The Jordan Harbinger Show - 984: Susan Casey | Unraveling Mysteries in the Ocean's Darkest Depths

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

What challenges can the ocean help us meet, and what must we do to safeguard its treasures? The Underworld author Susan Casey dives deep for answers here! What We Discuss with Susan Casey: The ocean plays a crucial role in regulating the Earth's climate and serves as the largest carbon sink on the planet, making its preservation essential for mitigating climate change. The ocean is home to a fascinating array of creatures that have adapted to extreme conditions, such as iron-breathing microbes, glass sponges, and jellyfish that can reverse their life cycle. Pollution, including plastics, chemical weapons, and nuclear waste, has severely impacted the ocean ecosystem, with some deep-sea creatures found to have plastic particles embedded in their organs. There are an estimated three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor, preserving valuable historical artifacts and information — such as the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analog computer. Exploring the ocean can lead to groundbreaking discoveries in medicine, Earth's history, and climate, providing valuable insights for addressing humanity's challenges — provided we safeguard this treasury of knowledge for current and future generations. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/984  This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals  Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Yeah, we've used the ocean as a giant dumpster, and the thing is we're not getting away with anything when we do that. We're the ones who are going to have to marinate in it if we eat stuff that lives there and want to swim in it and do anything in it.

Everything has a price, and we're going to be paying it for a really long time, even if we clean up our act very dramatically. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today, my guest, Susan Casey, is an ocean explorer and journalist and all around just an incredible adventurer. Today we're exploring the ocean. We'll dive into, if you'll excuse the pun, how a famous plane crash has opened our eyes to the wonders of the deep in ways we have never seen before. We'll discover some amazing sea creatures that seem like they're just from another planet straight up. And we'll discuss sea monsters, explosives, submarines, plastics, underwater mining, which is unfortunately a thing. Really fascinating conversation about all things ocean that really just took me by surprise.

If you're into science, animals, ships, shipwrecks, and again, who doesn't love a good thing? shipwreck, am I right? You're going to love this episode. Here we go with Susan Casey. I really liked the book. I thought it was so interesting. Thanks. And now I'm like, oh, I should have read the other ones too, but I guess I can do that later. I was like, oh, it's about diving in history. Like, oh, it's not really like, I don't usually, you know, go for this. And then I was just like, but this is interesting. Let me just keep doing. That it was over. And I was like, oh, that's, I'm done with it. That's really interesting. There's so much cool stuff in there. And that's going to be the basis of our conversation today, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, that for me is the game, is to take people on an adventure,

and then, you know, you slide in science, you slide in other things. And, you know, if you just say you're going to write a book about this very dense subject matter, people probably don't want to read it at this point. So let's go on a ride, you know, let's go somewhere really cool that you've never seen before. And yeah. I'm one of those guys who's, and this is cliche, right, but I take the ocean for granted. I only see the surface and I'm sort of mildly terrified about what's underneath that part. And that's it. And I'm just like, oh, I know we got to take care of it. There's so much stuff in there and the animals are amazing.

But it's very hard for me to, like, physically appreciate it. Like, if I go snorkeling, I feel like I can't breathe. If I'm diving with those whale sharks, I'm just like, oh, gosh, I'm going to be the one guy that gets eaten by these vegetarian animals or whatever in the history of the world. And you write that the search for MH17, that airplane, or that airplane crash, showed us the bottom of the Indian Ocean in ways that just no one had ever really seen before.

So tell us about that, because that's kind of an interesting point that we spent all this money looking for this airplane, and rightfully so, there were people on it, but then it just maps the ocean floor, and it's like, well, actually, the silver lining in this cloud of not finding anything with the plane

is look at what we have here, and that was surprising. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was what really caught my attention in the beginning, because if you think of where they think the plane probably went down, It's in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean where there's not a lot of ship traffic.

You get down there into those latitudes and it's gnarly. You know, there's not a lot of traffic. So there's not a lot of high resolution mapping of the seafloor. And just to give you a sense, we've only mapped about 25% of the Earth at high resolution. So we can see seamounts, we can see things that are actually on the seafloor. Whereas in Google Earth, it's very, very low resolution comes from satellites. So to go over an area. that we don't know on the seafloor, particularly an area that really even scientists hardly ever go to,

it was like putting the lens on the Hubble telescope. So, you know, we kind of knew there was this huge fracture zone over there. You could see it on Google Earth, sort of in the right location, but no detail. And then they zoom in on it, and they find out that there are thousands of volcanoes and it's even deeper than they thought. And there are really interesting sort of moats around the volcanoes, which indicate that there are currents that they didn't understand. I started reading about papers from marine geologists about this. It was like, what do you mean? It's a network of national parks for giants. It's like Tolkien's Middle Earth, and it's always been there, and we didn't know it. Old continents. Oh, really? Yeah. Old continent. I mean, I guess that had to exist, right? Sure.

Well, yeah, remnants of when Australia, India, South Africa, and Antarctica were sort of one big continent called Gondwana and Gondwana broke apart and there are still bits of Gondwana on the seafloor. So to me it was like, I don't know, we live on this earth and the ocean is 98% of it and the deep ocean is 95% of that 98%. I mean, there's a lot down there that's just awesome. Are there fossils deep underwater or is that not possible because of ocean chemistry? Because imagine the fossils that are in there if it's an ancient continent. Oh yeah. No, and they also, they find things down there like, you know, megalodons probably been gone. Great White Shark blown up to parade float size, probably been gone for 20 million years at least. And they find megalodon teeth, and they've

been down there for so long that they're like encrusted with metals, because metals will accrete out of the seawater. And the seafloor is constantly being renovated in a way because where the tectonic plates pull apart, there's a 40,000 mile long seam that is all volcanic. So 75% of Earth's volcanism comes from that. It's called the Mid-Ocean Ridge, and it encircles the planet, kind of like the seams on a baseball. On the other side, we have subduction where the tectonic plates are colliding and basically imagine a tectonic plate being fed into a paper shredder. That's where all the megathrust earthquakes that cause tsunamis happen. But so we are recycling seafloor. So even though the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the oldest part of the

seafloor that hasn't gone through the paper shredder yet is 340 million years old. Ah. So it's constantly recycling. And so you could have things that are 340 years old. But other than that, when it subdux goes back into the mantle and eventually melts and just becomes part of the system again. Right. 340 million years old.

So, well, look, that's old enough for me to be still super interested in it. It is a bummer that we don't have the beginning of the earth rocks down there that we could, you know, get into. But I suppose them's the brakes. You mentioned that metals, I can't remember the word you used. but they go into the fossil. So there's metal-crusted. Metal Meglodon sounds like a great name for a band,

but also sounds like something from Transformers that could come out of the ocean. That's a good basis for a Godzilla sequel. How does that work? Does it literally mean that there's metal on the outside of the fossil? Because that's so badass for some reason. There's metals all through the ocean

and they accrete over millions and millions of years. Yeah. Or precipitate. They basically like sort of encrusted slowly. Like if you think of how a pearl is made, there's a little nucleus in it that eventually after a long time becomes the pearl, similar in the ocean. There's metals, gold, silver, like they're in the seawater. I've heard there's so much gold in the sea, and then there's something like in the core of the earth,

there's something like 20 trillion tons, where if you could get it all, gold would be worth less than paper, basically, because there's just so much down there. And obviously, you can't get all the metals out of the core of the earth. But it just sort of illustrates the amount of stuff that's underneath us that we will, don't have the technology to get to, don't have the will to get to, which reminds me, you said something like space research gets $150 for every single dollars spent on ocean research. So why do we think that is? Because space is fascinating, but to put 150 times the funding into it when we are next to the ocean,

well, depending on where you live, right? It's a little, I don't totally understand the logic here. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. When you said that you think of the ocean as what you look at, you see the surface. We're visual creatures. That is sort of our thing. We can look upwards. We can see the stars. We can imagine going up there. And the idea of it is really excited. Like we're hardwired to go upwards. We like the light. We don't want to be in the dark. And I think there's something about the ocean that makes people really nervous. Well, yeah. And, you know, especially, yeah,

the idea of going deep into the darkness, into an unknown realm, there's all this pressure. Like, there is a sort of almost a biological bias, terrestrial biological bias. And of course, with space, we could be like, hey, we might be able to mine an asteroid. We could go to Mars and have a town. We might be able to expand ourselves. We might be able to go outwards and upwards, and that sounds good. Whereas going inward into darkness, into blindness, you know, that is less appealing in general. but, you know, it's really important because this is the planet we live on and the deep ocean,

the entire ocean, deep ocean especially is so alive and so unknown. You say alive and this is one of the sentences that got me. I wrote it down and paraphrasing it, but you said in the ocean there are creatures that breathe iron have glass skeletons and that can turn themselves inside out

and I have more examples of this kind of crazy stuff later in my notes here, but when I heard that I was like back up the truck, back up the iron breathing glass chassis truck, how is it possible that you can have a glass, glass isn't naturally occurring? What can breathe iron, it's metal? I don't understand. You can't have to, you can't leave us hanging with stuff like that. Okay, so the iron breathers are microbes and the ocean is just an incredible mass of microbes. It's 89% of its biomass is microbial and microbes, as you know,

just run the joint. They do everything. They make the planet habitable for us. And so they have all kinds of different metabolisms, and there are microbes in hydrothermal vents that will actually metabolize, in other words, eat, breathe iron. Wow. And they just dissolve it, kind of? They just digest iron? They digest it. Wow.

