Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 269 - Mike McDowell - The Most Interesting Man Alive

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Mike was born & educated in Australia. His career began on MacQuarie Island as a geophysicist with an Australian expedition in 1971. He would go on to found Quark Expeditions and pioneer tourism transit to the polar regions with Russian icebreakers. In the late 1990s, he sold Quark in order to focus on new ventures in space travel and deep ocean exploration. He currently serves on the board of Space Adventures which offers space travel to the general public and operates Deep Ocean Expeditions which has coordinated dive expeditions to the Titanic, the Bismarck, and the Mariana Trench.   Mike is currently a partner in Antarctic Expeditions and Logistics which offers air transportation, logistic support, and guided experiences for those venturing to the interior of Antarctica.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. I'm looking right now at their website, and the newest thing that I'm seeing is they have a collaboration with Go Ruck. They're on their main landing page, the banner, they have a BRCC and Go Ruck sweepstakes. And what's included is you get two VIP tickets to the Go Rutt sand lot in Jacksonville. Two backpacks, shoes, swag, coffee, holy cow, you get a ton of stuff. So if that's your thing, I've actually never done one of these Go Ruck events, but I've heard some pretty good things about them and also about the founders. But again, take that with a grain.

I've never really been a part of it. If that's not your thing, well, just go to black raffle coffee.com and get all the coffee needs that you might have for your day, for your week, for your month, for your friends, coffee subscriptions and everything that you need to actually make coffee for yourself. That doesn't taste like shit. And don't use a French press by any means. Use a pour over.

Be a professional. Be better than a French press. And that's it. My guest today, the only way that's, I feel like I can describe him is the most interesting man alive. His name is Mike McDowell, and I met him when we were out in Antarctica. He's one of the four partners of Antarctic, logistics, and exploration. We had just completed her first practice jump out in Antarctica, and they brought some champagne out for us, which, okay, interesting, didn't think that was going to

happen, and sat down and just listened to him talk for what became ours. And I actually regret not going and getting a microphone at that time because he talked about so many of the things that he had done in his life, whether that be a scientist, traveling the world, seeing the Titanic multiple times, being in the submarine when the Bismarck was first seen visually, being involved in an organization that puts people into space,

traveling to the Himalayas, everything in between. It was an unbelievable conversation that we had that night, so of course I grabbed him. I had Logan and Jericho from Black Rifle Coffee joined me as well. and sat down for just over three hours to listen to this incredible story. And one thing I want people to realize from this story is that Mike didn't actually go into business until his late 30s.

So think about that when you listen to him talk and all the things that he accomplished before and after. My point in saying that is, it's never too late. Keep pushing yourself as hard as you possibly can. And on that note, I think we should get into this. episode number 269 with the most interesting man on the face of the planet. Mike McDowell. Enjoy. To the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I actually don't even know where to start because, what was it, two nights ago,

it was the day that we jumped. Yes. And you treated us to a lovely appres skydive of champagne and beer. And we were in the, what do you guys call that, the dining hall? Yeah. Yeah. I was going to call it the mess tent, but it's a little too military for me. Yeah, no, we call it the mess tent as well.

So we were in the dining hall, and you started going and talking about your experiences in life and in business. And I actually almost got up and grabbed the microphone at that point and just wanted to record you talking, but I didn't want to interrupt you. I think you were single-handedly the most interesting man I've ever met in my life. I'll introduce you to a while, so I think far surpassed me, but, you know, we've got to be. We've got a few stories, yeah, and some experiences. What do you boys think we should start? I think start at the beginning. Actually, this amazing, man.

I have a question. Because I do want to start at the beginning. But where we are now, when you are growing up, is this where we are right now in Antarctica, at Union Glacier at the ALE camp, which you're a quarter owner of? Is this what you wanted to do slash thought that you would be doing? Absolutely not. We were brought up in Sydney, myself and my brother, who's also a 25% partner here. He's doing a lot of the back office stuff at the moment.

He's back in Australia. We were a very ordinary, in a good way, very ordinary lower middle class family. You know, there was no spare cash at the end of the week. My mother managed the money, wrote a budget out. we'd end up with threepens or sixpens or two shillings left. You know, we were pound shillings and pence in those days. We'd end up, you know, mum would say, oh, it's a good week. We've got five shillings left.

But we had everything that we needed. I had a great mum, good dad as well. And so, you know, it's amazing now how kids have these expectations that we never had. You know, if you had a good meal on the plate each night and you had clothing and, you know, It used to always be a big deal about school shoes. That was a big deal.

You know, school starting, we've got to get new school shoes and whatever. It was very basic. And, of course, we were growing up in an era where you'd come home at the end of the day, at the end of a school day, straight out into the streets. You know, it was none of this screen fixation. I'm sure you guys were the same. You'd actually go out and play with other kids, be it a bit of football, bit of cricket or whatever.

Do you think, though, that if you had had... screens that you would have had that fixation as well. Because I've thought about that. I watched my own children and they're, the devices are amazing. And I know they're designed properly when you don't have to actually teach a child how to use an iPad. In about five minutes, they're already deeper into a sub menu. I'm like, oh, I don't know how you did that. So I thought about that. I think that our generation would have that same struggle of addiction. I'm absolutely in agreement. I mean, I've got it now. later in life and I detest the fact that I've become reliant on my phone.

You know, first thing, oh, where's my phone? Oh, God, I've left my phone somewhere. And then you sit and sort of consider it and it's like, why am I a slave to this damn device? So, you know, the computer I use for business type stuff and for a little bit of news and whatever, but it's the phone straight in the morning, BBC, CNN, Australian news. then it's the email. I don't use any social media. I've got, you know, I absolutely don't use social media. I don't want to.

I don't care whose dog's doing what or cat or what their food is or who's sitting in a first-class lounge somewhere. How's that supposed to make the dog or cat feel? Yeah, well, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, the RSPCA, you know, the animal cruelty people are after me for that. But so, yeah, we were growing up. The extent of our travels was literally from Sydney,

up to what we call the Blue Mountains just outside of Sydney. It's an hour and a half train ride. Used to be steam trains, you know, which kids in those days, you know, steam trains, wow, this big thing, chich, chich. And that was the extent of our travel. So I really didn't think about anything like this, nothing. The first excitement I got about travel was one of my school friends, his father was a doctor, and he went to Cambodia.

This is in the late 50s. And that was pretty far-fetched in those days to go from Australia to Cambodia because the air travel in those days was very basic. And he went to a place called Angkor Wat. I don't know whether you know Ankur Wat. I do not. It's a massive Khmer, K-H-M-E-R,

the Khmer Kingdom dominated that part of Cambodia and northern Thailand in those days. And there's actually some beautiful temples in northern... than Thailand called Pemai, same culture, but absolutely ornate, beautiful stone carved buildings. And Ankor Wat is, that's the center of it all. So anyway, this guy came back and showed my friends, and they showed me, you know, there was no video in those days, obviously, it was still black and white photography or whatever.

They showed me these ruins in Ancour Wat. And I've got to say that tweaked a sort of really early basic interest to go, Jesus, there's a lot to see in the world sort of thing. But then there was nothing. We, again, you know, used to travel down to Canberra, and that was the extent of it. What were your kind of in those times? What were your earlier aspirations, you know, when you're a kid, I want to be a fireman. Well, yeah, going through the early stages of child.

Of course, it was, I want to be a steam train driver. You know, that was a big thing of young kids around steam trains. Oh, yeah, wouldn't it be great to be a train driver, you know, driver, a steam train. Later on, really, I was more into, you know, sport. I played cricket, pretty decent at that, rugby, tennis. Didn't do any surfing, body surfing, but not board surfing. Even though we grew up, you know, very close to beaches. We were in southern Sydney.

I went to school in a place called Cronulla where there's a big beach area. But at that stage, I wasn't really thinking of, you know, expeditions or whatever. And, you know, given how difficult it was to travel in those days with air travel and expensive, we weren't thinking, you know, further afield. So even within Australia, we didn't know a lot of travel. Did you have any idea how large Australia was at the time growing up? No. I don't think most people actually realize how large Australia is and how much landmass of the U.S. you can fit inside of Australia.

Basically, continental U.S. is just a little bit bigger than Australia. Yeah. Take out Hawaii, take out Alaska. The continental areas, U.S. is still a little bit bigger, but very close. I didn't realize it until I came to Australia to do a speaking engagement. And I believe one was in Perth and one was in Sydney. Oh, yeah. And I figured, well, just drive, right?

I mean, it's Australia. Sydney and Perth are obviously neighboring cities. Perhaps they have an overlapping area code. And I looked at the tick and I was like, what's this five-hour flight? Well, when you look at that, when you look at Sydney, Perth and compare it to New York, Los Angeles, US is a little bit further, but US is a little more squat. You know, Australia has a lot of, you know, north-south, probably more than the US. You know, if you start in Tasmania and go to the top of Cape York, You've probably gone further than you can go in the U.S., maybe.

I think you're right. I think in the overlays, it bubbles out both south and north. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How far is Melbourne from Sydney? 900 kilometers, 600 miles, more like. So my sister was born there of all things. My dad did an exchange program. He came and taught physical education in Australia for two years.

Right, okay. In Melbourne? In Melbourne, well, near Melbourne. I know that's where my sister was born. and they worked on a dairy farm, and he grew marijuana and had nothing but great things to say about Australia. And when was that? Weed on the dairy farm.

Yeah. When was that? Well, let's see. She's 47, so I would need our friend Mike Glover to be here to double-check me on this math. 1974. There you go, 1974. Okay. And so she, yep, and they left, I think when she was about two.

So 74 to 76. Yeah. Because, you know, when I first went to university in 1966, there wasn't, you know, we were almost unaware totally of any drugs. You know, we knew there was beer. Australians drank a lot of beer in those days. I still do, but probably less because the wine revolution started. So, you know, we drink a lot of wine now.

But I can remember my first awareness of drugs was when I was at university, they caught some of the chemistry professors or PhD students or whatever, making LSD in the university. And this was a big deal. And I was like, what the hell is LSD? What's this stuff? And, you know, there was no awareness of marijuana or anything. You know, it was if you were going to get toasted, it was booze.

You know, it was whatever. You know, you look at social evolution and the way the world's moved. And, you know, human beings like stasis. You know, we like stasis largely. We like predictability because that means that we, you know, we can control our own. environment to some point. We're just talking over there today that the pace of evolution, social evolution now will mean a lot of discombobulation because people, it's like,

how do you deal with quantum computers, AI, we're already struggling. You know, I'm generationally challenged with computers and whatever. You know, I can manage them up to a certain point. And then they frustrate the hell out of me when they, you know, when it's a little systemic problem and I don't or where I've got to press a button or take a tick out or put a tick in and it's like, you know, what the hell? And, you know, that's, if I go to my son, he'll go, yeah, yeah, look, yeah, you know, you're stupid dad, bleh. And he'll just go, tick, tick, tick.

And I go, no, no, no, no, no, don't do it at that speed. Let me see what you're doing. No, no, no, no. And it's all done and I'm no further enlightened, you know. These are uncannily similar to the conversations I have with my father. Yeah, yeah. I bought him his first computer. Yeah.

And he, to this day, struggles to use it. Yeah. Yeah. The first computer I bought was 1985, and it was a brand called Compact, C-O-M-P-A-Q. And the thing was about this big, and it had 64 kilobytes of memory. Everything else was on floppy disks, right? And you look at the irrationality of that now, 64 kilobytes. You know, one of the passing sort of metrics is when,

Bill Clinton was in the White House. He had a certain amount of access to computer power. A kid on an iPhone now has more. It's gone that far. You know, it's like crazy. Do you know Ray Kurzweil? I have heard the name before. Right.

He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he wrote a book, The Zero Point Is Near. That's not the right word, but something similar. He's a futurist and a very, very clever guy in terms of technology. and he says that we're about to hit the inflection point on an exponential curve. So an exponential curve rises at a fairly benign rate, and then it hits the shoulder of the curve, which is the inflection point. Then it goes almost asymptopic, where it just is going vertically.

And he reckons we're at that inflection point, where technology will change so quickly that the average person will just turn off. and be guided by a technological elite or be led by the nose. Or basically, if you look at, you know, we were talking today about reading the fine print on any of these apps that you get. You know, here's our terms and conditions. Nobody reads it. Buried down in that is we can do this with your data. We can do that.

We can sell it. We can lease it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And eventually we'll just sit there and shrug our shoulders and just be, you know, it would be like cows. cows being led by a leash. I feel that a lot of people are already there. I think we'll be okay because we have guns.

Yeah. It is an equal. Well, this is a problem. You guys have got it because in Australia you cannot own a handgun. Right. It is the only people who own handguns in Australia are either in security services and they're carefully, you know, carefully screened

how careful is careful, or you're a criminal, right? They've got them. Nobody else has them. The difference is nobody else is looking for them. Nobody's sitting there going, we feel disenfranchises as horrible. And as we were saying, when we spoke today, it's just a matter of different social evolution. You know, we didn't have a war of independence. You know, we didn't have a civil war.

We didn't have to go out and fight the Indians and blah, blah, blah. You know, we moved out through the Aboriginal population. But, you know, a spear here and a spear there was nothing that was going to stop. Interesting how, you know, social evolution. really controls differences between people. Mike, you said your dad fought in World War II? Yes. Is that right?

Yeah, dad went through difficult era because he was there during the Depression. So my father actually had a really good mathematical brain, not in terms of complex equations, because he never went past like, He probably left school when he was 15. He had to because of the depression. So he and his brothers, his older brothers,

had to leave school and go and get some work and try and help sustain the family. But later on, he could manipulate numbers in his head. People sit there with calculators and dad would be going, no, that's the answer. He was good. So he went through to depression. He had fairly basic education, basic jobs.

1941 or 42 when the Japanese invaded New Guinea and obviously were pushing through New Guinea, they only ended up 40 miles from Port Moresby. You know, if they'd had taken Port Moresby with the airport and whatever, that would have been a place to attack Australia. They bombed Darwin quite heavily. And it was interesting because Churchill in those days, we had two Australian divisions were fighting overseas in Europe and the Middle East. We had the sixth division and the ninth division. And then one division, I think, I forget which division or remnants of it were caught in Singapore. You know,

the Japanese came the way that they weren't expecting. The British were expecting to come and do a sea invasion and they just came down the Malaysian Peninsula. And they were in a very bad internment camp there that, you know, a lot of our guys, a lot of the British guys died in, in the tournament camps. But Churchill's attitude was keep the Australian divisions fighting up north, let the Japanese take the top end of Australia and we'll take it back later. Well, fortunately, the Prime Minister of the day went, no, that ain't going to happen. These divisions are coming back to fight where we need him to fight. So anyway, Dad was, I don't think he was even conscripted. I think he volunteered and they went up. He was a remnant of the 52nd battalion

but his company were all trainees. They hadn't been trained very long. So they went up, they went onto the Kokoda Trail. His unit was badly cut up by the Japanese. There was another part of that battalion that were proper trained troops. They did better. So Dad's lot fell back. Then he was taken out because he had malaria and scrub typhus and whatever.

And then he went back. and was involved with, I believe, something similar to Coast Watchers. You know, they would have guys with, as I said, the Fuzzy Wuzzies, the local New Guinea people, behind the lines reporting aircraft movement and whatever. So he didn't talk much about it. And the other, you know, Dad was a really, the most generous guy you could ever run across. Generous to the point where he'd lend his mate's money and mum would say, well, we're out of money. What's happening?

Oh, I had to lend my mate a couple of thousand dollars. You know, he was doing it tough. And my mother would go, well, we're not exactly flying here either. You know, Dad would go, oh, yeah. But, you know, he was super, super popular with people because he was just a generous guy. The other connection I had with warfare was my grandfather who really had a big influence on me and, you know,

in terms of respect for people. he immigrated from England, came out to Australia as a 12-year-old, got a free trip back seven years later as part of an Australian machine gun division that went to the trenches in France. And he was involved in a couple of the real big trench battles there and was gassed,

was hit with mustard gas that the Germans were using, repatriated back to London to recover and because of his lung weakness he contracted tuberculosis so he could when he came home he could never work again so we have a thing in Australia called TPI which is a special pension

for totally and permanently incapacitated veterans and he never weighed more than about 65 pounds you know he was and they said basically they predicted he would live till he was five years old Sorry, he'd live another five years, and he lived till he was 75. He was always frail, but he was the most calm, stable guy you could ever run across,

and just a voracious reader. He read and he read and he read and he read. And, you know, I saw him as a source of wisdom, so to speak. So I spent a lot of time around my grandparents. We lived in my grandparents' house for the first 10 years, because Dad didn't have any money. So, you know, myself, my brother was five years or is five years younger. So we were brought up in like one bedroom, mom, dad, me, and then Peter. And then eventually moved out on what was called a war service loan.

You know, they lent veterans a certain amount of money to build a house. So I got very close to my grandparents. And my grandmother was also a strong influence. She was of Irish descent and, you know, quite feisty. and because my grandfather couldn't work, then she went out. She was the breadwinner. And she became, she was a suffragette. You know what suffragettes are?

