Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Cave Diving: Totally Nuts

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

There are extreme sports and then there is cave diving, the most extreme activity a person can engage in without leaving Earth. Cave divers stay underwater swimming miles into – that’s right – caves, where no human has ever been before. It’s pretty cool. Wade in with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace.

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, everyone, it's Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen our 2019 episode, Cave Diving Totally Nuts. One of the most apt titles for any of our episodes, cave diving is indeed nuts. And you need nerves of steel or to be utterly careless, because it's one of the most dangerous activities a person on earth today could pursue. But both cave diving and the things that cave divers do and see are both immensely interesting. So I hope you enjoy listening to this classic episode as much as I did again.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Danger is his middle name, even though it begins with W. Bryant. Wanger. And there's Jerry Jerome Rowling. We're going to stick with Jerome, okay? It's a good cave diver's name. Yeah. I have just my regular name because I would never in a million years cave dive. Same. But I never even scuba dived. Yeah, I believe that. Open water stuff. Yeah, sure. Once. That was it. I got really like, I guess seasick right afterward too, and I was convinced that it had to do with the arrows breathing out. I was like, I'm done.

Which stinks because it was really cool. Breathing underwater is one of the neatest experiences you will ever have. Yeah. It's really cool. Not snorkel, like you're totally, you're underwater, and you're breathing. Even as it's a pool, it doesn't matter. Just take like a scuba lesson once, and you'll, there you go, you're done. I have dreams where I can breathe underwater a lot. Really? But it's not like, hey, I'm Aquaman, and I'm just breathing like a fish or something. It's that I figured out how to very slowly draw in air very carefully from the water around me. It's really a strange dream, but I have it a lot. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm not sure what it means. I don't either. I can't even begin to guess.

But what's more boring than talking about someone's dreams? They say that nothing is more boring than that. Yeah. I thought that was a pretty interesting one though. Thanks. If you're gonna talk about your dream, that's a good one to go with. Yeah. We're not talking about your dreams today though, Chuck. No. We're talking about cave diving. Right, which is not a dream. Again, I'm with you. I don't think it's not for me. Like, I couldn't even go like regular caving, spelunking. Yeah, which I did the one time. Right. I can't remember. Did you enjoy it? I did. It was a butt kicker physically. Very hard work. Right. But I remember describing the pancake thing that I went through. Right. Where the, you know, I was laying on my back squirming through

in the rock face was three inches above my body and face and you, I could, you're getting nervous now. I don't even like hearing about it. Yeah. That was a little weird and I'm not even a claustrophobic guy, but I was like, this is, you know, you could die in here. I read about a poor guy, maybe the poorest of all time. Well, one of them who was caving with his family, friends and family, and got stuck and ended up dying. His like, they could get to him, they could move his foot, they could touch his legs, but he was just so stuck that they just couldn't do anything for him. So they just decided to go home? He died. No, they were there the whole time. Oh, okay. But over like, I think the course of 24 hours, he just died the slow,

jeez, terrifying death. So they couldn't, they could reach his foot, but not his mouth, clearly. Yes. To give him, you know, nutrients. They tried to give him stuff through an IV. I think they tried to give him a sedative and it kept falling out of his leg, so they couldn't even do that. Oh gosh. Yeah, it was bad. That's hard to even hear about. I know. Man. But this is cave diving. Which is even more dangerous than caving. Yeah. And there's a couple of, a few types of diving. There's the open water diving that you were talking about. There's cavern diving, and open water diving just means, you know, if you get in trouble, go up and you'll reach the surface. Exactly. You're not going to get hit in the head by a cave ceiling. Right. Or pinned down

through crevasse. No. Cavern diving is a little different in that you're in a cavern, but you should be able to see sunlight above you. And if you go up, you can get your head out. Eventually, you're, from what I saw, the definition is you're no more than 70 feet deep. Okay. And you're within 130 linear feet of the cave mouth. Okay. Or more specifically, your surroundings are illuminated by daylight. That's really what separates cavern diving from cave diving. It's kind of like, remember a biospeleology episode? Oh yeah. So this would be the twilight zone. Between the dark zone and the light zone, that would be kind of cavern diving, diving in the twilight zone. Right. Then you get to cave diving, and that is serious

business. This is not what's considered recreational diving. This is going deep and dark. Yeah. With David Reese. Going deep with David Reese. I haven't spoken to Reese in a while. Love that guy. Oh, he's a great guy. Yeah. So this is technical diving. Well, hold on. Can I give another definition of, I squandered my turn on that Reese joke. Going deep wasn't good enough. Cave diving is diving with an overhead environment. So that separates it from open water environment. Yeah. Like if you go and panic and swim straight up, you're going to bonk your head. Yeah. You might have gone up a foot. Yeah. And you have no direct vertical access to open air, surface or light. Yeah. This is extremely important. It's basically a horror movie.

