Part: Two Stockton Rush: Inventor of the Deathsub

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What still at the bottom of the ocean. My worst
submersible in history. Uh, there we go. That was That
was That was nice. Huh that was good. Respectful of
the sea.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Sure, it's the most submerged submersible in history.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Look in terms of being submerged. It did its job
with a plomp. Yeah, you know, it is under the
fucking water as hell. So none of these other submersibles
lasted except for maybe the Curse. Yeah, but it's great,
the great moments.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
It's like our top twenty submersible in terms of how
fucking underwater it is staying.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, it's it is super under the goddamn water. Oh Andrew,
how are we doing on this glorious week? Uh, you're
having a good one to enjoy the Monday.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know, good, better than some folks. Let's just say,
I guess worse than some other folks.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Better than some folks. Yeah, yeah, middle Yeah, I'm feeling
better than both submersible rich people who love submersibles, and
I'm feeling better than many members of the Russian government.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
We had a little break for there to be a mutiny.
I'm very happy there was a mutiny in Russia. You know,
outside of a variety of geopolitical reasons, primarily because like,
how long has it been since we've had a mutiny
like in the news, like a real ass mutiny that
just doesn't happen often anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Listen, maybe, listen to me.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Russian Russian revolutions, robber barons, the nineteenth century into the
twentieth centuries, back baby.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Hell yeah, hell yeah, the Titanic's killing people again.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
It's all coming back.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
History never changes, beautiful, beautiful. All we need now is
for European powers to get us into a disastrous conflict
and forget that machine guns exist where we're kno going
to have everything off one by one.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
In that direction. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
So, speaking of easily predictable disasters with a high body count,
let's return to the story of Stocked and Rush. Yeah, good,
good ship. So in two thousand and nine, are our
boy stocked and founded ocean Gate Incorporated, which is both
the funniest name he could have possibly picked for a

(02:34):
company that was about to become infamous for killing a
bunch of rich people. Really, yeah, the the goal, It
is quite a choice. Huh, Like, yeah, did you not
think about.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Why? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:55):
My guess is because, like you know, it's your gateway
to the ocean and to deep sea exploration. But you
are around in the nineties, Stockton, like, you know what,
we use that word more.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
I mean, the full dame of the company should be
ocean gate parentheses gate like a door, not like that
kind of gate.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Never mind, it's going to be fine getting no, no, no,
like not like a watergate thing.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
I would have called it, yeah, absolutely safe Submersibles Incorporated,
but he didn't. So the goal of the company was
to deliver manned submersible solutions to the private market. Now,
because Stockton did not yet know how to design submarines
or submersibles, we are using the word interchangeably as regular people,
but they are two different things, right. Submersible needs needs

(03:41):
a bigger boat that takes it around to places. A
submarine is a boat in and of itself. I think
that's more or less accurate. So, since he didn't really
know how to make either subs or submersibles, he and
his partner bought two functional subs and started kind of
like hacking them, which makes sense right. Their goal was
like to to have, you know, kind of figure out

(04:02):
the basics so that they could eventually build a multi
person submersible that could handle four thousand meters.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Of that he's started.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah, he's a kit he's kit bashing. He's kit bashing
his way to James Cameron's status.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
That's the goal.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
They started with a pair of conventional submersibles, the Cyclops
and the Cyclops too. But the Cyclops is the cyclop i.
I don't know what the plural of Cyclopses would be.
But the two Cyclops submarines couldn't handle the trip that
he wanted to make down to where the Titanic is.

(04:39):
But having those early submersibles allowed Rush to kind of
start building a business. Now that this was not like
a money business, right, Rich people don't have to make
businesses that make money. As we all learned from Uber,
It's okay to be in continually lighting piles of money
on fire as long as you're like establishing your place
in the market. And so yeah, his kind of plan

(05:01):
was basically Netflix. Yeah see Netflix, see most of the
companies this outside of Apple and like the modern deck industry.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, Jesus Christ, I know it's it's it's pretty.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
They also, in his attitude Ocean Gate, it would be
really funny if Netflix was like you know what, We're
going to go down to the to the Titanic. Now
everyone who pays seven to ninety nine a month gets
a seat in our in our giant death sub.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
But no.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
So his his basic idea is like, I'm going to
start taking just rich people on dives, you know, not
to the Titanic, but to other you know less deep shipwrecks,
and that'll get you know, that'll start building buzz, right,
That's kind of a big part of his plan was
like getting famous people, taking them down there, trusting that
the majesty of the sea and being in a submersible

(05:57):
would like make them evangelists for the brand, and that
would allow him to get kind of the investment dollars
initial eventually that he needed to move on with his
more ambitious plan, the titan a submersible made with all
the hubris of the Titanic and the size footprint of
a Chevy suburban.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
It's awesome, how he was.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
His business plan was like clout is better than physics.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, it is, well, because it's one of those things
like people are inherently like intense experiences have a mind altering,
especially like ones where you're at risk of dying have
a kind of mind altering effect.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Like if you take.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Somebody to an intense place and they feel like they
might die the whole time, and then they don't, they
get kind of a high, you know, Like that's why
war works the way that it does in a lot
of cases. So that was I think that was kind
of the idea, is like these people would like walk
away just kind of like unable to stop talking about

(07:00):
this thing. Which is why it's really interesting. He seems
to have had a huge base of contacts. There's since
this all went pear shaped, a bunch of different famous
people have been like, oh yeah, like we were talking
about going out, he offered us a ride, And it's
interesting to me that, like, given how unknown he was
kind of before the sub went down, relatively speaking, how

(07:22):
well connected he is. And I think it was because
of this, because he was kind of building this this
undersea influencer network of like famous people and rich people
who just really liked doing this. Not a bad plan
at least in terms of like building his company. So
the problem with the plan was that he wanted to

(07:42):
make this big submersible with space for a larger crew
than basically any of the any of the like the
deep water diving vessels had had previously. You know, you'd
had those Russian subs and stuff that could carry a crew.
But when you're looking at like, you know, the different
national like deep water exploration vessels or like James Cameron's vessel,

(08:03):
they were made for like generally one person, and they
usually had like the actual the pressure barrier, which is
like the part of the submersible that was meant to
actually protect the human being was usually made out of
like titanium or some sort of special steel, which is
what you'd expect. This is the reliable, safe way to
do it, and Rush chose not to do the reliable

(08:26):
safe way to do it. Basically after like this, I
think like the last big submersible disaster was in like
the early seventies. It was these guys who were like
laying deep water cable off the coast of Ireland and
then something went wrong and they got stuck fifteen hundred
feet down.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
They both got rescued.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
It was like a real They had like twelve minutes
of air left when they got saved, So it was
a fucking close thing. Yeah, it sounded like a nightmare,
but it was one of those like it was survivable
because the pressure barrier didn't fail, right, Like everything else
went wrong, but like they did not explode, and you

(09:04):
can survive most things aside from exploding.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah, for a while at least.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
So the industry at all, I say industry, it's more
of like a subculture of all of the the kind
of weird undersea neabors.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
James Cameron calls it a community.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yeah, a community, Yeah, I mean they kind of is
the subculturist of all subcultures, the subs.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's the sub So the literal subculture built
a bunch of safety rules about like here is how
you make a pressure barrier. These are the different like
things you want to make sure your your vessel has
and they kind of voluntarily adopted these standards and it
worked really well because nobody died, Like in the last

(09:49):
like since everyone listening to this podcast basically has been alive,
no one has died doing these kind of like crazy
deep water dives, which is wild when you think about
what they're doing, right, that they're going to a place
less explored than the fucking Moon, and that it was
so safe. But Stockton Rush is like I'm going to

(10:10):
ignore all of the things that they've been doing. I'm
going to ignore like all of the requirements they have
for these vessels and instead I'm going to make this
motherfucker out of carbon ass fiber. Now carbon fiber. It's
one of those you remember when it was special, when
like we would hear about like this amazing space aids
carbon fiber and all the like. Obviously, it's got a

(10:30):
lot of uses. It's great material for certain things, for
over the water things, pretty good for things not in
the water, maybe not under the water. Maybe might make
a great boat. I don't know. I'm not a boat maker. Yeah,
but uh yeah. So Stockton was kind of obsessed with
the fact that carbon fiber has three times the strength

(10:51):
to buoyancy ratio of titanium, which he brought up constantly.
People who were you know, didn't think this was a
good idea. It would be like, yeah, but it like
has terrible compressive strength. Like if you it's it's great
if you're trying to like push it certain ways, but
if you're trying to push it the way that pressure
works underwater, it's it's a bad thing. It's also when

(11:12):
like metal, the different metals they used for these things
have the ability to kind of bend and flex to
an extent, whereas carbon fiber is super strong, but when
it breaks, it just it breaks real bad.

Speaker 5 (11:25):
You know.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Pretty good metaphor for all tech stuff that it's like
a space age fiber, a space age material. It works
really well at one thing and catastrophically bad at everything else.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
And it's you know, it's also a great tech industry
kind of metaphor because the defining thing about the defining
like cultural aspect of big tech is its inability to
leave well enough alone.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
Right right.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
You can't just be like, oh, hey, subway systems can
work really well, and a lot of the most livable
cities in the world have public transit. You have to
be like, no, we're going to under sea hole or
underwater holes and we're going to drive tesla's under them
and they'll have no fire escapes. And likewise, it kind
of seems like, at least from the reading I've done,
it kind of seems like the submersible industry there wasn't

(12:14):
any room to really like disrupt or innovate, Like cameras
get a little better, batteries get a little better, but
the basics of the thing that goes underwater and keeps
you alive is always going to be the same. It's
a big metal thing, like a big metal sphere. Titanium
is listen.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
I mean, the whole tech industry is just like the
ultimate participation trophy. All these bozo's coming up with ideas
that already exist and no one has like, no one
has ever told them their ideas are wrong or bad,
and then they get to make them and you know,
bankrupt existing people.

Speaker 5 (12:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah, and then yeah, Uber lights tens of billions of
dollars on fire. Yeah, this is he's kind of doing that.
He's got He's just he's not doing this. I mean
there's a couple other reasons, as we'll get into, but yeah,
carbon fiber bad idea for this sort of boat. Now,
people had tried to use it before for submersibles. In
the early two thousands, Richard Branson had funded an explorer

(13:09):
named Steve Fawcett who wanted to make like an airplane
shaped carbon fiber submarine that could basically fly to the
bottom of the.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Challenge team and back up.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
Every name in this story is somehow funny.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, Fawcett's really because Fawcett was like a legitimate explorer.
He was also known as this guy who repeatedly nearly
died and like would cost various governments a shitload of
money rescuing him, and then he'd be like, well I'm
not I'm not paying for that and get himself into
another disaster and eventually he died in a mysterious plan.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
That's that's the lesson.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, you might not take his advice on this, and
he never got to build it because he was involved
in a mysterious plane crash that became the most expensive
rescue effort in modern history.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
I guess up until this subwent down is.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Fine, we got to stay peg taxes because they just
go to these bozos once.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Exactly exactly so that they can fly their planes into
the sides of canyons. Oh so anyway, Yeah, as kind
of he starts moving along and building this and testing
it out and Shorter dives. Various people within the industry,
including like literally James Cameron, start reaching out and being like, hey,

(14:28):
I don't know about this, feels like it might be
not the best idea ever, and Rush ignores them. He
told Smithsonian Magazine, there hasn't been an injury in the
commercial sub industry in over thirty five years. It's obscenely
safe because they have all these regulations. But it also
has an innovated or growed because they have all these
regulations obscenely safe, it's too safe. It makes me sick.

