Underwater Drones and Digital Treasure: Navigating Modern Marine Adventures (E9)

I'm Phil Laarman, and I'm Douglas Borthwick, and this is Old Men, New Money. Welcome, everyone. This is a very exciting episode we have for you today. Today, we've got Mark and Chris Gerian, and we also have Mike Bonoff with us, and they're from the Treasure Experience. And the Treasure Experience is one of the first ever companies to do a security token raise. So, very exciting business that they're in, and really, I'll start with the Mark. If you could introduce yourself and describe the business. I am Mark Gerian. I'm CEO of Treasure Experience. And we are committed to commercial archaeology, treasure hunting, and marine exploration.

And our business model is we spend time researching shipwrecks, looking for recoveries. We're building a media base behind that, and we develop our own technologies in the area of submersible remotely operated vehicles or underwater drones. And Chris, what about you? My brother and I have been partners since '89, and Michael, his father and I went to high school together. But we've put together the Treasure Experience to share as much as we can with as many people the experience of finding treasure, looking for treasure, and recovering treasure.

If you recall, back in, probably you don't, you're probably too young, but when we landed on the moon the very first time, I remember being glued to the TV every second of that operation that was engaging, it was exciting, and it was an adventure, and it was completely new. So that's the same kind of experience we want to bring to the people that sign in, follow us and participate, so that they get that same excitement, adventure, and experience that we get to do. So you can come with us virtually, and in some cases maybe even physically. It's just a total wonderful experience. So that's what we're trying to bring to the public. Great.

Mike, introduce yourself. Yep. Mike Baumhof. So operating as the CTO of the company. So my history, a little bit different, kind of led me to this point. So I went to school in the University of Hawaii for archaeology and anthropology. What am I going to do coming out with that? I had no idea. So obviously you fall into finance, started working for the State House of Representatives as a budget analyst for some of the state departments, and then migrated my way back to the university, helping implement this large software system, and that was my feeder into technology.

Grew from there, eventually created my own consulting firm focused on artificial intelligence. This was before chat GPT and everybody knew what AI was. Worked with IBM on the IBM Watson suite of services, if you remember Watson, it was the robot that played Jeopardy and beat the pants off of everybody. So I worked with those guys, developing out a lot of those things, helped implement those into a lot of companies out in San Francisco. They all did very well, and me as the consultant, I got to cheer on from the sidelines. So got really into technology, built some startups in terms of mobile apps, software platforms and things of that nature.

And then by happenstance, my father was telling me, he met up with Mark and Chris at a conference, saw what they were doing, called them the right brothers of the ocean, because of some of the technology they built, actually being able to fly, use flight dynamics underwater. And it was the coolest thing and seeing I wanted to be an archaeologist, didn't see a pathway there, went into technology. And then when they presented the idea of really merging those two, I just said, I'm your guy. And here we are. Got it. So my understanding of treasure experience is there's really three separate areas that overlap would be technology.

You develop technology for underwater exploration. And I think we should go into that at some point in this conversation. Another one would be the actual treasure hunting. My understanding is that you have the rights to go after treasure in different parts of the world. And then by go after treasure, actually get into the water and find it and then pull it out and then keep it. And then I guess the third part would be media. And when media, I guess I'm thinking your Netflix shows like Deadliest Catch or that type of thing that would show maybe on an Amazon or on a Netflix, who wants to go into this?

Yeah, the technology first, Chris, are you the technology expert? I can start with that. The first ROV that we ever purchased was called a Benthels Mini Rover. And we didn't know anything about underwater drones. So we purchased that one based on opinions that we got from the Army Corps of Engineers. And it turns out it was an OK unit, but it didn't do what it was billed to be able to do. It wouldn't fly in a current. It would just act like a fishing lure. And we couldn't find anything on the market that actually would fly in a current, be towed, all the things that we want to do or to accomplish. So we sit down and built our own.

Mark had the vision of what he wanted. And he approached me and said, do you think you can build this? So we did. We built it. The first vehicle we built was called the Nova Ray. It's from the top. It looks like a stingray. And from the front, the arcuate-shaped wing makes it look a little bit like a seagull in the wind. What that vehicle can do is both be towed or fly under its own power. And so it's using all the characteristics of an aircraft in the air. But we're using the medium of water. And everything underwater is 10 times or 100 times more effective on the vehicles. It was a great success.

