Living a Life of Deep Adventure – Bob Ballard, Finder of the Titanic : 839

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. This might be the coolest interview I've ever done because it's over a 20 megabit satellite connection to a large. What do you like? Boat. Ship called the Nautilus.

It's a ship. A ship.

I kind of said that to tease you. Called the Nautilus with none other than Bob Ballard, the man who discovered the Titanic sitting on the bottom of the ocean or maybe rediscovered, found, whatever the right word is, done a hundred deep sea expeditions and it's probably one of the most interesting guys I could possibly think of because Laura Logan, the 60 Minutes correspondent and friend who's been on the show, introduced me. She said, dave, you have to talk to Bob. So thank you for taking the time for the second interview ever off your new ship before its maiden voyage. I'm so honored.

That's right. Well, I loved our expeditions with Laura. I would love to have her see our new command center, the one behind me. She was on an earlier evolution when we were over in the Black Sea when we were finding ancient shipwrecks. And then we did another show with her on Nazi attack of America where we were diving on a German U boat. No, it's great, great to be with you. Looking forward to chatting and. Fire away. All right.

There's so many things I want to ask you and it's. In fact, I just have a live member of the studio audience coming in. That's why I'm looking off the camera. My buddy Chris is coming up. All right, Bob, you talk about how your first trip in 1959. I actually have a signal light from 1960s, a ship. You know, it's like giant flashlights with louvers that you would use to signal. Right? I have one. I'm going to mount it on the deck of my house whenever it's done being built. Just because it's a representation of we have an iPhone, that's so much better. The type of change of technology that you've seen over your life, from a child digging in, digging around in tidal pools by your house to all this stuff, it's one of the most inspiring things I've I possibly could think of. So the fact you put this into a book called into the Deep that I hadn't read until Lara, Lara raised things, that's cool. And you're famous for that. But what no one talked about. And this is why I was thinking you were 72, because you were 72 when you figured out you had dyslexia.

Correct. That was interesting.

Okay, let's walk people through that. Because a lot of people think, oh, you have a disability or something's wrong with your brain. But you kind of kick some ass throughout your life, my friend.

Absolutely. I do not look at it as a, as a disadvantage. I look at it as an advantage. There are certain our brains. I mean, the key is that the research now has cracked the nut we now know. I remember I was driving a car and listening to a show and they were talking about two authors named Dr. Brock and Fernetti Eiddy, who wrote a book called the Dyslexic Advantage. And I never heard those two words in the same phrase. And I got the book, read it. Being dyslexic took me a little longer into the night, never put it down. And as I read that book, tears were pouring down my face because here I was, 62 years old, finally learning about me. This book explained me to me for the first time. And it was earth shaking because I realized I wasn't weird, I wasn't stupid. I wasn't. And I wasn't alone. There's 20% of our population that has dyslexia. And in this book they so beautifully explain the pathways to success. If you look, most self made millionaires are dyslexic. MIT calls dyslexia the MIT disease. If you go into engineering, I'm a field geologist where everything's visual. We're visual creative creatures. And when I'm in this command center and strutting my stuff, I take in all of these sensors and I create an image in my mind which we uniquely can do, that puts me down in the bottom of the ocean in total darkness. I'm never lost. It's cool.

I had a similar experience in the the 90s. Wired magazine ran a piece on Asperger's syndrome and I was like, oh my God. They just described my whole family, at least one side of my family, and certainly my brain and how you see the world. And my brain scanned and I did all this stuff and certainly was there. And I've hacked my brain since then. I don't represent that way anymore. But along the way I did visual training and with Helen Erlin, who's an expert in dyslexia and changing how the brain do you know Helen's work? And she looked at me and they looked at my eyes and they said, wow, you really do see. And I didn't know this. I see all the floaty crap around, all the words But I don't have dyslexia because I learned to track. Right.

There's an IRENE syndrome where the letters are moving and they, they have, there's a syndrome and it appears that it's the frequency of the wavelength coming into your brain. And if you put on glasses, I think it's mostly in the blue spectrum.

It depends on the different brain. Yeah.

