The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 234: Diapers and Masks and Sharks, Oh My!

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

The Aquatic Indiana Jones, Jeremiah Sullivan, drops by to discuss art, Science, risk, and the joy of embracing the idiom Safety Third. 

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It's the way I heard it episode number 234. this one is called diapers and masks and sharks. Oh my. No, no, you fucked it up. It's diapers, masks, sharks, oh my. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. You know what? All right.

I'll give you that one. I didn't pick it up. You f***ed it up. Why don't you do yourself a favor and count us in again so you don't have to live with this humiliation. Three, two. Hello, friends. it's the way I heard it episode number 234.

This one's called Diapers and Masks and Sharks. Oh, my. This is the preamble part of the program, to which you have no doubt become accustomed. But today we have a slight twist because joining me for the preamble is the producer of the podcast. You know him, you love him. You know him anyway.

It's Chuck Klaus-Mark. Hello, everyone. Welcome to 234. And they love you, by the way. Do they? You read the comments, man. They're mildly fond of me, I think. Well, I was not mildly fond of you yesterday because to those of you who don't follow me religiously on Facebook, why aren't you?

Why wouldn't you? I put up a meme yesterday, and I want to describe the meme to you, and I want to describe the fallout of the meme. It happened like this. I woke up early and found a text from a friend of mine named Matt. who sent me this meme of Rod Serling, right? And Rod Serling, host of the Twilight Zone, he's standing there, he's got a cigarette in his hand and he's looking like Rod Serling looks,

right in the middle of saying something important. And the meme says, imagine there's a 99.97% chance that you won't crap your pants, but you're forced to wear a diaper just in case. Now, imagine you have to wear a diaper to keep your neighbors from crapping. their pants. Now, you get it, right? This is some commentary, probably on masks and mask policy

and the current ambiguity surrounding the mask policies. And it was very early and I hadn't had my coffee and this thing made me laugh. So I sent it to Chuck. And Chuck, what did you do? I laughed and replied, genius. Correct. And then I thought, you know, it is kind of of ingenious, a little subversive, a little cheeky, perhaps, but it reminded me of a photo taken years ago at a diaper factory with me and the Dirty Jobs crew. And if you go to my Facebook page now, I think you can still see it, unless it's been removed. I hope it hasn't been removed, but it's me and the old crew standing there naked, except for the diapers that we're all wearing. The cameramen are holding their cameras, the sound guys holding his gear.

we're all just standing there in our diapers. So I sent that photo to Chuck. And Chuck, what did you do? I memed it. It's a first meme I've ever made, Mike, honestly. So we basically took the Rod Serling meme and we put it on this photo of me in a diaper. And again, I still had my coffee,

but I wanted to post something because I had a busy day, so I just kind of put it up there. And an hour later, my God, this thing has been liked. This is the good news. It's been liked 260,000 times. That's a lot. And it's generated tens of thousands of comments, and it's been shared 80,000 times.

That's a lot. Right. It's gone around the world. So while the overwhelming majority of people saw the humor, and I think took my meaning from the meme, a lot of people were upset. A couple thousand maybe. Unsubscribe. Very disappointed. Micro.

could you? Look, I'm with respect, my goal is to not offend anybody and I'm not trying to drive people off of the page. And I want to just say briefly that this podcast is going to be dedicated to discussing the fallout of this. And I'll tell you who my guest is in a moment. You're going to love him. But let me first just say, people thought I was comparing masks to diapers. And I was, Sort of. Although, frankly, I think diapers are a lot better at doing their job than masks are at doing theirs, especially the cloth variety, right? I mean, everybody's out there, which at Dr. Wend literally just said. Cloth masks are a little more than facial decorations. Yeah. The CDC doesn't disagree. It's out there. It's happening. The point wasn't to compare masks to

diapers, nor was it to compare COVID with pooping your pants. The point was to simply talk about our relationship with risk and what we'll do. Not consequences. I get that the consequences of getting Omacron are different than the consequences of pooping your pants. One might put you in the hospital, kill you. The other will cause mortification and embarrassment. It's not about comparing those two things. It's about comparing the odds of an unfortunate thing happening and the incredible unlikelihood of an unfortunate thing happening, and the fact that we get used to living with all kinds of risk all of the time, and we're just not used to living with this risk yet. And it doesn't make us bad, and it doesn't make us shameful. It just makes us human.

We're used to the risk of getting in our cars and driving, and we know that 40,000 people will die every year as a result of doing that. And yet we've determined that that's a price that we pay for the freedom to come and go as we want on highways. It's baked in. The risk of this is not yet baked in. That's all I was trying to say. And so I said it in a meme before coffee. And now, I'm not going to go on the apology tour. I don't think I have anything to apologize for. But I do think, Chuck, that this is all your fault. I knew you would. I was only following orders. Great, like my good little German producer. Well, to shed a little bit more light on this, perhaps, and maybe expand a conversation that I think could be useful around the notion of safety third, which by the way, thank you, folks, another thousand or so masks were sold yesterday.

We've raised all kinds of money for our next work ethic scholarship program by selling safety third masks. Which, by the way, begins February 23rd, 2020. Right. If you want to apply for a work ethic scholarship, microworks.org starting late in February. We'll be flogging that ad nauseum in the coming weeks. But for now, I want to bring a guy onto the podcast who I met years ago during Shark Week. His name is Jeremiah Sullivan. He is the aquatic Indiana Jones. He's been there. Stud. He's done that. He created the first steel mesh shark's suit, which, boy, you want to talk about diapers for your whole body? That's what this is. You want to protect yourself from sharks? This is a body diaper or a body mask, if you will. He's been in the

safety business his entire life. However, he is the least risk-averse person I've ever met. He's created textiles and fabrics that are being used in the government with first responders, with Navy SEALs. He has a brilliant mind. He's a scientist. He's an artist. And he's a lunatic. I love him. I haven't checked in with him in a while. We're going to have a conversation with him forthwith. And I don't want to overstate it, Chuck, but it's going to be great. Are you ready? I'm super ready, man. All right. Well, here's a little thing I like to call the guitar sting, followed by an unscripted hour or so with my friend, Jeremiah Solomon. You're about to see entering the frame in mere moments is a legend.

I don't want to overstate it, and I don't think I have. But he's my old friend. Oh, my God, I was going to say Jeremiah Sullivan, but it's Jeremiah Johnson. Look at that beard. Holy crap. Oh, God. I just started growing this thing this morning about 10 o'clock, so it's fresh and a little bit rough, but I appreciate your compliment.

Oh, you look like you mug the old man in the sea and stole his face. Well, that's partly true, you know. I'm certainly an old man. I got that part of right. I don't know how the hell it happened, but it did. Even with this goofy connection, Chuck, tell me if you think I'm wrong, but the testosterone, the manliness, the joie, it all just oozes through the fiber optics with this guy.

Come straight through the camera, yeah. What's up with the dog? Who's got the dog? Is that you, Jeremiah? That's one that Holly promised me she would keep away here during the time we did our podcast, so she'll take him away now. Holly lied. Holly looked just square in the face and lied.

