Julian Dorey Podcast - #368 - Cave Diver on “Ice Age” Girl Discovery, Diving Pyramids & Thai Cave Rescue | Gus Gonzalez

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) RIDGE: Take advantage of Ridge’s Biggest Sale of the Year and GET UP TO 47% Off by going to https://www.Ridge.com/JULIAN #Ridgepod (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Gus Gonzalez is a prominent scuba instructor and technical cave diver, widely known as the co-host and producer of the popular YouTube channel and podcast, "Dive Talk GUS's LINKS: - YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/ORCATORCHWorldwide - IG: https://www.instagram.com/OrcaTorch/# - X: https://x.com/orcatorch - WEBSITE: https://www.orcatorch.com/info/orcatorchambassador-10.html JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Intro 01:36 - Diving in 2018, cave diving, Iceland, Silfra, wetsuit vs drysuit, nitrogen narcosis 13:03 – Dry suit danger, off-gassing, decompression sickness, stigma, first dive, 250 dives 24:08 – 10k cave divers, gatekeeping, technical vs recreational, oxygen pressure 34:02 – Commercial diving, certifications, deepest dive 58:47 – Cavern to cave diver, guidelines, Gainesville, 4k ft lines 01:06:42 – Virgin caves, danger, Thai cave rescue, Rick Stanton 01:26:22 – Rick Stanton, Sheck Exley, narcosis, near death 01:35:13 – Mental training, problem solving, lifelong commitment 01:43:18 – Rogan cave story, lost line, backlash, ocean vs freshwater 01:55:36 – Artifacts, bones, Blue Hole Belize, bodies 02:04:09 – Blue Hole depth, rescues, Edd Sorensen, robots can’t dive 02:19:51 – Orcas, sharks, expeditions, Titanic sub 02:31:38 – USA migration, Venezuela 02:40:30 – Bonne Terre Mine, DiveTalk, private caves 02:53:16 – DiveTalk mission CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 368 - Gus Gonzalez Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cave diving is not for super humans. It's just super dangerous. My favorite exploration was in Casumel called El Diablo. You pop into the cave. The entrance is complete zero visibility, and every rock is like blades. Touch something, you get caught. But then the water has this thing called hydrogen sulfide. It was used as a weapon in World War I, which is like acid. I mean, the whole cave's trying to kill you.

And I remember I was really close to probably dying. Like, it was, it was bad. I was underwater and I was tied with lying somewhere in my tanks that I couldn't reach. was a fish caught in a neck. But if nobody would have helped me, I would have potentially, eventually drowns. And we trained for this. There was a discovery in one of these Mexican caves

where they found the body of a girl next to like a giant sloth, like a woolly mammoth, cybertooth tiger. Yeah, unbelievable. There's a bunch of divers in the blue hole of the hub in Egypt. People die all the time there. That's why it's called Diver Cemetery.

What makes this one so dangerous? At the bottom, there's... Whoa. You never had anything like that. I found... Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help.

Thank you. in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't get into cave diving until 2020. Because cave diving is, there's a progression. I equal it to martial arts. It's like you don't, if you say the cave diving is like the black belt of diving, then you don't start a black belt, right?

You have to start a white belt and then blue belt and so on, and you grow from there. So in 2018 is when I became a diver, just a regular diver. How'd that happen? So we were going on vacation to Iceland and I looked up things to do in Iceland and scuba diving was number one. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to go get certified. Now I thought I grew up competitive swimming. I play water polo. So I was always in the water.

And then so diving was always in my mind. Like I wanted to learn how to dive. And back in 2016, I started this thing just for me that I pick up a skill and I learn every year a new skill. Some of them have stuck. Some of them have not. but diving was the skill for 2018 so I just went and got certified to be able to dive in Iceland and it just stuck like I just loved it diving in Iceland also seems like a hell of a place to start diving and it's fucking cold up there and yeah I've seen I've never been but it looks amazing

and there's all kinds of crevices and everything so like where were you specifically diving there yeah so Iceland has this crevice called sylphra which is in a lot of divers bucket list The reason for that is the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates come together in Iceland at this place called Silfra. They come like six feet apart, five feet apart, very, very close together. And that crevice is filled with the clearest water on earth to dive. And during the dive, you get to put your hands on both continents, North America and Eurasia. Yeah, there you go. That's silver.

Yep, yep. It's super clear water. And to me, actually, the most special part of that dive was how clear the water is. It's not so much the fact that you get to touch both continents. I mean, that's pretty cool. You get to touch two continents at the same time. But the clarity of the water is the most mind-blowing thing. Like, when you're just floating there and you look down and you can see, like, your fins, like they're suspended in the air, that was the most mind-blowing part.

I wouldn't expect that, like up in Iceland. Not to say it's not beautiful up there. Again, pictures I've seen are insane. Yeah. But like in my amateur head with this shit, we always think of like the clearest water is by the equator or like where it's warm or the Mediterranean. And then the farther north you get on the seaboard like it's dark. You think like the Black Sea or like the Atlantic. If you're up in Jersey, you know, I put my hand in two feet. I can't see it. Yeah. So why is it so clear up there? I don't know exactly the whole story behind it. But from what I remember is something like the water inside the crevice takes like a hundred years to be filtered. through volcanic rock, like just this porous rock. Imagine like a filter, and it takes decades, if I remember correctly, to make it there. So by the time it fills this crevice, it's just super clear. And you can drink it.

It's super clean water. Absolutely, yeah. All the ice line, like the water in Iceland, like from just the river, is cleaner than tap water in like most countries. I mean, it's super clean. Right. So the river's fresh, though. But then if you're dealing with the ocean water, it'd be salt water.

Yeah, of course. This is fresh water and it's super clean and it's awesome. I mean, Iceland is my favorite country in the world. Like, besides the U.S. to visit, I've been to, I think, 53 countries at this point. And Iceland is by far my favorite. Like, I could go to Iceland every month if I could. Just because of the dive or a lot of other things. No, no, no.

Just Iceland, the country is just gorgeous. Like, we could do a whole episode on Iceland. Like, Iceland, you're looking at stuff and you're looking at it with your own eyes and he looks Photoshop. I mean, it's just insane. It's like a waterfall falling on a volcano with ponies jumping over. It's just crazy. It's like mind-blowing. You should definitely go to Iceland.

I think everyone should go to Iceland. It's just the best place. I mean, it's awesome. I want to say, and Dave, check me if I'm wrong here, but like the scenes of training in Batman begins that look nuts back in 05. Christopher Nolan filmed that in Iceland. I know I'm right about that one. The other one I think they filmed there with some of that crazy shit in Interstellar. Yeah.

You know, where it just looks like, you know, it's supposed to look like another planet and it actually does. I know that Game of Thrones was filmed in Iceland and the park where Silfra is is where they film the Game of Thrones scenes because it's like, you know, national park or whatever where that is. I can't remember the name. All the names are in Icelandic, so it's, you know, but yeah, I mean, Iceland is just a great place. Was that your first time going in 2018? Yeah, it was my first time going. I've been there once after that. I think it was 2022.

I went back or 2023, something like that. And I would love to go back. I mean, it's just a great place. Now, what month of the year were you there in 2018? October. So October. Yeah. I mean, what kind of temperatures are you dealing with in water like that?

Well, the water is cold all year around. I think it was 33. Yeah, 33 degrees when I dove there. And we were supposed to do two dives. tell you, like, we're going to do dive one. And if everybody is cool after that, we'll do a second dive. And we dive with a dry suit. So when you go scuba diving, if you don't know, typically, I mean, if the water is really warm, you can just wear a swimsuit and a rash gar or whatever. Like, people, people dive like that. I try to use a wetsuit every time,

no matter how warm the water is. It's a three millimeter thick wet suit. But a nice time, we dive with a dry suit. The different between a wet and a dry suit is that when you wear a wetsuit, the wet suit is designed to trap water between your skin and the actual suit. So your skin will warm the water up, and that's what provides you with warmth, the water inside the suit. Now, throughout the dive, that water comes in and out and you heat it up constantly. The dry suit is designed to keep you dry. It's not designed to give you protection from the cold the way the wet suit does by heating

the water. It's designed to keep you dry. So underneath the dry suit, you get to wear clothes that you would wear as if you were at 40 degrees, 50, whatever it is, out on the surface. So for Iceland, for example, you're diving in 33 degree water. You wear multiple layers. Like if you were outdoors in 33 degree weather, you will wear a jacket, you will wear all this stuff. And basically we were called undergarments. We put undergarments on it.

And I had like, I don't know, three or four layers underneath it, but you're dry. under it. So that's what makes you warm is that you get to wear regular clothes. So imagine wearing whatever you like for warmth under the suit and then you go diving. Can we get a picture of a dry suit? Yeah. I don't know that I've really... There's going to be a lot of uncharted territory. We're going to learn a lot today. Yeah. That sounds really cool. And in order to learn how to dive on a dry suit, you have to be a regular diver. Although I think that in a lot of places in the world, if you're learning how to dive in cold water, you will learn both dry suit diving. and regular diving all at once.

How does it make diving different, like behaviorally? So when you go diving, one of the biggest misconceptions of diving, I think, for most people that are not divers, is that there's pressure, that you go underwater and there's all this pressure crushing your bones or whatever, and that just doesn't happen. The water pressure only affects gases, and our bodies are made of bones and blood and muscles and stuff like that that are not gases. So if I took you underwater and you equalize, which is the way we equalize the gases inside our bodies, which are in our sinuses and our ears and stuff, you will not tell the difference between being a 10 feet deep or

100 feet deep or 200 feet deep. You will not tell the difference. Now, if you breathe gas like regular air, the air because it's affected by the compression, only gases are affected by the compression. This is called Boyle's Law. Then you will feel a difference on the breathing. By the breathing, feeling thicker, you would be like, okay, I think I'm a little deep here. I'm out a hundred something feet probably. Like with experience, you'll be able to tell by the way you breathe that you are deeper than shallower. Okay. Also, narcosis can cause effect. Starts are about 100 feet. So you can feel a little narct and you can be like, okay, I am deeper than 100 feet. Narcosis? Yeah, nitrogen Narcosis is calling. We'll get into that. But the point is, for the human body, you don't feel the

difference in pressure, whether you're a 10 feet or 110 feet or 210 feet or 210 feet. You just doesn't, it doesn't affect your bones and your arms or whatever. You don't feel weight of the water. It only affects gases. And gases are affected based on the depth. So every 10 meters or 33 feet, the pressure of the atmospheres doubles, or it increases by one. So the first 33 feet, when we're here on the surface, we are under one atmosphere of pressure. So the atmosphere is putting pressure on us. It's 14.7 PSI. So 15 PSI.

When you go to 33 feet, now you're at 30 PSI. So it doubles. Then when you go to 66, then you add 15 more PSI and so on. So it's one atmosphere every 33 feet. And based on that, gas compresses. So if you take a balloon under water, the balloon will be this size. When you're at 33 feet, it will be half the size. When you're at 66, it will be one-third of the size.

When you're at 100 feet, it's one-fourth of the size. And it keeps compressing because the gas compresses the deeper that you go. But it's only gases. Liquids and bones and things like that are not affected by this pressure. So the reason why dry-suit diving is dangerous, more dangerous than wet-suit diving is the wet suit has water between you, between your body, your skin, and the suit. The dry suit has air, which is affected by pressure. So as you go deeper, literally you're constricted by the suit, and you have to add gas.

You have a button, which is typically in the middle of your chest or somewhere in your chest, although some people add it in their legs and other places for other reasons, but typically in your chest. So like the Ironman thing, you know, they have a just press it and you add gas as you go. go deeper. But that gas will then expand when you're going shallower. So as we go up, the gas starts to expand and you become a balloon, which then can take you all the way to the surface and literally kill you. So because of that, we need to air the suit out, which we have a vent on the arm, and you just lift your arm and you let the air out. So you have to learn how to use a dry suit. You can't just throw one on and go and dive. It's not that simple. For the better part of

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That could happen. So what happens is, so this is where the concept of the bends or decompression sickness comes in play. So when we're breathing, our bodies are, the air that we breathe is made mostly of nitrogen, which is useless to us. Our bodies don't use nitrogen. So 79%, 78 and almost 79% of the air that we breathe is made of nitrogen. We only use the oxygen, which is only 21%.

And we don't even get to use all of that. We only use about 5% of the 21% that we breathe. And our body just breathes out 16%. This is why, or 17, this is why mouth to mouth works, because you can breathe out and you're still breathing oxygen into the victim. If you use all the oxygen, then mouth to mouth wouldn't work. The victim would never, like, wake up, basically. So what happens is when you're at depth, the air that we're breathing, based on your depth, has double the amount of molecules, triple the amount of quadruple, like depending on how deep you go.

So those become bubbles in your blood. And if you ascend too fast, those bubbles will expand. Right? So typically those bubbles affect us in the parts of our bodies that bend, like your elbows and your knees and stuff, like, that. That's typically what it affects you. And the decompression sickness that you feel is typically not severe. It's itchy. You will notice because your elbows and your knees just itch. Those are bubbles that are caught that you either came too fast or you didn't do a safety stop or decompression stop depending on the type of diving that you're doing for too long. So you start itching. But those bubbles

can lodge in your heart. They can launch in your spine. They can get lodging your brain. They can get lodged in your brain. So you can die if one of those bubbles is lutch in the wrong place, which you have no idea where it's going to be. It's a total gamble. So because of that, we follow safety. Yeah. Right? To off gas, it's called. So you get rid of the nitrogen that you have in your, in your blood, by going up slowly, 30 feet per minute. And if you don't know how to use a dry suit and it sky rockets you to the surface from 100 feet deep, those bubbles that you have, in your blood will be four times the size, and you hope for the best

that they didn't blow up to four times the size in the wrong place. So, anyway, you get certified to dive a dry suit so that doesn't happen. You know how to handle all of that. Yeah, I hope so. And there are other things that we do to make sure that you don't get affected

by decompression sickness, like you don't fly after you dive. We, depending on the dive that you do, you spend a certain amount of time before you fly, typically recommend at 24 hours, but if it's a shallow dive, but it could be 18, it could be 12, depending on the type of dive that you did, you don't go on mountains. Like, you know, you're at a resort in Costa Rica or whatever, and you just want to go up into the mountains in the jungle. No, you can get decompression

sickness by going up and those bubbles will continue to expand, just like underwater going to the surface. If you go from the surface to the top of the mountain, those bubbles can continue to expand. So there's a lot that you learn in scuba diving to prevent you from getting sick. There is so much in your line of work that can go wrong. Like the smallest little thing and like, oh, you're dead. That bubble thing is scary in the shit to me. That, that is scary. But I think that is one of the biggest misconceptions about diving, especially cave diving, especially cave diving. People think that, oh, the littlest thing will go wrong and you're dead. It doesn't work like that. It's safer than you think. Way, way, way safer than you think. We just

scared the shit out of everyone for the last five minutes. So please explain how it's way, way safer. Again, this is all with training, right? The training that you do and the diving that you do to get better at it prevents you from running into these issues. I mean, there's people out there that have tens of thousands of dives and they have no issues, right? But decompression sickness is a diving injury. And I think that there's a big stigma in our industry and just in diving in general, that if you get bent, which is how we call it, you know, being under decompression sickness, that if you get bent, you're a bad diver. That's just not the case.

It's just like if a basketball player injures their ankle or their knee or whatever, they're not seen as a bad basketball. It's an injury that you get from playing basketball. Being bent is an injury that you can get from being a diver. It's just the way it works. But there's a lot of things that we do in place, like planning our dives to make sure that that doesn't happen. So when you take me back to this first dive, though, in 2018,

because this was like, as you said, you were a lifelong, swimmer obviously love the water you're clearly an adventurer someone that always wants to learn stuff there's some gene in there where you know i'm not saying you don't have fear but you jump into things obviously no pun intended so you have all that going for you but you're going to iceland to dive in 33 degree water i know for like the first time ever who who were you even doing this with at the time like did they have what was it i i assume it's like a professional place that's helping you do it but like what kind of training do they have ahead of time like how did this go down so the The only thing that's required is that you're a certified dry suit diver.

So you have to become a diver first. I think I got certified in June of 2018. And then I did some diving. And then I took my dry suit class when I had like, I don't know, maybe 20 dives in or whatever. And then I got certified as a dry suit. And then I did a couple of those. And then I went to Iceland. So you don't go to Iceland to dive as your very first dive.

You need at least four dives in order to get certified. Okay. So you trained ahead. Yeah, yeah. So I train ahead. Now, I wasn't an experienced diver. I've been diving for like three months at that point or two months at that point. So I was very, very new when I did Iceland.

But the company that I used when I was in Iceland is called Dive IS, I believe, dive Iceland. And basically all they require is that you are a dry suit, certified dry suit diver. If you are certified to dive a dry suit, you can rent it from them. And you can bring your own too. and you just go and diving in SILFRA. SILFRA is not a challenging dive. It's the easiest diving that you can do. What makes it easy?

It's shallow, crystal clear water. You cannot silt it out. There's no current. There's no waves. It's just like being on a swimming pool that is 33 degrees cold. Like literally the only challenge of SILFRA is how cold the water is.

Everything else is super easy. It's as easy as it gets. And it wasn't, they didn't have an option that you're going to use a wet, in that scenario you had no you would die no no you would die yeah because it's way too cold yeah he would be hypothermic immediately like yeah 33 degree water is terrible like I don't know the numbers like how long you can be on that kind of water without having something like a dry suit but I assume it's minutes yeah you know like five minutes in and you're hypothermic like I don't know if they can bring you

back type of thing I don't know what when you did your training you were doing that back in America right yeah so what where were you diving then I was in Georgia I was diving in Georgia and, you know, mainly like quarries and stuff like that. We don't have a whole lot of places in the Atlanta metro area that we can dive. So I was doing a lot of quarry diving. I was diving every weekend. So, like, just to give you an example, on my first year of diving, I did 250 dives. So that's like five dives a weekend.

