Explorer Alan Jamieson has gone on nearly 70 expeditions to the deepest parts of the ocean, what he’s found there is incredible. We talk deep sea exploration, life at the bottom of the ocean and how we’re changing the deep ocean. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Bobs of All Time.
Alan Jamieson: 01:45
Pointless: 52:03
Top 5: 01:05:19
The Deep-Sea Podcast — Armatus Oceanic
Interview with Deep Sea Explorer Alan Jamieson
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant Coming up in this episode ocean exploration, and the best Bob's
Alan Jamieson 0:21
thing that got me in my first semester divers, once you leave the surface, suddenly it's quiet. It's like really quiet, and you're just gliding downwards. And then eventually, four hours later, you start to see the bottom, the seafloor coming up towards you. You have submarine canyons, which are enormous canyons, if some of these features if they were on land, would be a wonder of the world, we are having an effect on the deep sea, everything we mess with on the surface, has a knock down effect what's underneath it,
Nick VinZant 0:49
I want to thank you so much for joining us, if you get a chance to subscribe, leave us a rating or review, we really appreciate it really helps us out. If you're a new listener, welcome to the show. If you're a longtime listener, thank you so much for all of your support. So our first guest has gone on nearly 70 expeditions to the bottom of the ocean, including some of the deepest places on earth. And what he has found there is fascinating. This is marine biologist and ocean explorer, Alan Jamison, just for reference, when we talk about meters, triple that and you have feet, kilometers, take that in half and you have miles. Zero degrees Celsius is 32 degrees Fahrenheit 25 Celsius is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Is the deep sea different, or is it just deeper? Like is it a fundamentally different place than the top of the ocean? For lack of a better phrase?
Alan Jamieson 1:55
I think there's that's a very good question. And it's one of these things where we're battling with this, like, for example, when does the sea become deep? This and this is a genuine issue. So the general consensus is the deep sea is 200 meters or more, the term doesn't mean very much. And it's actually a term which is a little bit damaging, because most of planet Earth is deep sea, the largest living space on planet Earth is in the water between 200 meters and the deepest point on Earth. And by calling a deep sea, we're almost saying this is different. This is not your ocean, this is this is something else. This is the other worldliness. And so we have wished, psychologically splitting the ocean into two parts is the bit that we'd like the bit that has whales and turtles and dolphins. And we look out over the looking at the sunset over the from the beach, there's that bit that we like to go on boats and stuff. And then there's a deep sea, which is the bit that we don't visit the bit that we don't like the bit that's dark and scary. And all that is is an imaginary line that someone has drawn on a chart saying shallow sea deep sea.
Nick VinZant 3:01
But is there something like would you say that as you're in? Because you've gone down there many times? Do you notice like, oh, now I'm in the deep sea? Like is there a change that you kind of feel?
Alan Jamieson 3:13
Yeah, there are there are multiple things that do change, for example, the temperature drops off pretty quick. So you can be 35 degrees Celsius on the surface. And by the time you get to 500 meters, you might be down to five degrees. By the time you get beyond 1000 meters, you know, less than two degrees. So there's a noticeable drop in temperature. And there's a noticeable drop in water quality as well. So in the surface, there's lots of things like plankton, and when you look out upon the submersible, you'll see it's quite cloudy, there's a lot of stuff going on. And when you get down deep enough, it's actually pretty clear. Once you put the lights on, of course, you know is very, very clean water. So and there are lots of things that you don't get in the deep sea that you do get in the shallow end like plants. So seaweeds, and one of the reasons why 200 meters was suggested as a limit is because light penetration from the sun doesn't go that much further than that. So photosynthesis cannot occur. So you suddenly you don't see any more seaweed or kelp or or seagrass or anything like that. So there are some changes, but generally speaking, looking at the deep sea floor at 6000 meters, isn't that different from scuba diving at 20 meters at night?
Nick VinZant 4:21
helped me kind of understand this, I guess, right? Like I know it's deep. I know the oceans down there. Right. And but I also don't really understand I can't really imagine it. There's two
Alan Jamieson 4:32
components to this. There's the vertical component and the horizontal. The horizontal one is one that we struggle with, for example, and when I say most apply if there's deep seated it absolutely is if you go on Google Earth and turn it to the Pacific Ocean, so Hawaii is in the middle. You will maybe see a little bit of New Zealand's maybe a little bit of California, maybe some Japan but generally speaking, half the planet is the Pacific Ocean. The average depth of that is 4000 meters underwater, right so that's Massive right? So there you go half the planet, just on that one side is deep sea. Now, when you start looking at the numbers, the Pacific Ocean diameter is something like 15,000 kilometers across. And we struggle with that. We can't really you can't see it, you can't, unless you're an astronaut, I guess you, you can't see that. So you can't really fully comprehend just how this the vastness of it. And then the other thing is the vertical one. And this is the one that I find really interesting when you tell people the deepest point on Earth is just short of 11 kilometers, so about seven miles deep. And that's the Mariana Trench, there's a few other places that deep as well. And then when you say that to people, and they say, Have you been to 10,000 meters underwater? And you're like, yeah, and then a few times, and they freak out. And you bet 10 kilometers is not far. Most people probably drive more than 10 kilometers every day. And you know, it's only half the length of Manhattan. Right? So on the horizontal 10 kilometers, not much, you tilt that 90 degrees, and see your 10 Kilometer underwater, suddenly, the mains just starts to race. And I think that's a sort of archetypal fear of, of deep water, we don't like the thought of being underwater, we hate the idea of being underwater when it's dark. Because there's two things that freak human beings out because we're air breathing, visually oriented animals is being underwater, because you're going to run and being in the dark, because you're no longer in control of your environment. And then the deep sea kind of represents both of those. And we use phrases like deepest, darkest fears. And then so you're trying to get people to engage with the largest living space on planet Earth, which happens to be the deepest, darkest, but so, so you're kind of this uphill struggle of trying to get trying to get people engaged without making it sound like a horror film. And everyone says, you know, the first thing people normally say, when you say you've been in a submarine and a deep sea, the sea or was it scary? But no, it's, it's not scary. It's actually very tranquil, very peaceful. But I'm pretty sure astronauts don't get the same question to see oh, well, you we You scared the whole time. Because of the cold and vastness of space, that's just, you know, a few millimeters away from you on the other side of the hole.
Nick VinZant 7:12
When we were talking like the idea of going down to the bottom, that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about is like, what's that like? To me, that would be terrifying. But I would never think of that. In terms of a space shuttle, I would think of that as like, oh my gosh, exhilarating.
Alan Jamieson 7:27
You do not get in a submarine and go 10 kilometers underwater, if it's dangerous, because it's a very unforgiving place to go. If you're not 100% confident in the technology and the engineering behind what you're doing. Why would you you'd be you'd be a nutcase, if you did that, if there was any, any chance of it failing. So, and I guess, I mean, submersible diving is probably not for everybody, it takes a certain disposition to do it. But you are locked in a small titanium bowl, just two people, and a bolt is probably no bigger than a bit, I think it's 1.2 meters diameter, and you're sitting in it for 12 hours. And, you know, it's, it is the thing that got me in my first semester divers, once you leave the surface, when you're on the surface, you're bobbing around all over the places, it's not particularly comfortable. But once you clear the surface, and you start descending, suddenly, it's quiet. It's like really quiet, and you're just gliding downwards. And it's it is genuinely very peaceful. And it's quite tranquil. And then when you eventually have four hours later, you start to see the bottom, the seafloor coming up towards you. And it's just like, wow, and then you are the touches, oh, we quite often are the first human beings ever to see this particular place. And you're looking at it and you're taking stock of it. And, and quite often it doesn't sink into afterwards, because once you on the bomb, you have a job to do. And you're you're telling a pilot where to go, you're trying to photograph various things, you're trying to remember what the dive mission actually is, and not just start chasing stuff, whatever you know, so you're on it. And your adrenaline is obviously pretty pretty up there. And you're trying to do under the end, we dumped our weight and it starts to float back up. And you have this weird four hours back to the surface where you've all the excitement is done. You've you've done it, you've seen what there is to see. And then you feel really tired. And quite often I've nodded off asleep a couple of times on the way back up. And quite often we just sit and watch a movie on someone's phone. And then it's for me, it feels like there's a big excitement when we get to the surface because it's rough and you're rolling around and the ships trying to pick you up and it's people jumping on sob and everything else to the last 10 minutes is pretty mental. It's not particularly pleasant, but it's all you know, in the event you claim at the summary and everyone's like, so great. And it's about 30 minutes later, when you've got the suit off, you've got all your gear off and everything else and you sit in you have a cup of coffee, and you say, wow, you know, and you've got time to actually absorb what you've just done. What you've just seen, what means you know, the and you've just come back with a handful of new stories, and loads of new data and stuff like that. And for me, I mean others People might be different. But for me, it takes a little bit of time. And that night you go to bed and you're sort of lying you beg God, because I went to nine and a half, 1000 meters this morning. Nine and a half 1000 meters under the ship. And the ship is not big. It takes a little while thinking is peculiar. So hard to it's hard to describe.