Yes. Yeah. A nightmare. A living nightmare that you're doing on purpose that you've paid a lot of money to equip yourself for. Yeah. The light thing is a really big one too. Like here's the thing. It's really easy because you're thinking that this is cave diving. And the word caves in there, we're talking about caves, but it's scuba diving really. But it's scuba diving inside a cave. Right. This is a really important thing to not lose sight of. It's a cave. It's deep in the bowels of the earth. Cave filled with water. Yes. There are, there's no light. There's only light is the light that you have and you're moving through it underwater. This is cave diving. Yep. I'm in awe of people who do this and I could watch videos of it all day long. Yeah. It's very cool

to see. It's like scuba plus as far as the creep factor goes. I read one article about a guy who is a cave diving researcher. And as we'll see, you know, there's scientific discoveries that have been made in these caves. Right. Because just like the deep dry caves, the things that live in there are remarkable. Yeah. And this guy was 69 years old and still going strong and said his family, you know, always worries about him, but he's super experienced, knows what he's doing, but it's still fraught with danger. Yeah. I do have a few death stats if you want. Lay them on me. I read a scientific presentation called 30 years of American cave diving fatalities. 1985 to 2015. You got the same one, huh? Yeah. This is by the divers alert network. 161 divers had died over that.

How long was that? 85 to 2015. 30 year period. 67 of them were trained. 87 were untrained, which is crazy. Like, I don't know what they're doing down there to begin with. You're a fool if you just take up cave diving for the first time. But yeah, exactly. Because 67 trained cave divers perished. Yeah. And how, Chuck? How? What was the vast majority? Most common cause was aphyxia due to drowning preceded by running out of breathing gas usually after getting lost because of a loss of visibility caused by suspended silt. And that's where I, most of these are in Florida. And that's where I learned about the silt out. Also from the article you sent about the cave rescue in Thailand, which was apparently very silty. And a silt out is when

so much silt gets kicked up that it just blacks out even with your light source. Yeah. The guy that was in that, I think it was an article in Atlantic with a guy and it was named Robert Layard, I think. He's a cave diving expert. And he said, you can put your light up to your mask and you can kind of see your light, but that's it. And you're in a cave. So you don't know where to go. Even feeling your way around is not going to help you. And the problem with a silt out is they can last for so long in a bad case of a silt out that you will run out of air before the silt settles enough for you to see through. So it's a bad jam. Well, and then you probably read the same interviews, but there's panic is what this guy said is what usually happens,

even with an experienced diver, because there's no escape, there's no quick way out, and things tend to have a domino effect. So if you're in a silt out, like you said, is you try and stay as still as possible. And it's still maybe not going to work. You're getting nervous again. Yeah, I'm kind of fidgety now that you pointed it out. It's panic inducing just to think about that. Yeah. Like you have to remain perfectly still in the total darkness. And that might not even be good enough to let that silt settle. Settle. I saw an even bigger estimate of the number of deaths from cave diving. Oh, yeah. From the National Speleological Society's cave diving section. They estimated more than 400

deaths in the history of cave diving, but they said in America in the world. Okay, that one. The other one's just. Oh, was it just America? Yeah. Okay. They placed a lot of them toward the beginning of cave diving, which took, which started in the 50s or 60s. The hey, I wonder what's in their stage. Yeah, which is crazy because scuba diving started in about the 50s. So within a little while of somebody inventing scuba diving, some people were like, oh, let's go into caves with this stuff. Yeah. And they started dying. And so they pointed out like these people, they can give their lives in vain. Each death was a lesson learned for everyone else who, who, um, you know, was yet to come. But a lot of people died early on. And it's gotten

much, uh, they're far fewer deaths from cave diving, but it's like you said, they're, they're typically are cave diving experts who are dying right because they're pushing themselves further and further. If you have, you know, no one's cave dive before every cave you dive into is a new exploration. And this is a huge driver for people who cave dive. This is why they do it. They're seeing something that no other human on earth in most cases has ever seen in the history of humanity. They're the first human to be in this place. There's lots of stuff to discover for when humans were there, but now it's flooded. Um, there's, there's just a lot of discovery, but as it's been going on for decades now, every time somebody discovers a new thing, that's one thing

that, that is not left to be discovered by everybody else. So they're pushing themselves further and further. When you cave dive, you might be a hundred feet under sea level, but you might be scuba diving for miles down through a cave system, not downward necessarily, but yeah, horizontal miles, um, you know, round trip for this, this cave dive, which is nuts, but that's, that's what they do. Yeah. I can't even remember where I was going with that. I started to get panicked again. Have you seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Yeah. You know the scene with Brad Pitt on the boat in his, in that 60 scuba gear? Yeah. It's just so cool looking. Before we say this, I come from the future to warn us in the past that we should add spoiler alert here. That was

that, uh, it's like when they used to call him skin divers. Yes. Do you think he killed his wife? Uh, well, I think that's what you were led to believe, uh, whether or not. Oh, I felt like it was up in the air. Well, a little bit. Uh, also could have been an accident because he was clearly had that, uh, spear gun resting on his knee pointing at her. Right. Um, yeah. The question is, did his neurons fire and make his finger move? Right. Okay. So we took care of the spoiler. That was like five minutes ago. I know. And now we're back to cave diving and we should talk a little bit about equipment. Uh, this, a lot of this came from one of our old house stuff works colleagues from the website, our old buddy John Fuller, who looks like MC Escher. He's been mentioned