(14:52):
No one's killed a sub full of people in decades.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
He did.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
He saw his opening and went for it. It's so
funny that every quote from him is just him doing
like the jack off motion at the idea of safety regulations.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
I'm just imagining him like coming out and like a
black turtleneck like Steve Jobs, and being like, and now
for something insanely great, a boat that kills a shitload
of people. What if we got more people to die
at the Titanic wreck.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
It's all about scale, Roberts. It's about the scale.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
So he's instead of basically, instead of doing the things
that engineers had been doing for decades to make this
stuff safe, he invented an entirely new kind of safety device.
It was called He called it an acoustic monitoring system
which could detect the sound of micro buckling before it
it being the carbon fiber fails Now. Nothing like this

(15:52):
had ever been used on a submersible. It was untested technology.
And again people who like worked with him, people who
knew what he was doing, warned him like, hey, it
kind of seems like this is the kind of thing
that will only give you a warning right before you die,
like it'll let you know, Like, and that's that's what happened.
Like a minute before they all died. It said, hey,

(16:12):
the structure's failing, so they tried to ascend and then
it imploded.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
It's so wild that.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
His big safety plan was a robot that goes, damn,
that just sounds crazy.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
It's like the bad idea about it. So he gets
this fucking carbon fiber hole made. He rush orders it too.
It's like a two week deal. It's a five inch
thick hole made by a specialist and assembled into a
submersible with a seven inch port hole put on by

(16:45):
ocean Gate. One of the things he does is he
attaches carbon fiber to titanium. The end cap of this
thing with the porthole a is titanium. People didn't do
that because titanium and carbon fiber, when put together and
put under seawater corrode in specific ways. Then you're really
bad but he was like, fuck it, I don't I
don't think that'll happen. Like, I haven't found a reason

(17:06):
why he thought this would be okay. He seems to
have just been like, I don't think it'll be a problem.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
I thought I.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Saw something where he was like, everyone says you can't
do it, So that's yeah, like I said, back to there,
we did it. It is start of shocking how much
the engineering of this thing is just a pringles can.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
It's like, really wild.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, well, I mean there's only basically everyone says, as
everyone points out, there's only really two shapes something like
this could be made the ideal one is a sphere,
or you make the less ideal shape, a pringles can,
as you call it. He goes with pringles can, and
I want to play this clip of him because it
really it makes it gives you an idea of how

(17:46):
fucking arrogant this guy was.

Speaker 6 (17:49):
You remember it as an innovator, Yu, and I think
it was general MacArthur said, you remembered for the rules
you bring, and you know I've broken some rules to
make this. I think I broke him with with logic
and good engineering behind me, the carbon fiber and titanium.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
There's a rule you don't do that.

Speaker 6 (18:04):
Well I did.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
It's pick I do love that.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Like he's he's he's being like quoting Douglas MacArthur positively here,
like the guy who the guy who attempted to invade
North Korea and then got his ass kicked, like Douglas MacArthur,
just like, yeah, he got he got a lot of
nineteen year olds killed. I feel like I could too

(18:38):
good call man, I mean good call it is. It
is like honestly crazy, how much every single thing he
says is wrong. It's like shocking.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
It's like it's like if if we learned that he
was a time traveler sent back from whatever he got,
you know, he got vaporized, and then that sent him
to the future, and then he figured out how to
way to send himself back, and he was his only
goal was to say the funniest possible thing about his death.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
See now I'm I'm trying not to like I'm trying
to like really ride the middle of the of the
not being too crude about this line. But now I'm
thinking about like maybe Stocked and Rush came from the
future where Skynett took over and like the billionaires on
this sub were all of the guys who invested on
the ground floor of that. And he's like, look, the

(19:33):
Terminator thing, that created too much of a mess. We
don't want a big shootout with the LAPD. I gotta
find a quieter way to stop Skynett from getting off
the ground, like inviting Miles Dyson to go under water
with you. Yeah, he's a big Titanic head.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
That is. That is a thing that I really.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Like tourat or two gets wrong, is like how easy
it is to kill billionaires simply buy like you don't
need guns or tact people are really there's just like
appeal to their idiot ego.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
They'll fucking kill themselves. It's great.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
It is funny that, like the least realistic part of
the movie Terminator Too is not like the time travel
or the robots with living skin, but the fact that
when Miles Dyson was told, like when this tech entrepreneur
was told your product will kill the world, he was like, well,
time for me to die stopping it, instead of being like, oh,
I better do another round of VC funding. So when

(20:34):
they finished building this stupid when it was done, they
first did an unmanned test up to I think around
ten thousand feet with this thing, and then as soon
as like it didn't explode, stocked and took it down
alone past ten thousand feet and against all expert advice.
The experts were like, you'd probably do it more than

(20:56):
once before you put anyone in it, right, Like human
life is generally, Oh, you don't think it's precious, Okay,
it's fine. It's whatever you know, And at this point, honestly,
that's fine. Like if this had remained a crazy man
who wanted to build his own terrible submarine and he
had died alone exploring the bottom of that would be romantic.
People would be writing songs about him, you know, the

(21:17):
lone maniac who just loved the ocean so much and
didn't really understand carbon fiber enough. But of course, you know,
his plan is again to sell tickets on this thing. Now,
there were some signs in his maiden voyage that this
thing was not safe. It stalled out at like ten
thousand feet below the surface for a while for reasons

(21:41):
they couldn't determine, and then it lost contact for like
a couple of hours with the team on the boat,
and he didn't notice. He was like so excited piloting
it that he didn't even realize he'd lost contact for
a while. And I'm I'm going to read a quote
from Smithsonian here. He had chosen to pilot Titan alone
in case anything went unexpectedly wrong. Said, but he also
wanted to be only the second person to travel solo

(22:03):
to at least that depth, the other being James Cameron,
who in twenty twelve took an Australian built sub into
the Mariana Trench, reaching Challenger Deep, the ocean's deepest point,
touching down at close to thirty six thousand feet. That's
a nice club to be a part of, Rush says,
and that that kind of makes it clear he doesn't
he's not a scientist. He wants famous explorer clout right.

(22:25):
He's not saying I want to test this, I want
to do this. He's saying, like I want my name
on like a list, right, Yeah, like I want to
I want to do the you know, check off the
box on the famous explorer list.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
That is, He's just.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Kind of a thing that's been hard, is how much
of this conversation, this last couple of days has been
like these people were explorers, and it's like they really weren't,
like they were not figuring anything out.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Like, look, guys, aside from very niche facts about how
boats underwater decompose, there's nothing left we're going to learn
about the Titanic. It's we did We did it, like
we've done a lot of time, spent a lot of
time looking at that dead boat and yeah, it's like
the ID it's it's just uh, it's clout. It's all

(23:12):
clout seeking, and yeah, that's kind of the That's like
why they went with That's why he went with, you know,
this less safe shape is because he wanted to be
able to take people with him so that they could
then brag about this stuff. He just wanted to make
sure he was first.

Speaker 5 (23:28):
He was.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Also the reason why ultimately he's making this out of
carbon fiber is because that will make it light, and
that will make it cheaper than the other methods of
making submersibles, and that means that it'll be like a
big heavy titanium or metal you know, diving vessel takes
a big boat to bring it around because like it's

(23:49):
so heavy, Whereas he thought this thing you could take
it around on smaller boats. You could make a bunch
of them and he could have them operating for a
lot less money and a fast company out of you.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I just want to say, you know, you do you
got to kill people with uh with scale.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
That's the key that he found.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, exactly, like we got to be able to get
a bunch of these out. It's like Uber's long term
plan was to get profitable by making autonomous cars and
forcing out drivers. And his plan is to like flood
the ocean with these dangerous submersibles so that he can
sell them to a bunch of people the long term.
This is what he told Fast Company. The long term

(24:25):
value is in the commercial side. Adventure tourism is a
way to monetize the process of proving the technology. Like
that's and again his plan is still I want to
sell this to the oil and gas industry. I want
to sell this shit to the CIA. Like his plan
is to make money in extractive industries, and like the
defense industry, he's just trying to subsidize that by getting

(24:47):
rich people to go down and look at the Titanic.
Technical problems continued to plague the craft. Between that and
bad weather, it missed several dive windows. In subsequent interviews,
Rush tended to ignore this period of time where it
was repeatedly kind of like failing to make depth. They're
having to return because something would go wrong. But there
were people within Oceangate who worried he was being reckless

(25:09):
from the very first dive the Titan did people inside
could hear crackling from the carbon fiber body. Now one
of the industry folks, like a sub maker that he
brought with him, was like, that is the sound of
your sub failing? Like this is a serious problem. I
can tell you exactly where it's compromised. Like, no, this
has to be dealt with otherwise you can't take people

(25:30):
on this boat. But Stockton tended to kind of brush
this off as like a quirker.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
Do they not know the rule? Do they not know
the rule?

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Though, Robert, what's the rule? Soviey?

Speaker 4 (25:43):
Do they not know the rule? The rule is snap
crackle pop, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
And so this guy, it's in twenty nineteen that this happened.
This guy, Carl Stanley, who's like runs an exploration compedy,
goes with him on a twelve thousand foot dive and
is like, yeah, that's part to the whole breaking down, bro,
And Rushi is like, no, no, no, it's it's fine.
We've we've we've been listening to the whole breakdown and
it's doing it less now, so we feel like it's
pretty good. And this guy's like, I don't know, I

(26:13):
don't think you should take people. You can't take customers
on this thing yet. Like, if you think it's safe,
that's great, but you should wait until you've done like
fifty deep water dives before you decide that this thing
is safe. And he brings up he points out like,
you know because because Russia's comment to that is like,
well you just picked a random number. There's no reason
fifty is safer than three or four, which, first stuff.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
That's very dumb.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
But second like this Stanley is like, well, you know,
like with sky diving, fifty is the number that you
have to hit to reach your like B license, so
we should probably you know, seek to be at least
as safe as the sky diving industry.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
And Rush is just like you just tend to number man.