And these microbes can digest a lot of things that people didn't expect them to be able to do. The really unusual microbes are known as extremophiles, and they can live even a mile beneath the seafloor. They can live in hydrothermal vents from volcanic seams on the seafloor. where the fluid that's coming out, the vent fluid is sort of a mix of minerals and gases and microbes from the mantle, is like 600 degrees. They thrive everywhere. And even like a mile beneath the seafloor, there's this entire deep biosphere that scientists are just beginning to study. We don't know how deep life goes beneath the seafloor, but it doesn't stop at the seafloor, certainly, yeah.

I didn't realize things lived under the seafloor. I've definitely seen on Discovery Channel, or heard about those microbes that live on the vents in there. It's like 600 degrees. Now that I think about it, how do you get something like that and bring it up to study it if it lives in 600 degree? I'm piping hot doesn't even quite cover it temperatures. Do you need a container that keeps it that warm? Oh, yeah.

The answer to that is very carefully because you can, it's really hard to not only to keep it at that sort of in its environment, but also to isolate it from other things around it that could contaminate it by the time you get, you know, four miles up to the surface. Four miles. I can't even imagine. And then somebody's got the, I guess, depending on how you look at it, unenviable job of trying to open that thing carefully, right, once it's up top. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then study it. There's pressure, you know, things sort of blow out the top sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Deep sea scientists are very intrepid folks. Yeah, you'd have to be because your stories of going into the sub and it's like, okay, here's what happens if the electricity goes out. And I'm like, no, no, no, this is already

scary enough. Now you're going to do it with no light and like maybe the oxygen. Okay, we have four hours of oxygen, but don't worry, we're going to gradually float up to the surface and someone will come get us. It's like, I'll leave that stuff to you, Susan. You said there might be as many as a billion species in the ocean, which is almost hard to believe. But I guess if we're including what microbes and things like that, then it's, okay. They call them taxa rather than species, but yeah, we have no clue. The microbial world is just so immense, and I think we're going to see some really interesting discoveries in our lifetime. This is new. And also, the other thing that gets me really excited is the idea of that we really are kind of the first people in history to ever be

able to know what's at the bottom of the ocean, what its dimensions are, what its geology is, what lives there? What's it like? We are so privileged to be living in an age when we can, can have those answers. Yeah, I guess if you sailed, I don't know when they invented boats, 600 years ago or more in your, longer? I don't even know. A thousand years? I didn't want to say a thousand because I might sound dumb, but maybe it's more than that. Keep going. Keep going. Yeah. I mean, as I think as long as there have been humans looking at water, there have been humans trying to figure out, hmm, how do we get across that water? What do we go out in it? Now that I do the math, 600 makes no sense. But a thousand somehow seems way too long, but I guess not.

Okay, little note here. I'm a knucklehead. Many of you already know this as evidenced by my email inbox, but by way of further proof, ships were not invented a few hundred years ago. Duh, they were invented at least by 1,300 BC, and the Phoenicians were building large merchant ships by 1,200 BC. So I was only off by like 2,000 or so years. No big deal. Anyway, ships are old, way older than I thought, and I'm glad I checked this so I could embarrass myself live on the show and not edit it out because you all deserve to have a laugh at me for that ridiculous gaff. Okay, back to the show. If you're sailing on that, you would have to be absolutely fearless because you have no idea

what's underneath. Absolutely. All you know is it's really far and you might never come home. I don't know. I just can't even imagine the mindset of somebody who sets out to do that. It's kind of like what you're doing going underneath, but at least you kind of know that you can come back up to the top and there's a boat there. Those people, they had no idea how to get back home or the food is going to run out.

Nothing. You know, it wasn't as though it was a luxury post to be a mariner in, say, the 18th or 19th century. It was like people that had a choice between here, you can go to jail or you can go onto this ship where you're going to get scurvy and probably going to die. I mean, it was definitely an adventurous time for going to sea. The other scary element of this is people come back and say, oh, yeah, there's sea monsters out there that eat whole boats and stuff like that. And of course, ancient sailors believed in monsters. Now we know that either that was apocryphal never happened or it was some kind of giant squid or other animal. They must have looked like alien monster dinosaurs to anybody who saw a glimpse of even a dead giant squid floating tentacle in the middle of the ocean.

Oh, I mean, imagine being a medieval farmer and you're there walking along the beach and there's a stranded sperm whale. I mean, what are he supposed to think? Or a baleen whale with all the sort of hairl. plates hanging from its mouth or male narwhal has this huge long tusk on its forehead. If you saw any of those animals, and they do strand and they do die and wash up and you have no context. You've got no clue. You're looking at a monster as far as you're concerned, you know? Wow. Geez. Yeah, the whole village goes down to take a look at the smelly, swollen, rotting carcass of this giant monster. Is that what we kind of make of the old tales of sea monsters and giant animals?

They say they take down ships. Is that even possible for a big animal? to do that to a boat? Well, a sperm whale can. Certainly a sperm whale in the days of whaling could pose a threat to a ship and did. And you know, you kind of can't blame the sperm whale. No. But yeah. So I mean, they're trying to stab it. And I don't know if you've seen in the news that I wouldn't call this an attack, but the orcas in the Iberian coast, they call them the Iberian pod. There's 15 orcas and they've managed to sink five boats. They looked into this because I was, You know, my book before the underworld was called Voices in the Ocean, it's about dolphins and orcas are, of course, the biggest and wildiest dolphins. And I wanted to know what was going on. And it seems that the scientists are really scratching their heads. But they do think that one thing that dolphins tend to do is it's almost like us having a fad, like we're going to wear our hair a certain way. Dolphins were for a while seen. It was all the fashion in dolphin world to have a sponge over your beak. So it could be a kind of a hobby or a fad.

There isn't really a way to say that, oh, okay, it's because they're mad at us, because we've done all this damage to their environment. Could be. We don't know that yet. There was one of the orcas in that pod had propeller cuts. I see. Yeah. So they might think, oh, these things are baby killing machines. We've got to sink these things.

And they won't come back. Yeah. And workers are really advanced in terms of their social. abilities or ability to sort of, you've probably seen the video of when they all get together and they see a seal on an iceberg and they line up and they make a wave that makes the seal tip off the icebergly there. Orcas are formidable, formidably intelligent and social and everything else. I wasn't going to go down this road, so this might be a little fuzzy, but have you seen, what is that movie? Is it called Blackfish where they explain the orca's killing the people at SeaWorld

or whatever it was? Oh yeah. And I've written about those incidents as well. What was going on there? sort of looks like they tortured this orca by keeping it in a small cage away from its offspring and it just developed mental illness or something like that. Is that possible? Clearly, absolutely. Any dolphin that is put into a tank is being tortured because when you see them in the wild, their entire lives are each other and they will travel for miles and miles and miles through the open sea, hunting and playing and communicating. It's like the equivalent of us being put in a padded cell, But even if it was a four-season's hotel room, with room service being delivered every day, we would still go nuts eventually. And that's basically dolphin captivity.

Just such a social, intelligent animal, orcas have never attacked humans. I think workers are too smart for that in the wild. But in captivity, there's been a number of fatalities and way, way, way more injuries than the marine parks we'll ever admit to. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I get it, though. I think everybody watched that and was like, well, yeah, you're standing on his face. Yeah.

Withholding food. It had a baby. You took the baby away. Like, yeah, I'd kill you, too. First chance I got. The more you learn about them, the more you realize that this is truly awful what we have done. Because when you remove an orca from a pod, particularly a female orca, it's matrilineal. So they can have four generations of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and the sons stay with their mother's their entire lives.

