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June 28, 2025 - Lionel Nation
15:28
Titan Sub: Death Trap Built by OceanGate Madman Stockton Rush
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I have been, and I think you have been, and other people have been, absolutely mesmerized by this horror story of the Titan submersible.
Not the submarine, a submersible.
And the more you look at it, the more you ask yourself, how did this happen?
How did so many smart people do this?
And why did people trust others?
And, you know, the Titan submersible, I call it a sub, this disaster.
This wasn't just some tragedy like, oops.
This was this grotesque and sickening carnival and freak show of ego and delusion and psychopathy and narcissism and death.
It's a modern day, you know, Icarus tale.
Only, notice the mythological reference, only instead of flying too close to the sun, this chidrulo stopped in rush, dove literally, bruh, headfirst into the oceans,
crushing, unforgiving, black, just this danger zone, crushing, crushing with the same suicidal arrogance.
I mean, it's just, it's incredible.
You know what?
It's like the old Chiffon margarine commercial.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
And unlike some kind of myth, this didn't end in some metaphor.
This was an explosion, implosion, a disaster of pressure and bone and steel that obliterated, I mean obliterated, dematerialized five human beings who never stood a chance.
All because one man, this sick bastard, one man, fancied himself above the laws of physics and engineering and basic human accountability.
The laws of pressure.
I mean, when you look back at what he did in the PlayStation, I mean, how did this happen?
This Rush wasn't a trailblazer.
He wasn't some innovator.
He was a narcissist.
You know, he was a narcissist, this megalomaniac, this psychopath dressed up in some kind of pseudo-scientific credibility or something, some Silicon Valley bravado.
And he was willing to roll the dice, to risk the lives with other people's lives and futures and the like for the sake of making headlines and wooing and attracting millionaires.
I mean, he flouted.
He disregarded every warning, every regulation, dismissing everything, ignoring every expert.
Why?
Why?
Because rules were for the cautious.
He was Richard Branson.
He was Sir Edmund Hillary.
He was Thor Heyerdahl.
He was Kantiki.
He was a, you know, he's an adventurer.
And in his eyes, this sick bastard's eyes, caution was cowardice.
It was weak.
This wasn't baldness.
It was recklessness.
It was stupidity, dressed up in some kind of a vision.
And now it's a tomb.
No, it's not a tomb.
It's the shattered remains of something.
So let's be brutally honest here.
Let's be clear.
Titan was never safe.
It was a glorified science fair project made of carbon fiber and bullshit.
Hubris glued together and stuck with delusion and fantasy and hope and sold to the rich and the gullible as some kind of a, well, what in effect was a luxury death trap.
Engineers raised red flags.
Industry veterans said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
They warned that the materials would fail.
Safety standards were not scoffed at.
They were ignored.
There weren't safety standards.
And even the simplest systems, emergency location, you know, communication, pressure warning, you know, were jerry-wigged and kind of fixed or completely missing.
And the entire vessel was operated with a $30 video game controller.
You can't write this.
That wasn't innovation.
It was sick.
It was sick.
And this guy knew.
Rush knew.
He wasn't naive.
He was willfully and deliberately negligent.
Former employees of him were fired for raising concerns.
Critics were mocked and laughed at.
Ah, come on, you know, you wimp.
Come on, you wuss.
He proudly bragged about avoiding regulation.
And he laughed off government safety standards like a man, a man whose ego had destroyed, eaten consumed his sanity.
I mean, you can't write enough about this.
He wasn't just out of his league, out of his depth in the Atlantic.
He was out of his mind.
And his greatest thrill wasn't exploring the Titanic wreck.
By the way, what are people, would somebody please tell me what the hell you're looking at with this wreck?
Have you not seen enough pictures?
It's like people who want to go see the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower.
There it is.
I sound like the Griswolds.
But that wasn't his big deal.
It was tempting death, dragging others along for the ride.
I mean, it was bizarre.
Look, if you want to throw your life away, that's up to you.
Commit suicide.
But others, and the passengers aboard the Titan, they weren't adventurers.
They were victims.
Victims of this sick thrill, what, a thrill merchant?
I don't know what you want to call it, who sold...
Maybe proximity, propinquity to danger as some kind of a luxury experience?
A father and son obliterated.
A deep sea veteran vaporized, dematerialized.
A billionaire reduced to what?
Ash And for what?
What for?
A 90-minute descent into the dark with no guarantee of return inside this, whatever this was, a capsule that never should have left a parking lot, much less plummet 12,000 feet into this abyss, this vacuum.
And the Titan didn't malfunction.
There was no malfunction in there.
It did exactly what everyone expected, stocked and rushed, expected.
It imploded.
You can analyze it all in one.
This was not a freak.
This wasn't raceps or locomotive.
This wasn't some plane that had some freak.
No, it was designed to do that.
If I jump off a mountain, guess what happens?
And yet somehow, somehow, we're still calling this an accident.
No, no, this wasn't an accident.
This was an industrial, well, this was industrial manslaughter under the guise or the delusion or the misrepresentation of exploration.
It was the natural, inevitable, predictable, absolute guaranteed conclusion of a company run like a cult.
It's like a cult.
He was intolerant, absolutely deaf to the notion of criticism.
He had nothing to do with, he was allergic to reality.
