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

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

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:02] Victor Vescovo: Technology has cured diseases, fed us, kept us warm, have done all these things for 8 billion people on the planet, and we've gotta keep that technological machine moving forward, which we are.

[00:00:19] 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. I. 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 amazing folks, spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional music mogul, tech luminary, special operator, or real life pirate.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today, we're talking with an amazing explorer who's been to the peak of each of the Earth's highest mountains, as well as to the deepest parts of every ocean.

We're talking with Victor Vevo. Usually I don't focus on these sorts of achievements. I don't know, it's just not really my thing. However, not only did Victor descend to these previously unknown depths, but he also helped fund design, test, and construct the vehicle that actually did it. I was not aware.

That we know more about the surface of Mars than about the deepest parts of the ocean here on Earth. I really had no clue about any of that. This story is really something else. Victor's kinda like a Tony Stark meets Jacques Csau kind of guy. He's also a really good storyteller and an amazing person all around.

I am very glad that we got to do this once. So if you're interested in science, the Ocean's, sea life climate technology, this is a great episode for you. Alright, here we go with Victor Vevo.

I'd love to hear a little bit about your background because that's what really kind of got me. Susan Casey, who introduced us, was like, oh, he was in the military and then he did this thing and then he started a hedge fund and then he started this other thing and they went to all mountains. Then they went bottom of the ocean.

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

[00:02:13] Victor Vescovo: Yeah, I've done, uh. More than a few things. Uh, born and raised in Texas. Uh, I was fortunate. I, I tested pretty well. I went to school out here in California. I went to Stanford and then I, uh, kind of went in between management consulting and investment banking for a while.

Picked up a master's from MIT and then from Harvard Business School and then went into private equity. Lately I'm a little bit more in a venture capital than private equity, but that's how I made my money to fund all the various activities that I've done. When I was about 26, I was at business school and I was approached by the Navy because I have some language skills and other things.

They invited me to be an intelligence officer in the reserves, and that started a 20 year career in the military, kind of on the side for several occasions. I was called up for relatively long periods of time to serve active duty in certain conflicts, but, uh, all the while I was, uh, doing my day job of investing and also started a multi-decade career in mountain climbing.

So that was something I was really passionate about. But as I got older. I realized it's more of a young man's game and I was looking for a different challenge that was more cerebral, more logistic, maybe more financially difficult. And then the ocean calls when you, when that happens. And that began a multi-year endeavor, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans been flying since I was 19.

So I've done that. So I've done a whole lot of different activities and uh, it's been a great ride.

[00:03:36] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like that was, man, walking up these mountains is really tiring what's more expensive, but involves less walking Ah, the ocean.

[00:03:43] Victor Vescovo: Yeah, exactly. And quite frankly, of all the things that I've done in my entire life, and I've done a lot of things, some of them fairly risky, mountain climbing by far is the most dangerous thing you can do in my view, because it's such a combination of factors, many of which you have no control over, like the weather in particular.

And if you're not careful and you're not prudent, you can die pretty. You can die in all those environments, but you can die pretty easily in the mountains. One of the greatest mountain climbers I know of Ule Shk climbed what I consider the most deadly mountain in the world. Anna Perna, he climbed it solo, I think in about three days or less, maybe even less than that.

He died on Everest. 'cause he just had, you know, what appears to be one bad move and he tumbled down a rock face. An incredibly experienced climber just shocked that that happened. But it's a dangerous environment. So really, uh, mountains were great at teaching risk management. If you do it for a long period of time, you have to learn that skill.

And that's a really helpful skill to have just for life in general.

[00:04:41] Jordan Harbinger: I would imagine. It's terrifying. I have friends who go, don't worry about me, I'm going to Kilimanjaro. It's really easy. It's mostly walking. And then one of my friends passed away because a rock probably kicked off by a mountain goat.

Just hit him in the head and that was it. Yeah. And he was like hiking. I mean, this is not, he was

[00:04:55] Victor Vescovo: not scaling rocks. Yeah. Most people don't die on Kilimanjaro. No. But, uh, you can, you know, break an ankle 'cause you're gonna, and it is 18,000 feet. And what people don't realize is that, you know that altitude will affect different people differently.

Some people can climb Everest without oxygen. Some people, I've actually seen a young woman unfortunately die at about 18,000 feet from acute cerebral edema brought on by altitude. What is that? What is cerebral eda? It's basically where your body malfunctions when it gets to higher altitude and you're, you get water on the brain, you're not getting enough oxygen.

And it begins in some people, a very, very small percentage of people, you'll begin to shut down. But everyone, in a way, I, I believe, from my experience, they have kind of a genetic limit to how high they can climb. And you will go no further, and you don't know until you actually get to that altitude. I had a good friend of mine who tried Everest this year.

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

[00:05:50] Jordan Harbinger: So he went back down? Yeah, he went back down. Thank goodness. Yeah. Well, yeah.

[00:05:53] Victor Vescovo: I mean, he was gonna get edema if he kept going up higher. And so when you're climbing ultra high mountains like Everest.

In the back of your mind, you're always going, okay, uh,

[00:06:01] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, I hope

[00:06:02] Victor Vescovo: I can keep going. I don't know what's gonna happen. And it's people that just push through that, that sometimes end up dead.

[00:06:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It seems like you'd be really tempted. Well, I've trained for this for three years. Right. I feel a little off, but I'm probably fine.

And that's like, Nope. That was the point at which like 2020 hindsight, that was the point at which you were dying and you, you were just the last to know, like your brain was already telling you were dying. I mean, there's a classic

[00:06:23] Victor Vescovo: example of that. A guy named Doug Hanson, who is a postal worker from, I believe Seattle, he climbed in the infamous into thin air incident with Rob Hall, and it was his third attempt to climb Everest.

And on his third attempt, Rob Hall, the great guide from New Zealand got him to the summit. But evidently it took everything that Doug had and he collapsed on the way down and he died. And so did Rob, his guide who was trying to get him down. You don't just endanger yourself, you endanger other people when you're up there in the aptly named death zone, and it's not just an hyperbolic description.

I mean, you literally, if you did nothing in state above that altitude, you would die. You simply cannot get in enough oxygen to survive unless you're a freak of nature. But, uh, yeah, so it's a, it's a very serious place, Everest, but it does teach you a lot about risk management. It took me two tries.

[00:07:13] Jordan Harbinger: There's a lot of sort of, I don't know if desensitize, well probably desensitization is the right word, where with, with Everest, where there was that guy, green boots, who was just, had some buddy who died on the mountain.

He was there for like, I don't know, what was it, 20 years. And people would go, oh, there's, there's green boots. It's like, well, that's a dead bo. But then people are just like, yeah,

[00:07:30] Victor Vescovo: you have to understand the context you're getting in the death zone of Everest. That is not down here in Saratoga, California, where you're talking normal conversation.

It is like a war zone up there. You can barely keep your own faculties focused. In fact, I didn't recognize one of my own mountain guides for a minute or two when I was up there. You're high, you're completely hypoxic, almost always sick. You haven't eaten near enough. Your body can't even process enough food.

So just put yourself in that entire context. And you're lucky that you can keep one foot going after another uphill and not fall over, much less be worried about the person right next to you. You are literally just trying to survive. Imagine being like in a foxhole with a gunfire gone off. It's different, but it's not, you know, mentally it's kind of like that.

[00:08:19] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. I, I hadn't thought about that. 'cause of course, when you read about it, it just sounds like a really hard hike with dead bodies around you.

[00:08:26] Victor Vescovo: No, it is not that. If you make one wrong move, if you do not clip your rope into that fixed line and you have a bad moment, you, there's no question.

You're gone. Wow. In silence,

[00:08:37] Jordan Harbinger: Nick. Because no one can go get, it's too Oh, there's no way.

[00:08:40] Victor Vescovo: No way. It,

[00:08:41] Jordan Harbinger: oh man.

[00:08:42] Victor Vescovo: That

[00:08:42] Jordan Harbinger: is. Yeah.

[00:08:43] Victor Vescovo: And you would risk people's lives, no question. By retrieving bodies, then how do you even bring 'em down for God's sake? That's a good

[00:08:49] Jordan Harbinger: point. You can't fly a helicopter up there or anything.

[00:08:51] Victor Vescovo: Not really. And yes, people go, well, helicopters have gotten to some rivers. Yes, but also I fly helicopters. I don't think people understand when you're at that altitude, there are so little air. It would take the slightest gust or loss of control and that helicopter would crash. That's why helicopters crash at high altitude.

See so often I see. 'cause there's just not a lot for them to bite into. So your control over the glider, even though it looks like it's fine, it's really tricky to fly a helicopter at high altitude, especially when there's winds and Everest is exactly that. So yes, you can get helicopters on the Everest, but it is very dangerous flying and you certainly can't be picking stuff up and you know, just 'cause

[00:09:28] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Fast roping down, grab the guy and leave. Not quite realistic. No

[00:09:32] Victor Vescovo: it's not. No, not, it doesn't work that way. My

[00:09:33] Jordan Harbinger: goodness. Everyone's so hyped up about space exploration. I know you are as well, but you said well yeah,

[00:09:38] Victor Vescovo: yesterday we had the first commercial space walk

[00:09:41] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. By Jared Isman. So that was, that was kind of a

[00:09:45] Victor Vescovo: surprise to see in the news.

Well, yeah, and it came right on the uh, back of SpaceX, you know, wrestling the two astronauts from the right, the Boeing Star liner. So it's kinda like they spiked the ball yesterday. It's good old SpaceX, but I went up on Blue Origin. Which is, uh, also a great organization and they got me into space and hopefully one day I'll get to go into orbit with them on their next rock at the new Glen.

[00:10:06] Jordan Harbinger: That's super exciting. I know SpaceX, I'm stoked about space exploration. You've said ocean exploration is actually more important or someone associated with You may have said that. I wrote, I wrote that you said it, but now I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure someone

[00:10:19] Victor Vescovo: associated with me. Okay, gotcha. I actually believe they're equally important.

Okay, gotcha. Heck, I'm an venture investor in a company called Astro Forge here in California, and we're actually trying to explore and eventually mine asteroids. I mean, all sorts of things. I mean, I'm really big into both spacer exploration and marine exploration. I, I truly believe you need to do both.

[00:10:39] Jordan Harbinger: How far away are we from mining asteroids? Or is it so far that we don't know? How far is it like kind of outside, let's

[00:10:44] Victor Vescovo: say the cone of uncertainty is really why there are so many things that you have to do well in order to mine an asteroid. I believe it is a function of time. Otherwise, why would I have invested?

Right. But the issue is first you have to find the asteroids that are very dense with valuable metals. That in itself is a trick. Yeah. Then you actually have to do the orbital mechanics and mechanics of actually landing on an asteroid that's tumbling in space. Actually getting the material off the asteroid and getting it back to earth.

That's probably the, the easiest of those complex problems, but you have to do all of them. But it will happen in time and you just, like you did with the mercury missions, the Gemini emissions, and then Apollo in space exploration, you just build. On what you did before, slowly, methodically, carefully, and you keep building the skills and the machinery needed to do the next step because there are so many unknowns.

