The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 317: Jason Williams—Adventure is Disaster Narrowly Averted

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

This documentary filmmaker, TV producer, and treasure hunter has traveled to some of the most beautiful and dangerous locations on the planet. The discussion includes ancient Assyrian artifacts, sunken ships, the treasures of Nimrud, underwater safecracking, a billion dollars in gold, and the greatest sizzle reel no one's ever seen.  

You know what adventure is? Adventure is disaster, narrowly averted. That is the title of this episode. It's episode 317 of the way I heard it. And that's a quote, Chuck, from my old buddy, Greg Stem, who is not our guest today. He's not. He is quoted by Jason Williams, who is my guest. Aha, we got to it, yes. It's such a good quote. It's now the title. Adventure is disaster. narrowly averted. What do you think of Jason? Jason is a lot of fun. He is quite British, I believe. And terribly British, and he's got a wonderful accent. He can spin a yarn, you know.

He can tell a story. And he's been around the world and done some really crazy things from, you know, under the ocean to the deserts of Iraq. He's been everywhere. Yeah. He's done a lot of talks. His wife actually hired me many years ago to narrate some program. for Animal Planet about tigers.

And then she must have liked me because she recommended me to her husband, Jason Williams, who you're about to meet. And he hired me to narrate a series on treasure hunting. Specifically, a series around a recovery vessel called The Odyssey

and a guy named Greg Stem, who is a professional treasure hunter. Jason, Williams, our guest, is a professional documentarian, as we may have pointed out. Anyhow, I narrate these three episodes, and they do really well for discovery. And so Jason reaches out after that to say, look, we have the rights. Odyssey Marine has the rights to dive on what he called America's Titanic.

And I'm like, what do you mean America's Titanic? And it was Jason who first told me the story of the SS Central America, which is a gold ship that was coming back from the gold fields in California by way the Panama Canal and stopped in Cuba and about 100 miles off the coast of South Carolina ran into a hurricane in 1857 and sunk. Nearly 500 people died. This is a full-on tragedy. But what makes it so unforgettable is not just the tragic nature of the disaster itself, but the fact that somewhere between 20 and 22 tons of gold went down with the ship. This is gold pulled out of the gold fields in California, smelted down into bars and coins,

gold that was sewn into people's jackets and stored on the ship. It was just, it was a ship of gold. In fact, Gary Kinder, he wrote the book called Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And so this is a conversation about what happened when I went down to Charleston years ago and then went down to the warehouse to see. the gold and went aboard the Odyssey to meet the guys who found it. What happened when the U.S. Marshals showed up? There are a couple things you just need to be mindful of when we jump into this,

because it moves pretty quick and Jason, you know, he talks like this, you know. But this is the story of the incredible sizzle reel that we put together that I was never allowed to share because of all the lawyers. And this morning I learned that National Geographic and the BBC are going to do the project, just not with me and Jason. Not yet. At least. Not yet.

So I don't know what's going to become of this conversation, but I wanted you to hear it because it speaks to the way the sausage gets made, or not made sometimes. But mostly it's just a great tale of treasure hunting. And what happens to a man named Tommy Thompson, who gets a line on nearly a billion dollars in gold? finds out where it is, 7,200 feet in the Atlantic and starts to bring it up. This guy, what he went through after he brought up $50 million got him on the FBI's most wanted list.

It got me to Charleston onto the Odyssey where I was allowed to bear witness to the recovery and help transport the gold to an undisclosed location in South Florida, where I was allowed to Hold it in my two hands, Chuck, and introduce a documentary that I was just so looking forward to making but never got made. So things are in motion. Things are happening. And I just thought, well, we got a podcast to do. So let's see if old Jason Williams is out there to tell us some treasure hunting stories and remind me of why this thing really is the best documentary. Never made.

Somebody else made a version of it. But not like we were going to. because adventure really is disaster, narrowly averted. It's episode 317. You're going to love Jason Williams, a modern day pirate with a little bit of treasure hunter thrown in. Right after this. Duh do do do do do do.

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I should hope so, Michael. So I'm going to give you a little prologue, okay? Something happened this morning. You know, when you called, I didn't know, this is going to happen. But subsequently this morning as I'm going, gosh, you know, I should really go and buy that microphone for Mike Roe. I got a call from the guys who like repair stuff for us, like jewelry and things, right, watches. And then he said, well, do you not want this? And I'm like, what I've no idea what you're talking about.

He said, well, it's been sitting here for seven years. And I was like, whoa. I love, how can it come and have a look? Whatever it is, it's a mystery, it's been there for seven years. Is it Hunter Biden's laptop? No. Oh, God. No, it's this, it's this.

This little item here is green thing in the midst of this is 2,800 years old, and it is a copper fragment from the gates. of Nur Shharukin, as they say in ancient Assyrian, which I'm not very good at. But it's called Nurehqin. Norsherukin was where Emperor Sargon the Second had his great empire of blood in the sort of Assyrian period. And I was very lucky in to 1993, I got involved. invited. And back in 93, when everything was run by Saddam Hussein, if you got an invitation

from Saddam, you went, you know. You went. Now, to be clear, the Assyrian empire is now what, that's northern Iraq, right? That is exactly right. So it's basically, you got Baghdad's down here, and then up here is Mosul, and here is this place called Korsabad. And at that time, it was still very much under Kurdish, no-fly zones. And it was kind of a fairly hostile environment, but they were digging. And they had just discovered one of the city gates of ancient Nur Sharokin.