And he loved, enthralled by the ego that this man had, this man who thought he could rewrite the rules of deep sea physics.
Physics.
By sheer force of what?
Personality or schmaltz or glitz?
I don't know.
And even, this kills me, even as the warnings mounted, he doubled down.
He says, no, no, no, you're not going to tell me.
No, no, no.
I know better than you.
The pressure hull made popping noises during previous dives.
Hello?
Layers of composite material were separating.
And experts openly warned, questioned, alerted the structural integrity of this thing, this tomb.
And what did Rush do?
What did he do?
He plowed ahead, marketed tickets.
Oh, come on.
We don't need no staking regulations.
And he wrapped himself in this flag, the veneer of progress and bravado and brio and bravery.
He told anyone who disagreed with him to take a hike, beat it, pound sand.
And now, five corpses lie in some form somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Again, shattered, obliterated, atomized, I don't know.
Thanks to this sociopathic, psychopathic idiot with a sense of invincibility.
He was beyond the rules of nature.
History will not be kind.
Look at now to Stockton Rush.
That's an understatement.
But it shouldn't be.
This wasn't the story of a brave explorer who pushed the boundary, some Red Bull adventure dude.
It was the story and the tale of a reckless psychopathic narcissist playing God, using the ocean and innocent people as his, you know, his arena, his plaything.
And while his name might one day sit alongside other catastrophes like Challenger or Chernobyl or the Chevy Chase talk show, don't mistake that for some kind of greatness.
Remember something.
In fact, remember him instead for what he truly was, a man so obsessed with risk, so enamored with himself, so in love with himself that he became a prophet of doom, his own doom.
Not a visionary, but a warning.
Now look, we now know as we speak, and it's not just hindsight because we knew this thing, but we now know that the final moments before the implosion were marked by a cruel lie.
All good here.
That's what the passengers reported moments before they were annihilated.
All good here.
A phrase that will live in infamy.
Perhaps the most haunting three words in the lexicon, in the annals of disaster.
Because they weren't all good.
They were trapped in a steel or composite coffin built by hubris and bullshirt, speeding towards oblivion.
While the man responsible sipped his own self-mixed Kool-Aid, this tropical fruit punch of denial.
And this wasn't just a failure of engineering.
Remember what I'm telling you?
It was a collapse of character, of ethics.
This did what it was supposed to do.
And the very idea that exploration and ego can coexist without accountability, come on, nonsense.
Stockton Rush, remember that name?
He built a death machine.
Sounds like a Springsteen lyric, but some suicide.
A death machine, and he called it progress.
And he gambled and threw away his lives on theories and hopes he didn't test.
Assumptions he didn't even verify, and limits that he refused to respect.
And there's no regulation.
For those of you who say, we don't need government regulation, maybe not.
But who knows?
Could this have been prevented?
And the cost was not his own life alone, but those of innocent people who trusted him, for some reason trusted him, who bought into this myth, this nonsense, this fantasy, and died for his delusion.
And for the so-called legacy, you know, the so-called history, there will be no legacy.
No monuments, no honors, only lawsuits, documentaries, a cautionary tale about how not to lead, about how not to destroy through this ridiculous, and how not to invent, how not to dream.
Ocean Gate will be remembered.
Ocean Gate will be remembered for a lot of things.
Not for the daring, you know, to explore the sea, you know, that stuff, but for becoming a case study and how this unchecked, unregulated, this ego, an absence of regulation.
I'm sorry, I don't want to be Mr. anti-libertarian here, but how this can All kill.
And make no mistake, this was preventable.
It was avoidable.
It was foreseen.
It was known.
It was guaranteed to happen.
This sub, this submersible, this bucket of whatever it was, it didn't fail.
He failed.
The leadership failed.
The system failed.
The idea that rich people with more money than cents could bypass every check and balance, every scintilla, every aspect of common sense, every dose of reality, everything, because they wanted to, quote, do something cool.
Oh, they did something cool, all right.
I'm saying it again.
The Titan didn't just implode physically.
It exposed the rot, the infected rot underneath a culture, this weird sickness that confuses recklessness and lunacy for bravery and PR stunts, I guess for what, pioneering or something?
It's like that Bezos with that little stupid little thing he did with the girls in the uniform, whatever that was, space travel.
And in the end, in the final analysis, Titan is now going to be, I hate to say it, a metaphor.
It's going to be like the word Titanic, a metonym or something.
This kind of sleek, overhyped, bullshit, underbuilt, underdeveloped fantasy that looked great on paper, looked great for the prospectus, sold down quickly, and then collapsed, crushed catastrophically when reality tested it.
Five people paid the price.
One man caused it, and the rest of us should never forget how close it really came to being glorified.
This wasn't exploration.
Again, please, let's don't confuse the two.
It was ego with a death wish.
It was sick.
It was like Thanatos or some reference.
Because let me say, the ocean doesn't forget.
Pressure doesn't forget.
The rules of physics don't forget.
Nature doesn't forget.
You can't fool with Mother Nature.
I learned that from a margarine commercial, for God's sakes.
What do you think?
What's your take?
Am I being too rough?
Of course not.
Am I being spot on?
Of course.
Your thoughts and comments.
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This is a currency.
Puts us in the HOV lane of stuff.
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Repeat.
I'm going to put some comments and questions for you as I ask for you right now to comment.
Comment, dear friend.
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