Transcript for Dr. Robert Ballard Interview on the Beyond Speaking Podcast

Robert: I had to lie about the Titanic. My mission, that was a cover, a top secret cover. And that's what's coming out in museums and science centers starting in September, is telling, finally, I can fess up and tell the true story. The Titanic was a decoy. 

 

Intro: Welcome to the Beyond Speaking podcast from Premier Speakers Bureau, featuring in-depth conversations with the world's most in-demand keynote speakers.

 

Brian: Hi I’m Brian Lord, president of Premier Speakers Bureau and host of the Beyond Speaking podcast. Our guest today is the legendary underwater explorer and marine geologist Robert Ballard, who I first hope we're figuring out. I first booked 23 years ago. So this is very cool for me. He's among the most accomplished and well-known of the world's deep sea explorers. He's known for his historical discovery of the deep sea vents. Obviously, the HMS Titanic, a huge discovery, which most of us knew where we were when we first heard about it, the Nazi battleship Bismarck, and numerous other discoveries in the Black Sea and elsewhere. We don't have enough time to cover them all. We'll get as many as we can. 

 

During his long career, he's conducted more than 150 deep sea explorations around the world, always innovating, always using the best technology. For me, from a business standpoint, I always think that he's an expert in daring the impossible, how to have that explorer's mindset continuously, and how to bring together the most successful teams in difficult circumstances. So, Dr. Ballard, thank you for joining us here on the Beyond Speaking Podcast.

 

Robert: My pleasure. It's great to be here. And probably one of the busiest years of my career. I'm really flat out this year.

 

Brian: I know it's amazing. You've got so much going and well, this is a tease. We're talking about this. We're going to talk about all those things at the end, but I'm very excited about all the cool new things that you have. I'm curious to know where all this got started. I mean, you've been a trailblazer over the years. I just read your memoirs about never quite fitting into just the academic or just the navy or just these other things. Where do you think it came from within you to be comfortable being so unique?

 

Robert: Well, I think, you know, I was really set on being Captain Nemo when I was twelve years old. I'm dyslexic, so I didn't quite honestly hadn't read the book. But in 1954, when I was twelve years old, Walt Disney produced that amazing book, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. And I went to the theater, ate a bunch of popcorn, went back and watched it again. And you know, when you're 12 years old, your parents are always asking “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I said, Well, I want to be Captain Nemo. And they didn't laugh because when a child has a passion, even if it's crazy like mine, you should never pop their balloon. 

 

And so my parents, they may have gone into the other room and said, Houston, we've got a problem. But they worked with me on that. They said, Tell me more about Captain Nemo. And I was living in San Diego at the time. And I said, Well, he had a submarine called a Nautilus. And they said, Well, let's go down to San Diego to the sub base and I went aboard a diesel submarine back then. It was nineteen fifty-nine, nineteen fifty nineteen fifty nine when the movie aired. And I just fell in love with that thought of operating a submarine. So that's what led me down to become a submarine officer, deep submergence officer in the United States Navy. But then they said, But the Nautilus was more than a submarine; it had a big window.

 

The window opened like the iris of a lens and he could see out through it. And they said, Well, gee, that sounds like an oceanographer. And again, I was living within 10 miles of the largest oceanographic institution in the world, Scripps in La Jolla, California. And as you know, I went on to get a PhD in geology. And the reason was when you saw the movie, in the movie when Kirk Douglas, who was then Ned, opened that window to look for Captain Nemo, he saw their team walking on the bottom of the ocean. And I just fixated on the fact that I'd grown up on the shores of San Diego, looking out at a featureless horizon, and never thought about the ocean having a bottom. But there it was. They were walking on the bottom of the ocean in their lead shoes with their helmets on. And I went on to become a marine geologist. So it was really being excited about being Captain Nemo caused me to go down multiple paths in life so that I could actually become Captain Nemo. And as you know, right over my shoulder is my own ship and it's called the E V Nautilus.

 

Brian: Yeah, and that's amazing. Like it's it's amazing how you kind of bring those things to fruition. And and obviously it took a long time to get from the kid in San Diego to having this amazing ship to that is able to do so many things because for a long time you were you were kind of beg, steal, borrowing so many different different things from so many different places, which is impressive in its own right of just being able to accomplish those things. your kind of your first big accomplishment, I think, was, you know, finding the the deep sea vents, you know.

 

Robert: That's fascinating. When and as you read in my autobiography, Into the Deep, there's a prologue from my mother. And I'm thirteenth generation American. My family came over in 1635 into Williamsburg, Virginia. And I am the first of that 13 generations to go to college. And so my parents, my mother always had these wonderful sayings from Kansas, you know. And one of them was, you know, great is the person who plants a tree, knowing they'll never sit in its shade, and attributed that to Johnny Appleseed. But my mother, when I found the Titanic, as you know, we came home and there was this feeding frenzy by the press. And National Geographic had me on the Today Show, the tomorrow show, the day after tomorrow. They had me on this blitz for a couple days. And I finally got home and the phone rang, and it was my mom.

