Part One: Stockton Rush: Inventor of the Deathsub

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss Oceangate CEO, Stockton Rush.

(2 Part Series)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, what's at the bottom of the ocean? Right? You
all know what we're doing. You all know what we're doing. Look, no, exactly.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst
people in all of history. We're all going to feel
like the worst people in all of history. A little

(00:23):
bit making jokes adjacent to this week's topic. Andrew T
my guest today. How are you doing, Andrew? Hi, I'm alive,
you know, just striking, but a lot fighting fighting against
the man. Andrew. You are a writer in the in
in in the entertainment industry and are on strike like

(00:43):
all of the all of the god fearing writers out there,
which means you have time to be on a podcast. So, uh,
it's really working out good for me, this old strike.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I mean, here's the other secret of TV writers. We
always kind of have time to be on a podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, anything that can count as procrastination is always always.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Around whole hole.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Uh oh, but you're getting a hell of a lot
of cleaning.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Done instead of yeah, instead of try to try to
do anything productive.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Now, Andrew, it's my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong,
because I come from a slightly different world. But while
you can't we can't. You can't be doing any writing
for like TV or whatever. We can make a reality
show together, right, That doesn't violate anything, right, I.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Mean that that is what we're doing now, essentially.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Because I I I'd love to get you involved in
a project that I've I've had passion for for quite
a while. Basically, basically, I fill a super soaker with
my own piss, and you and I drive around in
a van and whenever we see anybody who looks like
they might be famous, like around Rodeo Drive or wherever,
we just we squirt them with the super soaker full

(01:57):
of piss and then we get it on camera and
then well it's a show called super Soaker full of Piss.
It's a good idea.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
I think this is not materially worse than anything else.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
Fair Well on reality TV.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah. I've been looking to get into politics, and I'm
thinking about how Donald Trump's career got started by the
last writers strike, and I feel like this could be
my opportunity. You know, this could be my celebrity apprentice.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, yeah, all the all the like the Wall Street
Journal is like this is the super Soaker full of Piss.
Guy's never Gonnam out to anything, and then it's like, well,
I mean, obviously he's making he has a lot of
groundswallow support, a lot a lot of good points.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, I run once in twenty twenty eight and everybody laughs,
and then in twenty thirty two everybody's like, I don't know,
the piss super soaker guy's kind of making a lot
of sense, really passionate fans, and it's it's what you know.
In a normal time, I think people would would consider
the idea of squirting famous people with a pristoker full

(03:00):
of human urine to be silly. But given our topic today,
it's downright responsible, Andrew, Because today, I mean I feel
like normally we comment on like, so, what have you
heard about you know, X person potentially obscure or whatever.
We're all aware of the death sub right that that
imploded on its way down to the Titanic.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
This is like so tricky because normally, as far as
the audience goes like like the service behind the Bastards
provises informing and not that you won't be informing people
of stuff, but this is probably we're at nearly the
apex of broad knowledge about this human being that's only

(03:42):
going to diminish over time.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, it's interesting. I there's like so much that's wrapped
up in this and it's it's such a there's a
lot that's kind of fascinating about what the the interest
in this and the way people are talking about it
says about kind of like our current moment in media.
I've chosen for the episodes to kind of rather than
well focus specifically on the accident, to focus on stocked

(04:07):
and Rush and like his background and kind of where
he comes from and how this all got together, but
we will kind of be talking about the stuff around it,
including you know, it's interesting, there's this like a lot
of so the kind of the two big arguments over
this thing that have that have been filling the internet
so far, or like should we laugh when a bunch

(04:29):
of billionaires die in an easily predictable accident and that's
between you and your god people like I can't. And
also it's one of those things where it's like if
you think it's bad to laugh when like people you
don't know die, that's a perfectly ethically consistent point. Also,
if you think that it's fine, I don't really that's

(04:50):
that's that's what it's whatever. It's like if we're gonna
flip out about people laughing at this, Like the Internet
has been like full of shit like this from the
very if you can remember the early days, the Darwin
Awards were one of like the biggest things on the Internet,
which was just laughing at people dying in stupid ways.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
This really is the ultimate like Darwin Award. I think I.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Finally come down to the thing I think I wrote
on Twitter. It was some version of like, look, yes,
I get it, it's probably not healthy to like hate
these people, but I'm just gonna I think I triangulated
to I just love them less than anyone else who
was victimized in any way this week. And I also
love them less than any penny that was spent trying

(05:35):
to rescue them.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. That's that's more or less where I am on this.
And like there's the other thing that people are pointing
out is like there was just this horrific hundreds of
people you drowned and another one of those boats. That's yeah,
and it's you know, I actually have kind of like
a slightly off the mainstream take about that, which is
like the thing people are saying is, well, it's fucked

(05:58):
up that this's got so much more attention than that. Yes,
it definitely is, but it's also like not particularly surprising.
Like if you think back, because I started, I started
covering like refugees moving from kind of northern Africa to
through Europe back in twenty fifteen, I was on the

(06:18):
refugee trail for a while and it was a huge story.
People paid a lot of attention. There was a lot
of aid coming in. You know, when that little boy
I believe his name's parents Island Curdie drowned a few
years back, like that was there was a massive amount
of attention, and then it, because it happens so often,
kind of just became normalized. Which is the thing. I mean,

(06:40):
it happens with mash It's not just a thing that happens.
It happens with fucking mass shootings, right Like it's this
is a thing that happens because people can only sort
of like be outraged or horrified about a thing they
can't directly affect, you know, which is not to say
that like more shouldn't be done, or that the fucking
coastguards and some of these like Italy and whatnot are

(07:02):
not doing nightmarish things, Yeah, stopping rescuers from coming in.
But it's not surprising or really a mark that, like
people are much worse than they've ever been. That like
this unique story of a bunch of rich people dying
in a sub visiting the Titanic got so much attention.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Like.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
That's just not a surprise. If like a thousand years ago,
a bunch of wealthy merchants had disappeared on a sea
voyage from like Venice to the coast of Spain, this
would also be like there would be stories being sung
in the market square about this shit. That's just how
people are.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
But I guess it is a little bit why if
given all that as true, which it is I believe
as well, Like that is why I feel like derision
is actually kind of an important part of this marketplace
of ideas.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Sure, yeah, I don't think that's wrong, but that's up
to you know, people can make their own decisions. My
job here is to let you know about the specific
guy who was absolutely the worst in all of this,
Because whatever you think about the other people on their boat,
there is a villain of this story. There is a
monster who who is directly and who would have gotten
more people killed if he had the chance. And his

(08:14):
name is fucking stocked In Rush.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
Really yeah, just I was just gonna say, just for
context listeners, Robert, I've been doing this show for five
years and this is the only topic where it's like, oh, Robert,
do we have to and Robert's like, yeah, we fucking
do so, Okay.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
It would be irresponsible for us not to try and
do this.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
Just it's it truly is like, if you're gonna have
this like Ann Rand ass name, you got to go
out in an Ann Rand style.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
This is the vandis death ever Yeah, it's so it's
so appropriate for like the guy that he is, that
this that this happened. So let's talk about Stockton Rush. Now.
The first thing you will have noticed is that, yeah,
he sounds like he's got He sounds like a guy
who would be in Galt's gulch, right, Like he's got

(09:09):
a very yeah, an Atlas shrugged ass name. It's a
dumb name. And the name like he has this dumb
name because our special dead boy was named for two
of his ancestors, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush, both of
whom signed the Declaration of Independence, which for rich white people.
Was kind of like owning a foil charizard in nineteen
ninety nine, Like it was real special, you know. So yeah,

(09:33):
and he's a twofer. He has a twofer. And speaking
of owning Andrew, when you hear signed the Declaration of Independence,
the first thing you should probably ask yourself is like,
did this guy own people?