And the words stop moving. No, it's just cool to see that we have neurons that are much widely spaced. So we, we have firing mechanisms that are very different. And in some areas we don't hit like speed reading, but in areas we hit it in the bullseye. And the key is to get early detection and learn the pathways to success. Like I said, most entrepreneurs, because I couldn't live in the box. The rules inside the box were written by non dyslexics and they were simply not fair. I live outside the box. But if you come into this room and you're non dyslexic, you're going to have a little trouble understanding it. But if you're dyslexic, it's like eating candy. So it's really getting kids to realize. But you also have to understand there's a lot of downside. There's a high suicide rate. And in prison, particularly people of color who didn't have the opportunities I had to get around my issues and conquer them are in prison. 60% of the population of the prisons are dyslexic. It costs more to send people to Harvard than it costs to send them to prison. I think we need to re evaluate how we're educating people to make sure they go down a road to success.

Well, I am so impressed and grateful that you decided to say I'm going to include this in your life story and into the Deep, because it's a powerful book and I've had the honor of interviewing a lot of my elders. People have done incredible stuff. Nobel Prize winners. I mean, you only have 20 honorary doctorates. So I guess I have a real.

One as well, by the way.

A real one. And so you're, I mean, you, you have this, this life of achievement. You know, you're like, oh, the Titanic was cool, but you know, the Lusitania, we'll just add that. And you know, you've, you've done things that are so impressive and out of the box and in, in your book, you're, you're talking about some of the things that made you who you are. And certainly dyslexia is part of that. But You've lived a life that is so different than most people. I want to know what really made you who you are. So is this like parenting? Is this early childhood?

Like, where did this come from? Actually, it came from because I'm dyslexic. I didn't read the book 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but at 12, I saw the movie 20,000 Leagues under the Sea that Disney made. Disney, by the way, was dyslexic. And he had a little plaque that says, if you can dream it, you can do it. So all parents, you know, they're asked their kids, what do you want when you grow up? And I told my parents I wanted to be Captain Nemo. Now, thank God they didn't laugh at my dream. I mean, they didn't humiliate me. They say what a dumb dream that is. They said, let's work on. I know they got into the next room and said, houston, we got a problem. But they didn't do that in front of me. They sat there and they said, well, tell me more about Captain Nemo. And I said, had a submarine. We were living in San Diego.

Boom.

The next day they got me on a submarine. It was a diesel submarine from World War II. But I then went on, as you know, to became a naval officer and spent a tremendous amount of my life in deep diving submarines. But then they said, well, a Nautilus was more than a submarine. I said, yeah, it had a window that opened like the iris of a lens and you could see the bottom. And they said, hey, that sounds like an oceanographer. They took me up the street from where I was living called place called Scripps, the largest oceanographic institution in the world. I went on to become an oceanographer. For so fundamentally I lived my passion. In many ways, I admit I probably never grew up. I never lost the spirit of a middle school kid. The wonderment of everything. And I had parents. And all the way along the road, I saw my biggest challenge was surviving the educational system. Because for people like me, that everyone's born with that flame of curiosity. Every child is born a scientist. And yet the educational system can turn off that pilot light and kill it. And so I was lucky enough, right when my pilot light was getting low, someone would put their arm around me and say, you can do it. Help me through it. I had people all the way. In the book, you can see all the people along the way right at creek. Critical pathways in my life were there, starting most importantly with my mom, who was my, my champion. And she, she she said, you're not stupid. And so yeah, that was fortunate. I just got lucky. I'd have to say luck had a lot, a lot to do with me sitting here. Certainly I wouldn't have found the Titanic if the military didn't want me to do a top secret mission in the same area. So yeah, just lots of crazy things have happened and I'm still at it and I'm not going to quit.

Do you think you make your own luck?

I think you do. How? By just being in the game. By being in the game. I mean here it's all about being on the bottom of the ocean. You know, here's what's so easy about what I do. I boldly go where no one has gone before on planet Earth and turn on the lights. I can't miss. I'm going to place. We will spend the next X months literally going to a piece of the earth never seen by a human being before. Imagine that. Year in and year out, for 62 years, I've been going where no one has ever been. How can I miss finding things that no one has ever seen before? It's sort of a piece of cake.