Nick VinZant 10:21
I would imagine. It's kind of like, did that really just happen? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I'm kind of a numbers person, on a scale of one to 10. One being like, we don't even know what this wet liquid is. 10 being like, we've got this completely figured out. Where do you think on that scale? We would be when it comes to the deep sea?
Alan Jamieson 10:42
Oh, that's a difficult one. Because, yeah. Oh, there's lots to discuss on that question. I would say somewhere between five and seven.
Nick VinZant 10:51
What part of it would be like the stuff that we kind of know what part of it would be the stuff that we don't really know.
Alan Jamieson 10:56
So there's multiple components to this question that one is we are forever hearing phrases like we know more about the moon than a deep sea. And you know, every TV documentary that talks about the deep sea talks about how much we don't know, that's us telling us what we want to hear. It's not true. But you know, people have been working in deep sea for a long time over 100 years. And sure, we haven't mapped every species on the planet, but it's very rarely go somewhere and you genuinely see something totally and utterly unexpected. Right? So I think that's, that's an entertainment Sherpa that's crept into science that we keep telling ourselves we know nothing about the deep sea. We do. Right? That's that's the thing. One of the issues with how much do we know there's there's there's another one that goes around saying we've only mapped 20% of the seafloor, we've only explored 1% Whatever it is, again, that's not strictly true either. That is the mapping of the of the seafloor is all a matter of resolution. There are no more Mariana trenches out there to be found, right, there are no big features left in the first complete map of the ocean was printed in 1977. So, you know, it's, if you want to get right into rocks, and boulders, they ensure no one's mapped it to that resolution. But realistically, people are going out on a regular basis and finding new hydrothermal vents exactly where they thought that we're going to be, we go to big trenches, and we find things that exactly what we think we're going to be this big, new deepest fish story came out a couple of weeks ago, we predicted that entire population of fish will be there, and there will be the deepest ones in the world. And no one had ever seen them before. And they're an entirely new species. And we did it. So that doesn't marry up with the idea, we know nothing. But the third component to that is things are changing really fast. And so we are having an effect on the deep sea, everything we mess with on the surface, hasn't a knockdown effect to what's underneath it. Because most of the deep sea derives its energy from stuff that comes down from the surface dead squid, jellyfish, dead fish, dead whales, plankton, all that organic material sinks. And that's what feeds the deep sea. We're obviously having a lot of influence on what's happening on the surface. And so we've had many occasions where we found something and someone has said, Is this right? Is this who it's supposed to be? And we said, well, actually, we're too late. We don't know what a lot of these animals are supposed to be like. Because we're only now getting a chance to study them while we're going through a period of dramatic change. And so what these are a good example, that was a few years ago, we published a study on microplastics. And we found some of the animals at the bottom of each trench, pretty much all of them had at least one piece of plastic and a gun. At the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in earth, every single one of them had at least one piece of plastic as gun. And that's horrendous. And someone's asked me on the radio to say, Well, what does this mean for the animal? It says, Well, we know this type of stuff comes with a certain degree of contaminants we know and shallower species, similar species that we can study that it reduces the reproductive success. And he said, Well, is it affecting the reproductive success of these animals at the bottom of my trench? And the answer to that is, we don't know. Because they're already contaminated. We've only just found them. So we will never know where it's supposed to be, because that window is closed. And that's the problem. When we talk about how much we know about the deep seas, we can get a pretty good snapshot of where things are now. But we've missed a window, because we'd have been great to get some baseline data from 100 years ago. But there aren't many out there. And so that's that's the problem is how things how quickly things are changing.
Nick VinZant 14:34
What would you say? Like I know, this is a big broad question, right? But what would you like how does what goes on in the deep sea affect everything else around us?
Alan Jamieson 14:44
Oh, massive massively. So physically, the deep trenches. The deepest parts of the world are where two tectonic plates collide. So everyone's probably more familiar with hydrothermal vents and volcanoes and Siemens. That's the opposite. So the tectonic plates are interacting in several ways where they are spinning apart, you get a rich, just a positive feature, suddenly a second big long Ridge at the top of that rages where you have volcanoes that eventually some of them are so big, they become islands like the Azores, or Iceland or whatever. And this is where you see hydrothermal vents, this is where all new seafloor has been created. Now, the Earth isn't getting bigger, so you for all that new seafloor that's coming out, we're going to lose it somewhere else. So you go the opposite end, which is mostly the Western Pacific, because two to two tectonic plates, when they meet each other, are not spreading apart, they're being compressed together, and the heavier one will get pushed down and lift the other one up. And this is where you create these trenches. So things like Mariana Trench or Japan trench or wherever. And where are the influence human life the most is it's the very deepest parts on the earth, which create earthquakes and tsunamis. So the Boxing Day tsunami, you know, 15 years ago, whatever it was, that was the Java Trench that slept, and it's the tectonic plates are pushing against each other and the jam, and eventually one of them gifts, and they want to give it launches this enormous big pressure wave, it becomes a tsunami. Japan is one of the few places in the world that sits on what's called a triple junction. So you have three tectonic plates all fighting each other for dominance. And Tokyo was right on the corner of that. So with a bit of hindsight, the worst place in the world to build a legacy is exactly where Tokyo is. And it gets rolled over by earthquakes all the time, say maturely stuff like that, that's the deep sea doing that. In other ways. There's more more information coming out. Now, that showed some of the original climate models weren't really coming true, because no one had factored in all of the warming that's going on and surface has been being absorbed by the water below it, which in hindsight, makes perfect sense. And sort of deep sea is starting to warm and it's pulling that tip that heat down from the surface. So there's that. And there's also an idea that a lot of people probably don't appreciate is that every animal on the ocean does something. When we call it ecological function. Every animal performs a service to the planet. And most of that is through consuming and redistributing carbon. Now, as I said before, most of planet Earth is deep sea. The vast majority of every single animal in the water column, every single animal on the seafloor is irrigating is gardening. All these little creepy crawlies are going around the seafloor are turning the sediment over the gardening, they're oxygenating the seafloor, if they weren't there, all that stuff from the surface and all that crap that we put into the sea will sink and then become stagnant and become some sort of big mass rotting mess. But you need those animals to consume it and to do all these biology mechanical processes to keep the water healthy to keep the seafloor healthy. And you know, after deep sea animals went on strike, and just decided, You know what this is, this is no life. This is no life for our sea cucumber, we're giving up for a couple of years, the seafloor would become toxic, pretty sure and of this rotting mass of organic matter. And that sounds bad. But then we go back to this statistic of 70% of planet Earth is deep sea. And suddenly the ocean is this big, horrible cesspit sounds like a problem, I wouldn't recommend it.
Nick VinZant 18:14
So like when you go down there, right like in my mind, I am imagining basically a really deep flat beach.
Alan Jamieson 18:22
There are multiple types of features we see on the bottom. So the biggest one is what we call the abyssal plains, and your call planes for reasonability like desert plants, and most of the planet Earth is abyssal plain. So most of the Pacific Ocean is big, flat slabs of tectonic plates, that genuinely do look a bit like a desert. There they will be punctuated by sea mounts, which are mountains of about 1000 meters elevation, which are just been conical. You know, Hawaii is probably the most famous cmon, it's so big it's breached the surface and is no Hawaii. But then you get other features such as the trenches look at explains where the tectonic plates are. So they're very, very deep, but not very big. So there are big huge cracks big fishes on the seafloor, which to give you an idea of scale, the minor trenches, roughly the same volume as the Himalaya. So they're not just little cracks in the seafloor. They're huge. And it's you know, it's a mile deeper than Everest is high. And you get other things like fractures on so when I explained about the the mid ocean ridges, the Earth isn't particularly flexible. On the surface. The tectonic plates are not that flexible, per se. So those big ridges are not continuous, they break perpendicular to the axis of the ridge. So you get more of these big cracks forming there and they form their own little habitats. And yeah, and then and then on the continental shelf when you when you walk off, you know eastern seaboard of of America, for example, you'll if you could just walk off as far as you can without droning. You'd walk along the Continental Shelf to a depth of 100 meters 200 meters and then suddenly drops off and you'd walk down to the abyssal plains. But on those continental shelf, sometimes the fracture and break or erode down in your hand, you have submarine canyons, but you're enormous canyons in some of these features, if they were on land would be a wonder of the world. Because the problem is they're underwater, so you can't see it. So you don't, humans don't get that sense of all. You know, people love Mount Everest to look at and go, Wow, look at that, that's massive. No one can do that with the Mariana Trench. So some of these features would be impressive. One of my favorite features on that line is, there's a place we're going to next year called the Tonga trench, and it's just a bit too strange. It's the second deepest place in the world. It runs south of Tonga. And the deepest point is called Horizon deep. And if you look at it on Google Earth, you'll see this big trench, and somewhere towards the bottom, you'll see some lines running parallel to the trench. And it looks like ripples, it looks and what it actually is, is the tectonic plates being pushed down and it is buckling. On the on the big picture, it doesn't look much, you just look, hang on, well, a couple of couple of ridges or whatever Scarlets down there. But when you get if you put yourself in that place, and actually look at the size of these things, they're run for about 500 miles there, or at least, be somewhere between one and two miles high, and a series of ripples, and they're at 910 1000 meters deep. So they were on lands, you be like, What the hell are these things? Right, but because they're buried under 10,000 meters of water, and they're in a little bit of the Pacific, where no one ever goes on holiday, because it's underwater, right? It doesn't really it doesn't, doesn't go into the public consciousness. And so that's what I find fascinating is there's so much more going on underwater than there is on land.
