Jump to: Indigenous Utah | Deep-Sea Diving | Countries That Don’t Exist
Fireside Dances, Ancient Ruins, and the Beauty of Hózhó (Balance): Indigenous Utah
In-field producing, script writing + editing, marketing and promotion
Show Notes
Maiku. Yá'át'ééh. And hello!
You can't really know a place without hearing from the people who have always been there. Utah is the sacred and ancestral home of eight different tribal nations, including the Paiute, Navajo (Diné), Shoshone, Goshute, and more. And today, we're learning as much about their histories and cultures as we can.
Join us as we listen to Southern Paiute music under the stars, see a traditional Diné fireside dance, sample fry bread with a unique twist, step inside a traditional hogan in Monument Valley, and learn about what being Native American means in 2024.
Script Excerpt
Interview tape // Scripted voiceover
Louis Williams 2:18:19
So it's really reminds me of how, you know, life continues to cycle. And I say Grandpa doesn't really worry about too much except for the feeding the family and sheltering the family. You know, so what's important and your simple things. And he I remember my grandpa and my grandmas, they would come out here they would just close their eyes, you know and really connect and listen.
Louis tells us how every morning, his great grandmother would greet the day by running towards the sun, how she would pull her drinking water from the cool depths of the Earth, how she would end her day as the sun set. That too, he says, is what Hózhó is all about.
There is a Diné ceremonial prayer called The Beauty Way:
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
In our world of night lights, pharmacy receipts, and bottled water, it’s easy to forget that. But as I look out across that canyon, the remnants of ancient ways on either side, a lush valley where people once gathered water within, it’s impossible to ignore.
We say our goodbyes to Louis and drive an hour and a half south to the towering red rock mesas and desert buttes of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. It’s a place sacred to the Diné people — a place where their history, and Hózhó, is literally carved in stone.
Harold Simpson 2:06:36
Hold on, this is where it gets a little bit rough.
Aaron Millar 2:06:43
Okay, holding on!
[ct’d over driving sounds]
Expedition Deep Ocean: Diving to the Deepest Parts of the World’s Oceans with Victor Vescovo
Talent booking, interview production, script writing + editing, marketing and promotion
Show Notes
"Half of planet Earth is still completely unexplored...and nobody seems to be paying attention."
When Victor Vescovo learned in 2016 that nobody had been to the deepest point of four of the five's oceans, he was flabbergasted...and he was up for the challenge.
Victor had earned his pilot's license at only nineteen, and he had spent much of his life pursuing adventure. He was one of the only people in the world to complete the Explorer's Grand Slam, during which he climbed to the highest peak on every continent and skied to both Poles. But he had never been far below the surface - and he quickly became obsessed with the idea.
He assembled a world class crew and tasked them with an extremely ambitious mission: Build a deep-sea submersible more durable, safe, and sturdy than anything in existence. Previously, subs had been built to survive one deep-sea dive. But Victor's team needed to figure out a way to replicate it - for at least five dives - if they wanted a shot at breaking this record.
And the mission wasn't purely adventure for adventure's sake. The ocean's depths are quickly becoming more and more critical for climate change science, species conservation, and more, and Victor knew that the science to be found under the surface was something that could be life-changing for the entire globe.
Riveting, inspiring, and terrifying all at once, Victor's story will take you deeper into the truth about our planet than anybody has ever been.
Script Excerpt
Interview tape // Scripted voiceover
Victor Vescovo is a legend. In 2017, he became one of the only people in the world to complete the ‘explorer’s grand slam:’ Climbing to the highest peak on all seven continents - including Mount Everest - and skiing to both poles. Since then he’s gone into space, and as we’re about to find out, ventured deeper into the ocean abyss than any person in history.
In an age of civilization when so much of our globe, our history, and even our personal lives is mapped onto phones and computers, it’s easy to forget that there are still a few places on our planet that remain untouched and unexplored. And the wildest of all them is the ocean deep.