I, I'm still deeply pissed that you did not find the Loch Ness monster.

Oh well, you know, it's really funny, at the end of that trip I, I know everyone said, why'd you do that? I need a comic relief once in a while and, and I remember when we got done and Leonard Nimoy came in and made this show in search of and we, we were packing our bags but I decided I needed one last Nessie burger because all along the Loch Ness was a sky selling hamburgers, they call them Nessie burgers. And I went up there and I'd been eating a lot there because that was my way of getting lunch because it was right at the lock. And he said, so did you find it? And I said no. He said, well, I hope you don't tell anyone that. I said, listen, your job is secure because it's impossible to prove that something that doesn't exist doesn't exist. And so keep selling Nessie burgers, you're just fine.

I know that. I think after you, you did that, they did a genetic scan where you just look for loose DNA floating around in there. And I don't think they found anything either. Which also doesn't prove it's impossible. But man, that sure makes it less likely.

Well, you know, we need those mythologies. But you know, as you know in the book, we went after the biblical Flood, which we have pretty good proof where it took place and, and really got some.

Okay, tell me about this.

Well look, are we have the biblical flood, the Persian world have the story of Gilgamesh, all ancient cultures have flood stories. And there's a real good reason why. So let's go back 22,000 years. 22,000 years. @ the height of the great glacial age, it's called the last glacial maximum, there was 15 million cubic kilometers of ice on the continents. Fifteen that aren't here now. Okay, you want to, you wouldn't believe how much ice all the way down to my house in Connecticut was, was ice right into Long Island Sound. So that was because during the cold period when, when it rained, it didn't fall as rain, it fell as snow and it got locked up. So it was a one way trip out of the ocean. So sea level went down 22,000 years ago, was 400 hundred feet lower than it is today. So then things start to warm up and the ocean starts to advance and reclaiming lost territory. Well, in the case of the Black Sea, the Black Sea was a sea just connected through the Bosporus. But it had a very shallow entrance, a very shallow sill. So once sea level went down, the Black Sea became isolated and the civilizations grew around it. Wonderful rivers flowing in the Danube. The dawn, a fertile crescent of civilization. And then as the sea level rose in the Mediterranean, because it was connected directly to the Atlantic, they started rising, rising, rising right at the Bosporus. And then one day, boom, it broke in and completely flooded that farmland and everything. So we went in and found the ancient shoreline that was there before the flood. And we went along the shoreline and we collected shells. I love collecting shells. As you read in the book, I love walking along. And I came home with all these shells and I went to shell experts, you know, and I said, so what do I got? And they said, well, half your shells are from freshwater species and half your shells are from saltwater species. And I said, thank you. I took my shells, I then went over to a carbon 14 lab and said, date them. And so I dated them. And my, my oldest shell was 15,000 years old and my youngest shell was 5,000 years old. And when I merged the data, it said all the shells from 15,000 years old to 7,500 will be called BPE before the present, about 5,000 B.C. in our term, in our terminology. And everything after that was salt water. It documented the exact moment that whole thing happened. And it was during times of early civilizations when all knowledge was passed orally. We dyslexics love that period. And it's all sitting around the fire and talking. So we were able to actually date it. And if you stood there at the ancient shoreline and looked up, you'd see Mount Ararat right where the Bible puts it.

That's incredible.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Have you come across a Graham Hancock's theory about a comet hitting close to the North Pole 11,000 years ago? Cloud of iridium dust that's detectable.

That well. You have the one that knocked out the dinosaurs. But that was way back.

That was like 50 million years.

Yeah, that was way back. I haven't heard any recent one, but we've had major periods of extinction all throughout Earth's history. Earth has had very close calls, but Earth always seems to bounce back. And I'm not worried about Earth. Earth's going to be around for billions of years. Life's going to be around for billions of years. I'm just not sure the human race is going to be around.

You're right about that. The Earth is just fine. There's life two miles down that doesn't even need sunshine. It'll be there and it might look different. It's this whole speciesism thing we have.