We were able to mount sonars and underwater cameras and sub-bottom profilers, all these things to the ROV to make it a very good and very efficient work tool. So that vehicle has shortened survey times. It's seven times more efficient than anything else out in the field. So we're able to accomplish and cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. And we still use that unit that we built. We designed it in 2003. And the particular one we've been using, I've been using it for 14 years. So it's robust, tough, and very good search tool for finding treasure.

So for listeners to this, I guess what you're talking about is something that looks like a manta ray that goes underwater, that is tagged, that is towed behind a boat and can scan the ocean floor? That's correct. And I've actually worked this vehicle in a six knot current. And it doesn't affect the vehicle. In fact, it only makes the control surfaces even more sensitive, more efficient. So for covering a lot of ground and using all of the survey tools that we mount on this, the side scan sonar, for example, I can see 150 feet, 200 feet on each side of the vehicle as we make a pass. And the forward scan sonar up to 450 feet in front.

And combine that with the visuals of the cameras, we can cover a lot of ground. Got it. I got a question. So I wore my hunting hat just for you guys, right? It's a different type of hunting, but we're hunting treasure here. And so I don't know that much about this sector, but I have been watching a little bit of Outer Banks on Netflix, right, for inspiration. And so what is, what was the old way to search for this treasure underwater? And then why have you guys been so successful with this technology? Where did it used to, where did it used to be where you'd go to try to find it?

And how are you guys different using the technology that you have now? I can address that the, there's basically two kinds of marine exploration in terms of shipwrecks. Shallow water, deep water, shallow water is going to be as deep as people can dive, which are into a couple of hundred feet without extra help. In the shallow water sector of treasure hunting, it exhausted itself in the late nineties worldwide. You stopped hearing about fishermen finding shipwrecks. It just didn't happen anymore because then there still could be a few after hurricane or typhoon, but those are gone. Those have been found, picked out.

So now you have deep water left and the deep water there, you need the remotely operated vehicles. And so what we did is we, we addressed both of those by going after shallow water sites that are submerged under or buried under sand. And with that we can do with sensors. And so the important thing about the old way was you fishermen told you where to look or you had information, a map and you went and you looked and it's always looks easier in the movies than it is in real life. It'd be very boring movies if they showed all that we have to do. So there's a lot of work in research to make sure you're in the right place.

There's more false positive fake sites in terms of what you think it might be than there are real ones. So it happens that ships sink in shallow water, they would sink in the same place. So you could be diving on an area where there's one ship, two ships, three ships from all different periods, hundreds of years apart. The deeper water is really left for anyone with the resources, you need a surface craft. The deeper you go, the bigger the boat has to be because you need more crew fuel food and you need bigger ROVs to go down and look. So we're straddling those two.

Our ideal area to work with our technology in going into this new year is a couple hundred to 300, 400 feet because we're still very flexible and portable. We don't have any real competition, but just there aren't that many people doing it. They're still waiting for the fishermen to tell them where to look. And by the way, those were great days. Those were great days. You just showed up somewhere and somebody had something and you go and you look and that was a lot of fun, but I'm not expecting any more of those. So I guess you could think of it like oil, right? First oil was on the surface. It was pretty obvious where it was.

Now you got to do fracking and all kinds of stuff to really get down and find it. It's a little trickier. And I guess everyone has already done the bottom picking. They've picked up all the stuff that was sitting there that you could see. And so now you've got to be a little bit more technical in terms of how you're finding it. And you're submersible essentially helps people find things, helps you find things. But are there other uses for this technology as well? Is it only good for treasure hunting? It's good for any mining resources, oil and gas, infrastructure inspections are great for this.

That's where we made our last relatively large amount of money in the business world. We're looking at port security as a new market for us because our new design is scalable and flexible enough to accommodate any number of sensors for the client. So in the old days, we had cameras, side scan sonar to look to the sides forward, scan to look forward and sub bottom, which allows you to look straight down. But in the new market, it'll be nuclear, biological, chemical, radioactive and explosive sensors. And there's no uniform size, different, very familiar companies like Boeing and SAIC and Northrop Grumman make them.

But they make the size they want and they make the power draw they want and they make the shape they want. Then the client gets them and they need to figure out how to implement that into a platform like an ROV to do to work. And very often that's left unattended. In today's market, it's mostly after market. So they build the drone, then they build the sensors and then let's see if we can marry these two. All right. So your underwater drone is essentially something that can go underwater, but then hold sensors that are commercially available and you can attach those sensors to it.

And so it makes it perhaps more affordable to folks than what currently exists today. Definitely more effective. The costs are going to be the cost, but when you want to get the work done, the most important thing for us is that deliverable at the end for the client, if they want information that they paid for or that they will pay for, whatever that is, you need to be able to deliver that. And very often there's a gap between the sensor and the actual drone itself, being able to do the work effectively. So if we can do it faster, then either the client makes more money from us or we make more money from the client. Got it.