Whoa. Nonstop. Yeah. And of course. And how long is each dive at one average? I would say 30 minutes, 40 minutes. That's a lot, though. Yeah.

Just to stop. and so I was diving every weekend and I also went on trips where it would be like an all inclusive resort where you can dive every day three times a day or you can go on a liverboard where you dive four times a day so like in a week you can do 15 to 20 dives and then every weekend after that so I just fell in love with it I was just obsessed with it and for everybody who says like oh I wanted to learn how to dive but like snorkeling is so hard diving is easier than snorkeling. I mean, snorkeling is hard, I think, compared with diving. Diving is super easy. And of course, people watching this or listening to this would feel that, well, I don't want to do it

because what he's talking about is dangerous or gnarly or whatever. Like, this is something that you work up to if you want to. Like, most people don't become cave divers. Like, that's just not a thing. Like, I think there's over 20 million certified divers in the world, 22 million, 25 million something like that and maybe 10,000 cave divers, something like that out of the 25 million. Yeah, yeah. There's not a whole lot of them. I mean, there's no central database that would tell you exactly. Like some people say there's like 4,000.

Some people say there's like 20,000, but it's maybe in the tens of thousands out of millions and millions and millions of divers. Yeah. Like from the outside, someone who doesn't do this, when you talk about like cave diving and what those guys will do, forget whether it's clear water or dark water. I don't care. I don't care if it's out on the outskirts of like an ocean or if it's back in some fucking lake or wherever it may be. That's a whole, I mean, you're, you are inserting not only the unknown, but massive, you know, crevices and claustrophobic type things that you're not getting, I would imagine, in regular dive.

So we're going to talk about that today because that's a whole different level. But either way, like, you know, you talk about it like going 100 feet down or 200 feet down or whatever it may be. There's a there's so many things you do have to. know in order to do that. But I see what you're saying that like once you have repeated it a bunch with professionals doing bit by bit more, bit by bit more, it becomes kind of like no pun intended, like breathing. You know, it's second nature in a lot of ways. Yeah. And a lot of things in diving are a progress, right? You have to do a, you have to do something, do it a lot, and then you can progress to the next level. And I think dive agencies do a good job gatekeeping

that. You can't just be like a brand new diver in this site. I'm on a cave dive. Like, That's not a thing. There's no way to do that like through an agency realistic. Now, can you grab a tank and go in a cave and potentially get lost and die? Yeah, like it's happened to a lot of people. And I think that's what people see cave diving as one of the most dangerous things you can do is because a lot of debts have happened because special instructors who think that, oh, I'm an open water instructor.

I can do anything. Then they go in a cave and get lost and drown. So the agencies do a good job, gatekeeping. that and making it so it's a progression where you have to have certain level of experience before you can even do the training right so even to do the training you have to show all this experience and all these skills or else they won't even let you take the training right and when you get to technical diving which is what most people don't do they do recreational diving in technical diving people fail classes all the time i fail training before um whereas with

recreational diving very very rare that you would fail what do you mean technical diving like what would that consist of? So recreational diving is the diving that you do where it's just open water, right? You're not penetrating wrecks. You're not going into anything like that. You're staying on the open water. You're staying shallow.

Shallow is 130 feet or less, but typically is recommended to not go over 66 feet. Then with experience, you can go to 100 and 132. And there's training for this called deep diving, 132 feet. But overall, decades ago, we basically took a bunch of studs in the Navy and we bent them out of shape. Like we tested, like, what are the limits of the human body, basically, on these Navy divers. And we learn a lot about it.

One of the things that we learned was the no decompression limits, which is basically how much time can you spend a certain depths that is safe for you to go over? all the way to the surface without stopping if you have to. Right? So the limits change depending on depth. So let's say you want to dive to 132 feet. I believe the limit is 5 to 6 minutes that you can spend at that depth without having to stop mandatory decompression stop.

Anytime you have a mandatory stop, we call that a ceiling. The ceiling can be a legit ceiling like in a cave or it can be an artificial ceiling, which is a decompression stop. You have to stop or you run the risk of getting bent. So the dry suit example you gave a few minutes ago. Dry suit's still recreational because you can go to the surface. Right, but I'm saying

when you're talking about the, when you're talking about the bubbles that blow up because you go down to a certain level, that all made sense to me because you're within a suit and everything. But when you're talking about a diver could go down to 132 feet, regardless of what suit it is, and they could spend five to six minutes before decompression sets in, like what is that, why does it take five to six minutes for it to set in? Because we bent a bunch Navy divers and realize that, okay, if you spend more than that time for the average person, it just slowly happens. You have a way higher risk of getting bent, getting decompression sickness.

So we have these tables that we use, which now nobody uses tables. We use dive computers that tells you, based on your depth, how long can you stay here without having to go into decompression? Wait, a table versus a dive computer? What's a table? So the table, the dive tables basically tell you, in like 10 or 5 feet increments, how long can you stay at that depth?

Oh, like you're looking at analog, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It just tells you, like, at 100 feet, you can be for this many minutes. At 60 feet, you can be a, you know, whatever, 66. It just tells you which depth. The problem with diving tables is that with diving tables, when you plan it, you say, okay, I'm going to go to 80 feet.

The dive table will tell you, at 80 feet, you can be for this time. But you don't magically show up at 80 feet. You have to go down to get there. The computer knows exactly how to death you are at all, times and he can calculate in real time how much time you can stay based on where you are in the water column so how deep you are do you have the computer i mean like are you are you able to like look at it on a device as you're going down is that how it works this is a dive computer this is a garmin

descent mark three you hold that up a little bit yeah so this is just an example of a computer i actually don't use this computer that much um i i tend to use the ones that are bigger there's different kinds of form factors for computers. But this one is just convenient because not only does the diving, but he does all my activities. Like, I play pickleball every day. I track all my stuff, you know. Oh, your big pickleball guy.

I try to play every day. You know, it's good exercise. I'm not out there doing tournaments or anything just for fun. But anyway, so this is just an example of a dive computer. It just looks like a watch. But then some of them are bigger and a lot easier to read, let's just say. Especially when you're doing bigger, more technical dives. and you have multiple gases and things like that,

it's good to have a bigger screen. Right. But anyway, recreational diving is when you stay within your no decompression limit, you don't go into decompression, and you could, if you want it, go to the surface at any time without having to stop.

That's what a recreational dive is. Anytime you change those things, we call that technical diving. And that you got to get a whole separate certification for. Different training. Yeah, different, depending on what you, you're trying to do. So like diving with more than one tank, we consider that technical diving because it's not common. Now you have two tanks to deal with, right? How do you deal with

problems depending on the tank? Are they two different gases? If you have two different gases... Two different gases? Yeah, yeah. So when you do decompression dives, it's common to bring different gases because what you're trying to do is breathe a gas that is safe for the depth that you are, which again, have to get into safety. Um, for the depth that you are. So like, a common thing would be you have a deep gas, which is where you're going to breathe when you're deep deepest in the dive. And then you switch to a shallower gas, which is higher in oxygen. So one common mix is 50% oxygen. Remember, the air we breathe is 21. So we bring 50% oxygen that you, that is safe to breathe at 70 feet or

shallower. So as you go up at 70 feet, we switch to our 50% mix. Got it. Yeah, I was thinking, of that too literally in my head for a minute. A hundred percent oxygen is safe to breathe from 20 feet and shallower. We still don't know why there's theories, but we still don't know why oxygen is toxic to breathe deeper than 20 feet. Pure oxygen. So like oxygen is great to treat ailments. Like, you know, you have a problem. They put you in oxygen, like whatever it is on the surface. Yeah. But you breathe that, let's say out 100 feet, you have a seizure and drown. And we don't have any science to back up why we don't know why we don't we just know it happens huh because we bent a bunch

of navy divers to find this out um maybe that's why all the aliens are down below the sea so we all we know is that it happens but we don't know why it happens um and so yeah so as humans when we breathe we we can breathe a spectrum we call the partial pressure of oxygen and the oxygen that we breathe on the surface is 0.21 is the partial pressure of oxygen, so 21%. But as humans, a regular, like a normal person can breathe anywhere between 0.16 and 1.6. So that is the range. The only way you can get more than one is to go deep because the air is compressed and then you can see more than that. But if you breathe 100% oxygen, it's 1.0 is the partial pressure of oxygen. So this is way too technical, I think, for this.

But the point is, there's a lot to learn as you move up to technical diving, cave diving, wreck diving, all these different things. And then there's the whole commercial diving. That's a whole different animal. Like those guys are gnarled. Like when you get the guys that go down to, you know, get the golf balls from the bottom of a lake that people get that kind of stuff? Those are recreational. I'm talking about the people that work are like oil rigs and they're like down there doing welding at 300 feet like that. Those guys are gnarly.

Oh, okay. I totally misunderstood that. So that's a separate training to be able to do any of that. That is completely separate wing of diving. That's you can make a career out of that. Very dangerous profession. I don't envy them. We get that question all the time.

Like, you know, would you want to do hard had, you know, commercial diving? I'm not interested at all. Like, because in order for you to do dives like that, you have to get fully saturated. It's called getting fully saturated. So those guys spend weeks at death. Like, they,

they sleep under pressure, like if they were a 300 feet, they're in a pressure chamber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they work and sleep whatever for weeks at a time. So at some point the human body gets fully saturated of nitrogen. You cannot take any more. And so you can stay at death. So those guys, the commercial divers, are gone for a month. Like it's... Whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he takes a week... They got to get paid pretty good, right? Yeah, yeah. They make good money. But it's still, it's super dangerous. I mean, a lot of people have died. I'll bet. Yeah.

That's the thing. Like, your body, you're talking about, oh, you're five, six minutes at 130 feet and you've got to watch it. And then, you know, you're like, all right, I'm going to put myself through this kind of thing for a month and just keep my environment the same at all times. There's got to be some sort of price to pay at the end of that. Yeah, yeah, it's tough. But, yeah, people are doing that. I mean, it's, it's one of those things that I've never been super interested to do. So if you're like a highly trained dive specialist with the native.

SEALs where, you know, they're all on the swimming side already, but then you're like a dive specialist there. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're automatically qualified to go do like a commercial dive or something like that. No. Total separate training. No, I don't know. That's a complete different animal.

The same with cave diving, like you put a Navy SEAL in a cave, they'll die too. I mean, it's that they are not, they don't train for that. It's a completely different wing of training. Like Navy SEALs dive rebreaters, which is what I dive in caves. But the rebreaters they dive are oxygen-only rebreaters. and they only go super shallow, like 20, 30 feet max type of thing. I think that, again, I'm not a Navy SEAL or I've ever trained, you know, like that, but they can do dips to go a little bit deeper because they are better than the average human.

They can hold, you know, levels, let's just say, that are better than an average human. And this is the kind of conversation I have with students sometimes. All these tables are theoretical based on the average human. What is that? What's the average human? How tall is the average human? Do they smoke? do they are they vegetarian like there's it's impossible to say that you're an average person like

an average person goes up and down um so because of that I think seals can do certain things that are beyond average but they don't have the know how to do something like a cave die for example I'm sure there's Navy SEALs that are cave divers but that's not what they learn because you're not fighting wars in underwater caves yeah that's just not a thing yeah I know I know what you mean what about like if there's something i'm just thinking on this commercial end i i hadn't really thought about that before but if you have something like the bp oil spill right which just goes from miles and miles and spreads out all over the place completely i mean it's oil you can't really like swim through it i would imagine though they had to send down commercial divers eventually

to fix it yeah yeah probably so they're like going they're basically going through like oil infested water. Yeah, but I think the oil is probably just floating on the surface, right? I don't know. Is it, what's the, because it spreads so much. I'm pretty sure, obviously, like, oil does float, but it's so thick that there's got to be like some sedimentation going down. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of things about water that I don't know. Interesting. Like, how come when a lightning hits the water, the fish don't die? Isn't lightning like... Dude, I think about that all the time. Right. Yeah. What's up with that? I don't know. I guess They're just like, maybe they're born with like a little lightning pressure in their veins.

I have no idea. This is when I say, leave a comment below and answer because I don't know. Yeah, let's chat GPT that one. Why don't fish die with lightning strikes? Right. Are we getting anything on that, Joe, on the BP? That's kind of like a really exact question with the oil. Yeah, I mean, I assume they used a combination of rovers, you know, like vehicles, whatever submersibles and commercial divers.

Hopefully not by the fucking Titanic guys. exactly all right so here's what google a i's telling us no the bp oil spill did not just sit on the surface a significant portion of the oil sank to the ocean floor formed underwater plumes and was dispersed throughout the water column yikes with some while some oil was visible on the surface a large amount remains submerged clinging to sinking particles like marine snow and impacting deep sea ecosystem that's what i would think like all the seaweed's catching it and then it you know binds to it and whatever that's fucking nice man and then the ducks and you have you have to wash them with a don't soap you know like the commercials yeah exactly yeah that's that would not be a job

for me for sure that's that's that's a whole different beast yeah but when you were back to when you were doing the training before going to iceland you said you're diving in quarries and stuff yeah around atlanta and you know in the ocean when i had a chance and all that yeah what was the deepest you went during that time i mean i stay within the recreational limit so like 120 130 So you are pushing the limit, but not obviously not going past. Yeah. Staying recreational. Right. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. 2019, late in 2019 is where I became, when I started my rebreather training. So with rebreathers, that's when you get into technical diving. We're going to be doing decompression. You can be doing deeper dives, although like martial arts, with rebreathers, you start shallow and then later on you keep on building and getting, you know, more experience and more trained with it. So like my first level, when I learn how to dive a rebreather and,

got certified on it, I could only go again to 132. And I will talk about what our rebreather is in a second. But then after, I think you have to do something like 50 dives or put in 50 hours, I don't remember, then you can take the training to go deeper. So the next level after that is 200 feet. So I got certified on that. And then after I don't remember how many hours are dives, then I was able to qualify to do the training and learn and get certified up to 330 feet, which is the deepest certification

that technical diving offers. When you're doing that in the actual training, not after you're obviously qualified. Every dive you do, are you hand in hand like with an instructor who's going with you every single foot? They're never behind you. It's called direct supervision. They're right next to you the whole time. And I've had great instructors and mentors throughout the years that I've learned from. So it's, I've been really, really fortunate in that in that regard.

Now, is there any way like to? Based on, you know, the equipment you're wearing, is there any way ever to talk on a radio down there? There is. We typically stay away from that. If you dive a full face mask or a hard hat, you do have comms, communications. And with a rebreather, you can kind of talk underwater because the thing in our mouth, called the DSV, is like an air chamber. And you can actually talk to each other and kind of understand. use wet notes. We write to each other, but most of the...

Oh, wet notes. Yeah, yeah. Most of the communication that we do is with hand signals. And there's a lot that we can communicate with hand signals. So you can write, how does that work writing? Just use write. I mean, it's with a pencil. It's pretty straightforward. And it works? Like, 100%? Oh, yeah, 100%. We just wet notes all the time. What? Yeah. That, like, doesn't... I mean, I've never tried to do anything. Like, I wish that doesn't... That doesn't compute to me. So you're using a pencil, obviously, and then... And, like, you can get enough pressure and not break the paper or anything as well. Oh, no, it's a special paper that you can write on the water and it can get wet and it's, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, I use all the time.

We use it all the time. It's very, very common. How long, like, what's the analog signaling there? Like, how long would it take to write one sentence of like 10 words? I mean, the same it takes on the surface. Really? There's no difference. Yeah. So you get that used to it to where you could write like that? Yeah, it's like writing on a pad. Yeah. Now, what about when, when you first go into the training because again you're at this time you're prepping for Iceland where the water's going to be cold but it's going to be beautiful and clear and everything right but now you're diving in some quarries sometimes around atlanta it's fucking black yeah like how do you dive in something does it does it feel like you're just in like a deep dark sleep black hole like when you're

diving in water that you can't even see in front of your face not always i mean it obviously it all depends on the on the water and the visibility where you are and in a quarry is simple because the quarry visibility is stars you know so so visibility not great and then if you get close to the bottom depending on how good you are with finning with kicking you can stir it up and then it goes to shit like it just goes really really bad visibility at some point um but if you stay off the bottom you can you can see i don't know like 10 20 feet in front of you it's not it's not terrible yeah god i jump in the bay in ocean city new jersey i can't i put my hand here i don't know how people dive in fucking see it i know i don't know how people can dive in in places like that like in georgia

there's lakes but it's like that is i mean you have one foot of visibility what's the point you're just going on the water for the sake of going on the water that's what i'm saying like is that there's nothing you enjoy no right no do it for fun yeah yeah but earlier i mentioned rebreathers so rebreathers are a very very special piece of equipment that i love i absolutely love diving rebreathers uh i i wish more people do with rebreaters but with a rebreather basically what you do is you can breathe your same breath over and over and over and over again. So earlier I mentioned that when you bring a tank, you typically have 30 to 40 minutes and as you get better with breathing and with your trim underwater, like the level of effort that

it takes you to dive is directly related to your air consumption. So as you get better at swimming and moving through the water, you can extend that into an hour, an hour plus. But with rebreaters, can do six hour dives, eight hour dives, 12 hour dives, like depending on the unit, depending on what you're trying to do, because you recycle the breath over and over and over again, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. How long has that science been out? It's older than scuba. That's how submarines work. You're basically, you have a little submarine on your back. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Rebreathers were invented before scuba, before regular scuba. And what is the science that that is essentially able to recycle it so that when you breathe out, it turns back into...