How are you? Well, I'm good, man. It's been a wild ride, as you know, for quite a while with a lot of folks. It's an exciting time in a lot of ways. I called Chuck earlier every week now. We're just like spinning the wheel of people we know thinking who would be a great guest on the podcast. Obviously, safety has been headline news since this whole my asthma unfolded. But so too has risk in our relationship with risk. And as you know, I think we had a great conversation back. in 2006 or seven the first time we met, just about the fact that humanity, or so much of it anyway, is defined by our relationship to risk. And since you are the aquatic Indiana Jones, one of the least risk-averse people I've ever met, who nevertheless makes his living, making safety equipment, I just thought perhaps I could pick your brain and talk about, among other things, the current backlash I'm experiencing for standing naked with my

crew wearing diapers in a meme currently circulating the interwebs. Pretty much every morning, that's how I find myself. Somehow, I found myself out in the yard, standing there in my Depends, wondering how the day is going to go. So I understand how you feel. Isn't it funny? That word depends has literally become maybe the word of the ages. There's so much uncertainty.

I can't think of a more defining term than uncertainty, which of course is just another way of saying that depends. everything, it seems, depends on so many things and none of those things are in our control. What sage wisdom might you have to help us mere mortals keep some perspective? Man, I got to tell you, I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of it is cultural, you know, particularly with our culture, because as you know, when we were kids, when I was a kid, you're only about, what, half my age, I suppose, but when I was a kid, there were all kinds of things that we got away with that weren't a big, drama. And you see memes and things about this all the time now. How terrified everybody is of

virtually everything. In some cases, those things are rational and they're appropriate, and sometimes they're not. In my view, a lot of these things are part of the capitalist approach to finding a way to profit off of whatever we can conjure up in our head or otherwise. That's just the American way, I guess. And I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not a big fan of living in fear. For that reason, I do what I do. You know, I try to find ways to help people survive in difficult or challenging or formerly threatening circumstances or situations. As you know, it started on the ocean with my marine biology background and has extended many, many places since you and I first met. Well, we can't sort of control that human issue about how quickly we agree to be concerned or fear

about things. My whole thing is about quickly finding solutions so that we can move beyond those fear of things. Of course, that interferes with somebody's business, perhaps, but that's not my concern. My concern is people being able to do what they need to do, what they want to do, and to do it as safely as possible. Sure. All right. I think then maybe before we dive too deep, as it were, and solve the problems of the world, we just establish your bona fides a bit more. you, among other things, created a steel mesh suit that allows divers to interact with sharks and recreations to recreational diving to occur, maybe in a safer way. The applications, though, from that have gone in so many different directions. I'll let you spell it out for me because, honestly, I can't keep up with you.

But last I read, you basically developed a lightweight, invisible Kevlar bulletproof thing that would let me live forever. Was that it? And it cures all forms of illness. Where do I sign? Nobody has a thing to worry about anymore. Everything's fine. That's true. That whole process of extending survivability,

preventing, reducing, or eliminating injuries that are unfortunately very common in certain work environments or, you know, lifestyles of military, DOD, that kind of thing, and action sports and industrial safety and all that sort of thing. So suddenly I started getting calls from all sorts of asundry people that had issues, some kind of an issue of a danger, a threat, of physical harm to either participants from their group or other individuals, perhaps, that might be exposed to these threats. And the calls were far and wide, everything from NASA, looking for ways to protect the tires

on their Mars landers, things of that nature, to the protective garments and the textiles that I've been building for the DOD, special operations, communities, things of that nature. Now it's also tremendous interest to the industrial safety markets because they've got all those same people that are stirring up these needs for safety, insurance, or some other form of business. We're trying to knock those little problems down as they come up. So at base, you're trying to make hazardous situations less hazardous, not necessarily safe, because I don't even know that you can, I mean, how do you talk about safety to a Navy seal, who I know you've been working with providing these kinds of technologies in a practical yet tactical way?

Do they even think in terms of what's safe, or do they just think in terms of what's less deadly? You know, you'd be surprised. These guys are very expensive to make. You know, it cost a few million bucks to turn one of these guys out as an operator. And the rules and regulations they have for their safe. would surprise you. But the nature of the work is so dangerous that it's its own level. You have to accept it from that perspective. They know it's a dangerous game. And many, many, many of the things that they do are in one way or another related to how some of us, older folks like us, lived our youth. We were out climbing and falling out of things and getting cut up and crashing and burning

and doing all those things for years. But that has become apparently a very profitable sort of a sector for part of our economy. So what you said just now is exactly what Chuck said to me earlier. We were talking about when we were kids riding a bike. Yeah. Right? I mean, how many of those kids, Chuck, did you see wearing a helmet when you were 11, 12 years old? Exactly zero.

Yeah. Right. You know, it just didn't happen. I guess what I was trying to get at is there seems to be this trend or tendency toward everything is dangerous and everything needs somebody to either sell you an insurance policy or something to make sure it doesn't happen, whatever it was and could be. And in the case of the Navy guys, it comes with its own inherent risks, obviously. These guys sign on, you know, terminally if that comes to be the final outcome for them. Sure. And they're quite happy and fortunately willing to

do that. But there are many, many ways that we have been able to augment and enhance the safety of these guys. For an example, some of the earliest work that I was doing for those guys, some of the seals were in my shop here in San Diego and they had seen some of the things that I was developing for the new shark resistant wetsuit concept that I've been toying around with since the early 2000s and I've been testing and having some pretty significant success coming up with non-metallic solutions for even things like the sharks and the great whites and all that sort of thing. But there were so many derivatives of this kind of work that when these guys saw what I was doing with otherwise lethal circumstances. They figured that, well,

shit, maybe this guy can help us out. We have similar exposure, sharp things, dangerous places, in hospitable environments and things of that nature. So I did. And man, once that gate open, it just kept going. And as a result, I've got things that I've built for people all across the special operations community. And I continue to do that with a lot of the latest tech that I've been working on. What are you doing right now that you're allowed to talk about that you're most bullish on? Well, you know, I had a tremendous amount of success with the earlier textile laminate or composite non-metallic solutions that I was coming up with. And I had some good success with that stuff, but it was straight out of the gate. Everything was expensive. When a new

advanced fiber or some new whoop-de-doo becomes available somehow, generally it's very expensive for a while before the economy comes down and it becomes more accessible. Well, that's That was the case with these textiles as well because some of these fibers were so rare, so unique, and so special and so expensive that everything I was doing was costly because I wasn't concerned about the cost. I was concerned about solving the problem for somebody. And what was the problem exactly that you were trying to solve with this stuff? But could be injury.

It could be a laceration, penetration, could be exposure to flame or heat, anything along those natures. We've got a lot of thermal activity, you know, protecting against heat or, allowing it in in cold environments, things of that nature. So beyond the more kinetic type things, the fragmentation in the case of the military and law enforcement that is flying around on too many occasions for them and very, very dangerous, the laceration from climbing up an oil rig out in the Persian Gulf someplace, something like this. There are all kinds of ways these guys get hurt, sliced up, cut up, because the technologies that they had were essentially the same

as they had in World War II in Vietnam. So there was a huge sucking vacuum of interests in the concept of improving and making multifunctional protective solutions that might have started in some obscure place with a little niche, but it found its home in a much wider application, which is, you know, the classic American success story, I suppose, if you think of it that way. Why is it so damn hard to get this stuff to market? I mean, we talked maybe 10 years ago. you showed me something you had invented. It was a piece of fabric, and you did a couple of things.

