The Worst Shark Attack in History, the USS Indianapolis Disaster - Part 1: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis

Tooth & Claw is back with another multi-part series, this time concerning the men of the famed United States heavy cruiser that was sunk during the efforts of World War 2, and the sharks who couldn't pass up the tragic but opportune feast that now floated helplessly in the ocean water. This one gets intense, so prepare for some graphic conversation and content. In the second half of the episode, the guys are joined by Dan Abbott,  an underwater cinematographer that specializes in sharks as well as one of the stars of the hit Netflix show All the Sharks. Watch here: https://youtu.be/Rn0xRUnnkN4 Ollie: Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Visit https://www.ollie.com/tooth today for 60% off your first box of meals! #ToKnowThemIsToLoveThem Mint Mobile: Get this new customer offer and your 3-month Unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a month at http://mintmobile.com/TOOTH Quince: Go to http://quince.com/TOOTH for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. LMNT: Get a free 8-count Sample Pack with any purchase at http://drinklmnt.com/tooth ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social: Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Jeff Larson?

  Hello everyone and welcome to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our host Wes Larson with us. He's a decorated wildlife biologist.

• 0:22Wes Larson?

  Decorated.

• 0:23Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I mean, I see two decorations right behind you.

• 0:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, my studio is decorated. I guess I'm decorated. I'd be like a private first class, probably.

• 0:36Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 0:36Wes Larson?

  And then humility. Yeah, it's like the second rank, I think. Sure.

• 0:41Jeff Larson?

  Uh, you also have our co-host Mike Smith with us. He's also decorated and

• 0:46Mike Smith?

  Slightly.

• 0:47Jeff Larson?

  I am Wes's younger brother Jeff Larson, and I'm less decorated, but I still have a couple.

• 0:52Mike Smith?

  I was gonna say, you're both more decorated than me with all your tats. You guys are all inked up. I don't have any.

• 0:58Wes Larson?

  Jeff, you got a decoration of a shark right behind you, which is really fitting for today.

• 1:03Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, so we're doing a three-part episode on some sharks, right?

• 1:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I'll get into that in a second, but

• 1:10Jeff Larson?

  Oh, that's

• 1:11Wes Larson?

  Really, yeah. Really quickly, I just want to let people, for any new listeners, know what we do here. We're Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have a podcast that's mostly about animal attacks, but we like to explain why they happened, how it's often the person that's at fault, and how we can prepare our listeners for time in the great outdoors and how they can avoid similar encounters with wildlife. Because we all love wildlife and we want to make sure we can enjoy it in a safe way that doesn't harm us and doesn't harm them. That's kind of our whole, our whole purpose here is education, but also some fun stories. And today's is a doozy. Doozy of a story.

• 1:48Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:48Jeff Larson?

  Where they kind of educate you on what not to do's.

• 1:53Wes Larson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54Jeff Larson?

  A lot of stories of what not to do.

• 1:57Wes Larson?

  Cautionary tales.

• 1:58Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, you were nervous if part one isn't good that no one's gonna listen to the next part.

• 2:03Wes Larson?

  Uh, that's just a nerve, that's just worries that I live with my entire life, Jeff, you know?

• 2:08Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Wes Larson?

  That's just the pains of being anxious about producing good content for people. I'm excited about this episode. I, this is, I know I've said this before, but this, it's true for this one. And it's true for the other ones, but the changes because of, you know, how time works. This is the episode that we've done where there's the most information out there about the topic, about the story. There are lots of books out of all the, I think, out of all the stories that I've done personally, this one has the most that's been published about it. Cause it's a huge story. And if you've read the title of the episode, which you probably have already,

• 2:48Wes Larson?

  we're finally doing the USS Indianapolis, which is commonly billed as the worst shark attack of all time. And I think that's very possible. So I'm going to start, I'm going to start us out with-

• 2:59Jeff Larson?

  World record?

• 3:00Wes Larson?

  Yeah, it's a Guinness World Record. Which, you know, I sure have made it worthwhile for all these guys that we're about to talk about.

• 3:07Mike Smith?

  Was there a Guinness Book of World Records representative on the USS Indianapolis? With his little clipboard, like making sure and verifying everything. It's like, ah, I don't know.

• 3:18Jeff Larson?

  He's like, that one drowned.

• 3:19Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Wes Larson?

  No, and, and that's something we're actually going to talk about too, is that, not that exactly, but the fact that this is said, like, this could be the worst shark attack in history. It's hard to know how many of these people died from sharks. And it's hard to know, you know, if like Spanish galleons that went down in the 1600s or 1400s or whatever, didn't have more. It's hard, it's hard to say, but like, this was the one that has probably been reported as the most. So for now, I think most people feel pretty comfortable saying this is the largest mass shark attack incident in history.

• 3:57Mike Smith?

  How many people are going to fit on a galleon? Cause the US in Indianapolis had, well, you'll get into it, but-

• 4:02Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, that's-

• 4:03Mike Smith?

  I don't know if a galleon's holding that, but I don't know about galleons.

• 4:07Jeff Larson?

  There hasn't been like, like before we were really recording a lot of history. Like they couldn't even get that many people out in the ocean at once, you know?

• 4:17Wes Larson?

  That's a good point. Yeah. All right. I want to open with a little story.

• 4:21Mike Smith?

  Okay. I was going to bring up Noah's Ark, but-

• 4:23Wes Larson?

  Noah's Ark.

• 4:25Mike Smith?

  That was post history.

• 4:27Jeff Larson?

  Six people though.

• 4:28Wes Larson?

  That's true. Insert our Bible reference sound here.

• 4:32Mike Smith?

  A little angel noise.

• 4:35Wes Larson?

  All right. On an early morning in the summer of 1945, a naval officer woke up to a familiar hell. He'd been floating in the warm waters of the Philippine Sea for two days after being involved in the largest naval disaster in US Navy history. The torment he is enduring at this point was beyond our comprehension. He's floating in the water and his life jacket is rubbing on his skin and the combination of really terrible sunburn, burns from the explosion of the ship, saltwater, and constant rubbing is producing huge infected painful ulcers all over his body. The brightness of the sun on the water has led to an enraged cornea and each blink of his eyelids feels like rough sandpaper dragging

• 5:19Wes Larson?

  across his eyes. And then the thirst. The thirst is all encompassing and maddening. He's floating on a literal ocean of cool water and he's not able to drink a single drop of it. It's been over 36 hours without any real water, so it's pure torture. And even in the worst pain of his life and hopelessly adrift in the ocean, he feels lucky. He'd entered the water mostly unscathed, but a lot of the other survivors weren't that fortunate. All around him, his friends and his shipmates are terribly injured. They're burned from the sinking. Many of them have already succumbed to their injuries and are now just corpses floating in this oil slicked water. On the first morning following the sinking, he'd found one of his close friends from the ship and bobbing in the swells of the Pacific, they fantasized about reuniting with

• 6:04Wes Larson?

  their families and their girlfriends when they're rescued. They talked about the meals they would eat, the soft beds they would sleep in, the warm embraces they would find half a world away. Surely rescue would come at some point. Rescue had to come at some point. So waking up that morning with only his head and his shoulders above the water for the second consecutive day, he reaches out to wake up the sleeping friend with a gentle push. But when he pushes, his friend immediately flips over like a lopsided toy bobbing in the water. Even after two days of unending, unimaginable terror, the officer was so shocked and horrified by what he now saw that his brain couldn't process it. Geez. The entire bottom half of his friend had been

• 6:46Wes Larson?

  eaten away and his shredded torso was now bobbing upside down with his entrails spreading out into the water. Dude.

• 6:53Jeff Larson?

  Mike, you ever have that happen?

• 6:56Mike Smith?

  Rarely. Yeah, it's terrible.

• 6:58Wes Larson?

  Just maybe with like a hot dog that you drop in the water?

• 7:00Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Wes Larson?

  He stares at this grotesque buoy of flesh that used to be his friend. And the feeling of quick movement under the water breaks the spell. Something big passes by the officer and then he hears a splash behind him. He whips his head around and screams as a large white dorsal fin slices through the water toward him. Men floating nearby turn their heads and shut their eyes and the screaming suddenly gets cut short. All right, so you may think this sounds a lot like the monologue from Jaws. Cause it does. Quint talks about pretty much this exact same thing happening. But this is real. This actually happened to one of these sailors where he reached out. And his friend was cut in half from sharks.

• 7:44Wes Larson?

  The sinking of the US Indianapolis in 1945 was not only the worst US naval disaster in history. It's also widely regarded as the worst and deadliest mass shark attack in history. It's a truly unbelievable story of war, suffering, survival and courage. And it's probably our most requested shark story since we started this podcast. So we're going to cover it like Jeff mentioned earlier in three parts. It's also kind of perfect timing for this episode. The story of the Indianapolis was made especially famous after Jaws was released in theaters. And became one of the first summer blockbusters in 1975. And probably the most famous scene of the movie is when Quint, played by Robert Shaw. Launches into that long monologue about being aboard the Indianapolis and the horrors that he saw.

• 8:30Wes Larson?

  And in my opinion, it's one of the best scenes ever put to film. You guys like that scene, right?

• 8:35Mike Smith?

  Of course. Oh yeah, it's the best. It makes sense how somber the room gets as he invokes that imagery. Like as a child watching that movie, I kind of understood what was going on in the monologue. But I mean, after, after you do this series of episodes, I think we'll have an even deeper understanding and appreciation of like,

• 8:55Wes Larson?

  Dude.

• 8:55Mike Smith?

  How brutal that was.

• 8:57Wes Larson?

  It's so much worse than I ever even imagined. It's terrible.

• 9:03Wes Larson?

  I think for some reason I had thought that it was actually like not as bad as I thought it was like Quint had oversold it and it's actually like worse than what he said and yeah anyway I I that scene I think is perfect because they're so giggly and like having fun and trading stories and then when he launches into the monologue it just gets like very quiet and I I like feel that reverence when I've been doing this research because this is a crazy story of survival like a really crazy one and death.

• 9:35Jeff Larson?

  Imagine like being the guy that has to tell the story after him.

• 9:39Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Right. He's like really excited to tell his story.

• 9:45Jeff Larson?

  They're like, all right, your turn now.

• 9:47Wes Larson?

  Yeah. When he got bit by like a nurse shark in the Bahamas. Yeah. Tooth and Claw is brought to you by Ollie. We can be kind of picky about the sponsors that we allow on our show and one that I'm extra picky about is dog food. I wouldn't read an ad for any old dog food that I don't believe in and that's why I'm really excited to tell you guys about Ollie. We have fully switched our dog over to Ollie and that's because we love that they deliver clean, fresh nutrition in five really great flavors that'll work for even the pickiest eaters. Ollie is made in US kitchens with the highest quality, human-grade ingredients and contains no fillers, no preservatives, just real food, which means you're gonna have a healthier pup, they're gonna have more energy, shinier coats, better poops, and just more excitement

• 10:32Wes Larson?

  when you go to feed them too. And they have really great recipes at Ollie, stuff like fresh beef with sweet potatoes, fresh lamb with cranberries, or chicken with carrots. We have yet to find a flavor that our dog doesn't like and I know your dog is gonna like them too. So it's really easy to sign up. You just introduce Ollie to your pup, you fill out a 30-second quiz and they create a customized meal plan based on your pup's weight, activity level, and other health info. You're gonna get a welcome kit with two weeks' worth of meals, a free storage container, and a guide on how to gradually switch them over to their new diet. And you'll also be able to customize your plan if there's things that they like or don't like. You can add treats. They even have supplements that you can add. And the thing that really makes Ollie different is that they're the only fresh dog food that comes with unlimited routine health screenings

• 11:17Wes Larson?

  so that you can get your pup on track to living their healthiest, happiest life. Dogs deserve the best, and that means fresh, healthy food. Head to Ollie.com/tooth. Tell them all about your dog and use code TOOTH to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today. Plus, they offer a happiness guarantee on the first box. So if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. That's O-L-L-I-E.com/tooth and enter code TOOTH to get 60% off your first box. Anyway, Jaws just celebrated its 50th anniversary and the sinking of the US in Indianapolis happened exactly 80 years ago next week. Plus, Shark Week is just starting and there are some really popular shark shows on Netflix right now,

• 12:00Wes Larson?

  including a really great show, All the Sharks, which features two shark experts that are actually longtime listeners. And we're going to be talking to at least one of them during this series. So what I'm getting at is this might be the best possible time to tell this story and I'm really glad we're doing it now.

• 12:15Jeff Larson?