 

And my mom said, you know, we watched you on all the different programs and the phones ringing and the neighbors are so excited, but it's too bad you found that rusty old ship. And I was just, you know, thunderstruck. I went, Mom, why did you say that? Well, you are a great scientist. You discovered hydrothermal vents and a new life system on our planet that rewrote the biology book. You found high s black smokers that rewrote the chemistry book. You helped prove the concept of plate tectonics and threw away the geology book. But now they're only gonna remember you for that rusty old boat. So and you know, moms are always right, and particularly ones from Kansas.

 

Brian: Absolutely. That's great. Well, that's and that was one of my questions too, is that how do you, you know, we work with companies all the time who say we've just had our best year ever. And I do want to get back to this Titanic story because I know everybody I put it out there. What do you want to talk about? Titanic. But how do you bounce back from success? We have all these companies that are like, this is it, we just had our best year ever. Now what do we do? You just did this amazing thing. How do you grow from that, go beyond it, take it to the next level?

 

Robert: What have you done for me lately? I mean, the key is I just, you know, I'm just driven by my passion. And I think if you're not driven by your passion, then when you get knocked down and being dyslexic, I did, you know, I didn't have an easy road to hoe to get where I got. But when I was laying on the ground, like a prize fighter saying, maybe if I just stay here and let them count to 10, it's all over. But then you get up.

 

And it's your passion that gets you up. I have found that failure is the greatest teacher I've ever met. When I go against failure and it knocks me down, I sit there, think about it, and then I say, I've learned from my mistakes and I get back up. So I think that's part of the process. But if you're not running to work, then you should get another job.

 

Brian: Yeah. Well, kind of going into some of these questions here. So we'll go through some of these discoveries here. So one of the questions from Daniel in Washington, DC was what was the most interesting thing you found at the deep sea vents? Because I know you just said it rewrote a lot of the books about it.

 

Robert: Well, it's why NASA just launched the clipper to Europa. People don't realize that we're not the only object in our solar system that has an ocean. In fact, the moons of Jupiter and Europa, in the case of Jupiter Europa has more water than we have. The moon of Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, has more water than we have. And they have now launched and they believe that they should be able to find hydrothermal vents on those oceans because we know they're volcanically active. So stay tuned for when it gets there, because I think it's gonna be April of 2030, it'll arrive. And will we find life within our own solar system off of Earth? Now I don't think we're gonna find New York City there, but I think what we're showing is that as you look out to the galaxy and you look at the immensity of the galaxy. When I was a little kid, I used to go to the Mojave Desert and lay on my back and watch and look up at the galaxies in the Milky Way. And what we now know is we're not alone. We're not the only, probably certainly not the only intelligent creatures in the universe. Practically there should be other places, probably I hope a lot smarter than us, that this discovery just completely shattered our belief that we were this unique little planet in the Goldilocks zone of our orbit, not too close to the sun, not too far away, that could support advanced life. Well, like I say, it's throughout the universe. Now, having said that, we cannot physically escape our solar system. Laws of physics say as you travel faster and faster, your body gets heavier and heavier and you reach a point where your heart fails. So physically, we're locked within our own solar system. So there's really no plan B for the human race to escape Earth. We need to take care of Mother Earth. And right now, Mother Earth is very angry with us. So Mother Nature is throwing everything at us. So we need to get back on the reservation when it comes to living in harmony with our planet.

 

It's the concept of Gaia, G-A-I-A, that Earth is actually a creature living symbiotically and codependent upon all other life on our planet. So that's been an interesting journey down that road in science. But I've also loved going down history. Even though I majored when I went to college, I didn't know what I knew I wanted to be an oceanographer, when I was, like I said, saw 20,000 leagues under the sea.

 

But I didn't know which discipline to go into. So I took a five-year degree instead of a four-year degree. And I majored in chemistry and geology and minored in physics and mathematics. So yeah, I was nuts. So I became a Swiss Army knife. And I think that that's my strength. I also became a naval officer after being an army officer. I also went into television production. I've literally gone down all these different roads in life. And in doing so, I can dream up things that no one else can dream up. 

 

And I think that's also because I'm dyslexic. Now I didn't know I was dyslexic when I was born in 1942, but I learned it through my daughter when I was in my 60s when she was diagnosed with dyslexia. And if there's a book you gotta read. You gotta read the dyslexic advantage. And when I saw that book, I never saw those two words, advantage and dyslexia, next to one another. And the new issue of it, the new revised version of dyslexic advantage, has a researcher at Cambridge, England, who says that dyslexics make great explorers. Through human evolution, we are the hunters of the hunter-gatherer society. We're the ones that are fearless about going where no one has ever gone before. And think about my career. I've spent the majority of my life going to a place no human has ever been to. In fact, I have this new program over my shoulder called Exploring the New America. My team now, the Nautilus, is the flagship in a 10-year effort to map the new America. What's the new America?

 

All our land, if you go out 200 miles, and you can actually go beyond that, but if you go out 200 miles off Alaska, north in the into the Arctic or in the into the Pacific or off of California or off the Gulf, when you add up all of what was called what's called our economic exclusive economic zone, the EEZ, it's 52% of the United States. And we have better maps of Mars than we have of over half our own country. So we've been commissioned in 2019. We won a competition along with collaborating with other institutions to explore the new America, to literally do the 21st century version of the Lewis and Clark expedition. But our EEZ is five and a half Louisiana purchases.