You put a flame on it, like a hot, hot flame. Chuck, it didn't do anything. Then he blew smoke through it, right? Proving that this thing was completely breathable, right? Like, as much as cotton. And then he stretched it, and he had like a two-by-four

that he had driven like a 10-penny nail through. Right? So this thing is up like a spike, like a pungy stick. and he stretches the fabric, puts it on the tip of the nail, and leans into it, like puts his weight on it, and it won't cut through. So 10 years ago, I know for a fact that you had developed a piece of fabric that was breathable, fireproof, and seemingly impenetrable. And for the life of me, I don't know why our cops and our first responders and our Navy seals and all our men and women in uniform aren't wrapped in this stuff. from stem to stern. Please explain.

Well, the smart ones are, a few of them are, but the commercialization of technologies in a sector that is so heavy, like the DOD, the industrial military side, et cetera, there are a lot of American businesses that like things the way they are, because that's their gravy train. Sure.

And when it comes to something new and disruptive, particularly disruptive has been the case with a lot of the things that I've done. I mean, starting even with the interacting with sharks safely, as opposed to the high risk of being bitten, particularly when feeding or in those kinds of environments, you know, it guess it became a threat. Sidebar. Chuck, why are you shaking your head? Was it the casualness with which he describes this? Yeah, there's that. I mean, I've seen video and people who are listening to this have to go to his website, which is Jeremiah Sullivan.com or shark armor.com

and look at some of the video that's there of like a tiger shark that is probably 10 feet long and I don't know how many hundreds of pounds and just coming straight at you and you just casually touch his nose

with your hand and he pushes you away and it all happens like a dance and I'm like, that's a big old shark coming at you. This is the thing Chuck about Jeremiah. He will bury between parentheses, that which a sane person would put in 44 print Helvetica, right? The day we met, he handed me, and this is relevant, right, because I've signed maybe 300 releases in my life.

And they've all, in some way, shape, or form put the onus of responsibility on me. Some of them take great pains to sugarcoat it, right? some of them are so obtuse and oblique, you have to give it to your lawyer to translate. Jeremiah's, on the other hand, ought to be framed and hanging on a wall somewhere, because it basically says, I, blank, understand that I'm about to engage in a series of behaviors best not engaged in. The odds of being bitten are nearly 100%. The odds of dying are extraordinarily high. The odds of things going wrong. wrong are so written in the stars that by signing this, you simply admit to knowing that somewhere between bad luck and a death wish, that's where you live. Go ahead, sign it, I dare you. I mean, it was the only time I actually felt like there was some truth in the disclaimer.

Yeah. Well, just to set the point a little clearer, there is video footage of you, Jeremiah, standing on the bottom of the ocean somewhere, holding a giant hunk of raw fish, leading a shark toward you. And then just as the shark opens his mouth to get said fish, you offer your forearm instead. And he bites on your forearm and shakes you like a rag doll. And I say to myself, this guy ain't right. Well, there could be some truth to that. You know, opinions very for sure.

Probably that same shoulder is the one that I just had replaced with a new socket over here a couple of months ago. There is a downside occasionally. You could get a little wear and tear action there. Chuck, the moment people should try and conjure up in their minds eye was during Shark Week. I think it was 2006 or seven. I think the job is to weld a shark suit and build one. He invented the thing. And so I'm down there working with the inventor of the shark suit.

And then we get done. And then he's like, well, let's go test. I'm like, well, how would you do that? He goes, well, you jump in the water and let the sharks bite you. I think he's kidding. He's not kidding, right? So literally, hours later, there's a chum slick. There's blood in the water.

The sharks are everywhere. Jeremiah and I are dressed up like Ivanhoe and Lance a lot. And we dive in. And of course we get bitten. But 60 feet down, we're kneeling on the bottom. And there's a moment, Jeremiah, and you can consult the video for this. And this isn't actually the forward to a book. I can't get around to finishing.

but there was a moment when I looked over, and a shark had you by the elbow, left elbow, another one's got you by the right shoulder, one of them got you from behind around your hamstring. And to Chuck's point, they are truly shaking you like a tug toy. You go upside down. There's so much blood in the water from the chum, but who knows? It could be yours, could be mine, could be, I don't know. And I saw the tail of a reef shark whip around and knock the regulator and the mask off your face. Chuck, the man is upside down, 60 feet below the surface.

The bottom of the boat is just a distant little smear on the surface. Bubbles are coming out of his mouth. The only thing I can hear are the sounds of my own screams. I have a front row seat to the end of this man's life who I just met. And still, in the midst of that awfulness, all I could think was, he kind of brought it on himself, you know? Better him than me. But it is as stupid does.

Do do do do do do do do do do do dumb Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle.

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It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's net suite.com. We probably should have gotten all that out of the way at the top. But the point is, you spend your life in situations that are slightly to the right of ill-advised. But you've made your living, creating materials that allow you to survive and fight another day. And clearly, clearly they work. You're on the podcast today because, A, I really am genuinely curious as to why there's so many barriers to getting all of these tactical innovations into a practical environment.

But also because I need to understand why I got in so much trouble for standing around in a diaper trying to make a point about, our country's relationship with risk. So those barriers and why it's not out there more, I can tell you this. And I've done this several times now. I put all my blood, bone, and breath into developing things like this. I get it done. I build it up. We take it to the point of commercialization.

And then you realize, oh, man, we need some professional business people involved here. And I'm an art and science guy, as you know. I do things tangibly. I like my hands on and I like to experience them and know what I'm talking about. And I try every opportunity to avoid ever speaking on anything that is not a direct experience of mine that I can validate. You stay in your lane. Yeah, I just can't bear all the nonsense that's everywhere now. I assume that other people function the same way I do because I've always been self-employed in a bootstrapper.

I assume that most people like me, once they grasp something, are going to be able to, you know, sort of develop around that thing, pick it up and run with it. Because it's not that tough. I mean, obviously, it's like a no-brainer. You see these things, and it's like, okay, what's going on? But in fact, that's where I've made a mistake twice. And that is bringing in some people on a business side. I run all the tech team.

I develop these things, turn them into prototypes. I test them, do all that. But the challenge that I've had is finding the right people who are commensurate with the opportunity at this level to then commercialize it because it's a battle. Let me tell you, it's a whole other game to get things into commercial production after you solve the problem because there are a lot of people

that don't want that to happen. They're quite happy with the way things are. They don't want something that's going to completely reestablish the threat level. And that's basically what we did. We reestablish the or set the new threshold for protective textiles, laminates and composites globally.

It's going to happen. We're very, very close right now. I finally think I figured out this business thing. I've gotten rid of all the riffraff, and I've cleaned up that process and streamlined it so much that I think we're getting it right finally. And we've got some very significant projects going on at the moment, not just with DOD things on a global level, but also with other industries, you know, the mental health industries, you know, in the country and certainly the action sports and the hockey and us, all those kinds of things. But how do your products apply to mental

health, Jeremiah? Well, it's surprisingly, many years ago, I had the first call from somebody. I think it was like the National Institute of Mental Health Providers or something here in the United States. They had some patients who had a horrible affliction. They were always chewing and gnawn on themselves of trying to doing self-damage. And they wondered if what I was working on, since it worked with these other creatures, it would work against these poor humans that had these various kinds of afflictions. Well, it turns out there are a lot of those kinds of mental afflictions with biting, and self-harm and all that sort of thing. So these people call me up and say,

hey, we need something for our patients. We need something for their providers, because when these interactions happen, if these people are off kilter, we need to be able to protect everybody, and that's our goal. Nothing out there does that. What I have been developing for them does.