Nick VinZant 21:42
I kind of feel a little dumb asking this question, but has that as this stuff always been covered? You know, because I think of like Pangea, where the continents were together. But all of this has kind of always been covered.
Alan Jamieson 21:54
A lot of it has Yeah, the Western Pacific certainly is spent most of its time underwater, but the you know, the other sort of lesser known fact is, wherever there's a desert, that's an old seafloor. So the Sahara Desert, the Gobi Desert, you know, Utah, Nevada, these places, they were all oceans. And that's what creates sand. Sand is basically what you find at the bottom of the ocean. So a lot of them have been underwater. But then what happens is, once it breaches, and moves up on land, quite often, it gets eroded very quickly. And then we had the ASIJ. And that carved away a lot of what these features would have been.
Nick VinZant 22:26
How did you get into this? By mistake? That's usually the best way though, isn't it?
Alan Jamieson 22:33
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that So long story short, I went to university begrudgingly, because I didn't see at any point on a degree in industrial design. So product design type of thing very much, because the only thing I think I was good at I was playing drums and technical drawing. And I couldn't get a degree in playing drums. So I went for technical drawing one. And I still do all the technical drawing, I still do on accounts here, on top of everything else, but from my final project at university. I was in Aberdeen, Scotland at the time, and it's the oil and gas capital of Europe. And it's everything's subsea engineering and stuff. And I designed this underwater device. And that got me in touch with a professor at another university who was doing subsea gear for biology. And about a year after I graduated, he ever place a job when I went for the job. And after became his mechanical engineer for a while. I ended up working for over 13 years till he retired and then took his job and and it's somewhere along that roads, this stuff I was building, and designing was considered to be worthy of a master's degree because the boss found out how little I was being paid. And so I had no desire to do a master's degree. And eventually, that became a PhD, which I thought was hilarious, because I don't really want a PhD, if none of my experience at that point a PhD students wasn't good. So I was like, I don't want to be like them. So yeah, basically just did it for a pay rise, essentially. And then, at some point in the PhD journey, I asked myself, Why Why does everybody design gear and deploy gear to 6000 meters? That's only halfway. I mean, sure, 98% of the planet will get you there. But why? Why does no one push that last bit? So I did some theoretical designs for started looking at the biology of it. And over the over a space of about 510 years just got more and more into the biology. So now technically, I'm a Professor of Marine Biology. I don't actually have any formal qualifications in biology whatsoever. So
Nick VinZant 24:28
I'm really just a mechanic. Right?
Alan Jamieson 24:32
On the holes and pools guy, right, right.
Nick VinZant 24:35
I was just assembling Ikea furniture one day and next thing I know I'm at the bottom of the ocean.
Alan Jamieson 24:40
Yeah. Come back to that whole thing that people have a certain disposition that when I went for that job interview, trying to work out what was it those as well, you build his gear? We put on the war on that. Yeah. There you go. I was like, I'll be going on ships. And we'll put this stuff in a deep sea. I'm like I'm sold. I don't eat at that point. I think you know what that is I don't really know what these guys are talking about. But that That sounds awesome.
Nick VinZant 25:00
When we talk about kind of the life that is down there is this you get down there and you're kind of always seeing something, or is it very sporadic,
Alan Jamieson 25:11
the bigger stuff is quite sporadic. But if you know what you're looking for, you will see this life everywhere. And, and some of these environments are so slow moving, that the sediment on the bottom takes about 1000 years for every centimeter of mud that's laid down. So it's slow, the current speeds are slow. So you see a mix of animals and a mix of where animals have been. So you see the tracks and their burrows and all these little pits and things. And you can actually infer quite a lot about what's there just based on the traces they've left behind. But generally speaking, I feel it's much more interesting and diverse and abundant than I think a lot of people would pitch on their heads, there's not many places we've been where we've thought that was a boring dive. Like the worst worst place we ever went was probably Eastern Mediterranean where it was basically, plastic litter outweighed life by about 10 to one. That was That sucks. But Eastern, it's pretty bad anyway. But generally speaking, there's, if you can't see anything at the viewport of the sub, you will do within a matter of minutes. That's the kind of frequency on which we see stuff. I would think
Nick VinZant 26:22
that if there's something down there, they would be very curious about a sub coming down there.
Alan Jamieson 26:27
The some of the fish after I don't think I've ever told this story before, so this, this is a new one, but some of the fish are skittish, as some fish should come across. And as soon as as soon as you're anywhere near you can, you can kind of see a sediment cloud because of obviously just went well. 10 million years of evolution, I've never seen a big thing with thrusters and lights come to come in at me. So it just runs. There's another species of fish called bustles eats which we study a lot. It's a big brown thing that hangs around somewhere between five and a half, six and a half, 1000 years. And it's not the brightest tool. And it's not the sharpest tool in the box, right? It's this big old fish that just stares at the cameras a lot. And we came across one a couple of years ago, and it was almost like it didn't know what to do. And you can see it almost had a personality it was kind of hanging there and the lights gone? Well, it because these things are almost blind, right? They can't really see anything and it kind of is kind of like tilting his head going, something's not right. Should I run away when I don't have enough energy to do that? Maybe I should just turn around. See this bureau thing? It's just like, there's no SOP for this. I don't, you know, it's just like it almost didn't have an insert. It had no instinct of what to do. And it just kind of looked a bit and just looked really uncomfortable. And it felt almost like maybe we should just leave it alone, though. And just just back off and just let it get back to its Tuesday afternoon. Because we've obviously obviously I've just started with it. That's very funny.
Nick VinZant 27:52
That's kind of the way I would feel if aliens suddenly showed up. I'd be like, I don't know what I'm, yeah, like I should run. But I'm too curious to see what this is. Yeah,
Alan Jamieson 28:02
no one prepared me for this, right. This is the thing. It's like, am I supposed to run? Am I supposed to attack it?
Nick VinZant 28:09
Yeah, this is another one of those questions that I don't know if this will make sense, right? But like when we talk about things that are living at the bottom like that, are they living things like I think of like whales and horses and like stuff with personalities and that are moving and doing stuff? Or is it more like alive like algae like, yeah, it's alive, but
Alan Jamieson 28:31
none of as. So there's a couple of points to this. So whenever you watch, or read about deep sea and depress, they'll show you things like angler fish with the biomass and lower and the big teeth, beady eyes, and they're all black and scary. Now they are genuinely very small. Some of them are relatively large, but generally speaking, they're very, very small. And generally speaking, they're in the top 1000 meters, but they're like the poster kids for deep sea. So when people think deep sea, they think that that's not really deep sea, that is dark sea. That's the animals that live in the top 1000 meters where there's a very small fraction of sunlight still getting down this to what they call it Twilight Zone. So all those adaptations are to do with hunting at night in a low light environment with very little food. When you get down to deep sea proper. When I say proper, I would say 1000 meters or more. The fish and the other animals tend to look either the same, or at least a bit woebegone that I have that kind of look a bit boring, so they don't get on TV very much because they're not ugly enough to be hideous. And they're not beautiful enough to be beautiful. They're kind of in between. They're kind of like bit sad looking and a bit. Some of them actually look a bit bored. But what's interesting about familiar groups of animals is just sick for the last four years. For example, we know there are fish at just over 8000 meters. They don't look like deep sea fish. They're not even deep sea fish. They're shallower fish. They're fine shallower family that has evolved. So quickly their basic overtaken all the deep sea fish by 1000 meters. So the deepest question the world's a little pink thing and it looks like bit like a sock puppet. It looks kind of weird goofy looking thing. We found a dumbo octopuses 7000 meters that just looks like a beautiful little Dumbledore is big ears just going around and doing Dumbo stuff. And it was 2000 meters deeper than any other cephalopod. A year after that we found a squid just being a squid at six and a half 1000 meters, we found jellyfish at 10,000 meters, pin comb jellies, 10,000 meters, we find these big, beautiful bright red prawns that are almost a foot long, we see those down to 8000 meters. So a lot of this stuff, if you were to show someone the video and say, Where did this come from, there'll be nothing in there that you would you wouldn't be able to instantly recognize that as being deep see, it will be quite familiar. And one of my favorite animals is our type of anemone. It's called a galaxy anthem, which is kind of horrendous word, but the little white roses, like flowers for their anemone, and you find them at the deepest point on Earth. And they're just sitting there attached to a rock just look like loops that are just swinging in the wind. But just sort of slowly rocking back and forward in the current and there's nothing weird about it at all. It's just genuinely a beautiful animal. And it's one of the most hardcore animals on the planet.