Yeah. In space exploration and ocean exploration that you're constantly kind of, you know, shining a small flashlight into a very dark room. Yeah. Hoping you don't follow into a pit and you slowly learn how to navigate your way in these complex environments,

[00:11:52] Jordan Harbinger: how do they even figure out what's inside an asteroid?

Because it's like, oh, the outside is, uh, I dunno, whatever, iron ore and dirt or whatever. And then, but inside is, I dunno what's more valuable than gold by kelo? Well, there are a lot,

[00:12:03] Victor Vescovo: uh, platinum group metals, iridium, rhodium, platinum, hopefully other metals, but they're very dense. That's a wonderful thing about asteroids.

It's not like you're separating 99 tons of dirt from one ton of valuable stuff. It's very concentrated, which makes it much easier and much more valuable. But you can look at the magnetic. Signature of a rock, you can look how it's actually moving in space. You can shoot a high powered laser at it and see what ablates off, and then do a mass spectometry of the wavelength of light that it get.

I mean, there's all sorts of nerdy stuff you can do.

[00:12:36] Jordan Harbinger: That's pretty cool. That's pretty damn cool though. Yeah,

[00:12:37] Victor Vescovo: of course.

[00:12:38] Jordan Harbinger: That's why, yeah, I mean, first of all, lasers blasting into space and then going, that's a big old rock of platinum. How are we gonna get that thing outta there? Exactly. That's kind of exciting.

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

[00:12:52] Victor Vescovo: that? It depends on the asteroid. Yeah. There's some silly numbers out there. We're going for much, much smaller asteroids that are actually in the near earth moon orbit, so they're actually relatively close.

Right, okay. We're not going out to Jupiter or anything like that. Yeah. That's not cost effective at this point. But no, there's enough out there. And really what it's about is so much what happens in venture capital. It's not so much, you know, getting the metal and bringing it back and selling it. It's building the tech that can do that.

That's what's valuable. If you can bring back even a pound of platinum from an asteroid for the first time, you know, maybe it's worth, you know, X, that's not what's valuable. Right. What's valuable is that you bloody did it. Yeah. Right? And and from there, where do you go? Then you can do it again and again, and get further out in the space and all this stuff.

That's what venture's all about. It's not about the actual product so much. Sometimes the technology you develop.

[00:13:42] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Yeah, that makes sense. Right, because if you can show, I don't know, the Air Force that you can do this, they're kind of like, okay, how many zillion dollars do you guys want for us to get this and for you to never sell it to China or whatever.

Right. Exactly. That's pretty amazing. I heard that humans have only explored 20% of the ocean, which to me is shockingly low. Yeah. I just kind of figured like, oh, we've got at least 60, 70% of this stuff mapped, whatever.

[00:14:06] Victor Vescovo: Well, or people look at Google Maps and they think they could see the sea floor. That's a very, very rough map.

I see. That's like doing an interstate highway map of the US with crayon. It's just, it's not that accurate. But the actual stat is 71% of planet earth is ocean. In fact, a stat that shocks people is that the average place on planet Earth is 4,000 meters underwater. This is more of an ocean world than it is a land.

Well, and most of it is deep ocean at 5,000 meters. So if you take the average, the average place on planet Earth is 4,000 meters underwater, which is like 15,000 feet. That's where most of the world is. So the point is 71% of the earth is ocean, and of that 75% is completely, completely unexplored, which means half of planet Earth.

It's still completely unexplored. And that's why I'm very passionate about ocean exploration. 'cause I love maps and I'm doing a lot of different projects to map the deep ocean and all that. But yeah, I mean we know in many respects more about the surface of Mars and the moon than we do of our own planet.

And it's because the ocean's really deep and it's opaque. You can't just shine a light. Right. And radar doesn't

[00:15:11] Jordan Harbinger: work. I didn't know. I didn't realize. I just, because I've, as a layman, I'm like, oh, submarines just shoot the sound thing and then everything comes back and there's a big map.

[00:15:19] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. Even the best military submarines that are designed for depth, maybe their maximum depth is seven or 800 meters.

The average depth of the ocean is about 5,000 meters. So they just scraped the surface. They're just getting underwater. But most of the ocean is really deep. And where I went, the deep ocean trenches, they're even twice that deep. And those are really hard to get to. We know nothing. Oh, here's another stat that'll blow your mind when it comes to ocean exploration.

'cause everybody's obsessed with climate change and climate models. I think one reason a lot of climate models often miss the mark is the fact that, again, 71% of the world is ocean. The deep ocean trenches are only like two or 3% of the ocean, but they hold 40% of the water. When people talk about, oh wow, the ocean is holding more heat than we thought it could, or Why are the currents so unpredictable?

Well, it's 'cause we never go there, right? It's been impossible to go there. So they kind of just guessed or had theories about how this, like for example, when I went to the bottom of the Maria on the trench, the first time I was told there would be no current 'cause. It's just too deep, right? There's no energy can get down there.

Sure enough, I got to the bottom, turned on my thrusters off. I just sat in the sub right off the surface and what happened? I started drifting. I came up, told my scientists, and they're like, no, you didn't. No, you no. I know what I saw. Mm-hmm. You can look at the video.

[00:16:34] Music: Yeah,

[00:16:35] Victor Vescovo: there was a current, but that was a big deal because wow, if there's a current there, that means the water's moving, right?

Which means it's circulating. So if water is circulating in the deepest trench on earth. What is the actual impact on climate models for the ocean? You know, gotta do some new math, right? New. Yeah. Throw those numbers. So that's why this expression is very interesting. There's so many different facets, whether it's marine biology, marine geology, oceanography, even archeology, finding wrecks and things like that, which I like doing as well.

There's just so much fun stuff, unlike space, which is empty except for, you know, asteroids except for all

[00:17:10] Music: the stuff that's in there.

[00:17:11] Victor Vescovo: Or yeah, or maybe life on another moon way out there. But, uh, here on earth, we have a lot of things still to explore.

[00:17:17] Jordan Harbinger: Most of the ocean is unexplored. Is is the stuff that we've mostly mapped and explored just near the United States and Europe, because is it just easier for us to access that stuff?

Oh, absolutely.

[00:17:27] Victor Vescovo: You know, the deep ocean in the middle of Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. I. We did one dive on my expedition to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans in the Southern Ocean. In fact, most people can't even name the five oceans on planet earth.

I literally, they'll do the first four can

[00:17:46] Jordan Harbinger: also now do it. They'll,

[00:17:47] Victor Vescovo: they'll do Atlantic Pacific and Indian, then they'll go, uh, Arctic.

[00:17:51] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay.

[00:17:52] Victor Vescovo: But then they never get the one in the bottom, which is the southern ocean.

[00:17:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Is that really what it's called? I feel like that's what it's called.

[00:17:57] Victor Vescovo: And some people say the Antarctica Ocean.

Yeah. Well, colloquially maybe, but it's actually called the Southern Ocean. And we mapped the deepest point there for the first time. And I went and dove it. But we were just getting hammered on the surface. Yeah, on the surface by the storms. The snow, ice, it was horrific. In fact, it was the first time that actually the submarine collided with the ship because the, the waves and the motion was just so chaotic.

We did one successful dive in like 30 days here. Thank God it was, it was a dive where I tried to go to the bottom, but other, then we just said, you know what, we're done. And because it's so harsh, that's why, you know, it's, it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean.

[00:18:40] Jordan Harbinger: So on this ship, I'm just trying to get my head around this.

On the ship, you have terrible weather. You're stuck on the boat and you're just waiting for like one day that you can go down and do this. But the rest of the entire month you're like looking out the window and going, well, today's not the day. And then you read and eat the same stuff with the same people and get on each other's nerves for like the next 20, 29 days.

It's not that

[00:19:00] Victor Vescovo: bad. In fact, it's actually pretty good because, you know, you make sure the ship has, you know, good food, great coffee, you're always doing something with the technical gear, especially the submersible. You know, they were always begging for more time, oh, we need, let's fix this, let's harden that.

Let's, you know, they're always one more time and then, you know, every day. Yeah. But yeah, you're right. Every day, you know, we're checking the satellite maps 'cause we had a satellite link, so I took, got a spot beam from a satellite right on my ship. So we had good connectivity. That was a whole separate issue.

But you know, every day we're pouring over the satellite maps, you know, where's the hole in the weather gonna appear? You know, is that gonna work? Is it, you know, so there's a lot of activity and we all really got along well. Thank God. Thank God you have to have a good, happy crew.

[00:19:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can only imagine if you get one or two people that don't jbe, you're just like, I'm gonna go throw this guy off the boat.

[00:19:44] Victor Vescovo: Well, that's why you have shakedown cruises. Military does. I was in the US Navy for 20 years. I know how it works. And if there are people that are not working out, or if you don't have a good team, that was one thing about my favorite explorer role. Amon, you know, you swap 'em out with no pity, no delay.

You just, that's your job. It's the leader. You have to get the team right and you gotta do it quickly. And if there are still problems, then you need to have those hard conversations. I, I relieved multiple people off the expedition while we were underway. You know, you're getting off with the next stopper, it's not gonna work out anymore.

You just had to do it. That was my job. And that's what I do in business as well. 'cause business very much is the business of. Creating the teams that make the companies run. And they're no different. Where you need the right people in the right place, they need to be properly motivated and everything else.

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

[00:20:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense. Of course, we've all seen businesses where there's dysfunctional teams,

[00:20:48] Victor Vescovo: and it can come from any number thing people think classic dysfunctional teams is, oh, there's like a bad egg who's just a jerk, or this or that, or she's a jerk.

But it can be, you can have teams where you have just a lot of really, really strong, capable people. But that doesn't work either, right? Because they're butting heads constantly. Sure. You have to have a good mixture of leadership capability, mutual respect. Sense of humor is absolutely imperative, huh? Yeah, because under high stress, it's humor that gets you through.

It usually makes sense. Especially at the, gosh

[00:21:18] Jordan Harbinger: you mentioned waiting for a hole in the weather. Does that ever happen, like at night, like, okay, the night's gonna be the calmest part, or is it too dangerous to go down at night?

[00:21:25] Victor Vescovo: We preferred it not to be night. Of course. Yeah. We typically would not do it at night doing deep ocean dives, but we would come up at night.

'cause actually in some respects it was easier to pick up at night 'cause you could see the lights of the submarine in the ocean.

[00:21:37] Music: Oh,

[00:21:38] Victor Vescovo: and you, it was easy to pick stuff up out. You know, the landers that went down with me, we could see them more easily. The ship was pretty bright. But there are pluses and minuses to both.

But we typically. Would not launch at night.

[00:21:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, that just seems, it already seems terrifying in many ways that it's like, why? Why make it harder? But if the only hole in the weather is at 4:00 PM it's like, well, all right, you do what you need to do. Yeah.

[00:22:00] Victor Vescovo: There was also the circadian rhythm we had to take into account of just, of just humans, right?

If human beings you, you don't wanna necessarily do a launch, and then people are working all through the night when they're normally asleep, then you start, you know, there's a lot of high tension cables, a lot of stuff has to go, right? So you have to take all that into account when you're doing a mission and you know, yeah.

And assessing risk.

[00:22:17] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense, right? You don't want somebody who's sort of dozing off if they're supposed to stop that tension cable at a certain point, or like. Is too tired to have full mental faculty.

