This week on the SHIPSHAPE podcast, we talk to Bruce Jones, CEO of the Florida-based Triton Submarines and take a deep dive into what an entrepreneur needs to make it and keep afloat in the submarines and submersibles industry.
Along the way, we discover all about Jones’ truly remarkable life. One that has led him to visit more than 100 different countries, get into treasure hunting, and build submarines which have explored the wreck of the Titanic, the Marianas trench – and even made contact with a giant squid. Listen on to hear about some of the coolest vehicles ever to make it underwater and explore that other final frontier.
Transcript——-
Farah [00:00:00] Shipshape.pro. The number one resource in the U.S.
Merrill [00:00:04] Today on the SHIPSHAPE podcast, we have Bruce Jones. Bruce is the CEO of Triton Submarines and he’s going to be giving us some information on submarines, treasure hunt and exploration, all of that type of stuff. Your host today are Merrill Charette. I’m a boat owner out of Boston. I live aboard a Ta-Shing Tashiba, 36, and we have Georgia.
Georgia [00:00:41] Hi, I’m Georgia Tindale and I am a freelance journalist and editor primarily in the luxury yachting sphere. Joining Merrill for this podcast.
Merrill [00:00:51] So, Bruce, what is the definition of a submarine?
Bruce [00:00:56] Well, there are actually two definitions that for the general public tend to be used interchangeably. You know, the first is for a submersible or a deep submersible, and that refers to an undersea vehicle that has limited range and endurance and are really more like vertical probes. Get in on the surface. You go down, you can cruise around the bottom. But, you know, typically you wouldn’t be underwater for more than eight or 10 hours at a time. And in a lot of cases, you’re just down there for an hour or an hour and a half. So that’s primarily what my company builds, are these deep luxury submersibles. And some of them, one one of them, and particularly dives as deep as 36,000 feet or 11,000 meters. The other term is submarine. And that’s, you know, sort of an all encompassing term. But for those of us in the industry, it really sort of stipulates that the vehicle has a lot of autonomy. Like a military submarine. A military submarine. The old diesel electric subs could spend two or three days traveling submerged when they come to the surface and recharge your Battery Bay and, you know, bring on additional air with a nuclear submarine, you know, you can go for months without surfacing. So submarines, that term generally applies to military style vehicles. But at Triton, we have a new submarine on that. It’s a luxury submarine and sort of a yacht analog, and it’s on the drawing boards right now. And we’re we’re working on that. And it would be about 100 feet long and have transatlantic capability, you know, three luxury staterooms and had galley and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, we would go underwater for an extended period of time, but the other vehicles we build could really be better classed as submersibles.
Merrill [00:03:00] So luxury submarines, I feel like that is relatively new phenomenon. How long has the term luxury submarine been around?
Bruce [00:03:10] Well, we sort of coined it back in 1993 when we started my second submarine company, a company called U.S. Submarines, we developed five different luxury submarine designs ranging from sort of 40 feet long up to 213 feet long. And so, I mean, that company did not get much traction. We did a lot of design and engineering work and a lot of consulting, but we never built one of the really big luxury submarines. So as we develop new designs, they tended to be submersibles. But, you know, they were designed for people to do observation underwater for underwater tourism and exploration. So all of them have acrylic pressure hulls, plexiglass, if you will, and they’re quite thick, but you have a 360 degree view. So we put luxury interiors in them. You know, I mean, an interior in a small sub, it’s rather abbreviated and smaller than what you’ve got in a car. But we wanted it to be luxurious and we wanted it to be fully air conditioned and comfortable at any depth. And so it’s capable of heating the seats and air conditioning the entire interior of the vessel. So we continued using luxury instead of submarine. It was submersible. As the years passed.
Merrill [00:04:37] I’m sure in the beginning when you first coined that term, people are like, Why, no one’s going to get that. But you know, people are interested in it.
Bruce [00:04:46] Well, certainly now, I mean, there’s been a real change in terms of the acceptance of what we do in the early days. My business partner and I would go to the Fort Lauderdale Yacht show and people would. Come by and laugh and say, hey, do you do you do you get two torpedoes with that? And they would ask me the price. And I tell them the price. And they said, Really? It cost $2 million to go down in your submarine. And I said, Yeah. I said, Look, you know, think about it. You wouldn’t want you take your family and friends to a thousand meters in a cheap submarine or do you?
Georgia [00:05:22] Yeah. I was wondering about product testing for these things because you’ve mentioned before that obviously they you can go down to that, what is it, 36,000 feet, 11,000 meters. And if you guys are pretty much the best people doing that from a kind of obvious perspective, how do you test that?
