1089: Victor Vescovo | Into the Abyss: Reaching Earth's Deepest Places

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Speaker 1 Today, we're talking with an amazing explorer who's been to the peak of each of the Earth's highest mountains, as well as to the deepest parts of every ocean. We're talking with Victor Vescovo.

Speaker 1 Usually I don't focus on these sorts of achievements. I don't know.
It's just not really my thing.

Speaker 1 However, not only did Victor descend to these previously unknown depths, but he also helped fund, design, test, and construct the vehicle that actually did it.

Speaker 1 I was not aware that we know more about the surface of Mars than about the deepest parts of the ocean here on Earth. I really had no clue about any of that.
This story is really something else.

Speaker 1 Victor's kind of like a Tony Stark meets Jacques Cousteau kind of guy. He's also a really good storyteller and an amazing person all around.
I am very glad that we got to do this one.

Speaker 1 So if you're interested in science, the oceans, sea life, climate, technology, this is a great episode for you. All right, here we go with Victor Vescovo.

Speaker 7 I'd love to hear a little bit about your background because that's what really kind of got me.

Speaker 7 Susan Casey, who introduced us, was like, oh, he was in the military and then he did this thing and then he started a hedge fund and then he started this other thing and they went to all the mountains and then he went to the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 7 I was like, is this one person or did I had to rewind the book.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've done more than a few things. Born and raised in Texas.
I was fortunate. I tested pretty well.
I went to school out here in California.

Speaker 3 I went to Stanford and then I kind of went in between management consulting and investment banking for a while.

Speaker 3 Picked up a master's from MIT and then from Harvard Business School and then went into private equity.

Speaker 3 Lately, I'm a little bit more into venture capital than private equity, but that's how I made my money to fund all the various activities that I've done.

Speaker 3 When I was about 26, I was at business school and I was approached by the Navy because I have some language skills and other things. They invited me to be an intelligence officer in the reserves.

Speaker 3 And that started a 20-year career in the military, kind of on the side. For several occasions, I was called up for relatively long periods of time to serve active duty in certain conflicts.

Speaker 3 But all the while, I was doing my day job of investing. and also started a multi-decade career in mountain climbing.
So that was something I was really passionate about.

Speaker 3 But as I got older, I realized it's more of a young man's game and I was looking for a different challenge that was more cerebral, more logistic, maybe more financially difficult.

Speaker 3 And the ocean calls when that happens. And that began a multi-year endeavor, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans.

Speaker 3 I've been flying since I was 19. So I've done that.
So I've done a whole lot of different activities and it's been a great ride.

Speaker 7 It sounds like that was, man, walking up these mountains is really tiring. What's more expensive, but involves less walking? Ah, the ocean.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 And quite frankly, of all the things that I've done in my entire life, and I've done a lot of things, some of them fairly risky, mountain climbing by far is the most dangerous thing you can do, in my view, because it's such a combination of factors, many of which you have no control over, like the weather in particular.

Speaker 3 And if you're not careful and you're not prudent, you can die pretty, you can die in all those environments, but you can die pretty easily in the mountains.

Speaker 3 One of the greatest mountain climbers I know of, Ule Schuk, climbed what I consider the most deadly mountain in the world, Annapurna.

Speaker 3 He climbed it so low, I think in about three days or less, maybe even less than that. He died on Everest because he just had, you know, what appears to be one bad move and he tumbled down a rock face.

Speaker 3 An incredibly experienced climber. Just shocked that that happened, but it's a dangerous environment.
So really, mountains were great at teaching risk management.

Speaker 3 If you do it for a long period of time, you have to learn that skill. And that's a really helpful skill to have just for life in general.

Speaker 7 I would imagine it's terrifying. I have friends who go, don't worry about me.
I'm going to Kilimanjaro. It's really easy.
It's mostly walking.

Speaker 7 And then one of my friends passed away because a rock, probably kicked off by a mountain goat, just hit him in the head. And that was it.
Yeah. And he was like hiking.

Speaker 7 I mean, this is not, he was not scaling down.

Speaker 3 Yeah, most people don't die on Kilimanjaro. No.
But you can, you know, break an ankle because you're going to, and it is 18,000 feet.

Speaker 3 And what people don't realize is that, you know, that altitude will affect different people differently. Some people can climb everstroth without oxygen.

Speaker 3 Some people, I've actually seen a young woman, unfortunately, die at about 18,000 feet from acute cerebral edema brought on by altitude.

Speaker 7 What is that? What is cerebral?

Speaker 3 It's basically where your body malfunctions when it gets to higher altitude and you get water on the brain, you're not getting enough oxygen.

Speaker 3 And it begins, and some people, a very, very small percentage of people, you'll begin to shut down.

Speaker 3 But everyone, in a way, I believe from my experience, they have kind of a genetic limit to how high they can climb. And you will go no further.

Speaker 3 And you don't know until you actually get to that altitude. I had a good friend of mine who tried Everest this year.

Speaker 3 Great guy, fantastic shape, but it was like he hit a wall, I think at about 21,000 feet. And that was it.

Speaker 7 So he went back down. Yeah, he went back down.

Speaker 3 Thank goodness. Well, yeah, I mean, he was going to get edema if he kept going up higher.

Speaker 3 And so when you're climbing ultra-high mountains like Everest, in the back of your mind, you're always going, okay, yeah. Yeah.
I hope I can keep going. I don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And it's people that just push through that that sometimes end up dead.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it seems like you'd be really tempted. Well, I've trained for this for three years.
I feel a little off, but I'm probably fine.

Speaker 7 And that's like, nope, that was the point at which, like 2020 hindsight, that was the point at which you were dying and you were just the last to know. Like your brain was already telling you.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's a classic example of that. A guy named Doug Hansen, who is a postal worker from, I believe, Seattle.
He climbed in the infamous into thin air incident with Rob Hall.

Speaker 3 And it was his third attempt to climb Everest. And on his third attempt, Rob Hall, the great guide from New Zealand, got him to the summit.
But evidently it took everything that Doug had.

Speaker 3 And he collapsed on the way down and he died. And so did Rob, his guide, who was trying to get him down.
So you don't just endanger yourself.

Speaker 3 You endanger other people when you're up there in the aptly named death zone. And it's not just an hyperbolic description.

Speaker 3 I mean, you literally, if you did nothing and stayed above that altitude, you would die. You simply cannot get enough oxygen to survive.
Unless you're a freak of nature. But yeah.

Speaker 3 So it's a very serious place, Everest, but it does teach you a lot about risk management. It took me two tries.

Speaker 7 There's a lot of sort of, I don't know if desensitization, probably desensitization is the right word with Everest, where there was that guy, Green Boots, who just had somebody who died on the mountain.

Speaker 7 He was there for like, I don't know, what was it, 20 years? And people would go, oh, there's, there's Green Boots. It's like, well, that's a dead body.

Speaker 3 But then people are going. You have to understand the context.

Speaker 3 We're getting in the death zone of Everest. That is not down.
Here in Saratoga, California, where you're talking normal conversation. It is like a war zone up there.

Speaker 3 You can barely keep your own faculties focused. In fact, I didn't recognize one of my own mountain guides for a minute or two when I was up there.

Speaker 3 You're completely hypoxic, almost always sick. You haven't eaten near enough.
Your body can't even process enough food.

Speaker 3 So just put yourself in that entire context and you're lucky that you can keep one foot going after another uphill and not fall over. Much less be worried about the person right next to you.

Speaker 3 You are literally just trying to survive. Imagine being like in a foxhole with gunfire gone off.
It's different, but it's not, you know, mentally, it's kind of like that.

Speaker 7 That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that.
Cause of course, when you read about it, it just sounds like a really hard hike with dead bodies around you.

Speaker 3 No, it is not that. If you make one wrong move, if you do not clip your rope into that fixed line and you have a bad moment, there's no question.
You're gone. Make sense.

Speaker 7 Because no one can go get you.

Speaker 3 It's too bad. There's no way.
No way. Yeah.
Oh, man. That is...
Yeah. And you would risk people's lives, no question, by retrieving bodies.
And then how do you even bring them down, for God's sake?

Speaker 7 That's a good point. You can't fly a helicopter up there or anything.

Speaker 3 Not really. And yes, people go, oh, well, helicopters have gotten to some rivers.
Yes, but also I fly helicopters.

Speaker 3 I don't think people understand when you're at that altitude, there is so little air, it would take the slightest gust or loss of control, and that helicopter would crash.

Speaker 3 That's why helicopters crash at high altitude so often is because there's just not a lot for them to bite into.

Speaker 3 So your control over the glider, even though it looks like it's fine, it's really tricky to fly a helicopter at high altitude, especially when there's winds. And Everest is exactly that.

Speaker 3 So yes, you can get helicopters onto Everest, but it is very dangerous flying. And you certainly can't be picking stuff up.
And, you know, just because. Right.

Speaker 7 Fast roping down, grab the guy and leave, not quite in real life.

Speaker 3 No, there's not, no, not, it doesn't work that way. My goodness.

Speaker 7 Everyone's so hyped up about space exploration.

Speaker 3 I know you are as well, but you said yesterday we had the first commercial space walk. Oh, yeah.
By Jared Isaacman.

Speaker 7 So that was, that was kind of a surprise to see in the news.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah. And it came right on the

Speaker 3 back of SpaceX, you know, rescuing the two astronauts from the Boeing Starliner. So it's kind of like they spiked the ball yesterday.
It's good old SpaceX.

Speaker 3 But I went up on Blue Origin, which is also a great organization. And they got me in the space.
And hopefully one day I'll get to go into orbit with them on their next rocket, the new Glenn.

Speaker 7 That's super exciting. I know SpaceX, I'm stoked about space exploration.
You said ocean exploration exploration is actually more important or someone associated with you may have said that.

Speaker 7 I wrote that you said it, but now I'm not 100%.

Speaker 3 Someone associated with me said that I actually believe they're equally important. Okay.

Speaker 3 Heck, I'm a venture investor in a company called Astroforge here in California, and we're actually trying to explore and eventually mine asteroids. I mean, all sorts of things.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm really big into both space exploration and marine exploration.

Speaker 3 I truly believe you need to do both.

Speaker 7 How far away are we from mining asteroids, or is it so far that we don't know how far? Is it like kind of outside?

Speaker 3 Let's say the cone of uncertainty is really wide. There are so many things that you have to do well in order to mine an asteroid.
I believe it is a function of time.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, why would I have invested?

Speaker 3 But the issue is first you have to find the asteroids that are very dense with valuable metals. That in itself is a trick.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Then you actually have to do the orbital mechanics and mechanics of actually landing on an asteroid that's tumbling in space.

Speaker 3 Actually getting the material off the asteroid and getting it back to Earth, that's probably the easiest of those complex problems, but you have to do all of them, but it will happen in time.

Speaker 3 And you just like you did with the Mercury missions, the Gemini missions, and then Apollo, in space exploration, you just build on what you did before slowly, methodically, carefully, and you keep building the skills and the machinery needed to do the next step.

