Guess what will what's that mango?
So a few years ago I got to go in this incredible experience to Kenya and we were off the coast. It was in this place called La Mu, and I had heard we could go see dolphins, and of course, you know, I'm a huge animal lover, and even though I'm not a great swimmer, I just had to go. So we go out onto the open water. It's beautiful, but the water just starts getting rougher and rougher, and as we're going you can see the dolphins getting closer.
So I was getting a little excited. But also the water was just getting choppier, and We're on this little boat and my stomach is turning and I'm not usually affected by seasickness, but this was just something else. So I'm trying to figure out how to control it, Like do I puke? Do I look at the horizon? Do I close my eyes? It was really, really miserable.
That does not sound pleasant. So what did you end up doing?
So I tried a little of all of it. Like I closed my eyes, I was trying to look at the horizon, but in the end, the boat captain just pushed me into the water, and he said the only way to get over it is to get into the water,
and he was absolutely right, Like it was crazy. Luckily the water was so warm, and then, you know, I obviously had this life jacket on, but I'm in the middle of a school of dolphins all of a sudden, and I peer down and they're just swimming and playing, and it's this incredible experience but also totally terrifying because
I don't swim well. But this week I was reading this thing on Jaques Cousto and his son was saying that even though he grew up on the calypso you know, with Jaques Custo going on these adventures, you still get seasick a little. And he said the only way you can get over it is to get into the sea like that, and so I felt a little bit calm by that, and also felt better about the sea captain just pushing me in. But yeah, you know, I was curious after reading that. I wanted to know more about
Jaques Cousto's life. You know, how did he get into exploring, did he really work as a spy, and why did he and his crew always wear those red hats? So grab your Snorkels. We're about to dive in.
Hey their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Hot Ticketter and on the other side of the soundproof glass sporting this red knit hat, of course, in honor of the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. That's our friends and producer Tristan McNeil. And I feel like he finally got one spot on this time.
He did, But I actually think it might be a tribute to Steve Suzu from a life aquatic, like just judging from all those Bill Murray posters behind Tristan. But you know, since they both were hats like that, why don't we just call it a dual tribute, and that why neither of them will be offended.
You know, I actually read that in the original note. It's from the movie. Bill Murray's character was supposed to be named Steve Custo, and that obviously changed as the script evolved, but it still shows how big of an influenced Jacques was on the movie.
Yeah, and I mean not to nerd out on Wes Anderson, who does happen to have my birthday. But there's a reference to Jackustou in Rushmore, where like Max tries to build out aquarium and he gets this book from Jackusteau. So obviously he's been a hero of his for some time.
Yeah, I'm curious, just I haven't checked on your movie rankings recently, as Rushmore still in your top five or so.
Yeah, it's still one of my favorite movies.
That's awesome. Well, after looking into Cousteau's life this past week, it's easy to see why he would be, you know, a hero to him. And you know, his inventions basically revolutionized undersea exploration in the mid twentieth century. Plus you consider the work he did in film and TV that sparked a public interest in ocean research, and it's really been difficult to match that in the decades since then.
And that's before you get into all the conversation of the work that he did later in life, like you know, the time in nineteen sixty when he helped prevent the French government from dumping nuclear waste into the Mediterranean Sea. I mean, that's I feel like that's a pretty decent.
Accomplishment, pretty incredible. Yeah.
Yeah, And there was a period there when you know, he was pretty much everywhere you looked.
Yeah, of course, and this was the day is when oceanographers could actually be rock stars. But you know that said Gusteau was kind of a tough guy to pin down. Like. He was an explorer, he was a conservationist, he was obviously an author, a filmmaker. He won apparently as many awards as Meryl Street. He was a scientist, a government spy, and I mean he was pretty much the greatest dinner guest in history.
Yeah, And obviously anybody with a resume like that is worth taking a closer look. So today we'll talk a little bit about Jacques's background, his legacy, including a few of the advances he made during his many years at sea, and then later in the episode, we'll try to figure out if the beloved explorer is actually to blame for a toxic strain of seaweed that happened to escape into the world's oceans forty years ago. And the spoiler is, go, he totally is. But we can get to all of
that in a little bit. I feel like we need to back up a little bit. Where where do you think we should start?
