Stockton Rush and Ocean Gate prioritized clout over safety, ignoring expert warnings about the Titan's flawed carbon fiber hull and fabricated NASA/Boeing partnerships. The vessel's marketing framed a deadly gamble as "citizen science," masking thruster failures and structural cracks while appealing to wealthy adventure seekers. This toxic commodification of exploration contrasts sharply with selfless pioneers like Edmund Hillary, turning a fatal implosion into a hubristic spectacle that wasted rescue resources on the rich while dismissing genuine scientific curiosity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Submersibles and Famous People00:15:30
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What's still at the bottom of the ocean?
My worst submersible in history.
There we go.
That was nice, huh?
That was good.
Respectful of the deceased.
I mean, sure.
It's the most submerged submersible in history.
Look, in terms of being submerged, it did its job with a plom.
Yeah.
You know, it is under the fucking water as hell.
So none of these other submersibles lasted that, except for maybe the Kursk.
Yeah.
But it's great.
It's like a top 20 submersible in terms of how fucking underwater it is.
Staying.
Yeah.
It is super under the goddamn water.
Oh, Andrew, how are we doing on this glorious week?
You having a good one?
Enjoying the Monday?
You know, good.
Better than some folks, let's just say.
I guess worse than some other folks.
Better than some folks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're in the 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.
Exactly.
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.
Listen, maybe Russian, Russian revolutions, robber barons, the 19th century into the 20th century's back, baby.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
The Titanic's killing people again.
It's all coming back.
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.
We're knocking everything off one by one.
It's gonna head in that direction.
Yeah.
So speaking of easily predictable disasters with a high body count, let's return to the story of Stockton Rush.
Yeah, good, good shit.
So in 2009, our boy Stockton founded Ocean Gate Incorporated, which is both the funniest name he could have possibly picked for a company that was about to become infamous for killing a bunch of rich people.
Really?
Yeah, the goal.
It is quite a choice, huh?
Like, yeah.
Did you not think about the only things that have is there an explanation for why?
Yeah.
My guess is because like, you know, it's your gateway to the ocean and to deep sea exploration, but you were around in the 90s, Stockton.
Like, you, you know, what we use that word for.
I mean, the full name of the company should be Ocean Gate, parenthesis, gate, like a door, not like that kind of gate.
Never mind.
It's going to be fun.
Get it.
No, no, no, no.
And not like, not like a Watergate thing.
Yeah.
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?
A submersible needs 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 have, you know, kind of figure out the basics so that they could eventually build a multi-person submersible that could handle 4,000 meters of.
Yeah, he's a kit.
He's kit bashing.
He's kit bashing his way to James Cameron status.
That's the goal.
They started with a pair of conventional submersibles, the Cyclops and the Cyclops 2.
But the Cyclopses, the Cyclopi, I don't know what the plural of Cyclops would be, but the two Cyclops submarines couldn't handle the trip that he wanted to make down where the Titanic is.
But having those early submersibles allowed Rush to kind of start building a business.
Now, 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 continually lighting piles of money on fire as long as you're like establishing your place in the market.
And so his kind of plan was basically Netflix.
I may have.
Yeah, see, Netflix, see, most of the companies is outside of Apple in like the modern tech industry.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ, I know.
It's pretty all Ocean Gate.
It would be really funny if Netflix was like, you know what?
We're going to go down to the Titanic now.
Everyone who pays $7.99 a month gets a seat in our giant death sub.
But no.
So his basic idea is like, I'm going to start taking just rich people on dives, not to the Titanic, but to other 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 would like make them evangelists for the brand.
And that would allow him to get kind of the investment dollars 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.
It's awesome how he was his business plan was like clout is better than physics.
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.
Like if you take somebody to an intense place and they feel like they might die the whole time and then they don't, you, 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 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 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 make this big submersible with space for a larger crew than basically any of the any of the like the deepwater diving vessels had had previously.
You know, you'd have those Russian subs and stuff that could carry a crew.
But when you're looking at like, you know, the different national like deepwater exploration vessels or like James Cameron's vessel, 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, safe way to do it.
Basically, after like this, I think like the last big submersible disaster was in like the early 70s.
It was these guys who were like laying deepwater cable off the coast of Ireland.
And then something went wrong and they got stuck 1500 feet down.
They both got rescued.
It was like a real, they had like 12 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 can survive most things aside from exploding.
Yeah.
For a while, at least.
So the industry, all I say industry, it's more of like a subculture of all of the kind of weird undersea nerds.
James Cameron calls it a community.
Yeah.
A community.
Yeah.
I mean, they kind of the subculturist of all subcultures, the subs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the subbist.
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, your, your vessel has.
And they kind of voluntarily adopted these standards.
And it worked really well because nobody died.
Like in the last, like, since everyone listening to this podcast basically has been alive, no one has died doing these kind of like crazy deepwater dives, which is wild when you think about what they're doing.
Right.
You know, that they're going to a place less explored than the fucking moon.
Um, and uh, uh, that it was so safe.
But Stockton Rush is like, I'm going to 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 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 yeah, so Stockton was kind of obsessed with the fact that carbon fiber has three times the strength to buoyancy ratio of titanium, which he brought up constantly.
People who were, you know, didn't think this was a good idea would be like, yeah, but it like has terrible compressive strength.
Yeah.
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 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, it, it breaks real bad, you know?
Um, yeah, it's a 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.
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, right?
Right.
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 dig undersea hole or underwater holes and we're going to drive Teslas 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 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.