They don't leave. And because, you know, it's the ocean. nobody's writing down anything, the oldest female orcas are sort of the keeper of the knowledge. Like, they know that if the ocean conditions change, okay, this is where we're going to go to get the fish. It's like sort of a living library of how this particular group is going to survive. And when we just take them out, we're taking out their chances of survival as well as an

individual who the removal of an orca causes real grief. And one of the things that I think it was very, very evident that they do feel grief, Do you remember it was a couple years ago, an orca in Puget Sound had a calf, and the calf died. The reasons for that, or because Puget Sound is basically completely polluted and they're slowly starving. The calf died. The mother then draped the calf over her kind of a rostrum, you know, the top of her head. Okay. And swam around with it for 17 days.

Do you remember that? No, but that's so heartbreaking. Yeah. it's so clear that they feel emotions, they feel grief. And when neuroscientists look at their particular brains, which are incredibly elaborated, they have two hemispheres like ours, but they're, you know, like 30 million years older than ours. And so they can do all kinds of things and have different wiring that accommodates being primarily an acoustic animal because that's how they communicate in the ocean. There's one area that their paralytic system that's so,

we have it too, but theirs is so much bigger and it's very baroque. And when scientists look at it, what it indicates to them is that there's very sophisticated processing going for emotions. There's a lot of sociology and emotions even evident in the structure of their brain. Of course they're feeling emotions. They may be feeling them differently than we more strongly than we do. Yeah. It is also kind of the brain indicates that they may have a slightly different sense of self that's more communal. So they have a lot of these particular neurons called von Economo neurons that relate to socializing and empathy. And we have them too, but Orcas have three times more than we do and have had them a lot longer. And it really just everything we know about their

brains means that we should be very cognizant of the fact that we're sharing the oceans with this very advanced. You know, the word intelligence is loaded, but I'm still going to say it, intelligence. It makes me feel kind of sick to know that there's this really sensitive group of animals in the ocean that we're literally just throwing our shit into and treating like garbage. That's like, that's really sad to me. Having like an emo moment here, knowing that just like those things are in there suffering like that. Because that's so gross that what we do to those, I'm not, I wasn't going to bring this up either, but those Farrow Islands where they slaughter all those animals just for fun. Oh, yeah. It's so gross. Yeah. Can you tell us about that a little bit? I think

most people have never heard of this, and it's like one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen. Oh, it really is. It's called The Grind, which is horrible enough, and it's really a kind of blood sport. And they whales, they're dolphins. Now, dolphins in whales, it has to do with size. So these are called pilot whales. They are, they're just a larger dolphin. They have, they're toothed whales. And they drive them. You use sound, actually, to drive them up on the beach, and then they just hack away at them. And the idea, they do this also in Taiji, Japan, if you've ever seen the movie, The Cove, or heard of that. Another big mass roundup of dolphins. I've been there, unfortunately. So in the Faroe Islands, they kill all these pilot whales, but here's the thing about pilot whales. If you start eating

pilot whale meat at this point, because so many toxins are in the ocean, and keep in mind, a lot of these toxins bind to fat. So these are animals with a lot of fat. You're basically eating a super fun site. The idea that they're going to eat these, particularly if they're feeding them to children, because some of the toxins in there are neurotoxygen. It is not a good idea. There's lead. You can't be eating pilot whale at this point, and that seems like a really lame way to save animals is because we've made them so polluted we can't eat them, but that's the case with pilot whales. So I don't know why the Faroe Islands keeps doing this. I don't know why any nation is engaging in whaling. We know so much more now. Wails are such an

integral part of keeping all the other, the rest of the ecosystem in balance. They're cornerstone species in the ocean. We can't take them out. You should be. trying to, you know, make sure there are as many of them as possible if we want to keep fishing, if we want a healthy ocean. So, yeah, the Faroe Islands, stop it. At first, when I heard about it, I was like, look, this is like a native culture thing. You got to respect what they're doing. Maybe they have a reason for it. And then when you see it, you're just like, wow, this is just like watching a group of people get scalped or something. It's on the level of disgust where you're just like, wow, is that necessary? This seems totally

undiss. And it's brutal. It's not like they're like, okay, here's the humane way that you kill this, and then you butcher it and eat it and respect it. It's like you're just stabbing babies with knives and laughing maniacally. It's totally insane. Yeah, it was described to me as someone who's been there as complete blood sport. Yeah. Oh, I could never do anything like that. And you're right. It is sort of weird to be like, save the whales. Not just because they're a cornerstone species of an important ecosystem, but because we have ruined it so much that if you eat it, your kid's going to end up. in a care home because of the toxins going to his brain. That's just a weird, weird argument, but here we are.

Eat pilot whale and watch your liver shut down. Seriously. But, you know, when a whale dies in the open ocean, eventually, you know, first of all, the first thing that happens is the sharks will show up. They'll sort of come around and start grabbing bites out of it. The second thing that happens is that the whale will sink and it will end up on the seafloor. They call it a whale fall. And it's like having all of a sudden, here comes the buffet, right?

every little bit of this animal is going to be consumed over the course of years. It's like a little miniature ecosystem on the seafloor. There are even worms that burrow into the bones, and like every little bit of it supports the ecosystem all around it. And it's also a lot of carbon capture in a whale when a whale goes down. So there are real ecological reasons to want to make sure that there are as many whales as possible in the ocean. if we care about sequestering carbon, if we care about other species being healthy, these whale falls are fascinating. You can Google them and you can watch the whale just sort of dwindling.

I saw one. Yeah. On Reddit. Actually, it was a orca, I think, and it just sort of stops moving and then like just falls into the abyss, basically. And it's, yeah, it's mesmerizing because, yeah, it just said a whale's sinking. But really it's, I mean, you're witnessing this sort of like special moment in nature, I guess, that, and it died of natural causes, too, which I think makes it a little bit less horrific, right? It actually lived its full life. The whale fall, the fact that the ecosystem uses the whole thing up, it really is something incredible. And carbon sequestration, and we've done episodes about this as well, it's tricky. And it's something we can't do as humans. So the fact that there's these giant beasts underneath that are

essentially harmless to humans doing it is pretty amazing. And I will say, every time I go and eat sushi, I'm always like, 10 years, this might be like three times the price or just not available at all. I always think about that. Like, enjoy it now while it's not $1,000 for uni or whatever. I hate to tell you, but I have stopped eating sushi about 10 years ago. And of course, I loved it. I didn't. I figured.

It's just. I was like, I wonder if she's going to be mad at me for eating sushi. I'm not, look, I'm not out. I think people have to make their own decisions about this, but it's because of the pollutants. There are nanoplastics. Hold on. So basically all the, the lot of the fish that you eat is sushi are fatty fish, right? And as I said, we outlawed some very bad chemicals in the ocean in the 70s and, you know, things like DDT dioxins.

We outlawed them in general, but they didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke. They're ambient. And they call them persistent organic pollutants. We don't know how long they're going to be out there, but they bind to fat. So especially a fish like a tuna at the higher end of the trophic, you know, scale, is eaten a lot of things on the way up. At this point, there are nanoplastics so fine that they're in. embedded in cells of deep sea animals. And, you know, so unfortunately, you're not just eating fish, even if it tastes good.

Right. Yeah. Oh, my God. I figured there was a little bit of mercury in there because I've read about that. And that, heavy metals, cadmium. There's nuclear waste in the ocean. There's radioactive carbon particles from nuclear testing. There's lots of things that you probably don't want to ingest.

Whenever you see those, was it bikini island where they just nuked the whole thing and they show this giant plume go up? and you're like, who's filming this from that boat? Because it looks like they're pretty close to this. Absolutely. I mean, when they did those tests, nobody really understood the effects of them. I've seen footage of people like stirring vats of nuclear waste with a bare arm. And they didn't know. But you do know that when you set off a nuclear bomb in the ocean,

you're going to cause a lot of havoc and kill like vast amounts of life. But the really kind of, I guess, uplifting part about bikini atoll is that it was so radioactive. We left it alone for a really long time, and now the ocean is so resilient, quite good with scrubbing radioactivity. It's coming back. It's flourishing. It's one of those places where we haven't been and you see this sort of more thriving ecosystem there than in the places around it.

So we can repair our damage. That's really good news. I do wonder where it is because if it's anywhere in sort of the – I just wonder if China's fishing there illegally or other countries are fishing there illegally because you hear about that all the time. Yeah. Or is it too far? Well, I don't know. I think at this point, people think it's maybe still too radioactive, but it's...