Yeah, I know we're sort of a bad actor right now, but we'll clean ourselves up. We can. We can do it.

Are you hopeful? I mean, you've seen the world longer than I have.

I'm an optimist because you know what's really cool about optimism and pessimism? You have a choice and I choose to be optimistic.

It sure is a lot nicer world.

If you do that. It is, you know. It is. I always like that. Like Burl Eyes wasn't always look on the bright side of life or whatever. I just love being an optimist because I have a choice and I'm going to be an optimist and you can't talk me out of it.

I love that in my own life I decided that I was going to believe in reincarnation because whether or not it's real or not, if my nervous system believes that there's a reset button and I get to play again, I'll probably be less stressed about death. And if I'm wrong, I won't know. So there's my optimism.

I believe in that too. I believe in that too. And again, we have a choice because certain things are in science we call are nonlinear. They're indeterminate, you know, and we all have that question where do we come from, why are we here and where are we going? And you can fill in the blanks.

Yep. So fill them in positively because at least you can be less stressed.

Right.

And if you're wrong, who cares? Right?

That's right.

I'm really interested in one other thing. You've done so much science, I could talk to you for hours, but of course, we don't have hours. So one of the early things you did is you contributed greatly to the tectonic plate theory.

That was my first biggie. The plate tectonic theory. Yeah.

Now, you led to when people would say, dave, what race are you? I would say, I'm Pangean. American.

That's right.

In other words, human.

This is because of your work and you're very old. Yeah, no, I. It's so beautiful because when I was going to school, the geology book was gobbledygook. And I remember going through it and saying, I just don't quite get it. And they say, well, you know, it's not smart enough. But when we. What I have found in science, when we finally figure it out, it's simple. That's the beauty of it. You know, when you look at all the equations that preceded E equals MC squared, boom. The blackboard was full of equations. I always tell people, if you can't tell a fifth grader what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing. So you can always, when you finally crack the nut, explain it to remember. I'm first of 13 generations of my family, go to college, and I was able to sit down with my grandma and explain Playtech John. And she got it. So it's pretty simple. The Earth is alive. You have to think of it as the concept of Gaia, that the Earth is a dynamic feature. It has pieces, we call them plates. They're about 22 big ones. And those plates are doing one of three things, not four, one of three things. They're either moving apart and when you rip open the Earth, it bleeds. Its molten blood rises from inside its body up to the crack that's called the mid ocean ridge where the plates are separating. Just like blood, it's liquid, it coagulates, and it forms new tissue called ocean oceanic crust. And then as it moves away from its site of genesis, it bumps into another plate because the Earth is not getting bigger or smaller. So there's a dance going on, a dynamic dance going on. And then when the plates collide, one subsides against the other and remelts. That's where we get the big earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia. And then, then there's a third kind of behavior where it's not doing this, not doing this, but going by that way, and that's called the San Andreas fault is a transform fault. You have San Francisco sitting on the North American plate, Los Angeles sitting on the Pacific plate and the two towns are going towards one another. It's going to be a long time before the Dodger Giant games across town rivalry. But those two cities will get closer your height in your lifetime. They're getting closer. And that's plate tectonics. Bingo. End of story. And, and it's so beautiful because then we know how the Earth works. And all the resources of the earth were not put here by an Easter bunny. They were systematically made by plate tectonics. So we now know where to look. It's amazing. A Rosetta stone we were given in the 60s and I was lucky to be in that graduate student period and mount the historic famous project that confirmed the theory in 1970. 72, 3 and 4. It was cool. But that was then followed when we wrote. So that's throughout the geology book. We rewrote the geology book. Then here we are in 1977 going along this mountain range where the plates are separating and barren rock looks like the moon. Couple fish here and there, but not much. And we turn the corner and there is these giant walls, worms, 13ft tall, thickets of them. And we call it the rose garden. Sticking out of the worms was a it's lung about this big. It's sticking out this red featherly lung and it's ingesting poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas coming out of the volcano. There were clams a foot across. When you open them, they had human like blood in them. Talk about eerie. And when you slice them open, they had no internal organs like a clam. They smelled awful. They smell like rotten eggs because of the sulfide. And then you saw inside their body was another creature that took over the body. A body snatcher, so to speak. And it had a conversation with this clam and worm says, here's a guy, let me live in your body. Because I don't live like living in the fire hydrant of this spring. Let me live in your body. Feed me poisonous gas that would normally kill you. Don't worry, it won't. And I'm going to turn it into food. I'm going to replicate food photosynthesis in the dark through a process we now call chemosynthesis. Throughout the biology book. It now Tells us that there's life probably pervasive throughout the universe and maybe within our own solar system. So we threw out that. Two more years later, 1970, we come driving along the same valley and there's this chimney coming up like a, like a fire hydrant. It looks like a smoking chimney and I call them wrongly, a black smoker. But when I got close to this billowing thing, I was just pouring out, I looked close, I mean, I didn't get too close because it was hot enough to melt my window. I didn't know it at the time. And I saw it was a clear fluid that soon as it saw that cold deep water, it was dropping out minerals that made it smoky. And those minerals are commercial grade copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. We are discovering vast, vast resources. But what we discovered through that was we had been taught the hydraulic cycle. You evaporate water falls as rain come down. You have this system. We found a second system we didn't know about where the entire ocean is going inside this great mountain range, through the cracks that we found down to the magma chamber, changing its chemistry and coming back. And when we discovered that that the entire volume of the world's oceans goes inside the earth and out every 6 to 8 million years, we threw away the chemist. A street book. That was a pretty good run. Wow.