Now you said that you'd had some success in the past. Can you talk about that in terms of the technology and whether you have patents, if it was licensed to anybody? Yes. We developed 10 US and foreign patents between 2001 and 2008. And in that time we licensed in 2008, nine and 10, we licensed the technology, very complex deal with Petronas, the national oil company of Malaysia. Their interest was oil and gas pipeline inspection.

They believed at the time, as did we, that more effective pipeline inspections would increase oil production because you wouldn't have to shut your pipelines off with, they had been affected by hurricanes and typhoons. And we went down this path together for a while. It was very interesting, very lucrative. We also developed a deeper water system for them. We had, first one was a 305 meter depth capability and then this, then later a 1500 meter depth capability. And so we exhausted that particular contract by 2015 and decided to go back and look for shipwrecks while developing our new technology. Got it.

So you're not spraying chickens to technology. This is something that you've already done before that you've licensed to one of the big leaders in the oil and gas space. What about defense? Are you dealing with the department of defense at all? Are you dealing with local police folks? Is this something that's also being used by governments? They're using currently governments and government agencies and military using different kinds of underwater drones, size, and basically from portable to what we'll call industrial, which aren't so portable. We do not have any contracts at this time, but we are addressing that as we speak.

We are, we have very good in road. The fact that we've been doing this long enough and we know, we know all of the competitors in one way or another. And we also know all the sensor manufacturers because we're also clients of them. So we're looking for a fit with military and anything that helps with port security because we think we have the greatest advantage there. But what about what about recreational use? Yeah. I don't know who would use it, but guys with big fancy yachts probably want to have something like this so they can scan the bottom and watch it on television.

Well since day one for us, we've never actually been in that in the recreational market, but the new design, we are introducing a called recreational light duty, single camera, possibly one sensor, portable little system under $10,000. And the odd owners will want it because when you ever hear it, see the hear noises and things happen and it's not always convenient to get down in the water and see what it is. So then there's a recreational side where we got your kid there and you don't want him in the water. So you let him play with it and fly it around.

And there's a lot of fun things you can do with it and you can look at the fish and there are, I would say academic applications for the recreational unit where they just need to carry a hydrophone and a camera where they can study fish and fish habits. We had the pleasure of spending a day in an evening with a guy before doing that. And so those are markets that are, I think they're good. The Fort Lauderdale boat shows coming up in January, we'd like to have a presence in that and see where it goes. So you've refreshed the old technology to create a new technology that's better.

And now does better mean it's lighter, faster, stronger, goes deeper? What does better mean? For sales performance. So what's your expectations as a customer or client is if I tell you that can do something, it should be able to do that. So that's where we focus on performance response to the elements. There's a lot of current in the ocean and not everywhere, but most of the places you have situations where you have, you have to be able to carry more sensors that would make it more efficient deeper. Deeper just changes class. It doesn't make it better.

We could make a hundred meter system that's likely to be the recreational be 300 meter system for the commercial and pretty much unlimited for the industrial because it would just be on a case by case for the client. But performance is it performance and the maintenance because most of these things, saltwater, electricity, they don't seem to be very good friends. So they break down. And when it breaks down, where are you and how long does it take to get fixed? So if it's recreational, you put in a box, send it back, they get it fixed. It's commercial or industrial. You don't want the downtime. It costs you too much money.

So if we were seven times better in the performance and being able to get a job done, we also, that doesn't matter. It gets totally canceled out if we're not working. So we, we usually expect an hour, maximum one hour to repair any of our vehicles in the field. And then for the last 15 years, we've held to that. So functionally speaking, is this, does it need to be connected to a vessel above water or is this a free roaming drone or what should I refer to it? What should I call it? Drone is the easiest because everybody knows what that means underwater drones, but ROV was, is an older term, remotely operated vehicle, which is very broad.

It could be anything. It's just like UFO could be anything because it gets with you. So the question again, so it doesn't need to be connected to a vessel, yes, or a tether. So for our purposes, we're using tethered vehicles. We've designed one without a tether for veterans before they don't work for us because we want real time delivery information. It's a good example was when the Malaysian jetliner was shot down and they went looking for it. The Australian Navy did, and they used an autonomous system and they collected a lot of data, but they never could sort it out and find anything because it was too remote.