They were the women that went out and demonstrated in the streets for the voting rights for women. Oh, okay. So she was very active in that. And then she became a member of the Labor Party. And I mean a very, a very strong member of the, the Labor Party and she was at all sorts of meetings. Now she wasn't well educated and if Stalin had run for the Labor Party she would have voted for him.

You know the idea that you would vote for anybody in our Liberal Party or the country party which is the opposition and she would have shot you. I mean she was like woof. So I was as a teenager I was the oldest grandchild living in Sydney. I had cousins, but they lived elsewhere. So she bought me a dinner suit at 15 or 16 years old and I used to be taken to the Labor Party ball and you'd meet the Prime Minister or the state premier or whatever.

So that was sort of an interesting milieu that we grew up in. But yeah, my grandfather, he used to talk. Dad didn't talk much about the war. If you asked him, he was just saying, you know, it wasn't real. Wasn't a lot of fun. My grandfather also said that, he said. trench warfare, as you, you know, that's that trench warfare, you know, you're in muddy, friggin trenches and this over the top in charge, and you're going through barbed wire, machine gun,

you know, heavily in case machine gun areas, like, you know, who didn't learn strategy? You know, it's like, this is unbelievable. And they had, they still had in France, you know, mounted regiments. Now, certainly in Egypt, we had the, what was, what was, It's a fairly famous Australian unit called the Australian Light Horse, and they fought up in North Africa, and they attacked, I think it was Turkish, Turkish emplacements, or maybe German, I forget, at El Alamein. There was a famous battle at El Alamein where the Australian Light Horse rode in on horses and cleaned up the opposition.

That's kind of a famous military blunder, is that they use the light horse in Gulliver Yeah. Correct? No, no, not in Gallipoli as well. Gallipoli was a complete screw up. Right. They didn't actually use their horses though. No.

They just had to be as regular infantry and they just got... Well, you know, Ataturk, who was the guy in charge, the senior general for the Turks, who ended up then being their president for quite a while. You know, they had the high positions. And here's these dumb Australia... We've got a thing called Anzac, which you probably would have heard of. you probably would have heard of, which is the Australian New Zealand Army Corps. So Australia and New Zealand fought, you know, together in a number of wars.

But they landed on the beach commanded by Australian officers, but superior command was the British. The British officers are parked offshore in yachts, you know, directing this ridiculous attempt to, you know, take the highlands there. And, of course, it was never going to happen. The Turks were entrenched. and the Australians we lost a lot of guys

there and the casualties you know in the first world war the casualties were on all sides German, French British, Australia, New Zealand, Canadian

you know it was carnage Yeah They go over My grandfather would say You go over the top Charge and then you come back And you know There'd be 2,000 casualties

Not all dead ones but You know So that's You know, you guys have been through really tough crap. Maybe, but comparatively, I can't even fathom that type of warfare. No, no. I mean, I'm sure you guys used to talk about it when we would watch Band of Brothers or stuff overseas. Or historical, whether the whistle charge, which, for clarity, both sides can hear the whistle.

Yeah. As the guy's been checking his natural point of aim for the last seven months, and racks it round into the chamber just starts hammering as the, it's like, Human wave. He's like, what do you think? So you guys hear that whistle. Would you go up the letter? Or would you pretend that you pulled a hammy?

Or you think somebody's just out of the football game. Oh, fuck, yeah. But the stories from that, they would go up and come back into the trenches and then they would maybe dig their trench forward three inches. Yeah, yeah. They were literally fighting for inches and then it would cover up. And then redigging their trenches, they would find their fucking dead comrades. Yeah.

Like, I'm sorry. What they did and what we did. And what we were asked to do is like comparing an Apple to a geospatial satellite. It's not the same thing. Well, you know, you guys were mobile and you had mobile assets, you know, helicopters, whatever vehicle support you know. Satellite support. Satellite support.

And, you know, there it's a game of, you know, more cat and mouse. You know, there's guys there. How do we move there? This trench warfare, well, let's line all your dudes up and our dudes up and let's just shoot each other and see who's still standing at the end. Yeah, yeah. And the Germans never really, they did lose the war, sort of, but militarily they weren't wiped out.

Yeah, it was like a popular movement within Germany to end the war less, less so than, or more so than a strategic process. And then the Treaty of Versailles guaranteed the Second World War. Yeah, yeah. It was like they had a saying, squeeze the German lemon until a pips squeak. Yeah. And, you know, they took away territory.

They took away access to coal mines. You know, there was an incredible financial penalty. And all it did was create the situation for Hitler. And, you know, I always asked the question of the Germans and the same of the Russians. How did an Austrian end up? Because Hitler was Austrian. His name was Schicklegruber. That was his surname.

Schicklegruber. How did he end up being in charge of Germany? And then Stalin, of course, was Georgian. How did a Georgian end up running Russia and murdering millions of Russians and murdering millions of Georgians, too, for that matter? Crazy. Would you say, it's interesting to me, like, from the history I know in the movies I've watched, the attachment to kind of the Commonwealth,

the attachment to Great Britain from Australia. Is that something you felt as a kid growing up, a loyalty to the Commonwealth? Yeah, loyalty to, not the Commonwealth per se, but loyalty to, you know, Queen and whatever. Because the Commonwealth is just an association of countries and territories that were, you know, colonised basically by Britain. You know, we always talk about England, England, but it was Britain, of course. You know, Britain came together, I don't know, three or four hundred years ago. The Scots are trying to unwind that at the moment, of course. and probably ultimately will have some sort of increased autonomy.

But, you know, we took it for granted when I was growing up. You know, we sang God Save the Queen and that was our national anthem. You know, the British flag still up in the corner of the Australian flag. So we just saw that as a, you know, a natural thing. We didn't really, you know, we weren't down sort of kissing the floor in front of royalty when they arrived or whatever. But there was certainly the older generations, my father, my mother's, generation were more attached. And that attachment, of course, is declining. Right. I think that's

declining even in Britain. Yeah, well, it is. You know, the Queen's death and Charles ascending to the throne has, I think it's stopped that descent temporarily. Now, there is this, oh, well, the Queen was such a wonderful person, which she was. I mean, she was a pretty incredible figure for her stability and in spite of a lot of challenges. Yeah. I think, I think Charles is a good guy. How long will he last? William seems to be pretty stable. Your friend, Prince Harry, is in the crap at the moment talking about how many people he killed in Vietnam. Afghanistan. He said 25. He said 25 kills. He was an Apache pilot and he only killed 25 people? What a chotch. Yeah, yeah. I thought he was attached to the Gurkhas. No, he was an Apache pilot.

He was a helicopter pilot, yeah. But you know, those guys, as well as their actual active military service. They're the honorary colonels for this and the honorary colonels for that. And some of the Princess Anne is the honorary colonel for two or three different regiments and all of that sort of thing. This will change in Australia. The Queen, having died now, there's another push to turn Australia into a republic. For me personally, I don't care. The influence of the British royal family on Australia is minimal. Constitutionally, they're still the head of state for Australia. They never act that way.

For a day-to-day. Day-to-day, or not even day-to-day, year-to-year, the Governor General and the state governors who literally, in theory, represent the Queen. She used to, and now Charles, of course, would appoint them, but she always appointed who the government said, we want this dude or this lady. Will it happen?

Yeah, it'll happen. Canada changed its status. The Queens, the king now, still has a role, but I think they, I can't remember what they did, but they reformed their constitution so that that was less of a direct thing. For you, so going back to more of you, like we're talking, did you think you would be here when you were a kid? What do you think was, you know, the book over there, Anthony Bourdain, he's like a role model of mine in his life, and he talks about he ate an oyster. And that was the point in time when he knew he was a food guy.

Yeah. Right? And a travel guy. Yeah. What do you think that was for you in the beginning? As I said, I traveled very little. I did my university degree between 65 and 69. What did you study?

Physics and mathematical physics. I was going to study that too and then realize that was stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually graduated, but I still went, I'm stupid. So I finished that and I was on a. teachers college scholarship. In other words, you know, they were paying for the university tuition fees and I was getting paid, I don't know, 25 bucks a week or something. And part of the deal

there was when I finished the university degree, I had to do a year in teachers college learning to be a teacher. So I got about three quarters of the way through that and I was like, this ain't for me. You know, this people had come with their lesson plans and, you know, we did practice. We went out to schools and the others that all be sitting there doing the lesson plans. And I'd be looking and going, what? You've got to do this? And so about three quarters of the way through it, the guy in charge of the teachers' colleagues said, Mike, we need to have a meeting. He said, do you really think you want to be a teacher?

And I said, no. And he said, well, would you be open to resigning from teachers college? And I said, yes, as long as you give me next fortnight's paycheck, yeah. So I did that. And I can remember thinking, okay, how am I going to tell my mother this? And she was not an overbearing woman at all. You know, she was five foot two, weighed 100 pounds on a good day. And very kind and loving mother.

But I thought, you know, what am I going to do? So I remember sleeping on the beach during the day when I was supposed to be at university. And eventually I went and told her, I went, okay, look. I resigned and I'd met a New Zealand girl at that stage and I thought, I'm going to go over to New Zealand and see her. And it was back in the good old days where you exchanged, you know, friendship or a little romance or whatever by mail. You know, I'd write a letter and send it.

And then a week later you'd be checking the mailbox every day looking for something back. Then she'd send something back and some photos. So I went over to New Zealand. And there were a couple of seminal events right here. I went to New Zealand, saw her, met her family. Her mother didn't like me at all, right? Mainly, because I turned up to the front door, barefooted. Because that's, we used to go around the streets barefooted.

You know, it was just considered normal. And she was a much younger wife of a very successful businessman who owned fishing rights out in what's called the Chatham Islands, which are out to the east there. they caught fish and lobsters. And he was Italian. And she was a princess. You know, everything was around her and whatever.

So she took it immediate this, you know, I was, I've got to say, I was a pretty reasonable person. You know, I wasn't particularly aggressive or whatever. But she, you know, she took one look barefoot. And so that wasn't going to go anywhere. But to try and sustain, you know, a bit of the relationship, I lived with her brother and I got a job and that job cured me forever of working anything like that.

It was in a lead smelting factory and it was a very small factory and they used to smelt the plates in batteries, car batteries. So it was horrible. It was, well, I'll tell you there was one guy it was even more horrible. They would bring in all these, car batteries, this Greek fellow used to sit outside just under a canopy. He'd be dressed in,

you know, full clothing to avoid acid. And he'd sit there and chop the rubber off the side of the batteries. There's bloody acid going everywhere. And he'd sit there day in, day out, there'd be storms, because Wellington's known as windy Wellington. You know, you get a lot of wind through there. So this guy would be sitting there all day chopping this. He'd have acid, but. He'd have acid, and there'd be a bit of acid burn up here. Then the plates from the batteries would come into where we were, and there were two of us, and the guy in charge used to load these plates

from the batteries into the smelter, which is like 110, 120 degrees, and then it would melt and we'd pour it into ingots. But you'd get lead, you know, if it hit any moisture, the lead used to spit, say it'd have holes through the clothes, you know, holes in your legs, it holes in your legs. And once a week they'd test us for, they test us for lead poisoning. And the guy who drove, there was another guy who drove a forklift, he had lead poisoning,

but just kept working. And then once we got 12-hour shifts, right? So I'd get up at 6 of the morning, take the train out, which was an hour. Then there was no bus. It was a 20-minute walk to the factory. End of the 12-hour day, you'd go back. And, you know, seeing the girlfriend, didn't happen. You get back and just grab a food and go to sleep. And once a week, they'd shut the smelter down and there was what we called the bag room where all of the exhaust coming off this process

went through this bag room to try and catch all the lead dust, lead particles. And it would cake the inside of this particular area. So they paid us like, $3 an hour extra to put on a respirator, crawl into this little space with a little jackhammer, a little hydraulic thing, and cut all this bloody caked up lead dust in there.

And I used to volunteer for that just to make this three bloody dollars an hour. Then you got 15 minutes to shower. That was, you know, you got 15 minutes go and shower. And I did this for, I don't know, many months. And I thought this ain't gonna be me. So just about this time, The guy came to me and said, we're going to start a night shift,

and we're going to make you the night shift foreman. Night shift foreman was going to be me and one other guy. And it was just at that time that you were talking about Bourdain eating the oyster. My mother was worried that I was going to turn out absolutely a useless piece of whatever. And she saw an ad in the newspaper for geophysicist to go to Antarctica. It was the what was called Anari, the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition, which is based in Tasmania down in Homba. And they're the ones who staffed the Australian bases.

So they're advertising for geophysicists. So my mother wrote me a letter and I got it and she said, look, just want to let you know, I've applied for you to go to Antarctica. And I looked at it and went, yeah, that's cool. You know, we'll see what happens. So the next time I went into the lead smelding factory, and he said, well, we're going to make you the ship form. And I said, you know what, mate, I'm out of here.

Thanks very much. I've got a university degree. And I'm not going to be smelting lead. But what that taught me was never again. Now, I don't denigrate that job. And there's people who do it and we need it and whatever. This is the thing. You guys come out of the military, but you're adventure people.

I mean, military's adventure, let's face it. It's venture at the cutting edge where life is... Whether you want it or not. Whether you want it or not, the risk is there the whole time. You know, as you said, you charge down the inside hall of the place and suddenly there's a machine gun nest at the other end. It's not the adventure that you really want, but it's there. It's the adventure you're getting.

It's the adventure you're getting. And the thing there is that we need, and I appreciate and respect all of the people who do the daily humdrum jobs. Because they provide the structure and idiots like us who, you know, want to not have the stability, can play around on the edges. And again, respectfully, because the structure's in place.

You've got a lot of people who get up and go to work every day, man the fort, and the rest of us are sort of, you know, we're like little pimples out on the edges there. But so she said, She's applied and then I got a letter back saying, look, come and do an interview. So I went and did an interview. And they chose two of us.

There were two positions. And this is, you know, you guys have been through it as well. There's, you know, times in your life that links into another time, into another time. And people often say, oh, how do you do all this? Just, you know, casual opportunistic links. This happens and that happens. And there's a young fellow here, Anton. But you said yes, and you took the opportunities.

Well, you know, to young people occasionally, they say, oh, I'd like to do what you've done. And I said, well, you can't do what I've done exactly, nor what you've done. You know, you can't recreate an exact sort of path. You know, paths are going to move around and circumstances are different. But I said, if I can give you one piece of advice that I think is reasonable, when you walk up and there's a door, go through. Have a look on the other side because a lot of people go up to the door and think,

oh, not sure what's out there. There could be, you know, some danger or whatever. At least go through, because the same as you chaps have done, you go through and sometimes it's a complete screw-up. And you think, oh, geez, I wish I hadn't gone through this door. You just back right out and slowly. Yeah, yeah, slowly sort of back. If you didn't leave anything in that room for somebody to find. Well, you talk about backwards, just a little tiny sort of, it always reminds me. of this, the emblems on the Australian coat of arms, right?

One is a kangaroo and one is an emu. You know, an emu? It's like an ostrich. Yes. Right? And ostriches are very interesting because in every continent, this shows continental drift. We have ostriches, right? Sorry, we have emus.

Africa has ostriches. And in South America here in Patagonia, they have a bird called a Rhea. thing and they're all interrelated and they're really a very good example of continental drift where you know because these things can't fly so they haven't migrated via flight so anyway I met this other guy you know I've got a really bad memory sometimes for names but there's names that just pop up so this guy's name was Yosko Peckovich he was the other guy and we both wanted to go to Mawson, which is the Australian base in Antarctica around there. The other place was

Macquarie Island, this sub-Antarctic island. We threw dice or drew lots or whatever. He got Mawson. I got Macquarie Island. So I went and did some work outside of Perth. There was an observatory there called the Mundaring, Seismic Observatory, detecting earthquakes and all that sort of stuff. And then off I went on a little ship called the Nelladan, this little a Danish vessel that used to resupply the Australian bases. We landed on Macquarie Island and I spent another 13 months there. Was that your first time off the continent? First time off the continent.

Well, no, second, because I'd been in New Zealand. Yeah, but same thing. I'm not going to tell anybody. No, tell anybody. Yeah, the girls here are talking about where the western aisles of New Zealand. And we say they're the seventh state of Australia. There's this lot of jostling. between Australia and New Zealand.

And how old were you? The first time you got to Antarctica? Well, the sub-Antarctic I was, that was 71, so I was 24. Okay, pretty good. Yep. And 13 months there. 13 months, we got dropped, we got picked up. There were 16 of us, 16 guys.

They wouldn't let women be on any of the bases in those days. It's so weird. I wonder if there was a reason for that. Yeah. Like it would have caused any problems. No, not at all. There would have been no knife fights over the ladies or, or whatever, no pregnancies.

So we were 16. Within about six weeks, we were 15. One of the guys just on a Saturday afternoon outing around. Corrie's like a big ridge. It's actually an underwater mountain pushed up. And then there's a flat isthmus where the base was, and then there was a headland. This guy was around walking around the headland,

decided to go up the cliff with another guy. boink fell off. So we were sitting there enjoying a Saturday afternoon. It was one of the rare days where it was calm and sunny because that's in the roaring 50s. So the weather there, you can have six seasons in a day sort of thing. It just changes and windy. The second guy came racing around. Look, Brett's fallen off the cliff. And so we went over the top and down. and the doctor who had a bad leg took ages to get there. So two of us got there first, and he was wedged in a rock in between two rocks. And, you know, you...