Before Victor, no one knew the risks, dangers, and wonders that lay in the dark unexplored abyss far beneath the water’s surface. And that unknown, for victor was a beacon, a siren’s call of adventure, that couldn’t be ignored. Because that thirst for the unknown, that embrace of risk, is written into his DNA.
Victor Vescovo 6:50
There’s a lot of discussion about what makes certain people have a intense desire to explore. And it certainly varies by population. And during long voyages on our ship, the ship's doctor and some other people brought out some information that they think that there's a genetic component to it, that there are just some people that have certain dispositions, genetically even, but also upbringing to seek more novelty, to be maybe a little bit more fearless. And always curious about what's on the other side of that hill. I there were so many other small nerdy details involving electrical systems, hydraulics, all those other things that we just simply use the state of the art that had improved over the last 10 or 15 years to make the most robust vehicle that we cut, and we designed it so that we could maintain it and take it down repeatedly in short intervals.
The testing was extensive, expensive, and exhausting. Victor’s engineering team was taking on what the book described as a “Sisyphean task:” Creating a submersible that could not only make it to the bottom of the ocean once, but at least five times. They had no idea if it would even be possible. In their push to assemble a worthy craft, the team painstakingly transported their equipment around the world to various testing chambers and dive sites; built a simulator in Victor’s own garage; hit dozens of deadlines and missed dozens of others; argued, despaired, rejoiced, and ground themselves to the bone.
And finally, one thousand, four hundred and twenty nine days since Victor first had the idea, he climbed inside for his first solo test dive off the coast of the Bahamas.
It did not go well. Headsets stopped working, control readouts were wrong, alarms went off, the craft’s manipulator arm snapped off … during one test dive, a cloud of smoke filled the cabin — not a good feeling when you’re trapped thousands of feet under water. But despite the absolutely terrifying failures of the test dives, the team forged ahead to tackle the first of the five deeps and dive to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Victor Vescovo 26:36
That was a very, very tense time, when we were off the Puerto Rican trench trying to do the very first dive, we actually had attempted to do a major test, dive off the Titanic, but the weather was actually really, really bad. But even leading up to that Puerto Rican trench dive, we still had a lot of things that weren't working well with the submersible. And it got to that point where I was just on the cusp of telling the team, you know, we're just not where we need to be, I need to put everything on ice for six months or a year, we need to go back to the drawing board…
[…]
And that's what I did at the end of my for our first dive, I turned off the thrusters, I just lightly drifted just along the bottom, and I sat back and I ate a tuna fish sandwich. And it was the most exclusive little cafe in the world at that point, I think. And I just really took it all in and appreciated, what the team was able to do and where I was, and just felt so very thankful.
When the Limiting Factor landed on the ocean floor and sent up a cloud of silt into the silent depths, the ungraspable dream that Victor’s team had been chasing finally materialized. Victor was on the bottom of the deepest part of the Atlantic ocean, in a place where nobody had ever been, floating in a landscape so silent and still that it felt more like the surface of the moon than any part of Earth. The Five Deeps team had their craft, they had their pilot, and they had proof - albeit a single test out of hundreds - that it was doable, that they could reach the bottom, come back, and be ready to dive again. Four dives to go.
But next up was the Southern Ocean - the frigid, raging waters surrounding Antarctica, where towering waves travel for thousands of miles and icebergs the size of countries calve into the strongest currents on Earth.
Victor Vescovo 28:47
It's the place on the old maps from the 16th century where the cartographers didn't know anything. So they would just put Here Be Dragons. And that is certainly what I think we experienced, where we had ferocious weather…
Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist With Eric Czuleger
Talent booking, interview production, script writing + editing, marketing and promotion
Show Notes
“I'm sure bungee jumping is crazy and a real like adrenaline rush. But if you've never walked through Somalia with $15,000 in your backpack, you have never lived. You think you like adventure sports, but that is real, real pumping adrenaline.”
In this episode, American journalist Eric Czuleger takes us on a journey into the twilight zone of almost countries, the places in the world that are fighting for recognition: Kurdistan, Kosovo, Somaliland, and a tiny island called Liberland that has an insane story you will not believe.