I can beat titanium is listen.
I mean, the whole tech industry is just like the ultimate participation trophy.
All these bozos 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.
Yeah.
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, 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 2000s, Richard Branson had funded an explorer named Steve Fawcett who wanted to make like an airplane-shaped carbon fiber submarine that could basically fly to the bottom of the channel and back every name in this story is somehow funny.
Well, and Fawcett's really, because Fawcett was like a legitimate explorer.
He was also like 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.
Why Carbon Fiber Failed00:14:55
And eventually he died in a mysterious plane press.
That's, that's the lesson.
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, I guess, up until this sub went down.
This is why we got to stop paying taxes because they just go to these bozos once again.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that they can fly their planes into the sides of canyons.
So anyway, yeah, as kind of...
He starts moving along and building this and testing it out in shorter dives, various people within the industry, including like literally James Cameron, start reaching out and being like, hey, 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 35 years.
It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations, but it also hasn't innovated or grown because they have all these regulations.
Obscenely safe.
It's too safe.
It makes me sick.
No one's killed a sub full of people in decades.
He did.
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.
I'm just imagining him like coming out in 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?
It's all about scale, Robert.
It's all about finding the scale.
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 microbuckling before it, it being the carbon fiber, fails.
Now, nothing like this 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, the structure's failing.
So they tried to ascend and then it imploded.
It's so wild that his big safety plan was a robot that goes, damn, that shit sounds crazy.
Yeah.
It's like the bad idea, bot.
So he, 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 porthole put on by Ocean Gate.
One of the things he does is he attaches carbon fiber to titanium.
The end cap of this thing with the porthole is titanium.
People didn't do that because titanium and carbon fiber, when put together and put under seawater, corrode in specific ways that are really bad.
But he was like, fuck it.
I don't think that'll happen.
Like, I haven't found a reason why he thought this would be okay.
He seems to have just been like, I don't think it'll be a problem.
I thought I saw something where he was like, everyone says you can't do it.
So that's like, I was about to say that.
There we did it.
It is sort of shocking how much the engineering of this thing is just a Pringles can.
It's like really wild.
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 fucking arrogant this guy was.
He remembers an innovator.
I think it was General MacArthur said, you're remembered for the rules you break.
And, you know, I've broken some rules to make this.
I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me, the carbon fiber and titanium.
There's a rule you don't do that.
Well, I did.
It's picked.
I do love that, 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 19-year-olds killed.
I feel like I could too.
Good call, man.
Good call.
It is, it is like honestly crazy how much every single thing he says is wrong.
It's like shocking.
It's like, it's like, if, if we learn 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 send himself back.
And he was, his only goal was to say the funniest possible thing about his death.
It's crazy.
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 Stockton Rush came from the future where Skynet 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 Terminator thing, that created too much of a mess.
We don't want a big shootout with the LAPD.
I got to find a quieter way to stop Skynet from getting off the ground.
Like invite Miles Dyson to go underwater with you.
Yeah.
He's a big Titanic head.
That is, that is the thing that really like Terminator 2 gets wrong is like how easy it is to kill billionaires simply by like, you don't need guns or tech people or billionaires.
Just like appeal to their idiot ego.
They'll fucking kill themselves.
It's great.
It is funny that like the least realistic part of the movie Terminator 2 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 they finished building this key when it was done, they first did an unmanned test up to, I think, around 10,000 feet with this thing.
And then as soon as it didn't explode, Stockton took it down alone past 10,000 feet.
And against all expert advice, the experts were like, you should probably do it more than 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 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 10,000 feet below the surface for a while for reasons 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.
Was like so excited piloting it that he didn't even realize he'd lost contact for a while.
Um, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a quote from Smithsonian here.
He had chosen to pilot Titan alone in case anything went unexpectedly wrong, he said.
But he also wanted to be only the second person to travel solo to at least that depth.
The other being James Cameron, who in 2012 took an Australian-built sub into the Mariana Trench, reaching Challenger Deep, the ocean's deepest point, touching down at close to 36,000 feet.
That's a nice club to be a part of, Rush says.
And that kind of makes it clear.
He's not a scientist.
He wants famous explorer clout, right?
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, I want to do the, you know, check off the box on the famous explorer list.
That, that is, he's just kind of.
The 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.
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 idea.
It's, it's just, uh, it's clout.
It's all clout seeking.
Um, and yeah, that's kind of the, um, 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.
He was 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.
It takes a big boat to bring it around because like it's so heavy.
Whereas he thought this thing, you could take it around on smaller boats.
You could make a bunch of them and you could have them operating for a lot less money.
In a fast company interview, I just wanted to say, you know, you do, you got to kill people with scale.
That's the key that he found.
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 value is in the commercial side.
Adventure tourism is a way to monetize the process of proving the technology.
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 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 or having to return because something would go wrong.
But there were people within Ocean Gate who worried he was being reckless.
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 on this boat.
But Stockton tended to kind of brush this off as like a quirk of the business.
Do they not know the rule?
Do they not know the rule, though, Robert?
What's the rule, Sophie?
Do they not know the rule?
The rule is snap, crackle, pop.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And so this guy, it's in 2019 that this happened.
This guy, Carl Stanley, who's like runs an exploration company, goes with him on a 12,000-foot dive and is like, yeah, that's part of the hole breaking down, bro.
And Rush is like, no, no, no, it's fine.
We've, we've, we've been listening to the hole 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 don't think you should take peep.
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 50 deepwater dives before you decide that this thing is safe.