Alive or dead? Well, we didn't know. As it turned out, the doctor said, when you got there, he was dead. But we didn't know that. You know, it's like you're trying to feel for a pulse and thinking, oh, I don't know. So I gave you mouth to mouth, and the other guy was giving him chest compressions. Now, as it turned out, his chest was massively... Damage.

Damage because he'd fallen. And, but, you know, we tried. And then after a couple of minutes, it was clear he was dead. So, you know, the funny side of it, which is not really funny, he got put in a bag and put in the chicken freezer and stayed there for like two and a half months. Yeah. And the funniest thing that came out of that, this is a super windy place. And we had big aerials for, because it was in the days of radio.

You know, you'd be trying to send back message. Right, try 15 megs, no, that's no good. Drop down to 11 megs, no, that's not good. And everything that came in was Morse code. There was no facts, there was no... So we're relatively cut off. And so... I wouldn't say relatively, because you were very cut off.

Yeah, we're very cut off. We're on an island 23 miles long and a mile and a half wide. That's it. Wow. And we got the base and there were huts down the island, which was fantastic, really basic. But we went out a lot of the island. We went out a lot. And on that island, and this is what, there were several events

that basically trained my life, so to speak, or pointed in a certain direction. One was there were four million penguins on this island and four different species. And one species only exists on that island, royal penguins. And the biggest rookery was right down the southern end. And we used to hike down there, tough hiking. And it was up and over and up on top. there, it was pretty boggy. And it had what, until I saw Vincent here,

it had the best, the best toilet scenery I have ever seen because there was this, you know, sort of a structure with no door, and you sit on the crapper there, and there were a million royal penguins. Right there. And to get down, it was, you had to go down a scree slope. So, you know, all this loose rock.

and that used to be one of the great things to do because you'd have to run down this grease, like you know what it's like running down a sand dunes. You know, you'll jump in your legs and whatever. But this, you sit out there, it was a privilege to go and crap there over a morning. Of course, you'd sit and look out and go,

you know, who else is in the world crapping watching a million penguin? Absolutely nobody is the answer to that. That was the biggest royal penguin rooker in the world, still is. But we had King penguins, you know, the big, second biggest, but those beautiful orange colors. So we had a couple of big colonies of those. And we had an absolutely overwhelming rabbit population,

all right, because the sealers used to go to this island and boil down elephant seals. There were about 300,000 elephant seals that used to mate all around the place. And so the sealers used to catch, penguins and seals and put them in boilers and get the oil. And of course, as a food source, they brought rabbits. Well, there was quite a lot of hedgeland, you know, sort of whatever.

Well, you know, what are rabbits like? You know, they reproduce whenever 20 times a year or whatever it is. So this, but there was the most amazing rabbits of blues, blue rabbits and sort of red rabbits. You know, the fur color was unbelievable. So we did a lot of rabbit shooting because the Tasmanian government who controlled it, even though it's an Australian federal government possession, Tasmania controls it. So they sent down a guy for the summer who was a shooter. So we used to go out with him and it was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Subsequently, they've done the cleanup or 20 years ago. They've got rid of all the rabbits. They introduced the same virus that they introduced into Australian rabbits. They used to be a thing called mixomatosis, and then they changed that to another virus that they could introduce onto rabbits that would kill out there. They spread it themselves.

Yeah, interesting. They spread it themselves. And there were wild cats. You know, cats had got off ships and whatever. And there were that used to, a lot of the birds there nest on the ground. So it's just, it used to be an open smorgas board for these damn things.

But they've cleaned all that up. So down I go. We're there. And this was the crucial oyster that Baudetheer ate. There was a little expedition ship, which was the first expedition ship to run trips to Antarctica and all over the world, the Arctic and all of these remote islands, called the Lindblatt Explorer. And it was put together by this Swedish guy who lived in Connecticut. or just outside of New York called Lars Eric Lindblad, who was Swedish. And Lars was a

travel visionary. And to the end of his life, he was the same. It was a big gafforing, you know, ha ha ha, ha, ha, great guy. But his vision was to explore these remote places around the world, especially Antarctica. And he actually ran his first couple of trips down there before that he got this specific dedicated vessel. He ran, he charted Chilean cargo ships out of Ushua, sorry, out of Puntaurranos, and took them down. People were in cargo ships. But he convinced a company called Swedish America Line to build this, it was 75 metres long, 100 passengers, ice strengthened, zodiacs on board for landings and all of the.

that sort of thing. And that started in 1970. And in 1971, I'm on this base. And Antarctic vessel tourism is mainly out of the bottom of South America, because it's a lot closer to the peninsula, sometimes out of the bottom of Australia or New Zealand. So in this particular year, he brought the Limblet Explorer to go to the Ross Sea, down to McMurdo, the big American basin. You know, you've got Scott's Heart Shackled and, sorry, Scott's Two Hearts Shackledon's heart, a lot of penguins, Mount Erebus, you know, beautiful scenery, superb scenery. So anybody going down from Australia or New Zealand goes through the sub-Antarctic islands. So New Zealand's have got the Auckland Island, Campbell Island, Snares. Australia has,

and all of them have got penguins, right, and some of them, species that only appear on that island. There's a little island called Snares. It has a snares crested penguin. And Macquarie, of course, is probably the best of all of them in terms of just its, in that area, it's diversity of wildlife. So in comes this little expedition ship to visit us, you know, which had never happened before, because these, this base had been going for quite a well. So on board of Swedish stewardesses. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of passengers, many of them old, but, you know, there's some cuties in there as well. So here we are deprived young males. In comes this boat. They invite us out. So we go out and cause

bedlam and, you know, we're drunk as newts and they're trying to get us off at the middle of the night, excuse me, making announcements, you know, we'll all, base personnel please go ashore, you know, half an hour later. Will all base personnel please go ashore? Where are the base personnel? Not sure, you know, sort of thing. So they did a two-day trip, and I remember one particular lady who obviously interfaced with somebody on board the, sorry, on the base. And I can remember up the flagpole the next day was a pair of panties fly. And all of us walking past, I wonder who got lucky. I wonder who got lucky. But And they came again.

They did a second trip. So same thing. So this Limblet Explorer was suddenly focused in my mind. And I thought, wow, that's cool. Gee, that's cool. Because we'd spoken to, you know, the young lads running the Zodiacs and all that sort of thing, and the crew. So it sails off.

I go back to Australia. I live in Canberra for three years. As a, you know, working as a geophysicist. for the government and just was getting bored with that but at the same time we partied like banshees you know we just partied and partied and partied and this is where I bought the Shev Corvair this this crazy vehicle what was the book that was written about that you yeah unsafe at any speed Ralph Nader yeah this is when you were daddy cool this is well well as I said I came back and you know I was pretty clean-cut young fella we got down there it was no point

cutting a hair or shaving. So I grew a full beard. I had hair halfway down my back. And when I got back, I used to go with a headband just to keep the hair out of my eyes. And of course, we landed, the ship, same ship picked us up.

Took us back to Melbourne, and my mother and father came down. And I could always remember mum, you know, as I said, was a little lady red hair. And she was scanning the boat as we docked, looking for me going, you know, I could see a saying to my father. I can't see him. Where is he?

And I'm like, like this. So I get down and my mother's like, oh, oh, what have you done? I said, oh, you know, you grew it. And my father was, you know, fairly succinct. And what he used to say, and he just looked at me and went, Jesus Christ. So for three years, you know, it was like, When are you going to get your hair cut? When are you going to get your hair cut? No, no, no, I'm not going to do it. So I decided it's stuffed this, I'm going to keep it. Why not?

And, you know, I got accosted by people in, you know, the pubs, toilets. You know, we call, in those days, disrespectfully, gay guys were called poofters. Right? Sometimes they still are. Sometimes they still are. Yeah. I've got a number of gay friends, and they're great. I've got nothing against it whatsoever, nor do I have the right to have anything against it.

Anyway, so we lived there, we partied, we partied. Then eventually, I thought it's time to move out. How old at this point? 27. Yep. Yep. And basically thought, okay, we're going to travel. And it was a standard practice in those days for Australian young people to travel to Europe.

They used to go to London and go to Earl's Court. Earl's Court was like this massive Australian and New Zealand young people. That was sort of their stamping grounds. You know, drink beer, party, chase women, and then try and do a bit of Europe. So we were going to go for a year. We said, okay, we'll go away for a year. Okay, good. So we departed in a ship because you couldn't, you know, nobody could afford to fly.

So it was a ship that ran Sydney to Melbourne, Sydney to London. How long is that journey? Oh, a month. Fuck. Yeah. So we get on it. He goes Sydney, stops in Fiji for a day, so all good. Now, this was, I mean, you talk about parties back at home.

This was just every night drinking party, drinking party, trying to, you know, chat up the chick, so to speak. The panties aren't going to run themselves up the flagpole. No, exactly. But we used to do stupid things. You look back on your life and go, I used to, I had a, you know, develop a friendship with a guy there who was a fairly small guy. We'd be drunk down the back deck, and I'd pick him up in my arms and then go over the side of the ship hanging on by one arm,

and this guy going, let me down, let me down. No, no, it's all right, mate, it's all right, yeah. And then you look back and go, you know, why do you do these things? You know, the adrenaline, the testosterone and all that sort of stuff. We then went to Acapulco, and I nearly died in Acapulco by walking across the street looking in the wrong direction, you know, because, and a friggin' Mexican bus almost literally pulled up sort of inches away, because I'm looking in the wrong direction. And then our plan was to get off in Panama, and we were going to do a short backpacking trip in

South America and then continue on to London later. Everybody who was there on board was basically going to London. So we get to the front end of, you know, the Pacific of the Panama Canal, that's good. We go through the Panama County Canal. We, Christabel Colon, which is on the other end of the canal, we get off there. So there's three of us, myself and two friends, one of whom was the brother of my girlfriend at the time. So we get off and it's like we've come out of Sydney, which, you know, it's a pretty hospitable place, nice place to live. And here we are in Christobo Calon looking around going, what? hell is this? You know, it's sort of, we're down in the poor part of town and everything looked

threatening, you know, and it was obviously we'd never seen poverty like that. And the thing that really freaked me out the next day just temporarily was we went to the market and there must have been a hundred vultures sitting on top of the market, you know, just staring down. It was like, Jesus. So we quickly decided, Panama was worth a day and that was it. So we climbed on an aeroplane and went to Ecuador. And then we started what was meant to be a year, ended up three years backpacking around South America. Wow.

Just moving around. We went out to, and it was in the early days where you lived on five bucks a day, literally, $5 a day, $2 a night hotels, really crappy, you know, concrete dungeons. But there was, what was great in those days, there was a traveling entourage in the sense of there were people, from all over the world with their backpacks. And so they're all living in these, you know,

decrepit hotels and eating in the same cheap restaurants and people passing on information, oh, by the way, when you go there, there's this hotel, it's $1.50. You know, it's like, now, you know, kids are like, well, okay, where's the three star, four star hotels? Now some people still do it on the cheap, but not many now.

This is the other thing that's gone up in the world for all of us is expectation. Yeah. And it's what's killing the environment is expectation. I expect that I can have and I can have and I can have and I want this and I want that. So as a species, we're really getting into a very challenging era where the people in the third world have expectations as well

because they can look at their, you know, you've got the Masai warrior out there in the middle of nowhere with his cell phone, looking going, oh, look, I'm out here herding cattle with a spear There's a line over there. I'm eating, you know, their Masai standard meal is blood taken from the neck of the cow and milk. They mix it. And of course, for a Masai, his wealth is how many cows he has.

And they use that as a, you know, sustenance food source. They never kill the thing and eat the meat. But they take the milk and the blood and mix it around and whatever. So here's a Masai. His expectations are gee I like these Ferraris you know so and here we are the same time

you know I drive around under Toyota Corolla and she'd be nice to have a Ferrari which we don't need so it's all expectation privilege whatever so we get off so we travelled very you know sort of frugally

and we went out to the Galapagos Islands at that stage so we flew out and there's almost no tourists. Now you go out there, there's thousands and thousands of tourists. We're doing all right for time? We are plenty on time. I have hours of recording ability. So we go out to Galapagos, and again, we find the cheapest joint in town and settled in there.

And there was an interesting little group of Germans who had settled in Galapagos not long after the Second World War. And they were out there, these German families basically not running. the show, but they were the ones who, you know, were the entrepreneurs, so to speak. I remember one, the main guy, Gus, he still sort of picture him, who was a real, you know, German entrepreneur with a thousand tales of what it was like to live in the early days on Galapagos. So we charted a little fishing boat, really basic little fishing boat. You know, you live down in the hole, in a hammock and whatever, went out around Galapagos and, you know, that was a really, you know, the wildlife out there, as you know, Darwin

and his theory of origin of the species didn't just start there, but that's where he saw the finch species, looked at the different species of finches on each island and went, they're all the same family, but they've adapted to the specific conditions. So their beaks were different. So some were seed eaters, some were plant eaters, etc. And that, you know, amongst other things, that started him thinking about speciation and evolution of the species. So then we went back and we were up in the highlands there in Keto. Keto's up in the mountains. And you have the Ketua people up there.

They wear the blankets, whatever. And that was a beautiful place. And Ecuador was a mess now. Absolute mess with drug barons really screwing up. They're in their third state of emergency. I don't know whether you guys read a lot. They've had their fourth or fifth prison riot where gangs are shooting or killing each other.

You know, 150 people dead. Yeah. Gang, gang. You almost think, well, you know, one gang killing another gang. She, what do we do about that? Probably not a lot. But anyway, it's out of control. So then we went down to Peru.

We went to Bolivia. And then we went down and got to Chile. and ended up staying then in Santiago for, you know, six, probably eight or nine months. Got jobs teaching in a school there, played rugby, had fun, drank wine. It was just after a Yende was kicked out, and Pinochet came in the military coup. So it was pretty hard times there.

You know, it was a curfew at night. And often machine guns and you'd hear a bomb and all this sort of thing. So we stayed there. You know, Chile was a great place and there was a fantastic black market for $4. So we could live way above our station in life with drinking good wine and whatever because of a 6 or 700% black market. People desperate to change. So we stayed there.

Then we continued on down south, went around in the Chiro du Fuego, went up then through sorry, Argentina, stopped in Argentina in... Buenos Aires and stayed with friends from the Australian Embassy. Didn't work there, but I learned to fly there. Learned to fly small planes because it was $12 an hour because of black market again. So we had a great time there and then eventually went back to Chile. And then we went up through Uruguay, went to Paraguay, Uruguay, and then up to Brazil. And this is where it all reconnects.

Along the way, we met this English girl. And we got to Rio de Janeiro at the same time. And, you know, we had a little fun there. And we were ready to go back to Australia because we'd run out of money. You know, we had no money. So we're out in a pub one night in Ep and Emma. And everyone's hooting away and we're drinking. And this semi-drunk Irishman, who was the size of a leprechaun,

came up to us and said, and what do you guys do? And we said, oh, you know, we're backpackers. We're about to go back to Australia and, oh, why are you going back to Australia? I said, well, we're out of money and, you know, we can't crimp too much more. And he said, well, have you gotten the education? And we said, well, yeah, and I forgot, I'd hooked up with my girlfriend. She came to Peru and then we were traveling together. And the first thing she said to me, oh, you know, her mother and father were really lovely people.

And they put up with me with the long hair and the beard and whatever. Which, by the way, I'd cut my hair. My mother kept saying for years, get your haircut, get your haircut. I'll pay for it, I'll pay for it. So when we decided to leave for South America, I figured having long hair in South America and, you know, suspicion of drugs and whatever, probably smarter to cut it off. So I went one day to my mother.

So give me $10. She said, what do you mean, give you $10? So give me $10. She said, I'm not giving you $10. I said, I'm going to get my hair cut. Well, the money was out of a purse in a flash. And so I sat there while this guy's cutting it off and it was like, because I was used to, you know, the headband, you know, you wash your hair and brush it

and all that sort of shit. And suddenly it was like, you know, you're almost semi-naked. So my girlfriend's parents, you know, were really smart, educated people, really nice people. Anyway, they expected that when Roz came over, to Peru. She said, oh, mom and dad thinks it's so romantic. We're going to get married up in a little Peruvian church in the Andes. And I was like, what? Sorry? Come again? Oh, yeah. You know, they're expecting us to get married here. I said, I'm not going to get married here. If I'm going to get married at all, it's going to be back home with my family and whatever. Anyway, that never happened,

fortunately. So we got to Buenos Aires. We lived there. And it was pretty tough there, too, because there This is when the, you know, there was a lot of revolutionary people attacking police stations and all this sort of stuff. So, you know, there was again curfews and you had to be very careful where you went and how you went sort of thing. So we stayed there for a while. And then, as I said, we're now moved up to Brazil. We get to Brazil. This Irishman says, well, look, I'm the president of. this English language institute called Césé A Arts, Centro, Centro, Cultura, Anglo-Americanos.