Bruce [00:05:39] Well, it’s actually quite a complex process. All of our submarines are classed by a classification society like the Danby or ABS. The Navy is debt Norske Veritas, ABS is the American Bureau of Shipping. And I tell my clients that by the time the paperwork weighs as much as the submarine, the project is done. That’s a bit of that duration, but it is a very arduous process. It’s rather like the FAA looks at building new aircraft and you know, we start by submitting all of the drawings and there might be, you know, 400 different drawings for a submarine. And all of the engineering calculations we do reports on all of the materials and their origin as well as all of their characteristics. We test some of the materials for for fire and for strength. And so the Classification Society reviews all of that, stamps the drawings and the engineering calculations, approves those things. And then as we assemble the sub, we have surveyors from the society that come and do periodic inspections. As it gets toward the end of the process, the surveyors make us test these materials, you know, like a drop weight or like the life support system and to measure the results. And so those are all approved when we get to the part of the passenger compartment. Those pieces of acrylic spheres are tested hydrostatic. So we either drop them into water 1.2 times the design depth. So if the sub was rated for 100 meters, we’d take it down to 120 meters and we’d strain, gauge the interiors and measure any dimensional variations. And so that whole process gets approved. In the extreme case of the Triton 36,002, which is 11,000 meters capable, we went to the only pressure vessel facility in the world that could accommodate the sorts of pressures and the size of the personal capsule. So the passenger compartment was composed of a specific alloy of titanium. We took it to the Krylov Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and they tested the sphere to about 45,000 feet salt water pressure. So, you know, again, it was strange. In the interior, the surveyor from the Glass Society was there and there were no problems, you know. So then they signed off for the test program. So then the surveyors come in with actual ocean dives and record everything working in the in the interior of the sub. And finally, after that crisis completed, we got the classification certificate. So the submarine then is classed and the owner can get insurance. The end result of all this are that civil submarines are the safest form of transportation in the world today. Statistically, there has never been a single injury or fatality to anyone traveling aboard a classed submarine or submersible. And that says something significant because the tourist submarine industry, there are about 30 large submarines carry 48, 66 passengers operating around the world, and they’ve been operating since 1986. The first one came into existence back then. These days, they carry a million passengers a year on short dives of about an hour. And they they have that. They have a perfect safety record as well. So it’s it’s pretty significant from a statistical perspective.
Merrill [00:09:48] Now, if we rewind a little bit, we go back to the beginning. So you grew up on oil rigs. Is that true?
Bruce [00:09:57] It is true. My parents. And my grandfather owned a company called DeLong Corporation, and it was a very large, privately held marine construction company. And my grandfather developed the world’s first self elevating jackup rigs that all the oil production rigs are based on or were based on for quite a few years. And they also were able to build bridges and underwater fuel storage facilities and that sort of thing with that technology. So we lived on offshore rigs in the Persian Gulf, in the South China Sea. And yeah, so I grew up on those rigs and my first jobs were running, you know, running small boats for the company and then later larger boats. And at one point, my parents said, okay, well, living on the rigs is getting a little old, so we’re going to build a yacht. So they had the fever design, a 68 foot powerboat back in 1970, and we had a built in Japan, and they lived aboard that yacht for 35 years.
Merrill [00:11:08] So with the being on the rigs and all of that, you were basically allowed to see the world in a sense, right?
Bruce [00:11:14] I did. I did a lot of travel today. I’ve been to about 122 countries. I’ve lived in 20. And a lot of that a lot of the territory that I covered, you know, back was back in those early days traveling with my parents.
Georgia [00:11:29] So we’ve got the oil rigs. We’ve got They saved the world. What was your early career like before you ended up doing what you ended up doing with the submarines? Because I also have a background in all things gems.
Bruce [00:11:43] It’s true. My undergraduate degree is in geology, and I started back in 1978, and when all of my contemporaries graduated and went to work, they all wound up in the oil industry because that was the big thing back then. I was interested in Hardrock geology, which is mineralogy petrology, igneous petrology. And I wasn’t interested in the oil business. So I wound up sort of being fascinated with gemstones. So I went to the Gemological Institute of America, graduated from there. I also became a fellow of the Gemological Association of Great Britain and did some Gemological training. And in Germany at the Deutsch Gemologist consultant and I started a gemological laboratory. So that was sort of my first career. I did also a lot of gem mining consulting where I’d go in and help miners maximize the extraction capability of their techniques for the gems that they were mining in Asia and Africa and South America. So that was my my first career.
Georgia [00:12:50] And so how do we get from there to the submarines?
Bruce [00:12:54] Well, I was always fascinated with submarines and being underwater because of my parents exposing me to, you know, to living at sea or on a jack a break. I learned to dive when I was nine years old under a terminal jacket in the Persian Gulf. I’ve been a lifelong diver, and I’ve always been fascinated with that. And so, you know, it was always something in the back of my mind. And my my wife and I have been married 36 years. And just before we got married, I took her to the Philippines to do some treasure hunting. And we she was reading an article in the Manila Bulletin and it talked about a guy who lives in the UK. His name is Paul Moorhouse, and he had engineered a couple of small diesel electric submarines. You know, by small I mean 15 meters or less.