  Good. Me too.

• 12:16Wes Larson?

  I think all three of us, you know, when we talk about the military, we kind of have different views on lots of things when it comes to the US and the military. And I think, you know, war is always terrible, but I would guess that all three of us kind of agree that World War II was kind of the last US war where it really felt like a good versus evil struggle. Am I, am I like speaking for myself there? Would you guys agree with that?

• 12:42Mike Smith?

  I wasn't there, so I don't know.

• 12:47Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's, it's an interesting question. Like as me, in my family, I have a lot of, not just brothers who served as Marines in more modern theaters of war, but also grandparents who served and great uncles, all that stuff, like.

• 13:03Mike Smith?

  It's a hard one. It's a hard thing to ever truly justify war. So I, I struggle with it every day. Every time I think about it, I kind of land somewhere new. So yeah, but it's never for lack of appreciation or respect for the people who have put their lives on the line.

• 13:19Jeff Larson?

  I'd go back to the Revolutionary War.

• 13:21Wes Larson?

  That's the last good.

• 13:22Mike Smith?

  The last one?

• 13:23Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Jeff Larson?

  Where they're trying to charge for tea.

• 13:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah, you probably have an argument. I like.

• 13:30Mike Smith?

  I'd go to the, I'd go to the War of Minas Tirith, I think is probably the last good one.

• 13:35Wes Larson?

  Good for Sisibol.

• 13:37Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Wes Larson?

  Uh, yeah, I think, you know, this was a war that the US didn't necessarily want to be part of. They got dragged into, especially the war in the Pacific. We weren't really planning on getting involved until after Pearl Harbor. And it does really seem like there was some forces building out there that needed to be stopped. And, and, you know, some of these US presidents and generals and everything recognize that. And I'm not saying that we didn't do some terrible things during World War II. And I think there's an argument for the dropping of the two atomic bombs being like terrorist acts. But I also through researching this episode have learned like that we kind of felt backed into a corner in some ways. Even with that, so it's, my mind is kind of expanding on World War II, but I do see this as kind of,

• 14:23Wes Larson?

  maybe one of the last kind of big military campaigns of the US where it wasn't about furthering US interests, US interests so much as like protecting the world from some evil forces.

• 14:34Mike Smith?

  Yeah, the USS Indianapolis, well, you'll get into it, I'm sure.

• 14:37Wes Larson?

  I, oh yeah, we're going to talk about that a lot.

• 14:39Mike Smith?

  A pretty cool little secretive history concerning World War II. So I'm excited to see what you got.

• 14:44Wes Larson?

  This episode, part one, we're going to call the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. And this is really just kind of setting up the scene for the sharky part of this story. We're going to talk a little bit about the sharks, but this is kind of more about the sinking, the mission and kind of some of the forces that were at play. So a lot of history, but I really got into it as I searched and researched and, you know, learned a lot more about this. So my main sources, I used a book called In Harm's Way, The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton. I also read the book Left for Dead, A Young Man's Search for Justice for the USS Indianapolis,

• 15:27Wes Larson?

  and the book Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the 50-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sarah Vladek.

• 15:38Jeff Larson?

  And Indianapolis, Peyton Manning's legacy as the quarterback.

• 15:44Wes Larson?

  Indianapolis Colts. Pretty boring, but we sure had some good years.

• 15:51Wes Larson?

  Yeah, Indianapolis, sorry to all you Indianapolis listeners, kind of a boring place. I had to spend a few days there once and I ended up just kind of staying in my hotel room. Well, they got that NASCAR once a year. They're the center of the NASCAR world. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there you go. All right.

• 16:09Jeff Larson?

  Shots fired.

• 16:10Wes Larson?

  That sounds exciting. Yeah, sorry. That's just my personal opinion. Sorry, I'm not going to offend some of you Indianapolis people, but. All right. In 1945, the USS Indianapolis was roughly a 600-foot US cruiser warship that since the attack on Pearl Harbor had already been involved in a lot of different World War II battles all over the Pacific. She had been used in campaigns in the Aleutian Islands, Guam, Palau, New Guinea, the Marianas, and lots of other places. She was essentially a floating city and had all of the things that the sailors would need to spend months at sea. So like laundry, dentist, doctor, all these different, like an ice cream shop, lots of different things that they would need. Yeah, to just feel kind of comfortable

• 16:55Wes Larson?

  and like they had a home on the water. She had really powerful guns and weaponry and was mostly used to attack enemy battlements on land and blow planes out of the air. So when they were like trying to invade an island, this boat would pull up and just barrage these battlements with these big guns. So it was also a very fast ship, but.

• 17:17Wes Larson?

  When you have a fast battleship, you kind of have to make some important trade offs. And one of the biggest trade offs is the protection, the armor. The Indianapolis was only protected by three to four inches of steel. Whereas battleships would often have 13 inches of steel. So not great armor for the Indianapolis, but she was really fast.

• 17:36Mike Smith?

  Yeah, vibranium would have been, that stuff is so good. It's like super strong, but also light.

• 17:43Wes Larson?

  Yeah, no wonder Wakanda has such a tight, you know, control on that.

• 17:48Mike Smith?

  Right.

• 17:48Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Mike Smith?

  Their navy is probably so sick.

• 17:51Wes Larson?

  What's the other one? Unobtanium? You build this out of unobtanium?

• 17:55Mike Smith?

  Avatar, yeah. I don't know what that stuff does. I just know it's valuable.

• 17:59Wes Larson?

  I think it was energy source.

• 18:01Mike Smith?

  Hmm, okay.

• 18:02Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Mike Smith?

  Was it easy or hard to obtain, Wes?

• 18:07Jeff Larson?

  Another example would be the Black Pearl. And that one, well, the Inceptor was the fast one, right?

• 18:14Wes Larson?

  Uh, yeah, the, I forget what.

• 18:16Mike Smith?

  Well, yeah. You, let's not spoil it, because that'll probably be episode three, right? The Black Pearl?

• 18:22Wes Larson?

  The Black Pearl? I don't recall it being part of this story, but I can certainly try and work it in if you guys want.

• 18:30Jeff Larson?

  Cause I think it's fast, but I think it, well, none of them were very armored, actually.

• 18:35Wes Larson?

  Yeah, alright.

• 18:37Mike Smith?

  No, I'm glad we could, yeah. Thanks for walking us through those thoughts.

• 18:41Jeff Larson?

  I'll strike that, never mind.

• 18:44Wes Larson?

  In the summer of 1945, Adolf Hitler had already committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. And the Nazis and the other Axis powers in Europe had been defeated. So victory in Europe had been declared for the Allied powers. That, you know, that sneaky little Adolf just snuck in there and blew his own little head off.

• 19:03Jeff Larson?

  He didn't have the resources we have nowadays to get help.

• 19:07Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Mike Smith?

  Like, I'll, I'll speak for myself, like Wes was doing earlier and just say, I'm glad Hitler died.

• 19:16Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Mike Smith?

  But I don't know how you guys feel.

• 19:18Wes Larson?

  It's a shame that we couldn't get him when he was a tiny little defenseless baby, but I'm glad. Mike, I think you're, I think you're safe to speak for all three of us when you say that

• 19:29Mike Smith?

  Oh, good.

• 19:30Wes Larson?

  Hitler to be dead.

• 19:31Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I just never want to assume, but I'm glad we're all agreeing, agreeing.

• 19:35Wes Larson?

  We're all in the same boat there. But the war in the Pacific.

• 19:38Mike Smith?

  The USS Indianapolis.

• 19:39Wes Larson?

  Hopefully not that boat. The war in the Pacific raged on in the late spring and early summer of 1945. And after over three years of battle in the Pacific, the allied powers of the US, UK, Australia, China, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, as well as some other smaller fighting forces from other countries were winning the war. They had these strategically important islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa that had both been captured by American fighting forces. But that had led to huge casualties on both sides. And during these battles, they had learned something very important, which is that the Japanese are extremely tenacious when they're defending their homeland. It was becoming more and more evident to the allied powers

• 20:22Wes Larson?

  that the invasion of a Japanese homeland would lead to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dead Americans and Japanese civilians. And I think that's pretty well reported throughout a lot of World War II literature, just that the Japanese really fought hard, especially when it was for their own country. They, they were willing to fight to the last man, woman, and child. I will say this, this argument that the, the Japanese were going to fight to the last man, woman, and child is an argument that has historically been used as a justification for what comes next. And I just want to say that doesn't mean that I necessarily buy into that justification or think it's true. But there is a lot of, a lot of information that shows the Japanese were ready to sacrifice

• 21:05Wes Larson?

  a lot of people should we invade their homeland, which makes sense.

• 21:10Jeff Larson?

  I think even their fighting style shows that, like the kamikaze pilots shows that they were all or nothing.

• 21:18Mike Smith?

  The guy in the Philippines that was still like trying to fight the war in the 1970s because like no one told him it was over yet. Yeah, it's insane.

• 21:27Wes Larson?

  We're gonna talk about the kamikaze stuff and there's something in here that just absolutely blew my mind that I can't stop thinking about. So.

• 21:35Jeff Larson?

  The Godzilla?

• 21:37Wes Larson?

  Basically, it's Godzilla. Yeah.

• 21:40Mike Smith?

  Just can't believe it. That thing was real?

• 21:42Wes Larson?

  Basically, the allied powers started bombing the ever living shit out of the Japanese mainland and every major Japanese civilian center, not every, sorry, most major Japanese civilian centers. We always talk about the atomic bombings when we talk about this time period, but the firebombing of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and dozens of other Japanese cities were also insanely destructive and deadly and likely killed close to a million people, which were mostly civilians. Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project had reached its climax in New Mexico and the atom bomb had been successfully created. You've all seen Oppenheimer. You know the story. Jeff, you want to quickly summarize the Manhattan Project for us?

• 22:28Jeff Larson?

  Uh, the Manhattan Project, that's just building the atomic bomb, right?

• 22:32Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that was very quick.

• 22:34Mike Smith?

  Nice summary.

• 22:36Wes Larson?

  Very concise. Alright.

• 22:39Jeff Larson?

  This is a great movie.

• 22:40Wes Larson?

  Yeah, basically the US put their strongest minds and best researchers all at work on building the atomic bomb.

• 22:48Jeff Larson?

  They like split items in half.

• 22:50Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Jeff Larson?

  You want me to go?

• 22:52Wes Larson?

  No, that's what I wanted. That's you did it.

• 22:54Jeff Larson?

  They had to wear sunglasses when they did the demo.

• 22:57Mike Smith?

  The Trinity.

• 22:58Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Wes Larson?

  So the allied forces decided that Japan wasn't going to give them the unconditional surrender that they desired. Without either an invasion of the Japanese mainland that would cost millions of lives, or a show of our new atomic power. So the decision was made by President Truman to use nuclear weapons against Japan. Specifically, the civilian center of Hiroshima was selected as the first bombing site. Many of the main components of the first atomic bomb, which was named Little Boy, were shipped to California and then loaded onto the USS Indianapolis on the 16th of July, 1945. So the mission was to deliver these materials and it was considered top secret.

• 23:41Wes Larson?

  So the captain of the USS Indianapolis, who was Charles Butler McVeigh III, was just under strict orders to get these bomb components to the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas as quickly as possible. He didn't really understand what he was carrying. None of the passengers on the Indianapolis knew what they were carrying. Oh, crazy. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. And they thought they were going to be in California for a while and suddenly they got orders that they were leaving in like a couple of days. So they're not thrilled about it.

• 24:11Mike Smith?

  You can just imagine them putting the payload onto the ship and be like, don't just don't touch that box.

• 24:17Wes Larson?

  We're gonna get to that.

• 24:18Mike Smith?

  Don't even get close to it. The guys are like, huh, I wonder what's in there.

• 24:21Wes Larson?

  That's honestly exactly what happened, but we're gonna talk about that a little bit. But they're not that happy about this because their last mission, a kamikaze pilot had hit the Indianapolis, almost sunk her. Nine of the crew had died and 29 had been wounded. So it like, a bomb fell all the way down into the kitchen and like blew up all their beans. Not the beans. I watched this interview with the survivor and he was like, man, there are beans everywhere. And he's just, I've never seen so many beans in my life. But people died. They like had to limp back to California and the ship after that moment felt different and broken. And they started to wonder if it might be an unlucky ship.

• 25:04Wes Larson?

  And now they're being told that they have to head out to the far reaches of the Pacific and abandon any plans that they might have in California. They also got, you know, get all those beans back on the ship. It takes a while to get all your beans. Especially back then. Yeah. Rest of machines.