 

Can you imagine what we're going to discover? Right now on right now we're focusing on finding rare earths within our own exclusive economic zone. We don't have to deal with other countries. We have it within our own exclusive economic zone. So this is very exciting to be doing the second Lewis and Clark expedition. But since 60% of our core of exploration, Lewis and Clark called their team the core of discovery, I call my team the core of exploration. Sixty percent of our team are women in positions of leadership and authority. So I call it the Lois and Clark expedition.

 

Brian: I like it. And that's one of the things too. Like if you watch your videos, your team, there there are a lot. I've got three daughters out of my four kids. So I love that idea of involving you know, so many, as you know, when you have those high school students, college students, girls, women, in leadership positions all the way up from those interns. So I think that's a great thing to have.

 

Robert: Well, we need everyone we can get. You know, the if you there's a little clock on the web that you can go to. What percentage of the world's population are Americans? And there's a clock ticking. And it's now the last time I looked at four point three percent and declining. So we only have four point three percent of the world's population. So we need every American we can lay our hands on. And that's why I'm so excited about getting everyone in our country excited about the importance of exploring and particularly exploring the new America, because that will change the economic engine of our nation, just as the Lewis and Clark exploration of the Louisiana Purchase changed the economic engine of our nation. Now it's called the blue economy. So that is the career path kids need to focus on.

 

Brian: Yeah, and that's one of those fascinating things. I know with Lewis and Clark, I mean, they had the definite economic things they were hunting for, but they also had those things like Thomas Jefferson said, maybe you'll find dinosaurs or the lost tribes of Israel or anything else. What are the most exciting sort of non-financial things that you hope to be able to find while you're doing this search?

 

Robert: Well, you know, kids, you know, because I have discovered a lot of things, I have kids say, Would you stop exploring? You know, so there's something left for us. And you know, when you think about all the shipwrecks, I have found if you add all up, maybe seventy ancient and modern shipwrecks. If you go on Google and ask how many shipwrecks are in the ocean, it's over three million.

 

So I tell kids, don't worry about it, kids. I haven't even, you know, I've got a hundred out of three million. And I like to tell them that the generation of kids in middle school today will go down in history as the greatest explorers of Earth of all time. That generation, because of this technology we're bringing to bear now and advanced robotics and AI and all the things that we're implementing, their generation that are in middle school right now will be the greatest explorers the human race ever had because they're gonna explore what hasn't been explored, which is most of the planet under the ocean for sure, which is seventy-two percent of the Earth.

 

Brian: Speaking of kids, I do have one of the questions I gathered from Brooklyn from Jackson, Tennessee, who wanted to know what is the coolest crab or crab-like creature that you have found in your exploration?

 

Robert: Well, there's some really cool ones in the hydrothermal vents. I mean, if you look at the hydrothermal vents, they have these giant worms that are 13 feet tall. You have to understand when we were exploring in the ocean, where I go, it's pitch dark. There's absolutely no sunlight where I am. The average depth of the ocean is 12,000 feet and it gets down, which is, you know, gets down to 12,000 feet. It gets down to 35,000 feet. And so it's in total darkness. So when I first explore these great mountain ranges, you understand the largest mountain ranges on Earth are not the ones you see above water. It's the mid-ocean ridge, the largest mountain range on our planet runs around our Earth like the seam on a baseball. And it has many, many tens of thousands of active volcanoes. It's where the earth creates its outer skin. But it's dark. So when you get down there, it's very common to not see a whole lot. But can you imagine going down a mountain range and coming across creatures like an oasis in the Sahara, characterized by giant worms 13 feet tall sticking out their lungs? And they're breathing and ingesting poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. And in their body, they have human-like blood. And their body cavity, we find giant clams, this big across. When you open them up, they look like liver. And when you cut into them, they have no internal organs. They have no mouth, no gut. They have another creature living inside their body through a process called chemosynthesis.

 

This creature has had a conversation with these giant worms and the clam says, let me live in your body and I'll feed you better than you can. Now, what I want you to do is inhale poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas in solution in these vents, and then you won't die, trust me, and I'll feed you. And they cut the bargain. So what I like to say to kids is that that's far more important than discovering the Titanic. No, that's unbelievable when we found those life. And that's again why NASA's launched probes to the Jovian moon of Europa in search of what's living in its ocean beneath an ice canopy. So pretty cool stuff. But kids will say, What are you going to discover next? And I say, I don't have an idea until I discover it. I literally bump into these things. Now literally I go looking for A and find B, which is more interesting. I have lots of looking for one thing and finding something more important. And so that's the beauty of my profession. How can I miss not making discoveries if I'm the first human to be there? But we can share it with you. 

 

The room I'm in, we call it the looking glass. Now you remember in Alice in Wonderland, she had a mirror which she went through and went in through the looking glass. My ship, this is my command center right here on my ship. So there's the Nautilus, a big satellite. I have a replica behind me. So I don't even physically have to. I mean, I like to go, but my wife gives me an allowance on how often I can go out to sea on the Nautilus. She gives me two months a year with time in between. Now, if I take my daughter, which I do, or my son, I get credit for that. My wife's even joining me on our big expedition. We got to talk about Guadalcanal. July. 