It's so amazing because much of the things that we do as a society, a lot of the decisions we make, government level, corporate level, are based on these assumptions that aren't even accurate reflections of current science. And we know current science changes and it disproves itself every 10 or 20 years anyway. Do you get pissed over the course of your life when you see all these people going, well, you're still basing that on the stuff we believed in 1950s. And you know, it's, it's 2020. Your phone screen is aging your skin and wrecking your sleep at the same time. Artificial blue light goes from your phone screen straight into your eyes and deep into your skin. That light messes with your melatonin levels, interrupts your deep sleep and speeds speeds up skin aging by breaking down collagen. The bodyguards red light converter fixes this at the source. It's a first of its kind screen protector with real tech that converts blue light into beneficial red light before it hits your face. It turns your scrolling into a skincare routine. It supports healthier skin, reduced eye strain, improved sleep quality, and fewer screen related headaches. Third party testing showed a 50% plus increase in red light exposure within the optimal range of 620-770nm. And this comes with zero compromise on your screen. The red light converter preserves your screen's true colors and full touch sensitivity. Beyond its wellness benefits, the red light converter provides ultra thin edge to edge protection for your device and bodyguard stands by their quality. Enjoy peace of mind with lifetime replacements ensuring your red light converter continues to protect and support your biology for the long haul. Visit bodyguards.com and use code Dave for 25% off. That's bodyguards with a Z.com for 25% off.

Well, science is a work in progress. Science is a work in progress. But the point is, is that when you can have something like imagine you have this theory and it says that if you go to the following coordinates on the earth that are in total darkness, you'll see fresh lava. So what I'm going to tell you I've never. I'm going to show you a place that's 40,000 miles long, the mid ocean Ridge. I'm going to tell you if you go anywhere on that 40,000 mile crack, you're going to find fresh lava and we've never been there. And then you go there and voila. That's science. When you can make a prediction that even someone that doesn't like you can go and verify that it's true. Science is where a stranger can replicate what you say and even if they don't like you.

You said something massive that I hope all scientists listen to someone who doesn't like you because it's the skeptics who go into disprove and go oh darn. That's when you know you've really got something. How many times have you come up, if you even counted, have you come up with things in your career where that's happened? Like big discoveries, more than you can remember?