• 25:20Mike Smith?

  They're probably still finding beans in places you never knew beans could get.

• 25:26Mike Smith?

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• 26:53Mike Smith?

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• 27:04Mike Smith?

  I think it's really important to remember that a lot of these sailors are just 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 year old boys. They're essentially children and they're being thrown into war. I think in modern days, we tend to think of soldiers as these like hardened fighting machines. But in World War II, it's like a lot of farm boys and just like kids.

• 27:25Wes Larson?

  Back then, they had like three kids already though.

• 27:27Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's true. They're, I mean, maturity wise, they're probably like 35 nowadays, but they're young.

• 27:34Wes Larson?

  I'm just kidding. Yeah, they're very young.

• 27:37Mike Smith?

  And the average age. Yeah. Average age on Indianapolis was 19.

• 27:42Wes Larson?

  Whoa, dude.

• 27:43Jeff Larson?

  That's a crazy app because you know, there's a couple like 50 year olds.

• 27:49Jeff Larson?

  It's like really bringing that average up.

• 27:52Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Jeff Larson?

  It's crazy.

• 27:53Wes Larson?

  So as they depart California, they pick up a security detail of 39 Marines, as well as two army officers that have been heavily involved in the Manhattan Project, James Nolan and Robert Furman. They're kind of disguised as army officers, but they're actually scientists and engineers. Captain McVeigh was aware that they were carrying some kind of new deadly weaponry, but he wasn't given the details. And like I said, all these men are completely unaware of their mission, but they're getting like this big crate and these like lead boxes loaded onto the ship. They're being guarded by 39 Marines. So they know like this is something weird that we're transporting.

• 28:33Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. They're like, those new beans have a lot of protection.

• 28:37Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Why is there fragile written on the beans box? Here's a crazy thing, though. As they leave the port in California, they make it about an hour out into the bay and then the ship suddenly stops in the water, not too far from shore. About a thousand miles away in New Mexico, the first test of an atomic bomb was happening, which is dubbed the Trinity Test, which Mike just said. And the Indianapolis would only proceed onward with its mission if the test was successful. So they loaded this bomb onto the Indianapolis, but an atomic bomb had yet to be detonated and successfully tested. Yeah. So as Bobby Oppenheimer watches this mushroom cloud rise over the desert of New Mexico,

• 29:22Wes Larson?

  a small boat delivers a message from President Truman to the Indianapolis, and it instructs them to proceed with their mission and make their delivery at any cost. Only Nolan and Furman knew that they were transporting roughly half of the available uranium-232 in the United States. And then it was worth about $300 million. The journey to Hawaii was done in record time and there they refueled and pick up more. Record. Yeah, it was a world record. Yeah, I think it might be a standing record even. Wow.

• 29:52Jeff Larson?

  That feels like the easiest test ever to like, see if it worked or not. Be like, yeah, that worked.

• 30:00Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Mike Smith?

  You mean the atomic bomb?

• 30:04Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Jeff Larson?

  Because they were all like waiting to see if it would work before like they sent the ship out.

• 30:10Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Jeff Larson?

  And it's the most like clear like.

• 30:13Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, that'll do it.

• 30:16Mike Smith?

  You'd probably like see the mushroom cloud from the ship. It's like, yeah.

• 30:19Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Mike Smith?

  There we go.

• 30:21Wes Larson?

  And apparently Little Boy was like a certain type of fission weapon with like, uh, the, it was really wasteful when it comes to uranium, but it's pretty much guaranteed to work as long as it had been like proven to work. So they were really confident that this bomb would work once they dropped it. All right. So they refuel and they get more provisions in Hawaii. Then they continue onward more than 3,000 miles to Tinian Island, which is in the northern Marianas. This journey's pretty uneventful. Once they get to Tinian, there's a lot of cloak and dagger stuff and fanfare as they unload all this secret cargo. I guess the crane operator on the Indianapolis like kind of jokingly let the box fall a little bit. And all of these dudes were like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 31:06Wes Larson?

  Because he like, didn't know that it was enriched in uranium in the box. Anyway, I do think they kind of started to get an idea of what they might have been delivering. Because they were allowed to sign, I read this only in one spot though. They're allowed to sign some components and they signed greetings to the emperor from the men of the Indianapolis. But it wouldn't be long before Japan would deliver their own message to the USS Indianapolis. So they set sail for Guam, where some of the men were relieved by other sailors. And then they left for the Philippine island of Leyte, Leyte. They're going to Leyte to receive training before joining other forces in Okinawa and preparing for the potential ground invasion of mainland Japan.

• 31:51Wes Larson?

  So that's their, their mission. They know at some point they're going to be in this ground invasion. What no one knew is that they were supposed to relay this plan for the Indianapolis to go to Leyte. But somehow it got bungled. And as a result, the rear admiral in Leyte wasn't expecting them. He had no idea that the Indianapolis was on its way. And this would go on to be an incredibly costly mistake. Mike, you're a bit of a rear admiral yourself, aren't you?

• 32:19Mike Smith?

  Yeah. Flag bearer of the rear admiral.

• 32:22Wes Larson?

  Yep. All right. As they prepare to leave towards Leiti, McVeigh asks for an escort of a destroyer. And that's pretty like typical protocol. Apparently everywhere they'd ever gone, they had an escort. Because the Indianapolis had no way to detect submarines. They didn't have surface sonar. They didn't have any kind of way to to find submarines. But they were assured that their route from Guam to Leiti was in the backwater of the war. That there was no enemy presence in the area and no need for an escort. So McVeigh orders an intelligence report about enemy presence along their route. And when he gets it, he doesn't see anything too concerning. This intelligence report, and this is another big error, was actually incomplete.

• 33:06Wes Larson?

  Because it should have included a report that a US warship had been sunk by a manned Japanese suicide torpedo. Or Kaiten, just three days previous. And this is where we need to take a quick break to talk about my new obsession, which is suicide torpedoes.

• 33:23Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I need more information on that.

• 33:25Wes Larson?

  So they're called Kaiten. And they are manned torpedoes, like a suicidal torpedoist. Would get in it and he has a steering wheel and it launches and they are they steer them into the side of boats. And if they miss, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean where they're crushed by the immense pressure of the water above them.

• 33:47Mike Smith?

  Dude.

• 33:48Jeff Larson?

  Geez.

• 33:48Wes Larson?

  These guys begged for it.

• 33:50Mike Smith?

  I was envisioning a torpedo with like a saddle and the guy just riding on it like a horse, but this way makes more sense.

• 33:56Jeff Larson?

  I like just like being in the war room of Japan. And they're just like, yeah, we could just have a boat shoot these. And they're like, no. We need a way to put a person in.

• 34:10Mike Smith?

  They're staring at a torpedo and they're just like, can we put a guy in that?

• 34:14Jeff Larson?

  Like the the scientists are like, these can like steer themselves with like data. And they're like, oh.

• 34:21Mike Smith?

  Magnets.

• 34:21Jeff Larson?

  I don't trust it.

• 34:23Mike Smith?

  So wait, are they like, are they, these torpedoes big enough for them to be sitting upright in? Or are they like laid out?

• 34:29Wes Larson?

  They're kind of like laid out with, they're like sitting, I think, but they have a steering wheel. I like, I need to look into more.

• 34:36Jeff Larson?

  Maybe it's like the Batmobile when he like hits the button and goes forward.

• 34:42Wes Larson?

  Yeah. But these, like, these were a common thing in Japanese submarines. This isn't like, that's a one-off. They tried this once, like, this was a thing they employed. And, uh, yeah, we'll get into it a little bit more, but I, I couldn't stop thinking about that little detail. All right, so 112 men had died in this sinking that had happened three days ago. And it happened right on the route that the Indianapolis was about to take.

• 35:06Jeff Larson?

  Seems like that's the number one thing you would want on your report of what's been going on.

• 35:11Wes Larson?

  You'd want to know that.

• 35:12Jeff Larson?

  In this area.

• 35:14Wes Larson?

  The report also didn't include that there were some recently intercepted Japanese messages that pointed toward a lot of submarine activity on this route. So basically they were sailing into some pretty dangerous waters without an escort.

• 35:27Mike Smith?

  What did this report include?

• 35:30Wes Larson?

  Yeah, not much. It pretty much said, yeah, go for it.

• 35:32Mike Smith?

  Everything's going pretty well, you know, all things considered.

• 35:35Wes Larson?

  So there was some weird stuff at play and I wasn't really gonna get into this.

• 35:39Mike Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. This is wife's shopping list or something.

• 35:43Wes Larson?

  I wasn't really gonna get into this, but it is interesting. There was two major like admirals at the time, uh, MacArthur and one other one. But they kind of had like divided up the ocean and they were battling back and forth on kind of how they should run the, the Navy. And because of that, there was a lot of like miscommunication that was happening during this time. So it was kind of a mess in this, in this specific part of the Pacific.

• 36:13Jeff Larson?

  That's really interesting. It's like, you can't be arguing about that, you know?

• 36:19Wes Larson?

  No, no. And, and the reason it was especially bad right here is because it's where these two pieces kind of met. So it was kind of like, there wasn't a real operating procedure for this area. So as they sailed toward Leyte, McVeigh is told to use this zigzag pattern of travel during daylight hours. And to continue it at night at his discretion based on visibility. This maneuver of zigzagging the ship is actually completely ineffective at deterring submarine attacks, but it's still Navy policy. We're gonna put a big fat pin in that because that's gonna be important in part three. All right? All right. Jeff, do you pin it for me? I pin it. On July 29th, around 8:00 PM, McVeigh gives the order for the ship to stop zigzagging because

• 37:04Wes Larson?

  it's a cloudy night and the swells were really large. Around 10:30 PM, McVeigh steps off the bridge and onto one of the walkways. He notices about 300 men trying to sleep in the humid air on the deck of the ship. And this is because the interior workings of the ship would get really, really hot, and a lot of the cabins were extremely hot. So a lot of these men would sleep topside all over the deck with just their blankets. It was kind of the coolest place to sleep on the ship. And to try and remedy the heat in the different compartments of the ship, a lot of the doors and hatches were left open to improve airflow. Uh, this is only allowed when threats are minimal because a bunch of open doors in a ship makes

• 37:45Wes Larson?

  it much harder to isolate a breach if one happens. So like if you have all these hatches and doors open and suddenly like you have water coming in, it can quickly flood the entire boat and you can't really isolate it the other way. But they're not worried about enemy subs, so they're leaving all these doors open to try and reduce the temperature aboard. McVeigh gets into his cabin and goes to sleep around 11:00 PM. A few miles away, and about 60 feet below the surface, Commander Hashimoto of the Japanese sub I-58 couldn't believe his luck. He'd been trying the entire war to sink an enemy ship, and he struck out. But he was about to make up for that by causing the biggest naval disaster in US history.

• 38:28Wes Larson?

  This dude was like frustrated that he hadn't been able to sink anything yet, so he's stoked at this point. The Japanese sub wasn't the only thing following the USS Indianapolis. As they traveled across the Philippine Sea, they dumped large amounts of food waste and human waste directly into the water, and that added a lot of really interesting scent to areas that they passed through. Pelagic sharks travel wide expanses of open ocean where food is scarce. And as a result, they can sometimes go days or even weeks without substantial feeding. So when they find a potential source of food, they can be really tenacious and they'll follow it for a long time.

• 39:08Wes Larson?

  These are sharks that really rely on like dead whales, on these like little pockets of food throughout the open ocean to sustain them. This is especially true of what species of shark. We've done an episode about them before. They're one of my favorites.

• 39:23Jeff Larson?

  I know it, Mike. Do you know it?

• 39:25Wes Larson?

  Oceanic whitetip? Oceanic whitetip, correct. They're large pelagic sharks that are known for their tenacity. They can grow up to 13 feet long. They're easily recognizable by their large paddle shaped dorsal fin with an obvious white tip. So as we discussed in our other shipwreck episodes, including our episode that focuses, that focuses on oceanic whitetips. They're often the shark species that's implicated in encounters and bites with people that are adrift at sea. And if you're floating around long enough in tropical waters, there's a good chance that an oceanic whitetip will show up. Victims of these attacks are often not able to report what kind of species was involved.

• 40:06Wes Larson?

  And a lot of oceanic whitetip attacks on shipwreck survivors can't be contributed to a certain species. But honestly, after doing this episode, I think there's a pretty good chance this is the species that's killed the most humans. I think it's like, a pretty decent chance of it.

