984: Susan Casey | Unraveling Mysteries in the Ocean’s Darkest Depths

984: Susan Casey | Unraveling Mysteries in the Ocean's Darkest Depths

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show.

[00:00:03] Susan Casey: Yeah, we've used the ocean as a giant dumpster, and the thing is we're not getting away with anything when we do that. We are the ones who are gonna have to marinate in it if we eat stuff that lives there and wanna swim in it and do anything in it.

[00:00:16] Everything has a price and we're gonna be paying it for a really long time, even if we clean up our act very dramatically.

[00:00:26] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of incredible people, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian chess grand extreme athlete, four star, general rocket scientist or special operator.

[00:00:55] And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, AI crime cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

[00:01:12] Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now today my guest, Susan Casey, is an ocean explorer and journalist, and all around just an incredible adventurer. Today we're exploring the ocean. We'll dive into, if you'll excuse the pun, how a famous plane crash has opened our eyes to the wonders of the deep in ways we have never seen before.

[00:01:34] We'll discover some amazing sea creatures that seem like they're just from another planet straight up, and we will discuss sea monsters, explosives, submarines, plastics, underwater mining, which is unfortunately a thing. Really fascinating conversation about all things ocean. That really just took me by surprise.

[00:01:51] If you're into science animals. Ships shipwrecks. And again, who doesn't love a good shipwreck? Am I right? You're gonna love this episode. Here we go with Susan Casey.

[00:02:03] I really liked the book. I thought it was so interesting. Thanks. And now I'm like, oh, I should have read the other ones too, but I guess I can do that later. I was like, oh, it's about diving in history. Like, oh, it's not really like, I don't usually, you know, go for this. And then I was just like, but this is interesting.

[00:02:17] Let me just keep doing. Then it was over and I was like, oh, that's, I'm done with it. That's really interesting. There's so much cool stuff in there and that's gonna be the basis of our conversation today, I suppose.

[00:02:27] Susan Casey: Yeah, I mean that for me is the game is to take people on an adventure and then, you know, you slide in science, you slide in other things and you know, if you just say you're gonna write a book about this very dense subject matter, people probably don't wanna read it at this point, so let's go on a ride, you know, let's go somewhere really cool that you've never seen before.

[00:02:45] And yeah.

[00:02:47] Jordan Harbinger: I'm one of those guys who's, and this is cliche, right, but I take the ocean for granted. I only see the surface and I'm sort of mildly terrified about what's underneath that part. And that's it. And I'm just like, oh, I know we gotta take care of it. There's so much stuff in there and the animals are amazing, but it's very hard for me to like physically appreciate it.

[00:03:04] Like if I go snorkeling, I feel like I can't breathe. If I'm diving with those whale sharks, I'm just like, oh gosh, I'm gonna be the one guy that gets eaten by these vegetarian animals or whatever in the history of, of the world. And you write that the search for MH 17, that airplane or that airplane crash, showed us the bottom of the Indian ocean in ways that just no one had ever really seen before.

[00:03:26] So tell us about that. 'cause that's kind of an interesting point, that we spent all this money looking for this airplane and rightfully so. There were people on it, but then it just maps the ocean floor and it's like, well actually the silver lining in this cloud of not finding anything with the plane is look at what we have here.

[00:03:40] And that was surprising.

[00:03:42] Susan Casey: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was what really got my attention in the beginning because. If you think of where they think the plane probably went down, it's in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean where there's not a lot of ship traffic. You get down there into those latitudes and it's gnarly.

[00:03:58] You know, there's not a lot of traffic. So there's not a lot of high resolution mapping of the sea floor. And just to give you a sense, we've only mapped about 25% of the earth at high resolution. So we can see sea mounts, we can see things that, that are actually on the sea floor. Whereas in Google Earth, it's very, very low resolution comes from satellites.

[00:04:18] So to go over an area that we don't know on the sea floor, particularly an area that really even scientists hardly ever go to, it was like putting the lens on the Hubble telescope. Mm-Hmm. So, you know, we kind of knew there was this huge fracture zone over there. You could see it on Google Earth, sort of in the right location, but no detail.

[00:04:36] Then they zoom in on it and they find out that there are thousands of volcanoes and there's this, it's even deeper than they thought. Mm-Hmm. There are really interesting sort of moats around the volcanoes, which indicate that there are currents that they didn't understand. I started reading about papers from marine geologists about this, and it was like, what do you mean?

[00:04:56] Mm-Hmm. It's a network of national parks for giants. It's like Tolkien's Middle Earth. Yeah. And it's always been there and we didn't know it. Old continents.

[00:05:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh really? Yeah. Old continent. I mean, I guess that had to exist, right? Sure.

[00:05:07] Susan Casey: Well, yeah. Remnants of when Australia, India, South Africa and Antarctica were sort of one big continent called Gun and Guana broke apart and there are still bits of Guana on the sea floor.

[00:05:19] So to me it was like, I don't know. We live on this earth and the ocean is 98% of it, and the deep ocean is 95% of that 98%, and there's a lot down there. That's I. It's just awesome.

[00:05:32] Jordan Harbinger: Are there fossils deep underwater or is that not possible because of ocean chemistry? Because imagine the fossils that are in there if it's an ancient continent.

[00:05:40] Susan Casey: Oh yeah. No, and they also, they find things down there like, you know, megalodons probably been gone. Great. White shark blown up to parade float size, probably been gone for 20 million years at least. Oh my God. And they find megalodon teeth and they've been down there for so long that they're like encrusted with metals.

[00:05:58] 'cause metals will accrete outta the sea water and the sea floor is constantly being. Renovated in a way because where the tectonic plates pull apart, there's a 40,000 mile long seam that is all volcanic. So 75% of earth's volcanism comes from that. It's called the mid ocean ridge and it encircles the planet, kind of like the seams on a baseball.

[00:06:19] Mm-Hmm. On the other side we have subduction where the tectonic plates are colliding and basically imagine a tectonic plate being fed into a right paper shredder. That's where all the mega thrust earthquakes that cause tsunamis happen. But so we are recycling sea floor. So even though the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the oldest part of the sea floor that hasn't gone through the paper shredder yet is 340 million years old.

[00:06:44] Ah. So it's constantly recycling. And so you could have things that are. 340 years old. But other than that, when it subdues goes back into the mantle and eventually melts and just becomes part of the system again.

[00:06:55] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 340 million years old, so well look, that's old enough for me to be still super interested in it.

[00:07:00] It is a bummer that we don't have the beginning of the earth rocks down there that we could, you know, get into. But I suppose them, the breaks, you mentioned that metals, I can't remember the word you used, but they go into the fossil. So there's metal crusted. Metal megalodon sounds like a great name for a band, but also sounds like something from transformers that could come outta the ocean and kill.

[00:07:21] That's like a basis for a Godzilla sequel. How does that work? Does it literally mean that there's metal on the outside of the fossil because that's so badass for some reason

[00:07:29] Susan Casey: there's metals all through the ocean and they accrete over millions and millions of years. Yeah. Or precipitate. They basically like sort of encrust slowly.

[00:07:38] Like if you think of how a pearl is made Mm-Hmm. There's a little nucleus in it that eventually, after a long time becomes the pearl. Similar in the ocean, there's metals. Gold, silver, like they're in the seawater.

[00:07:50] Jordan Harbinger: I've heard there's so much gold in the sea. And then there's something like in the core of the earth, there's something like 20 trillion tons where if you could get it all gold would be worth less than paper basically, because there's just so much down there and obviously you can't get all the metals outta the core of the earth, but it just sort of illustrates the amount of stuff that's underneath us that we will don't have the technology to get to, don't have the will to get to.

[00:08:13] Which reminds me, you, you said something like space research gets $150 for every single dollar spent on ocean research, so why do we think that is? Because space is fascinating, but to put 150 times the funding into it when we are next to the ocean, well, depending on where you live. Right. It's a little, I don't totally understand the logic here.

[00:08:34] Susan Casey: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, it's when you said that you think of the ocean as it's what you look at. Mm-Hmm. You see the surface. We're visual creatures. That is sort of our thing. We can look upwards, we can see the stars. We can imagine going up there and the idea of it is really excited. Like we're hardwired to go upwards.

[00:08:51] Yeah. We like the light. We don't wanna be in the dark. And I think there's something about the ocean that makes people really nervous. Well, yeah. And you know, I know especially, yeah, the idea of going deep into the darkness, into an unknown realm, there's all this pressure. Like there is a sort of a. Almost a biological bias terrestrial, biological bias.

[00:09:11] And of course with space we could be like, Hey, we might be able to mine an asteroid. We could go to Mars and have a town. Mm-Hmm. We might be able to expand ourselves. We might be able to go outwards and upwards and that sounds good. Whereas going inward into darkness, into blindness, you know, that is less appealing in general.

[00:09:31] But you know, it's really important because this is the planet we live on and the deep ocean, the entire ocean, deep ocean especially, is so alive and so unknown.

[00:09:43] Jordan Harbinger: You say alive, and this is one of the sentences that got me, I wrote it down, I'm paraphrasing it, but you said in the ocean there are creatures that breathe iron, have glass skeletons and that can turn themselves inside out.

[00:09:53] And I have more examples of this kind of crazy stuff later in, in my notes here, but when I heard that, I was like, back up the truck. Back up the iron breathing glass chassis truck. How is it possible that you can have a glass, glass isn't naturally occurring? What can breathe iron? It's metal. I don't understand.

[00:10:10] You're gonna have to, you can't leave us hanging with stuff like that.

[00:10:12] Susan Casey: Yeah, no. Okay. So the iron breathers are microbes and, okay. The ocean is just an incredible mass of microbes. Mm-hmm. It's 89% of its biomass is microbial. And microbes, as you know, just run the joint. Mm-Hmm. They do everything. They make the planet habitable for us.

[00:10:29] And so they have all kinds of different metabolisms. And there are microbes in hydrothermal vents that will actually metabolize, in other words, eat, breathe, iron. Wow. And they just dissolve it kind of, they just digest iron, they digest it. Wow. And these microbes can digest a lot of things that people didn't expect them to be able to do.

[00:10:48] The really unusual microbes are known as extremophiles, and they can live even a mile beneath the sea floor. They can live in hydrothermal vents from volcanic. Seam on the sea floor where the fluid that's coming out, the vent fluid is sort of a mix of minerals and gases and microbes from the mantle is like 600 degrees.