And he said, we've got, I don't know, 35 English speaking places or English teaching places. And, you know, we like to have a variety of English-speaking teachers from different countries, different accents, you know, different vernacular and whatever. So he said, we'll give you a job. Oh, great. So anyway, so we got jobs both of us teaching English. And we made a same pub. We met an English guy who was there.

There's a thing called the British Council, which is like, you know, Allianz Francais. The French government have an organisation called Allianz Francai. That's all around the world. It's meant to expose French culture, you know, French language and whatever. And the British had a thing called the British Council. It was to incentivise people in other countries to learn about Britain, learn the language and whatever.

So he said, British Council paid for my apartment. It's got another bedroom. Come and stay with me. So this, in a strange way, all interconnect. So this English girl that we'd met, she comes there. So they start having a relationship. So they were like, okay, we're going to go. We're going to go back down to Argentina.

Tina, To O'Shoir. Okay, great. Long story short, they come back and said, oh, how to go? It was really great. And she said, oh, and by the way, I got a job on a little expedition ship called the Limblet Explorer. And I went, Limblet Explorer. I know Limblet Explorer, you know, because it had come through Macquarie Island. And she said, oh, it's going to be here in 10 days.

It's coming up the coast and then it's going to go up the Amazon. Why don't you try and get a job on the ship? So I went, oh, shit, okay. So we did a little sort of asking around and found out where the representative from the company, Limblad Expeditions, was based in East 55th Street in New York. It wasn't Madison, Lexington, Lexington and 55th. The office was there. And so this dude, Chris Powell, who was the most socially inadequate person I've ever met, you know, he was like, he didn't. been born in Argentina. He was English, born in Argentina. And he couldn't look you in the eye. He was like, you know, and he was always rubbing his hands. But he was a really nice guy, but just,

I mean, you see him as a social animal was like, holy shit, you know, something's wrong here. So we find out where his hotel was and I ring him. And his immediate thing was, how did you find my name? How did you know where I was? And it's like, oh, okay. So we go down to the ship. Get on. board and you know have a look around and think gee this is pretty cool and there's a couple of young Americans guys there who are Zodiac drivers lecturers what's it like on board oh it's fantastic you know we go to all these remote places really fantastic yeah that's cool so Chris comes around and says well actually we're not interested in you me we would be interested in your girlfriend because she studied biology we don't have a lot of use for

physics okay um Anyway, Roz said, well, I'm not going by myself. So Chris said, well, you know what, we don't have a job, but give me your address. So that's good. So we then decided, you know, we were finished in Brazil. We went up to Amazon, you know, on one of these bloody local boats where the hammocks are stacked three deep. And there's, you know, insects all over the place. And, you know, you wake every morning something had bitten you and you wondered what it was.

We went up to Manouse, which is at the junction of the Rio Negro, and it's where the black water meets the colored water there. And we stayed there, and it's got a famous opera house. Back in the rubber days, because, you know, Brazil was the source of rubber. And so back in those days, they built this ornate opera house in the middle of the bloody Amazon jungle. And that's still there. So, you know, we had a look at that.

We did a few things. Then we went up the Rio Negro then and up the what's called the Rio Branco. So the Black River, then the White River. And that runs up to Guyana. So along the top of South America, you got Venezuela, what used to be British Guiana, and then Dutch Guiana, and then French Guiana. Right? So there's a three.

It's now independently, you know, they're all independent. Dutch Guiana is now Suriname. French Guiana, funnily enough, is not independent. It's still a French colony, and that's where they launch the Aryan Vives, a launch from there. So anyhow, we go up, we go into British Guiana, and then we went across to Suriname or Dutch Guiana in those days,

and then across to French Guiana, traveling, and then we got back to Venezuela, and I used to get my mail sent to me to the embassies. So where there was not an Australian embassy, we'd get the British embassy. So the mail could go there, they'd hold your bail. So I went into the Venezuelan embassy, and the lady said, oh, you Mike McDowell. And I said, yeah. She said, oh, well, the international police have been looking for you.

And I went, oh, okay. And she said, it's to tell you that your mother passed away. And my cousin was high up in the Australian police force. So, you know, they didn't know where we were, because we'd been out of it. contact because we're up in these god forsaken sort of places beautiful but you know a little bit on the edge so we went back to australia for the funeral and uh while i'm there along comes a letter from this chris powell going we can give you a job going to antarctica driving zodiacs on this little expedition ship so this is where it all circled back this mccory island met this

girl comes to stay with uh you know meets us and she goes down and and gets a job, passes on the information. And this is what we're talking about. Opportunistic situations. You don't plan. It just happens. And so I got this letter, and they weren't asking Ros to come, just me to be a Zodiac driver.

And she at this stage, we'd gone back home. Her parents are not happy. They're not happy. Because you arrived unmarried? Yes, we arrived unmarried. And that was a little sort of pressure point. And she said, well, what are you going to do?

And I said, do you know, I've got to go and, you know, I just want to go to Antarctica because, you know, I'd been to Macquarie. I knew about Antarctica because, you know, I was in the lottery to go, I could have ended up in Mawson, which would have changed everything. You know, you look at these what ifs.

Yeah. If I'd have gone to Mawson, I would have never seen the Limbled Explorer, probably would have come back, got married, lived a suburban life, white picket fence, and, you know, probably been happy.

then again maybe not. So these were these little connecting links, none of which were thought out, none of which were planned. Some people planned their lives are going to do this, this, this, this and this. Mine's been, I wouldn't say chaotic, but it's been, you know, flop here, flop there.

So I said, I've got to go, but I'll come back and we'll look at what we're going to do going forward. Well, I never came back. I did come back and it was obvious this was not going to happen. I'm still in touch with Ros. You know, we're still casually,

every couple of months she'll ring her, I'll ring her, and we'll crack a few jokes and laugh about things and whatever. I always tell her, you're really, really lucky that you didn't get me. You're really lucky, and I think to myself, I'm really lucky as well. She was really smart and really talented, but it would have been a suburban life. So I go off, start driving. and the first thing, I get on board and it's like,

holy, there's all these Swedish stewardesses, there's all of these visiting people coming on, some of them young, some of them little older and some very old. The bar is free. I got a free bar bill, so we partied like banshees every night because the passengers wanted to as well. And then we're going down Antarctic Peninsula and it was the only vessel.

now there's 50 tourist vessels. Wow. We were the only vessel. Like specifically Antarctic tourist vessels? Yes. Wow. Yes. We were the only Antarctic tour vessel in the whole of Antarctica.

Now we were focused there. Later on we went to the Ross Seaside as well. So we did like five trips the first year. And there'd be five landings a day and there'd be shore parties, you know, drinking booze. and we could go anywhere and there was, now there's quite significant restrictions. Those days there was nothing. You didn't have to have a permit,

you just went down and did what you were going to do. So again, you know, we often sit with, you know, fellow travellers of that time or guys that I work with and go, back in the old days, and my kids go, you know, back in the old days, you know, stupid old bastard and it was like, no, back in the old days, it was different. You know, you look now, they're queued up with ships waiting to land, and they have to wait, because you can't put two lots of people on the same landing point.

And they're lucky to get one landing, maybe two a day. We used to do four and five. Three o'clock in the morning, we'd see whales, wake everyone up, get out and whatever. So I started off driving the Zodiacs, and then a couple of months later, we went to Galapagos. and the guy who was the expedition leader he was going home and they needed a new expedition leader so he recommended me which was a bit of a shock to a number of people

because we were the party hounds so I took over as the expedition leader and did that for the next six years and you know we went all through Alaska the Arctic all of the little islands in Micronesia which in those days were not deculturated New Guinea

a lot in Indonesia out through to all the remote islands going out through Indonesia. We did a lot of the Pacific islands, as I said, New Guinea, Solomon's Vanuatu, some of the really remote stuff there. They'd through to Chile, back down to Antarctica, blah, blah, blah, up the Amazon. We went right up the full length of the Amazon. What would you say the turnover was on that ship? Like how many crew were on there and then how often did that? Crew was 50.

and the passengers maximum were 100. It really depended the changeover of a crew or changed over a passenger normally a couple of weeks. Maybe Antideca used to be a little less 10 days, 10 or 11 days. If you just went to the peninsula, if you went to, we spent a lot of time

in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, which for wildlife, you know, is absolutely fantastic. Those trips would be longer. If you did it out of Australia and New Zealand, there they were much longer, because the distance is much further. But the great thing about doing that side was you've got these sub-Antarctic islands, which have different range of wildlife. So all of that really got me into appreciation of the natural environment, wildlife balance of nature,

which we're not very good at. You know, human beings, we're terrible. We don't understand the integration of nature. we pick out big things. We like big animals. If you talk to people about, you know, the specific things like beetles. Beatles are, used to be, as far as I knew before, the most speciated living organism aside from bacteria and viruses and fungi.

And beetles are beautiful. You know, you look at some of those horn beetles in Africa and whatever. Now, if you've said to most people, well, gee, It's really exciting beetles. You know, most people would go, Beatles? Who gives a shit about a beetle? You know, beetles are critical to the environment.

You know, they reprocess forests. You know, they break down cellulose out of trees. And this is a thing. We just don't understand the integrative nature of the natural environment. You know, we're almost like an interloper. Somehow we've developed this big brain that allowed us to sort of,

separate to some extent and most people don't see themselves as an animal but of course we are. Yeah. Clearly we're an animal and clearly we were originally part of the environment rather than somebody who sits above it. We only sit above it because we think we sit above it but as we know what's happening now nature's biting our ass and one of the my hobby horses is people don't understand nor do I fully either. The deterioration in insect species. We're wiping out insect species by the thousands all the time because of pesticides, habitat destruction. And insects are a part of this integrated, you know, nothing that's evolved doesn't have a place. Because nature evolves into niches. If there's a

bare niche, they'll integrate into it. So, you know, insects are pollinators. It's not just bees, Insects are a food source. As I said, beetles break down cellulose, recycle forests and whatever. And here we are, this big bumbling, you know, mammal just, you know, stampeding our way through. So that experience with Antarctica and a lot of other places, we got into diving, scuba diving very early. And so I've done a lot of scuba diving around the world. And, you know, that's another world that's just fantastic. That again is being destroyed, right?

with ocean temperatures rising. There'll be adaptation, of course. That's the other thing that we might wipe out a lot of the corals that we currently enjoy, but nature doesn't leave an empty niche. So something will evolve into that, whatever it is. You know, we're killing 100 million sharks a year. Because there's about 200 plus species of shark.

You know, we all think of, you know, tiger sharks, great whites, blue sharks and whatever. And, you know, fisheries. are so destructive. Because, you know, you don't catch one species. They drag nets. They just, you know, the bycatch that's just tossed back. They don't discriminate.

They don't. So, you know, there you've got the loss of, you know, one of the top predators. The top predators probably killer whales. Nothing predates on killer whales. Killer whales will predate on other whale species. They'll predate on sharks occasionally. but nothing attacks a killer whale. So they're the top predator.

But, you know, the sharks are also way up the top there. So you get rid of them, what do you end up with? Maybe squid. Because, you know, squid are predatory. But it's a different sort of, you know, you wonder what's going to, you know, how is nature going to evolve into this? Because if human beings totally disappeared, the planet wouldn't give a rat's razzoo.

You know, not that the planet has a consciousness, but. be a touch happier actually. Yeah, well, you know, all of the cities in the world, everything that we built eventually would just be overgrown. It's still be there, you know, you still have concrete structure, that ankle, what I referred to was, I think, the 12th century or the 13th century and it's still there. There's trees growing through parts of it and all that sort of thing. Anyway, all of that exposure to the wildlife that I was very lucky to experience, you know, It made me sort of probably a little bit more aware than many people of, you know, just this beauty of nature. And just the, as I said, this integrative situation with nature where we've got to consider ourselves as part of this.

Not, you know, of course, religiously we're taught that, you know, certainly Christianity. I was brought up a Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. The moment I left school, literally the moment it was like, this ain't for me. I respect it. I respect it. You know, many people believe in Jesus Christ and Christianity and Hindu people are lucky because they've got a thousand gods. You can, but and Islam, of course, is a monotheism, as is Judaism. And I respect it, but it just for me personally, it doesn't make any sense. I fall into the exact same boat. To me, it's another myth. You know, you create these stories. And it's like, you know, I look at it from a scientific point of view,

because I did a second degree in economics and statistics, and then later in life I went back and did a master's degree in astronomy and astrophysics. So, you know, I like science. And to me, the laws of physics explain much, and there will be much that remains inexplicable. Because, you know, I've got a friend at the moment saying, how can you explain what comes before the Big Bang? It's like, you can't.

It's a meaningless question. The human brain cannot tell you what came before the Big Bang. And somebody said the other day, do you believe in multiverses? I said, well, it's an interesting idea. There's absolutely nothing to prove one way or the other. And mathematically, some of the smart scientists are fiddling around with string theory and other theories about multiverses and wormholes and whatever.

All really interesting, but in terms of experimentally proving it, it's not going to happen in my lifetime, so I don't really care. But so that, I did that for six years. That boat got sold. So I got off in Japan, and a wealthy Chinese guy down in Singapore contacted me a friend. He said, Mike, Mike, I've got a job for you. There's this friend of mine in Indonesia who's building a boat for 30 passengers to run out of Bali.

And he needs somebody like you who has had the experience of being on board and operating. So I went, okay. So I went down to see this guy. He had this dragon of a wife, very good-looking. He was Chinese Indonesian. She was as well. And she was like the Dowager Empress. know, sort of...

Johnny, Johnny! These names were Johnny. Johnny! Johnny! And it was like, oh, dear, oh, dear. Anyway, we went out, there's outside of Jakarta, there's a place called the Thousand Islands, and it's all these little islands, and they're mainly owned by

rich dudes, so we go out to this guy's island, and this guy used to love to drink. So he'd have two or three bottles of wine, and he'd be absolutely toasted, but he was a really nice guy, so he said, well, you know, will you work for beans? Yeah, but I've got to bring. I had met a Brazilian girl on board on one of these trips

who was, everyone says their wife or their girlfriend's beautiful. She was friggin' beautiful. And just a lovely person. So we were together for the next nine years, basically. Off and away, you know, me traveling and whatever. But so Christiana was with me. I said, Johnny, it's me and her. And he said, oh, well, let me think about it.

So Johnny, Johnny. She got involved. Anyway, they said, yeah, okay. So we lived in Bali for a year, ran this boat out through. If you look at Indonesia, if you go from Java, there's a whole string of islands go out towards New Guinea. Indonesia's got about 18,000 islands. Some of them very small, some of them bigger. So culturally, it's extremely, Indonesia was, and still is to some extent.

But, you know, the changes in the world now people don't wear in these sort of places. They don't necessarily wear their traditional clothing. Their customs are different. Now the guys running around Bali are all in bloody Western Coes and T-shirts and driving motorbikes. It's not the same. And again, this goes back to the, in the good old days, well, it was true. Yeah. There was more diversity.

There was more cultural interests and whatever. Anyway, each of these islands had their own. different culture. They were, I collected weavings, you know, because they used to weave these beautiful textiles. You know, they'd use cotton, the ladies used to spin it, they used to dye it using natural dyes, and then they'd use a thing called a backstrap loom. You know, they'd sit and they've got the, you know, the sort of bases of the threads there, and they have a big belt around their back, so that's why it's called a backstrap loom. And they'd sit, and they'd sit, and they'd sit there for hours and then weaving these exquisite pieces of material. Each of those was different.

You went to Sumba and then Sumbawa or Flores and they had all of these. And this is where there was just this cultural diversity. It was beautiful. How old are you at this point now? This was, let me think now, this was 84, so now I'm 37. So we spent a year doing that and it was great. a lot of hard work but interesting and we did a lot of diving so this is where the next step came because now I'm still working for somebody and Johnny

Johnny had this boat that was beautiful sort of inside but really badly designed because it ended up the bow was like two feet lower than the stern so this this is a catamaran that used to go go around like this. And it was just boom, boom, boom.

It was a terribly designed boat. They eventually put Sponsonsons inside and lifted the bow, but it was never a great sea boat, you know. But nice inside. And, you know, I was at this stage thinking, well, shit, I can do this? You know, so, you know, do I start my own company? And so I did.

I started a company called it still in existence because I sold it at the end of the 90s. Quark Expeditions. So I started, I went to Johnny and said, well, look, Johnny, you have this period where there's nobody, nobody's booked. This is the first year. They're, the guy running it, who's still running the marketing, who's still a very good friend of mine, an American guy from Michigan who's lived in Indonesia for like 40 years, speaks absolutely fluent. Indonesian, better than most Indonesians. And his name's Jack Daniels. So Jack was running the shore side. I'm running the ship and the expeditions or the trips.

And I said, well, look, Jack and Johnny, you guys don't have any bookings. How about you chartered to me and we'll run dive trips, right? Because we knew, because of the times we spent going through Indonesia on the Lumbloat Explorer, we knew these fantastic dive spots in what's called the Banda Sea. So Johnny says, oh yeah, so he gives me this rate. Now, one of my very dear friends, both of them, husband and wife, but the husband passed away about 10 years ago. Valery's still in Australia. She's 87 now. She's a legend in Australia for underwater filmmaking. They call her the shark lady. She used to feed sharks and she used to get in the chain mail suit and put fish around and get bitten and all that sort of shit. And Ron was the camera.