Speaker 7 (26:59):
Yeah, yeah, it's like these people that claim to be
these like numerate hard science like whatever, it's just like, eh,
three fifty whatever.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 8 (27:13):
Man?

Speaker 1 (27:13):
Oh yeah, it's anyway. So one of his employees takes action.
In twenty eighteen, a guy named David Lockridge, who was
a he's a submersible pilot who had been hired to
be the ocean Gate director of marine operations. That meant
the safety of the crew in customers was legally his business,
and he was like he takes a look at this

(27:33):
thing and is like, wait a second, I'm responsible for
like not killing people, and this thing is a death trap.
I have some problems with this, right, like responsibly. Lockridge
is like one of two people in this entire story
who does their fucking job right. So they had built
a one third scale model of the Titan in order

(27:54):
to like do you know, pressure tests and stuff outside
of you know, the deep ocean, and those tests had
shown that consistent constant pressure cycling weakened the carbon fiber
overtime that it degraded pretty rapidly. Lockridge also found flaws
and the visible carbon in samples for the Titan. He
was like, we had this was not made well enough
and it degrades very quickly over time. So he wanted

(28:17):
the company to perform more extensive tests to see if
the Titan had already been compromised. Stockton refused these tests.
He claimed, quote no scan of the Wholer bond line
could be done because the hole was too thick and
the equipment to test it didn't exist. He was like,
this thing is so well made, we can't even test
if it's.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
If it's safe. Bro, you can't even test this ship.

Speaker 6 (28:41):
Bro.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, it's too thick, man, it's too thick, too thick
to But also he's at the same time, he's like,
it's safe because we're always monitoring to see if there's fractures.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
And it's like, well, but what Both of those things
can't be true, Stocked it.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
You can't be monitoring the hole for problems and unable
to the whole for problems. But Lockridge Lock So, Lockridge,
I think, notices this, and he keeps digging. He finds
other problems. For one thing, he'd always been concerned about
the viewport, which people would note seem like it flexed
at depth a lot more than it ought to be flexing.

(29:17):
And so he was like, what is this thing rated for?
And he like digs into it and he finds out
that the viewport is rated for thirteen hundred meters. They're
they're going down to like four thousand meters. So he's like, well,
that seems like a real problem. And Stockton's general line is, oh,
thirteen hundred. They just put like that number on there.
It can actually handle a lot more. There's not any
reason why he thinks it can handle more.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
He keeps saying engineering what he means, because I fucking
felt like it.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
It's so bizarre.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, because I fucking felt like it. Yeah, it's it's
pretty good. But you know what can with stand up
to four thousand meters of pressure. Food boxes that Blue
Apron ships out, every single one of them guaranteed to
survive the pressures of the deep. And in fact, if

(30:07):
you want to go see the Titanic yourself, you can't
use this sub anymore. But what you can do is
dive into the Atlantic with a box of Blue Apron
food and it'll keep you safe. You will not die
if you leap alone into the frigid North Sea with
a box of Blue Apron vegetables. Keep you alive, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
We're back.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
So this guy, David Lockridge finds a bunch of shit,
that's a problem. In addition to the porthole not being
rated for depth and the fucking carbon fiber being shit,
he also finds out that there's hazardous flammable materials inside
the vessel that the customers are not being informed about, Like, hey,
you can all burn to death inside inside a carbon
fiber tomb. Is a problem, and they just didn't tell people.

(31:00):
And a big part of Lockridge's issue is like not
just that they're doing this because it's it's not illegal
to do this, right, because there's no laws in the site.
He's like, we're not informing people that these are dangers, right,
Like you're writing on the list, Hey you know you
could die doing this, which generally just makes people think
it's extra cool. But we're not saying, hey, guys, here

(31:21):
are all of the defects in this process.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
Here, we are all of you.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
You really could die, So a lot of ways that
you are not even thinking of. Burning to death in
that tube under the ocean is the most like postmodern
way to die, I feel.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, Yeah, find the tech bros innovating disrupting
the ocean enough that people burn to death inside it
truly r Yeah, yeah, So Lockridge brings all of this
to Stockton, and according to Lockridge, Stockton grows enraged and
then fires Lockridge. So Lockridge ocean Gate sues Lockridge for

(32:01):
disclosing confidential information, and he counters sues and claims like, well,
I'm a whistleblower because I think he's going to get
people killed. Now, none of this becomes major news while
people are writing articles about their ocean gates first successful
Titanic drops like this is all available again within like
twelve hours of the boat going missing. This winds up

(32:22):
in news stories. Anyone could have found this. And by
the way, like billionaires, especially billionaires with their own companies,
tend to have like crews of people who like look
up shit rhythm, you know, who make sure that vet
trips that they're doing, vet people they're working with, they
have like intelligence wings. They tend to hire people for this.

(32:43):
They could have found this too, Like nobody was looking
for this shit, but it was not hard to find.
So two months after Lockridge filed this suit, ocean Gate
has another potential PR disaster on its hand because around
forty leading figures in the industry, including deep sea explorers
and oceanographers, write an open letter to Stockton in which
they warned that his experimental craft is unsafe for passengers.

(33:06):
Their primary issue here was that he had chosen not
to get his submersible rated for four thousand meters of
depth under the phvo or Pressure Vessels for human occupancy standards.
This was not something he had to do. Again, he's
not like required to do this. The boat's registered in
like Canada, he's in international waters. There's not really a
way to stop rich people from paying to build subs

(33:27):
like this and taking them out in the ocean.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
You know, if.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Canada made a law against it, he would have registered
his boat in the caravan or some shit right like
there's it's boats. You can't stop rich people from doing
what they want on their stupid.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Boats and needing to be rescued by a public entity.
This is the perfect libertarian Parbertarian story. This is as
libertarian as the shit gets.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
It is what they always take to the sea and
it always goes so badly. There were a lot of
other issues that people or a lot of other people
who brought up issues. One of the guys who kind
of like points out some potential risks kind of directly
to Stockton is a guy named Rob McCallum, and McCallum

(34:16):
is kind of a dude in the industry, and he
is in direct contact with Stockton. Stockton's trying to get
him to like get on this boat and be like, hey, man,
don't you want to, like, uh, don't you want to,
you know, go see the Titanic with me? And this
guy responds like, I think you're potentially placing yourself and

(34:37):
your clients in a dangerous dynamic in your race to
the Titanic. You're mirroring that famous cat ry she is unsinkable.
And Stockton responds, we have heard the baseless cries of
you are going to kill someone way too often. I
take this as a serious personal insult.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
I mean, like you can't make someone learned, like if
he's going to respond to no, you really can't. People
have been telling me I'm going to kill someone that
I'm insulted, Like, you cannot fix that. That is like
millionaire brain worms that cannot go away.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah, yeah, it's you know. When I was in a
little kid and I was in like the boy Scouts,
we had this one camp out and like I was
one of at this point, I was like fourteen, So
I was one of the older boys and we had
a couple of the younger boys, you know that we
were trying to like teach the basics of camping and
stuff too.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
And you know, it's nighttime.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Everyone's sitting around their fires cooking food and they have
this like nice cooler that one of their dads had
brought out with them, and they've got it like wedged
up right next to the fire and they're sitting.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
On it like it's a chair.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
And as I'm like doing a walk through, I'm like, hey,
that's kind of a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Guys.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
You know, it's pretty close to the fire. It might
like you know, catch on fire, get melted or something.
It looks expensive, and like one of the kids just
looks at me, like I'm an idiot, and it's like
it can't catch on fire.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
It's got icon.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
We just like we go over to like the adult
who's running things, and he's like, just let it happen,
you know.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
Like they'll learn a lesson. And I wish.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
I feel like if that had happened to Stockton as
a younger man, maybe maybe all of those people would
still be alive. You know, one melted cooler could have
saved a lot of lives. Yeah, it is like, yeah, just.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Face a consequence once or twice a minimum, please.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, learn that, you know, when other people give you warnings,
they should be heated sometimes. Learn that maybe your instincts
don't always take you in the right directions. He does
not ever learn this lesson because he's born super rich,
you know. So all of these warnings were super correct.
And this gets proved in twenty twenty. And I'm gonna

(36:46):
quote from a summary published by MSN Law MSN Live
Right now.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
In twenty twenty, the CEO told geek Wire the whole
of the submarine was showing scigns of cyclic fatigue, one
of the same technical issues mister Lockridge allegedly warned about
as the company continued to test the craft, including with
a four thousand meters deep dive in the Bahamas. As
a result, the company temporarily downgraded the Titanic submarine's whole
depth rating to three thousand meters, a thousand less than

(37:11):
the Titanic's depth according to tech Crunch, So they have
this problem. They had like recognized the cyclic fatigue and
they decrease the depth rating while they get material to
rebuild the hub the hole, which they do in twenty
twenty one. Now, the fact that they had to rebuild
the hole that quickly is kind of worrisome, But what's

(37:32):
extra worrisome is that they also cut costs.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
On this ship. So yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
After the Titan imploded, Travel Weekly editor in chief Arnie
Wiseman wrote that he had been due to take a
trip to the Titanic that year, and he'd known Stocked
in a while and liked him. He'd gone out with
him a couple of times. But he expressed that like
they'd been talking one day and Russiad told him quote
he had gotten the carbon fiber us to make the
Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was

(38:03):
way past its shelf life for use in airplanes. Oh yeah,
And so he tells this to the guy he's trying
to convince to come down with him, and Arnie's like,
that seems like a really bad idea, Like it seems
really dangerous that you're using expired carbon fiber. And Stockton's
response is like, nah, man, they set the shelf light
dates on those like way earlier than they ought to

(38:25):
be it's actually like, it's the argument I make when
I take expired like it in that like a friend
of mine has in a medicine cabinet and they're like, oh,
we should just throw that out, Like, no, man, this
stuff is still good.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
This is he's he's as cavalier with multiple people's multiple
billionaires lives as I am with, Like, is this takeout
still cool?

Speaker 3 (38:47):
Rice beIN in the fridge too long? It is?

Speaker 1 (38:53):
It is so wild that like and he just admits
this to someone he's trying to talk into getting on his.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Boat, Like, yeah, you know, was extra cool.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
I had a deal on this carbon fiber because they
say it's not safe for airplanes anymore.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
Let's go under the sea with it. I am not
getting in your boat.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
If you're saying that, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
God.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah, it's bragging about cheaping out on your fucking submersible.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
Is so wild. It's so wild.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
It's it's funny too, because like a big touchstone with
this story is obviously Jurassic Park, which is the tale
of a you know, insane an insane rich man killing
getting a bunch of people killed through humans. At least
the book Hammond is a bad very much a bad
guy in the book, But I do at least he's
like smart enough to brag that they spared no expense,

(39:46):
like they cut corners everywhere in Jurassic Park. But like
he doesn't say that. He's not like being like, you know,
we made all these t rex enclosures at a turkey
wire a lot cheaper than the stuff that these experts
said I needed to use.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah, I just I just all I.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Wish is that every Silicon Valley titan of industry has
the like you know, has the self belief to live
their lives according to what they really believe.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
The way that Stockton rushed did.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
I think he is a hero and a model for
everyone of those guys.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, I think he. I agree with you entirely, And
I think this is why I've heard that they're remaking
doing like a TV show version of Jurassic Park that's
based on the book. And I actually think we're ready
for that, because in the actual book, Hammond, rather than
being a sweet grandfather, is a psychotic tech entrepreneur who

(40:41):
gets brutally murdered by one of his own dinosaurs. And
maybe we need that right now. We may in fact
need to that version of Jurassic Park or.