twice today. He's the tie that binds the Escher episode and the cave diving episode. Yeah. And some of this equipment thing isn't the most exciting stuff in the world, but, uh, we should talk about it anyway. I found it, frankly, arousing. You got your mask. Uh-huh. Uh, and this is something I didn't know. Um, they use sort of simple black masks because it absorbs light. Yeah. Um, which makes sense. Yeah. Because you're using your own light source. So it can get pretty bright. I saw a flashlight from underwater kinetics, maybe it's like 15, 15,000 lumens. Some ridiculous amount of lumens. Just lots of lumens. A lot of lumens. Um, and yeah, if you have that stuff bouncing all over the place, you don't want your light, your, your, you know, gold glitter diamond dusted

mask, reflecting it in your eyes and it cuts down on visibility. But I take issue with Fuller saying that they favor simple masks because these guys do like the full face, like BA masks. Yeah. Not the Brad Pitt skin diver 60s mask, which I loved. Yeah. Great design. I think some of them might, but I also saw plenty of them have like, you know, I'm trying to think of what to call it, but just a really cool full face mask. Yeah. It looks like something that you could dive in a cave in or go to outer space in basically. Yeah. Yeah. So then you've got your fins, again, black rubber fins, but the difference here and that I gather from this in open water is you don't want those super long, super bendy fins because you're trying to not kick up silt. Right. So you want those

shorter stiffer fins. And when you're down there swimming around, you're using little short controlled kicks. Yeah. No big sweeping leg movements. No, it's a huge, huge difference between cave diving and open water diving. Yeah. Open water diving, your legs are extended out behind you and you're fluttering those, those fins up and down and you're propelling yourself forward. And in cave diving, your, your bent, your legs are bent at the knees. So your feet are up slightly above you and mostly you're making frog kicks, which are all in the ankle. Yeah. And you're just kind of waddling yourself along with these little kicks. You see what I'm saying. I love for 12 years you've been doing little physical gestures of me like anyone else in the world

could see them. Well, who am I talking to, but you know, that's the whole point. So the frog get, look, Chuck. I know, I see. Here, this is what they do. Little frog kicks. But in doing that, that you cut down on the potential of coming in contact with the rest of the cave. There's a couple of reasons why you want to do that. One, you want to preserve the cave. If you break off a stalactite, stalactite coming from the ceiling, that's a, that's nature's work that you just messed with. You don't want to do that, bro. And then secondly, a lot of caves, pretty much all of them have that silt sediment on the bottom. That's your enemy. If you kick it up, you've got a silt out. So you, you want to really be careful what kind of movements you're making with

your fins and then just how big your fins are and how flexible they are. And then one other thing about that too, you also want to maintain basically perfect buoyancy where you're completely neutrally buoyant relative to the top and the bottom of the cave. Yeah. What do they call the movement? Dragon float? Pull and glide. Pull and glide. Dragon float. Yeah, sort of the same thing. That's how you do when you recover a body. Well, a lot of this is body recovery, very sadly. Well, not a lot of it, but part of search and rescue can very much involve going deep and getting very swollen waterlogged bodies. Right. But yeah, you pull yourself along with your hand, like in a little groove by the rock, and then just let yourself glide. It seems very relaxing.

Considering you're doing the most horrifying thing on the planet. Yeah. So you might do that even instead of kicking depending on where the space is, how tight it is, that kind of thing. Also, it depends on how solid the surroundings are. You wouldn't do that on coral or anything like that. And then also, apparently you only do that when you have a current. There's one thing we should say. There's two kinds of cave diving, spring diving and sump diving. Yeah. And in spring diving, that's where you see like the pictures in like National Geographic magazine, where it's just this beautiful cave, and there's just two people in scuba gear floating in the middle of it. Yeah. That's a spring-fed cave where you've got water moving through it, keeping it very clear because

there's no way for sediment to settle because the current's moving too quickly. And you use that current to pull and glide. That looks like something that has a little bit more appeal. Yeah. But I mean, it's just as dangerous as anything else. Sure. Like you said, most of the people who die cave diving die in Florida, and that's what they're doing is diving in those springs. That's true. And the other time, the sump kind, those are a little more scary to me. That's a cave system where if you imagine like kind of like a zigzag like Charlie Brown's shirt, say that's the cave system inside of the cave. Half of the bottom half is covered with water that you have to scuba through, but you also have to climb over through dry parts in air

and then get down to the water again. That's the sump kind, and that's super sedimentary. And you really got to know what you're doing there. That's the most dangerous kind by far. Yeah. You have your suit that you're wearing, and you can wear a wet suit, a standard wet suit, or a dry suit. These are not cheap. They cost, you know, several thousand dollars for a good one. And all this equipment is not cheap. So it's not the kind of thing that you just sort of decide to try out. Right. So you have to be wealthy and totally out of your mind to cave dive. Dry suits are sealed off. So, you know, if you've ever put on a wet suit, part of the process is getting in that cold water and letting it fill up your wet suit, which will warm it up. That's the idea.