Speaker 3 Because there are so many unknowns in space exploration and ocean exploration that you're constantly kind of

Speaker 3 shining a small flashlight into a very dark room, hoping you don't fall into a pit. And you slowly learn how to navigate your way in these complex environments.

Speaker 7 How do they even figure out what's inside an asteroid? Because it's like, oh, the outside is, I don't know, whatever, iron ore and dirt or whatever.

Speaker 7 But inside is, I don't know, what's more valuable than gold by keeping it?

Speaker 3 There are a lot of platinum group metals, iridium, rhodium, platinum. hopefully other metals, but they're very dense.
That's the wonderful thing about asteroids.

Speaker 3 It's not like you're separating 99 tons of dirt from one ton of valuable stuff. It's very concentrated, which makes it much easier and much more valuable.

Speaker 3 But you can look at the magnetic signature of a rock. You can look how it's actually moving in space.

Speaker 3 You can shoot a high-powered laser at it and see what ablates off and then do a mass spectrometer of... the wavelength of light that it gets.
I mean, there's all sorts of nerdy stuff.

Speaker 3 That's what you can do.

Speaker 7 That's pretty damn cool, though.

Speaker 3 Yeah, of course. That's fine.

Speaker 7 I mean, first of all, lasers blasting into space and then going, that's a big old rock of platinum. How are we going to get that thing out of there? Exactly.
That's kind of exciting.

Speaker 7 I see why people get stoked about this. Absolutely.
And then when it lands, it's worth like $700 billion or something like that.

Speaker 3 It depends on the asteroid. Yeah, there's some silly numbers out there.
We're going for much, much smaller asteroids that are actually in the near-Earth-moon orbit.

Speaker 3 So they're actually relatively close. We're not going out to Jupiter or anything like that.
That's not cost-effective at this point. But no, there's enough out there.

Speaker 3 And really what it's about is so much what happens in venture capital. It's not so much, you know, getting the metal and bringing it back and selling it.
It's building the tech that can do that.

Speaker 3 That's what's valuable. If you can bring back even a pound of platinum from an asteroid for the first time,

Speaker 3 maybe it's worth, you know, X.

Speaker 3 That's not what's valuable. What's valuable is that you who bloody did it.
Yeah. And from there, where do you go? Then you can do it again and again and get.

Speaker 3 further out in the space and all this stuff. That's what venture is all about.
It's not about the actual product so much sometimes the technology you develop.

Speaker 7 I see. Yeah, that makes sense, right?

Speaker 7 Because if you can show, I don't know, the Air Force that you can do this, they're kind of like, okay, how many gazillion dollars do you guys want for us to get this and for you to never sell it to China?

Speaker 7 Right. Whatever.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I heard that humans have only explored 20% of the ocean, which to me is shockingly low.

Speaker 7 I just kind of figured, like, oh, we've got at least 60, 70% of this stuff mapped, whatever.

Speaker 3 Or people look at Google Maps and they think they can see the seafloor. That's a very, very rough map.

Speaker 3 That's like doing an interstate highway map of the U.S. with crayon.
It's just, it's not that accurate. But the actual stat is 71%

Speaker 3 of planet Earth is ocean. In fact, a stat that shocks people is that the average place on planet Earth is 4,000 meters underwater.
This is more of an ocean world than it is a land world.

Speaker 3 And most of it is deep ocean at 5,000 meters. So if you take the average, the average place on planet Earth is 4,000 meters underwater, which is like 15,000 feet.

Speaker 3 That's where most of the world is so the point is 71 of the earth is ocean and of that 75 is completely

Speaker 3 completely unexplored which means half of planet earth is still completely unexplored and that's why i'm very passionate about ocean exploration because i love maps and i'm doing a lot of different projects to map the deep ocean and all that but yeah i mean we know in many respects more about the surface of mars and the moon than we do of our own planet and it's because the ocean is really deep and it's opaque you can't just shine a light right and radar doesn't work work.

Speaker 7 I didn't know, I didn't realize, I just, because I've, as a layman, I'm like, oh, submarines just shoot the sound thing and then everything comes back and there's a big map.

Speaker 3 Even the best military submarines that are designed for depth, maybe their maximum depth is seven or eight hundred meters. The average depth of the ocean is about 5,000 meters.

Speaker 3 So they just scrape the surface. They're just getting underwater.
But most of the ocean is really deep. And where I went, the deep ocean trenches, they're even twice that deep.

Speaker 3 And those are really hard to get to. We know nothing.

Speaker 3 Oh, here's another stat that'll blow your mind when it comes to ocean exploration because everybody's obsessed with climate change and climate models.

Speaker 3 I think one reason a lot of climate models often miss the mark is the fact that, again, 71% of the world is ocean. The deep ocean trenches are only like 2% or 3%

Speaker 3 of the ocean, but they hold 40% of the water. When people talk about, oh, wow, the ocean is holding more heat than we thought it could, or why are the currents so unpredictable?

Speaker 3 Well, it's because we never go there.

Speaker 3 It's been impossible to go there. So they kind of just guessed or had theories about how this worked.

Speaker 3 Like, for example, when I went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench the first time, I was told there would be no current because it's just too deep, right? There's no energy can get down there.

Speaker 3 Sure enough, I got to the bottom, turned all my thrusters off. I just sat in the sub right off the surface.
And what happened? I started drifting.

Speaker 3 I came up, told my scientists, and they're like, no, you didn't.

Speaker 3 No, I know what I saw. You can look at the video.
Yeah. There was a current, but that was.

Speaker 3 a big deal because wow if there's a current there that means the water's moving right which means it's circulating So, if water is circulating in the deepest trench on Earth, what is the actual impact on climate models for the ocean?

Speaker 3 You know, gotta do some new math. Right, new math, right? So, that's why ocean exploration is very interesting.

Speaker 3 There's so many different facets, whether it's marine biology, marine geology, oceanography, even archaeology, finding wrecks and things like that, which I like doing as well.

Speaker 3 There's just so much fun stuff, unlike space, which is empty, except for asteroids.

Speaker 7 Except for all the stuff that's in there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, or maybe life on another moon way out there, but here on Earth, we have a lot of things still to explore.

Speaker 7 Most of the ocean is unexplored. Is the stuff that we've mostly mapped and explored just near the United States and Europe? Because is it just easier for us to access that stuff?

Speaker 3 Oh, absolutely. You know, the deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown.
We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough.

Speaker 3 We did one dive on my expedition to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans in the southern ocean. in fact most people can't even name the five oceans on planet

Speaker 3 they'll do the first four can also now do they'll do atlantic pacific and indian then they'll go uh arctic right okay but then they never get the one in the bottom which is the southern ocean yeah is that really what it's called that's what it's called and some people say the antarctica ocean well colloquially maybe but it's actually called the southern ocean and we mapped the deepest point there for the first time and I went and dove it, but we were just getting hammered just

Speaker 3 on the surface. Yeah, on the surface by the storms, the snow, ice.
It was horrific.

Speaker 3 In fact, it was the first time that actually the submarine collided with the ship because the waves and the motion was just so chaotic. We did one successful dive in like 30 days here.

Speaker 3 Thank God it was the dive where I tried to go to the bottom. But then we just said, you know what? We're done.

Speaker 3 And because it's so harsh, that's why, you know, it is, it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean.

Speaker 7 So on this ship, I'm just trying to get my head around this. On the ship, you have terrible weather.

Speaker 7 You're stuck on the boat and you're just waiting for like one day that you can go down and do this, but the rest of the entire month, you're like looking out the window and going, well, today is not the day.

Speaker 7 And then you read and eat the same stuff with the same people and get on each other's nerves for like the next 29 days.

Speaker 3 It's not that bad. In fact, it's actually pretty good because, you know, you make sure the ship has, you know, good food, great coffee.

Speaker 3 You're always doing something with the technical gear, especially the submersible. You know, they're always begging for more time.
Oh, we need, let's fix this, let's harden that.

Speaker 3 Let's, you know, they always want more time. And then, you know, every day, yeah, but yeah, you're right.
Every day, you know, we're checking the satellite maps because we had a satellite link.

Speaker 3 So I had a spot beam from a satellite right on my ship. So we had good connectivity.
That was a whole separate issue. But, you know, every day we're pouring over the satellite maps.

Speaker 3 You know, where's the hole in the weather going to appear? You know, is that going to work? Is it not, you know, so there's a lot of activity. And we all really got along well.
Thank God.

Speaker 3 You haven't had a good happy crew.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I can only imagine if you get one or two people that don't jibe, you're just like, I'm going to throw this guy off the boat.

Speaker 3 Well, that's why you have shakedown cruisers. Military does the same.
I was in the U.S. Navy for 20 years.
I know how it works.

Speaker 3 And if there are people that are not working out or if you don't have a good team, that was one thing about my favorite explorer, Roald Amundsen. You know, you swap him out with no pity, no delay.

Speaker 3 You just, that's your job as the leader. You have to get the team right and you got to do it quickly.
And if there are still problems, then you need to have those hard conversations.

Speaker 3 I relieved multiple people off the expedition while we were underway. You know, you're getting off with the next stop or it's not going to work out anymore.
You just had to do that. That was my job.

Speaker 3 And that's what I do in business as well, because business very much is the business of creating the teams that make the companies run.

Speaker 3 And they're no different where you need the right people in the right place. They need to be properly motivated and everything else.

Speaker 3 So that skill was highly translatable to running an expedition either in the mountains or in the ocean. And I think that's one reason that they were usually pretty successful.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense. Of course, we've all seen businesses where there's dysfunctional teams.

Speaker 3 And it can come from any number of things. People think classic dysfunctional teams is, oh, there's like a bad egg who's just a jerk or this or that or she's a jerk.

Speaker 3 But it can be, you can have teams where you have just a lot of really, really strong, capable people, but that doesn't work either. Right.
Because they're butting heads constantly.

Speaker 3 And so you have to have a good mixture of leadership, capability, mutual respect, sense of humor is absolutely imperative because under high stress, it's humor that gets you through it usually.

Speaker 7 Makes sense.

Speaker 3 Especially at sea. Gosh.

Speaker 7 You mentioned waiting for a hole in the weather. Does that ever happen like at night? Like, okay, the night's going to be the calmest part or is it too dangerous to go down the night?

Speaker 3 We preferred it not to be nice. Of course.
Yeah. We typically would not do it at night doing deep ocean dives, but we would come up at night.

Speaker 3 Because actually, in some respects, it was easier to pick up at night because you could see the lights of the submarine in the ocean. Oh.
And it was easy to pick stuff up out.

Speaker 3 You know, the landers that went down with me, we could see them more more easily. The ship was pretty bright, but there are pluses and minuses to both.
But we typically would not launch at night.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, that just seems, it already seems terrifying in many ways that it's like, why make it harder? But if the only hole in the weather is at 4 p.m., it's like, well,

Speaker 3 you do what you need to do.