Speaker 9 (40:50):
Yeah fictionally, Yeah, So the weirdest thing about what I
just told you about him getting cut right carbon fiber
for his death sub is that he may have lied
about that, which is this wild thing to lie about.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
It's hard to say, but like journalists reached out to
Boeing to be like, are you guys selling discount carbon
fiber to the death sub guy? And Boeing was like,
we have no record of any kind of sale of
this sort to ocean Gate or to Stockton Rush. Now
Boeing is very like possibly a liar in this situation.
I'm not going like there it's Boeing, I have no

(41:28):
need to defend them. But also, like stocked and Rush
would be the kind of guy. I find it equally
likely that he cheaped out on life saving parts or
that he actually bought better stuff and light about getting
a deal on them to try to impress some guy.
Like either of those things is possible. There's no way

(41:48):
to know. Yeah, yeah, so many possibilities.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
It feels like there's also something like he seems like
the guy who doesn't actually know where his shit is
sourced from, like someone.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Just told him at price, and like basically Boeing and like.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Fuck it, yeah, yeah, who knows, Yeah, yeah, who knows.
And it is also I should say this is also
part of a pretty fun pattern for him, because Stockton
had a history of bragging in his interviews, you know,
he had He would he would take people on and
they would see like, oh, there's a lag Tech controller
as like piloting this thing, and like the interior lights
are just like shit you bought from Camper World. Seems

(42:26):
kind of jankie for a submarine that you're expecting to
keep you alive at like twelve or thirteen thousand feet
below you know, the surface. And Stockton to be like, well, yeah,
you know, we you know, this is like a rough
and tumble outfit. We had to kind of hack you know,
certain shit. But like when it comes to stuff that
really matters, when it comes to the pressure barrier, that
is the best stuff available. You know, not only is

(42:48):
carbon fibrous space age material, but we designed the whole
pressure barrier with help from NASA and from Boeing and
from the University of Washington. He would bring up those
three names every single time, like somebody pointed out that
it was janky, and since all those people died. Journalists
reached out to Boeing, and Boeing was like, we didn't
have shit to do. I don't know what he's talking about.
We didn't help this guy with anything, like, we have

(43:10):
no idea what you're commenting on.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
I have not seen NASA answer those like to that yet.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
I haven't seen any sort of response from them as
to whether or not they had any role in this.
CBS notes quote. In a statement, the University of Washington
said it supplied physics Laboratory provided engineering services to the
company in Rush from twenty thirteen to twenty twenty, but
on a different submersible. The one they helped with was
the Cyclops and at that point was steel hold and
only meant for shallow dies. So basically he was and

(43:41):
it seems likely to me that like I don't know,
maybe he talked with a guy from Boeing, maybe a
because like there was one astronaut we'll talk about later
that he like brings in that he hires to basically
be a brand evangelist. I think he was just kind
of like doing that normal tech thing where you just
you have like this this little bitty sky of truth
and you just sort of like embellish on it until

(44:03):
it's a lie. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
So it is I know you.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
Said a moratorium on forty k commentary, but it is
shocking how much this is just an ORC mech that
we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
It is.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Hey, if this was an ORC mech, it would have
made it down there, right, because all of these guys
believed in this stupid thing, you know, that.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
Would have kept it safe.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, he's he's a rip to the number one war boy.

Speaker 5 (44:33):
Yeah he.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
I.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
People always want us to do like a Warhammer episode,
which I won't do because because there are only like
thirty people who appreciate Warhammer enough for that to happen.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
But you didn't think I would be one of them.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
No, no, no, no, I'm proud it was proper use
of a of a war boy there there.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
I'm oh.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
Yeah, from the old Armageddon campaign. Orchimedes actually did build
an Orc submarine. There was a during the Armageddon games.
There was like even a little model that some.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
People act together for. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Orchimedes better sub designer in the sky than sucked in Rush,
A lot more concerned with safety. Yeah, Jesus okay, all right, sorry,
sorry for that. So at this point I want to
get to the thing that I've been most excited to
show you because I found an ad that Ocean Safe
was using to sell this that and it is bug fun.

(45:37):
I am so excited for you to see this fucking thing.
We're gonna play several clips. But here's how it's study.

Speaker 5 (45:42):
Expeditions offers you the once in a lifetime opportunity to
be a specially trained crew members safely diving to the
Titanic wreckage site. Get ready for what Jules Verne could
only imagine a twelve five hundred foot journey to the
bottom of the sea.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Probably, so you see, they start right off with like
it's safe, this is a safe journey. It's a safe
journey that Jules Verna would be jealous about. Jules Verne,
who famously wrote about safe submarine.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
Chah, listen, I know billionaires again just have brain worms.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
But anytime you're paying, like the idea, the fact that
they call these people crew members or whatever, like anytime
you have to pay money to ostensibly do a job,
you should realize you're being scammed.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yeah, it does have a little bit of that, like
going to it.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeah, I don't know exactly where to where to draw
the line here, but it does have a little bit
of that, like, no, we call our at this restaurant,
we call our customers guests or exactly, yeah it is.
I just want to play the next clip from this
because the kind of the different. By kind of paying
attention to the verbiage he uses here, you get two things,

(46:58):
which is that like he's really obsessed with making sure
people think this is safe, and he's really obsessed with
making sure that they don't consider themselves tourists. Right, Like,
we'll play some more from that, but like there's a
couple of points where he like really emphasizes this is
not tourism. Now, by the time this video was published,
like two months before the sub kills everybody. So at

(47:20):
that point, Ocean Game has done two different dives to
successful dives to see the Titanic, and each time they're
doing this, I think they're going down more than once. Right,
they have a boat and it's got like a number
of people on it, and they do is you know,
a couple of trips. It's unclear to me exactly how
many times the sub reached the bottom, but they brought
a few different groups of people down there, which meant
that they had some customer testimonials to play, which gives

(47:43):
this thing kind of like the flavor of like a
TV infomercial for I don't know, like a shot back.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
So if you play it again, another trip like this,
fewer people have been the Titanic and into space.

Speaker 10 (47:56):
It's tougher to go to the bottom of the ocean
than it is to the far side of the moon.
So we saw things that maybe human eyes have never
seen before.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
This is like, this is what's playing on the TV
during RoboCop.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
This is a company that exists in RoboCop and every
week they do get people killed, but it's not a
problem in the RoboCop. The second guy you hear in that,
the dude like talking about how you know you could
see something no humans ever seen, is a former astronaut
named Scott Perezenski. Scott was in NASA for seventeen years.

(48:34):
He's the first person to fly in space and to
summit Mount Everest. Now I'm not accusing doctor Perezinski of
any illegal or an ethical behavior, but he is the
major selling point of this video right. He is on
this more than basically anybody else. He's constantly there to
like let His job is to both let potential customers know.
Number one, if you do this, you'll be an explorer

(48:57):
like me, the cool astronaut guy, and nonumber two. I
think this is a good idea as an astronaut. This
seems like a safe thing to me. I guess I
am accusing him of something that is unhappy mean in
a two thousand nine year No.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
It is probably the best, most charitable version of this.
He's like, what, how bad could it be?

Speaker 3 (49:18):
It is? I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
I don't think he maybe knew, But also I think
he he is a doctor in an astronaut and like
guys who wrote for Business Insider found this this lawsuit
from his former employee warning that the vessel was unsafe
a day after this thing went down. I have to
believe doctor Nasa man would like have found some of this,

(49:41):
like it wasn't hard. Again, Business Insider not the greatest
publication in the world, and they they locked this stuff
down right. So anyway, in that twenty nineteen Smithsonian article,
doctor Perezinski is fawning towards doctor's genius. It's not easy
to take a white shee of paper, come up with
a new submersible design, fund it, test it, and mature it.

(50:04):
It was an incredibly audacious thing to do, fair enough, certainly.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Audaciousacious, you know, not that hard, it turns out, but sure.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
Not easy, I guess. Yeah. You know what else was audacious?
That guy who shot the Archbishop of Austria, Hungary. A
lot of people killed too, but audacious. Yeah, So.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
Anyway, cool stuff. Scott's job is again to make potential
clientele feel cool. Right, These are mostly a lot of
the kind of the cash crop that Stockton is hoping
to harvest is like late middle aged, super rich guys
who want to feel like Indiana Jones but don't know
how to do anything but shovel VC money into different

(50:50):
startups and hope that it makes them a profit. Right,
And so Scott's job is to be like, no, if
you do this, you're an explorer and you'll be in
this kind of like private club of deep sea explorers
with me, the cool astronaut guy. So a big part
of the work that this ad is doing is to
try to incite that feeling in people while also pruning
away the sense of embarrassment they naturally feel about paying

(51:12):
a quarter of a million dollars to see a grave site.
And I'm going to have Sophie play you another clip
from this fucking video.

Speaker 5 (51:19):
This is not a thrill ride for tourists. It's much more.
It is an eight day, one of a kind experience.
You will be trained as a mission specialist and record
valuable findings.

Speaker 8 (51:32):
A citizen scientist is also involved in the science.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
They are doing jobs that are.

Speaker 8 (51:38):
Essential to the scientific research, not just busy work. We
are looking at the process of degradation at the science.
We are trying to make a really good map of
the site and its current state.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
This is not tourism. You're contributing. It's not a ride
at Disney. You know, there's a lot of real risk.
Then there's a lot of challenges we partnered with.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
I. All of these things are what you tell a
five year old when you quote give them a job.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
Yes, this is bonkers.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Yeah, guys, we're really going on a Star warship kids.
You know, as you take them to the Disney World
Star Wars experience, it's so funny because too they keep
talking about like you're doing real work. But the closest
they get to like saying anything scientific they're doing is like, yeah, we're.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Gonna look at like how how it's falling.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Apart, like you go down there. Yeah, the boat's still
all fucked up. Guys, it's not it's not not sailing again.
It hasn't reconstituted itself.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
My god.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
And yeah, it's it seems like ocean Gate they really
wanted their customers because there it's very interesting. They cycle
between being like, you know, this isn't a tour a
throw ride, this is there's real danger here, but also
like you're not going to die, like they have to
get it's interesting. They have to get both of those
things across to the clientele. Both like you're in danger

(53:05):
because they don't want it to People don't want to
feel like this is safe. They want to feel like
they're explorers. But also you will not die if you
do this. Those are the two things they're trying to
get across in this video. Is this next clip will
help to make clear.