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah? Right?

Speaker 1 (09:49):
I like, did this guy own human beings? Yeah? He
sure did. Well, these guys, these guys both did right,
that's so yeah, yeah, this shouldn't be surprising. I'm going
to read you first some fun information about Richard Stockton,
who is who Stockton University is named after, by the way,
so that's cool. Quote. In Stockton's case, enslaved people worked

(10:11):
in his family home, a property he called Morven, built
after he inherited near Princeton, New Jersey in the seventeen fifties.
When he died in seventeen eighty one, and despite assertions
during his lifetime, Stockton did not free the people that
he owned. They appear in his will when he bequeathed
them along with his other property, to his wife, Annie Stockton.
And whereas I have heretofore mentioned to some of my

(10:32):
Negro slaves that upon condition of their good behavior and fidelity,
I would, in some convenient period grant them their freedom.
This I must leave to the discretion of my wife
and whose judgment and prudence I can fully confide. So
he's like, I promise these people I can free him,
but I'm passing that buck down to my wife.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah, a prudent time for your freedom?

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Like is it piecesh?

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah? Sorry, when's convenient for me for you to be free?

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Let me pencil that indie for you. Yeah, And it's
like that's shitty. It's pretty normal shitty for the day,
which doesn't make it less bad, but like, yeah, he's
a pretty normal, rich, slave owning asshole, Richard Stockton. It's also,
interestingly enough, there's a pretty good chance that he turned
trader against the United States. He was like arrested by
the British. No one knows quite. It doesn't seem like

(11:24):
there's like conclusive evidence about what he did, but he
got kind of led off, and there were rumors that
maybe he'd like given up information and stuff. Yeah, we
don't seem to have. Yeah, he's a snitch, right, He's
a slave owning switch.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
Finally got him.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, he decided finally got took care of that snitch.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Put an end to that family line. Benedict Arnold's descendancer. Next, Yeah,
Tom Arnold, better watch the fuck out, They're coming for him.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Stay out of the water, homing, Stay out of the water.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
So, uh, let's talk next about his other ancestor, Benjamin Rush.
This is a somewhat more complex story, and as Rush
authored one of the first major pieces of abolition writing
in the colonies, a seventeen seventy three pamphlet titled and
Addressed to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America
upon slave Keeping. Now that sounds pretty good. Benjamin Rush

(12:19):
was an ardent and active abolitionist. He helped organize the
first anti slavery group, and he eventually named the Pencil,
which was eventually named the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Interestingly, you know,
we talk a lot on the show about how many
abolitionists were still real racist, right, like you could be
an abolitionist and super racist. Benjamin Rush was, interestingly enough,

(12:42):
one of the guys who argued ardently that black people
were as smart and capable as anyone else. He authored
a seventeen eighty nine article about the first free black
physician named James Durham, and he also wrote about an
enslaved black mathematician named Thomas Fuller. He was like kind
of writing anti racism tracts back in the seventeen eighties,

(13:03):
which is pretty cool. Here's here's where it stops being
cool because he was publicly an anti racist, but privately
he bought an enslaved black man named William Gruber and
held him in bondage as his cook for more than
a decade.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
So yeah, I mean I think that's that, Like, that's
obviously there's all kinds of you know, any combination of
politics can exist, as we all see obviously in rarer
rare proportions. But it does sound like also there's some
version of like, you know, oh, black people are an inferior.

(13:42):
We're just lucky that we could enslave though, like what
a what a boon?

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, it's it's it's really it's it's kind of fascinating,
like the like, what's going on with this guy because
like he buys William Grueber, He like he doesn't just
keep him as a cook, but he hires him out
for profit to other families. Now he files manumission papers
for William in seventeen eighty eight, but that doesn't actually

(14:11):
free Gruber until seventeen ninety three, when he kind of
lets him go with the equivalent of a letter of
recommendation and a write up I found on the University
of Pennsylvania Library's website seems to argue that Rush was
probably probably kept it a secret that he'd owned Gruber
because he's this public anti racist, so he would like

(14:32):
hide the fact that he was keeping a man enslaved
in his home because he's like a public intellectual who
argued with racists in like these tracts at essays and
stuff that he was printing, and it wouldn't have looked good.
And I'm going to read a quote from the University
of Pennsylvania Library here. When Gruber died in seventeen ninety nine,
Rush wrote a remembrance of him in his Commonplace book.

(14:53):
It appears in the Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. In it,
he described Gruber as a Native African whom I bought
and liberated after he had served me for ten years.
The period is not likely accurate. He described Gruber's change
from a drunkard who swore frequently to a sober, moral
man and faithful and affectionate servant. He remembered especially a
night in seventeen eighty seven when Rush gravely ill was

(15:14):
expected to die and Williams stayed up with him all night.
So he wrote manumission papers for this guy, like the
year after this dude helped like carry him through a
deadly illness, but still didn't free him for half a decade.
Like that's that's so weird. I guess it's not. You know,
at least he did free him. I don't know where

(15:35):
you want to put that, Like, I mean, I think it.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Is like very hard to like, no matter, Yeah, I mean, look,
this is at all levels. I mean obviously, when Chattle
slavery was around, hypocrisy is probably a lot bigger deal.
But obviously we all participated some level of capitalistic hypocrisy,
you know, and this is a fucking insane version of that.

(16:03):
But it is like, you know, sub version of like
everyone else is doing it, and like, oh, at least
I wrote these papers. He's like the uh, the Lena
Dunmer of his day.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Like fu, yeah, he's like he's Lena Dunnaming. He's done
himing pretty hard, right.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, that's that's I think where we're gonna leave this guy.
So yeah, it's interesting. I don't claim to be an
expert about either of these men, but the fact that
Benjamin Rush publicly portrayed himself as an abolitionist and a
crusader against racism while owning an enslaved black man could
be seen as evidence of what seems to be a
long running family trait that gets passed down to our

(16:39):
boys Stocked and Rush, which is the ability to act
like one kind of dude while being the opposite kind
of dude.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, I god, I mean it's obviously so fucked up.
But if you signed the Declaration of Independence and you
only have one slave, you're probably for your peer group
on the better side of things.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Right Yeah. I Like, I don't know how you want
to like mark that out, because also I don't know
is it better or worse to just be like, yeah, man,
I own slaves because I think it's fine, or to
be like I think it. I know it's wrong to
own slaves, and I know it's wrong, Like I know
racism is bad, but also I'm going to do it,
you know, Like, where do we land on that. I
don't know. I mean, this isn't Pepe. You should think

(17:20):
about that, all of you. But like I, behind the
bastards is not where we'll make that moral deciding line
or anyway. They're all bastards. It's fine, yeah, for sure.
So that that is beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So both the Stockton and Rush families continue to be
very wealthy and powerful throughout the life of the new
United States. Gradually the two families get intertwined through marriage.