So, at the risk of saving hat obsessed, I do kind of want to start with the origin of those red knit caps that Tristan started to show off, because one thing I was surprised to learn this week is that divers actually wore hats like that long before Jacques Cousteau came on the sea, and in fact, it was pretty standard attire among hard hat divers going all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Wait, you said hard hat diver. What's a hard hat diver?
Yeah, it's a real term. So it's the name for the old school diving helmets that you'd see something like in like twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and sometimes like you see picks of like Salvador Dolly holding them too, But it's those big, bulky spherical helmets with those little like glass viewports. But you know, when commercial or military divers were in their diving suits, they would wear knit hats under them for just a little bit of extra cushioning.
And the divers wore red ones specifically because they often would rest on the docks between their dives, and obviously they'd have their helmets off at this point, and the bright hats just made it easier for crane operators to keep track of them and also to avoid smacking them in the heads with heavy machinery.
So that's the reason Custo wore a hat like to avoid cranes.
Yeah, I mean, eventually wearing a red beanie just kind of became like a diving symbol on its own. You know, whether that was for like practical reasons or just out of the sense of tradition. But one likely reason for why the caps endured so long is that they were away to honor this famous British diver. His name was William Walker. And I know we're talking about Jocastow today, but Walker's story is pretty great and it only takes a minute. So I'm going to go on a tangent if you're okay.
With that, Yeah, sure of course.
So back in the early nineteen hundreds, it was discovered that England's Winchester Cathedral, which is one of the largest in Europe, was in danger of collapsing. Apparently, when the builders laid the foundations back in the eleventh century, they unknowingly built them on top of the peat bog, and sadly no one realized this until the cathedral actually started
to sink. So engineers quickly determined that the cathedral could actually be saved if someone dove in into this bog and you know, went to the cathedral's foundations, removed the bottom layer of pete and then replaced it with a whole bunch of concrete. And so this is exactly what
William Walker did. He was this experienced diver. He was hired from a nearby dockyard, and over the course of the next six years, Walker spent six hours a day submerged in twenty feet of pitch black water like it was so dark he could barely even see the foundations he was supposed to be underpinning. But despite the setback,
Walker actually got the job done. He had a one hundred and fifty men top side support crew, and all told he managed to lay a staggering twenty five thousand bags of concrete and over a million concrete blocks and bricks. I mean, it's stunning, and because of that effort, the cathedral was not only saved, it actually still stands today.
That really is impressive. And I'm guessing this whole time he was wearing the red net hat while he was.
Doing this, right, that's right, and so Walker obviously got a fair amount of press during the ordeal, and it's likely that other divers knew of him and adopted to look in his honor, possibly even Jacques Cousteau himself.
Wow, I like how you looped him back at the end there. That was pretty nicely done. All right, Let's dig into the real man of the hour, which of course is Jacques Eves Cousteau. And as you can imagine, Jacques was born in France near Bordeaux if you happen to be familiar with the great growing region there, and this was in nineteen ten, and his family consisted of his father, who was an international lawyer, and his mother, who was the daughter of a successful wine merchant and
a landowner there, plus one older brother. So the Cousteaux family was pretty well off, but health wise, Jacques was actually far from it. So he suffered from anemia and this chronic stomach issue that he dealt with throughout his youth, and it really didn't slow him down that much though at least. And Jaques learned how to swim when he was just four years old, and he later credited his early swimming experience as the origin for the passion of
his life. And here's what he said about it. I was four or five years old when I became interested in water. I loved touching water.
I mean, it sounds so simplistic, but I also kind of know what he's talking about, like the first time you experienced that sensation of floating, or like the effort it takes to move through something other than air, Like it's a surreal moment and it's like nothing you felt before.
Yeah, it actually reminds me this other quote from Custeau that I like a lot. There are so many good ones, but another one is from birth. Man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He has bolted to Earth, but man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. Buoyed by water. He can fly in any direction, up, down, sideways by merely flipping his hand underwater. Man becomes an arc angel.
