four people at the exact same place at the same time, witnessing the exact same event, you will get four different stories. Ask any cop. History is even worse.

I mean, so if somebody came to you and said, I know where Atlantis is, and you still have the submersible, you would have done it.

In fact, you a guest on your show, Rear Admiral Galladale, who asked me to take a look at some suspicious places underwater that may have been associated with unidentified aerial phenomenon. I obliged him. I sent my landers down, and we took pictures, and we took Sonar, and there was nothing there. Some unusual rocks, but no secret doors.

Why did he think that those...

They did look unusual on Sonar. There's no question. And there were reports of unusual aerial phenomenon. I treat it like I'm a scientist. I never say never. I'll believe anything until proven otherwise. So if someone says, Hey, Victor, do you want to go look at this place? Because it looks interesting. I'm like, Okay, sure. I don't know what I'm going to find. I try to do it with an open mind, but we didn't find anything. Or a couple of others. Where was it?

Was it the area? Was it the Nimitz that documented that area?

Where we dove was actually off west of Los Angeles. Okay. But I also took a look at something west of Mexico on the way up. Neither did we find anything unusual. I personally have never had any UAP encounters of any kind. I'm always hoping for. I'm hoping to go down even deeper. What's funny is in the James Cameron movie, The Abyss, they go down very deep and they find the big spaceship, right? Well, I went down even deeper than that. I still didn't find a spaceship. That was about 8,000, 9,000 meters in the Cayman trench. We went down to the Mariana's. If you were ever going to hide a spaceship, that's where you would hide it, right? But so far, nothing.

No spaceships under there yet.

No, not yet.

Right on. Well, let's talk about the Grand Slam.

The Grand Slam. Yeah. Physical beat down that was. Most dangerous thing I've ever done is high altitude mountain Worry.

You think that's more dangerous? Oh, yeah. Really?

No question. Easily. I've almost died a couple of times. Yeah. It is very dangerous because you're dealing with Mother Nature in a very harsh place. It's like you're in mortal combat when you get above 8,000 meters. They don't call it the death zone to be melod dramatic. It's very scary up there. You're slowly dying and you get in trouble. No one's really going to help you out that easily. So it's very dangerous. And just one wrong decision in one moment of absent mindedness, and you're done. So, yeah, it's dangerous.

Could you explain what the Grand Slam is for the- The Grand Slam is summiting the highest mountain on all seven continents and skiing at least 100 kilometers to the North and South Pole.

Yeah, it took me about 20 years. I didn't intend on doing it. It wasn't like, Oh, I'm going to go do this thing. I just loved climbing, and I kept climbing higher and higher, and eventually I was able to climb Everest. Then I said, Well, that was pretty cool. Wow, the Pole sound pretty interesting. And by the way, the North Pole is a lot harder than the South Pole.

Why is that?

Well, it moves. You're on ice flows. So on one day of our expedition to ski to the North Pole, we woke up, we skied like 12 hours that day. We were exhausted, and it was negative 40 sea. It's just hellish up there. Polar bears are running around. Who's we? Myself and two other people, including maybe the world's best Arctic explorer, Eric Larson. He was our guide and one other individual and the three of us with one tent, pulling all of our supplies over ice flows in the ice. It was epic. We plowed forward all day for 12 hours, went to sleep, woke up, right back to the same place where we started. Because we had drifted while we slept. Now, sometimes it worked in our favor, but it was very frustrating. But the most dangerous thing about the North Pole is you're on ice, and with climate change a little bit, the ice is getting thinner. If you go in the water and it's ambient temperature, negative 30, negative 40, it's a life or death situation. You need to get that person out immediately, get their clothes off, put them in warm clothes, or they will get hypothermia and die really quickly.

We had a whole drill for that. It was a dangerous place. South Pole, you're on a high plane, it's land. You just get on a vector and you just keep skiing until you get to the South Pole. Also very cold, very windy, but it's doable.

How long did it take you to accomplish that?

Each one was about six days. They literally drop you off in a plane 100 kilometers from each objective. When that plane leaves, I swear to God, you just look at your friends and yourself and you're like, What the hell did I just get into?