So it'll be another one of those challenges to see how easily we can integrate this in commercially so that it's really available on a high commercial level. It seems like it would be very easy. People would just snap at it and it would be done. But it's not as simple as it appears because of the competing factions of what some in its country believe the way businesses should be run and who should profit from them, I suppose.

Ki Bono, who profits. It's so exciting on the one hand to think about the progress that could be made if we just got out of our own way. And it's so maddening, on the other hand, to think about what other areas. I mean, look, we're still in the midst of this pandemic. We're still looking at therapeutics with a weird mix. It's the same mix. I'm very optimistic that we're going to find something great.

But I'm also troubled by the fact that there might already be something great that's out there that simply doesn't come with many hundreds of billions of dollars that's going to accompany the introduction or the discovery of something novel or new. you could fill a book with what I don't know about ivermectin but i've read the stuff on uber pradesh and i've read about 300 million people who are now COVID free and i know that that drug costs about a penny a pill yeah so i don't think it's a tin foil hat conspiracy thing to say well wait a second if there's no money in a cure how excited is the world going to be about exploring that particular avenue you seem to be facing something similar

In a way, I completely agree with you. And unfortunately, I've come to believe that it's just the dark side of capitalism. All great societies and cultures that get too big for their britches, eventually they implode. And I think that it's probably some of these very same issues and processes that we're experiencing now are part of that downward slide unless people pull it together. And as you say, get out of their own way so that we can solve some of these things. There are many, many different ways that things could be a lot simpler. But there's a massive, massive, particularly in these recent years, shift to profit first. Solutions, forget solutions.

I mean, right now, even with the COVID business, we have opportunities. We've got the big guys doing their thing, the big organizations doing their thing, and you've got the smaller people doing their thing. And where's the answer? One side gets demonized or both sides get demonized by the other. thinking that, well, we don't like your way. That's the same thing. It's somebody not being happy with a situation, whether it's an existing industry that profits from selling unsafe products, you know, to the DOD, the police, or whomever, or the medical field or, you know, virtually anywhere else.

You see it the business wars between these taxi companies now, the Uber's and the lifts and all these kind of things. It's utter madness. And it seems to me that our capital is, our American way, in our capitalist system wasn't so antagonistic, I guess, before, to improvement. You know what I mean? It's like, aren't we supposed to be working together and pulling toward the same goal, making our country stronger in every possible way? But no, we've got special interests who don't seem to want to, you know, see things that way. I think competition is almost always good and healthy as long as it's fair.

And everybody's singing from the same hymn book. playing the same game of cards, right? It has to be fair. But I still wonder if part of what's happening in your industry and throughout this pandemic, and really in every industry, is a natural response to what happens when safety becomes artificially elevated to a point where nothing matters more. And so it's a difficult thing to articulate. and every time I try, I wind up putting my foot in it and I piss somebody off. All I'm really trying to articulate, like that last meme that Chuck and I were talking about before, it wasn't an attempt to compare masks with diapers.

It wasn't even an attempt to compare COVID with pooping your pants. It was an attempt to say, look, life only works when you get used to assuming risk. How much risk? Well, that varies on the activity. Obviously. But we know for a fact that driving is going to result in 40,000 fatalities this year. And yet we drive. Is it because we're irresponsible? Or is it because we've simply gotten used to the bargain? Used to the risk? Nobody's going to wear a diaper 24-7 if the odds of pooping their pants are roughly zero. Right? And it's interesting. Even though the stakes are much, much higher, I get that. I get that. I get that. We seem to be struggling with the notion of whether or not it's wise to spend the rest of our lives covering our faces if the percentage of risk involved in doing it is infinitesimal. So I'm just continually fascinated by industries and individuals as they struggle to come to terms with the reality of living in a society that continues to elevate safety above all things. it's insurance business man. It's one of the largest industries in the country. I just had

the shoulder replaced, as I've mentioned, a couple of months ago. And I was going through all of that insurance kind of stuff trying to figure how it all works. And oh my goodness, it's just an in-less. I don't know if you're 65 yet, Mike. I'll be 68 next birthday. Good grief, man. You are holding it together. Congrats. Well, again, opinions vary. But I did have worn out parts. I'd already ground down a half an inch of bone on this right shoulder, including zero cartilage. You did or sharks did? We just get used to it. You know what I mean? You get used to that risk, that assumption that

things are as they are. It's not as though things have become more dangerous across the board. In some areas, obviously, they have. But things are the way they've always been. And the only change has been that somebody's figured out a way and convinced enough people that we should be paid in order to protect you from these things that you have. have always survived and lived through. Again, the dark side of capitalism. You know, it's just run amok. It's like any society or culture that gets too big for its bridges eventually just disappears and implodes. And it appears that there are those among us, not all, but some among us that, you know, are okay with that because they've got a sort of a short, narrow vision, you know,

a very small interest. They're not looking at the bigger picture. Is it like an unearned moral superiority already going on? We're talking before about our youth when nobody wore a helmet when they rode a bike. Now, I'm not bemoaning that. I'm not saying that it's a good idea for kids today not to wear helmets. I'm just saying, isn't it interesting when somebody sees a kid without a helmet, how they'll clutch their pearls and how they'll gasp, how something that was completely common, barely one generation ago, is now looked at as not just bad, but the height of every heart of responsibility. How did we get to that place? And where do we go after that? You know, I'm with you. I'm as surprised by it as you and everyone else is. I think it's just in our country, I think it's just

comes down to profit motive. I swear, I've seen the dark side of that in these past 10 years or so. But at the same time, man, it's hard not to agree when you see no reason for this to occur, yet it does. And it happens over and over. And somebody tells you the sky is blue when it's raining, et cetera. It's just some weird thing that's going on particularly in our country, because I don't see this in a lot of the other places. People are living their lives, going about their business, doing what they can to improve

their existence in every way they possibly can. But here, as things get more crowded, as our resources get more contracted, as the finite access to things that we've always assumed would be ours for. for the picking forever, people are getting strange. You know, they're getting greedier and they're getting scared and they're frightened that somebody else has, you know, got something on them or above them or going to take over their live or whatever. And it's just, it's utter madness.