Georgia [00:13:50] Yeah.
Bruce [00:13:50] And and so I started writing to him, saying, you know, somebody ought to build a bigger one of these things and take tourists down to see coral reef. That would be really cool. Well, I found out that, you know, someone had already started doing that only a couple of places around the world. But I became fascinated with it. So I traveled to see these operations. I wrote reports on the economics and the logistical issues. And eventually, you know, I just set myself up as a consultant in this nascent sort of new industry to the submarines. And that sort of developed into someone saying, okay, well, why don’t you be the owner’s representative on the build so you can look after my interests with the manufacturer? And so I did that a few times. Well, why don’t you help us set up a tour, a submarine operation in the Caribbean, okay. And or, you know, in the South Pacific? Sure, I’ll do that. And at one point, I finally had a client that said, Well, Bruce, you know more about this stuff than anybody I’ve met. Why don’t you just build me a submarine? I said, Yeah, okay, we can do that. And so that’s how it all started.
Georgia [00:15:03] Wow. And do you remember the first time you ever went down on a submarine?
Bruce [00:15:08] Well, the most notable first time, I think, for me was when I was the owner’s representative on that first submarine. I was there at the factory, which was in Vancouver, British Columbia. And we, you know, we finished the sub and then we went out for sea trials. And it was classic by the American viewership. And then we went through all of the requirements there. And then we wound up diving the sub in India arm and we had to find enough people to kind of fill this 36 foot or a 36 passenger submarine. And my parents were living on their boat and so they came up with some friends and and so I had a lot of my family members on the test dives of that that first submarine. And so that was it wasn’t a deep dive by any means, you know, 100, 350 feet, so, you know, 45 meters maximum. But it was it made a real impact on me. I just I just thought it was really cool and that really wasn’t enough to sort of get me to drop everything and get into the luxury sub business. But I did have an experience where I was in the Caribbean with my wife in the early days and I had to do a little work on that very submarine that I had built in Vancouver. And I was running late and I promised my wife I would take her out to dinner. And I said, You know, Liz, I called her and I said, Why don’t you come down to the sub? And I’ve got to, you know, do a couple of adjustments to things and you can just hang out with me and we’ll we’ll have a meal in the submarine. So just, you know, find something and bring it down here. So she did she went out and got a, you know, sort of picnic meal and grabbed a bottle of champagne and came down to the sub. And I just loosened the lines at the pier, shut the hatches and drove the submarine down, you know, maybe five meters, six meters. We’re just, you know, just sitting on the bottom. And it was it was a lovely evening. And we could see the light shade and we were the only two people in this pretty good sized sub. And when we turned on the underwater lights and hit the fish feeders and the fish came in and was sipping champagne, and I thought it was one of the most peaceful and romantic things, experiences that I’d ever had. And I looked at Liz and I said, You know, we ought to start a company to build submarines like this so people could really enjoy the undersea world.
Georgia [00:17:40] Yeah, it’s all about that experience, isn’t it? I mean, that sort of thing as well. Obviously, a Triton submarine is a slightly higher price point than some people might be able to afford. But how do you see kind of the future of of submarines in terms of accessibility? Because, you know, we could also talk about underwater residences and things that maybe are going to make this kind of experience a bit more accessible to people. How do you how do you see the future of submarines in that sense?
Bruce [00:18:12] Well, I think that we’ve made huge inroads into the acceptance of our subs, particularly by big yacht owners, superyacht owners. There are better clients because they find out that by having the sub on board, they can become a hero with their family and friends because they just, you know, we can’t or nobody else offers that experience. So they love it and family and friends love it and it’s educational. And every time you go underwater, you see something that or you you are in a place where no human has ever said it before. And so, you know, that’s a pretty special experience. Now, even though, you know, I say that subs are are accepted now by especially by large theater owners, it’s still a pretty minuscule market in the scheme of things. You know, we may build ten, 12 subs a year. So but that’s up from one type of year when we first started. And, you know, we are increasing our construction capability. We’ve opened a new major facility in Barcelona three or four years ago. So it’s all moving in the right direction. But I you know, it still takes thousands of man hours to build this up and they cost millions of dollars. So it’s not something that everybody is ever going to own. It also costs a lot to have a yacht that can launch and recover us. Yes. It’s not going to be a household thing, but I think that the tourist submarines being popular allow people that are, you know, eight, ten months old, up to 90 years old, to go down on a tourist sub, you know, and be perfectly. Comfortable and experienced the undersea world. So, you know, I think that the you know, the undersea residences and the resorts will slowly, over time, come to fruition and be more popular. But I don’t have any illusions about it being, you know, experiencing huge growth and everybody being able to do it. It’s still going to be a very specialized thing. Back in the sixties, Jacques Cousteau wrote a book. I’m trying to remember the name of it, but basically it was a book that talked about his experience building the first sort of viable underwater habitat in the Red Sea. And it was an ambient pressure habitat meant that it was at sea or I mean, the underwater pressure imposed by the depth. And instead of a sub, which is always at surface pressure, no matter how deep you go. So he built this in about 30 feet of water and Ross bonus off the coast of Egypt. And he just thought that was the greatest thing. So this book that he wrote talked about, you know, the future of underwater habitats and how within ten years they were going to be underwater towns and people were going to start to live underwater and they were going to be living under water and mining minerals and doing so. He had this very painted, this very rosy picture. And none of that, of course, has come to fruition. And, you know, here we are 60 years later. So it’s sort of like you guys are probably not old enough to have sat around and listened to the lunar landings. And when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and, you know, my dad came out and he looked at me and he said, well, son, I don’t know if I’m going to get a chance to go to the moon in my lifetime, but it’s absolutely certain that you will. And then space travel just became sort of a nonevent the in the subsequent years. So, yeah, those that’s my feeling. It’s still a really cool job. And it’s it’s you know, it’s a great thing to do.