Eventually. Is that water warms, but that process isn't fun. Getting in and out of a wet suit isn't fun, either, to be honest. And it's not that flattering. No. God, what suits are the worst. You just kind of have to go with it, you know. We had to wear them when we scuba dive with the whales, right? Yeah. The whale sharks. It seems like 100 years ago. It was easily 100 years ago. The dry suits seal off that water. So you are dry. That's why they call it a dry suit. Your body doesn't get wet. And the cool thing here is that you can layer up some clothing and then put on this suit so you can stay warmer. Right. It's much more pleasant, I imagine. Like silkies or something. Yeah. I love the silkies. And then John makes a good point. You want to

have extras of just about everything. You don't go down there with a flashlight. I'd have eight flashlights strapped to every single limb on my body. Sure. I'm sure they carry an extra. I would have a bunch of extra light. Yeah. 150,000. You got your little knife. If you could snag, you cut things. I would have nine knives, eight flashlights. Well, you do want a redundant amount of stuff like you were saying. Because if something goes wrong down there, you are toast unless you can slowly and deliberately get yourself back to the surface of the ocean. That's right. So yeah. But the other thing you want to do too is you're in very cramped quarters here. So everything has to be strapped down pretty closely to your body

or in like a pocket because you can't have any stuff hanging down because you'll get tangled up. Don't want to get tangled up down there. I know this is kind of amateur hour stuff because we're not at a good breaking point, but we should probably take an ab break right here. No, I think it's a great time. And we'll talk about how you breathe down there right after this. My space was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace

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Suprema. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60. And now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it. With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leone, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim. The list goes on and on.

Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sorry, everyone. I'm so sorry. So you need to breathe down there. Everyone has seen a scuba tank, but it's a little bit different. It's quite a bit different, in fact, than open water diving. You're going to need different things to go that deep, different kinds of air mixtures. And there are a few different kinds that you can use. But we should probably talk a little bit about the bends and what happens to your body. I know we covered the bends in the, which one was it? What was the old time diving suit called? Diving bell? Was it diving bell?

I think we covered the bends. We must have. Probably so. Yeah, because we've never done a scuba episode. So John, from his original How Stuff Works article, makes a very great point about pressure and talks about soda bottles. And obviously, if you shake up a soda bottle and then open it really quick, it's going to go everywhere. Right. Or if you're Josh and you've never in your life, apparently opened a tonic bottle. It's club soda. I thought it was tonic. It was probably both, really. Yeah. You got to open those very, very slowly every time, no matter if it's shaken or not. Yes. I don't think any of those were my fault. But like every backstage we've ever been to has tonic and soda on the floor. I'm cursed with that. But if you do shake up a soda bottle,

in the difference between opening it quickly and very, very slowly, is can be related to how the human body reacts under the pressure of that water. Yeah. So in this case, when you're scuba diving, opening the cap is analogous to slowly making your way back up to the surface at a graduated set of time. They're both decompression basically is what it is. Right. And so you could have rapid decompression where your soda goes everywhere or your blood vessels burst. Yeah. Or you can follow these timetables to get the nitrogen bubbles out of your blood. And like you're saying, that's a big problem with scuba diving, especially if you're down below 100 feet

for an extended period of time, the nitrogen can really build up in your blood, which can give you the bends. You can also suffer from nitrogen narcosis, which is bad news, where you apparently feel like you're drunk because you're intoxicated on nitrogen. Yeah. The same thing can happen with oxygen. Yeah. It's different, but you can have oxygen. What's it called? Oxygen toxicity. Yeah. Right. So there's like, if you're just doing like a dive or whatever, and it's like 30 feet of water and you're down for like a half an hour or something like that, you're just breathing compressed air. Like they just took air out of the air and put it into a tank and that's what you're breathing and you're fine. They took air out of the air.

Exactly. So if you're down for a while and you have this problem with too much oxygen or too much nitrogen, they've started to get kind of crafty with the stuff that they put into the tanks. There's something called nitrox, which deals with the problem of nitrogen narcosis by removing a certain amount of the nitrogen and replacing it with oxygen. So with compressed air, with regular air that we breathe here at sea level, it's something like 78%. Nitrogen. Yes. And like, no. 21% oxygen. Is that right? I had them backwards. So 21, 22% oxygen, 78% nitrogen. In nitrox, you have something like 36% oxygen and the rest nitrogen. So because you have far less nitrogen there, you are susceptible to the bends and nitrogen narcosis less susceptible

than you would be breathing compressed air. So you can go down further and you can stay down longer. But the problem is, like you were saying, that oxygen toxicity can be an issue too. So they've come up with even other stuff. Yeah, you can breathe helium. There's something called Heliox. 79% helium, 21% oxygen. The weakness here is, or I guess the downside is that you lose body heat six times faster than with compressed air or nitrox. So then you got to think about hypothermia because it's cold down there. It is cold. And then there's one called Trimex, which is oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. And apparently this is what you use for the deepest dives. Yes. And all of these things have their pluses and their minuses. There is no perfect