[00:11:08] They thrive everywhere and even like a mile beneath the sea floor, there's this entire deep biosphere that scientists are just beginning to study. We don't know how deep life goes beneath the sea floor, but

[00:11:21] Jordan Harbinger: wow.

[00:11:21] Susan Casey: It doesn't stop at the sea floor. Certainly.

[00:11:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I didn't realize things lived under the sea floor.

[00:11:26] I've definitely seen on Discovery channel those micro or heard about those microbes that live on the vents in that it's like 600 degree now that I think about. How do you get something like that and bring it up to study it? If it lives in 600 degree, I'm piping hot, doesn't even quite cover it.

[00:11:40] Temperatures. Do you need a container that keeps it that warm?

[00:11:43] Susan Casey: Oh yeah. The answer to that is very carefully because you can, it's really hard to not only to keep it at that sort of in its environment, but also to isolate it from other things around that could contaminate it. By the time you get, you know, four miles up to the surface,

[00:11:57] Jordan Harbinger: four miles, I can't even imagine.

[00:11:59] Yeah. And then somebody's got the unenviable or the, I guess depending on how you look at it, unenviable job of trying to open that thing carefully, right. Once it's up top. Oh, yeah,

[00:12:08] Susan Casey: yeah. And

[00:12:08] Jordan Harbinger: then study it and

[00:12:09] Susan Casey: there's pressure, you know, things Yeah. Sort of blow out the tops sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh.

[00:12:15] Susan Casey: Deep sea scientists are very intrepid folks.

[00:12:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You'd have to be, because yeah, your stories of going into the sub and it's like, okay, here's what happens if the electricity goes out. And I'm like, no, no, no. This is already scary enough. Now you're gonna do it with no light. And like maybe the oxygen, okay, we have four hours of oxygen, but don't worry, we're gonna gradually float up to the surface and someone will come get us.

[00:12:37] It's like, uh, I'll, I'll leave that stuff to you Susan. You said there might be as many as a billion species in the ocean, which is. Almost hard to believe, but I guess if we're including what microbes and things like that, then it's, yeah. Okay.

[00:12:49] Susan Casey: They call them taxa rather than species, but Okay. Yeah, we have no clue.

[00:12:53] The microbial world is just so immense. Mm-Hmm. And I think we're gonna see some really interesting discoveries in our lifetime. This is new. And also the other thing that gets me really excited is the idea of that we really are kind of the first people in history to ever be able to know what's at the bottom of the ocean, what its dimensions are, what its geology is, what lives there, what's it like.

[00:13:17] We are so privileged to be living in an age when we can have those answers.

[00:13:22] Jordan Harbinger: I guess if you sailed, I don't know when they invented boats. 600 years ago or more in your, oh, long, longer. I don't even know. A thousand years. I, I didn't wanna say a thousand 'cause I might sound dumb, but it's, maybe it's more than that.

[00:13:34] Keep going,

[00:13:34] Susan Casey: keep going. Really? Yeah. I mean as I think as long as there have been humans looking at water, there have been humans trying to figure out, hmm, how do we get across that water? What

[00:13:42] Jordan Harbinger: can we go out in it? Now that I do the math 600 makes no sense, but a thousand somehow seems way too long, but I guess not.

[00:13:49] Okay. Little note here, I'm a knucklehead. Uh, many of you already know this as evidenced by my email inbox, but by way of further proof ships were not invented a few hundred years ago. Duh. They were invented at least by 1300 BC and the Phoenician were building large merchant ships by 1200 bcs. So I was only off by like 2000 or so years.

[00:14:10] No big deal. Anyway, ships are old, way older than I thought, and I'm glad I checked this so I could embarrass myself live on the show and not edit it out because you all deserve to have a laugh at me for that ridiculous gaff. Okay, back to the show. If you're sailing on that, you would have to be absolutely fearless.

[00:14:27] 'cause you have no idea what's underneath. Absolutely. All you know is it's really far and you might never come home. I don't know, I just, I can't even imagine the mindset of somebody who sets out to do that. It's kind of like what you're doing going underneath, but at least you kind of know that you can come back up to the top and there's a boat there.

[00:14:41] Those people, they had no idea how to get back home or the food was gonna run out. Nothing.

[00:14:45] Susan Casey: You know, it wasn't as though it was a luxury post to be a mariner in say the 18th or 19th century. It was like people that had a choice between here you can go to jail or you can go onto the ship. Mm-Hmm. Where you're gonna get scurvy and you probably you're gonna die.

[00:14:59] I mean, it was definitely an adventurous time for

[00:15:03] Jordan Harbinger: going to sea. Geez. The other scary element of this is people come back and say, oh yeah, uh, there's sea monsters out there that eat whole boats and stuff like that. And of course ancient sailors believed in monsters. Now we know that either that was apocryphal never happened, or it was some kind of giant squid or other animal.

[00:15:21] They must have looked like alien monster dinosaurs to anybody who saw a glimpse of a, even a dead giant squid floating tentacle in the middle of the ocean.

[00:15:31] Susan Casey: Oh, I, I mean, imagine being a, a medieval farmer and you're there walking along the beach and there's a stranded sperm whale. I mean, what are you supposed to think?

[00:15:40] Or a baline whale with all the sort of hairy plates hanging from its mouth, or male narwhal has this huge long tusk on its forehead. Mm-Hmm. If you saw any of those animals and they do strand and they do die and wash up and you have no contacts, you've got no clue. You're looking at a monster as far as you're concerned, you know?

[00:15:58] Wow. Geez.

[00:15:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The whole village goes down to take a look at the smelly, swollen, rotting carcass of this giant monster. Is that what we kind of make of the old tails of sea monsters and giant animals? They say they take down ships. Is that even possible for a big animal to do that to a boat?

[00:16:14] Susan Casey: Well, a sperm whale can.

[00:16:16] Certainly a sperm whale in the days of wailing could pose a threat to a ship and did, and you know, you kind of can't blame the sperm whale. No. But yeah, so I mean, they're trying

[00:16:25] Jordan Harbinger: to stab it.

[00:16:26] Susan Casey: And I don't know if you've seen in the news that, I wouldn't call this an attack, but the orcas, and in the Iberian coast, they call them the Iberian pod, there's 15 orcas and they've managed to sink five boats.

[00:16:38] They looked into this 'cause I was, you know, my book before, uh, the underworld was called Voices in the Ocean. It's about dolphins and orcas are of course the biggest and wildest dolphins. Mm-Hmm. And I wanted to know what was going on. And it seems that they, the scientists are really scratching their heads, but they do think that.

[00:16:57] One thing that dolphins tend to do is, it's almost like us having a fab, like we're gonna wear our hair a certain way. Mm-Hmm. Dolphins were, for a while seen, it was all the fashion in dolphin world to have a sponge over your beak. So it could be a kind of a, a hobby or a fad. There isn't really a way to say that.

[00:17:17] Oh, okay. It's because they're mad at us because we've done all this damage to their environment. Could be. We don't know that yet. There was one of the orcas in that pod had a propeller

[00:17:29] Jordan Harbinger: cuts. I see. Yeah. So, yeah. So they might think, oh, these things are baby killing machines. We gotta sink these things and they won't come back.

[00:17:36] Susan Casey: Yeah. And workers are really advanced in terms of their social abilities or ability to sort of, you've probably seen the video of when they all get together and they. See a seal on an iceberg and they line up and they make a wave that makes the seal tip off the iceberg. Like there, oh gosh. Orcas are formidable, formidably intelligent and social and everything else.

[00:17:56] Jordan Harbinger: I wasn't gonna go down this road. So, uh, this might be a little fuzzy, but have you seen, what is that movie? Is it called Blackfish where they explain the orcas killing the people at SeaWorld or whatever it was?

[00:18:06] Susan Casey: Oh, yeah. And I've written about those incidents as well.

[00:18:08] Jordan Harbinger: What was going on there because it sort of looks like they tortured this orca by keeping it in a small cage away from its offspring and it just developed mental illness or something like that.

[00:18:17] Is that possible?

[00:18:18] Susan Casey: Clearly, absolutely. Any dolphin that is put into a tank is being tortured because when you see them in the wild, their entire lives are each other. Mm-Hmm. And they will travel for miles and miles and miles through the open sea hunting and playing and communicating. It's like the equivalent of us being put in a padded cell.

[00:18:37] Mm-Hmm. But even if it was a four Seasons hotel room. With room service being delivered every day, we would still go nuts eventually. Mm-Hmm. And that's basically dolphin captivity. Just such a social, intelligent animal. Orcas have never attacked humans. I think orcas are too smart for that in the wild, but in captivity, there's been a number of fatalities and way, way, way more injuries than the marine parks will ever admit to.

[00:19:04] Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I get it though. I think everybody watched that and was like, well, yeah, you're standing on his face. Yeah. Withholding food. It had a baby. You took the baby away like, yeah, I'd kill you too. First chance I got.

[00:19:16] Susan Casey: The more you learn about them, the more you realize that this is truly awful.

[00:19:20] Yeah. What we have done, because when you remove an orca from a pod, particularly a female orca, it's matrilineal. So they can have four generations of grandmothers, mothers daughters, and the sons stay with their mothers their entire lives. They don't leave and because, you know, it's the ocean, nobody's writing down anything.

[00:19:37] The oldest female orcas are sort of the keeper of the knowledge like they know. Mm-Hmm. That if the ocean chain conditions change, okay, this is where we're gonna go to get the fish. It's like, um, sort of a living library Yeah. Of how this particular group is gonna survive. And when we just take them out, we're not, we're taking out like their chances of survival as well as an individual who the removal of an organ causes real grief.

[00:20:01] Mm-Hmm. And one of the things that I think it was very, very evident that they do feel grief. Do you remember? It was a couple years ago, an orca in Puget Sound had a calf, and the calf died. The reasons for that are because Puget Sound is basically a completely polluted and they're slowly starving, the calf died.

[00:20:21] The mother then draped the calf over her kind of a rostrum, you know, the top of her head.

[00:20:27] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:20:27] Susan Casey: And swam around with it for 17 days. Do you remember that?

[00:20:31] Jordan Harbinger: No, but that's so heartbreaking.

[00:20:33] Susan Casey: Yeah. It's so clear that they feel emotions, they feel grief. And when neuroscientists look at their particular brains, which are incredibly.