 

But the point is that this is what's going to happen in your home. When I was growing up, we had what was called the den. And because you had a TV which had to have a real dark room to see it. And then you went in and then you watched TV. This is the future den. Well, think about it. I can now not move my body, but move my spirit through my technology. So when we're sitting in the command center, you look at them, they're not looking at one another. They're looking at the big screen. So it doesn't matter where your body is. And I'm sitting here with a headset and they don't care where my body is. So what you're talking about is the forerunner to what'll be called electronic travel.

 

You're going to have a room like this because it's not that expensive to build. The first one's pretty expensive. The next ones are really cheap. This is not a whole lot of computers and consoles. But think about having a room in your house that teleports you to the Serengeti, and you're sitting in a Jeep with a driver in front of you that's really in the Serengeti, but you're in the backseat.

 

And you're having the experience, you're able to talk to them, they're showing you, but you can get there like that. You leave no carbon footprint and you get a phone bill. So electronic travel, we're just pioneering a whole nother way. So remember, I'm the first of 13 generations to go to college. So I'm not used to having a jet or buying expensive places to go to Africa. So I'm really developing the technology for us common folk that'll make it possible for everyone to go somewhere and then come back. It's sort of funny when I first started doing it. Now I've gotten used to it because I've been doing it for quite a while. So here I am exploring, and we're down 10,000 feet, and we see something, and I go, I gotta go to the bathroom. And I can literally hit a button, and the robot will lock up. And I go to the bathroom, but I'm in Connecticut.

 

And then I'm back underwater. So it took a while for me to make that shift, but now it's pretty easy. I can and it'll get easy. So you'll be in the Serengeti, a lion comes at you. Now I have a board for my trust. And they say, Well, wait a minute, you're gonna make people think they're there? And I said, Yeah. Well, what happens when that lion comes chasing them and they have a heart? They'll have to sign a waiver that they're not, and all they have to do is close their eyes. They'll be fine.

 

Brian: Goodness. That's great. Well, well, I don't want to. So speaking of bringing people to certain places, I know a lot of the questions we had were going to the Titanic, the Discovery Titanic. Can you take us there? What made you finally decide to go after that? Because it wasn't the first thing. And one of the questions we had was what was your first reaction either in your head or what was the first thing you said when you actually got there? Well.

 

Robert: Well, you have to remember that I was a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout, Explorer Scout, Army officer, Naval Officer, on my honor will do my best to do my duty done. On worthy, tresporty, faithful queen. I had to lie about the Titanic. My mission, that was a cover, a top secret cover. And that's what's coming out in museums and science centers starting in September is telling, finally I can fess up and tell the true story. The Titanic was a decoy. Now I found the decoy equally interesting, but during the Cold War, when I was in the Army and then into the Navy, we lost two nuclear submarines with all hands, the Thresher and the Scorpion. And in the case of the Scorpion, it was carrying nuclear warheads. We do not like leaving them around. So here's the scorpion. Here's the thresher. Guess what was in the middle? The Titanic. 

 

So when my commanding officer, Vice Admiral Ron Thunman, who was chief of secretary, he was the OP02, we called those terms back then he was head of all submarine warfare. He was my boss, and they wanted me to go out and find out what those nuclear reactors were doing, where they were having an impact on the environment because they wanted to know. They also wanted to know if anyone had been there, because they leave their signatures on the bottom. And they wanted me to find the status of the nuclear weapons. And they didn't want the Russians to know where I was going because we knew where they were, but they didn't. So they needed to to deflect them because spy satellites can move around. They have enough fuel to move around. And you can tag someone with a satellite.

 

So they wanted to see if I was tagged, and they were able to watch them move their satellites. So when I headed out on my mission, I told the world I was going after the Titanic, and they didn't tag me, but I really went to the Scorpion. I spent most of my time doing what my commanding officer told me to do. So you can imagine with a few days, it was a miracle that I was able to find it as fast. But I learned how to find the Titanic by exploring the Scorpion nuclear submarine wreckage. 

 

And that's what you gotta watch. So that will be in Peoria in September and traveling around the United States. And so I can finally fess up and tell you the true story. So to answer your question, what was I thinking when I found the Titanic? Is this gonna blow my cover? My commanding officer was furious when I found the tight. He says, Commander Ballard, your job was to look for the puppy, not find it. The public was so enamored, they got caught up in the cover and the cover was as good as the Bureau mission. So yeah, that was a hoot.

 

Brian: What was the and I'm I wanna make sure I give credit to people on here. So the first question was that's from Michael Bogers in Indianapolis. The second one, from this is from Nancy Kitnermeyer in Seattle. What did you discover on the ship that you had not anticipated?

 

Robert: State of preservation. I mean, I was really particularly when we went down the grand staircase with our little robot, we couldn't fit the sub now the Titanic had two staircases and a forward one for first class, had a glass dome over it. But then when it hit the bottom, it shattered the dome. And then the wood bores began eating the wood. So I remember landing on the deck of the Titanic, which was quite remarkable.