So we have this chemical, colsofnolime, that basically binds to the carbon dioxide that you exhale. So when you breathe in, you're breathing in 100% of a breath. Okay. When you breathe out, 95% of that breath is the same breath that you took in. Right. 5% of that was oxygen that your body used and converging. to carbon dioxide, right? And then that is bound by this chemical,

and he lets the other 95% go through. He just lets the other 95% go through. And on the rebreater, we have a small oxygen tank. It's pure oxygen. They just replaces that 5% that your body used. So you rebreath 95% of it. The little tank that we have on the rebeater injects the 5. And then you breathe out again, 95, it injects the five.

So with this little tank, it's just giving you five, five, five per year, reusing 95% of the same breath over and over and over and over and over again. So you can go for hours and hours and hours. My longest dive is for hour and 10 minutes. And theoretically, I could go for much longer than that. Why don't people always use that? Because it's more complicated, it's more expensive. Yeah, I was going to say the money, right?

It's more expensive. Obviously, it's a special piece of equipment and you have to get certified. The training for it takes longer and everything is more expensive. But once you have it, it's not expensive to dive it, and there's a level of safety, in my opinion, because we bring open circuit gear

in case the re-reader fails. So if my re-reader stops working completely, I go into what I was doing before, which is a regular tank or two tanks or whatever it is that I was doing. and that will be my you know breaking case of emergency you know it's open circuit diving wow yeah did you ever have any like fears growing up because you're you're talking about doing a job here that is there's a lot of things you can run into we're going to get to it yeah yeah i mean i think

a lot of the things that i do in diving are things that i either never thought i was going to do or i flat out said i was i was never going to do and now i do them and that's because the nature of diving is that everything is by progression. You get so used to doing the thing. It's like it pushes you out of your comfort zone. And again, there's no progress in the comfort zone. I mean, you can continue to do all those dives at 20 feet and looking at pretty fish forever and be okay and just be that that diver. There's nothing wrong with that. But for me, I feel like with anything that I love doing, I feel like I need to overdo it. And the way to make progress is you push yourself out of the comfort zone a little bit. And then once that becomes comfortable, you push yourself. You push yourself.

off a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. So everything has been building over time. It was never just out of the blue. I'm going to be a k-tiver. My wife says it all the time. You always say you were never going to do it. I'm like, I know, I know. Here we are. Little by little it just happened. Now you're literally like, you know, a huge YouTube channel even talking about. You do everything with it. But like, where does that come from that design, that inner will to push the limits and boundaries of things that you seem to have on everything you do? Man, I don't know. I feel like growing up, I was always very competitive. I still am very competitive.

Do you have siblings? I do. I have one younger brother. He's three years younger than me. But yeah, I think part of it is being super competitive. And then there's another side of it, which is I want to be competent and I want to be an asset to my team. Diving is a team sport.

Even though that team may be two of us, like me and Woody, my co-host on Dive Talk, I want to be an asset to him. I know that in a lot of ways his life could be depending on me and my skills and what I can do. And he feels the same way. And every time I dive with my team, I want to feel the same about everybody. Like, I got you, you got me. Like we trust on each other. So I think that drives me to get better and better and better.

It's like leadership in a way. Yeah. I mean, I think some of it is leadership and some of it is, I know that not every diver is like that. But some of it is, I just want to be an asset to my team. That to me is important. How did you and Woody meet? Like how long ago? He was my instructor at some point.

So I became a diver in 2018. I think in 2019. So in diving, there's these levels. So you become an open water diver. Then there's an advanced open water diver. So when you're an open water, all you want to do is be an advanced diver. And then once you're an advanced diver, there's a next level, which is called master diver. Master diver is the highest you can go as a recreational diver before you become a professional,

like an instructor, for example. So in order for me to become a master diver, I had to become a master diver, I had to become a rescue diver, like do CPR and be able to pull unconscious people from the bottom of the ocean and stuff like that. And when I signed up for my rescue class, Woody was my instructor. He had been an instructor for like, I don't know, 10 years or something like that at that point. And we just connected. You know, he likes doing all this stuff that I enjoy. He believes in overdoing things, you know, so he was a rebreather diver. I don't know if when we met, he was already doing cave diving. I think that came later um but he he just wanted to progress just like me yeah and uh we just clicked

and so he talked me into becoming a pro going pro so becoming an instructor first you become a dive guide like a dive master like help taking divers on dives but you're not teaching them anything you're just responsible for their safety right so i did that and then i became an assistant instructor and then ultimately an instructor but um your progression's insane man yeah but this what this was overtime, right? I know, but still, we're not talking about like 20 years here or something. You know what I mean? Yeah, and I think a lot of people are critical, I think, of dive talk and me especially because they say, like, you just went through it super fast. But what they don't understand is that I was diving every weekend. Like, even the numbers, like the minimum number,

just to give you an example, to become an instructor, is 100 dives. So you have to do 100 dives and do some training in order to qualify to become an instructor. I, I had like 300 dives when I became an instructor. So I had, in my opinion, enough experience to teach somebody how to do the basic diving, which is open water diving. That doesn't require a whole lot of skills. You just need to know how to teach people. And I was already an instructor.

I work in IT. So I was already teaching people how to use computer systems and stuff. So teaching for me was natural. This was just something that I'm passionate about, just like computer stuff. And it was easy for me to become an instructor. It was the easy progression for me. So Woody talked me into that. I chose him as my mentor.

We started teaching classes together. It was just for fun. And I was already doing a podcast for my computer stuff. And I told him, I said, dude, I have all these equipment. We're doing all this driving to Florida or whatever, just talking about diving. Why don't we just record? It's fucking talk. Yeah.

Let's just talk about diving. And we see people want to listen about it. You know, listen to us talk about diving. And little by little, it just grew. You know what, though? It's also like you're in the. arena because you're talking about it, niched in the space as well. And so people nitpick people from the space who aren't online are going to nitpick every part of the story. It's like,

you know what you do. You know how much you fucking dive. You know how long you took, not even like how long you took, but how much work went into getting to each level. So yeah, I think on the internet, people have a lot to say. They get upset when people are doing the things and maybe they want to be doing too. Right. And I think I think it's fucking awesome that I think what progressed like this. What happened to us was when dive talk became a thing and started growing, I feel like a lot of channels and people that are out there that are divers are adverse to showing any mistakes they made or places where they failed, where we don't care. The way we see dive talk is this is like if we're at a bar, having a beer or something, we're talking to each other. Like we don't edit anything. Like we just hit record and post it out there.

Whatever the conversation was like, we don't have a script. this is this is what it looks like kind of like this we don't have a script we're just talking and people really enjoy the fact that we're willing to admit when we messed up you know i i have videos on our channel where i describe a situation where i was really close to probably dying like it was it was it was bad like what was one of them well like one i was in a cave in missouri called roaring river and i i was breathing the wrong gas um were you alone or were you it wasn't it wasn't dangerous, but it was stupid. And what I mean by that is breathing air is safe to breathe down to 218 feet. That's what we call an MOD or maximum operating depth. The maximum operating depth

of air is 218 feet while I was breathing at 208, which is pretty close to 218. Now the challenge is not that it was unsafe to breathe is that you're heavily nark, which I was. And I talk about on the show. And I know that looks bad because I'm supposed to be this professional YouTuber or whatever diver. But I messed up. I made a mistake. And I, you know, if you want to ridicule me and say, like, I would have never done. Okay, you're a better dive than me. That's okay. I'm okay saying that. But I want people to learn from what happened to me. And so I talk about it in detail. I was so narked. So nitrogen narcosis, the, when you have too much nitrogen in your blood because you're so deep that is compressed to four times the amount,

five times the amount with every breath you take, it starts having an effect on you. That effect is called nitrogen narcosis. And people talk about it as this is like if you're drunk. And it's not that it's like if you're drunk because it goes away when you go shallow. It goes away immediately. But the effect that it has on you is that if everything is going great, then it has no effect on you. It's no problem. But if things go bad, the ability for you to respond to the problem and respond properly, like out of all the options that I have, this is the best one to deal with this issue, kind of go out the window. Because you can't go out the window. You can't think straight, right? So it has different effects on different people. And I remember, like, I think I talked about

on the episode, like having this, like, out-of-body experience. Like, I wonder if my body can see how good my trim it. Like, I'm having this conversation in my head, not realizing that I'm just narked out of my mind. Like I, and then I looked at my computer and it says, 20A. And I'm like, whoa, like, oh, I'm in the wrong gas. Let me start going up. And I started to us.

Were you alone or were you? I was alone. At that point, yeah, I had a buddy, but at Roaring River, around 150 feet, 160 feet, something like that, there's like this crevice that is super tight to go through and is a cave. and when I went through this crevice I was first and my buddy his name is Mike he was behind me he didn't see that the visibility

is not great at Roaring River it's like 10 to 20 feet visibility and when he got to the crevice when he got to the crevice he didn't see it disturbed so in his head he was like well there's no way Gus made it through here because he would have silted out

he would have silted out this whole crevice when he went through it so he decided that well he must have gone somewhere else and me go back up because he's probably up there where in fact I made it through the crevice I just didn't disturb the silt I made it through it and I got all the way down

to 208 feet and then I turn around and I'm alone and I'm breathing the wrong gas and I'm narked out of my mind okay what do I have to do I need to go up nitrogen narcosis goes away when you go shallow so I just started going up little by little by little and when I got to I don't know 100 feet or whatever the symptoms were gone but that was sketchy

Do you – so when – I'm trying to think where to start here because the cave diving thing is a whole different animal. Well, let's go back for a minute because we can come back to this story too. That's – I'm getting fucking secondhand goosebumps in the wrong ways hearing that. But, you know, you go through like a year or so, a diving, year and a half a diving, then you make the decision like, okay, now I want to train for cave diving as well. Yeah. You know, how do you even train for that? Do they have a lot of these caves mapped out ahead of time? I'll tell you.

What does it look like? So I always said I was never going to be a cave diver. And the reason for that is the misconception that cave diving is always super tight, people squeezing through it, fighting their way through stuff. That is not like cave diving. Some is. There's some caves that are like that. I heard about that tight cave rescue, man.

Yeah. But the majority of caves are big. Like you can drive a bus through them. They're big, big, big caves. So I always said, I'm not attracted to overhead environments. Like anything that has a roof over my head, like I'm not attracted to it. And when I started diving rebreaters in 2019, a lot of rebreather divers are cave divers. They go into cave diving.

So a lot of my buddies were diving caves and they're like, dude, you should join us. You should do, you know, you should become a cave diver. And I'm like, I'm not interested. And then they said kind of the magic works, which is, well, you don't start as a cave diver. you start as a cavern diver. So there's big caverns that you can dive. But to become a cavern diver, you learn all the skills of cave diving

without going into caves. So I'm like, okay, that sounds cool. I will love to, I love learning. So that sounds cool. Like, I would love to learn all those cave diving techniques without going into a cave. That sounds awesome.

So I took the class. I got certified as a cavern diver. You have to have, I think, 25 hours or 25 dives, rebreather dives, to qualify even for the training. So then I became a cavern diver, and I started diving caverns. And I'm like, this is pretty awesome.

And I fell in love with the techniques. Like to me, my attraction to cave diving is not the caves. Some caves are very attractive. Like there's some caves in Avaco that are made of crystal. It is like the fortress of solitude from Superman. You go in there and it's just white walls with crystal is unbelievable in the Bahamas. So some caves are attractive, but what attracts me to cave diving is the process, the preparing your gear, the briefing and looking at a map, planning your route.

Like that process is what I love about cave diving. And the fact that you get to dive with other people that are more competent than you. Like it's, that's what I like about cave diving. So anyway, I do my cavern diving. I do a bunch of that. And then they were like, well, what don't you do intro to cave? So the next level to become a cave diver is called intro to cave. And intro to cave, you go into caves, but you don't navigate away from the main guy. guideline. So in caves, we have guidelines. And in Florida, specifically, we call it the gold line. The line looks like this. I brought you a prop. So this is cave line. This is orange. But in caves is gold. And in Florida caves is gold. And you can see how strong it is. So this is the main line of a cave. And so for

intro to cave, you stay on the main line. You don't do any navigational decisions. You don't go in any side tunnel, side quests, or anything like that, we basically dive the guideline. You go into a cave for a few hundred feet, you come out of the cave, you don't go anywhere. And you do that a bunch of times, and then you can do your full cave training. And full cave training is when you can start going out and this side passages and other stuff. Do they even have that mapped out, though? Yeah. So they know any cave you're going into, they know ahead of time, oh, there's a two foot by three.

Not any cave. but the caves in Florida where you do dive training they're all mapped out in great detail yeah yeah so you before you even go in the dive like the instructor pulls out the map and says we're going to go in here we're going to go here we're going to go here like you plot the whole thing because based on where you're going you have to bring

as many spools with you like there's a lot to it but the guideline is what we used to not get lost in caves we follow the guidelines we have cave diving rules and we follow the guideline and the guideline has these objects called arrows. So these arrows tell us where the exit is. This is a cave diving arrow.

This reminds me a little bit of like it's different but with like boating where they got the green and the red. Correct. Right. So on the lines, and I'm not going to tie it properly, I'm just going to do a quick tie up.

But this is what the line will look like in a cave and that tells me that the exit is that way. Right. Right. So even if you're completely blind because the cave is dark, you know, your lights broke and we bring at least three lights is another thing that you learn in cave diving. But let's say all your three lights work and your body's three lights broke

and your body's three lights broke, you still can hold the line, feel the arrow with your hand and be like, okay, the exit is that way. It's pretty straightforward. And then if the cave has flow, so there's flow, like in Florida, a lot of caves have flow. It's like a river under the ground. Then you just go with the flow. The flow is typically going out. It's called spring so we dive in against the flow and then with the flow on the way out where's the typical place you're diving in florida like what's like what towns are close to gainsville will be the closest town gainsville florida so that area of florida is called cave country so most divers caves by gainsville yeah just we'll see some uh just look up devil's cave system

is the most popular cave perhaps in in florida and that's where i did my first so it's inland cave diving yeah it's yeah it's called the devil's cave system yeah so it looks like that wow yeah it's crystal clear water as well but you can see the map so that one right there still clear yeah so joe that's that's the map the partial map of genie springs is the the place where you can go in and dive it uh no that's a different cave so that is yeah the other one wasn't coming up yeah this is is devil's den is like an example kind of map right here yeah the just an example of the of the clarity of the water but yeah these caves are map but like the devil's cave system is the most popular cave in florida i would think uh there's a lot of people that dive that cave and they still haven't found

the end so they've mapped like i think that's not reassuring i think like 18000 feet of caves and it they still just keeps going and it keeps going yeah so this is what the cave map looks like Holy shit. This is just a partial, you know, view of the map. The map, if we lay it on this table, it will cover the whole table. I mean, it's gigantic. Now, how long? I'm just looking right here on the map, right?

So it's really wide right here. Yeah. How wide is it when it gets thin like this? Are we still talking, you know, 10 yards across, 10 feet across? Yeah. So I know that people can't hear you because they're on the microphone, but you're asking depending. Joe had to turn it. Joe was on it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah. The big ones that you were pointing at are really, really big. Like, I would say you can drive a school bus through those. But I've been in little, little ones. Like, if you see some of those, they look like a single line, like really tiny ones. That is like the width of a person.

So, like, you can swim through it, but not scraping through it. You're not scraping through it. You're swimming through it. It's just you can swim side by side with somebody. There's not enough room. Yeah, but if you swim through it and then you get to one spot that hasn't been mapped before and it gets a little too tight, you get stuck and be dead. No, this whole place is mapped out.

I don't think you can find a place that it hasn't been mapped out that you can keep going in. And if you do, you should definitely lay your line and map it. But then, so the progression after cave diving, so after doing that for a couple years, I think I've done at that point, like 120 cave dives or something. And how long would those ones be? You said the other ones would be maybe a half hour.

Yeah, most of my cave dives are two hours plus. Yeah. So after I did that, I got invited on my first expedition. The expeditions is when you go to caves that have not been mapped that no human has ever been. So the first one I went was Throaring River, which is where I had that issue. And I wasn't an explorer on that. I was a safety diver on that team. And then I was invited to do cave exploration in Mexico where I was actually exploring. The first one, I was looking for leads. So somebody else was laying into virgin cave again no human has ever been in there before and the second person in the team is looking for leads meaning looking for tunnels and places you can go which is way harder than it looks you find any fucking blow down there and i don't think so but there's some interesting things sometimes you're deep inside a cave and you find a mattress like how is how is there a mattress in here something something's happening down there bro something's going on yeah um or shoes or whatever it's just weird yeah but uh yeah but i've been in cave

that nobody has ever been. I think I've been at this point in three or four expeditions. You're not afraid of that at all when you go to... No. No. So you're about to go underwater into a cave that's never been mapped before. It's awesome.

It's awesome. Can't get enough of it. I wish I was doing that right now. Like, it's the best. But again, you work your way to that. You work your way to... This holiday season, your support can help Cam H transform mental health care.

From now until December 31st, every donation will be tripled for three times the impact. That means your generous gift goes even further to help create a future where Canadians can get the help they need, when they need it, no matter who or where they are. Together, we can forge a better path for mental health. Make three times the impact with a donation today at camh.ca slash holiday. You know, what is it that we know? Well, what we know is that this cave has an entrance here, and, you know, the type of entrance dictates what kind of gear you can wear and all that stuff. So, like, if the entrance is too tight, then we wear side-mount stuff, which is nothing in our back, nothing in our chest, so we can squeeze through stuff. If the entrance is big, you can wear stuff in your back.