(17:44):
You know, it's a pretty incestuous breed rich people in
the Northeast. In eighteen ninety seven, their descendant, Ralph K.
Davies was born. Dave's got a job working as an
office boy for a company called Standard Oil. When he
was fifteen. He rose through the ranks and became the
youngest director in company history. In World War Two, he

(18:05):
was FDR's petroleum administrator, which is maybe the least directly
evil job a member of the oil and gas industry
ever held. It's like the one job where it's like, well,
you know, it was World War Two, we probably needed
somebody doing that.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
I don't know, right, yeah, I guess.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Look, it's like we're going to go through Stockton, Russia's
ancestry grading on a curve. He's okay, but that curve is.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
He is the member of this guy's family. You're gonna
hate the least for that.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
So after the war, Davies moved to San Francisco and
his wife became a major patron of the art scene.
She basically paid for the San Francisco Symphonies Music Hall,
or they donated like four million dollars to it. Her
name is still on the venue. And I'm going to
quote from an article in SFGate dot com. Here at
a high society ball in nineteen fifty seven, Ralph UIs

(19:00):
Davies's daughter Ellen met Richard Stockton Rush Junior. A month later,
the pair were engaged coverage of their wedding, accompanied by
a huge photo in the San Francisco Examiners said they
were settling down in Berkeley talk Rush, as he was known,
also settled into the Davies family's line of work, serving
as the chairman for Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in
Burlingham and the Natomis Company in San Francisco. His two

(19:22):
thousand Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary noted that He even served
as the president elect of the city's infamous Bohemian club,
which is the Bohemian Grove Group, Right, like, that's who
runs that. So wait, I don't even know what that
is Bohemian Groves. That it's in the Redwoods, kind of
near the Bay area, and it's where it's where like

(19:43):
Henry Kissinger and all, like Dick Cheney all go to
party once a yeares Alex Jones snuck in once.

Speaker 4 (19:55):
And I think all your least favorite people's favorite.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Hang everyone who sucks loves the Bohemian Growth and there's
a bunch of It's like in conspiracy world. It's like
where the secret Masters of the world all meet to plot.
And it also is kind of where the secret masters
of the world all meet to plot.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
So right, well, it's the the conspiracy is it's secret masters,
as the reality is, it's the masters.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
Everyone does.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
It's Hank Kissinger and fucking Cheney and stuff. Yeah, of course,
And it's it's interesting. I haven't seen this breakout widely
onto the internet yet, but there, I'm we've already started
to see conspiracy theories flowing like water through a crack
in a submersibles hole. Here David Concannon, who's a legal advisor.

(20:44):
He's like the lawyer guy for Oceangate, the company that
Stockton founds is a hiss R we name. Yeah. He
like within hours of this going missing, he was kind
of trying to drum up conspiracy theories, posting stuff like,
you know, we're working on this hard, but like the
US government isn't helping us, you know, if they don't

(21:06):
fix this and come to our a and I'm going
to make sure the world knows the names of the
people who didn't do their jobs. And that's led to
like I found a fucking like Donald Trump Junior has
been posting shit about how like everything about this is sketchy.
You know, why are they doing this? I'm seeing people
talk about how like, oh, you know, how would billionaires
have made a decision so dumb is to go down?

Speaker 2 (21:26):
If I don't know, I mean, there's no way billionaires
would would do something less stupid.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
And it's like, first of all, also like putting that on.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Twitter is remarkably like like particularly bonkers. It's like, this
is Twitter is to the extent that it serves any
function now is it's such a direct demonstration that not
only are billionaires not better than you, they are actively
stupider than you in any conceivable way. Well, yeah, in
every conceivable way except for the one thing they made
their billions in modulus luck.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, And it's it's like, I, I there's so I
when I think about like what probably conspiracy culture is
going to take of this. There's a conspiracy that's existed
for a while. It's never been like kind of top
of the world. But like, uh, there's a theory that
you that I came across started coming across I don't know,

(22:22):
years ago, that like the Iceper, the Titanic was blown
up by a bomb because a number of the rich
guys on it, like John jacob Astor were against, uh,
moving away from the gold standard and establishing the Federal Reserve.
It's one of those kind of things, right, right, right,
And so part of like what people are pointing out
is that Stockton Rush's wife is like she had relatives

(22:45):
who are on the Titanic. They're actually in James Cameron's movie.
They're the two old people who are like cuddling on
that bed as it goes down. And so there's I
suspect I've already seen some of this. I suspect we're
going to see more like, oh, this is like a conspiracy.
These guys we're gonna, you know, had some dirt on
Biden or whatever and in what the Fed's doing with
interest rates or some shit. It's silly, I will tell

(23:08):
you right now. The fact that Stockton had relatives in
the Bohemian Club is definitely you're gonna wind up seeing
this on some YouTube videos that the algorithm serves you
at some point. Right, Just be ready for it, folks,
It's a coming. So that's Stockton's family background. He is
the scion of two very wealthy families who got wealthy

(23:30):
through a mix of slavery and exploiting the Earth's resources
in the most poisonous way possible. Right, this guy, he
grows up his family's worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars,
at least tens of millions of dollars, and he grows
up with that amount of money. In a twenty seventeen
Bloomberg profile, he described his family wealth this way. Rush
earned his money the old fashioned way. He says, I

(23:52):
was born into it and then grew it. I don't know,
that's not really the old faction I guess it is
it is.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I don't know, man in reality, unfortunately, that is the
most I guess that's not right.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
The way to be rich is by rich.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
I got it the old fashioned way. My grand parrots yeah,
and he notes that like his grandpa made his fortune
in oil and gas in Indonesia, which I'm sure makes
it sketchier because like boy howdy, there's not a great
history of extractive industries in Indonesia, So I don't know
when Stockton was born. Actually that maybe out by the

(24:30):
time you hear this. It's interesting, I kind of when
I was started looking into him, I was surprised to
see that despite how high profile his clientele is and
the fact that like he'd been in a number of
prominent news articles prior to this. When I started working
on this, at least Stockton had no Wikipedia page. There
was no like single Stockton Rush entry on Wikipedia. Oh wild,

(24:51):
and I wasn't able to find an exact reference to
his birth date. One article that I read notes that
he was eighteen when he got his pilot's license in
nineteen eighty, which would mean he was born in sixty
two thereabouts. Be beat motherfuckers, Hey, Robert here from the future.
Since we recorded this, a number of official obituaries have
come out for Old Stockton, and we now have an

(25:12):
actual birth date for him. The New York Times gives
it as March thirty first, nineteen sixty two, in the
place as San Francisco. I'm leaving in the conversation we
had around it before we knew that, because it gives
good context as to how actually, like relatively unknown this
guy was prior to the disaster, which I find interesting
considering how connected he is to so many like rich
and super famous people that like very little about this

(25:35):
dude before he became very suddenly famous. One of the
things that I use sometimes for research is an AI
powered search engine called find Phi n D, which is
basically like it's nice because you can kind of ask
it direct questions and it'll scrape the internet trying to
answer it. And so I asked it when was he?
After I couldn't find a birth date. I was like,

(25:56):
for shits and giggles, hey, when was this guy born?
And Find was also like, there doesn't appear to be
a clear exact birth date for it. There's not a thing. Yeah,
there also doesn't appear to be a clear exact answer
as to where he was born. Some articles suggest he
was born in the UK, other say California. Given how
Rich's family is, that it's possible, like it's not weird

(26:16):
for like Rich people don't care.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
He was probably born born on the private plane, you know, Yeah,
exactly between those two points.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
He's a child of the sky.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
He was born and super positioned in Schroer's box somewhere.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
I mean it's.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Also I was, you know, not not to go down
the AI route, which is not remotely what we're talking
about today, but.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
It is like this this guy will be given that.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, there was so little apparently like like reliable stuff
written about him. It does feel like this is he's
going to be one of those examples of like almost
every word generated about him will have AI in it already.
He's just like he's like corrupt data for the data
set already.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah. Yeah, Like most of my sources for this, I
tried to stick to stuff that was written three, four
or five years ago before all this happened, just because like,
well that it wasn't tainted by what happened later you
get more information about how the media was kind of
covering him and stuff. But I think you are right
about this because, like he wasn't really a major figure
until he got all those people guilt.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
The bulk of shit, the bulk of shit written about
him is gonna be lies.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Yeah, that's really Yeah. I think you're actually exactly correct
about that, Andrew. And you know who else loves to lie,
the sponsors of this podcast. You cannot trust a fucking
word that they say, So please give them your credit
card information. How is that, Sophie? Is that a good

(27:46):
Is that a good ad plug?

