Garrett Reisman Lived at the Bottom of the Ocean for 2 Weeks | Joe Rogan

Well you've done underwater exploration as well. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What have you done there? I live for two weeks in the bottom of the sea. Oh, Jesus. I get weirded out just talking, just you saying that. Two weeks at the bottom of the ocean? Yeah. How deep? It was exactly 20,000 millimeters under the sea. It was about 60 feet, which works out to be about... Oh, only 60 feet? That's okay. Yeah. That doesn't freak me out too much. I thought you were going to say like miles. No. I'd start panicking. No, it's about 60 feet. But the cool thing was we stayed there for weeks. Wow. Now, if you're normally scuba diving and you go down 60 feet, you have 60 minutes and then you've got to come back up or you get too much nitrogen in your blood and you're going to get bent, right? Mm-hmm. So, but it's not a problem if you just stay. The problem is then if you stay, you build up all that nitrogen in your blood, now you can't go back up. So like if you run out of air or you lose sight of your body or something, you can't go to the surface because within a couple hours you'll be dead. Wow. So you have to stay down there. And we use cave diving techniques that we did a lot of training for to be safe. And we have redundant tanks, redundant manifolds, redundant regulators, and we could have valves that we can flip around so we can always make sure we can get air without ever having the – in an emergency ever having to come up because coming up is not an option. So how do you eventually get out? It's a freaky thing. It takes about a day. And what you do is you take – so we're living in this habitat and it was kind of like a submarine on the bottom of the ocean, but it didn't have a motor so it just like stuck on the floor, like a big – like a big cylinder. And it had a hole cut in the side here and the only thing that was keeping the ocean out was the air pressure inside. Whoa. Kind of like taking a cup and flipping it over, putting it in a bathtub and trapping the air. Oh, God. And you just scuba dive on down and then you swim into that thing and then once you pop up in that hole it's like you're in a swimming pool inside the habitat and then you just step out into the habitat. Whoa. Have you ever seen the movie The Abyss? Yes. Like that? It's like that. Oh. Yeah. How accurate is that movie? I think – what's the guy – what's the Navy SEAL in there? He gets like – He gets crazy from the men. He gets like – what do they call it? Deep dementia or something? Yeah. Is that fake? Yeah, that's fake. Damn Hollywood. So this process of getting back to surface level, you said it takes a day. What do you have to do? So what you do is you close up that hole and you convert the habitat into a pressure chamber. And what you do is you very, very slowly bring the pressure back to sea level. So you decrease the pressure and you slowly – as if you're slowly, slowly going up in the water column. And then over – as you do it gradually, the nitrogen slowly comes out of your blood and you can feel it kind of tingles. Oh, wow. Over the course of a day you just lie – you try to lie still in your bunk and just like read a book or something but you feel like this tingling. And then after about a day of that, they get you all the way back to sea level slowly so that the nitrogen – you know what it is? It's like if you take a can of soda and you shake it up. If you open the top quickly, pshhh. Right. But if you open the top really slowly and you let it slowly come out, you don't get all the bubbles. Right. It's that same effect. Ah, that's a great analogy. Yeah. Oh. What's freakier, being in the bottom of the ocean or being up in space? Up in space is more surreal. Yeah. Because the floating, the earth out the window, the views are better. But being down there was pretty wild too. I remember once we were doing this experiment where I had my crewmate and I had an ultrasound and we were doing this telemedicine experiment. So there were these docks in Houston looking at the screen but there was a delay. And I was supposed to find her kidney and I'm like searching around for her kidney. And then I look up and I look out the window and I see a six-foot hammerhead shark right out the window. And we have a guy in the water. And I was – and I dropped a giant F bomb. Like, fuuuuck. And all the docks in Houston are freaking out. They're thinking like in a moment they're going to see her liver explode on the screen or something. And they're like, what's that? What's that? How's the patient? How's the patient? I'm like, patient's fine. Got a six-foot hammerhead out the window. Yeah, that's got to be really weird, right? You're in that thing in their world. For how long? Two weeks? Yeah. So is that the weirdest animal that you saw? Is the hammerhead? The scariest thing I saw was one night I was taking a dump. It's a true story. The way you do this – okay, number one, you just pee in the pool, okay? But if you have to go number two, you go into the pool because you don't want to flutter in your pool, right? Of course. That's like catashack. You don't want that. Right. So what you do is you go – you don't take a tank. You just take your mask and your fins. You go down. Naked? Yeah, you can. We had a mixed-gender crew, so I wore some trunks, but you know. And then you just go down and you have to swim, I don't know, it's like maybe 10, 15 feet. It's not that far. And there's what we call the gazebo, which is just a little dome that has air inside. Now, you're out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Like with no tank, and you're 60 feet down, it's night. You can't see a thing. You're alone in the ocean. But you can see this little gazebo. You swim to that, you pop in, and then you got air, just some valves, you let in some fresh air. And then you hold on, and you just – and you take off your trunks and you just let it rip. But the problem is the fish get accustomed to this. