all right welcome to the adventures club of Los Angeles my name is Rich Mayfield member 1211 I’m here tonight with Victor vovo now Victor thank you so much for coming we appreciate you coming out um we’re here tonight to talk about your five deeps Expedition but I want to start I want to kind of get to know who you are first and and how you got to this point so get we always like to bring it back to the beginning what gave you the bug to be an Explorer or an adventure like what was the what was the first thing that you did as a as a human being I was born I think it’s genetic I there are some interesting discussions during our Expedition we had some Expedition doctors and uh there is some literature out there saying that human beings fall on the spectrum of how adventurous frankly they are there are some people that are very very conservative in how they live and then there are the ones that want to know what’s on the other side of that hill and the one after and the one after and you know maybe we’re the Expendable ones that push us forward a bit but I think I was born with all the copies of that Gene so I think the most dangerous thing that happened to me when I was young was my parents giving me my first bicycle when I was six and uh and that’s the last they saw of me for a while so I think you just took off and you know you came back at dinner time maybe yeah and I was born and raised in Texas I’m a proud Texan apologies to all the Californians here but uh being nice and flat allowed me to go for quite a distance that’s interesting so you you bring up an interesting point not everybody is into adventure and everybody’s on the Spectrum what how many people do you think are are on the spectrum of Adventure at your level in the world at my level God help them I would say a fraction of a percent because there’s the other issue of you know there’s a there’s an axis of risk-taking there’s a very very fine line between being really adventurous and being a successful Explorer or Adventurer and being Reckless uh probably the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in my life life was high altitude mountaineering for several decades and it’s a very very fine line between having a good Summit day and not coming back and one of the key elements of Adventure and exploring is being an absolute expert of risk management many people in this room I’m sure can appreciate that if you don’t do that correctly you’re just playing Russian roulette and that’s why I always come back so so I think your resume kind of started with your Navy career did you join the Navy immedi after college or high school was it the Navy thing kind of happened on the side I was uh heavily involved into mountain climbing which is what I was primarily kind of doing my adventuring in my 20s and 30s I was actually approached to join the Navy when I was in business school in Boston and I I speak a couple of languages I’d done some mathematical simulations of Warfare when I was at MIT and the Navy contacted me and said hey we have this interesting program for guys like you and uh would you like to get a commission and be an intelligence officer in the reserve I went okay uh sounds interesting and 20 years later I had been in the Navy for 20 years first 10 years I was a targeting officer I was involved in the war in Kosovo and in uh in in Iraq I was with carrier airwing N9 off the nits and then 911 happened and so for the next 10 years especially because one of my languages is Arabic I went into counterterrorism interesting so so the Navy was kind of a side career for you what was your what was your primary career my primary career was business so I studed I started as a Management Consultant and then eventually really rapidly I went into private equity and took other people’s money and tried to make more of it by doing heavy industrial Investments my first big achievement was in of course being in Texas was an oil and gas company and that did very well but we also did a lot of basic industry type stuff and that allowed me to found with another individual a private Equity Firm and we did very very well and that allowed me to pursue my other passion which I’d been developing from mountaineering which was more intensive Explorations because when you start getting really really high-end Explorations particularly in the ocean it gets really expensive really fast so so you did the Explorers Grand Slam yeah so you so you hiked Every Mountain on every continent and and ski to the North and South Pole yes at that point were you looking for a new Venture ADV Venture yeah in a way I was and there’s also you know mountaineering when you do it a lot I mean I got invited to go to K2 and that’s when you have to start going okay am I a professional or not and what is the risk that I’m willing to take and I was getting older and mountain climbing in some respects is a Young Person’s game it it starts getting dangerous and you can think you’re going to be you know Immortal and live forever but in the ultimate high altitude mountains it gets really really dangerous especially when your body starts to not be quite the same that it was in its late 20s and early 30s so I said what’s a different adventure maybe that I could do a complete 180 one might say and what you know what’s kind of symmetrical going up high oh I could go down low and then I heard about Richard Branson who actually had what he called the five Dives project to go to the bottom of all five of the world’s oceans but the technology that he chose was not really appropriate it wouldn’t work it was carbon fiber it was a quartz crystal canopy and the project was abandoned but I was sitting at my home in Dallas one day and I kind of studied it that’s what I do when I’m bored and uh I said we have the technology to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench the triest did it in 1960 in James camera did in 2012 we could we could do this why isn’t it being done and so I got a spreadsheet together I talked to some people I did some research and I said this is actually doable but you have to build a new submersible and you’d have to fund it but fortunately I had the means to do that and so I made the decision I just made the commitment I said you know if not me who no government’s even trying to do this and it’s about time we went to the bottom of four of our world’s five oceans so so is the issue that that the submersibles weren’t reusable in a sense like okay it it went down let’s talk about Challenger Deep that is one of the most brutal points on the planet you’re talking 16,000 lbs per square inch it’s like four automobiles on your fingernail on every single surface of the submersible freezing temperatures corrosive saltwater whenever you go down really deep the environment is literally using God’s Own Hammer to try and Destroy whatever vehicle you can go into space and with enough oxygen supplies you can stay in space for years you cannot stay at the bottom of the ocean more than about 6 or 12 hours it is slowly destroying the craft that’s why the triest only went down once Challenger Deep Sea Challenger went down once so we were trying to develop a submersible that could do it repeatedly and safely which would allow us to go anywhere in the world I really I’m motivated by technology I like to push technology forward I really wanted to build a door so that human beings could go anywhere on the sea floor repeatedly and safely that was the real drive for me was to do it and I’m a pilot so I wanted to Pilot the damn thing I can’t believe that Elon Musk and Jeff bezo Stone go up well Jeff did go up in their own rocket right I’d be the first one on it but anyway that’s me so that’s interesting because you know these other submersibles one off one shot how how do you even get to the point where you can say this is safe enough for for man travel when it’s never been down there before math I and you just really have to trust the math I was interviewed by a reporter once he said you know are are you a really religious person Victor did you have religious Transformations on your experiences and I said not really I said I really believe in two things mathematics and titanium and and that’s what allowed me to do the finite element analysis the mathematical simulation of materials and structures under stress in silica that allowed us to have a very high confidence that it would survive because the first time my submersible the limiting factor Dove to the bottom of Challenger Deep that was the first time it had ever been fully assembled and Dove to that depth there is no pressure chamber on Earth large enough to test the full system we had to test all the components but not all together and that in some respects is the real trick and I was in it but I was in it because I trusted the math and I trusted the engineers and I also knew we had a lot of backups that’s interesting cuz engineer I’m the exact opposite I don’t trust the math I want to see it show show all right and do it again okay now it’s safe right I mean you can’t do that for everything right well no but that’s you can’t otherwise you’re never going to get out of bed in the morning I mean you can’t test everything to Perfection you test enough and repeatedly enough that you get a certain degree of confidence another question I got asked once was okay so what is your degree of confidence that you have to have to do something like that that’s that dangerous and I said 90% And they said so let me get this straight so you’re willing to take like a one and 10 risk that you like not come back and you would say okay and I said yeah that’s but you sound like a guy that’s taken more than 10 shots though correct but it’s the first one where it’s 9010 once it had done it and once we got to know the character once it came back you know we tore it apart looked at it you know what went right what went wrong the confidence interval goes up just like an aircraft the first time you fly an experimental aircraft is the most dangerous time to fly that aircraft after you’ve done it 10 or 12 times it’s not as dangerous so it’s the same principle so you you had a picture in here I want to advance to a couple slides of of the actual uh I would call it a schematic yeah there’s the submersible to limiting factor so it started with two brilliant British designers John Ramsay and Tom blades and they designed it so that it could go up and down in the water efficiently that’s why it looks the way it does it doesn’t look like a conventional sub submarine but it was able to go laterally you know in a reasonable amount but it was primarily designed to do one thing and that was to survive repeated Journeys to the bottom of the ocean wherever it may be that’s interesting cuz you know we’ve seen pictures of like Alvin right it’s a famous one and it it looks like a a sub correct that’s meant to go forward right but it well that’s a brilliant example of human nature where designers design things that they’re familiar with the two individuals that designed the limiting factor did not have a formal education in submarine design but they did have an incredible background in materials science and