And there was all these green flecks lying around in the mud because it was incredibly wet, miserable, muddy foulness there. And I was like, what are these flecks, these gorgeous green things on the ground? And they said, oh, that's the city gates of Sargon the Second's great capital city. And what they did back in the day, they took these huge sheets of copper, beat them into the gates of the city. So they shone brightly on the hill and scared the bejesus out of anybody who's stupid enough to come and, like, mess with Sargon. right. So I picked these things up and I made, I had these things made, one for my eldest and one for

my youngest daughters. And it had disappeared. For seven years, we've been looking for this treasure, Mike. Good God. And it turned out it being my jeweler the whole time. After a decade spent cavorting around in ancient ruins, after years and years of archaeology and documentary filmmaking, the great treasure that you actually found was one you weren't even seeking. Exactly. It was exactly that. Anyway, beautiful thing. It showed up this morning. So I thought I'd sort of wheel it in. It was kind of cute. Well, I think it's an excellent, if unanticipated, sidebar simply to come out of the gate acknowledging the fact that sometimes the greatest treasures fall in your lap. And sometimes you spend a lifetime digging around for,

them, only to come up profoundly empty. And I've been wanting to talk to you for a while. In general, I wanted to have a conversation with you about the state of documentary filmmaking and nonfiction programming in general, because the first time you and I met, you were kind enough to hire me to narrate a, I believe it was a three-episode run of the Garasopa.

And was it the Mantola? Was that the name of the boat that the German sank? You don't even remember anymore. It was a Gersopa and it was sunk by the Germans and there was another vessel which they were also looking which I think was actually also was called the Mantola. I don't think they found that one. But that's right.

We'd actually hired you before. My spouse reminded me of the fact that she directed you for I think some animal planet show about tigers. Yes. And she's like, yes, yes. Say how to Mike. Yeah. Well, you know what?

You're the only couple to have directed me ever. In fact, you're the last guy I ever actually took direction from in a way that felt like, you know, because your ideas are always good. Plus, you always sound more credible than the average director, you know,

when you tell me what to do. I actually, Chuck, found myself not only taking Jason's direction, but starting to sound a little bit like him. And he would hop in from time to time and say, no, dear boy, we're not, paying you to sound like us. We want you to sound like you.

I'm like, I know, I'm sorry, but you get sucked in. My point is... Was he giving you line readings with the accent? Because I've experienced that before. No, no. He would never give a line reading. But what he would say is things like, now, if you were to do it again and you were to suck less, what would that sound like exactly?

He would let me find my way. But look, this is all beside the point. The point is, Between takes, Jason, you and I had many conversations about what we called the deteriorating state, the lack of an appetite for the classic discovery channel, the classic Nat Geo, the classic history stuff, you know, that brought us into the business. So I wanted to talk to you about that broadly and in general, but now, now this morning, I had a little wake-up call, too. I didn't find a forgotten treasure. I found an announcement from National Geographic that they'd partnered with the BBC to do the project that you and I worked on for some time a few years ago.

So I'm just going to very generally turn it over to you and say, which would you like to dive into first? Well, it's so funny you should say that. I think anything about my fabulous speaking chops, frankly, we'll just start there. All right, then why didn't you cast yourself for the garrasopa? And tell people what the garrasopa was and why it was. Oh, by the way, sorry to filibuster, but I'm on your page now where you've got like, on IMBD, you've got like 60 films there you've directed. Highest rated one, Silver Rush, narrated by Micro.

You're welcome. Boom, boom. No, it cannot be. Coincidence? We think not. Some things that they are what they are. They are what they are. Correlation is not causation, but actually a lot of the time it is.

But a lot of the time it is. Sometimes. So, yeah, that's a funny one. This all boils down to two letters, Mike. IP and who the freak controls the IP. And in this instance, the IP is this astonishing. cash of gold, gold and gold, which went down with the SS Central America. In 1853, a side wheel paddle steamer, splendid thing, three masts, if I remember rightly.

And might have been 57, Jace. For some reason, I got 57 seared into my retina, but I could be wrong. I often am. Fifty-three, 57. I don't know. I don't know. It's a long time ago. stage in my life, you know, it's whatever is on, it's whatever's on Wikipedia, brother. And so all I do is like, oh God, you know, dust off a few brain cells, look at the Wikipedia page and go, you know. So in its first iteration, Tommy Thompson, who's a really remarkable guy, he gets a really substantial trance of monies, weirdly enough from, you know, the landlocked state of Ohio. And he was, a lot of the money came out of Columbus and Cincinnati.

And for some reason, he was able to persuade all of these good burghans of, you know, those great cities, to foot up all this money to essentially invent technologies, which at that point really, never been deployed to secure, you know, cracking a safe at how deep it was. I mean, it was deep. I mean, this was a really crazy. Seventy 200 feet. It's a mile and a half down. This is some deep shit, as I say. And nobody had done this before. Now, the good news is, you know, it's not like you're actually cracking a safe 7,200 feet down because the safe actually is the boat. and once they'd found the vessel, the Central America, which was an astonishing achievement,

because this is all, you know, this is happening in, I'm going to say, 1988 was when he first got a visual ID on the ship and then 89 he does the recovery. We did, when I say we, that would mean Odyssey Marine Exploration, which is organizations on a lot of deep water shipwreck recoveries over the years with whom I've worked extensively. We did a comparable thing with the Gersopa, which you narrated. I mean, that, though, was 25 years later.

And profound iterations and sophistications of technology and hardware. And this was, you know, this is in the late 80s. Nobody had done this. Literally nobody had touched this. And the idea that he found it and then cracked it and then key extracted. Somewhere, you know, it's all bullshit because, you know, we invent these numbers

as much to promote the shows we make as to really describe the nature of the treasure found. But, you know, in late 1980 terms, somewhere doing $150 million worth of gold. A lot of double eagles back then, but also just a lot of ingots. So a lot of gold, 150 million. and he brings it up and it immediately triggers this sort of cycle of litigation,

which wouldn't really stop until, as I understand it, about three years ago. It finally settled down. But at one point, Tommy Thompson was being pursued by like 39 separate insurance companies. all of whom are saying, we paid out on the wreck of the S. Central America and its treasures back in the 19th century. We want our VIG now. It's our money.