Like, it depends, right? But, yeah, I mean, I've been to, I don't know how many caves now that people have never been to. I think I've laid at this point like 4,000 feet of line in virgin caves Yeah so all right So how long is this like two and a half feet? Something like that two feet Yeah now this is this is the thickness

Yeah this is like two feet maybe This is the thickness of main explore cave line When we do cave exploration It's a thinner line Thinner than this But it still holds like a thousand pounds Like it's super strong But like half the size of this

Half the diameter How do you lay it? Are you like stable going in it? Yeah, you have a spool and you just run like with a spool and you're tying it in different places. I mean, out of the one week of training to become a cave diarrhea, like three or four days of those is linework. Like you learn how to run line. So they're teaching everyone how to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to do it.

That's so cool, man. Yeah. I mean, it's cool. I don't ever want to fucking do it, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah. Talk about it. What was the one in Mexico, the first one in Mexico you did? The first one in Mexico was at a cenote in Casumel.

that basically had been explored, I think, in the 70s or 80s or something like that. And they found some Mayan ruins or something in there. So they shut it down. Like, nobody can dive. And then the government of Casumel wanted to continue that exploration. So they invited a team to come. And I was lucky to be invited to be part of that team. So, yeah, we went to this sonota called Chunha in Casumel.

and we laid a bunch of line in there. So the Mayans were diving? No, this had to be above ground. Like Mayan pottery, stuff like that. Like, because Senotes are basically like a sinkhole. So this used to be, oh, and then it just collapsed, and now there's water down there. Okay.

And they found some Mayan pottery. Now, they took that out and it's at a museum somewhere or whatever. That pottery wasn't there when we went. But the Sanote exploration had stopped decades ago, and they invited us to go back. Yeah. So I think until this point, Chun Ha is the only cave or Sonata that has my name on it, that like there's an area of the cave that I found that they name, they put my name on that

because I found it. And it's not my proudest moment because it's called Gus's Labyrinth. There's literally line everywhere. He went in all directions. So it's so confusing. I found so many rooms and leads that when you look at her on the map, it looks like a labyrinth. So they name it Gus's Labrant. That's kind of cool, though.

Yeah, which is pretty interesting. No one's ever done it. I mean. Whoa. Yeah, we're looking at it right now. That's near, that's Cozumel, you said? Casamel is the island in Mexico. There's so many sonatas out there. Got it. Okay. How long ago was that? So the first time I went there was, I think, 2022, 2023, something like that. I've been there twice after that. I think my favorite exploration

was another place in Mexico in Cozumel called El Diablo The Devil? Yeah, the Devil's Cave and that one is still to this day the sketchiest cave I've ever been. I mean, the whole cave's trying to kill you. It's like there's nothing good about that cave.

Why? I mean, the entrance is complete zero visibility for like the first 100 feet. You are in much, mud and rock, chest and back. So you're literally like dragging yourself through mud in zero visibility. And then at some point you pop into the cave and every rock in the cave is like jagged. It's like it's like blades.

So every time you touch something, you put your hand, you get cuts. But then the water has this thing called hydrogen sulfide, which is like acid that you can smell through your mask. Underwater, you can smell it. And it's like it's terrible. Like it was used as a weapon in like World War I It's like terrible So you're swimming in this You come out of the water after your dive

And anything that was metal that you have is black So you went in and it was like silver color And you come out and it's black Tanks that we leave in this water bubble Like the water is eating the aluminum In the tank it's like toxic water Sea water It's not deep

It's I would say I don't know 40 feet or something It's not deep the cave is not deep but it's just like the whole cave is it's like dangerous it's really dangerous and I love it like it's my favorite cave it's just my favorite how many times have you done it uh I think I've done like 10 dives at L Diablo yeah for two to four hours apiece yeah well my longest one was four hours and 10 minutes it was there so you have zero visibility for up to a hundred feet like the first hundred feet of the cave yeah first five minutes what's going through your mind when you're going into something for the first time,

maybe not the third time you did it because you knew what you'd expect, but you're going into something and you cannot see. And it's est, did you know it was going to be like 100 feet or? I mean, the people that discover it, they told me about it. And you can't see anything anywhere you may touch

could be basically like stab you like a knife. Like is your heart rate jacked while you? No, I love it. I love every second of it. I don't know. Where are you from? I tell you it's the best. Where'd you grow up?

I literally cannot wait to go back. Where'd you grow up? Like, where are you from? I feel like you were getting into shit when you were like 70. No, no, no, no. It's just so good. I love it. Yeah.

It's just part of what makes it special is all those dangers. And the fact that you have trained so much to get to a point where you can do it safely. Yeah. Yeah. What does your wife think all of this? She hates it. I was going to say. She hates all of it.

But she's not even a diver. She doesn't die at all. Oh, that's, oh, I see. This is your golf. Yeah, but she knows that she's not going to talk me out of it. I mean, I just love it. It's just what I do. And she knows that if something happened, I just died doing what I love. I just love it. I mean, I love everything about it.

Yeah, I mean, that's very clear. It's just like, you know, people like activities that you don't have to think about 7,000 things before you go in there or, you know, risk death. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, I feel. like we're talking about the absolutely most dangerous type of diving that you can do, which is cave exploration and super tight caves filled with acid water. Like, yeah, he doesn't get more dangerous than that. And I don't want people watching this to think, like, well, if I get into diving, that's what I'm going to do.

Like, no, no, like you don't have to do anything like that. And even with cave diving in big caves, I tell people, you don't have to cave dive. That's just, I just happened to land on that and love it. But just like I love it, there's a chance that I wouldn't have. loved it, you know. But yeah, cave diving is a whole animal. And you were talking about the cave rescue, the Thai cave rescue. That was gnarly. So actually, that's 2018, right, when they did that? So that's the year you're learning how to dive. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was after that because I feel like when the rescue happened, I was already a cave diver. I think like I was

already certified. So for people that don't remember this story, it was in 2018, never It was an international story. Oh, yeah. It was a soccer team. I think they were like between ages 11 and 16, all these kids. Their assistant coach decided to celebrate. I don't remember what they were celebrating, but they were celebrating something after practice and decided to go into a fucking cave.

I don't know why one of the kids or a few of them maybe didn't go. So that's how they knew that the team went to the cave and they didn't return from the cave. So people went and found their shit outside the cave and then realized they were. stuck in it. And I forget, but this lasted a while. They were in there a while and there was incoming monsoon season, meaning that there was a water table rising in different parts of the cave and they got stuck. Yeah, so this cave, I'm not an expert in this cave or anything. I've never been, but I believe this cave floods, like a few months of the year. Whenever it's the rainy season, the cave floods. And then when the rainy season goes away, it goes empty again. So this

kids went in and there was some freak rain, like once in a hundred year type of rain that flooded the cave once they were deep inside the cave. And of course, they thought they were all dead. And they called cave divers to go and find them. Is this in that kind of situation, are they always going to call like military dudes or military dudes don't train for cave diving? And I think that's the problem.

I think first they try with the Thai Navy SEALs, which by the way, I believe, I believe Thai Navy SEALs go through the U.S. Navy SEALs go through the US Navy. seal training in Coronado. Like they come here and go through the, go through the training in Coronado. They don't do the training in Thailand. But anyway, they're badasses. Like, you know, the Thai Navy SEALs are legit dudes. They call them, but they are like, we're not cave divers. And I think they brave it. They try to go in and they couldn't figure out because cave diving is not for super humans. It's just people that learn the techniques that are needed to be safe in a cave.

And these are regular average people. Like I've met a couple of the people that rescue those kids in Thailand. And they're just like normal dudes, you know, they're not super humans. They weren't military or anything. They're not like Navy SEAL guys or whatever. No, like I, I met the guy's name. So I met Richard Harris, uh, who was the doctor who sedated the kids. He's an Australian. Uh, oh yeah, that's right because they had to, they couldn't panic down there. That's a big thing. You can't panic. Yeah. No, that that and you would have absolutely panicked immediately if, if they didn't sedate those kids. So that was definitely the right call. The only way to get them out. So Richard Harris, I met him in person, and he is an amazing diver. He's doing

gnarly to 800 feet dive. Like, he's breathing like hydrogen or something. Like, it's, he's doing stuff that I'll never do. Like, that guy is a whole next level, Richard Harris. And then Rick Stanton, I met him in person. I spent a whole week with him earlier this year, which was super interesting. And he not only showed us what the rescue was like, but he allowed us to do it. So he brought, he brought the same stuff that they put on the kids. And then he told us how to do it. So I actually, how did they do it? Can you break it down?

Yeah. So I actually took Woody, my co-host on Dive Talk, and I bound him, hands behind the back and Lex and everything, put all the stuff, the face mask and everything. And then I blinded myself because they couldn't see anything. The rescuers couldn't see anything. And then I did this mock rescue of him. In a real cave? No, it wasn't a real cave. We did it in a pool. But the pool, there was some navigation in the pool. So I had to like swim around and the pool had like a grotto. So like we surfaced in the grotto. It was, it was super interesting. We recorded this whole thing on Dive Talk. And then we let other people do it. And some people made it. Some people didn't make it. We were lucky that me and Woody both made it. So spoiler alert, meaning like I was able to rescue him blind. And then I was the victim and he was able to rescue me. You didn't actually sedate each other.

No, I don't know. But we didn't move. And that's another thing. Can you be underwater and not move tied with hands behind your back and bounding your legs and just like be cool? I thought it was the most relaxing experience. It was awesome. So how did they, because I don't remember the specifics of the story like exactly what the process was. You're going through some of it right now. But let's break it all down. Yeah. So they sent a doctor down there who was also a diver. Well, so let's back out for a second. So so they. call these cave divers to come in and can you help us find the bodies? Like they thought it was going to be a buttered recovery, not a rescue. And they go in and as they start exploring the cave and going deeper, they find these workers from like a cable company or a gas company. It was like an utility company inside the cave. Nobody knew they were there. Adults. Like some workers that were like laying cable inside the cave or something. And then they go in and they find these guys and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad you found them.

I'm like, they didn't even know. They were looking for kids and they run into these adults. Oh, my God. Like, imagine you go into a cave like that looking for kids and then it's like three AT&T workers in there. Like, you don't watch the news. What is going on? And like, nobody knew they were in the cave. So then they rescue those guys without sedation.

Okay? They rescue those guys without sedation. And it was like a brawl on their, as soon as they put him on their water, they started fist fighting the rescuers. Like, they panic. I mean, wait, so they rescued, the guys were down there and, oh, they were stuck, too. They were stuck in an air chamber in an air pocket. Yeah, yeah, got it. So the guys panic.

Yeah, so he's like, okay, I'll get you out of here. So breathe this thing, put this mask on, whatever. As soon as you're on the water, you can't see anything and you're in a cave. Dude, like, they lost it. And like, they came out there, like, with bruises and bleeding. So that's how they learned that we can do this to kids. We can't do it. So when they found the kids ultimately, and they thought they were going to, again,

run into a bunch of bodies. and the kids were alive, then they started thinking about, well, how do we get them out of here? And they had to, like, get them fed for a while because this took days, right? I think they were in there for 18 days or something. So they got food down to them.

They basically dove food in or something. Yeah, they brought food. They fed them. I think they brought a couple of the Navy SEAL guys, you know, to stay with the kids. I mean, I don't know the entire process of it, the whole story of it. We got it directly from Rick Stanton,

which was the late rescuer in that whole operation and it was great to see a lot of like behind the scenes pictures and videos and stuff that was cool but anyway eventually they realized that the only way to do is sedating these kids so when you say sedating them

they're completely under meaning like they're asleep they're not like you know it's the only way so is the only way they get them asleep they put a full mask on them and everything and their body can face mask yeah their body's breathing and then they tie them they tie them hands

behind the back in case they were to wake up if they wake up yeah and then every rescuer carried like a syringe to re-inject like if they start moving like they're waking up just hammer him on the leg and put him back to sleep again it was gnarly dude it's not and they're doing one at a time yeah yeah one one kid at a time yeah and it was it was unbelievable like can we google that joe how long it took once they started the rescue yeah it was like three days i think something like that but how far like how far was the dive at to get to where they were. I think it was two hours, two and a half hours carrying a kid. So that's a, hold on a second.

Yes, you're in water. So, like, you know, you have like a, there's a buoyancy mechanism there. But you're carrying a kid diving and moving forward with equipment on. Yep. For two or two and a half hours. Like, I see you. You're in great shape. You got to be an insane shape to do that and do that.

There were two divers total doing this over three days across like 12 kids or 15 kids or something? Yeah. Yeah. It was three or four of them. I think it was John Bolantham, Rick Stanton, Richard Harris. I'm trying to remember some of the other people there. But yeah, I mean, they did a great job. I mean, the stuff they did, I wouldn't even imagine being in that position. Yeah. No, they did a great job. Those guys are heroes. And that's one of the things that I just didn't understand. Like, Elon Musk was like, Oh, I'll just build a submarine and we'll just go get him. It's like, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Like, zero clue. Like, whatever you're thinking, it's just forget about it. Like, I have nothing against Elon Musk. I'm not an Elon hater or whatever. But like, when he said that, I'm like, you have no clue what you're talking about. Let's build a sub and go through this. So stupid. It's the dumbest thing.

It's like, oh, don't worry. I'll prove it to you. I'm going to build a Tesla sub that will make it. Shut up. All right. This is actually a great image right here that we have on the screen. Joe, let's pull this up just because so people can see this. Yeah, so one kilometer into the cave.

It's one color. Yeah, so that's over half a mile inside the cave. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. It's one kilometer below the ground, but the entrance is five. Oh, five kilometers, yeah, from the entrance, one kilometer. So this is, this map is good to illustrate that they couldn't just dig a hole and get him out through the hole. And it's showing what a combination it is of both diving and then climbing over rocks on land. It's called something.

Dump diving, which is very popular in England. And that's why I think the British divers that came in to rescue these kids were. Jason Allison was the other name I was thinking of. They were better prepared to deal with this. So he's like I'm looking at the picture there. You see the big mound at the beginning of the entrance. Yeah. When he get on the way out, let's just focus on that part.

When he's on the way out with a kid who's sedated, you know, it's not a 20 year old, but you're talking 11, 14, 15 years. I mean, they weigh something. Yeah. He's carrying him up. those rocks. Well, they had other divers set up to help with that. Hell with the transport. So in every one of those air pockets that you see in the cave map, they had other teammates. So because of the narrow passage, only one diver could carry one kid. But once it opened up into an air pocket or whatever

into a sump, it's like an assembly line. Yeah. Then somebody else could help, you know, carry them. And then so would it be the same diver, though? Meaning if Rick went back there to where the boys were and he starts and he gets through that first area with the water and gets up to the assembly line. Is he walking past the guys on the assembly line and getting to the water and continuing? Yeah. Those guys carry them all the way to the exit. So it wasn't like a relay race where there was one at each guy. No, I don't think so.

Wow. Yeah. No, it was unbelievable. You got to get Rick on the podcast. Holy shit. Rick is awesome, dude. It's like one of my favorite people on Earth. And he's the first one who tells you like, I'm not a certified cave driver.

Like he learned by, you know, these guys started on. another level. Yeah, let's go there. He's not a certified cave diver and he pulled off the greatest rescue in history. I don't think Rick Stanton is a certified diver period, like open water diver at all. What the fuck was he doing? Did he sleep at a holiday and express last night? He learned by doing. He learned by doing it. He's, he's, he's, he's, he forgot about cave diving more than I know about cave diving. Like, the guy is a legend. Why was he called in to do this if he's not certified? Because he's one of the best in the world. One of the best. What? Some divers, rescue divers, You know, he's one of the best cave divers in the world.

Rick Stanton is a legend in cave diving. Before the Thai Cave Rescue, he was a legend. But you just said he didn't know how to do. Yeah, but most of the like the grandfather, whatever, the godfathers of cave diving were not cave. There wasn't cave diving training. These guys learned by doing. Oh, I see. Okay.

I misunderstood you. So he learned by doing, he didn't have like your resources when he was learning. He's self-taught, you're saying. Yeah, like the rules of cave diving that I learn and that I follow in every dive I go. or because of guys like him are because of people like that. The guy who wrote the rules of cave diving, Shaq Exley, he was,

he was, you know, an American, like math teacher that became an absolute legend in cave diving. And he wrote the rules. Sheck almost died. I don't know how many times. And he ended up diving in like the deepest sonata in Mexico or something at 800 feet or something.

He died. But yeah, those rules were written in blood. I mean, they were people that died because they didn't. follow those rules. They weren't even rules at that point, but we learned from their deaths and now we have rules that we follow.

Is that the most amazing rescue you ever heard of? I mean, there's a bunch. Yeah, check actually, he's awesome. He died in Mexico. How did he die? He was on a super deep cave dive. Super deep.

Yeah, but he died at like 800 feet deep or something like that. Yeah, it would be like saying, like, oh, he, he was a, he was a, um, a race car driver and he died, you know, on, on a, on a car accident or whatever. Yeah, but it would be the equivalent of like setting the land speed record. Like he was doing a super gnarly dive. How old was he? Can we go back?

I don't know. He was in his 40s, maybe 50, something like that. All right. Let's say his Wikipedia. So he's 45. 49. 94. Yeah, 49 to 94.

Joe, down to his death. He was 45 when he died. All right. So, Exley died age 45 on April 6th, 1994, while attempting to descend to a depth of over 1,000 feet in a freshwater sonote or sinkhole called Zecatone in the state of Tamolipas, Mexico. He made the dive as part of a dual dive with Jim Bowden, but Bowden aborted his descent early when his gas supply ran low. So actually was alone.