 

And I had this little robot called Jason Jr., JJ, that was like a dog on a leash. And we literally could drive it. And we had a sort of like a fishing reel that let out its cable. And then we literally turned our back to the window, little windows. And there was a monitor in the back, and we became Jason Jr. So I knew that the safest thing was to go down with the wall of the where the grand staircase mural used to be, but that was just a wall. But I knew if I went down the wall I wouldn't get lost, and then I would turn and see into a deck, and then I go back to the wall and come in. So imagine we're going down, down, down inside the Titanic, looking, seeing the different rooms in the Titanic, seeing the big pillars, and then can you imagine turning and having a light go on in front of you? I about had a heart attack.

 

I banged my head and then I realized, well, that's you're not down there. But I thought I was down there. And then naturally, once I realized that I was safe up there, I went to find out what it was. And it was a glass chandelier reflecting light back at me. It was like the cowboy that draws on his figure in a mirror. But I'll never forget seeing the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I went, I'll be darned. And then reading first class entrance and for cure crew use only. And I realized that the deep sea is the largest museum on earth. There's more history in the deep sea than all the museums of the world combined. And that led to 20 years of going after history all the way back to the Iron Age. So I go on these trips, you know. I was on this academic trip that I left, and I'm still in academia, still a professor, I still have work with postdocs and students. But I also then went on this trip into my earlier passion in history, and then I served also in the military. So no, it's been amazing to have these little different chapters of my life, and I'm just getting started. 

 

It's funny. You heard the word retiring. Well, I did. Because if you read the second definition. It says halfway through the Indianapolis 500, the racers race into the pit, get a new set of tires, and race out. And it's called retiring. And I have a new set of tires. And I'm going to be going into Guadalcanal in January, where we had seven major sea battles in World War II. Over 111 warships were sunk, 1,000 airplanes, and we've only found a small number of them. And we will be going back, and you can watch it live on NautilusLive.org. In fact, the Nautilus got underway yesterday and is headed to Guam. So in April, a little in May, and first week in May, turn on NautilusLive.org and you will be in this room able to ask questions. Now, the reason we have this room in this satellite connection is we are boldly going. I love this. We are boldly going where no human has gone before in our own country. So what are we going to find? I don't know. 

 

So, how do we handle the uncertainty of what we discuss? We can't have every discipline situated on the ship. So we're running the ship, the Nautilus, we're running it like the emergency room of a hospital. When the ambulance pulls in, they open the back door. What? Surprise! It could be a mother having a baby, it could be someone that had a heart attack, an auto act, whatever. How does a hospital deal with that uncertainty? Well, their ability to do immediate massage, like we did in Vietnam, you get them off the battlefield. You needed to get them then to help. And so what we have is doctors on call. You see this book right here. This guy has a book of experts willing to be called 24 hours a day, anytime. We always make our key discoveries Sunday morning at 2 a.m. 

 

So all right, so here we are. Sunday morning at 2 a.m. We turn the corner and we see something we've never seen before. We have enough experts to know that it's something we've never seen. They look in their book. And for the entire time Nautilus is deployed, people have volunteered time slots. You can call me in this time slot or that time slot. They sign up. We can have a hundred experts or more that have signed up to be in our book because they want to be called. So here we go Sunday morning, 2 a.m. We find some crazy creatures. Sarah. We call Sarah, who got a PhD in marine biology or whatever, that's the closest to helping us on this. And we wake her up and she's in her bed. We say, one way video, don't worry, you'll just see us. And  she boots up her laptop, literally in bed. And we patch her into the pilot. And while she's in bed, she makes the decision. Do I get out of bed? And 90% of the time they fly out of bed. But to be on call, you have to have one of these. And now using the Internet to Level 3, all major universities have the ability to have one of these. They boom. So this is how we're running the game. And it's exciting moments constantly. But you can then you can then ask questions. We have educators right here who are ready to take your questions and then they can network with experts. So this is so cool because we have a complete television production studio, which National Geographic helped build for me. So yeah.

 

Brian: I know. Well, one of my favorite ones that I read about where your son one-uped you finding a Canaanite at 2 in the morning and yeah so that's what I thought of when you said that, tell us about that.

 

Robert: My son wanted to be a classicist, but now he's in cybersecurity and doing quite well. But when he was loving to be a classist, I brought him out on an expedition to the Mediterranean to a funny seamount that was flat topped, that had been sitting there and all the trade routes and people throwing stuff over. And we're far from land. And he said, Dad, that's Canaanite. And I said, Son, the Canaanites couldn't have possibly been out here. But I said, let's get an expert. So I called Larry Steger at Harvard University who studied the Levant and is an expert on Canaanites, and he said, Your son's right. Now, how did they get out there? But anyway, no, that was cool that he actually recognized that it was Canaanite.

 

Brian: Yeah. I love that about that. And you're kind of bringing family and kids in on this and seeing that. What are some of the best questions you've ever gotten from kids? You'd said that you know if kids are able to do this, you know, send in questions. What are some of the best questions that you've gotten from kids?