Basically, it's our money. Well, there's a lot of dough. It's a lot of dough and it's a lot of lawyers, right? I mean, think about it. 39 insurance companies. It's got to be 139 attorneys. How many insurance companies would you need? I mean, not all of those claims must have been legitimate, correct?

Well, the weird thing is, over that amount of time, a lot of companies are bought by other companies, they aggregate around each other. They've all got some degree of, you know, presumed title to this treasure. And this is a big payday. And everybody knows there's more down there. I mean, this is the first cycle of material, which has been brought up. And so this insane process of litigation, you know, goes underway. And Tommy Thompson, I've never met him. I've actually loved to meet the guy because he is still alive and he's just got out of jail. I think he's now out of jail. So, you know, there's no reason why one couldn't touch base with him. But he's got a story to tell. I mean,

it's going to be, I think, a very interesting story. And as you intimated our good friends at National Geographic, chatting with our good friends at the BBC about telling Tommy Tom. Tomy Thompson's life story. You and I, of course, intersected with this yarn, courtesy of Odyssey Marine exploration, who were actually brought in to sort of finish up the recovery of the treasure of the Central America. Because Tommy Thompson, once he's sort of got submerged in this horrible mess of litigation, He never went back there. He couldn't raise money, presumably, because of the litigation. There's talk that he had his own stash, but I have no idea.

Did he, didn't he? I don't know that. But I do know that he was in no position technologically, practically, financially to finish up the business of the recovery. And that ended up being handed over to a court in the state of Ohio. I really hope I'm getting this right, which had jurisdiction as the sort of custodians in principle in fact or something of whatever was left of the SS Central America. And so ultimately it's a judge who cuts a deal with Odyssey Marine Exploration, my good friend Greg Stem, to go and finish the job that Tommy Thompson had not been able to complete. And as you know, because you, my friend, were there, they managed to put together this

final. I mean, this has got to be, I'm going to say, is it 2014 when we were working on that? Yeah. 14 and 15, we met. I flew to Charleston. I met you in Charleston. It was about 110 degrees. Then we went down, I think, to St. Petersburg or maybe around Sarasota. And we actually looked at some of the gold that was recovered. But let me just, for purposes of clarity, so people can follow this, it's not a bunch of gold at the bottom of the sea. It's the largest treasure to date ever found. Some estimates put it at over $900 million in today's money sitting there. When this ship went down to Central America, they just started throwing their gold over the side. Remember, the ship's coming back from the gold fields from up here where I live, right?

around San Francisco, comes all the way down through Panama, stops in Cuba, they get onto the Central America, and these people, they, you know, you take your gold dust and your nuggets and you, and you melt them down and you create these gold bars in many cases. And many of those gold bars, they were in a safe that was actually on the ship. But most of it was, it was sewn into people's coats, right? This is their life savings. You're talking about 22 tons of gold that goes down with a ship. And it's not just, oh, no, the ship sank. This is America's Titanic. You've got 500 people who died, 100 miles off the coast to, I think it was South Carolina. So, you know, I meet Jason, and I'm narrating a show about the Garasopa, which sinks with all this

silver, millions and millions of dollars worth of silver. And our friend Greg is on the Odyssey, recover the silver. And this documentary opens with everything Greg recovered being flown away on a plane, seized, I think, by the Spanish government, right? So that's how I met Greg Stem. That's how I met Jason. And ever since then, I've been like, we have to do something around the Central America. We have to tell this story. So, again, just by way of explanation, I've got... Mike, you do this so good, but, you know, I love this. I mean, you actually really... did watch the sizzle reel, which is really great. Watch it. I've got it queued up right here because it's the single best sizzle reel for a

documentary I've ever seen. No one has ever seen it because no one will let me share it. Meanwhile, now it's seven years old. This thing would have sold the show. Had you let me put it out on Facebook, but Greg was like, no, we got the IP, we got lawyers all wrapped up. And literally this morning, I see that two weeks ago, the BBC and that Gio come together. And then, They're going to tell the story that you and I got this close to being able to tell. So, Mike. What the hell, dude? What are we going to do about this?

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Let me tell you how it really works. All right. What's really funny is you've actually committed the cardinal sin of fusing two great historic shipwrecks together. Nothing wrong with that, really. Just so, you know, the treasure which was flown out, literally like the plane with all the treasure on, going back to Spain. That was from the Neester Théniola de Les Methodes.

It was a slightly different chip break. Right, right, right. But, hey, you know. Well, it was the same series. I'm not going to say you're wrong. But anyway, there are two shipwrecks, three shipwreys. 1853, 1857. Who knows, Jason.

These are confusing times. I just looked it up. It was 57. The beautiful thing is, is that, you know, both of us has spent, you know, approximately a lifetime looking for treasure. And what's fun about looking for treasure isn't finding the treasure. It's sharing the treasure. And what you're pissed off about, Mike, is that you know, and I know that we actually

do have the best. ever treasure. I sit all real, right? We do. I mean, it is true. And we've always sitting around going like, how the hell do we resurrect this, you know? And I think strangely enough that the time may be nigh. And that's because my good friends at the National Geographic, I've just been chatting with them about some other, you know, pirates actually. I'm in my piratical mode at the moment. But, you know, treasure's never far away, Mike. But the thing is that when you're pitching shows, when you're trying to get people to do the right thing and, you know, snap up the value of the sizzle real, you know, your faves, sizzle real all time. It's good to, like, make people watch it.