[00:20:43] Elaborated. They have two hemispheres like ours. Mm-Hmm. But they're, you know, like 30 million years older than ours. And so they can do all kinds of things and have different wiring that accommodates being primarily an acoustic animal because Yeah, that's how they communicate in the ocean. There's one area that their Paralympic system that's, so we have it too, but theirs is so much bigger and it's very baroque.

[00:21:08] And when scientists look at it, what it indicates to them is that there's very sophisticated processing going for emotions. Mm-Hmm. There's a lot of sociality and emotions even evident in the structure of their brain. Of course they're feeling emotions. Yeah. They may be feeling them differently than we, uh, more strongly than we do.

[00:21:25] Yeah. It is also kind of, the brain indicates that. They may have a slightly different sense of self that's more communal. So they have a lot of these particular neurons called von Omo neurons that relate to socializing and empathy. And we have them too. But orcas have three times more than we do and have had them a lot longer.

[00:21:47] And it really just, everything we know about their brains means like we should be very cognizant of the fact that we're sharing the oceans with this very advanced, you know, the word intelligence is loaded, but I'm still gonna say it. Intelligence,

[00:22:00] Jordan Harbinger: it makes me feel kind of sick to know that there's this really sensitive group of animals in the ocean that we're literally just throwing our shit into and like garbage.

[00:22:09] That's like, that's really sad to me, having like an emo moment here knowing that just like those things are in there, suffering like that. Yeah. 'cause that's, uh, so gross that what we do to. I'm not, I wasn't gonna bring this up either, but those Pharaoh islands where they slaughter all those animals just for fun.

[00:22:26] Oh yeah. It's so gross. Yeah. Can you tell us about that a little bit? I think most people had never heard of this, and it's like one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen.

[00:22:32] Susan Casey: Oh, it really is. It's called the grind, which is horrible enough and it's really kind of blood sport. And they whales, they're, they're dolphins now.

[00:22:41] Dolphins and whales. It has to do with size. So these are called pilot whales. They are. They're just a larger dolphin. They have Mm-Hmm. They're toothed whales and they drive them, you use sound actually to drive them up on the beach and then they just hack away at them. And the idea they do this also in Taiji Japan, if you've ever seen the movie The Cove or heard of that.

[00:22:59] Mm. Another big mass roundup of dolphins. It, I've been there, unfortunately. So in the Pharaoh Islands, they kill all these, uh, pilot whales. But here's the thing about pilot whales. If you start eating pilot whale meat at this point, because so many toxins are in the ocean, and keep in mind a lot of these toxins bind to fat.

[00:23:17] So these are animals with a lot of fat. You are basically eating a Superfund site. Ugh. The idea that we're, they're gonna eat these, particularly if they're feeding them to children, because some of the toxins in there are neurotoxins. It is not a good idea. There's lead. You can't be eating pilot whale at this point.

[00:23:33] And that seems like a really lame way to save animals is because we've, we've made them so polluted, we can't eat them. But that's the case with pilot whales. Wow. So I don't know why the Pharaoh Islands keeps doing this. I don't know why any nation is engaging in wailing. We know so much more now. Whales are such an integral part of keeping all the other, the rest of the ecosystem in balance.

[00:23:55] They're cornerstone species in the ocean. We can't take them out. Yeah. We should be trying to, you know, make sure there are as many of them as possible if we wanna keep fishing, if we wanna healthy the ocean. So yeah, the Ferro Islands. Stop it.

[00:24:09] Jordan Harbinger: At first when I heard about it, I was like, look, this is like a native culture thing.

[00:24:13] You gotta respect what they're doing. They, maybe they have a reason for it, and then when you see it, you're just like, wow, this is just like watching a group of people get scalped or something. Like it's on the level of disgust where you're just like, wow, is that necessary? This seems totally unnecessary, and it's brutal.

[00:24:27] It's not like they're like, okay, here's the humane way that you kill this and then you, you butcher it and eat it. Respect. No, no, no. It's like you're just stabbing babies with knives and laughing maniacally. It's totally insane.

[00:24:37] Susan Casey: Yeah, it's, it was described to me as someone who's been there as complete blood sport.

[00:24:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, I could never do anything like that. And you're right, it is sort of weird to be like. Save the whales, not just because they're a cornerstone species of an important ecosystem, but because we have ruined it so much that if you eat it, your kid's gonna end up in a care home because of the toxins going to his brain.

[00:24:59] That's right. Like, that's just a weird, weird argument. But

[00:25:01] Susan Casey: here we

[00:25:02] Jordan Harbinger: are,

[00:25:02] Susan Casey: eat pilot whale and watch your liver shut down. Mm-Hmm. Seriously. But you know when a whale dies in the open ocean, eventually, you know, first of all, the first thing that happens is the sharks will show up. They'll sort of come around and start grabbing bites out of it.

[00:25:15] The second thing that happens is that the whale will sink and it will end up on the sea floor. They call it a whale fall. And it's like having, all of a sudden, here comes the buffet, right? Mm-Hmm. Every little bit of this animal is gonna be consumed over the course of years. It's like a little miniature ecosystem on the sea floor.

[00:25:32] There are even worms that burrow into the bones and like every little bit of it supports the ecosystem all around it. And it's also a lot of carbon. Capture in a whale when a whale goes down. So there are real ecological reasons. Mm-hmm. To want to make sure that there are as many whales as possible in the ocean if we care about sequestering carbon.

[00:25:55] Sure. If we care about other species being healthy, these whale falls are fascinating. You can Google them and you can watch the whale just sort of dwindling. I saw one

[00:26:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. On Reddit. I actually, it was a orca I think, and it just sort of stops moving and then like just falls into the abyss basically. And it's, yeah, it's mesmerizing because yeah, it just says a whale sinking.

[00:26:16] But really it's, I mean you just, you're witnessing this sort of like special moment in nature I guess that, and it died of natural causes too, which I think makes it a little bit less horrific. Right. It actually lived its full life. The whale fall, the fact that the ecosystem uses the whole thing up, it really is something incredible.

[00:26:31] And you carbon sequestration, and we've done episodes about this as well, it's tricky and it's something we can't do. Humans. So the fact that there's these giant beasts underneath that are, are essentially harmless to humans doing it is, is pretty amazing. And I, I will say, every time I go and eat sushi, I'm always like, 10 years, this might be like three times the price or just not available at all.

[00:26:51] I always think about that, like, enjoy it now I. While it's not a thousand dollars for uni or whatever,

[00:26:57] Susan Casey: I hate to tell you, but I stopped eating sushi about 10 years ago. And of course I loved it. I figured he doesn't, it's just, I was like, I wonder if she's gonna be mad at me for

[00:27:05] Jordan Harbinger: eating sushi. I'm not.

[00:27:06] Susan Casey: No.

[00:27:07] Look, I'm not mad. I think people have to make their own decisions about this, but yeah, it's because of the pollutants. There are, tell me about this plastics. Hold on. So basically all the, a lot of the fish that you eat is sushi, are fatty fish, right? Yeah. And as I said, we outlawed some very bad chemicals in the ocean in the seventies.

[00:27:25] And you know, things like DDT dioxins. Mm-hmm. We outlawed them in general, but they didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke. They're ambient and they call them persistent organic pollutants. We don't know how long they're gonna be out there, but they bind to fat. So especially a fish like a tuna at the higher end of the trophic, you know, scale is eaten a lot of things on the way up at this point there are nanoplastics so fine that they're embedded in cells of deep sea animals really.

[00:27:52] And you know, so unfortunately that's, gosh, you're not just eating fish even if it tastes good,

[00:27:58] Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah. Oh my God. I figured there was a little bit of mercury in there. 'cause I've read about that and that. Yeah, heavy

[00:28:03] Susan Casey: metals, cadmium, there's nuclear waste in the ocean. There's radioactive carbon particles from nuclear testing.

[00:28:11] There's lots of things that you probably don't want to ingest

[00:28:14] Jordan Harbinger: whenever you see those. Was it Bikini Island where they just K nuked the whole thing and they show this giant plume go up and you're like, who's filming this from that boat? 'cause it looks like they're pretty close to this.

[00:28:23] Susan Casey: Absolutely. I mean, when they did those tests, nobody really understood the, the effects of them.

[00:28:28] I've seen footage of people. Like stirring vats of nuclear waste with a bare arm. And they didn't know, man. But you do know that when you set off a nuclear bomb in the ocean, you're gonna cause a lot of havoc. Mm-hmm. And kill like vast amounts of life. But the really kind of, I guess, uplifting part about Bikini Toll is that it was so radioactive.

[00:28:49] We left it alone for a really long time, and now the ocean is so resilient. Quite good with scrubbing radioactivity. It's coming back, it's flourishing. It's one of those places where we haven't been, and you see this sort of more thriving ecosystem there than in the places around it so we can repair our damage.

[00:29:07] Jordan Harbinger: That's really good news. I do wonder where it is, because if it's anywhere in sort of, I just wonder if China's fishing there illegally or other countries are fishing there illegally Because you hear about that all the time. Yeah. Or is it too far?

[00:29:19] Susan Casey: Well, I don't know. I think at this point people think it's maybe still too radioactive, but it's, well, I don't

[00:29:24] Jordan Harbinger: think they care if they're illegally fishing, naming from like they're not gonna eat it.

[00:29:27] Right? What do they care? This is in the Marshall Islands. I'm trying to find a map, but it's like so remote. I don't know.

[00:29:33] Susan Casey: It is remote. And you're right, there's illegal fishing. My cousin is a pilot for Air Canada and he was flying over the Pacific recently and they came across what looked like the lights of a major city.

[00:29:44] And of course there was no major city below them. And he said it was just this industrial fishing fleet that was so enormous and the lights were so bright they could see them. Just brilliantly at 35,000 feet, like these are massive, massive operations that you know, that are taking fish on an, you know, industrial Mm-Hmm.

[00:30:02] Scale. Uh, it doesn't seem sustainable at all. Of course it isn't. No, that's Even before you get to the illegal fishing.

[00:30:12] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Susan Casey. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by AG one. I've been drinking a G one as my morning ritual, one of for over a decade now.

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[00:32:31] Jordan Harbinger: By the way, I know I tell you about six Minute Networking a lot. I wanna keep this one short. It is not cringey, it is not gross. It is for retired people. It is for people looking for jobs. It is for people in jobs who wanna network better and not look like a person who's networking.