Speaker 4 (27:47):
I think the Regan coin ad people would like it
very much.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, yeah, buy a Reagan coin.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
Fucking moral that's so wild.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
I love the Reagan the coin, and I love our listeners.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
Here's a.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Ah good times. So we're back. Andrews got his Reagan coins. Yeah, yeah,
this is this.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Is real money.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
This is company script on my private plot of lands.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
Yeah. As soon as his Reagan coin arrived, David Zaslov
sent him a letter saying like, now you're now you're
one of us, You're one of the secret masters of
the world. I want to go to Bohemian grove, Andrew te.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
I mean again, what's it not to take a diversion.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
But Zaslav really feels like like all the billionaires got
together just before this writer strike and had like a
dinner for schmucks kind of thing to ye, like who's
the most repellent.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Of us, Who's going to take the heat from everyone else?
And he won? Slash lost. I was gonna doesn't realize
he lost.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
I was gonna make like Nerdier reference about it, but
but I don't know. We'll keep it. Nobody wants to
hear my warhammer forty thousand jokes. So stocked and Rush
probably born in nineteen sixty two. It's yeah, he hard
to say exactly. Was probably very likely born in California.

(29:20):
Certainly grew up in the Bay Area. As a we lad.
He was obsessed with space travel, and he wanted nothing
more than to be an astronaut. His parents assumed he'd
grow out of that, as most kids do, but since
they were super wealthy oligarchs, they were able to humor
him by introducing him to a real astronaut, Pete Conrad,
the commander of Apollo twelve and the First Man's Skylabih

(29:42):
just like, well, he wants to be an astronaut, let's
go find a nag go find an astronaut dotting it
really bring him in bias an Apollo twelve man, like
he's a Gi Joe.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
It really. We're also at the point where it's like
that now that like some individuals, these billionaires start to
have resources of countries. Yeah, like nothing is off the table,
especially if you want to do it on the cheap
for incredibly you know, shitty and unethically.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
It's interesting. I'm thinking about when I was a kid,
I wanted to be a paleontologist for a while, like
every kid who grew up in the era of Jurassic Park. Yeah,
And we went to like I think it was the
Saint Louis Natural History Museum one day and there was
like they had an exhibit where there was like an
actual paleontologist and a bunch of like things that they
had brought out of a dig site and were actively
like cleaning off. And I got to like like shake

(30:36):
that guy's hand and he like walked us around. It
was like part of a thing like a bunch of
other like families and stuff where they're It was like
one of the best single moments of my childhood. And
for Stockton, the equivalent of that is like, bring the
skylamb man over to the house, have him talk to
the boy, right, I mean, he's.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
They're at the level of wealth.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
Like if he'd liked dinosaurs, they would simply have had
to get him eight din yessor.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
They would have sponsored a dig and had him just
like go, you know. Yeah. Anyway, So Stockton claims that
Pete told him, you know, if you want to be
a spaceman one day, you should get your pilot's license asap,
which is, to be fair, probably pretty good astronaut advice.
I don't know, not an astronaut, but that does seem
like step one in that Bloomberg article, which is, as

(31:24):
far as I can tell, I think the first detailed
article about Stockton Rush's life and ambitions. Stockton claims to
have started work as a professional pilot when he was nineteen. Quote.
Rush has been investing in startup companies most of his
adult life, while also working at aviation. He was a
commercial jet transport pilot at nineteen and later a flight
test engineer for McDonald Douglas. Now that's not the most

(31:48):
detailed version of his early life that I found. In
a Smithsonian magazine profile from twenty nineteen, he gives a
little more detail and some of its contradictory because in
that he says that at age eighteen, he became one
of the youngest commercial pilots in the world. From what
I could done, what I think happened is he got
his license at eighteen. He started working a year or

(32:08):
two later. But like once he started to get more famous,
he started lying and saying that like, oh no, I
was the youngest commercial pilot ever. You know, just a
little bit of that fluff cycle, right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
It's also there's also like you when your parents are
rich enough, you know what? You know what?

Speaker 2 (32:25):
By what definition are you saying commercial pilot like someone
who is compensated to move cargo from one place to another.
Like that's also daddy giving you you you're allowances, say,
take my luggage to wear out.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
That's interesting, Andrew, because the first article about him just
says he was a commercial dreatshit transport pilot. You want
to guess where he was working when he started his
pilot career, You want to guess who his employer was.
So yeah, remember his parents, both sides of his his
mom and his dad's family are both huge oil and

(32:58):
gas families helping to run major oil and gas companies.
And Stockton's first flying job is taking chartered planes into
and out of Saudi Arabia. He's working for the Saudis
he as a teenage boy.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Oh my god, Yeah that is I mean, that's but
that's also the billionaire version of I drove my friend's kids,
my parents' friends kids around.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah, a babysitter essentially a babysitter.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
When I was a kid, Like my mom would help me,
like talk to you know, when I first started mowing lawn.
She'd be like, well, let's go over to the neighbors
and see if they need like their lawn mode and stuff.
And for his equivalent is like, well, the king of
Saudi Arabia needs like a pilot to take I don't know,
probably torture supplies or whatever to fucking re odd.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
Like this is this is this is a very very
dumb tangent.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
But for some reason, the algorithm on Instagram has decided
I want to see Saudi fast food reviews.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Oh shit, I bet they got I bet they're good
fast food in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
It looks wonderful, it looks it's I mean, it's It's
so funny the way culture works. It's like they're all
like speaking Arabic in the exact same like TikTok cadence
as like English language TikTokers. I don't I don't speak,
you know, I don't. I don't know what they're saying.
But I'm like, okay, this is amazing.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah, I'm able to pick up a lot more than
I otherwise would because you're like using the same patterns
as talkers all the way in the world.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
The fast food looks great.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Burger King in Riod looks quite good.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
I will say, the best fucking Popeyes I've ever eaten
at was in the the airport and Aman Jordan. Yeah,
fucking incredible Popeyes. I think they've changed their standards.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
But KFC and Beijing, when I went a kid was
they apparently still used lard to fry everything, and it
was hell.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Yeah, so good.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
I'll bet I'll bet. Yeah, not at all surprised here.
The KFC in Beijing slaps so yeah. He while he's
while he's working for the Saudi Royal family as a pilot,
he's studying aerospace engineering at Princeton And yeah, it's a
it's interesting you know that's that's that's a fun career.