No, these guys were doing insane stuff. Like, if you look at the dive profile of this dive, it's like it makes no sense. for the knowledge that we have now because of people I check. Right. Like these guys were breathing air past 300 feet. Like I said, the maximum operating depth of air is 218. These guys were breathing air to like 400 feet or something. It was like they were doing stuff that was crazy.

I think Czech's physiology was better than most people. Oh, for sure. When he came to people, not as an athlete, I just think as a diver, he was made for diving. But he's definitely in shape too. Exley's body was recovered when his support crew hauled up his unused decompression tanks. It was found that he had looped into the descent line, perhaps to sort out gas issues. His wrist-mounted dive computer read a maximum depth of 906 feet. Insane.

The cause of Exile's death could not be determined. Team members concluded the causes could include stress of HPNS exacerbated by the narcotic effects of nitrogen. At that depth, the line was also wrapped deliberately around. on Exley's tank valves, Bowden and other experts have theorized that Exley might have done this in anticipation of his own death to prevent any dangerous body recovery operations. Holy shit. Imagine knowing you're going to die and say, let me prep the people they're going to find me. Imagine that you are so conscious to know that, okay, this is it. I'm going to make it easy for people

to recover my body rather than just drifting and letting them seek for my body in thousands of feet of water or whatever. So like, I'm going to wrap myself through the line. So when they pull it up, my body will come with it. Yeah. You mentioned that you had that dangerous dive in Missouri where you narc a little bit. But again, that's also like where you're kind of, you're loopied and your your brains fucked with a little bit. So you're out of it. I was a little out of it. These guys were. Have you ever had a moment where in a dive anywhere where you're fully aware and you say to yourself, there's a chance I'm not going to make this back and you prepare yourself for death? No, I've never prepared myself for death, but I've been in situations where if it wasn't

for my dive buddy, Woody in this case, I think I would have probably died. Do you want to give me one of those? Yeah, like at El Diablo, the cave we were talking about earlier, that entrance, the zero visibility entrance is so tight and the line is not laid in the best way. So I got wrapped around line in that portion, so I couldn't see anything. I was underwater and I was tied with line somewhere in my tanks that I couldn't reach, and I was just there. Like, I was a fish caught in a net, basically. Now, obviously, we're on rebreathers, which means we can last there for hours. But if nobody would have helped me, I would have potentially eventually drowned.

But luckily, I'm diving with a buddy. And unlike what you hear from other people telling stories like Donald Serroney when he told his story where he said, oh, if I'm with my buddy and they run into issues, I'm saving myself. No, that's the complete opposite of reality. My buddy, Woody, came behind me, and he found me completely entangling line. And we trained for this during cave diving training. What was the visibility like when he found you? Zerovis.

So he just ran into me and I was there stuck on the line and I'm like, help. Did you have a, was this one of the situations where he had a radio kind of thing? No. So you just hit him or something? We're just talking on the water because with a rebreather, you can kind of. yell and make up well you can yeah so like if i tell you go like you would understand yeah yeah help you can hear it right god it's so hard for me to think about it's like okay okay okay i can i can tell and again we're in zero viz so he's feeling me and and then he feels the line and

then we start you know we spend like 10 minutes untangling me from this mess in zero viz so i would say that's probably the closest gus yeah when i like double tie my shoe like double not my shoe at the gym and then come home because I wear Everlast boxing shoes. So they're like on my ankles and everything right all the way up very tight. I'll have moments where I come home and I can't get the not undone and my brain starts claustrophobic freaking out and I got to go sit down. It's okay. Get your breath.

I got this. And it takes a few minutes and I get it. Now imagine no visibility. You're under fucking water. You're breathing in a tank. You can't say things out loud. You can't see around you. It's a cave.

And now you got line tangled that you can't see to untangle. I know. I know. I know. And so during cave diving training, you learn how to deal with that if you get tangled. So you're taught what to do to minimize the chances of entanglement. But if you get entangle, here's how you're going to handle that. And if you have to cut the line, this is how you fix the line.

So like all of this is part of cave diving training. Like all of it. And again, I'm thankful for that. I didn't just magically come up with this. so anyway Woody was good enough to figure out where the entanglement was untangle me

let's go back to the surface and talk about this so we went back to the surface and I was like okay well that was that was sketchy and let's go back yeah so we went back right away and did like a two and a half hour dive after that Maggi's untangling you

on your neck yeah no it was it was all over my tank I mean, at some point, obviously, you contemplate cutting it, but there was another team inside the cave already at that time. Oh, there was. So I would have had to repair the line for them or else they would have come out and have no line to the surface. And you can find it.

I mean, it's complete pitch black. There's no way you know where the exit is unless you have a guideline. So we had to, we would have had to fix it for them. So we would have spent the next hour fixing the line for those guys. Luckily, he was able to get me off of it without breaking the line. I mean, this line you can see. It's not hard to break. But we can cut it if we have.

have to. I mean, if I'm entangle underwater. I mean, it's sturdy. But, yeah, as you were saying, you can cut it if you have to. Yeah. Do you, like, in your training and all the time you train for this before you ever do something like this, do they go through mental exercises with you about how to handle situations? Like, I've talked with Navy SEALs before, for example, not related to diving, but just like situations where they have to do, you know, some techniques where they can reduce their anxiety, you know, whether it's a mental technique or what it might be, intel guys have to do that as well. Like, is there any training like that for, hey, you get in a situation, you have to tell yourself you're okay. Here's how you do it. Yeah, I mean, I think part of

training is you have to stop, breathe and think about what the problem is and how to solve it. So they do train you with that. My cave diving instructor, his name is Doug, Doug Eversoll. He told me that, look, out of all people, there's like 20,000. 25% of people that will never panic no matter what you do. They're just born without the panic gene. They just don't guess you. They can be, no, I don't think that's me. But they can be being shot at like Navy SEALs and they'll just like smiling like they just don't panic.

There's people that are mentally like that. They didn't train for it. They were just born that way. And then there's people that no matter what you teach them and what techniques you tell them and how to handle whatever, they will panic no matter what. When they're facing a situation like that, they're going to panic and shut down. but the vast majority of people can deal with panic and the way we deal with it is we stop what we're doing we look at the problem think of the solution for this specific problem and then

take care of it right prioritize and execute okay what do i have to do now and i think you can keep breaking that down into the simplest form which is the next move that i'm going to make needs to be forward needs to be trying to get me out of here and there's a point where there's no move to make At El Diablo when I was entangled, I tried to untangle myself, and I realize I can't do it. So the only thing I can do at that point is make it worse by pulling hard, losing the line from whatever is tied up, making it impossible for Woody to find me and help me. So I just lay there, literally underwater in the darkness, just like there's nothing to do. So why panic?

Yeah, why panic? Just breathe, normal. Like I can't move. I'm entangled. I get it. Just wait. Woody's going to come at some point. And if not, and I remember, I remember thinking about this, I'm like, if Woody can find me,

then the guys that are inside the cave, at some point, they'll run into me. And then they'll help me. So, worst case scenario, I'm just going to have to lay here for three hours until they come out. And then they'll help me. Like, that's, I remember thinking that. But luckily, again, Woody came like five minutes later, running to me, help me out of it. And we were good to go. I just started this random question.

Like, let's say you're sitting there for three hours. Yeah. You just, like, pissed through your wetsuit? Yeah, if you have to. Yeah. Is that what you do on a dive? You just... Yeah, most people pee on their wetsuits. Like, it's not a big deal. I try not to, but I have a bunch of hands. Catching the draft. Right. Well, with the water or L. Diablo, I don't think... That's just toxic water. I think I would have enhanced it if I peed on it. So... Jesus Christ. Yeah. I'm getting all day. I've been getting... I'm getting claustrophobia. Just thinking about some of this.

Yeah. This would not... That's why this would not be for me. I don't like being in, like, really, really tight spaces. I don't mind small spaces. Like, I don't... elevators are perfectly cool shit like that but like the idea when i'll see imagery of like someone shimmying through a cave or something like that but that's what most people think cave diving is like but most cave diving is not like that most cave diving is big big you know caves i mean there's like the mount errors of cave diving is in florida it's called eagle's nest and at eagle's nest you can fit i don't know maybe like an aircraft carrier inside that thing is that big the cave is that big you cannot see you cannot see the other wall it's like that big it's like that big that big. It's huge. And Eagle's Nest is a good example of what a cave looks like. They're

humongous passages. Oh, yeah. We got it. Deep scotted up here. Yeah. You know what? I do have to say this. All the imagery we've been looking at today of like cave dives of places you are fucking beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. You haven't even seen the Abaco caves. The Abaco caves with the older crystal are just breathtaking. Where's that? This is an Alaco is an island of the Bahamas. And have you do dived in these yeah i've been four times maybe to abaco and it's just gorgeous just look at um glass factory look at glass factory abaco and you'll see what i mean so i think the one over here on the left um it's an example of that but yeah glass factory is a good example so whoa yeah so when you go inside the cave it looks like you're diving inside

a chandelier i mean it's just glass everywhere all right if you guys are listening to this and not watching it if you're on like apple or something like that go over to spotify or youtube for a minute and look at this d'if can we get that big right there blow up that one of them that looks beautiful so we're like an hour 35 into the podcast right now so would be ads and they were probably like at the 138 mark or something but yeah whoa that doesn't look real I know. How wide is that right there? Because the depth reception is a little off.

Okay. So he's got like, looks like maybe four feet a room right there to go through that top to bottom? Yeah, I would say four feet is about right. The whole ceiling is decorated with crystals. So you don't want to hit the ceiling. What you do is you crawl on your stomach. Can they stand you? In here.

I mean, the crystal is, it's heavy. Like, if it hits you in the head, it would hurt. But the diver that you see in here with a yellow helmet, his name is Brian Kekakok. Brian Kekog is perhaps the greatest diver that ever lived. Like, Brian Kekakok is amazing. What is he done? So he was a diver in the Navy, and then he became a cave diver like decades ago, and he lives in Avaco.

He is your guide when you go diving in Avico. And Brian Kekakak is just, yeah, he's spotless. Like his technique diving, he's just unbelievable. What about his technique that's like so good? He just looks like a submarine. He's just perfect underwater. He can move in any direction. He knows, I think the most perhaps underrated skill that Brian has, in my opinion, is his

awareness of his gear and his body. Like he can rotate in the middle of crystal and not hit anything. Whereas for most people, it's hard to know where like where my fins end or whatever. because these are extensions of your body. He just knows his size so well. He's like a cat. Yeah, he's amazing. So Brian, I love Brian diving with Brian because it just makes it effortless.

Oh, so you've gotten to do it with him as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian was my instructor also in one of the rebreathers that I'm certified. Because when you learn how to dive rebreathers, you have to get certified on every unit. Every unit is different. And I'm certified in four different rebreathers. He was my instructor for one of the four, and he's just amazing. You're unbelievably well-traveled with this stuff.

I mean, I enjoy it. Holy shit, man. Like, again, I said something like this earlier, but now that you've been like spelling out pieces of your career with this throughout, you're talking about doing stuff with cave diving in the last five and a half years or whatever, with diving in general the last seven and a half. Yeah. And it sounds like you've packed like 30 years into that.

You're doing caves in all these different countries. Well, you have to. You don't have to go to other countries, but I think for cave diving, because cave diving is so skill intensive, if you stop doing it for months, you just lose the skills. Right. Yeah. So you have to keep going. It's a lifelong commitment, in my opinion.

Yeah. Now, you send me this clip over the weekend when we were talking of Cowboy Donald Soroni. Yeah. Talking about cave diving. So he obviously long, he was a long time UFC fighter, really famous. famous guy, but he's a parent, I really, I was unfamiliar with this. He's apparently, you know, certified in cave diving and does a bunch of that. And so he was talking with Joe Rogan seven or eight years ago or something going through some story where he almost died. And you were telling me,

like, everything he was saying. It just doesn't make sense. Why? There's so much to unpack on that. And I, you know, Donald Serroney is one of those people that I would love to have on dive talk or even go diving with them because I'm trying to understand like why like why do you do what you claim on that video that you did all right so for people who haven't seen the video we can't play it because of copyright issues I told you sometimes that'll happen with with some of these videos of other podcasts and stuff but like what exactly the story was gnarly like I don't know anything about cave diving so I'm watching it like yeah but what exactly where was he what was he doing and how did he explain it going down so so okay so there's two things number one

the stuff that he's talking about on the video maybe happened to him maybe but the thing is everything that he said that happened to him let's just believe that everything happened he would have avoided if he just followed the rules of cave diving like he would have none of that would have happened literally

if he just followed the rules that you learn when you become a certified cave diver so like for example at the beginning of the video he says he's talking to his wife and he's like I'm coming home like he's making it sound like cave diving is this like Russian roulette like you know there's a huge chance you're going to die if you go cave diving no if you're a certified cave diver the you know 99.999% of cave dives are go without issues right because you know what you're doing and you you follow the rules you train for it right so at the beginning he makes it sound

like it's way more dangerous than what it is so i already have a problem with that now i don't have a problem saying cave diving is dangerous and it's one of the most dangerous activities you can do especially if you're not a certified cave diver a lot of people have died in caves because they're not certified cave divers they don't have the right equipment the skills and they go and they get lost and drown and die but he is allegedly a certified cave diver i believe that he is because some of things he said on the video makes sense he explained you know how cookies and arrows are used and things like that but one of the things that that bother me immediately was the fact that he said, well, in cave diving, one of the unspoken facts about

cave diving is that you just care about yourself. What are you talking about? Like, you're part of a team. Even if that team is two people, you're going in together because you have each other's back. So the story starts, if you, you know, whoever is watching this, if you watch the video, the story starts because the dive body that he went with got tangled in line. And in the process of being tangled in line, he disturbed the silt, and visibility went to zero in the cave. And Donald Seroni, all of a sudden, he doesn't know what to do because he's like, you know, one of the main unspoken rules of cave diving is that if you get into trouble, I'm leaving. Like, I'm going out.

It's better for one of us to die than both of us to die. Like immediately watching that, I'm like, what are you talking about? Now, for most people that are not cave divers, they're like, it makes sense. You know, somebody gets panicked and whatever in trouble. save yourself that's not how cave diving works at all i'm not saying all the people haven't done in the past but no you help your teammate just like would he help me at el diablo when i got entangled oh this guy got entangled hey let me help you out and then multiple times he's like i found the main line and i just let go of it and started crawling in the ceiling why the guideline takes you to the exit and we have

arrows in the line to tell you where the exit is so several times i think at least twice or three times in He's like, I found the line, but I let go because I remember a crack in the ceiling, and that crack in the ceiling would take me to the exit. The guideline takes you to the exit. Like, why would you let go of the line? Like, at some point, he's like, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to die. So I'm thinking about writing a note. And we joked on the show that you should have written like, I let go of the line. Like, it's like, it's number one.

Like having a line to the exit is paramount. Follow the line. You can follow it in zero viz. Like one of the exercises is zero viz navigation on the line. You okay the line. You put your hand around it and follow it all the way to the exit. So even though it's a bright colored line that's like, you can't see it in. No, I don't know.

And that's another thing that people are like, well, the line should be like fluorescent glow in the dark. No, when he's zero viz, you cannot see it. It's literally a wall. You can't see anything. They don't have signs for that now for the lines we're laying now. It doesn't matter. You can make it out of like, you know, Wonder Woman's last. So, like, full on light, it doesn't matter.

You won't be able to see it. Yeah. Like, my flashlight that I use for cave diving is a 4,000 lumen or a torch D630. And I can face it to my eyes and can't see it. Like, it's, it doesn't matter. It's like super powerful lights won't cut through it. Do you carry that in a hand like this? Or do you keep on a helmet or anything?

You can have it in your helmet, but the one I wear is on my hand. It's called a good man handle. It's a handle that we have on the hand for cave diving. And then I have, I carry three extra lights on top. of that for backup but the point is several times he makes this claims that just don't make any sense like if you find the guideline stay on the guideline even if you have to go and help your body and they are on a side passage without line or whatever which they have line because he got entangled on that you can attach your own line to the main line and swim to your body with your lines so

always finding a way to go back to your guideline all of this is basic training I'm not talking about like, well, Gus, that's you because you're a cave explorer and you know what you're doing. No, no, this is week one of cave diving training. They teach you how to do this. Lost line procedures. They teach you how to find the line again and make sure you don't lose it again. He lost it multiple times.

They teach you lost body procedures. If you lose your body, how to find your body, get him back on the line and out of there. All right, this is an exercise that you have to do in cave diving training. I assume Donald Seroni did all of this because if you don't do it, you cannot get certified. right? So why on the story, he's making it sound like he did none of the things that he learned in cave diving? So he's either lying about it or demonstrating that all the things that happened to him he could have avoided by following the simple rules of cave diving and what he learned in training. Right. Yeah.