Well, I don't think they care if they're illegally fishing. Like, they're not going to eat it, right? What do they care? This is in the Marshall Islands. I'm trying to find a map, but it's like so remote. I don't know. It is remote, and you're right. There's illegal fishing. My cousin is a pilot for Air Canada, and he was flying over the Pacific recently, and they came across what looked like the lights of a major city. And of course, there was no major city below them. And he said it was just this... industrial fishing fleet that was so enormous and the lights were so bright they could see them just brilliantly at 35,000 feet. Like these are massive, massive operations that, you know, that are taking fish on an industrial scale. It doesn't seem sustainable at all, of course. It isn't. No. That's even before you get to the illegal fishing. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Susan Casey. We'll be right back. By the way, I know I tell you about

six-minute networking a lot. I want to keep this one short. It is It's not cringy, it is not gross, it is for retired people, it is for people looking for jobs, it is for people in jobs who want to network better and not look like a person who's networking. Just practical exercises that are going to take a few minutes that will make you a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer in a few minutes a day, and many of the guests on our show subscribing contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Again, it's all free over at six minute networking.com. And I do not email you 10,000 times to get you to buy something after that. That is not a thing that I do. Anyway, now back to Susan Casey. So for people who are wondering, and you're not, you're driving, you don't want to use Google Maps, it's, Bikini Atoll is in the Marshall Islands, which is between Hawaii and, well, Asia. So if the Chinese illegal fishing fleets are getting all the way to, was it Chile, I think they found boats off the coast, then it's very possible that they're already there. So you might be eating some Bikini Atoll sushi, radioactive sushi. And that reminds me, you may, you might,

mentioned unexploded ordinance underwater, so bombs and chemical weapons. Oh, yeah. What are those things doing there? How do they get there? Is this World War II? They fell out of a plane that got shot down? Oh, no. I wish it was just that. So until pretty recently, like in the 80s, the military called, not just in the U.S., but everywhere, called it sea disposal. The idea was even earlier than World War II, for sure, like World War I, there were troughs and trenches. There's one in the UK that they're all over the place. There are a huge amount of munitions are on the seafloor around Oahu. It makes sense. Kind of Pearl Harbor is there. But one of the characters in the underworld is because I lived on Maui at the time and would go over to Oahu and hang out with them. And they had these two

submersibles. They did a lot of charting of this because they found that right around Pearl Harbor are kind of near Waikiki. There were unexploded chemical warheads, just a tremendous amount of I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of chemical weapons as well as these things called hedgehogs. And there are these bombs that have these, they look like hedgehogs, right? They've got these sort of spikes sticking out of them. If any of those spikes have pressure on it in a certain way, it will just explode. So it's a pressure bomb.

Oh, my gosh. That pressure wave would set off every other hedgehog in the vicinity, and there are a lot of them. They did a study. The Army had people down there. a mass spectrometer, they were trying to figure it out, they determined that it would be more dangerous to try to bring them up than it would be to sort of leave them in place. Some of them are inert after years of just being underwater. But mustard gas does not go so quickly.

In a lot of places in the world where there are mustard bombs on the seafloor, fishermen who pull up their nets by hand end up with this sort of gel on their hands that's basically mustard gas. And every so often, particularly in Europe, in Northern Europe, the fishermen pull out bombs that are, will actually explode. Oh, my gosh. There's an arsel on the seafloor all over the place. So when you find that, I've seen it on C-Maps where it'll say there'll be an icon or it'll say UXO and it, so you're not supposed to navigate over it because they just don't know what will set it off or if it's already been set off or if it's a nerd, they just don't know. But you're diving, or you and your colleagues are diving around this stuff, do you ever find anything like that?

Or is it always, do they have a pretty good idea of where all this stuff is? Well, around Oahu, they do, they mapped it all out. And I haven't actually personally been down on the sub and seen one of them, but I've seen lots of pictures. It's not like something you would actively worry about if you're just diving in the open ocean. Like, you have to, it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around how vast the deep ocean is. everybody talks about how 70% of the planet is covered with ocean, right? But what I like to think of it is, imagine a biosphere, a living space, and 98% of that is ocean, and 2% of it is land. That's Earth. And then 95% is deep ocean. So we really don't have any scope. Everything we know, we're living

on 2% of the biosphere of Earth. No matter where you go in the deep ocean, unless you're going to a couple places that people often go like the wreck of the Titanic or Challenger Deep now the deepest spot in the ocean, you're the first person who's ever been there. You're probably the only person that's ever going to go there. It's just enormous. You'd have to be very unlucky to get down there and end up landing on a hedgehog or something like that. But if you're driving around Oahu in a submersible, you do watch out. Do these things ever just blow up on their own? Like is it ever just like, oh, that big explosion you heard? That was just some UXO blowing up that's been there for 80 years. It has happened. I don't know if it's happened in Hawaii, but it has

happened. Yeah, you'd think it would have to. There were also, a friend of mine was involved with the French efforts to demine. Sometimes during wars, they'll put landmines on, say the bottom of the Suez Canal is one, the bottom of the Red Sea, things like that. They actively try to demine those because there's so much traffic through them and, you know, we don't want these things lying around. But my friend told me that longer story, but he was one of the passengers aboard the Titan submersible. His name was P.H. Nardjolet. He also had to demine things that they were really concerned about were the bombs that Hitler's troops had left because they were booby-trapped. They would have to go down there and be incredibly careful how they would remove these bombs, check them out.

I mean, obviously they weren't in the water when they did it, but they would have to really be careful. There are conventions of war so these things don't happen, but there are also instances where they're booby-trapped. That's absolutely nuts. It seems like it would just be safer to let it blow up under, to trigger it somehow than to bring it up and disarm it. But I mean, what do I know? I think that's also what they were doing. You know, I don't know all the details. I've never witnessed this, but it's definitely an ongoing effort. Another thing that people often don't think about is there are these, all of our data on the internet, all of our financial stuff, all of our, like, we need this now. It goes through seafloor cables. It doesn't go through satellites. So there are hundreds of high-speed cables in the seafloor, telecommunications cables that are really. sort of the circulatory system of modern life and certainly the modern economy. And so now they want to put in more and more of these cables. And they're finding when they go to do the surveys that they may end up, oh, wow, here's a giant pit of munitions from a war. And so it's becoming something that we need to pay more attention to as we sort of venture deeper as a society. So going back to

bad sushi, if that stuff is at the bottom and people are trawling or whatever, do they not, trigger that stuff, or do they not maybe open up a barrel or whatever mustard gas gel down there? And if they're catching fish while they're doing that, and there's a mustard gas container in there, is that possible that stuff's also in my sushi or am I just sort of being overly paranoid at this point? Well, I think if there was a mustard gas in your sushi, you'd probably know it. Yeah, yeah, you'd figure it out fast after the fact, but I'm just wondering if that stuff is touching the fish that I'm eating. Yeah, I mean, everything's touching everything.

That's kind of what the ocean is all about. Yeah, everything's circulated. Everything's in motion. Everything's going, you know, is wafting around, and everything's eating everything else, and then it's dying, and then it's getting back into the system. So none of this stuff is really going away. Some stuff goes away a little easier than others. I mean, all of our plastic is still down there. There is no plastic that has biodegraded on planet Earth yet. We don't know when there will be, maybe never, but probably some point. There are so much nanoplastics in some of these animals that they can't find one that's fully organic. Even at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, there's a little creature called an amphipod. It looks like a little crustacean. So we're talking as far as you can get away from us. Bottom of the ocean, deepest spot in the ocean. Kind of the final sink for all of our stuff because they're in these trenches that form between tectonic plates. Like imagine the Himalayas turned upside down.

Those are Hidal trenches, the peaks of the mountains. They found this amphipod that has so much plastic embedded throughout its organs that they named it. It's a new species. They named it Eurithini's Plasticus. Oh, man. It's the first plastic hybrid organic creature. And then they found as many as they could to see if there was a baseline, like, at what point did this animal get so contaminated? Couldn't find one that wasn't plastic organic.

And I asked him how many other animals do you think, you know, are going through this? And he said all of them. That's really scary. I've done episodes on plastics. And I had one recently with this guy who was like a scientist. And he's like, look, plastics degrade. But it just takes a really long time. But they degrade.

And that still doesn't quite sit right with me. And you just said no plastic has ever fully degraded, which is biodegraded. Bio-degraded. I see. They do. You know, they go from big hunks to little pieces to microscopic particles to nanoparticles to who knows what next, but they're still not biodegraded, like back to their organic elements of plastic.

So that was sort of left out of that episode. And we're doing this sort of deep dive fact check on it because it was like half right. And then half of it was kind of like maybe pulling the wool a little bit. It was a controversial episode, and it was sort of like, oh, a big relief because plastic's not that bad, but then it's like, but some of the stuff is even worse. Did you happen to see the news yesterday where they found a quarter million nanoparticles of plastic in the average bottle of water? No, but that's really gross. And also not that surprising, I suppose. That's really gross.