Oh lots, there's lots. I mean another one of my favorite ones was proposing that the Ancient Mariner against the scholars went straight to his target. They said no, no, no, he hugged the coastline. You know I remember when I see, I wander and there's a great saying, all those who wander are not lost. And I, because I'm dyslexic and I play around and I wander, I wander a lot and I wander into someone else's turf. Heaven forbid when I do that. Who are you? What makes you think you can walk into my area of science? And I've done, I just wander around. I just went through biology, chemistry, geology. So then I started wandering in Maritime Archaeology. And I went to the scholars of the time and I said so where do you find ancient shipwrecks? Well you find them along the coastline. Oh where are you looking? Well along the coastline. So this is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy is it? Have you ever go out in the deep ocean? They didn't go there. And I said well let me see if I got this straight. I'm going to go in the Mediterranean. So here's the Mediterranean. I'm going to go right in the middle where I have Tunisia. This is called the Tyrrhenian Sea. That's a part of the Mediterranean. This is Tunisia where ancient Carthage was. And this is Rome. And so after the Romans vanquished the Carthaginians in the Pudic war Carthage became the vassal state to Rome for whe and provided it with a lot of wine. So I said stop right there. So we got guys making wine right here. Yeah and they're. And they've got a guy that good market a lot of wine drinkers in Rome. Yeah, they love it. Okay, so you're going to leave Carthage and you're a businessman and you're going to go around. Why wouldn't you just go straight across? He knows where it is. Oh they didn't do that. So I said okay, I'm going to test this. I'm going to do my most sophisticated analysis I ever made. I took a ruler and I drew a straight line from Carthage to row and here's what I did. I said think about it. I'm going to ask you. You're that ancient mariner right? You got some sailors aboard. I just loaded up 3,000 bottles of wine for your five day trip. What are you going to do on the way?

You're probably going to drink half of it.

What are you going to do with the evidence?

You might kind of toss it over.

Yeah. So imagine an i95 without an adopt a highway program for two millenniums. It's going to be littered with empties.

That's such a common sense thing.

I'm from Kansas so here's what I did. I started in Sardinia and I drove to Trapani, Sicily which would take me perpendicular from land to land. I'm going to drive across and look for the i95. And so I learned it, lowered my camera, towed along the way 60, 70 miles. I haven't seen a single empty. Then I come into the sweet zone. Nothing but empties for 4 km and then nothing. And then I turned and I drove all they drank all the way To Rome. And I followed them. They started doubling up as they got closer. And I went on and along that highway, I found all the shipwrecks. Boy, did that tick. Did that tick them off, you know, I mean, yeah, I tick. I'm sorry. You know, I'm sorry, but when you wander around and you got a little science behind it. So there we go. We launched a whole new field called deepwater archaeology. And we found gobs of them. We've found more. I found more ancient shipwrecks in the deep sea than any archaeologist on the planet. And I'm a geologist. Sorry.

You don't seem sorry about that.

Not at all.

Now, one of the things that I always just thought about. I've been fascinated by shipwrecks for a long time, since I was a kid. The statistical distribution across the deep sea is clearly going to be not that many. But what you're saying is, well, why would you look across the whole deep sea? That'd be dumb. Let's look at the most common places people would go over the deep sea. When you narrow it down, it makes so much sense.

As long as you don't narrow it down too much. You have to leave your mind open that here we are, we're going to be off of Polynesian. If I found a Roman shipwreck, that would be big news. So, yeah, I think you narrow your search, but it doesn't mean that someone else randomly doesn't trip over those hydrothermal vents in the giant tube worm. We weren't looking for them. We were looking for A and found B. And that's what's so cool about this guy. Right? Here we are right now, been asked by our country, this is a cool thing, what we're doing. We've been asked to map the 50% of America that lies beneath the sea. We own more land underwater than any nation on earth is called the exclusive economic zone. And yet we have better maps of Mars than half of the United States of America. Go figure. So we've been commissioned, and starting on July 3rd, off we go, working with NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration to do what we call the second Lewis and Clark expedition. But since. Since 55% of my team behind this class are women in positions of leadership and authority, we're calling it the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And we have the entire. When we do our broadcast, we want to reach every week right from this. This is our studio at sea. I mean, we have. Educators are going to be going around the clock. When you go to nautiluslive.org July 3. Here we're up and running. We're going to be doing regular programming into any school in this country, and we're going to have every kind of face, every. This is the United shades of America. This is about having a program that's inclusive with. We need Everybody. We're only 4.9% of the population, of the population planet. And we need to. We need to draw upon everything, including those 20% dyslexics.

