Real Treasure Hunting: Pirates, Hurricanes & Spanish Gold | Captain Mike Perna | Ep. 036

Real Treasure Hunting: Pirates, Hurricanes & Spanish Gold | Captain Mike Perna | Ep. 036

Captain Mike Perna has spent 25 years doing something most people think only happens in movies: diving for sunken Spanish treasure. Off Florida's Treasure Coast lie the scattered remains of the 1715 Plate Fleet — eleven galleons loaded with New World gold and silver that a hurricane drove onto the reefs in a single night, killing over a thousand people and strewing their cargo across miles of ocean floor. This past summer, Mike's crew pulled 1,051 silver coins off the seabed and made national news. He flew from Florida to Montana to tell us how it actually works: the "breadcrumb trails" of coins scattered a mile from the wreck, the magnetometers and metal detectors, the short summer dive season, and the "you never really own the treasure, you just hold onto it for a while" philosophy that comes with a quarter-century of doing it. He brought real pieces of eight to pass across the table, walked us through the legendary Mel Fisher and the $400 million Atocha, and got into the thorny ethics of who really gets to keep history. Whether you're here for shipwrecks, colonial history, or just a great real-life treasure story, this one's got gold, pirates, hurricanes, and a lead box packed with 16,000 pearls.   1715 Fleet Society: https://1715fleetsociety.com [https://1715fleetsociety.com/]

His Mother Vanished. 20 Years Later He Found Her in the Amazon. | David Good | Ep. 035

David Good grew up with one foot in suburban Pennsylvania and the other in the Amazon rainforest. His father, anthropologist Ken Good, spent 12 years living with the Yanomami — one of the last relatively isolated peoples on Earth — and married David's mother, Yarima, the daughter of a headman. Then, when David was six, Yarima walked back into the jungle and didn't come out. He wouldn't see her again for 20 years. This is the story of what happened next: two decades of trying to bury his own identity, and then a bug-fearing 24-year-old's decision to travel days up the Orinoco River to find the mother he thought had abandoned him. What he found reframed his entire life — a family, a new name, a brother he would later grieve in a Yanomami funeral, and a scientific calling studying the Yanomami gut microbiome, which may hold clues to the diseases of the modern world. David is a microbiome researcher at the University of Guelph, the founder of the Yanomami Foundation, and the subject of the new documentary WAYUMI. This is one of the most singular life stories we've ever had on the show. Venezuelan Earthquake Relief Fund: https://welove.foundation WAYUMI Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aWDwQNTqk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aWDwQNTqk] Yanomami Foundation: https://www.yanomamifoundation.org/ [https://www.yanomamifoundation.org/] David's book, The Way Around: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Around-Finding-Mother-Yanomami/dp/0062382128 David's book, GOOD: https://nbmpub.com/products/good David's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidalexandergood

The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart | Laurie Shapiro, Journalist & Biographer | Ep. 034

Who was responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart? Was it her oft-drunk but undeniably brilliant navigator, Fred Noonan? Her publicist husband, George Putnam, who pushed his wife toward the PR stunt of the century despite her relative mediocrity as a pilot? Or was it Earhart herself, whose sudden fame had begun to cloud the thing a pilot needs most: her judgment? Journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro — a contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic — spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless icon, but a real and complicated woman. Today, Laurie gives us a portrait of the person behind the legend and a deep dive into Earhart's final flight and July 1937 disappearance over the Pacific: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna on the Lockheed Electra, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a pilot who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel as she searched for tiny Howland Island. We get into the enduring mystery and the theories it spawned — and why the real story of what happened to Amelia Earhart may be sadder, and more human, than any of them. Shapiro's book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.   Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website [http://lauriegwenshapiro.com/] Amelia Earhart Project Recordings [https://sova.si.edu/record/nasm.2020.0025] The Aviator and the Showman [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593295900]   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

Are Survival Shows Real? | Cody Lundin, Dual Survival's Original Host | Ep. 033

Cody Lundin has spent 34 years keeping people alive. Almost none of it looks like what you've seen on TV. He's the founder of Arizona's Aboriginal Living Skills School, an EMT since 1993, the author of 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive and When All Hell Breaks Loose, and one of the two original hosts of Discovery's Dual Survival. He built (and nearly broke) his career by refusing to fake it for the camera. We flew Cody up to Bozeman, took him duck hunting at the crack of dawn (his very first time), and then sat down for one of the most no-BS survival conversations we've ever recorded. Hayden throws him a series of escalating worst-case scenarios: a desert breakdown, a broken leg in the Colorado high country, a hiker lost at an alpine lake. Cody refuses every easy answer, demanding context and walking through what staying alive actually requires (hint: it's rarely the sexy stuff). Along the way: the physics of freezing to death, why your survival shelter should be invisible, the truth about what survival television did to his profession, and the on-camera stand that cost him his show. Producer Andrew even gets pulled in to defend his off-grid cabin.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Survival Show [https://thesurvivalshow.com] Keep Your Ass Alive Podcast [https://open.spotify.com/show/75m0Hx0p47OovzZEQhKTMn] Cody's Book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (2003) [https://www.amazon.com/98-6-Degrees-Keeping-Your-Alive/dp/1586852345] Cody's Book When All Hell Breaks Loose (2007) [https://www.amazon.com/When-All-Hell-Breaks-Loose/dp/142360105X]   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032

Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.