Yeah, plastic is more pernicious than we think. And, I mean, I have to say, I think we have bigger challenges right in our face than plastic. but plastic is a really big one. The reason is because we don't know how it's going to affect long-term development of endocrine systems, immune systems. If like a kid, say baby right now is ingesting all these nanoparticles of plastic or an animal in the ocean, that does something. It may not, like, they may not drop dead in front of your eyes at the first ingestion,

but it's this long-term effect that it can't be good. Well, I would imagine. And we've also done shows on endocrine disruptors. in your house, like thalates or whatever it's in your, like you're putting shampoo on your head, and it's been in a plastic bottle, and there's plastics in there, and it disrupts your hormones. And it's like, well, that's not good for adults, but it's really not good for developing little boys and girls, because we just have no idea. Yeah, the amount of stuff that whenever we do shows like this, people will go, I can't believe

we used to dispose of chemical weapons in the ocean. And it's like, well, yeah, but then in 30, 50 years we're going to be like, I can't believe we used to put things that would touch your skin in plastic bottles for years at a time, or we would drink things out of plastic. Can you believe they used to drink things and eat things out of plastic? I mean, it's only a matter of time until something like that is so common. And we just say, yeah, when we're little, everything was in plastic, and people can't believe it, right?

Plastic is so durable and so, like, omnipresent. What we should be using it for is are the things that we never want to get rid of. Or we never, like, a heart stent or, like, some sort of three-dimensionally printed housing or something, you know, roof tiles. I don't know, but instead it's like, oh, we'll just use this once and toss it away like it's going somewhere. It's not going anywhere. You ever go to a hotel and you got, I forgot my toothbrush. They gave this plastic, and you're like, I'm going to use this for 30 seconds or two minutes or however long. And you want to reuse it, but it's a piece of crap so you end up throwing it away and feeling terrible for the next 10 minutes. It's just really

horrible. One of the things that was said during the plastics episode, the most recent one with Chris de Armit. He said, hey, we only find fishing gear in remote places. We don't find trash. But you've been to a lot of remote places. Have you seen trash there or only fishing gear? All of the above. There's trash everywhere. And in some of the remote places of the ocean, and you're on the seafloor a few miles down, you're not going to see it. But there are people who've been down in submersibles as deep as 10,000 meters or, you know, six miles who have seen eco-friendly plastic bags floating past the viewport of the submersible. And teddy bears on the seafloor and spam cans.

And a friend of mine who's a subpilot said, the most common bar none piece of human detritus that you see in the deep ocean are Budweiser beer bottles and cans. So it's a very popular. Really? Yeah, on the deep seafloor. I'm surprised to hear that. I was going to guess flip-flops because so much of the world wears that,

they're always garbage. Yeah. Oh, man. Budweiser, though? I don't know why. Maybe fishermen like bud. That almost doesn't make any sense because Budweiser's really only, I mean, the only people dumb enough to drink that are Americans like me.

And how much of it is being consumed and then thrown into the ocean? I mean, don't we recycle the bottles? Mostly, you get 10 cents for it, for God's sake. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you're not near a recycling facility, but I think, yeah, stuff gets dumped off ships. It's got to be that. Yeah, we've used the ocean as a giant dumpster. And the thing is, we're not getting away with anything when we do that.

No. You know, we're the ones who are going to have to marinate in it if we eat stuff that lives there and want to swim in it and do anything in it. Everything has a price. And we're going to be paying it for a really long time, even if we clean up our act very dramatically. Yeah, it's not going to be solved in my lifetime from the sound of it. You mentioned the Titanic submersible or the Titan submersible. Is that the one that imploded, the one that was made out of, was it carbon fiber type stuff? Styrofoam and duct tape.

Styrofoam and duct tape. Yeah. I really was mystified by that. Are they so hard to build submersibles or is that company is just like, ah, we figured out a way to make this really cheap. My book was going to press right before this happened. And I'd been following this company for like five years before the accident happened. I shouldn't call it an accident.

It wasn't an accident. It was entirely predictable. But so I wrote a big piece for Vanity Fair about this that came out. It kind of was like my primal scream about it because these submersibles, are very expensive. We know exactly how to engineer vehicles to go safely into the deep ocean, but it takes a really long time. It's not about innovating on materials for the passenger sphere. Like he was using a type of carbon fiber that's wound filaments. This is a really strong material. If you've got pressure coming from the inside out, like let's say you have gas,

or let's say you're building an airplane, it's really unpredictable when the pressure comes from the outside, like the very, very intense pressures of the deep ocean. And to give you a sense of how intense, at the depth that the Titan was diving, about 4,000 meters is where the Titanic lies in the Atlantic. The pressure is of 8,000 pounds per square inch. And it's coming from every degree, 360 degrees, every direction, equally. The only shape that can withstand that kind of pressure is a sphere. At that level of pressure, the only certain materials can handle those forces without deforming or what they call in submersible speak, failing catastrophically,

which is what happened to the Titan. Titanium, steel, steel alloy. These days it's mostly titanium. But because it's so rigorous, not just like the physics and the materials that are needed and the precision, but it's also the safety.

So all of the other subs go through what would be the equivalent of the FAA, like really peer review from an external independent expert agent And there are many of them. It adds a huge amount of cost to the build of the vehicle. But there's no making an end round around that. And so, in fact, though, Stockton Rush, what he did was he built his sub in the U.S. out of this carbon fiber and absolutely everybody who, it's a very small world, deep sea submersibles. Yeah, and it would have to be, right? Yeah, very small. There are only about

six or seven other submersibles that can go as deep as 4,000 meters or below. And only two that can go to full ocean depth, one of which I dived in. And the other. one of which is owned by the Chinese government. So that gives you a sense of how like rarefied this world is. And he wanted his craft to be a cylinder because he wanted to be able to stick five people in there because that would make economic sense. Right. He could charge. Yeah. And they could charge because people wanted to go to see the Titanic and there are a lot of people that do. And he wanted to make it out of this lighter material which he felt was stronger because it would be easier to transport. But here's the thing like the ocean

doesn't care about your business plan. You see these submersibles on a ship and they've got their own climate-controlled hangers. They've got their own engineering technicians. They're inspected and inspected and inspected and inspected and they've got their own ships and they've got 18 different kinds of redundancy for any safety failure. And here's this guy towing this submersible like on a basically like a float platform off through the North Atlantic to get to the Titanic dive site. Well, how do they even do maintenance on it when it's floating off the back of the ship. And so the reason I kind of knew about it back in 2017, 2018 is when I decided, hey, I want to write about the deep ocean, my biggest question was, okay, well, how do I get down there? It's hard. Got to call Ray Dalio. Yeah. Well, I did dive in one of

his ocean access subs. But at the time, I was just beginning. I was just learning about subs. And as mentioned, lived in Hawaii. So I was hanging out with the University of Hawaii. They had two, 2,000 meters submersibles that worked in the Pacific. But I heard they were about to come out of the water and they're not going to dive again. I heard about the Titan. I heard about this company in Seattle that, hey, we're going to take paying passengers to 4,000 meters. And I was like, I don't really want to go to the Titanic, but that could work. So I called them up, spoke to a marketing person. You know, a journalist, I'm always recording my conversations and transcribing them later in case I want to quote them. So I've got this conversation. And it's,

just all kinds of misinformation about how great this thing is and how innovative and how safe. I'm thinking, this is the answer. I go back to Hawaii and I spoke to Terry Kirby, who was the chief pilot of the University of Hawaii subs. And, hey, I might dive in. It wasn't even built yet the Titan. It hadn't even started. They were just talking about it and they had pictures of it. And so I said to him, I'm thinking about diving in this Titan.

And he was like, just absolutely not. You must never set foot in this. And then he started to explain why. And once I started to understand why, and just think about it this way, if you're going to put your foot on a soda can and see what happens, crush a sphere and it just gets stronger. Right. I'm starting to learn all this, all the dynamics of what really is about, the deep ocean and how to get there safely. And I started a file. Like, everybody I met in the deep ocean world was talking about this.

We don't really think they're going to do it. Like, we're trying to figure out a way to stop them from doing it. But he was threading a needle of regulation going into international waters through Canada and all this. So basically to sum it up, like what happened is what everybody feared what happened. And nobody who knows anything about submersible's thought for one second that this thing was just lost and floating and adrift in the ocean. It was always about an implosion. It was absolutely almost inevitable. And I'm surprised it actually even made 13 dives.