Georgia [00:22:11] In terms of the treasure hunting. I’m really interested in this because I’ve actually done interviews before about treasure hunting. And it’s not without its slight controversies, really, in terms of questions of who has the right to own what, you know, whether it’s who has jurisdiction over what. It can be quite a thorny topic, actually, which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected going into it. I think, you know, finders keepers, possibly, But yeah, I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, if that’s something you’ve ever come up against.
Bruce [00:22:44] Oh, well, in a way. Have you ever seen the the the movie with Humphrey Bogart, The Treasure of the Sierra madre? It was a well-known movie where, you know, these guys are hunting for gold and they make a discovery and everybody’s personality changes and they get greedy and aggressive and it sort of a human nature thing. And you run across that in the treasure hunting business. And, you know, my experiences were a little bit different because we were treasure hunting successfully in the Philippines, and the Japanese buried 27,000 metric tons of gold bullion that they had looted systematically from 11 Southeast Asian countries. You know, they went through the banks in Hong Kong and Singapore and Jakarta. And the Asians have always been sort of hard asset inclined. And they for complex reasons, we don’t have time to go into. They buried that stuff in the Philippines. And so I was there and President Marcos was my partner. But we had permits and, you know, we were digging for this this buried gold, which is in a number of different locations in our particularly case, you know, Marcos took all of what we recovered offshore. And we you know, we got a ride to the airport and got put on an airplane back home. That’s a that’s a different story.
Merrill [00:24:22] Now, when you were looking for this gold, I’m assuming there wasn’t like, you know, a map with an X marks the spot. How did you go about finding it?
Bruce [00:24:30] Well, we used some remote sensing equipment and we would actually come across an old Japanese map on occasion and in the early days. And so we you know, we had some general eyewitness because this is, you know, the eighties, early eighties, and there were still eyewitnesses around from World War Two. So, yeah, I mean, it it was not an easy thing. And we but we did find 30 metric tons of gold in the sea floor. Off of color to Ghana and Batangas. And as I said, Marcos got it. After Marcos left the Philippines, we went back and started working again with some of the people that we’d worked with originally. And we said, well, you know, how is it now that Marcos is gone? And one guy that was a government official just looked at me and he said, Well, Alibaba is gone, but we still have the 40 thieves.
Merrill [00:25:24] When you’re doing treasure hunting, I’m assuming that there’s a level of uncertainty with everything. So how did you manage that?
Bruce [00:25:32] Well, look, you do the best you can, you know. I mean, you get the permits, you get approval so that because otherwise, if you make any kind of a recovery, you know, they’re going to take it off of you at the slightest excuse to do so. And, you know, that’s the issues with treasure hunting now, because we occasionally will sell us someone who wants to use it for treasure hunting. You know, they usually have information about a ship that sunk. And as a consequence of new remote sensing technology, those ships are oftentimes able to be pinpointed utilizing proton procession magnetometers and side scan sonar. And, you know, a whole raft of technologies. And you’ve seen in recent years that there are all kinds of wrecks from, you know, the Indianapolis many years ago to various wrecks that are deep sub has made dives on and including the Titanic and and and others they just recently use that sub to dive on the deep, deepest wreck ever found. Don’t ask me the name of it because I can’t recall. But in any event, it happened. So it’s it’s easier to locate these ships. A lot of them are. The losses were documented. You know, if there were Spanish ships in the Spanish libraries, they have if there were survivors, you know, they have a general idea of where the ship went down. So, you know, the legal issues really are well, okay, the ship sank in our territorial waters. So, you know, maybe some of this belongs to us in the Spanish saying, wait a minute, it was in Spanish ship and in Spanish gold. So we want the proceeds. And then the guys who are putting up all the money and taking all the risk and making the recoveries saying, well, you know, look, we’ve got it possession to 9/10 of the law. So, you know, there you go. It’s a treasure for the attorney, but it can be very difficult if you’re one of the participants unless all that is settled beforehand.