And I actually think I've got to send a follow-up note to a pitch which I did last Tuesday. And I'm going to send it with this sizzle room. Good. Because I think that without using the material that you and I were fortunate enough to be able to create, we're really taking something away from the BBC, Mike. Oh. We're taking something away from National Geographic, the great National Geographic Society. And that's wrong, right?

Would you agree, Mike? We should be sharing, don't you think? I would think since the very underlying theme throbbing through this whole thing is treasure and exploration. And what happens to people who get too greedy? I mean, that's the story of our lives here, you know? So, I mean, not for nothing, but I can executive produce, which, as you know, doesn't mean anything. It just means promoting. And I can narrate.

And I can get out there. And I can help this story reach more and more people because more and more people need to hear it. But you're the BBC guy. I mean, you with the accent. You work on them. And you got your Nat Geo buddies for all that stuff you did over in Iraq 20 years ago. They'll take your call. I'm just wondering, what happens legally?

if I post that sizzle on Facebook, does anybody care at this point? Well, it's a really good question. Not much. Great. The only person who, again, and I have made some inquiries, I think it's all owned. I think all of the IP materials are now owned by Greg. I think that this whole amazing, you know, treasures are all. always part of very cyclical stories.

They know, it never goes from point A to point B. It's always, you know, these stories of return. And, you know, Greg is now out in the Cook Islands, for God's sake. Right. Living out there. Which, by the way, guess where Tommy Thompson stashed a lot of his money? He had a Cook Islands account. Who knew?

Who knew, right? And so, yeah, it's interesting. I actually do think that the possibilities for a real collaboration exists at this point in a manner which they've certainly not existed as far as I'm concerned for the last seven years. By the way, Greg actually reminded me a something very funny. When you came aboard the Odyssey Explorer, the ship, which did the recovery. of recovery part two of the Central America. There were wanted posters inside the Odyssey. They were wanted posters for Tommy Thompson. He was on America's most wanted list.

I can't remember why the U.S. Marshal Service, because at this point, he was on the Lamb, remember? I think I'm right is he was on the Lamb from 2012 to 2015. We're working just before he, is found again. That's right. He was holed up in that Hilton down in Boko Riton, right?

Like they literally... Yes. Yep. I remember. But the U.S. Marshals were so concerned that Tommy Thompson might show up and try and either lay claim to the treasure or, I don't nick it, I don't know, what are you thought I'm worried about?

But they had us put wanted signs. And at one level it's like, well, that's going to look great in a telly show one day. Right. But we didn't put them up there. It was actually the U.S. Marshal Service which mandated them being there. Well, that's how crazy this all got, right?

I didn't know Tommy's backstory. I just knew that Greg was a treasure hunter, that The Odyssey was the most cutting-edge piece of treasure recovery technology ever made, and that you had made a whole lot of documentaries in your life and that you were really into this thing. By the time I got down to Charleston, it just got surreal because Tommy's wanted posters were out there the same time as the Boston bomber. Like, he was being as sought as the Boston bombing suspects.

He was like in the top 10 America's most wanted criminals. And to this day, he's not really charged with anything other than not giving. up the location of some 500 gold coins worth a couple million bucks. He just refuses to talk about it. So everything about the story is amazing from the way the judge handed down his sentence, which is very much in keeping with a contempt sentence, with a daily fine of $1,000, which has been going on for years. So the story is so rich and literally rich with gold, rich with human tragedy, and rich with intrigue that it's the first time I got excited about a documentary, like really excited in a long, long time. And I love the sizzle and I was this close. Remember, we almost got CNN to buy a whole

series called Dirty Docs, where I was going to go out and we were going to do all these things together. And none of it ever happened. So what a weird day that you find that piece of treasure that I learned the BBC and the Nat Geo have got together to shove our project back up our but with all well intended. But the other thing I didn't mention, as Chuck goes, guess what I did, like minutes before I logged on to talk to you, I narrated eight hours of Bering Sea gold, which just tells the story of guys hunting for gold on the bottom of the ocean.

I can't get away from this. And deadliest catch, their gold looks like crab. But whatever. It's like, in the end, this treasure hunting thing, just seems to be all over our industry. And try as you might, Jason. I don't think you're ever going to be able to shake it. It's a fun one.

I have to say, I'll have this phrase I use about treasure. You know, treasure only becomes treasure. At the end of the day, it's commodities. But if you lose it, it becomes treasure, right? Because all treasure stories are essentially redemption yarns, right? It's all about that which is lost has been found. Because, you know, if it's just gold, it's cool, but it's either, you know, bullion or it's mining or it's being stolen, maybe. But at the end of the day, it's just wealth, fungible goods, right?

But what happens, why does one coin just a coin? A thousand coins, just a thousand coins. When does it go from me, this is a thousand coins, to being, this is treasure? And I'd argue that somebody's got to lose it, because it's in the loss and then in the redemption. That circle of yarn, right? I love to tell. That's when money becomes treasure. And that to me is like a really fascinating thing. You know, Greg has this great line, right? What is the definition of an adventure? It's disaster narrowly averted. Right? And, you know, and it's with treasure, it's gold. It's gold.

lost and found, right? It's how you know it's treasure, right? I've never said this in my life before, Mike. I'm actually quite pleased with this. I wish I had it a little bit more polished. I could want Basso Profundo. You see my... No, this all works.