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[00:33:04] I promise. That is not a thing that I do. Anyway. Now back to Susan Casey. So for people who are wondering, so, and you're not, you're driving, you don't want to use Google Maps, it's Bikini at Toll is in the Marshall Islands, which is between. Hawaii and well Asia. So if the Chinese illegal fishing fleets are getting all the way to, was it Chile?

[00:33:25] I think they found boats off the coast there, then it's very possible that they're already there. So you might be eating some bikini toll sushi. Radioactive sushi. And that reminds me, you mentioned unexploded ordinance underwater. So bombs and chemical weapons. Oh yeah. What do those things do in there?

[00:33:41] How do they get there? Is this World War ii, they fell out of a plane that got shot down, or what's going on here? Oh

[00:33:46] Susan Casey: no. I wish it was just that. So until pretty recently, like in the eighties, the military called, not just in the US but everywhere, called it sea disposal. The idea was, oh no. And even earlier than World War ii for sure, like World War I, there were troughs and trenches.

[00:34:01] There's one in the UK that they're all over the place. There are a huge amount of munitions on the sea floor around Oahu. You know, it makes sense kind of. Pearl Harbor is there. Yeah. But one of the characters in the underworld is because I lived on on Maui at the time and would go over to Oahu and hang out with them, and they had the, these two submersibles, they did a lot of charting of this because they found that right around Pearl Harbor, kind of near Waikiki, there were unexploded, chemical warheads, just a tremendous amount of stuff.

[00:34:33] I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of chemical weapons as well as these things called hedgehogs. And there are these bombs that have these, they look like hedgehogs, right? They've got these sort of spikes sticking out of them. If it they're, any of those spikes have pressure on it in a certain way, it will just explode.

[00:34:52] So it's a pressure bomb. Oh my

[00:34:53] Jordan Harbinger: gosh.

[00:34:54] Susan Casey: That pressure wave would set off every other hedgehog in the vicinity. And there are a lot of them. They did a study, the army had people down there, they had a mass spectrometer. They were trying to figure it out. They determined that it would be more dangerous to try to bring them up.

[00:35:09] Oh yeah. Than it would be to sort of leave them in place. Some of them are inert after years of just being underwater. But mustard gas does not go so quickly. In a lot of places in the world where there are mustard bombs on the sea floor, fishermen who pull up their nets by hand end up with this sort of gel on their hands.

[00:35:27] That's basically mustard gas, and every so often, in, particularly in Europe, in Northern Europe, the fishermen pull out bombs that are, will actually explode. Oh my gosh. There's a, an arsal on the sea floor all over the place.

[00:35:42] Jordan Harbinger: So when you find that, I, I've seen it on CM Maps where it'll say there'll be an icon or it'll say UXO and it.

[00:35:47] So you're not supposed to navigate over it because they just don't know. What will set it off, or if it's already been set off, or if it's a nerd, they just, they just don't know. But you're diving or you and your, your colleagues are diving around this stuff. Do you ever find anything like that? Or is it always, do they have a pretty good idea of where all this stuff is?

[00:36:05] Susan Casey: Well, around Oahu, they do. They, they mapped it all out. And I haven't actually personally been down on the sub and seen one of them, but I've seen lots of pictures. It's not like something you would actively worry about if you're just diving in the open ocean like you have to. It's really hard for us to wrap our heads around how vast the deep ocean is.

[00:36:23] Everybody talks about how 70% of the planet is covered with ocean. Right. But what I like to think of it as, imagine a biosphere, a living space, and 98% of that is ocean and 2% of it is land that's earth. And then 95% is deep ocean. So we really don't have any scope. Mm-Hmm. Everything. We know we're living on 2% of the biosphere of Earth.

[00:36:46] No matter where you go in the deep ocean, unless you're going to. A couple places that people often go, like the wreck of the Titanic or Challenger deep now the deepest spot in the ocean. You're the first person who's ever been there. You're probably the only person that's ever gonna go there. It's just enormous.

[00:37:04] You'd have to be very unlucky to get down there and end up landing on a hedgehog or something like that. Yeah. But if you're driving around Oahu in a submersible, you do watch out.

[00:37:13] Jordan Harbinger: Do these things ever just blow up on their own? Like is it ever just like, oh, that big explosion you heard? That was just some UXO blowing up that's been there for 80 years.

[00:37:21] Susan Casey: It has happened. I don't know if it's happened in Hawaii, but it has happened.

[00:37:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It ha You'd think it would have to.

[00:37:26] Susan Casey: There were also, um, a friend of mine was involved with the French efforts to Demine there. You know, sometimes during wars they'll put landmines on, say the bottom of the Suez Canal is one the bottom of the Red Sea.

[00:37:37] Things like that. They actively try to demine those 'cause there's so much traffic through them and, you know, we don't want these things lying around. But my friend told me that longer story, but he was one of the passengers aboard the Titans submersible. His name was pH Nala. He also had to demine.

[00:37:56] Things that they were really concerned about were the bombs that Hitler's troops had left because they were booby trapped. They would have to go down there and be incredibly careful how they would remove these bombs, check them out. I mean, they obviously, they weren't in the water when they did it, but they would have to really be careful.

[00:38:11] There are conventions of war, so these things don't happen, but there are also instances where they're booby trapped.

[00:38:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's absolutely nuts. It seems like it would just be safer to let it blow up under to trigger it somehow than to bring it up and disarm it. But I mean, what do I know?

[00:38:25] Susan Casey: I think that's also what they were doing.

[00:38:27] You know, I don't know all the details. I've never witnessed this, but it's definitely an ongoing effort. Another thing that people often don't think about is there are these. All of our data on the internet, all of our financial stuff, all of our, like, we need this now. It goes through sea floor cables.

[00:38:42] Mm-Hmm. It doesn't go through satellites. So there are hundreds of high speed cables in the sea floor telecommunications cables that are really sort of the circulatory system of modern life. Mm-Hmm. And certainly the modern economy. And so now they wanna put in more and more of these cables and they're finding when they go to do the surveys that they may end up, oh wow.

[00:39:01] Here's a giant pit of munitions from a war. And so. It's becoming something that we need to pay more attention to as we sort of venture deeper as a society.

[00:39:12] Jordan Harbinger: So going back to bad sushi, if that stuff is at the bottom and people are t trawling or whatever, do they not then trigger that stuff? Or do they not maybe open up a barrel or whatever mustard gas gel down there, and if they're catching fish.

[00:39:27] While they're doing that and there's a mustard gas container in there, is that possible that that stuff's also in my sushi or am I just sort of being overly paranoid at this point?

[00:39:35] Susan Casey: Well, I think if there was a mustard gas in your sushi, you'd probably know it. Yeah, yeah. You'd figure it out fast after the fact.

[00:39:41] Jordan Harbinger: But I'm just, I'm just wondering if that stuff is touching the fish that I'm eating.

[00:39:44] Susan Casey: Yeah. I mean, everything's touching everything. That's kind of what the ocean is all That's the point, right? Yeah. It's, everything's circulated. Everything's in motion, everything's going, you know, is wafting around and everything's eating everything else, and then it's dying and then it's getting back into the system.

[00:39:58] So none of this stuff is really going away. Some stuff goes away a little easier than others. I mean, all of our plastic is still down there. Mm-Hmm. There is no plastic that has biodegraded on planet Earth yet. We don't know when There will be. Maybe never, but probably some point. There are so much nanoplastics in some of these animals that they can't find one that's fully organic.

[00:40:19] Even at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, there's a little creature called an amphipod. It looks like a little crustacean. So we're talking as far as you can get away from us, bottom of the ocean, deepest spot in the ocean, kind of the final sink for all of our stuff, because they're in these trenches that form between tectonic plates.

[00:40:35] Like imagine the Himalayas turned upside down. Mm-Hmm. Those are hale trenches. The peaks of the mountains. They found this amphipod that has so much plastic embedded throughout its organs that they named it. It's a new species. They named it Ur Athena Plastics. Oh man. The first plastic hybrid organic creature.

[00:40:52] And then they found as many as they could to see if there was a baseline. Like at what point did this animal get so contaminated? Couldn't find one that wasn't plastic organic. And I asked him, how many other animals do you think you know are going through this? And he said, all of them.

[00:41:06] Jordan Harbinger: That's really scary.

[00:41:08] And I've, I've done episodes on plastics and I had one recently with this guy who was like a, a scientist and he is like, look, plastics degrade, but it just takes a really long time. But they degrade. And that still doesn't quite sit right with me. And you just said no plastic is ever fully degraded, which is

[00:41:23] Susan Casey: Biodegraded.

[00:41:24] Jordan Harbinger: Biodegraded. I see.

[00:41:25] Susan Casey: They do. You know, they go from big hunks to little pieces. Yeah. To microscopic particles, to nanoparticles, to who knows what next. But they're still not biodegraded like back to their organic elements of I see.

[00:41:36] Jordan Harbinger: Plastic. So that was sort of left out of that episode and we're doing this sort of deep dive fact check on it because it was like half right.

[00:41:42] And then half of it was kind of like maybe pulling the wool a little bit. It was a controversial episode and it was sort of like, oh, a big relief. 'cause plastic's not that bad. But then it's like, uh, but some of the stuff is. Even worse.

[00:41:55] Susan Casey: Did you happen to see the news yesterday where they found a quarter million nanoparticles of plastic in the average bottle of water?

[00:42:03] Jordan Harbinger: No. But that's really gross. And yeah, also not that surprising, I suppose that's really gross.

[00:42:08] Susan Casey: Yeah. Plastic is more pernicious than we think. And I mean, I have to say, I think we have bigger challenges right in our face than plastic. But plastic is a really big one. Mm-Hmm. The reason is because we don't know what's, how it's gonna affect long-term development of endocrine systems.

[00:42:24] Mm-Hmm. Immune systems. If like a kid, let's say a baby right now is ingesting all these nanoparticles of plastic or an animal in the ocean, right. That does something. It may not, like, they may not drop dead in front of your eyes at the first ingestion, but it's this long-term effect that it can't be good.

[00:42:41] Jordan Harbinger: Well, I would imagine, and we've also done shows on endocrine disruptors in your house, right? Like phthalates or whatever's in your, or like you're, you're putting shampoo on your head and it's been in a plastic bottle and there's plastics in there and it disrupts your hormones. And it's like, well that's not good for adults, but it's really not good for developing little boys and girls because Yeah.