electronic systems so they just took what are the requirements that I gave them and from the requirements they designed the optimal design and the fundamental requirement is it is going down correct it’s not a torpedo correct like every sub I’ve ever seen is a torpedo right and just think about the design it’s actually has a perfect center of gravity it’s not weighted heavily on one end with the pressure Capsule that’s really heavy and you have to balance it on the other end it’s inherently stable right so it’s interesting you named this limiting factor which is totally an Engineers thing so what was the limiting factor in this whole project the limiting factor was simply how to design systems that could survive the beating it took at the ultimate depth the gaskets the small interfaces those are always the weak points and that pressure over time will find the weakest point in that submersible if you have a thousand points of vulnerability on a submersible like this nature will immediately go to the weakest one and just start pounding it but the name the limiting factor actually comes from the name of a Starship in my favorite science fiction series the culture by Scottish author Ian Banks if any of you are familiar with him so it’s a it’s an omage to him actually the the ships that Elon Musk lands the Falcon 9 rockets on are also named from the same Series so there it’s some real deep nerd stuff right there I love it so in the center is this titanium sphere correct that you had built that two person yeah the first submarine that went down was a two person sphere but it was made out of steel which is why the triest was enormous it was actually using gasoline as its buoyancy because gasoline is lighter than salt water but it was really heavy but it really couldn’t move so when Don went down to the bottom of the ocean and he was good friend of mine they went down they were only down there for like 10 or 15 minutes and came right back up they didn’t maneuver at all it was just too unwieldly to maneuver that massive craft it had to be towed out to the Marana trench James Cameron had the deep sea Challenger that was also a steel material it’s cheaper it’s highly characterized we know how it operates but it had to be small so Jim actually was like this you know for the entire Journey up and down because they couldn’t make it much bigger it would have been too heavy they couldn’t have carried on the back I really wanted to have a pilot and a scientist on board and that was one of my design requirements they said well that’s going to be a lot harder you won’t be able to use steel it would be enormous you’d have to tow it and that holds has a whole lot of problems and we settled on titanium the biggest issue with titanium it is really really hard to machine that takes time but most of all it’s incredibly expensive so I wrote the check so I kind of want to know about that check so just the most people do just the U titanium sphere there how much was that tiny titanium sphere it was about 12 million and what was the total cost of the submersible 35 so a little bit less than half that just just and what did they deliver you just a sphere with nothing no no they’ve developed a fully machine sphere and probably the most complex part of the entire submersible which were the three windows and we had huge arguments over how many windows to have because the triest and the deep sea Challenger only had one because that is the that is a key vulnerability the submersible you don’t go poking holes in the pressure hole they wanted three and they being Triton they said no you need one to look down and you need one for the passenger and one for the pilot I went okay but we figured out how to do it so when they delivered the titanium sphere it had six penetrations it had the three Windows it had two for the electrical conduits which were frankly easier to develop than the than the viewports and then the hatch the triest had a hatch deep seat Challenger didn’t have a hatch they bolted Jim into it I wasn’t going to have that and uh you wanted to be able to pop the hatch which I could and that was an emergency scenario if anything had gone terribly wrong I would have been able to get to the surface pop the hatch and get out and have a GPS you know telephone and get to get me out of there so it’s just a different Evolution did you get push back on that requirement that’s an interesting requirement to I want to be able to pop the hatch no actually they insisted because this was the first submersible that could go to the bottom of the ocean that was commercially certified by DMV the German Norwegian firm that actually makes something commercially safe like an airliner and they said no you need to be able to get out you can’t be bolted into something that’s commercially certified so we’re very and that added another 6 months or 10 months to the design and certification and probably added another 30% to the cost to make it that safe that’s why Prince Albert of Monaco went in the sub with me to the bottom of the Mediterranean that’s why Kathy Sullivan the first woman to the bottom got in it with very few questions this was a commercially certified tested device that was inherently safe in fact the third dive to the bottom of the ocean in this submersible was done by Patrick Ley the guy who designed and built it and the German lead engineer for submersibles from Germany that was one of their requirements was that one of their guys had to go down in it and test it he wanted to it wasn’t put a gun to his head yeah he put a gun to his head so how many times has it been down the limiting factor has been down to the bottom of the ocean I believe 202 times and do you do you guys have um some math that that predicts its lifespan or how many how many cycles it the titanium sphere the pressure hle is designed to withstand up to 10,000 Dives interesting but we basically had to replace certain components of it after every five dies every every 10 what’s really here’s a little funny story dnv that certified the submersible they said yeah after every Deep dive you have to log it and when you get to about 25 you have to tear it apart check everything and then put it back together Etc that’s one of our requirements I said okay but what counts as a deep dive and they thought about it they said about 4,000 meters went okay so all of our Dives to the Titanic they didn’t even count because it wasn’t deep enough that’s easy that’s kind kind of cool so so what kind of you you did some testing on the titanium sphere to start right yeah there’s only one place in the world we could pressure test the pressure vessel which was the biggest component of the sub and that was at the krylo Institute in St Petersburg Russia okay and that was at a sketchy time and so we actually put the pressure vessel in a container in Poland we drove it to Poland on a Friday we paid in cash and we tested it on a Saturday and got it out on a Sunday were you worried that like if it passed they we were extremely worried that they were going to keep it or that they were going to put a million dollar export tax on it we didn’t know we had the pressure vessel back until they cracked open the container in Florida and there it was we thought it could have been a lot of bricks huh yeah welcome to Russia so so there there’s a facility in you said St Petersburg uh no actually it was uh the production facility in Sebastian Florida where Triton is based so no where the where the test facility oh St Petersburg Russia yeah so so there’s a test facility how how deep was that able to test it it was able to test it to 20% greater than about 14,000 meters in fact there was so much energy in the system when they tested the the pressure vessel to that depth that they said if there had been a catastrophic failure in the mechanism it would have leveled the entire building so it was very it was the deepest they had ever tested anything and we’re talking Russia well I got to ask how much that test cost did you have to have insurance on it are you serious this was so non-ins insurable it was ridiculous this was all cash on a weekend when it was the last time you got insured for something like that so you’re taking this to this this building full of scientist and you’re saying testest totally on the down low this was a bunch of Russian guys that were trying to make money to pay the light bill and they didn’t want their own authorities finding out about it so yeah so basically if it had have imploded or something I mean we’re talking yeah can we come yes you come yeah you can come we can test it you have cash like yeah yeah we got cash it’s like okay can we come up on a Friday and be out by Sunday yes yes we can make this work do you have cash you know so if it goes bad just everybody walks away yeah pretty much nothing happen yeah and they’re like yeah you know who who’s going to come you know is Victor going to come no no don’t bring Victor no this is not good we just come very quiet you know so you had it tested so you know that your sphere and and when you tested it did it have all the through Hall penetrations like yep so that’s your test to give you confidence yep that at least you’re safe the other key design requirement that I gave the designers was the laws of physics would have to be violated for me not to come back and I know that’s a incredible but they kind of had that in mind so literally I had to struggle to figure out ways for the submersible to fail so that I could not come back the most dangerous dive I probably did was at the Titanic and people go why it’s not that deep the most risky thing that can happen in submersible is entanglement okay and at the Titanic you have two you have a really bad com three bad combinations the currents can be very strong stronger than the maximum power output of the submersible so you’re no longer in control if you get caught in a really you got this big pillow number two right number two the wreck is big it is a really big wreck which means there’s a lot of potential areas where you can get impaled or something else number three it has a lot of cables ropes and you’re always trying to get closer to get the best possible video for Discovery Channel so there were times when I was near the railing where actually the currents would just come out of nowhere and kind of push you towards or even into the wreck that happened once and if you ever got entangled that’s a really bad day because the submersible was designed according to dnvgl where everything had to be able to be ejectable if it could have been come entangled the thrusters the manipulator arm if this and that but if that happened your life depends on a single switch working and you never want to put yourself in that position so it was a it was a and I it was a mistake probably to dive the Titanic solo because you you need two pairs of eyes one set of eyes inside looking at the sonar looking at where you are another set of eyes looking at the wreck looking at the hazards and doing both in a strong current was incredibly stressful I never did it again and it was really sketchy so I I think I heard something there did did you hit the