Georgia [00:27:37] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I said, it’s definitely a topic that’s come up before and is was deemed too controversial for me to ask about in an interview once. But I’m glad you were able to speak about it. And one discovery, which I think was possibly less controversial, which I’d love you to tell us a bit more about, was the giant squid.
Bruce [00:27:55] Oh, okay. Well, we have a great client whose name is Reed Ali. And you know, you may know of him. He owns the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater. And Ray has been a big fan of Triton for a long time. And he owns two of our thousand meter capable submersibles. And, you know, one of Ray’s many ways of being a benefactor is that he sponsors marine science research programs with his subs. And he allows, you know, certain people, certain scientists, to come aboard his incredible exploration ship and to use the subs periodically. So, you know, I think back ten years ago or so, they had a program to try and find the giant squid. So they invited three scientists for giant squid experts, and they made dives in deep canyons off of Japan. And they tried luring the squid in with bait. They tried, you know, lights. They tried, you know, different types of bait, live fish sent since, you know, that were pure up your bones in the water. And they were diving one day with the Japanese squid expert and spent his whole life researching giant squid and they encountered giant squid at about I think it was about 800 feet. And they got 22 minutes of video and some squid followed the sub down to like 2800 feet or so. So that was the first time that any human had seen a giant squid underwater. So NHK did a television special. BBC did a television special, The Discovery Channel did a television special. All on that encounter.
Merrill [00:29:57] Yeah.
Georgia [00:29:58] Wow. That’s. Absolutely incredible. And so actually it turned up when you weren’t trying to find it then like like when all the busses arrive at once.
Bruce [00:30:06] Well, no, they were trying to find that they had you know, they were they went to made a lot of dives and made a significant effort to try and lure in a giant squid. And they finally were successful.
Merrill [00:30:19] Some other dives that has been a part of wasn’t it, Blue Planet. And they went and saw the Titanic again, right?
Bruce [00:30:28] Yep, indeed. Well, the the Triton 36,002 has been around the world and has made dives to the deepest spot in each of the five oceans. And that had never been done before. And at this point the sub has made well over 20 dives to 10,830 meters in Challenger, deep in the Marianas Trench. And it’s carried various people down. It’s made dives in each trench that is over 10,000 feet deep. And so it’s made wreck dives on Titanic and other wrecks. I mean, it really has a long and storied history over just the four years that it’s been diving. So I would say for me and for my business partner, Patrick Leahy, building that sub was the most difficult endeavor that treatments ever undertaken. And everybody said you’ll never be able to do it. The pressure on the personnel capsule and this is put it in terms that people can imagine is equivalent to a stack of 292 fully fueled and loaded seven forceps. That’s how much pressure the water at 16,000 PSI puts on the sub capsule itself. So, you know, building something to withstand all that pressure is an amazing feat. It’s the only sub in the world that the class certificate says unlimited diving depth. And for me, when we completed that and the the first owner of that sub and and system which consists of a 2000 time 225 foot ship set up to support the sub and some landers that can accompany the sub down independently that are autonomous is moving on now to a new owner who’s going to use it exclusively for marine science research so that sub and its systems have really changed the way mankind relates to the very deep ocean. And it’s done some spectacular things. So it’s sort of like, okay, I can check the sub box and now I can retire.
Merrill [00:32:55] Well, you’ve certainly made lasting impacts not only with, you know, research discoveries and all that type of stuff. So here’s a question How unexplored are the world’s oceans?
Bruce [00:33:08] Oh, well, I mean, there are huge ocean surface. You know, 71% of the Earth’s surface is ocean water and thousands and thousands of square miles of ocean bottom. And if you know, if you’re talking about how much of it is seen acquire submersible, well, that many. Yeah, that would be less than 1% by far. Now, how much of it have we surveyed and using our own means and all of this sort of thing And how much of it has been of its depth and topography have been determined? Well, then that’s a much larger number. But certainly, you know, in general, when you take near coastal areas and it’s easy to say that 95% of the seafloor has been completely unexplored.
Merrill [00:34:00] Now, one of the topics that is kind of being brought up is how to use the ocean, you know, and build communities on that. And I know that you were in the process of building a underwater resort. I like to assume that would be one of the first steps in order to make underwater communities. Can you discuss a little bit about that?