gas. But people have figured out things like if you want to use Heliox, you can stay down longer. You're not going to get nitrogen narcosis. And your case of the bends is probably less susceptible to the bends because the nitrogen's not present. But you also can't breathe that up closer to the surface. There's not enough oxygen in it. So you have to carry an extra tank of oxygen or mixed air to switch to as you get closer to the surface. That's right. There's like a lot of different clever things you can do to make it safer for you to stay down longer and go further into a cave system when you're diving in it. Yeah. And the rule of thumb is they go by the rule of thirds, which I saw it described a little bit differently than the House of Works article describes it.

The way I saw it was, is you want to make sure you always have two thirds of your tank left when you're at your deepest part of the dive. Yeah. I think that's what Fuller said. Maybe he just said it in a way that sounded a little backwards. But yeah, that's the rule though. Yeah. Is if you know you're going to go to the very deepest spot you're going to, you want to only use one third of your oxygen, of your tank mixture to get that far. Right. Because sometimes it can take longer to get out than it did to get in. And you want to be back on the surface with a third left in your tank basically. Right. Plus don't forget you're also going to have to slowly unscrew the cap on the soda bottle. It takes time and therefore it takes some of your air, your gas and your tank

to, to do the decompression schedule and slowly work your way up to keep those nitrogen bubbles from explosively producing in your blood. Now how do those tables work? Do you, I have no idea. Do you just learn this stuff? You have it like on your, it's a piece of paper. Yeah. I mean, obviously not just regular paper. It's laminated. It's laminated. Basically, yeah. But you're looking and. Yeah, I'm sure if you're an experienced diver, you know those things back and forth. Right. But because there's such a thing as nitrogen narcosis or hydrogen, you can breathe hydrogen, but apparently it has a trippy effect on you too. You would want to be able to have something to look at. So you're not just relying on your brain, but they haven't printed out. Yeah.

So the idea is like, how much leeway is it? Like you can't go, like don't go 10 feet higher or you're in big trouble. Like it can't be down to the inch or anything. Right. I don't think it's that although I suspect that as we advance, like we'll have it down to the inch and like by different kinds of people and genetics and stuff like that. But right now it is, I think it isn't graduated in 10 feet or maybe 10 meters because that's an atmosphere, but it says stay at this depth for this amount of time before moving up 10 meters. So hang out for another minute. So I think it's longer than that. Oh, really? Yeah. And what you're doing is you're allowing the nitrogen that's dissolved in your blood to turn back into gas, go to your lungs, and then be expirated to be

breathed out by you slowly. That's what you're doing. And so they figured out that after say 10 minutes at 30 meters, you have removed enough of that blood or that nitrogen from your blood that you can safely move up to the next 10 meters above. And you're neutral at this point? You're just hanging out, hanging on your line. Like you're not sinking and you're not rising unless you try to. No, you have a buoyancy vest that is keeping you neutral. You're just hanging out. You don't want to rise. Now, if you're in big trouble and like you're out of air, you want to make your way to the surface and just take, you know, press your luck. Like bends be darned. Right. Like I'm either going to drown or have the bends and maybe the

bends won't kill me, but drowning will definitely kill me. Even though we learned that drowning is not necessarily what you think it is. Well, that's true. But if you aren't in any trouble, you want to go through the decompression schedule. Okay. You got it? Yeah. I mean, I just, I knew about this stuff, but I've never really kind of thought about exactly how that worked. I wonder if we do need to do a scoop episode now. Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, what are you doing while you're waiting around? You're just waiting around, looking at fish. Looking at fish. If you're with a, you should be with a buddy. It's tough to communicate unless you have radio. Right. And in which case, if you do have radio, you're probably listening to XM

or something like that instead, but you can communicate with hand signals or us. Sure. Yeah. You could listen to stuff you should know. That'd be nice. It's a great idea. So let's go back to traveling. We talked about the grab and pull, the pulling glide, the grab and float. You can also have one of those, and this is what I would totally have, one of those cool little DPVs, driver propulsion vehicle. Yeah. It's the little torpedo looking, it's sort of like a boat propeller that's enclosed and it just pulls you along. Yeah. You just hang onto it and it drags you behind it. Yeah. I always thought those were really cool. Yeah, they are cool. They're kind of James Bondy. Yeah. Very much. But that's going to

save you from breathing more because you're exerting yourself and it's going to save you from just exerting, you're not going to be as tired. I mean, think about it. Diving for miles under the earth's surface, like for miles along. Even though you're floating, you're still working. Yeah. Yeah. That little kick, your ankles are going to get tired after a while. Your little ankles? Yeah. And that would help a lot. But I would imagine you really want to practice on that thing because if it got away from you, it's going to pull you into like a cave wall or something like that. You're in trouble. Kick up that silt. Yeah. I would think that little propeller will kick up silt. I guess if you're not on the bottom though. Yeah. I think you keep

it away from the bottom. All right. I think we should take another break. And we'll talk about what I think is one of the cooler parts about this whole thing or these guidelines right for this. Spoiler alert. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, main accounts, the story of MySpace,

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to main accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard.