I absolutely love that. And the fact that you really built an environment for teaching and sharing that wasn't possible 20 years ago.

No, I was hammered when I did it. I mean, by my colleagues. Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to write an article for National Geographic? I said, they're paying the bill. You know, let's not forget this. This, what I do is paid for the American taxpayer, and they want me to go find out what we own. Doesn't that seem logical?

Let's talk about that for a minute. A lot of academics, if you write a book, and I deal a lot with medical and biology and aging and things like that, you write a book or an article for the mainstream and all of a sudden you get snubbed by your academic colleagues.

Oh, yeah, they hammered. Carl Sagan was denied entry into the Academy of Science because he popularized science because, you know, many of them can't see that's the problem.

So it's a jealousy thing.

It's. I didn't say that. That's a great observation. You know, I need to do more research on that. But I think you might be right.

Your sense of humor comes through in your book. But it's better alive.

I'm as corny as Kansas in August. Remember that? That's where I was born.

So you've got. You don't have a thick skin. Like, there are people who have a thick skin, but it's. It's calloused, but you can tell. This doesn't bother you at all. None of the stuff, you just. You take it humorously.

Yeah. People take straight aim at me and never hit a vital organ.

So how do you do that?

Like what.

What's your secret to that?

Processing, you know? You know, it's okay. I mean, yeah, there are things that are said, but I've had everything. I've had a lot of practice at being, you know, criticized for popularizing science. And I say, well, why don't. Why don't you guys try it? Oh, that's right. You may not know what you're doing right. So, no, I'm okay with it. Because. And again, I'm the first of 13 generations of Americans to go to college. I'm the common guy.

Ah, that's your 13. You're talking about Americans. I'm like, what about the 14th generation? That's because you weren't in the U.S. i got it now. Okay.

Yeah, I'm the 14th. My family came here before there was the United States of America in 1635, into Williamsburg, and we started walking across the country, and I was dropped off along the way in Kansas, and then we kept going. My dad was test pilot during the war with Chuck Yeager. I woke up in California, and I went to the ocean, and I just kept walking. Wow. It's in my blood. We are explorers. Americans are explorers. And half of our nation needs to be explored.

It's funny. I've used the Lewis and Clark analogy when I'm trying to explain this field of biohacking that I created. And it's the idea of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control of your own biology.

Right?

And I'm willing to be a guinea pig. And people say, but it's not scientific because you're a guinea pig. I'm like, look, I'm happy to be the first guy to go do something. Academics are going to come and do map work. And I'm happy if all biohackers do that. But you need the Lewis and Clarks to know that you should make a map. Because if someone doesn't go there first and say, yeah, I did live longer than I was supposed to. Oops. But, man, it pisses people off all the time.

Here's the problem. Wisdom comes late.

Yeah.

And fortunately, at 79, maybe I got a. And what I'm trying to do is share that. I think that's our job at this point in our life. I'm mentoring, I've got an amazing team, and I'm stepping back, handing off. They don't quite do it the way I do it. They do it very differently. But who am I to judge? My grandmother thought I was going to a bad place because I listened to Elvis Presley. I can remember. So every generation stands on the shoulders of the last and sees New Horizons license. We can't see.

One of the reasons I'm interested in extending human lifespan is that I believe we have an epidemic of missing our elders. Because so many people who are 79 have Alzheimer's, diabetes, they can't stand up under their own power. You don't seem like you're going in that direction. You are sharp. You can tell when you talk to you. I mean, you're going to be out at sea and all this stuff. What have you done to be as robust as you are at 79?