[00:22:27] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. Well just think it this way. You know you're gonna take your flight to London, you're scheduled at, you know, 7:00 PM Oh, great.

Okay. Then it's delayed until 3:00 AM Yeah. You want the pilots flying, right? I'm like, tell me the pilot, just the

[00:22:38] Jordan Harbinger: reason it was delayed is he was sleeping. Right? Sound. He's been up the whole time. Yeah. He's been drinking coffee since five. Right? Yeah. Obvious it's five, right? Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned in the book that something called Crush Depth Limited Humanity for a while.

What is Crush Depth?

[00:22:51] Victor Vescovo: Well, crush Depth is directly related to the design and construction materials of the submersible. If you go down in a paper cup, you're gonna be crushed, you know, at a hundred meters. Sure. Military submarines are made out of steel primarily. Okay. So they're going to reach a certain depth on average, between 300 and a thousand meters.

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

[00:23:17] Jordan Harbinger: gr right? And everyone goes, uhoh, who's that? Right? And

[00:23:20] Victor Vescovo: they will implode. And that's what happened to the submersible to Titanic. You know, last year, which some friends of mine were on, and that was a flawed design and it was not operated correctly and it imploded.

[00:23:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:23:31] Victor Vescovo: That was really horrible. So that's crushed depth for the, for that submarine, it was about 4,000 meters. Mine was designed and tested to a crushed depth. The 15,000 meters, it's the deepest, capable submarine ever built. That thing was a tank and we tested it to that.

[00:23:49] Jordan Harbinger: I I we're definitely gonna get into that.

'cause some, some of the stories about testing this, I was just like, that's the test. Yeah. Um, some of the like Soviet Union looking type stuff, stuff. It was Russian. There in Soviet, but Yeah. Ba but that thing was built. Whatever. We, we'll, we'll we'll get there. We'll get there. 'cause I'm thinking that was not, that was not a modern facility, but I guess it doesn't matter.

It sounds like the way they describe it in the book is you got this V tattoo with seven peaks and five depths and it's like, I don't have

[00:24:13] Victor Vescovo: a tattoo. No, no. I don't really. This is so this is just nonsense. Yeah. There that one thing I learned about, you know, not that I seek publicity, but it was funny. I just do what I do.

'cause I like doing it. I love the missions, I love flying. I like climbing. But no one heard about me before this marine stuff. 'cause I didn't care. I still don't care.

[00:24:28] Music: Yeah.

[00:24:29] Victor Vescovo: But that was newsworthy enough that people started reporting on it. So I'll do things like this to explain it. Yeah. To correct misconceptions.

Yeah. But I am stunned. Absolutely stunned. How many details are gotten wrong? Yeah. In the media, this is like,

[00:24:43] Jordan Harbinger: definitely, uh, clipped right out of the book for people who are wondering, you did not write the book, someone else did. But it says, yeah, you got a V tattoo with seven peaks and five depths. So it was just like, up, it's just wrong.

I don't have that tattoo. It's like, I, I just thought like, oh, he got a tattoo and then was like, oh, I, I only thought about going to the tops. Now I gotta go to the bottoms. It's like, I. No, just a apocryphal story that sounded cool in the book. All right.

[00:25:03] Victor Vescovo: Or just another one there. In the BBC, they reported when I went to the bottom of the ocean that I saw quote sweet wrappers like candy wrappers.

Right? Okay. But British English, right? Oh, I

[00:25:14] Jordan Harbinger: see.

[00:25:14] Victor Vescovo: Some PR person in England just put that in, confused it with a different trench. But since the BBC reported it, it is now part of history, right? There were candy wrappers at the bottom of Challenger deep. It's like, nope, that happened because it was reported by everybody.

And I'm saying that didn't happen. That's fascinating. So, but there's so many details like that, what you read in even the most reputable news sources. Always take with a grain of salt. 'cause they do get it wrong and they don't

[00:25:42] Jordan Harbinger: really. Correct. That's really interesting. 'cause of course I have questions like, I can't believe there was trash at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.

Well, I did find a piece

[00:25:49] Victor Vescovo: of trash.

[00:25:49] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:25:49] Victor Vescovo: I did find, and I'm not sure what it was, I'm pretty sure it was plastic, but there was no question there was human because there was like an S Oh I see. On there was a piece of packaging, but I didn't find candy wrappers. Right. Although at a different part of Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean, we did see a beer bottle and we're pretty sure it was a Heineken.

Huh.

[00:26:08] Jordan Harbinger: I, you, you can't really even point to the Danes on that one. 'cause they sell it everywhere, right? Yeah, right. It could have been. Could have been anybody, but we'll blame the Danish, whatever. Is it Danish or Dutch? I don't even know. I don't even know. Yeah, I don't drink beer. We'll blame the Danish.

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

[00:26:29] Victor Vescovo: couldn't decide when I was in my twenties what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to go hardcore into business and investing in finance, or if I wanted to pursue, frankly, you know, a hardcore military career, being an intelligence officer, doing war planning and all this stuff.

I ended up kind of doing both. I kind of figured out how to do it. As part of that, I accepted a PhD program position at MIT, and it was defense analysis. So really it was about the mathematical modeling of warfare. I just, I did a little bit bit of that when I was at Stanford and I really got to do it at MIT where, you know, how can you predict the outcome of conflicts and what are the key variables to decide who wins a war?

And I was really interested in that. So I did that at t, I didn't want to get a PhD. That would've taken too long and I didn't like the TR career trajectory for that. So I took a master's and I left. But my master's thesis that you just alluded to was literally the balance of air power in central Europe, a quantitative assessment where I basically built a mathematical model for what would've happened if East and West had fought in Europe during the Cold War.

And, you know, and, and more importantly, especially for all the nerds out there, it's like, no, but what were the key variables that drove the conclusion of who won and who lost, and what were the most leveraged things you could invest in to change the outcome? That's the real important lesson. So that's what it, but it was really operations research.

Who, who was gonna win that

[00:27:49] Jordan Harbinger: one? The United States?

[00:27:50] Victor Vescovo: The

[00:27:50] Jordan Harbinger: West. Nato. Nato, yeah.

[00:27:51] Victor Vescovo: Mainly because after a mobilization period, we had better numbers, better systems, but most importantly, better pilots. Really, in doing all my research for that thesis, what I turned out again and again, it comes down to the human factor.

You put a great pilot in a mediocre playing healed defeat any other aircraft. Wow. No matter what it is, if it's a mediocre pilot and you just come up over and over again where you end up in real world situations where, you know, that's why the Israelis are so amazing when they go into aerial combat. I mean, they defeated the Syrians like 92 to nothing.

Wow. In 1982 and the Falcons War, you had inferior numbers by the British, but they never self suffered an air to air loss from the Argentinians. And it goes down to pilot training and pilot quality and that's, that was the key differentiator. So. Off tangent, but that was something I was pretty passionate about.

Yeah, no, that's interesting.

[00:28:39] Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting because as a person who knows nothing about flying at all, you kind of think, oh, these machines are so advanced. The pilot just has to know the controls. But it's like not true at all. No,

[00:28:48] Victor Vescovo: that's kind. That's kinda the old Soviet or Russian style I see is that it's all underground control.

It's all about the platform. The human is just a cog in the machine. But what history shows you quite clearly even now, is that really well-trained pilots with good doctrine can completely overcompensate for inferior technology. And if they have superior technology, which they usually do, they get five to one 10 to one 50 to one kill ratios.

And that's why you, when you also study, whether it's World War I or Modern Warfare, it comes down to 90% of the time, if you're shot down in a plane, you never saw who shot you down.

[00:29:26] Jordan Harbinger: Really? Wow. Cor,

[00:29:27] Victor Vescovo: it's ambush,

[00:29:28] Jordan Harbinger: right? So it's not the top gun dog fighting. Yeah,

[00:29:30] Victor Vescovo: no, that's really rare. And that's Hollywood. It really is.

Situational awareness. I know where you are, but you don't know where I am. And I get a missile shot off and take you out before you even know what's happening. Because radars look forward, they don't look all around, don't get me started on aerial warfare. I could go on for hours about that.

[00:29:48] Jordan Harbinger: I, I am curious what, so AI would be like the best, theoretically the best pilot at some point it will be able to best the best human pilots at some point.

Yeah. And then that decide everything.

[00:29:57] Victor Vescovo: Well, you know how you can do the projection where that goes, where you would effectively have, you know, maybe a human optional aircraft is kind of where you're gonna go. But yeah, you could have an AI with a training data set of some of the best pilots ever and have cameras all around the aircraft.

It would be better than a human. Mm-hmm. Because it would have 360 degree view. It would have the accumulated experience of any fighter pilot ever build a training set reaction to it. And it could do maneuvers. No human could survive. Right, right. I would be absolutely terrified to go into a dog fight with a completely AI controlled fighter aircraft.

It would be suicide.

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So come on and join us. You'll be in smart Company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Alright, back to Victor Vesco. Especially with like drone technology where your GForce is zero to like whatever maximum that would kill a human in like one second, right?

[00:33:12] Victor Vescovo: That maximum of nine Gs for a human.

And even then they're gonna probably pass out, but a machine wouldn't even think twice. And that's the other thing that they've, that they've seen even in very initial studies of doing, you know, AI combat in silica, you know, doing simulations of putting human pilots against AI driven, they've kind of done that a little bit.

They said it's unnerving because the AI controlled fighter planes are utterly fearless. They just immediately make the decision and do things that even a human will hesitate just a little bit. Sure. But that little bit of hesitation can kill

[00:33:43] Jordan Harbinger: you. I would imagine an AI can be like, I need to get three feet above the water level to avoid this.

And the human's like, Ooh, can I do that? The AI's just like, well, whatever. It's gonna work or it's not. And I'm a machine. I don't really care if I crash. Yeah,

[00:33:54] Victor Vescovo: yeah. Probability is 95%. I'll do it. Okay. Done. Right. Yeah. Done. Yeah. Is what is the

[00:33:57] Jordan Harbinger: guys like. Okay, I do have kids at home. Well, I'll, I'll just try it.

Right. Oh, by the way, it's an interesting point

[00:34:01] Victor Vescovo: you made about skimming the ocean because that is one of the key ways you can evade, uh, missile shots is by getting really, really low because you blend in with a ground. The radars can't tell the difference between the ground and a fighter plane. Even if it's moving.

There's too much clutter that is accurate in Top gun when they're weaving in the mountains and stuff. Yeah. That is one way to evade missiles is because the missile can't figure out what you are and what the terrain is.

[00:34:24] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that makes sense. That actually makes sense. I. They have interesting stories that now I'm resing whether or not they're true.

In the book, when you climbed a summit in Russia in, I think it was like 1991 Yeah. And you get back to Moscow and you're like, that's not the flag that was on top of the building. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:38] Victor Vescovo: No, the coup happened the day we summited the highest mountain in Russia and in Europe, and we came back down, go, Hey, we summited.

This is great. And all the Russians were like clustered around the radio and we're like, Hey, what's what? What's up? There's a coup underway in Moscow. We're like, oh, crap. Yeah. Think our plane's gonna take off in time. Yeah. If we actually were considering hiking across the border in the Turkey, if things got really dicey, that would've been a pretty rough trek.