(35:17):
So he uh, he's he's called like his description of
this is that it was the coolest summer job. Interesting
way to phrase that.

Speaker 4 (35:26):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
So he goes to school. He's doing aerospace engineering for
his thesis. He builds his own plane from a kit, which,
like that is like impressive. That sounds difficult. I don't know.
It feels weird as a thesis because you are just
kind of like following a kit. But why no, I'm
not an engineer, you know.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
That's that's like putting in a little like ticking a
lego set to your to your thesis.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah. I don't know that it would have been possible
for him to not get his thesis, given the amount
of money his parents probably gave to that school. But whatever,
you know, I've never built a plane, so what do
I know. I've also never built a death sub, so
I guess I have that on him. So anyway, guys,
that Smithsonian article continues. The astronaut dream was dashed when
Rush learned that his eyesight wasn't good enough for him
to become a military pilot in the nineteen eighty Still,

(36:14):
the astronaut fast track so he kind of has the
background of that kid from Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah, that's
the that's the continuation of that dude's life. Instead, he
moved to Seattle to work for McDonald douglas as a
flight test engineer for F fifteen fighter jets, then went
on to business school. Building on inherited money, he invested

(36:37):
in a string of esoteric tech companies, wireless remote control devices,
sonar systems. Still, he dreamed of going to space, perhaps
as a passenger on one of the private rockets being
developed in the early two thousands by the likes of
Richard Branson. In fact, Rush traveled to the Mohave Desert
in two thousand and four to watch the launch of
Spaceship Ie, the first commercial craft sent into space. When

(36:57):
Branson stood on its wing and declared that a new
era space tourism had arrived, Rush says he abruptly lost interest.
I had this epiphany that this was not at all
what I wanted to do. I didn't want to go
up in space as a tourist. I wanted to be
Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
So there's a lot in that paragraph Jesus. First of
all the articles I found, and again, no one's really
done a super deep dive on this guy. They all
kind of take his red from what he said, like
he did he did one, he did one, but they
all kind of take his red that like he built
on his family wealth through smart investments and made a

(37:35):
bunch more money. We don't actually know that, Like his
family might just have been super rich. He may have
been terrible at investing. We have no evidence actually that
he was good at it that I've seen.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Well, or with that amount of money, like he can
he can even have made money and still like index
funt yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Oh but yeah, even like with.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
His little like you know, investing shit, know, given the
way the market is, the real question is like did
he do better than yeah, like an index fund or
like yeah, yeah, so who actually knew what the fuck
they were doing. It's the same way like you know,
Donald Trump has kind of made money at some point,
but it's like, yeah, yeah, but did he do did
he make enough money given how much he started with?

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Exactly? Yeah. It's I think that's like a fair way
to look at it. It's also really interesting to me,
super interesting to me. I think kind of is the
key to understanding this dude that he loved the idea
of spaceship one until he realized it was just someone
else's spaceship for tourists, right yeah, because it's Branson's ship.
If he gets on it, all he's going to be

(38:39):
is a tourist. And he didn't want to be a
paying customer, like visiting space is a casual, rich visitor.
Now he describes as like, well, I wanted to explore.
I wanted to be Captain Kirk. I don't think that's
actually accurate either. I think he wanted to be Richard
Branson selling tickets to rich, old white dudes who would
worship him as a badass billionaire adventurer. Right yeah, like

(39:02):
that's that's what this guy actually wanted. Now, the startup
costs for this guy's rich. His family's rich. But like
there's rich, and then there's being able to start your
own space company rich. And this guy is not that rich.
You know, his family doesn't have that kind of money.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yeah, if he was looking, if he was actually that
good an investor, he would have that kind of life.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah. Yeah, why didn't you Why didn't you get you
make yourself a billionaire. First, pull yourself up by your
boots stocked.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Very very stupid people have accomplished that.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
So yeah, it's it's not a high bar, you know,
like Elon Musk has a rocket company and that dude, yeah,
what a mess.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Like the most patently stupid person. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
But you know, Musk is evidence that, like the market's
starting to get crowded by kind of the the early
to mid aught. So Stockton decides he's got to go
somewhere else, somewhere where there's less billionaires getting involved, which
at this point is the ocean right now. Stockton has
always liked the ocean. He'd been a dedicated scuba diver

(40:04):
most of his life. You know, he's rich, his family's
going to all these exotic places on a regular basis
for vacations. So he's done a bunch of diving all
over the world. And he specifically he gets into because
he moves up to Seattle as an adult and he
does a lot of cold water diving off the coast
of Seattle. Now, as he notes, the diving off of
the Puget Sound is gorgeous, but it's like cold water

(40:27):
diving is like a whole different beast from like regular
open water or regular diving, right, like where you're in
I don't know, like fucking I learned to dive in Okinawa,
where the water is kind of a perfect comfortable temperature. Right,
it's one of the best places in the world for diving.
The Puget sound as cold as hell. So if you're
going to dive there, you've got like special suits, you're
carrying extra tanks. It's like more of a pain in

(40:49):
the ass. And that's kind of how he describes it quote,
I loved what I saw, but I thought there's got
to be a better way. And being in a sub
and being nice and cozy and having a hot chocolate
with you beats the heck out of freezing and going
through a two hour decompression hanging in deep water. Now
that's funny for a couple of reasons, Like I don't know,
Subs are fine, subs are cool, Like I think what

(41:11):
James Cameron has done with his submersibles is like neat,
But it is funny that this guy's like I wanted
to be an explorer, but also I want my hot cocoa. Yeah,
I don't know, man, Like read about what astronauts go through.
It's not a comfortable process.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, but that's you know, that's exactly the diletant that
yeah winds up exactly.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
His path is like more perfect than it probably should
have been, honestly.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, no, he should have died a lot faster. Like
if he'd gone to space, he wouldn't hacked it as well,
because it's space is a whole mess. Like everybody's nasty
up in space. They don't talk about that enough, but
like the space stations smell terrible. If you read through
the old Apollo transcripts, they're like regularly poop will get
out and it'll just be like floating around the space ship.

(41:57):
They'll be arguing about whose shits fly around. It's very funny. God, Yeah,
you wouldn't want to You wouldn't want to be drinking
coco in that environment, I'll tell you that much. So
since he was a very rich kid, he had the
power to just kind of go out and spend money
to make this expensive whim happen. But alas Stockton was
stymied because there aren't a lot of private submarines. It's

(42:21):
actually pretty uncommon for like just a dude to own
a sub which is a shame because I did grow
up reading the Illuminatus trilogy. I would like to, you know,
it'd be cool to have a golden submarine that you
run a global conspiracy from, but it's apparently a real
pain in the ass to upkeep them.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
I think we were, you know, if you ever needed
an illustration of why there's not a bunch of private subs, yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Did all get a reminder in twenty nineteen when that
Smithsonian article came out, they said they are about one
hundred private submarines across the entire world. Chartering them is
extremely expensive. But Stockton kept digging until he found a
company in London that had was like, we can sell
you the parts and a kit to build a mini