Nick VinZant 31:25
Are you ready for some harder slash listeners submitted question?
Alan Jamieson 31:29
Yes, go for it.
Nick VinZant 31:30
What do you think is harder to comprehend? Deep Sea or space?
Alan Jamieson 31:35
I think deep sea. I think it's the one that's the most misunderstood. People seem to be quite happy with space. But people still seem to be conflicted when it comes to deep sea.
Nick VinZant 31:46
Which one was your favorite expedition? I think you've been if I'm correct, like 65.
Alan Jamieson 31:53
Yeah, coming up to 70. Now, yeah, favorite expedition. Or I'd like to think there was one in the Indian Ocean we did, which was my first submersible dive, which I wasn't expecting. And that was a glorious dive. It was one of those real mental ones because my first ever submersible dive, we went to seven and a half those Amir's so I wasn't, I wasn't been broken in gently. And it was the pilot at the time was really, really funny. And we had such a laugh was great. And that was the same one will be friendly octopus, and it was one of those ones. That was a very short trip. But every day, every every bit of tech we had just kept on giving. It was one of those amazing, but it could stay there for a month.
Nick VinZant 32:29
Do you get nervous? Do you get anxious about it, or it's like, all right, going into the bottom of the ocean. And it's Wednesday.
Alan Jamieson 32:37
Surprisingly not. I mean, we have had some incidences in the sub we've had the hatch, looking at one point when were 1000s of meters underwater. And we've had an incident last September, where we were nearly at the sea floor at length those meters and there was a big or mighty bang on the side of the SAP and we couldn't place where it was. And so we had to abort, we just we've got to make that decision in a space of like, 60 seconds ago, something just popped on the outside of the sub, we're still going down and saw pressures on the increasing. So we need to make the call and you have this. And what's weird is in those situations, I think I trust the submarine so much. And the pilots trust it as well, that it's rather than nobody panics, nobody freaks out. In fact, if anything is opposite, you suddenly because you're inside the submarine you can't see out of it, your eyesight is useless. And suddenly it's like your brain just reactivates everything to do with your hearing. And you're just sitting there listening is anything is anything cracking is anything doing, you know, and then you're very quietly speaking to each other and saying, Okay, what was that? What could it be? Is it should we be worried about this? Do we need to abort? And you just do it? And you know, it's maybe maybe something like I said before about that? It's maybe it's not till afterwards, where you're sitting with a cup of coffee thinking, Oh, what did I just do? Sometimes there's been a case where it's the same thing is happening there. And you're thinking, wow, we just upgraded over 9000 meters, and we're still not quite sure what it was that made that bang and then attend to you get the opposite. You're like, oh, maybe we should have freaked out. But I think it must be the same as being like an airline pilot. If you're the type of person who freaks out when things go wrong, then you're probably in the wrong job.
Nick VinZant 34:13
Does it does what does it sound like? Like, can you imagine you've got external microphones or something on the satellite. What is that?
Alan Jamieson 34:20
So in the sub you, you can hear the thrusters moving a little bit, it's makes a sort of Heartless, relatively high pitch or waning noise, and you hear sort of like whizzing back and forward a little bit, but generally it's spookily quiet. And so there's been times where, you know, it's a long day for us. So when you get into submarine shut, the hatch is 12 hours before you can get out. And so you take your lunch, and there's been times where it'll be four hours down and four hours, the bottom four hours back up halfway. During the four hours on the bottom, we just park up, you just set it on the seafloor. You stretch your legs a lot, you can't really stretch your legs but you can move your legs and back and forward a little bit. and take a few selfies and whatever I you know, take a picture, I think and just eat a sandwich and just sit there and eat some Doritos sitting on the bottom of the ocean, just checking out this and that. And then 15 minutes later I get back to it again. And it's in when you sweat when you go. And point is when you get down and you sit on the bottom, you switch the thrusters off. It's just the more silent you can experience this is beautiful.
Nick VinZant 35:22
Follow up that excellent answer with this question. Of course, from our audience. How do you go to the bathroom?
Alan Jamieson 35:27
Yes, that question. There's two is two ways to overcome this. There are there are on a day you dive in a submarine, you normally got maybe four hours before the dive, basically, you drink a couple of cups of water or coffee, whatever. And then that's it, you just stay off it. When you get thirsty. The trick is to just put half a glass of water in your mouth, swirl it around a bit and spit it out. That seems to satisfy your thirst without taking on water. So that's a little trick that I do. I also have been blessed with an iron bladder. So it's never bothered me. And to the point where one of the guys have vied with quite a lot, one of the sub pilots, he does not have an iron bladder. So he uses what's called a range extender, which is a plastic bottle. But just to wind them up. When we did a dive before I was trying to I was boasting about my iron bladder to the point where before we got in the submarine, I downed a whole pint of apple juice in front of them just to show just the way numb ups and doesn't bother me.
Nick VinZant 36:29
As a person who does not have an iron bladder, I understand that you've been to the bottom of the ocean and gone to places that no one has been before, but holding it for 12 hours might be the most impressive. Do you think that we'll ever be able to really make a home there or to really have people kind of coming and going so to speak?
Alan Jamieson 36:48
Probably not. I don't see any reason why you would want to live underwater. So there are there has been underwater habitats. And I know a guy who spent a lot of time on one. And it's not a deep sea one. It's one that used to be off Hawaii, I think. And the idea was the divers would live in this underwater habitat. And you can go diving every day for like two or three weeks. And he was saying that the air inside is so moist that you end up growing fungus all over your body. Because you're basically damp for weeks on end. And your human body isn't really meant for that. So there's that. And there's just a huge expense of trying to clean that air or trying to get fresh air trying to get food up and down and that kind of stuff. So I think for the foreseeable future is not particularly practical. Where it is becoming more accessible is the number of cruise liners now that have submersibles on it. And so you do your Antarctic cruise or in the Mediterranean or of the Arctic, whatever, maybe there are opportunities now you can just jump in us up on a pilot will take you down to 200 meters, 500 meters, and you can go see stuff and come back again. It's becoming more and more common. In fact, there are more tourist submarines not in the world, and there are science. And so there are ways in which you can access the deep sea that without necessarily living in it.
Nick VinZant 37:56
Is there anything down there that you think that would change that and the thing that jumps into my mind is like, Okay, we find oil, or we find something that we can manage and that now this is now the next great frontier of exploration in economic activity,
Alan Jamieson 38:11
there is sort of deep sea mining is becoming a very contentious subject at the moment. And you know, they are they have developed these enormous harvester machines which are controlled from the surface. And I think in cases like that, it's probably no some indiscriminate destruction of the seafloor doesn't necessarily require a pilot. It just requires a remote system. But
Nick VinZant 38:30
I feel like that's one of the things though, and with me knowing nothing about it, like we should not mess with that. Let's just leave that whole thing.
Alan Jamieson 38:37
I think one of the one of the biggest issues at the moment at DMC is to is we never learned our lesson. This is the thing, right? So just at the point where, you know, we did a study a while back about manmade contaminants in the deep sea, which are astronomically high. These are particles that were made in the 50s and then banned in the 80s. And they were banned because they don't ever degrade. They just pass from one animal to another. And then you see, what do we learn from that? Oh, well, we started creating more and more plastic, and then saw all the plastics in the sea. And everyone's screaming about oh microplastics microplastics nanoplastics. And then you find out that the silver nanoparticles are now in socks and deodorants and all this kind of stuff and microbeads and facial scrubs, it's like what are microbeads they're not cosmetic microbeads you're actually making micro plastics that are designed to be flushed down the shower or down the sink. Where does that plug hole end up? And no one thinks about that right? You use it's just you're literally pouring little bits of plastic into the sea. And it's like How is this even legal? And then you have all this all this business of oil and gas industry moving into deeper water and when oil and gas came online and around the 70s offshore biology or science played a bit of a game of catch up because they started going for it was a cool Gold Rush, right? And everybody needs oil and whatever and then suddenly realize that maybe some of this, it, maybe this isn't the best for the environment. And they said, Okay, well, if there's ever going to be another big industry going in to see, maybe we should do the science first. And to then understand why it's happening. And then deep sea mining comes along. And it's, it's this constant struggle, there's a race on between those who want to destroy 1000s of square kilometers of sea floor that has taken 10 million years to form and will not recover for another 10 million years, if it ever does. And those who are saying, I don't think we should do this. And but the people who are saying, I don't think we should do this or not being promised a billion dollar check. And then we're probably just going to make the same mistake all over again. And that's the saddest thing about human races. We just don't learn.
Nick VinZant 40:51
I was, I was a history major in college, and one of my history professors said, if there was one constant in human history, it's that we never learned the lesson that we never learned our lesson. Yeah, I know, we really don't.