There's too much information and you had to go back hours or days after you collect that information, sort through it and figure out what it means. In our experience, when you look, when you find an anomaly, you want to look, check it right now, or the same day. You never come back tomorrow. It's the weather's bad, something's wrong, can't find the same spot, even with GPS sometimes. We just don't see it again. So the ideal, you want to have the tether. We can make them without tethers, but it's just not good for our purposes. Got it. Now there's other technology you use as well, right? Mike's got a background in artificial intelligence.

I died that he's using that on the water. So what are you doing? And do you have information? Do you have, can you give me any sort of background as to where Mike fits in here? How about Mike, you tell him how you fit. He fits. That you're in. He's where AI fits in the water as well. So that's all we'll say at this moment. But a lot of what we're doing and Mark mentioned it earlier is research is so incredibly important here to be able to come up with these stories, understand, manifest potential locations and all of that. So what we've acquired is life's work of a man named Jack Haskins.

So he spent all this time in the archives of Spain and Seville, just gathering information, documenting. I thought you were going to say it sounds like it. But Jack was incredibly prominent in the Shipwreck community, working with Burt Weber down finding the conception of Dominican Republic, the silver shoals down there, just a wealth of information from this man. His life's work is in our hands right now. So what we are doing is we're digitizing that and then it's archaic Spanish. So very difficult for even some of these machines.

So we're layering different services on top of it to break this down, to get it into a digital format, which we're then going to feed into large language models so that it can start to understand. And so we can actually run our own analysis against Jack Haskins, as if he was sitting here and remembered every single word he ever read and wrote. So it's going to be, it's definitely an undertaking. It's not something that you spin up in two seconds, GPT is great, but GPT runs off of its generic information. This is going to be super hyper focused on all of this information we've gathered.

And then as we come across more, we're going to keep feeding into that to really create this massive database of information as it relates to Shipwrecks. So ultimately maybe a Google maps of the water where you can be over a certain site and then you can pull up in your database what happened around that area. And you'll have firsthand accounts, secondhand accounts, thirdhand accounts, really all the information that right now is maybe held by 50 different researchers around the world. You'll all have it in one database. Yeah. And then you want to take it a step farther and get wild.

Then we put in some weather information and start to understand what were weather conditions at that point. When this happened, how has the coastline shifted and maybe some of the underlying sand and sediment as well. So there's a lot of different analyses we can do. This is step one of a very grand plan.

There's one other thing, if I could add to this too, Douglas, that AI being used in the drones now, the same thing would apply to our new vehicle will incorporate AI into its software so that when you're flying it, it'll start to become intuitive on seeing the things that Mike just mentioned and also shortening the survey times, the methodology. All these things will come into play using the AI underwater because there's a lot that's goes on for the pilot to see. And any help the pilot can get makes the job much more, you're going to have a much better positive result in a shorter period of time.

So AI will still be used even in the underwater drones. So that's where Mike understands it more than I do. So I definitely lean on him for that. That's just wanted to add that in as well. The gathering and processing of information. Let the pilot fly and not worried about understanding the leaks, cracks in an oil pipeline. You speed across that as fast as possible, keeping yourself safe. And then this system is actually identifying through visual recognition these areas of focus and pinpointing that location. So now we're taking the pilot out of the spotting game and just into the flying game, which speeds up operations substantially.

Now you're worried about Elon Musk getting into this business? As far as I know, he's already in it and we'd love to make him a business partner or client. It would be wonderful. As far as we know right now between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they do spend money on research and development for the drones. I understand Jeff Bezos is trying to find the drone that'll deliver in all weather, all kinds of weather at some point, if the law permits drones to be flown beyond the physical side of the operator in the US, then that'll be a viable business.

And again, I can only say as far as I know, because they're not, their development programs are secret. Even people within the same divisions of those companies don't know what's going on. That's what we're told. Yeah, we'd love to dance with those guys if the opportunity ever came up. And so there's a lot of co-development that goes on all around the world and nobody knows what anybody's doing at the time. And then we have these simultaneous breakthroughs at the same time, but we're going to class by ourself.

We don't have much competition other than we, every now and then we check on the patent office and find out the Navy is still building off of new designs off of our patch. Nice. Can you tell me then about, let's talk about treasure hunting. We've talked about technology, treasure hunting, I think that's why everyone's listened to this. Everyone gets excited about finding treasure. Can you tell us about your past exploits, things that you've found in the past and what you're looking for in the future?