• 40:23Jeff Larson?

  I kind of felt that way when you did your first oceanic whitetip episode. It's just like, yeah, a lot of people just can't report what happened because they're in the middle of the ocean.

• 40:35Wes Larson?

  Right. And they're, I mean, like with great whites, it's like, you know, a few a year. And with oceanic whitetips, it's like you'll have years without any, and then all of a sudden there's like 200, you know?

• 40:45Jeff Larson?

  Right.

• 40:46Wes Larson?

  So, yeah, anyway.

• 40:48Jeff Larson?

  It's like, maybe someone eats more hot dogs than Nathan, but they're not being like recorded doing it, you know?

• 40:55Wes Larson?

  And Joey Chestnut?

• 40:56Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Wes Larson?

  Yeah. No, it's a good. It's a good point. These are the Joey Chestnut of the sharks.

• 41:04Jeff Larson?

  Uh huh.

• 41:06Wes Larson?

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• 42:30Wes Larson?

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• 42:43Wes Larson?

  All right, so we're not going to do a ton of biology about them today, because during this series, we're going to be talking to some people that know a lot more about sharks than I do. But I will say that this has quickly become one of my favorite shark species. They're incredibly beautiful. I love that they have kind of this unpredictable nature to them, and they are just a really interesting species.

• 43:04Jeff Larson?

  They seem the most wild, almost. They just like know the least about human interference, maybe.

• 43:12Wes Larson?

  Yeah, they're one that, when you talk to shark, people that are out diving in the ocean and around sharks a lot, this is one of the sharks that makes them nervous when it shows up, you know? Like, people that are really used to tiger sharks, even, if an oceanic whitetip shows up, they suddenly have to be very careful. They're spicy, a spicy shark. Alright, so who knows how many sharks were following and directly within the radius of the Indianapolis and who knows how many of them were oceanic whitetips? But it's safe to say there were already a lot of sharks in the nearby water when the I-58 submarine launched six different torpedoes at the US Indianapolis just after midnight on July 30th. The suicide torpedo pilots had begged for the honor to strike the ship, but she was

• 43:57Wes Larson?

  so close to the submarine that no one needed to steer a torpedo. They were very confident that they would hit it with at least one of these torpedoes. So the six that were launched were oxygen-powered magnetic torpedoes, each of them carrying enough explosive power to level a city block. They were launched in three-second intervals and were now speeding underwater toward the Indianapolis and life's about to change forever for all 1,200 men aboard. At 12:05, the first torpedo slams into the bow of the Indianapolis and all hell breaks loose on the ship. The massive explosion launches boys 15 feet into the air and some were immediately blown in half. The second torpedo hits seconds later on the midship.

• 44:38Wes Larson?

  Fuel tank was hit and thousands of gallons of burning fuel erupt into the passageways of the ship and they melt and burn everything in their path, including screaming human bodies. Seawater starts pouring into the ship and this is something that's important. These torpedoes didn't hit like the propellers or anything, so even though they've hit the ship, it continues moving and they have these massive holes, so it's essentially like sucking water into itself as it's moving. It's really important that if a ship gets hit by something like this, it stops and they didn't stop, so they're sinking really fast. Yeah, interesting. It lists to the left and everyone aboard knew that they probably only had minutes

• 45:19Wes Larson?

  before it would start sinking, but the torpedoes had completely destroyed their communication within the ship, so all they could do was yell to each other, which leads to a ton of chaos. Oh no. Yeah. This is gonna get pretty gnarly, just so people know, like if you don't, if you can't hear about burning and violence, you might just wanna skip ahead a little bit. Captain McVeigh literally gets thrown from his bed in the attack and now he's on the bridge desperately telling men in the radio shacks to try and get out a distress signal. The bridge is the... what is the bridge? That's where the captain like hangs out and like steers the ship and they have all the controls and stuff. Okay.

• 46:01Wes Larson?

  Yeah. So, he's joined in the bridge by some of his officers, like any of the officers would know to kind of meet up there. And one of them is gunnery officer Stanley Lipsky, who'd been so badly burned already that his hands were melted down just to his tendons, and his eyes had been burned into two blackened holes. He's completely blind and he felt his way by memory up to the bridge. Already a hundred men had just simply been vaporized, burned, or drowned, and many others were stumbling around in the darkness with their skin on fire, coughing for air. There was nearly an inch of blood on the forward deck, and men were slipping and falling in it as they tried to escape the flames. The ship was moving, and because of that, it's scooping up all this water. It's flooding really fast.

• 46:46Wes Larson?

  And sailors had to make the impossible decision to close and lock hatches while there were still men trapped behind them and screaming, trying to get out. But they had to do this to try and stall the sinking. So there's all these terrible stories of them, like shutting hatches and hearing men screaming behind them, knowing that they were gonna drown. Eight minutes after the first torpedo hit, McVeigh makes the call to abandon ship, and he just starts yelling it out to everyone. Boys start jumping from the ship, and most of these early jumpers had life jackets. But the ship was listing so heavily to one side now that the jumpers on the high side have to jump like sixty, seventy feet to get down to the water. And on the low side, they only had to jump a few feet to hit the water.

• 47:30Wes Larson?

  So it's kind of crazy, like, depending on what side of the ship you were on is a very different experience. There were a lot of life rafts on the Indianapolis, but in this chaos, only twelve of the thirty-five life rafts make it into the water, and they're missing a lot of the lifesaving provisions and survival gear that was supposed to be on them. In part two, we're gonna get into what they actually had in the water. But one lucky break is that the Indianapolis actually had a lot of extra life jackets. So, they were able to get a lot of life jackets, but it ended up that only about half of the men ended up with them when they jumped in the water, because a lot of them just panicked and jumped in without life jackets or life belts.

• 48:12Wes Larson?

  Another really crazy thing is there was huge amounts of black oil leaking from the boat. And the oil that they had was like this thick molasses kind of tar. So everyone that jumped in the water would land in this oil first. And it would completely smother them in this sticky black blanket as they came back up. It got in their eyes, their ears, their mouths and their throats. They would start just like vomiting. And they wouldn't be able to clear their eyes of all this oil. So it was like, that was just another kind of insult to injury.

• 48:44Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, because oil just kind of sits on top of the water and like stays pretty thick. It doesn't like dilute very fast.

• 48:53Wes Larson?

  No, so they're just jumping into this pool of oil essentially. Alright, so we talked about those Marines that were responsible for guarding the components of the bomb. Some of them had stayed on the ship to help like guard the jail on the ship and a couple of other things. One of these Marines, when he jumped into the water in this oil. He came back up and he turned to see the still spinning propeller rising out of the water. And he was watching men jumping off the boat, hitting the propeller. And being sliced in half or screaming as they were thrown hundreds of feet out into the sea.

• 49:25Jeff Larson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 49:27Wes Larson?

  The doctor on the ship, Louis Hines, who we'll be talking about a lot in the next episode. Woke up to screaming from the cabin next to him. It was coming from the ship dentist and he was being burned alive in his cabin, which was fully on fire. Hines ran from his room, knowing there was nothing he could do for his friend. Then had to climb through a porthole and use a rope to make it up onto the deck. And when he got there, he wasn't prepared for the scene that he saw. Men in various stages of being burned alive were stumbling around. One approached him, and this is what he reported. He said his arms were held high. With ribbons of burned flesh hanging from them like wings. He was screaming, "Don't touch me, don't touch me." And a breeze caught these streamers of flesh and made them ripple in the wind.

• 50:13Wes Larson?

  And he had to grab a life jacket and try and put it on this man who was just screaming as he tried to do this. He also strapped a bunch of men that were in pain into cots to give them some morphine to try and calm them down. And then the boat suddenly listed even more and he watched hopelessly as these cots with men on them rolled down the deck, splashed into the water, and the cots and the screaming sailors sunk immediately. They were like tied to the cots. Yeah. That is probably a bad idea. Bad move, yeah. He finally had to stop trying to help the wounded because the ship was sinking so fast, and he jumped himself from the ship after securing his life jacket. In the Radio Shack, men had succeeded in getting distress signals out, but what they

• 50:58Wes Larson?

  didn't know is that these signals had been heard by US dispatchers and were quickly dismissed as Japanese interference or pranks, because when they would get any kind of like distress signal, they would immediately ask for a reply, for confirmation, and if they didn't get a reply, they would do it in like code, they just thought it was the Japanese trying to mess with them. So because they didn't get a reply from the USS Indianapolis, and because it wasn't where they thought it was, like they didn't know where the ship was necessarily, they just dismissed it, filed it away, and no one heard about these distress calls, which is crazy. Yeah. All right.

• 51:39Wes Larson?

  Captain McVeigh really thought long and hard about going down with the ship, but when it was completely apparent that the ship was sinking no matter what, he too put on a life jacket and jumped into the water. He was full of dread, thinking about the men that he had just lost and the repercussions should he survive this ordeal, but as he watched the last bit of the Indianapolis disappear under the dark night water, what he didn't realize is that in a lot of ways, the boys that had a quick, albeit painful deaths during the sinking, were in many ways more fortunate compared to the almost 900 boys that were now floating in the tropical waters of the Philippine Sea. Many of those 890 men were bleeding, vomiting, shitting, and pissing into the water as they

• 52:23Wes Larson?

  writhed in pain and shock. Those bodily fluids slowly spread out into the water column, along with the oozing scent of blood and death from the dozens and dozens of corpses that were also floating in this dark tropical water. The sharks that had been following the boat in the area were already gathering in numbers to investigate the almost overwhelming amount of scent in the water, and the splashing and thrashing of the men as they struggled to stay afloat and conscious further intensified the interest of these large sharks circling around and below the men. Almost thirty minutes after entering this water, a petty officer second class was clinging to one of the floating rafts, noticed one of his shipmates struggling to stay afloat a few meters away.

• 53:05Wes Larson?

  It's a cloudy night, there's only a sliver of moon, so it makes it really hard to see exactly what was happening, but he swims over to this fellow sailor so he could drag him back to the raft. As he gets closer, more details come into focus, and this petty officer sees the man in the water moving in quick jerky motions, and he realizes that the sailor is face down and dead, and only his life jacket was keeping him afloat, but somehow he's still moving, or something was moving him.

• 53:36Mike Smith?

  Uh oh.

• 53:37Jeff Larson?

  Man.

• 53:38Wes Larson?

  The petty officer pauses in the water to think about what to do next. He turns back to look at the raft and the other men clinging to it. The raft was feeling a lot further away than he wanted, and then a large splash brings his attention back to the drowned sailor, but the man was gone. Life jacket and all had been pulled underwater by an eleven-foot oceanic white-tipped shark. It and the hundreds of other sharks that would arrive in the area would go on to torment these men in the water for the next four days. And in part two of this series, we're gonna go over the absolute hell that the men of the Indianapolis experienced while adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

• 54:13Mike Smith?

  Oh, can I sit part two out, Wes?

• 54:16Jeff Larson?

  It's crazy, pretty much any other group of animals, like nine hundred humans can take it out, especially like soldiers, you know?

• 54:27Wes Larson?

  Right.

• 54:28Jeff Larson?

  But then like-

• 54:29Wes Larson?

  In the ocean, we're just-

• 54:30Jeff Larson?

  Sharks, it's just like you-

• 54:32Mike Smith?

  No chance.

• 54:33Jeff Larson?

  It doesn't matter how many humans there are, you can't like gang up on a shark.

• 54:38Wes Larson?

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about some of their attempts to stop these attacks in part two, but they're totally futile. It, it's crazy. Part two is, is gonna be kinda wild, like how many, just the level of death that these men had to experience and witness, and not like good death, this is like screaming, hearing your friends being ripped apart by animals ten feet away, kinda death. It's not pleasant, but it also, it's a, it's just like a story of courage, too. Like, I, I watched these videos, like of them interviewing the survivors, this is probably like twenty years ago, most of these men are dead now.

• 55:19Wes Larson?

  But it made me cry like they they had to witness some terrible, terrible stuff. And it's hard to even imagine having that kind of trauma through your whole life. So.

• 55:30Mike Smith?

  You said about nine hundred survivors are now in the water is.

• 55:34Wes Larson?

  Yeah, eight hundred and ninety is what they guessed. So about three hundred people died or two hundred and fifty people died.

• 55:40Mike Smith?

  From that initial.

• 55:41Wes Larson?

  No, three hundred, because there's about twelve hundred on the on the boat. So about three hundred died with the ship. Yeah.

• 55:46Mike Smith?