I get scared even looking at pictures of it on land knowing what I know. now. Gosh, I was riveted by that because I was imagining them all stuck in the floor of the ocean with no light and no electricity and no oxygen, just waiting to slowly die from lack of oxygen or lack of water or whatever comes first. So I was almost relieved when I heard that it imploded instantaneously and killed everyone on board with a bunch of knife shards of carbon fiber, as gross as that sounds, because it was definitely the preferable. way to go of those two options. Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it. Really tragic. Even if by some weird happenstance, they did get lost, there was all kinds of safety issues with even getting, let's say

they had found it. Let's say it was floating on the top of the water. It had no hatch tower. So how do you even get it? It had no fittings to be able to crane it out of the water. I mean, this is a thing that weighs several tons. Because the hatch tower doesn't, you know, remember how it was bolted in? Well, they don't do that. There's a, real reason why they don't do that. Hatch towers clear the sea surface so that people can climb up a ladder and if you need to be rescued, you can open the outer hatch, climb out and be rescued. The nose cone that swings sideways, they could have never gotten out of that, even if they got them. And so they have five days of oxygen. Let's say it takes two days to

find them. They're floating on the surface. They get there. They can't pull them out of the water so they have to tow them. Where is the nearest land? Right. Oh my God. It's going to take more than the oxygen they've got on board to tow them, that's the only place you would have been able to get them out of the water. The ship they rented was not, didn't have a crane that could have lifted it out of the water so they could have, it was just breathtaking the safety stuff that no emergency beacon. How can you send a flare if you can't get out of the top of the hatch tower? Let's say they managed to get the thing open. How do you get anybody out of the sub without water cashing in and you're going straight back down to the seafloor? So like just absolutely, everything. about it was just this death trap. It's such a shame because a lot of people had no sympathy because it was like, oh, a bunch of rich people died or whatever. I thought that was kind of gross because, of course, this guy went in there with like his kid, you know, it's just like they wanted this special opportunity.

I guess, got to do your research. It's such a, it was such a shame. Yes. Such a shame. Yes. Well, I mean, I can tell you a couple things. Do not get in a surrecible that is not certified by one of the Marine Classification Societies and do not get in a deep sea submersible by deep sea.

anything below 600 feet that has not got a spherical pressure chamber. There are these subs, and you've probably seen pictures of them. They're really cool. They look like James Bond subs, and these are the ones that Ray Dalio has, where they have a plexiglass hull. They're made by a company called Triton submersibles, which is like the apple of submersible design, really the top of the top. And you can actually sit in this sort of transparent bubble and go down as deep as 6,000 feet using that material. It's pretty thick, but it's very clear. or the plexiglass, and you just feel like you're in a psychedelic aquarium. And that's an experience that most people, I think,

aside from really claustrophobic people, would really love. Because down in the uppermost layer of the deep ocean called the Twilight Zone, there are more fish and creatures in there than in all the other regions of the ocean combined. I call it the Manhattan of the Deep. And 80% of them are bioluminescent or can flash and glow and twinkle, and you're going to see things that look like alien. It's just magnificent.

And it's really fun to watch that in a sphere. But those are the two things you really have to watch out for. Anywhere below 6,000 feet you need it to be a metal sphere. And material science will eventually probably make it possible for us to be in either glass or some other, probably glass, Vol ocean depth, but that's a ways away. You had me somewhat interested until you said it was called the Twilight Zone and then I just went right back to being scared of the ocean again. Yeah, that's not a very reassuring. Oh, my God, it's just so beautiful, though.

I've got to tell you, it's a wonderful. Like, if you think it would be fun to just look at amazing animals you've never seen before that are glowing and sparkling with lights. And you're sitting there in, like, a beautiful soft chair and everything's kind of revolving around you. That's the Twilight Zone. Yeah. I mean, it does sound amazing, actually. I know that we find so many things in the ocean, medicines, antibiotics. Even was the COVID test based on something found in the ocean?

I think I read that in your book, yeah? Yeah. It was the PCR test was required the use of an enzyme that came out of a volcanic hydrothermal vent on the seafloor. Wow. These, as we mentioned earlier, like these microbial adaptations for resilience for, because, you know, the ocean's also filled with viruses. And so microbes have evolved all these strategies to survive different regimes of temperature, pH, you know, attacks by viruses, different things that they've had to survive. and all of these adaptations are things that we can learn from, strategies. We've really expanded our repertoire of what life is even capable of by looking in the

deep ocean, and that's part of it. That's a big part of it. Yeah, the fish at that depth, you said one looks like a pink gummy bear because it's just kind of almost solid because otherwise the pressure would destroy it. That's fascinating. It totally makes sense that a gummy bear would hold up decent or something, the consistency of a gummy bear would hold up better than like a body like mine, for example, or hours, I should say. Well, yeah, because it has no air cavities in its body. So this is what you're

talking about is a hidal snailfish. So the very bottom layer of the deep ocean is called the Hidal zone, named after Hades. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah, the underworld. And in the Hidal zone, there is currently no fish on earth that can make it to the deepest point in the ocean, which is 35,867 feet by our best measurement. And that's called the Challenger Deep, the deepest spot of the Mariana Trench. The deepest a fish can go before it sells implode is a hattel snailfish has been seen at 29,300 feet, I think it is. And it is adapted to be that deep. And there are some other animals down there. Like there's a animal called a cuskeel, and they're very jelly. The cuskills are pretty big. They have little tiny eyes. They're also known as ass fish.

Yeah, I thought you wrote that. I was like, I'm going to ask her if it's ass fish or if I just misunderstood. Yeah, and the common one is called, in the Mariana Trench, it's called the robust ass fish. And because its body is really big and its brain is really small, it's technically by body-brain ratio, the stupidest animal on earth. But you know, you're doing something right, if you can survive deeper than all your predators and their mouths open up like this cavernous vacuum cleaner and they suck in these little crustaceans called amphipods. And then they have the sort of cohort down there are these cute little pink jelly hale snailfish. They look, if you think of a tadpole shape, they look like translucent pink tadpoles

and with these little black button eyes and these big smiley mouths and these sort of fluttery angel wings and these ribony long tails. And they look like adorable. They're just having the time of their life. They're snacking away on these amphipods and they confounded scientists because scientists thought, well, they certainly can't be a vigorous, fast swimming, fat little fish. They're probably starving down there, but no, they're completely great. Nothing eats them. And they have no closed skull, no swim bladder, nothing that could implode. They've gotten deeper than anything else. And the best part, my favorite thing is they have two mouths. So these amphipods have claws. And so if you suck in amphipods and you're made of gel, the first thing the amphibod's going to

do is eat its way out of your head. So the snailfish is fixed that by it, sucks it in. And then right behind it, there's another mouth, and it's like a mill, and it just amphipod puree, and that's that, and it digests it. You can see right through their bodies. And what I love about that is we've got the top predator in the most hostile environment on Earth, and it's a pink gummy bear. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Susan Casey. We'll be right back. If you like this episode, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is shove it down your friend's throats mercilessly and repetitively until they listen to this podcast. Or alternately, you can support one of our amazing sponsors. I also appreciate it when you do that. All the deals,

discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordanharbinger.com and if you can't remember the name of a sponsor or you can't find the code, I am so happy to receive emails over at Jordan atjurbaner.com. I am more than happy to surface those codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Susan Casey. One of the other species that was mind-blowing was you said there's a jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle and rebirth itself. How is that possible? What does that mean?

Yeah, so it's called the immortal jellyfish. And basically, it's been a while since I looked this up, so I'm going to talk in real generality because I don't want to get this wrong. But it can basically rebirth different parts of its body. It can age in reverse. It can regenerate cells. And there's actually, if people are interested in learning more about this, there's a Japanese scientist that's doing all this research on it. And if you Google the immortal jellyfish, you can really take a deep dive into that because

they're really studying it for obvious reasons. I mean, it can certainly it's not immortal if it gets sucked into sperm whale's mouth or something like that. But if you just leave it on its own, apparently it can just regenerate and recycle its cells and age and reverse. That is absolutely mind-blowing. I mean, look, jellyfish are simpler than mammals in terms of their construction, I suppose, but the idea that it can de-age whatever, we don't even have a word for that, the cells, that's just something out of science fiction. It doesn't even, it's beyond science fiction,

I guess, right? I mean, it's just really, it's super incredible. Imagine if you could do that with your skin or an organ or even your brain or something like that, just really, really incredible. You mentioned there's all kinds of metals and minerals and stuff like that in the ocean. Are we mining that stuff? I'm afraid that the answer is probably yes. This is top of mind right now because I've written a chapter about this that gets it all across in narrative form because it's kind of complicated. But we've been trying to humans, corporations, industrial interests have been trying to mine the seafloor since like the 60s and 70s. There was a real attempt at it in the 70s.