Our experience in the past, we've looked for ships anywhere from what we call the colonial period, the Spanish Calleons, that's where we started in the Caribbean and Florida. And then over time we found ourself in Southeast Asia and started finding Chinese ships that predate the colonial period, so as far as 1100 AD as our oldest shipwreck that we found. And then modern, because modern ships are quite interesting as well, especially World War II vessels. And so we've been active in searches and locations of modern ships, but Chris wins the prize for the most value.

If you ever want to ask that question, what's the most interesting or valuable thing you ever found, then I'll let him tell you about it. I went on my first expedition when I was 19 years old. And by the time I turned 20, we ended up working with Mel Fisher on the Itocha site down off of Key West. We worked 62 days straight without coming to shore, and on the 29th day we found, let's start to find gold. We found several gold bars and then a three pound gold disc, and the following day I was buddy breathing with a guy named Rich Banco, and we both grabbed this seven and a half foot gold chain at the same time, weighed 79 ounces.

And as I recall, Mel Fisher was his favorite chain he wore around his neck all the time after that. So that was the most interesting thing I found as far as gold goes, definitely. And then treasure hunting, though, you've done it around the world, right? Florida and in Asia as well. Florida, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. South China Sea, which is a bit dubious now, there's places we'd like to work there, but it's not politically correct and there's a big Chinese gunboat there, so we're not. And can you tell us now what your plans are over the next year, like what are the areas you're looking at?

I guess you don't want to give us the exact locations, but you could certainly give us the parts of the world. Yes. So we're going to run tandem this year, both in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. And the we plan to start with two very historically significant shipwrecks, neither of them are treasure ships, but they're the subject that everybody knows about if you studied any history. And so the reason to do this is while not all all gold may be treasure of sorts, not all treasure is gold and some of the treasures are the intangible values, the historical significance.

So with two really interesting projects that we can run this year, we've got the clearance finally. We worked with the kind of national museums that protect cultural properties, don't like for-profit entities, so we created a nonprofit to work with them and they've said, okay, so we're doing the paperwork. So then with that, we'll be able to bring the crowd with us. We'll be able to bring live, the live experience of the search and the survey and the fun and the drama that goes with it. We don't have to stage any drama, we'll have plenty. Things break and people get, well, hopefully not hurt, but I do. So I will have plenty of that.

And then they're long shots. I think we calculated one of them at 60 million to one, that's a pretty long shot. But with our technology, both the kinds that we build and the kind that we can buy and that we can partner with, we can get it down to about 60 to one in the pods, which is in our businesses and banks. I'm sorry, you can reduce the odds from 60 million to one to 60 to one? Yes, with the technologies. And that's what we build, what we buy and what we partner with. And some of them will never show them their faces, but we're using them now. They help us narrow down the scope, the field, the area, because it's like a jigsaw puzzle.

If you have a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, those first few pieces are tricky. But the last 50 to 100 are easy, right? So we want to get down to the last 50 or 100 out of 10,000 pieces. And that's where it takes less time and it's a better chance of success. And it's a three-dimensional issue. Even if you gave me the vertical pinpoint, there's places in the world I could have 30 feet of mud over the target, you got to get through the mud to get to prove you're right or not. But those are the non-physical treasure, but very valuable projects. Then we have also a 19th century vessel that's what we call a silver bullet.

It doesn't have any legal claims against it, no insurance claims, no environmental issues, no jurisdictional issues, meaning in theory, there's nobody that take us to court and say, you should give this to somebody. We've got one of those that we would have probably finished by now. We just didn't have a terrible weather season this year. I think the worst of record. We have a couple more that aren't quite as simple as that. When I say we know where the ship is, we still have to get permission from a country of origin so we can work it without ending up in court. Lawyers would love it if we just started working and then get sued.

We'd like to do it the other way around, make a deal and then tell them everything. Both of those are here off the coast of Florida and a little bit north of Florida. Then we have some in the Caribbean. We're planning to have a contract to begin mapping specific coastline of one country that we know is target-rich, so provide the data that we acquire. Then that's where Mike talking about the AI and the research. That's where we begin to cross-reference the research with what we found. Very often you find things and there's five experts and none of them can agree where it came from, but the research it helps.

We've a grateful year coming up with that. Some of those are real treasure ships, too. You said something that was interesting if folks have claims to it. How does that claim, do the claims go back to just the beginning of time almost? What deems a claim versus there's no claim on a shipwreck or an artifact? The first claim is the physical jurisdiction. If you're inside a country or you're inside state waters, you're under their rules. It doesn't matter where it came from. It's their rules.