  Man, already just like the worst thing that's ever gonna happen to you. And it's just like, it's even just not even really started yet for.

• 55:56Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's the thing is like, we have roughly nine hundred people in the water. And I think they end up pulling out like three hundred and sixteen. So, yeah.

• 56:07Jeff Larson?

  It's crazy to thinking about that Japanese submarine commander, just like how like knowing like what happened with the war. Like he was probably a hero for like three years. It's just like, and now he's like known as like a terrorist almost, you know?

• 56:26Wes Larson?

  Yeah, well, no, it was funny in in this documentary where they interviewed all these survivors. They also interviewed his daughter and granddaughter. And they were both just kind of like, yep, he got him.

• 56:37Jeff Larson?

  Really?

• 56:38Mike Smith?

  That's the craziest thing about war is like on every side, not it's not just a Japanese phenomenon, but like. You're looking for any way to like carry your weight and do your part and like. Your part resulted in the worst thing that's ever happened to a thousand plus people. It's just, it's, I'm not trying to like. Moralize or grandstand on any kind of point here. I'm just saying like.

• 57:04Wes Larson?

  True, like this was a celebration for them. Yeah.

• 57:07Jeff Larson?

  I feel like it's.

• 57:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Jeff Larson?

  Especially interesting because Japan is like such an ally now. And it happened like pretty quick afterward.

• 57:17Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Jeff Larson?

  He really had the smallest window to be like celebrated.

• 57:22Wes Larson?

  Right.

• 57:24Wes Larson?

  Yeah, at some point, we'll do the Ramri Island story, which is all about a Japanese platoon on this island where they think hundreds of them were killed by saltwater crocodiles. So that's a story we'll get to at some point. That one sometimes reported as the biggest mass death ever from an animal inflicted on humans. So. Yeah.

• 57:44Mike Smith?

  So you said white tip, these oceanic white tips are one of your favorite sharks.

• 57:50Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Mike Smith?

  What does that mean? Like where on the list? Because one of could be carrying a lot of weight.

• 57:55Wes Larson?

  I would say, so my list is fluid and you guys know that.

• 57:58Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Jeff Larson?

  When you do an episode, they definitely climb up.

• 58:03Wes Larson?

  The top two are always going to be great whites and whale sharks. Mm hmm. But I would maybe put oceanic white tips at three right now. Whoa.

• 58:13Jeff Larson?

  Okay.

• 58:14Wes Larson?

  I wanted to say quickly, thank you to everyone who suggested this story. We've gotten a lot of suggestions for it over the years. It's kind of activated me in a different way than a lot of our stories has. Uh, it just, it's fascinating. I, I can't consume enough about it. Even in my spare time, I'm just watching little YouTube videos and stuff. So I do recommend reading these books. I think it's a really interesting little sliver of American history that wraps around so many different facets of our, of our shared history. So, yeah.

• 58:46Jeff Larson?

  Or wait until

• 58:47Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Jeff Larson?

  Maybe someday we write a book and it has a little chapter about it.

• 58:53Wes Larson?

  Yeah, it probably will. That's a good point. I think.

• 58:56Jeff Larson?

  So don't read any of Wes's books.

• 58:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Jeff Larson?

  That he recommends. Wait until we write one and it might have something about it.

• 59:04Wes Larson?

  Yep. Just go watch Love Island and just wait. Yeah.

• 59:10Wes Larson?

  You guys got any questions or comments before we, we move on to our categories?

• 59:15Mike Smith?

  No.

• 59:16Jeff Larson?

  I feel like I've been commenting a lot since.

• 59:18Mike Smith?

  I actually do.

• 59:20Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 59:21Mike Smith?

  Maybe I don't. Maybe this is a question for another time, but so did Nicolas Cage, is he a pretty good, uh, stand in for the role he was playing? Do they look similar?

• 59:30Wes Larson?

  He's, he's playing Captain McVeigh, I believe. We are gonna, so Mike's referencing, referencing a movie called Indianapolis Men of Courage or something like that.

• 59:40Wes Larson?

  Uh, I kinda think we should review that movie for a subscription episode during this series cuz it's not very well reviewed and I think it's pretty hokey, but I kinda really wanna watch it. So, yeah.

• 59:54Jeff Larson?

  Have any of us seen it?

• 59:57Mike Smith?

  I saw the 10 minute long trailer, so.

• 59:59Jeff Larson?

  That's what I was gonna say. The trailer like feels like you watched it.

• 1:00:04Mike Smith?

  It's insane.

• 1:00:04Wes Larson?

  I have watched, I watched this Shark Week special called Ocean of Fear that was quite good, that does a lot of reenactments and.

• 1:00:12Mike Smith?

  I've never watched a trailer where I got like so invested in the trailer itself that a plot twist in the trailer was like as effective as any plot twist I've ever seen anywhere else. I was like, wait a minute, what? We're in a courtroom now? What is going on here?

• 1:00:28Wes Larson?

  It's such a weird phenomenon these days of trailers where you feel like you kinda just got the whole movie, you know?

• 1:00:35Jeff Larson?

  That one is like the number one all time for that.

• 1:00:39Wes Larson?

  I need to watch it. I don't think I've even seen the trailer.

• 1:00:42Jeff Larson?

  It was unbelievable how much the trailer showed.

• 1:00:46Mike Smith?

  It's like watching Return of the King. It just like it ends, you think, but it's like, no, we're just getting started here. We got like three more places to take you before this.

• 1:00:55Wes Larson?

  I hope you like cuddles and beds cuz you're about to get a lot of them.

• 1:00:59Jeff Larson?

  It's just whoever made that trailer was the most indecisive person. And it's just like, can't we keep all of this?

• 1:01:11Wes Larson?

  All right. Well, I think with that, then we will move on to our categories.

• 1:01:17Jeff Larson?

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• 1:01:58Jeff Larson?

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• 1:02:31Wes Larson?

  Okay. For the second half of the episode, we're actually joined by a very special guest, an underwater cinematographer and a shark specialist, uh, someone who's been around sharks quite a bit. Dan Abbott, Dan.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 1:02:43Wes Larson?

  How's it going on the show?

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

• 1:02:45Jeff Larson?

  Thanks for coming on, Dan.

• 1:02:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Dan is currently in a show on Netflix called All The Sharks. Uh, it's a show that all three of us have watched. Really fun show. Uh, we're excited to talk to you both about the Indianapolis and about the show a bit.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Cool. Yeah.

• 1:03:01Wes Larson?

  So the first category is one for all of us. It is your favorite World War II movie, show, or other media.

• 1:03:09Mike Smith?

  Uh, Wes.

• 1:03:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Mike Smith?

  I.

• 1:03:11Wes Larson?

  You want me to go first?

• 1:03:12Mike Smith?

  No, I, um, no, I actually, I'm going to go first just to get, I've had, I've been emotionally compromised today. I'm sorry, Dan. This is like the first time we meet and I'm going to probably start crying because um, I watched the trailer for Grave of Fireflies. Um, I don't know if you're familiar with it, Dan, but um, it's a Studio Ghibli movie about.

• 1:03:36Mike Smith?

  I can't like, I haven't cried in so long. This is like, this is really intense, but just from the trailer, but it's the story about two young Japanese children. Uh, gosh, this is too heavy, but it's brutal. Go watch it once and never watch it again. It's a probably the most powerful statement, like anti-war film I've ever watched because there's just like no relief, no relent from depression and tragedy. So, uh, yeah, let's, let's raise the spirits now before I start crying.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Definitely adding that one to the list.

• 1:04:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, it's, it's well timed because we were talking about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that's what that film revolves around. And it is, I agree with Mike, it's an intense one. So.

• 1:04:19Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Wes Larson?

  Yeah. All right. Well. Answer. Hey. I gotta go with just Saving Private Ryan. I know it's kind of a basic answer, but I that was kind of the first movie where I think I realized like, oh, war is is really, really bad. Like, this isn't fun for these guys. There's not like a ton of like valor and like, it's just kind of dirty and bad and awful. So it really opened my eyes to that reality. So I gotta pick that.

• 1:04:50Jeff Larson?

  First R rated movie I was ever allowed to watch.

• 1:04:53Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Mike Smith?

  Oh, really?

• 1:04:56Mike Smith?

  Nice.

• 1:04:57Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I'll go. I'll go Band of Brothers, the TV show.

• 1:05:01Wes Larson?

  It's a great.

• 1:05:01Jeff Larson?

  Really well done.

• 1:05:02Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Dan, what do you think?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I think mine was mine was probably gonna be Saving Private Ryan as well, just for its iconic first intro sequence. But I know it's cheating because it's the wrong world war, but the shout out to 1917, just because of the technique that it's filmed in and like the continuous shot. I've never seen that in a war movie. And that must have been an absolute like, yeah, so difficult to pull that off.

• 1:05:26Wes Larson?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:05:27Mike Smith?

  You don't.

• 1:05:28Jeff Larson?

  Actually.

• 1:05:29Mike Smith?

  You don't often get a movie that's kind of marketed on a gimmick like the one shot kind of thing, but it lives up. It like kind of surpasses even the hype around the gimmick itself. Like, it's just a really solid movie, even without the one shot thing.

• 1:05:44Jeff Larson?

  Well, twenty minutes in, I was like, how did they do this?

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I literally was texting my. I was literally texting my dad going, you're not gonna believe this. They're still the same shot.

• 1:05:55Wes Larson?

  That's insane.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  But the detail that that involves, like, they had to wait for exactly the same weather for each time they were shooting. Like, if it got too sunny, they had to stop and wait for the clouds to come back. Like, it's incredible.

• 1:06:07Wes Larson?

  That's crazy. Yeah.

• 1:06:09Jeff Larson?

  All right. I'm gonna switch mine. I forgot that I always forget this is a World War Two movie, but Glorious Bastards is mine.

• 1:06:16Wes Larson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  So good.

• 1:06:18Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  So good.

• 1:06:19Mike Smith?

  Well, Dan opened the door. We don't have to stick with World War Two, it turns out.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Yes. Sorry.

• 1:06:26Mike Smith?

  I'm gonna go with that.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  I went rogue.

• 1:06:28Mike Smith?

  Right.

• 1:06:28Jeff Larson?

  Braveheart.

• 1:06:29Mike Smith?

  Braveheart.

• 1:06:32Mike Smith?

  Lord of the Rings, that last fight.

• 1:06:36Wes Larson?

  All right. The next category, because the USS Indianapolis story was made famous because of Quint's monologue in Jaws. I wanted to ask you guys what you think the best monologue ever was, or the best ever monologue in a movie.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Can I jump in straight away with Deep Blue Sea?

• 1:06:53Wes Larson?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Deep Blue Sea, Samuel L. Jackson, just before, I won't even say it in case people haven't seen it.

• 1:07:00Wes Larson?

  Yeah, you can say it right here.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  That is one of the best little monologues because you know what's coming.

• 1:07:07Mike Smith?

  So, our, we have a, our community, we did a movie watch along on our Discord server. A small plug for them, but they just watched that movie and a lot of them, for them, it was their first time seeing it.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Oh, brilliant.

• 1:07:19Mike Smith?

  And when that moment happened, I got like thirty messages in my inbox, like, what the hell is going on? Like, what, is this really how this is happening? It's so funny to me that like, that movie lives on, but still hasn't quite been spoiled in that way. So, it's really exciting to see that.

• 1:07:36Wes Larson?

  I feel like most movies, when someone's about to die like that, it like cuts out, kind of like the camera pans back. So you kind of are like, oh shit, something's about to happen. And in that movie, they do a really good job just like maintaining the same frame. So you, it's pretty shocking when the shark grabs him. Uh, I picked the Christmas monologue from Gremlins. So Phoebe Cates, where she suddenly goes into this long talk about how her dad got stuck in the chimney. And that's how she learned and like died and started smelling terrible. That's how she learned that there was no Santa Claus.

• 1:08:13Mike Smith?

  Forgot about that.

• 1:08:15Wes Larson?

  Oh, man, that monologue, if I'm ever even close to that and that movie's on, I wait to hear that part because it's so good.

• 1:08:23Mike Smith?

  Yeah, it's funny. What's yours, Jeff?

• 1:08:25Jeff Larson?

  I mean, I kinda, I thought this interview was later, so I still had prepped all my answers.

• 1:08:32Mike Smith?

  Okay, I'll go.

• 1:08:33Jeff Larson?