And unfortunately, it just seems to be, the only place I see this to this extent is in the business community. And usually where there's significant upside or significant revenues involved, that suggests greed, you know, which is, of course, one of the deadly sins and for obvious reasons. Maybe I'm just pointing out the screamingly obvious, but since you brought it up, fear. The things we're afraid of, we get to choose. We get to choose the things we're afraid of. You have spent decades doing something that would petrify the average homo sapien. And you do those things on purpose, and you do it day after day, and I've done them with you.

and for a while there, I really couldn't decide if you were missing a synapse or just the part of your brain that would tell a normal person, hey, maybe don't do that. Like that guy who climbed, what was it, El Capitan, Alex Huddled, was it right, or half-num, there's something missing in his brain that says, okay, you don't have to be scared of this when everybody else would. You literally swim with sharks, and yet the only sharks that really bit you, the only ones that, the only ones that, left a mark were the ones on two legs. The land sharks. That's right. Yes. So isn't that crazy? The video of your life is that of an aquatic superhero. The reality of trying to launch this business, you're in it just like the rest of us. Oh, dude. There are two other companies out there right now that are working to profit off of what they thought was my tech. I've learned to be very observant, let's say, as I go through these kind of business maneuvers these days. And I'm generally

much more careful now. I don't expose a lot of the good stuff. I'll show some of the old tech and so on to certain people. And son of a gun, if they don't take that, run out there and try to turn it into a business. And sometimes they do. They'll never last. Of course, they'll fall apart and go down. But people trying to profit from the concepts. And the concepts are far more important to me than the details of the solution. They're obviously equally important. Otherwise, they would have already been figured out by somebody. However, the concepts are really where the innovation and where the growth comes from and our understanding and our experiential capabilities of surviving dangerous situations. I've seen this happen several times, and I'm thinking to myself, man, you know,

there are two kinds of people, those that create and share and those that take and destroy. And It's become more and more clear to me through the years. Some business person said that somewhere along the line. And I'm thinking, son of a gun, man, that's absolutely correct. That guy was paying attention. The guys that generally are willing to steal something or try to play that game or claim your tech is theirs and all that sort of nonsense. It's so easily unwrapped. They're either not the brightest, you know, the shiniest penny on the roll, or they just are part of a system, a way of thinking that I just simply can't relate to.

You know, I work like a farmer all day every day. I try to create good things. If I work, I eat. If I don't, I don't. I'm happy to share it with it, whomever. But I don't like getting hosed in the process. And I've learned slowly, slowly, slowly, how to weed those characters out before they ever get in the door.

But it took me a while. I've done that twice now, two different companies. Well, most of the big lessons, you know, are the lessons we just keep learning over and over again, unfortunately. The most important ones. Yeah. Well, you said something before, too, that I'm, want to riff on. You mentioned in the context of innovation and development and risk taking,

you also use the word art. My impression anyway is that a big part of who you are is rooted in artistry. You have the mindset of an artist. You have the artist way, but you also just have this weird combination of daring do, risk taking, entrepreneurship and so forth. But talk to me about art. I mean, I know your photography speaks for itself, but just the way that you approach solving a problem by incorporating some kind of artistic sensibility to the solution. Yeah. I think the sort of the risky, the wild-eyed side of it is the, that's just a result. I mean, it's really a part of the process of validating those things that we create through our art, through our art and science. Art and science is how I kind of describe my personal approach to

things. And I think that's the critical window, really, because you've got all this money and all these big companies out there. Very smart people, highly educated. You got all the white coats in the world, all the science guys sitting in a lab someplace trying to figure something out. And then some used to be a young guy from California walks in and just blows away of everything they've managed to accomplish with the blink of an eye. You know, they don't quite get it. But if you step back a little bit And think about that how engineers in particular are hyper-focused. I wasn't educated an engineer. I was an educated marine biologist with a behavioral emphasis, meaning the human shark interaction.

When you see people that focus hard in, and this is certainly the case with the DOD and all that, you get all these guys in there are really, really good at what they know, but they're not getting outside of what they know to be creative or innovative or engineering new concepts because they simply don't see them. It's like asking someone to describe the color blue when they can't see color. You know, how do they do that? They simply can't.

So in my case, I've always felt that I was absolutely and utterly blessed by someone somewhere to have this ability to see things from different perspectives. And I don't mean just known ones, but entirely different perspectives, you know, from an artistic one and a scientific one. They don't necessarily always be. mesh together. No, but they are

two sides of the same coin though, right? Yes, yes, yes. And in my case, that is everything. Why can't all these things be an art? If we think back to Galileo and all these guys, I would think those guys more as artists than something else. I mean, they were doing things off the charts, right? Everybody was. Michael, and everybody.

Whether they were actually painting or creating some other form of really spectacular new something, technology, or understanding or insight or understanding of the solar system. I mean, these things are absolutely extraordinary. Have you ever seen the sketches of Da Vinci's first helicopter? I'm sure I have at some stage. That to me is maybe the greatest example of art and science coming together. To conceive of a

thing that would be created hundreds of years later, to draw it in the form that it would actually come to exist, and to draw it with such precision and such beauty. I get it. I love it. And I'm asking, you to keep going, just so you know where I'm coming from, when we took the arts out of the industrial arts, we just left the industry. And when we turned that into Votech, we just had a bad hyphenated term, and then we turned it in a shop. And then, of course, it was easy to remove from high schools altogether. But we started by taking the art out of it. I just wonder how many failures you've seen, how many great notions just kind of crap the bed because they forgot to put the art in it.

My guest today, Tom Albanyce, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands, on a fundamental level, that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American Giant knows this, which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make a all their excellent clothing right here in this country. It wasn't easy, but they did it. They sourced locally grown cotton, and they built factories in towns across the nation where they could hire hardworking locals who cared about making a quality product. And then they went about the business

of gently reminding people that when you buy a piece of clothing from American Giant, you're not just buying a high-quality sweatshirt or t-shirt or another pair of jeans. You're You're investing in a local supply chain. You're supporting communities from the Carolinas to California. And you're getting a piece of clothing that won't just survive the wash. You're getting a garment that'll get better with age. Check out their high-quality staples, hoodies, teas, denim, built to be worn year after year at American-giant.com slash mike. It's quality you can feel and a true American success story that you can be proud to support.

Use code Mike. Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant, American Made. You know, I would say that many, many highly commercialized and profitable entities and or items out there are probably largely devoid of anything of interest. That's why it's so easy to make better ones at this stage of the game. There was always somebody making a better this or a better that.

I reckon that there are probably examples of how they left out the soulful part of those developments, meaning the art side, almost anywhere you look. I don't get it. My head's not in that world. You know what I mean? Mine is, oh, I see something. It's another opportunity to improve something, make something better, protect somebody from this or that. If it turns into a business, great.

Find some people and let them want to run it and let them do it. And boom, move on to the next thing. You make it sound easy. as an entrepreneur. I thought it was going to be easy. As an entrepreneur and an inventor, what do you reckon is more important? Innovation or imitation?

Innovation by a long shot. The imitators are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. You'd be shocked, you know. Well, actually, you wouldn't be shocked, but a lot of people would be shocked that there are many, many, many people that function that way.

When I think about that as a creative guy, particularly after this past 10 years of dealing with so much nonsense, you know, you wonder how on earth, if you're not a creative person, how on earth do you survive? You can't grow anything. You can't build anything. You don't know how to design something. You can't engineer things. You're just sort of helpless. You're along for the ride. You become a working drone within the system, particularly here in our country.

And that's what kind of freaks me out. see people that are actually doing the creating, getting abused by the non-creatives, because that's the only angle they've got. That's why people like myself on the art and science side and the creative side, that's why we're constantly in conflict with the money side of business, because the money side guys have only money, and too many of them are still caught up in the chase of more of that. I don't give a rat's tale about that kind of stuff. I care about good innovation, development, making the world a better place, a safer place, you know, doing something good, not just acquiring shekels, you know, and more, more money or more of this or more of that. That's the real

conundrum that I have. You know, you've got the creatives who are making it possible. They're providing the food. They're growing everything. They're doing all these things. And then those that simply profit off of all the creatives work. If you step back and look at the American way, this has been going on for quite a while, and it continues. The, you know, the clever, the shrewd folks, the system, learn ways to game all of that. And, of course, we see examples of this every day in our contemporary society. Sure. And you can see what happens in an imitative and derivative world.