And so the reason is because at certain depths, the metals do accrete into these sort of nodules that form around a nucleus, as I mentioned earlier, like a shark's tooth or a piece of coral or something. It takes tens of millions of years for them to grow. They look sort of like little cannonballs. But they aren't just lumps of metal. They're more like corals or trees because they have microorganisms living inside them. And microorganisms contribute to their creation, although we don't know exactly how. And they contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper, and traces of other metals and minerals. And there are a lot of them. And they tend to be at abyssal depths in the ocean, say around 15,000 feet. So below the twilight zone is the midnight zone, goes down to about 10,000 feet. And then from 10,000 to 20,000 feet is the largest ecosystem on Earth, which is the abyssal zone or the abyss. And where the abyss meets the seafloor, more than half the planet is covered by waters that deep. And in the place, where the tectonic plates meet, you have this deeper zone of the ocean called the Hale Zone that goes from 20,000 feet down to 36,000 feet.

But the abyss has got a lot of planes that are covered in these nodules. They're not everywhere, but there are trillion... It's the largest metal deposit on the planet, but it's very, very complicated in terms of what you're going to do to the ecosystem and the very intricately interconnected carbon cycle throughout the ocean, the sort of geocanical. chemistry of the ocean, because these are a habitat that have been there, and it's an untouched habitat. And once these nodules are removed, they will never come back on human timescales. And more than 50% of the animals that live in the deep ocean at that depth live because of the

nodules. So there are actually two other kinds of deep sea mining, and it's hard for me to know how much depth to go into. But let's just focus on the nodules, because that's what's up right now. The other two types are mining hydrothermal vents. If you do that, there's not that many hydrothermal vents. There's all this very unique life around it. We think that's maybe where life originated on planet Earth. All of the live vents in the world wouldn't even occupy half of the United States. So why would we want to tear this up?

And then the other thing is taking the equivalent of mountaintop removal on land in the ocean. And seamounts are also like big oasis of life. So the manganese nodules have come into the forefront. It didn't work in the 70s for economic reasons in the technology. It's really hard to try to do anything. I don't even think people who want a seafloor mine now are aware of just how hard it would be to operate at that depth because it's just an unforgiving, the pressure, everything. Like your machinery is, the ocean is constantly going to be trying to destroy the machinery.

Yeah. Jeez. Cobalt and nickel is really the game. So you've got all these interests that are very much chomping at the bit to get these nodules. And people who've heard about deep sea mining may have heard of it in the guise of a sort of an investment come on. Like this is going to be the next big thing. And this is much more environmentally friendly. We don't have to have tailings. We don't have to rip up a rainforest. All of these things are extremely debatable, if not false. It could be that we really one day may. need this metals, but EV battery chemistry is changing to the point where we're kind of phasing out cobalt and nickel. Yes, thankfully. Fast. Yeah. Fast. And so anybody who's rushing at this particular moment to try to do deep sea mining just has one reason for doing it and the rest is greenwashing and that's to get a quick buck. Yeah. I mean, it's not even going to be a quick

buck. It's going to be a hard buck, but it will be a big buck. I bet it's, they're trying to get a bunch of funding and then maybe, oh, it doesn't work out, but we paid ourselves a lot of money for starting this company. Well, in fact, that happened already, and it's the same people. The company that's really pushing this forward is called the metals company. And they previously had a lot of the people who worked at the metals company had come from a previous attempt to mine hydrothermal vents in Papua New Guinea called Nautilus. And Nautilus ended up having the Papua New Guinea government invest like $120 million. It was on the Toronto Stock Exchange. You know, stock goes up, it goes down, it goes bankrupt, but the people who have now turned around

from Nautilus and come to the Create the metals company, they did great. You know what I mean? The Papua New Guinea government lost $120 million in a country where only half of the people have electricity. Right. Oh, man. The biggest reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, and my, of course,

preference would be this is the womb of the earth and it's the largest carbon sink on earth. Like, at this point, leave it the fuck alone. Yeah. It's a wisdom test. We've got to pass one someday. And the real reason is because we don't know what's down there. We don't know how it works. We don't know what future medicines. We don't know what will happen to the microbial regime that produces oxygen. I mean, just a lot of things could go wrong. So the deep sea scientists have what they're asking for before anything goes forward like this is a moratorium for 10 to 30 years of further study. And it seems like the least we can do is know what we're destroying and how it, affects us before we destroy it. I think it's really important to stress that this is happening

on a large, large scale. Like, the nodule mines are 30,000 square miles each. Wow. That's really hard to even wrap your mind around that kind of thing at all. Unbelievable. I know we're running a little bit short on time. I'd like to talk about shipwrecks because I had no idea. You wrote there are some three million shipwrecks. I would have been off by about 2.9 million if I had to get how many shipwrecks there were. That many. Unbelievable. Yeah, that statistic comes from UNESCO, and of course nobody really knows how many shipwrecks there are. But that gives you a sense. I mean, it is really this sort of archive. A lot of ships crashed on rocks or reefs, or, you know, they're not in deep water, but the ships that are in deep water are

incredibly interesting because a lot of the time, they're really well preserved. They could be packed in silt. They're below the depth of wood-boring organisms. In some cases, like in the Black Sea, the chemistry of the water. It's anoxic, so it's really, really well preserved. But the problem is, is it's really expensive to go out and look for them, kind of like the ultimate needle in a haystack, even with sonar and LIDAR and the things we have now. And then when you find them, it's very expensive to, you know, there are people who have a business just looking for treasure, treasure hunting and going and getting gold coins and stuff. But it would be really cool if we could archaeologically examine some of these more prominent wrecks. But that's,

is so, so, so expensive. Yeah, I bet. There's so much lost history on the seafloor. That stuff's always been fascinating to me. So if they sink into deep ocean, are they preserved by the cold and the pressure and the fact that there's just not that much light down there and all that stuff?

What else? Yeah, the organisms that bore into wood, they're actually mollusks. Obviously, if a ship is on a reef or something, it's going to be smashed over and over by waves, that isn't really happening in the deep ocean. There are internal waves in the ocean, but mostly the deep ocean is pretty calm.

You know, you really kind of have a time capsule, particularly if it gets sealed into the sediments, and then you really have it protected from any kind of microbial. Like the Titanic is sitting there and all these metal-eating microbes are eating it. It was there for a long time. Eventually it will be gone. If a ship is under the sediment, it's preserved. That is, yeah, that makes sense, I suppose, just like being buried in mud, like a fossil. And then it's just, it's there for a few million years. I just find this stuff endlessly fascinating.

I read this somewhere else, not from your book, but people had found empty jars of olive oil from like ancient Greece. And I don't know how the hell they found this part out, but apparently the stuff that the label on the outside of the jar was not what was inside the jar, even though I guess it would have been gone after all this time. But somehow they figured it out. So the idea was that it was counterfeit olive oil. They said it was one thing, but it was actually like a lower, the crappier brand. And I'm thinking, wow, they had counterfeit food like a thousand years ago. Crazy. Yeah, it's really fun. There's a lot of scholarship about this around Greece and Turkey. There's some really fascinating shipwrecks in not too deep but deep enough waters that we've really learned a lot from them. It's changed history. We've found mechanisms that look like they were sort of analog computers to chart the movement of planets and stars. And it just, when you find something like that, you sort of, it's another piece in the puzzle of the past, you know? We just, there's so much we don't know.

I rewound that part of your book when you said that they found a bunch of statues inside and then some sort of analog computer and they suspect that it might have been something from Archimedes. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Because I think people just did a little double take on analog computer like I did. You can see it if you go to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Actually, it's a reconstruction of it, but it's so complicated. It's called the Antiquetheera mechanism. A.T. Antiquetheera. Yes, got it. You can put it in the show notes. Anyway, so it came up and it's basically, when it comes out of the ocean, of course, it just looks like a lump of bluish patinaed metal.

But when they started to clean it up, it had dozens of cogs and gears very intricate. And it was basically, they think Archimedes created it because nobody else could have done anything that intricate at the time. And it just basically charted the movement, celestial movements. It was like, imagine a clock, but way more complicated. A science paper came out really recently talking about it and just saying, this really causes us to rewrite our assumptions of technologically what was possible in ancient what they were doing. And it's worth reading more about it. And that wreck, the antique a thera wreck is still being excavated. It was obviously huge. It obviously was carrying really precious objects. And it's at a depth that's just deep enough for really advanced scuba divers, but very dangerous. But they are still working on that. And I'm really, really curious to know how many more of those ships will be found because I found a description of what they were like, and they just sounded like floating palaces filled with artworks. And this is so far the only one we've found like this.