Alan Jamieson 41:03
We're doing this all over again. Yes, we are.
Nick VinZant 41:07
We're gonna do that. Right. Yeah. What would you personally say like for you? What was your favorite place down there.
Alan Jamieson 41:12
They're all unique and weird in their own little ways. But one of the more recent ones I did was just off Japan, it was a place called the boss or triple junction. And it's the exact junction where those three tectonic plates I was telling you about meat. And the seafloor plunges down nine and a half, 1000 meters. And that was the one where there was a big bang on the outside, and we're buoyed, but a week later, we tried again, and figured that it will be fine. And we got down there. And it's a unique place in that you have these animals called crinoids, which are sea lilies, they looked like Ferran so like plants. So you quite often see crinoids in the Paleo record, you'll see this sort of circular families get planted embedded in this in Iraq. And so there's not many shallower versions of these, but the deep ones are stocks that don't like plants, but they're they're nine and a half, those are mutants, they're all bright yellow. And normally on a dive to these types of depths, you would be lucky if you saw maybe one or two on a rock somewhere. At the bottom of bows or triple junction, there were 1000s and 1000s. And 1000s is called the Crinoid metal. And that was just like, This is so surreal. It was like driving around in someone's backyard, because there were these big steps in the rocks, because it's such a gnarly place geologically anyway. And there's just these big yellow flowers growing and everything. And it was it was like a metal. And it was just like that was really quite surreal. And on the opposite end of that one of the most bizarre places, which I've still got a great affection for was a place called the wallabies, Zenith fracture zone. And so 500 miles off West, Australia, and me and this guy who uses the range extender, came down. And we found in deep sea mining is all about manganese nodules. It's about these black balls on the seafloor that only form and deep water and so on. And we had an inkling that there would be some there. But when we came down on the sea floor, were like, Oh my Lord, there were billions of these things. Like the entire seafloor was black. It was like someone had laid out 10 billion cannonballs on the seafloor, beautiful, perfectly spherical black balls. And at the time, we were, quite often listen to music on the way down at the time, we were listening to corn. And we had a dead bodies everywhere was playing on the stereo at the time. And it was like, This is so creepy. It's weird. It's like, you know, corn is your soundtrack to landing and what appeared to be this blackened alien planet wasn't maybe the best choice of soundtrack, but that was
Nick VinZant 43:34
that's aggressive music to be listening to going down there. Yeah, you got you gotta keep your mind going. Yeah, um, do you think that there is something there? We haven't found and I'm think what this person means in that sense is like, is there some big thing? I'll use the example of like, is it Marianna are Maria? Anna? I marry Ariana? Like, do you think there's still a place like that that we don't know about?
Alan Jamieson 43:59
No. So when I was when I was talking about we've mapped over the ocean, it just depends to what resolution, most of the ocean has been mapped using satellite derived altimetry. So there's satellites that will look for bumps on the sea surface. And you can infer from data that's been mapped more accurately what those bumps mean. And so there are no more trenches to be found that we normally all are. When you get down to the scale of smaller sea mounts, maybe there are a whole bunch more that aren't being picked up on that. But generally speaking, the general lay of the land is solid. So there are no more finches to be fine, unfortunately.
Nick VinZant 44:36
Okay, I'm pretty sure you have you know, you get asked this question all the time. But let me phrase it this way. If there was like another Atlantis or human civilization or some intelligent life living down there, would you be surprised like Is it big enough that this something like this could happen? Like if you suddenly saw like, name or walking around on down there, would you be surprised about
Alan Jamieson 45:04
if you were going to hide in plain sight? That's where you would do it right? And if you were if you were, if you were to evaluate the human race and look at the places that don't normally go on, so we would be a good place to hide on this planet, you would see that there's very, very few people going deeper than about 4000 meters. So yeah, I mean, if a purely hypothetical alien invasion, then if I were an alien, I would hide in a trench because chances are, no one's gonna even clock in there. Because most militaries don't even have capability of going in depth we do. In fact, that don't, that's that's one of the issues. So one of the things we discovered a few years back was, when we're working in the Mariana Trench, we found lots and lots of fiber optic cables, to the point where it's almost unbelievable. Now the deepest place in the earth is just covered in these like abandoned coils of fiber optic. I'm thinking one, why would anyone do that someone's obviously cut these off. And then you're thinking, Well, what is on Guam? Because Guam is the nearest Island and Mariana Guam is essentially essentially the top bit of the rest of the marina. So what what's there well, in Guam is basically a massive US Navy Air Force Base. Now, if you want to listen to submarines coming in and out of Guam, and you want to deploy some hydrophones or listening devices, talk about hiding in plain sight, if you stick them down at the bottom of the Mariana, you're within easily within earshot of a naval base for our Navy, that doesn't have the capacity to know you were there. And then suddenly, you start to see all this abandoned technology. And we don't see that in any other trench, we only see it in the one next to the airbase. So you're like, Huh, I wonder what's been going on now. So yeah,
Nick VinZant 46:43
very suspicious. Right? Um, oh, you want to end on? I don't want to end on a bad note. But like, are we ruining it? Yes. Can we fix it?
Alan Jamieson 46:55
I think we can fix it. And I think on a positive note, we have to think about stop thinking about the deep sea as being the deep sea, stop thinking about it as being this other dimension. That doesn't matter to us, I think. So to turn that question around, we are affecting it. And people need to acknowledge that and realize that it's, you know, this big, these big garbage patches in the Mid Pacific, everyone's aware of that. And I don't think anyone wants that, right. I don't think anyone the right man is gonna go, Yeah, I'm all for the big Pacific Garbage Patch. But you've got to be aware that it's sinking. It's, it's, you know, plastic breaks down, it's just going to weather and eventually sank. Where's it going. And there's this weird thing, because we keep telling ourselves, the deep seas deepest out of sight out of mind, the sinking of that material isn't being transported to another dimension, it's still on planet Earth, and a deep sea is still very much planet out. And then so is trying to break that barrier, trying to blur the lines between the top bit of the ocean that we love, and we write poems about. And the rest of it, which is 95% of it is just to remember, the ocean is just one big body of water from the top to the bottom. And there is no imaginary line there that says, the top half is the bit you should care about the deep bit is a bit that you don't care about. And if we're affecting the top, we're affecting all of it. And it's not this gradient of how much we should care, you should care about all of it. And what we're trying to do with releasing the videos will be doing the talks that we do and the types of science we do is show people that, like even this podcast, we're trying to show people, the deep sea is really cool. It's really interesting. It's fascinating. There's this stuff there that you don't appreciate as normal. It's familiar. It's not that bizarre. And, you know, we're desperately trying to get documentary makers and journalists to stop this ridiculous monsters of the deep truth, because that's keeping people from caring. Because nobody cares about the monster and horror film, but they'll still they still want to see it, but they don't care about it. And that's what we're trying to undo is trying to get that meat with THC, positive, beautiful part of the plant.
Nick VinZant 49:01
I get caught up listening to people, I was listening to everything you were saying. I'm like, Yeah, we got to do that. Get on. Get on this man. Is there anything else you think that we missed? What's kind of coming up next for you? Where can people learn more?
Alan Jamieson 49:16
Learn more. We but there's a TED talk out, which is seems to get a lot of traction at the moment. We have various website if you just Google their Minderoo UWA Dipsy Research Center, we'll find that stuff there. And the next step for us is we're going to take it up another level, because that's how we That's how we're all surrounding and doing a few dives and a few books around various deep bits. We've decided the shipping is submersible. We work in the last four years it's now been it's not under new ownership. Sort of very wealthy person has bought it and he's basically letting us loose. And so we want to do the biggest horizontal project ever so on so the first of June, we're going to leave For 240 Day legs back to back and take the ship from San Diego to Hawaii and then down to Tahiti and then back again twice, to look at these big huge expanses over the Pacific, because a lot of people walk around Hawaii, Walker and California, they walk around New Zealand, but nobody's joining the dots between these big things that we're seeing. So that one is a huge because on one, an income, New Year, we're gonna go down to Tonga trench, and the idea is to get video and data from every 150 meters from the surface to the second deepest place on the planet. And to try and demonstrate that you don't have to be the deep sea guy, you don't have to be the shallower guy, just do all of it. You know, make make tickets, 90 days to do it. But let's do all of it. Let's do it right from the top to the bottom, on the sea floor and in the water call. And then a month after that, go up to the Philippine trench and do all again. And then by next Christmas, we'll be in Antarctica, and we'll do it again. But we'll do a sub zero temperatures. So, so three and a half is going to be mental. I think it's going to if we make it out alive, it was going to be amazing.
Nick VinZant 51:04
Does he ever does it ever freeze? Is this the zero freeze? No,
Alan Jamieson 51:11
don't So Sam is strange, which is Antarctica the it's the only place in the world which is subzero in the trenches. So it could because it's saltwater or the freezing point is lower. So you can get to just less than zero degrees, which is pretty hardcore thinking there's this beautiful little fish living there in sub zero temperatures, and a pressure of 800 atmospheres. And they're just swimming around being little fish.