You see my... No, no, Mike, you have to understand. It goes from a fungible good to great wealth, to treasure. but for that transformation, the transubstantiation of foul money into great treasure requires Loss, loss and recovery, you see, there you go. Anyway, I do think there's real truth in that. One of the other things which you cannot talk about the SS Central America without mentioning is the fact that there are not only.

objects of great value in the literal, bring it up, take it to the marketplace, sell it for half a million dollar stuff. There's also photographs. Remember the DeGero types? I was just about to ask you, see, it's not just treasure and it's not just a shipwreck, it's a graveyard. And that immensely complicates the ethical and moral ambiguity that are typically not present during an Easter egg hunt, right?

It's just like, who can find it? Who can get it up? No, no. Now all of a sudden you're down there with HD cameras and all of this great technology and you're looking for gold. You're looking for anything that glitters. And Chuck, the camera all of a sudden goes in front of a photo. And it's preserved perfectly down there in cold storage. And you are looking right into the face as close as I'm looking to yours right now of somebody who died on that boat. It's this. This weird mix of holy crap, that's a lot of money with good God, am I relieving myself in a cemetery? This is not cool. This is not right.

It's really tricky. You know what it really is, Mike? It's a time capsule. It's a moment in time that is for, you know, they don't get another moment after that. Everything that happened, it all stays right there on the ship. These faces, you see, are very unusual faces because they're poor. they're not rich people in the 1850s, right? Getting your photograph taken was something that only the wealthiest people were able to do.

There were perhaps only two or three professional photographers anywhere on the California coast. But they and what they will, you know, then there's no prints. I mean, it's literally the images are sort of somehow etched onto glass. I can't tell you precisely how it happens. but they're the most fragile images, but they're also the most fragile of people. These are working class men and women who suddenly have access to wealth

beyond their wildest streams, and they're able to turn it into selfies, right? Because that's what everybody does. But it's amazing. And there are people of color, black images down there of black couples, and they don't exist in any other milieu. And these people come from,

from absolute poverty and working class necessity, force them all the way out to the Western seaboard to do this hellacious work of getting gold out of the ground at that time. And the moment they can do it, the first thing they spend the money on is actually not on booze and drugs. They take photographs to themselves because this is that moment in time

when they're memorializing this extreme, extraordinary achievement. And they're doing it in the full knowledge. They're about to get on a boat. And they're going back out east and how, you know, we don't know if actually they're going to make it back. And a lot of them, of course, didn't. But that sort of incredible impulse, you know, to record with dignity what you have done, I find it really just, you know, that gets the old hackles up on me. As opposed to the Titanic, which was a very different proposition, a maiden voyage, the pump. the circumstance, the presence of it all. Yes, of course, there's incredible wealth. There's Lady Astor,

for God's sakes, right? And then there's steerage. You've got all that. But that's like first class and coach on a 767, right? This ship is filled with prospectors and people who somehow got to California with nothing but a dream and hope and the willingness to work their ass off. And they struck it rich. they were coming home with the gold, 22 tons of it. They did it. All they have to do is get home. And they're a hundred miles off the coast of America. And down they go. And boy, and it took a while. You know, when you read Gary Kinder's book, it was Kinder, right? Who wrote Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. When you read about the days that they spent trying to bail the ship out, firemen lines of 100, men bailing water over the side. Meanwhile, the rain's coming in sideways, and it's a sucker's bet. They're not going to get out of it. And then trying to get the women into the lifeboats, you know, in 15-foot seas, crazy. And then down it goes, man. Seven thousand two hundred feet. And one of the things is, tragically, that sort of moment, they've all been working every last

muscle on this, you know, we're going to bail out, we're somehow we're going to live, we're somehow going to survive and they don't take their coats off, which are lying with the gold dust. You know, it's just, of course, you know, of course they drown, you know, because they're laden down with the thing they can't let go off, you know. It's some crazy stuff. It's some crazy stuff. But think about it like this, Jace. Every single thing that the gold touched has been somehow screwed up in ambiguity at best and tragedy at worse. You drown because you can't take off your coat that's full of gold dust. Meanwhile, Tommy Thompson effectively drowns. His life is gone. In litigation. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Sucked up in litigation. And now here we sit. I got the

sizzle of all sizzles I've been scared to share for seven years. And now the BBC has come in and at you is coming in. It's just like, I'm not going to say it's cursed. But boy, it is certainly a wash in irony, nespa? Bien sure. No, it's crazy stuff. It's crazy stuff. The thing which drives every aspect of the story, of course, is it's human greed. And it's, you know, and that beat goes on and on.

But I think what's really interesting to me is that, I mean, Tommy is such a crazy. I have to. I really would like to sit down and chat to Mr. Thompson. I'd like that very much. Because the fire he had for getting that treasure from the Central America at that extraordinary moment, you know, 25 plus years ago, more, 35 years ago now, is astonishing. And it's hard, I think, when you've wanted something so much.

and then it has been denied you? I mean, I'm sure there's a sort of sexual metaphor, which I can find for this, but it's... No, we're good. It's not me. I'm not going. I'm not that guy. Okay, I'm not that guy.

Well, look, I mean, what guy are any of us? Everything I read about Thompson, he was a true believer. He wasn't looking to get rich. He was looking to revolutionize the way people explored the deep blue. He was a technologist, exactly. Exactly. And brilliant.