But we could have done it. But things, we just stayed there for a couple of days, drank vodka with the Russians, and eventually things calmed down and we flew into Moscow and yeah, there was burning stuff in the streets. The flag had changed and it was sketchy at the airport. I bet. But, but you know, good old Western passports, they were like, they, they didn't want us there.

They, they wanted us out. That's, you're lucky. They weren't like,

[00:35:25] Jordan Harbinger: we had bargaining chips. Look at these three that just walked. It was very

[00:35:28] Victor Vescovo: confusing. And so when, when things are really confusing, people just, they just want you to get outta there. So that happened. That was fun.

[00:35:35] Jordan Harbinger: You were on top of the mountain and the entire world changed overnight

[00:35:38] Victor Vescovo: in Russia.

It certainly did. Yeah.

[00:35:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, it's changed here also, right? We were like, okay, so no more nuclear annihilation maybe. Yeah, right. Possibly. Yeah. You never know, but yeah, TBD on that one. Yeah. You speak fluent Arabic or you did it 1.0,

[00:35:53] Victor Vescovo: I'm not fluent. No, I don't think any Western can ever speak fluent Arabic, but I, I had a tutor and I trained in Arabic.

I was part of my job requirement. I lived there for almost about a year and a half, a little longer than that. And yeah, it got pretty good. 'cause I was living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and I had to. I use my Arabic a lot, but now that was 30 years ago, so it's degraded. But no, I learned Arabic and I spoke, I learned French when I was little, uh, German in college.

And uh, lately a little bit of Italian 'cause that's my ancestry. So yeah, a couple languages.

[00:36:21] Jordan Harbinger: Now it's too late, but I'm gonna ask anyway. Is it Vesco or Ves? Covo.

[00:36:24] Victor Vescovo: It's Vesco in the West and it's Vesco in Italian. I mean it means bishop in Italian.

[00:36:30] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Because I was, I can't stop saying it the one of those ways, but it depends which way you prefer.

'cause I'm gonna write it down. I just do

[00:36:38] Victor Vescovo: it. American English, VES Covo.

[00:36:40] Jordan Harbinger: I was like, do this at the front of the show. And don't forget now you're immediately forget. Have you ever been seriously injured doing any of this stuff? Oh yeah,

[00:36:47] Victor Vescovo: yeah, yeah. I would assume so. Yeah. I almost, you know, bought it on the highest mountain in South America ua.

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

So I was just getting pummeled by, not rocks, but by boulders. Boulders. And I got smashed in the head and then I had a huge boulder that like impacted my spine. Ooh. So I was laid flat and I was unconscious for a minute or two. When I came to, my guide was hovering over me and there were only two others on our trip, and I couldn't speak.

I was partially paralyzed in my legs and I had amnesia. I was in a very, very bad way. And of course it was in the mid-afternoon and a storm was coming in and the three of them thought I was completely out of it. But actually I was quite lucid. I could understand what they were saying. They were saying there's no way we can carry 'em down, not the three of us, not this altitude.

And so they seriously had only one option, which was we're just gonna, I. Give him everything we can to keep him warm and we'll come back tomorrow morning. Oh my God.

[00:38:04] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine hearing

[00:38:04] Victor Vescovo: that. Yeah. They're gonna leave me out there to struggle through at 22,000 feet

[00:38:09] Jordan Harbinger: in a storm while injured and not able to move.

Yeah.

[00:38:12] Victor Vescovo: I mean, what else could they do? Yeah, I mean, I mean, honestly, I didn't begrudged them that, but fortunately there's a team of four French climbers on the summit, and I had spoken with them in French on the way up, we'd become kind of buddy buddy. They were pretty cool guys. And they saw the accident and they came down and they recognized me, Hey, your friend, is he, is he okay?

And they said, no, he is really jacked up. So the seven of them told me, dragged me down a couple thousand feet that evening and night to get into an emergency shelter. And sure enough, a storm did blow through. Oh my God. And so I just struggled through that night and then eventually got down to an altitude where the helicopter got me out.

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

[00:38:56] Jordan Harbinger: But get new ones. Yeah. Yeah. I

[00:38:57] Victor Vescovo: mean, kind of. That's what I did and I went back two years later and did it.

[00:39:01] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, you can't, you can't let the mountain win on that one. That that's a, that would be too a, a bummer.

[00:39:05] Victor Vescovo: No, I was really, really careful the next time I

[00:39:08] Jordan Harbinger: went

[00:39:08] Victor Vescovo: to

[00:39:08] Jordan Harbinger: that area, man. Just being clothed that close to death, does it bring life into stark reliefs? Or, or, or focus somehow, or you don't recognize that? Yeah, it

[00:39:15] Victor Vescovo: does. It didn't like make me super religious or anything, but it definitely, I mean, the first thought that went through my mind was like, I just killed myself and for what?

To climb this stupid rock really, you know, kind of mad at myself, I'm gonna do this seven

[00:39:28] Jordan Harbinger: more times and then go in the

[00:39:30] Victor Vescovo: ocean. Yeah. But what it did do is like, you know, they call it climbers amnesia, not for that reason, which is, you know, when you get better and you're, uh, it wasn't that bad, you know, it kinda was.

But I think in that case it really made me, I. Appreciate risk management and that no matter what happens, you never, ever let yourself not get reckless, but even let your guard down. Yeah. 'cause those environments that we operate in, they're trying to kill you and they don't care.

[00:39:58] Jordan Harbinger: They don't care. Yeah.

It's hard for people who are like indoor kid ish, like myself to, you really have to realize like this, this is what a hostile environment is. Right. It's not just like, oh, the earth doesn't care about you. It's like, no, no, no. It would rather you fall off the edge of this mountain and die. Yeah. Yeah. One

[00:40:14] Victor Vescovo: analog I have to that, and it didn't happen until, you know, after that incident, was I learned how to fly helicopters, and one thing you learn flying helicopters is that they are inherently unstable.

What I mean by that, if you're flying a fixed wing aircraft and you completely let go of the controls. It will continue flying for quite a while. It's stable, it wants to fly. If you did that in a helicopter within seconds it would flip on its side, flip over and be unrecoverable. So you are constantly in positive control of a helicopter, which is why they are kind of dangerous.

'cause you, the pilot is really important in the helicopter. You're really betting on that pilot being good. Yeah. Especially in an emergency situation. 'cause they're inherently unstable. But the point is, is that nature and it all of its forces that are acting on you. It's like you're living in a helicopter.

If you let your guard down, driving on a highway or walking across an intersection on a icy road, you're in that unstable environment. And if you're not careful not to make people paranoid. I should be a little paranoid driving on the highway, but sure, you can mitigate it.

[00:41:20] Music: Yeah.

[00:41:20] Victor Vescovo: And that's what I've learned in my whole life of doing all these interesting things is.

You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware and you need to mitigate those risks.

[00:41:31] Jordan Harbinger: I know you don't. Alright. It says in the book, I have to preface everything with that now. Sure. That's okay. It says in the book you don't have any kids and you'd never married. I wonder if that makes it easier for you to risk your life.

Yes. 'cause you don't have people who are like, oh well dad left us and then fell off a rock.

[00:41:44] Victor Vescovo: Yes. Yeah, it does. And that does mystify me. Why there, you know, are some people that have like four kids and they're out there climbing on really dangerous mountains. Yeah. I kind of have been able to view myself as kind of expendable.

That's my job in the grand tapestry of life here on this earth is I'm one of those guys. If someone has to take a risk, probably should be me. I've been trained for it. I'm comfortable in those environments and I don't have a wife, I don't have kids that I'm responsible to. And that also I think sharpens my capabilities when I'm in a very dangerous situation.

I. I, I don't have the iconic, you know, picture on the dashboard of my plane kind of thing. That is not a good thing to have. Interesting.

[00:42:22] Jordan Harbinger: Because I don't, it distracts you from Yeah, I

[00:42:25] Victor Vescovo: know. I know. People will disagree with me and say, oh, but you know, that gives you connection to humanity and this and that and the other.

But man, when you are operating on the sharp edge of risk and life and death kind of things, you wanna be 100% there with you and the machine and the environment. Nothing else. Nothing pulling you back or whatever.

[00:42:42] Jordan Harbinger: I was wondering about that when I was reading about the submarine, the dives. It's like if there's an emergency down there, you don't wanna be with somebody who's like, oh my God, I never, my wife and kids.

You're like, Hey man, put the fire out in the electronics thing.

[00:42:55] Victor Vescovo: Well, yeah, I mean, that was why I, people always said, you know, it was a two seat submersible and I got some flack, especially from the scientific community saying, how come you only dive solo? Well, I did in the early days because I was a fricking test pilot.

If there was an emergency one, I wanted to be able to focus on it completely and not have to worry about the passenger. Number two, I was able to operate with a bit more risk. If it was just me, if the slightest thing was off and I had a passenger, I would abort the dive and go up. My primary responsibility was always to the passenger.

Everything else is secondary. When it was just me, I could test the submersible. Now some of those things bled into one another. Like the longest dive we ever did. At the bottom of Challenger deep, I did do with a passenger. But that was Hamish Harding, who's a trained jet pilot. And he and I talked about the dive and, and yeah, I was, we did a little bit more risky thing with him because we were really pushing the submarine to its limits.

But he was qualified to do that with me. And if something had gone wrong, you know, we would've immediately come up. But nothing did. It was fine. It was, it was a good dive. But, uh, yeah, you just have to calibrate your risk when you're with a, a passenger and you definitely take less risk when you have other people that are responsible

[00:44:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

That, yeah. That you're

[00:44:07] Victor Vescovo: responsible for.

[00:44:08] Jordan Harbinger: Right. That makes sense. I mean, I can't do stuff like this. Not that I was ever cutsy enough to do stuff like this in the first place, but I've got two little kids and I would, my wife's like, you can't go to this dangerous country right now. Like, what happens if you get, if you

[00:44:21] Victor Vescovo: die?

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

[00:44:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's unfair. It's, it's like, it's selfish. I guess I'm calling those people who climb dangerous mountains with four kids a little bit selfish. They're, I mean, they're probably com have a compulsive thing and they're also delusively confident that they won't die, probably.

[00:44:42] Victor Vescovo: Well, it just means they need to change their risk profile. The example I mentioned earlier where Rob Hall escorted Doug Hansen to the summit of Everest and he never came back and he had a pregnant wife back in New Zealand. I. The issue was, I don't wanna criticize Rob Hall, but point being, if you do have a pregnant wife back at home, I would think really long and hard about pushing any client or pushing any situation.

You should be the first one to say, Nope, we're done. And take the flack from it. Yeah. There's not enough money

[00:45:08] Jordan Harbinger: in the world. Yeah,

[00:45:09] Victor Vescovo: right. But you need to change your risk profile or not. Do big hard mountains, be an instructor on lower mountains, or you know, you need to think hard about your life. You can't have it both ways.

Life is a series of trade-offs.

[00:45:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. I think I get why people don't change their risk profile. It's kind of like, I don't wanna be old yet. I don't wanna be outta the game

[00:45:26] Victor Vescovo: yet. Age gracefully. People, we all age and doing what I do. I'm not fighting against, you know, mortality. I'm just adjusting to it.