And he brings up, he points out like, you know, because Rush's comment to that is like, well, you just picked a random number.
There's no reason 50 is safer than three or four.
Which, first off, that's very dumb.
But second, like this Stanley is like, well, you know, like with skydiving, 50 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 skydiving industry.
Oh, my God.
And Rush is like statistical significance, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like these people that claim to be these like numerate hard science, like whatever, it's just like, 350, whatever.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about, man?
Yeah.
It's anyway.
So one of his employees takes action in 2018, a guy named David Lockridge, who is 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 and customers was legally his business.
And he was like, he takes a look at this 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 to like do pressure tests and stuff outside of the deep ocean.
And those tests had shown that consistent, constant pressure cycling weakened the carbon fiber over time, that it degraded pretty rapidly.
Lockridge also found flaws in the visible carbon in samples for the Titan.
He was like, this was not made well enough and it degrades very quickly over time.
So he wanted 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 Holar 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 safe.
The Hole That Killed Titan00:05:19
Bro, bro, bro, bro.
You can't even test this ship, bro.
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.
And it's like, well, but what you, both of those things can't be true.
Stockton, you can't be monitoring the hole for problems and unable to monitor the hole for problems.
But Lockridge, 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 seemed like it flexed at depth a lot more than it ought to be flexing.
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 1300 meters.
They're going down to like 4,000 meters.
So he's like, well, that seems like a real problem.
And Stockton's general line is, oh, 1,300.
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.
He keeps saying engineering when he means because I fucking felt like it.
It's so bizarre.
Yeah, because I fucking felt like it.
What am I kidding?
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's it's pretty good.
But you know what can withstand up to 4,000 meters of pressure.
The food boxes that Blue Apron ships out, every single one of them, guaranteed to survive the pressures of the deep.
And in fact, if 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?
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lying About Materials00:14:38
We're back.
So this guy, David Lockridge, finds a bunch of shit that's a problem.
In addition to like 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 could all burn to death inside a carbon fiber tomb is a problem.
And they just didn't tell people.
And a big part of Lockridge's issue is like, not just that they're doing this, because 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 are all of the defects in this process.
Here are all of the things.
You really could die in 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.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Finding the tech bros innovating, disrupting the ocean enough that people burn to death inside it.
Truly remarkable.
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 disclosing confidential information.
And he countersues 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 Gate's first successful Titanic drops, like this is all available.
Again, within like 12 hours of the boat going missing, this winds up 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 for them, 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.
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 40 leading figures in the industry, including deep sea explorers and oceanographers, write an open letter to Stockton in which they warn that his experimental craft is unsafe for passengers.
Their primary issue here was that he had chosen not to get his submersible rated for 4,000 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 like this and taking them out in the ocean, you know?
If Canada made a law against it, he would have registered his boat in the Caribbean or some shit, right?
Like there's it's boats.
You can't stop rich people from doing what they want on their stupid boats.
And including needing to be rescued by a public entity, this is the perfect libertarian story.
This is as libertarian as this shit gets.
It is.
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, um, is a guy named Rob McCallum.
Um, and McCallum is kind of a dude in the industry, um, and he is in direct contact with Stockton.
Um, Stockton's trying to get him to like get on this boat, um, 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 um, this guy responds, like, I think you're potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic in your race to the Titanic.
You're mirroring that famous catch cry, she is unsinkable.
Um, 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.
I mean, like, you can't make someone learn.
Like, if he's going to respond to, no, you really have been telling me I'm going to kill someone that I'm insulted.
Like, you cannot fix that.
That is like billionaire brainworms that cannot go away.
Yeah.
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 14.
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 to.
And, you know, it's nighttime.
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 on it like it's a chair.
And as I'm like doing a walkthrough, I'm like, hey, that's kind of a bad idea, guys.
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 is like, it can't catch on fire.
It's got ice in it.
So we just like, we go over to like the adult who's running things and he's like, just let it happen.
You know, like they'll learn a lesson.
And I wish, 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 face a consequence once or twice, minimum, please.
Yeah.
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, he's born super rich, you know?
So all of these warnings were super correct.
And this gets proved in 2020.
And I'm going to quote from a summary published by MSN Live right now.
Quote, in 2020, the CEO told Geekwire the whole of the submarine was showing signs of cyclic fatigue, one of the same technical issues Mr. Lockridge allegedly warned about as the company continued to test the craft, including with a 4,000 meter deep dive in the Bahamas.
As a result, the company temporarily downgraded the Titanic submarine's hole depth rating to 3,000 meters, a thousand less than the Titanic's depth, according to TechCrunch.
So they have this problem.
They recognize the cyclic fatigue and they decrease the depth rating while they get material to rebuild the hub, the hole, which they do in 2021.
Now, the fact that they had to rebuild the hole that quickly is kind of worrisome.
But what's extra worrisome is that they also cut costs on this ship.
Hell yeah.
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 Stockton 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 Rush had told him, quote, he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was way past its shelf life for use in airplanes.
Hell 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 be.
It's actually like, it's the argument I make when I take expired glycodin that like a friend of mine has in a medicine cabinet.
And they're like, oh, we should just throw that out.
I'm like, no, man, this stuff's still good.
He's as cavalier with multiple people's bills, multiple billionaires' lives as I am with, like, is this takeout still cool?
Like, has Christ been in the fridge too long?
It is, it is so wild that, like, and he just admits this to someone he's trying to talk into getting on his boat.
Like, yeah, you know what's extra cool?