Nick VinZant 51:35
I want to thank Alan so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him. We have linked to him on our social media sites. We're Profoundly Pointless on Twitter, tick tock, Instagram and YouTube. And we have also included his information in the episode description. If you are listening to this on May 10. The YouTube version of this interview will be live on May 11, at around 430 Pacific time. Okay, now let's bring in John Shaw and get to the pointless part of the show. How do you feel about the ocean?
John Shull 52:12
Two emotions, coming to mind one terrified, and secondly, just damn impressed of it. My favorite thing to do is cruising. And I literally stand there and overlook the ocean. It's that incredible to me.
Nick VinZant 52:31
I have to say I don't really like it. I'm impressed by it. I'm scared of it. But I don't really like the ocean. I like the beach. I like going into the water. But once you get out there and like the Open, open ocean, I've only been on a cruise ship once. It's pretty terrifying.
John Shull 52:49
I'm more scared of of what you can see than what you can't see. But I would imagine what you can't see is more terrifying than actually what you can see. Which is even more terrifying when you really think about it.
Nick VinZant 53:01
Are you What are you more afraid of space? Are the ocean?
John Shull 53:06
mean the probably the ocean?
Nick VinZant 53:09
Yeah, there's something that seems to me more scary about it. I feel like it would be a worst death. I would rather die in space than in the ocean because I feel like in space at least is going to be a little bit quicker.
John Shull 53:21
Yeah, you know, I've heard the stories about people that are lost at sea or spend two, three weeks, you know, just sometimes drifting and on a boat that's disabled or a partner, you know, or one of those blowup rafts. I can't even imagine could you imagine being on a blow up raft? Say it's 15 feet long. And you're just in the ocean? Just going with the current that would be that would that would be that would be one of the worst ways i think i To die for me it would just something like that.
Nick VinZant 53:50
I would. That's what I think separates space from the ocean like in space, you're just as dead. But there's no real hope like, you know, like, nobody's coming for you. It's not like they're launching a backup shuttle, or somebody that might just happen to be flying by but in the ocean. There's a little bit of hope. Like well, maybe maybe. I feel like that's what makes it more scary.
John Shull 54:13
Until Yeah, there is a little bit of hope until you realize it's a plane that's 30,000 feet in the air and you can see them but they don't see or care about you. I just you know one of the this necessarily it was in the ocean but it was more like rain related was that we were on I was on a cruise ship one time and you can literally see the thunderstorm coming over the water. That was pretty intense. That was a moment I'll never forget.
Nick VinZant 54:41
I don't understand your love of cruise ships. i To me that's the worst vacation in the world. Just on this boat. I mean just it's basically like the whole vacation is just driving somewhere and coming back. No, it's basically a transportation vacation. You're just traveling but
John Shull 55:00
it's it's kind of what I said, opening up this this question you had was it just kind of being out in, excuse me in the middle of the ocean just I love the fact that you can literally turn off your phone and no one, you know, no one can know you get a hold of you, you're off the radar, or at least you think you're off the radar for a few days.
Nick VinZant 55:21
And understand when people say that, like who's who's contacting you what's going on all the time that you need to be off grid that much. I've never understood anyone who says that, like I just got to be off grid, like, then you need to just set better priorities in your daily life,
John Shull 55:37
you may be correct in saying that, that might be right. It's like
Nick VinZant 55:41
the only way that I can have any kind of boundaries and set priorities around my life is if I'm forced to be cut off from it. That's kind of what you're saying to me.
John Shull 55:51
I mean, I mean, you're right. I mean, you should set better boundaries. However, it you know, it's good to just get away and not have the responsibilities that you usually have. And on a cruise ship, it's easy to do. Because once you leave port, you're like what you said earlier, you're kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe somebody will find you. Maybe they won't. Okay, all right. I just wanna I just want to I also just want to add that if you've never been on a cruise ship, do it. You owe it to yourself to at least do it once.
Nick VinZant 56:23
I would also like to add that if you have an opportunity to go on a cruise ship pass.
John Shull 56:28
So we'll start off with Charlie Faulkner. Nate half, Robert Finley, Jesse bolt. I like that. I like that name. For some reason Jesse bolt. It's a strong name to me.
Nick VinZant 56:42
JB and can be abbreviated as
John Shull 56:45
JB Curtis for Dylan Gregson. Nathan Roy chi Walker.
Nick VinZant 56:55
Clad Are you sure it's clad?
John Shull 56:59
Think actually, it might be Claude.
Nick VinZant 57:02
How do you spell it?
John Shull 57:03
I think I missed a you but I think it's C L A U D? I'm pretty sure it's Claude Burke not clad a Burke.
Nick VinZant 57:10
I wouldn't think that that'd be like naming somebody like pine well are like you don't name people words.
John Shull 57:18
I'm gonna end on the name of the week or shout out or the week which goes to Puerto Healy. But a great name Porter. I like that name.
Nick VinZant 57:28
Yeah, that's okay. That's one of those limited, limited names, right? Like, as long as it's in a limited number of people. That's a good name. Can't have too many people named Porter.
John Shull 57:39
So this is actually this is this is ironic that this would come up because on my bangers for you. Which by the way, Nick, and I don't really share, we don't share ideas before the show. Because why would we? Why would we be prepared? One of my questions was to ask you, if you could own one of these things, which one would you own? And it was a private jet or a like a cruise ship slash mini yacht? And but now I'm not I know what you're going to say because you've already expressed your displeasure with boat craft. So
Nick VinZant 58:11
yeah, I would go with a private jet. faster, more efficient, more convenient, because like otherwise, if you got a big private boat, like it's not like you can go anywhere with that. Or it takes you forever. So private jets and easy ones. Yeah. And I think it might I don't think the cost would be that much less.
John Shull 58:31
I'm gonna go a boat, I think it'd be great to have a boat and just sail and drive wherever you want it. Plain sounds great plan sounds like it'd be the obvious choice until you start thinking about you know, being in the Air lots cramped up.
Nick VinZant 58:46
You can't go wherever you want. Sure, you
John Shull 58:49
can you can still go around the world in a boat, it's gonna take longer and you're gonna have to, you know, once you get to a port, you don't have to take a car or something. But it's,
Nick VinZant 58:58
you're gonna have to take a plane so you still have to take the plane to get to some places right? You can take your boat to Spain, but how are you going to get to Sweden
John Shull 59:04
drive?
Nick VinZant 59:06
Or just have your private jet? Just you know, the private jets the better one right, like stop trying to justify it because you can. It's ridiculous. I just think the private jet is the better
John Shull 59:16
one. The important part of this is that I had a question involving a cruise ship. Before we even you even mentioned the question of a of a cruise. All right. What would you rather be as you grow? They're known for your endurance are known for your smallness?
Nick VinZant 59:36
Do you mean by basically endurance or strength?
John Shull 59:38
Yes. Life
Nick VinZant 59:40
is a marathon man. It's not a sprint. Endurance is always better.
John Shull 59:44
So you're going for the long longevity then you don't want to be don't be a rip hitter right out the gate. You want to be you know, the marathon?
Nick VinZant 59:51
Yeah. I want to try to have a good 20 to 30 year stretch rather than a good year stretch. See Right. That's that's the that's the mindset people who peak in high school.
John Shull 1:00:05
And you didn't peak in high school, look at your peak. And right now with that great hair,
Nick VinZant 1:00:09
I still hope I haven't paid paint. I'd like to peak. I would like to peak at 47.
John Shull 1:00:17
Well, you're only two years away, right?
Nick VinZant 1:00:19
Like this a little bit longer than that. Right?
John Shull 1:00:22
I have a buddy the other day. I didn't know how old he was. And he was mentioning his birthday coming up. And I said, Oh, well, how old are you? And he told me, he's gonna be 56. And I said, What? I've gone through life this whole time thinking you were 44th ups. And you're going to be, you know, mid 50s. Oof.
Nick VinZant 1:00:43
Hey, you're still really old. That's the difficulty though. If you look younger than you are, then people expect you to be a certain age. And then maybe they think that you're lame. Like, what if? like, Man, that's a really lame 35 year old? Oh, I'm 45. Oh, you always feel a little out of place. I think it's better to look younger. But then you also feel a little out of place, I think. Because you don't look like the age that you are same for people who looked like they were 30 in high school.
John Shull 1:01:16
I that Oh, that. That sentence just makes me want to throw things against the wall because of growing up in the era that we did. The LeBron James debate was every time you turn around, it was always he's not in high school. He's really 27 Or he's really 25. It's like, No, he isn't. He's just, you know, just built differently.
Nick VinZant 1:01:39
That is the thing. Usually when you see prodigy athletes, like they look 10 years older than they really are like, that's a grown man and 17.