Speaker 3 There was also the circadian rhythm we had to take into account.

Speaker 7 Of just humans.

Speaker 3 Right, of human beings. You don't want to necessarily do a launch and then people are working all through the night when they're normally asleep.

Speaker 3 Then you start, you know, there's a lot of high-tension cables. A lot of stuff has to go right.

Speaker 7 so you have to take all that into account when you're doing a mission and you know yeah and assessing risk that makes sense you right you don't want somebody who's sort of dozing off if they're supposed to stop that tension cable at a certain point or like is too tired to have full mentality

Speaker 3 this way you know you're going to take your flight to london you're scheduled at you know 7 p.m oh great okay then it's delayed until 3 a.m yeah you want the pilots flying right i'm like tell me the pilot just the reason it was delayed is he was sleeping

Speaker 3 soundly no he's been up the whole time yeah he's been drinking coffee since five right yeah yeah

Speaker 3 you mentioned in the book that something called crush depth limited humanity for a while what is crush depth well a crush depth is directly related to the design and construction materials of the submersible if you go down in a paper cup you're going to be crushed you know at 100 meters sure military submarines are made out of steel primarily so they're going to reach a certain depth on average between 300 and 1000 meters.

Speaker 3 And as you see in the movies, if you go too deep in a military submarine, those bolts and those welds will start to give way.

Speaker 7 Right. And everyone goes, uh-oh,

Speaker 3 and they will implode. And that's what happened to the submersible, the Titanic, you know, last year, which some friends of mine were on.

Speaker 3 And that was a flawed design and it was not operated correctly. And it imploded.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that was really horrible.

Speaker 3 That's crushed depth for that submarine. It was about 4,000 meters.
Mine was designed and tested to a crushed depth of 15,000 meters. It's the deepest capable submarine ever built.

Speaker 3 That thing was a tank. And we tested it to that.

Speaker 7 We're definitely going to get into that because some of the stories about testing this, I was just like, that's the test.

Speaker 7 Some of the like Soviet Union-looking type.

Speaker 3 Oh, there's Russia. They're in Soviet Union, but yeah.

Speaker 7 But that thing was built, whatever.

Speaker 3 Well, we'll get there. We'll get there.

Speaker 7 Cause I'm thinking that was not, that was not a modern facility, but I guess it doesn't matter.

Speaker 7 It sounds like the way they describe it in the book is you got this V tattoo with seven peaks and five depths.

Speaker 3 I don't have a tattoo. No, no, I don't.
Is this so? This is just nonsense. Yeah, that one thing I learned about, you know, not that I seek publicity, but it was funny.

Speaker 3 I just do what I do because I like doing it. I love the missions.
I love flying. I like climbing.
But no one heard about me before this Marine stuff because I didn't care. I still don't care.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But that was newsworthy enough that people started reporting on it. So I'll do things like this to explain it and to correct misconceptions.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I am stunned, absolutely stunned how many details are gotten wrong. Yeah,

Speaker 7 like definitely clipped right out of the book. For people who are wondering, you did not write the book, someone else did, but it says, yeah, you got a V tattoo with seven peaks and five depths.

Speaker 7 So it was just like up to the. It's just wrong.

Speaker 3 I don't have a tattoo.

Speaker 7 I just thought like, oh, he got a tattoo. And then was like, oh, I only thought about going to the tops.
Now I got to go to the bottoms. It's like, no.

Speaker 7 Just an apocryphal story that sounded cool in the book. All right.

Speaker 3 Or just another one, in the BBC, they reported when I went to the bottom of the ocean that I saw, quote, sweet wrappers.

Speaker 7 Like candy wrappers?

Speaker 3 Right. Okay.
But British English, right? Oh, I see. Some PR person in England just put that in, confused it with a different trench.
But since the BBC reported it, it is now part of history. Right.

Speaker 3 There were candy wrappers at the bottom of Challenger Deep. It's like, nope, that happened because it was reported by everybody.
And I'm saying that didn't happen. That's fascinating.

Speaker 3 But there are so many details like that. What you read in Even the most reputable news sources always take with a grain of salt because they do get it wrong and they don't really correct.

Speaker 7 That's really interesting because, of course, I have questions like, I can't believe there was trash at the bottom, deepest part of the ocean.

Speaker 3 Well, I did find a piece of trash. Okay.
I did find, and I'm not sure what it was. I'm pretty sure it was plastic, but there was no question it was human because there was like an S.
Oh, I see.

Speaker 3 There was a piece of packaging, but I didn't find candy wrappers. Right.

Speaker 3 Although, at a different part of Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean, we did see a beer bottle and we're pretty sure it was a Heineken.

Speaker 7 You can't really even point to the Danes on that one because they sell it everywhere, right?

Speaker 7 It could have been anybody. But we'll blame the Danish, whatever.
Is it Danish or Dutch? I don't even know. I don't even know.
I don't drink beer. We'll blame the Danish anyway.

Speaker 7 So your concentration, I know you worked at a consulting firm, but you got a degree in some sort of defense-related thing. It sounded really complicated, like air power in Europe or whatever.

Speaker 3 I couldn't decide when I was in my 20s what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to go hardcore into business and investing in finance or if I wanted to pursue, frankly, you know, a hardcore military career, being an intelligence officer, doing war planning, and all this.

Speaker 3 I ended up kind of of doing both. I kind of figured out how to do it.
But as part of that, I accepted a PhD program position at MIT, and it was defense analysis.

Speaker 3 So really, it was about the mathematical modeling of warfare.

Speaker 3 I just, I did a little bit of that when I was at Stanford, and I really got to do it at MIT, where, you know, how can you predict the outcome of conflicts?

Speaker 3 And what are the key variables that decide who wins a war? And I was really interested in that. So I did that at MIT.
I didn't want to get a PhD. That would have taken too long.

Speaker 3 And I didn't like the career trajectory for that. So I took a master's and I left.

Speaker 3 But my master's thesis that you just alluded to was literally the balance of air power in Central Europe, a quantitative assessment, where I basically built a mathematical model for what would have happened if East and West had fought in Europe during the Cold War.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and more importantly, especially for all the nerds out there, it's like, you know, but what were the key variables that drove the conclusion of who won and who lost?

Speaker 3 And what were the most leveraged things you could invest in to change the outcome. That's the real important lesson.
So that's what it is. But it was really operations research.

Speaker 7 Who was going to win that one? The United States or the NATO. NATO, yeah.

Speaker 3 Mainly because after a mobilization period, we had better numbers, better systems, but most importantly, better pilots. Really?

Speaker 3 In doing all my research for that thesis, what I turned out again and again, it comes down to the human factor.

Speaker 3 You put a great pilot in a mediocre plane, he will defeat any other aircraft, no matter what it is, if it's a mediocre pilot.

Speaker 3 And you just come up over and over again where you end up in real world situations where, you know, that's why the Israelis are so amazing when they go into aerial combat.

Speaker 3 I mean, they defeated the Syrians like 92 to nothing in 1982 in the Falklands War. You had inferior numbers by the British, but they never suffered an air-to-air loss from the Argentinians.

Speaker 3 And it goes down to pilot training and pilot quality. And that was the key differentiator.

Speaker 3 A little off tangent, but that was something I was pretty passionate about.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, that's interesting.

Speaker 7 It's interesting because as a person who knows nothing about flying at all, you kind of think, oh, these machines are so advanced, the pilot just has to know the controls. But it's like

Speaker 3 that's kind of the old Soviet or Russian style.

Speaker 3 It's all underground control. It's all about the platform.
The human is just a cog in the machine. But what history shows you quite clearly, even now,

Speaker 3 is that really well-trained pilots with good doctrine can completely overcompensate for inferior technology.

Speaker 3 And if they have superior technology, which they usually do, they get five to one, 10 to 1, 50 to 1 kill ratios.

Speaker 3 And that's why when you also study whether it's World War I or modern warfare, it comes down to 90% of the time, if you're shot down in a plane, you never saw who shot you down. Really? Wow.

Speaker 3 It's ambush.

Speaker 7 Right. So it's not the top gun dog fighting.

Speaker 3 No, that's really rare, and that's Hollywood. It really is situational awareness.
I know where you are, but you don't know where I am.

Speaker 3 And I get a missile shot off and take you out before you even know what's happening because radars look forward. They don't look all around.
Don't get me started on aerial warfare.

Speaker 3 I could go on for hours about that.

Speaker 7 I am curious what, so AI would be like the best, theoretically the best pilot at some point. It would be able to best the best human pilots at some point and then that would decide everything.

Speaker 3 Well, you know how you can do the projection where that goes where you would effectively have, you know, maybe a human optional aircraft is kind of where you're going to go.

Speaker 3 But yeah, you could have an AI with a training data set of some of the best pilots ever and have cameras all around the aircraft. it would be better than a human because it would have 360 degree view.

Speaker 3 It would have the accumulated experience of any fighter pilot ever. It could build a training set.

Speaker 3 And it could do maneuvers no human could survive.

Speaker 3 I would be absolutely terrified to go into a dogfight with a completely AI-controlled fighter aircraft. It would be suicide.

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Speaker 1 All right, back to Victor Vescovo.

Speaker 7 Especially with like drone technology, where your G-forces is zero to like whatever maximum that would kill a human in like one second.

Speaker 3 Right. About maximum of nine G's for a human.
And even then, they're going to probably pass out. But a machine wouldn't even think twice.
And that's the only thing that

Speaker 3 they've seen, even in very initial studies of doing, you know, AI combat in silica, you know, doing simulations of putting human pilots against AI-driven. They've kind of done that a little bit.

Speaker 3 They said it's unnerving because the AI-controlled fighter planes are utterly fearless.

Speaker 3 They just immediately make the decision and do things that even a human will hesitate just a little bit. But that little bit of hesitation can kill you.

Speaker 7 I would imagine an AI can be like, I need to get three feet above the water level to avoid this. And the human's like, ooh, can I do that? The AI is just like, well, whatever.

Speaker 7 It's going to work or it's not. And I'm a machine.
I don't really care if I crash.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
Probability is 95%. I'll do it.
Okay, done. Done.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Whereas the guy's like, okay, I do have kids at home. Well, I'll just try it.

Speaker 3 Oh, by the way, it's an interesting point you made about skimming the ocean because that is one of the key ways you can evade missile shots is by getting really, really low because you blend in with the ground.

Speaker 3 The radars can't tell the difference between the ground and a fighter plane, even if it's moving. There's too much clutter.
That is accurate in Top Gun when they'reaving in the mountains and stuff.

Speaker 3 That is one way to evade missiles is because the missile can't figure out what you are and what the terrain is.

Speaker 7 That makes sense. That actually makes sense.
They have interesting stories that now I'm questioning whether or not they're true.

Speaker 7 In the book, when you climb to the summit in Russia, in, I think it was like 1991, and you get back to Moscow and you're like, that's not the flag that was on top of the mountain.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, the coup happened the day we summited the highest mountain in Russia and in Europe. And we came back down, hey, we summited.
This is great.