I get a deal on this carbon fiber because they say it's not safe for airplanes anymore.
Let's go under the sea with it.
I am not getting in your boat if you're saying that.
I'm sorry.
God.
Yeah.
It's bragging about cheaping out on your fucking submersible is so wild.
It's so wild.
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 about getting a bunch of people killed through Hubis.
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.
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.
Lot cheaper than the stuff that these experts said I needed to use.
Yeah.
I just, I just, all I 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 the way that Stockton Rush did.
I think he is a hero and a model for everyone of those guys.
Yeah.
I think he, I, it, 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 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 more.
Yeah.
Fictionally, Wink.
So the weirdest thing about what I just told you about him getting cut rate carbon fiber for his death sub is that he may have lied about that, which is a wild thing to lie about.
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 like there, it's Boeing.
I have no, no need to defend them.
But also like, Stockton 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 lied about getting a deal on them to try to impress some guy.
Like either of those things is possible.
There's no way to know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So many possibilities.
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 just told him a price and like basically Boeing and like fucking.
Yeah.
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 Lagotech controller as like piloting this thing.
And like the interior lights are just like shit you bought from Camper World.
Seems kind of janky for a submarine that you're expecting to keep you alive at like 12 or 13,000 feet below.
you know, the surface.
And Stockton would 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 the stuff that really matters, when it comes to the pressure barrier, that is the best stuff available.
You know, not only is carbon fiber a space age material, but we design 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 no idea what you're commenting on.
I have not seen NASA answer those like to that yet.
I haven't seen like 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 its applied physics laboratory provided engineering services to the company in Rush from 2013 to 2020, 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 dive.
So basically he was, and 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 skine of truth and you just sort of like embellish on it until it's a lie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's what he's doing.
So it is, I know you said a moratorium on 40K commentary, but it is shocking how much this is just an orc mech that we're talking about.
It is.
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 would have kept it safe.
Yeah.
He's a RIP to the number one warboy.
Yeah.
People always want us to do like a Warhammer episode, which I won't do because there are only like 30 people who appreciate Warhammer enough for that to happen.
But you didn't think I would be one of them.
No, no, no, no.
I'm proud.
That was proper use of a Warboy.
Oh, 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 people hacked together for us.
Amazing.
Feeling Like Explorers00:09:12
There you go.
This is it.
Good stuff.
Yeah.
Orchimedes, better sub-designer than this guy than Stockton 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 thing.
And it is bug fuck.
I am so excited for you to see this fucking thing.
We're going to play several clips, but here's how it starts.
Expeditions offers you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a specially trained crew member safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site.
Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine, a 12,500-foot journey to the bottom of the sea.
So you see, they start right off with like, it's safe.
This is a safe journey.
It's a safe journey that Jules Verne would be jealous about.
Jules Verne, who famously wrote about safe submarine jets.
Seriously.
Listen, I know billionaires, again, just have brainworms, but anytime you're paying, like 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.
Yeah, it does have a little bit of that like going to a, 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, we call our, at this restaurant, we call our customers guests or whatever.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It is, I just want to play the next clip from this because the, the, the, the kind of the different by kind of paying attention to the verbiage he uses here, you get two things, 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 they don't consider themselves tourists, right?
Like he, there's, we'll play some more from that, but like there's a couple of points where he like really emphasizes this is not tourism.
Um, now, by the time this video, this video is published like two months before the sub kills everybody.
Um, so at that point, Ocean Gate 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 his, you know, a couple of trips.
Um, it's unclear to me exactly how many times a 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 this thing kind of like the flavor of like a TV infomercial for, I don't know, like a shop vac.
Like, Sophie, play it again.
Other trip like this: fewer people have been to Titania than going to space.
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.
This is like some RoboCop shit.
This is what's playing on the TV during RoboCop.
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 world.
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 Perazinski.
Scott was in NASA for 17 years.
He's the first person to fly in space and to summit Mount Everest.
Now, I'm not accusing Dr. Perazinski of any illegal or unethical 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 people, his job is to both let potential customers know, number one, if you do this, you'll be an explorer like me, the cool astronaut guy.
And number 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 unethical.
In a 2009 is probably the best, most charitable version of this.
He's like, how bad could it be?
It is, I think you're right.
I don't think he maybe knew, but also I think he, he is a doctor and an astronaut.
And like guys who wrote for Business Insider found this lawsuit from his former employee warning that the vessel was unsafe a day after this thing went down.
I have to believe Dr. NASA man could like have found some of this.
Like it wasn't hard.
Again, Business Insider, not the greatest publication in the world.
And they locked this stuff down, right?
So anyway, in that 2019 Smithsonian article, Dr. Perazinski is fawning towards Stockton's genius.
It's not easy to take a white sheet of paper, come up with a new submersible design, fund it, test it, and mature it.
It was an incredibly audacious thing to do.
Fair enough.
Certainly audacious.
Audacious.
You know, not that hard, it turns out, but sure, not easy, I guess.
Yeah.
You know what else was audacious?
That guy who shot the Archbishop of Austria-Hungary got a lot of people killed too, but audacious.
Yeah, truly.
So, 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 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 a quarter of a million dollars to see a grave site.
And I'm going to, I'm going to have Sophie play you another clip from this fucking video.
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.
A citizen scientist is also involved in the science.
They are doing jobs that are essential to the scientific research, not just busy work.
We are looking at the process of degradation at the site.
We are trying to make a really good map of the site and its current state.
This is not tourism.
You're contributing.
It's not a ride at Disney.