So this is one thing that I would always love to have him on the show. The way Joe Rogan interviewed him, I would have just bombarded him with questions. Like the first time he said, so I let go off the line. I would have been like, why? Why would you let go off the line? It doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't. It would be like, I jumped out of the parachute,

and I activated my main parachute, and it worked. And then I just caught it off because I wanted to use my backup. Like, huh? He doesn't make any sense. Was there a lot of backlash from, like, the diving community online when this story came out where they were talking about a lot of the same things you are? Like, what the fuck? No, I think when we started recording reactions,

there wasn't anything out there that was talking about this stuff. Yeah, no, I think... That's interesting. I think some of the comments in that video were from legit divers that were like, this is not making any sense,

but they are drowned by the thousands of other comments of people are like, whoa, you're barely alive. Like, you're lucky to be alive and all this other stuff where for me is like, bro, if you just follow the simple rules of cave,

I mean, none of that would have happened. He's like, oh, you know, when I went in, the cave, I took a reading with my compass, just so I know where the exit is. Like, what are you talking about? Like, that makes no sense whatsoever. Why? Because caves are like a maze and it's not even a three-dimensional maze, like on a regular maze. Caves go up and down and sideways and in all directions. So it would be like, if you went into a 10-story building, walked in the lobby of the building, took a compass reading to the exit, and then went to the eighth floor to a corner

and then try to use that reading to find the exit of the building. Like, it's impossible. It's completely nonsensical to take a compass reading like he said that he did so that would have been another question he was like why would you take a compass reading it's useless once you're in the cave was this a largely unexplored cave he was in or one that did have well i i don't know he didn't say the name of the cave but he did say where it was he said it was cosumel okay in that in that story and the only sonota that i'm aware of that non-explorers with a permit by the government kind of the way that we went can dive. It's called Aerolito. But I've dived that Sanote, and I don't remember crevices in the ceiling or anything like that. He also makes it sound like it was a, it wasn't a

freshwater cave, like it was an ocean cave. I've seen some caves in Casumel that are ocean caves, but again, you're not supposed to dive those. Maybe that's why he didn't say the name because he went into them. Why aren't you supposed to dive those? Because they're dangerous or the line, you know, Like, I remember diving a cave in Mexico called Dos Coronas that is an ocean cave and the saltwater deteriorated the guideline to the point that you would just touch at any breaks. So there's a huge danger that you can go deep inside a cave and then get completely lost and the line is broken and you can't find your way out. Outside of the saltwater effect, what are the biggest differences between like an ocean cave and, you know, fresh water? Yeah. The other problem with an ocean cave is tides. So tides can affect the way the water works in the cave. So when we go into ocean, into any cave, really, you want to go into caves that have either no current or there are a spring. A spring means that the water is exiting the cave. It's like a river that is coming out of the cave. That means that you're going in against flow, but then if you have to get out, the flow is pushing you out. What you don't want to do is dive a siphon. So a siphon, is water is rushing into the cave.

So going in is easy because you're going with the flow, but if you have an emergency or something, now you're swimming against the flow to get out of the cave. That's why you're trying to avoid. Diving siphons is extremely dangerous. So ocean caves can switch based on tides from being a spring to a siphon. They can behave in different ways,

depending on the time of the day and the tites and all of that. So they're just more dangerous. But again, you approach them with a safety brief and decide at what time you're going and all of that. But I don't think he was in an ocean cave. I think that he was probably doing Aerolito, which is the most common cenote in Casumel. Every cave diver that goes to Cosomel dives that place. It's awesome, by the way.

He has its own ecosystem. There's animals in there that you cannot find anywhere else. Wait, what? Yeah, Aerolito. What kind of animals are we talking? Like, I mean, I don't know the scientific name or whatever, but they're like sea stars or whatever that you can only find in that hole. Not shit that eats you. No, no, no, no.

You don't, there's no big animals. dark swim through these fucking caves? No, not really. Imagine that. You're in like low-vis water and then suddenly... Most of the animals, most of the animals that you're finding caves are tiny translucent bugs, basically. You can see through them.

Like, if you shine them with your light, you can see their heart beating inside their bodies and stuff. They're pretty cool. They're completely blind and they're translucent because they grow up in no light. So they have no pigmentation. Yeah. It's like fucking bane. You merely adopted the dog.

I was born in it. Wow. Now, you obviously do this for the love of diving, and you know, you've mentioned how you'll go map places that haven't been mapped. But you also mentioned one of them where there was the rumor that there had been like Mayan pottery. They're not the rumor.

Like, they literally had been mine pottery that had been found down there and stuff. Have you ever gone to a cave where there's an expectation, like, oh, we might find like some treasure here or something? No, I think every cave in Mexico that we're going. go into we hope to find something. So you are hoping. Yeah, yeah, I am hoping. Now, I know I can't keep it or anything like that, but I think the, you can't, no, but that's all, depending on the country, like the, like, like, I think here in the U.S., if you find, like, a wreck and it has like

gold, you know, stuff in it or whatever, you can keep it. Or I think you get, you get to claim it and then you can harvest it. I've never done that. I've never done, you know, diving for treasure or whatever. Legually. I've never done it. Listen, no one's listening. Yeah, nobody's watching. No, I've done a ton of gold. No, I'm kidding. But in Mexican caves, anything they find in a cave is the government owns it. So the cartels on it. The cartel owns it.

And then they get to, no. So anyway, it goes into museums and stuff if you do find something. Museums. I found bones, like a lot, especially from animals. Like, I found an entire horse basically in bones. I guess this horse fell in the hole and drowned and who knows how many years ago. So you go down there And it's like a full skeleton of a horse

That's kind of cool I mean, I feel bad for the horse That's kind of fucking cool though Yeah, there was a there was a discovery In one of these Mexican caves a few years ago Where they found the body of a girl Right next to like a cybertooth Or a saber tooth tiger

Right next to like an engine like It was literally the cast of Ice Age It was like a giant sloth With a saber tooth tiger With a mammoth like woolly mammoth and a girl like the body's like in the same place inside of a cave it was unbelievable yeah you can look this up this is all legit so they didn't yeah all fell and they started working together so they didn't eat the girl i guess they're like well we all got to get i don't know but they yeah they they found

they found her intact yeah i feel like her name is like lucy or something like that they even named the girl here it is girl skeleton found can i just girl skeleton found in cave sheds light on origins of first americans oh this is interesting michael was talking about some stuff the other day i wonder if this was, we had Michael Button in here, who's an ancient Sibs expert, and he was talking about the history of humans and the Americas, and he was going through different things we found that can date it. I wonder if this was also one of those things. DNA recovered from 12,000-year-old skeleton helps to dispel claims that first Americans came from Australia, Asia, or Europe. The remains of a small, delicate teenage girl who fell to her death in an underground cave

system in Mexico 12,000 years ago have thrown fresh light on the origins of the first Americans, cave divers chanced upon the girl's skeleton, along with the bones of saber-tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and cave bears in a vast water-filled cavern they discovered while exploring a submerged network of tunnels reached from a sinkhole in the Yucatan jungle. It's awesome. Research is pretty cool. Dude, imagine going down there in a cave and finding like a saber-tooth tiger's entire skeleton.

Yeah. We're being insane. I might go to the cartel and try to sell that. Exactly. Researchers believe the girl whom they have named Naya died after breaking her pelvis when she fell into the cave, which would have been dry at the time, apart from a small occasional pool at the bottom. Like the animals around her, she may have met her death after venturing into the cave system to look for drinking water. It's a tough way to go. Yeah.

Imagine, yeah, you're right, though, coming upon that, you're like, whoa, body, whoa, saber tooth. Whoa. Yeah, no. Crazy. Crazy. Yeah. You never had anything like that. No, no, I've found bones.

You keep going the way you're going. Probably. You're probably going to find something. No, like we know, for example, next year we're doing a dive, depending on when you're watching this. In 2026, we're doing a dive to the bottom of the blue hole of Belize. And we know there's dead divers down there. Dead divers. Yeah, we know there's at least three bodies down there that they haven't recovered.

And the last expedition there was in a rover. It wasn't divers. It was a rover. And they ran into the body. So they're still down there. Oh, so they know where the bodies are? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're going to know on the map.

I'm pretty sure we're going to run into them. Yeah. What are you going to do when you run it? Just leave them. You're going to leave them. Yeah. It's like Mount Everest when they just leave a body there. Yeah.

Yeah, the bottom of the beliefs. That's kind of heavy, though. That could have been you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how these divers died, but their bodies are still down there. But you're, but what? So they're just leaving the bodies?

They're not trying to recover that for their families? I guess not. Yeah. There's a bunch of divers also in the blue hole of Dahab in Egypt. Their blue hole is nicknamed Diver Cemetery. The blue hole of Dhab? Yeah. Can we pull this up, Joe?

Oh, that one is, I mean, the blue hole in Belize is impressive. The one in Dhab is also impressive. We'll come back to Belief. I just, I wasn't even familiar. There's something like that. And there's fucking everything in Egypt, bro. Egypt has everything, yeah. Whoa, that's it.

Yeah. The blue hole in the hop. What do they call it? Divers what? Diver Cemetery. There's a lot of people that have died there. And there's still bodies down there. Still. Like we made a video reaction on some of the bodies and people that filmed them and we show them and everything in them.

But we have no interest in filming that or showing that or anything. But we're pretty sure we'll run into them when we go next year. Right. So what makes this one in Dhab so dangerous? Yeah. So if you open the second part. picture so the hole is connected to the ocean by this kind of tunnel okay and what happens is people people will go down and then try to take the tunnel all the way back to the ocean and the the tunnel is

deeper than people think so when they go down there and they start swimming in the tunnel that connects the hole to the ocean they run out of air and die so they miss they miss you know they underestimate how deep it is and by the time you're halfway through the tunnel literally a tunnel you run out of air and you die of asphyxiation yeah yeah so it goes down to like 200 feet i believe 60 meters and uh yeah if you don't if you underestimate it people people die all the time there that's why it's called diver cemetery and the bodies are just left yeah some of them this is a thin yeah because if you if you fall so the tunnel is like 200 feet or whatever it is i think starts at like 150 and it's a big tunnel it goes to like 200 but i think the whole the hab itself is like 600 feet deep or whatever like

the tunnel starts in kind of the middle but at the bottom there's bodies and there's a guy acmet gabber i believe is his name he recovers them but not all of them have been recovered oh so they do try to get some of them out yeah yeah they do that's awful yeah and that's how that's minus 32 meters down there all the way at the bottom this is a picture of the canyon this is around the hub but it's not

it's not the the blue hole in the hub there's a lot of blue holes in the world I think this is maybe New Mexico oh this is yeah this is the hub and the hub is on the left yeah so you see the cave system though right so you see says the hole goes to

110 meters 110 meters is almost 400 feet something like that I've never been to Egypt but this will be one place that I would love to dive. You do want to die The cemetery

Yeah, the Diver Cemetery will be awesome because I would do it on a rebreater where I have six hours or whatever to dive. That was going to be my question Yeah So these people

They're going down there On just a regular They go on a single tank And they just run out of air Yeah, that feels a little bit Like Darwinism You know You're taking a single tank

down there One way in, one way out in the ancient land to Egypt yeah people die what is on the other side where it says L bells is that coming up on land I guess yeah I guess so I guess that he's a

again I've never been there so it would be a it would be a cool dive all right so there's one in Belize are you you said there's bodies down there you're probably going to pass them yeah are you trying to map some of it

that hasn't been mapped or you just diving it for sport in general I just think it will be awesome to be at the bottom of the blue hole because it's such a memorable site. This is Jack Cousteau's favorite dive site or one of his favorite dive sites. And, you know, there's an attraction to that. Jack Costo, the creator of the Aqualong scuba diving.

And it would just be awesome to be at the bottom. Very, very few people. I mean, I don't know how many people have been to the bottom of the blue hole, but I would think less than 100, maybe. Less than 100. Yeah. probably i mean i don't know exactly but i've been to places of course you know outside of cave exploration which is like i've been and me and my body would be the only people that have been there

um i've been to caves and places where less than 50 people have ever been you know you know it's crazy you told me there's like around 10 000 certified cave divers in the world it's hard to know but let's just say yeah give or take yeah with all the cave diving you do and all that you're hitting just the place we talked about like you're hitting all kinds of serious spots around the world that a bunch of these cave divers have never hit in their life yeah but there's so many i haven't been to that i would love to i understand that but like has it hit you that you're legit one of the best in the world no what you do no no no i'm not even close i'm just the cave diver i think that's you being humble but you're you're hitting serious no that's me being a realist

like no the people that are really good at it are they're just at a whole new level i mean a level of their own i'm just a cave diver like the stuff that i do i think most if not all cave divers can do like i'm not doing anything anything crazy i would never call myself one of the best or whatever like not even close no no no there's people that are a whole new level like i think if you if you talk to ed sorenson for example who is uh until the tie cave rescue he held the record for the most body recoveries and rescues in caves he lives in florida so he's called in like a spec ops kind of guy when this shit goes down somewhere well it's a funny funny story one of the one of the guys on the cave rescue came to the U.S. and got lost in a cave and they called Ed to go rescue

that guy. Yeah. Yeah. There's rescues that he has done or recoveries, body recovers that he has done where they were like, we're going to seal the cave because it's impossible to get those bodies out of there. They're so wedged and so impossible to get them out that we're just going to close the cave forever. And all right, before we do that, let's call Ed. And then Ed goes and gets him out. Yeah, this guy is like I'm not. percent of the diver ed is like these guys are holding so great you were talking about the other guy in the bahamas i forget his name he just knows his movements and stuff yeah uh yeah i mean i think what makes him so special it's a combination of the mental side of it that i don't think i have

and the just the vast amount of experience like ed cave dives every day he has over 12 000 cave dives i have 163 or whatever this guy is 12 000 cave dives yeah and when you say the mental side of it that you don't have. What do you mean by that? Like, I don't think I'll be okay if I if I recover a body. Like I think especially like those bodies that he recover in Dominican Republic that they said they were impossible to get out. I think they've been dead for 18 days underwater. Like you can be on a bathtub for two hours and not look back. Like imagine 18 days dead in a cave. And you're about to pass some in Belize. Have you thought about that? I mean, it is what it is. But I feel like, you know, Ed goes.

In people like Ed, he's not the only one, you know, Rick Stanton and John Volantham did that with the Thai kids and they were, they were going to find dead kids. Like, I don't think mentally I would be able to recover. I don't know. I feel like I would see that image in my head of a dead body in a cave. Now, I would do it, you know, if I had to. We recently had these rains in Texas that like a river ran over like a girl's summer camp or something like that. I don't know all the details. And they called us to come and help recover some of these buddies. Because we're in Georgia, we're super far away. I said, I think that you guys will be better off finding people in Texas, because this is in Texas. And again, we're not these super duper divers. Like,

you can find more people that are local that can be there tomorrow. We have this amazing van that we use for scuba diving that is literally a dive shop on wheels. We can fill tanks. We can do everything with this van, I offer to drive the van there and support the teams. So if we're called to do it, and I am in a position to do it, I would do it, but I don't seek it. I am not, like I wouldn't throw my name in the hat, like, hey, call me first. Like, no, you should call Ed. You should call other people like Ed. But yeah, I think a lot of cave divers would do it if it had to be done. Yeah. Yeah, that's hard to, I mean, it's one thing. to recover a body doing anything but when you're doing it in an enclosed kind of place like

that underwater different environment like you said someone you'd mention one there where they're dead for 18 days and then you got to bring them up takes an hour and a half to bring them up it's it's awful i mean i remember they were recovering a body just out here like in the hudson or someone or someone fell i have i have the utmost respect like the stuff that i do is child's play compared to some of these rescue divers they're going in there to, you know, gather bodies of people who drown like kids and stuff. Like I, I don't envy that at all. Like I don't feel for a second that that I'm capable or that I am at that level.

Like those guys are total studs, you know, men and women that can do that. I have no intention of ever getting into that. Well, I'm actually thinking about that in my head now right now because the Hudson is like, you literally can't see this. in front of your face i mean just think about it being in zero viz yeah just doing a grid pattern every branch that you touch do you think it's a hand or a leg it's like dude i i can't even imagine like i would do it if i had to but i hope i never have to do it right yeah what do you you know with with modern technology like lidar scanning and stuff is that helping us be be able to

like map a bunch of places to dive no i don't think so i i you need humans for caves i think that I think that if you send a robot inside a cave, it would just get tangled within five minutes, and you have to send a diver to go get the robot. I mean, it's one of those things. I think there's technology that is used by divers. There's some devices that you can run through caves, and they would be taking pictures of the cave and doing the map. Like, there is that kind of technology. But I think the idea of sending like a Rumba type of, you know, robot inside to map caves,

it's just not based in reality. I think it would just, you would just lose the money. Like, it would just go to waste and the robot will be unrecoverable or you would have to send divers to recover. Yeah. Well, what about the process here? I keep thinking about that. So let's use the Belize one as an example, because you're going to go do that soon.

Yeah. So you're familiar with the cave. You decide you're going to do this cave. I'm sure you've already reviewed the map of it yourself at home, right? Now, fast forward to a month. from now when you go there on the ground and actually do it when you get to the site what is the process you and woody do you go through the map exactly what you're going to do talk out step by step how does it go down yeah so i for this particular cave uh for this particular blue hole

dive we are actually letting uh a world class diver an expert uh german guy named akam uh he is is going to be leading that whole dive. So we're just literally going to follow his plan. This guy has dive to 600 feet. Like he's done recoveries of wrecks in Europe that no diver has ever been to. Like he's going down there 600 feet to a wreck and recovering the bell, you know, of the wreck and what I mean, the stuff that he does, he's at a whole other class. So we actually will be using him to, you know, plan, execute. everything to dive. I think that that's one of the best parts about those kinds of dives,

those kinds of dives, is that we have a plan and you're so focused on making sure you don't miss anything, following checklist, making sure that everything is done, that you don't have time to worry about it. You don't have time to be like nervous about it. It's like, okay, what do I have to do? What's the process? Which gases are we taking? Understand what is that we're taking. So even though he's planning it, I need to understand it, you know, what am I doing, when and where, what's expected? How many people are in the team? what positions are we in how are we doing this thing and then we're just execute the plan yeah now have you done like we were talking about pressure systems earlier and what levels you can go to and then what

you do once you go past like just recreational diving and actually go to professional diving how much deeper they take you when we're talking an ocean though you go on the Atlantic you know there's no diver that's diving down fucking four miles or something like that right right obviously right but like deep ocean dives have you done any of that whatever it is and and what is what does that look like so a deep ocean dive so for recreational divers a deep dive is 130 feet right in the ocean uh the deepest that most people go is 330 feet or 100 meters um but there's people to go deeper than that the deepest i've been in the ocean is 248 feet that's the deepest i've been in the ocean. It was a wreck site in Florida. Gold Coast? It's near, like, West Palm Beach, or Pomp

on a beach that area. There's a wreck called the RBJ there, which is funny because I think I remember the story of the RBJ is, I thought it was named like after a pressing or something. And apparently it's like they found this wreck and they did a contest on the radio to name it and some guy named RBJ won. And I feel like that's kind of how the story went. But it's this, it's too. It's too wrecks and they are an X like they one was dumped this way and the other one was dumped on top and it's 250 feet deep so I went

to yeah there it is so it's the one on the right what's this wreck this wreck from I have no idea a lot of wrecks in Florida were drug boats that they got sunk or whatever typically there's a there's a dive in Florida that are really lot called governors

where it's a governor's run or whatever but anyway it's four wrecks that they found with drugs, and then they basically floated them out in the ocean, and they asked the Navy to sink him. It's like, hey, you guys want to do some target practice? We have legit boats out there. Go at it. And the Navy said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And they just shot them all down and they fell. So you can do all four wrecks in one dive. You can dive from one to the next to the next, and it's pretty cool. I might find a little white powder or something. But those are, but those are not super deep.