  No, I'll do, I'll do just like, it's not a fun answer, I don't think, but it's like a sincere one. The closing monologue in A River Runs Through It, where he's just like, talking about how he's like, rivers haunt his life, like it's, but, and just like how he's drawn to water, it really connected with me.

• 1:08:56Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Wes Larson?

  What's yours, Mike?

• 1:08:59Mike Smith?

  Thanks for being sincere for once. Dude, I actually might. So at the end of Blade Runner, uh, Roy Batty's monologue, famous forty-two, uh, forty-two word Tears in the Rain, the attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. I've always wondered what sea beams glittering near the Tannhauser Gate. I wonder what that looks like, but at the same time, I don't ever want to see it because like, nothing can compare to the imagery that conjures in my brain.

• 1:09:24Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Mike Smith?

  But like, it's such an amazing moment. It's such a short monologue and then he releases the dove. He's got the spike through the hand. It's just like a beautiful moment. I know that movie doesn't do it for everyone, but I, I absolutely love it.

• 1:09:37Wes Larson?

  Great. Well, since we have, you know, someone that knows sharks much better than any of the three of us on the show, I do want to ask Dan a couple of questions.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  That remains to be seen.

• 1:09:48Wes Larson?

  I want to make sure we ask a couple of questions in between some of these categories. And, and one I had for you, Dan, was just a little bit about, I want to hear a little bit more about what types of sharks you think might have shown up once these men were floating in the Philippine Sea. And kind of what makes those specific species of sharks special?

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the one that you definitely will have been talking about is the Oceanic Whitetip. And I think the reason that one gets the most publicity around this incident is because it's one of the most well-known pelagic sharks. And pelagic sharks are the ones that are ocean wanderers, always traveling, always moving. So Oceanic Whitetips for sure, but, uh, definitely there would have been things like tiger sharks, possibly oceanic black tips, bull sharks, all the ones that spend their lives just completely out in the deep blue. And because they're the ones that are constantly on the lookout for food. There were probably blue sharks. And so, yeah, all the, the ones that we would class as pelagic species.

• 1:10:48Wes Larson?

  Okay, great. And as far as their behavior in a situation like this, uh, what would you expect to see? Especially from some of these larger species like the oceanic white tip or a tiger shark. What are you expecting when they're around such a, you know, an intriguing source of potential food like this?

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  I've worked with a lot of different pelagic species. In fact, tomorrow I'm guiding a blue shark snorkeling trip off the coast of the UK. So, and that's a pelagic species as well. And the thing to remember and to know about them, that I often think it's helpful to think of it in their shoes, so as it were. So if you're an animal that relies on finding food in the deep vast ocean, you have to inspect and check out everything. Everything could be a possible food feeding opportunity. Not always, but it's worth going and having a look. So every pelagic predator is on the, is traveling through the vastness of the ocean, just looking for those possible feeding opportunities.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Which is why when we do things like snorkeling with blue sharks, for example, just that little bit of scent that's in the water that we put out is enough for them to come and investigate it because it could be a feeding opportunity. So when you have something like a shipwreck or a situation where there's lots of smells going into the water, probably lots of splashing from people that are freaking out from suddenly being in the water. All these sorts of things are what sharks are looking for that could be a potential feeding opportunity. Now, the one, the thing that I will say about the oceanic white tip that is perhaps a little bit different to things like blue's oceanic black tips and species like that, is they're a very bold species. Bull sharks get that reputation, but oceanic white tips are very similar in that they

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  won't really hesitate to go and have a look. And we see that a lot with some videos, especially in places like Egypt where there's divers in the water and the oceanic white tip is just coming right at them. And that's because they don't really have that timid nature. They're a very bold species and that makes sense as to why they would be going and investigating people that might be in the water.

• 1:12:55Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Jeff would be the oceanic white tip of the three of us then.

• 1:12:59Mike Smith?

  He's bold.

• 1:13:01Wes Larson?

  Just constantly sniffing people. And I'll eat anything.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Every feeding opportunity matters.

• 1:13:08Mike Smith?

  You'd get, you'd get like one point in the all the sharks competition because you're just always everywhere. You're like not a rare sighting. I'd be a hundred point shark, I think.

• 1:13:18Wes Larson?

  That's true. Yeah, they have to go to your basement to find you.

• 1:13:24Wes Larson?

  All right. Um, well, that's really good to know. Yeah, I think I I have some friends that that work in Moraya or these places where they're out in, you know, looking for humpback whales or out in the open ocean, looking for different pelagic animals. And I know for from them, like when an oceanic whitetip shows up, it's kind of like everyone needs to pay attention to this shark and keep eyes on it, just because of what you just explained, that they are super inquisitive and not that timid. And so it can, it's not that they're necessarily, you know, like they're not bloodthirsty predators. It's that they are more likely to come into close contact. And that's when you do kind of have these more tricky situations.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  Totally. And it's worth, it's worth noting that people go and snorkel and dive with them every day. Uh, it's not a species that you have to quickly get out the water from. It's just one, as you say, to be more alert, keep your eyes on it. In the same way that if you were diving with bull sharks, a tiger shark, uh, something like that. It's just the one that's perhaps going to be a little bit more pushy and a bit more bold. Personally, I love those species because it means you have to be really sharp and on your game.

• 1:14:34Wes Larson?

  But definitely not the one you want to be around if you're floating around 900 other people in blood and vomit and human waste. It's, that's kind of a scary shark to have. You'd want to be by whale sharks. Nurse sharks, whale sharks.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  That'd be a lovely experience.

• 1:14:51Wes Larson?

  All right. So.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  The thing, the thing just to add, I think with with the oceanic whitetip especially, um, especially as we're kind of looking back in time a little bit with how many sharks there might have been around and things like that, is just how fast this particular species has has disappeared. And there's really interesting visual representation on that. Um, because there's a movie that Ronan Valerie Taylor did in the early seventies called Blue Water White Death, which is like the original shark documentary, the first time people went swimming with these animals without a cage. And they're surrounded in South Africa by oceanic whitetips. Now, you couldn't see an oceanic whitetip in South Africa. Like, it's literally in that period of time when they, when they've disappeared from that area. In fact, in some parts of the world, it's it's 98%

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  decline from the species, which is quite incredible.

• 1:15:39Wes Larson?

  Yeah. And I guess, you know, with the finning industry, this is an, an animal that has large fins. So I'm sure it's targeted by some of those, those boats. And then also. These pelagic sharks, I think, are especially susceptible to some of the fishing techniques that they're using to catch sharks. So that makes that makes a lot of sense. As far as behavior goes, I know you wanted to mention that just contact with humans throughout their their life can also be a factor in these sort of things.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, completely. And I've spent lots and lots of time with an oceanic blacktip species in South Africa. And they're kind of like blacktip sharks that you find on the reef, but slightly different in that they're the ones that are traveling in the ocean. They're kind of similar, I guess, to oceanic whitetips in that regard. And there's places in South Africa where you can dive with them pretty regularly. And they're really used to divers. An amazing dive site called Alawol Shoal, which I've spent a lot of time time diving there. And they're really used to divers. So they know what the deal is. They know what the baited situation is like. They know the divers are just there to just kind of swim around and they don't really, they don't really pay any attention to them. And then,

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  interestingly, I was on a film shoot filming a shipwreck in Dubai in April. And it took a long time for us to see our first shark, even though we knew they were there because we had seen them on the drone. And it's because they had never seen people. It's not normal for divers to go out that far. We were quite far offshore. And so they were behaving in a completely different way. Exactly the same species, but not coming close to us. And then every now and again, when you'd be doing your three meter, your five meter safety stop, you would turn around and there'd be one like right behind you. And it's just their way of like, like we said before, that way of, I'm not sure what you are, but I

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  need to go and check it out just in case it's worth it. And again, that's the pelagic behavior of this kind of species of shark.

• 1:17:39Wes Larson?

  Cool.

• 1:17:39Jeff Larson?

  It is impressive with sharks when you're diving. Because like the ocean's just so open and you have like such a like 360 degree view. And then they can still like sneak up behind you.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:17:53Jeff Larson?

  So like easily. And it's just like, how are you just like right next to me without me noticing?

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  Some species are really good at it.

• 1:18:02Mike Smith?

  That's actually something we've brought up a couple of times and maybe I just haven't been listening very carefully. Sorry, Wes. But the fact that these sharks, they have such an extraordinary sense of smell or just detection of things that are also in the water. Do you have data that shows like, I know for the USS Indianapolis, it's a little uh exceptional circumstances, but like, how far are you expecting these sharks to be able to sense? And then approach these people that are in the water. Is it miles or?

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Probably, yeah. Um, it it depends on what senses they're going to be using. I mean, the, I was having this conversation with someone yesterday. We talk a lot about the whole one drop of blood in an Olympic sized swimming pool kind of stats. But that gets, um, it's a little bit more complicated than that because it depends on what blood it is. Sharks aren't tuned in to focus on human blood, for example. In fact, they they couldn't care less about our blood.

• 1:18:56Mike Smith?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  I've done tests with people who are deliberately making themselves bleed underwater and they couldn't care less about this person. But what I will say is, I think, um, we often overlook the sound, like their hearing is incredible. And they're probably hearing the sounds of splashing, they're picking up on the vibrations in the water as well. But I would say the sound is usually the thing that they'll pick up on from great distances. When you've been in the water, um, anyone that's been scuba diving, you'll know that some, how far sound travels underwater. Like you'd be hearing whales a mile away type thing, several miles away. Um, so they will be picking up a lot on the, on the sound and the vibrations and the splashing.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Um, and then, yeah, just the, they'll be smelling it. Like, it's, it's not like they're completely oblivious to it. They'll be smelling it, but they won't be registering, oh, look, there's a feeding opportunity. It'll be, oh, I'm not really sure what that is. Maybe it's worth going and having a look.

• 1:19:54Mike Smith?

  Yeah, maybe there aren't enough data points on this either to give a clear answer, but would an explosion of a torpedo on a ship, would that attract sharks or would that be kind of a frightening sensation to them?

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Uh, that's a good question. Um, there's probably only one way to test that, Mike.

• 1:20:09Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it probably does a bit of both. Anything in the immediate area might get a little bit, um, spooked and, and try and get away. But yeah, that shockwave is gonna travel quite far and they'll definitely be picking up on that.

• 1:20:25Jeff Larson?

  And this story seemed to eventually have brought some sharks in.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. The one test we can rely on. Yeah.

• 1:20:32Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Wes Larson?

  We mentioned that these big cruisers like this, they're dumping lots of food, they're dumping human waste. So they probably just kind of have a train of sharks behind them anyway, that are somewhat interested in what they might be. And then, yeah, I'm sure kind of what you said, Dan, like these really loud noises probably scared off some of those immediate vicinity sharks, but the ones further away might've been like, oh, what was that sound? Was that a whale that just died? Was that, you know, who knows? So, yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Mike Smith?

  It's not fun. I don't mean to laugh. That's not.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Following, following boats is something we know oceanic whitetips will do. Um, there is a study, I, I think there was an oceanic whitetip that was following a fishing trawler for like 48 hours, something crazy like that. Um, so if they think there's an opportunity there, they will stick it out.

• 1:21:21Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Wes Larson?

  Yeah. And then I think one other thing that I kind of just wanted to clarify that, that you mentioned is as these men are floating in the water, I think what we're gonna see in episode two, a bit more of what I know we're gonna see is that the sharks at the beginning are just kind of curious, but the more time you spend in that water, the more time you're sitting there, the more comfortable those sharks are gonna be getting closer and closer. And then after a while, they might start doing these exploratory bites. And then they realize, okay, this is actually something that I can eat. And that's when things get pretty, pretty, uh, terrifying for these men.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And of course, a lot of them are gonna be injured already because of the torpedo and the boat. And, um, a lot of them are gonna be in a pretty bad way. So it's, it's, it's worth going and having a look for these animals. Yeah.

• 1:22:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Well, Jeff and Mike, I wanted to ask you guys, what would you do? What would Jeff and Mike do? You've just been torpedoed, you jumped off this boat and you're in the water. What are you doing?

• 1:22:21Jeff Larson?

  I mean, you can't let him sneak up behind you.

• 1:22:25Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:22:26Jeff Larson?

  So I'll be spinning.

• 1:22:27Wes Larson?

  You're spinning back and forth the whole time.

• 1:22:30Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. Like WWE Sting, whenever he sneaks up behind someone, like they're done.

• 1:22:39Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Jeff Larson?

  So you just watch him.

• 1:22:42Wes Larson?

  That's all you're focused on. Splashing around a lot, just going back and forth.