Bruce [00:34:22] Well, you know, I was looking for a way to build a permanent one atmosphere underwater structure. And, you know, there were a lot of, you know, sort of research programs and people claiming they were going to build this for scientific research and they were going to do this and do that. And I just didn’t see any of it being viable unless it was a profit making endeavor, which is why we designed an undersea resort. And there’s huge amounts of interest from the people in staying. But but trying to get it funded is has been extremely difficult and a number of false starts. We were at a private island. Two years where we were going to put in, and then there was a coup in Fiji and the investors pulled out. So, you know, I don’t really ever see there being underwater cities in general because we have so much land in the United States alone. I mean, fly across the country from L.A. to New York and look down. I mean, there there there are hundreds of miles where there’s just no human habitation at all. So as long as you can build there or anywhere terrestrial, the the ocean and ocean floor particularly is a very hostile environment. You know, the temperature has to be regulated. Got to get air somehow down, you know, to the people that are living there, then you’ve, you know, you can’t scuba dive if it’s at any kind of significant depth down below 45, 50 meters. So, you know, I don’t ever see it becoming a mainstream thing for for those reasons. And it’s incredibly expensive to build stuff that goes underwater. I mean, it’s just the nature of the beast. So, look, I like to think that, you know, there might be a few residential developments underwater in the tropics, you know, in the future. But, you know, I don’t see it as being the next the next big thing. I am sort of puzzled by all of the interest in going into space where 95% of the seafloor is completely unexplored. I mean, that that does puzzle me.
Merrill [00:36:37] As any of the inventions and creations of your company have been used in space at all.
Bruce [00:36:44] No, we’ve had, you know, numerous sort of inquiries regarding developing life support systems for spaceships, because, you know, the submarine life support systems are pretty much the same. You know, we we take oxygen from oxygen flasks into the pressure hole and we just add oxygen to maintain 21% by volume. And then we scrub out the CO2. And that’s, you know, pretty much the same thing that they do in space, although they do use oxygen generators instead of carrying, you know, flats or whatever. But other than that, no, because the one thing about a sub is that it has to be very heavy. It has to weigh as much as the water it displaces and water is heavy. So imagine you’re on the beach, you know, one day with your kids and you’ve got a beach ball that they’re kicking around and you’re just in the water and you try and push this beach ball completely underwater. Well, chances are you can’t do it because it’s so buoyant and you’ve got all the force of the weight of the water that’s keeping you from succeeding. And so that’s, you know, we have to hang a bunch of weight on the sub. And there they’re heavy, which is one of the difficulties that, you know, that our clients have. And putting them on yachts is that you need, you know, lifting gear that can handle it and you’ve got to handle the deck loads. I mean, a two passenger sub may weigh, you know, three tons. So or more important, we have three of your subs that weigh 80 £800, you know, so four or five times. And then the two man sub that dives to the world’s deepest places, the Triton, 36,000 to it weighs 12 tonnes.
Merrill [00:38:40] So if some person was some younger person was thinking about coming in and trying to get into this industry, what would you suggest would be the way of getting into submarines?
Bruce [00:38:50] Well, you’ve got to get a job with an existing company, and they’re not very many companies that actually know what they’re doing. So, you know, you’d have to be discerning about that. You know, we occasionally will hire mechanical engineers. We’ll hire skilled technicians. And, you know, the the best way is to you have to learn by doing by doing it. I mean, everybody wants to be a sub pilot, but very few are willing to stick with it long enough to truly get qualified to do that job.
Merrill [00:39:23] So you’ve had a bunch of entrepreneurial work throughout your entire life. You’ve been the president, BP, CEO of so many companies. What about entrepreneurship drives you forward? What what is your guiding star?
Bruce [00:39:39] Well, I am a pretty independent guy. I hate people. Tell me what to do, although that happens regularly when you have clients, you know, and I have been self-employed my entire adult life. I’ve never worked for anybody else unless, of course, they were a client. So I’ve always felt. That I’d like to live or die by my own decisions. And you know, I don’t have a single dollar invested in the stock market because I don’t have any control. And so maybe I’m a bit of a control freak. I don’t think so anymore because I have lots of people doing whatever I want them to do. It wasn’t always like that. I mean, I think in terms of success and what makes a successful entrepreneur. It’s clearly knowledge of the subject matter that’s relevant. And, you know, if you don’t know something about what you’re doing yourself, you can usually hire someone that does. But by far, for me, by far the most significant characteristic has been perseverance, you know, willing to fail and get back up and keep going. I mean, I have had failures and I’ve lost money and I’ve pondered, you know, continuing on. But for some reason and in a lot of cases, I have to say it was the support of my wife who allowed me to have this experience and still stick it out. You know, we eventually became very successful. But perseverance was the key element for me.
Georgia [00:41:19] I think what sounds really exciting about looking over your career that you’ve had is how much has changed. You know, you’ve basically created the luxury submersibles market. Really? Very much so. And then, you know, all these discoveries that have been made with the Triton subs, it’s such an exciting career to to be able to look back on. I’m going to ask you a ridiculous question now, which is what discoveries do you think there may still be to happen, you know, with the undersea exploration? So much of it is still undiscovered. What do you think we might be able to find?