So she's got all sorts of award and she's a legendary person. So they were very close friends and I said Valerie, do you think you can go to your mailing list, you know, friends list and see whether we can get anybody to fill up a dive trip? And Valerie said, yeah, of course we can. So two weeks later we got a full ship. So I went to Johnny and said, how about a second one? Yeah, okay. Valerie took it, you know, four weeks now instead of two weeks.

So that was a start of Quark expedition. So we had two fantastic trips. So we ended up running 20 or 22 of these. Barley to Ambon, Ambon back to Bali. Not easy in the middle of the year because you have the south-the-southeast monsoon blows. So it's 20-25 knots, 20-25 knots. And this friggin badly, badly made boat, you know,

it was rough as hell. So we'd have to crawl up behind these big reef islands and dive. So that was the... start of me branching out. Your first business venture. First business venture. And then, you know, we ran two trips and went, wow, it's not bad. The profit's good.

So next year, same thing. And then, you know, in subsequent years, I can't remember exactly which year. It was like, okay, now I'll charter a boat in Solomon Islands. We'll do diving there. Then Vanuatu. Then we chartered a, I chartered a boat out of San Diego, went down to Costa Rica. and went out to Cocas Island, where you get these big schools of hammerhead sharks,

which is, you know, you sit on a ledge there at 60 feet, and here's 200 hammerheads just like a ballet, just swimming around. So we ran that. Then we did, we went up, we did Palau, and various other places. But the main thing, the best diving in the world, in my opinion, is eastern Indonesia.

You get out towards New Guinea. There's a place called Roger Amput, which is still legendary. Highest number of species of any dive in the world. You know, they sent guys down for a one-hour dive. How many species? Not only fish, but vertebrates, invertebrates, 350 species in a dive, this sort of thing. Really, really, really rich.

And the reason it's rich, because the number of species radiates out in a descending order from eastern Indonesia and New Guinea. That's the most species-rich area in the ocean. One of the reasons there is during the ice ages, it's very deep in those areas. During the ice ages,

all of the, you know, next to Java, the Java Sea, that's shallow. So that was all land. So the water that remained contracted into smaller areas. So guess what happened? All the fish and the species had contract into that area. And there were more and more species. So that was the start of it. It built up. We ran an eclipse and eclipse trips. We did stuff in Baja, California. Then we did some stuff

up in Alaska. No, we didn't do that. Then I started to run North Pole trips. So Kenboric Air went to them and chartered twin otters and we used to fly from, we'd fly from, we'd fly to, we'd fly to Resolute, which is up in northern Canada. It's on an island called Cornwallis Island. And that's like a big local center for the Eskimos and sort of logistics. We'd fly from them up on, you know, Ellesmere Island? I know of it. Take me a little bit to point it out on a map. Yeah, well, it's a very big island and just adjacent to Greenland, to the western side of Greenland. Because between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, there's these narrow straits

then break out into the Arctic Ocean. So there was, there's a lake up there called Lake Hazen, and they had, you know, a hut there on this frozen lake where you could catch Arctic chaff and inner and all that sort of shit. Then we'd fly out of there. We'd have to land somewhere else to get fuel, and then go to the North Pole, land at the North Pole. Put it down right there in the otter.

Put it right down on the otter. Yep. Did that, did a number of those. And then kept, kept developing, you know, instead of one or two trips a year, five a trips, six trips, seven trips. And then when I'd worked for, on that Limblet Explorer, towards the end there'd been two new owners. Lars Limblab was a great visionary,

but wasn't probably the best businessman in the world. And he'd more or less gone out of business, set up another little company but wasn't in the main business. But, you know, he was a legendary, visionary, fabulous guy, great raconteur. But, you know, once he moved aside, there was, you know, there was space for others. And his son started his own company and did very well. He's still in business, you know, great trips, great. He had his mother's acumen for business.

She was Swiss. And she had, you know, she was a really good business person. So, and then there was another crucial element. to making it a little bit better business-wise. So the guy who was the president of this Lin-Blad, it was called at that state, Selen Lindblad, owned by a Swedish guy called Krista Selen. He sent his very close friend and godfather of his children

to run the company in the US. So I worked under this guy, Lars Vakanda. When I was running the ship, he was the boss, so to speak. So I break out on my own And I said the last look I don't want to do the friggin' office stuff Can I use your people? Oh, it's like a back end

Yeah, you know, because And he said, yeah, yeah, we can work something out I think he took a 6% commission on gross And so then his office staff Used to do the bookings And they used to do the operational stuff Send all the stuff out And so I could go out and go, yeah, we'll do this trip,

We'll charter that boat, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it worked really well. So comes beginning of the 90s. There's a new ship built in Japan, right? 164 passengers, really upmarket. And Krista Selen became a co-investor in that boat, along with Mitsubishi, a big investment company in Japan, and Mitsui, I think, another Japanese one.

So I said, right, we've got this one and we're going to sell it. And, okay, that's good. And he said, I want you, Mike, to be the expedition leader on it to start, get it started off. He said, no, no, I don't want to do that. And he said, no, no, you've got to do me a favour. I want you to do that. So I went, okay, I'll do it. And then they weren't marketing particularly well.

So I thought, yeah. So I went to him and said, look, you've got some space here. Can I charter one ship? Oh, sorry, one trip. and it was out of Australia down to, no, it was out of New Zealand down to Antarctica of the Rossi. And he said, well, let me talk to the Japanese people. Anyway, he came back and said, okay, do you think you can fill it?

Because, you know, if you don't, it's a lot of money, you'll lose. And I went, no, I think I can. So I had a friend in Australia who ran a travel company, who was a specialist in South America. So I went to Dennis and said, look, we've got the ship. Do you reckon you could sell it in the Australian market? And he said, yeah, I think I can.

So four weeks later, we had 164 people. Damn. And so I went back to Lars and said, can I get a second one? Oh, no, I don't think so. They don't want a charter. They want to make retail. So a few weeks later, he comes back and said, no, they'll charter because they're still not selling.

So I went to Dennis. Dennis, they think we could maybe... And of course, he's making money on it hand over foot as well. So he says, yeah, I think we can. So, you know, six weeks later we've got another ship filled. So we've got two ships, 164, 164 or two departures, and that's a lot of profit. So I'm thinking, wow, this is cool.

And then I thought, wow, this is risky because they're still building this boat. This is still in the shipyard being built. Now, the good thing was it was in a Japanese shipyard. right and you know what the Japanese like for they have they're very punchillious it's going to be finished on this day

and this day but I thought oh gee what if something happened so by chance we'd met an insurance guy who then became a lifelong friend and he was a Taiwanese guy who lives in New Jersey and Ting Mr. Ting I went to Mr. Ting and said Ting can I insure

against what I call no show something happens and the boat can't come and I can claim insurance and he said Mike you can insure against anything it just depends on the premium

he said they'll ensure you know piano players insure their fingers you know for tens of millions of dollars so he said yeah so he said let me go and see and I said here's the detail so he came back and said yep they'll insure

against non-delivery basically for any reason so I went great and I said he said how much coverage do you want and I said I want a million dollars on each departure and he said okay they want to see what the revenue is so I said fine well 164

I can't remember what the price was but it wasn't cheap and he said yeah okay so the insurance company said yes and eventually it all goes back to Lloyds of London goes back to and Lloyds people think Lloyds is one company it's not it's a bunch of syndicates and Lloyds started back in the 1700s where they used to meet in a coffee shop and insure against loss of cargo.

But if you go to Lloyd's, there's Lloyd's. It's syndicates and they put syndicates. The syndicates, many of them take a part of the insurance. They won't take the whole lot. And then there's a reinsurance market where the insurance company gets somebody else to take part of it. So you've got Munich Re,

and Swiss rea, these big reinsurance companies. So anyway, and I said, well, what's the premium going to be? And he said, $6,000. I went, oh, yeah, that's okay, $6,000. Now, nobody would touch it for $6,000 now. It would be $600,000. Yeah. But this was fairly new.

I'm waiting for you to say a day. Yeah, yeah. Or something like that, yeah. So that's fine. So I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well, I'm insured. This is good. So the delivery of the ship, you know, when it rolls down the gangway, down the rail there is scheduled, I forget October.

The Japanese rolled that thing down on the minute, right? They said, we're going to deliver the boat on this day. It's going to be this time. So we all fly over to Japan and the shipyard was down near Osaka somewhere. So I'm sitting there thinking, this is not bad. You know, because, so ship rolls down, we go on board, look at it, beautiful, beautiful ship. It's still sailing. It's got another name now, and they've refurbished it, and it's being operated by friends of mine now.

So, Lars still says, right, you've got to do the first couple of voyages. So, yeah, okay, that's good. So I get on this boat in Guam, right, is where it starts the first one, and we go through the Micronesian Islands, the Carlin Islands. So Palau, Carlin Islands. out through that area. Then you come into the Marshall Islands, and then you go down the what's called Kiribus,

Kiribus and Tuvalu. That used to be the Ellis and Gilbert and Ellis Islands. Used to be British colony. So we go down there, and everything's good. We go out to Fiji to finish the voyage. Then I was getting off, and they were going to do another couple of trips to the New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands

before my Antarctic trip started. So we get near Fiji and there's a hurricane warning. So a cyclone warning. So we go into Fiji's main harbour and the local port authorities had closed the port. And so the only way to get people ashore was by tugboat. So we had to take everybody in. This cyclone's coming.

captain takes it out and anchors it in the lagoon. I get into the hotel and this cyclone hit hard. So, you know, I was in the bathtub inside the bathroom because the front window shattered and this went on. And next morning, you know, the place was a wrecked at trees down and a lot of the locals, you know, they've had all the roofs ripped off and whatever. Anyway, I then find out that the ship dragged anchor in the middle of the night. the captain had turned the engines off

which was you know most captains would not turn the engines off when you've got a cyclone coming you keep them running he's got two anchors out and he goes to bed the watch officer doing the 12 what it's 812 12 4

is a fairly junior guy the chief engineer goes to bed sick sorry no the chief engineer's in bed The engineer on watch, who was Japanese, was sick. So he goes to bed. So the Filipino motor man's down there, right? So the watch officer looks, you know, they're checking the radar and starts to see that they're dragging anchor.

So he calls the captain, the captain comes up. They can't find the engineer, or they look and find the engineers in bed. They get him out of bed. It takes something like 17 or 18 minutes to start the engines up. And when he goes onto the throttle, the propeller hits the reef. bends the shaft or damages the shaft so it's now in effect incapacitated

there's no shipyard in Fiji so the only shipyard they could find is down in Sydney Australia but it's edging up to Christmas so you ain't going to get the ship in so I'm sitting there going oh okay I wonder how this affects me and then yeah as as the

things evolved, it's like, I've got to cancel the first cruise. So I ring Ting, Ting, shit, you know, blah, blah, blah. He said, Mike, just be calm. He said, this is exactly what you've insured against. He said, this is an insurable event. I will start the process to make a claim. So, okay, all right, good. And then they're supposed to get it ready for the next cruise. That also gets cancelled. Ting, Mike, don't worry, I will start the process. So I got two million bucks. out of these insurance cancellations. Without issue, went through no problem? Went through no problem because it was such a straightforward event.

For 6,000? For six grand on each. Six grand on each premium. Wow. Then they're still missing, they're still not selling the rest of the trips. So I went to Lars again and went, Lars, I don't want to charter this time because you've got other people on board, but you've got loan. let's say you've got 50 cabins unsold. Can I buy those cabins at a discounted rate? So they do their figures and go, oh, yeah, and I went, oh, no, that's a bit too expensive. Oh, okay, well,

so they give me this very, very good price. So I go back to Dennis and go, Dennis, all of the people who couldn't travel on those two trips, because they cancelled, how many of those do you think you could get back for a later cruise? He said, I think you can get most of them. So we got most of them back, paid again. Because they got refunded. Yeah, of course. Paid again. So we made another million bucks on that.

So I get to the end of that season and went, not bad. Not bad. And that was the start then of getting into Antarctic cruising again, not now as a worker, but as an entrepreneur running home. And it was just about this time that a German guy, rang me and never heard of him, Gunter Schultz. Hello, this is Gunter.

Yeah, okay. Would you like to come on a Russian nuclear icebreaker to the North Pole? And I said, yeah, that'd be great. God, I don't get any phone calls like that. No, no. Well, I don't get many more either. So I said, yeah, that'd be great. And he said, can you bring any, you know, do you have any clients?

I'll try, but I didn't have anyone in short notice. So I turned up to Germany. I meet Gunter. And it was a very interesting meeting. Because I met him driving to the airport. We were flying up to Finland, where we would go from Finland across the border to Murmansk. You know, Murmansk is right up the top there.

It's where all the Len Lease stuff in the war, the Americans with Len Lease, all of that went into Murmansk to help Russia fight the Germans. So I make Gunturters really early in the morning. We're driving to the airport. His secretary's there. She's chain smoking cigarettes. It's, you know, winter, so it's cold.

It was coming out of winter. And he's chained smoking cigars. So I remember that vividly. I thought I was going to, you know, asphyxiate. It's like, Jesus Christ. Anyway, we get on the ship. We go to the North Pole. And it was, I mean, just endless party time.

You know, we used to meet. On a Russian nuclear submarine. On a Russian nuclear submarine. Vessel icebreaker. Okay. It's not a submarine. 75,000 shaft horsepower, two light water reactors.

Driving three propellers, and this thing is, you know, you're banging through 10 foot of ice. Wow. And, you know, with ice breakers, it's not just the banging, you ride up, you know,

it's, the hull is undercut. Yeah. So in the really tough ice, it rides up and over and breaks with weight, basically. Yeah. So this thing was fascinating. You know, middle of the night it wasn't real comfortable,

because it was like, come, bomb, bang. So we go right up to the North Pole, have a great big party up there, have a swim in the, you know, where they've broken the channel behind, and all in all, pretty damn good experience. So we come back,

and Gonta had a personality that wasn't really what the Russians wanted. He was very aggressive with them. He was critical of them, So they basically said, we don't want to do any more business with you. Right. He was actually persona non grata in Murmansk. Don't come back to Murmansk.

Because this was Murmans shipping company who basically was the biggest company in Murmansk. You know, they ran a lot of things there. So I thought, well, this is an opportunity. So I called the Murmans shipping and said, look, can I come and see you guys and we'll, you know, talk about me chartering the ship? And so went up there, I met the president and vice president who became good friends. And they said, yeah, we'll charter. So again, I'm still using this other former Limblaid company to do all the bookings. So I get the nuclear ice baker.

We go out and advertise it and we fill the two trips. So it was like, this is pretty cool. then this was the time when we were actually on the nuclear icebreaker over near the Bering Straits so not too far from Alaska when the when Yoltson took over power you remember they attacked the White House and so we were there so we had this perestroika party where the Russians were on board were really happy we were sort of happy and there was this big party to celebrate that you know

But the Soviet Union basically was breaking apart. So I kept, and at that stage, the Russians had so many ships that suddenly didn't have work that had been built as either ice breakers or ice strengthened vessels. So we started chartering. I ended up chartering 12 or 14 different ships over a period of time to run specific, mainly Arctic and Antarctic. I didn't do much in between, although we did use a couple of the small. when I say small 70 metre, 220 foot ships.

When we were re-positioning back to Russia, we would do dive trips along the way. So we did Seychelles. We did... Seychelles was great. We did other stuff in the Indian Ocean going back and then we ran other sort of exotic positioning, repositioning trips just to try and, you know, because you're paying by the day until you get back, so we're trying to offset it. Anyway, so that went on.

And so Quark Expeditions, that's what we did for the next 10 years, basically, was charter Russian ships. You know, it sent them to Antarctic and the Arctic and the business built up, built up. And eventually I took this guy who'd been doing the bookings, or he's group, he was out of work then in 1992. So I said, well, last, I'll give you 50% of Quark. You come in and you run the day to day.

And that's what he did. He came in and run the day to day. Towards the end of the 1990s, I don't know, it was 99 or 2000. And I thought the company was becoming more mainstream. It was marketing, spreadsheets. And I was like, no. And at that stage, I'd started running the submarine trips to Titanic. We were running the...

Oh, yeah, those. Yeah, yeah, those. We were running space stuff. I almost forgot. We were running space stuff. We were sending people. The first guy we sent to the space station using the third seat on Soyuz was 1998.

It was a small guy from, good guy, very smart guy from California, Dennis Tito. He had a stock index called the Wilshire 5,000. And he'd been an engineer with JPL, with the jet propulsion laboratory. But he was one of the first guys to realize that you could use mathematical programs to manage stock investments. Yeah, so he was a really bright guy.

So he was the first to go up with that. So at what point did you all of a sudden get into space? 1998. Just before that, you know, I had an interest in space. and I was one of the first investors, and I didn't have a lot of money to invest, but in a company called Zero Gravity Corporation, so we ran Zero Gravity.

The Parabolas. The Parablus, in a 727, did a number of those. And then we started the Space Company, and then over a period of, we didn't make a lot of money out of the Space Company, but it was interesting. So we sent eight people to the Space Station over between 1998 and 2010.