This one, the RBJ, is at 250 feet deep. So that was my deepest ocean dive. What does that feel like down there, 250? It feels like 100 or 20 or whatever. Because we're breathing something called Trimix, which is gas that has helium in it to minimize the amount of nitrogen that you're breathing. So when you're breathing at those depths, because of the amount of helium in the tank, it feels like you were super shallow. It's awesome. Trimix is awesome. All commercial divers use Trimix, for example.

So the deepest dive that I've ever done is at Eagle's Nest, and that was 295 feet. That's the deepest I've ever been, and it's inside a cave. But in the ocean was 248, and I've done a bunch of dives that are over 200, just never deeper than 248. Actually, no, I think I did in Roatan this year, I went past 248. That's true. I think I went 255, 260, something around there. It's still not my deepest. My deepest was inside Eagle's Nest, which is the Mount Everton.

of cave diving, which is in Florida. Yeah. Mount Everest of cave diving. Yeah, yeah. That cave goes to 320 feet deep or something. I did 295 on that. Oh, light work. Now, when you're doing this dive, though, to the wreck,

are you swimming inside the cabin there? Are you staying totally outside the boat? You can penetrate. The dive that I did to this, I did not. I just swim below the wreck because they are sitting on top of each other, like an X, so you can swim under it. It's like an arch. And I was able to do that.

So we didn't do any penetration on that one. But yeah, now that I think of it, the dive in Roatant that I did earlier this year, was at a wreck, a deep wreck there. That one went past 250 for sure. It was like 260, something like that. But again, my deepest is at Eagle's Nest. Now, if you had found something down there, though, that was legal. In America, you'd be able to keep it.

Yeah, in the U.S., I think you can. can keep it, yeah. I don't know what the process is like, whether you have to pay taxes or not. I don't know how that works, but I think you get to keep it. What's that one right there, Dief, the YouTube one diving to Okinawa wreck? It says Pompano Beach. Oh, there's so many. Why does it say Okinawa wreck? Because that's the RBJ, technical diving, RBJ, Corey and Chris wreck, Pompano Beach. So RBJ and Corey and Chris are the two wrecks that are on top of each other? yeah um but that would be the okinawa wreck like okinawa was a battle in in the pacific and right right no there's i think there's a wreck out there's so many wrecks man in south florida it's

like hundreds of them and i think the okinawa may be one of those i had uh colin woodard in here i think that was episode 212 he's like the golden age of pirates historian like the guy on that and you know talks about all these wrecks that would happen off the coast of florida or off the Coast of Cuban stuff during that whole time in the early 18th century, late 17th century. And that's why they call, like, apparently, if I remember correctly, the Gold Coast in Florida, that, because there's all kinds of, like, shipwrecks there. Wow. No, they're still finding. And there, I mean, there's people that do this, like, almost for a living.

They just wreck searching. They're trying to find these wrecks all over Florida. Now, when you're swimming, though, in the ocean, especially, and you're diving in Florida, you've got to think about sharks. you know sharks are awesome sharks are not dangerous to divers at all at all all all breeds of them all of them yeah they're not like you don't get scared of that at all no no i i hope for them i look forward to it yeah yeah no for divers it's uh it's they're they're just not dangerous to divers now have they're being attacked in the past sure have there people being killed by by sharks yes but they're just not dangerous at all like i think i don't know you get like five

deaths per year by sharks and out of the five four and a half are non-divers or like surfers norcourers that so they attack that so you're not worried about being attacked when you're diving no not even a little bit no that's so interesting yeah like like to give you an example like the diving that they do in south africa with like cages and stuff when you watch the videos there's people outside the cage filming the cage like they're outside with the sharks there's tons of videos online of people diving with great whites and whatever, they don't do anything to divers. On the videos, you see.

What about the ones you don't see? Not exactly. This is funny because another fun fact about animals in the ocean is or killer whales, as they're known. There has never been a fatality by a killer whale

or an orca for humans ever recorded, ever. I've heard that. In the wild. They have never attacked Humans kill humans. They just don't care about humans. They're interested.

You can find people swimming, videos of people swimming with orcas and stuff, and they're awesome. They're just great. They've never attacked humans. They have killed humans in captivity, like at SeaWorld or whatever. They have to kill a trainer or whatever. But they've never in the wild. They've never killed a human.

Sharks are very, very, very, very. We kill hundreds of millions of sharks every year. Oh, yeah. That's a huge problem. Yeah. But when it comes to humans, I mean, I don't know. If I had to guess, it's something like four divers every five years or something. It's like less than one diver a year.

Think of how many divers are out there in the ocean. How many people are in the ocean? Like at the beach or whatever, just swimming in boats and whatever, tens of millions. And there's maybe, I don't know, 10 deaths worldwide by sharks. Yeah, they're just a non-issue. You see that video in Egypt a couple years ago? Again, it does happen, but they're just a non-issue. Like, it's, I tell people, you know, like the story of that Uruguayan rugby team that crashed landed in the Andes and they had to like eat each other.

Yeah. Eat each other to survive. Yeah. If you ask, are humans cannibal? No, they're not. Has it happened in the past? Sure. There have been incidents where that has happened.

Maybe a tribe out there. There still does it or whatever. But overall, humans are not cannibal. That's just the way works. And overall, sharks are just. not dangerous to divers. They're just... So when you've been diving in the ocean,

you encounter them, and it's cool. Oh, so many. Do you ever touch them? No. They don't, you don't get close to them. They don't, they don't let you touch them. So you're not worried about it. You shouldn't touch marine life to begin with.

But they don't, they're curious. Like, they swim near you. They check you out or whatever, but then they swim away. Yeah. I mean, there's even, like, I think Mark Rover did this whole experiment about, like, blood in the water.

Like, what if there was blood around you? Like, what if... I think he dumped like gallons of cow blood and the sharks couldn't care less. They just couldn't care less. They didn't care about the blood. Couldn't care less. Does it depend on the species though? Like if it's a bull shark or a tiger shark?

No, he was in the Bahamas with all kinds of sharks and they couldn't care less. When he dropped fish blood, they were all over that. Fish blood, they were all over that. Like mammals' blood, cow, whatever, couldn't care less. Yeah. I guess they didn't know what it was. they it's like that's not food like they just didn't care well it's also i you know i've been thinking about this all day with you talking but you know we use the common parlance of the fact that

when you look at our oceans around the world like 95% of our of our depths are completely unexplored now these are oceans it's not yeah so much freshwater caves or something like that but it's kind of crazy that we have all the advancements we do we've been on earth as i mean there's people who debate that but we've been on earth a long time right and yet the most common resource around us outside of land, which is the water that surrounds it, you know, we have so much left unexplored. Would you, have you had thoughts and aspirations of, you know, getting involved with projects that are looking to, you know, not even necessarily just diving, but, you know, using submarines and stuff like that, that are looking to map out

the ocean? That would be super cool, I think, be on, on a submarine and do, you know, like go to bottom of the Marianna, stuff like that. That would be, that would be. super cool. I'm not something that I'm passionate about. That will be awesome to do. But yeah, you're right about the mystery of the oceans. Like, we find new species that we didn't even know existed, like every day. All the time. I've been in expeditions in Mexico where we found critters in caves that they are brand new, brand new species. So we're still discovering the fact that we don't know like 95% of the ocean floors, basically. It's super interesting. but at the same time it's super costly and super dangerous to do that and i don't know if there's

the value on that like let's say you map the entire gulf of mexico or gulf of america whatever what's the value on that i'm not sure um unless you're willing to drill the oil out of it i'm not when you look at pictures though where we do have places mapped and you just look at it like on a scan right where you know you're removed the fact that there's water where you can't see stuff it looks exactly like land like mountains and valleys of course peaks and everything it's like there's a whole world down there so there has you know the resources is one thing to think about like oh could you find oil and stuff like that of course people are always going to think that but there has to be some sort of value in that i mean it's it's a whole no pun intended it's a whole different world

no i think i think the more that we learn um it's good for us for humanity as a whole i i appreciate the people that are willing to do that there are some billionaires out there that are just exploring this deep spots in the ocean out there and you know putting up the money to do that i just don't think like governments are interested in right the people that really could afford something like that are just i don't think there's interest on that right did you see that documentary on netflix about the titanic sub yes absolutely you like i keep thinking about today obviously it's different than what you do completely but yeah you know they're diving it's it's a different kind of a dive but you talk about like safety precautions and all

the things that you've emphasized today about the process and the training and what you got to do and what you got to consider every time to try to avoid something, it is unbelievable to me that a company like a United States company at that would just completely openly basically break every possible rule. Yeah, they're like, well, I know everyone uses metal, but we're going to use carbon fiber and then the when they were testing at a depth it's just like the carbon fiber cracking like they have all just microphones and they're just cracking and i mean i can only imagine just waiting for one of those cracks to blow up and then you're dead but to to his credit i mean the guy who created it he's the one solo diving this thing like thousands of feet you know to test and

putting his name and his safety on the line and he ultimately died and then but then he did it with other people that's yeah yeah he did it with other people but this is not a thing theoretical like i'm just going to put passengers and in theory should work is i'm i'm going to go do it right you know but yeah they found all these issues and he just kept doing oh it's so sinister when you look at the tests on on the on the on the tracks and it's just every time it's like a piece of fiber breaking oh but the the most sinister part was the video on the the the selfie camera on the boat with his wife and then two other members of the team when it actually blew up and you see his wife like kind of in denial that what she might have just

heard she's like what was that and you see the other guy go what do you think and then just walk out of the room and he knew like you know that guy knew like oh they all just yeah no yeah they were instantly dead but uh yeah i mean those guys didn't feel anything. I mean, they were blown up before they're blown up with their dead. They're feeling, yeah, before they could even feel anything. But I feel bad for like the dad and the sun and all that stuff. It was just terrible. Yeah, I feel bad for all involved. It's a bad situation. But you got to, you know, regulations can be annoying on some things for sure. And sometimes, you know, you'll see a regulation made because it's one idiot did one thing one time and now everyone gets triply punished for it,

which is going to happen with this now, with other things that aren't carbon fiber, I'm sure. Yeah. But, like, there's other things where it's like, this is the science. Like, carbon fiber breaks if it goes below this level or, you know, fails, whatever you want to say. Like, that's what it is. Like, you're not God. You know what I mean? And that guy, I think, had a, what was his name?

Salman or I forget his name. Yeah. Rush, something rush. But, you know, obviously he just had a huge ego. Stockton Rush. That's it. and rush yeah yeah hate to see it yeah but i i think yeah several things it's like there's some organization that is supposed to test the safety and because he knew he was going to fail he decided

to test it with someone else like stuff like he was just getting around it but a lot of the stuff is in hindsight right it's easy to criticize uh once something happens and we do this a lot in diving to every time there's a fatality or something it's easy to go back and be like well you know this happened because of this or because of that when you're going through the process you don't know you know like if something were to happen to me tomorrow i'm sure people will be like well what do you expect you only started diving seven years ago like of course like people will always find a way to justify what happened but instead of learning from what happened and hopefully you know a lot of people learn from that ocean gate incident are there any mysterious known like very uncharted

territory caves in the world that you'd like to dive in i mean there's for me i don't I don't know if it's mysterious, but, like, I would love to dive under Budapest. So the whole capital of Hungary, Budapest is built on top of miles of caves. Can we get a map of this? Yeah. You can get pictures of it for sure. I would love to go there and dive that. I would love to dive Wookie Hole, which is the cave in England where cave diving was born.

So the very first cave dive was ever done in Wookie Hole. This has to be dark waters. Yeah, this is right. You can't see shit. No, you can't see anything. But you want to dive. Those are the places you want to die. that's where cave diving was born like of course you know that you want to go there but

butapest will be awesome um yeah there's there's several caves around the world that so that's not amazing so the in budapet the city's built on top of the water i didn't know that correct the whole city is built on top of caves wait but that kind of looks clear right there is that that one yeah it's clear water left left side joe second down and the water's not cold From what I understand. That's under Budapest right there? Yeah. And you would do that in a dry suit?

I don't think the water is that cold. I don't think you need to do a wet suit. I will probably do it in a wetsuit, yeah. Wow. Yeah. And a lot of that's unmapped? No, I think it's very mapped. I think they know where everything is,

but it would be cool to do it. Unmapped caves, they're really hard to find. For me, I think there's supposed to be a cave. in Venezuela where I'm from, where there is the largest underground or underwater lake of all Latin America is supposed to be in Venezuela. And I don't think that has ever been dived or mapped or anything like that. I would have loved to do that. I don't think there's a lot of Venezuelan cave divers to begin with. Definitely not in Venezuela, like the country is a disaster with the regime and all that. But I would love to be the first diver to go into some of those caves.

I mean, we're right at the ocean, and it's limestone, you know, like the rock in Florida that where all the caves are in Florida. So I only assumed there's a ton of caves in Venezuela that nobody had ever dived. So I would love to do that. How long were you in Venezuela? 22 years. Oh, you were in Venezuela for 20. You didn't come here for 22 years.

Yeah. I grew up there. How long ago did you? 2005, I came. So what, I mean, it's got to be kind of hard to come here from Venezuela just because the relations aren't too good, right? Yeah, I mean, in 2005, I came because I knew where the country was heading, and I just decided to, that I didn't want to raise a family there. I didn't have kids yet or anything, but I knew I was going to eventually have kids.

And that's, that's why I decided to come to the States. I sold everything I owned and I moved. Yeah. How hard was that process, though, because you were coming from there, just because, like, the relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela are not great. Yeah, I mean, I, I came, you know, completely legal, I guess, with a visa and all that. and then eventually found a job and I got married and so I just built my life. That's awesome. You know, when you do everything through the legal path that exists in this country,

then everything is relatively easy. It takes a long time. And I think the length of time, and this has nothing to do with diving, but I think the length of time that it takes is mainly to make sure that the people that get to stay are good people, you know. So I think the hardest thing for me was, you know, waiting and waiting and waiting and then getting background checks run on you, and then you have to wait another two years

and then another background. So it's like they are waiting years to make sure you're not some douche that is going to come from some other country to be a bad asset to society here. And that's good. So I came in 2005, I became a citizen in 2010. Do you still have family back there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, extended family. My parents and my brother, I only have one brother. They all live in Georgia. Okay. But extended family, you know, cousins, aunts kind of thing. They're all still over there. But anyway, you ask me what caves I will love to dive. There's caves in Venezuela that I would love to go there.

What do you make of what's going on in Venezuela right now? Because it feels like the United States is certainly ramping up pressure. And obviously, the regime there is not great. But, you know, as someone who's from there and came here, what are your thoughts right now? Yeah, I mean, I think just like they've done with Cuba, I think this is a lot of, I don't know if anything will be done. as much as I would love for that regime to go away, of course, because it's just a bunch of thugs that don't know how to do anything. You know, I would love to see someone that is capable

of getting the country out of the whole to take over. But the people that are leading the country right now, like precedent and ongoing, like all that people at the top, there are a bunch of thugs. Like I think the president went to prison for rubbing armor vehicles. Like, these are legit thugs that are, running the country, you're not going to get him out with votes. Like, that's just not going to work.

So I think Trump is putting press, President Trump is putting a lot of pressure to try to get rid of him. But I just don't think you can do it. Like, I don't think they're going to bomb him or anything. I feel like it's a lot of, just like Cuba, like how many decades Cuba has been on their communism and they've never done anything. Right. Well, all the pressure they can put on them is like, at some point, there's just nothing

you can do. Yeah, one of my longtime guys, Christian, is from Venezuela. well and lives there and it works with me and it's it's tough like you know it gets pulled over by maduro's guys sometimes yeah they'll lose electricity for fucking 10 hours at a time 12 hours that's terrible it's it is it's not a great situation down there obviously like people don't want to see like regime chain wars and and stuff like that from the perspective of the u.s but you would love to see at some point the people be able to get their own you know actually democratically elected leaders and and it's

I mean, they have the largest oil reserves in the world. They have, I think, the second largest natural gas in the world. So when it comes to, like, resources, Venezuela is a rich country from that. But everyone is stealing that money. So if they could leverage that, you know, money to put their citizens ahead, I feel like it would be so much, right, so much better for the country as a whole. I just don't think you can. I don't think you can undo it at this point. They're far too gone.