So I saw this quote too, and it's from right after he learned to swim. Right.
Yeah, he was four years old and he was like, finally I'm free. I'm an archangel now. And he was kind of a weird kid, I guess, but back to
his childhood. Let's just fast forward to about nineteen twenty when his family lived in New York while mister Cousteau was practicing law, So they lived there for about two years, and it was during that time that Jacques learned to speak English, and he also got plenty of practice swimming and snorkeling at this summer camp that he attended in Vermont, and it's actually there that Jacques gets his very first
taste of diving. So the camp had launched this effort to clean up a nearby lake, and Jock volunteered to dive to the bottom to help clear away the debris that was there. And once again, this early experience proved formative for Jacques, who quickly fell in love with being underwater, despite the fact that he didn't own any goggles at the time.
And I'm guessing on a plus side, there probably wasn't all that much worth seeing at the bottom of a dirty lake, so I guess he didn't need those goggles.
Yeah, but I mean, Jacques was completely hooked after this experience. So when his family returned to France in nineteen twelve, they settled in the Mediterranean city of Marseilles, which was not far from the Italian border. And so this allowed Jacques to continue snorkeling, and you know, this is right
there along the city's coast. Also, not to boggy down with too many origin stories, but this is also around the time that Jacques bought a used movie camera and then he proceeded to take a part and reassemble it so he could learn how it works. So he was a very curious kid in terms of, you know, how things were built and everything. So sure, we've already got this boy who loves exploring underwater and who now has
an interest in both mechanics and filmmaking. So I mean, his trajectory and life really seems to have taken shape pretty early on.
Actually yeah, I mean I think it looks that way in hindsight, but at the time Jack didn't seem to have his designs on a career at sea at all, and certainly not as a researcher. He actually got pretty terrible grades in high school and he didn't show any
interest in academics. He also acted out a lot as a teenager, like apparently he went on a window smashing spree at one point, and it wasn't long after that that his parents decided to send him away to this super strict boarding school in northeast France.
And so did this sixth period straighten him up? Or what?
Yeah, it actually did. The school it's in Alsace, and it seemed to do the trick for Jock because he did well in and out of school. From then on, you know, he finished his studies, he attended college in Paris, and then in nineteen thirty he was accepted to the French Naval Academy and that's where he trained for a couple of years before finally being commissioned as a second lieutenant. After that, things went pretty smoothly. For the next few years.
Jock actually got to sail the world as a gunnery officer. He traveled to exotic ports in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans. He captured what he found there on video actually, and then in nineteen thirty five, with a little bit of perspective under his belt, Jock finally decided on what he wanted to do for his life's career. He wanted to be a naval aircraft pilot aircraft.
So after all this tooling around and see, he wanted to fly and not sail. It just seems weird, but I mean that that obviously didn't happen, so what changed his mind?
So he had a bit of a tragedy. Unfortunately, in nineteen thirty six, just before his training was finished, Jack had borrowed his dad's sports car to attend a friend's wedding, I guess, and on the way back that evening, he was going a bit too fast around one of the bends in the road and all of a sudden, his headlights shorted out, and you know, Custo had this massive accident. He did survive, but not without breaking like a dozen
bones and fracturing both arms. Worse still, his right arm became so badly infected that surgeons actually thought the best option was to amputate it. And you know, Custeau insisted that his arm be left intact no matter how bad the infection got.
But I mean, obviously he recovered, as we know from seeing him in later years, So why didn't he go back to piloting?
So the damage to his arms was just too severe, Like there was no way he could have flown a plane in combat after that. But the accident provided Jock the opportunity to get reacquainted with the hobbies he loved as a child, So he actually spent the next several months swimming daily in the Mediterranean as a way to strengthen his arms and to make the sessions more enjoyable
for himself. He borrowed this early pair of swimming goggles from a friend and this was honestly the first time he'd done this, and it literally opened Joq's eyes to the underwater mysteries all around him, and from then on he pretty much spent as much time as he could just taking in the strange and colorful plants and animals
that he found on the seafloor. When it was time to return his friend's goggles, he actually decided to craft his own pair for something he just happened to have lying around, a pair of aircraft pilot goggles.