What was the hardest summit?

Everest. Everest? Yeah. And not because the lines, although they are for most people, we had a unique situation where when I went up on my second try, on the first try, I got frost by at camp two, halfway up, and I had to come down. So I went back again two years later. And on that trip, a storm started when we were at camp four, when we were about to launch for the summit. And it was not good. It was It was so not good that every team except one other chose not to go up that night. But we had a really strong team, and we thought, no, we could do it, and there'll be no lines. So we traded one risk for another. It was very cold, very windy, stormy, but we didn't have anyone in front of us. Well, we only had one group, and we were able to keep moving, and we were able to summit. But when we got to the summit, we can only see about 100, 200 meters. But we definitely were on the summit. Then very rapidly, after 15 minutes on the summit, we came down because it was very dangerous.

But it's just a physical and mental beat down climbing Everest. It takes two months. It takes two months. Yeah, that's the whole evolution because you climb up to get acclimatized, you come down. You climb up even further and you come down again. The whole time, you're sick, you're losing weight. You can't eat enough to keep your body weight up because you're just burning so many calories and your body can't digest food. It's a beat down.

What is the altitude at that summit?

29,028 feet, plus or minus. Yeah, it's really high. Above 8,000 meters, you are slowly dying. If you're on summit day and you get above 8,000 meters just outside of camp four, if you stop to rest, you're only dying more slowly. You have to get back down. And that's why if you run out of oxygen and you've been on oxygen, you're done because your body starts getting used to it. And people have a misconception that if you're on oxygen, oh, it's like normal, like you're at sea level. Not at all. It just takes the edge off of It lowers the feeling of altitude by 3,000 or 4,000 feet. It gives you enough oxygen to keep yourself warm. It's not like Popeye opening a can of spinach and making you strong. It keeps you alive. And yes, people have summited Everest for that oxygen, but it's very rare and very dangerous. So it's a serious place. And people, I think, sometimes give it too much. Oh, it's a walk up. Look at the lines. You just have to pay a lot of money and go up. Yeah, Let's hear someone who's actually done it say that. They don't.

It's tough. Any good stories? There are dead bodies up there, and you're just too exhausted to do anything.

Do you see them?

Oh, hell, yeah. It's a narrow trail. Some are more covered than others. But people go, Well, how can you leave them up there? People just don't get a sense of what it's like on Summit Day on Everest. You are hypoxic. It's like you're drunk. You're bound up in all this material to keep you warm. You can't hear because the wind is so loud. You can't even recognize your own team members because we all look alike in all of our gear. It's hard to even figure out what the hell is going on, much less, is that person next to me dying or are they just taking a break? You don't know. You don't care. You're just trying to stay alive, especially in bad weather. So it's a serious place.

Man, I bet. Man, it's just wild how many places you've been.

Although the most dangerous mountain I climbed was Carsten's Pyramid in Papua New Guinea. Yeah, because that is the highest mountain on a noncontinent. It's on the island of Punjac Chaya in Indonesia. And that one's really dangerous because it is remote as hell. We're talking primordial forest. There is no one there except a bunch of tribes, literally with bows and arrows and spears. It was about a six-day trek from a mountain an airstrip to get to the mountain, and we were guarded by tribesmen. We had a couple of tough interactions with other tribes as well. That's a whole separate story. Then when we got there, the mountain partially had to be free-climbed without ropes, which you don't do on Everest. If you got hurt there, there's no medical attention. It's all self-rescue. There was one point where you actually have to do what's called a tyrolian traverse, where there's a steel cable between two and you actually have to clip into the cable and then pull yourself over a chasm to get to where the summit is and then do it again on the way back. Yeah, you start questioning life choices at that point sometimes.

I guess heights don't bother you. No.

Claustrophobia, heights, they just don't. None of it. I don't know why, they just don't.

What about the tribes? What was that complication?