Speaker 3 And all the Russians were like clustered around the radio. And we're like, hey,

Speaker 3 what's up? There's a coup underway in Moscow. We're like, oh, crap.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Think our plane's going to take off in time?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we actually were considering hiking across the border into Turkey if things got really dicey.

Speaker 3 that would have been a pretty rough trek but we could have done it but things we just stayed there for a couple of days drank vodka with the russians and eventually things calmed down and we flew into moscow and yeah there was burning stuff in the streets the flag had changed and it was sketchy at the airport i bet but but you know good old western passports they were like they didn't want us there they they wanted us out that's you're lucky they weren't like We need bargaining ships.

Speaker 7 Look at these three units that just walked through the street.

Speaker 3 It was still very confusing. And so when things are really confusing, people just, they just want you to get out of there.
So that happened. That was fun.

Speaker 7 You were on top of the mountain and the entire world changed overnight.

Speaker 3 In Russia, it certainly did. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 I mean, it's changed here also, right?

Speaker 3 We were like, okay, so no more nuclear annihilation, maybe? Yeah. Right?

Speaker 3 Possibly.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you never know.

Speaker 7 Yeah, TBD on that one. Yeah.
You speak fluent Arabic or you did?

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm not fluent. No, I don't think any Westerner can ever speak fluent Arabic.
But I had the tutor and I trained in Arabic. That was part of my job requirement.

Speaker 3 I lived there for almost about a year and a half, a little longer than that.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I got pretty good because I was living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and I had to use my Arabic a lot, but now that was 30 years ago, so it's degraded.

Speaker 3 But no, I learned Arabic and I spoke, I learned French when I was little, German in college, and lately a little bit of Italian because that's my ancestry. So yeah, a couple languages.

Speaker 7 Now it's too late, but I'm going to ask anyway, is it Vescovo or Vescovo?

Speaker 3 It's Vescovo. in the West and it's Vescovo in Italian.
It means bishop in Italian. I see.

Speaker 7 Because I was, I can't stop saying it one of those ways, but it depends which way you prefer because I'm going to write it down.

Speaker 3 I just do it American English, Vescovo.

Speaker 7 I was like, do this at the front of the show and don't forget. Now you immediately forget.

Speaker 3 Have you ever been seriously injured doing any of this stuff?

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I would assume so.
Yeah. I almost, you know, bought it on the highest mountain in South America, Cerro Aconcagua.
It's on the border of Chile and Argentina. And

Speaker 3 it was one of the first mountains I climbed and my skill level wasn't quite where I needed it to be, but I was only a couple hundred feet below the summit and I fell and I went down a pretty steep incline and I started a rock slide and I ended up on the bottom of it.

Speaker 3 So I was just getting pummeled by not rocks, but by boulders. Boulders.
And I got smashed in the head and then I had a huge boulder that like impacted my spine.

Speaker 3 So I was laid flat and I was unconscious for a minute or two.

Speaker 3 When I came to, my guide was hovering over me and there were only two others on our trip and i couldn't speak i was partially paralyzed in my legs and i had amnesia i was in a very very bad way and of course it was in the mid-afternoon and a storm was coming in and the three of them thought i was completely out of it but actually i was quite lucid i could understand what they were saying they were saying there's no way we can carry him down not the three of us not at this altitude And so they seriously had only one option, which was we're just going to give him everything we can to keep him warm and we'll come back tomorrow morning.

Speaker 3 Oh my god, imagine hearing that! Yeah, they're going to leave me out there to struggle through it 22,000 feet in a storm while injured and not able to move. Yeah, I mean, what else could they do?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I mean, honestly, I didn't begrudge them that, but fortunately, there's a team of four French climbers on the summit, and I had spoken with them in French on the way up.

Speaker 3 We'd become kind of buddy-buddy, they were pretty cool guys, and they saw the accident and they came down and they recognized me and says, Hey, your friend, is he okay?

Speaker 3 And they said, No, he'd really jacked up. So the seven of them pulled me, dragged me down a couple thousand feet that evening and night to get into an emergency shelter.

Speaker 3 And sure enough, a storm did blow through. Oh, my God.
And so I just struggled through that night and then eventually got down to an altitude where a helicopter got me out.

Speaker 3 Three months of physical therapy and no permanent damage, thank God, except for some teeth that got smashed.

Speaker 7 Get new ones.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, kind of, that's what I did. And I went back two years later and did it.

Speaker 7 I mean, you can't let the the mountain win on that one.

Speaker 7 That would be a bummer.

Speaker 3 No, I was really, really careful the next time I went through that area.

Speaker 7 Man, does being that close to death, does it bring life into stark reliefs or focus somehow?

Speaker 7 It does.

Speaker 3 It didn't make me super religious or anything, but it definitely, I mean, the first thought that went through my mind was like, I just killed myself and for what? To climb this stupid rock. Really?

Speaker 3 You know, kind of mad at myself.

Speaker 7 I'm going to do this seven more times and then go in the ocean. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But what it did do is like, you know, know they call it climber's amnesia not for that reason which is you know when you get better and you're like

Speaker 3 it wasn't that bad you know it kind of was but i think in that case it really made me appreciate risk management and that no matter what happens you never ever let yourself not get reckless but even let your guard down yeah because those environments that we operate in they're trying to kill you And they don't care.

Speaker 3 They don't care. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's hard for people who are like indoor kid-ish kid-ish like myself to, you really have to realize like this, this is what a hostile environment is, right?

Speaker 7 It's not just like, oh, the Earth doesn't care about you. It's like, no, no, no, it would rather you fall off the edge of this mountain and die.

Speaker 3 Yeah. One analog I have to that, and it didn't happen until, you know, after that incident, was I learned how to fly helicopters.

Speaker 3 And one thing you learn flying helicopters is that they are inherently unstable.

Speaker 3 What I mean by that, if you're flying a fixed-wing aircraft and you completely let go of the controls, it will continue flying for quite a while. It's stable.
It wants to fly.

Speaker 3 If you did that in a helicopter, within seconds, it would flip on its side, flip over, and be unrecoverable.

Speaker 3 So you are constantly in positive control of a helicopter, which is why they are kind of dangerous because the pilot is really important in the helicopter.

Speaker 3 You're really betting on that pilot being good, especially in an emergency situation because they're inherently unstable.

Speaker 3 But the point is, is that nature and all of its forces that are acting on you, it's like you're living in a helicopter.

Speaker 3 If you let your guard down driving on the highway or walking across an intersection on a icy road, you're in that unstable environment. And if you're not careful, not to make people paranoid.

Speaker 7 I should be a little paranoid driving on the highway.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 you can mitigate it. Yeah.
And that's what I've learned in my whole life of doing all these interesting things is you can operate in a very dangerous world.

Speaker 3 You just need to be aware and you need to mitigate those risks.

Speaker 7 I know you don't, all right, it says in the book. I have to preface everything with that.

Speaker 7 It says in the book, you don't have any kids and you never married.

Speaker 7 I wonder if that makes it easier for you to risk your life because you don't have people who are like, oh, well, dad left us and then fell off a rock.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yeah.
It does. And that does mystify me why there, you know, are some people that have like four kids and they're out there climbing on really dangerous mountains.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I kind of have been able to view myself as kind of expendable. That's my job in the grand tapestry of life here on this earth is I'm one of those guys.

Speaker 3 If someone has to take a risk, probably should be me. I've been trained for it.
I'm comfortable in those environments and I don't have a wife. I don't have kids that I'm responsible to.

Speaker 3 And that also, I think, sharpens my capabilities when I'm in a very dangerous situation. I don't have the iconic, you know, picture on the dashboard of my plane kind of thing.

Speaker 3 That is not a good thing to have.

Speaker 7 Interesting, because I don't, it distracts you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know. I know people disagree with me and say, oh, but, you know, that gives you connection to humanity and this and that and the other.

Speaker 3 But man, when you're operating on the sharp edge of risk and life and death kind of things, you want to be 100% there with you and the machine and the environment.

Speaker 3 Nothing else, nothing pulling you back or whatever.

Speaker 7 I was wondering about that when I was reading about the submarine, the dives.

Speaker 7 It's like, if there's an emergency down there, you don't want to be with somebody who's like, oh my God, I never, my wife and kids, you're like, hey, man, put the fire out in the electronics thing.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, I mean, that was why I, people always said, you know, it was a two-seat submersible.

Speaker 3 And I got some flack, especially from the scientific community saying, how come you only only dive so low? Well, I did in the early days because I was a freaking test pilot.

Speaker 3 If there was an emergency, one, I wanted to be able to focus on it completely and not have to worry about the passenger. Number two, I was able to operate with a bit more risk if it was just me.

Speaker 3 If the slightest thing was off and I had a passenger, I would abort the dive and go up. My primary responsibility was always to the passenger.
Everything else is secondary.

Speaker 3 When it was just me, I could test the submersible.

Speaker 3 Now, some of those things bled into one another, like the longest dive we ever did at the bottom of Challenger Deep, I did do with a passenger, but that was Hamish Harding, who's a trained jet pilot.

Speaker 3 And he and I talked about the dive. And

Speaker 3 yeah,

Speaker 3 we did a little bit more risky thing with him because we were really pushing the submarine to its limits. But he was qualified to do that with me.

Speaker 3 And if something had gone wrong, you know, we would have immediately come up, but nothing did. It was fine.
It was a good dive.

Speaker 3 But yeah, you just have to calibrate your risk when you're with a passenger. And and you definitely take less risk when you have other people that are responsible.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that

Speaker 3 you're responsible for.

Speaker 7 Right, that makes sense. I mean, I can't do stuff like this.

Speaker 7 Not that I was ever cutsy enough to do stuff like this in the first place, but I've got two little kids, and I would, my wife's like, you can't go to this dangerous country right now.

Speaker 7 Like, what happens if you get, if you die?

Speaker 3 Right. It's a valid point.
You know, when you take on a family, you have responsibilities other than yourself.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's unfair. It's, it's like, it's selfish.
I guess I'm calling those people who climb dangerous mountains with four kids a little bit selfish.

Speaker 7 I mean, they probably have a compulsive thing, and they're also delusionally confident that they won't die, probably.

Speaker 3 Well, it just means they need to change their risk profile. The example I mentioned earlier where Rob Hall escorted Doug Hansen to the summit of Everest, and he never came back.

Speaker 3 And he had a pregnant wife back in New Zealand. And the issue was.

Speaker 3 I don't want to criticize Rob Hall, but point being, if you do have a pregnant wife back at home, I would think really long and hard about pushing any client or pushing any situation.

Speaker 3 You should be the first one to say, nope, we're done and take the flack from it. Yeah, there's not enough money in the world.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Right, but you need to change your risk profile or not do big hard mountains, be an instructor on lower mountains. Or, you know, you need to think hard about your life.
You can't have it both ways.