And that's what you need to do. 'cause we're all gonna die. None of us make it outta here alive. Not yet. Anyway.

[00:45:41] Jordan Harbinger: That, yeah. Yeah. There's people working on that right here in Silicon Valley. Good luck with that. It's creepy when you're siphoning your son's blood into your body every day. That stuff freaks me out.

[00:45:50] Victor Vescovo: That's a whole separate topic, but, but. There's the physical side of immortality, which I think they're gonna really struggle with. But then there's the Insco way, which even now they're able to like, you know, just imagine dumping every email, every text you ever wrote into an ai. And even now they have algorithms that can mimic

[00:46:11] Jordan Harbinger: you.

So if I croak, Jen can text me about picking up a target order. Look it up on the internet

[00:46:16] Victor Vescovo: Now from beyond. There are actually services that allow you to do that now and then that's straight outta black. Mirror it, right? It is, yeah. But that's Black Mirror is often foretelling the future. Yes. And then Kevin AI just synthesize your voice, which is child's point now.

[00:46:28] Jordan Harbinger: Well, especially with, I've got 2000 hours of my voice out there. It would be easy for somebody to do that. I

[00:46:32] Victor Vescovo: think it will be common in the next 10 years for people who want it to have digital recreations of their deceased with the proper visuals, voice, and even personality based on all of their textile communications.

It will be perfect. Yeah.

[00:46:48] Jordan Harbinger: But it will be eerily. That seems like something you shouldn't use for a long period of time, like a drug or anything else. Right? Right. It's like maybe it eases you into your, like through a grief period of somebody suddenly dying. But it also has shades of the movie Psycho where he is talking to his mother, but it turns out to be a corpse in the basement in a rocking joke.

Oh,

[00:47:07] Victor Vescovo: she talked back. Maybe you wouldn't kill people. That's, I don't know. That's, you know what, you know,

[00:47:10] Jordan Harbinger: technology always cuts both ways. You might be outta something. Yes, exactly. This is gonna sound like I'm belittling your accomplishments, and I swear I'm not doing that. But as I sit here in my living room, I would've thought by 2014 when you started diving to the bottom of these trenches that we had done that all already.

Well, that's what

[00:47:25] Victor Vescovo: motivated me. I, uh, got the idea because Richard Branson came up with the original idea. I give him credit because he came up with a project called The Five Dives, but he chose a submersible technology that was based on carbon fiber, a quartz crystal, all this. It didn't work, but I said, wait a second.

I'm a little bit more. Techie and I said, that should be possible in putting my business hat on. I said, probably the five most dangerous words in the English language, which are uh, how hard could it be? Yeah. And I started, I do what I do. Right. I'm a pseudo engineer and I started taking apart the problem, putting into pieces, and I found out that each one of them was doable.

Expensive. Yeah. And hard but doable. Hmm. Well, no, no one else had done it. And this is something I said, like you just said, yeah, I can't believe no one has done this. This is ridiculous. I thought like, okay. The Navy did it in 1965, they dove in 1960. They dove to the very bottom of the challenger deep, and then that was it.

That one did one dive. And not only that, we didn't even know exactly where the other four deeps were. Oh really? No. That was one thing that happened to me where we were building the ship, building the sub, and I had assumed that we knew where the bottom, where's the map? That shows where we're going? Yeah.

Oh, it doesn't exist. Yeah. Where's the bottom of the Indian Ocean? And then, you know, my chief geologist, uh, the wonderful Dr. Heather Stewart of the Royal, uh, geologic Society, she was in the meeting, she was my geologist on the exhibition. She raised her hand saying, um, Victor, we actually don't know where exactly the other four deepest points are.

Yikes. I went like, literally, like, you're kidding? I said, well, you know, okay, well what do we need to figure out? You need a really big sonar. Oh man. Mounted on the ship. And I'm not kidding. I had to go and we installed the most powerful sonar ever put on a civilian vessel to map. These deep ocean trenches 'cause they're seven miles deep and we had to do it precisely and yeah, so we would literally just burn holes in the ocean for days at a time.

Tracking the bottom, finding the deepest point, and then diving it. They were not known. In fact, in the Indian Ocean, there were two candidates, thousands of miles apart. You know, we had to survey both of them and they went, okay, that one's like a hundred meters deeper. We'll go there. Right? The last thing you wanna do is find out that you went to the second deepest part.

Correct. In fact, people said, Victor, you really need to map it because yeah, if you dive the wrong one, that's not a good outcome. Remember that

[00:49:40] Jordan Harbinger: world record we gave you? Gimme that shit bad.

[00:49:42] Victor Vescovo: In fact, some of them we couldn't even verify. With sonar, it's in the margin area. Like the, in the Pacific Ocean, there are two really deep trenches.

The Mariana Trench and the Tonga trench. No one talks about Tonga trench. Two really deep points. The challenger deep and the horizon deep. No one had even remotely gone to the bottom of the horizon. Deep, not even tried. And yet they were really close on sonar. So we had to physically dive each one. And yet.

Actual measurements, multiple from any number of instruments. Turned out that the Tonga trench was like 110 meters shallower. That's like a football field, right? Miles, 11 miles thousand meters. Yeah, that's really close. Wow. We were actually really pulling for the Tonga trench 'cause we would've gotten to rewritten all the textbooks and stuff like, but no, the challenger deep is the deepest point.

Mean People out there may go like, well maybe there's some place. No, we know. It is the deepest point because the satellites in orbit have done magnetic surveying of the earth, plus or minus a couple of hundred meters. So we know, I see without doubt where all the deep ocean trenches are and we've now pretty much mapped all of that.

[00:50:45] Jordan Harbinger: Got it. So there's not like a super deep spot hiding somewhere. Right. That would be, unless it's under ice. Is that possible?

[00:50:52] Victor Vescovo: No, no. There's Antarctica, but that's an unusual issue. But short answer is no.

[00:50:56] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Yeah, I was thinking like under Antarctica. Oh, we look, this one over here is just massive. We do and no covered by Glacier.

Oh. I heard in the beginning you bought an existing sub instead of building one. No, I didn't buy, so that is

[00:51:09] Victor Vescovo: also not true. There had been only two dives to the very bottom of the ocean. One by the uh, the Triste in 1960 by Captain Don Walsh and Jacques Picard and then James Cameron, the film director.

Right, okay. In 2012. So he dove the Deep Sea challenger, his submersible based on steel and something called syntactic foam, which allows it to float. And he did one dive and then he gave it to the Woods Hole Institute. So my initial impression was, why reinvent the wheel? Right. I'll just get his submersible, I'll refurbish it, maybe add some new bells and whistles and I'll dive that one.

And I went to Woods Hole and I inspected it and it was not in great shape. And not only that, but I had a group from Triton Submarines who I was talking to who were the submarine experts, and they said, you could do so much more if you did blank sheet. We know so much more. And you can use titanium, not steel, and allow it to have two people, not one.

So they made a really good case for not doing that. And they were right. What is the market like

[00:52:10] Jordan Harbinger: for secondhand submarines that can go that deep? Right.

[00:52:12] Victor Vescovo: Let's just say it's really, really thin.

[00:52:14] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, there was a, I would imagine you send them an email like, I'm thinking about buying that submarine. And they're like, delete what, who's, who's this spammer?

[00:52:21] Victor Vescovo: Yeah, there's, it is actually in the book Expedition Deep Ocean, where the Josh Young, the embedded journalist we had on the five Deeps, he wrote about that. And yeah, it was one day I kind of, in my mind I said, I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to write the check and take the risk. 'cause I had no guarantee it would work.

I could have blown tens of millions of dollars down the drain. And oh, well, I wrote the email to Triton and I tried to. Say, look, I'm a serious person. I do have the financial wherewithal. You know, I'm rated Jet Pilot. I could pilot it. Let's just meet. Let me make my case and let's talk about it. Well, they'd really been wanting to build a submersible they can go to the bottom of for a long time.

[00:53:02] Jordan Harbinger: We need to find somebody who has deep pockets and will just let us recklessly spend all of his money.

[00:53:09] Victor Vescovo: In some respects, that's a Well, they had their own vision of what they wanted to build. Sure. They wanted to build a submersible that had a clear hole. Oh, that's a cool idea. Had never been done before, but theoretically it's possible out of glass.

But I know enough about manufacturing to know, just manufacturing that without any flaws would've been a research and development project. And in one of our first meetings, I said, I am not willing to write a bunch of checks for a five year r and d project.

[00:53:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah.

[00:53:36] Victor Vescovo: Let's take it a step back technologically, and I'll fund that.

In the same way. You know, I admire Elon Musk a lot. He always goes to first principles. You start with the requirements. What's the minimum requirement that you have? And then you build up from there and don't take anything else as you know, oh, well, other people did it this way. Just start from a blank sheet of paper with minimums and build from there.

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

[00:54:04] Jordan Harbinger: Barely. Yeah. But I gotta say, the submarine world really does seem like it's full of, of characters. Like guys who hunt for treasure, guys who've lived all over the world and grew up all over the world. People who are child prodigies, people who grow up to build one of a kind unique devices that most of us can only dream of.

And also just like some crazy people. I think maybe, yeah, what you described pretty much described my team

[00:54:27] Victor Vescovo: for five years.

[00:54:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I, I mean, some of the guys in the, in the book by, by Jo will link to the book in the show notes. I, I read the thing. I was just thinking I. You're just making this project harder by being insane and then having like red tape and all of these delays and like, oh, we didn't think about this, but it's gonna cost a million dollars to fix, or like $400,000 to fix.

And it's like you just need, the budget cannot be this like tightly controlled thing because there's so much stuff that goes, goes wrong. Well, it goes into

[00:54:53] Victor Vescovo: one of the key principles of doing anything, whether it's doing venture capital or private equity or doing expeditions, it's the boring professional discipline of program management.

How do you manage a complex program? And you have to do with a little bit of, give a little bit of take, but you have to have control and you have to have hard limits. And I think there's a reason why our project, of course it didn't come in on budget because there are unknown unknowns, but you have to set limits and you have to be able to flex your requirements so you can meet overall the objectives.

But that's why you see multi-billion dollar overruns on government projects because they're just so big and massive and many of them are undermanaged. That it's chronic. You see that less so in oil and gas exploration where you still have things go wrong, but they're much more professional about it and they know when to cut their losses.

Program management is the unsung enabler of all the great things that have happened in history, the construction of the Panama Canal, a Lewis and Clark Expedition, you know, the winning the race to the South Pole, studying those and how they were done is just as important as the sexy stuff, like the technology or the brave leadership, whatever.

But that's what gets stuff done. And that's, I think what I brought to the table was that I managed it very tightly personally, and it was benefited by the fact that, you know, I was the guy writing the checks. Yeah.

[00:56:13] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I had no sponsors. You didn't have to lobby from some, yeah,

[00:56:16] Victor Vescovo: I didn't have to ask more money from me.

It was all my checks. I didn't, I didn't have to abide by anyone else's expectations or calendar. Mm-hmm. Very important. Number two, I was a pilot, so I knew everything about that sub and I was working with them on design features, this, that, and the other. And I was also the person, you know, putting together this whole expedition and running it.