Titanic okay according have you touched the Titan that’s another way but I mean they made it sound they made it sound like I sank it again okay but when you dive in the Titanic you need to get a permit from the federal government because they passed a congressional law saying you need to it’s an it’s a British wreck in international waters why do I need an American permit but that’s just the rules one of the rules is you don’t touch the wreck unless you have authorization I and they said you can survey it but you can’t touch it so I mean I’m going around the rack I’m right next to it and this that and the other yeah current and I I bumped a railing and it was on video and I had to download my whole report I had to give Noah and the FEDS the video oh my God he touched the wreck oh my Lord I was hauled into federal court in Norfolk Virginia before a judge to explain myself of why we allowed the submersible to hit the wreck so the only time I’ve ever been prosecuted for a moving violation was when I hit the Titanic with my submersible well done how exactly and the and the judge was like really that’s it that’s all you did and like yes judge you’re dismissed so did he just ask to shake your hand and you be on your way she just looked disgusted and went really why did I’ve got better stuff to deal with yeah so traffic cour um a submarine version of it yeah I did how exactly does the US have any sort of jurisdiction over the Titanic well there’s a rationale to the Brits the Canadians and the Americans they didn’t want people going to the wreck and pillaging it so they passed a Federal US law saying that you need a permit and you know if you go and pillage the Titanic without a permit from the US then technically that’s a violation of our laws so if you ever come to the US Canada or the UK you could be arrested so it acts deter but if I was from Serbia and I wanted to go plunder the Titanic and I never went to the US yeah you could go do that but there aren’t that many submersibles I can get down that deep and it’s a big operation to bring stuff up yeah yeah you mentioned that uh so it’s interesting this whole project um you said the submersible there the Titanic yeah was 35,000 or $35 million yeah to build the submersible yeah what was the total cost of the entire project for four years yeah a lot more so so you the dirty the dirty secret of deep ocean exploration is okay the cost of the vessels is is extremely high the operations and maintenance of a 24/7 operation for marine exploration is extremely high which is why it is so rare it’s very expensive and governments even have a hard time rationalizing it and private individuals it’s extremely rare there are only a handful of private individuals like Ray Delio with ocean X Kell Roi of rev Ocean or Eric Schmidt of Schmid ocean I mean it’s like on one hand and then what I did I did it for four straight years but I was very thankful that Gabe Newell the American billionaire who founded the steam gaming Network bought my entire system system hired my entire crew and has funneled an enormous amount of money into the the exact same system and they’re diving in the Pacific and in Antarctic doing the science missions I’m incredibly thankful for him to do that that’s what I wanted but now that allows me the Liberty to learn from everything we did for four years and try and develop the Next Generation submersible that will be even more capable than the limiting factor I mean typical engineer I mean God there was I’ve got this list of all the things I would change about the original you know so when you were starting backtrack a little bit you you were basically calling these guys and and I I’ve come up with a scenario in which I could kill myself what is our solution to make sure that that doesn’t happen it wasn’t that way at all I had the idea hey this is doable to do the five deeps with a reusable submersible the only people in the world that I thought remotely could do it were Triton submarines in Florida so I contacted Patrick Le the president he was like yes this is going to be awesome we’ve been wanting to do this for 10 years and uh so then we started and uh it was a great interplay between the designers Patrick myself developing the submersible you needed someone you know that really believed to pull this off because there were a lot of people saying that this was a fool heart a fool hearty look one thing that I think people don’t fully appreciate maybe people here at the adventures club and true explorers get it after you’ve done it it’s like oh well yeah great that’s awesome we had no idea that this was going to be successful I undertook this mission I wrote those checks with zero assurance that it was actually going to work the per the embedded journalist that we had on the Expedition Josh Young Who wrote the book expedition to deep ocean he said it was the hardest book he ever wrote I asked him why he said I had no idea how it was going to end and think I was right in the middle of it I didn’t know either and there were several times where I didn’t know if it was going to work but 2020 hindsight it makes it look easy and it’s not it’s really really hard I mean the path is clear when you look behind you right so we you had this bug five deeps and you had to go to this compan you had to F you had to find a company who could build you a submersible because everything I’m sure you like you said you did spreadsheets you know you looked at looked at everything there’s I need to build my own submersible right and other people have tried and Richard Branson who’s richer than I am he he tried and it didn’t work out I mean you had to be very careful very methodical but that’s what I do how long did it take these guys to design this submersible a year that’s fast it’s private sector oh let me give you an example the difference between for all of my friends here in California let me give you an example of the efficiency and speed and cost effectiveness of private sector versus government this actually happened I was sitting at my desk in Dallas one day where I live I’m native and I was working on business stuff and I got a call from Triton they said oh there’s a detail we need to nail we need to get it like now because of a bunch of other stuff where do you want the stick shift that controls the maneuverability of the Sumer well you’re the pilot what is optimal for you we can put it on the left we can put it on the right how high do you want it you know this type of everything and we talked about it for about 15 minutes some really rough pros and cons made a decision within 15 minutes done that’s it how long would that have taken how many committees would you have had to go through to decide where to put the primary control mechanism for $35 million submersible it would have taken months it would have taken so much more time and money and it probably would have been suboptimal yeah because it would have been a decision made by committee that’s the difference at the most fundamental level between private sector and government but this was extraordinary because I was not only the person writing the checks I was setting the requirements and I was the bloody pilot that’s a really really tight decision cycle right and that’s why you’re able to do things quickly and effectively and how many how many Engineers do you think um touched this project over the course of a year odd 50 all the different components subcomponents electrical engineers mechanical engineers you know block and tackle guys have had to get it on and off the ship it was it was very involved we had up to 50 people on the ship that you can see there at one time combination of technicians ship’s crew film crew scientists sonar operators you name it and then and then was that build time included or design time was a year design time strictly design and then how long was the build years to build two years to build it and then 6 months to test but really the testing took a year and a half the five deeps expedition was effectively a Shakedown Cruise of the ship and the submersible where we figured out what went right what went wrong so and there you can see you can see the map we took it around the world I figured hell if you’re going to do a Shakedown Cruise do it right you know let’s go to the bottom of all five oceans the funniest thing that happened when we were planning this Mission we brought the scientists on board and you know idiot me I thought oh well we know where the bottoms are at least right we’ve mapped the seaf Flor and Heather Stewart a geologist from the Royal Geological Society raised her hand she said um Victor actually we’re not exactly sure where the bottom parts of four of the five oceans are we know Challenger Deep pretty well but we’re not sure of the other four I said what do you mean he says you’re going to have to map them first to know where to dive I went really okay what do I need for that she said you need a really big sonar I went okay so in about six months we bought the most advanced sonar ever put on a civilian vessel a kongsberg em24 I bought serial number one and we actually debugged it and tested it also on the five deeps but we were able to identify the deepest points in all five oceans which wasn’t easy now was that was that real time you had yeah you had um the the the submersible on the back pretty much sub surveyed and you’re like that looks like it yeah we had to take it we had to take it to cure out to build a gondola for the sonar install it and then on the first dive in the Puerto Rican Trench was when we were testing and qualifying the sonar I mean this was all really break neck speed really fast and loose I mean no way this would have happened in the government but it was my ship and I was paying for it and people were like going okay why not I always always hire real young people they have no idea what’s impossible yeah very yeah they work long hours too right right but that is f by the way the best way ever to motivate Engineers it’s a little secret I learned in business and in in this type of stuff was uh if an engineer ever gave me too much oh I’m not sure we can do that this oh that’s okay um I H I know this other team they they’ve got they I think they have a way to do it that’s okay no no we got it got it yeah then like no no no I can figure it out you know I think it helps that you’re doing something really freaking cool too right well when you’re also doing something that’s breaking barriers that’s what every engineer you know lives to do is to build something that’s never been built before that’s doing something extreme and God forbid you say someone else might be able to do it better than you then they faster they won’t sleep for like 5 days to get it done and that’s what I needed and that’s what we got done so so take us forward to I or wherever we’re at in this this talk um setting out on this Expedition so you got your ship yep you’ve got you got the limiting factor on the back yeah the first solo dive I ever did was to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the limiting factor and the 36 hours prior to that lots of things broke it was very unclear if we were