Wow, I mean it sounds like he really turned things around after the crash.
Yeah, he did, and that new outlook extended to his love life as well. So in nineteen thirty seven, just a year after the crash, Jacques married a woman he'd met at a cocktail party earlier that year. Her name was Simone Melshore, and she and Jacques stayed together for fifty three years until her death in nineteen ninety and the couple also had two sons together, Jean, Michel and Philippe. Both of them joined their parents on many expeditions when they were young.
Well, that was what was so interesting, like reading about him as a kid or seeing some of the old films and things like that. I mean, his wife and kids pretty much lived with him on the trick that research ship, and that goes back to the fifties or so, doesn't it.
Yeah, the ship was the Calypso, And it's actually a funny name, like if you think about it, Custo got the name for this sea nymph character in Homer's Odyssey. So in the story, Odysseus washes up on Calypso's island, and when she finds him, she enchants the adventure to make him forget about his wife, Penelope, the one he'd been trying to get home to, and so Calypso basically keeps him there as a prisoner for seven years, and the whole time Penelope is just waiting and hoping that
he finally makes it back to her some day. So it's kind of strange to name a boat that you sail around on with your wife and kids that same name.
I think you made one mistake though, I thought Calypso comes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The film series is oh right, right, yeah, we'll correct that later. But all right, we're getting ahead of ourselves here, because an awful lot happened between Custau's wedding and the time the Calypso set sail, including the invention of the aqualogue, and of course a little something we called World War two.
Yeah, definitely a lot to talk about. But let's take a quick break first and then we'll get back into it.
You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about French oceaneering legend and scuba pioneer Jacques Coustea. All right, Mago, So let's talk about the war years and what those were like for Custo, because remember he was serving as a gunnery office in the French Navy when the fighting began, and this was of course, in nineteen thirty nine.
Yeah, and from what I read, that was a really difficult time for a Jacques emotionally because suddenly his country was at war with the Italians right next door. Like he'd had so many friends over there and now he was on board the ships that were attacking their naval bases, and he clearly felt conflicted, you know, wiging war in the Mediterranean against all these people he'd grown up.
With, right, And so then a year later France surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Italian occupation began. So it's a pretty rough going there in those early years. And thankfully, once Paris fell, Cousteau was able to flee with his family to this small town near the Swiss border, and
they lived there peacefully for the next few years. And in fact, this period of relative safety was when Jacques began to focus on that underwater exploration and beginning to do some research, and you know, it was really the beginning of what would make this huge career.
That's true, but we should also mention that it's not like Cousteau was just on holiday up there, because following Franci's surrender, he actually joined the French resistance movement and he began working against Italy's intelligence services, so basically spying on Italian troops, kind of keeping track of their movements, that kind of thing. And then after the war, Cousteau returned to work for the French Navy to help clear
underwater minds. So really all the years of underwater excursions and scuba stuff that we're talking about, that's all happening in between these long running series of military operations he was involved in.
So basically, if you weren't impressed enough already, keep in mind that all the ocean research and these technical breakthroughs like that was really his side gig during World War Two exactly.
And it's strange to think about, but it's true. You know, Cousteau is living in the heart of occupied France during the darkest days of the war, and he somehow managed to turn them into some of the most productive years of his life. Is truly impressive. In nineteen forty three in particular, that ended up being this pivotal year for Custo. First, it was in the town where he'd fled. He'd actually met this fellow explorer named Marcelle Chak and together that
year they made the first underwater film. It's called eighteen meters Deep. Sorry, it's the first French underwater film, and they shot at themselves in the waters around this group of islands in the French Mediterranean. And this was really the first step in what become this very long career
of underwater film making for Custeau. That wasn't the only life changing thing he did in nineteen forty three, because that's also the year that Coustau co invented the aqua lung with this French engineer named Emil Gagna.
All Right, so let's give a little bit of background on why that's important, because it's not like the aqualung was the first breathing apparatus ever made, or or of course even the first scuba gear, right m m.