While sending people to the Titanic. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Classic pairing, really. Okay. How much was it to go to space to the ISS? The first guy that went up paid $16 or $17 million.

Wow. Right, to go up. Trained in Space in Star City. Had to train for six months. Like six months straight? Yeah, well, pretty much six months. They gave them a bit of leeway because of business people. But a full dedication.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And training in Star City with the Russian astronauts. Okay. They're doing all the... So it wasn't stroke a check for $16 million and you high five somebody is going at yet? No, no. And the Russians were very...

They had very strict medicals. Oh, I'm sure they did. Very strict. And very professional. So he went up. And then subsequently, we had others go up. We finished at number eight. It was actually really number seven because one guy went twice, right?

And he paid probably, he would have been paying 20 mil a hit. That's so interesting that he liked space so much. And how long were they in, the ISS? On flight. Well, on the flight and then in... In the space station. It was about a 10-day round trip, because what happens with the space station? even now, but especially in those days,

Soyuz would go up and dock, right? There was already astronauts up there. They were due to come back. There was never a time when there wasn't a Soyuz docked, because that was a lifeboat. If there was a breakdown there, so they'd go up on the new Soyuz, dock. Guys would get into the space station,

including our clients, would get in. They'd spend a certain amount of time there in the changeover. It wasn't like, you know, you turn up, here's your hat, watch your hurry, we're out of here. So they would get on and, you know, I forget the number of days, probably five, six, maybe seven days in the space station living, weightless and doing all that sort of stuff. Then they'd get in the returning Soyuz, which is the one that's already been up there for a while. And then, as you know, they land out on the Kazakh steps. So the Russian capsules, all the Russian capsule always come down in Kazakhstan and they land out on this you know the

Kazakh steps are huge and they're these flat areas so they come down land by parachute and then the Russians sort of knew where they were they'd send the helicopters out and pick the guys up so the the last guy who went for us was the the guy who owns Cirque de Soleil he's a Canadian Glenn knew of him yeah Guilla Liberté. Yep, yep. He was the last one. Then we had another woman training,

and I think I mentioned it the other night, Sarah Brightman, who's the wife of Andrew Lloyd Weber at the time, who wrote Phantom of the Opera and many other musical things. And she was the first soprano to sing Phantom of the Opera. So she was going to go up. She started training, she paid money, and then, I don't know, partway through, She was in Moscow, but then her mother, I believe, got sick, and so she cancelled.

And that was the end of it. I'm not in it anymore because we had a situation with our CEO, who, in our opinion, you know, caused the situation where we suddenly weren't shareholders anymore, which was a strange sort of sequence of events. But it was great. We didn't make a lot of money out of it. We could have if we stayed in longer, but these events happened. But it was fascinating in the meantime.

Oh, I bet. How was the Titanic submarine journeys? Well, the Titanic came out of two of the ships that I was chartering from the Russians to do these Antarctic things, came from an organization in Moscow called the Shershov Institute of Oceanology. Now, ultimately, all of those ships belong. to the State Property Committee in Russia, but they were hived out to various institutes through the Academy of Sciences.

The Russian Academy of Sciences, back in the Soviet days, was a very prestigious, powerful organization. It's after the Soviet Union started to fall apart, it wasn't really financed. And the Russians were absolutely the cutting edge of science, whatever. up until the perestroika.

Once that happened, you know, it disintegrated. Not to say they still don't have some good scientists, but it's not as prestigious now. A lot of the people who would have worked there are out driving taxis or running their own businesses and whatever. So we were actually on the nuclear icebreaker going to the North Pole with a guy who was the president of the Explorers Club and also a guy called Don Walsh, who was the first person,

sorry, one of the two first people to ever dive to the Marianas Trench in a bathoscope called the Trieste. And it was actually designed by a Swiss adventurer engineer, but then subsequently bought by the US Navy. So when it dived to Marianas Trench, it was a US Navy. when I say bathescape, that was a fancy name for basically a sphere hung under a great big bladder of diesel fuel. Because the diesel fuel, because of it's a lower specific gravity,

if you let it go, it goes to the top. Yeah, but what if it gets a leak on the way down? You've got a problem. You've got a big problem. Big problem. Well, what you would do, you know, the way they go down is to put weights on them. Yeah, you'd release the weights. And you release the weights and then you go up.

So a pretty basic system. But that's what all submersibles do. Now, in the Russian case for these mere one, mere two subs, they used to fill tanks with water. For ballast. For ballast, and down you go. And then they also had nickel shot that you could jettison. But nickel shot was so expensive.

They never jettisoned it. It was always pump out the water. A lot of the other subs have pig iron bars underneath, and they've got a release mechanism. Just drop it. And people used to often ask me, well, gee, how do you get to the top? You drop the weight and you sit back and you're a cork. Yeah.

Sit back, play some music, have a cup of tea, eat a sandwich, have a sleep, whatever you want, and you're just coming up. So have you seen the Titanic? Five types. I've been on Titanic. Yeah. Yeah. I know five times on Bismarck, the big German battleship. Yeah. And it's at 16,000 feet.

Which one was more impressive to you? Probably, well, more iconic, Titanic, more impressive in some ways, the Bismarck because the teak decks are still on it. There's still a swastika on the back deck. Oh, wow. And if you remember, the only reason that the British Navy caught Bismarck was a torpedo, from a biplane coming off the Ark Royal

aircraft carrier which were World War I airplanes basically they fired torpedoes at Bismarck and one lucky shot nothing hit it except one torpedo hit it in the rudder

propeller area bent the rudders into the propellers or one of the propellers and they couldn't steer and Vizmark was was basically turning in a circle and they became sitting ducks. Otherwise they would never have caught Bismarck because it was heading for breast in France

where the Luftwaffe commanded the skies. So, you know, the British Navy wouldn't have come anywhere near it there, almost certainly. So just that one lucky shot. And when we went out there, you know, we're diving at 16,000 feet. it's got just a little part of the, it's got just a little part of the after end broken off, but we could go down and you could see the propeller and the rudder.

Oh wow. It sort of, you know, turned into each other. And the rest of it is intact except it's got a lot of holes. Yeah, that, right? And the bridge, you could see where, you know, they wipe the bridge out with some, because the bridge has just pounded it and pounded it and pounded it.

So you can see where the, the projectiles had gone through the bridge, taking that out. But we could see the, still have one of the airplanes in the hangar because they used to slingshot sideways, and then the pickup was a crane. You know, they'd come in and they'd pick it up and whatever. But the big armament, they had 16-inch guns. All of that is out in the debris field,

because those 16-inch guns are not bolted down. They sit in the turret on a cogwheel. So what normally happens with a vessel sinking to that depth? It starts to sink. Almost all of them then invert. And as a result, the big Japanese warship up near Guam, I'm trying to think, it sank in 600 feet of water, so it turned on its side and stayed on its side. the Bismarck went down and it seems that deeper you go it's inverted and then the air starts being pushed out and whatever then they turn they turn back up so it's sitting

uh Bismarck sitting on its um you know on its keel but it landed on an underwater mountain there's quite a lot of these small underwater mountains in the north pacific and it actually skied down the hill set off an avalanche it was moving down the hill and then eventually moved across and stopped so the starboard side you know the mud is up to the gunnels right up to the decks the port side you can go right down

under the hole so so the big armament we went out to the big guns which are out in the debris field it used to have an admiral's bridge above the main bridge that broke off so that that's out in the debris field.

The smaller guns are all still in place. The anti-aircraft guns are still in place, and you drive around this thing and it's like, wow, this is Bismarck. Especially at that depth. Oh, yeah, it's a long way down. It's a 14 to 15-hour dive. Right, you're in the sub. And the sub's a sphere that's about seven foot in diameter.

Because all deep diving submersibles have to be a sphere. right so it's room for three people the sub-pilot's got a bigger porthole you've got two small port-holes to the side it's like a little bench so you can sort of lay along it or sit on it or whatever and then of course you've got outside cameras and you lose light on a sub-dive

depending on the water and where you are somewhere between six to 800 feet it goes dark. So then you've got to use the lights which run off battery. So all the propulsion is battery. So you've got thrusters and it's all battery. So you were putting people into space while also checking out the Titanic and the Bismarck. Yep, yep. And then we did quite a lot of diving along, you know, the hydrothermal vents, these big black smokers. Yeah. So down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is what's called the Atlantic Ridge.

and it's what's called a spreading zone. So there's actually a material being forced up from inside the earth and it's spreading across the bottom of the Atlantic. So the Azores, for instance, is moving towards Portugal or that area, I don't know where it exactly would hit. So that plate, that spreading zone is moving away from that Middolandic Ridge. And basically, as a result, It's very active.

So you've got these big bellowing black smokers and you have these shrimp swarms. I don't know whether you ever seen it on videos or documentaries. I think I have actually. I've got these massive shrimp swarms and all this really strange sort of biota. And a lot of people think this may have been where life started.

What are they playing out there? I don't know. Leave it on. I'll just mute your mic while you go out there. So we did a lot of dive, well, I'm going to say a lot of dive, we did a couple of trips, diving on these various black smokers.

And that's fascinating. That's like primordial life. I mean, you sort of park there and there's this gushing, very active. It's not like a little wispy smoke. I mean, this stuff is surging up there. And every now and again, one of the shrimp swarms will sort of get a bit

too close and they're wiped out. So these things, well these things have to be in, they've got to be in close, but you can't get too close. Are the shrimp swarms there because of the temperature of the bellows? They're there because there's a lot of, there's a lot of nutrient. Because this stuff is bringing nutrients back up out of the, you know, the inner, inner part of the planet, of course. So, you know, you get there and you watch this stuff. and it's like, Mama me. Remind me, Andy, I'll get your contact

to you guys, and I'll send you some footage of this. Oh, please. Because we did one of these trips we did with Jim Cameron. I know him as James when I talked to him. Yeah, yeah. When I'm consulting on his avatar movies.

Yeah, yeah. No, the other night you were talking to Jim Cameron, and I'm scratching my head. Who the hell is that? Oh, it's fine. It's just the avatar guy. James. He's just finished, finally. So I did a number of trips with James Cameron.

He did a IMAX documentary on Titanic. It is fantastic. I've seen it. Yep. So we were involved in that. I charted, worked with him. I charted his organization, the ship and the subs. He knew the Russian main guy, Anatoly Sagalovich,

who's a wonderful scientist, engineer. He ran the whole submersible operation. Jim had, you know, he's a personal friend of Jim's as well. In the original Titanic Hollywood movie, if you remember in the very early part of the movie, you see two submersibles. They're them. They're the same ones that we used subsequently.

So Jim's a very good friend of Anatoly still. and was for many years. So when he wanted to do the IMAX, at that stage I'd been chartering already from, I started Titanic in 1998, going to Titanic. Jim had already, you know, knew Anatoly, so when I first met Jim

or was in contact with him was 2000, I think he and another guy and an Australian guy who became a close personal mate, said, look, we want to do this IMAX movie and, you know, you're working with Anatoly, on the subs and the support vessel. So we put that together. Then we did the Bismarck as well.

He did a documentary for Discovery Channel after we'd been to Bismarck the first time. We were the first people to lay human eyes on Bismarck. Robert Ballard found Bismarck and Titanic, but with Bismarck, he only ever put down a photography. Sled and we dragged a thing through. So nobody had actually been there and dived on it with a submarine. So and I remember the first...

I can't even imagine what that is like when that comes into view and you're the first time... Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a short story there. Were you that person also who saw it for the first? Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a lot... Three of us in the sub. So the, um, the, we, we were trying to find out the exact position of Bismarck. Robert Ballard knew where it was, but of course, you know, it was confidential information at his place in his part.

So we were going to get a guy to do a renavigation. There's a guy, American guy lives in England who's, he is the guru of renavigation, which is going back and looking at all the data, you know, how far does a dead body with a life jacket on? Draft. Yeah. How, you know, debris from a ship. How far does it float in what period of time? Da-da-da-da-da.

And this guy's name's David Mien's. And, I mean, he's unbelievable in terms of renavigation. And he's found a hell of a lot of warships and other ships as well. So we got him to do a, you know, a renavigation investigation. And he gave us a box. and we were going to go out and side scan sonar and find it but along came an opportunity

from somebody who had the coordinates to buy them from them so Jim and I bought the coordinates and so we went out first Jim came out later with his documentary team and his brother was a guru with little robot um

ROVs that could fly off the excuse me could fly off the subs on a fiber optic line and he used those on Titanic for instance to go down seven

I think it was seven decks into the Turkey's baths into cabins using these these little bots as they call them you know brilliant stuff and when Jim does anything it's brilliant I mean the guy's a genius

and even though he's not a trained engineer his ability with technology and to understand engineering and whatever is phenomenal. Guy is not just a genius in terms of lighting and directing movies, and he writes his movies. He wrote Avatar. He had a writing group helping him, but it's his.

He's the one who's written. He's now written Avatar 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. They've already shot most of 3. It'll come out at the end of next year. I haven't seen how this one's the... It's past a billion before we came out here. Right. And I know that he was saying that it would have to be two and three.

Would need to be in the top five grossing movies of all time to be able to fund four and five. Exactly. They're going to take a hiatus after three and see what the results are and then move to four and five, which last time I talked to him was he's partially, if not, almost fully written four and five. But, you know, he's, I was just in the Republic of Georgia, Frederick Palson. I'll introduce you to Frederick, who came in now, he's here tonight. He's,

he's one of the partners here. So I'm in the Nassau today. Yeah, yeah, no. Frederick's a very wealthy guy and a very smart guy. So I forgot my, trying to think. Talking about Cameron. Oh, yeah. So we were talking to Cameron. Yeah. So we were talking about Jim and Frederick's birthday in the Republic of Georgia just recently. Frederick, sorry, Jim's main business manager, Maria, was there.

And, you know, we know Maria. Maria is a friend of Fredericks as well. And I said... Ten minutes to what? Bench was the... What plane? That's on you? Yeah.

We get ten more minutes. So you're good. Yeah. So basically, I said to Maria, you know, what's Jim up to? Because, you know, the avatar, and she said, and this is typical of Jim. When Jim does it, and he's so focused and he's so organized, you know, coming from the chaotic side of the human species, I look at Jim and go, Mama, I wish I had that focus or his ability to focus and just run the thing. She said, I think it premiered on December 15th or December 14th.

She said he's working just, you know, right up to the end, just perfecting, perfecting, perfecting, perfecting. She said, you know, I'm his business manager. And even I can't, you know, I don't send him emails because he doesn't have the time. But, you know, he's a perfectionist. And when he does something, it comes out pretty perfect. So anyway, we did a number of things there. We went back. I want to say we, Jim went back and did what's name Titanic again.

And again, they were using a fiber optic thing from the surface to go down. Jim likes pushing the boundaries of technology. So they went out and did that. Then he did one called Aliens of the Deep. I have not seen that one. Which is an IMAX movie again, and it was about the hydrothermal vents. And some of the shots there were we, he, or we, you know, collectively, he put down four submarines on the, there's a remnant stack. Probably the highest one there is, one of these remnant stacks of a, basically a dead smoker.

It's still got hot water coming off the top. It's this incredible looking underwater formation. I have seen this. Yeah, he put down four submarines there. He put down, he and I own two together, which are 1,000 metres. Lost City is about 800 metres. A lot of the other hydrothermal vents are much, much deeper. And here's this thing of four submarines, two of these acrylic subs that can go to 1,000 meters,

plus the two mears that can go to 6,000 meters. And they're all on, you know, he's a, he's a, Jim, Jim, as one of his brilliances, is lighting. You know, he knows how to light things. So he's sort of backlighting, and one sub sort of lights the other and whatever. And it's this phenomenal thing of, I must go back and see that. I'm sure that must be available somewhere on Netflix or somewhere. It is.

And look at that again, because, you know, that shot. I've dived on Lost City myself with In The Mears. and then you see the two deep rovers down there as well. I wasn't on board for that voyage, but, you know, some phenomenal stuff. With all the subs and exploration in that area, is it with all the shipping losses that we had in World War II between New York and the UK and Russia, like, did you find, in the process of finding the Bismarck and the Titanic,

Were there just tons of other vessels down there? There are, and we didn't find Titanic at all. Titanic was found by Robert Ballard, who was working with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And Ballard is the premier explorer of the ocean. You know, he's probably retired now. I've only ever met him once at a thing called The Grove. he found both Titanic that he actually dived on with a French deep diving sub. And then he found a Bismarck, as I said, with underwater detection stuff, this sled.

So Ballard probably is the premier oceanographic Whizkid for the last, you know, in the last, say, 30 years or more, 40 years. You know, Titanic was found in the 1980s, late 1980s. Bismarck, you know, I forget exactly when they found Bismarck, but he's found other World War II wrecks. There were throwaway numbers when we were fiddling around with this of saying there were estimates that there's 2 million wrecks in the world's oceans, going back to Phoenician trading vessels in the Mediterranean. So if you looked at all sorts of vessels, not just warships and whatever, there's a huge number of sunken vessels, but ranging from very small and very old.