(43:09):
sub that was designed by a retired Navy sub commander.
And like a kit, you love a kit, you love
putting together your own submarine.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
But that is also like just this perfect example of
these like rich kid billionaires like building a kit and
presenting it as something you made.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
It is It is interesting. It's both because like, yeah,
that is fat like that it like as you said,
but it also like I will say, if I'm going
to trust someone to like take me in a submarine.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
It.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
I would prefer it be someone who knows what it's
like to build a submarine from the ground up. Like
I will say that that is probably where you'd start.
So so far he's doing he's taking the right first step,
you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Well the problem is there's two lessons, two pretty divergent
lessons you could learn from that. One is like, wow,
look at the care look at the difficulty. Building a
submarine is no joke. And the other lesson that it
looks like Stockton Moore took to heart.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Is yeah, see it's easy.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
I have mastered the submarine.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Yeah, building, building and designing a submarine is easy.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah. And the sub he builds is a twelve foot
one man sub So he's like lying flat in this
thing with like his face directly over a porthole, and
like that's the way this works. So when we say
sub this is like almost more of like a diving suit,
like a legit diving suit. Probably is would be like
closer to what this is as opposed to like, you know,

(44:40):
the red October right, Yeah, Sam Neil isn't fitting in
this thing, you know. Quote while I was building the
sub I was thinking, this is stupid. I should have
just bought a robot and explored with that. But the
moment I went underwater, I was like, oh, you can't
describe this. When you go in a sub things sound different,

(45:01):
they look different. It's like you've gone to a different planet.
Rush was hooked. His entrepreneurial instincts were peaked. I had
come across this business anomaly. I couldn't explain if three
quarters of the planet is water, how come you can't
access it? Now? Yeah, that's a fascinating thing to think.
Where like he's underwater, alone in a submarine, looking at

(45:24):
like the majesty of reef systems and underwater life that
very few people get to see, and his immediate thought
is like, why isn't this owned? Why haven't we enclosed
this and turned this into like corporate property.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Well and also though like clearly his like going further
train of thought was not just like, Wow, this is
amazing and beautiful.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
Why doesn't everyone do this?

Speaker 2 (45:46):
And instead of coming to the conclusion because it's very
difficult and dangerous, he came to the conclusion because everyone
else is stupid. I'm the only one that thought this
is amazing and people should see this.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, everyone is stupid. And he's not saying people shoul
see this as much as he calls it a business anomaly,
He's like, why aren't Why don't more businesses own the sea?
Is his first thought? Right, he is an exploiter, He's
not an explorer, right, that's his primary motivation, right, So
his immediate goal is to start a business to build small,

(46:17):
cheap submersible vehicles, which he thought could be lucrative for
a variety of reasons. And when you read about the guy,
you get the feeling more than anything. He sees this
as his opportunity to become a self made billionaire and
put himself on an even footing with guys like Branson
and Musk. But the private submarine world, you know, it's
never been huge. It's never been a big business to

(46:39):
be a submarine owner, and it had pretty much collapsed
by the early aughts. In his interview with the Smithsonian,
Stockton Rush claims that there were two reasons for this.
One of the big markets for private subs had been
carrying what are called saturation divers to work underneath. So
you've got oil rigs right in the ocean. They go
down very deep and they need repair work done on

(46:59):
them intense depths, and these are the kind of depths
where you don't just like throw on an oxygen tank
and go diving. Right. Number one, it's too deep. So
when you're diving, you can go down pretty quickly, but
going up you have to be extremely careful about how
quickly you go up right otherwise you're gonna fucking die.
So when you're going to intense depths like this, and

(47:21):
you have to work, so you have to be able
to spend a decent amount of time down there to
do stuff. What they would do is they would put divers,
and these divers don't have oxygen tanks. They have like
special formulations of different kind of like chemicals that allow
them to breathe in the specific like it's I don't know,
we're not going to go into like how diving works.
There's different stuff like nitrox. I'm not sure exactly what

(47:41):
these guys were on, but they're wearing special suits, they've
got special you know, mixtures in their tanks, and a
submarine takes them down and takes them back up so
that they can get on the sub and be in
decompression without kind of running through all that way. They
don't have to carry as much as many tanks and stuff. Now,
this is was for a while kind of the only

(48:02):
way to do repair work on this stuff, but it
was extremely dangerous, Like this was one of the most
dangerous jobs in the world. These guys died all the time,
not because like the subs weren't safe, but because diving
at that depth isn't like people just die for like
no reason while diving. You know, like sometimes it's it's
just like a you know, your heart stops or whatever.
You get the wrong, you know, mix a shit in

(48:24):
your blood. It's like it's very dangerous to dive, especially
this kind of shit. So once oil and gas companies,
once drones and stuff started being good enough, they moved
away from having divers do this as much as possible
and started having robots do it, which is like, I'm
not gonna give the oil and gas company a lot
of credit, but I'm sure it was both more cost
efficient and like, yeah, people, it's like a lot safer.

(48:49):
So the other reason he claims was that or the
other like business for private submarines was tourist subs, which
could be skippered by anyone with a coastguard captain's license
and were regular by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of
nineteen ninety three, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection
requirements and prohibited dives below one hundred and fifty feet.
The law was well meaning, Rush says, but he believes

(49:11):
it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation. So he's like,
it sucks that they stopped having divers fixed oil rigs
because they were all dive dying, and it sucks that
they stopped. They wouldn't they won't let us take people
below one hundred and fifty feet in subs because it
keeps killing them.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
I mean, look, as far as money where your mouth is,
he is the most like, like, you know, true believer, libertarian,
bullshit guy. He was a you gotta handed to him.
You have to hand it to him.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Yeah, you gotta hat. He did put his money where
his mouth was. It is funny where you can there's
just all these quotes where he's like, they're pointlessly focusing
on safety over innovating. Maybe there's a reason for some
of those SA dear regulations stocked it it truly.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
I mean, you know, when all this was happening, the
one of my like more fucked up thoughts was like,
you know, obviously it wasn't likely that these guys were
going to get rescued, but I was like the cost
in the world where they are rescued, it will cost
so many more lives in a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
Like well, and it's you know, honestly, like this this
will not be news to most people or a lot
of people probably, but like you know, if you pay
attention to like the world of people who do this
kind of stuff, and I have I have a buddy
who there's a book called blind Man's Bluff if you
want to read about kind of the shit that US

(50:40):
and Russian subs got up to in the late Cold
War era. It's a really good book. But like, basically,
we used to have these fights between our submarines where
they would try to force each other to surface, and
it was insanely it's like chicken with nuclear submarines. It
was insanely dangerous shit. But like talking to him and
talking to like other people who were in that industry,

(51:00):
anyone who has done this kind of like four there
have been four submarine rescues that have been successful in
the history of submarines, and none of them were very
deep compared to where this thing was. There was never
any chance of saving these people, I don't think. But anyway, whatever,
that's not that's not what we've got to talk about.
So we got to talk about. Yeah, one in a million.