I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two-thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60. And now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leone, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim.

The list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, you're underwater, you're 100 feet into a cave, it's pitch dark. You got your little flashlight, but you need a little trail of breadcrumbs, right? Yeah, more than that. You can get disoriented down there, even if you're super experienced. Right. So you need something that says, go this way to live. Right, so you have guidelines. Like not written guidelines.

No, no, an actual literal guideline. Right. And they were laid however many years before by people who originally explored the cave. And they, the yellow lines or gold lines, I'm sorry, are in yellowish in color, and they use those as like the main line through the main parts of the cave. Yeah, and it's like a little thinner than a rope, but it's basically a nylon string that is throughout the main tunnels. Like you said, these little side tunnels are going to have white lines if you branch off. Right. And you know, you know, you look at the color and you know where you are basically

in a side tunnel or the main channel. And they end within about five to 10 feet of the main line. That main line too doesn't go right to the top of the entrance. Right. Because apparently that is an invitation for dum-dums to say like, hey look, let me see where that leads. Right. So they don't even put them on the surface. No, 50 to 100 feet from the entrance, like you said. Yeah. I saw a really interesting video from the 90s called a deceptively easy way to die. And it's like blood on the asphalt, but for cave diving, it's like an instructional video

with recreations and crazy camera shaking like, oh, it's out of control. Yeah. And the guy, it's from the cave diving chapter of the National Splunking Society. And like it really like is meant to scare you. The guy even says like, am I scaring you a little bit? Good. It's just like a car safety video. And it ended with the song, cave diving, don't do it. Right. Is that a Heather's reference? I think so. Okay. Nice. But he was saying this guy who was astounding, it was almost like he was a ventriloquist. He barely moved his mouth and words were coming out. You got to go watch this.

But he was saying, not only do they not put like the lines near the mouths of caves to tempt people, they say, if you're not an experienced cave diver going on a cave dive, but you're going to be diving somewhere in the area of a cave, don't even take a light with you. Just to keep yourself from being tempted, from being like, oh, I got a light. Let me go down in this cave. If you don't have a light, even the most foolish among us probably would not go into a cave. Right. But if you do have a light, you might try it even if you're not experienced. Interesting. For sure. Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah. But you're still a dumb dumb if you do it. Yeah, exactly. They do have entry lines though. And that is if you go to an explorer in a cave, it's a temporary line that you do. And this is the one that you do tie to a big rock on the surface. And then you take that to the main line that's 50 to 100 feet inside. And then everything's all connected because John makes a great point. You've got to be able to, in the worst case scenario, if it's dark down there, pull yourself along this line, give the okay sign to your buddy. And you've got to maybe do this in total darkness. Right. With your eyes closed.

Let's say your flashlight's off or it's silty. Silt out. Yeah. The scary stuff. I have the impression that you're kind of supposed to be hanging on to this guideline basically all the time. Oh, really? Yeah. Or like inches away from it at all times. I would want it within grabbing distance, for sure. Did you read up about the dwarf markers? I predicted that the dwarf markers existed. Because yeah, before I got to that part,

I was like, surely they have thought of this. Like an arrow? Yeah. It's like a plastic, basically arrow on the line saying this way, not that way. Well, yeah. Because I mean, if you're in a cave system and you turn around, you are like, wait a minute, that doesn't look anything like what I thought I just came through. Talk about panic. Luckily you have the guideline. But which way is the guideline leading you?

So that's what these dwarf markers are. They're arrows pointing the way to the mouth of the cave, the way out, basically. Did you see the history of the dwarf marker? No. Because immediately it was like, why is it called a dwarf marker? It was just such a weird name. And apparently I got this from a brief history of the cave diving line arrow by Alexander Cofield Feith. And there was a death in 1976 at Peacock Springs in Florida

where pre-dwarf marker, and I guess this person died from the situation you just explained, like went deeper into the cave instead of on the planet. I know. And a man named Louis Holzendorf invented this thing out of duct tape. So he made these duct tape arrows and they called them dwarf markers. But because they were dwarf, I'm sorry, because they were tape and all dwarfed up, they would deteriorate or fold up and not work over time. So later on, flash forward, a man named Forrest Wilson

invents these modern dwarf markers. And one of the stipulations he was like, we got to call them dwarf markers still, which is very cool. But these are finally made out of plastic. It's a plastic triangle. You fold it over the line and snap it shut, basically. Nice. So thanks to Forrest Wilson and Louis Holzendorf, the worst case scenario, I'm getting out of here and you're just going deeper, and will never happen. Forrest Wilson told everybody, we go out and call them dwarf markers. And they're like,

after Holzendorf, he's like, who? Oh man, that's a good dumb joke. It's a lot of setup too, though. I just used up a lot of our air. All right. So you've got these dwarf markers. They're telling you where to go. You're diving. If it's just a regular sort of, and I was about to call it a recreational dive, but technically it's a technical dive. But if you're just out there having a good time, you're probably down there for about an hour or so.