Now, where do they get a number like two million? Out of the hat. It's just meant to say there's a lot, a lot down there. And, you know, there's some active salvoys still out there if they can, you know, get the information. You know, for Spanish, for Spanish wrecks. the Spaniards were very proactive in analyzing what happened if they lost vessels, mainly because there was often King's cargo on board. And the riches that they took out of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Central America

made Spain a world power back in the days of the Armada and whatever. So, you know, if they lost a ship coming back from, South America or Central America, they took it seriously. And they'd always hold a court of inquiry investigation if there were survivors particularly. Otherwise, they would try, you know, they were often surviving vessels in the same fleet. They could say, you know, we were in a filthy storm here, we saw the other vessel at this time of the day, next day we couldn't find them, they weren't sighted, they never arrived back. So it gave them an approximate position.

Their problem was they couldn't estimate longitude, right? Latitude you estimate with the sun passing through local midday and using a sextant or in those days, whatever similar instrument, you can work out your latitude. Longitude required chronometers. You had to have an accurate time. And there's a couple of books written about the British guy or English guy who invented the chronometer.

Once they got chronometers, then they could do an accurate thing of longitude. Otherwise, they had to do it by dangling a rope out and, you know, really sort of pretty basic stuff. So getting deep water wrecks were hard to find. Shallow wrecks, often the Spaniards went back and salvaged them. They had divers, many of them Indian pearl divers, for instance, who were almost like. slaves, they would take them out and send them down. And they used to salvage quite a reasonable amount. But of course, a lot of it all stayed there. We actually, we started a company in 2012, I guess, I started it with a marine archaeologist and a guy who I'm still partners in this

company with, who is the guru of searching for Spanish. Spanish vessels. And he's still out there now, you know, in Bahamas. Later on, remind me, I'll show you some of the stuff he's been pulling up recently, these gold chains and a lot of emeralds and whatever. Because there's serious amounts of treasure that's... There's serious amounts of treasure. We were not involved with her, which I had have been, but then subsequently I wish I'm glad

I wasn't. There's a guy in Florida who's an ex, not an ex- He was formerly Cuban. And he was a Cuban marine archaeologist. So spent his earlier life looking for Spanish wrecks. Probably one of the largest number of Spanish wrecks around Cuba. Because the fleet coming from South America, which used to come out of Panama, it used to go Panama, Colombia, pick up treasure there, go up to Cuba.

the Mexican or Central American fleet used to come over to Cuba. They would both meet in Havana. Normally, you know, they'd get out and re-victual, fix the boats. The boats often were in poor condition for woodworm and all this sort of stuff. Then they'd all go back together in a bigger fleet for protection. But the thing that brought them to grief was normally storms, hurricanes or really strong wind events. They used to come up the channel between Florida and the Bahamas. And you know what the Bahamas is like?

It's reefs, sandbanks. So they only had to get blown off course there. And so we're working now in Bahamas mainly on a boat call or a 1656 vessel called Maravilla. And I'll show you later. There's gold chains and all this sort of stuff coming up from there. So, of course, I had this Antarctic experience. I was always interested in more Antarctic stuff. And I was reading a magazine in Australia in 1986.

And I saw just a little article that said this company called Adventure Network International was going to go to South Pole. And they were offering commercial trips to South Pole. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. So, boy, that would be interested in that. So Adventure Network had been set up in 1985. A guy called, well, I forget his first name, Bass, who owned Snowbird. Dick Bass.

Dick Bass. Yeah. Dick Bass. It's a great name, by the way. Yeah, Dick Bass. Yeah, Dick Bass, yeah. It's two first names. Yeah, I met Dick a number of times up in Snowbird there.

He was a character. He passed away, unfortunately. But he wanted to do the seven summits, right? Highest mountain on each continent. To do that, he had to come here. So he contacted the founders of Adventure Network were basically Martin Williams, Giles Kirschor, and a Canadian guy,

and there were a couple of other guys who got kicked out of the sort of group there. Pat Morrow was the Canadian guy, and they're all mountain climbers and whatever. So they set up to come down and get Dick to the mountain, which they subsequently did, and Dick went on, I think, And I don't know whether Dick ever actually finally summited Everest.

But that was the initial part. So in 1987, they were planning the 8788 season. So, you know, the season we always put, it's November, December, through the next year. So 8788. So I thought, wow, that's cool. So I rang this number or contact, and it was a guy called Martin Williams, who subsequently became very close friends. He was one of the guys with us when we dog sledded to the North Pole,

56 days of, you know, days of enjoyments, some days of misery. So Martin, I call Martin, Martin, oh, yeah, yeah, can you bring any clients? But come yourself, but can you bring any clients? I said, yeah, okay, I think I can. So I turned up in late November with some clients to go to South Pole. And it was interesting when I first arrived at Pontoranus Airport. Pontoranus is famous for its winds. It's windy.

It's always windy. So I get off the plane. In those days, there was no, you had to disembark down the steps and walk. So I disembarking. I'm walking across the terminal. And I look and here's this DC-4, but it's only got three engines. There's obviously an engine missing. So I thought, oh, that's interesting.

So Martin's there. and Martin's a very, you know, he's got a lot of, a lot of energy. And he's, oh, Mike, you know, really, he's originally English got sort of reddish hair. And, oh, Mike, great to see you. And, oh, you know, yeah, it's really good you can come. And I think I had five or six clients or something. And I said, Martin, just a matter of interest, does that aircraft fly on three engines? And as a bit of a joke, you know, oh, no, no.

But, you know, the winds, they didn't tie the propellers down and the winds turned. the propellers and it's bugged up something inside the engine. Well, okay. So what's the plans for fixing it? Oh, no, we've got spare parts. We've got spare parts coming. Oh, okay, good. So six weeks later, we're still in Punda Raines, right?

The plane still hasn't flown. And they've got a chunk of people down ready to, might have been a little bit less, but our trip, the first trip to South Pole was six weeks wait. I sent the clients home, and they had to come back again. So anyway, I did the first season where I got to know all the people involved. And so that was good. That was the start of that.

Next year I came back. I brought clients but became more integrated into the operation. And then the following year, I started to buy shares in the company. Some of those guys wanted to get out. They wanted to get their money. So I was sequentially over the next few years. is buying, buying parts of it. And then one of the original founders, Giles Kirschor,

who was the guru of flying twin otters around Antarctica, he crashed a gyrocopter just over near the British base and died. They were filming for National Geographic. He went up in this gyrocopter and the wind inverted him. So his wife took over heat. shares, we bought everyone else out and then we continued all through the 90s as I was the majority owner. She had a fairly significant but minority share and she ran the day-to-day stuff and you know I did my normal thing of let's do that, let's not do that, but she ran day

to day. Is that what became ALE? Yes. So we went to the end of Adventure Network, you know, was the brand name for Antarctica. There was nobody else operating in Antarctica. in the interior. We were the only ones. And it was a struggle because in those days we were using DC4s and a DC6 and we didn't have a lot of money. And we were over at Patriot Hills where it's really windy and half the days of the year we couldn't land because the main winds are at right angles to the runway so you'd have a beautiful day but there'd be a 20 not 60 degree wind. So and you know we'd end the season we'd have 30 dreams. We'd have 30 of fuel on the ground and we had to fly, you know, more fuel in.

And it was really seat of the pants. Yeah. But we were still doing good things, you know. We're taking people in all over the place, not as many places as we do now. But so that evolved, evolved, evolved. At the end of, we bought the first commercial Basler, these ones out here. All the rest had been military or CIA. As I said, the other night, they sold gun ships.

The Thai Army bought, or Thai Air Force bought them. The Mali in West Africa Air Force bought them. The US bought a lot for drug interdiction down in Colombia. But we bought the first one. And it had, I've been a lucky recipient on the insurance side of the ship stuff. So the second season, we have the Basler sitting over next to the camp, and I don't know, 100 mile an hour, wind comes up, gets under the wing, collapses the gear, because their weak point is the gear, side-loaded.

You know, of course it's a retracting, so it collapses the gear, the gear goes all up through the fuselage, it's kaput. So we had it insured, fortunately, and the insurance company basically, or insured, Again, it was Lloyds of London, it was a syndicate with a lead syndicate running it. I went over to see them and they said, well, we're going to send people down and repair it and bring it back. I was like, oh, okay. And we said, well, you know that's going to be, it was actually then, then, I'm just trying to get my dates right. We sold the company, right?

We sold Adventure Network because along came a, what I came, what I came, call a roll-up company. You know, they go around and buy. So they were buying all little boutique travel organizations. Put it under one umbrella. Put it under one umbrella. And it was, you know, one of these private investment companies putting the money up, North Castle Partners, I think it was at that stage. And so these guys bought one company. The first one they bought, the guy who owned it happened to be a friend of ours. So he said, oh, you've got to buy Adventure Network. Now, why they bought us, I don't know, because, you know, we were real seat of the pants stuff. We weren't standard mainstream. But their accountancy gurus who said, wow,

we, over here, we're getting sometimes $180,000 for one person. Well, what it was, it was an expedition that was funded by, so it really was a bad way to analyze the income, you know, So our normal income was 25 grand a person or 30 grand, but they'd see these ones 180 grand, 200 grand for a private expedition. So they saw us as a growth market or whatever, which it wasn't. So we sold it. Two years later, I bought it back for 20 cents in the dollar. And we were at that stage, the other company, this roll-up company, had decided not to run the season, right? because they were in legal dispute now with Anne, this lady who'd been a co-owner with me all through the 90s.

And she'd stayed with them as a manager. And I think they paid me two years as a consultant, but I never consulted. So it was like, yeah, okay. So is that where the name change went from A&I to ALE? Well, what happened then was we noted that they weren't going to run a season, right? I had a non-compete, but my non-compete was almost up. So I thought, we'll set up a new company, right? They're not going to run the season.

We'll set up a new company. And even if the non-compete hadn't run out, we weren't competing because they weren't going there. But, you know, I thought I'll be very, very careful. So we didn't set the company up until it was August, I think, in 2000. And I said, I went to my brother, because he'd been helpful through the years, said, look, I'll help you get set up. And you come in as a 25% shareholder, which he's been fantastic, all the work he does. He does a lot of the, he does a lot of the hell of a lot of the back office stuff. And he's a very detailed guy, which I'm not, and that's great.

And then we took in another two partners, including a guy who'd worked for us for many years, and he'd spent 20 years working for the British in Antarctica, dog sledding and everything. So we thought, we'll set up a new company, and we'll call it Antarctic logistics and expeditions. Because we wanted the word Antarctic in there, because clearly for web searches and whatever, you try and we won't smart about engineering any of that, but we at least went, oh, we'll put the word Antarctic. And but right at the same time, these guys, so we were going to have to start from scratch, right?

We're going to have to buy camps. We were going to have to buy fuel. We were going to have to establish a new brand name. So it wasn't going to be easy. So right at this time, these guys ring me. And the first thing they did was threaten to sue me. I'm on Titanic, right? We're out of Titanic.

I got this phone call, this guy, who I knew, from that company. And he said, Mike, you know we're suing Ann about non-compete. I said, yeah, I know that. He said, well, we've got emails between you and her. And I said, well, that's good. I've got them as well. Neat. That's just...

Cool story. Yeah, just, that's perfect. Well, we think that you've been, you've broken your non-compete. And I said, well, I guarantee you I haven't broken non-compete. He said, well, we think, our lawyers think we can sue you. And I said, well, I've been to the mat before, because with Titanic, the right to dive on that went to the Supreme Court of the United States. And we didn't win in the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court said,

this is not a constitutional issue. This is not a constitutional issue. So we had a three zero win in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. So Supreme Court said, no. not for us, whatever the appeals court. So we won that. So that was like half a million bucks that I couldn't get back

because we were actually fighting a lower court. We weren't fighting the salvo, the salvage company was actually the one behind it, but they hid behind the court. So you sue a court or you contest a court. You can't claim the damages. So I said this guy, mate, you know, whatever you want to do,

get your lawyers and, you know, I'll fight it because it's, It's just not true. I'd been very specific because I didn't want to compete because I didn't want to go back in. Because I knew the setup costs and to try and get the infrastructure down here. It was like, oh, screw that. And this is the, you know, this is now 2002. So I'm still running Titanic.

We're still doing the space stuff. And it was like, well, you know, I don't need any more. Anyway, two weeks later or three weeks later, the guy, rings me and says, Mike, would you be interested to buy the company back? And I said, well, what price? And he gave me a price not much less than what they had paid us. And I said, no, no, too expensive. Anyway, I think we knew, he came back then and we negotiated and I forget what we settled at. Whatever it was, it was a bargain. Because we sold the company with 30 drums of fuel on the ground. They sold it back to us with 600 on the ground. They sold us then

the brand name, which had been, you know, had existed for 15 years, so everybody knew it. Yeah, equity in that. Yeah. And they'd also done a lot of camp enhancement, so we got all that. So we made enough in the first year to pay it all off. And they gave me, I brought the others in, but the others had no contact with this company. They gave me 12 months to pay. So that was good.

So we bought it back. we immediately ran the season because there was a lot of pent-up demand because they were going to cancel. And we made enough profit, as I said, to cover the costs of acquisition. And then we ran it with two brands. We ran Adventure Network International for the tourist side of things. We ran Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions for the expeditions, the mountain climbing, and also government work.

Because, you know, the government, we always felt. the government's buying services from us and we called Adventure Network. You know, it's like these are a bunch of, you know, cowboys on motorbikes or whatever. So we, this Antarctic logistics and expedition sounded more serious. So we ran two brands for quite a while and I mean quite a while. We're over at Patriot Hills, which was very windy and a much more difficult place to work with. And then in 2007, one of the partners came over here and searched this area. We knew where the Blue Ice Runways were because we had an advisor, a British guy, a British scientist,

who was the expert in Antarctica on Blue Ice areas. So he said, guys, there's a good Blue Ice area over here. Go and check it out. So Mike Sharp, one of the partners at that time, who's no longer a partner, he sold his shares to Frederick because he wanted to just. retire, live in England and enjoy life. He came over, did a survey. Then we sent one of the Aleutians over to do a test landing.

And then Mike found this area, you know, which the Patriot Hills area was the camp was just a kilometer from the runway. So people could walk at times, excuse me, backwards and forwards. So this was seven or eight kilometers away, but it gave us this area, which is, We get wind here, but nothing like over there. Talking about where we're sitting now. Where we're sitting now. And how do you, both with the first company and ALE, how do you get the rights to be here?

Do you have to negotiate with the governments involved in the treaty of Antarctica? Or how does that work? Anybody operating in Antarctica. Now, I mean, if you came out, if you were an Afghani and you came down here and said, I'm not going to go through any treaty nation. Could anybody do anything? No, not really. But the way the governments can constrict people is the treaty nations are all the gateways.

So Australia is a gateway. They can restrict your assets. Argentina's a gateway. So if you came in, now people have done it. People have got on a yacht and sailed down to parts of Antarctica without a permit. But if they're from, if it's an Afghani citizen coming from Afghanistan, as an example, or a Syrian coming from Syria, there's no what we call, not what I call, but what is called enabling legislation. So as an Australian citizen, you as American citizens, if you do something down here that contravenes the Antarctic Treaty. If I go to around drop-kicking penguins, you know, go down there and start booting penguins.

Jesus, Mike, that's quite an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, it's an extreme example, but, you know, I've seen people way back in the old days pick a penguin up and throw it to the next guy sort of thing. Okay. Okay, now if you did that, even though you're in an area that is not controlled by any one nation, as an Australian citizen, they can prosecute me in Australia. They can do the same to the U.S. and the... Most countries, most European countries. There's now about 40, I forget the number now, or I don't know the number of people who have signed up to the treaty.

It's about 50 nations. It was originally 12 or 13. Now there's 50. So to come here, we need to get a permit from a treaty nation. But a treaty nation that has a permitting system. South Africa, for instance, guys operated out of there, they did not have. a permitting legislation they do now. So we started off when the company was first formed, a venture network, and all through the

90s, we permitted via the foreign and Commonwealth office in the UK. So we dealt with them. Our first office was in Vancouver. So why go through UK versus Australia? We are a pain the ass in terms of trying to get permits, not cooperative, don't like tourism, etc. Foreign office in Britain was, they were quite good, but it became more convenient to do it through the American system. The American system is very strict, but it's reasonable. You know, we can work with them. We have a five-year rolling permit, but every year we have

to put in our environmental statement, estimate the fuel use, the emissions, et cetera. So we have to deal with National Science Foundation, with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of State. You know, we've got a sort of belly up to the bar with all sorts of applications and background and all that sort of thing. So we do that. So we permit through the U.S. So to do that, you know, we set up the office in Salt Lake City. So we're a US company operating on a US permitting system. And all the ships, they all need to get a permit from a permitting nation. So it's quite strict from that point of view.

Now, of course, the ship-based tourism in the peninsula is, you know, something's going to happen there in terms of restrictions. because when we were on the Limblet Explorer, as I said, we were the only boat. We used to put through maybe 500 people, 600 people a year. Not doing that a day. Oh, they're not even doing it in a day. To get up to close to that a day,

they're talking this year, I think, in the peninsula, 110,000 with 50 ships and increasing. So at some stage, you know, the treaty as a group. The treaty as a group move fairly slowly because you need, I believe, unanimity and that's really hard to get with all the different countries. All right, they're back.