• 1:22:48Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Wes Larson?

  Great tactic. Mike?

• 1:22:50Mike Smith?

  I'm doing the Titanic move where I hog a whole flotation device to myself and no one else is allowed to get on.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 1:22:57Mike Smith?

  Stay out of the water.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would work.

• 1:22:59Mike Smith?

  See?

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:23:01Mike Smith?

  Good move.

• 1:23:03Wes Larson?

  Dan, so now I want to ask you, you know, God forbid you find yourself adrift in tropical water. You know, there's all this stuff in the water with you. What, what is like the best case or kind of what's the best thing a person can do to avoid getting bit in this kind of?

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's a very extreme scenario, of course, but typically when we're talking about shark bite prevention, the things I would normally say to people is usually sharks are ambush predators. So if they think they've been seen, typically they won't, won't really, uh, won't do too much. So yeah, Jeff, you're, you're good.

• 1:23:41Jeff Larson?

  Like Sting.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  And also when you're, if you're being squared up to by a shark, the thing that they're going to be looking for is, is this an opportunity that I can take full advantage of and not get damaged myself? Like not get injured myself. Like there's a reason great white sharks breach on seals and not just swim up to them slowly. It's because seals fight back and they can't risk any injury to themselves. So if you are being squared up to by a shark, the, the one thing you want to try and do is convince it that you are not its food. And it's quite, it's quite a simple kind of saying that, but what most of the time a shark's food does is it swims away. So if you don't do that, then it has to rethink a little bit about what you are. In fact, I know some of my close friends who swim with things like white sharks, tigers.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Uh, if they want to keep the shark around, they'll swim towards it. And the shark actually kind of has to rethink, oh, this is definitely not what I thought it was. So I'm now gonna have to reprocess my relationship with whatever this animal is. Maybe they'll just swim away and kind of lose interest. And so, yeah.

• 1:24:46Jeff Larson?

  Well, that's true with like land predators a lot of the time, you know? Like it just throws, like they have to kind of be like, wait a second, you're supposed to be trying to get away from me.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:24:59Mike Smith?

  We start losing self-esteem and kind of mentally trying for them.

• 1:25:04Jeff Larson?

  Talk to someone.

• 1:25:05Mike Smith?

  Yeah, therapy.

• 1:25:07Wes Larson?

  And I know we've talked about this a bit with our other sharks and I, I wanna take it the advantage of having someone that knows so much about them on the show. But one thing that I've told people in the past is if you can get anything between you and the shark. So if you have anything along that you can kind of have in between you and the shark, you don't necessarily wanna like poke it with it and antagonize it. But just having that kind of separation built in in between you and the animal is also something that can be pretty effective.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, for scuba divers, there's a common one, which is they say, give it the tank. So if something's coming up at you quite quickly, you can spin around and then it's gonna hit the tank. And yeah, there you go, Jeff, you're all over it. Uh, I typically, typically have a large camera in my hands, so that's my barrier, uh, which

• 1:25:55Jeff Larson?

  Get a good shot.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  A little bit easier, get a good shot, hopefully. Um, but yeah, that's also true, because they'll do a lot of, um, especially like the logic species, the faster ones, like we're talking about the white tips, the black tips. They all often dummy charge, like they will come at you at a pace just to see again how you react. If you freak out and start splashing around, swim backwards, then they, they might be much more interested in. But if you hold your ground, even start swimming towards them, it's amazing how quickly they'll cancel their dummy charge.

• 1:26:24Mike Smith?

  Like Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport when he cuts his hat off and doesn't even flinch. And he's like, oh, this guy.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  Exactly the same as that.

• 1:26:32Mike Smith?

  He's got, he's got potential.

• 1:26:34Wes Larson?

  We were all thinking it.

• 1:26:35Mike Smith?

  Yeah. One thing we talk a lot about on our show, like, we try not to sensationalize or vilify these sharks. Shark encounters and attacks that end fatally are exceedingly rare. But have you, have you ever had a close encounter yourself or a brush with a shark that ever was even close to like you being concerned?

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  I've never had a moment with a shark where I felt like this is going south, but I've definitely been in situations, conditions, environments where it's been really sketchy, but that's usually not really the shark's problem. Um, so no, I, I have a few friends who are scientists that have been bitten, um, like here and there, but always doing their scientific research, not because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time type thing. Um, yeah, I've been bumped hundreds of times by sharks in low visibility from all sorts of directions. Um, but I've never felt, uh, that there's been any, any risk in that, in that way.

• 1:27:31Mike Smith?

  Is it just a question of being in the water at the wrong time, like during, uh, maybe a feeding frenzy? Or some kind of compromising situation?

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:27:42Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  I think, I mean, I, so the one I've, the species I've worked the most with is, is the great white. That was my first shark I worked with in South Africa. And you hear a lot of, a lot of things going on around that area over the last, uh, over the years. Um, the way I like to put it is there's not really such thing as a dangerous shark, just dangerous situations. And that's usually your fault. So people do, well, before they closed Guadalupe down, people did swim with great white sharks without a cage in beautiful, clear water where the shark can see you a mile off and see exactly what you are, or more specifically what you're not, which is you're not a seal. And then the shark's behavior towards you is going to be very different. Whereas if you take the same species in South Africa, where you're swimming around a seal colony at dawn,

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  where the water is murky, the light is low and you're making lots of splashing on the surface, not on the same eye line, then that's a much more dangerous situation. And that's because that's the context in which they hunt. So, yeah, it, there's, there's definitely a lot of behaviors that you can look at with, uh, with a lot of big predatory sharks that you can kind of identify why it might be a dangerous situation or not.

• 1:28:47Mike Smith?

  Interesting. Great.

• 1:28:49Wes Larson?

  So now I, you know, we're going to talk a lot more about Indianapolis next episode and the third episode, but I did want to get into, Mike, did you have something else before we?

• 1:28:58Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:28:58Jeff Larson?

  I had something on Mike's, what would you do?

• 1:29:02Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:29:02Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:29:03Jeff Larson?

  With like the Titanic. So you said there's a few life rafts, right Wes?

• 1:29:08Wes Larson?

  Yes, they do have some life rafts, but I'm going to explain exactly what they look like. They're not what you're picturing, probably.

• 1:29:14Jeff Larson?

  Well, I'm just wondering, and Titanic is like women and children first, but in World War II, it's primarily men on that boat, right?

• 1:29:22Wes Larson?

  Yeah, just men. Yep.

• 1:29:23Jeff Larson?

  So then, did any of them, were any of them allowed on the life rafts?

• 1:29:29Wes Larson?

  No, they all were holding it. You mean they were all just waiting for women to board? In case a woman showed up, they, they left them open. Yeah.

• 1:29:37Mike Smith?

  I do the Billy Zane thing and grab like one of the small soldiers and be like, I have a child.

• 1:29:47Wes Larson?

  Everyone's just like, where'd that kid come from?

• 1:29:49Jeff Larson?

  Cause I was like, that's why, that's where my thought started was like, you gotta grab a kid to get on the lifeboat, but I'm like, they can't do that.

• 1:29:57Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Jeff Larson?

  But then I was like, oh, but they don't even have to wait for like other people to get on first.

• 1:30:03Mike Smith?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:30:04Wes Larson?

  It was a free for all. All right. We'll get into that though.

• 1:30:07Mike Smith?

  No, that's a good, good line of thought.

• 1:30:09Wes Larson?

  There was kind of a hierarchy with these rafts, but um, yeah, anyway, what I was saying is, we've talked, we're going to talk a lot about Indianapolis, but um, I did want to take advantage of having you on the show, Dan, and talk a little bit about some of your more recent work, specifically all the sharks, uh, which I just want to say really quickly, I really enjoyed because um, I think often with these shark programs, we see, you know, great whites, tigers, kind of, you know, the usual customers with the typical kind of storyline. And something I really liked about all the sharks was this focus on finding lesser known shark species and ray species.

• 1:30:45Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:30:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah. And it, it really kind of uh, accentuates just the variety of species within this order of, of fish. And yeah, so I, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very educational. I thought it painted sharks in a really good light. It shows people just out swimming with tons of tiger sharks that are, you know, relatively unconcerned because, because they again know their behavior and know how to, you know, act around them. So my first question for you.

• 1:31:14Mike Smith?

  Was what are your top three species of shark that you haven't seen that you really want to see? So in if we were doing a hypothetical, all the shark right now, all the sharks, these would be your highest value sharks in your life.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  Interesting. Um, the one I've not managed to see yet that I really, really want to is a Mako.

• 1:31:36Mike Smith?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  I've done a few dives where where they do sometimes turn up and they haven't. Um, so that would definitely be one. Um, and then I think I just go rogue and say something like a six gill shark, which is like a deep sea. Species that you find in a lot of places. Um, I actually was on a project. Uh, I just came back yesterday in the Mediterranean where they're filming six gills on deep sea brubs. Which are cameras that you put down on the seafloor and kind of just wait and see what happens. And, uh, last year was the first time they've ever filmed one alive in the in that part of the Mediterranean, which was really cool to see.

• 1:32:14Mike Smith?

  How many points do you think it'd be worth?

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man, it'll be off the scale.

• 1:32:19Mike Smith?

  So just for anyone wondering, if you don't know, uh, all the sharks, it's kind of like Pokemon Snap, where you go and try to take pictures of sharks.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Good way of describing it.

• 1:32:28Mike Smith?

  A certain amount of points for how rare a shark is in those particular waters. So I it's genius to me. I thought it was such like a such a good conceit for a show.

• 1:32:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's from the very beginning, like when when we were first getting involved in the the pre-production stuff. The thing they wanted to avoid was the sensationalism around seeing sharks, which I think they have held true to really, really well. And that was a really important. Aspect of me being involved with it in it as well. And now you've got kind of audiences getting excited about seeing this. Like tiny little cat shark in South Africa that no one's ever gonna make a documentary about. Cause they're not that interesting, except for now, because they're worth points.

• 1:33:06Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  So the the concept is a is a clever one.

• 1:33:10Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  Um, and yeah, and I we saw some species that we probably weren't expecting to. We we missed out on seeing species that we were perhaps expecting to see in certain places as well. I'm trying like really hard not to give anything away for anyone that hasn't seen it yet. Yes. There's obviously a lot going on in the trailers and things.

• 1:33:27Jeff Larson?

  Wait, I have a question for the about the show. I don't mean to derail the question, but.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  No, go for it.

• 1:33:33Jeff Larson?

  So how do you guys, how's the audio work when you're like scuba diving?

• 1:33:38Wes Larson?

  Did they explain that? Like how?

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're wearing full face masks.

• 1:33:42Wes Larson?

  So you're able to talk to each other?

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  We can talk to each other, yeah. And Sarah, my dive buddy, she's, she likes to talk slightly more than I do. So I would say I was listening more underwater.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  But yeah, so you do have the ability to communicate and kind of, you still have to work within the parameters of scuba diving. You still have to be close to each other and kind of do all those kind of the things that you normally do when you're scuba diving. But you do have the chance to talk to each other. And the boat can hear you as well, and they can talk to you if they want to, but usually they just leave us to it.

• 1:34:19Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, but typically we'd try and formulate our plan before we were getting in the water. They basically left all of that up to each team. So we have our own boat, we have our own skipper, and they basically say, here's the area that we're going to be working in. You have two days. See you, see you later. Like, and it's completely up to us how long we spend in each place, how many times we dive there. And we had to do our research, like what species are we likely to find here? And like, what, what depths are we looking at and that, all that kind of stuff? So, yeah, it was all on us to try and find some of these species.

• 1:34:54Wes Larson?

  That's great. So you've said short fin Mako or Mako shark?

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mako.

• 1:34:59Wes Larson?

  Six gill.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Six gill. It would be amazing to see a Greenland shark.

• 1:35:04Wes Larson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  Just like otherworldly.

• 1:35:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's a million point shark there too.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  But actually, another one that's just come to mind, I have seen them, so I guess it doesn't count. But only very briefly in Scotland is a basking shark, but more specifically in Ireland at the end of summer. It's only recently been kind of documented properly using drones. Is you get hundreds of basking sharks all spiraling in this incredible courtship behavior. And which it seems to be Ireland is like the, the best place in the world all of a sudden. So that, which is really cool.

• 1:35:39Wes Larson?

  Amazing. Mike and Jeff, I want to ask you guys the same question. Your top three kind of high value sharks.

• 1:35:45Mike Smith?