going to be successful I was this close to hitting the pause button for a year which would have been a disaster financially and to morale but then I said you got 36 hours and you know taking some of my my business training I left them alone I literally went into my cabin on the ship and I didn’t come out for like a day I just let him go at it and then finally you know Patrick came to my cabin he said I think we got it I think we’ve got you a sub that can dive and I went okay and I got what was broke I think that’s important oh so many uh electrical systems had been shorted out uh the manipulator arm had fallen off in a previous dive there was all sorts of stuff but I said focus on the core elements I need to go down and come back up successfully and that’s what they did they basically hotwired this up but they did it really well and so I had a completely uneventful dive but it was my first solo dive it was two 8,000 plus meters 2third of full ocean depth that’s when we kind of knew we had something but then the next dive was in the photograph that you see was off of uh the Southern Ocean that’s South Georgia Island one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen where Shackleton is buried and we spent a month in the Southern Ocean getting the hell beat out of us we actually had a collision between the sub and the ship at one point which was not cool but no one had even remotely mapped the South Sandwich Trench before it’s completely Virgin Territory and no one had ever found the deepest point the Southern Ocean we mapped it and we found it and on the one day we had a successful dive I dove solo down to the bottom of the Southern Ocean and at 4,000 M I lost all comms with the surface because of because of a very thick thermal climb a temperature differential in the water and it cut off all acoustic Communications with the ship so I had a decision when you communicate what you’re not tethered right not tethered nope so so the communication with the surface all acoustic is just acoustic yeah uh people don’t realize often that radio doesn’t work underwater so we’re using an acoustic telephone built by L3 Harris it was basically a military system and it was traveling the speed of sound so actually at the bottom of the ocean it takes 7 seconds for Transmissions To Go from the surface to the very bottom of the ocean you can talk to the moon faster than you can talk to someone at the bottom of the ocean how did the sun work the sonar was a multi-beam echos Sounder so it was a gondola that was about 10 m long 5 m wide and it had transmitt and receiver noes so it would send sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean and line by line it would map the bottom of the ocean and we would do that kind of in real time and then they’ produce the maps they go where do you want to dive I want to go I want to dive there and that’s what we would do but in the Southern Ocean I went down below 4,000 meters lom’s procedure in submarines and there’s some submarine people out here is that if you lose Communications for more than 30 minutes you come up well this was a special situation we were in a very remote place it was like the one day we were able to dive I said when am I coming back to the Southern Ocean so I made the call to keep going down down everything else was fine with a sub I just couldn’t talk to the surface I didn’t really need them anyway I was autonomous so I kept going down got down to about 6,500 got to the bottom of the Southern Ocean which was just awesome it was amazing stayed down for one hour and then I came back up and then at 4,000 meters so we got comms again so they were really upset with me uh when I got to the surface although although although one of them one of the engineers he took me aside later that night he said now I knew you were okay I went really how did you know I was okay you didn’t hear from me he said if you had imploded we would have heard it yeah I was like oh great thanks you know so I kind of want you oh by the way the deepest point in the Southern Ocean is now named The factoran Deep after the submarine that’s traditional I want you to kind of take us through a dive because you know a lot of what we see we we can kind of imagine you know we’ve seen images at the bottom right around the Titanic or you know the the the the crazy alien landscape the ocean floor and we see you we see you you know bobbing around the surface what what’s it like after the point so so you you know you drop the submersible in the water I’m not sure how you get over there a skiff or something but you nope I’m in the sub when they put it in the water okay so so you’re in there and you you close that hatch and and you’re bobbing at the surface yep uh tell us what it’s like once you descend past like 5 ft or something okay well first of all the the whole process is very methodical I’ve been a pilot since I was 19 years old and I’ve I stressed over and over again I want every single dive to be as boring as possible you make a yeah checklist after checklist you make your plan you stick to it yeah things happen and you adapt just like being in a plane and so you know you pre the dive the day before I personally inspected the sub before every dive I made checking every gasket every potential major failure Point yeah I did it myself it’s how you fly get in the sub they lowered in the water and then they’re looking for other craft all this other stuff and then they they tow me right over the point where they wanted me to dive where I wanted to dive and then we go through the checklist and they say you’re clear to dive I open the buoyancy tanks water comes in and then very gently it starts slowly going into the water and after about 5 ft it then starts accelerating a little bit about 1.3 m/ second and then yeah you start dropping pretty rapidly I mean most military sub submarines can probably go down to 4 or 500 M I went through that in like a couple of minutes and at about 1,000 M it starts getting dark and after 1,000 M it’s completely dark at 6,000 M which few people can say they’ve been to but when you get to 6,000 meters the scientists tell me photons cannot go below that so when you’re looking out of the viewports below 6,000 MERS you are looking into absolute void in fact it actually gives you a bit of vertigo if you stare into it it’s almost like the nian thing right be careful when you’re staring into the abyss the abyss is looking back into you and uh it was very strange to see that it’s the ultimate black so so what you described the visual what does it sound like oh well the first couple of Dives it sounded awful because I didn’t know my craft and any pilot out there will tell you it’s like every plane every vehicle even your own car right they all have their own unique sounds so every time my submersible made a sound when I was first test flying it it freaked me out like oh what’s that oh Lord what’s that but I got to know it after a while in fact there’s a funny situation where the pressure capsule was actually bolted together so to keep it in perfect spheros they wrapped a steel cable around it under very high tension that kept it tight and in a sphere when we were lowering it into the ocean and bringing it back out the engineers thought that over the distance traveling down the bottom of the ocean that that coil would compress into the sphere unpredictably we found out that no it was a stepwise function which meant on one of my Dives I went like past 7,000 ft and then it was very quiet the fans are worrying circulating the air to get rid of the carbon dioxide you know a couple little you know whooing sounds the water and then out of nowhere right under me I heard this big thump I’m like oh crap but Don Walsh told me he said if you ever hear anything in a deep diving submersible you’re okay [Laughter] said uh it’s when you don’t that you’re going to you know not come back the first time though did you it was that scared the hell out of me but I just kept going I I didn’t even know what it was I didn’t know what it was until I brought brought it back up and I asked them and they said that that’s the only thing it could have been so whenever I took a passenger down after that I wouldn’t tell them that that was coming and uh so it was about half the time it happened and it was kind of funny when it did they oh my God what’s that no so going back to the map the first dive was where again the Puerto Rican Trench the second dive was to the Southern Ocean that was really tough that’s when the crew really came together under very high adversity the next dive was well we had there it wasn’t clear where the deepest point in the Indian Ocean was that was still a mystery we’ve solved it now it could have been the diamantina fracture Zone off the coast of Australia or it could have been off the Java trench and we ended up diving on both and it turned out that the Java trench was Deeper by about 100 m so it’s really close and the biggest barrier to deep ocean exploration is not the technology it’s not even the money it’s government permitting the Indonesians said that the Java trench was within their exclusive economic zone which it is and they said we needed a permit to dive there so for a year and a half I worked with the Indonesians to get a permit and everything was great they were all smiles they said permit was coming finally got over to Indonesia no permit yet no permit we got right over the deepest point in the Indian Ocean still no permit and I had to make the call do we dive or not do we wait for a permit technically according to the UN law of the sea it you do not need a permit if all you’re doing is going down and coming back up you’re testing your equipment you’re a tourist you’re not touching anything you’re not taking anything it’s not 100% clear if that’s considered Marine Science or not but by most conventional definitions it is not so I got in the sub drove to the bottom of the Java trench it was the deepest point we came back up the next day the Indonesians transmitted to us that our permit had been denied on National Security grounds that we had violated their sovereignty they even several months later passed a law making it a crime in Indonesia to do what we did so now I was a pirate uh we could not go back to Indonesia they were probably going to impound the ship and so we said well where can we go we’re literally looking at the map we’ve only got like a third of our fuel left this is during the height of covid we’re like going where do we go um we can’t go to Indonesia and Indonesia is big uh we could go to Australia no they’re going to inter us for four weeks they’re paranoid of covid you know can’t go there can’t make it to India oh let’s go to East teamour that old Portuguese pirate Haven so we started steaming to East teamour I came out on deck that night and the crew had was flying a pirate flag off the back of the ship and I said oh man I go up to the captain you know hey Captain yeah uh the boys put a pirate flag two questions boys put a pirate flag on the back of the ship um you’re going to take that down before we go into East teamour Port right he said yeah we’ll take that the boys