When you have like one person that is doing all those things, decisions are really tight and rapid and that's one thing that made it work. Plus, I think other people have described the initial phases of the first expedition. It was kind of like Oceans 11, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person?

Yeah. For that, for expedition management. Oh, that's Rob McCallum. Who would be the best ship captain? Oh, that's Stu Buckle. And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it. So I was able to assemble an extraordinary, the a group of people that all wanted to be there and were willing to do whatever

[00:57:12] Jordan Harbinger: it took to make it work.

You Pressure testing the sub, we kind of talked about this earlier in the show. You gotta pressure test the sub. Right. But also each of the parts.

[00:57:21] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. There is no test chamber large enough on earth. To test the entire submarine at 11,000 meters.

[00:57:29] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. So we

[00:57:30] Victor Vescovo: had to test all the components and then assume that they was worked together well at pressure.

But the most important one was the pressure vessel that held the, the pilot and the passenger. So it was actually designed so that it could fit in the largest testing chamber on Earth, which was at the Cry Law of Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. So that was the core, and we send it off, you know, on a Friday paid cash and got it in and out over a weekend.

I.

[00:58:00] Jordan Harbinger: Now for some discounts. So deep something, something. You'll need a submarine to get 'em. I didn't think this one through. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. You know those household name brands? Heinz, Mattel, Allbirds. It's easy to think their success is all about having awesome products, but spoiler alert, it's not just about the stuff they sell, it's about the engine running, the whole operation.

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We're happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Victor Kova. I am surprised that they didn't just go, Hey, this is really expensive. If you want it back, we need more money. That's exactly what I was

[01:00:42] Victor Vescovo: expecting was gonna happen.

Yeah. Okay. But the team worked it and we got it outta there. We didn't know until we opened the container in Florida if it was a pile of bricks or something. Yeah, God yeah. Broke the seals. Literally a pile of bricks. Yeah. Which they could have done. Said, oh, you know, there's an export tariff of a million dollars.

You know, whatcha gonna do. Right. Here's your million dollars. And we were very, very fortunate that things went well.

[01:01:03] Jordan Harbinger: That's what I meant by like, this place looks like it was built. They describe it in the book as like vines growing through the walls and it's like this is the number one place for this.

There's a fricking tree growing too. Well, it's basically big

[01:01:16] Victor Vescovo: and it's basically nothing but a huge screw. That's really all it's, I see. It's this massive pit made of metal. They fill it with water and then they put whatever they're testing in there and then they put a screw on top of it and using a hydraulic press, turn the screw and they increased.

That's basically all it was. Wow. And you know, that's very Russian, right? Yes. But, but it works. Yes. You know, no American would do that. But they did it and they did it to test God knows what, but it worked. And, uh, we were able to test it to 15,000 meters. So when I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together and things did go wrong.

Eventually. Not on that first dive. Really. The first dive was actually great, but over time things started breaking down, uh, because of the pressure and the salt water. But I knew that the pressure vessel was very, very strong. Yeah. And that I, it was not gonna implode. And, you know, the, the foam was going to keep me buoyant.

So I had great confidence. Was I 100% sure? Well, no, you never are. It's a test vehicle and you're going down. That's why I went down solo and every little noise that it made on the way down, I was like, what's that? Is that the last thing I'm gonna hear? Yeah. Over time I learned what each sound was. And like any machine, like a plane or helicopter, you just Oh, that's fine.

That's fine, that's fine.

[01:02:35] Jordan Harbinger: That's the camera housing flexing under the pressure, it's fine. Oh,

[01:02:37] Victor Vescovo: sort of. Yeah. I kind of, or that's the C doing this, or that's that fan that needs a little oil. You know, you just, I see you become, that's one thing I love is that I am never more comfortable than when I'm in a complex machine.

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

[01:02:53] Jordan Harbinger: What sort of tolerance does the material need to have in order to survive at those depths? Is it like space shuttle level more or less?

[01:03:00] Victor Vescovo: It depends on the part, but the most important thing was the curiosity, as they call it, of the pressure vessel.

I see. It had to be a perfect sphere,

[01:03:07] Jordan Harbinger: otherwise there's too much pressure on the car. Right.

[01:03:09] Victor Vescovo: You'd get imbalanced pressure. That's what was cool is that it was like 0.01 millimeters, I can't even remember was, but it was really, really tight sphere. But what was cool is that we tested the metallurgy of the capsule after several dives and it was even stronger.

What had happened was without repeated dives to the bottom of the ocean, it was like it was being reforged. Right? Just packed together really tight in nature's most brutal forge, right? You can't have anything at a higher pressure on planet earth unless you go underground and it just made it stronger.

[01:03:43] Jordan Harbinger: Water, just basically at the molecular level is correct. Pushing equally on each side

[01:03:47] Victor Vescovo: as a, as a perfect sphere. Yeah, perfect. You know, balance of the pressure. That's pretty cool.

[01:03:51] Jordan Harbinger: That's really cool. There's something about that as like poetic. I heard, I heard you say if something goes really wrong and it's submersible, you'll never know it, which is, well,

[01:03:59] Victor Vescovo: Don Wallace Funny is the first person to the bottom of the ocean who was on my ship when I made my dive.

A wonderful person and, uh, he passed away, unfortunately last year. But, uh, yeah, he said, uh, Hey Victor, just know that, uh, you know, if you hear it, you're fine.

[01:04:12] Jordan Harbinger: Right. If you don't hear it, well you're dead. So I guess it doesn't matter. Yeah. And you don't even know.

[01:04:15] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. And he said, you won't even realize it.

It's not, not like the movies where you're gonna have water coming in. He says, under extreme pressure, you're gonna be dead before it even hits your brain.

[01:04:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's actually kind of a relief. The last thing you wanna do is like, run out of

[01:04:29] Victor Vescovo: No, that's a bad way to not run out of oxygen or, you know, have a leak.

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

[01:04:41] Jordan Harbinger: I heard you had that movie on the ship and it's like, who put that in the Yeah. Collection. I love

[01:04:46] Victor Vescovo: Jim Cameron's movies.

I think they're wonderful.

[01:04:48] Jordan Harbinger: But it, it's like you watch that before you go down in a summary. Yeah. It seems like a bad idea. Well,

[01:04:52] Victor Vescovo: it's actually funny, the little untold stories that whenever I took passengers down, especially to the bottom of the ocean, it's like about four hours to get back to the surface.

And you know, you've dropped your weights. There's really not a lot you can do as the pilot. Let's watch a movie. Yeah. So I literally, and I would let my passengers pick the movie that they would watch on the way, plus it also distracted the passengers. Sure. And, you know, kept 'em calm and all that stuff.

And you gotta think about those things. And it was funny what different people chose, like one person chose that the horror movie that takes place at the bottom of the ocean, I forgot what it was. And then other people chose comedies. One person chose, you know, Lawrence of Arabia, you're watching a desert movie while you're surrounded by ocean.

It just all varied by the individuals at Titanic. I did watch the Titanic

[01:05:31] Jordan Harbinger: that that would be, that's, you have to do that one, but if you're Yeah, if I'm 10,000 or 20,000 feet under the sea, I'm watching like toy story three. See you're that

[01:05:40] Victor Vescovo: way. I'm

[01:05:40] Jordan Harbinger: not trying to be like, how do I make this worse?

[01:05:43] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. How can I get the most chilled out?

You know? Or, or watching the Meg. Right. Okay.

[01:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like my anxiety doesn't need any help in that direction. Um, let's say there's a fire, 'cause I know that was one of the things that electrical fires. How do you put out a fire underwater inside a submarine without killing the people? But you have to remove the oxygen or something?

Yeah. Well there, there

[01:06:03] Victor Vescovo: are two types of fires. There's inside the capsule where the humans are. Right. And then there's somewhere else on the sub. Okay. And I did have that happen at the Tonga trench, the previously, you know, second beest place on planet Earth. And it happened at the bottom. And one of the batteries, one of the big batteries, a lot of power, had a saltwater ingress and it had a massive short and it was just dumping power out.

And it started melting the sub parts of it. Oh, melting the sub. Yeah. Parts. It was burning through the electronics, burning through. And the worry there is, if it went uncontrolled, you know, maybe it would go to the other batteries, you know, I could have a, a meltdown. Situation. And then that could potentially jeopardize, you know, the buoyancy.

Now there were contingencies for that. I, I never felt fearful for my life. It was definitely stressful, but I didn't fear for my life. 'cause I could have jettisoned the batteries. I see. I could have like you, you know, just like in Star Trek, you know, drop a warp core. Right. You know, I could have done that, but that would've been really expensive and I would not have enjoyed that and I would've gone up like a rocket.

[01:07:01] Jordan Harbinger: Seeing your life flash before you is worse than just seeing your bank account flash before you.

[01:07:06] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. But trust me, when you're down, you know, four hours from the surface and you're alone in the two person submersible at the second deepest place in the ocean and it's really quiet and you're, you know, you're doing your mission and then literally all at once, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, red flashing lights.

Yeah, this and that, just outta nowhere. That gets your heart rate up and you're like, what the hell? And then, you know, just like being a pilot, that's why pilot training is so, so great. It's like, what's the master caution thing happening? What's driving everything else that's going wrong? I really quickly zeroed in one of the batteries is not good.

And so I just went through the procedures that I was trained to do and that we had analyzed as a team. It's like, okay, isolate the electrical problem and you turn everything off that you can, hoping that that isolates the circuit. And that's what I did. And it did isolate that battery. That battery melted down, but it didn't cascade into the other ones.

'cause I shut off its communication with the other ones. There was no way for the OVERVOLTAGE to jump to the other batteries, or more importantly, to jump into the capsule because the internal batteries were feeding off the out ones. And so the issues, I had to close that door. If an electrical fire had gotten into the pressure capsule, there are ways to mitigate that.

It would've been a terrible day, but I would've gone onto an emergency air breathing apparatus. Okay. Yeah. I would've gotten what they use in mining complexes. These are artificial oxygen generators. I would've put on a smoke hood. I would've turned off everything in the sub. If I did that, all the weights would've automatically dropped 'cause they were magnetically held, and I would've started in ascent.

Now, it would've been a terrible four hours to the surface, you know, breathing in that situation, knowing that there's noxious fumes outside. But I'm on this, you know, regulator. But, uh, yeah, I would've gotten to the surface and, and then they would've opened the hatch and I would've been okay. It would've been.

Not a great day. Yeah. But happy to, you know,

[01:09:00] Jordan Harbinger: survive. It sounds like there's a lot of pretty damn cool advanced safety systems inside these things.

[01:09:05] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. Even if I'd gone completely unconscious the submarine, if I had not pressed a certain button every 15 minutes, a dead man switch. Oh, that's cool. It would've released the weights and come up.

[01:09:13] Jordan Harbinger: That's awesome. That's, I assume it gives you a beat before it accidentally do because I'm thinking I would just be like, oh, this is great.

[01:09:19] Victor Vescovo: Yeah.

[01:09:20] Jordan Harbinger: What am I forgetting? I feel like I'm forgetting something.

[01:09:22] Victor Vescovo: It, it would give a definite audible beat before, before I did that. That makes sense. So there's a lot of fail safe mechanisms.