Speaker 3 Life is a series of trade-offs. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I think, I get why people don't change their risk profile.
It's kind of like, I don't want to be old yet. I don't want to be out of the game yet.

Speaker 3 Age gracefully, people. We all age.
And doing what I do, I'm not fighting against, you know, mortality. I'm just adjusting to it.
And that's what you need to do because we're all going to die.

Speaker 3 None of us make it out of here alive. Not yet, anyway.

Speaker 7 Not yet. Yeah, there's people working on that right here in Silicon Valley.
Good luck with that. It's creepy when you're siphoning your son's blood into your body every day.

Speaker 3 That stuff freaks me out. That's a whole separate topic.
But there's the physical side of immortality, which I think they're going to really struggle with.

Speaker 3 But then there's the in Silico way, which even now they're able to like, you know, just imagine dumping every email, every text you ever wrote into an AI.

Speaker 3 And even now they have algorithms that can mimic you.

Speaker 7 So if I croak, Jen can text me about picking up a target. Look it up on

Speaker 3 beyond. There are actually services that allow you to do that now.
And that's straight out of black mirror.

Speaker 3 It is. Yeah.
But that's black mirror is often foretelling the future. Yes.
And then you have an AI just synthesize your voice, which is child's play now.

Speaker 7 Well, especially with, I've got 2,000 hours of my voice out there. It would be easy for somebody to do that.

Speaker 3 I think it will be common in the next 10 years for people who want it to have digital recreations of their deceased with the proper visuals, voice, and even personality based on all of their textual communications.

Speaker 3 It won't be perfect, but it will be eerily

Speaker 7 that seems like something you shouldn't use for a long period of time.

Speaker 3 Like a drug or anything else, right?

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 7 It's like maybe it eases you into your, like through a grief period of somebody suddenly dying, but it also has shades of the movie psycho where he's talking to his mother but it turns out to be a corpse in the basement in a rocking chair if she talked back maybe you wouldn't kill people that's right you know what technology always cuts both ways you might be out of something yes exactly this is going to sound like i'm belittling your accomplishments and i swear i'm not doing that but as i sit here in my living room i would have thought by 2014 when you started diving to the bottom of these trenches that we had done that all that's what motivated me i uh got the idea because richard branson came up with the original idea i give him credit because he came up with a project called the five dives, but he chose a submersible technology that was based on carbon fiber, a quartz crystal, all this stuff.

Speaker 3 It didn't work. But I said, wait a second, I'm a little bit more techie.
And I said, that should be possible.

Speaker 3 And putting my business hat on, I said probably the five most dangerous words in the English language, which are,

Speaker 3 how hard could it be?

Speaker 3 And I started, I do what I do, right? I'm a pseudo engineer and I started taking apart the problem, putting it into pieces.

Speaker 3 And I found out that each one of them was doable, expensive and hard, but doable.

Speaker 3 No one else had done it. And this is something I said, like you just said, I can't believe no one has done this.
This is ridiculous.

Speaker 7 I thought like, okay, the Navy did it in 1965.

Speaker 3 They dove in 1960, they dove to the very bottom of the Challenger Deep and then that was it. They only did one dive.
And not only that, we didn't even know exactly where the other four deeps were.

Speaker 3 Oh, really? No.

Speaker 3 That was one thing that happened to me where we were building the ship, building the sub, and I had assumed that we knew where the bottom where's the map that shows where we're going oh it doesn't exist yeah where's the bottom of the indian ocean and then you know my chief geologist uh the wonderful dr heather stewart of the royal uh geological society she was in the meeting she was my geologist on the expedition she raised her hand saying um victor we actually don't know where exactly the other four deepest points are i went like literally like you're kidding I said, well, you know, okay, well, what do we need to figure out?

Speaker 3 You need a really big sonar

Speaker 3 mounted on the ship. And I'm not kidding.
I had to go and we installed the most powerful sonar ever put on a civilian vessel to map these deep ocean trenches because they're seven miles deep.

Speaker 3 And we had to do it precisely. And yeah, so we would literally just burn holes in the ocean for days at a time, tracking the bottom, finding the deepest point, and then diving it.
They were not known.

Speaker 3 In fact, in the Indian Ocean, there were two candidates thousands of miles apart.

Speaker 3 survey both of them and then went, okay, that one's like 100 meters deeper.

Speaker 7 We'll go there. Right.
The last thing you want to do is find out that you went to the second deepest part.

Speaker 3 In fact, people said, Victor, you really need to map it because if you dive the wrong one, that's not a good answer.

Speaker 7 Remember that world record we gave you? Give me that shit bad.

Speaker 3 In fact, some of them we couldn't even verify was sonar. It was the Margin of Mirror.
Like in the Pacific Ocean, there are two really deep trenches, the Mariana Trench and the Tonga Trench.

Speaker 3 No one talks about the Tonga Trench. Two really deep points, the Challenger Deep and the Horizon Deep.
No one had even remotely gone to the bottom of the horizon deep, not even tried.

Speaker 3 And yet they were really close on sonar.

Speaker 3 So we had to physically dive each one and get actual measurements multiple from any number of instruments it turned out that the tonga trench was like 110 meters shallower that's like a football field right 11 000 meters yeah that's really close wow we were actually really pulling for the tonga trench because we would have gotten to rewritten all the textbooks and stuff like that But no, the Challenger Deep is the deepest point of the idea.

Speaker 3 And people out there may go like, well, maybe there's some place that no, we know it is the deepest point because the satellites in orbit have done magnetic surveying of the earth plus or minus a couple of hundred meters so we know without doubt where all the deep ocean trenches are and we've now pretty much mapped all of them got it so there's not like a super deep spot hiding somewhere that would be unless it's under ice is that possible no no there's an arctica but that's an unusual issue but short answer is no okay yeah i was thinking like under antarctica oh look this one over here is just massively deep no covered glacier oh i heard in the beginning you bought an existing sub instead of building one no i didn't buy it so that is also not true there had been only two dives to the very bottom of the ocean one by the uh the triest in 1960 by captain don walsh and jacques picard and then james cameron the film director right in 2012.

Speaker 3 so he dove the deep sea challenger his submersible based on steel and something called syntactic foam, which allows it to float. And he did one dive, and then he gave it to the Wits Hole Institute.

Speaker 3 So my initial impression was, why reinvent the wheel? I'll just get his submersible. I'll refurbish it, maybe add some new bells and whistles and I'll dive that one.

Speaker 3 And I went to Witz Hole and I inspected it and it was not in great shape. And not only that, but I had a group from Triton submarines who I was talking to who are the submarine experts.

Speaker 3 And they said, you could do so much more if you did blank sheet. We know so much more.
And you could use titanium, titanium, not steel, and allow it to have two people, not one.

Speaker 3 So they made a really good case for not doing that. And they were right.

Speaker 7 What is the market like for secondhand submarines that can go that deep?

Speaker 3 Let's just say it's really, really thin.

Speaker 7 I would imagine you send them an email, like, I'm thinking about buying that submarine. And they're like, delete.

Speaker 7 Who's this spammer?

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's it is actually in the book, Expedition Deep Ocean, where Josh Young, the embedded journalist we had on the five deeps, he wrote about that.

Speaker 3 And yeah, it was one day I kind of, in my mind, I said, I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to write the check and take the risk because I had no guarantee it would work.

Speaker 3 I could have blown tens of millions of dollars down the drain. And oh, well, I wrote the email to Triton and I tried to say, look, I'm a serious person.
I do have the financial wherewithal.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm rated jet pilot. I could pilot it.

Speaker 1 Let's just meet.

Speaker 3 Let me make my case and let's talk about it. Well, they'd really been wanting to build a submersible that could go to the bottom of the ocean for a long time.

Speaker 7 We need to find somebody who has deep pockets and will just let us recklessly spend all of his money.

Speaker 3 In some respects, that's, well, they had their own vision of what they wanted to do. They wanted to build a submersible that had a clear hull.
Oh, that's a cool idea. It had never been done before.

Speaker 3 But theoretically, it's possible out of glass. But I know enough about manufacturing to know just manufacturing that without any flaws would have been.
a research and development project.

Speaker 3 And in one of our first meetings, I said, I am not willing to write a a bunch of checks for a five-year R ⁇ D project.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Let's take it a step back technologically and I'll fund that.

Speaker 3 In the same way, you know, I admire Elon Musk a lot. He always goes to first principles.
You start with the requirements. What's the minimum requirement that you have?

Speaker 3 And then you build up from there. And don't take anything else as, you know, oh, well, other people did it this way.
Just start from a blank sheet of paper with minimums and build from there.

Speaker 3 And that's what we did. And we ended up building something that was definitely doable.
Barely. Barely.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 But I got to say, the submarine world really does seem like it's full of characters, like guys who hunt for treasure, guys who've lived all over the world and grew up all over the world, people who are child prodigies, people who grow up to build one-of-a-kind unique devices that most of us can only dream of.

Speaker 7 And also just like some crazy people, I think, maybe.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what you described pretty much described my team for five years. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I mean, some of the guys in the book by Josh, we'll link to the book in the show notes.

Speaker 7 read the thing i was just thinking you're just making this project harder by being insane and then having like red tape and all of these delays and like oh we didn't think about this but it's going to cost a million dollars to fix or like four hundred thousand dollars to fix and it's like you just need the budget cannot be this like tightly controlled thing because There's so much stuff that we have.

Speaker 3 I think it goes into one of the key principles of doing anything, whether it's doing venture capital or private equity or doing expeditions.

Speaker 3 It's the boring professional discipline of program management. How do you manage a complex program?

Speaker 3 And you have to do it with a little bit of give, a little bit of take, but you have to have control and you have to have hard limits.

Speaker 3 And I think there's a reason why our project, of course, it didn't come in on budget because there are unknown unknowns, but you have to set limits and you have to be able to flex your requirements so you can meet overall the objectives.

Speaker 3 But that's why you see multi-billion dollar overruns on government projects because they're just so big and massive and many of them are undermanaged that it's chronic.

Speaker 3 You see that less so in oil and gas exploration, where you still have things go wrong, but they're much more professional about it and they know when to cut their losses.

Speaker 3 Program management is the unsung enabler of all the great things that have happened in history.

Speaker 3 The construction of the Panama Canal, the Lewis and Clark expedition, you know, winning the race to the South Pole.

Speaker 3 Studying those and how they were done is just as important as the sexy stuff like the technology or the brave leadership, whatever. But that's what gets stuff done.

Speaker 3 And that's, I think, what I brought to the table was that I managed it very tightly personally. And it was benefited by the fact that, you know, I was the guy writing the checks.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 I had no sponsor.

Speaker 7 You didn't have to lobby from some. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I didn't have to ask more money from it. It was all my checks.

Speaker 3 I didn't have to abide by anyone else's expectations or calendar. Very important.
Number two, I was a pilot.

Speaker 3 So I knew everything about that sub and I was working with them on design features, this, that, and the other.