But yeah, I mean, it's, I hate to see what's happening there. You know, I became a citizen in 2010. I renounce my Venezuelan citizenship just because I was in such a disagreement with the regime at the time. So I'm just an American citizen. I still obviously say that I'm from Venezuela. I grew up before communism and all of that. I tattoo the stars from the flag in my arm. Like I am Venezuelan, but, you know, I am.

so disconnected from what's happening there right now that it's just terrible wow yeah that's that's wild man i'm glad you're able to get here too yeah i mean now you can't now like someone here from venezuela i made that call because i was trying to see we get christian here i was like buddy we're going to wait till 2028 yeah no last time i went was 2007 uh and since then like my family just comes and visits here because i mean it costs the same to fly there and back then to fly from there and back to Venezuela. So I'd rather see them come here and actually have electricity and food. Right. Right. So yeah. It makes you appreciate a lot of stuff. For sure. For sure. And like when I talk with him and just see some of the basic stuff, it's like, God damn, we got it so

good here, man. But yeah, I hope to see something changed there. But back to diving. You guys, I didn't know that, you know, obviously there was the whole Chernobyl disaster years and years ago, which involved a nuclear reactor. I didn't realize fucking people dive down into that thing. Insane. And you guys did a full breakdown on this. Who the hell did this dive? So there's this group of guys that are like the jackass of Ukraine, basically.

It's like this racked that group of lunatics. Kurosan is their name. And they just go and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Like not just going there and diving in Chernobyl, but going in like subway. trains and like they just do all kinds of crazy stunts right curzon and uh they went to Chernobyl and one of the buildings in Chernobyl is basically flooded uh i think it's by rainwater and of course these guys exaggerated a little bit to say like oh we're closed the reactor or

whatever no that reactor has been sealed you can't get there but there are buildings around the reactor that are still there that perhaps were other reactors not the one the blew up that basically was abandoned because of the radioactive disaster that happened there. And because they're flooded, these guys are just going in there. And it's just like, but they're not even divers. You can get on that, like to even do that legally? Well, you can go to Chernobyl right now. Like, legally, you can go and do tours.

They do tour. Well, right now, they're not even divers. Right now with a war in Ukraine, that's probably not happening. But before the war in Ukraine, you could go to Chernobyl, do a tour. Like, yeah. So these guys are just sneaking in. and putting like a fish bowl in their head and going on their water, like just total lunatics.

So we love these guys, by the way. They're all very entertaining. Total lunatics. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, I don't want them to dive because they're going to die. I mean, if you watch their videos, they're complete, like, they don't know what they're doing, clearly. And they do all different shit.

They don't just, it's not just diving. Like, I don't know out of hundreds of episodes they've dived in, like, three or four of them or something like that. So how long was the dive they did and like how difficult was it? Ah, five or ten minutes or something. Once they realized like this is crazy. You're like, fuck that. Could they even see anything? No.

No, no, no. It's just terrible. Did they video of it? Yeah, they video it and it's just zero viz. I mean, it's just terrible. And there's nothing in that water that's like nuclear or something? Probably. I don't know.

Like, it's the same like everything. We posted a reaction to these videos and you get all this nuclear scientist to comment, you know, because everybody's an expert. Uh-huh. So they are saying. It's like, well, no, the water is safe, but the air is not. You know, you don't know who to believe. Overall, if this wasn't in Chernobyl, this will be a cool dive.

I would do this dive. You would do this. Yeah, if it wasn't in Chernobyl, right? If this was in France or something where there was like a flooded building, I would love, like, how cool would it be to just dive into a building like eight stories down and going to rooms of the building? It would be awesome. It's cool to you to do it.

I'll watch the fucking live stream on Twitch. But that would be, that would be pretty awesome to do these, these dives and, you know, submerged buildings like that. That would be awesome. Yeah, we've done mine diving. Mines are cool. Gold mines? No, it was a let mine. Where? From back in Missouri as well, yeah. It's a Bontara mine in Missouri. So it got flooded. Yeah, it's flooded. How deep are we talking? Right now, I think it's shut down because there's some legal dispute over the rights of it or whatever. But, well, the mine goes, I don't know how it, I don't think they found the bottom of that mine. Our friends who used to be guides there, they've been to over 200 feet. But you can see these are some pictures of Bontar mine. And that looks so clear to it.

Well, I guess because it's like rainwater filling it, right? It's super, I don't know if it's a spring that fills it up or whatever. I know they have to pump water out or else it will flood all the way to the roof. But it's really cool to dive there. and we go there pump water out yeah because if not it would just keep flooding with water to the top wow so it's cool because you go in there and this was an operational mine so you'll be like a hundred feet deep or whatever and there's buildings and stuff and boards with stuff written it like it was a mine there's tools there's cars you know mine cars or whatever with like on rails

and it's just super cool to see all this stuff down there it what's amazing about what you do is that I'm trying to think of even what the fuck to compare it to, but it's not like, it's not like a swimmer who swims in a bunch of pools and they're all, you know, 25 meters or 50 meters or whatever. Right. But it's a pool. It's got chlorine, it's water. One's 20 feet deep. One's 10 feet deep. Whatever.

Yeah. You're going to like different, like, Narnia maps. You're going somewhere where one place is like, oh, this is a naturally flooded lead mine. Yeah. In the middle of land somewhere. Yeah. The next one is, oh, this is a 300 foot deep fucking drug mining cave off the ocean in Mexico.

Oh, this one's a dark pool in Egypt. That maybe the pharaohs dumped fucking Egyptian dogs. You know what I mean? Like you're doing entirely different scenario things. Now, it's the same skill you're diving in a cave. You're not training for every one of those. You just train how to be a cave diver. And then you can use those skills for any of that.

By the way, you mentioned Egypt. I believe that some of those pyramids. are flooded and some people have dove inside the pyramids so that would be another thing Egypt if you're watching give me a color people have taken dives in the pyramids in Egypt yes yes from what I from what I understand some of that stuff has been flooded and divers going in there I would love to go dive this Egypt Egypt oh you know what it's like I just thought of this it's like golf courses you could play a golf course in Scotland that's like St. Andrews Which is like deep fucking bunkers and reeds everywhere.

Or then you could go play some, you know, fucking Torrey Pines on the on the West Coast of California, which is wide fairways on a cliff. Like there were Pine Valley in Jersey, which is kind of northeastern classic bent, Bencgrass golf. These are all very different environments, but it's the same. You're playing golf. Same skills. Yeah.

That's interesting. Okay. So you're like a golfer except you dive. I guess so. A little harder. Yeah. Do we have anything on people diving in pyramids, Steve? Just like people talking about, like, interviews, but I'm not getting like actual...

There's not a whole lot of footage of it. You're fucking... You're diving. You're like, shit, there's the alien. I would... That's not a human body. I would love that. You'd go very viral if you did that.

I would love that. Can you fucking live stream that? We reacted to... Wait, wait, what was that flooded tunes? What it's like to scuba dive under pyramids. I mean... The pyramids in Egypt. In pyramids in Egypt are more famous, but the ones in Sudan.

Oh, they're talking about the ones in Sudan. Any royal burial sites that archaeologists can explore? What the fuck? Any pyramids. You know this trick? The Mike Ben's trick. Oh, there's a bunch of like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, that's really cool.

Oh, let's go. We got, Dief got it. All right, so let's read a little bit of this, Steve. Oh, that's already scary looking at it. That's just him entering right there down in a crevice. All right, so scroll down. Is it having trouble? scrolling. All right. I could feel myself suffocating. I'm already out.

2022. Each step down the bedrock passageway brought me closer to what I'd long imagined. The pool of khaki water, the flooded tunnel it hid, and the moment I'd have to enter that darkness, the crumbling grandeur of a pyramid loomed above. Here at the ancient necropolis of Nuri in Sudan's northern desert, Kushite royals were laid to rest millennia ago in a series of underground burial chambers beneath mighty pyramids. Now the chambers were flooded with groundwater leaching from the nearby Nile. So the Nile's dumping into this. Archaeologist Pierce Paul Kriesman, funded in part by a National Geographic Society grant, was leading a team that would be the first to attempt underwater archaeology below a pyramid. Initially, I'd been

calm, even excited about going along to photograph this ambitious and risky effort in 2020. But as I walk deeper underground, my heart raced and I could barely breathe. So this guy is a photographer who's going down with him. He's not even like a train dive. I would love to do this. Holy shit. Look at that picture. If you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, like, and these are flooded down below? Allegedly.

I don't know. I've never been to Egypt or Sudan. But, yeah, so there's 20 pyramids, it says, right there. 20 pyramids that appear strung together. What's the, what's the, that will be epic. How do you get cold versus like other divers? Like you said the one in Texas, they called you, they happen to call you in Atlanta. And that was a rescue one.

Yeah. But then like an exploration run, or call, like they call Gus Gonzalez because he's known, you're known for doing certain explorations. No. So the ones I did in Mexico was part of a team. It's mainly connected to this guy named Mike Young, which is also one of the greatest divers that ever lived. Mike is a cave explorer. And Mike, we became friends over the years because he makes rebreathers and we dive the rebreaters

that he makes. and then we started traveling with Mike first. It was a trip just we would just diving in the ocean in Cozumel. It was like over New Year's and he's like, oh, let's just get together and dive river in the ocean. Great. And then we went to Roaring River and then we went to Mexico. And so he knows us.

We're friends with Mike and he has invited us in the past. And we always are very thankful and love to join his expeditions. Now, he goes in way more expeditions without us too because he's a large team and you don't always need everybody. And then for the one in Texas, I believe they reach out to us via email, just like info at dive talk.com, whatever. Yeah, they know about the channel,

whatever they said, would you guys be willing to come to Texas and help recover some of these bodies? So basically from everything from the famous Thai rescue to things we don't hear about it, it's usually like reputational or word of mouth or someone knows that you exist and it's like,

oh, we can call it. them versus like there's not this system of like every time x happens here's the phone book of these are the 10 people we go to not necessarily the thing is that even though there are organizations like that like there's like the international cave rescue something like that i see you are something like that i don't remember exactly the nomenclature of it or whatever the acronym but um even though there are organizations like that i don't think most people know about it i i don't think most people know about those kind of organizations and sometimes I feel bad like I remember I think it was last year maybe earlier this year we got also either an email or a call or whatever from

some some people that drown in Namibia which is north of South Africa is in Africa and they contacted us it's like oh there's you know there's this incident that happened in Namibia we need help recovering these bodies would you guys be willing to come if we pay for you to come And I said, yes, but you shouldn't. Like, there's so, South Africa is known for, like, they're divers. Like, there's some amazing divers in South Africa that are right next to you. It would be like if there was an accident in Canada and they were calling people from Africa to come and help. Like, why?

Just use Canadians or people from the U.S., you know, there are closer. So we respectfully declined. We said, we would come and do it, but save you some money. No, like, just people will be there faster. There are way, way, way capable just work with the South Africans if you don't have someone in Namibia, they can do it. Ultimately, I'm not sure how they recover the bodies, but they did recover them. And we didn't have to go.

So, yeah, I think the fame of dive talk has opened up some doors. You know, one of my favorite doors that has opened is people that have holes in the ground in their properties, like in Florida. And then they're like, hey, there's a spring in my property or my grandpa's farm or whatever. You guys want to come and dive it? Sure. You're like, fuck, yeah. Absolutely.

So these are completely unknown springs that you're just going in. Completely unknown. Yeah. You can't see shit, right? No, some of them are crystal clear. It's just because it's in private property, divers don't go in there. So they are like, would you guys be willing to come and map it or whatever until absolutely we'll go there.

Oh, my God. And it's, man, those are awesome. And what's the deepest one you did? Well, the deepest one in Florida was Eagle's Nest. But those, no, no, of the private properties, they're not that deep, like 100 feet or whatever. Oh, yeah, not deep at all. No, I mean, in relative to other caves. How wide is that?

Like, I mean, I imagine they vary, but someone in private property, they get a spring and it's 100 feet deep. Are we talking like it's like a cylinder like that and it's 10 feet wide at the top and two feet at the bottom? What are we talking? So like the last one we did, I think it was in April or May. That one had multiple entrances. So like in the same property, they had multiple springs and they were all connected together

on their water. So that was cool because I went in the first. entrance, which was the closest to the car, really. It's like that one is the closest to transport gear and stuff. Let's just go in on this one. And it was like, I don't know, I would say like a 10 by 20 hole in the ground. And then we went in and I tied the primary line. So basically we start running line from open water. The idea is if you follow the line on the way out and you're completely blind, when you reach the end, you can go straight up and find air. That's why it's called the primary. So I ran the primary. I was the first one in.

And I ran the primary line and I went like, I don't know, like 200 feet or whatever, into the cave. And I can see this cave going in like all directions. It's like, this thing is just going everywhere. I was like, oh, my God, this is the best thing ever. And I came back out and I'm telling there were four of us. And I'm like, dude, hurry up. Like, this cave is awesome. And I'm like, get me my exploration reel.

So that one had 1,200 feet of line or 1,800, something like that is a big, big spool. and I went in, we followed the line, and then I laid the whole thing, like all 1,800 feet of line into brand new cave. How long did that take? It's like an hour and a half, two hours, something like that? I don't remember. And I just, I remember telling the guys,

I'm like, I'm going to keep going until I run out of line. And like, I could go back there with 10,000 more feet and keep going. Like, it's just like the cave just seemed to be going. And it was just awesome. It's like all these crevices that you go on the right and you get to like a dead end and then you look up and it's like a chimps. I mean, I guess we're going up. Elevator thing.

Here we go up. Then you would go up and he would just open up again. All right. Let's go that direction. Then you go and drop back down. I mean, it's just awesome. I just absolutely love that. That was really cool.

This is one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever done in my life. Because like I told you what I don't think anyone is watching because they're used to. They're used to all these amazing guests that you have on the show. Dude, you're unbelievable. Super interesting. I've been, but that's the thing. I don't know shit about any of this. Right.

Like when you reached out. I was like, oh, this seems awesome. Like, I don't know anything about cave diving. Most people don't know. I have, like, there's so many questions I have now. Like, I have a full education on this. So I'm sure people out there who are listening to do, too. Like, it's amazing stuff.

And, like, what you've accomplished over, like, not a long period of time, as I said a couple times today, is unbelievable. But I think it's really cool that you're actively doing all this. You're actively jumping into a lot of unknown situations just because you're fucking curious. And you're bringing that to the public with dive talk and you and Woody going through this whole thing. Yeah. And explaining what you do, reacting to other dives around the world, explaining everything that goes into this. And that's probably one of the coolest things about the internet these days is that very, very specialized skills like this can be available to some kid out there who knows nothing about it. And he gets to learn from you like a college professor. So I hope you guys keep doing it. It's it's fucking awesome stuff. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think dive talk is, and I always tell people like there are other channels out there that are much better than us divers, like there are. much better than us, divers who are documenting their dives much better than us. I think the way we like to do it is more from the entertaining side of things. It's like, let's just talk about cave diving to anybody. Like, you don't have to even be a diver. Yeah. I think that if you're a serious diver,

there are other channels out there that you can watch an entire two-hour cave dive from beginning to end if you want to. That's not what we do. We like to just talk about, you're breaking it down. Yeah, yeah, talk about the Donald Seroni. Like that, the Chernobyl video, like talk about this lunatics doing this stuff and try to make it. entertaining and educational at the same time and not being afraid to admit when we mess up like we're not the greatest divers in the world we make mistakes i mean we did whole episodes about training that we failed we did the training we failed the i think that's great because the internet you know had for a long time has incentivized this thing of like showing up perfect you are at everything

and that's not the reality in anything especially a highly specialized skill like this that's like highest stakes in some cases so that's awesome that you do that and and it was it's just cool like this is the coolest part about my job when like someone like you reaches out and i get to find a whole new world that i know nothing about so this has been absolutely fucking awesome today thank you for coming up my pleasure to do this everyone check out dive talk we'll have it link below i'm also happy to collaborate this with you guys if you want as well on youtube so that'll go into the algorithm for your audience as well but is there anywhere else any other links you want us to put down there for you guys to you know be found online for what you're doing no i mean we're not

in a bunch of different platforms. Everything we do is on YouTube, basically. We have like Instagram and whatnot, but our content is for YouTube. It's long form. A lot of our videos are super long, and it's always interesting because when we post a video that it's like 30 minutes,

people are like, well, what the hell? It's normally 90 minutes. Like, what is going on? They're going to like this episode. They're going to like this episode, yeah. But yeah, I mean, just look us up on YouTube. We try to branch out into other things based on our audience.

So, for example, people, after watching our videos and stuff, it's like, how can I dive with you? I'm a diver. I would love to dive with you guys. So we started doing a trip every year called the Dive Talk Meetup. Oh, cool. And every year becomes the largest scuba diving trip in the world is 130 people show up. A typical dive trip is like 20 people, tops, 15, 20, and we have over 100 people that show up. We give away tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear.

We give away rebreathers. We give away, like, all this stuff. people you know ask again to dive with us we started that well we also started making a rebreather most rebreaters are like $15,000 $20,000 whatever we partner up with Mike young who has been making rebreaters for decades and we launched a rebreather to the market that is 3,500 bucks is still not cheap like that's way better than 1520 grand there's nothing like that in the market called a dive talk go and it's great for that. So everything we do is really base in our audience.

Like all the videos that we make, all the things that we put out there are based in our audience. And yeah, I appreciate you for the shoutout and for the invite. Dude, thanks for coming. We'll link your Instagram down below as well and we'll also link your website

where people can check out some of the equipment you just talked about. But thanks so much for walking me all through this today, man, that's been great. My pleasure. All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought.

Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching. in the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.