So I just looked this up. It is A-N-T-I-K-Y-T-H-E-R-A. So I was never going to get that. Neither were you, I guess, off the top of our head. But it was, so it's an ancient Greek hand-powered ori, which I don't, it sort of looks like a really fancy watch, but it's larger, of course. it fits in your hand. Oh, it's bigger.

I want to say it's about six, seven inches tall like a box. It's like cuckoo clock kind of looking thing. Exactly. Except it's the oldest known example of an analog computer. This part's amazing. Used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. That's mind-blowing. To be able to, I thought it was going to be like able to keep the days or something.

No, decades in advance it can predict a solar eclipse. That's just bananas. that and somebody came up with this and then built the thing and machined all the parts by hand, obviously. Imagine the value of this instrument at that point. This is like the Hubble telescope of whenever this thing was actually constructed, the Hellenistic period. Yeah. You know, it was whatever the, yeah, the equivalent of being able to see into the heavens for them. But think about it this way. If we found that in like one shipwreck, what else is out there? It's an area that's so vast that We search for MH370 for three years with the top technology and cannot find it.

I mean, it's just like what else is out there. There's got to be so much stuff out there. So much stuff out there. And in areas that we think are already sort of done and explored, like between Greek islands probably, because we're just going to be have tech that can look into sediment 300 feet. And it's like, oh, there's, it's like we did an episode about Egypt and pyramids and tombs. and Remy, the expert, Egyptologist, he was saying that we've probably discovered something like 2% of Egyptian tombs and pyramids and the rest are still under the sand. We just have no way of knowing where they are.

It sounds like shipwrecks are kind of in that same boat. No pun intended. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we don't have, as I said, only 25% of the deep seafloor has been mapped at high resolution. Not that we would even be able to tell the difference between a rock and a shipwreck on the kinds of imaging that you get. but we haven't even looked. So the fact that we've found stuff already,

but it's just mammoth. And then, of course, there's dimensions of years, sediment, the deeper you go, and who knows what's down there. There's definitely not just ships, but there are cities, there are towns, there are prehistoric settlements. There are anywhere there was metal used.

We can probably find things. Just unbelievable. I've heard that it's hard to get funding to explore stuff like this, Because even if you have funding for archaeology, marine archaeology is kind of like, well, this isn't real archaeology. I don't really know. They've got beef with each other, these groups of scientists. Yeah, I think marine archaeology is really not one of the sciences that was showered with funding.

It's always been like that. It's sort of a labor of love for many of the scientists that do it. But I think it's getting a little bit better, but it's still hard. And they're doing some really interesting. The French are really into marine archaeology and are doing some really. cool projects. In Egypt, there are countries that care more about this and are doing more to look around. Well, good. Somebody's got to do it. Yeah. So the problem is governments, right, they have the permission to do it. You probably have to get permission from whatever government these waters are,

if it's not international waters. Archaeologists have the interest, but the only people who have the money is going to be a corporation that's like, yeah, we'll dive for that Spanish galleon, but then we're going to melt everything down or sell the artifacts to somebody, and we're not going to do anything with the actual ship because it's just sort of like scientific historical value but not economic value. So you have these kind of misaligned incentives. Exactly. It's like a catch-22. It's like, so yeah, who cares about that old altar piece? But by the way, it belonged to Christ or something like, I mean, who knows? Yeah. So yeah, it would be nice. There are legal issues for sure. Even in international waters, like if somebody finds, there was a Japanese sub that was found in the Atlantic that

was carrying supposedly, the reason people went to look for it at all is because it was rumored to be carrying a tremendous amount of gold during World War II. And they found it. And as far as I know, the people that found it were basically looking for it because they wanted the gold. Japan has a few things to say about that, right? First of all, it's a war grave. And second of all, if it belongs to Japan and it's a military vessel, no matter where it is, it belongs to Japan. And no matter when you find it, it belongs to Japan. So you run into that kind of thing all the time. There's lots of court cases involving this stuff. So I guess that's a bit of a disincentive.

But there are also some great museums. There's great marine archaeological museum in Bodrum, Turkey. There's the one in Athens I mentioned. You can see these treasures. You can see them in museums. I've heard that there are salvage crews from various countries illegally salvaging things like warships. So it's possible.

It's even possible to do it without government support if they're doing it illegally and supposedly on the low, right? Yeah. It's amazing to think that the salvagers could get, you know, from thousands of feet down a warship. But they do. And particularly over in the Java Sea, one of the things that they're after are, let me make sure I'm going to say this right. Before atomic weapons testing, there's metal that's really valuable because it wasn't subjected to the radiation from atomic. They use it in medical instruments that have to be really highly calibrated. So they need certain types of metal that were pre the 1940s, right? And that's what they're after. It's called low background steel or pre-war steel. Any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. And I guess that's because some modern steel is just all contaminated with traces of nuclear

fallout for some reason. I don't really understand why. But if you want to build like a quantum physics particle reactor machine, you can't just put any metal in there because it's loaded with whatever would cause noise in that machine. So you need this like perfectly, well, you need pre-war steel. And that happens to be in large quantities in boats that are at the bottom of the ocean. And I guess it's worth a ton of money.

Yeah. And I guess also just, you know, copper. Like there's other metals that just any bulk of it is going to be able to be saleable for some amount of money. And I guess it's worth the while of the salvagers. But it's a real problem. It's starting to become a real problem as a technology and robotics make it easier to get down there and like saw away its stuff.

But just to give you a sense of when you're talking about that nuclear blast, it actually, when that happened, it was an atomic signature. The oldest vertebrate in the world is the Greenland shark, and it's a deep ocean shark, and there's one in the Pacific that's closely related, called the Pacific Sleeper Shark. They can live to be 500 years old. So they're the oldest living vertebrates. And the way they date their age is they take their eyeballs and they look for when that atomic signature comes up in their eyeballs, in their retinas. That's sad somehow, right? Yeah, it's just kind of like everything we do, somehow the effect is, it's still here.

Yeah. But at the same time, I really think it's important to take the first step is like, let's look at this magnificence and really revel in it. And isn't this incredibly cool? And then hopefully people will have the emotional response that makes them want to care more about it, take care of it. You know, make sure that it's going to support life, flourishing, diverse, magnificent life. and, you know, for their kids and their grandkids and their grandkids kids. Well, I know I said something like this earlier, but, you know, for a guy who's mostly afraid of the water, at least deep water, I'm starting to really understand your passion for

exploring the ocean. I'm still too much of a wimp to dive anytime soon, but I appreciate you taking us on this dive here today on the show. So interesting. This is just fascinating stuff. I don't know how to, I guess you can't really overstate it. I can go on. I could go on. I just put it that way. I could go on. I'm sure you could. I only read one book and you've got a bunch. I'm like, okay, I know what I'm doing next time I get a week off, plowing through the rest of your catalog. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

Yeah, thank you. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show, where Captain Max Hardberger navigates treasorous waters, both at sea and in the courtroom to reclaim stolen ships from the clutches of the corrupt, rich, and powerful. Our specialty is reclaiming ships that have been illegitimately seized, either by a private party or more often by a government. In fact, we don't operate in any country that has a functioning series of laws

and a procedure in place for a legitimate owner to make a claim against an illegitimate seizure. Papering the ship is the act of seizing the ship. Now the owner, if it's that kind of situation, can try to fight it legally, but very often he will find that there is no fighting it in the local court, and that's when he comes to us. If there is a possibility of taking the ship out legally, that's what I prefer to do. Quite often I'll work with the correspondent as the insurance person, the lawyer,

in the local jurisdiction. I'll work with the port authorities. I would do almost anything to get the ship out, including some things that I probably couldn't do here in the States without having to do a middle of the night extraction. That's the last resort. As a general rule, I need people

who are extremely competent in their field, especially the chief engineer. He's the most important man in the entire team, including me. Nobody can replace a good job. chief engineer. We have possessed aircraft. We've repossessed ferries. The vessels are not that small because we're so expensive that the vessel has to bear the cost. But we've been approached on various other projects, like for example a submarine and Russia and so on. Yeah, I like the fact that

the bad guy is get to come up. It's gives me a great deal of satisfaction. To hear about the extreme lengths, Captain Max Hardberger will go to retrieve these ships, check out episode 896 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. After the show, we talked about why exploring the ocean is key to stemming climate change. Even more important space exploration that's also covered quite a bit in her book. We did an episode on using the ocean to stem climate change. That was Mike Kelland, episode 932. He talked about a certain type of really easy to find and produce chemical, for lack of a better word,

but mostly harmless bio stuff that can be put into the ocean that sucks in carbon. Fascinating episode, a lot of scientists really liked it, but also a lot of people who don't know anything about science because Mike was really good at explaining it. Why am I selling you that episode? I'm not entirely sure. All things Susan Casey will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

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