[00:43:01] We just have no idea. Yeah. The amount of stuff that whenever we do shows like this, people go, I can't believe we used to dispose of chemical weapons in the ocean. And it's like, well, yeah, but then in 30, 50 years we're gonna be like, I can't believe we used to put things that would touch your skin in plastic bottles for years at a time and or we would drink things out of plastic.

[00:43:20] Can you believe they used to drink things and eat things outta plastic? I mean, it's only a matter of time till something like that is so common. And we just say, yeah, when we were little, everything was in plastic and people can't believe it. Right? It's

[00:43:31] Susan Casey: plastic is so durable and so like omnipresent.

[00:43:34] Mm-Hmm. That what we should be using it for is. Are the things that we never want to get rid of. Right? Right. Or we never, like a heart stent or like some sort of three dimensionally printed housing or something. Mm-Hmm. You know, roof tiles, I don't know. But instead it's like, oh, we'll just use this once and toss it away.

[00:43:50] Like it's going somewhere. It's not going anywhere.

[00:43:52] Jordan Harbinger: You ever go to a hotel and you go, I forgot my toothbrush. They gave you this plastic toothbrush with plastic. Yeah. And you're like, I'm gonna use this for 30 seconds or two minutes, or however long. And you, you wanna reuse it, but it's a piece of crap. So you end up throwing it away and feeling terrible for the, the next 10 minutes.

[00:44:07] It's just really horrible. It, one of the things that was said during the plastics episode, the most recent one with Krista Armit, he said. Hey, we only find fishing gear in remote places we don't find trash. But you've been to a lot of remote places. Have you seen trash there or only fishing gear?

[00:44:24] Susan Casey: All of the above.

[00:44:25] There's trash everywhere and, um, in some of the remote places of the ocean, you, and you're on the sea floor a few miles down, you're not gonna see it. But there are people who've been down in submersibles as deep as 10,000 meters or, you know, six miles who have seen eco-friendly plastic bags floating past the viewport.

[00:44:43] Oh my gosh. And submersible and, um, teddy bears on the sea floor and spam cans. And, um, a friend of mine who's a sub pilot said the most common bar none piece of, uh, human detri that you see in the deep ocean are Budweiser beer bottles and cans. So it's a very popular Really?

[00:44:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. On the deep sea floor.

[00:45:00] I'm surprised to hear that. I was gonna guess flip flops because so much of the world wears that. They're always garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Budweiser

[00:45:10] Susan Casey: though, I don't know why. Maybe fishermen like bud,

[00:45:13] Jordan Harbinger: that almost doesn't make any sense. 'cause Budweiser's really only, I mean, the only people dumb enough to drink that are Americans like me and how much of it is being consumed and then thrown into the ocean?

[00:45:23] I mean, don't we recycle the bottles Mostly you get 10 cents for it, for God's sake.

[00:45:27] Susan Casey: Yeah. I mean, I guess if you were out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you're not near a recycling facility, but I think yeah, stuff gets dumped off ships.

[00:45:35] Jordan Harbinger: It's gotta be that. Yeah. We've

[00:45:36] Susan Casey: used the ocean as a giant dumpster and the thing is, we're not getting away with anything when we do that.

[00:45:42] Jordan Harbinger: No.

[00:45:42] Susan Casey: You know, we are the ones who are gonna have to marinate in it if we eat stuff that lives there and wanna swim in it or do anything in it. Everything has a price. We're gonna be paying it for a really long time, even if we clean up our act very dramatically.

[00:45:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's not gonna be solved in my lifetime.

[00:45:58] From the sound of it. You mentioned the Titanic submersible or the Titan submersible. Is that the one that imploded, the one that was made out of, was it carbon fiber type stuff or Styrofoam and duct tape. Styrofoam duct tape. Yeah, that I really was mystified by that. Are they so hard to build submersibles or is that company is just like, ah, we figured out a way to make this really cheap.

[00:46:19] Susan Casey: My book was, um, going to press right before this happened, and I'd been following this company for like five years before the accident happened. I shouldn't call it an accident. It wasn't an accident. It was entirely predictable, but. Uh, so I wrote a piece, big piece for Vanity Fair about this that came out.

[00:46:34] It kind of was like my primal scream about it because these submersibles are very expensive. We know exactly how to engineer vehicles to go safely into the deep ocean. Mm-Hmm. But it's, it takes a really long time. It's not about innovating on materials for the passenger sphere like he had, was using a type of carbon fiber that's wound filaments.

[00:46:56] This is a really strong material if you've got pressure coming from the inside out, like let's say you have gas, or let's say you're building an airplane. It's really unpredictable when the pressure comes from the outside, like the very, very intense pressures of the deep ocean. And to give you a sense of how intense at the depth that the Titan was diving, it was about 4,000 meters is where the Titanic lies in the Atlantic.

[00:47:18] The pressure is 8,000 pounds per square inch, and it's coming from every degree, 360 degrees every direction. Equally, the only shape that can withstand that kind of pressure is a sphere. At that level of pressure, the only certain materials can handle those forces without deforming or what they call in submersible speak, failing catastrophically.

[00:47:39] Mm-Hmm. Which is what happened to the Titan Titanium steel. Steel alloy. These days it's mostly titanium, but because it's so rigorous, not just like the physics and the materials that are needed in the precision. But it's also the safety. So all of the other subs go through what would be the equivalent of the FAA, like really peer review from an external independent expert agency.

[00:48:06] And there are many of them. It adds a huge amount of cost to the build of the vehicle, but there's no making an end round around that. And so in fact though, Stockton rush, what he did was he built his sub in the US out of this carbon fiber and absolutely everybody who it's a very small world, deep sea submersibles.

[00:48:24] Yeah. And it would

[00:48:25] Jordan Harbinger: have to be right.

[00:48:25] Susan Casey: Yeah, very small. There are only about six or seven other submersibles that can go as deep as 4,000 meters or below, and only two that can go to full ocean depth, one of which I dived in, and the other one of which is owned by the Chinese government. So that gives you a sense of how like rarefied this world is.

[00:48:43] And he wanted his craft to be a cylinder because he wanted to be able to stick five people in there because that would make economic sense,

[00:48:50] Jordan Harbinger: right? He could charge,

[00:48:51] Susan Casey: yeah. Yeah. And he could charge because people wanted to go to see the Titanic. And there are a lot of people that do. He wanted to make it out of this lighter material, which he felt was stronger because it would be easier to transport.

[00:49:04] But here's the thing, like the ocean doesn't care about your business plan. Mm-Hmm. You see these submersibles on a ship and they've got their own climate controlled hangers. They've got their own engineering technicians. They're inspected and inspected and inspected and inspected, and they've got their own ships and they've got 18 different kinds of redundancy for any safety failure.

[00:49:23] And here's this guy towing this submersible, like on a, basically like a float platform off through the North Atlantic to get to the Titanic dive site. Well, how do they even do maintenance on it when it's floating off the back of the ship and. So the reason I kind of knew about it back in 2017, 2018, is when I decided, Hey, I wanna write about the deep ocean.

[00:49:45] My biggest question was, okay, well how do I get down there?

[00:49:48] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:49:49] Susan Casey: It's hard.

[00:49:49] Jordan Harbinger: Gotta call Ray Dalio. Yeah,

[00:49:52] Susan Casey: well I did dive in one of, uh, his ocean Axis subs, but at the time I was just beginning, I was just learning about subs and as mentioned, lived in Hawaii. So I was hanging out with the University of Hawaii.

[00:50:03] They had two, 2000 meter submersibles that worked in the Pacific, but I heard they were about to come out of the water and they, they're not gonna dive again. I heard about the Titan, I heard about this company in Seattle that, Hey, we're gonna take paying passengers to 4,000 meters. And I was like, I don't really wanna go to the Titanic, but that could work.

[00:50:23] So I called them up. Spoke to a marketing person, you know, a journalist. I'm always recording my conversations and transcribing them later in case I wanna quote them. Sure. So I've got this conversation and it's, you know, just all kinds of misinformation about how great this thing is and how innovative and how safe.

[00:50:39] I'm thinking this is the answer. I go back to Hawaii and I spoke to Terry Kirby, who was the chief pilot of the University of Hawaii subs, and I, Hey, I might dive in. It wasn't even built yet. The titan, it hadn't even started. Mm-Hmm. They were just talking about it and they had pictures of it. And so I said to him, I'm, I'm thinking about diving in this titan.

[00:50:57] And he was like, just absolutely not. I don't do, you must never set foot in this. And then he started to explain why. And once I started to understand why, and just think about it this way. If you're in a, put your foot on a soda can and see what happens, crush the sphere and it just gets stronger. Right?

[00:51:17] I'm starting to learn all this, all the dynamics of what really is about the deep ocean and how to get there safely. I started a file, like everybody I met in the ocean, deep ocean world was talking about this. We don't really think they're gonna do it, like we're trying to figure out a way to stop them from doing it.

[00:51:34] But he was threading a needle of regulation going into international waters through Canada and all this. So basically to sum it up, like what happened is what everybody feared would happen, and nobody who knows anything about submersibles thought for one second that this thing was just lost and floating and adrift in the ocean.

[00:51:52] Oh, interesting. It was always about an implosion. It was absolutely almost inevitable. And I'm surprised it actually even made 13 dives. I get scared even looking at pictures of it on land. Mm-Hmm. Knowing what I know now.

[00:52:04] Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, I was riveted by that because. I was imagining them all stuck on the floor of the ocean with no light and no electricity and no oxygen.

[00:52:16] Just waiting to slowly die from lack of oxygen or, or lack of water or whatever comes first. So I was almost relieved when I heard that it imploded instantaneously and killed everyone on board with a bunch of like knife shards of carbon fiber, as gross as that sounds, because it was the, definitely the preferable.

[00:52:34] Way to go of those two options.

[00:52:36] Susan Casey: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No doubt about it.

[00:52:39] Jordan Harbinger: Really tragic. Even

[00:52:40] Susan Casey: if by some weird happenstance they did get lost, there was all kinds of safety issues with even getting, let's say they had found it, let's say it was floating on the top of the water. Mm-Hmm. It had no hatch tower. So how do you even get it?