At least. But if you're really like doing scientific investigation or inquiry, or if you're after a body, then you can be down there for hours and hours doing your thing. Right. So some of these extraordinarily long cave dives can last into the double digits of hours. And they'll have tanks placed along the path, basically. Dwarf tanks? Maybe. All right. The ghost of Dwarf himself is handing these out.

I don't know if he's dead or not yet. Tim Conway? No. Holzendorf? Yeah. I don't think he's with us. Oh, okay. Yeah. So he's this friendly patron spirit who hands out tanks.

I think, although who knows, he may still be around. Well, why did you say that you didn't think he was? I got the idea because someone else developed it and named it after him, that it was in Memoriam. Oh, gotcha. I might have been wrong. No, no, it's a good point. Yeah.

At any rate, they'll leave tanks along the way so you can be like, well, here's my new fresh tank. It's pretty amazing. But yeah, the cave dives can last a very, very long time. And like you were saying, when they're doing this stuff, they probably are being employed by maybe the National Geographic Society, a museum, some university, and they're exploring the geology of these caves that no one has ever seen before.

They're also conducting underwater archaeology, which is a huge new aspect for cave diving, because what they figured out is we've lost a lot of human settlement archaeology when the sea levels rose after 11,000 years ago. And people were running around in America on the coast more than we realize, and we're starting to figure that out because of this cave diving archaeology that's become a thing. Yeah, the largest as in longest, not deepest underwater cave is in Tulum,

on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. And they, I think it was a few years ago, discovered that two flooded caves actually connected, making it the longest. It's 215 miles if these things, if you go from end to end. And in there are tons and tons of Mayan, like extinct animal stuff and Mayan artifacts, like you were talking about it, just the waters rose and that stuff just got sucked in. Yeah, they found the oldest, mostly intact skeleton in North America in one of those caves, the Hoyonegro.

Oh, really? It was a woman named Nea, N-A-I-A, I believe. Well, that's what they named her. And she was from something like 14,500 years ago, which is way older than the Clovis people. Can you imagine coming up on that? It'd be pretty neat. Yeah.

Yeah, but this is what cave divers do. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of the things. The deepest is pretty new as far as findings go. Well, the deepest in America is Phantom Springs Cave in Texas, which is chump change at 462 feet. The deepest now, it passed Italy's Pazzo del Merro. It is in the Czech Republic and Pazzo del Merro is now number two.

This one, the Ranica Propast, is 1,325 feet deep. That's amazing. And I don't think they've gone to the bottom. I think they go as far as they can go. And then I think they drop a line and measure from there, right? Exactly. Yeah, that's intimidating. And apparently GPS doesn't work at all in these cave systems.

It's just impenetrable. You're on your own. So they have to tie off 10-foot increments on rope and just lower it down. That's how they figured out the one in the Czech Republic. And this is a big team. This isn't just like, all right, we got our buddy system. You've got a lot of people involved in something like this for safety, obviously. Yeah, and for fellowship.

And for fun. Yeah, the reception afterward is quite nice. Right. So how do you do this? How do you get certified? Oh, well, there's a lot of steps you want to take. You want to become basically a professional open water diver first with years and years of experience. Yeah, this one guy said at least 50 dives before you even think about a cave.

Right. And then after that, you want to start training for cavern diving. Yeah. You want to do that for a couple of years. Get your toes wet. And then, right, and then you start doing cave diving. And one of the ways, I didn't think about this, but it makes sense. One of the ways you train for cave diving is doing night diving.

Taking a night diving course. Oh, yeah. Because there's no sun. Just in open water. Yeah. There's no sunlight there for you. But probably night diving and caverns or something like that. That's probably kind of creepy too.

Yeah. But once you are a certified cave diver, you are part of basically the top 1% of divers in the world. Yeah. I saw an estimate of 75 professional cave divers in the world right now. I totally count. Yeah. So you're part of a very elite group who are actually exploring, pushing the limits of human exploration on Earth right now.

Yeah. And I saw the one guy who had, I think it was the guy who helped out with the rescue in Thailand. Which we got to talk about. Yeah. I mean, he was saying, this stuff is tough to do because you think you just go in and retrieve a body. But it's a crime scene, first of all. Right. So you can't photograph it.

So you have to go down there and first look around and make as many mental notes as you can to recreate this for an artist perhaps or for at least note-taking. Right. And he said it's really tough emotionally and physically to get the body out. It's not, you got to be made of tough stuff. Exactly. That's it? You didn't have anything else on it?

Well, I wanted to talk about the Thai cave rescue. Yeah. That's what we were going on. But the thing is, there weren't anybody. So there was one former Thai seal, Navy seal, who died. And because he died, the Thai Navy realized we don't have any professional cave divers on staff. We need to make this part of our formal training.