You know, there's a lot of real risk involved and there's a lot of challenges.
We partnered with...
All of these things are what you tell a five-year-old when you, quote, give them a job.
Yes.
This is bonkers.
Yeah.
Guys, we're really going on a Star Wars ship, 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 going to look at like how it's falling apart.
Like go down there.
Yeah, the boat's still all fucked up, guys.
It's not, it's not sailing again.
It hasn't reconstituted itself.
Oh my God.
And yeah, it seems like Ocean Gate, they really wanted their customers because 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 because they don't want 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, as this next clip will help to make clear.
It's very well engineered and very safe, but and the team is very focused on safety first.
The communication is really key, I think, knowing that they never lost communication.
Not one second of me experiencing anything from Ocean Gate have I ever felt unsafe.
As I pointed out on the bridge earlier, your safety plans all around the vessel.
All mission specialists get to dive down to the Titanic, but the full experience entails much more.
So hold that for a second, Sophie, 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 that 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.
And the attitude that fucking Stockton tried to push was 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 employ, we're fine.
Elon Musk's Warning Signs00:04:28
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's, he is kind of a good person 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 that he would like take calls from his wife, like while he was doing dives and shit.
Like, again, because he was taking it seriously.
Say what you want about James Cameron.
After he nearly got Ed Harris killed on the set of the abyss, he took undersea safety a lot more seriously.
It is like this thing where you're like, we all see James Cameron as like, I guess he's just the S tier dilettante, but yes, it is like a little, you still 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.
Yeah, it is, 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, quick correction.
James Cameron was a truck driver, not a school bus driver before he got into directing.
Sorry, I didn't mean to put the fuck up on my big gym lore.
But yeah, James Cameron, interesting dude.
But he's not, I 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 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.
Anyway, very funny.
Mike Reese is a Rice is a former, he used to be the showrunner for The Simpsons.
And 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 comms at some point in every one of his four voyages.
Here's what he told ABC: quote, with no GPS, Rice said it took his crew three hours to find the Titanic, despite landing just 500 yards from the ship.
Rice, who served as showrunner 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.
Yeah.
Which is, I guess we'll see how well these disclosure or whatever permission slips go off in court.
Speaking of The Simpsons, when all this shit about their liability waivers came out, I kept thinking about that scene where Seymour takes them all to the Civil War 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 slips.
For real.
You did this.
You signed this.
This is your fault.
Oh my God.
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 didn't.
And this wound up not being the thing that got them all killed, but it shows you the level of like safety consciousness they have where it's like, oh, wow, this is a real obvious danger.
Better not do anything about it.
I mean, I guess in fairness, his point of view is like, this thing isn't going to get lost.
A beacon is truly wasted buddy.
I know how this thing is going to, how the end comes for this thing.
I know how everyone's gonna die, we're good.
No one's suffocating on this thing.
That is like the Stockton Rush guarantee.
Yeah, the problem is not going to be that you run out of air.
Stockton Rush's Guarantee00:03:03
Don't worry, guys.
But you know who never runs out of oxygen.
The sponsors of this show.
That's right.
Immune to dying.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends.
Fixing the Controls Mid-Crisis00:08:01
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, and we're back.
Yay.
So, talking about Mr. Stockton Rush.
There is a point like when that ship went missing on Pogue's voyage and is 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, actually, that's a thing I will defend.
People have been like, well, that's really shady.
I actually disagree with that.
Because if 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 a video.
Like, I'm not going to give Ocean Gate a lot of credit, but that is what you would do in this.
Right, right, right.
They did, they did the right-ish thing for obviously.
Yeah.
I think we could all be confident they did it for the wrong reason.
I'm sure they had a shady reason for wanting to do it, 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 billionaire, the Pakistani billionaire who went down and like his son, she was like on the boat when they went missing.
Like she's on the like, which is pretty bad time.
Real fucked up.
A lot of fucked up stuff.
So the thing I keep coming back to is that all of the shit 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 voyage.
Like credible people had pointed out that this was dangerous.
And one of the things that I'm most frustrated about is that 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 up.
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 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, 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, 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 boats, 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?
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 of a jig.
And that trip captures the looming disaster feel better than like when the documentary about this gets made, they're going to use 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 boat's spinning around in circles.
And because there's a film crew there, they don't want to just scrub the dive to fix it.
So they figure out a way that the guy piloting it can like hold the controller sideways so that it works right.
It's so janky.
I mean, there's true video game spirit.
They're basically on take the cartridge out and blow on it mode.
It's wild.
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 control or whatever in the boat as they try to figure out how to fix this.
And it shows you how janky this whole process is.
Oh no.
We have a problem.
When I'm thrusting forward, one of the thrusters is thrusting backwards right now.
This only thing I can do right now is a 360.
On the stick now, like the actual thumbsticks, what is left and right?
The right stick, that's forward, back, turn left, turn right.
And what's happening is he's going forward, he's getting a turn.
Got it.
What's left stick?
Down and up.
Okay.
Yeah.
What would cause that?
Do you know?
Bye.
They swapped out one of the thrusters right now.
They turned it wrong way.
I mean, if you're in a directional thruster, right?
Yeah, it should be, but something happened.
Yeah, what you can do.
So on the controller, you have the up, down, left, right arrows, and you could set them so that one was going.
And then every time you hit the crew, the button, you would go forward.
I hope he knows how to do this.
Hey, Jerome Stockton on Wendy's phone.
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 PS3 controller.
Nice.