Speaker 10 (53:18):
That it's very well engineered and very safe. But then
the team is very focused on safety. First.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
The communication. It's really key, I think knowing that they never.

Speaker 11 (53:30):
Lost communication, not one second of me experiencing anything from
otion Gate.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
Have I ever felt unsafe? As I pointed out on
the bridge earlier, your safety plans all are unvessele.

Speaker 5 (53:40):
All mission specialists get to dive down to the Titanic,
but the full experience entails much more.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
So hold that for a second, so because I may
have you play another clip, but like, that's that's really interesting.
Number one, it's come out since it went down that
they were just lying on that part where they're like,
at no point, maybe the old lady was telling the truth.
But like there are repeated stories from numerous clients of
it like losing contact. It was regular that it lost contact,

(54:13):
and the attitude that fucking stocked and tried it pushes like, look,
this is you know, an experimental sub something a little
you know, stuff's going to go wrong all the time,
you know, as long as the big thing, as long
as it doesn't. Employees were fine. If you listen to
James Cameron. Cameron, who was another guy who was started
as an amateur and you know got into doing this
stuff right, so he is kind of a good person

(54:35):
to bring in here. Cameron's attitude was very much like, well, no,
something shouldn't be going wrong. Every dive and when something
major like comms goes wrong, you should go back to
the drawing board and fix it before you keep going
back down there. Like Cameron's vessel had three different methods
of communicating with the ship above. It was so reliable

(54:55):
that he would like take calls from his wife like
while he was doing dives a bit like again, because
he was taking it seriously, say what you went about
James Cameron. After he nearly got ed Harris killed by
the set of The Abyss, he took undersea safety a
lot more seriously.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
It is like this thing where you're like, like, we
all see James Cameron as like, I guess he's just
the s tier dilettante.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
But yeah, it is like a little you still.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Kind of roll your eyes when you're like, oh, he
did it, and then you like, now you see how
a true dilettante could have done things, and you're like, oh,
all right, we simply must hand it to James Cameron.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
It is funny because like Cameron's background prior to becoming
a film director was I think he'd been a school
bus driver and dropped out of college. Hey, everybody quit correction,
James Cameron was a truck driver and not a school
bus driver before he got into directing. Sorry, I didn't
mean to fuck up on my big Jym lore. But yeah,
James Cameron interesting dude, but you know he's not. I

(56:00):
think what it is is that, like all these tech
dudes need to have that Elon Musk. Elon Musk puts
a lot of effort into making people feel like he's
an actual inventor, like making these impressive things that his
companies make, and Cameron, on the other hand, seems more
like a guy who's like, well, I want to do this.
I want to be like diving down there. But I'm

(56:21):
going to find the very best people in this industry
and listen to whatever they have to say, as opposed
to like, no, everyone but me is wrong. I'm going
to make a sub that kills three billionaires. Yeah, anyway,
very funny. Mike Reese is a Rice is a former.
He used to be the showrunner for The Simpsons, and

(56:42):
it tells you how much money used to be in TV,
writing that he was able to take four trips in
the titan including one down to the Titanic, and he
says that the ship lost Colms at some point in
every one of his four voyages. Here's what he told
ABC quote with no GPA. Rice said it took his
crew three hours to find the Titanic, despite landing just

(57:03):
five hundred yards from the ship. Rice, who served as
show runner for The Simpsons, said he signed a waiver
that mentions death three times on the first page. It
is always in the back of your head that this
is dangerous and any small problem will turn into a
major catastrophe, which is I guess we'll see how well
these these these disclosure or whatever permission slips go off

(57:25):
in court.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Speaking of the Simpsons, win it. When all this shit
about their like liability waivers came out, I kept thinking
about that scene where Seymour takes them all to the
Civil War like fort as a as a school trip.
They get in trouble and he winds up leaving several
kids behind, and it's like hugging the permission slips. God
bless the man who invented permission.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
Slip real did this this is your fault? Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
So David Pogue, a journalist with CBS News who went
on a trip with Ocean Gate, also mentioned this formidable
waiver and once the titan went missing. He noted on
Twitter that while he was on the boat reporting on
the company, a tour went out and got lost for
five hours. He notes that after this, because this was
so scary, Stockton considered adding a beacon. But yeah, and

(58:18):
this wound up not being the thing that got them
all killed. But it shows you the level of safety
consciousness they have where it's like, oh wow, this is
a real obvious danger.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
Better not do anything about it.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
I mean, I guess in fairness, his point of view
is like, listen, this thing isn't going to get lost.
A beacon is truly wasted, Bundy. I know how this
thing is gonna Uh how the end comes from this.
I know everyone's going to die. We're good, No one's
no one's suffocating on this thing. That is like the
stocked in rush guarantee.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Yeah. Yeah, the problem is not going to be that
you run out of air. Don't worry guys.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
But you know who never runs out of oxygen? The
sponsors of this show that's right immune to dying. Ah,
and we're back so talking about mister Stockton Rush. There

(59:20):
is a point like when that ship went missing on
Pogue's voyage and it has gone for like five hours
when they can't communicate with it. Pogue noted in that
Twitter thread that like they shut down the internet as
soon as the boat stopped communicating. Well, and that actually
that's a thing I will defend. People have been like, well,
that's really shady. I actually disagree with that, because if

(59:41):
you're running a trip like this, right, even if it's
not like a death sub right, if you're just like
taking people out on a boat and one of your
boats goes missing, if I'm in charge of that boat,
first thing I'm doing is turning off the Internet because
if a bunch of people just died, they shouldn't find
out about it, because some like TikTok dude posts the video,
you know, like, I'm not gonna give ocean Gate a

(01:00:02):
lot of credit, but that is what.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
You would do with this they did. They did the
right ish thing for obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Yeah, I think we could all be confident they did
it for the wrong reason.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
I'm sure they had a shady reason for wanting to
do it, but but there is a justification for wanting
people to not find out that they're like and I
don't know, I guess it is one of the real
fucked up things to me is that like the wife
of that that billionaire, the Pakistani billionaire who went down,
and and like his son, she was like on the

(01:00:35):
boat when they went missing, like she's on the like, which.

Speaker 3 (01:00:40):
Is pretty bad. Time up a lot of fucked up stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
So the thing I keep coming back to is that
all of the ship we've talked about about, how like
all of the evidence that this thing was dangerous before
it went down was easily available somewhere online. Prior to
the titan setting out on its final voice, like credible
people had pointed out that this was dangerous. And one
of the things that I'm most frustrated about is that,

(01:01:06):
like none of the people in the media who are
covering this thing once it starts actually getting to the
Titanic bring any of this stuff right right and it's
it's It's very interesting because like David Pogue's of CBS
goes on a tour and like Pogue, I think his
like coverage is absolutely irresponsible, Like there's not really any

(01:01:28):
investigative rigor. He's not pointing out any of the signs
that this thing is like dangerous, and his article is
the video in the podcast that he does is basically
pure praise, right where like when he talks about it, yeah,
it's a disgusting puff piece, right, Like that's that's like
there are parts of it that look almost identical to
the ad video where he's like showing him around the

(01:01:49):
you know, all this footage of it diving and footage
of like life on the boat, like it is super fawning.
Pogue did mention briefly that one of these butt like
one of the trips got lost and they lost comms
and stuff, but like he brings it up as like, well,
it's still you know, not super tested technology, as opposed
to like, well, this is a major problem and the
boat shouldn't be back out until this gets solved. You know,

(01:02:13):
there were other basic problems that should have drawn more
scrutiny from journalists. For one, like, outside of the CBS report,
Stockton also invited a BBC team to come film one
of their dives as a pr thing imagig and that
trip captures the looming disaster feel better than like when
the documentary about this gets made, they're going to use

(01:02:34):
clips from that BBC documentary because during this fucking dive
that the BBC is there to film, I think two
of the thrusters on this thing are installed backwards, like
they put the engines on wrong, and so the boats
spinning around in circles. And because there's a film crew there,
they don't want to just scrub the dive to fix it,

(01:02:55):
so they figure out a way that the guy piloting
it can like hold the con troller sideways so that
it works.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
So they I mean, and there's new.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Video game spirit. They're basically on take the cartridge out.

Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
And blow on it mode. It's wild that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Yeah, And I want to play you a fairly long
clip from this because it gives you an idea. It's
kind of cutting between you know, mission controller whatever in
the boat as they try to figure out how to
fix this, and it shows you how janky this whole
process is.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Oh no, we have a problem.

Speaker 11 (01:03:33):
When I'm thrusting forward, one of the thrusters is thrusting
backwards right now.

Speaker 5 (01:03:38):
Slowly.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
Thing I can do right now is the three sixty
on the sticks now like the actual compsticks. Yeah, what
is left and right?

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
The right stick that's forward back, turn left, turn right?
And what's happening when he's going forward? He's getting a turn?

Speaker 5 (01:03:52):
Got it?

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
What's left it down and up? Okay, yeah what we
calls that?

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
You know, by got one of those restaurant.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
I mean if you're a directional parts right, yeah it
should be. But something happened. Yeah, what he can do?

Speaker 12 (01:04:13):
So on the controller you have the updown, left right
arrows and you could set them so that one was
going and then when every time you hit the crew
the button, you would go forward. I hope he knows
how to do this. I hate Jerome Stockton on Wendy's phone.