are just having some fun he’s Scottish you know and I said the second question probably more important is why is there a pirate flag on my ship he said ah Victor you know us Scots you scratch a Scot you find a pirate okay fair enough you know that’s interesting like I I hear all this stuff about how the US Navy uh enforces like freedom of navigation and all that stuff did you have any back did you feel where was your vessel flagged first of all was it a US flag vessel us uh territory so martial Islands okay so we had the protection of the us but we were not American because having an American flag would have caused more problems than even a different flag it’s just it gets really tricky did you feel you like you had any backup going like you know Indonesia is going to I was 20 years in US Navy I have friends I feel like they were watching they were watching the ship and telling and yeah yes we knew if someone was coming after us that’s good and did you ever feel like the Indonesian government was coming after you talking I cannot go back to Indonesia no some of the best stories end like that and I can’t go back to that country anymore I’ve been to Bali once not going to go again but I’m I’m good good so so you know after like this is this is such an incredible Venture right to to dive all these when when you did oh oh and right after that we went to Challenger Deep so then it’s like okay now we got the Big Show now we’re not just going to dive to the bottom of of the ocean we’re going to do it multiple times which no one had done before so I mean the the tension level went up a lot was that was that the most tense dive that you did yeah I mean yes the first time you go down and you go down to that depth it’s like if something bad’s going to happen it’s going to happen there but Don Walsh came on board and he was there with us and he he gave some good pep talks and you know gave me some advice and this that the other he was also the first person that congratulated me when I came out of the hatch and uh from the first dive and then and then three days later we did it again that actually might have been a little bit more worrisome was doing it the second time because you’re like okay no one’s ever done this twice I wonder if there was a reason uh but it went off without a hitch but you had all those other Dives under your belt right yeah but to Mariana Trench not to 11,000 M 10,935 yeah and what what percentage in terms of pressure I depth pressure same thing but like what uh it was well if the bottom of the Atlantic was 8,000 meters this was about 50% more so it’s just an insane amount of pressure yep that’s it yep and here we have actually you know there’s a we made the sonar map of the Marana trench no one had really done that with modern equipment there were some maps before that but we did it with an em24 so this was by far the most detailed map of the Challenger Deep ever built I took down three robots with me that acted as navigation beacons cameras they took scientific data we assaulted the Mariana Trench with more technology than anyone had ever done before and so you know I knew where I was they were and we did it multiple times that’s why we knew the characterization of the Challenger Deep and that’s what we do and I even there are three pools to the Challenger Deep the eastern central and Western pools Don Dove and the Western pool Jim dove in the Eastern pool a little bit north of where I dove and U we did all three over time and explain explain your robot buddies that you take down with you I think there’s a few pictures of these robots there’s picture so the uh the Landers did the heavy lifting on the science so we built these Landers that would we would deploy over the side there’s there’s one of them Colby on the bottom of the Marana trench they had cameras they took water samples they had baited traps so they could take pictures of the animals that we’d see down there and we were able to create kind of an acoustic GPS where we could ping the Landers that we knew their locations after you know many hours and figure out where the sub was in relation to them so we would know where the sub was on the bottom of the ocean and I could navigate so that was very important although I have to confess on the very first dive to the Mariana Trench all three Landers went down and one of the backup systems we had to make sure the Landers came back was that it had a dissolvable cable and they had done a mathematical analysis of how long the cables would last so we made the cables that long and of course no one tested them because how can you test them for the bottom of the ocean so on my first dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep I’m at like 8,000 M and I saw all of a sudden get a call from the surface saying um Victor yeah all three Landers are coming up one of them was on the exact same coordinates I was diving so I swear to God I’m going you’ve got to be kidding me I’m about to have a midair with a Lander in the bottom of the Marana trench but you know big ocean right so probably it it passed 50 meters to my left I saw the light come up and I was like oh you gotta be kidding me but anyway so they weren’t there for my first dive but um the first dive was simply getting there safely yeah I sort of I got to the very bottom of the Marana trench on my first dive I got to the bottom I’m like oh my God this is awesome I’m still here the craft works it’s in great condition like what do I do so I liter I just tooled around for like four hours cruising around the bottom of the Marana Trench because it was fun it looks like the moon but I felt like I was I felt like I was seven years old again it was great and we eventually you know we got a little more serious when we were not focused completely on the sub we recovered the first rock from the Serena deep that was from like 10,900 M and then we brought it back and when we actually put it under an electron microscope we actually saw colonies of bacteria now this is life that is existing without photosynthesis they’re living off chemosynthesis they’re taking the methane and the chemicals from the rocks and that’s providing their entire existence so if there’s life on other planets it’s going to look more like that than it does up here on land so I think we have some slides on that show the uh the next slide that shows the where we kind of we got the rock the gold area that’s the bacterial colonies they’re colored gold not that they care because there’s no light down there but that’s just the color and then the next slide shows under the electron microscope the colonies of the animals so that is completely otherworldly and it was it was just such a privilege to be able to bring stuff like that back were they sequenced yes they are being sequenced are they a new species yes every single dive we made into the deep trenches we discovered new species because no one had ever been there and they’d been developing for 40 million years so of course there would be different species that was one thing that was great about exploring no one had ever been to these places even remotely so I I by the way the average place on Earth if you took the highs and lows the average depth of the ocean the average place on Earth is about 3500 ft underwater and completely dark that’s the average place on our planet not the land yeah so so you mentioned you you you went to all these places right and from what I understand you’ve sold all this stuff now what what’s the idea behind that why why why do all this and then and then and then and sell it well I mentioned it earlier the cost of maintaining an oper op ating a completely well-outfitted deep ocean expeditionary system is prodigiously expensive I am not a billionaire but that’s what it takes to do that okay it is a lot and so I was very happy what I like doing most is technological development test pilot stuff and I did that I did it for four years and we perfected the limiting factor after the amount of time all the stuff that was a little sketchy we fixed it we reinvigorated and then like I said it was great gave major Innovation is being able to go up and down repeatedly 10,000 we made it normal I mean we started calling it the elevator because that’s what it was like getting in an elevator and going down wherever we wanted but what I wanted to do was get a lot of my Capital back and stop the burn so I could apply those resources to developing new technology the next submersible I’m developing now would have new technology that the limiting factor doesn’t have it would have sonar system that can look out 5 to 10 times further instead of having a hydraulic manip arm which failed half the time I’m now investing with some universities to develop a manipulator Arm based off of carbon fiber and artificial muscle that’s electrically stimulated that would be impervious to pressure that doesn’t exist but I need money to develop that I think we talked about this but why is it that Hydraulics are are susceptible Hydraulics work on pressure so this is something that you’re you take at se level that’s working at like you know one atmosphere but then you’re taking it down to okay when you go from sea level at one atmosphere osphere to outer space you’re going from one atmosphere to zero a vacuum when you go to Challenger Deep you’re going from one atmosphere to 1100 right Hydraulics fail in that environment almost routinely even even Jim’s manipular arm fail they they just do because the pressure differentials are just too high is it just all the all the bubbles in the system that you know you you would bleed it out but it’s like a microscopic time you put it down there and you’re putting it in freezing cold conditions and it’s the gaskets that fail those gaskets are moving under intense pressure pressure with differential pressure between what’s inside and outside so it would work for like four or five minutes and then it would just go you know and then it’s useless so you need something that is not based on Hydraulics and that’s one of the things the other thing I want to do is I want to build we have the technology now I want to put cameras outside the sub that have 8K resolution and then having a direct fiber optic feed into the sub with a curval linear display that matches the hole of the submersible oh yeah so that it is basically a virtual window when you’re looking at the screen it’s like you’re looking through the hole they have that on the F-35 fighter and I want to put it in a submersible these are all the things I want to do but that takes capital and it takes time it’ll take me four or five years to design and develop the NextGen sub but that’s people never see the hard work the time that it takes to build all the stuff to do the planning they only see when you pop out of the hatch and go yay it’s a lot of engineering right yeah but I like that part so what’s your engineering team look like right now uh it’s in flux uh there’s a lot of movement in the submersible space between different companies being bought and sold the people that designed my submersible were acquired by inkfish inkfish also wants to build a Next Generation submersible