They may have made agreements with other countries saying if you find anything in our waters or if somebody finds anything in our waters, we'll give it to you. As US citizens, we live like that. We try to be sensitive to UNESCO claims and the jurisdictional claims, which is when I say jurisdictional, it's the physical location. Then there's a country of origin. If you've ever dealt with customs, then you know country of origin gets really tricky. You can find something one place, but it came from another. We physically had things taken out. One of our early ships had Vietnamese blue and whites, beautiful stuff.

Vietnam was not a country 500 years ago. It was a province of China called Anam. But at the time we found it, we had still had an embargo against Vietnam. So we had two pieces taken out of a shipment. Even though the physical argument, there was no Vietnam. It was either that or surrender the whole shipment to go to court and spend a year in paved storage every day. So you have to be sensitive to those things. Then there can be insurance claims. There was a famous, more than one, but specifically a big one, a gold ship that was found off the coast of South Carolina in the late '80s.

And it was dozens of insurance companies had paid claims on the lost shipment. So when the salver found them, he was not experienced enough on that side of it to wait and negotiate. Instead, he had a marching band waiting for him when he came ashore, and there was more people, more attorneys serving him than there were people in the marching band. But those, we've had the benefit of that experience in seeing what happened. So you want to check and see if there's insurance claims. And then you can buy those claims, being cheap, very often if you do it in the right way. Then there's the personal claims, and this still works in the courts.

If we found something on a ship and somebody could say, "That belonged to my great whatever grandfather," the chances are you could lose that then. And then there's the cultural claims. And by that, even in the deals we make with countries, if we find something, we could agree on, say, coins. There's 10,000 or 100,000 coins, you can't argue those are artifacts, and you need only a few for the museum. But if you found something like that 7-foot-10-inch gold chain, there's only one in the world like that. That's going to end up in the museum. And it doesn't matter what the paper says, that's where it will end up.

So you have to be able to show- If it goes to a museum, do you get paid some of that? Do you get paid money for it, or you've just lost it? I'm going to say we lost it, but with our new nonprofit and our building, our museum, we intend to build a museum consortium where we have different museums that we will build our own virtual collections where people can view online. We have several museums agreeing to let us do that with them. And then with the physical location and the right aftershave, these guys will let you loan, they'll loan it to you, and you can loan stuff to them.

But technically, no, I would consider no commercial value to us directly. It would have to be an indirect form of income. That a tax deduction? If you've got something that's got a valuation of $5 million that you paid, that you spent money looking for, and then you have to give it to a museum, do you get a big tax deduction on that? I think we get tax deductions anyway, because we have a tendency to lose them off of a little money in our efforts. But I suppose an accountant can say, hey, it cost us $1 million to go find that thing. We ought to be able to write it off. Chris takes care of the tax guys.

Perhaps there's positives with giving artifacts to a museum, because maybe it can offset some of the costs you had in finding those artifacts in the first place. There's probably devils in the details of my first guess is you'd have to take physical possession, and then you'd have to hold it for a period of time, then you'd have to donate it back, and then if it was done appropriately, maybe you'd get a tax deduction. If it was too clever, you couldn't get the tax deduction. Let's not get too deep into that stuff, but let's talk about something exciting, or even more so, piracy. When we hear treasure, we think pirates.

You guys are modern day treasure hunters. Do you run into piracy today? If you're in a boat, and you think you're going to bring up $25 million from the ocean floor, are people following you? How do you deal with this? I just heard recently that pirates were more interested in running drugs because they made more money. As far as the piracy thing goes, yes, we've ... Of course, I've both seen pirate ships in the Caribbean. This has been a while, but ... Even now. Yeah, I'm sure there's some still around. They're not going to bother a commercial boat with a bunch of guys on it that might have weapons.

They're mostly looking for the two couples on a sailboat and drinking rum and don't know what's going on. I would suggest that one of the most dangerous areas for pirates is the north coast of Haiti right now, if you're within sight of land, simply because they don't have any law and order there. Other parts of the Caribbean, I think ... We used to see them in the Bahamas before. We'd see them in the Bahamas, and when you further ... You got away from civilization. You could tell. If they thought you were vulnerable, they would approach you. Chris, tell them about the one you had.

On the very first boat that I worked on, they docked in Guyana for some maintenance. Luckily, I was not on board, but all my friends were. They were standing watch, and they had half a dozen guys climb up the back of the boat with knives, and our guys were standing watch with shotguns. It was pretty one-sided, a couple of shots, and we didn't have anybody on deck, so it does happen. How do you prepare for that? If you're going out and you're in the Caribbean, and you're near Haiti, do you bring along guards? We have a security guy, and I think Mark can talk to you better on what his capabilities are and what his experience is.