Speaker 3 And I was also the person, you know, putting together this whole expedition and running it. When you have like one person that is doing all those things, decisions are really tight and rapid.

Speaker 3 And that's one thing that made it work. Plus, I think other people have described the initial phases of the first expedition.

Speaker 3 It was kind of like Ocean's 11, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for that, for expedition management? Oh, that's Rob McCallum.

Speaker 3 Who would be the best ship captain? Oh, that's Stu Buckle. And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it.

Speaker 3 So I was able to assemble an extraordinary group of people that all wanted to be there and were willing to do whatever it took to make it work.

Speaker 7 You pressure testing the sub? We kind of talked about this earlier in the show. You got to pressure test the sub, right? But also each of the parts.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there is no test chamber large enough on Earth. to test the entire submarine at 11,000 meters.
I see. Okay.

Speaker 3 So we had to test all the components and then assume that they would work together well at pressure. But the most important one was the pressure vessel that held the pilot and the passenger.

Speaker 3 So it was actually designed so that it could fit in the largest testing chamber on Earth, which was at the Krylov Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia.
So that was the core.

Speaker 3 And we sent it off, you know, on a Friday. paid cash and got it in and out over a weekend.

Speaker 1 And now for some discounts so deep, something, something, you'll need a submarine to get them. I didn't think this went through.
We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Victor Vescovo.

Speaker 7 I'm surprised that they didn't just go, hey, this is really expensive. If you want it back, we need more money.

Speaker 3 That's exactly what I was expecting was going to happen. Yeah.
Okay. But the team worked it and we got it out of there.

Speaker 3 We didn't know until we opened the container in Florida if it was a pile of bricks or something. Oh, God.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Broke the seal. Literally a pile of bricks.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which they could have done. Said, oh, you know, there's an export tariff of a million dollars.
You know, what are you going to do? Right. Here's your million dollars.

Speaker 3 We were very, very fortunate that things went well.

Speaker 7 That's what I meant by like, this place looks like it was built. They describe it in the book as like vines growing through the walls.
And it's like, this is the number one place for this.

Speaker 3 There's a freaking tree growing. Well, it's basically big.
And it's basically nothing but a huge screw. That's really all it is.

Speaker 3 It's this massive pit. made of metal.

Speaker 3 They fill it with water and then they put whatever they're testing in there and then they put a screw on top of it and using a hydraulic press turn the screw and they increase it that's basically all it was wow and you know that's very russian right but it works yes you know no american would do that but they did it and they did it to test god knows what but it worked and we were able to test it to 15 000 meters so when i went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub

Speaker 3 Any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together and things did go wrong eventually. Not on that first dive really.

Speaker 3 The first dive was actually great, but over time, things started breaking down because of the pressure and the salt water. But I knew that the pressure vessel was very, very strong.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it was not going to implode. And, you know, the phone was going to keep me buoyant.
So I had great confidence. Was I 100% sure? Well, no, you never are.
It's a test vehicle and you're going down.

Speaker 3 That's why I went down solo. And every little noise that it made on the way down, I was like, what's that? What's that thing I'm going to hear? Yeah.

Speaker 3 But over time, I learned what each sound was. And like any machine, like a plane or helicopter, you just, oh, that's fine.
That's fine. That's fine.

Speaker 7 That's the camera housing flexing under the pressure. It's fine.

Speaker 3 It's sort of, yeah, kind of. Or that's the seat doing this, or that's that fan that needs a little oil.

Speaker 3 You know, you just, you become, that's one thing I love is that I'm never more comfortable than when I'm in a complex machine.

Speaker 3 I love getting to know my machines and kind of merging with them and making them do what I want.

Speaker 7 What sort of tolerance does the material need to have in order to survive at those depths? Is it like space shuttle level, more or less?

Speaker 3 It depends on the part. But the most important thing was the spherosity, as they call it, of the pressure vessel.
I see. It had to be a perfect sphere.

Speaker 7 Otherwise there's too much pressure on the floor.

Speaker 3 Right. You'd get imbalanced pressure.
And that's what was cool is that it was like 0.01 millimeters. I can't even remember.

Speaker 3 But it was really, really tight sphere. But what was cool is we tested the metallurgy of the capsule after several dives and it was even stronger.

Speaker 3 What had happened was with repeated dives to the bottom of the ocean, it was like it was being reforged.

Speaker 7 Right, because it's packed together really tight.

Speaker 3 In nature's most brutal forge, you can't have anything at a higher pressure on planet Earth unless you go underground and it just made it stronger.

Speaker 7 Water just basically at the molecular level is pushing equally on each side.

Speaker 3 As a perfect sphere. Yeah.
Perfect

Speaker 3 balance of pressure.

Speaker 7 That's really cool. There's something about that is like poetic.

Speaker 3 I heard you say if something goes really wrong in a submersible, you'll never know it, which is Well, Don Walsh, the first person to the bottom of the ocean who was on my ship when I made my dive, a wonderful person.

Speaker 3 And he passed away, unfortunately, last year. But yeah, he said, hey, Victor, just know that, you know, if you hear it, you're fine.

Speaker 7 Right. If you don't hear it, well, you're dead.
So

Speaker 3 you won't even know. Yeah.
He said, you won't even realize it. It's not like the movies where you're going to have water coming in.
He says, under

Speaker 3 extreme pressure, you're going to be dead before it even hits your brain.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's actually kind of a relief. The last thing you want to do is like run out of...

Speaker 3 No, that's a bad way to not run out of oxygen or, you know, have a leak you can't solve.

Speaker 3 You know, like watching James Cameron's movie, The Abyss, just gives me the chills when the water's coming in and they can't shut it off. That's like a nightmare for me.
That's a terrible way to go.

Speaker 7 I heard you had that movie on the ship, and it's like, who put that in the collection?

Speaker 3 I love Jim Cameron's movies. I think they're wonderful.

Speaker 7 But it's like you watch that before you go down in a submarine?

Speaker 3 It seems like a bad idea.

Speaker 3 Well, it's actually funny, the little untold stories that whenever I took passengers down, especially to the bottom of the ocean, it's like about four hours to get back to the surface.

Speaker 3 And, you know, you've dropped your weights. There's really not a lot you can do as the pilot.
Watch a movie. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I literally, and I would let my passengers pick the movie that they would watch on the rate. Plus, it also distracted the passengers and, you know, kept them calm and all that stuff.

Speaker 3 You got to think about those things. And it was funny what different people chose.
Like one person chose that the horror movie that takes place at the bottom of the ocean. I forgot what it was.

Speaker 3 And then other people chose comedies. One person chose, you know, Lawrence of Arabia.
You're watching a desert movie while you're surrounded by ocean. It just all varied by the individuals.

Speaker 3 At Titanic, I did watch the Titanic.

Speaker 7 That would be, that's, you have to do that one. But if you're, yeah, if I'm 10,000 or 20,000 feet under the sea, I'm watching like Toy Story 3.

Speaker 3 See, yeah, you're that way.

Speaker 7 I'm not trying to be like, how do I make this worse?

Speaker 3 Yeah. How can I get the most chilled out? Or watching the Meg, right?

Speaker 7 Okay. Yeah.
Like my anxiety doesn't need any help in that direction.

Speaker 7 Let's say there's a fire, because I know that was one of the things, like electrical fires.

Speaker 3 How do you put out a fire underwater inside a submarine without killing the people but you have to remove the oxygen or yeah well there are things there are two types of fires there's inside the capsule where the humans are and then there's somewhere else on the sub okay and I did have that happen at the tonga trench the previously you know second deepest place on planet earth and it happened at the bottom and one of the batteries one of the big batteries a lot of power had a saltwater ingress and it had a massive short and it was just dumping power out and it started melting the sub parts of it.

Speaker 3 Oh, melting the sub? Yeah, parts of it. It was burning through the electronics and burning through.
And the worry there is if it went uncontrolled, you know, maybe it would go to the other batteries.

Speaker 3 You know, I could have a meltdown situation and then that could potentially jeopardize, you know, the buoyancy. Now, there were contingencies for that.
I never felt fearful for my life.

Speaker 3 It was definitely stressful, but I didn't fear for my life because I could have jettisoned the batteries. I see.
I could have like, you know, just like in Star Trek, you know, drop a warped core.

Speaker 3 Right. You know, I could have done that, but that would have been really expensive.
And I would not have enjoyed that. And I would have gone up like a rocket.

Speaker 7 Seeing your light flash before you is worse than just seeing your bank account flash before you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But trust me, when you're down, you know, four hours from the surface and you're alone in the two-person submersible at the second deepest place in the ocean and it's really quiet and you're, you know, you're doing your mission and then literally all at once, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, red flashing lights, this and that, just out of nowhere, that gets your heart rate up.

Speaker 3 And you're like, what the hell? And then, you know, just like being a pilot, that's why pilot training is so, so great. It's like, what's the master caution thing happening?

Speaker 3 What's driving everything else that's going wrong? And I really quickly zeroed in. One of the batteries is not good.

Speaker 3 And so I just went through the procedures that I was trained to do and that we had analyzed as a team. It's like, okay, isolate the electrical problem.

Speaker 3 And you turn everything off that you can, hoping that that isolates the circuit. And that's what I did.
And it did isolate that battery.

Speaker 3 That battery melted down, but it didn't cascade into the other ones because I shut off its communication with the other ones.

Speaker 3 There was no way for the overvoltage to jump to the other batteries or more importantly, to jump into the capsule because the internal batteries were feeding off the out ones.

Speaker 3 And so the issue is I had to close that door. If an electrical fire had gotten into the pressure capsule, there are ways to mitigate that.
It would have been a terrible day.

Speaker 3 But I would have gone onto an emergency air breathing apparatus. Yeah.
I would have gotten what they use in mining complexes. These are artificial oxygen generators.
I would have put on a smoke hood.

Speaker 3 I would have turned off everything in the sub. If I did that, all the weights would have automatically dropped because they were magnetically held and I would have started an ascent.

Speaker 3 Now, it would have been a terrible four hours to the surface, you know, breathing in that situation, knowing that there's noxious fumes outside, but I'm on this, you know, regulator.

Speaker 3 But yeah, I would have gotten to the surface and then they would have opened the hatch and I would have been okay. It would have been not a great day, but happy to

Speaker 7 survive. It sounds like there's a lot of pretty damn cool advanced safety systems inside these things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, even if I had gone completely unconscious, the submarine, if I had not pressed a certain button every 15 minutes, a dead man switch, it would have released the weights and come up.

Speaker 7 That's awesome.

Speaker 7 I assume it gives you a beep before it accidentally does. Because I'm thinking, I would just be like, oh, this is great.
Yeah. What am I forgetting? I feel like I'm forgetting something.

Speaker 3 It would give a definite audible beep before it did that. That makes sense.
So there's a lot of fail-safe mechanisms.

Speaker 3 I mean, the design language I gave the designers was, I need the laws of physics to be violated for me not to come home alive. And they said, okay.