they want to do in a little bit different way that I don’t want to get into it’s just a different level of Technology maybe a bit exotic compared to what I would do but that’s what they’re doing and who bought who bought um the limiting factor uh Gabe Newell and his team and what’s he up to well no as I mentioned they’re doing the explorations in the Pacific and the uh and the Antarctic and they’re doing it pretty intensively so I’m also very concerned with doing mapping 75% of the seafloor is completely unmapped so if you do the math half of planet Earth is still completely unexplored so I’m developing a ship that would probably be the most efficient deep ocean mapping vessel ever constructed I’m hoping to have that in two years I’m also trying to develop uh Landers that can be deployed much more easily to take components down for testing so yeah I’m involved and I’m using satellites now to map coastal areas that’s something that’s new as well we can use satellites to map coastal areas to a depth of 30 m we can do that with a combination of new technologies so just last year we were able to map a quarter of a million square kilometers of coastal areas that had never been mapped before and is that just a function of the image processing that’s available now that you can actually what they’ll do is they’ll take image after image of these areas then they’ll be able to get rid of the clouds and then they’ll analyze the light coming through the water with multiple images and from that they can stereoscopically measure the bottom of the seaf Flor if it’s not too turbid so that’s just one technology that we’re using to try and map the seafloor and then the ship would do the DB areas so I’m interested to know how how your work mapping the seaf Flor inter interacts with the the governments out there that or have a vested interest they’re they’re more interested in cables that might be down there and all that kind of stuff but yeah government unfortunately moves at the speed of dinosaurs that have been drinking heavily and private sector is is much more rapid so this whole thing with satellite der aemet using satellites to map coastal areas they’re not doing it at all I mean I literally am out there mapping as many parts of the coastlines of as many countries as possible to say see what you could do and it’s not that expensive and they’re like oh wow yeah I guess it does that’s pretty cool and then maybe five years from now they’ll do something it’s just so slow so we’re trying to private Enterprise is trying to push governments to do things that they can’t do themselves and bring them along I mean you’re seeing the same thing happen with space I mean if you look at what the government has built the space launch system it’s a huge white elephant it’s still it’s an Expendable booster rocket for God’s sake and Elon is catching a booster in Texas that’s that’s how far behind they are not just in Rockets but in ocean science and so many other things and it’s getting worse that’s why you’re seeing private individuals leading the charge technologically doing things governments can’t or won’t do that’s an interesting what what do you think happened because um government went to the moon they went there first before any Private Industry yep but it seems like that their pace of development has definitely slowed and and private sector has taken over what I think it’s just the nature of bureaucracy if you go back to Ancient Rome or any other civilization as civilizations mature they just get larger heavier and more lethargic they get more and more requirements they become less efficient it’s it’s a natural progression it seems of countries it’s so complet spot for us yeah in a way I mean in once in while you know a little Revolution now and then is not a bad thing and it can you know set the clock back a little bit but there is that inertia and I think you’re seeing that you know yes we built the Panama Canal with government we did the Apollo program which is great but something happened in the 60s 70s and 80s where government became concerned with other things became much less efficient and you know fortunately Technology’s allowed private sector to do those things technology allowed certain individuals to a mass level of wealth where they could mimic what governments can do that is is very rare historically but we’re there now that’s an interesting thought too because because you get scale right someone like Mark Zuckerberg can harness the economies of scale with information technology to personally have more wealth in some countries yes it it’s an interesting thought because you spend a lot of money on this project but it isn’t a incomprehensible amount there’s a lot of people that have $100 million yeah and they buy a they buy a party yacht and go hanging out in the Mediterranean and that just sickens me it’s like come on have a little bit more imagination get out of your comfort zone we’re not put on this Earth to be comfortable and then when we get comfortable become even more comfortable and then when we’re that comfortable then it’s like well I want something bigger than the next guy for God’s sake get out of that get out of that mindset use your time to do something effective that advances us as a species that even puts your own life at risk if you have to because what’s the point none of us make it out of here alive we are all living in a teenage horror movie yeah so well I’ll tell yeah I’ll tell you what you know in terms of what you can spend $100 million on this is definitely one of the coolest things that I’ve ever heard of oh yeah and it’s more effective if the government had done it it would have cost four or five times as much but yeah um I I was amazed that I was the one that did it I just couldn’t believe it sometimes I said there are so many people that are so much wealthier than I am that could have done this but they just didn’t do it no imagination I guess I guess um so we’re going to get to a Q&A in a second but what but what I want to do is I want to talk about a couple can you just give us an idea of what you’re up to now you you kind of alluded to some things that you’re up to in Marine exploration you do want to do a second um submersible yeah there’s my exploration side and then there’s my private sector investment side so I’ve discussed a little bit on the exploration side I really want to do ocean mapping I love that I I think it’s the last great exploration on planet Earth and it’s true exploration yeah we don’t know it look we’re the adventurers club right and and and one of the things that we always say it’s like well there’s not a whole lot of Peaks that you can climb and explore they are they’re just underwater yes so yeah it is it’s just harder but you found the only thing that’s not explored on this planet well and everybody’s been saying it but you know nobody listens right you just need more imagination and yeah it’s it just gets harder so I really want to do the mapping thing uh with Satellites with ships I want to develop a new submersible there are about 23 deep ocean trenches in the world I’ve done 17 the other six are really bothering me so gotta got to do that so uh on the private investor side I do Venture Capital as well as private Equity but the Venture stuff can be very exciting so as you’re seeing on the slide I’m I’m I’m actually CEO of a biomedical company we’re trying to cure some uncurable diseases using artificial viruses that can get into the human nervous system that’s a whole separate thing we’re going to FDA trials hopefully in a year I’m an investor in colossal biosciences we’re trying to resurrect that animal back there the woly mammoth and uh hopefully we’ll do that in three or four years but really that’s about developing the technology to manipulate DNA to conserve every species that exists now and may have existed in the recent past so that’s very exciting I’m also involved in uh asteroid mining here in La I’m an investor in astrof Forge and we are sending a probe that the deepest space probe ever sent up by a commercial company will be launched next month on a Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX to do a flyby of an asteroid that we think is heavy in metals and from my perspective it’s not a question of when but if we end up mining asteroids it is an engineering problem at this point we do not need to invent any new technologies to commercially mine asteroids it’s a cost issue and it’s an engineering issue and as Neil degrass Tyson said the first trillionaire is going to be the person that figures out how to mine asteroids because it will completely change the economics of so many things so I’m really excited about that and even this is my investment philosophy philosophy even if I blow all the money I’ve invested in AST Forge or any of these other high technology companies I’ll still be happy because we move the ball forward the next group that tries to do these really hard things will be building off of what we failed at you cannot be afraid to fail and I’ll just say to everybody out there one thing I love about my country that I love about American culture especially Texan culture we are not afraid to fail when you fail in the United States we take it for granted that it’s not that big a deal in fact it’s kind of a badge of honor in so many cultures that is not the case failure is failure and it’s a shame and you don’t want to do that but that’s what makes us such a dynamic and energetic people and I hope we never lose that [Applause] well I’d like to open up your questions uh Lance is going to pass this mic around I’m sure I’m sure people have a lot of questions but please wait for Lance to get you the mic you ready you get grilled Oh no you’re a tough crowd I’ve done worse I’ve had worse sir hi thank you um I was very curious about the mapping right so you said at some point you you more or less get dropped in uh in around the place where you want to land right and then you have the three uh auxiliary things that probably you’re triangulating with but how are you really accurately going where you want to go you spend a few hours there but you there is a challenge in even knowing where you are because you have no external reference there is no GPS except for the mapping that you have done previously which I’ll tell you how it’s an acoustic GPS system and it took us a couple years to perfect the ship on the surface of the ocean we knew exactly where it was because it had Precision GPS you send down the Landers the Landers land on the seaf Flor we have a pretty good idea of what the topology is because the sonar built the map then the ship cruises around in a circle for several hours and it is acoustically pinging each Lander so we’re able to triangulate where the Landers are on the sonar map to pretty good Precision within 10 20 MERS okay now we know where they are then the submarine goes down the submarine can ping the ship and the individual Landers so in three dimensions using mathematics we can roughly triangulate where the submarine is in three dimensions I feel like that had never been done before Four Points though I really cutting it close you didn’t