You can see it in my industry, certainly. You'd be hard pressed to find a news program that doesn't look like every other news program or a pop song today that doesn't sound like every other pop song. And it's because they're all imitating each other. But I would ask you to ruminate too, not just on the whole system, vis-a-vis imitation and innovation, but on the individual. I remember standing there with you in your very best mad scientist lab down there, wherever we were, welding that shark suit together.

And people should understand. Chuck, this thing is thousands of little tiny steel rings. About 400,000. 400,000 little steel rings. And they all have to be welded together, like just little tiny tig welds. By hand. By hand, right? Well, the assembly is by hand.

Now we can make the bulk material. We can make mechanically, but everything still has to be done ring by ring by ring to turn it into a garment. This is why I'm asking, when you create something that innovative, you start with a prototype. And the innovation gets all of the sex appeal and all the glamour, as it should. It's the thing. But now what? How many do you want to sell? Now the question becomes, I think, how facile are you at imitating your innovation?

Right? I'm just always interested in that. Like up here in Silicon Valley, not far from where I'm sitting, every company I know wants to brand themselves as the great innovators. But the ones that succeeded were equally good at duplicating what they did. This thing, right? Our phones. My God, it's a hell of a prototype.

but what good does one do you? They had to make billions. So I just wonder for you, when did it occur to you that, man, this shark suit is pretty cool, but it's got 400,000 individual pieces in it, and I got to figure out a way to make them. And only five people that need one, right?

Right. This is not a great model, Jeremiah. Well, again, that's where it all comes down to interest of the artist. I chuckle when I call myself an artist because I can hardly draw a straight line. At the same time, innovating these kinds of solutions, man, that's everything. If you look at some of the big innovators, the guys that actually innovated something, did something really significant.

And it's getting hard to tell who those actual people are sometimes now. And a bigger company could be the people in the other offices. And the CEO will try to claim that as his innovation. That's all BS. That's not so. The innovators are the ones who are doing that. He's out there making a financial decision about what's going to make a higher profit. So I respect the people that actually do the work, not the ones that talk about it or claim it in a unworthy manner.

Replicating things. Building that first thing and solving that problem is all that's ever been my focus. And as a marine biologist back then, that was the human shark interaction. It was a very particular and immediate interest of mine. Well, that's gone on, actually, for about 45 years, shockingly. It's amazing to think that. At the same time, it was instrumental in development of a global shark. driving industry, which has been up at times to about a billion dollars a year. It's been a massive

value in the education and awareness programs for people to understand more about sharks so that we're not all living in abject fear of them, you know, in every water. I mean, people all over the planet and are out playing around with sharks. The only time when he chargersuits, of course, is almost off days when things don't go correctly or properly. Understated. This was not part of my dive plan. Losing this arm was really... But it's nature, you know, and we have to accept, just like when we were kids. Look, I'm going to ride this bike down that hill as fast as I can, and I may come off.

Well, you know, that's part of the deal. It just comes with the territory. And, of course, imagine the insurance people having that conversation. Their eyes will be popping out of their heads and there's smoke coming out of their ears because they don't see things the way we do. They see them as dollars and cents. Sure. That have nothing to do with anything else.

Chuck, you have the look on your face of a man who's dying to ask a question. Thank you, my guess. I do. I just want to back up a little bit because you said before Jeremiah that you sort of all shucks your way about being an artist. And I would say that that is a giant understatement as well because I've seen your photographic work and you've been printed, your photos have been printed in some of the biggest magazines in the country, right? One of the biggest, I would say, is National Geographic.

If you think I'm kidding, go to S-H-R-B-A-the-Numeral 8, shark bait, very clever, on Instagram, and you can see a lot, and also on your website, of course. From the artistic side, I guess it's kind of a personal thing. It's just how we see the world, you know, and I've been very fortunate to be out in nature, out in the world. I was very, very fortunate to work in the very beginning of the ecotourism and adventure travel business. So we were out there running around most parts of the world before anybody else had access to them. And that was an extraordinary opportunity for a young guy.

You know, I'd started that at about 20 years old or so. Wow. And that was a beginning for me that you would have seen some of those images looking through those websites. But to me, it's, you know, without art, what are we? We're nothing. We're like a warehouse full of shit. I've been called worse.

I've been looking for a title for this episode. I think we just found it. A warehouse full of shit with Jeremiah Solomon. Congratulations, brother. your ship just came in. There you go, man. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of time and resources are spent on. Imagine if the guys that were out there actually creating and doing really good stuff

were backed by somebody that shared that interest instead of getting it off the rails and turning it into a financial advantage of some kind. There's nothing wrong with that. Believe me, I love spending money. I couldn't do the things I do if I didn't. Even the photographic days, that's how I subsidized all the, early development of all the shark suits and all these other projects that I was doing. That's how I educated myself.

I spent time in my art life, which was not a bad way to go, starting with natural history imagery for life and geographic and all that's New Yorker, all those publications from the old days. And then shifting into commercial work and then fashion. I did fashion for years, which was a lot of fun, and ultimately to celebrity images. But that was mostly the intellectuals, not the TV, Hollywood type. I was more of the scientists, the Attenboroughs, and people like this, and the Deepak Chopperus and all these kind of folks.

And that was, I think, instrumental in how I developed my orientation, my modus operandi at solving these other kinds of problems. Because as an artist, you're always doing something. As a scientist, you're always trying to figure something out. If you're trying to solve things, figure things out, that's a whole lot different than making more money and just focusing on that being the goal, doing some of them. innocuous work that you don't have any interest or bring any value to. You're just a drone. What about bearing witness? What about the simple business of bearing witness, being the audience, watching a thing? I'm listening to you talk about this, and I'm guessing you photographed David Attenborough or Richard. Which one was it? No, actually it wasn't Attenborough, but if you're talking about Richard,

we were talking about Leakey the other day. I was online. I was a young boy back then. I had the chance to meet up with Richard Leakey in East Africa when I was down there at one point, I think in the 60s, and his son, Richard, who had unfortunately passed away a couple days ago. But as a witness to some of these things, you know, the access that I had and the places that I was going out in the world, man, I was working next arm in arm with the best cinematographers, the naturalists, the wildlife painters, Sir Peter Scott of the World Wildlife Foundation, Roger Torrey Peterson, the artist from Audubon Society, you know, I mean, all these kind of characters and the explorers. These are the folks that I was out there cruising around

with. So I had the benefit of really having some impressionable years in the exposure of these epic, magnificent people who have actually accomplished so much in their lives in a different kind of way. And clearly the epigenetics of that are probably what helped to sort of guide my path into the rather peculiar way that I go about this as well. What would they make of Shark Week? What do you make of Shark Week? I won't say it's not been a lot of fun at times. We've had a ball. You and I met there for quite a few years, it seemed to be going pretty good.