Speaker 3 And, you know, that's going to cost you. Right, right.
I know, but I think it's worth it. They did it in a way that it wasn't prohibitively expensive.
It was just, it's just smart engineering.

Speaker 3 That is a good example. You know, a good example is magnetic locks for the weights.
They weren't mechanical locks for the weights. They were magnetic.
So if the electrical power failed, They dropped.

Speaker 3 They have to. Laws of physics say they can't, they weren't held by anything else.
Right, okay. So they couldn't get stuck or something.
And then there were the issue of entanglement.

Speaker 3 That's what made the Titanic dive so dangerous is all the cables

Speaker 3 and the currents were really strong. And the really frightening thing to a subpilot, because you can't really see that well,

Speaker 3 is the propellers getting stuck in a rope or a cable that's attached to a rack. Right.
What do you do then? You can't go outside and untangle it.

Speaker 3 So it was designed where you could throw a switch and it would burn through the attachment bolt for things that are most likely to get entangled.

Speaker 3 So I could have dropped my propellers, but my life literally would come down to that one switch working. So you don't want to go there.

Speaker 7 Right, ideally.

Speaker 3 But if you did, at least that might help. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's funny because right now, a lot of people are like, this is so cool. And other people are like, this is why I'm never going into a submarine.
I'm in the ladder camp for sure.

Speaker 3 It's funny. Yeah, there are people that are in line to go on a submarine adventure.
And then there are people saying, I will never step inside that thing.

Speaker 7 Yeah. There's not enough money.

Speaker 3 the queen of england doesn't have enough money to put me into one of those things what sort of things are you looking for at the bottom of the ocean yes shipwrecks everyone loves a good shipwreck but are you taking rocks plants and yeah we brought rocks back we are taking film of the areas and don't forget wherever we went no human had ever been to the vast majority of these places so we always found new species we found new geologic features we found colonies of algae where there was no sunlight i mean well how does that work well there wasn't algae technically i know a lot of the marine biologists out there will scream at me but there were colonies of bacteria that were living on rocks at 11,000 meters.

Speaker 7 Those are the ones that feed off of what, like sulfuric acid coming through.

Speaker 3 Feed off the minerals and the methane coming out of the rocks and out of the fissures. And it's a different form of life.

Speaker 3 So that's why I keep telling people, you know, if we find life on other planets, it will be more like what we saw in the deep ocean trenches

Speaker 3 than what we saw up on land because that's what most of the world is. Yeah.
There's water, same out in the solar system or in the galaxies. It's going to be more like that.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that makes sense, right? Something that can breathe gases that would kill humans and every other material. Pressures that would kill

Speaker 7 everything.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 7 Spherical bacteria or however they survive. I don't know.
I think that stuff is just so fascinating. You found a lot of,

Speaker 7 was it 40 plus new species or something like that?

Speaker 3 Just on that expedition. And it's almost like, I'm not even sure how many.
And how do you define a new species?

Speaker 3 If you count microbes, God knows how many we found. We could have found thousands.
And it wasn't just we were going to places no one had been before.

Speaker 3 these were isolated places the deep ocean trenches most of them are not connected to each other so if a creature goes down there or it evolved down there it's not growing with other species or interacting like they do on land they're developing genetically completely independently of each other it's essentially an island yeah correct and so therefore you get very different genetic pathways.

Speaker 3 And that's why it was so cool to go all these different,

Speaker 3 we never knew what we were going to find.

Speaker 7 Sea creatures are incredible. Susan, our mutual friend, Susan Casey, was telling me all about some of the stuff that she sees when she goes down there.

Speaker 7 Just like totally transparent types of fish, which like, how does that work?

Speaker 3 Well, they don't need pigments. There's no light.
When you go below 6,000 meters, photons can't penetrate. Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 It is the absolute blackest black that exists when you look out of the portal of a submarine below 6,000 meters. You're going to go, wow,

Speaker 3 yeah, how many subs can go below 6,000 meters? Four?

Speaker 3 So it was really strange for me because I did a lot. I did a lot of dives below 6,000 meters, which also is unusual.

Speaker 3 But I would stick my head, you know, right next to the glass or plexiglass, looking out and getting out all the other ambient light. And, you know, it was weird in your head.

Speaker 3 You could focus on nothing. And it was like instant vertigo in a way, but it's kind of cool too.
That is cool.

Speaker 7 So photons can't get down there because the pressure

Speaker 7 is too dense.

Speaker 3 It's like armor. Wow.

Speaker 7 I didn't think it was that.

Speaker 3 I just assumed there was like some light that you needed to use computers to see it or whatever it's like you know when you when you dive scuba the deeper you go the darker it gets when you take it to the extreme it's like an individual photon out of the trillions that hit the planet not a single one gets below 6 000 meters wow so you're going down as far as what airplanes are flying high in the sky or is it yeah about that about that i would say the deepest part of the ocean is 11 000 meters which is about 35 000 feet so yeah so if you're flying in a commercial aircraft looking down that's similar to what the depth of the ocean is are there But it is deeper than Mount Everest as high.

Speaker 3 You could fit Mount Everest easily in the Challenger Deep. Oh, yeah.
But there were tons of space to spare. Wow.

Speaker 7 How do you communicate? If photons can't go down there, can radios?

Speaker 3 Sound waves. Sound waves.

Speaker 7 Oh, well, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but what's funny is that actually it would take seven seconds for a single transmission to go from the ship to the bottom of the ocean and then seven seconds back. Right, okay.

Speaker 3 So it's actually faster to talk to someone on the moon with radio than it is to talk to someone at the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 7 I assume that did you have to create special gear that could communicate that need?

Speaker 3 No, we didn't create it. We adapted some very specialized equipment, pseudo-military, that was tailored for us by the wonderful people at L3 Harris.
And it worked to our amazement.

Speaker 3 It was faint, but we could talk to each other with simple words, but we could also text. And that was really helpful.
Yeah. Wow.
Gosh.

Speaker 7 All the problems it sounds like you had are kind of life and death, except for one. It sounds like the dialogue on the ship was, he almost died because of an air hose.

Speaker 7 We destroyed $300,000 worth of equipment. Something fell off into the ocean that we kind of needed, and we can't get it back.
We need a new one.

Speaker 7 Oh, and stop pushing the buttons on the coffee machine because it's expensive. No, well,

Speaker 3 I learned in the Navy that the most important piece of equipment on any ship is a damn good coffee machine. Yeah.
So we actually had two.

Speaker 3 And I told the captain, I said, I literally said, I said, spare no expense. Make it the best damn and reliable coffee as she has possible because I know they're they're just brutalized.

Speaker 3 And sure enough, those things after a couple of expeditions,

Speaker 3 like, how do you, how are you breaking them? Yeah. And yet they're just used constantly.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 They're not up to the test.

Speaker 3 It's like, I don't even drink coffee. You don't.
Yeah. You're a Diet Coke guy.
I read in the book.

Speaker 7 Me too. Some of the requests.
We need $750,000 for new thrusters, new mechanical arm, and a new Brevel Oracle touch because John keeps smashing it with his knuckles. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And God knows what I was doing. You know, they never really complained hard to me because I was writing the checks.
So they, what could they really do?

Speaker 3 But I knew a couple of times when I came up, you know, I bumped the sub against a rock or something and they'd have to replace a thruster or replace it.

Speaker 3 It's like, you guys, it's the cost of doing business, what we're doing. We're operating on the jagged edge out there.

Speaker 3 So let's all, let's all cut each other a little bit of slack while also still being mindful and not wasteful. Because this is all real dollars directly coming out of my pocket.

Speaker 3 And they were all cool about that.

Speaker 7 Where's the sub now?

Speaker 3 Where is it? After four years of intensive diving it and four years of development, so after eight years, operating a deep ocean submersible is ruinously expensive. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I am not a billionaire, but I was able to sell it to the wonderful Gabe Newell, who founded the Steam Gaming Network. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 That Gabe Newell, he is multi-billionaire and is really committed to ocean science. It's just something he's passionate about.

Speaker 3 And I said, hey, it would be great if you would purchase this and continue to fund it to do nothing but 100% science. And he did.

Speaker 3 So the submersible and the ship are operating in the Pacific as we speak, doing hardcore intensive marine research

Speaker 3 with the exact same team pretty much that I had.

Speaker 7 That's pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 That's what I wanted to have happen for it. It's like I was a foster dad, you know, and I wanted to go to a permanent family.
And it all worked out great.

Speaker 3 And so, but I'm more of a technology developer. That's kind of what I do in VC and I love piloting anything.

Speaker 3 I like being a test pilot. I'm not a marine scientist.

Speaker 3 I dabble in it, but I like being the test pilot. So yeah, what am I doing now?

Speaker 3 I'm designing a mapping ship and I'm doing a long-term planning for a design of a new submersible that's going to be even more advanced than the one I dove in that will correct many of the issues that I had on that one.

Speaker 3 And there weren't that many, but technology moves forward and there's some really cool stuff we could do with the next one.

Speaker 7 I found it interesting that y'all were worried about the Chinese stealing the sub-technology to cut deep water transmission cables and disrupt financial markets.

Speaker 7 I was like, oh, I didn't think about that. But not just them.

Speaker 3 The Russians definitely are looking at that. I mean, there's more than enough go on the internet.
Not all of them are fake or wrong. But no, there is a concern in a general conflict situation.

Speaker 3 Undersea cables that carry most of the world internet traffic are completely vulnerable. And repairing them is very, very difficult.

Speaker 3 That's something, quite frankly, I could have done as a private individual. In fact, I told the U.S.
Navy, I told other people, I said, okay, if I can do this, anybody can do it. The Navy can do it.

Speaker 3 I could, in my private submersible, go down and get any number of submarine cables that are carrying the vast majority of the world's traffic and mess with it.

Speaker 7 Do explosives work down there? Yeah.

Speaker 3 They do? They do. You don't need explosives.

Speaker 7 You just need to move it five inches off the thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I had a manipulator arm. Yeah.
I could have messed with it pretty.

Speaker 3 You just put a different attachment on the end? Yeah. Oh, jeez.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 7 What other sort of security concerns were there with the project? Having your ship hijacked in Russia during the testing phase is one of them. What else?

Speaker 3 Well, we actually had to move the ship and the sub through the Bab el-Mandib, which is just off the coast of Yemen.

Speaker 7 I see.

Speaker 3 So we actually, in the Red Sea, we had to board a special operations team with weapons, barbed wire, to make sure that we were not boarded because that would have been a really nice prize for someone to ransom.

Speaker 3 So we ended up going with a convoy, military escort, and nothing ever happened. But yeah, you have to prepare prepare for those things.
They told me, you don't want to be on the ship.

Speaker 3 And I went, okay.

Speaker 3 It was minimum manning.

Speaker 3 It would have been hard to take over that ship. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Well, yeah, it sounds like they were prepared to not give it up without a fight. And that was the same thing.