Well, they've been fighting each other however long they've been there. Loes and arrows aren't cute for them. They are actually weapons of war, and they do little stage fights every now and then. But they're serious people. Kids I run into, they're some of them and they've never seen Caucasian before. They do the typical come up and trying to feel what it's like, or they just get mesmerized by my eyes and my hair. They never seen it. But there were a couple of interactions where we would go into a town in so-called enemy territory, and we would thought we had arranged safe passage with our guides. There was one very tense moment where they were going to try and extract value from us, money or whatever we were carrying. We were in the middle, the Westerners, and then our tribe was in a circle around us. Then there was another circle around them, and a Mexican standoff. It was very, very tense. We couldn't understand a word they were saying, but they were yelling a lot, which is never a good sign. I got my knife ready to go. No, I wasn't going to go down quietly.

And eventually, they worked it out. And very tensely, we got up and slowly got through. Went on our way to the mountain. That happened.

Right on. And then you went to space.

Yeah. I've compared these things a lot. Going to the bottom of the ocean is like going into a pyramid. It feels very ancient, very dark. You get this immense sense of time. Climbing Everest is like mortal combat, going into the octagon and just getting the hell beat out of you and still trying to survive. Going into space is like going to a Metallica rock concert. It is just awesome. You're with your friend, It happens. You're going up vertically at Mach 3 on a ballistic trajectory. It happens in three minutes. You're in space. The chime goes off. You unbuckle and you float out of your chair. You have these huge windows, and you're seeing the Earth from space. There's no kidding. You are in space. You are looking down on the Earth. It is a white sun on a black background. No atmospheric distortion to make it yellow. You see the very thin veneer of the atmosphere. And there's something that astronauts coined in the Apollo program called the Overview Effect, that when you get to space and you see the Earth from space, it can change you psychologically. I believe that is true. I think it affects different people to a greater or lesser degree.

But yes, you look down on the Earth, you don't see boundaries. It's not just beautiful. It is drop dead gorgeous, the Earth from space. And I swear you, you want to come back and be better and do better. That's why I'm a huge proponent of getting people into space, because I don't think anyone goes into space and comes back worse.

That's amazing.

You need to go.

I would love to go. I don't really know anybody that can get me there.

I'll try and work with you on that.

I would love to go.

Yeah. They need more good storytellers and people that can communicate the experience.

What is it like to see that?

It is difficult to put into words because Because the colors are so vivid. And instead of being able to see, even like in a plane I fly, hundreds of miles, you're seeing thousands of miles. It's almost like a God's eye view of the world. And the curvature is perfect. Everything just feels perfect. The sun is white, a perfect yellow ball of fire in a completely black space. The perfect curve of the Earth, the brilliant blue the atmosphere, the tans and slight greens of the Earth, and you're floating. I mean, that just adds to the experience. And you're with your friends, and everyone's laughing. Everyone's having fun. And yes, okay, I know for people out there, Oh, this is a bunch of rich people spending money like Katie Perry going up and all this. I get that. But please humor me a little bit that in the early days of flight, people would pay a decent amount of money to go up in a thing called an airplane, daredevals, right? The more that was done, the more common it became. By going up on Blue Origin or on SpaceX or these other spacecraft, the more we do it, the more accessible it will become for everyone else.

And I believe we can do a lot of good in space. We can do manufacturing in space. We could hopefully mine steroids one day. A lot of benefits will come from accessing space in a more affordable, reliable, and safer way than we have historically. And I feel that by having Yes, people of good means going up on rides, fine. I don't think it's bad. And, Oh, you should be spending the money doing other things. Well, if you use that excuse, you would never do anything other than just providing charitable resources for those that really need it. We wouldn't be advancing ourselves as a species. I firmly believe that technological developments have solved more misery, solved more problems in human history than anything else we've ever done. And space exploration, along with ocean exploration, along with venture capital, those are the mechanisms to improve us as a species, which allows 8 billion people to live on this planet and raises hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It's technology.

When you get up there and you're looking at the Earth, do you have any thoughts about what happens when we die? What is this all about?