John Shull 1:01:49
Right. All right, let's see. So, gonna take this off a little different path this week. And I want to ask you bring up something real fast. So guarding Guardians of the Galaxy three comes out this week? Well, actually, I think it came out like Friday, but either way, it's already Yeah. What's your thoughts on it? Is it going to be the movie of the year? Could you care less? Is it going to be you know, it's number three, obviously. So is it going to is it going to be just an just another moneymaker and just be a completely pointless movie to the storyline.
Nick VinZant 1:02:27
I am sick of basically all media and TV shows and movies. I feel like we haven't seen anything that is truly different. In the last five years, all of the big movies have been superhero movies, they've all been the same concept. All of the new shows that are coming out on Netflix or whatever. They're all these true crime things or young adult theater things. There really isn't anything new or different. That has come out in entertainment. I feel like in the last couple of years, the most recent thing that I saw would be like, Oh, that's a little bit different. Like that's something that I would actually like to watch and be interested in is the Sandman stuff that was on Netflix. That's the most recent thing that I've like, hasn't been basically either superhero movie or true crime.
John Shull 1:03:11
I mean, you know, I think you're that's a pretty bold statement. I don't agree with it.
Nick VinZant 1:03:18
Name the last couple of movies that you have seen that have? What's the last movie that you saw that you would be like that was different than a movie that I've seen before?
John Shull 1:03:26
While I wasn't necessarily thinking movies, but TV shows if you were copying that and I mean, you could say The Last of Us is different.
Nick VinZant 1:03:35
Zombie Walking Dead parity.
John Shull 1:03:38
Okay. succession, as you're gonna say business
Nick VinZant 1:03:42
basically, basically, business Soprano's.
John Shull 1:03:45
Ted lasso
Nick VinZant 1:03:47
that okay, I haven't actually seen it. But I've heard that maybe that's a different tone than other shows that it's a
John Shull 1:03:53
sports show, but it's not, you know, I mean, when's the last port show that's been successful other than Ted lasso. And I'm not talking about like the drive to survive or any of those like Docu series shows. I mean, like a TV show.
Nick VinZant 1:04:07
I don't think that there's really any I don't think that there's really very many non kind of news and or commentary related sports shows that have ever been successful. Ted last was probably the most successful one and I can't even think of something else that was centered around sports. It's even close.
John Shull 1:04:22
I mean, Coach back in the 90s. But I
Nick VinZant 1:04:25
Oh, yeah. But was he really coaching? Did he ever was here there Was there ever anything about him actually out on like the soccer field, or whatever he was supposedly coaching can't recall. I
John Shull 1:04:35
don't I don't think they actually ever showed any, like real scenes of athleticism.
Nick VinZant 1:04:42
Maybe Friday Night Lights,
John Shull 1:04:43
Friday lights? Yeah, that's a good one. I liked that show. But also, you know, it's hard for me to differentiate that show from like a because it's clearly made for a certain kind of demographic. And as I guess
Nick VinZant 1:04:56
it was more of a drama than it was an actual kind
John Shull 1:04:59
of like Yeah, but it was more of like for teenagers like if I watched it now I feel like I would care less about most things in that show.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:07
Yeah, I would agree with that.
John Shull 1:05:09
That's it. That's all I got were Oh, you don't have anything else that's it man. We ran through my console.
Nick VinZant 1:05:18
Okay, all right. Are you ready for our top five?
John Shull 1:05:20
Let's get it Bob.
Nick VinZant 1:05:22
So our top five are our top five his top five Bob's and Roberts do not count they have to go by bomb and only by Bob so any kind of like Robert De Niro's anything like that, that does not count they have to go by Bob. What's your number five.
John Shull 1:05:39
So as always, as I always do, I'm going to preface this with saying I did not realize how many Bob's there were like and I when I say that I mean people who go by the name Bob or went by the name Bob. And you're like, oh, that's Bob so and so. Anyways,
Nick VinZant 1:05:55
there's there's a lot but I would say that there are some at the top that are truly kind of influential in society. There's a lot of mid level Bob's
John Shull 1:06:05
I think you're not going to like my list because I think you're going to say a lot of my Bob's are outdated. But I feel that if you're saying a top five list, these Bob's have to be on it. So my number five is going to be Bob Hope.
Nick VinZant 1:06:20
Oh, that's pretty. That's going back. There are ways it is. But he was. He's somebody that if we were older, we might have actually put him much higher on the list. I think he was very influential at a certain time and probably one of the most famous people probably maybe one of the most famous Bob's but he's just not our time.
John Shull 1:06:40
Right. Well, that's that's what I said. I kind of tried to think all encompassing as I do on these lists, because my listeners barrier to yours. As given the video game top five characters list last week, in saying that
Nick VinZant 1:06:53
you had Donkey Kong tied with Mario, what's your number? It's just ridiculous. Bob Barker.
John Shull 1:06:59
Okay, so I have him on the list. He's a little higher up for me, but
Nick VinZant 1:07:05
I don't think he should be higher than five.
John Shull 1:07:08
But in terms of well, I'll get I'll get back to him in a minute or two. How about that? Okay, okay. Who's never for Bob Newhart?
Nick VinZant 1:07:20
What was the show that he was on?
John Shull 1:07:22
Oh, God, you would put me on the spot for this at all in
Nick VinZant 1:07:26
the family? No, it
John Shull 1:07:28
was not on the family. Um, the new heart, Bob, new heart. Yeah, I think it was the OH is called Bob Newhart Show. I thought you were trying to play a joke on me because I was gonna say I'm pretty sure it's a new heart show. And then you're gonna come out and say, it wasn't. But
Nick VinZant 1:07:45
I thought he was famous for something else though. I thought he was famous for another TV show and then got The Bob Newhart Show.
John Shull 1:07:53
Yeah, I don't know. I don't. I just know of him, literally from that show, and then the things he's done.
Nick VinZant 1:07:59
This makes no sense. This makes no sense. So the show was called The Bob Newhart Show. But in the show, he played someone else. He played ROBERT HARTLEY. So in the show named after him, he played someone else. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.
John Shull 1:08:22
I want to say that I could give you a reason, but I can't I just, he is just that known that I had to put them on the list. So he's number four.
Nick VinZant 1:08:32
But why would they name the show after him? And then in the show, he plays a character who is not him?
John Shull 1:08:39
Maybe you should message? I don't know, whoever the producers were the show.
Nick VinZant 1:08:44
That's uh, how could you even explain that choice to somebody?
John Shull 1:08:49
I have no idea.
Nick VinZant 1:08:51
Bob Vila is my number four. Bob Vila was a staple of my childhood, both in terms of watching that show with my parents. And then making fun of anyone who was working on their home is like, Hey, Bob Vila. How's that going?
John Shull 1:09:07
Yeah, just No, just absolutely not. I can't No.
Nick VinZant 1:09:12
You can't put Bob Vila on there. Everybody knows who Bob Vila is.
John Shull 1:09:17
I think he's less known. I think he was known for a certain generation, which you could say about my first two. However, I feel like my first who have transcended history so far as where in 30 years people will not I feel the generation of today has no idea like people are googling right now who Bob Vila is when you said that
Nick VinZant 1:09:37
you would use a little Bob Vila maybe you would have gotten your basement done in less than four and a half years.
John Shull 1:09:41
Do you realize that you are the only person on this podcast that has brought up my basement every week since you gave me shit like a month ago? Person that talking about my basement?
Nick VinZant 1:09:51
Because you talked about it so much that now I have to find out about how you're going to talk about your basement this time. Listen, how long did it take you to do your basement? Right Bob Vila Uh, maybe if you would have watched those episodes, you could have got it done a little bit faster and a little bit cheaper and with less stress because Bob Vila is a solid number four.
John Shull 1:10:09
Well done, or you can we move on now.
Nick VinZant 1:10:12
I'm pretty proud of that extra eight. Okay? All right. That's
John Shull 1:10:16
Bob Barker's, my number two or three. My number three is Bob Barker. Sorry.
Nick VinZant 1:10:21
I think that's too high for Bob Barker. I think he's a sentimental picot best honestly. And I in hindsight, should maybe and put them on my number five,
John Shull 1:10:29
he is he is he was on, you know, the price is right for what, 50 years, 40 years. He he was how do I put this? Probably one of the top five talk show whatever you want to save all time, like he is known and he will be known, just the way that Alex Trebek was known and will still be known in 50 years. If people are watching Jeopardy, they will still know of Alex Trebek I feel it's the same way with the prices right people don't care about Drew Carey. They just look at him and see Bob huger Barker. Barker,
Nick VinZant 1:11:04
that's another name a guy who's more famous for his name, but I can't put Bob Euchre on the list. But he's a great name. Bob. You grouse. Um, what are we at my number three? Yes. Bob Saget.
John Shull 1:11:23
I mean, it's hard. I mean, you're gonna have a real issue with my number two. So I can't really say anything about your number three.