They're back. That's right. They can wait. Yep. So we go through that permitting system and, you know, we operate via the US who are strict but reasonable. And, you know, we also, we've made sure that we try very hard to be productive for governments and science. So we do a lot with governments. We provide logistics and we provide science support.

So, you know, we just did a big lot with the Brazilians. We normally do stuff for the Americans. Do it for the British, do it for the Chileans, at times for the Argentinians, this year for the Germans. Because we're, this area, we're it. Yeah. And are we any great sort of intellectual geniuses for being it? No, we just happen to be it because it's remote and it's hard to operate. And we've built up infrastructure over many years.

So, you know, ALE, you know, it's a bit of a funny acronym, ALE, you know, oh, ale, you know, do you make beer? No, no, we don't make beer. We run, you know, we run commercial operations in Antarctica. We take people to the South Pole, as you know. We've got mountain climbing. We go out to the Emperor Pank. We have this year probably 18 people skiing a thousand kilometers to South Pole.

We've got, we run vehicles to the South Pole. We can do bespoke expeditions. We've done three filming contracts this year with, you know, pretty high-end documentary films, including, you know, some Hollywood-based people as well. Including Black Rifle Coffee? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, now, here are these dudes. turn up and you know we saw this you know they were via pH our one of our you know

advisors for Skydow and he said look I've got this group they're all you know ex-US special forces as it turns out there's one Canadian we call them maple syrup yeah maple syrup yeah these guys want to come and they want to do 777 well we know the concept 777 because we done it for a marathon yep the only difference for the marathon is it's easier for them because they always they had 60 people or whatever they could afford to have their own plane. And they care less about the weather. And they care less about the weather.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we saw this group coming and I was backwards and forwards with PH about, okay, what do they want to do? And Jim Whittington, of course, we've had before. So we knew Jim. And my son was like, he calls me my mind. My kids have, for whatever reason, they've never called me Dad. It's always been ever since they were little Mike.

And basically, it's, of course, you know, they used to hear my wife and people around me call me Mike. So they just started calling me Mike and I went, I don't really care. They know I'm their dad. So they still, to this day, call me. If they refer to another person, they might say, my dad or... But to your face, it's Mike. But to my face, it's always Mike. Always has been, both of them.

So Timothy went, Mike, have you seen who's on this list? And I went, no. And I looked at it and went, I don't recognize any of them. And of course, he's, as I said, he's always been interested in special forces and that side of things. I think in another, you know, sort of return to life, he might go into the army or whatever because he's really interested in security, special forces. He went, oh, there's this guy called Andy Starr. And he has this podcast and oh, it's great.

And he said, and there's dudes there from Black Rifle Coffee. And Timothy has always been following Black Rifle Coffee. And he said, and, you know, there's this guy, Evan, whatever Evan's second name is. Heifer. Yeah. And these other two guys and he said, you know, they're all special ops guys. You know, they're seals or their Rangers or they whatever. And that to him, it was like, wow.

And I went, oh, okay. Sounds cool. It'll be interesting to meet these guys when they come. So, you know, the whole thing of Black Rifle coffee now, it's like, oh, I better check out what Black Rifle coffee is. But obviously it's just good quality coffee. But the thing that he said, which is relevant here, he said, oh, these guys do all of this work for veterans, you know, veterans or veterans' families who are struggling either they've lost the veteran or the veterans' incapacons. It doesn't have earning ability, et cetera, et cetera. So he said, oh, this is going to be cool, cool to meet these guys.

And I went, oh, yeah, okay. So here we are. And, you know, we've done the first skydive, and hopefully we'll get the one, the weather's still looking good for Monday. Yeah, yeah. We'll track that carefully because the weather starts to improve tomorrow evening. If it looks like suddenly Monday's going to the crapper,

then we'd have a look here. It still puts us well in line with what we're trying to accomplish. And I don't know if people be able to hear, but we've basically taken over our communal space. And so everybody's back now, and we actually have been at it for like three and a half hours. And I don't want to stop yet. Have we?

We have. No, that's how you know you had in a great conversation. But I want to give them their space back because they're going to be whiny little. We call them sniveling little cunts. I don't know if you've ever heard of that term. I've often used it, actually. It's one of my favorite things

about the British, and Australia, it's the full mastery of the word. Yes, yes. Out of everything that you have accomplished in your life and all the things that you've done, what do you have left that you still want to do? You know, basically one of the, I'd call it a sad reality, or at least a reality of life, is as you get older, there are certain things that I can't do now that I could do before. You know, I've got two replacement knees, you know, wore those out. You know, you're definitely less dexterous.

You know, when I'm climbing in and out of vehicles, it's like I look like a, you know, a seal trying to get in. And that's just a fact of life. It's a little bit, you think, oh, this is screwed, but it is what it is. So can I go back and, you know, do some of the, you know, I dog sledded at a North Pole. We dog slitted across Greenland, dog slated up the East Coast of Greenland. England. We did a big man hauling, or what we thought was a big ban hauling from South Pole down the Scott Glacey to the Rossi shelf. You know, we've done a lot of physical things as well. But, you know, there are things now that you, you know, reality is. I'm not going to be able to do

those. People often say, well, you've been, gee, you know, I don't know how many countries and how many islands we've been to. They'll say, oh, you've been everywhere. And it's like, That is the most senseless statement that's ever made. I mean, who's been everywhere in the United States of America? Who's been everywhere in Australia, even if you're citizens? And then you look at all of the countries and all of the different things. And, you know, I'm not a list ticker. Would I go back to many of the places I've been?

Absolutely. You know, you go back because, you know, memories fade and they're beautiful and whatever. So I've got a list. And my list never. decreases because I sit with guys like you, other people, and they tell me stories and it's like, oh shit, I've got to go to that place. Watching the movie last night, I've trekked in Nepal and I've been down to the southern river-rafted in southern Nepal down to the areas where they've got the rhinos and the tigers

and elephants and whatever. So I've been to Nepal, but have I seen all of the Nepal? No. And watching that movie last night of those scenes of Everest up at that high high camp area where you guys were skydiving, some of those visions of the mountains there was like, wow, wow. I did a trek a long time back in Pakistan. You can go up what's called the Baltoro Glacier and it goes up to an area called Concordia.

So you've got K2 and you got Gashabrum 1, 2,4 and you got Mashabrum, all of which are 8,000 meter peaks or most of them. And then you've got this area as you trek up called Trango Towers, which is these big granite spires. It's absolutely magnificent. So I look at that and go, and I wanted to go into K2 from the Chinese side, because this was the Pakistani side. Didn't do it.

I regret not going to Afghanistan and Syria in the good days. Because, you know, Syria was the cross section of the world at that stage between Romans and Greeks and Persians and whatever. And, you know, some of the stuff that's been destroyed there now is, you know, it's horrible historically. Libya, I've been in Libya illegally because we did a big desert trip out of Egypt. And we went up inside Libya before we crossed what's called the Great Sand Sea in western Egypt. We're in a unimog, you know, those big German army vehicles. So we're in a unimog there.

So, I mean, I wish I had another 75. years because I could fill it out with stuff and you know I like going birdwatching love to get into more of the Amazonian rainforest area before it's all cut down and and gone there's a place called the Mulu caves in Indonesia sorry in Malaysia where these giant limestone caves come up out of the jungle and I mean you guys must have a ton of places also you can look at and go here Yeah, I'd like to go there. One of my problems is I pick up travel magazines and it's like, oh, yeah, I want to go there.

I want to go there. My wife's going, you know, you can't travel all of your life. And it's like, well, I'm going to try. I'll give it a good, good wash, so to speak. I'll give it my best effort for sure. You know, sort of, I have done a lot in Australia, but there's a lot I haven't done. So we bought a couple of Toyota, new land cruises and changed all the suspension underneath. and put rooftop tents and all of that.

And Frederick, I'm taking Frederick to an area up in Northwest Australia called the Kimberley area, which has these really strange rock formations and waterfalls and rivers and all that sort of stuff. So to me, the idea that you've been everywhere, it's the most nonsensical thing to say. And I can remember a really funny incident In the very early days of Limblaid Explorer, you know, I was, you know, new to the,

we were doing a trip in, we did a lot of trips in China in 1978, 79, just after Nixon and Kissinger, you remember they had ping pong diplomacy. You know, they had ping pong teams as a way of, you know, getting to talk to each other. And that, it was, again, a Limblet Explorer. And again, this was Lars Eric Lindblad's vision

that he suddenly went, here's an opportunity. you know, we'll go to China. So we did over 20 cruises over a couple of years there and went into Tibet very early at the end of the 70s when Tibet was Tibet

because now the Chinese are put, you know, Han Chinese and now are taking over Tibet. They treat the Tibetans really poorly. But, you know, I looked at things like that and, you know, as I said, I was sitting there one day I'm just new on the boat and quite excited about everything.

And actually, these people came back to China, but the original thing happened on a trip going to Antarctica. So I sit down and there's a American guy from US who was a colonel, retired colonel. And so he's introduced itself, I'm colonel, whatever, from Texas. Okay, great to meet you, mate. And his wife was there, and she was a big, bosomed, you know, sort of blonde dude. and she had a t-shirt on or a sweatshirt that said my name is peaches

and I looked at this and I didn't know whether I was staring at the boobs or the thing I said oh is your name really peaches and she said yes it was obviously a nickname so everyone calls me peaches and was like oh okay so we're sitting there and they said this woman said oh you know we've we've we've almost traveled everywhere and I went oh yeah okay that's good And this was my early travel days. I hadn't done a lot of this other stuff. And I thought, oh.

And so overcomes another lady. I don't know where she was from. I can't remember. She was English speaking. So she sat and everyone's going, oh, hello. And we go off to Antarctica. Hello, how are you? And then the conversation went into,

where have you been in your life? And each of them were telling stories. And then Peaches said, oh, we've been almost everywhere. And this is our last continent. Well, you know, collecting seven continents is not exactly difficult these days. Antarctica was the most difficult, you know, because you couldn't do it under normal circumstances. And, you know, Peaches became, you know, quite arrogant and obnoxious. Anyway, this other woman said, have you been to the cave paintings in southern Algeria?

Because there's very famous cave paintings in Southern Algeria. And Peaches went, no, I haven't. then this woman stood up and said, well, then you should shut up because you haven't been everywhere, and she stomped off. So I was left sitting there going, Oh, there's always a bigger fish. Yes, there's always a bigger fish.

No, I've got a, I wouldn't say endless, but pretty much for me it'll be an endless list because I'll never get to it, all of it. But, you know, Mongolia, I haven't been, I'd like to go to Mongolia. There's areas in, well, not just areas, but countries in Eastern Europe, I haven't been. I want to go through in the near future all the stands, Tajikistan, you know, Kazakhstan,

Turkmenistan, et cetera. Be careful in the stands. Yeah, yeah, you've got to be careful. Yeah, absolutely. Stan can bite you in the ass. Jericho, Logan, closing questions. So I've just been putting your timeline together in my head as we've been walking across this. I can't put it together in my head, man.

It's amazing. you got so much jam-packed. It seems like you didn't have kids until into your 40s. I had my son. I had an accidental Russian son. Very nice lady who was the English translator in Murmansk while we're running these nuclear icebreaker trips and got associated with.

to one night, three bottles of vodka with... She operated out of the... They have what's called Siemens. And I don't mean... Yeah, I mean... Yeah, that's not how many's amazing. Seamon. So I found out.

Seaman of ships. They have a Siemens club when the local boys are there. So we had a big party there. And, you know, she was attractive lady. And it was just one night, huge amount of vodka. And then, you know, some months later, And she contacted me and said, oh, by the way, I'm pregnant. And I went, oh, gee, well, okay.

And, you know, there was just no way that it was going to end up in living together or marriage and whatever. So I'm still in touch with him. I don't see him very much because he couldn't get out of Russia for quite a while because he was in conscription age. And unless you hadn't done your conscription, you couldn't get a passport. Then along came COVID. Or bring him down here next year.

You know, he's a, I haven't met him very many times, you know, since he's growing up. He's 30 now. He's a member of the parliament there in the local parliament. He's in one of the opposition parties to Putin, but it's one of the accepted opposition parties because it has to look like a democracy. So he has, it's the Communist Party, actually. It was Zirinov, who just died. Zirinov was a controversial.

commercial politician there, he just died. So then, but really the first non sort of mistake child was Timothy who's here and that was I was 48 and a half and then Kimberly. So my wife and I lived together, you know, with the kids and eventually 2000. She'd been saying I think we should get married and I was interested to do that and we finally did it in Zermat in Switzerland in the year 2000 so I was a late father I wasn't sure I was going to be a father and there wasn't a decision either way so it's my first marriage and only marriage and it will only be my only marriage even if for some bizarre reason we separated you know who needs to get married again you know so but I

I've got to say it was a wonderful experience having the kids. Now, the Russian son I really had no contact with, but you know, with Timothy and Madota Kimberley. You know, it's been, and to me, anybody who doesn't have kids, and there's a lot of people don't, there is an element of life that's missed. You know, having children, you know, and having them and washing them grow up.

And now they give me nothing but cheek. and, you know. That's what happens. That's what happens, you know, sort of level of playful derision, you know, the old bastards, you know, sort of thing. And, you know, for me, that's just fun. So, you know, so.

Jericho. I was wondering, how many people have skydived here besides us? We had, back in the 90s before, you know, we lost a couple who didn't deploy their shoots properly. That was probably, that was six went out on that jump. Then we had some guys from Dubai came. That was a group of say six or eight.

So that would be 14. And then we had Jim and Bill Booth. Tandem. Both. No, Bill Booth was a solo. Okay. Jim was a tandem, though. Jim was a tandem with Tom.

Okay. So that was, let's say, what was that? So that was six. Seven. I see. Morning. Yeah, including you guys, say, jumps total, 25. Oh, wow.

Okay. I was guessing it would probably be somewhere around 100, and I think these guys, that's what they were saying, 50-ish. Now, none of the other commercial companies have done skydiving, that's for sure. But here and where I don't know what the US has done historically in terms of what's gone on at the bases,

not a lot skydiving at the bases I would say there's probably close to zero because they don't want to take the risk. Here I can get an exact number but 25 to 30 maximum

maximum and probably less. Wow. Okay. I did not realize that. It's pretty unique. Well, I'm going to close it up because everybody's trying to come in. On that note I can't thank you enough for your time today and also the hospitality here at the camp.

This has been, it blew away every expectation that I could have possibly had. I brought way too many cold clothing. This has been an interesting stretch of weather because I was talking to the meteorological guys today and saying they're here, you know, months on end and both of them are done multiple seasons, whereas, you know, I come down for relatively, you know, short or medium times here and I said I can't remember this many consecutive windless or almost

windless low wind days and they said no they're they think they're trying to remember back so we've had abnormal for sure yeah abnormal for sure now it may be just a cycle as the guy said today well we've had other

years where there was more snow than usual we haven't had a major snow event here for a long time this this season so but I got to say It's been, and I say this genuinely and seriously, that's been, you know, very pleasant for me to meet you guys and to meet the rest of your team.

And listen to your stories as well. Because, you know, okay, I've got some stories. Each of you have got different but also equally interesting stories. And when it comes to the camp here, you know, because, you know, the head honcho is the one that gets told, oh, you run such a great camp. This camp is run by the staff. You know, I parachute in, so to speak, hello.

Literally, if you did a go. Literally, yeah. Now that I've done something I've wanted to do. I was going to say, did you count yourself on that list of genres? I will, I definitely will. And that was such an experience, you know, that I knew the view would be fantastic. And I'd only done one other tandem and, you know, enjoyed that, but it was over, you know, a bunch of agricultural or little agricultural area. But certainly, you know, Tim Heward, who runs the camp,

and Fred also, who's his 2-O-C, and the staff here and the outer camps, the guys there, you know, it's nice to say as one of the owners, oh, it's us, it's all us, you know, we, we, it's, that's rubbish. It's, the team here is as good as we've ever had. As Tim said today, we've had really good teams most years, but this year, up till now, there's been no major drama. you know, we normally get some sort of drama, COVID or whatever.

So it's gone very well, but it's the staff and team that make it work. You know, we put a little oversight on it and, you know, pre-planning, and we take the risk and we do a lot of the contractual stuff and all that sort of business. But when you come down to operating, Tim is a fantastic, you know, number one person running the camp. But everybody, all the department heads, you know, it's great. And we feel, you know, absolutely appreciative and privileged to have,

and we'd love to keep as many of these people on. There'll be some who go off, you know, they come down and do some seasons, and then, you know, someone gets married, someone starts a business, whatever. So there is rollover, but it's all about the team, as you guys know. I mean, you know, in the military, you know, you read military history and everything's about the commanding general. well the commanding general ain't running the whole show you know you filter that down through

you know division levels battalion levels company levels you know section levels and whatever if you don't have that integrated team and communications you know it so yeah so being a pleasure and I'm going to enjoy drinking black rifle coffee for a lot longer yeah we gotta figure out getting uh... getting it down to Australia or getting some in Salt Lake City as well the Salt Lake easy is an easy piece that's a truck

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for the time. It's spectacular. Happy, happy to sit and yarn. That's great.