So now they do have that. Oh, really? Yeah. But in 2018, in the summer, the whole world was watching because these 12 soccer players and their coach were hiking along in a cave system that got flooded from a monsoon. And they were trapped in what became a sump cave. Yeah. And just from everything we learned about cave diving, the idea that they managed to

get all 12 of the soccer players and their coach out to safety. Amazing. In one of the most treacherous types of caves you can dive and no one died except for this one diver is astounding, man. Yeah. And the one guy was talking about just how silty it was down there. And so you're trying to rescue these people with as minimal movement as possible so you're not getting a silt out conditions.

Right. I just, where's that movie? It's got to be coming. Sure. Yeah. Is that, you got anything else? Hugh Jackman, lead diver? Sure.

Why not? I got nothing else. I mean, I guess this last part about regulations is it's not super highly regulated. You're sort of dealing with the local authorities and it sounds like hazardous or treacherous hiking. You got to check in with an office and usually say, this is what I'm doing. This is when I'm going in and when I'm coming out and you got to sign that little piece of paper when you return, otherwise they're going to come looking for you.

Yeah, but there's also places where you can cave dive all you want where you just pay a fee, they just are like, go with God. Do your thing. There's this flooded mine I've talked about before. I don't remember. It must have been the abandoned mines episode in Bontair, Missouri. It's just this a flooded 19th century mine. That'd be pretty cool.

With like vodka clear water, 100 foot visibility and you just swim around the mine. Hey, there's Rambo. Was he in the mine? Yeah, he hid out in the mine in first blood. I'll bet we had the same conversation in the abandoned mines episode. Probably. Because I don't recall it. Oh, you got anything else?

Nope. Well, if you want to know more about abandoned mines, I almost said, if you want to know more about cave diving, read about it. Probably don't do it. And since I said that, it's time for listening. Oh, you can read about on how stuff works even. That's right. And since I said that, it's time for listening.

I'm going to call this one of the follow-ups from our conversion therapy podcast. We got a lot of really good responses on that. Mm-hmm. And one bad one. Did you see that guy? I didn't see that one, no. Yeah, we had a guy who said he was quitting us because of our liberal bias. But it was interesting because he says, well, I don't think conversion therapy is something

that works. I do think that homosexuality is a disease. He's one of those. Sayonara. And yeah, I wrote him back and just, I was very nice. I was like, you could probably find podcasts that are better suited for you. You didn't say Sayonara? No.

Cultural appropriation? Yeah, I just said, good luck to you, sir. That was very classy, Chuck. Yeah. I always think it's interesting when people write us to tell us they're quitting us. Right. Have you ever taken the time to do that? No, I have not.

You just quit something, right? Yes. Yeah, keep it to yourself. Maybe like, you know, ran about it to friends for a little while to get it off your chest. But like, just so you know. Person, person I've never met. This is from Jordan. He says, hey guys, as a Southern Baptist turned agnostic, I absolutely detest the acceptance

of the garbage psychotherapy pseudoscience of CT. Josh mentioned that if you've ever been an early teenager and a late teenager, you know what it's like to be sexually confused or curious. When I was between the ages of 14 and 17, I was called gay or the F word many times. I did have what some might consider telltale signs, stereotypically at least associated with being gay. The bullying and verbal abuse was so intense and frequent. I truly started to question my sexual preferences.

Oh. That question was put to bed quite definitively one night when a very good male friend of mine and I decided to experiment some. I'll spare the specifics, but I realized that night this is just was not doing it for me. But being the good Baptist boy that I was, I felt guilty about that night. And even though I was not aroused, it was still a homosexual act. I carried that guilt with me for many years and through college until I realized almost every other male friend of mine had some kind of experience that they could look back on

and say, this is when I knew I was straight or gay or bi or trans or whatever. At that point, I was finally able to let go of that guilt and what a relief that was to my mental health. I wanted to thank both of you for making the point that an experience or a feeling you have in that time of your life should not be anything to feel guilty about. I didn't know that when I was mentally abusive to myself over a long time. What is shameful is how many people would use the knowledge of such an act as a weapon to abuse the person even more. Oh boo hiss. So to every teenager out there, please don't think there's something wrong with you because of your curiosity.

Embrace yourself. Don't worry about what your peers or elders may think you are perfect the way you are. Nice. Boom. That's from Jordan. Thanks Jordan. Jordan wasn't even anonymous. Yeah, he even drew a little mic dropping.

You're right. That was a great email. Yeah. That's funny if the guy who said he wrote in to say he was quitting us, he's like, I'm cave-diving. I'll give him one more chance. He gets to listen to your emails. That's it. He's going to send us another email.

He's like, oh, this next one's called the gay disease. Maybe I should listen. Well, that was very nice of Jordan to shout it out to everybody out there. Yes. Way to go. If you want to shout something out to support and encourage your fellow humans, we love that stuff. You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and send us something on one of our social links. Or, more better, you can go to your email client and send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. My Space was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of My Space,

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of My Space on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.