I mean, the design language I gave the designers was, I need the laws of physics to be violated for me not to come home alive. And they said, okay. You know that's gonna cost you. Right, right. But I know, but uh, I think it's worth it. Yeah, they did in a way that it wasn't prohibitively expensive, it was just, it's just smart engineering.

That is a good idea. You know, a good example is magnetic locks for the weights. They weren't mechanical locks for the weights. They were magnetic. So if the electrical power failed, they dropped. They have to Laws of physics say they can't, they weren't held by anything else.

[01:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: Right, okay. Yeah. So they couldn't

[01:09:59] Victor Vescovo: get stuck or something.

And then there were the issue of entanglement. That's what made the Titanic dive so dangerous is all the cables I see. And the currents were really strong. And the really frightening thing to a sub pilot, 'cause you don't have, you can't really see that well, is the propellers getting stuck in a rope or a cable?

Oh man, that's attached to a rack man. Right? Oh, what do you do then? Geez, you can't go outside and untangle it. So it was designed where you could throw a switch and it would burn through the attachment bolt for things that are most likely to get entangled. So I could have dropped my propellers, but my life literally would come down to that one switch working.

So you don't, you don't wanna go

[01:10:39] Jordan Harbinger: there, right? Ideally, no. But

[01:10:41] Victor Vescovo: if, if you did, at least that might help.

[01:10:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's funny 'cause right now a lot of people are like, this is so cool. And other people are like, this is why I'm never going into a submarine. I'm in the latter camp for sure. It's

[01:10:52] Victor Vescovo: funny. Yeah. There are people that are in line to go on a submarine adventure and then there are people saying, I will never step inside that thing.

[01:10:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There's not enough money. The Queen of England doesn't have enough money to put me into one of those things. What sort of things are you looking for? At the bottom of the ocean? Yes. Shipwrecks. Everyone loves a good shipwreck, but are you taking rocks, plants, animals, soil? Yeah. We brought

[01:11:08] Victor Vescovo: rocks back.

We are taking film of the areas and don't forget wherever we went, no human had ever been to the vast majority of these places. Yeah. So we always found new species. We found new geologic features. We found colonies of algae where there was no sunlight. I mean, wow. How does that work? Well, there wasn't algae technically.

I know a lot of the marine biologists out there will scream at me, but there were colonies of bacteria that were living on rocks at 11,000 meters. Those are

[01:11:34] Jordan Harbinger: the ones that feed off of what? Like sulfuric acid coming through? Vent

[01:11:38] Victor Vescovo: vents or something. Yeah. They're feeding off the minerals and the methane coming outta the rocks, outta the fishers, and it's a different form of life.

Yeah. So that's why I keep telling people, you know, if we find life on other planets, it will be more like what we saw in the deep ocean trenches that makes sense than what we saw up on land, because that's what most of the world is. Yeah. Is water same out in the solar system or in the galaxies? It's gonna be more like that.

[01:12:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. Right. Something that can breathe, gases that would kill humans and ev and every other man pressures that would kill human pressures. That number. Yeah.

[01:12:06] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. Absolutely.

[01:12:08] Jordan Harbinger: Spherical bacteria or however they survive. I don't know. I think that stuff is just so fascinating that you found a lot of, was it 40 plus new species or something like on that

[01:12:16] Victor Vescovo: expedition and it's not, it's almost like not even sure how many in, how do you define a new species?

I dunno if you just, if you count microbes, God knows how many we found. We could have found thousands and it wasn't just, we were going to places no one had been before. These were isolated places. The deep ocean trenches, most of them are not connected to each other. If a creature goes down there or it evolved down there, it's not growing with other species or interacting like they do on land.

They're developing genetically, completely independently of other, it's essentially an

[01:12:47] Jordan Harbinger: island. Yeah.

[01:12:48] Victor Vescovo: Correct. And so therefore you get very different genetic pathways. And that's why I was so cool. We go all these different, we, we never knew what we were gonna find.

[01:12:55] Jordan Harbinger: Sea creatures are incredible. Susan, our mutual friend Susan Casey was telling me all, all about some of the stuff that she sees when she goes down there, just like totally transparent types of fish.

Yep. Which I like. How does that

[01:13:05] Victor Vescovo: work?

[01:13:06] Jordan Harbinger: And then,

[01:13:06] Victor Vescovo: well they don't need pigments. There's no light. Yeah. When you go below 6,000 meters, photons can't penetrate. Oh, I didn't know that. It's the absolute blackest black that exists. When you look outta the portal of a submarine below 6,000 meters, you go, well yeah, how many subs can go below 6,000 meters?

Four. So it was really strange for me 'cause I did a lot, I, you know, I did a lot of dives below 6,000 meters, which also is unusual. I would stick my head, you know, right next to the glass or plexiglass looking out and getting out all the other ambient light and, you know, it was weird in your head. You could focus on nothing and it was like instant vertigo in a way.

But it kind of cool

[01:13:44] Jordan Harbinger: too. That is cool. Is it? So photons can't get down there because the pressure, uh, the water is dense. Oh, just too dense. It's, it's like armor. Wow. I didn't think it was that. I just, I assumed there was like some light that you needed to use computers to see it or whatever.

[01:13:59] Victor Vescovo: It's like, you know, when you, when you dive scuba, the deeper you go, the darker it gets, when you take it to the extreme, it's like an individual photon out of the trillions that hit the planet.

Not a single one gets below 6,000 meters.

[01:14:11] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So you're going down as far as what airplanes are flying high in the sky? Or is it Yeah. About that. Yeah, about that. Yeah. I

[01:14:18] Victor Vescovo: would say the deepest part of the ocean is 11,000 meters. There's about 35,000 feet. So yeah. So if you're flying in a commercial aircraft looking down, that's similar to what the depth of the ocean is.

Are there, but it is deeper than Mount Everest is high. You could fit in Mount Everest easily in the uh, challenger deep. Oh, I didn't realize that. There with tons of space to spare. Wow. How

[01:14:37] Jordan Harbinger: do you communicate if photons can't go down? There can Radio signals sound waves. Sound waves. Oh, well that makes sense.

[01:14:42] Victor Vescovo: Yeah, but what's funny is it actually, it would take seven seconds for a single transmission to go from the ship to the bottom of the ocean and then seven seconds back.

[01:14:51] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay. So it's

[01:14:51] Victor Vescovo: actually faster to talk to someone on the moon with radio than it is to talk to someone at the bottom of the ocean.

Wow. Wow. I assume that did you have

[01:15:01] Jordan Harbinger: to create special

[01:15:02] Victor Vescovo: gear that could communicate that? You know, we didn't create it. We adapted some very specialized equipment, pseudo military, that was tailored for us by the wonderful people at L three Harris. And it worked. To our amazement, it was faint, but we couldn't talk to each other with simple words, but we could also text and that was really helpful.

[01:15:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. Gosh. All the problems it sounds like you had, are kind of life and death except for one. It sounds like the dialogue on the ship was, he almost died because of an air hose. We destroyed $300,000 worth of equipment. Something fell off under the ocean that we kind of needed and we can't get it back.

We need a new one. Oh. And stop pushing the buttons on the coffee machine because it's expensive. No. Well,

[01:15:44] Victor Vescovo: I learned in the Navy that the most important piece of equipment on any ship is a damn good coffee machine. Yeah. So we actually had two, and I told the captain, I said funny. I literally said, I said, spare no expense.

Make it the best damn and reliable coffee machine as possible. 'cause I know they're just brutalized. And sure enough, those things after a couple of expeditions, it like how do you, how are you breaking them? Yeah. And yet they're just used constantly. Yeah.

[01:16:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:16:09] Victor Vescovo: They're not up to the test.

[01:16:10] Jordan Harbinger: It's like, I don't even drink coffee.

You don't? Yeah. You're a diet Coke guy. I read in the book, me too. Some of the requests we need $750,000 for new thrusters, new mechanical arm, uh, and a new Breville Oracle touch because John keeps smashing it with his knuckles.

[01:16:24] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. And God knows what I was doing. You know, they never really complained hard to me 'cause I was writing the checks so they, what could they really do?

But I knew a couple times when I came up, you know, I bumped the sub against a rock or something. They'd have to replace a thruster, replace it. It's like you guys, it's the cost of doing business. What we're doing, we're operating on the jagged edge out there. So let's all, let's all cut each other a little bit of slack while also still being mindful and not wasteful.

'cause this is all real dollars directly coming outta my pocket. And they, they were all cool about that. Where's the sub now? Where does it after four years of intensive diving it and four years of development. So after eight years operating a deep ocean submersible is ruinously expensive.

[01:17:07] Music: Yeah.

[01:17:07] Victor Vescovo: I am not a billionaire, but I was able to sell it to the wonderful Gabe Newell who.

Founded the Steam Gaming Network. Oh yeah. That Gabe Newell, he is multi-billionaire and is really committed to ocean science. It's just something he's passionate about. And I said, Hey, it would be great if you had purchased this and continue to fund it to do nothing but a hundred percent science. And he did.

So the submersible and the ship are operating in the Pacific as we speak, doing hardcore intensive marine research. That's cool. With the exact same team pretty much that I had. That's pretty amazing. Which is, that's what I wanted to have happen for. It was like I was a foster dad, you know, and I wanted to go to a permanent family and it all worked out great.

And so, but I'm more of a technology developer. That's kinda what I do in vc and I like piloting new things. I like being a te, I like being a test pilot. I'm not a marine scientist and, and I dabble in it, but I like being the test pilot. So yeah, what am I doing now? I'm designing a mapping ship and I'm, you know, doing a long term planning for a design of a new submersible that's gonna be even more advanced.

Than the one I dove in that will correct many of the issues that I had on that one and there weren't that many. But you know, technology moves forward and there's some really cool stuff we could do with the next one.

[01:18:23] Jordan Harbinger: I found it interesting that y'all were worried about the Chinese stealing the sub technology to cut deep water transmission cables and disrupt financial markets.

As I was like, oh, I didn't think about that. But it totally that you're concern. But the Russians

[01:18:34] Victor Vescovo: definitely are looking at that. I mean, there's more than enough go on the internet. Not all of 'em are fake or uh, or wrong, but no, there is a concern in, you know, a general conflict situation. Undersea cables that carry most of the world's internet traffic are completely vulnerable and repairing them is very, very difficult.

That's something quite frankly, I could have done as a private individual. In fact, I told the US Navy, I told other people, I said, okay, if I can do this, anybody can do it. A Navy can do it. Yeah, right. I could in my private submersible go down and get any number of submarine cables that are carrying the vast majority of the worlds.

Traffic and mess with it. Do explosives work down there? Yeah, they do. They do. You don't need explosives, you just need to move it five inches off the thing. Yeah, I had a manipulator arm. Yeah.

[01:19:22] Jordan Harbinger: I could

[01:19:23] Victor Vescovo: have messed with it pretty bad. You make it out. Yeah. You just put a different attachment on the end. Yeah.

[01:19:26] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, geez. Wow. What other sort of security concerns were there with the project? Having your ship hijacked in, in, in Russia during the testing phase is one of 'em, when else?

[01:19:35] Victor Vescovo: Well, we actually had to move the ship and the sub through the Bob El Mende, which is just off the coast of Yemen. I see. So we actually, in the Red Sea, we had to board a special operations team with weapons, barbed wire to make sure that we were not boarded because that would've been a, a really nice prize for someone to ransom.