 

Robert: That I can't answer. See, I've always told people that if you can't tell a middle school kid what you're doing, then you don't know what you're doing. And so teachers should never be concerned that they don't know. That's what it's all about. And the lovely thing about it now with the access to information and our use of AI right now is quite staggering. We're constantly going to an AI engine to help us answer questions because we're constantly pushing the frontier of knowledge and constantly bumping into things. And to be able to say, well, let's go find out together. I don't call it Google, I call it God. Let's go to God, go Google God and find out. And I just constantly, my wife says. When we go out to dinner tonight, you will not be able to bring your cell phone. You must leave it in the car. We're now says, Mom, but we're gonna get in a conversation. And I wanna no, not not not that. But I am constantly going in. My father, I can remember when I was growing up, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have all that. He would we had this Encyclopedia Britannica and he'd say, Well, go look it up. And so, yeah, that's what's so cool is we can now look things up.

 

And now we have to then get a lot of different opinions. You can't just believe one thing you hear. Do you hear that everyone is saying things, things? What's always interesting is when you get this conflict where they're one says one thing and one says the other, that means that neither has figured it out yet. So to me, that's what science is all about is pushing the frontier of knowledge. And I've told my graduate students to serve society, you can't have a vested interest in the answer. You can't, you have to. 

 

I remember a classic TV series when I was growing up called Dragnet. And there was Sergeant Friday. And Sergeant Friday would come to the crime scene, take out his notepad, lick his pencil, and say, just the facts, ma'am. So my job is to gather the facts and then hand it off to society and hope it's used properly. I mean, you can use nuclear energy to heat your house or blow it up. Everything has a yang and a yang. But our job is just the facts. We cannot have an agenda. And that's very, very important to be able to not have a biased observation.

 

Brian: I like that. Well, one thing too, you're talking about innovation. You know, a lot of times we're working with leaders who are trying to push their people to innovate. And for you, you've always been at the front of that. You're creating a lot of the stuff that you're doing, you know, like Jason, you know, named after you know, Jason the Argonauts and the explorers, those things always were at the front of innovation. And you talk about pushing your people. How do you push people to innovate?

 

Robert: Make it theirs. Make it theirs. My job is to use my crazy mind, which my wife says, I do not want to be in your head. because I'm constantly thinking up things. But then I know that I've created a lot of organizations and everyone I they're still there. And so my job is to think differently, which I'm blessed with this crazy brain, to get it started, but then know to g you gotta hand it off and know they're not gonna do it exactly the way you would do it. That's leadership. Leadership is to motivate but make it theirs and make them even more excited about it than you are, which is pretty hard to do. So no, that's fun. So I love to go in normally fifteen year cycles where I dream up something, get it going, get it where it's really on its own and then hand it off. That's fun.

 

Brian: Yeah. Well, I know one of the other things I saw while reading about you as a leader. There's like the speaker we work with, the author John Acuff, who he talks about in the middle of a goal is always really boring. And you're talking about one of the things that you have to do in exploration is what you call mowing the lawn, which is going back in the search grid up and down, and it's very disciplined, but also really boring. How do you keep in the middle of a goal, in the middle of this big thing? You have a big exciting start, you want to have that really big payoff. How do you keep people motivated in the middle?

 

Robert: Well, knowing that you don't want to do something we've already done. They want to know that they are at the cutting edge. They think that science is sort of interesting. I think of it about a mountain in front of you. And you start chipping away. And you want to get a tunnel through that mountain. And you go along and and when you're at school, you have the luxury of going down the tunnel someone else has already excavated it but you then reach the back of the tunnel. And your job is to pick up that pick and get another inch or two. And getting that sense of continuity of building, I say each generation stands on the shoulders of the previous generation and sees a farther horizon. That's the process. Put them up on your shoulder and say, What do you see? So it's all about that.

 

I think my military training had a lot to do with it. Being put in a difficult situation when I went through combat infantry training, I was nineteen years old at Fort Lewis. And we went on leadership reaction training where they would give you a mission and then change it or have something happen and they wanted to see how you reacted. And what I have discovered and and I think having that early training in life was so valuable to me that when it really hits the fan, you don't really know a true measure of a person till it goes bad. And then you see this person you thought was gonna you know do everything right, panic and run. And then you see this person who you thought was weak and whatever stand their ground. And it's always to me when and I've been in a lot of situations where they're near death experiences and that's why I like telepresence now. I just send the robot. But anyway, where I find myself when things hit the fan to get calm and everything goes in slow motion. And that's what I found about it. I'm looking around. I'm seeing who rises to the occasion and who doesn't. You know, I remember studying the battle of so many different battles where a complete route occurs and someone moves into the route, which is very difficult to turn them around and has that leadership to turn the route. and I did have that at a very, very early age, that being in a combat situation where people can get hurt. And fortunately, in most of my cases, I was on missions that I was trying not to be found. They were questioned by my mission. So no, I think that in sports, I played college basketball, I was an athlete. I think all of those things and I have respect for all worlds. I think every major institution that we have, whether it's religion, whether it's government, whether it's business or it's the military, there's no bad ones. They're the natural product of our development over time. But there are always the guardians of the difference. If you can exclude people, you know, how does a short person get tall and cut the legs off? The key is if you can, if you can be able to rally people and realize that each person has something to offer. 