Like the hard hat diving suits we talked about earlier had been around for almost hundreds of years by that time, you know, And actually Leonardo da Vinci created designs for a diving suit way back in the early sixteenth century, so the idea of breathing underwater definitely was not new.
That's weird. I'm curious though, Like, do you know what da Vinci had come up with.
Yeah, it was basically this dual snorkel system, but with these really long snorkels, Like he suggested making a boy out of cork so that it would flow, and then attaching these long cane tubes to either side. So the diver below could I guess breede through the submerged ends. But you know what the best part of da Vinci's design is, and I had never realized this before. It's that Da Vinci actually came up with this bag that the diver would wear so that he wouldn't pee straight into the water.
I mean, you got to love the priorities there.
Yeah, I mean you get it. But anyway back to Custeau, I have.
No idea what you mean by that.
I don't either, But you know, he's got a few years worth of diving under his belt and he absolutely loved it. But you know, over time he started to get frustrated with the limitations of the diving equipment. He couldn't travel as deep as he wanted, and he couldn't stay under for anywhere near as long as he would have liked. And at that point, the best thing on the market was a self contained underwater breathing apparatus or scuba as we call it, that had been invented about
twenty years earlier by another Frenchman. So divers already had this option of wearing air tanks on their backs instead of like the heavy helmets with the air tubes that
kept them kind of tethered to the surface. But the problem was that the first scuba gear it actually lacked any kind of regulator, so there was no way to control the airflow to the driver, and that meant that the air supply was used up super quickly because it was being released in this constant stream, and so dive times were just actually limited to a few minutes at the best.
Huh. I could see why that would definitely put a damper on this experience for Custau, especially when he wanted to dive as deep as he possibly could, and it it's tough to go that far when he've only got ten or twenty minutes worth of air.
Right, And that's ultimately what Cousteau was looking to do, Like he reached out to his friend Emil and a year earlier, I guess in nineteen forty two, Emil had invented this demand regulator to control the gas flow in engines, and Cousteau thought the valve like that he had invented might also have applications for diving, and he figured that if you could just modify the valve a little, it could supply air only when a diver was breathing in, and then it would conserve the air supply and allowed
the diver to stay underwater for longer. So Cousteau took his idea to his friend and in nineteen forty three they co invented and patented the on demand diving regulator, whereas they called it aqualung. I guess this would later serve as an inspiration for a Jethro Toll song. But you know, Cousteau was clearly thrilled about this invention, and
this is what he said at the time. Quote from this day forward, we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level with our flesh, feeling what the fish scales know.
I mean, it's kind of a great and weird quote at the same time, but I mean Custo definitely put his newfound freedom to use once the war ended. So you passed forward a little bit to nineteen forty eight. He joined with these fellow divers and a group of scientists to explore this Roman shipwreck that was off the coast of Tunisia. And this was actually the first underwater archaeology operation to use scuba equipment, so it was really
the birth of this brand new field. And then in the early nineteen fifties, Custeau and his team decided to take the next step and they devoted their lives full time to underwater exploration. There was only one problem with this is that they would need lots of money to fund those expeditions, and unfortunately they didn't have any money. So, you know, Custau started reaching out to all kinds of
French science institutions as well as like potential private donors. Well, he eventually struck gold with this wealthy British philanthropist named Thomas Lowell Guinness. Now Guinnis also happened to be a member of Parliament, so he was connected in so many different ways. But Custeau told him about his plans to make undersea documentaries and to introduce the world to the wonders of the deep, and Guinnis just love this idea, and so here's what he decided to do to help.
He bought a decommissioned mind sweepership from the war, and this was one that had already been converted to use as like a car ferry or something like that, and he leased it to Custeau for a symbolic price of one franc per year, and that's how Cousteau came to own the world famous Calypso for one franc.
That's amazing and it's pretty awesome, except now he had this like giant, like one hundred foot one hundred and fifty foot like car ferry. But he doesn't still seem to have much money to equip or staff it, right.