So they are just like you and your friends playing video games at someone's 13th birthday party late at night.
They're getting tripped up remapping a PS3 controller.
Like, wow, these fuckers are underwater.
God, it's janky.
Like, it really is.
I should like this.
Yeah.
People flipped out a lot about the fact that they're using 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 this kind of motion.
But like, this is the jank.
Like, you should not be having to remap on the fly because whatever checklist you had for this thing before it went off didn't make sure the engines were on.
Like that's that's pretty bad.
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 going to, we're just going to like figure it out in the air.
Don't worry.
No, 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.
Don't worry.
It's so oh, God.
I'm sorry.
There's nothing really to say, but it's so fucking bonkers that this was allowed to happen.
It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's nuts.
Um, and it's nuts that, again, guys like Pogue are just talking about how cool this is.
What a great, and it, it's, it, 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 to make your tech product look cooler than it is, right?
Legal Battles and Refunds00:05:55
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 experiences that intense, it creates like a bond and a sense of like emotional loyalty between folks on the journey and 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 from on this clip that Sophie's going to play is a former MasterChef contestant who paid for a trip to the bottom of the sea on this thing.
And here's her talking about that kind of like emotional bond that people form on this thing.
Here instantly became family.
And that's something that you take away for life.
And like, you know, that's, 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 they're, as they're all leaving from their time together.
And Stockton understands this psychological phenomenon.
And he is, he, he was making kind of very concerted use of it in order to pump his company.
And this is made unsettlingly clear in how he responded to a lawsuit against Ocean Gate that was launched in February of this year by a Florida couple who sued him for refusing to refund their $105,000 tickets to see the Titanic in 2018.
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 Kinkanon, who is the Ocean Gate Company legal advisor, we heard from him earlier.
He was the guy trying to blame the Coast Guard 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 judging, he's like, look, judge, you can't properly adjudicate this case if you haven't been to see the Titanic.
Why don't we take you on a free journey to the Titanic, which number one seems illegal.
Both in terms of bribery and now in retrospect, making credible death threats against a sitting judge seems like it shouldn't be a felony, too.
What's wild is according to the New York Times' reporting, she seemed down to do it.
Quote, perhaps if another expedition occurs in the future, I will be able to do so.
The judge wrote in May, adding after many years of hearing cases about the Titanic wreckage, that opportunity would be quite informative and present a first eyes on view of the wreck site by the court.
Oh my fucking God.
So because this is 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, that got adjudicated in this court, which is why when the Ocean Gate got sued, it wound up in front of this judge.
For whatever reason, she was like the district or whatever that they've picked for Titanic shit.
Right.
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 also clearly Stockton trying to get her in his weird little boat cult.
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 Titans.
Quote, on the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform.
The company's legal and operational advisor, David Kincanon, wrote in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The submersible sustained modest damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading OceanGate to cancel the mission so it could make repairs.
So, you know, it's cool that this judge was still like, I don't know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll go.
Oh, God.
No, no one can calculate risk, I guess, is the clear lesson.
Not if they really like the Titanic.
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.
Yeah.
So as we've talked about in the ads and the PR materials, Ocean Gate made a big deal about the fact that their customers are citizen 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.
Quote, so we have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as Titaniacs.
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 $105,129, the inflation-adjusted cost of a first-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.
See, but then to both have like gone through that and then see Jeff Bezos fly people up and be like, oh shit, we could actually make way more money off these rubes.
Marketing Death as Adventure00:15:25
Very cool.
Great science that you're bringing these citizen scientists into.
Yeah, you're a scientist, a citizen scientist.
Get the fuck out of here.
Yeah.
We're going to do an expedition to see how much money I can make off of you.
Gonna really expand the bands of the bounds of human knowledge, R.E., how much cash I can take out of your fucking wallet.
And again, I haven't actually found any evidence of like science that resulted from the trips that these guys did because they took like 28 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 special.
Again, 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, you know, which I'm sure is going to happen in like six months, right?
But yeah, I want to play you another clip here.
Maybe best of all are the one-on-ones with experts like Commander Paul Henri Narjalais, leader of 30 dives to the Titanic wreck 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.
For me, it's very well done because it's simple.
There are 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.
You are not only a 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 that great.
Oh, my God.
It's like a checklist at the rainforest cafe.
It's like a little scavenger hunt.
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, kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're all like seven-year-olds that you want to give them a job.
Hand them a fake cell phone.
Let them pretend that they're taking important notes.
It's a little child steering wheel that they can just turn back and forth.
The French guy that we heard there was Paul Henri Narjolais or PH as like he tended to be called.
And his nickname was Mr. Titanic because he's done more dives down to the wreck side or he had done more dives down to the wreck site, like 35, I think, than anybody else.
He was a subcommander for the French Navy.
And when everyone died, folks were like, oh, it's a bummer that this like working class dude went down with them.
Again, 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 leatherneck with like a copy of fucking Bruce Springsteen album 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 a, 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, 5,500 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 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 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 $1.5 billion.
Like this, he's also an entrepreneur, right?
Now, Narjolais 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 super fan community because he's done so many dives down there.
And his fame would act as an advertisement.
Specifically, Narjolais' fame would act as an advertisement to the people who are like real big Titanic nerds.
And David Pogue talks to one of these customers in his series, a woman named Renata 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 an election.
But she's got enough that she could spend $105,000 on this because she's kind of nuts about the Titanic, right?
Like, which is one chunk of it.
You know, maybe Stockton was lying when he said people mortgaged their homes for this, but like that's not outside of the bounds of like, there's definitely 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.