So we, we, we ended up going with a convoy, military escort and nothing ever happened. But yeah, you have to prepare for those things. They told me you don't wanna be on the ship. And I went, okay. Yeah, it was minimum manning it, it would've been hard to take over that ship.

[01:20:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, yeah. It sounds like they were prepared to not give it up without a fight, and that was a draft and

[01:20:10] Victor Vescovo: that that was, they, they actually asked me what were the rules of engagement there?

I said, you're an international waters. They try and board you, you do whatever you have to do. Yeah. But you do not let them get on the ship. They went, okay.

[01:20:20] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like if, if you're the one on the ship, you decide the rules of engagement. Like if they board, you have to surrender. No, at the

[01:20:24] Victor Vescovo: end

[01:20:24] Jordan Harbinger: of

[01:20:24] Victor Vescovo: the day, the characters, but they were worried about, well, what if there was risk of damage to the submarine?

They, you know, they were polite to ask me, but at the then day, you're right, the officer in charge on the scene has absolute discretion and I gave him that discretion. Yeah. Actually, it, it raises an interesting point. One of the things that I did on my expedition was I told my captain and my expedition leader independently that either one of them could overrule me at any time, particularly if it's a weather or a safety issue.

I couldn't, you know, pull out the checkbook card and say, Hey, I'm paying for it. You know, you do what I say, you work for me. I said, that's never gonna happen. You actually have the authority to tell me to back off and No, we're not doing it today.

[01:21:06] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's a good idea. Keeps you alive.

[01:21:08] Victor Vescovo: Yeah, and I wanted that.

Yeah. That was important. And I, you know, of course I never pulled that card and uh, yeah, absolutely. And we never disagreed either. We always came to a good consensual decision. But there are instances, whether it's on Mountain Expeditions or any number of other things, where people play that card and they get killed.

[01:21:27] Jordan Harbinger: It hardly seems worth it to be right and dead or I guess you would be wrong and dead.

[01:21:31] Victor Vescovo: That's what happened to Titanic.

[01:21:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:21:33] Victor Vescovo: Never ever get into any vehicle where the pilot is more afraid of failure than dying. I

[01:21:38] Jordan Harbinger: see. Yeah,

[01:21:39] Victor Vescovo: yeah, yeah, yeah. You never want that. Yeah. You don't wanna be next to them. And that's what happened to Titanic.

[01:21:44] Jordan Harbinger: That was terrifying. I mean, that was the way society reacted to that was kind of gross too. It was a lot of like, who cares? They're just a bunch of rich guys. And I'm like, if they're down there, I thought maybe they were trapped in there with like slowly running out of air. Yeah, it sounds awkward. They would, well, they probably

[01:21:58] Victor Vescovo: would've died it hypothermia first, but

[01:21:59] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

See. But I was almost glad to hear it was like instant.

[01:22:02] Victor Vescovo: Yeah. There was some ugly stuff that came outta that, which is I'll never begrudge anyone doing anything that they want, if it's their money and it, it's not hurting anybody. And they weren't, they took their own risk. Yeah. With the exception of the 18-year-old young man.

And that was just a, a tragedy that, that he died. He didn't know the risk he was taking. But yeah, there's, there's just this, this really strong undercurrent of rich people get what they deserve kind of thing. And it's just. It strikes me as kind of ugly. I mean, I'm sure people say horrible things about me, about what I do, but it doesn't really matter.

There's always gonna be negative stuff. You're never gonna make everybody happy. You're never gonna be popular with everybody. I just do what I do. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. Yeah. I like doing it myself, but I like putting myself on the, the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people.

If someone's gonna take a risk with a, you know, multimillion dollar piece of equipment that I commissioned, yeah, I wanna be at the control. Jared Isman, the guy that just walked in space, you know, he's a pilot, started companies and you know, he paid. Tens of millions of dollars to do this mission with SpaceX.

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

[01:23:08] Jordan Harbinger: What's the next challenge, man, you don't seem, you did the seven summers, he did the deepest parts of the ocean. You don't seem like a packet in and relaxed kind of guy. Uh, so what's, what's next on the docket?

[01:23:18] Victor Vescovo: There's a lot. I'm, I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity. I just am so curious about somebody doing things. So like I mentioned earlier, I'm working on the design of a ship that hopefully we will be able to map the sea floor far more efficiently than anything that's ever existed before.

That'll take a couple of years. What I do often takes 3, 4, 5 years to, to actually reach fruition. You only hear about it when it's actually doing something, but you don't see all the work that goes into it. Right. The so-called overnight and the success story that takes 10, 20 years. There's that. I'm doing long-term planning on the design and development of a next generation submersible that'll take five years.

I'm CEO of a biotechnology company. We're trying to cure some incurable diseases using synthetic biology. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I won't go too much into detail on that 'cause we're in stealth mode, but that's a fascinating area I didn't know much about and I'm getting to learn about it, but also put it into practice.

And I'm doing all the things I'm doing in venture capital. I get to support companies that I think are really on the bleeding edge and are pushing boundaries like Astro Forge or Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth Ben Lamb was on the show. Yeah, Ben's, Ben's a great friend and we were both in Dallas and that's the most rewarding thing about, you know, I.

Having some net worth is where I am. You know, what else am I gonna do with my money? You know, I don't have a big yacht, I have research vessels, right?

[01:24:39] Music: Yeah.

[01:24:39] Victor Vescovo: And if I'm gonna spend money, I'm not gonna spend it on a $10 million birthday party. I'm gonna spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology that I think is the way to spend a wealth.

And cars.

[01:24:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And car, you, you love cars. Do you think you will spend all of it before you leave this world? Are you, is that kind of the plan? Well,

[01:24:59] Victor Vescovo: no. I hope, I don't, I hope that I'm smart enough on my investing side that I try, you try to spend it all tried and failed to spend all of much, right? I try to spend all the money on all these different things, but hopefully I have good teams.

And the technology is interesting enough that wow, they actually work and now they're worth more money. You know, you wanna, you wanna be on that treadmill where you're actually trying to spend your way to zero by the time you die, but you're spending it not on pure consumption, but on true. Not politically camouflaged investment, but true investment.

And those investments yield very profitable results, but they're profitable because they have moved the technology forward and they create real value. That's what I'm all about. That's if I have a religion, that's it. It's what can we do to advance technology because I believe more than any other thing in history, it's technological advancement that has alleviated more human suffering than anything else.

For sure. Of course. Be it politics, even religion. No technology has cured diseases, fed us, kept us warm, have done all these things for 8 billion people on the planet and we've gotta keep that technological machine moving forward, which we are. I'm an optimist. Yeah, it sounds like it. Yeah. Another, I'm not one of these guy, I can't stand how many dystopian.

Movies and novels is look at the ratio of how many dystopian TV series and movies you have versus purely optimistic ones. I don't even know if there is a ratio, 'cause there are like none that are really optimistic about, wow, isn't the world gonna be great in 10 years? And it kind of is. We live in one of the most extraordinary wonderful times in human history.

People don't believe me, but look back in history, it's one of the most peaceful, most amazing times in human history. We have in our pockets a device that gives us access to the sum of all human knowledge. We can talk to someone on the other side of the globe almost instantaneously. Yeah, pretty much instantly.

Yeah. It's extraordinary. And so I believe that we do live in an optimistic age, and I don't understand why people have these incredibly dystopian urges or think that the world's gonna, okay, yeah, there's climate change, but you know, it seems like every decade or two. There's a new calamity that's gonna destroy us.

In the seventies, it was the population bomb. Oh, yeah. Right By Ehrlichman. Right. We're gonna overpopulate the world and we're all gonna die. And then it was in the eighties, I remember, oh, we're all gonna die by nuclear war. You know, Reagan is gonna start a nuclear war with the Russians. Oh God, we're all gonna die.

And then it was Y 2K. Okay. All the lights are gonna go off. Right, right. Yeah. And they're gonna be burning cities. People said that and believed it. All the survivalists went crazy. Okay, well then that, and then it was global warming. It was like, oh my gosh, didn't, that's how, and yeah, there looked to be like strong indications that we are affecting the climate, but then they had to change it to climate change.

Now why was that? Because eh, things weren't going quite exactly as they said, and it's just. It really is unusual where every 10 to 15 years there is a new thing and it is gonna kill us all. And it's almost like there's this 10% of the population that actually wanna believe. They kinda want it to happen.

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

[01:28:15] Music: Yeah, it's true. And we

[01:28:15] Victor Vescovo: come up with ways to mitigate those dangers. My prediction, I think like in like 20, 30 or 24, the asteroids are gonna kill us.

Yeah, sure,

[01:28:24] Crosstalk: sure. The ones, we're all one's coming. The ones we're mining, right? One's coming. Yeah. No, the ones are, mine aren't gonna hit us anyway. Yeah. It's gonna be something. Or pandemic. Well that's actually very possible. Yeah. Right down is

[01:28:34] Victor Vescovo: very possible. We already had one, you know, potential, you know, could have been a way worse kind.

Initial warning. And the next one might be, who knows? So it'll be something. Thank you so much for coming on the show,

[01:28:42] Jordan Harbinger: man. I know. Yeah. My pleasure. You gotta, you gotta open up a watch. I actually wanna see this watch that's been to the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, yeah. Many the space times and into space, you know, it's.

Let's fade out with that. You are about to hear a preview of one of my favorite stories from an earlier episode of the show. My friend Steve Elkins, found a lost city in the jungle that most people never even knew existed. I'm not even kidding. It sounds insane. This has to be one of the most incredible stories I've ever recorded on the show.

I know you're gonna love this one.

[01:29:14] Clip: The legend of See It De Blanca or White City in English goes back probably 500 years to the best of my knowledge, people have believed that there is this civilization out there, and the local indigenous people have their own legends. It has about five different names of which I can't pronounce.

About this culture, this civilization that lived out in the jungle at one time. One of the other monikers for the city in current times is lost city, the monkey. God, maybe there's some truth to this legend. I kind of felt there was something to it. The Ede Jungle, where it's located in the eastern third of Honduras, is one of the toughest jungles in the world, and by accidents of geography in history, it's remained pretty much unexplored until recently.

I have a map made by the British in the 1850s, and on that map it says Portal De and Phau over that part of the jungle, and it was called the Gates of Hell because the terrain was so tough. A lot of people have gone looking for it. Some went in and some never came back. A director friend of mine introduced me to a guy named Captain Steve Morgan, and he was a lifelong adventurer, explorer, treasure hunter, rock onte tour.

Nice guy. Really pretty smart. And I said, let's go. And in 1994, we headed out to Honduras for an unknown adventure, looking for the lost city

[01:30:40] Jordan Harbinger: for more with Steve Elkins, including the details on how they discovered the city and made one of the most important archeological discoveries of the century. Check out episode 2 99 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Victor ve Covo. Actually, both pronunciations are right. I know some of you're paying attention, and honestly, both are correct.

We'll be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser. The idea here is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes a week.

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This show is created, an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we've rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, and the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

So if you know somebody who's interested in ocean exploration, I dunno, building submarines, exploring the mountain, pushing the limits of human potential, definitely share this episode with 'em. 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.