want to add a fifth because with four four satellites effectively four worked well enough it’s a big ocean but that’s the minimum four is the minimum required to get well we we also we also figured out you know when you when you drop the submersible from from the surface to the bottom of Challenger Deep it was 7 miles we did it so many times we actually figured out roughly how much drift we would get and we did it with the Landers as well in fact there’s a quick quick story where on the second dive to the Mariana Trench one of the Landers went to the bottom and when we all got back to the surface one of the Landers was stuck on the bottom and we were like oh crap it’s going to run out of power we’re not going to know where it is we I will have lost a half million dollar Lander but then we said wait a second we have a submersible and we can go look for it said but how are we going to find it we came up with a solution where we knew where we dropped it so we took another one of the Landers and dropped it at exactly the same place and of course it didn’t land right on top of the other one it drifted but we figured we’ll then home the submersible on the new Lander and then do a search pattern around it and sure enough within 30 minutes we locked onto the Lost Lander found it nudged it and it came up how much that’s the deepest Salvage operation in human history and always will be because it was at the bottom of the Challenger how much did you save by not having to replace a land oh half million yeah half million dollar Lander and it had the uh one of the three Omega watches that were designed for full ocean depth so that was another motivation for so that watch has been down at the bottom of the ocean more than any other watch in history all right we got one over here uh two questions if I may sure what’s the team the D extinct excuse me your D Extinction team what is the plan for air gap redundancy to keep it out of AI hands and then your opinion on this madness pursuit of going to Mars versus colonizing the Deep oceans as an anti-extinction event for humans okay two very different questions the first one colossal biosciences has an extensive number of people that are bioethicists genetic Engineers the head of the chief technology officer is Dr George Church from Harvard who is one of the founders of the Human Genome Project this is a very serious very large organization that is Con L interacting with the government of how to make sure that what we’re doing is ethically sound that is going to be high integrity and if you want anyone doing this you want this organization at least that’s what I believe I’m biased because I’m an investor but this is a worldclass team and we don’t think anyone is even remotely close to what they’re doing we’ve already had three spin-off companies from colossal because of the technological tools that we’re developing a side thing that they’ve thrown off is a company that I’m also invested in which is developing biolum incent plants right these are plants this isn’t theoretical I’ve been in the lab and seen these things I have seen plants that are bioluminescent that’s crazy that’s Avatar level stuff anyway okay second question was oh oh Mars okay colonizing the ocean I still don’t get it I know there are a couple of groups that are interested in colonizing the ocean living in the ocean is really hard anyone that wants to do anything in the ocean I don’t think fully appreciates how ultimately brutal the ocean is it systematically has a will to destroy anything put in it it’s corrosive saltwater the energy in waves in the ocean is unbelievable so if you want to go in the ocean and live there that’s kind of like saying let’s go build a new house in the Palisades it’s I don’t know if it’s the the best idea the other thing is that the ocean is still on planet Earth the the other hey I’ve been in two tornadoes in Texas I know what it’s like okay so going to Mars is about allowing us to not be 100% Exposed on this rock I think that’s one of the big motivations of Elon and others that want to go to Mars is to get us off this one vulnerable potential asteroid strike kind of place so that we have an ability to preserve our species in a place other than planet Earth I think it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder than people think it will be uh most of the people that go there are not going to come back in the first 50 years they’re going to die of radiation probably but that’s just my view I still think it’s worth doing and uh yeah if Elon asked me to go and be one of the first colonists on Mars and not come back yeah I’d do it Victor back here I’m gonna die anyway come on uh I’ve heard you talk in podcasts interviews as well as in your book you mentioned that most people I’ve never written a book uh the book written about your exploration uh that most people fail to live to their full potential yes and I’m wondering what do you think is the biggest impediment to achieving your full potential and ultimately how do you know that you’re on the path to achieving your potential okay I firmly believe that that’s true that the vast vast majority of people come nowhere near their full potential of what they can do in their lives okay the two major reasons they do not okay let me give three there are three and they’re the words that are almost like that cannot be said laziness fear and lack of self-discipline okay human beings are creatures of comfort we just want to survive and when we get to a nice level of comfort gosh so much is is lost so we become lazy and a lot of people are lazy you know uh and then there’s fear huge fear of failure huge fear of not doing the right thing of wasting resources and people are inherently fear fearful and then the last I think the greatest virtue that a human being can have is self-discipline if you can control your mind and how your mind thinks you can do anything pretty much you just have to point it on where you want to go people ask me how I could do so much I just decided to do these things I wasn’t afraid of failure and I saw them through and it’s persistence that gets you through all that but really it starts with self-discipline if you can control your mind you can control your reality that’s from my favorite science fiction book of all time Dune that’s a fundamental precept of that whole series control your mind and you can do extraordinary things but we are too lazy to train our minds shocker I’m a Zen Buddhist but okay go ahead back here here is the mind killer um are you aware of a coming sail drone and what would you say is the state-of-the-art of um subsurface navigation mapping sure I’m very familiar with s drone I’ve looked at s drone as a POS POS solution for mapping the seafloor but there are two issues with sail drones in my view and I’m sure they would disagree one is they’re very expensive because they’re fully autonomous so you have to put a lot of very complex and expensive Electronics into them they are also relatively small compared to a surface vessel so the sonar that you can put on their bottom and power with solar panels is relatively limited that’s why I’m designing and building a minimally crude man vessel or crude vessel uh that could has one or two people to basically be a minder and it comes and goes out of port but it has an em12 for sonar the biggest and most complex sonar you can put on a civilian vessel so it can map tons more than a sail drone and frankly it’s very cost efficient it was designed for fuel efficiency so when you do the cost per square kilometer mapped because I’m a business guy reduce it all the cost per square kilometer it’s cheaper and it’s more reliable and Pirates won’t take it on the high seas and strip it for parts that’s my view of sail drone I think sail drones will be really good in mid coastal areas where you can’t do satellite dietry at 30 MERS but a deep ocean vessel is not efficient at 100 meters I think sail drones would be great between 30 and 200 meters so like so many things in life the combination of Technologies is the ultimate solution not the Silver Bullet why is it that Americans are so obsessed with silver bullets on like everything back yeah it’s simple and we’re a simple people okay fair enough so this is a bit of a two-part question so how long the distance take or how long would it take for you to get from the surface down to the bottom of the ocean and is it an active uh sort of activity that you’re sort of engaged the entire time or could you put on cruise control and if it took a long time what would you do to entertain yourself you’re by yourself for however long it would take you to get that was three question questions but okay uh so first it would typically to go to the very bottom of the ocean it would take 4 and a half hours from the surface to the bottom of Challenger Deep we typically would spend anywhere between two and four hours at the bottom and then come back up in four hours uh yes there was an autopilot on the sub there wasn’t initially so going down is not big of a problem you were kind of just drifting down and it was really just making sure that the instruments were saying what you wanted them to say make sure the batteries weren’t leaking all sorts of stuff it was just like you know monitoring a panel when you’re in the uh military submarine when you get to the bottom you’re very busy you know you’re you’re trying to stay just off the surface you’re going in different directions you’re trying to track a course you’re looking the joke was on The Descent a minute feels like five because you just want to get to the bottom when you’re on the bottom a minute seems like a second because you’re so busy and so much is going on and it’s so cool and so fascinating and a minute going up is like an hour cuz you just want to get back to the surface so by the time we had been diving the submarine for about 4 years it got to the point where on the Descent I was getting course updates from the surface saying hey you’re drifting you know 50 m to the north correct back and I would get on the thrusters and move the sub back so it was in a straight line so we got really good at that but it was not that active uh but autopilot helped a lot when you were on the bottom especially with heading control and on the way back up I noticed especially when I had a passenger like a scientist people would start getting antsy and so we would have inflight movies and and I would let the passenger select the movie on the way back up so at the Titanic we watched the Titanic at uh at Challenger Deep on my way back up from the first dive I watched the abyss by Jim Cameron and uh other people wanted to watch you know other dramas The Man Who Would Kathy Sullivan the first woman at the bottom we watched the man who would be king on the way back up so yeah we would entertain ourselves and I did have a tradition whenever I got to the bottom of the ocean I I would have a tuna fish sandwich cuz was appropriate now I have a quick followup wait before you developed the inflight movies did you ever just stare into the abyss to see how long you could look into the Blackness did you ever flirt with the abyss