He was a brilliant engineer. He came out of a little town. What was the town? No. Defiance. He came out of defiance. I mean, how perfect is that? He learns to hold his breath for like seven, eight minutes at a time because he just loves

to be underwater. He creates like a chitty, chitty bang, bang of a vehicle. It's got wheels. You can drive it like a car, but it's also amphibious. And he would put his friends in it and not tell them. and drive into a lake and everybody would freak out, you know, but then they'd float. He was that guy. He was a true explorer, a true technologist, and a true engineer, and he maintained all the

way up into the early 90s that his only interest in recovering this was to be able to get enough money to fund the next level of exploration because there are other ships down there that just haven't been found. And all of his dreams up in smoke were down in flames. or just down in the depths, whatever it was. But he's not the guy he started as, Jason. And so now, when you start to look at this simple story like that, it doesn't just become more biographical,

which obviously is what Nat Geo has realized with this announcement. It becomes operatic. It becomes homeric. This is an epic. I love stories like this seven years ago. a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat

was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. and Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier

of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me, that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious, and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, $40 off your first order. Good Ranchers.com. delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch,

get good ranchers now. It really is. I love that, the Homeric piece. You know, it's not the wine, dark sea, because it was the Western Atlantic. But boy, oh boy, you know, you don't have to reach very hard for the metaphors to describe this because it is so built into human desire, if you like, that you want that thing, you know, and Tommy Thompson wanted something so bad. And again, I really do wonder if he's going to speak because to date he really has been completely inaccessible. He's been a mystery locked inside a riddle held inside an enigma, you know. I mean, he's really been deep in all of that, right? But his time is coming, clearly. I mean, when you've got both the BBC and that GEO after you, mate, and normally gets your lips unsealed

somehow. Well, apologies, if this treads on an NDA. Just tell me you can't answer if you can't. But is our friend, Greg? Is the Odyssey tied in to this new venture? No, no. I really mean, what's interesting, you know, Mike, I mean, you know, for your audience, this is like a real-time moment here. I mean, this is, we're not messing, you know. We're sitting here confabulating because neither of us want to give up on this sizzle because it's not just a sizzle designed to sell a story. It's a sizzle that tells the possibility of a story which hasn't been told effectively

and which has been consistently denied, not first. of all to Tommy Thompson and then to, you know, Mike and I. And now we're like, ooh, you know, this could be opportunity knocks. You know, we got a whole new world of interest, deep-pocketed interest clearly between BBC studios and National Geographic. In, is this the right moment to sort of, you know, do the big reveal? I am willing to bet very, very good money because we really did sit on that sizzle because the IP issues were just too tranchant and profound, nobody knows it's there. Nobody knows it's there.

I'll say this is a huge sidebar. You're ready for a huge sidebar, but it's quite fun. Hit me. Okay. So years ago, as I briefly mentioned, when we started, and hopefully you'll just trim that because I don't think it's appropriate place to really begin the yarn, but that's up to you. It's your material. I signed the release.

You do whatever you want with it. That's hysterical. He still thinks she's directing. Isn't that adorable? Producing as well. So I was back in 1993. I'm in Iraq at the height of the sanctions regime against the Iraqi people there. And I stumble into a videotape, which has never been seen at that point.

anywhere outside of a terribly small circle of people, of the head of the Iraqi Archaeological Service, pulling out the burial treasures of four Assyrian queens from the city of Nimrud, also in northern Iraq. And it is a staggering set of images, the digit bones coming up with rings around the bones. the wrist bones coming up these huge gold bangle still decorating the bones of these now long dead

2,800 year ago dead women right and this is the treasure of Nimram and it is in the history of great treasures probably second only to King Tuts the quality of the handiwork on these materials it's frankly way better than anything in touch to. It's just beautiful goldsmithing and it's just exquisite. And there's like kilos of exquisite gold artefacts.

But this is in the middle of sanctions, it's all crazy. This stuff disappears, just like disappears. And I spend the next 10 years, basically, trying to lay my head. hands on it, not literally. All I want to do is make a film about it. And I finally get in 2003 the permission of Muayad al-Said, if I remember his name rightly, the then head of the Iraqi Archaeological Services. You know what, Jason, you should really come and make a film about the treasures of Nimrod. But, you know, you might want to do it a little bit after the, you know, present diffalien. which was that the Americans, the Europeans,

said were about to invade Iraq, right? And so I managed, courtesy of National Geographic, to essentially go to Baghdad in the middle of the bloody war because not only do I have I seen the videotape, but now because I can't get my mind off at this stuff, right? For the last, the next decade, I mean, where is it? Where is? Is it still there? Is he melted it down? Where is it? Where is it? And I'm like one of very, very few people in the world who know where the treasure of Nimrod is. And, you know, in the craziness of war, certainty is the greatest currency you can possibly possess. Because everybody's going on, what the fuck's happening? And you go, oh, I actually know what the fuck's happening. I know where the crown jewels of the Iraqi state are. And you know, you need to talk to me about getting them back.

And, you know, I was able, because I knew something nobody else knew, to actually get on the inside of the American efforts to secure the Iraq Museum, which had been looted and everybody's terrified that great objects of great wealth had been, many of which had been, but not as bad as everybody first thought. But the thing is, they didn't know. And I remember going up to the Marine Colonel, an attorney from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, Matthew Bogdanis.

And I said, Matthew, I want to show you something. And I said, I had this video, and I showed him some artifacts, photographs I had. And I said, you don't know what these are, do you, Matthew? And he goes, yeah, I think I should know, shouldn't I? Yes, you should, you should. And he says, what's the deal? I said, well, you're a Marine colonel, so I will take your handshake.

And I will lead you to the treasures of Nimrud. If you agree that I can have the world exclusive rights for National Geographic to recover these treasures alongside with you, and we did a handshake deal. And guess what? We were able to recover them. It's a good story, good yarn. It's an amazing story. And I've heard you tell it before.

think you told me some of it years ago over some warm gin somewhere. Was there a flood in the vault? I mean, I seem to remember you telling me you're just wading through water and not knowing if the whole thing was going to collapse under your feet and then just all these jewels suddenly present themselves. Not quite. No quite. No quite. The long story is that surprise, surprise, the crown jewels of the Iraqi state were actually in the central bank of Iraq. It's just that you can imagine, you know, it wasn't something that people ever talked about. You talk about it and you die, you know, it's very simple. Iraq back in the old days, very simple.