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. So they go there knowing that you're going to poop. As soon as you drop in the water at night, it's like the dinner bell going off. Oh, the school – And there's like school – yeah, yeah. Because this is feeding time. Whoa. And so you feel them, like, pecking at the back door? The worse are the angel fish, because that shape, they can get like right up in there. Oh, boy. So you take your fin off and you're like whacking them. Oh, Jesus Christ. So that's all bad enough, but as you're doing that, and you're in the pitch-black Atlantic Ocean, 60 feet down, no scuba tank. At night. At night. With the sound of the ocean lapping against the dome. And you're looking down and this endless black, you know, just a black void. And you're thinking about every single scary ocean movie like Jaws, you know, The Meg, whatever, The Abyss, all those scary movies, right? And you think about all these things that could be down there. You can't help but go through your head, so it's kind of freaky. And then you finish and you put your mask back on. And I took a big breath. And I went down and I opened my eyes in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight and I saw like right in front of me, this huge eyeball, like about the size, I don't know, of like a saucer, you know, like this big, staring, unblinking right at me. And I freaked out. I just tore off for the pool, for the moon pool and the habitat. I jumped in there, I surfaced, I'm screaming, I'm screaming. And my crew come running thinking I like, I've been bit by a shark or something. And I'm like, giant fish. And it was a goliath grouper. Oh, I've seen those things before. They're enormous. Size of a cow. It's like hundreds and hundreds of pounds, right? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Scared to live in hell at me. Yeah. Those things could literally eat a person. Yeah. But it was big enough, that's for sure. And so it was, this side of it scared the heck out of me. So where were you in the Atlantic? Yeah. How far away were you from like Florida? Where were you at? We were just off the coast of Key Lago. Okay. Because that's what I was saying, like they live down there. Yeah. That's an enormous fish, man. Huge. I've seen videos of people catching them off of boats and it seems surreal. I'll give you that. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there's one. It's like a giant largemouth bass. That's what it's like. If you go bass fishing, they're so similar to bass. Like in the way they look. Yeah. Now imagine like... Jesus Christ, look at that thing. Yeah. Imagine like being eye to eye with that thing in the middle of the dark Atlantic with no scuba tank. They're delicious too, I bet. Like, I don't know if they taste as good as regular grouper. Yeah. I wasn't good. So you get a different... I wasn't going to find out. Look at the mouth on that thing. Good Lord. I'll tell you another quick story about down there. So I went out for a night dive once and I spent... The beautiful thing about saturation diving like this is you can do basically infinite time, bottom time. You're not limited to like 60 minutes. You can stay out there for six hours, you know, whatever. So I was not doing this night dive and I found this beautiful shrimp and it was just spectacularly gorgeous. It was like translucent. You could see through it. You could see its organs move, like internal organs, like doing their thing. And I stared at it for at least like an hour. Just held my light on it and just sat there and stared at it. And it was really beautiful. And I come back inside the habitat and I'm kind of hungry. And the best space food we got is shrimp cocktail. And I pulled that thing off the shelf and I'm like, oh, that looks good. Then I'm like, I can't do it. I can't do it, man. You felt bad because you just saw the shrimp? Wow. I ate it the next day. The next day. Yeah. But for that day though, you really felt bad. I felt bad. Mm. Wow. Grouper, you would have felt bad? Like a nice grouper sandwich? It scared me. I think I would have been okay with that after. Yeah, I wonder if they've ever eaten people. Because it seems like they could, I mean, they swallow giant fish. It seems like if you're not a large person, they might be able to just suck you right in there. You know? See, now, if this happens to me again, I'm going to be even more freaked out. I feel like I've read that grouper have bitten people before. Yeah. Like probably trying them out. Like if they get hung out, like if you're that big, you probably have to eat so much. Yeah, this nonstop buffet for those guys. And yeah. So when you're down there and you're doing all the swimming, you're using a rebreather? No. You're using tanks, regular scuba tanks? And what is the capacity of these tanks? Like how long can you stay down just swimming around for? We have two. And we can isolate them in case one of them springs a leak. But you don't have that much more time than a standard scuba tank, but we have is refill stations all around the floor with high pressure hoses. So we have these quick disconnects on our system that you can plug in and fill it right back up and then you're good to go for another couple hours. So when you swim to go take a poo, you have to do that? You have to wear the tank or do you just hold your breath? Just hold your breath. You're not going that far. How far are you going? Like 15 feet or so. In total pitch black. Yeah. You're going to go right on the gazebo. But that's all.