[00:52:53] It had no fittings to be able to crane it out of the water. Oh. I mean, man, I mean, this is the thing that weighs several tons. It because the hatch tower doesn't, you know, remember how it was bolted in? Well, they don't do that. There's a real reason why they don't do that. Mm-Hmm. Hatch towers clear the sea surface so that people can climb up a ladder, and if you need to be rescued, you can open the outer hatch, climb out and be rescued the nose cone that swings sideways.

[00:53:16] They could have never gotten out of that, even if they got them. And they, so they have five days of oxygen. Let's say it takes two days to find them. They're floating on the surface. They get there, they can't pull them out of the water, so they have to tow them. Where is the nearest land?

[00:53:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right? Oh my God.

[00:53:31] Susan Casey: It's gonna take more than the oxygen they've got on board to tow them. That's the only place you would've been able to get them out of the water. The ship they rented was not, it didn't have a crane. They could have lifted it out of the water so they could have, it was just breathtaking. The safety stuff that, no emergency beacon.

[00:53:48] Mm-Hmm. How can you send a flare if you can't get out of the top of the hatch tower? Let's say they managed to get the thing open. How do you get anybody outta the sub without water? Yeah. Cashing in. Of course. And you're going straight back down to the sea floor. Oh my God. It's chilling. So like, just absolutely everything about it was just this death trap.

[00:54:05] Ah,

[00:54:05] Jordan Harbinger: it's such a shame. 'cause I, a lot of people had no sympathy 'cause it was like, oh, a bunch of rich people died or whatever. I, I thought that was kind of gross. 'cause of course this guy went in there with like his kid, you know, it's just like they wanted this special opportunity, I guess. Gotta do your research.

[00:54:18] It's such a, it was such a shame. Yes. Such a shame.

[00:54:21] Susan Casey: Yes. Well, I mean, I can tell you a couple things. Do not get in a ible that is not certified by one of the marine classification societies and do not get in a deep sea submersible. By deep sea, I mean anything below 600 feet that has not got a spherical pressure chamber.

[00:54:37] Mm-Hmm. There, there are these subs and you've probably seen pictures of them. They're really cool. They look like James Bond subs and these are the ones that Ray Dalio has where they have a plexiglass hull. They're made by a company called Triton Submersibles, which is like the apple of submersible design.

[00:54:50] Mm-Hmm. Really the top of the top. And you can actually sit in this sort of transparent bubble and go down as deep as 6,000 feet using that material. It's pretty thick, but it's very clear, the plexiglass, and you just feel like you're in a psychedelic aquarium. And that's an experience that most people, I think, aside from really claustrophobic people would really love, like 'cause down in the uppermost layer of the deep ocean called the Twilight Zone, there are more fish and creatures in there than in all the other regions of the ocean combined.

[00:55:22] I call it the Manhattan of the deep. 80% of them are bioluminescent or can flash and glow and twinkle and you're gonna see things that look like alien is just magnificent. And it's really fun to watch that in a sphere. But those are the two things you really have to watch out for. Anywhere below 6,000 feet, you need it to be at metal sphere and material science will eventually probably make it possible for us to be in either glass or some other, probably glass full ocean death.

[00:55:49] But that's a ways away.

[00:55:50] Jordan Harbinger: You had me somewhat interested until you said it was called the Twilight Zone, and then I just went right back to being scared of the ocean again. Yeah,

[00:55:56] Susan Casey: that's a,

[00:55:57] Jordan Harbinger: that's not a very

[00:55:57] Susan Casey: reassuring, oh my God, it's so be, it's just so beautiful though. I gotta tell you, it's a wonderland.

[00:56:03] Like if you think it would be fun to just look at amazing animals you've never seen before that are glowing and sparkling with lights and you're sitting there in like a beautiful. Soft chair and everything's kind of revolving around you. That's the Twilight Zone. Yeah.

[00:56:19] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, it does sound amazing actually.

[00:56:22] I know that we find so many things in the ocean medicines, antibiotics even. Yeah. Was the covid test based on something found in the ocean? I think I read that in your book. Yeah.

[00:56:30] Susan Casey: Yeah. It's an, it was, the PCR test was required, um, the use of an enzyme that came out of a volcanic hydrothermal vent on the sea floor.

[00:56:39] Wow. These, as we mentioned earlier, like these microbial adaptations for resilience for 'cause, you know, the ocean's also filled with viruses. And so microbes have evolved all these strategies to survive different regimes of temperature, pH, you know, attacks by viruses, different things that they've had to survive, and all of these adaptations are things that we can learn from strategies.

[00:57:03] We've really expanded our repertoire of what life is even capable of. By looking in the deep potion and that's part of it. That's a big part of it. Yeah. The fish at that

[00:57:12] Jordan Harbinger: depth, you, you said one looks like a pink gummy bear because it's just kind of a almost solid, because otherwise the pressure would destroy it.

[00:57:19] That's fascinating. It makes, it totally makes sense that a gummy bear would hold up decent or something. The consistency of a gummy bear would hold up better than like a body like mine, for example, or ours, I should say.

[00:57:30] Susan Casey: Well, yeah, it's because it has no air cavities in its body. Right. So this is what you're talking about is a hale snail fish.

[00:57:36] So the very bottom layer of the deep ocean is called the hale zone named after Hades.

[00:57:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah. The,

[00:57:42] Susan Casey: the underworld. And in the hale zone there is currently no fish on earth that can make it to the deepest point in the ocean, which is 35,867 feet by our best measurement.

[00:57:54] And that's called the Challenger deep, the deepest spot of the Mariana Trench. The deepest a fish can go before it cells implode is a hale snail fish has been seen at 29,300 feet, I think it is. And it has adapted to be that deep. And there are some other animals down there, like there's a animal called a cuss, and they're very jelly.

[00:58:16] The cuss gulls are pretty big. They have little tiny eyes. They're also known as as fish.

[00:58:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I

[00:58:21] Susan Casey: thought you loved lovely. I had, I was like, I'm gonna ask

[00:58:24] Jordan Harbinger: her if there's, if it's as fish or if I just misunderstood.

[00:58:26] Susan Casey: Yeah. And the common one is called in the Mariana trench is called the robust as fish. And because it's body is really big and its brain is really small, it's technically by body, brain ratio, the stupidest animal on earth.

[00:58:39] But you know you're doing something right. If you can survive deeper than all your predators and their mouths open up like this cavernous vacuum cleaner. And they suck in these little crustacean called amphipods. Then they have the, the sort of cohort down there, or these cute little pink jelly hale snail fish.

[00:58:56] They look, if you think of a tadpole shape, they look like translucent pink tadpoles. And with these little black button eyes and these big smiley mouths and these sort of fluttery angel wings and these ribbony long tails and they look like adorable. They're just having the time of their life. They're snacking away on these alpha pods, and they confounded scientists because scientists thought, well, they certainly can't be a vigorous fast swimming fat little fish.

[00:59:24] They're probably starving down there. But no, they're completely great. Nothing eats them. And they have no closed skull, no swim bladder, nothing that could implode. They've gotten deeper than anything else. And the best part, the, my favorite thing is they have two mouths. So these amphipods have claws. And so if you suck in amphipods and you're made of gel.

[00:59:45] The first thing the AM pod's gonna do is eat its way out of your head. Oof. So the snail fishes fix that by, it sucks it in. And then right behind it there's another mouth and it's like a mill and it just amphi pod puree. And that's that. And it digests it. You can see right through their bodies. And what I love about that is we've got the top predator in the most hostile environment on earth, and it's a pink gummy bear.

[01:00:10] Jordan Harbinger: This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Susan Casey. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. Imagine you and Shopify as the Batman and Robin of the business world. Shopify is more than just a platform. It's your business's trustee Robin from the thrill of your first sale to boxing up your millionth order.

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[01:02:38] I am more than happy to surface those codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Susan Casey, one of the other species that was mind blowing was you said there's a jellyfish that can reverse its lifecycle and rebirth itself.

[01:02:56] How is that possible? What does that mean?

[01:02:58] Susan Casey: Yeah, so it's called the immortal jellyfish, and basically it's been a while since I looked this up, so I'm gonna talk real in real generalities, okay? Because I don't wanna get this wrong, but it can basically rebirth different parts of its body. It can age in reverse.

[01:03:11] It can regenerate cells and there's a, actually, if people are interested in learning more about this, there's a Japanese scientist that's doing all this research on it. And if you Google the immortal jellyfish, you can really take a deep dive into that. 'cause they're really studying it for obvious reasons.

[01:03:26] I hope so. Yeah. I mean, it can certainly, it's not immortal if it gets sucked into a sperm whale's mouth or something like that, but it, if you just leave it on its own, apparently it can just regenerate and recycle it cells and age in reverse.

[01:03:40] Jordan Harbinger: That is absolutely mind blowing. I mean, look, jellyfish are simpler than mammals in terms of their construction, I suppose.

[01:03:47] But the idea that it can de-age, whatever, we don't even have a word for that. The cells, that's just something outta science fiction. It doesn't even, it's beyond science fiction, I guess. Right? I mean, it's just really, it's super incredible. Imagine if you could do that with your skin or an organ or even your brain or something like that.

[01:04:06] Just really, really incredible. You mentioned there's all kinds of metals and minerals and stuff like that in the ocean. Are we mining that stuff? I'm afraid that the answer's probably yes.

[01:04:16] Susan Casey: This is top of mind right now because I've written a chapter about this that gets it all across in narrative form because it's kind of complicated.

[01:04:23] But we've been trying to, humans, corporations, indu, industrial interests have been trying to mine the sea floor since like the sixties and seventies. There was a real attempt at it in the seventies. And so the reason is because at certain depths, the metals do accrete into these sort of nodules that form around a nucleus, as I mentioned earlier, like a shark's tooth or a piece of coral or something.

[01:04:47] It takes tens of millions of years for them to grow. They look sort of like little cannonballs, but they aren't just lumps of metal. They're more like corals or trees 'cause they have microorganisms living inside them. And microorganisms contribute to their creation, although we don't know exactly how.

[01:05:03] And they contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper, and traces of other metals and minerals. There are a lot of them, and they tend to be at abyssal depths in the ocean, say around 15,000 feet. So below the twilight zone is the midnight zone, goes down to about 10,000 feet, and then from 10,000 to 20,000 feet is the largest ecosystem on earth, which is the abyssal zone or the abyss.