(01:04:39):
Just call it back if you get a chance. We
get a question on the dive right now, looking to
see if there's a way to remap the PS three controller.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
NICs.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
So they are just like you and your friends playing
like video games at like someone's thirteenth birthday.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
Party late at night.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
They're they're getting tripped up remapping a p S three
controller like while these fuckers are underwater.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
God, it's JANKI like it really is this.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
Yeah, people flipped out a lot about the fact, like
they're using, you know, a gaming controller, which is not
super weird for stuff like this. Like a lot of
times it gets used because controllers, gaming controllers are pretty
good at at at this kind of motion, but like
this is the the jank, Like you should not be
having to remap on the fly because whatever checklist you

(01:05:36):
had for this thing before it went off, didn't make
sure the engines were on right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
Like that's that's pretty bad.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Like if I get on a plane and they're like, hey, guys,
we got to go back. Somebody put an engine on wrong.
So we're just gonna We're just gonna like figure it
out in the air. Don't worry. No, I'm I am
opening the emergency door and rolling out onto the tarmac.
I'm not going up in the sky in that thing.
They're like, we just got to twist it and then
it'll go in the right direction.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
Don't worry. It's so oh god, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
There's nothing really to say, but it's so fucking bonkers
that this was allowed to happen.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
It's it's yeah, it's it's nuts, and it's nuts that again,
guys like Pogue are just talking about how cool this is,
what a great and it's it's of course it works
this way. For one thing, David Pogue is the kind
of quote unquote journalist you bring in if you need,
like a guy a dumb guy with a platform.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
To make your tech product look cooler than it is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Right, That's his actual job is to like pump up
bad ideas from the tech industry. So he's a great
dude for Stockton to work with here. And it's also
like Stockton has a kind of gut level understanding of
how awe inspiring being this deep below the ocean is
and the fact that when you put people through experience
is that intense. It creates like a bond and a

(01:06:57):
sense of like emotional loyalty between folks on the journey
in between them and the company. And he makes a
lot of conscious use of that even in testimonials on
this ad. The lady that you're about to hear first
from on this clip that Sophy's gonna play is a
former Master Chef contestant who paid for a trip to
the bottom of the sea on this thing. And here's
here talking about that kind of like emotional bond that

(01:07:18):
people form on this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
Here instantly became family and that's something that you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Take away for life, correct And like, you know, that's
a silly thing to say about spending eight days with
a bunch of people on a boat, but I have
no doubt that. After it's an intense peak experience. I'm
sure she felt that way, you know, as there as
they're all leaving from their time together. And Stockton understands
this psychological phenomenon and he is he was making kind

(01:07:49):
of very concerted use of it in order to pump
his company. And this has made unsettlingly clear and how
he responded to a lawsuit against Oceangate was launched in
February of this year by a Florida couple who sued
him for refusing to refund their one hundred and five
thousand dollars tickets to see the Titanic in twenty eighteen.

(01:08:09):
The trip was postponed repeatedly and they asked for a refund,
and Rush keeps trying to get them on other dives.
He's like, don't get a refund, just come out with
us in a year, come out with us the year
after that. You know, I can't give you your money back, basically,
so they sue him. The case goes to court, and
David Kinkannon, who is the ocean Gate company legal advisor,
we heard from him earlier. He was the guy trying

(01:08:31):
to blame the Coastguard for not working fast enough. He
offered the federal judge who was hearing the case, Rebecca Smith,
a free trip on Ocean Gate's boat to go down
and see the Titanic, right like, as she's judged, He's like, look, judge,
you can't properly, you know, adjudicate this case if you
haven't been to see the Titanic, you know, why don't

(01:08:54):
we take you on a free journey to the Titanic.
Which number one seems illegal.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
Both in terms of bribery and now in retrospect, making
credible death threats against a sitting judge seems like it
shouldn't be a felady too.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
What's wild is according to The New York Times is reporting,
she seemed down to quote, perhaps if another expedition occurs
in the future, I will be able to do so,
the judge road in May, adding, after here many years
of hearing cases about the Titanic wreckage, that opportunity would
be quite informative and present a first eyes on view
of the rex site by the court.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
Fucking God. So, because this is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
Like, you know, there's there's legal cases around like shit
that gets pulled up like that's why they declared that
they can't like sell random shit from the Titanic. They
had to like take it all together, you know. They
could sell like access to it as like a you know,
we've got all this shit in Vegas. You can pay
to go see it there. You can make money from that.
But you can't just sell random shit that got adjudicated

(01:09:52):
in this court, which is why when the Ocean Gate
got sued wound up in front of this judge for
whatever reason, she was like the district or whatever that
they've picked for Titanic shit, and so basically like there
was there was kind of a quasi justification. You can
see the judge being like, maybe I should go, you know,
maybe I do need to see the Titanic, but it's

(01:10:13):
also clearly stocked and trying to get her in his
weird little boat Colt, you know. And it's what's equally
unsettling is that in this legal filing where the judge
is like, this seems like it could be a good idea.
There are serious unreported issues revealed with the titan Quote.
On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersipal encountered
a battery issue and had to be manually attached to

(01:10:35):
its lifting platform. The company's legal and operational advisor, David
Kincannon wrote in the document, which was filed in the
US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the
submersipal sustained modest damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading
ocean Gate to cancel the mission so it could make repairs.
So now it's it's it's it's cool that this judge

(01:10:57):
was still like, I don't know, maybe I'll maybe I'll go.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
Oh god, no, no one can calculate risk, I guess
is the clear lesson.

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
They really like the Titanic.

Speaker 1 (01:11:07):
Yeah, Like that's the lesson of the Titanic. People are
bad at calculating risks, And it's also the lesson of
the Titanic fandom that they're bad at calculating risks.

Speaker 3 (01:11:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
So, as we've talked about in the ads and the
pr materials, Oceangate made a big deal about the fact
that their customers are citizens, scientists. One of the things
that's weird to me about that David Pogue interview is
that Stockton does not treat them this way when he's
talking to Pogue.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
So we have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we
refer to as Titaniacs. Some of their Some of those
folks are affluent and some are not. So we've had
people who have mortgaged their home to come and do
the trip, and we have people who don't think twice
about a trip of this cost. We have one gentleman
who had won the lottery. The first tickets had been
sold for one hundred and five thousand, one hundred and
twenty nine dollars, the inflation adjusted cost of a first

(01:11:56):
class berth on the Titanic. But according to Pogue, then
Stockton Rush saw how much people were willing to pay
to go to space, and he thought, man, I'm leaving
money on the table. So a couple of things there.
Number one, it does feel like you're kind of tempting
fate by being about, like, well, let's charge as much
as it costs people on the Titanic to go die,

(01:12:17):
you know see. But then to to both have like
gone through that and then see Jeff Bezos fly people
up and be like, oh shit, we can actually make
way more money off these rubes. Right, very cool, great
science that you're bringing these these these citizens scientists, And.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
Yeah, you're a scientist, a citizen scientist, get the fuck
out of here.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
Yeah, we're gonna We're gonna do an expedition to see
how much money I can make off of you. We're
going to really expand the bands of the bounds of
human knowledge are e how much cash I can take
out if your fucking wallet. And again, I haven't actually
found any evidence of like science that result from the
trips that these guys did, because they took like twenty

(01:13:02):
eight people or so down before this all went to shit.
I haven't found evidence of like real science that they accomplished.
But when you watch the ad, it becomes very clear
that the primary purpose of the because they have scientists,
actual scientists and other experts that they bring on every
voyage and their job is to make these customers feel spending. Again,

(01:13:23):
it's amazing they're LARPing, right. It's like if you brought
in like it's like if you were doing I don't know,
like a fucking Ukraine War larp and you hired some
like actual veteran Ukrainian soldiers to come in so that
like some fucking airsofters would feel like they've got the
real trench experience, right, which I'm sure is going to
happen in like six months, right, but yeah, I want

(01:13:46):
to play you another clip here.

Speaker 5 (01:13:48):
Maybe best of all are the one on ones with
experts like Commander Paul Henri Narjalais, leader of thirty dives
to the Titanic rec site. He and other world class
experts will be on all our missions to give you
an unrivaled up close and personal Ocean Gate Titanic experience.

Speaker 13 (01:14:07):
So for me, it's very well done because it's simple.
Lee's a lot of equipment and a lot of switch
and on this one you don't have because you work
with a screen and with a keyboard, and it's very
easy to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
If you are not only.

Speaker 13 (01:14:23):
Your passenger sit and waiting that the time is running
and just looking outside, you can do something inside. You
can be really a member of the team and are
that great.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
Oh my god. It's like a checklist at the Rainforest Cafe.
It's like a little scavenger hunt.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
It is sad, and it's like at one point, fucking
Stockton gets asked like are you basically coming up with
busy work and he was like, well, yeah, kinda yeah, yeah.
They're all like seven year olds that you want to
give them a job, hand them a fake self, let
them pretend that they're they're taking an important.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Note, a little little child steering wheel, like they can
just turn back and forth.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
The French guy that we heard there was was Paul
Henri Nargiolis or pH As like he tended to be called.
And his nickname was mister Titanic because he's done more
dives down to the reck side, or he had done
more dives down to the reck site, like thirty five
I think than anybody else. He was a subcommander for
the French Navy. And when when when everyone died, folks

(01:15:31):
were like, it's a bummer that this like working class
you know, dude went down with them.

Speaker 3 (01:15:36):
Again.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
I'm not going to say, you know, cheer these deaths.
Don't cheer these deaths. He was not like a he's
not like a blue collar leather neck with like a
copy of fucking Bruce Springsteen album in his in his
in his hat band. In addition, he was you know,
he's obviously he's He was an extreme, one of the
most accomplished submersible pilots in history. He also like ran

(01:15:58):
it started and ran several different deep sea like equipment
companies which he sold. He was on the board of
I believe it was an LLC that had the salvage
rights to the Titanic. He was one of the guys
when we talked about this process of taking a bunch
of shit fifty five hundred items from the Titanic, which
then wound up like touring Las Vegas and stuff as
a thing people could pay to go see. He's helping

(01:16:21):
to run the company that does that as well. You know,
Bob Ballard kind of insinuated that this stuff was grave robbing.
I'm not calling a dead man a grave robber. I
don't know that Ballard was. I think it's his exact
status within the industry is kind of unclear to me.
But he's not just a working class subpilot. He was
worth about one and a half billion dollars like this.

(01:16:43):
He is also like an entrepreneur right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
Nargalais is again definitely a respected figure for his diving acumen.
I suspect one reason that he was brought onto the
project is because he's huge within the Titanic superfan community.
He's done so many dives down there, and his fame
would act as an advertisement. Specifically, Nargalai's fame would act
as an advertisement to the people who are like real

(01:17:09):
big Titanic nerds, and David Pogue talks to one of
these customers in his series, a woman named Renato Rojas.
Renata worked for a bank. She I think probably would
describe herself as like upper middle class. She's not a billionaire,
she says, she's not even a multi millionaire, So I
think this is someone who is well off, but not
like a plutocrat, right, not someone who can like buy

(01:17:31):
an election. But she's got enough that she could spend
one hundred and five thousand dollars on this because she's
kind of nuts about the titanium, right, which is one
chunk of it. You know, maybe Stockton was lying when
he said people mortgage their homes for this, but like
that's not outside of the bounds of Like there's definitely

(01:17:51):
Titanic fans who would do something like, you know, burn
their life savings to get to go on this thing.
Those guys exist too, which is interesting to me. And
she makes the note or she says like when she's
interviewed by Pogue, Pogue asks, like, when you told people
that you were spending almost the price of a small
house to do this one day trip.

Speaker 3 (01:18:10):
Did you get any reactions?

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
And Renata was like, most people think I'm crazy by
spending all this money and trying to go down to
see Titanic. My response is, dreams don't have a price.
Some people want a Ferrari, some people have children, some
people buy a house. I wanted to go to Titanic,
and I feel like, first off, I feel like that's
kind of crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
I do.