We don't need names, but I guess we're right. We've been using security for a little over 20 years for our projects. There were places where we worked so close to land, so close to civilization. We didn't have to worry about security. Everybody knew us and we knew them, but in the last 20 years, in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, we have a security coordinator who's a former special ops Delta Force guy. We just give him a call and say, "Hey, we need this many people for this many days," and boom, here's the bill. It's quite affordable in the sense that it's cheaper than the alternative.

You just lose everything or get killed, but on the other side, we don't have to go looking for the guys. He'll say, "Hey, these are the team that'll work well together," and always, if you're in a country, you don't want to fly everybody in from other parts of the country. They can't necessarily bring their weapons with them. You really need to work with, I'll call it the expats, the expat community of former special forces guys that happen to be living in the same country or in the same region that can easily move over, and you don't have to pay as much to get them there, and they come ready to do business.

We did hire a team that we flew in from the US one time to the Philippines, and it was pretty bloody expensive, and they didn't know anything. We had to do everything for them, and then they looked like a bunch of secret surface guys out in the middle of this in the jungle, and they're all with their headsets on. So anyway, we didn't do that again. They couldn't handle climate, and they couldn't handle dysentery, and so it was ... We now bring guys that are acclimated and fairly local and readily available. The third leg of treasure experience is media. How do you envision that? Have you already started down that media rabbit hole?

What's the plan? We have started down. It's a long lead time. Like everything, we can conceive a project, and it can be a year or two or three before we get to do it. The same thing with the media. We've started the ball rolling. We have some players in place that we think we can work with, but the origination of this was we've always felt, and this could be naive, but the money that we can bank on every time is going to come from media and participation with the live crowd that comes related to the media. This is something that everyone else in our industry seems to leave on the table. That's the treasure they don't get.

There are shows like Oak Island. Their treasure is the media. They don't have to find anything. They just have to keep producing shows. We always felt that the branding opportunity and the media opportunity was undervalued, mostly because if you have a budget to do the project, you need another budget to produce the media. You have your budget to do your work, and now you've got to go raise money to do a budget for the media. Now, I think we've addressed that. We have the right people, and I expect this year we'll begin producing a two-season series. That's our best guess right now.

And we're excited about it because we've had a blast, and more people should have a sense of what that feels like. It's not practical for people to quit their daytime jobs and leave their families and friends and go do what we've done. It's not an easy path, but if we can deliver that, real delivery would be you join us on an expedition later on Netflix or whatever, and you were there when it was happening, and you get that first hit when you were there, and you get the reload later, and then you can have your cake and eat it too because you don't have to quit your job. Got it. It'll be a treasure finder.

Now, I've got a bit of a disclaimer here. Obviously, I've known you guys for, I'd say, about four years now, five years now. Last year, earlier this year, you asked me to be the chief investment officer, so I am associated with treasure experience, and I'm excited to work with these guys every day. But I guess one of the most interesting things is you all decided to do a digital security or security token, and that was at a time when maybe the four other security token issuances had happened. That was pretty exciting. You'd written a book, the work you'd done in the past, and you said, "Look, we need to raise capital.

We're going to do a security token." You did that with INX, and I was at INX at the time as chief business officer, and what's interesting is the holders of that token already have seen some sort of results from you. I know I got a musket ball in the mail. I think others did. I got a beautiful Chinese teacup that you found in some dive. But also, I think you paid a dividend on that token already, even though the raise is ongoing, and you did it with USDC directly into people's wallets, which is very interesting. So you can talk about why a digital security and what kind of tech you've been using in that space. I guess I can do that.

I was introduced to INX by one of our existing investors who didn't buy digital securities with us, but just sent us money, and he said, "You know, I'll check this out." First thing I checked, and the reason I liked it was there, there are the people in our space that have gone over the counter, big sheet companies, underfunded, very vulnerable, maybe raise a little money, and then sorry later that they did what they did. I think I can say that without fear of any contradiction. But what I liked about the digital security token was you couldn't sell one if you didn't own it.

So I said, "Whenever amount we could raise and whatever the relationship we have with our investors/token holders, that would be pure. We wouldn't have fakes in it, we wouldn't have people that were selling our stock that didn't actually own it. Maybe when you're much bigger, it doesn't matter as much, but when you're small, like one of those turtles trying to get to the ocean." And so that was the first reason. The second reason I liked it was we could reach people worldwide with much greater reach from a platform like INX than just us talking to people.