(51:21):
So Rush calls these these needless passenger safety prioritizations understandable
butt a logical, which is very, very funny. But what
we are what is interesting to me is that like
the sub market falls apart. The real reason is that,
number one, it's insanely dangerous the jobs that it was
being used for, and we found better uses than submarines,

(51:44):
better ways to fill those needs. And number two, once
we started replacing, like the subs that were being used
to transport divers and shit, the only real industry for
private subs was private trips for rich people to see
shit underwater. And the thing that people most wanted to
see was the Titanic. And we're going to talk about that,
but first, you know what's also Titanic The savings that

(52:09):
you're gonna get if you purchase these products. And we're back,
so we're talking about tourist trips to see the Titanic.
So spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen

(52:30):
the movie, The Titanic went down on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve,
with a shitload of people on it. Now, despite the
fact that this is the most famous nautical disaster in history,
when it happened, and for like decades after it happened,
very basic details of what had actually gone down were
seriously in doubt, which is weird because eyewitnesses saw the

(52:51):
ship break in half the way that it does in
the James Cameron movie, right, But when that happened, like
scientists at the time, an awful lot of the kind
of people who were building boats and were experts on
this didn't think a ship could go down that way.
I think the belief was that like it would basically
get overwhelmed and like just kind of all sink at once.
But they didn't think it could break that way. And

(53:12):
because a lot of the eyewitnesses were like women, there
was this like a lot of these people got like
mocked and stuff by the like. Anyway, it was a
whole It was a whole deal, which is to say that,
like when people started going after the Titanic, there was
a real reason to want to find it because, among
other things, you might actually like give some closure to

(53:32):
some of these people who had spent their lives being
called crazy. I don't know whatever, there was a good
scientific reason to want to find this thing, and the
shit the cruise ship's resting place remained a mystery until
a very cool dude named Bob Ballard got a secret
contract from the US Navy in nineteen eighty five. Ballard

(53:53):
Ballard is an oceanographer, and like Stockton, he'd always loved
the sea. Unlike Rush, he turned this love into a
lligent appreciation for the science of oceanography. And he gets
brought in. He's basically been pitching I think I can
find the Titanic, and the Department of Defense is like, well,
we got these two US subs that went missing in
the nineteen sixties and we don't really know what happened,

(54:14):
but we'd like you to find them, and this Titanic thing,
like will basically pretend that we're having you do that,
and if you find our subs like that, you know
this will work out for everybody. And I think he
does find He finds those subs, and he also he
finds the Titanic. Because Bob Ballard is very good at
what he does. You know this is he's also the
guy who finds the fucking Bismarck. And because he's the

(54:37):
guy who finds the big dead boat, he could have
claimed salvage rights to the wreck, which is like potitionally
quite a bit of money and salvaging the Titanic. But
because he's like a basically decent guy, Ballard was like,
I don't want to mine the graveyard of several thousand
people for profit. That seems that seems ghoulish. Yeah, he

(54:59):
actually was like, I think that's grave robbing, so I
don't really want to do that. But other people had
no compunctions against renting deep sea vehicles and grabbing shit
near the wreck to sell back on surface. And we're
actually going to talk about those people because one of
them winds up on Stockton. Russia's death sub kind of
the biggest of them. But over the next year, some

(55:19):
fifty five hundred artifacts from the titan Over the next
eighteen years, some fifty five hundred artifacts from the Titanic
are sold or put in the Titanic Museum. Bob later
wrote it had turned into an ugly carnival and a
front to the fate of the Titanic. And all those
who had lost their lives in her final hours. Now,
this grave robbing is done by mere subs which are

(55:40):
leased by the from the Russian government during a period
in which like this is kind of the late eighties
early nineties, like right after the Soviet Union fall, so
like the Russians, Yeah, they're kind of needing money, you know. Yeah.
So my analogous.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
Biggest regret is when I did a semester in Beijing.
One of the things that this is this will show
my age a little bit, but the Chinese, the Red
Arvy was enough up for sale that apparently you could
drive out to the desert and for one hundred dollars
shoot a rocket propelled grenade into a car.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Absolutely worth it. That's a good price. That's a solid price. Andrew,
I didn't. I was too I take that deal every
day of the week. It was very, very sketchy. So
I didn't end up doing it, but I was like, yeah,
now I wish.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
I had it.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Yeah, it is you know, you got to be careful
anytime people are offering you rocket propelled grenade launchers.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
But it is like you know, the and it's one
of those things we're talking about how insane this Titanic,
you know, tourism thing was. I actually chatted on fucking
Twitter with some guy who said he went to see
the Titanic on one of these mere subs. This is
pretty safe. These are actual submarines, right, like with actual
cruise and stuff, like, they're rated to be doing this.

(56:58):
Nothing bad happens.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Do this right.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
We can talk about like the grave robbing and the
ethics of that, but like James Cameron phil films the
opening scenes of Titanic, those like opening underwater scenes on
one of these mere submarines, you know, and for a while,
this is a pretty good way to get down there.
The runaway success of Cameron's movie of the same name
ignites a new Titanic fever in the hearts of people
around the globe. And suddenly there's this kind of burgeoning

(57:21):
fan And there had always been since the Titanic went down,
people have been obsessed with this, but obviously the movie
takes that to another fucking level. There's all these people
who kind of make the ship and its story the
center of there. It becomes a fandom, you know.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Ye.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
In two thousand and five, a company called Deep Ocean Expeditions,
decides to offer very wealthy clientele trips down to the
most famous grave in history, and over the next few
years they take one hundred and ninety seven tourists there
and back again. From that Bloomberg article quote, the last
of those trips took place in twenty twelve, the one
hundredth anniversary of the Titanic sinking. Russia assumed that mint

(57:58):
the market was exhausted. Then he talked to Rob McCallum,
the British born adventurer who led the trips. McCallum told
Rush that the only reason the trips had stopped was
that the Russians quit renting out the mears, which have
since been mothballed. There was never an end in sight
to our market, McCallum says, we just didn't have the machines.
So now he's like, oh, well, there's a market, and like,

(58:19):
nobody's serving this shit as a capitalist, you know nature
capitalism abhors a vacuum. This is this is how I'm
gonna make my fucking fortune. So he feels like he
stumbled upon a great idea and the way he puts
it in that interview with Bloomberg, which lists some of
his earlier ideas for how to monetize submercivals, and a

(58:40):
paragraph that is extremely fucking noteworthy. This keys you into
kind of the most important stuff about what he was
really planning to do here. Up to that point, Rush
had been thinking about unexplored rex hydrothermal vents and bizarro
sea creatures, not to mention the many ways a capable
sub could be leased out to an oil and gas
company to service under sea wells and oil plats, or

(59:00):
do were research institution to do surveys of sea cucumbers,
or to the CIA, NSA, d i A to do
whatever it is that spooks do on the floor of
the ocean. So that that's this guy's ethical basis. He's like, yeah,
you know, raping the world for the oil and gas industry,
discovering sea creatures, spying on people for the CIA, all
equally valid. It's so funny, like he is. This man

(59:27):
has the moral center of like a fucking donut. It's
so funny. We did not lose a paragon of virtue here.
I am truly grateful that Bloomberg profile exists because it
makes very clear the fact that this guy never cared
about exploration or expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. He
was an adrenaline junkie who liked planes and subs and

(59:49):
wanted to become a billionaire doing something that he thought
was cool. He'd have been happy helping Exon frack the
Marianna's trench if that had worked out for him, But
it just so happens that there was a bigger mar
for the initially at least in catering to Titanic weirdos.
So he started pouring money into building a new deep
sea submersible, the Cyclops, and then the Cyclops too. You know,

(01:00:10):
he takes these guys down, he tests them out, he
starts getting seed capital from fins and family. He's putting
a shitload of his own money into this, to the
tune of maybe tens of millions of dollars, and at
first he can't really get any big investors involved. For
pretty good reasons, Stockton cannot get to the Titanic, right,
and a lot of people are like, well, he probably
is never going to get to the Titanic. At present,

(01:00:32):
I think there are four other vehicles on Earth capable
of reaching that thing with people in them, and they're
all owned by various governments. The Chinese Jhaolong submersible is
capable of going down the furthest For a while. Famously,
James Cameron had the deep Sea Challenger, which had proved
that a rich maniac could have a submersible constructed for