[01:05:27] And where the abyss meets the sea floor, more than half the planet is covered by waters that deep. And in the places where the tectonic plates meet, you have this deeper zone of the ocean called the hale zone that goes from 20,000 feet down to 36,000 feet. But the abyss got a lot of planes that are covered in these nodules.

[01:05:48] They're not everywhere, but there are trillions. It's the largest metal deposit on the planet, but it's very, very complicated in terms of what you're going to do to the ecosystem and the very intricately interconnected carbon cycle throughout the ocean. The sort of geochemistry of the ocean because these are a habitat that have been there and it's an untouched habitat.

[01:06:10] And once these nodules are removed, they will never come back on human timescales. And more than 50% of the animals that live in the deep ocean at that depth live because of the nodules. So there are actually two other kinds of deep sea mining and it's hard for me to know how much depth to go into, but let's just focus on the nodules 'cause that's what's up right now.

[01:06:34] The other two types are mining hydrothermal events. If you do that, there's not that many hydrothermal events. There's all this very unique life around it. We think that's maybe where life originated on planet earth. All of the live vents in the world wouldn't even occupy half of the United States. So.

[01:06:51] Why would we wanna tear this up? Yeah. And then the other thing is taking the equivalent of mountaintop removal on land in the ocean and sea mounts are also like big oasis of life. So the manganese nodules have come into the forefront. It didn't work in the seventies for economic reasons in the technology.

[01:07:09] It's really hard to try to do anything. I don't even think people who want sea floor mine now are aware of just how hard it would be to operate at that depth because it's just an unforgiving, the pressure, everything like your machinery is the ocean is constantly gonna be trying to destroy the machinery.

[01:07:27] Yeah. Geez. Cobalt and nickel is really the game. So you've got all these interests that are very much chomping at the bit to get these nodules. And people who've heard about deep sea mining may have heard of it. In the guise of a sort of an investment, come on. Like this is gonna be the next big thing, right?

[01:07:45] And this is much more environmentally friendly. We don't have to have tailings, we don't have to rip up a rainforest. All of these things are extremely debatable, if not false. Sure. It could be that we really one day may need this metals, but ev battery chemistry is changing to the point where we're kind of phasing out cobalt and nickel.

[01:08:06] Yes.

[01:08:07] Jordan Harbinger: Thankfully

[01:08:07] Susan Casey: fast.

[01:08:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:08:08] Susan Casey: Fast. And so anybody who's rushing at this particular moment to try to do deep sea mining just has one reason for doing it. And the rest is greenwashing. Mm-Hmm. And that's to get a quick buck.

[01:08:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:08:19] Susan Casey: I mean, it's not even gonna be a quick buck. It's gonna be a hard buck, but it will be a big buck.

[01:08:22] Jordan Harbinger: I bet. It's they're trying to get a bunch of funding and then maybe, oh, it doesn't work out. But we paid ourselves a lot of money for starting this company 'cause it's,

[01:08:29] Susan Casey: well, in fact, that happened already. And it's the same people. Oh. It's the company that's really pushing this forward is called The Metals Company.

[01:08:36] Mm-Hmm. And they previously had a, a lot of the people who worked at the metals company had come from a previous attempt to mine hydrothermal events in Papua New Guinea called Nautilus. Nautilus ended up having the Papua New Guinea government invest like $120 million was on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

[01:08:53] You know, stock goes up, it goes down, it goes bankrupt. But the people who have now turned around from Nautilus and come to the create the medals company, they did great. You know what I mean? The Papua New Guinea government lost $120 million in a country where only half of the people have electricity.

[01:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Oh man.

[01:09:10] Susan Casey: But the biggest reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, and my of course, preference would be this is the womb of the earth and it's the largest carbon sink on Earth. Like at this point, leave it the fuck alone. Yeah. It's a wisdom test. We've gotta past one someday. And the real reason is because we don't know what's down there.

[01:09:31] We don't know how it works. We don't know what future medicines, we don't know what'll happen to the microbial regime that produces oxygen. I mean, just a lot of things could go wrong. So the deep sea scientists have what they're asking for before anything goes forward. Like this is a moratorium for 10 to 30 years of further study.

[01:09:53] And it seems like the least we can do is know what we're destroying Mm-Hmm. And how it affects us right before we destroy it. I think it's really important to stress that this is happening on a large, large scale. Like the nodule mines are 30,000 square miles each. Wow.

[01:10:09] Jordan Harbinger: That's really hard to even wrap your mind around that kind of thing at all.

[01:10:14] Oh, unbelievable. I know we're running a little bit short on time. I'd like to talk about shipwrecks 'cause I had no idea. You wrote there are some 3 million shipwrecks. I would've been off by about 2.9 million if I had had to guess how many shipwrecks there were. That many. Unbelievable.

[01:10:31] Susan Casey: Yeah. That statistic comes from unesco, and of course, nobody really knows how many shipwrecks there are.

[01:10:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[01:10:36] Susan Casey: But that gives you a sense, I mean, it is really this sort of archive. Uh, a lot of ships crashed on rocks or reefs or, you know, they're not in deep water, but the ships that are in deep water are incredibly interesting because a lot of the time they're really well preserved. They could be packed in silt, they're below the depth of wood, boring organisms.

[01:10:55] In some cases, like in the Black Sea, the chemistry of the water, it's anoxic. So it's really, really well preserved. But the problem is, is it is really expensive to go out and look for them. Kind of like the ultimate needle in a haystack, even with sonar and lidar and the things we have now. And then when you find them, it's very expensive to, you know, there are people who have a business just going, looking for treasure, treasure hunting and going and getting gold coins and stuff.

[01:11:21] But it would be really cool if we could archeologically examine some of these more prominent wrecks, but that is so, so, so expensive. Yeah. I

[01:11:29] Jordan Harbinger: bet

[01:11:29] Susan Casey: There's so much lost history on the sea floor.

[01:11:31] Jordan Harbinger: That stuff's always been fascinating to me. So these, if they sink into deep ocean, are they preserved by the cold and the pressure and the fact that there's just not that much light down there and all that stuff?

[01:11:42] What else? Yeah,

[01:11:43] Susan Casey: the organisms that bore into wood. Mm-hmm. They're actually mollusks. Obviously if a ship is on a reef or something, it's just gonna be smashed over and over by waves. Sure. That isn't really happening in the deep ocean. There are internal waves in the ocean, but mostly the deep ocean's pretty calm.

[01:11:57] You know, you really kind of have a time capsule, particularly if it gets sealed into the sediments and then you really have it protected from any kind of microbial. Like the Titanic is sitting there and all these metal eating microbes are eating it. It was there for a long time. Eventually it will be gone.

[01:12:12] If a ship is under the sediment, it's preserved.

[01:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: That is, yeah, that makes sense. I suppose just like being buried in mud like a fossil and then it just, yeah, it's just there for a few million years. I just find this stuff endlessly fascinating people. I read this somewhere else, not from your book, but people had found empty jars of olive oil from like ancient Greece and I don't know how the hell they found this part out, but apparently the stuff that the label on the outside of the jar was not what was inside the jar, even though I guess it would've been gone after all this time, but somehow they figured it out.

[01:12:43] So it was, the idea was that it was counterfeit olive oil. They said it was one thing, but it was actually like a lower crappier brand and I'm thinking, wow, they've counterfeit food like a thousand years ago. Crazy.

[01:12:54] Susan Casey: Yeah, it's really fun. There's a lot of scholarship about this around Greece and Turkey.

[01:12:59] There's some really fascinating shipwrecks in not too deep, but deep enough waters that we've really learned a lot from them. It's changed history. It's, we've found mechanisms that look like they were sort of analog computers to chart. The movement of planets and stars and it just, when you find something like that, you sort of, it is another piece in the puzzle of the past.

[01:13:18] You know, we just, yeah.

[01:13:19] Jordan Harbinger: There's so much we don't know. I rewound that part of your book when you said that they found a bunch of statues inside and then a, some sort of analog computer and they suspect that it might have been something from Archimedes. Can you speak to that a little bit more? 'cause I think people just did a little double take on analog computer like I did.

[01:13:36] Susan Casey: You can see it if you go to the National Archeological Museum in Athens, actually, it's a reconstruction of it. But it's so complicated. It's called the Anti Thera Mechanism. A NT Anti Thera. Yes. Got

[01:13:50] Jordan Harbinger: it.

[01:13:52] Susan Casey: You can put it in the show notes. Great. Anyway, um, so it came up and it's basically, when it comes outta the ocean, of course it just looks like a lump of bluish patid metal.

[01:14:01] And, but when they started to clean it up, it had dozens of cogs and gears, very intricate. And it was basically, they think Archimedes created it because nobody else could have done anything that intricate at the time. And it just basically charted the movement, celestial movements. It was like, imagine a clock, but way more complicated.

[01:14:19] A science paper came out really recently talking about it and just saying this really causes us to rewrite our assumptions of technologically what was possible in ancient, ancient, what they were doing. And it's worth reading more about it. And that wreck, the Antica Thera wreck is still being excavated.

[01:14:35] It was obviously huge. It obviously was carrying really precious objects and it's at a depth that's just deep enough for really advanced scuba divers, but very dangerous. But they're still working on that, and I'm really curious to know how many more of those ships will. Be found because I found a description of what they were like and they just sounded like floating palaces.

[01:14:57] Yeah. Filled with artworks. And this is, so far the only one we've found like this,

[01:15:01] Jordan Harbinger: so I just looked this up. It is A-N-T-I-K-Y-T-H-E-R-A. So I was never gonna get that. Neither were you, I guess off the top of our head, but, but, uh, it was. So it's an ancient Greek hand powered ori, which I don't, it sort of looks like a really fancy watch, but it's larger.

[01:15:18] Of course it fits in your hand. Well,

[01:15:20] Susan Casey: it's bigger. It's, I I wanna say it's about six, seven inches tall. Like a box. It's

[01:15:24] Jordan Harbinger: like cuckoo clock kind of looking thing. Exactly. Except it's the oldest known example of an analog computer. This part's amazing. Used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance.

[01:15:37] That's, yeah. Mind blowing to be able, yeah. I thought it was gonna be like able to keep the days or something. No, decades in advance. It can predict a solar eclipse that's just bananas. That, and, and somebody came up with this and then built the thing and machined all the parts by hand. Obviously imagine the value of this instrument at that point.