Did you get any reactions?
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.
I do.
I feel like that's nuts.
But also, that's fine.
Like, you know, 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?
Like, really, when it 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 objectively stupid.
I do believe that.
Right.
So I guess whatever.
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 19-year-old, had the resources and the experience to know that what they were doing was silly and likely to kill them, right?
All of them had the ability to be informed of everything I brought up in this episode about how like slipshod this thing was.
I am glad that like Renata 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 who saw the movie 77 times in theaters and like poured their pension into fucking Ocean Gate.
And the Titanic movie is kind of the thing that looms over all this hubbub.
From the day that it 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 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 it does seem legitimate for him.
But Ocean Gate definitely kind of callously cashed in on 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 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, Sophie.
Next dive.
Excitement.
Thrills.
Hey, Lord!
An adventure on the high seas.
I just loved every minute of it.
It has exceeded anything I thought it could ever be.
Titanic is the ultimate dream.
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.
Of course, that guy spent Everest.
I think there's more.
And I think there's more in the clip, but of course that guy spent Everest.
Yes.
Was the dream come true?
But as I look back, this will no doubt be the best experience of my entire life.
Come join us on our next expedition.
Don't miss the opportunity to be part of history.
The Ocean Gate Titanic experience.
There's truly nothing else like it.
I mean, 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.
Yeah.
Mind-blowingly, like, like, they're like blissfully ignorant.
They're like choosing to not educate themselves.
And it's like, it's sad.
Well, and it's also just, you can see it's such like he's, he's marketing this.
Again, he really is like a modern Hammond figure from Jurassic Park.
He's marketing this as like this can be a part of the, oh, your friends did Everest.
You know, they paid 100 grand or whatever it takes to like force or to like make, you know, they paid all that money to have locals like stop them from dying on the big 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 a thing that they haven't done.
You know, they haven't been in the Titanic yet.
So you have loved him.
Fucking L. Ron Hubbard.
First off, L. Ron Hubbard absolutely would have loved this.
And second, LRH never would have gotten on that submission.
Oh, no.
If there was one thing that man understood, it was self.
Yeah, he would have sent children.
He would have had a kid film it for him.
Get one of my boys down there.
Honestly, the fact that 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.
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 going on in Tom Cruise's head, he's able to rationally appraise risk to his body.
You know, absolutely.
It's wild.
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 2021 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 screen and in the customer testimonials, I tend to suspect that the client list was an 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, they're 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 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 Shinrik Baldota, who runs a massive industrial conglomerate in India.
Pogue, and you have a nickname?
Shinrik.
Yeah, they call me the wild monk, Pogue.
The wild monk, Shinrik.
Yeah, because I look like a monk.
I'm very calm, but I have these extreme interests that I do.
Going to a live volcano in Vanadu, two times to antaricle on an edge of spaceflight at 70,000 feet in a MiG-29, swimming with the blue whales, catching crocodiles in Botswana with National Geographic.
So, like, again, he's just like listing this like a rich kid.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He lists like everything he got for his birthday that year.
He's like, I did this, I got this, and I got to autograph the blue whales.
And, you know, I get to go to space in a MiG-29.
Man.
Yeah, it really is.
Like, just like, you know, toxic masculinity will continue to kill people, but this is genuinely pathetic.
Yeah.
I, and it, it's such an insult to like actual exploration.
I think about like the Apollo, like, whichever, I always forget, was it 11?
I, no, it wasn't 11 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 1, like it, it fucked up on the landing pad and caught on fire inside.
And because there was like too heavy O2 in the mixture, like all of these guys like burnt to death horribly, nightmarishly.
And like the 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 to a degree, like selfless willingness to explore, which is the, you know, you see the same shit with like Yuri Gagarin, 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 get, I want to, afterwards, I'll play up the danger, but like, I don't really want to die.
Tourists vs True Explorers00:12:46
Yeah, 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 and would gram it.
Maybe it was a TikTok guy, but like he was one of these dudes who does these like things and films himself.
So everybody thinks that he's, you know, like, oh, what a, what a cool, adventurous life you lead.
And like things went wrong on Everest.
And the, one of the Sherpas 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, 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 his app he is, because he, he, he doesn't, he's ashamed that like the guy had to save him, that 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.
Like, that's like the most incredible thing a person could do for another person.
Um, is like gamble their life to save you.
And like, it speaks to the attitude of these fucking adventure traveler, dark tourist freak ass motherfuckers.
Yeah.
It presumably has been what it's always been.
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.
No, no, it's not.
I mean, some of them were.
I know the guy, I think it was Edmund Hillary, who was like one of the first, like he and Tenzig Norge, who was his Sherpa, like were the first to summit 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.
Oh, yeah.
Like that was kind of important to 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?
Yeah.
It's even the difference between like fucking James Cameron and what these people are doing.
Anyway, big gym.
So what are we going to do?
I don't know.
So there keeps being stuff come out about this.
Like right before this episode went out, I ran across a story about a guy named Arthur Loibel, who was one of the guys who went down to the Titanic with Ocean Gate.
His first trip was delayed by five hours because of electrical issues.
And the second dive was abandoned for unknown reasons.
And then on the Titan's fifth dive, which he was down for, before it left, a bracket from a balancing tube on the vessel broke off and they reattached it with zip ties.
And like, you know, again, plenty of signs.
Look, it's, it's one of those things if like Loibel had been on this thing when it imploded or Shinrick, 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.