Bruce [00:41:53] Well, the last four years or so of operating the deep sub, the client for that we bought, it had only one thing in mind and that was personal records. He wasn’t interested in the science. He only wanted to achieve things himself, to put himself in the record book. And, you know, so that’s been that’s dictated what that sub has done over the last several years. Now it’s going to go into the hands of a guy who really is in love with the scientific aspects of deep sea exploration, you know, facilitating new discoveries of scientists. And every one of these deep dives, I’m sure, you know, even with the guy was an interested in in the science particularly they’ve made new discoveries. I mean they’ve photographed stuff on the sea floor that no one’s ever seen before. And so, you know, I expect lots of new discoveries and new fish species, you know, new kind of terms, all kinds of marine life. There’s just no question that that’s going to happen with this sub for years and years to come. And you know, who can tell what else you might find? Other people that are that are starting to use submersibles to plan deep sea mining contracts. There’s a lot of environmental concern. But look, nobody really knows what goes on in the deep ocean or notices it. And I think if you take some basic precautions, it’s inevitable that deep sea mining is is going to become a thing, you know, particularly with our penchant for electrifying everything these days. We just don’t have the lithium and other rare earth metals that are going to allow that to happen without finding new sources. So there’s that. You know, there’s the leisure aspects of having people take rides on tourist submarines. I like that because, you know, you I’m a big fan of preserving the oceans and you can’t really motivate people to do that if they don’t understand what the issues are. And if you take a ride on a tourist submarine in a lot of locations, if you’re looking at the Heineken bottles on the bottom, you know, you kind of get a sense that we have to take care of the ocean. And I think there is. So there’s some benefits to that side of the business as well.
Merrill [00:44:27] Now, you do so much business. What do you do for what do you do in your leisure time?
Bruce [00:44:33] Well, lots of things. My wife and I are both pilots, so we have an airplane, you know, we fly around than that. I have a hot air balloon. My ground crew is grown up, so I don’t use that as often as I. I would like. But I think one of my sons is going to take that over. I fly helicopters and I’ll probably buy a helicopter here in the you know, in the next. Little bit. We have a boat, a long distance passage maker, and I’m about to buy another one this month. That’s in is in the Netherlands. And we’re going to take that up and cruise the fjords of Norway and then, you know, do the do the Med over the next couple of years and then sail it back to the States. What else? I have a motorhome that I never have time to use. I’m a big reader. I have, I think about 12,000 books in my house, most of which I have not read, but I hope to get some of them someday. I have a a mineralogical and Gemological research laboratory also in my house. Lots of specialty equipment, an electron, micro probe, energy dispersive, x ray core essence spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectra Photometry. So I do I do a bit of research and I also cut gemstones for fun. I collect rough from all over the world and turn them into into gemstones. So no, I’ve never had a bored day in my life and hopefully I never will.
Merrill [00:46:04] Well, you also were a national skydiving champion, too.
Bruce [00:46:09] That’s true. I have a bit of an adventurous streak, and so I won the US National Collegiate Skydiving Championships back in 1977 and most of my later college days and on into graduate school, I spent a lot of time skydiving. I finally gave it up after I’d made over a thousand jumps when my my eldest son was born.
Merrill [00:46:33] That’s absolutely fascinating. I got like a phobia of heights. You can never get me to do that. Then when you say planes and helicopters.
Bruce [00:46:40] She says, Oh yeah. And I used to do a lot of hang gliding and and yeah, no. And in gliders I fly gliders. I love aviation. And actually, I’m kind of a big fan of transportation. You know, anything that moves, I’m sort of a fan.
Georgia [00:46:57] Well, last time we spoke, Bruce, you mentioned you can choose whether you want to have this. Last time we spoke, you mentioned potentially retiring from Triton.
Bruce [00:47:08] That’s true. Yeah, that is definitely in the in the plan. I have been self-employed for 43 years. I’ve had enough fun. You know, there’s some things I want to do. I’ve got my bucket list. And my wife sailed around the world before I met her. And she’s very adventuresome and she’s willing to go anywhere and do anything, you know, on a moment’s notice. So, you know, our kids are all grown now and there and we don’t have any grandkids yet. So there’s nothing, nothing holding us back. But I think that certainly by the end of next month, I will be retired from Trident submarines.
Georgia [00:47:47] Wow. And I mean, what it sounds like from from what you’ve been saying is that you’ve basically managed to have an absolutely incredible career where you’ve been able to combine your passions and your work. And that’s that really is the best thing you can possibly do, isn’t it, in your work, Be able to have those things that you enjoy, also be how you make your living.
Bruce [00:48:05] It’s it’s true. And it was certainly really true for me in the earliest days. But as you get older and you know, you’re you’re not doing as much that sort of cutting edge yourself, you’re really talking to lawyers and accountants and human resource people. The stress levels, you know, they get they get fairly high. My partner and I started in submarines. We’ve trained submarines without a single investor, and we’ve never had any investors in the company. So we bootstrapped this thing completely on our own and we’ve had to take, you know, significant risks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve signed my house away if there’s a problem with the subcontract, well, we don’t have to do that anymore. But we certainly did, you know, quite a few times in the early days. And so it’s become increasingly more stressful. And I think running a business, oftentimes it’s really, you know, when you break it down into its components, it’s it’s really not that difficult. But managing the people is very hard, I think. And, you know, I’m a bit tired of that part of the business. So I’ve been very fortunate in my life in so many ways, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had. But it’s you know, I’m 66, it’s time and I’m ready.