Now, I've been asked, and I'm a Zen Buddhist by practice. I was raised Episcopalian. I think that there's great value in all religions because I think that they encourage us to be better than ourselves naturally would be. I believe that there are very common strains among all the world's great religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, all of them. I think they're all just different expressions and different cultural, historical norms that sing to different personalities and heritages. I don't think it's any great shock that most people in Western Europe and the United States are Christian. That's our heritage. That's where we come from. But I've been in places like Papua New Guinea where they have never been really exposed to it. They have their own deities, their own religion. That doesn't make them bad people. In fact, they can be very wonderful people. For me, I have a sense of spirituality through experiencing the world as it is. I do not know what happens after die.

Do you think about it?

Not really.

Really? You don't think about that?

No, because I can't know it. My father was Episcopalian. He was very devout, and he really liked to believe in an afterlife that if you're a good person, you go there, which is great. I hope that he fulfilled that dream. I just don't know. If I can't know something, I'm such a rational person. Brian Gumbel interviewed me, and he called me a vulcan. If I can't know something, I don't worry about it. It comes down to faith. You either have faith or you don't have faith, or you don't even ask the question. I'm in that realm where I appreciate every day as much as I can. I experience all that I can. I try and be a good person. I try and advance technology as best I can to help other people. But what happens after we die? I'll find out.

How did you... Did you say Buddhist?

I'm a Zen Buddhist.

What is that?

Zen Buddhism is based on the premise that meditation is a doorway, that everything is connected, and that through direct experience, we can have commonality with each other, with the world, with the universe. And so it does have many common strains. There are Zen Buddhist who are also Christians, that they can meld the two philosophies. And it also tries to emphasize that human language is a barrier to truly understanding the world as it really is. You have to have it through direct experience. Hence all the jokes about Zen Buddhism and the riddles that they tell each other. They're actually trying to do that to show that human language has great limitations to explain the nature of the universe, the nature of the human condition and spirituality. You have to do it more directly. Very difficult to explain Zen Buddhism in a sentence or two, but that's part of it. It just fits my personality.

But would you talk about everything? I'm just curious. Have you ever done psychedelics? No. No.

I'm a pilot.

There's a overwhelming feeling that everything's connected on those.

Of course we are. Well, I certainly believe that. You experience that when you're in the high mountains, we're in the deep oceans, when you're in space. I've had privilege where I've been able to experience things that any practitioner, Zenbidism, would have loved to have done. It makes it easier. When you are in a place of awe, like a Gothic Cathedral, it's easier to get in touch with one spirituality, but the best Gothic Cathedral I've ever seen in my life are the Himalayas.

Very cool. What are some other things that you've done in your explorations that maybe most people don't know about?

Oh, goodness gracious. It's a difficult question. We've talked about a lot of them. Oceans, space. Flying, I think, has been one of the things that's a much more subtle thing. I think learning how to fly was one of the transformational experiences of my life because it teaches you to be very much in connection with the environment. It teaches you about mechanics. It teaches you about self-discipline. Don't fly on days where you're not ready to fly. You can get killed. You can kill other people. And it set me up for success because that's how I approach so many different things is like a good pilot. Is my craft ready? Am I ready? What's my plan of action? What's my way out if things go sideways? And being a good pilot taught me a lot of great lessons about how just to be a good person and be an effective person. And then the military just exacerbated that. The military taught me a lot of great lessons, too. They taught me a lot about how to manage people because in the military, you got to deal with who you get. You don't get to pick a lot of the people that you work with.

Maybe not in the Seals, maybe you do. But in the rest of the Navy, you play the hand you're dealt. Same there. Yeah. But you get taught a lot of how to motivate A players, B players, and not so great players, and hopefully meld them into a team that's effective. That was a very difficult lesson, but the Navy did a good job of trying to teach me some of that.

What do you... I mean, you sold the subversible.

And the ship. And the ship. And the whole team went and worked with them. Yeah.

I mean, so sounds like you're concentrating on venture capital right now.

So, yeah, a lot of attention on some of the technological advances that I want to push there, as well as this ocean mapping vessel. That will be a big deal. This single ship should be able to map as much of the sea floor as the rest of the world's combined fleet. Well, maybe not quite that much, maybe 70 %. Yeah, because that's all it does. No No other ship has ever been designed that does just one thing like this, which is to map the ocean. The ship designer said, We've never been asked to build anything like this, so hopefully it'll be transformational. It would still take a single vessel 80 years to map the ocean. I'm hoping that this will encourage people to buy one or two, and then we can do it faster. But I think it's something we need to map our own planet, for God's sake.