Speaker 1 (01:18:30):
I feel like that's that's nuts, But also that's fine. Like,
you know, if you if you're willing to die or
risk death to go see this boat and you're willing
to burn up all of your money to do it, sure,
why not?

Speaker 3 (01:18:43):
Like really, when it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
Comes down to it, I'm not going to get bent
out of shape when you die. But like, okay, everyone
has the right to want to love something so much
that it kills them, even if that thing is a
actively stupid.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
I do believe that, right, So I guess whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
Now I will say I am happy that like when
this thing went down, It's again, all of the people
on this boat, with the exception of that nineteen year old,
had the resources and the experience to know that what
they were doing was silly and like they kill them right,
all of them had the ability to be informed of everything.
I brought up in this episode about how like slipshod

(01:19:29):
this thing was. I am glad that like Ranata or
some other harmless Titanic maniac was not on the sub
when it went down. You know, it was people who
absolutely had the resources to know better. I don't know,
you can you can feel about that however you want,
but it seems at least like less fucked up to
me than if it had been a bunch of people

(01:19:50):
who saw that the movie seventy seven times in theaters
and like poured their pension into fucking Russian Gate. And
the Titanic movie is kind of the thing that looms
over all this hubbub from the day that it's sunk.
The boat captured people's imaginations, both because of how many
people died on it and because they were all rich
and famous. There's all this mystery. James Cameron turned that

(01:20:12):
fascination into a modern fandom, which I will say, I
don't think it's cynical for James, Like he wasn't doing
this to cash in on the Titanic, Like obviously he's
obsessed with it too. He is the biggest of the
crazy Titanic maniacs, right Like, does seem legitimate for him,
But Ocean Gate definitely kind of callously cashed in on

(01:20:33):
the film, and you can see some of this in
the ad which apparently when you finish the dive, they
would let you pose with like a replica of the
heart of the Ocean and take pictures, which is both
a fundamental misunderstanding of the movie. Right she like dumps
it in the ocean because these guys are obsessed with it,
and it's like disrespectful because of all of this person

(01:20:55):
she loved died, All of these people died, and all
they care about is this stupid piece of glittery jewelry,
right Like, I think that's that's one of the things
that Cameron is saying in the movie. And then they're like, hey, guys,
pose with this thing. Take a picture with it right
above the graveyard. Anyway, play the clip, Sophy.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
Next dive.

Speaker 5 (01:21:15):
Excitement, Thrills, an adventure on the high seas.

Speaker 4 (01:21:22):
I just loved every minute of it.

Speaker 8 (01:21:25):
It has exceeded anything I thought it could ever be.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
Titanic is the ultimate dream.

Speaker 14 (01:21:30):
I mean, this is definitely probably one of the most unique,
interesting things I've ever done, even going to you know,
I've been to Everest, but this is more unique this.

Speaker 4 (01:21:45):
Of course, guys spent Ever.

Speaker 11 (01:21:47):
I think there's more in the I think there's more
in the clip, but of course that guy spent Everes.

Speaker 3 (01:21:52):
Yes, was the dream come true. But as I look at.

Speaker 14 (01:21:56):
This will no doubt be the best experience of my
entire life.

Speaker 5 (01:22:01):
Come join us on our next expedition. Don't miss the
opportunity to be part of history, the Ocean Gate Titanic experience.

Speaker 3 (01:22:12):
There's truly nothing else like it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:16):
I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
That is true. There is nothing like imploding. You know,
it is a unique you know, lots of people. Look,
a ton of rich people know what it's like to
die of gradual hypoxia atop Mount Everest. You know, very
few rich people have imploded at the bottom of the sea.
You could be one of the one of the few.

Speaker 11 (01:22:41):
Uh yeah, to mind blowingly uh like like they're like
blissfully ignorant. They're like choosing to to not educate themselves,
and it's like it's sad.

Speaker 1 (01:22:57):
Well, and it's also just you can see it's such
like a he's marketing this again. He really is like
a modern Hammond figure from the Jurassic Park. He's marketing
this is like, this can be a part of the
Oh your friends did Everest. You know, they paid one
hundred grand or whatever it takes to like force to
like make you know, they paid all that money to
have locals like stop them from dying on the big

(01:23:20):
stupid mountain that rich people want to climb because it's
it's the one that rich people climb. Well, good news.
You can impress your friends with the thing that they
haven't done. You know, they haven't been Titanic yet, so
you'll have loved him.

Speaker 4 (01:23:35):
Fucking l Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 1 (01:23:39):
First off, l Ron Hubbard absolutely would have loved this,
and second l R H never would have gotten on
that submer.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:23:45):
If there was one thing that man.

Speaker 4 (01:23:46):
Understood, it was yah, you would have set children.

Speaker 3 (01:23:51):
A kid film it for him. Get one of my
boys down there.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
Honestly, the fact that like like a Tom Cruise type
or I guess Tom Cruise specifically hasn't been on this
thing has to be due to the fact that scientology
handlers literally googled this and when he inevitably was offered
and they were like Nah, you're not doing this.

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
I you know, I honestly, I feel like Tom Cruise
never would have done something like all of the He's
like James Cameron, Right, he'll do insane shit, that's a risk,
but he's going to like do it methodically by best
practices because he doesn't have a death wish, right, and
he's not like there's a degree for whatever else is

(01:24:34):
going on in Tom Cruise's head. He's able to rationally
a praise risk to his body.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
Yeah, you know, absolutely it's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:24:43):
But these people were not. Now I haven't seen like
a perfect list of all the folks who went down
on these trips or who had booked tickets. The success
of their first trip to the Titanic in twenty twenty
one brought a lot of new investments. That's when like
they started really getting money like pumped into them. But
from what we're shown on screening in the customer testimonials,
I tend to suspect that the client list was an

(01:25:05):
even split of like super rich people who are doing
this to impress, just to impress their friends. Right, they're
in the they're like Hamish was right where they have
this their adventurer travelers right, they're paying for these kind
of peak adventure experiences. And then the other half of
them are crazed Titanic fans, some of whom are also
super super rich, and some of whom are just kind

(01:25:27):
of like normal rich, you know. So Pogue's story gives
us some context on one of the crazy rich adventure
seekers too. Most of our fellow expeditioners were rich people
seeking adventure, like a hedge fund guy with his son,
an artificial intelligence pioneer who'd sold a bunch of companies,
and Shinrick Baldota, who runs a massive industrial conglomerate in India. Pogue,

(01:25:51):
and you have a nickname, Shinrick.

Speaker 5 (01:25:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:53):
They call me the wild Monk Pogue, the wild Monk Shinrick, Yeah,
because I look like a monk. I'm very calm, but
I have these dream interest that I do. Going to
a live volcano in Vanadu two times, to an article
on an edge of spaceflight. It's seventy thousand feet in
the mid twenty nine, swimming with the blue whales, catching
crocodiles in Botswana with National Geographic So like again, he's

(01:26:14):
just like listing this like like a like a rich
kidst like everything he got for his birthday that year.
He's I got this, I get this, and I get
to who is and you know, I get to go
to space in a mid twenty nine May.

Speaker 3 (01:26:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
It really is like just like you know, toxic masculinity
will continue to kill people, but this is genuinely pathetic.

Speaker 1 (01:26:38):
Yeah, and it's such an insult to like actual exploration.
I think about like the Apollo like whichever I always
forget was it eleven?

Speaker 3 (01:26:47):
I No, I wasn't eleven.

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
That was the first one that actually made it there.
But like the moon landing guys, right, all of whom
had like one of the I think it was Apollo one,
like it it fucked up on the landing pad and
caught on fire inside and because there was like too
heavy O two in the mixture, like all of these
guys like burnt to death horribly, nightmarishly, and like the

(01:27:09):
dudes who landed on the moon were their friends and
knew that, and like and still knowing that, decided like, no,
fuck this shit, we are like we are going to
go into space and do this thing because it will
expand the bonds of human like knowledge and achievement in
a way that matters it's worth our lives to do
this thing like this kind of like breathtaking and honestly

(01:27:30):
to a degree like selfless willingness to explore, which is
you know, you see the same shit with like Yuri
gegaron right, it's like speaks to some of the best
things in us, and then these guys being like what
if we commodify, Like I am willing to commodify this.
I want to buy a ticket so that I can
pretend to be that guy. As long as you promise
me I'm safe, you know, as long as like I

(01:27:51):
get I want to afterwards, I'll play up the danger,
but like I don't really want to die. There's a
story that came out a couple of weeks ago about
this this fucking I think he was an Instagram influencer
who like did a bunch of mountain climbs with gram It.
Maybe it was a TikTok guy, but like he was
one of these dudes who does these like things in
films himself, so everybody thinks that he's you know, like, oh,

(01:28:12):
what a cool, adventurous life you lead, And like things
went wrong on Everest and the one of the shrip
is on his team carried him down the mountain on
his back, which is that guy is risking his own
life for you. It is so hard to save people
on Everest, Like not only is like hiking down a mountain,

(01:28:33):
like hiking down a gentle hill slope with a human
being in gear on your back is a lot for
most people. And this guy goes down Everest that way,
and afterwards, this fucking influencer dude like blocks him on
TikTok or Instagram whatever happy is because he doesn't. He's
ashamed that, like the guy had to save him that,

(01:28:54):
like he didn't get to pretend to be the big
bold adventurer, Like it fucked up his brand that he
had been saved by this. Like any reasonable person somebody
does that for you, Like that dude's going in the
will right, like you know, like you take care of
Like that's like the most incredible thing a person could
do for another person is like gamble their life to

(01:29:17):
save you. And like it speaks to the attitude of
these fucking adventure traveler, dark tourist freak gasp motherfuckers.

Speaker 3 (01:29:26):
Yeah, it presumably has been what it's always been.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):
We just now have like the evidence of things like
blocking someone on Instagram or whatever that. Yeah, you know,
it's not like they were. They were better before you
got to imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
No, no, it's not. I mean some of them were.
I know the guy I think was Edmund Hillary, who
was like one of the like he and Tenzig Norgay,
who was a sharp like with a first summ at Everest,
and if I'm not mistaken, they both worked it out
to where like they basically would not let anyone know
who was the first. That was kind of important to

(01:30:03):
Hillary because he wanted he didn't want to just like
for Norgay to get forgotten, right, because he was like, well,
obviously I wouldn't have made it up without this guy.
We did this together. Like again, the difference between an
actual explorer, which Hillary for sure was, and what these
people are doing. You know, it's even the difference between
like fucking James Cameron and what these people are doing. Anyway,

(01:30:28):
Big Jim, So what are we gonna do? So there
keeps being stuff come out about this, Like right before
this episode went out, I ran across the story about
a guy named Arthur Loible who was He's one of
the guys who went down to the Titanic with Ocean Gate.
His first trip was delayed by five hours because of

(01:30:49):
electrical issues, and the second dive was abandoned for unknown reasons.
And then on on the Titans' fifth dive, which he
was down for before it left, a bread from a
balancing tube on the vessel broke off and they reattached
it with zip ties and like you know, again, plenty
of signs.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
Look, it's one of those things.