Georgia [00:49:29] Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanted to ask you one more final question, actually, because you mentioned about the 100 foot yacht that you’re having commissioned. And in terms of the fractional ownership of the yacht, just I wanted to just very quickly get your thoughts on that, because within the IPO industry, there’s a lot of talk about fractional ownership of boats and whether it’s, you know, a practical model for yachting. So I was just really interested to hear your thoughts. That.
Bruce [00:49:59] Okay. Well, if you look at the Superyacht world, you know, there aren’t any yachts that have been designed around utilizing a deep luxury submersible. I mean, there are a lot of yachts that carry them, you know, because they’ve made been able to retrofit things or or make provision in the garage to fit a submarine and the lifting system, that sort of thing. But I have clients of Triton who are real submarine aficionados and people that would love to own a submarine, but they really can’t justify the expense of a sub, which might cost 4 million bucks and a yacht to carry it, which is going to cost a lot more than that, you know. So they’re kind of left out in the cold because they’ve got a real interest. But, you know, they can’t justify spending all that money. And as you know, Georgia, the you know, the average yacht owner, you know, they they don’t have the time to spend, you know, a significant number of weeks or months on their yacht, most of them. So what I thought would work would be, you know, my wife said to me, look, you know, let’s buy another boat and we can sail it around various parts of the world. But I really don’t want a boat that doesn’t have a sub on it. And I’m thinking, well, okay, I’m retiring. You know, I’m selling half the company, so I’ve got some money. But do I really want to spend, you know, $25 million on building a yacht and putting a sub on it? Well, the answer no, I can’t afford it. So what we’re doing is we figured out a very efficient whole form with my naval architect, Paul Berry, in Australia. And, you know, we’ve made plans for a very efficient vessel that will survive virtually anything state, and it’s going to be very luxurious and comfortable, economical to run this particular boat as a twin. John Deere 500 horsepower diesels. So, you know, we don’t take a lot of fuel. And as I said, it’s an efficient home for them. But we’re we’re integrating a Triton 1653 that will live under under the deck of the yacht. So it’s not on deck. So it’s out of the way and can be secured. So we’ll have an integrated launch and recovery system that will launch it over the stern and then recover it, you know, from the stern and integrate it into the deck so you can’t see anything. It looks like an A-frame when the vessel is operating in a non sub mode. And then all the support equipment you can need is stowed below decks and again integrated into the whole system. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take five partners, I’ll be the six partner, and we’ll each put up enough money to build the boat and operate it. Initially, the yacht will go to two major dive centers for submersibles in the world every year, and the owners will be able to come in and spend up to, you know, they can spend two or three weeks at each location. So six weeks a year if they want. And then the rest of the time, 14 or 15 weeks out of the year, will sell charters to people that want to come. And do, you know, mainly sub diving at great spots like Pulau or Truc Lagoon or the Galapagos, Tahiti, the the Red Sea, that sort of thing. So it makes it not inexpensive, but it makes it sort of affordable for people of some means. And the charter, the profit from the charter operations will pay for the expenses of the entire operation of the yacht for a year. So basically you put up the money to build the the sub in the yacht and and you enjoy, you know, 15, 20 years of use and it doesn’t cost you any more money theoretically, unless there’s, you know, a real issue that you don’t have the cash. It’s all from the charter revenue. So that’s the plan.
Merrill [00:54:14] Well, it was amazing to talk to you, Bruce, and it sounds like you have the whole adventure ready to go right after you retire.
Bruce [00:54:22] Well, yeah, that’s the plan. At the end of the month, I’m going to the Netherlands to sign the papers on a boat that we’re buying, and then we’ll head off for the fjords of Norway. So I’m really looking forward to it. A couple of years ago, I took my kids, I and four adult children and their significant others, which are different then than they were now. They are now go to Tahiti. And we just did a bare boat charter for a couple of weeks, sailing around all the two Haitian islands. And my wife looked at me and she said, You know, I’m married to you for 36. For years. I’ve never seen you happier than in this moment. So I took that to heart.
Merrill [00:55:02] Well, where can people find your submarines if they’re looking to purchase.
Bruce [00:55:08] Triton subs dot com? Try to win subs dot com. There’s a great website.
Merrill [00:55:14] They’re awesome. Well couldn’t appreciate it more as well.
Bruce [00:55:18] Thank you very much. You’ve made it very easy. I think it’s great. I’ll start listening to your podcast and I really appreciate the opportunity. Hope you guys have a great rest of your week.
Georgia [00:55:29] Thank you.
Speaker 4 [00:55:34] And check back every Tuesday for our latest episode and be sure to like, share and subscribe to shipshape. Dot Pro. Dot Pro.
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