Yeah, that's true. And so the team was was pretty much a loss for how to solve that, and they pretty much tried everything they could, Like Cousteau begged the government for grant money. He hassled manufacturers for free equipment. There was even one time when his wife Simone sold her jewels just so they could buy fuel to keep the ship at sea. And all of this worked well enough for a while, and you know, Custeau was able to gradually restructure the ship and transform it into this
state of the art research vessel. You know, go back to him being so interested in the mechanics and all of this, I'm sure, but was you know, came a handy in this process. And they even had this support base for diving on the ship, a helipad and the special storage for equipment like the one and two man mini subs that he developed all by himself. But the team's biggest break after all of this, and the thing that really allowed him to keep financing their research, was
Cousteau's media exposure. So throughout the fifties, he and his fellow divers began publicizing their efforts and stories for Time and National Geographic, and Coustou co authored a biographical book for their early ski uba adventures. It was called The Silent World, and it was this huge financial hit. They sold more than five million copies over the years, and it included the first ever suggestion that whales were able to communicate with each other using echolocation.
And the team even knew how to build on that success because like just a few years later, Cousteau made his first color movie documentary about the ocean. It's called The Silent World, and it actually won Best Documentary OSCAR
in nineteen fifty seven. The movie turned out to be another big turning point for Cousteau's team and really for diving in general, because at the time very few people had seen undersea footage before, so the movie was really like this revelation for people who had no idea what the plants or the animals in the ocean even looked like.
Yeah, it was actually fun reading about how after this film came out, scuba sales like went through the roof because you've got all these people who are suddenly interested in trying diving for themselves. And you know, once again, Cousteau knew exactly how to capitalize on this, so he channeled all that money and public interest into these new expeditions until finally he was such a well known figure that the BBC and ABC here in the US just went ahead and gave him his own primetime TV show.
Oh I know about the day. It was actually called The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, and it kind of followed the real life exploits of him and his crew for I want to say, like nine seasons right like that. That's pretty impressive for like a French nature series.
Absolutely, and it was it was this series that really made Custeau a household name throughout the seventies and eighties. You know, in the same way that The Silent World had introduced moviegoers to the underwater world, the TV show gave viewers their first glimpse at humans interacting with ocean creatures like in a way they'd never really seen before.
And you know, they got to see them swimming with dolphins or being pulled along by giant sea turtles, and so I'm sure it was just fascinating for people to be able to watch for the first time.
Yeah, it's amazing. But I also do want to be careful that we don't paint too rosy a picture of Cousteau, because for all incredible achievements, he definitely made a few really weird mistakes over the years, and honestly, some of them are just too bizarre not to talk about.
Yeah, I think that's that's fair to say. Well, before we get into that, let's take one more quick break, all right, Mangos, So what dodgy aspect of Jaques Coustau's life do you think people would be most surprised to learn?
Well, the one I was most stunned to buy, But it was I guess, his darkest secret, which is that Custou actually had a secret second family that he hid
from the public for decades. One year after his first wife, Simone died from cancer in nineteen ninety, Custau actually shocked the world by revealing that he had been having this long running affair with a French woman named Francine Triplett, and they had had two secret children together during the eighties, and once the fair was out in the open, Cousteau married triplet though they still tried to keep it as quiet as possible for obvious reasons.
Wow. I mean, I know when pop culture French husbands have a reputation for keeping mistresses, but having secret kids and actually getting married is it seems like it's another level. But anyway to think that Simone sold her jewels to fuel his ship, that's a tough one.
Yeah. You know, it's always confusing to me when people have two families too, Like one family feels like so much work. I can't imagine like trying to keep two of them going. I read this story about William Sewan who was this legendary editor of The New Yorker, and he had two families, but he kept his apartments the exact same, so that when he reached for the remote in one where he went to get a notepad in the other, like, it was basically in the same place
in both settings, which is just so crafty. You know, his second family is probably the biggest scandal of Cousteau's life, So I guess at least, you know, it is good that his wife wasn't around to see the fallout from it.
Yeah, no, that's interesting. Well, the next thing I want to talk about is a lot less scandalous than a secret family, but it is a whole lot weirder, I actually think because in a nineteen sixty interview with Time, Jacques Coustau predicted that humans would one day be able
to breathe underwater, like actually breathe underwater like fish. He apparently thought that medical science would get to a point where you could have a reversible surgery that would let you alternate between lungs for life on land and gills for life underwater.