And as a result, we ended up with people from Japan that we never would have met, people that I feel like we're friends with now. They're like, "Kids could send us questions of what's going on and when's the next." So it's a lot of fun. And then the other reason was distribution. Our number one objective is that whenever people want to give us money, they should be able to make money. And if we don't have a way to get it back to them efficiently, and there's all those pitfalls between you and when you find it and you deliver the... you make money and send it, so many things can go wrong.

So our real objectives, at least with this system, we could just send the money in and then it could go through the INX platform, be distributed back to the investor. And then if at some point in time, not now, but in a couple of years, they could sell their tokens. And so if they didn't want to play anymore, they could sell them to somebody else. This is a much better feeling for us as we can focus more on... It's a secondary market, if you think about private equity, generally someone gives you money, but the investor's stuck there until either they get it back or they don't. And if they've got a life event, tough luck.

Whereas with a digital security in the United States, the RAG-D person has to hold it for a year, but then they can find a secondary market for it, where we trade on an ATS. And for a RAG-S investor, maybe they only have a 60-day period where they can't do anything with it after they've received them, and then they can trade as well. So I think that's a very exciting part, is that you guys have tapped into that, and I guess I see the token as being something that'll pay dividends over time, and that's exciting should you be successful.

But also the fact that at some point in the future, if it's not something that I want to own, I can actually sell it. And there's a lot of private equity stuff that you buy into that you can't sell. There is no secondary market. You've tapped into a need here where someone says, "This is a good idea today." But if in a year's time, two years' time, they say, "I don't like that idea anymore. I'd like to invest somewhere else," then they can. There's an exit point that's already established, and I think that's rather exciting. So is that how these are these, I don't want to say excursions, but these discoveries are underwritten?

Do you go out and you get rights to something, and then you go out to investors and say, "Look, we have exclusive rights to these, this is what it's going to take to go discover what's underneath there?" That would be correct. If it's project-based, that's how we do it. In the last, since Chris and I have been partners for 35 years, what we do is we go find it, and then we say we need some money to recover it, and that's how we've done it. But you're not using the token rates for that. That's equity. No, those are project equity investors, and they're in that project, and they get just like the oil and gas business.

They get the bigger return on investment, but they take all the risk, basically. The token holder doesn't take risks. They make money on the media, make money on our technology, and they make money. That's 10% of what we call the net recovery, which is after we've given the government share or whatever we actually physically get. So if it's not the gross number that we recover, but what we at the company collect. So if we collect $10 million and we pay a million dollars out to the token holders. So they get to ride in that and get a little bit of that buzz and that feeling.

And that's across all of the different projects you're working on at Infinitum. Yes, that's correct. That's the physical recovery. And then if you think you were talking about secondary market, and if somebody eventually wants to exit the opportunity, there's the facilitation of that self-service to go sell your tokens to someone else. But because of our mechanism and as a token holder, you're entitled to these dividends, these royalty payments through operations of the business. So go out and find a shipwreck.

Sure, there's going to be a big bump that comes in, but the consistency that wherever we go and whatever we're doing, we're generating media income. Our technology sales, even if it's the worst sees you've ever seen, 40 foot waves, doesn't matter. Technology can always sell. So it's a consistent revenue stream that's providing these consistent dividends with these big pops of shipwreck fines and monetization. And then if you look at the price of that token, so today's world, you can buy one token, $1, the more we're able to distribute and the more people can project their earnings by holding that token, you now can sell it for a larger amount.

So by owning tokens today, what you're saying is I want to be paid along the way to be able to sell it for an increase than what I actually sold it for. So you're making money on your way to making money is the whole point of it. Interesting. Well, guys, this has been fantastic. I think you've pulled back the curtain for folks like myself that had no idea how this operates. And I, it sounds like you've got some exciting things coming in the future that we're going to be eager to hear about when you have the ability to talk about it, but I'm sure we'll surely have you back because it sounds like it's not a small thing. It's rather large.

So thanks again for being on the show. I agree. I think that this is such an opaque world that I think that we're excited that you've actually come on our show to talk about it, because I think that there is a tremendous interest and treasure in finding it. And that's one exciting part. The other one is, I don't know how many shows I watch on television that are about people like yourselves running around trying to do something and whether it's, I've just gotten into guys that buy cars in Mexico and fix them up in Texas, or I'm watching Oak Island or I'm watching, there's tremendous demand, I think, for this sort of thing. And that's exciting.

And then lastly, the technology is very exciting. And it doesn't sound like there's a lot of competition in the space for what you're doing there. And it really is like that last unexplored area of tech. So very exciting too. So thank you very much on our show and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, too.