(01:00:54):
this kind of feet. But the Deep Sea Challenger, it's
not the sort of thing, and I don't think of
these are that you can fit a bunch of customers in, right, ye,
Like the deep the way it works, You've got like
this kind of superstructure that's this sort of weird almost
cylindrical shape right around it. But the actual thing that
a dude is in and that like the cameras and
stuff are, as far as I can tell, is like

(01:01:14):
a sphere, because a sphere is the is good for pressure. Yeah.
And it's also like by the time that that a
Stockton's working on this, the Deep Sea Challenger is not
operational anymore. There was like it took some damage just
like because it's this is tough on a vehicle, and
then there's like a car accident while it's being transported

(01:01:34):
and they're like, well it's kind of been compromised, you know,
we have to kind of retire it, which is what
responsible people do when their deep sea vessel has been damaged.
Like you know, now, it's interesting. When he's talking to Bloomberg,
Stockton presents both the Geolong and the Deep Sea Challenger
as kind of like this is what he saw as

(01:01:55):
the proof that his dream was achievable. Quote. People used
to ask me, how do you think you can do
this if nobody else can. I like to point out
that the two deepest diving subs on the planet are
the Chinese Joolong and James Cameron sub the DSV Deep
Sea Challenger, which in twenty twelve carried the Titanic Director
to Challenger Deep, the ocean's deepest point, and is now retired.
They were both built by amateurs who had never built

(01:02:16):
subs before. The sub is not the challenge. The challenge
is the business model and logistics. Now, that is an
insane thing to say, Andrew, and if.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
You have you have a hammer, if you're an idiot capitalist, who.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Yeah, fucking tech bro. No, the problem is monetizing it.
Building a sub that can go down the depth of
Mount Ever is to say, what do you want to get?
James Carmeron sketched it on a napkin. He just knows
how to make terminator movies.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
It really is also though like some that is some
because because you know, his goal was not to do
what they did. His goal was to do what they
did with the cocoa that you were talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Yeah, with the fucking and passengers multiple And it's also
he's everything he says is wrong, So he's like they're
all built by amateurs. So the Jhoolong, which is that
Chinese submersible which can read it reach as far as
seven thousand meters down, was developed by a desired a
designer named zou Zin Jaques sorry zoo quinin q I

(01:03:17):
n A N. And he is not I wouldn't. I
don't think he's designed as submersible before. So I guess
that's what he means by like amateur. But he's the
professor at the School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil
Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University. That's not an amateur. He's
a professor of naval architecture. He seems like an expert,

(01:03:39):
and like there's there's a whole team of experts who
are like people who build things under this four underwater shit, right, yes,
so you're not, yeah, just just in a like you know,
you can't walk down the street in La without hitting
a professor of naval architecture, right, that's like, that's like

(01:03:59):
running in a guy with a fucking podcast. It's so
it's such a funny way to be like they're amateurs.
It's also like a Chinese government ministry are the people
like handling the like the actual construction, and like it's
it's a serious project by serious people. That's why it works,

(01:04:20):
right And likewise he's being like, well, James Cameron's just
this director and he got to make this thing. It's
you know, an amateur. Well no, Cameron. Cameron says that
like he contributed, he was one of the designers. He
helped do some of the engineering. I don't know exactly
what that means, but he did not just design a
ship and have it built. He is working with a company,

(01:04:41):
an Australian R and D company called Acheron Project, and
the construction is headed primarily by the co designer, a
guy named Ron Allam, who is a professional engineer. If
you want to know how serious an engineer, Ron Allam is.
When they're working on this thing that Cameron takes down
to the Challenger Deep. There's like this kind of foam
that they are using is part of like the pressure

(01:05:02):
system that keeps it safe, and it's based on like
the initial thing they tried is there was this kind
of like nautical foam for pressure pressure vessels that were
meant to go down less depth, you know, I think
just a couple of thousand meters as opposed to how
far the Challenger Deep is. And they test out this
foam that's already in use, and they find out that
it can't handle the pressure, and so ron Allam invins

(01:05:24):
an entirely new kind of foam for this thing, right
new phone, Yeah, so yeah, Yeah. In two thousand and nine,
Stockton Rush founds ocean Gate Ink with the promise to
deliver Mann's submersible solutions to the private market. And that
is where we're going to end our story for today,

(01:05:45):
because we have now gotten up to the point where
the death sub is about to be made. So yeah,
how we feel in today, Andrew, how we feel in
about this whole tale?

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
So fine?

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
I mean I think it is it's just like exactly
the the only reason this guy is an outlier is
because most of these like again like tech pro libertarian
weirdos like know on some level that what they're saying
is bullshit, and like yeah, do not often put their
like again, go all in on their like half baked

(01:06:19):
or wrong ideas the same way, Like like the real
thing that you're supposed to do as a tech bro
is use other people's money to like and use other
people's money over and over and over again until you,
you know, hit the right lottery ticket and then say
it's your money.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
And take other people like Musk, you know, they just
had a fucking rocket blow up, right, Musk wasn't on
that thing, you know, like that he doesn't even there's
this like we're talking, there's this whole like thing going
on right now where like Muskin Zuckerberg are talking about
like fighting in a ring, and it's like, that's not
gonna I don't think that's really gonna happen. It'd be
funny if it did, but I don't think it's really

(01:06:56):
going to happen. Like that's the Those are the kind
of things that the tech bros who are a little
bit less dumb than Stockton do where they'll talk about
like doing bold and crazy shit, But if there's actually
any risk in it, they don't because they they don't
want to die, you know. Yeah, we're getting hurt or embarrassed,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Yeah, And on some level I think they like, yes,
they are over over over over confident, but again the
grift is to be overcught to like overconfident with someone
else's resources whatever. That yes, yes, and like him not
understanding that is the fundamental Like he's the dumb rich
boy that like these guys exploit.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
Yeah, And it's like to a degree, I don't know,
maybe you could say that makes Stockton slightly more in
some ways more respectable because one thing you can't say
about him, like he did put his money where his
mouth was, you know that that is really undeniable. I
think that's because he was just even more unhinged than
a lot of the people, maybe because he grew up

(01:08:02):
even richer than them, Like he's not as rich as
like Bezos or Branson or Musk, now, but I think
he was as ex gunned. He had money. Yeah, so
maybe he just like never had any kind of grounding
as a person. I don't know, though, I think it's.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Pretty pretty clear there's a level of money that completely
rots your brain.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
Yeah, this guy had it for sure. Yeah, no denying that.
So Andrew, you got anything to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:08:34):
Oh yeah, you knows. As I'm on strike. My podcast,
Yo Is This Racist?

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
Is continuing, but we also have a premium show you
can subscribe to at suboptimalpods dot com. We just did
a very fun watch along of Big Trouble in Little
China where I get dogged on relentlessly. So if you
found me irritating, I believe eight bucks a month and
you have access to this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:58):
Hell yeah, hell yeah, so yeah, Yo is This Racist?
Check it out? And uh yeah, check out. You know,
threaten your television with a lighter. Let it know you
have the ability to take it out. If this strike
doesn't be right, don't do anything yet, but yeah, be vigilant,
be ready and subscribe to cooler Zone Media if you

(01:09:20):
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more ads in my life for Apple Android. We'll figure
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I'm not doing any work.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
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