Nick VinZant 1:11:31
I think you're gonna have a real issue with my number two, two. I think we're getting into the top where you can kind of move some people around there. Right? Like there's some heavy hitters coming up for the bobs. But my number three is Bob Saget. And I know that he was America's dad at one point. But I would not say that he was influential like he didn't to me change the face of comedy or anything like that. He was more just a famous person who was who was funny, but I wouldn't say that he's on the level of the other. Top tier. Bob's
John Shull 1:12:00
like I remember Bob Saget as the really raunchy, terrible comedian more So nowadays, and I remember him from you know, America's dad. And I can't even remember who the like I can picture who the other two guys were, but I can't remember their names. The other two dads were
Nick VinZant 1:12:19
I can remember for some reason the guy who was bulky Bartok a moose? I don't know if she was that show that like came after that. I was like Trading Places or something like that. There are two foreign guys. Now keep our tacos,
John Shull 1:12:33
though. TJ was a TGIF. on ABC on Friday nights. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah.
Nick VinZant 1:12:39
I remember that picture of that house, though more than I remember anything from the actual show. He turned out to be the most famous person from that show, though. I think even though he wasn't necessarily the star. What's your number two.
John Shull 1:12:53
My number two is Bob Seger. Michigan zone by the way, Bob Seger. Here
Nick VinZant 1:13:01
we go. That's why the problem is is that when you compare Bob Seger to the other two musical Bob's that may or may not be on this list, he is the last of those. Bob's there's two other Bob's in music that are famous, more famous and more influential than he is.
John Shull 1:13:16
Uh huh. Well, I Okay, I'm kidding. You're,
Nick VinZant 1:13:19
you're forgetting you're forgetting one of them. Oh, boy.
John Shull 1:13:21
All right. Well, is he your number two?
Nick VinZant 1:13:24
No, my number two is Bob Ross. I love Bob Ross. Everybody loves Bob Ross.
John Shull 1:13:31
Once again, I feel like he's like your Bob Vila pick. He's. He's okay. But he won't be remembered outside of his
Nick VinZant 1:13:39
time. You won't be remembered Bob Ross won't be remembered. Bob Ross won't be remembered. Why? Because they after like 20 years after he did it. They just re released all of his episodes on Netflix. Everybody likes Rob Ross.
John Shull 1:13:52
He's he's become he's become a meme. And a joke is what he's become now.
Nick VinZant 1:13:58
He's not become a no, he has become a symbol of peace, hope and prosperity in life. He has become a symbol of hope for people and relaxation. You're like, Oh, Bob Ross. Man, I could watch some Bob Ross. Just watch the guy pain. Just watch somebody having a good time with their life and encouraging other people around him. He's not just one of the most famous Bob's he's a great role model and an inspiration to generations of people in the past and moving forward. Don't disrespect Bob Ross. Bobby, that's too that's too that I've gotten you with and you just feel like I mean, I
John Shull 1:14:36
don't agree with it, but I'm not gonna cut you off.
Nick VinZant 1:14:38
Is your shirt inside out?
John Shull 1:14:40
It was not no.
Are you sure? Yes. Okay, all right, check.
That sentence alone is gonna get 50 more people to watch. Whatever you post with me in it this week. All right, my number one,
Nick VinZant 1:14:55
your shirt is inside out. It is not why does it have such a straight collar like at the look at the okay you know the thing where the shoulders meet there's no tag and you get the line on your shirt you got way too pronounced of a shirt for that to be inside not me inside out look at it.
John Shull 1:15:11
I agree with you. I actually when I when I when I joined in I was like, Oh, my shirt it looks inside out but it is not inside out.
Nick VinZant 1:15:19
Have you checked it though?
John Shull 1:15:20
I just showed you the the color of the shirt. There's no tag back there.
Nick VinZant 1:15:27
But the tags not on the other side either. So how do you know it's not inside out?
John Shull 1:15:32
Anyways, my number one. Bob the Builder. Just kidding. It is not my number one. Bob Marley.
Nick VinZant 1:15:42
Yeah. Yeah, that's my number one, two. But I think that he is number one really? Bob
John Shull 1:15:49
Marley Moore. Who was the other Bobby referring to musician,
Nick VinZant 1:15:53
Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah, really? Probably. Really, if we did this list, like accurately and not based off a personal opinion, it would probably be like, do you could make an argument that one and two are interchangeable, but it would definitely be Bob Dylan Bob Marley at the top.
John Shull 1:16:13
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm not taking anything away. Bob Dylan's definitely top 10 I don't know if he's, if he's top three. But yeah, that was one that I did not think of him for whatever reason. But that's a good one.
Nick VinZant 1:16:29
Yeah, I think that Bob Seger was like the more popular musical version of Bob Dylan. Like, Bob Dylan might have some really good lyrics in the message. But Bob Seger was like, you just kind of liked his music a little bit better. Like the Bob Dylan songs. Like I just that's that's the kind of song artists that I just couldn't imagine like just driving down the road listening to all of that, like you're gonna listen to like 10 of those songs in a row. Like I'm not that depressed
John Shull 1:16:59
no thought you'd be in Texas by the time you finish those 10 songs
Nick VinZant 1:17:03
just like well it's there's things that he uses words that I don't know what that means, right? Like the summer gasoline rainbow. Well, what does that mean? To whatever you want it to mean man is whatever you want it to mean. Okay, who's in your honorable mentions? There's a lot of like mid tier Bob's Yeah, I kept
John Shull 1:17:23
it relatively short for my honorable mentions. But
Alan Jamieson 1:17:29
Bob Dole.
Nick VinZant 1:17:31
Yeah, I remember Bob Dole. He was a I was from Kansas, where Bob Dole I also remember Bob Dole, like falling off the podium. It was a great video, Bob Dole falling off the podium. So
John Shull 1:17:42
I do have Bob Euchre on there, by the way. I mean, he's a household name. In the sports world. He's everybody knows him. I don't know if he's, I don't know his top five or 10. But he's definitely honorable mention for me.
Nick VinZant 1:17:54
He's in like the top 25 I think he's up there.
John Shull 1:17:57
Yeah, for sure. Bobby Knight, Bob Knight remember him the basketball coach.
Nick VinZant 1:18:04
Is he a bob or a Bobby though? I know him as a Bobby.
John Shull 1:18:08
Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna I'm gonna keep it as Bob but yeah, he's known i You might be right on that one. Okay, another sports guy. Bob Gibson. Baseball, baseball. Yep. Fantastic. And then Bob Hoskins was the other one I had actor extraordinaire Bob Hoskins and no no no no, no
Nick VinZant 1:18:31
that is Bob Ross. You
John Shull 1:18:32
are terrible.
Nick VinZant 1:18:34
You know who I would make an argument that might be the most up and coming Bob and would maybe should have been on the list but he's definitely the most popular Bob right now is Bob Odenkirk guy from Better Call Saul.
John Shull 1:18:48
No, he's no he's not even a top 20 of Bob's of all time right now. Right
Nick VinZant 1:18:52
now he's he's got the fastest increase right now, though. He's the only one who's picking up speed. Everybody else is kind of trying to hold on or declining. The only one picking up speed is Bob Odenkirk. No other famous Bob's on the horizon. Um, who else is in my top honors? The other honorable mentions that I got a Bob Costas.
John Shull 1:19:10
Oh yeah. Good ones.
Nick VinZant 1:19:12
I'm still confused as to how Bob Newhart had a show called The Bob Newhart Show but then in the show didn't play Bob Newhart played somebody else.
John Shull 1:19:21
I mean, look it up then.
Nick VinZant 1:19:25
That doesn't make any sense. Okay. Let's see any other famous Bob's? Ah, nobody really?
John Shull 1:19:32
Yeah, we we narrowed it down. I
Nick VinZant 1:19:34
think there is a bob Denver.
John Shull 1:19:38
Yeah, no, not John Denver.
Nick VinZant 1:19:42
Yeah, that's but that's not John Denver.
John Shull 1:19:45
Oh, Bob Evans.
Nick VinZant 1:19:47
Don't know who he is.
John Shull 1:19:49
The restaurants Bob Evans.
Nick VinZant 1:19:53
What About Bob? Bob Backlund
John Shull 1:19:56
don't shoot. I'm
Nick VinZant 1:19:57
missing a wrestling match. I thought you were a Big Time Wrestling. should
John Shull 1:20:00
have a Bob Backlund I think Bob was deserves to be on the list.
Nick VinZant 1:20:05
No, it doesn't.
John Shull 1:20:05
That's just because you've never been there. Yeah, because I
Nick VinZant 1:20:09
have tastebuds. Oh, okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of Profoundly Pointless. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, leave us a rating or review doesn't have to be some big thing. Just a couple of quick words. It really helps us out. I've lost track a little bit. But I think next episode is going to be our 200 and 50th. The idea is to do something special, but we'll see if that happens or not. Let us know though what you think are some of the best Bob's I do think the top two is really going to have to be Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, maybe even Bob Hope if you're from an older generation, but after that the kind of mid tier Bob's are really an interchangeable I mean, I could see Bob Saget going anywhere from three to like 10 but let us know what you think are some of the best Bob's