 

That's teamwork. So I get all the credit for all the discoveries. There's no way in the world I could have done that without my team. I have an amazing team, a core of exploration. Each year more than 250 people will sail on the Nautilus and be a part of the many different missions that we're gonna be on. I'm toast without them. And so you've got to realize that, you know, I don't want people to. When I was in the military, you didn't wear your rank because that's the first person they would shoot. But certainly in science, I tell the kids, if you had a football team and you put out 12 quarterbacks on the field, would you win a game? And the kids immediately know, no way that 12 quarterbacks, that's the point. You need those blockers, those punters, those were receivers. You need all of this different talent that you put together to form an amazing team. And I think I've got the best team on the planet. I feel like the dummy in the room.

 

Brian: Mm. That's awesome. Well, that's the best way to be. If you're a leader and you're stacked with people that know more that you have, you have more than just that little book to call, you have all the people around you too.

 

Robert: My job is to open the door and bring in the ringers.

 

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I did want to cover a few kind of random things just because I love so you've done so many different things, it's hard to narrow in on them. But I see over your shoulder there you have Cleopatra and I know you've got Cleopatra's lost tomb coming up. Can you tell us more about that?

 

Robert: I can tell you that the premiere is September 25th and we hit some home runs, but it's naturally embargoed until it airs. So it'll be on Disney plus Hulu on September 25th, and we had a very good series of expeditions. We have something to tell you.

 

Brian: Okay, that's great. What is the I guess in your study of it, what's the most fascinating thing that you learned in your study of it about Cleopatra?

 

Robert: Working with the person that came to me with it was Dr. Kathleen Martinez. And I was not a Cleopatra person, you know, I saw the movies, which is really not a fair depiction of this amazing person, Queen Cleopatra. But so I got a phone call from a colleague at National Geographic who was working with, you look her up, Dr. Kathleen Martinez. She is actually from the Dominican Republic and her father had a library, and like me, at a very young life, very as a child, she fell in love with the story of Queen Cleopatra when I was falling in love with being Captain Nemo. And her father said, No, no, you you need to get a real career. She said, No, I want to be in Egypt. No, no, no. So she went to Brown University, a top school, and actually majored in law and went on to become a criminal lawyer investigating homicides. 

 

And so when she took her passion, she came upon the disappearance of Cleopatra and her husband Mark Anthony, who were surrounded by Romans at the time, their bodies disappeared and they never found them. And so who done it? So she came to it like you know Sergeant Friday, just the facts, man. And what she began to realize is when you're a queen of Egypt or a Pharaoh, as soon as you begin planning your afterlife, and you generally assume a deity. And she assumed the female deity Isis. And she started looking at temples in the Nile Delta that were associated with the goddess Isis. And she found one not listed, one was missing. And she went, you know, who done it? And it was called Tapazyrus Magna. And everyone says, no, that's not Cleopatra. Well, who are you in the first place? You're not, you're not, now she went on to get a degree in Egyptology and she's been at it for many, but she was led to solving it like a mystery, which I sort of like that because I get in trouble when I find something biological or geological or archaeological. They say, Who are you? And I said, Well, I'm just wandering around, I bump into stuff. But anyway, she was heavily criticized. And so for a series of, I think it's her eighth or ninth year, she's finally proving that that is the missing temple. 

 

But when she was excavating it, she came across, it's up, it's southwest of Alexandria on the Nile Delta. She was excavating the site, which is now growing like Stonehenge into a massive complex. She found on this solid limestone rock, there was, they were moving away the dirt, and then there was a square of dirt. And she ran into a tunnel. She found a tunnel, went down the shaft, and the tunnel went out to sea. And she got to the edge of her permit and it was flooded. And she turned to Ken Garrett, a National Geographic Photographer, and said, Do you know a guy that works underwater? And he said, Yes, I do. And so she they patched me. I met her, I began researching her, and I said, you know, you had a passion just like mine. And so we teamed up and get ready for the results.

 

Brian: All right. Well, last but not least on this, I know you out of the many things you've got coming up, I know you've already talked about finding the Titanic, the secret mission, a little bit, Cleopatra's lost tomb. Actually, I would be curious to know a little bit more about finding the Titanic, the secret mission, because I know we got into that a little bit, that you were actually the Titanic was not the goal. What are some of the things that you had to do as sort of a I don't know, spy? I know that I know your current ship, it was a former spy boat.

 

Robert: No, it was. It was an East German spy ship. And it was called the Alexander von Humboldt when we got it from when the two Germanys united and they surplused it.

 

Brian: Okay, okay. Yeah. So you definitely have this long background there. Maybe what's a little bit of a teaser that you can tell a little bit more on finding the Titanic, the secret mission.

 

Robert: Well, you know, I wasn't supposed to find it. See, everyone thought I knew I couldn't possibly find it because I had a mission. And but my commanding officer, Admiral Thumman, implanted in my team intelligence officers, two of which people thought were stenographers. They were not. So I had embedded in my team, I had one naval officer, Lieutenant Commander George Ray, who said he was with the Office of Naval Research, he was not. He worked for Admiral Thunman. And he was there to make sure I did what Admiral Thunman wanted me to do. And he said, But if you get it done and you have some time left over, do whatever you want. But do my mission first. And he's gonna make sure you do. So I knew that my mission to go out to the Scorpion was gonna eat up most of what I had a month of cruise. It was gonna eat up most of it. 