It's just, you know. Oh, yeah, cause and effect. Talk about causation and correlation. Exactly. Relation, there you go. So what had happened was that the... As soon as the invasion began, they flooded the central bank. They just opened all these spigots up and cajillion gallons.

I mean, we're talking about, you know, hundreds of Olympic-sized swimming pool quantities of water were pumped into the central bank. And we were, because I had made some mates, you know, back there in the 90s. And with my man, Bogdanus, you know, giving me cover, we were able to get a whole bunch of field. irrigation pumps and sump pumps and everything in it. And we started pumping out the Central Bank of Iraq. The greatest single email I think I ever got was from the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Iraq. And he said, I just want to thank you very much indeed for helping us recover four billion euros, four billion dollars, and I think it was like 45 billion Iraqi dinars. And as a result, we have been able to pay the entire Iraqi civil service for the months of April, May, June and July 2003.

Because guess what they keep in the bank? Willie Sutton, why do you rob banks? Because it's where to keep the money. That's where the money is. It's where the money is. How did you get the water out of the bank in order to get to the booty? Well, what we did is we just pumped to. lot and then we realized the water wasn't going down and so yeah well you know the word fixer all right

is like the key word of all documentary filmmaking is it's actually not the DP it's not people like me it's not people like you Mike it's your fain fixer pardon my friend it's the fixer always the fixer is that individual who knows how to get shit done right and it's on the ground internally this guy put together a group of people put out a little whispering campaign about I need to have every manhole cover in like a half-mile radius of the bank popped. And I need every spigot and every one of those manhole covers turned to the off position. And eventually, I don't know which one it was. Nobody ever knew which one it was, probably several. We got to the right spigot. The water stopped coming in and the water

inside the bank started to go down. We found one poor sod with an RPG and he literally was on the second level of the bank. He literally taken an RPG and fired it at this German steel classic bank vault, you know, thing and blew himself to pieces. You can imagine his body was like lying there, you know, destroyed. Big old dent in the door.

Goes down third. It goes all the way down to the fourth floor. And that's where they kept it. That's where they kept the crown jewels. And we were able to film the... Because nobody in Iraq at that time. Certainly not me. Certainly not Bogdana's.

Frankly, nobody knew for sure if the treasure was still there. Because we did know... And there was clear reporting that Usa and the other Saddam's son, Hussein, they, like three days before the Americans roll into Baghdad, went to that same bank and took out, you know, some money as one does, you know. And they took out, I think, four million dollars from the central bank. where those of us who knew that there was more in the central bank than just money were really terrified.

We were like, oh my God, are they going to take the gold? Because gold's a good way to move a lot of dough, you know, subtly and quietly. And so until we actually got inside that last bank vault, nobody knew for sure whether or not the treasures of Nimrud were intact. And there was a lovely Iraqi archaeologist, a woman. from the south of Iraq. And she's very traditional with a full Tadour on. And she's in that bank vault.

And she picks up one of the crowns, which had once adorn the head of one of the Assyrian queen. She picks up, she puts it on a head. And it's the most incongruous, beautiful moment. And it was a great moment of redemption and restoration. You know, this was about this. pleasure coming home. And it felt very good. It felt very good. As a producer, you no doubt realize this as you were getting through your story, but I'm

struck by the parallels of the Central Bank of Iraq and the Central America. I'm struck by the role of water and the role of men bailing furiously that preceded the sinking of the former. And the same basic activity effectuated many years. years later with better technology by you and your team and the Iraqis that allowed the crown jewels to be saved. I mean, you really can't script this kind of thing, Jason, which is why I so carefully crafted our dialogue to follow this preordained path, even if you didn't know it. You're welcome.

That's a cute one. The thing about water, Mike, is that we drown in water. That's what we do. And we don't take much. You know, the old story is you can drown in three inches of water, right, Mike? and so water and treasure go together because that's what keeps you away, you know. If you didn't have water getting in the way, yeah, nobody would have any problems. But, you know, it's water which creates this fantastic boundary.

You know, you'd think it would be something else. You'd think it would be a vault. You'd think it would be a safe. But actually, it's water, which is the most effective. The most effective boundary, the most effective safekeeping device, if you like, for great treasures. Well, that's what Tommy said. He said, I'm not worried about the rest of the treasure. I have it in the safest place on Earth.

I have it in cold storage. Nobody can get it, but me, because I'm the only guy with the technology. Then along comes Odyssey, and that all goes to hell. But the other interesting thing about your point, which is salient, obviously, is that we are water. We're 90% water. We can't live without it. Our bodies are constructed primarily of it, and yet we can die in three inches of it,

and the safest place to put something we want where we can't get it is in water. My God, we're smart people. Look at us making connections. This is amazing. I can't believe we're not producing this. That was very good, by the way. I have to say, I actually haven't gone there before,

but I think you're absolutely right. That's not a sort of, Okay, beyond metaphor to actual practical reality. It works. I like it. Well, it's all I got. Let's pivot seamlessly in our remaining time to talk about the broader straight. Just a broader condition of nonfiction, documentary making.

What's your assessment of it now? Has Netflix and Amazon, have they helped or hurt the overall cause? What's happened to discovery? What's happening to history? They're down to an H now. Discovery's down to a D. How do you think about the future for this kind of documentary? Not easy.