[01:15:56] This is like the Hubble telescope of. Whenever this thing was actually constructed. The Hellenistic period.

[01:16:02] Susan Casey: Yeah. You know, it was whatever the Yeah. The equivalent of being able to see into the heavens. Yeah. For them. But think about it this way, if we found that in like one shipwreck. Yeah. What else is out there?

[01:16:13] It's an, it's an area that's so vast that we search for MH three 70 for three years with the top technology and cannot find it. I mean, it's just like, what else is out there?

[01:16:24] Jordan Harbinger: There's gotta be so much stuff out there. So much stuff out there. Yeah. And in areas that we think are already sort of done and explored, like between Greek islands probably because we're just gonna be, have tech that can look into sediment 300 feet and it's like, oh, there's, right, it's like an, we did an episode about Egypt and pyramids and tombs and Remy, the, the expert, he Egyptologist, he was saying that we've probably discovered something like 2%.

[01:16:50] Of Egyptian tombs and pyramids and the rest are still under the sand. We just have no way of knowing where they are. It sounds like shipwrecks are kind of in that same boat, no pun intended.

[01:16:58] Susan Casey: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we don't have, as I said, only, only 25% of the deep sea floor has been mapped at high resolution.

[01:17:06] Not that we would even be able to tell the difference between a rock and a shipwreck on the kinds of imaging that you get, but. We haven't even looked. Yeah. So the fact that we found stuff already, but it's just ma mammoth and then of course there's dimensions of years sediment. The deeper you go and who knows what's down there.

[01:17:23] Oh man. There's definitely, um, not just ships, but there are cities, there are towns, there are prehistoric settlements. There are anywhere there, there was metal used. We can probably find things just

[01:17:35] Jordan Harbinger: unbelievable. I've heard that it's hard to get funding to explore stuff like this because even if you have funding for archeology, marine archeology is kind of like, well this isn't real archeology.

[01:17:45] I don't really know what the, they've got beef with each other, these groups of, of scientists.

[01:17:50] Susan Casey: Yeah. I think marine archeology is really not one of the sciences that, you know, is showered with funding. It's always been like that sort of a labor of love for many of the scientists that do it. But yeah, I think it's getting a little bit better, but it's still hard and they're doing some really interesting, the French are really into marine archeology and are doing some really cool projects.

[01:18:10] In Egypt. There are countries that care more about this and are doing more to look around.

[01:18:15] Jordan Harbinger: Well, good. Somebody's gotta do it. Yeah. The problem is governments right. They have the permission to do it. You probably have to get permission from whatever government these waters are. If it's not international waters, archeologists have the interest, but the only people who have the money is gonna be a corporation that's like, yeah, we'll dive for that Spanish galleon, but then we're gonna melt everything down or sell the artifacts to somebody and we're not gonna do anything with the actual ship because it's just sort of like scientific historical value, but not economic value.

[01:18:42] So you have these Yeah. Kind of misaligned incentives.

[01:18:45] Susan Casey: Exactly. It's like a catch 22. Yeah. It's like. So, yeah, who cares about that old altar piece, but by the way, it belonged to Christ or something like, who knows? Yeah. So yeah, the, it would be nice. There are legal issues for sure, even in international waters.

[01:19:00] Like if somebody finds, there was a Japanese sub that was found in the Atlantic that was carrying, supposedly the reason people went to look for it at all is 'cause it was rumored to be carrying a tremendous amount of gold during World War ii. And they found it. And as far as I know, it had, the people that found it were basically looking for it because they wanted the gold.

[01:19:18] Japan has a few things to say about that, right? First of all, it's a war grave, and second of all, if it belongs to Japan and it's uh, military vessel, no matter where it is, it belongs to Japan. And no matter when you find it, it belongs to Japan. So they run into that kind of thing all the time. There's lots of court cases involving this stuff, so I guess that's a bit of a disincentive.

[01:19:39] But there are some, also some great museums. There's great Marine archeological museum in Borum, Turkey. There's the one in Athens I mentioned.

[01:19:47] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[01:19:47] Susan Casey: You can see these treasures, you can see them in museums.

[01:19:50] Jordan Harbinger: I've heard that there are salvage crews from various countries illegally salvaging things like warships.

[01:19:56] So it's possible, it's even possible to do it without government support if they're doing it illegally and supposedly on the low. Right?

[01:20:02] Susan Casey: Yeah. The, it's amazing to think that the salvager could get, you know, from thousands of feet down. Mm-Hmm. A warship. But they do. And particularly over in the Javas Sea, one of the things that they're after are, let me make sure I'm gonna say this right.

[01:20:16] Before atomic weapons testing, there's metal. That's really valuable because it wasn't subjected to the radiation from atomic. They use it in medical instruments that have to be really highly calibrated. So they need certain types of metal that were pre the 1940s. Right, right. Yeah. And

[01:20:31] Jordan Harbinger: that's what they're after.

[01:20:32] It's called low background steel or pre-war steel. Any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. And I guess that's because. Some modern steel is just all contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout for some reason. I don't really understand why, but if you wanna build like a quantum physics particle reactor machine, you can't just put any metal in there because it's loaded with whatever would cause noise in that machine.

[01:21:00] So you need this like perfectly well. You need pre-war steel and that happens to be in large quantities in boats that are at the bottom of the ocean and I guess it's worth a ton of money.

[01:21:09] Susan Casey: Yeah, and I guess also just, you know, copper, like there's other metals that just any bulk of it is gonna be able to be saleable for some amount of money and it, I guess it's worth the while of the salvages, but it's a real problem.

[01:21:21] It's starting to become a real problem as a technology and RO robotics make it easier to get down there and like saw away at stuff. But just to give you a sense of when you're talking about that nuclear blast, it actually, when that happened, it was an atomic signature. The oldest vertebrae in the world is the Greenland shark, and it's a deep ocean shark.

[01:21:39] And there's one in the Pacific that's closely related called the Pacific Sleeper Shark. They can live to be 500 years old. Oh, wow. So they're the oldest living vertebrates. And the way they date their age is they take their eyeballs and they look for when that atomic signature comes up in their eyeballs, in their retinas.

[01:21:57] Jordan Harbinger: That's sad somehow, right?

[01:21:59] Susan Casey: Yeah. It's just kind of like everything we do, it's somehow the effect is it's still here. Yeah. But at the same time, I really think it's important to take the first step is like, let's look at this magnificence and really revel in it and think, isn't this incredibly cool? And then hopefully, I.

[01:22:16] People will have the emotional response that makes them want to care more about it, take care of it, you know, make sure that it's gonna support life flourishing, diverse, magnificent life and you know, for their kids and their grandkids and their grandkids, kids.

[01:22:31] Jordan Harbinger: Well, I know I said something like this earlier, but you know, for a guy who's mostly afraid of the water, at least deep water, I'm starting to really understand your passion for exploring the ocean.

[01:22:39] I'm still too much of a wimp to dive anytime soon, but I appreciate you taking us on this dive here today on the show. So interesting. This is just. Fascinating stuff. I don't know how to, I guess you can't really overstate it.

[01:22:50] Susan Casey: I could go on. Yeah, I, let's just put it that way. I could go on. I'm sure you could.

[01:22:53] I only read one book and you've got a bunch. I'm like, okay. I know what I'm

[01:22:57] Jordan Harbinger: doing. Next time I get a, a week off plowing through the rest of your catalog.

[01:23:01] Susan Casey: Well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Yeah,

[01:23:03] Jordan Harbinger: thank you. You are about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show where Captain Max Hardberger navigates treasurer's waters, both at sea and in the courtroom to reclaim stolen ships from the clutches of the corrupt, rich, and powerful.

[01:23:18] Max Hardberger: Our specialty is reclaiming ships that have been illegitimately seized either by a private party or more often by a government. In fact, we don't operate in any country that has a functioning series of laws and a procedure in place for a legitimate owner to make a claim against an illegitimate seizure.

[01:23:37] Papering the ship is the act of season, the ship. Now the owner, if it's that kind of situation and try to fight it legally, but very often he will find that there is no fighting it in the local court, and that's when he comes to us. If there is a possibility of taking the ship out legally, that's what I prefer to do.

[01:23:57] Quite often I'll work with the correspondent as the insurance person, the lawyer in the local jurisdiction. I'll work with the port authorities. I would do almost anything to get the ship out, including some things that I probably couldn't do here in the states without having to do a middle of the night extraction.

[01:24:14] That's a last resort. As a general rule, I need people who are extremely competent in their field, especially the chief engineer. He's the most important man in the entire team, including me. Nobody can replace a good chief engineer. We have possessed aircraft, we repossessed ferries. The vessels are not that small because we are so expensive that the vessel has to bear the cost.

[01:24:37] But we've been approached on various other, uh, projects like for example, a submarine in Russia and so on. Yeah, I like the fact that the bad guys get to come up with, gives me a great deal of satisfaction.

[01:24:49] Jordan Harbinger: To hear about the extreme lengths, captain Max Hardberger will go to retrieve these ships. Check out episode 8 96 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:24:59] After the show, we talked about why exploring the ocean is key to stemming climate change even more important in space exploration. That's also covered quite a bit. In her book, we did an episode on using the ocean to stem climate change. That was Mike Kelland episode 9 32. We talked about a certain type of really easy to find and produce chemical, for lack of a better word, but mostly harmless bio stuff that can be put into the ocean that sucks in carbon.

[01:25:23] Fascinating episode. A lot of scientists really liked it, but also a lot of people who don't know anything about science because Mike was really good at explaining it. Why am I selling you that episode? I'm not entirely sure. All things Susan Casey will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

[01:25:37] Transcripts are also in the show notes. Advertisers deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show, the newsletter over at Jordan harbinger.com/news. We bring out bits of wisdom from the show, stuff Gabriel and I are thinking about and some advice, some mistakes.

[01:25:55] We see people making just little bits every week in the newsletter. I think you'll love it so far. A lot of y'all do. And don't forget about six Minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created, an association with Podcast one.

[01:26:12] My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Foggerty and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. And if you know somebody who's interested in science, in the ocean, in diving.

[01:26:30] In animals and marine life, definitely share this episode with 'em. I think they'll dig it. Oh, and also shipwrecks. I mean, I can't not mention shipwrecks for the 50th time. 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Gadget Lab.

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