I don't, 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, I don't know about Narjalai.
Cameron, James Cameron did an appearance because he and PH were friends.
And he was like, I don't understand it.
Like it doesn't make sense to me why he did this.
I don't, I don't know the guy.
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 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 70s.
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.
So I don't feel bad for him.
Again, he made 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, 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.
Like fuck, I mean, he's like, like, he's a piece of every smirking piece of video too, really does just like this, you know, it's if you're not going to feel like any something like this is justified, you know, fine.
But like the man was literally asking for it several times on video.
Yes.
He desperately want, 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 Suleiman Dawood, who was the 19-year-old son of Shazawa Dawood, who was a Pakistani billionaire.
He was obsessed with the Titanic.
He was kind of an adventure tourist previously.
He desperately wanted to do this.
One family source says that Shizada or that Suleiman, 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 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, he was the one who was both being pressured by his dad, which is not a situation that's like most 19-year-olds are capable of being pressured by their parents and also not doesn't have the life experience to have known what he was getting himself into.
I don't feel at all bad for the rest of them.
They all made their bed and now they get imploded in it.
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.
Yeah.
They, they, they, they chose this.
They chose to like make a dumb gamble.
Yeah.
It's like feeling bad that somebody puts their life savings on like 21 black on a craps table.
Like, well, I guess that sucks for you, but like, what did you, did you really think that was going to work?
Yeah.
Um, anyway.
That's the put your money where your mouth is of like, all my apes are gone.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Are you laughing at the fact that like, you know, somebody lost their life savings?
Thank you for having me laughing at this.
A timely one.
This one is by far the least this time we could we could have a chuckle.
You know what?
And maybe, maybe.
Yeah.
This is also one of the first episodes I've been on where something resembling justice happened.
So I don't know where I am.
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 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 story of a drunk driver, right?
Like, this is like, it's like, if, it's like if 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.
He's certainly pushing.
But it's like, come on, motherfuckers.
A dumb one.
Yeah.
Like, what's the dumbest boat that you can get people killed on?
Yeah.
Like, again, and you know, for the folks that are, that all that 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 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 shoot yourself, you know?
Like you got, you, you were the one who chose to do that.
No one made you do that.
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 it 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 last week.
That's all.
That's where I'm at.
I loved him less than that.
I also loved him less than any amount of money we spent trying to find them.
But that's fine.
I love them, quote unquote.
That's a whole.
Uh, that's, that's a whole other conversation too because, like I don't know, I think the Coast Guard's attitude is reasonable where they're like, well, we don't, we don't talk about like what it costs, like it we, we are not, we do not make rescuing people into like a um, you know, a cost benefit sort of thing.
Like that is not what the Coast Guard's job is.
I do feel like maybe we as a culture should have a conversation about, like when do we make rich people pay for for, for getting rescued in in situations like this?
Uh yeah yeah, I agree, it's probably good for the Coast Guard 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 fire firefighter shouldn't be calculating, you know, to what extent is this?
How much is this house worth versus how much is this costing?
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, I don't know.
Like whatever yeah, the counterpoint to that though, is that, like firefighters maybe not individual firefighters or fire captains, it's not, you know they're, 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 happen to line up with race and socioeconomics.
So, like I, there is a world where like, making it a soft policy that gets violated in like soft ways uh, is actually contributing more to the inequity.
Like again, lots of other people died, even at sea last week, and you know these guys for sure got top tier service.
No, they got more money has been spent on them than has been spent ref like, rescuing refugees whose boats, you know, capsized in the Mediterranean.
Probably ever like, maybe ever, um and and again, I do think you know, look me a culpa here we, I just spent a whole week talking about Stockton Rush and it's because like um, I don't know, I thought it was interesting and this is what I I decided to read about that right, there's an extent to which like, I was just following the story because i'm fascinated by stories of like Hubris like, especially like Tech asshole Hubris,
and at a certain point last week it was like oh, I ran out of time to research anything else.
I guess we're talking Stock and Rush um, but it is.
I mean, I. 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 bat yeah, like last story.
Note it's amazing, if I may.
It's anyway.
It's Dicarous Dicarous yeah yeah, that's uh, that's what this motherfucker is all right.
The Perfect Icarus Story00:03:53
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 they were going to expose that the Titanic was blown up with a bomb to stop people from, you know, opposing the the, the Federal, you know uh the, or the FED, or the, the moving away from the gold standard right, if you want to do that um, if that's, if that's, if that's, if that gets brought up to you, just make sure that person knows that Stockton Rush's granddad,
or whatever uh was, was running Bohemian Grove.
You know, throw that in there.
You can add, you can make the problem worse.
Why not at this point?
Yeah, you know, might as well right, if they're gonna believe that there's no saving them yeah, give them, give them a little something, something more to think about.
Yeah Andrew, anything you want to pause?
Uh uh, that's it.
Yeah oh, i'll just.
I'll just do a quick plug.
Uh, I know we're off sync on timing okay uh yeah uh, let's see my podcast.
Is yo, is this racist?
And we do premium episodes?
Uh, you could subscribe at Suboptimalpods.com, which is where we do the non-racist fun stuff.
So uh yeah, if you've enjoyed any, any of my bullshit uh, check it out, please.
Yes, check out Andrew T, guest extraordinaire.
And the next time uh, the next time, a multi-millionaire, you know, son of an oil dynasty asks if you want to see the bottom of the ocean.
You know, do whatever you want to do.
I'm not your dad, like pretty sure Robert's not your dad.
Okay, bye.
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