So like, in his vision slash fantasy for this, like would we have underwater colonies? Because I mean, if it requires surgery to switch back and forth, I'm guessing he was picturing something more permanent than just like a like a two week vacation or something.
Yeah, I mean he was actually thinking long term with this, and can you can imagine for him that would have been exciting to just be able to live underwater but in that interview, this is what he says about the cultural shift he thought would come from having guilt. He said, everything that has been done on the surface will sooner or later be done underwater. It will be the conquest of a whole new world.
I mean, I feel like that's just a line from like Aquaman, like maybe something a bad guy would say.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that had been said at some point. But you know, speaking of things that sound like they were ripped from a comic book, did you know that Jaques Cousteau may have been responsible for releasing a mutant seaweed strain that continues to smother ocean floors to this day.
So I heard you mentioned this earlier, and I'm so curious. It almost sounds too ridiculous to be true, though.
All right, well, let me just kind of explain what happened here, and then you can decide what you want to believe on this one. So all right, So it all started in nineteen eighty nine when this marine biologist named Alexander Mainez went diving off the southern coast of
France and made this shocking discovery. So what he found was that the seabed throughout the region had become covered in this toxic tropical algae, one that was you know, really shouldn't have been able to thrive like that in the cold Mediterranean water, and it was later determined that the tropical seaweed was growing at twice the speed of the region's indigenous plants, and even worse than that. Even though the seaweed's toxin wasn't lethal the humans or the animals,
it made the plant taste terrible. And so this meant that nothing in the area wanted to eat the invasive species, and as a result, it was able to spread, I mean pretty much unchecked. And so Alexander knew that like if nothing was done, the tropical seaweed would take over and the Mediterranean's wildlife would either have to move somewhere
else or potentially face starvation. So he decided to bring his concerns to one of Europe's leading marine research organizations, which was the Monaco Oceanographic Museum, and he thought for sure that the museum would want to help solve the problem, but to his surprise, actually the director insisted that the seaweed had floated in naturally from the tropics and probably
wasn't as dangerous as it seemed. And so here's where things get interesting, because the invasive algae that supposedly floated in from the tropics, DNA testing later showed that it was actually an artificial human bread strain that was somehow released into the Mediterranean.
What, like, I don't even know what that means exactly.
Well, apparently this was man made. And you know, if that weren't suspicious enough, researchers also found that the earliest known infestation site for the seaweed happened to be directly below the Monaco Oceanographic Museum.
Wow, so the plot thickens. But you know, where does Jackustou figure into all of this?
Like?
Is he the one behind that strain? No?
I mean that part is actually still kind of a mystery. And researchers eventually followed the trail to a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, which had imported the strain from the Pacific and then used it to decorate their tropical fish tanks because apparently, and this is something I actually never heard before, but some zoos and aquariums used to have a really hard time getting seaweed to survive and the artificial environment of
a fish tank. And so for this German zoo in the seventies, the solution turned out to be, you know, this imported tropical seaweed, which, for whatever reason flourished in the way that other plants never seemed to be able to.
So then what happens exactly like the zoo eventually dumped their tanks in the ocean, and this seaweed made its way to the Mediterranean. Like didn't you say you thought this strain was man made?
Though, yeah it was. And the thinking here is that maybe, just maybe the chemicals and the lights that were used in the aquarium tanks caused the plant to mutate into this more invasive species than the kind that was originally found in the wild. And since aquariums all over the world began using the tropical strain once they heard about the zoo's success, there's really no way of knowing exactly where the mutant batch came from or who dumped it
into the open water. But since the Monaco Museum is considered the first known infestation site, there's a good chance that it actually did come from there. And so here's the thing. Based on the evidence, the most likely time for all of us to have happened was in the early nineteen eighties. And guess who was running the museum in the early nineteen eighties.
So I guess this whole ecologic disaster like it must have happened on Cousteau's watch, is what you're saying.