Speaker 1 (01:31:10):
If like Loibel had been on this thing when it
imploded or Shinrik, you know, I don't think I would
have cared too much about it, and I don't really
I don't feel bad. Everyone here should have known what
they were getting themselves into, and they made a choice.

Speaker 3 (01:31:25):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:25):
You know, Hamish Harding made his money in the private
jet industry and was a seasoned adventure tourist. He had
every opportunity to understand this was a bad idea. I
think he just wanted, you know, he was a gambler
in a lot of ways, and I think he was
kind of addicted to this. And I don't know about
Nargalais Cameron. James Cameron didn't appearance because he and pH

(01:31:46):
were friends and he was like I don't understand it, Like,
it doesn't make sense to me why he did this.

Speaker 3 (01:31:52):
I don't know the guy.

Speaker 1 (01:31:53):
I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze him. I did
find interviews with him where he would talk about stuff
like when he was at the bottom, you know, in
earlier dives near the Titanic, he would find himself almost
staying to the point where his batteries couldn't handle it anymore,
or where like his oxygen was kind of low, and
have to like force himself to come back up. He
was just so entranced down there. And I don't think

(01:32:16):
he obviously I'm not saying I don't think he was
like suicidal, but he talked a lot about how you know,
if it goes wrong, you're dead before you realize anything
is wrong. He was an old man, he was in
his seventies. I think he had just kind of made
peace with the fact that this was what he loved
and he would take do anything he could to get
down there, and you know, if he dies, he dies.

(01:32:36):
So I don't feel bad for him. Again, he made
a a a certainly an educated choice to be in
that situation. I certainly the only one I'm actively glad
about is rush because he deserved he got all these
people killed. He would have gotten more people killed, and
he would have like become a made money helping to
frack the planet if he could have.

Speaker 3 (01:32:55):
Like fuck, I mean, he's like, like he's.

Speaker 2 (01:32:58):
A very smirking piece of video to who really does
just like this.

Speaker 3 (01:33:04):
You know, it's if you're not going to feel like
any stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):
Like this is justified, you know, fine, But like the
man was literally asking for it several times on video.

Speaker 1 (01:33:15):
Yes, he desperately what he begged the universe to kill
him at the bottom of the ocean, and like, so
I will say, the only person I really do feel
bad about on that boat was Suliman Dahwood. It was
that the nineteen year old son of Shazahwa Dahwood, who
was a Pakistani billionaire. He was obsessed with the Titanic.

(01:33:36):
He was kind of an adventure tourist previously. He desperately
wanted to do this. One family source says that Shazada
or that Suliman his kid, was like really scared and
didn't want to do this, but like it was father's day.
This was like kind of their father's day thing that
they were doing, and he felt like kind of pressured
to go with his dad. Another article I read said

(01:34:00):
that he was going to try to like do a
Rubik's cube at the bottom of the sea and like
be the first person to do that. I don't know,
Like I feel like he was the one who was
both being pressured by his dad, which is not a situation.
That's like most nineteen year olds are capable of being
pressured by their parents and also not doesn't have the

(01:34:22):
life experience to have known what he was getting himself into.
I don't feel it all bad for the rest of them.
They all made their bed and now they get imploded
in it.

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
Yeah, it's yeah, I know that's that's like the clear
dark moment in this and then everything else. That's really like,
especially the more you learn it is like these people
are unbelievably repellent.

Speaker 1 (01:34:44):
Yeah, they they chose this. They chose to like make
a dumb gamble. It's like feeling bad that somebody puts
their life savings on like twenty one black on a
craps table. Well, I guess that sucks for you, but
like what did you did you really think that was
good work? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Anyway, Yeah, this is like this is like to put
your money where your mouth is of like all my
apes are gone, Like yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:11):
Yeah, yeah, are you laughing at the fact that, like,
you know, somebody lost their life saving by by far.

Speaker 2 (01:35:23):
The least this time we could we could have a chuckle.

Speaker 3 (01:35:31):
You know what? Maybe maybe yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:35):
This is also one of the first episodes I've been
on where something resembling justice happened.

Speaker 3 (01:35:40):
So I don't know where I am.

Speaker 1 (01:35:43):
Like one thing I'm frustrated about is that, from what
I can tell, a lot of like mainstream sources are
trying to portray him as like this this tragic figure
where he was he just loved exploration. He was pushing
boundaries so much, and you know, this horrible, horrible thing happened.
We're like, no, this is the already of a drunk driver, right,
Like this is like it's like if it's like if

(01:36:04):
a guy like crashes his fucking car into a school
bus because he's hammered, and he's like, well, he was
boldly experimenting with how much cocaine and vodka he could
manage a motor vehicle on. You know, he was pushing
the frontiers of human knowledge.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
He's certainly pushing pushing, but it's like, come on, yeah,
the fuckers.

Speaker 3 (01:36:24):
A dumb one.

Speaker 1 (01:36:25):
Yeah, Like what's the dumbest boat that you can get
people killed on?

Speaker 3 (01:36:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
Like again, and you know the folks that are that all,
they get all onry about like, well, people have died,
so we have to like be super somber about it.
You know, if that's the way you want to react,
we can. But like I do, remember how the most
popular thing on the old Internet was the fucking Darwin Awards,
and say what you want about it. But sometimes people

(01:36:52):
do stuff that makes it hard to be sympathetic for them,
you know, like if you, if you, if you pay
to compete in the International Russian Roulette Championships, I'm not
going to feel bad if you.

Speaker 3 (01:37:04):
Yourself, you know, like you got you. You were the
one who chose to do that, no one made you do.

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
I think it's just like all the sympathy stuff, it's
like that is so unbelievably asymmetric, you know. Again, I
think my response to that, I think I said a
last episode is like fine, if you if you don't
think it's appropriate, you know, to quote hate these people.
I just know that I personally love them less than
anyone else who was inconvenienced unfairly ya this week.

Speaker 3 (01:37:32):
That's all. That's where I'm at. I love them less
than that.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
I also love them less than any amount of money
we spent trying to find them.

Speaker 3 (01:37:39):
But that's fine. Yeah, quote unquote.

Speaker 1 (01:37:42):
That's a whole that's that's a whole other conversation too,
because like, I don't know, I think the coast guards
attitude is reasonable where they're like, well, we don't we
don't talk about like what it costs, like we are
not We do not make rescuing people into like a
you know, a cast benefits sort of thing, like that
is not what the Coastguard's job is. I do feel

(01:38:04):
like maybe we as a culture should have a conversation about,
like when do we make rich people pay for getting
rescued in situations like this?

Speaker 5 (01:38:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
It's probably good for the Coastguard to not ever think
about things that way, right, same thing with like any
kind of search and rescue people. Yeah, that's not what
they're there for. It's like a firefight. Firefighter shouldn't be calculating,
you know, to what extent is this how much is
this house worth versus.

Speaker 3 (01:38:31):
How much is this costing?

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
But like if you choose to live in the middle
of like a fireplane and like burn your trash every day,
maybe I don't know, maybe some of like if there's
a fire, maybe you should get in trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:38:43):
I don't know, like whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38:45):
The counterpoint to that, though, is that like firefighters, maybe
not individual firefighters or fire captains. It's not you know,
they're not exactly calculating the value of a home, but
the fact, you know, there is asymmetric service for different areas,
and those just so happened to line up with race

(01:39:07):
and socioeconomics. So like there's a world where like making
it a soft policy that gets violated in like soft
ways is actually contributing more to the inequity. Like again,
lots of other people died even at sea last week,
and you know.

Speaker 3 (01:39:25):
These guys for sure got top tier service.

Speaker 1 (01:39:28):
No, they got more money has been spent on them
than has been spent like rescuing refugees whose boats you know,
capsized in the Mediterranean. Probably ever, like maybe ever, and
again I do think you know, look mea kopa here,
I just spent a whole week talking about Stockton Rush.

(01:39:51):
And it's because like I don't know, I thought it
was interesting, and this is what I decided to read about. Course, right,
there's an extent to which, like I was just follow
the story because I'm fascinated by stories of like Hubris,
like especially like tech Ass and Hubris. And at a
certain point last week it was like, oh shit, I
ran out of time to research anything else. I guess
we're talking stock and Rush.

Speaker 3 (01:40:15):
But it is.

Speaker 1 (01:40:16):
I mean, what I do think is amazing about this
is that it is like a perfect, perfect like Icarus story.
Like it really is like the whole thing, like every
beat down to the last beat. Yeah, like last story. Note,
it's amazing if I may, it's anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:40:36):
Dickarus. Yeah's is all right?

Speaker 1 (01:40:42):
Well listen, folks, that's the episode. If people try to
tell you, you know, this guy was an explorer, you can
now tell them why they're wrong. But if a friend
of yours, someone you know, or whatever brings up a
conspiracy theory about how like these people got murdered, because
it won't expose that the Titanic was blown up with
a bomb to stop people from you know, opposing the

(01:41:05):
Federal you know, uh or the FED or the moving
away from the gold standard. Right, if you want to
do that ship, if that's, if that's, if that's, if
that gets brought up to you, just make sure that
person knows that stocked and rushed his granddad or whatever
was running bohemian growth. You know, throw that in there.
You can add, you can make the problem worse. Why

(01:41:27):
not at this point, Yeah, you know, might as well.

Speaker 2 (01:41:30):
Right, if they're gonna believe that ship, there's no saving them.

Speaker 3 (01:41:34):
Yeah, give them, give them a little something, something more
to think about.

Speaker 4 (01:41:39):
Yeah, Andrew, anything you want to plus, Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
That's it. Yeah, Oh, I'll just I'll just do a
quick plug.

Speaker 2 (01:41:47):
I know we're off sync on timing, okay, uh yeah,
let's see my podcast is you know.

Speaker 3 (01:41:52):
Is this racist? And we do premium episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:41:54):
Uh, you could subscribe at suboptinal pods dot com, which
is where we do the non racist fun stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:42:00):
So uh yeah, if.

Speaker 2 (01:42:01):
You've enjoyed any.

Speaker 3 (01:42:04):
Of my bullshit, check it out.

Speaker 1 (01:42:06):
Please whoa, Yes, check out Andrew t guest Extraordinarior and
the next time, the next time multi millionaire you know,
son of an oil dynasty asks if you want to
see the bottom of the ocean, you don't do whatever

(01:42:26):
you want to do.

Speaker 2 (01:42:26):
I'm not your fucking dad, Like pretty sure Robert saw
your dad.

Speaker 4 (01:42:32):
Okay Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.