Arguably, the Discovery Channel, the whole Shark Week thing started around the success of the Wild Kingdoms that I was doing back in the earlier 80s. People realized in the TV world that people like to watch these kinds of shows. So I was doing the Marlon Perkins shark stuff here and there. While Bob and I watched from the brush. And man, that was some fun because it was way back. Matter of fact, I was down in Guadalupe Island here off Mexico a couple of months ago, we realized that the first time I'd been to announce, you know, for the past 20 years, 15 years,

it's been to become maybe the premier great white shark viewing location in the world. It's really just off the charts. And anybody needs to do white sharks, it's hard to do any better than you can get it down here just off of our coast here, San Diego. Let's see, I just lost my train of thought. there. This has happened in you a lot. Do I need to worry about this? Well, don't forget my age, man. We were talking about Wild Kingdom, your time on the Wild Kingdom, and you realized something recently. Yeah, just to get back to the Mexico story, when I was recently down there, we were trying to figure out when I was first down at Guadalupe Island, 40 years ago. 40 years ago. Yeah.

And it was shocking because, and we were all a bunch of older guys. You know, we're like, holy crap, man, where'd this time go? I'm a big fan of accurate, informed, and relevant information. I don't care about all the drama and the reality TV and all that kind of silly stuff that has become more a part of these kinds of things, some of the programs. And, you know, what, I had a whole lot of fun doing some discovery stuff through the years. And more recent times, I've shifted over to National Geographic because they had made promises about trying to get back to a more academic-oriented, accurate content without all the silly stuff. Without being naked and afraid? Yeah, it's hard, you know, because they're all competing.

Network people are struggling in their own way and they're all competing against each other and all that sort of thing. So I know it's tough for them, but in my view, I believe that if you give people the very best content, And I mean aesthetically, informationally, conceptually, you don't eliminate anybody from your viewing audience. If you just show the Jerry Springer angle of things, you generally lose a significant part of your audience.

You may have quite a few that are still entertained, but that's not necessarily one that you're, that's irrelevant to your work anyway. So I'm just a big believer in doing things in a more authentic or sincere way. I don't like to see nature, wildlife, or important environmental things or cultures or societies or anything else being used as a prop for some petty personal aggrandizement and all that kind of silliness.

And a lot of the TV programs these days are sort of, I guess they're trying to make them personality driven because they're running out of stories or something. It's a strange thing to me. Well, they're running out of a runway. It's the eternal struggle. You have to know the playground that you're in. Dirty Jobs, first and foremost, was an entertainment show. And if people weren't entertained, it didn't matter what my personal ideas and beliefs and thoughts were.

It didn't matter if I had a larger agenda concerning work or anything like that. You must first entertain. And you, my friend, whether you like it or not, you understood that. And you took us on a ride on that boat in Stewart's Cove. And that was one of the first occasions where people on a really huge level had a chance to see your invention save a life, particularly yours and mine. And you know what? That's not a small thing. And whatever bargain you have to make, whatever price you need to make, the point of getting that moment into millions of living rooms.

I still don't appreciate the impact of that because I don't understand it. You just never know who's watching. I still get letters to this day about the segment we did and a lot of other segments too. Keep doing what you're doing. Keep putting the art out there. Keep pushing the rock up the hill. Don't let them get you down. You know, years ago, my mother gave me a little sculpture of Sisypice for that

very reason because she realized early on that, oh, this boy's going to have a tough road. He seems to like to do the hard projects. But in fact, that's absolutely correct. You know, if you can, you do it. You know, my partner, Mary Sullivan, right? Sure, absolutely. Adore her. Mary gave me years ago a similar painting, not of Sisyphus, but of Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

I still haven't hanging. I still haven't hanging right over there. There's something so noble and attractive and interesting about futility and the great notion and the unreachable star. I just did a segment. You're going to love it on Dirty Jobs, which is back, by the way. I can't wait to see it, yeah?

Yeah. Like I just kind of slip that in there, Chuck? It's back. Sundays at 8 on Discovery. Only on Discovery. We do a segment on Crazy Horse in South Dakota. Awesome. And just 20 miles down the road from Rushmore, if that.

But a completely different experience. Started 50 years ago. Won't be completed for an us. other 40 or 50 years. You talk about Sisyphus meets Quixote. You talk about art. They are carving a shockingly beautiful visage out of the living granite in South Dakota. And it'll take your breath away. There is no imitation for that. There's only the one. There's only the prototype. And it's only going to take 100 years to finish. You got to love that. Well, but it's the real thing, man. Imagine being that.

the guy or one of those groups that wants to build that thing. It's already been done. They've got nothing else on their mind. They can't figure anything else out. And they don't really have the skills to come up with something better. What a terrifying way to live that must be. And I think that one of the beautiful things is no matter what mischief or nonsense we get ourselves into or get set back or injured or whatever it happens to be, you're living right, man. You're living pure, pure life and building and developing things that have significance. They're relevant. You know, I think that that's another part of today's issue.

Everybody wants to have a rush to significance as though that's the goal that they feel they'd be able to successfully navigate without any significance. No, you can't. It doesn't work like that. It only works for a few minutes on social media that way. And then once people realize that that's all nonsense, and that's another charlatan. It's gone away, but then they're moved on to something else

because that's just the way a vast majority of our society apparently functions now. There's no dependence on the heart or the soul of what, it's something they're either trying to build and or present. As another traveler here on this wacky curved road. Well, look, man, if the fate of your travels involves pushing a rock up a hill, then you might as well figure out a way to like it. And if you're going to spend your life tilting at windmills, You might as well make the windmill your friend.

Yes, hey, man. I couldn't agree more. I've got a very early copy of Don Quixote here somewhere. It was actually written in Spanish, and I can't remember from Wynn, but I picked it up. I was going to give it as a gift to one of my Latin friends. It encouraged me to dig that thing out and see if I can remember any of my Spanish read a re-read a little bit of that.

The first modern novel. Is that what it was? Yeah. It was the first novel? He didn't know it at the time, but it was the first novel that, Well, it was written in prose, you know, and not verse. Up until that point, all the great narratives were the Iliad and so forth and so on. Servantes went a different way.

And so did you. Last question. I want to kind of land the plane where we, from the same runway where we took off. Fear. You said, well, actually, you didn't say it. I'll say it. Is the fear homo sapiens have of sharks? in any way justified?

Sure. Yeah. It's not the TV version. It's not the media version. Anyone, any islander or a tropical person that grew up in the environment of these creatures learns early.

You don't mess around with these animals. Doesn't mean that they're always trying to eat you up. It's just you respect them for who and what they are. The rest of it's all, well, I won't say it's all created by us, But fear of the unknown was everything. I remember until the 50s, we were mostly an anti-environment culture because it was considered dark.

It was the dark art. It was Satan. It was evil. Everything about nature was wrong. So they had that basis for the fear, I think, in the earlier days. And then, you know, of course, those would be people living in landlocked places. They wouldn't have any clue about things like sharks. But the islanders, people that grew up around these things,

there's partly a fear of the unknown. And the rest, I think, was done by media. It was easy to do. Somewhere back in the early days, I was always amazed also like you that people were so attracted to and or paid such attention to anything that had to do with sharks or shark bites or shark attacks, things of that nature. You know, I was always amazed by that. And then I came across some numbers somewhere that suggested that the word shark, you might be able to find this as resourceful as you are. The word shark was something like 600 times more of a trigger than almost any other word in the public lexicon to us, to humans. I was always amazed by that.