Yeah, I feel like I should have had that big setup and be like, Nope, it actually wasn't custou but no, it wasn't. He could have even been the one to unknowingly release the algae. But yeah, of course the Monaco Museum flatly denies all of this and maintains there's no connection whatsoever. And meanwhile, the seaweed is actually still there today, and in recent years it's cropped up in the harbors and coral reefs around Australia southern California too, so it
is kind of all over the place. So you know, at this point it's probably time to worry less about who started the problem and more about how to actually fix it.
Also, I mean, like Custeau's done so much, it's hard to imagine it would really hurt his legacy.
And probably not. I mean, his work has led to so many marine discoveries and inspired so many future explorers that he probably gets a pass on this one, I guess. And you know that's before you even consider the conservation work that's been done through his nonprofit, the Cousteau Society, which is something he formed himself back in nineteen seventy four.
Yeah. I mean, he was obviously an overachiever, as we've probably shown today, but I would still say his greatest achievement was opening so many people's eyes to just how beautiful and mysterious and strange the ocean really is. I mean, it's really difficult to get people to open themselves to the unknown, but that's exactly what Jacques Cousteau did through his work. He showed them reasons to care about the ocean.
That's a great point. And you know, like I read this week that roughly ninety four percent of all the space on Earth where life can survive is actually underwater. Yeah, we've only fully explored about five percent of that. And you know, when you think about it, the number was even lower than that before Cousteau came along, and now, hopefully thanks to his example, a little only continue to go up from there. Yeah, because of Cousteau's work proved anything.
It's that exploring the oceans is the way for humans to fall in love with them, and from there, the hope is that if we love them, then we'll also do our best to take care of them too. And it may sound a little bit corny, but you know, here's hoping.
It does sound corny. What do you think we get to the fact off from here?
All right, let's do it.
So here's something kind of fun. Off the coast of Florida. There's this underwater Museum of Art and it's the first underwater museum in the US. In addition to the artwork they've got there, they've got like a deer giant skull a pineapple, which I thought was initially like a tribute
to SpongeBob, but apparently it's just a beautiful pineapple. There's also this model of Jock Cousteau's scuba mask, and it is pretty cool because the sculptures are sixty feet deep and it's in this artificial reef where all types of reefish and turtles and other animals just swim through and seems really beautiful.
Huh. All right, well, here's one I wasn't expecting. Apparently, Fidel Castro was a huge fan of Cousteau. So in nineteen eighty five, when Coustou asked to come through and research Cubas system for managing their lobster population, Castro actually went aboard Cousteau's ship and ate dinner on board the Calypso and the pair I guess got along so well that mental floss reports on this Castro allowed the diver to liberate eighty political prisoners.
Wow.
Also, Cousteau's team became the first non Cubans to pass through Guantanamo Bay since the Cuban missile crisis.
That's pretty impressive. So one of the things I'm always fascinated about is how Custeau helped stop whaling. He actually called up and personally made pleas to a number of heads of states to get the International Whaling Commission to pass this moratorium on commercial whaling. This was in nineteen eighty six, and that's actually helped protect multiple species over the years.
All Right, Well, Cousto apparently didn't always come across as an environmentalist. In fact, in the beginning, he was more of a spear fisherman, an adventurer, and you can actually see this in some of his early films, like there's this horrific scene in the Silent World where the calypso collides with a baby sperm whale and then, thinking that it's near death, they also shoot the sharks that start
circling the whale. So this obviously isn't a good look for Custo, and so when the group decided to remaster the film twenty years later, they decided to edit out those ugly scenes. But according to reports, Custo absolutely refused to let that happen. He said, it was true and it shows how far we've come and how dreadful humans can be if we don't curtail ourselves.
So on one head, it's a little like Steve's Zoo from The Life Aquatic, like wanting to go out and kill a shark. And on the other hand, it really is amazing, like you'd show your warts and all in the hopes that others could learn that we can all change. You know. I just love how Jacques Cousteau's appreciation for this. He just grew more and more over the years, and I do think he get a trophy for pointing to that.
Yeah, I mean, he led an incredible life and it's fun to try to learn from it. But all right, well, I think that's it for today's show. So from Gabe, Tristan, Mango, and me, thanks so much for listening.