Speaker 3 And they actually asked me, what were the rules of engagement there? I said, you're in international waters. They try and board you.
You do whatever you have to do.

Speaker 3 But you do not let them get on the ship. And they went, okay.

Speaker 7 It seems like if you're the one on the ship, you decide the rules of engagement. Like, if they board, you have to surrender.

Speaker 3 No, at the end of the day, the captain was, but they were worried about, well, what if there's risk of damage to the submarine?

Speaker 3 They were polite to ask me, but at the end of the day, you're right.

Speaker 3 The officer in charge on the scene has absolute discretion. And I gave him that discretion.
Actually, it raises an interesting point.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I did on my expedition was I told my captain and my expedition leader independently that either one of them could overrule me at any time.

Speaker 3 particularly if it's a weather or a safety issue. I couldn't, you know, pull out the checkbook card and say, hey, I'm paying for it.
You know, you do what I say. You work for me.

Speaker 3 I said, that's never going to happen. You actually have the authority to tell me to back off and no, we're not doing it today.

Speaker 7 I mean, that's a good idea. It keeps you alive.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I wanted that.
That was important. And I, you know, of course I never pulled that card.
And yeah, absolutely. And we never disagreed either.
We always came to a good consensual decision.

Speaker 3 But there are instances, whether it's on mountain expeditions or any number of other things, where people play that card and they get killed.

Speaker 7 It hardly seems worth it to to be right and dead. Or I guess you would be wrong and dead.

Speaker 3 That's what happened to Titanic. Yeah.
Never, ever get into any vehicle where the pilot is more afraid of failure than dying. I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
You never want that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You don't want to be next to them. And that's what happened to Titanic.

Speaker 7 That was terrifying. I mean, that was the way society reacted to that was kind of gross, too.
It was a lot of like, who cares? They're just a bunch of rich guys.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, if they're down there, I thought maybe they were trapped in there with like slowly running out of air. Yeah.
It sounds awkward.

Speaker 3 Well, they probably would have done it with hypothermia first but i see

Speaker 3 i was almost glad to hear it was like instant yeah there was some ugly stuff that came out of that which is i'll never begrudge anyone doing anything that they want if it's their money and it's not hurting anybody and they weren't they took their own risk with the exception of the 18 year old young man and that was just a tragedy that that he died he didn't know the risk he was taking but yeah there's there's just this this really strong undercurrent of rich people get what they deserve kind of thing and it's just it strikes me as kind of ugly i mean i'm sure people say horrible things about me about what I do, but it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 3 There's always going to be negative stuff. You're never going to make everybody happy.
You're never going to be popular with everybody. I just do what I do.
I enjoy exploration.

Speaker 3 I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. Yeah, I like doing it myself, but I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear and I don't leave it to other people.

Speaker 3 If someone's going to take a risk with a multi-million dollar piece of equipment that I commissioned, yeah, I want to be at the control.

Speaker 3 Jared Isaacman, the guy that just walked in space, you know, he's a pilot, started companies, and you know, he paid tens of millions of dollars to do this mission with SpaceX.

Speaker 3 I don't begrudge him at all. I think he's a hero.
He's putting himself out there, and I respect that.

Speaker 7 What's the next challenge, man? You don't seem, you did the seven summers, you did the deepest parts of the ocean. You don't seem like a packet in and relax kind of guy.

Speaker 7 So what's what's next on the docket?

Speaker 3 There's a lot.

Speaker 3 I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity. I just am so curious about somebody doing things.

Speaker 3 So like I mentioned earlier, I'm working on the design of a ship that hopefully will be able to map the seafloor far more efficiently than anything that's ever existed before.

Speaker 3 That'll take a couple of years. What I do often takes three, four, five years to actually reach fruition.

Speaker 3 You only hear about it when it's actually doing something, but you don't see all the work that goes into it, right? The so-called overnight success story that takes 10, 20 years. There's that.

Speaker 3 I'm doing a long-term planning on the design and development of a next-generation submersible. That'll take five years.
I'm CEO of a biotechnology company.

Speaker 3 We're trying to cure some incurable diseases using synthetic biology. Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I won't go too much into detail on that because we're in stealth mode, but that's a fascinating area I didn't know much about. And I'm getting to learn about it, but also put it into practice.

Speaker 3 And I'm doing all the things I'm doing in venture capital. I get to support companies that I think are really on the bleeding edge and are pushing boundaries like Astroforge.

Speaker 3 or Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Ben Landon.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Ben's a great friend. We're both in Dallas.
And that's the most rewarding thing about, you know, having some net worth is where I am. You know, what else am I going to do with my money?

Speaker 3 You know, I don't have a big yacht. I have research vessels, right? Yeah.
And if I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a $10 million

Speaker 3 birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology.
That I think is the way to spend wealth. And cars.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and cars. You know, you love cars.
Do you think you will spend all of it before you leave this world?

Speaker 7 Is that kind of of the plan? Well, no, I hope I don't.

Speaker 3 I hope that I'm smart enough on my investing side that I try

Speaker 7 to spend it all. I tried and failed to spend it all.

Speaker 3 I try to spend all the money on all these different things, but hopefully I have good teams and the technology is interesting enough that, wow, they actually work and now they're worth more money.

Speaker 3 You know, you want to, you want to be on that treadmill where you're actually trying to spend your way to zero by the time you die, but you're spending it not on pure consumption, but on true, not politically camouflaged investment, but true investment.

Speaker 3 And those investments yield very profitable results, but they're profitable because they have moved the technology forward and they create real value.

Speaker 3 That's what I'm all about. That's if I have a religion, that's it.
It's what can we do to advance technology? Because I believe more than any other thing in history.

Speaker 3 It's technological advancement that has alleviated more human suffering than anything else. For sure, of course.
Be it politics, even religion. No.

Speaker 3 Technology has cured diseases, fed us, kept us warm, have done all these things for 8 billion people on the planet. And we've got to keep that technological machine moving forward, which we are.

Speaker 3 I'm an optimist. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It sounds like it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm not one of these, God, I can't stand how many dystopian movies and novels.

Speaker 3 Look at the ratio of how many dystopian TV series and movies you have versus purely optimistic ones.

Speaker 3 I don't even know if there is a ratio because they're like none that are really optimistic about, wow, is a world going to be great in 10 years? And it kind of is.

Speaker 3 We live in one of the most extraordinary, wonderful times in human history. People don't believe me, but look back in history.
It's one of the most peaceful, most amazing times in human history.

Speaker 3 We have in our pockets a device that gives us access to the sum of all human knowledge. We can talk to someone on the other side of the globe almost instantaneously.

Speaker 3 It's extraordinary. And so I believe that we do live in an optimistic age.

Speaker 3 And I don't understand why people have these incredibly dystopian urges or think that the world's going to, okay, yeah, there's climate change.

Speaker 3 But, you know, it seems like every decade or two, there is a new calamity that's going to destroy us. In the 70s, it was the population bomb right by Ehrlichman, right?

Speaker 3 We're going to overpopulate the world and we're all going to die. And then it was in the 80s, I remember, oh, we're all going to die by nuclear war.

Speaker 3 You know, Reagan is going to start a nuclear war with with the Russians. Oh, God, we're all going to die.
And then it was Y2K. Okay, all the lights are going to go off, right?

Speaker 3 And they're going to be burning cities. People said that and believed it.
All the survivalists went crazy. Okay, well, then that, and then it was global warming.

Speaker 3 It was like, oh, my gosh, didn't that type of thing? And yeah, there looked to be like strong indications that we are affecting the climate. But then they had to change it to climate change.

Speaker 3 Now, why was that? Because

Speaker 3 things weren't going quite exactly as they said. And it's just, it really is unusual where every 10 to 15 years, there is a new thing that is going to kill us all.

Speaker 3 And it's almost like there's this 10% of the population that actually want to believe.

Speaker 7 They kind of want it to happen.

Speaker 3 Right. And I'm part of that other 10% that's like saying, yes, there will probably be damage.
Bad things will happen. But, you know, gosh, humans are really resilient.
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 And we come up with ways to mitigate those dangers. My prediction, I think like in like 2030 or 2040, the asteroids are going to kill us.
Yeah, sure, sure. The ones we're all

Speaker 3 mining. Right.
One's coming. Yeah, no.
The ones we mine aren't going to hit us. Anyway, yeah.
It's going to be something or pandemic.

Speaker 7 Well, that's actually very possible. Right.

Speaker 3 That is very possible. We already had one, you know, potential.
You know, could have been way worse. That's kind of warning in the next one, might be.
Who knows? So it'll be something.

Speaker 7 Thank you so much for coming on the show, man. It'll be my pleasure.

Speaker 7 You got to open up a watch. I actually want to see this watch that's been to the bottom of the ocean

Speaker 7 many times and into space. Yeah,

Speaker 7 let's fade out with that.

Speaker 1 You're about to hear a preview of one of my favorite stories from an earlier episode of the show. My friend Steve Elkins found a lost city in the jungle that most people never even knew existed.

Speaker 1 I'm not even kidding. It sounds insane.
This has to be one of the most incredible stories I've ever recorded on the show. I know you're going to love this one.

Speaker 8 The legend of Ciedad Blanca, or White City in English, goes back probably 500 years to the best of my knowledge.

Speaker 8 People have believed that there is this civilization out there and the local indigenous people have their own legends.

Speaker 8 It has about five different names of which I can't pronounce about this culture, this civilization that lived out in the jungle at one time.

Speaker 8 One of the other monikers for the city in current times is Lost City the Monkey God.

Speaker 8 Maybe there's some truth to this legend.

Speaker 8 I kind of felt there was something to it.

Speaker 8 The Mesquitia Jungle where it's located in the eastern third of Honduras is one of the toughest jungles in the world and by accidents of geography and history, it's remained pretty much unexplored until recently.

Speaker 8 I have a map made by the British in the 1850s, and on that map, it says Portal del Inferno, over that part of the jungle. And it was called the Gates of Hell because the terrain was so tough.

Speaker 8 A lot of people have gone looking for it. Some went in, and some never came back.
A director friend of mine introduced me to a guy named Captain Steve Morgan.

Speaker 8 And he was a lifelong adventurer, explorer, treasure hunter, racon tour.

Speaker 9 Nice guy, really pretty smart. And I

Speaker 9 let's go.

Speaker 8 And in 1994, we headed out to Honduras for an unknown adventure looking for the lost city.

Speaker 1 For more with Steve Elkins, including the details on how they discovered the city and made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century, check out episode 299 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 1 All things Victor Vescovo. Actually, both pronunciations are right.
I know some of you are paying attention, and honestly, both are correct. We'll be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

Speaker 1 Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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Speaker 1 If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a great companion to the show.
JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Speaker 1 Don't forget about six minute networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Speaker 1 The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

Speaker 1 So if you know somebody who's interested in ocean exploration, I don't know, building submarines, exploring the mountain, pushing the limits of human potential, definitely share this episode with them.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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