And of course, that leads to all the success of these kind of sharky-type shows that are out there now. Endless new experts everywhere that have some new story they want to tell about them, et cetera. But there's just something that attracts people to these animals that, man, has become a meal ticket for a whole lot of, folks out there. There's a weird thing about being frightened of the thing you're attracted to or being attracted to a thing that frightens you. We kind of talked around it, but somewhere in the midst of the headlines today and in your career, there's a weird corollary between our relationships with sharks and our current relationship with this virus and trying to find a place. We're going to have to live with both because neither one is going to go away unless we hunt them into extinction like the morons

we've proven ourselves to be from time to time i certainly hope that doesn't happen but correct they've been swimming around the same oceans we crawled out of millennia ago they've been here from the jump they're still going to be here it's really just a question it seems of how fearful are we going to be. You made a shark suit that brought people a certain piece of mind. I think maybe we're seeing something similar unfold right now all around us every day, whether it's diapers or masks or whatever it is. We're still in the midst of figuring it out, and I, for one, can't wait to see how it all shakes out. You know, the shark suits, yes, provided some safety and sanctuary and some comfort in that regard. But it also, and more importantly, in my view, provides

access. It gave us access so that we could have experiences and have the time to deepen our understanding of what other creatures, any of the other animals, be they two or four-legged or on fins or whatever, out there, and as opposed to just being so disrespectful and discarding anything environmental and or the other creatures here, as though there are something of ours to be used, exploited, and extracted. I couldn't agree more that we face a similar kind of an issue today with how we're trying to navigate this. And you see how tough it is. Even for the people that spend their entire lives and careers studying these things, there's always something else.

There's always some little angle on here. And what we're seeing with this virus business has been spectacularly kind of insidious in some ways. My mother was an epidemiologist. She was a virologist, worked in small countries around the world, Iraq, Mexico, Africa, all these kind of dangerous places at different times. She was an epidemiologist by trade? She was a doctor and epidemiologist. As a result, I was exposed to a lot of that understanding and the theory and so on around this kind of thing.

Because she was out there trying to help some of these other smaller third world countries, if you will, no disrespect intended, to help them deal with some of these big public health crises. So I know that there's nobody trying to scam us and there's nobody trying to extend this drama that we're all experiencing now. just for profit. There are those who will take advantage of that opportunity to do so, and they're doing it clearly, the big pharma and all that. They're as dark as they are light. They've done good things and they've done ghastly things and they continue to do both like most of us, sadly. What's going on now, it's a dangerous thing to be pushing back on people who are really putting the time in to understand everything they possibly can about these bugs. And they do change and they do morph and they do

shift around and if we could just focus on the reality of it all as opposed to all the peripheral opportunities and or business angles and or politics and all that sort of nonsense, man, we'd be way down the road by now, I would assume. For instance, resisting, trying to do things that we know will help reduce the transmissibility of these things should be done. What's the harm? You know what I I mean, to conflate that with a lot of the other deeper emotional issues that our culture, particularly the American society, our egos have, is, I mean, that's perilous and it's killing people. And to me, that's a very sad thing.

It's a tough position to be in, but you've got to get to the other side of it. And the best way to do that is to do the best you can with the best information you have at that moment. Science is not perfect, but science is constantly in pursuit of the things that they don't know so that we can have a better understanding of what's before us. And art, art should come along with it. Otherwise, what is science without art, but a bunch of numbers? That's right.

What a blackboard. Yeah, that's right. X's no. I've never been bored in your presence, Jeremiah. Thanks for making the time. It's always my pleasure to have a few minutes with you, man. And wonderful to see her bringing back dirty jobs. And that Sweet Mary is still keeping you in.

line. She's trying. You're looking as healthy as a horse. I'm about as big as one, too. We've all put on a couple of pals. I know you're about as far removed from shameless pluggery and consumerism as imaginable, but what do you want to plug? Where do you want people to go? What do you want people to do who have listened to this and said, at Jeremiah, I'd like to know more about that, Kat. Well, you know, I think that the websites are a good place to start. The good overview is Jeremiah Sullivan.com. Then if you're interested in the marine side, the shark suits, that would be shark armor.com or shark suits, plural.com. This advanced tech that I've been doing, a lot of this current heavy lifting that I'm involved in now is you can see at Silvergate Tech.com. Silvergate

tech is S-I-L-V-E-R-G-E-T-E-T-E-K.com. Silvergate Tech.com. And there you'll see what all of this 45 years of working in the protective solutions sector has been turning out. And I think you'll find that one, particularly interesting. Chuck, final thoughts? Was he everything I promised? Yeah, first of all, just look at you. You look like Ernest Hemingway's older, more in shape, smarter brother to me. And you're as humble as the day is long, honest to God.

You are crazy brave, the stuff I've seen you do in video. your artwork is phenomenal. I mean, I encourage everyone to look you up on Instagram at Shark Bate, S-H-R-K-B-A, the Numeral 8. That's you, and it's great stuff. Pleasure to meet you. That is so cheeky, shark bait at Instagram. That was way back in the 70s. People would say, oh, Jeremiah, why don't you get one of those personalized license plates? So I'm out here in California. Everybody was doing that, right? I'm not going to do. No, no, no. I don't do that. I'm not a joiner. I don't put stickers on my car. I don't do that kind of stuff. Well, years later, somebody eventually talked me into doing it. I just restored a little

2002 BMW back in the, whenever that was, early 70s. I went in there to check out to see if I could find one. I was going to put shark bait, you know. So I looked up, I went in the DMV and I put in the letters. I'm telling you, they were probably six or seven variations of spelling that were already taken. They were already taken. And I'm going, what the, I'm the only shark bait guy that I think there lives on this planet, and all the shark bait license plates are gone. So I finally found one. I came up with one as I was quickly trying to configure it there, and I came up with a numeral on the end, which saved it.

Frankly, I think it's the coolest one. Totally. Naturally, but it was quite a surprise. Anyway, I kept that personal plate on my old cards for years and years and years, and that's where the whole shark bait thing came from. Well, this is why you hate imitators. You're the original shark bait, and everybody else in the world is taking your handle and driving around with sharks.

on their cars. I couldn't understand it. That's another one of the lessons, by the way, about contemporary capitalism. When I formed Silvergate with one of my partners, we're looking up names and things like that. When I shifted over to Shark Armor from rebranding from my old company name, what did my trademark first? And then I came in and thought, okay, I better get the rest of the stuff going. Never, ever, ever list your trademark or file for your trademark before you secure your URLs that you're going to use for social media. Because these guys, There's a whole industry out there that goes and watches new business names, grabs that name, and then they sell it back to you.

I had to buy my name back from a fireman who's called Mike Rowe, who bought it years ago. He wasn't doing anything online. He just saw dirty jobs and thought, no, one day that guy's going to want a website called micro.com. He was right. He was right. It's a strange world we live in now. I guess all we can do is keep trying to do the right thing, despite all of the tendencies and the inclinations for most of us to do things the wrong way.

Just do what we do, man. As long as we can do it, we might as well. Every so often you've got to buy your own name back. It's just the way the cookie crumbles. Jeremiah, you be well. Stay healthy. You too, my friend. All right.

Adios.