Well, I took care of myself. I was a athlete. I was a star athlete in college and high school. I've always loved that Greek philosophy of a fit mind and a fit body. I love the two. Being dyslexic and adhd, I found that I needed an outlet for my energy. And I think ADHD kept me active, you know, up and down, up and down, up and down. I've learned my son Dougie was also ADHD and dyslexic. On the mirror when he was growing up, I had a little sign and it said, my body is like a race car. And when I learn how to drive it, I'm going to win lots of races. I learned how to drive my race car. I learned how to take my bundle of energy and not make it destructive. I was never put on Ritalin. My mother, though, said if we were twins, she would have drowned both of us. But I was not a twin. And in the book, as you know, that, remember me going over the back fence and showing up at the grocery store and finally she put me on a leash and I ran up and down on the clothesline and I kept saying, just like a puppy dog. So I. I learned how to. How to control and use my energy in a very useful way. So I have a rhythm that I have where I do physical things. My wife loves it because I. During the pandemic, I make all the beds, I do all the dishes. You know, I put everything in place. My grandmother always said everything has a place in it. Everything should be in its place. So I'm sort of a, I confess, neat freak, so. But I use my energy while I'm thinking. It relaxes me because my mind is going so fast. I need something to slow me down. And I do puzzles. I love puzzles. My wife gets puzzles because she doesn't show me what they are. So I get puzzles. She covers up the box, so I just don't know what it is. She gets thousand piece puzzles sometimes. Here's what she did to me once she got commissioned a puzzle of a thousand pieces, okay. Had no borders. All the borders were gone. So you couldn't do that. You ready? It had holes in the puzzle that could never be filled. It gets worse. It gets worse. There were puzzle pieces that were worthless and went nowhere and the coup de grace, every piece was the same shade of blue. But you know what? I did that puzzle took me a little, took me a little longer than most. Yeah, I like, I like stuff like that. I like climbing tall mountains that take a long time. I love goals that take 15 years because then I don't have to dream up one every few minutes. I love, I find that, that people, there aren't a lot of people that will take on tall mountains. So it's not crowded and you can really get up those mountains pretty fast. So I, I think I cracked the nut. And I'm hoping that the book will help people that are like me, bundles of energy and help parents understand us 20% who are wired differently.

Well, as one of that 20%, the superpower of ADHD is it lets you pay attention to only things you care about. And you combine that with your curiosity that you cultivated or you already had, obviously a pretty high functioning brain and that dyslexia and suddenly you're just in a different universe than a lot of people. And it lets you do this over and over.

I'm dangerous. I'm dangerous.

You absolutely are dangerous in the best possible way that all people can be dangerous, which is who knows what you're going to do next. But at least it'll be interesting, right?

It will definitely be interesting. I can't wait to set sail and we'll be underwater in the next few days and, and who knows what will trip over.

Well, so you're going to do this for. You said three to five years, was it?

Well, we've got a ten year program to map and the 50% of America, but there'll be something after that and trips along the way. We're going to. We didn't find Amelia Earhart on our first go. We're going to go after her again, you know, and again I tell kids, if you don't quit, you can't lose. Just keep going.

That is such a great quote. Now, I'm thinking about all of the different things here. You've mentioned that you think there's a couple million shipwrecks just laying out there.

There's 3 to 4 million. I didn't make the estimate. Scholars, if you go to the United nations and say, you know, how many shipwrecks are there? There's three to four million. And these are chapters of human history. They have stories to tell. I like to tell the kids in middle school, my favorite group I talked to, I said, listen, your generation is going to explore more of Earth than all previous generations combined. The greatest explorers are in the room today and they just look at one another. Who is it going to be?

Well, you're one of them. And Bob, I've got to thank you for inspiring me. And so many of your ideas are part of the mythology of things. I remember watching a GI Joe cartoon when I was maybe 9 with big worms under the ocean. That were what you discovered and it still sticks with me now. Right? So you've had such an impact on the world and God, your energy. Thank you for sharing it with my audience and with the world and allowing Bulletproof Radio to be the second ever from your studio. We're all rooting for you. And guys, if you get the chance, you really, really want to pick up Bob's book because it is worth reading. You want to know how to kick ass hundreds of times throughout your life. This is the man to learn from. You are one of the masters, one of the elders. And thank you for sharing your wisdom with me. I genuinely appreciate you and thank you.

So much for having me. And please thank Laura for me for making this union possible.

I will do so. Guys, into the Deep is the name of the book. You can Google it. Bob's easy to find. Bob, enjoy your voyage.

Bon voyage. Fair Winds in a Following Sea.

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