I think what's interesting, Mike, is that when you and I first started sort of our little documentary journey, right? There were still really only four major networks, you know, NBC, CBS, ABC, a little bit of fox nibbling at the edges, right? Remember that? And now we look at this professional arc of our lives and we're back in a world

where it's almost like there's only four at Netflix and Disney Nat Geo and the other streaming services. I mean, but really we've gone from there being a great plethora in the middle of our creative, productive lives people like you and I could go to a convention

of documentary filmmaking and documentary programmers and distributors, and we could find 40 or 50 or 60 channels to flog stories. We could find ways to connect with our audience by way of these places, discovery, not geo, history, etc., etc., and there were all these portals into our world

where there was a willing audience who really wanted to look at this stuff, we loved this stuff, frankly. And now it's like, we're back with only a few of them, you know, and it's a harder world to get inside of. And the problem is it's a world where, you know, although I do think, I mean,

there's been some really incredibly good documentary material has happened. People have talked about, oh, this has been the Golden Age of Television, etc., etc. Right now it's not. Right now it's not. Right now you've got four to six massive, indebted to the Hilt companies which have found out that their costs of distribution are way higher than they'd ever sold it as being to Wall Street and to the money classes who support their endeavors and they're all going, how the heck do we cut costs? How the heck do we retrench,

you know, and how do we not spend money on really good shows? And that's ongoing. as we speak. I think it will be ongoing for several more years. And the good news is I think that the audiences do love these kinds of TV shows. It's not a surprise to me that Nat Geo and the BBC are looking to do the Tommy Thompson SS Central America story because it is an amazing story. And there really is an audience that wants to see stories like that. But I think that it's going to be a very, very hard row to hoe, Mike Roe, in this upcoming immediate period. I think, you know, it's going to fall to smart, quick wicket, still strangely, you know, fast-of-foot people like ourselves to introduce great opportunity to the storytelling titans that are at these networks.

and find our way to still tell the stories we want to tell. And they in turn really are driven by audiences that... I think audiences do love these stories. I mean, I go on and on about redemption narratives, redemption yarns, you know. That which is lost has been found. I mean, it worked for Tolkien, for the sake, why shouldn't it work for Williams and Row, you know? Why does it got to be Williams and Row?

I mean, I suppose I could live with that, but I'm just saying alphabetically it'd be row and row. Let's not split hairs. My friend, we can be micro in a footnote. We just got to close the deal. Well, here's the thing that breaks my heart and chaps my ass contemporaneously. That's a great sizzle. I'm going to figure out if I can post it.

So by the time people listen to this, they can go to my Facebook page and see it for themselves. But what makes it great is not just that it does a good job of promoting a really good story. It also introduces, I think, a way. to save documentary filmmaking, or at least allow it to evolve, given the constraints you just described. In much the same way Tommy Thompson's investors started to scream and howl, when the return didn't materialize, the Wall Street guys and the money classes, they get upset when their docs don't perform. So to me, it was budget, and we called him dirty docs. You take the guy from dirty jobs, you cut the budget to what, like, dirty jobs,

was, and you just send me out there, not like Josh Bernstein did, who's a friend of mine, I know you worked with Josh, you know, and digging for the truth, right? Look, the atmosphere, the topography is full of experts, and we need experts to help us tell the story, but at the root of what we did, it was just a guy, Forrest Gumping his way down to Charleston, and then going down to Sarasota, where you let me hold a million dollars in each hand, a million gold bar. Now, I'm the guy that normally has a bag of crap in one hand and some semen from a bull in the other. And all of a sudden, I'm holding, as one does, white gold, if you will. And so to suddenly be in this position, right, it's not dirty jobs, it's a big grown-up storytelling

doc, but with that same sensibility, that's the nut we very nearly cracked, you and me. And we should have. And it's a shame that we didn't, because sooner or later, somebody's going to come along and realize there is a way to keep telling these great stories that doesn't force a lot of people to lose a bunch of money. Listen, man, I'm happy to revisit Dirty Docs. I think what we should do, though, Mike, is I have to, as I say, make a follow-up phone call tomorrow. It's my job I pitched on Tuesday of last week. It is now Monday, Tuesday, week. Follow up phone call. That's what you do. Keep it warm, right? But I'm also going to attach the sizzle to this because the guy who I am engaged with in these conversations is actually the guy who made the announcement about the Tommy Thompson story. I think he's going to be fascinated to see this material. Okay. Well, I tell you what, let's see. In real time, we're doing this on what is today, Thursday.

No, no, today's Monday, right. Okay. So if he hasn't responded by next Friday, this podcast goes up on Tuesday, I'll post the sizzle on Sunday or Monday, just so people can see it broadly. Because honestly, this is ridiculous. We're actually kind of negotiating a deal

in front of, you know, 500,000 people. But this is how crap gets done in this stupid business, and it's been seven years now, so I'll just say it. I got a show on Fox business called How America Works. I executive produce it, I narrate it. And as a result, I go out in the world and talk about it. That helps at work. I'm so invested in this thing at this point. I should be out in the world promoting the show. You should be doing something for it. I don't know what you. Maybe you narrate it. And I executive

producer. It's okay. It's okay. Huh? You know, you got your lane, brother. I got mine. You know, but these are confusing times in these lanes, they intersect. And sometimes they merge. They do. They do. They do. I do. Listen. So, Mike, it's so great to see you. I really mean it. What a delight. It's been fun. I'll put a little sizzle on the fire in the way we've described.

I think this is all we good fun. And we'll be touching base next week. I love doing this in real time. This is good. I love it too. Don't hang up, Jason. We got to make sure all your wisdom is properly uploaded. But it's great to see you, my friend.

Yeah, yeah, I'm here. I ain't going nowhere, bro. All right. If you like what you heard. Even if you don't. Won't you please? Won't you please, pretty loves for. Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty, please, so.