  I want to get in that, that courting circle too, maybe join the fun. Greenland was the first shark that came to mind for me. We did see great whites. If there is some way, we were in a cage. We went cage diving in Australia. Maybe I'm cheating again, but if we could be outside of a cage and see them, I think that takes that experience to another level even. So Greenland great white and I like those threshers. You got, I don't want to spoil anything again, but thresher sharks for sure is my number three.

• 1:36:16Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I'd probably tiger oceanic white tip. I especially like those two in like the context of the show where, and as Dan was telling us earlier, like they, they have a lot of confidence and they'll like get up to you. So I like the idea of seeing like a big shark up close. You know, I, I haven't seen a lot of sharks. So I'll just do basics. I'll go bull shark for my third.

• 1:36:40Wes Larson?

  All right. Yeah. I think for me, I've yet to see a tiger shark in the water. So I'd love to see a tiger, oceanic white tip, and then one that Dan works with quite a bit, uh, blue shark. I really want to see a blue shark. I just think, I think I always just assumed they were named blue shark just out of like convenience, but then I've seen some photos where I'm like, wow, this is a really blue.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're really blue.

• 1:37:02Wes Larson?

  Yeah, like electric blue.

• 1:37:04Mike Smith?

  I'm looking at a picture right now. That's incredible.

• 1:37:06Wes Larson?

  They're gorgeous.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  It's fast become, I think probably my second favorite species after the great white because of how much time I'm spending with them and, and literally taking people who have never seen sharks before in the water with them. And they're probably like, I think they're the coolest shark. If you've never seen a shark, they're probably the coolest one to see because they're so curious. They're so inquisitive. They look beautiful. Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a phenomenal species.

• 1:37:31Wes Larson?

  Cool. Do you have a favorite moment from the show from all the sharks? Like a moment that really stood out for you?

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Um, it was really special being back in South Africa because that's where I used to live, where I worked with the great whites for so long. So just being able to be back and see some of these small species again was really amazing. But I would say probably seeing the epilep sharks in Australia on in Heron Island. And I I've known of this species like since I was a kid. I never thought I would see one in real life until that moment. And we saw eight in one night.

• 1:38:06Mike Smith?

  Amazing.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  They're just phenomenal. Like they they're not much to look at when you just kind of see them at first glance. They're not very big. And then when you start seeing them walking.

• 1:38:15Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's it's a species that can literally crawl out of rock pools, over the coral reef and into another rock pool at low tide. It's phenomenal.

• 1:38:27Jeff Larson?

  How? Because you obviously have a big passion for diving. So like, how much did the competition aspect of the show start to like, what was the balance of like wanting to get points or just like wanting to see cool sharks?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  It was so hard. It was so hard. Yeah, I mean, I won't give away too much about like locations that we're in and stuff, but the idea of leaving a location that I've dreamt about as a kid to go somewhere else because there might be more points is ludicrous to me.

• 1:39:00Jeff Larson?

  I like that you kept that mind frame.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, but what I will say is Sarah was really good at that. Like she almost completely disconnected from the emotion of being in these amazing places. And it was like, no, no, no, we need to get the points, even if it's just this tiny little.

• 1:39:15Jeff Larson?

  Even in the first episode, I saw that with you guys where you were like, no, I want to go out deep. And she's like, I don't think.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that happened a lot.

• 1:39:24Jeff Larson?

  Wes would only care about the points. He'd be like, he'd be opening the air on other people's boats so they couldn't go down.

• 1:39:31Mike Smith?

  Sabotaging. Taking pictures of the same shark like eight times.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  But yeah, you literally do see that in a few episodes, especially the ones towards the the back end of the series where Sarah is kind of like trying to convince me to leave this incredibly magical place, just because there might be more points available somewhere else. Yeah. And I'm I like, it's all quick in the edit, of course, but that process for me was sometimes a few hours. It's like, I need to think about this.

• 1:39:57Mike Smith?

  Yeah, there was a moment where someone got a picture. They thought they saw a shark and it ended up being a turtle and they were really disappointed. And I was like, well, I mean, it's still pretty cool. I'd still like to take a pick.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's the crazy thing is suddenly these sharks aren't just, wow, you're seeing a shark. Now they've got points attached to them. So you're literally pushing turtles out of the way, left and right, because they're not worth anything to you. And, and other species as well, like we saw whales in most of the places that we went to. And normally that's a wow, that's an incredible thing. Now, no, they're not worth a point. Keep moving.

• 1:40:33Wes Larson?

  That's great. Yeah. So I also just wanted to ask you kind of, you know, obviously after being involved with this kind of show, I'm sure as someone who loves sharks at the level that you do, you have to be kind of picky about what types of productions you want to be involved with, because you don't want to be part of one that's going to paint them in a negative light. So I want you to kind of explain what you like so much about all the sharks, like what, what you see is the main benefit of a show like this.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's, if they've taken the drama away from the sharks and put it on the competition. So what I really like is there is still drama, but it's nothing to do with the fact that you're in the water with a shark. And as we've already mentioned, some of these species, like we saw bulls, we saw tigers, we saw some really big sharks. But it was never a moment of this is a really dangerous situation for us. It's a, wow, this is an amazing species. This is how many points it's worth. And now let's talk a little bit more about how this species survives and adapts to the place that it lives in. Yeah, I think we, I mean, we all know Shark Week does what it does and that's, that's kind of what works for them. And most people probably watch Shark Week and know that it's not actually as

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  dramatic, dramatic as they're making out, but you know, you've got to get ratings. So we totally understand that. But I think, yeah, it is really cool to see that there, there is the chance to do shark shows that take away that sensationalist style away from just the fact that you're swimming with sharks and actually make it something really cool, like seeing sharks that we're not used to seeing.

• 1:42:03Wes Larson?

  Cool. Yeah, I think that's what I loved about it. I know Mike and Jeff really liked it too. I think, you know, if they want a

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  What was, what was your favorite species?

• 1:42:12Wes Larson?

  My favorite species from the show, I just like them so much. So the great hammerheads in, in Bimini, I've seen them there and. Um, I know it's like at the right time of year, it's pretty much a guaranteed sighting there, but still they're just such a that huge dorsal fin and I just love them. So the the thresher too. I know I don't want to spoil anything again, but that was pretty cool.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  That thing haunts my dreams.

• 1:42:37Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 1:42:38Mike Smith?

  I love that moment. It's the moment I was like, all right, I'm in.

• 1:42:41Wes Larson?

  Just taunting you.

• 1:42:43Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  But that's another that's another amazing demonstration of knowing your species and knowing your location, because where that happened, and I won't explain completely what it is, is so close to the island, and yet that depth is is where you're seeing thrashers. So just knowing that that's the likely place that thrashers are going to be because of the kind of depths that they swim at is like, yeah, is all again, really important part of it.

• 1:43:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Well, tell the producers that there should be a tooth and claw team for season two.

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  We'll put that forward.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I mean, this concept could work with all kinds of things, like imagine all the bears.

• 1:43:22Wes Larson?

  Yeah. There you go. There's a couple that would be very high points, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's that is a good concept. Yeah, not koalas.

• 1:43:34Wes Larson?

  All right. Well, the final question I had for you, and I I know you're very passionate about sharks, about shark conservation. I just kind of wanted to ask you, um, what would you want tooth and claw listeners to know about sharks in general? If you could give them one message about sharks, what would it be?

• 1:43:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, the main things you guys actually you cover really, really well in your uh, in your episodes is that these aren't animals that we need to be particularly worried about when you're swimming around in the water. Um, what is amazing to me now that everyone has drones is we see all the times that sharks are literally swimming underneath surfers, people swimming and do absolutely nothing. Like they are around us far more than we think they are. Especially white sharks.

• 1:44:16Wes Larson?

  Especially white sharks, yeah.

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  Um, and they really couldn't care less. Um, sharks are really not interested in us. And then the important part, of course, to know is that they really need our help. White sharks are very frequently missing in South Africa. Uh, we talked about. Also, the oceanic whitetips down by ninety eight percent in certain parts of the world. The blue sharks I'm taking people swimming with tomorrow off the coast of Wales is the most overfished shark on the planet. These animals are are really needing our help. And yeah, that's a that's a big struggle. And that's one I talk to people about most days is how do you actually help a species like that? Just knowing where your food comes from is often one that is a is a good one. But yeah, these for me is the most fascinating animal on the planet.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  And it's one of the most mysterious. It's one of the most misunderstood. And it is absolutely the most beautiful.

• 1:45:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, we elect Jeff president. That's how we help them. Yeah.

• 1:45:11Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:12Wes Larson?

  It's my whole platform.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  You get you get my vote.

• 1:45:16Jeff Larson?

  Sharks.

• 1:45:17Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I I liked what you said about, you know, good seafood choices. I but I just also want to say, I think what you're doing with programs like this or the other educational stuff you're doing is a big step forward too, because I think, you know, when when dolphins are being slaughtered or whales are being slaughtered, people are up in arms because these are animals that they love and feel a connection to. And I think it's taken a while for people to build that same kind of relationship with sharks, but I do think it's happening. And as that happens, I do think we'll see people be much more kind of involved and upset with what's currently going on with sharks. So.

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Wes Larson?

  Kudos to you for for pushing that forward.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:45:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah, all right. Quickly, we're going to give oceanic whitetips our claw rating, being this is our first episode of this series with them. We have done them before, but yeah.

• 1:46:10Jeff Larson?

  Dan, how how often do you listen to Tooth and Claw? Are you like pretty regularly?

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  I actually started listening to you guys quite a long time ago.

• 1:46:19Jeff Larson?

  All right, so you know all about our ratings and everything.

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. You guys would send me to sleep in a good way.

• 1:46:29Wes Larson?

  All right, I'll go first. Everyone knows that this is probably expected for me. This is a ten claw animal. One of my favorite shark species, so it's an automatic ten claw for me.

• 1:46:41Mike Smith?

  This is, I'm a little more precious with handing out tens. All sharks are gonna be at least a nine. I think this is a nine claw shark. Absolutely amazing, though. I love sharks. I always will. And yeah, again, nothing personal, all you sharks out there.

• 1:46:56Wes Larson?

  Nine's a good, that's a good.

• 1:46:57Mike Smith?

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 1:46:58Wes Larson?

  Yeah, especially for you.

• 1:47:01Jeff Larson?

  I'm pretty sure we did rate him in the.

• 1:47:03Wes Larson?

  We did.

• 1:47:04Jeff Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:47:04Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05Jeff Larson?

  Mine's, mine's a eight, but it's just because I haven't seen him. And I honestly, like, photos of him are great, but I feel like they're a shark you have to experience to really gain the appreciation for him. Like, not that you can't appreciate him without seeing him, but just like

• 1:47:22Mike Smith?

  Fully.

• 1:47:23Jeff Larson?

  to get him to that ten out of ten.

• 1:47:25Mike Smith?

  Sure.

• 1:47:26Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Understandable. Mine's gonna, mine's clearly gonna be a ten.

• 1:47:31Jeff Larson?

  Right.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  But I do agree with you, Jeff. I do agree with you, because yeah, sometimes you can't really fully appreciate it until it's looking you straight in the face.

• 1:47:38Jeff Larson?

  I have a feeling any shark, it'd be hard to get, Dan, to get below a nine.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 1:47:46Wes Larson?

  What would you rate, what would you rate a nurse shark?

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, maybe, yeah, eight point, eight point nine, maybe.

• 1:47:53Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 1:47:56Wes Larson?

  White tip reef shark, probably around there.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  They, they were one of my favorites, actually. Yeah. Yeah, if I think of one that's less than a nine, I'll let you guys know.

• 1:48:04Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 1:48:05Jeff Larson?

  Perfect.

• 1:48:07Wes Larson?

  Well, thank you, Dan, for, for joining us. This was really fun. And again,

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:48:12Wes Larson?

  if you want to see Dan on Netflix right now, go watch All the Sharks.

• 1:48:16Mike Smith?

  And you do want to see Dan.

• 1:48:17Wes Larson?

  Yeah, you do. Yeah. Star of the show, in my opinion. Thanks again, Dan, and everyone will be back soon with part two of the USS Indianapolis story. It is without a doubt, one of the more harrowing four days I've ever heard of anywhere in history. So it's going to be a pretty crazy story. Buckle up and that'll be coming out next week.

• 1:48:43Mike Smith?

  Thanks, Dan.

• 1:48:43Wes Larson?

  All right. We'll see you guys.

• 1:48:45Mike Smith?

  Love you.

• 1:48:45Wes Larson?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:48:46Mike Smith?

  See ya.