it was It was kind of weird actually when if you just you know cup your eyes on the portal looking out into ultimate Blackness yeah it kind of got weird you know I have to confess kind of spooky I will say there’s a really cool thing that we that we discovered kind of by accident between about a, and ,000 M I’ll never forget the first time it happened I was going down and I was checking something and I bumped the light controls and you know all the lights came up and I oh that’s a lot of battery power so I turned them off I looked out the portal and this massive wave of bioluminescent started lighting up off in the distance it was like lightning in the ocean I went holy crap and then of course the scientists went well yeah that’s you know that’s the most common form of communication on planet Earth is aquatic bioluminescence I went okay well you should have told me it’s really cool so after that it never happened all the time but about 30 or 40% of the time when you got in that Zone The Midnight Zone you know I’d get all the lights off and then I’d turn all of them on at once and then turn them off again and so many times you’d see them all flash back it was almost like you know you’re like hey and they’re like going what you know I mean I have no idea what I was saying but just that’s an endless amount of science yeah one flash two flashes three flashes whatever different colors like you can go close encounters God knows where that would have led but all right we got one back here is there any more is there any exploration of utilizing the ocean’s corrosive capabilities to create some sort of energy source possibly I don’t think it’s God knows people have studied so many ways to try and get energy from the ocean whether it’s tidal systems or one way that actually is pretty effective that I know DARPA is working on is actually the heat differential between the different layers that that actually can generate electricity using the corrosive nature of the ocean unfortunately that would probably require a consumable part of that system which would make it economically inefficient so the answer is technically could you do it maybe would it be economically efficient probably not heat differential is probably the way to go you know what’s interesting about that is getting back to bias right like we we’re familiar with plants and photosynthesis we can effectively you know grow some algae and make some biodiesel you found bacteria on the bottom of the ocean that are converting energy from that corrosive nature of everything but we’re just so far removed from it that never it always comes back down to the math what is the chemical efficiency of photosynthesis it’s really low it’s like 3% okay photovoltaic cells are like between 12 and 20 so the issue is just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s economically efficient and just because something can be done in a laboratory certainly does not mean it can be done in the real world at scale and and those bacteria are living a pretty meager existence on the bottom exactly and that’s why you know you don’t see huge algae Farms to create biodiesel because it’s economically inefficient so that’s spoken like a true Texan no spoken like no I say spoken like a true venture capitalist most people don’t realize in the realm of venture capital nine out of 10 of your Investments are ending up zeros or not that good it’s the one in 10 that you got right that pays for all the others because going from Theory to the lab is hard enough and then they actually call it the the Valley of Death how do you get from the lab to commercially scalable economically profitable which means it’s efficient that it works system and it’s really hard because the because the world is unpredictable you don’t know what you don’t know and that’s why even with all the brain power we had building the limiting factor we still didn’t know half the stuff that was was going to go wrong I actually I also hold the record for the deepest fire in a submersible okay that happened at the Tonga trench at 10,800 M it was the first dive to the Tonga trench I was down there on the bottom for 15 minutes and I was quiet I was exploring and all of a sudden all hell broke loose alarm after alarm lights flashing it was I was alone in the sub it was I was four hours from the surface I’m like okay you and then the first thing that goes to your mind is okay what is causing this massive Cascade of failures I guessed right and it was it was a battery a battery had gotten some saltwater Ingress and it was melting down it was dumping a couple of kilovolts into the system it was melting the submarine right outside the pressure capsule so I shut it down and I tried to isolate it before it could bleed into all the other circuits and cause a you know complete failure uh so that happened uh and I came back up and had probably the strangest radio call I’ve ever had when I was doing my diving which was they said okay Victor hey you’re back in the surface we’ve got you on the hook we’re lifting you back up on the ship all is good but you should know when we open the hatch you’re going to smell a lot of burning stuff I great they said yeah when you breach the surface the fire started again I oh thanks okay and uh so we solved that problem the fire was probably always burning the whole time right but but the fire showed where the weak point in the sub was so we went hard after that for the next month and we solved that problem but that’s what youy chemistry we didn’t know it was it was a lithium polymer uh but the issue was the gasket that allowed the circuit to come in and out and it was corroding much faster than we expected there was some other really technical stuff that went into it but it was something we could not foresee yeah it really wasn’t and but we found out through real world testing we got one back here uh you say that 75% of the uh ocean is unmapped um do you think there’s a chance that uh we’ll find any uh you know artifacts of human civilizations that don’t even know about uh through the mapping that you plan to accomplish mapping no cuz uh unfortunately sonar people don’t often get this you can’t tell the difference between rocks and metal people kept asking me to search for Malaysian flight uh four or three or whatever it was uh 370 or whatever the number was and the issue is sonar will just be mapping the acoustic Reflections and it can’t tell the difference between Rock and metal you need to get down and look at it closely you need drone you need an a remotely operated vehicle or you need to make submercible to go down and look at something interesting is it possible that we could find an a civilization like Atlantis or something or some other Subterranean yeah whatever yeah sure I mean God knows I was I was so looking forward to finding an alien ship at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that would have been awesome uh I could have told James yeah your movie came true uh but anyway I don’t mapping won’t do it but mapping may give you a clue and then you can go look for it but for example they they recently thought they found Amelia airart plane right yeah and they had a beautiful sonar image and it looked like a plane first thing I I said to myself when I saw that image was it looks too good right that’s a plane that crashed almost 100 years ago and it looks like a plane still uh-uh but it’ll fool you too Victor I I’m curious to know you mentioned Dune as a a book that’s inspired you what are some of the other books that you read when you’re younger maybe even now some of the things you’re talking about is is like Mich K Jurassic Park uh I I’m mostly asking because I’m um making recommendations to my own son different books that I’ve read I’d be interested to know what what has inspired you obviously I’m a huge fan of Science Fiction because I think good science fiction authors point to what could be and then you get crazy people like me saying well how can we actually make that work if something doesn’t violate the laws of physics it’s a matter of engineering and resources and science fiction often shows that uh one of the first books my parents got me when I was very young was Goods World Atlas and I just would sit there and study Maps I loved Maps just for whatever reason so I love science fiction I also read 20,000 Lees Under the Sea by Jules Vern when I was very young and look what happened um yeah so yeah that’s what I would suggest and uh you know a little bit of fiction variety variety is good you know and just encourage at the at the very root core just encourage kids to a bloody read you know get their heads in a book and off the screen we’re going to take one more question back there do you find it hard trying to balance your business mind and your Explorer mind because to me it feels like you know a business mindset you want to kind of have every single thing put in front of you before you go okay I’m ready to invest but an Explorer would be like you know I got 90 10 90 to 90% odds I’m ready to go no what’s extraordinary is how much they all rhyme business investment Extreme Exploration even war I’ve actually given talks on this they’re different but they rhyme and where they rhyme is that they can be reduced to basic principles and math and risk analysis so making an investment what’s the first thing you do when you make an investment what’s the first thing you do when you study a battlefield what’s the first thing you do when you’re going to dive into a new place you study the hell out of it you gather the intelligence in the military they call intelligence preparation of the battlefield you’re doing the exact same thing when you’re making an investment or going on an Extreme Exploration and then it becomes about adaptability trust me when you invest in a company especially in private equity and you’re doing a turnaround things happen that you did not expect so you have to adapt and change and do you know do the best you can same thing happens on a mountain weather changes you’ve got to adapt and you’re constantly doing if you’re doing it correctly the math on what’s the risks what’s the reward what’s my Escape Plan in business what’s my escape plan if everything goes to hell can I get at least my money back how do I do that how do I ensure that what if I’m in a dive and all of a sudden the battery gets on fire how do I get home all those disciplines flying is a great discipline I’m a huge believer in trying to get young people into cockpits because I think it teaches so many different skills about risk analysis planning knowing Machinery getting self-confidence and I actually give a lot of money to the association of pilots in the US because I want to get more and more kids into college pits so anyway well thank you for joining us Victor thank you very [Applause] much for those of you watching online as a reminder we do this every Thursday at the adventurers club uh so thank you for tuning in but other than that again thank you so much for joining us tonight it’s been an honor having you here uh but that’s all for us here at the adventur club of Los Angeles we’ll see you next week thank you