100% agree with that. When will that be operational?

Hopefully in two years. Trying to figure out where to get it built right now. Where are you going to start? Unfortunately, I love to build in the United States, but it's too expensive by a dramatic amount.

Who will build it?

I am not sure yet. I'm taking bids from all over the world.

Right on.

I guarantee you one thing, it will not be built in China.

Thank you. I was hoping you would say that. Where would you start? I mean...

Well, it's interesting you say that.

75% of the ocean hasn't been mapped yet. I mean, Where do you want to start?

The places I haven't dived yet. So part of the issue in diving to the bottom of all five oceans, we didn't know where the bottom of four of the oceans were. So we actually had to put the biggest sonar I ever put on a civilian vessel on my ship. And we had to map the areas first because we didn't know where to dive. And so of the trenches I have not been in, I'd probably use as the shakedown cruise, going to all the trenches I haven't been to and mapping them thoroughly so that when I eventually get another submersible, I can know where to go.

Is there anyone specifically that you want to hit?

Yes, but I'm not going to talk about it.

Can you talk about what?

Because the number one problem with ocean research, you're not going to believe it. It's not technology, it's not money, it's not people, it's permitting. Getting permits from governments to dive an experimental submersible in their waters makes some of them nervous, especially from a former naval intelligence officer.

I could see that. I could see that. Yeah. Well, Victor, you are a fascinating human being, and I love what you're doing. I love your spirit.

It's American.

It's cool to be around.

Well, no, I really do. But I'm so proud of our country, who we are as a culture. I know we have a lot of issues. Every country does, believe me. Let's not even talk about the French. But Americans, we always get stuff done. We always come together when it counts. We're optimistic. Failure is almost a badge of honor in our country. It meant you tried. And that is so rare in so many places in the world. We don't understand what an amazing culture we have, and it should be cherished and, when possible, pursued with intensity.

Thank you for saying that. Lifter, it was an honor to interview.

No, my pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for the cig.

My pleasure. My pleasure.

Yeah, my Second Amendment gift. Thank you.

Run it hard.

I shall indeed. I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CA contractor, and host of The Sean Ryan Show.

Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers, no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask. But in the age of the PSYOP, that search has never been more difficult. In September of 2022, the US Army's fourth CIAp group released a cryptic video on YouTube. There is another very important phase of warfare.

It has as its target not the body, but the mind of the enemy.

Between clips of troops assembling chest pieces and social unrest, phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, Have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings? These are the CIA soldiers. The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question, and an even bigger one. The global power brokers that conducts psychological operations constantly evolve. Technology like AI has evened the playing field, and now, in the era of social media, in the democratization of information, all it takes to conduct a PSYOP is a smartphone.

Like and subscribe.

In each episode, we look at a different method of psychological operations, how they've evolved and how they are being deployed. There's a A quote that is attributed to a scientist named E. O. Wilson that says, We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. This is a life raft in that sea of both information and misinformation. Psyops are all around us. They are conducted by corporations, governments, activist groups, intelligence agencies, foreign adversaries, and anyone who knows how to shape perception to get what they want. The series provides an in-depth look at how these PSYOPs work from conversations with whistleblowers, experts, historians, tech innovators, and more. We look at world events that are being shaped by highly constructed psychological operations specialists, and look at the terrifying buying possibilities of where this could all be headed. Along the way, you'll learn about everything from Russian troll farms, fake ghosts in the jungles of Vietnam, and mind control cults to the CIA's involvement in Hollywood. Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks? The early history of PSYOPs and psychological experiments laid the foundation for what we see today in modern campaigns that seek to divide culture over polarizing issues.

We look at where we are and how we got here. But ultimately, this series is a toolkit to help you understand how you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of a PSYOP. Before the Army's viral PSYOP recruitment video ends, the words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving and all the world's a stage. This series is a peak behind the curtain. Welcome to the PSYOP. Buy it today at psysopshow. Com.