We’re going to follow him into the throes of a political rally, dance in the streets doing shots, get hired as an ambassador, ride on a jet ski with a president and lots more. It’s a wild ride.
But there’s a serious side to Eric’s story too. Before he became a writer, he worked as a geopolitical intelligence analyst (like stalking your ex on social media, he says, but your ex is terrorism). Every day he was forced to watch the violence and hatred that misplaced patriotism can create. He wanted to understand why. What was it about countries that makes us want to draw a line in the sand and point a gun?
He decided to find out. Eric was sick of watching the world tear itself apart, he wanted to learn about the new ways that it was coming together. He wanted to watch a country being born.
Script Excerpt
Interview tape // Scripted voiceover
Eric Czuleger 0:59
So the idea behind the book in general was, um you know, I wanted to set out to answer this, this, what I felt was pretty so simple question in the very beginning, which is just like, well what, what is a country in the first place? um And and then I found out pretty rapidly that that's not an easy thing to answer. And, and that people actually, you know, you have sort of like one of two different people that that will answer you, when you ask them that question, which is like, either I know exactly what a country is, so long as there are no follow up questions. um Or well, you know, I know that my country is real, but like other ones I'm not so certain about. um And so like, the the fact that we're all sort of fighting and dying, and, you know, marching in parades, and um either singing national anthems or not singing national anthems, and you know, getting getting really worked up about these things, I figured, like, it'd be a really good idea to figure out like, what they are in the first place, if we're going to continue getting so worked up about everything.
He was working in Lebanon as a geopolitical analyst at the time, and he had become disillusioned with the world. He spent his days sifting through videos of executions, riots, bombings — “like stalking your ex on social media,” he described it, “except your ex is terrorism.” And it affected him. “I used to see inexhaustible wonderment,” he writes. “Now I see a bloody chess‐board.”
He wanted to understand why. Why do we spill rivers of blood to become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot? And the answer, he believes, begins with a story.
Eric Czuleger 4:33
This idea of the nation state um was that you it's a political unit, where um we have an attachment to some sort of geography, um and there is a, you know, municipal ruling center of that thing. um And then broadly, there's a shared story amongst the people. Now sometimes that can be ethnic or sometimes it can be historical, oftentimes it's language based, um but there is one sort of like unifying understanding amongst the people in the the nation state? um And when I got down to it, I was like, Okay, well, if the state is the sort of stuff you can blow up, right? um Like, you know, you can you can bulldoze town hall or you can, you know, get rid of roads and, and um statues and stuff like that, then the nation is the story that's held between everybody within that land, right.
Eric Czuleger 3:02
That's a sort of tapestry of, of abstractions that have been taught to us over a series of years. And, and, and saying, basically, that, that, you know, your identity is somewhere in this constellation of abstractions.
It’s an intriguing idea. Countries exist only in the stories we tell ourselves. The land they occupy is real, their infrastructure is real, but their identity, the identity of a nation — what it is to be American, or British, or Ecuadorian or Egyptian — is simply a tale we tell ourselves about ourselves over and over again. “They connect our individual identities to something larger,” he writes, “and give us a place on an incomprehensible globe.” That can be great. Our shared identities connect us and enable us to work together for the common good. But, what Eric realized watching the worst of humanity day after day, is that they can also divide us, and trick us too…
[…]
Eric Czuleger 59:08
…so it was like this really strange, like, yacht party, but like, there weren't any yachts. They were just like, Yugoslav house boats.
Eric was on a single mission: to find Liberland’s president. But, weaving amongst the crowds on the presidential boat, he was nowhere to be found.
“I wanted him to ‘unlock’ the answer to what is a country,” Eric says, “Because at this point I had been in three unrecognized nations, all of which were trying to free themselves through revolutionary warfare and protest…”
Eric Czuleger 59:57
And here you have instead of a country that's is trying to free itself through a revolutionary movement. It's apparently freeing itself through a Bitcoin boat party. And, like, please just somebody explain anything to me because I feel like I'm getting further away from the answer to what a country is…