 

So I cut a deal with the French, because I'd worked with the French on Project Famous. They had a new sonar that could mow the lawn. And they wanted to go out and test this new sonar. And so we collaborated. And I said, Well, here let's look at this. You find the Titanic with your sonar, and then I'll come and image it after I do a program for the Navy. They didn't know what the program was, they just knew I had a Navy program. It was the first time we were testing the vehicles. So they knew I was gonna do some stuff for the Navy, but they just thought it was to make sure it works. 

 

But it wasn't. Literally my biggest challenge is, so I'm going out with the French. They went out on the first leg and didn't find it. But then they invited me on the second leg and I expected them to find it because they were really mowing the lawn. And they didn't. And I went, you were supposed to fly the tight end. There's no way. I have a camera on a string that can see 30 feet. I got a camera dangling down 12,000 feet. I'm moving along slower than a baby walking across the floor. And you expect me in a few days? There's no way. But I'll give it a shot.

 

So here I am on the French ship. We pull into the French island that's off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and we get on a plane to join my ship in the Azores, owned by the Navy but operated by Woods Hall, to do the secret top secret mission. And if I had any time left over, I had to bring the French with me and geograph it. They're on my ship, and I'm going on a top secret mission. How am I gonna keep them in the dark?

 

That was the challenge. So when we were steaming out of the Azores, we were steaming south to the scorpion. Well, the sun should rise on your port side instead of your starboard side. I was headed the other way down towards the Titanic, which was more westerly, and they didn't realize the sun was coming up and going down in the wrong place. Because we've removed all the compasses and everything. 

 

So we're steaming along, and I say, okay, we're gonna stop and do some testing for the Navy. But they would prefer you to not come into our command center. So we had people at the door that the Navy people knew who could come in and who couldn't. We had a lock you had to go through to get past them. And they knew they weren't, so they didn't even try. So when I stopped the ship, they thought I was stopping to test my new vehicle, which I was the first time I had it. You know, I was just new at it. 

 

I was sitting on the Scorpion. But unless you came in the room and saw the scorpion. And so here I am. And then my commanding officer said, I want 100% total coverage of all the wreckage. They'd been down there before and they saw some wreckage, but they'd never done a complete mapping of the whole thing. So I said, Roger that.

 

So they said, Well there's the reactors sitting there, there's the scorpion in three big pieces. We want you to map that. So I thought they were, you know, they're just big in craters and that I would map you a hundred percent. But as I was mapping it, I went in and I got one boundary. Out boundary, out boundary I was going after the fourth boundary. It just kept going and going and going and going for over a mile and it was like a comet. And I realized that heavy objects went straight down, but lighter objects were carried by the current and fell out. And I said, didn't that happen to the Titanic? Shouldn't the Titanic have a comet too? And now I only have to go bing, bing, bing. I don't have to mow the lawn. I'll just go boop, knop, knop, knop, knop.

 

And in a matter of days, I picked up the comet and walked it in. That was pretty cool. So we put you in the exhibit. We literally put you in the con on the ship, and you have a clearance. So you could get past. So you're literally we were all back then before I had the Nautilus, we had we're on shipping containers. We can put on ships. So we literally put you on the deck of the the ship I was on with its shipping containers and move you through it all and watch you discover how we did it.

 

Brian: Wow, that’s cool, that's awesome. Well, well, the last part here is in honor of everything you've done. Now you've got your own ship, but now you've got a ship named after you. What's that like?

 

Robert: Wow, that was quite a shock. I was in a car in Georgia, poor cell coverage, driving to a friend's house and the phone rang and it was bad coverage. So I pulled over and the caller ID said, Secretary of the Navy. So I, yes, sir. And it was Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who I knew of but I never met him.

 

He said, I want you to know that the Navy has decided to name a ship after you, a Pathfinder, which is a really cool, you look it up, the USNS Pathfinder class ship. It's an amazing survey ex exploration ship, but a navy ship. We've named it after you. And I thought it was a hoax, because you don't name ships after people that are alive, unless you were president of the United States or something or Bob Hope. So maybe I'm in the Bob Hope category.

 

And so just a few weeks ago, I went down to look at it. You can go online, type USNS Robert Ballard. It's being built in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It's 400 feet long. It's an amazing ship. And it's pretty humbling to look up like that and see your name on it. That was, yeah, that was pretty humbling.

 

Brian: That's awesome. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us here on the Beyond Speaking podcast, sharing so many stories. And we've just got the I almost made that I almost hit the tip of the iceberg. That would have been really bad. Really bad. That wasn't intentional. 

 

Robert: That’s okay, I use it all the time.

 

Brian: We've just gotten the very beginning of the stories that you have. So definitely if you're interested, look up Robert Ballard on premierespeakers.com as far as the podcast goes, make sure to rate and review. And Bob, thank you so much for taking so much time here to be here on the Beyond Speaking podcast.

 

Robert: Well thank you, lots of discoveries happening this year and the year after. So plenty of new things to talk about. 

 

Outro: Thank you for joining us for the Beyond Speaking podcast. To learn more about today's guests, visit PremiereSpeakers.com. Make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen.